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If a Network Is Broken, Break It More

Posted by Soulskill on from the somebody-fetch-my-wire-snips dept.

New submitter Aras Esor writes "When a network is broken — an electrical grid, the World Wide Web, your neurological system — one math model created by a PhD student at Northwestern University suggests that the best way to fix it may be to break it a little more. 'Take the web of interactions within a cell. If you knock out an important gene, you will significantly damage the cell's growth rate. However, it is possible to repair this damage not by replacing the lost gene, which is a very challenging task, but by removing additional genes. The key lies in finding the specific changes that would bring a network from the undesirable state A to the preferred state B. Cornelius's mathematical model (abstract) provides a general method to pinpoint those changes in any network, from the metabolism of a single cell to an entire food web.'"

2 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. My wife does this with plates all the time. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The plate is chipped. She resents me gluing it back together. So she breaks it real good so I gotta go out and buy an entire new set.

  2. The TITANIC's weight distribution, a network? by wisebabo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So if one considers the weight distribution the bulkheads in the ill-fated Titanic as a "network" perhaps it would have been possible to save her (or at least keep her afloat long enough for the Carpathia to rescue all the passengers) by further "damaging" it.

    While it has been often said that she could withstand any two bulkheads being flooded, in truth she could take many more, various simulations show that she could take at least four being flooded, in various combinations. And this was with them being COMPLETELY flooded (up to the top of the bulkhead partitions); if she were on a more even keel they would only flood to the water level.

    The problem of course is that the Titanic was NOT on an even keel. When the compartments, all in the front, were flooded that caused her to pitch down. The water kept rising until it went OVER the bulkhead partition, flooding the next. This caused the weight in the front to increase even more which caused her to pitch even further and ... you get the picture.

    So, thinking of this like a damaged "network"; perhaps if the captain had flooded one of the far aft bulkheads (breaking the network more), the Titanic would not have pitched downward as much and the water wouldn't have overflowed the bulkheads (they were not watertight, water could go over the partitions). This might have prevented the cascading effect which led to the sinking of the world's largest ship just two and a half hours later.

    Would she still have sunk if they flooded one of the aft compartments? Maybe but it might have happened much more slowly and gently (no scenes of people falling down a nearly vertical ship!). And if the downward pitch was reduced so much that the water didn't surmount the bulkheads (the partitions separating them were quite high, much higher than the normal water level), maybe she would have remained afloat!

    The builder (designer?) of the boat was on her when she sank, I wonder if he considered this? Or did the thought of damaging the boat further never cross his mind?