PUBLIC MARKS with search spread

If we can read the Odyssey today, it’s not because its original “editor” has been able to preserve it, but because “Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe” and enough copies had been spread to insure its transmission.

An evacuee relaxes in her makeshift dwelling on the floor of the Big Palette convention center. The crammed emergency quarters lack privacy, and disease can spread rapidly.

About 146,200 more people died than were born during the year, another sobering record high, for the fourth straight year. The spread of people is also increasingly becoming concentrated in cities as economically struggling rural towns and villages empty. A little over 90% of citizens reside in cities. Indeed, there are more people who reside in Tokyo’s concrete jungle alone, about 12.66 million people, than all of the small towns across the country combined (11.86 million), according to the ministry numbers.

The rescuers are now in a bind. Even if they retrieve the bodies, anyone who comes into contact with them risks being irradiated, too, whether they're in the evacuation zone or not.

And if the bodies are cremated, the smoke could spread radioactive materials as well, the sources said. Even burial poses a problem. When the bodies decompose, they might contaminate the soil with radioactive materials.

First, and most obvious, my data is spread all over someone else's servers. I consider this unacceptable.

Over the past decade there has been a growing public fascination with the complex "connectedness" of modern society. This connectedness is found in many incarnations: in the rapid growth of the Internet and the Web, in the ease with which global communication now takes place, and in the ability of news and information as well as epidemics and financial crises to spread around the world with surprising speed and intensity. These are phenomena that involve networks, incentives, and the aggregate behavior of groups of people; they are based on the links that connect us and the ways in which each of our decisions can have subtle consequences for the outcomes of everyone else.

Networks, Crowds, and Markets combines different scientific perspectives in its approach to understanding networks and behavior. Drawing on ideas from economics, sociology, computing and information science, and applied mathematics, it describes the emerging field of study that is growing at the interface of all these areas, addressing fundamental questions about how the social, economic, and technological worlds are connected.

The book is based on an inter-disciplinary course entitled Networks that we teach at Cornell. The book, like the course, is designed at the introductory undergraduate level with no formal prerequisites. To support deeper explorations, most of the chapters are supplemented with optional advanced sections.