Slashdot Mirror
Network Scientists Discover the 'Dark Corners' of the Internet
KentuckyFC writes "Network theorists have always simulated the spread of information through the internet using the same models epidemiologists use to study the spread of disease. Now Chinese scientists say this isn't quite right--it's easy to infect everybody you meet with a disease but it's much harder to inform all your contacts of a particular piece of information. So they've redone the conventional network simulations assuming that people only ever transmit messages to a certain fraction of their friends. And their results throw up a surprise. In these models, there are always individuals or clusters of individuals who are unreachable. These people never receive the information and make up a kind of underclass who eke out an information-poor existence in a few dark corners of the network. That has implications for organizations aiming to spread ideas who will have to think more carefully about how to reach people in these dark corners. That includes marketers and advertisers hoping to sell products and services but also agencies hoping to spread different kinds of messages such as safety-related information. It also raises the interesting prospect of individuals seeking out the dark corners of the internet, perhaps to preserve their privacy or perhaps for more nefarious reasons."
Network scientists don't get around much.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I don't really understand what they mean. Are they implying that there are entire pygmy tribes somewhere that spend their entire day on IRC? That somewhere there's a bunch of Tunisian goat-herders that only get their news through Usenet?
If this is the case, who cares, and why?
Because we have our own asocial networks.
Perhaps Malcolm Gladwell had better update his book, "The Tipping Point". It's about how fads, crazes and fashions take off. In the book, he doesn't mention people who remain impervious to such things. They are indeed an interesting group.
I thought they were talking about 4Chan. Imagine my surprise they weren't.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
First of all, by "internet" they mean social networks like Facebook and Twitter and the interpersonal communication between people. Second, they have created a simulation, but it's not clear how it actually correlates to the real world. The key thing is they have the concept of "exhausting" sources, so once a person has communicated something, they won't receive or communicate that information again. Obviously that's not the case in the real world, because some people are more interested in certain pieces of information and will continue propagating them much longer than others, potentially seeding enough to compensate for the "exhaustion" of other average users.
Further, social networks all have a backlog where previous posts can be viewed (particularly true with FB), thus a person still "transmits" a given piece of information indefinitely as other people view their wall going back far in time. Thus it is always possible for a "dark corner" of the "internet" to always catch up by seeing a piece of information in that way instead of only real-time.
Better known as 318230.
WWW != internet. It is merely a sub-set.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Some people don't want to be marketed or advertised at, so they avoid these gateways. Maybe you should be a kind asshole and not find a way to these "dark corners."
The G
Places where education is more about athletics than academics and knowledge is substituted with opinion.
So... the vast majority of the United States?
"It also raises the interesting prospect of individuals seeking out the dark corners of the internet, perhaps to preserve their privacy or perhaps for more nefarious reasons."
Nefarious reasons is always a subcategory of 'to preserve their privacy'. But more and more it is a small subsection as interest in privacy grows.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
Doug Larson