Blogosphere
370. The future of science blogs
I’ve just finished a reading rather interesting article by Mark Penn on WSJ called “America’s newest profession: bloggers for hire“. Penn presents rather interesting stats there (based on analysis by Technorati):
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282. Communication among communities
This is a guest blog post by Massimo Ostilli from the Center of Statistical Mechanics and Complexity (INFM, Roma). Dmitry.
In recent times, in the network science, the problem of detecting the community structure of a given network (a random graph), has attracted more attention. The general idea behind the concept of community structure comes from the observation that, in many situations, real data show an intrinsic partition of the vertices of the graph into 
groups, called communities, such that between any two communities there is a number of bonds that is relatively small if compared with the number of bonds present in each community. The partition(s) can be used to build a higher-level meta-network where the meta-nodes are now the communities (cells, proteins, groups of people, tec…) and play important roles in unveiling the functional organization inside the network. Given an hypothetical community structure, one of the most important issue is to understand whether or not the communities exchange information and to what extent, and, more in general, what are their correlations. In a recent work, we have emphasized that such a problem cannot be faced through an analysis that takes into account only the network topology (that is, the detailed description of nodes and bonds) that, by its definition, neglects any kind of correlation among the nodes. Nodes, in fact, are the sites where some physical or abstract status manifests as a result of the status of the other nodes. The most elementary example is the case in which at any node there is a dichotomy variable taking values ON and OFF. This happens – for example – in an network in which individuals, in somehow equivalent, are asked to say YES or NO to some politic proposal. The fact that the individuals know, in part, the opinion of the others, makes the answer of each individual partly conditioned by the others, especially, but not only, by those that are near (neighbors) in the social space. Physicists immediately understand that – within the equilibrium statistical mechanics – such a system can be cast by defining a suitable disordered Ising model. In this approach, the temperature 
can be seen as a parameter describing the freedom of the vertices to assume a state independently of the state of the other vertices, while the Ising couplings 
between two vertices 
and 
belonging to the 
-th and 
-th community, respectively, as a tendency of the vertices to be positively or negatively correlated, according to the amplitude and to the sign of . At least in principle, if a Gibbs-Boltzmann 
distribution with some Hamiltonian 
has been assumed, one can obtain 
from the data of the given graph by isolating the two vertices 
from all vertices of the graph other then them, and by measuring the correlation function of the obtained isolated dimer.
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244. An efficient local method for community detection in large networks
This is a guest blog post by Symeon Papadopoulos (MKLab, Informatics and Telematics Institute, Greece) who is going to determine whether effective community exist in the complex network of NEQNET readers 
Dmitry.
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231. Don’t EVER criticize string theory
By Abstruse Goose (found via Clifford Johnson).
190. Ex-googlers share their impressions about the company. Hilarious!
Wanted to work for Google? Take a look at this post on TechCrunch and think twice next time
168. Yoneya on gravity from strings
As you may remember, recently we’ve discussed the paper by Alexander Polyakov – essentially, his contribution into the forthcoming volume “The birth of string theory”. Tamiaki Yoneya has also recently submitted his contribution to ArXiv (on Dec 31! ), which is definitely worth going through, too. Reading his paper allowed me to make a couple of sociological observations…
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147. Death of blogosphere, birth of blogosphere and Christmas wishes
1. So, death or birth?
Recently, too many people simultaneously started claiming that “the blogosphere is dead” – see, for example, the post by Nicholas Carr who started the desperation or the Bee’s blog post where she explains who actually killed the blogosphere (capitalist imperialist pigs, who else might have wanted to do that?).
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129. Metamodern – the trajectory of technology
Hi friends
Just wanted to let you know that Eric Drexler, considered by many as a founding father of nanotechnology, the man of great vision enormously respected by your humble correspondent 
, the author of “Nanosystems” and “Engines of creation“, has just made his own blog “Metamodern” open for public.
Read more on 129. Metamodern – the trajectory of technology…
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