Simple not simplistic

The end?

2009-07-31T08:56:00.000-07:00

To my many fans:

This blog was initially a university course exercise "to convey the unique feeling of having other people comment on your thoughts and opinions..." as put by our lecturer.

I must say that the first few posts were mainly driven by the course assignment, as the blog's popularity over the web grew, however, it became a part of my life - just like it became a part of your life, fans. I dare say it changed my life at least to the extent it changed most of your lives. It has been quite a journey for all of us since the first "Hello world", through the frustrated "I said, hello world!" until here and we all grew and learned something about ourselves. I learned of the almost infinite world of the web and it's inhabitants which in turn learned of me.

If this sounds like closing tones to you, I must admit you know me quite well by now (not that I'm surprised). OK, I'll just say it... I have been offered a weekly column in a major NYC newspaper and am currently considering my posting future. Sorry to drop the big news like this, but there is no easy way to say it: Simple Not Simplistic may have reached its final step.

Of-course, nothing is finalized and I have my lawyers working in shifts with the tough negotiations regarding the benefits, TV interviews and t-shirts. And the newspaper business has seen better days. And I'm pretty sure my wife will veto the whole thing. But there is a chance, so this is the heads-up for you fans.

Now like Lisa Simpson, the effort of writing has left me lightheaded, so i close by saying: Google is bugging me regarding the space used-up by your comments, so please keep it simple. Not simplistic.

Tel Aviv

2009-07-20T04:07:00.000-07:00

After the many responses I got (2 - one of which is my own test to verify the bloody thing works) for my previous posts, I decided it's about time you people got to know me a bit better.
As you read this blog religiously, you must know I'm from Israel, Tel-Aviv to be precise. At least currently. If you hear of a good 2 bedroom apartment with an external balcony and reasonable parking, please please comment. Please. Also a balcony with no apartment will be considered.
Tel-Aviv is awesome. It's young, fun, rich-cultured, liberal, and very much alive. But not all is well in the land between Bat-Yam and Herzelia. There is an ongoing process driving young people (as I consider myself still) out and rich people in. The reason is the rent rates, not to mention the cost of the apartment.
It seems that in the last 5 years (since I moved here from Beer-Sheva - another Ben fun fact) prices never stopped climbing. Just as an example - the rent rate of my apartment climbed by 150%!
As a result, the young people that make the city what it is can no longer afford it and that really sucks. When these people grow up a bit, get married (or not - very liberal town) and have kids, you have to either own an apartment (from the family or from the time the prices were sane) or be really wealthy to stay here. I'm not sure whether the same is happening in all popular cities around the world, I just know that while the world in a recession and real-estate prices are going down all over, in Israel their going up and Tel-Aviv is the front-runner.
In the last years, there were literally no new construction that are aimed for young families in Tel-Aviv, almost all new buildings are luxury apartments, which in-turn result in raising prices of the older "affordable" apartments. That also sucks.
If nothing changes, Tel-Aviv will become a boring, old and empty city. Not to mention, I may have to move away.
AS usual, this came out a little whiny, but I insist - I am not bitter!
Now you know me better.

My crapy Tel Aviv apartment
(just kidding)

Book review - Linked: the new science of networks \ Albert-László Barabási

2009-07-10T12:06:00.000-07:00

I first stumbled upon this book in UPA Israel's 2008 usability day conference held in the Open University campus in Ra'anana, where Prof. Sheizaf Rafaeli gave a lecture about networks and recommended this and a couple of other books as an introduction to "the new science of networks".

As someone who was utterly unaware of this exiting field, indeed this book is a good introduction. I dare say that this book at least has the potential to change the way I think about the world around me and especially about the more complex aspects. In this sense the book's declared goal is accomplished: it made me think about networks. The book discusses issues like how are networks created and how they evolve giving the reader a network-oriented view of nature, society and economy. Acting as a new framework to understand issue like democracy, the internet and its vulnerability and the spreading of viruses or new ideas, the new science of networks is a set of notions worth spreading to the masses.

Albert-László Barabási is a Hungarian physicist (proudly mentioning his home town and other Hungarian network pioneers) who together with his research team, conducted many studies in the field of networks in the University Of Notre-Dame, Indiana, USA.

Barabási claims that the 20th century reductionism approach in scientific research has almost reached the end of the road when it comes to trying to understand the world by setting it apart to its components and underlying mechanisms. Now that it's apart it's so complex that no one has any idea how to reassemble it back together to understand the big picture. The network approach is suggested to bridge the gap.

The book chapters are set as a "chain of links", gradually and coherently building the reader's knowledge, starting from the history of the graph theory and ending at the most "popular" networks: the internet, the World Wide Web, proteins in the human cell and the economy. The following is the main idea:

What are networks?

A network is a set of nodes connected by a set of links. Typically all nodes in a single network are interconnected either directly (direct link) or indirectly (through other nodes and links).

