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.)

A possible reason for the SUV incident?

I received an interesting e-mail this morning with the following text:

i saw your blog after finding your paper on ranking sports teams with a
markov chain. (that is a sortuh interesting topic but after 5 minutes on
your paper i decided to google elsewhere to see if there is anything a
little shorter; there are thousands of these most of which appear to be
rewrites, but then the paper on n-th excited state of the h-atom may in a
sense be a rewrite of the paper on the n-1st.). there does not appear to
be a good source on markov chains in fact (either they are for elementary
school or they immediately turn into a 'theorem/proof' stream of
consiousness). of course, googling for the answer is lazy in a sense, or a
'sociological' study. (who thinks what?)

i saw your post on the la times article, and was going to comment but
forgot my google password. i would just say that it seems to me that
situation (good or bad) is partly due to the fact that people at cal tech
spend alot of time writing papers like yours. in a sense, it may be as
lazy as buying an suv or trashing one---there may be better time allocations
(but i guess everyone is an ant following a pherenome trail). it also
suggests that 'genius' may not be all its cooked up to be.
i guess the alternative would be to say, teach calculus outside of
caltech and prison. (or markov chains). but, as opposed to laziness, that
might be too difficult a problem to solve. or, maybe one could see if your
algorithm works for ranking american idol candidates.


So, I guess the conclusion is that if we want to avoid more "ecoterrorism" incidents, people at Caltech should stop spending so much time writing esoteric scientific articles.

Any good ideas for what I should do with my life now?

I've had it with those SOBs in their SUVs.

So, I read an extremely interesting article this evening while I was at Peet's. I even clipped it out to show to Lemming, but he saved me the trouble by finding the article independently and posting it.

The article is about the former Caltech physics grad turkey who played a role in blowing up some SUVs a few years back. It discusses both the incident and his life in prison. I concur with Lemming and strongly encourage you to read this.