Monday, March 22, 2010

Network science research provokes terror alert

A run-of-the-mill network science paper about cascading failures via targeted attacks (based on nodes with high degree or betweenness) has caused a bit of a panic in the United States. The work is rather theoretical and there are tons of other papers like it. This one did appear in a journal called Safety Science, and I wonder if that made a difference here? (By the way, I very much appreciate that the New York Times piece uses the term "network science".)

Maybe I ought to be careful about my research on cascading failures in networks?

(Tip of the cap to James Gleeson, my coauthor on this paper on network cascades.)

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