Graph Theory and random graphs

At the beginning of the book, a historical overview of graphs and the work of the Swiss 18th century mathematician Euler and the 20th century Hungarian mathematicians Erdos and Renyi is given. While Euler is associated with the foundation of a new branch in Mathematics – the Graph Theory, Erdos and Renyi took it one step ahead to form the Random Graph Theory which has dominated the field for over 50 years. In random graphs each node is connected to a fixed number of other nodes in a random fashion. For example, in a random graph where each node has two links, there will be two neighbors randomly connected to each node. However this kind of static network is rarely found in nature.

Six degrees of separation

In the 1960's and 70's studies conducted by researchers including Milgram, Granoveter and Watts demonstrated that in many highly connected real-world networks, clustering effects can be found and quantified in a way that cannot be explained by the Random Graph Theory. One of the most interesting studies is Stanley Milgram's small world experiment examining the average path length for social networks of people in the United States. In the experience letters were sent to a number of randomly selected persons from Omaha, Nebraska and Wichita, Kansas each having a name of a contact person from Boston, Massachusetts. In the letter, the receivers were asked to add their name to the letter and send it to the contact person if they knew him or her or to someone else who may know that contact person. This resulted in a chain of correspondence where the average number of leaps from the initial receiver to the contact person (path length) was 5.5. The notion known as the "six degrees of separation" has since been widely populated, in essence saying that with only 6 leaps any two persons on Earth can be linked through the network of acquaintances. Similar effects have been also found in neural paths, the World Wide Web, the physical Internet, ownership of companies, food webs and cell biology. These studies demonstrated that the topology of these kinds of huge networks cannot be described by a static random network.

Hubs and connectors

Studies conducted by Barabási's research group and others found that many these real-world networks self-organize into hub-based networks, where the hubs are a small number of nodes containing many links while the other nodes in the network have only a few links. An intuitive example is the network of airports and flight destinations. While there are many small-town airports everywhere, they usually offer connections to a small amount of destinations, while there are also very busy airports that are connected with flight to a huge number of destinations (e.g. Hartsfield Jackson in Atlanta, Frankfurt International Airport, Heathrow in London, etc.). Studies indicate that also the World Wide Web is a hub-based network where a few web-pages are pointed to by many links, while most web-pages have just a few. Hub-based networks are highly inter-connected through the hubs. In these networks, therefore, the "small world effect" is inherent. The path between any two nodes in a network is proportional to the network's connectivity. If the network has an average of k links per node and N nodes, the average path length will be logk(N).

Power laws

The distribution of many characteristics in nature is a Gaussian distribution, perhaps more commonly known as "bell curves". This usually describes random events (e.g. a person's height) that are more common around the mean value and decrease exponentially towards the edges. It might be expected that also the number of links in networks would be distributed in this manner, but as Barabási found, this is not the case. Regarding the number of links in real-world networks, Barabási found that the distribution behaves according to "the 80/20 rule", first recognized by Pareto, an Italian economist who observed at the beginning of the 20th century that 80% of the land in Italy is owned by 20% of the population. In mathematics, the "80/20 rule" is described by Power Law distribution. Unlike the "bell curve", the power law distribution has no peak but is a curve in which a few large events coexist with many small events. In 1999, Barabási's team found that these power law curves are consistently found in numerous large networks. In these networks the number of links in a small fraction of the nodes is "off the scale" of the large majority of nodes; such networks are called "scale-free networks".

The formation of scale free networks

There are two conditions that must exist to allow the formation of scale-free networks:
1. Network growth – The network is constantly growing by adding new nodes
2. Preferential attachment – the network's new nodes are more likely to be attached to existing nodes with more links

This brings forth another typical behavior of scale-free networks – the rich get richer. Since nodes with many links are more likely to be attached to new nodes, they get richer with links. This poses a clear advantage to age – the older the node is, the more time it had to gain links from newer nodes. For example, in the scale-free network of journal article citations, early article publication on a certain subject is more likely to be cited, once it is, it is even more likely to be cited again in new articles and eventually can become a hub in the citation network.

It would seem like new nodes have a merely small change to become hubs, the explosion of Google at the turn of the century forced the modification of the suggested model. Barabási introduces a third principle to the formation of scale free networks:
3. Fitness model – new nodes that present competitive advantages are more likely to be linked.

Examining the fitness model data, Ginestra Bianconi, one of Barabási's graduate students noticed that the calculations used were very similar to those found in the formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate. The mathematical description of the behavior of "Bose gases" turned out to be identical to those in the network fitness model. According to Barabási, this means that in certain circumstances, particularly fit nodes in a network can not only get richer, but "winner take all" by destroying the hubs to form a "star network" where there is only one hub to which all other nodes are connected, this being their only link. The one example of this kind of network given by Barabási is the network of PC operating systems where the OS's are the nodes and the PCs are links – the obvious "winner take all" here is Microsoft with the Windows OS.

Robustness and vulnerability of scale-free networks

The scale free networks that exist in nature present a remarkable ability to survive under a vast range of conditions due to the high inter-connectivity between the nodes and the scale-free topology. The power-law distribution implies that the majority of nodes have only a few links; this means that for random failures nodes with small connectivity will be selected (and destroyed) with much higher probability. The removal of these "small" nodes does not alter the path structure of the remaining nodes, and thus has no impact on the overall network topology.

