I do. In the sense of phantom traffic jams—traffic jams without a bottleneck, that just emerge spontaneously (and with peculiar density characteristics—more below). The most fundamental feature of highway traffic is the “inverse-λ shape” flow-density diagram. Flow is the number of vehicles that pass a point along the road. Density is how many cars there […]
Compartmental models, networks and the coronavirus
It’s March 25, 2020, and the whole world is (or should be) battling the worst disease outbreak in anyone’s memory. It is definitely a unique situation in that it is the first emerging pandemics in the era of social media, so we get the full spectrum of information—from hard facts to nonsense—all filtered through the […]
10 papers of the 10s
Here I will list my ten favorite papers of the 2010s related to my research. It’s not an ordered list, and it will not be too serious, so don’t hate me if your paper is not on the list. Here we go: R Bliege Bird, E Ready, EA Power, The social significance of subtle signals, […]
Frozen weighted network
Yesterday a paper by Mason Porter, Hiroki Sayama, and myself was published in Frontiers for Young Minds. It attempts to present network centrality to the Frozen generation. In the spirit of data sharing, you can find the raw data below. It is the undirected network of who talks to whom and how many lines they […]
Reproducing computational studies in general and general network dismantling in particular
June 21, that authors of the General Network Dismantling paper sent me a reply with their comments on this blog post. You can read it here. I will comment on it later. This post is about some recent experiences and thoughts of reproducing the computational results of a paper. Thoughts about computational reproducibility The reproducibility […]
Firsts in network science
I revised this post after comments from Urska Demsar, Travis Gibson, Des Higham, Carl Nordlund, Mason Porter, Max Schich, Jan Peter Schäfermeyer, Johan Ugander, Balazs Vedres, and Jean-Gabriel Young. Thanks! Our field is interdisciplinary, and many smart people have been thinking about similar things. No wonder things get reinvented and rediscovered many times. I don’t […]
The importance of being earnest about the importance of nodes
One of the problems network science sets out to solve is to find important nodes. Of course, what is important depends on the context, but an applied scientist coming to network science for an answer probably has a clear idea of what it means in her study system. There is no shortage of methods in […]
Steak-pun networks: The state of affairs
This is a comment on the recent arxiv by Voitalov, van der Hoorn, van der Hofstad, and Krioukov titled Scale-free networks well done, and the ongoing debate of scale-free networks. As usual, I take a laid-back spectator position—no papers, no research of my own, just another blog post of my personal reading of this contribution […]
Community detection: A consumer’s voice
In one of my first network projects, as a student, I studied how networks break down when you remove edges in order of their betweenness. Simultaneously, Girvan and Newman used precisely the same approach to make the first modern community detection algorithm. This was before authors used to make their code publicly available, so when […]
Hierarchies and networks
We, scientists, love the word “hierarchy.” In every professor, it evokes a picture of us chalking up a pyramid on the blackboard and confidently explaining, “at the top, we have the …” Hierarchies are systematic and meaningful orderings. They are the successful ends of research projects, and bringers of peace to our curious minds. They […]
Petter Holme 