Of course this also presents the Achilles Heel of the scale-free networks – attacks on hubs. The 1996 Western power blackouts (affecting 11 US states and 2 Canadian provinces) is an example of the results of "cascading failures" in the power grid network. These cascading failures have also been demonstrated in other networks like the East Asian economy in the 1997 crisis, in ecological networks, etc. Duncan Watts's investigations on cascading failures found that such cascades do not occur instantaneously; failures may go unnoticed for a long time before starting a landslide.

The spread of viruses and fads are examples of diffusion in a network, with a calculable spreading rate. When this rate is larger than an epidemic threshold, the spread continues. It has been found that in scale free models the epidemic threshold disappears, explaining the persistence of some computer and biological viruses that should have disappeared according to Random Graph Theory. For example, the explosion of the AIDS epidemic, a disease that is considered hard to spread, is explained by its originating in a "hub in the social-sexual network" – an extremely sexually active flight attendant known as "patient zero".

The World Wide Web

The WWW is a directed network, meaning the links point one way. It has been found that all directed scale free networks have similar and analytically predictable topology consisting of four equal size "continents":

1. A strongly connected core - it gives a home to all indexed websites and is easy navigable
2. IN continent – easily navigating to the core, but with no paths back
3. OUT continent – easily reached from the core but with no paths back
4. Tendrils and islands – interlinked groups that have no links to or from the core. These are the web sites most search engines will never find (a quarter of the WWW).

Map of the World Wide Web

What do I think?

For me, as a novice to the field of networks this book was very interesting to read, opening my mind to see complex systems differently. In many cases these systems are so complex to that it's tempting to regard their behavior and events as random. Network thinking gave me a new mechanism to consider that can explain these complex systems.

This book is written in a very constructive and coherent manner making it understandable to any adult reader wishing to get an overview of a field that is likely to gain popularity in the future.

Critics of this book may say that the presentation of studies is too informal and can sometimes be simplistic. While this can bother a network physicist reading this book, I must say that I wasn't bothered by this at all. Another disadvantage is that it seems that the author sometimes goes out of his way not to write something even just a bit complicated and trying to write in a prose style.

To me it would be interesting to use network thinking in the context of innovation and product design. Networks of technology? Of requirements perhaps? Certainly worth thinking about it.

Since this was book released in 2002, the content may be not up-do-date. I would recommend future releases to have to update the content, because reading about the internet and the WWW in a 2002 perspective can be a bit anachronistic and naturally will be more so in the future, especially in the context of networks that evolve as fast as the WWW. Not doing so may result in this book losing its relevance in a few years.

Are you still here?

In conclusion, I would very warmly recommend this book to anybody who is interested in networks. Moreover, since the internet and the world wide web has an increasingly dominating role in our lives I would recommend this book to everybody.

Besides giving an overview of the new science of networks and its growing number of applications, I think this book can change the way you think about the world around you. Go get it!
Sources

http://www.amazon.com/review/R3FAO51MVVVGX

http://www.amazon.com/review/R2G7RCBDHVG314

http://www.dougsimpson.com/blog/archives/000075.html

http://www.bearcave.com/bookrev/linked/

Albert-László Barabási The Architecture of Complexity: From the WWW to network biology 2004 Princeton [PPT]

My iPhone

2009-06-20T09:40:00.000-07:00

Hi world,

For you to get to know me a bit better, I've decided to introduce a good friend of mine in this blog: my iPhone (AKA by my wife "the enemy").

I got it a few months ago and we're inseparable ever since. It's applications changed quite a few aspects of my day to day life:

I have never been so aware of the weather before
It opened me to the stock market, and have since lost some money there (but fully aware of when and how much)
I am completely addicted to "who's got the biggest brain"
I had a night with 2 hours of sleep playing backgammon
I had a week outside of society when I installed all the initial software and firmware
I'm suspicious of anyone who goes near my desk at work when it's not in my pocket

All in all I can say it has changed life for the better.

But seriously, if some love the iPhone and some hate it, I belong to the former group. It's big, it's heavy, it has a crappy speaker, its phone application has much much room for improvement, and the most annoying thing - you can't really hang up the phone on your own terms, but I still love it. I can't put my finger on why exactly (which is even more frustration as a human factors grad student), but i don't see myself go back to a "normal" cell phone.

Still, as a HF student, it's my obligation to at least try to understand what makes me feel like I do towards my iPhone. As I think about it, I think "feel" is the key word here. Using my iPhone makes me feel. For me, it's the best definition of the term "user experience". The elegance and aesthetics of the user interaction with this mobile device is something I didn't experience with any product before.
The multi-touch interface, although sometimes problematic, somehow forces a more "intimate" relationship with it. Together with the simple and seemless interactions the iPhone quickly became literally (almost) a part of me.

Now before I'm accused of sexually harassing my iPhone, i must also admit there is a downside, which bring's me towhy my wife calls it "the enemy". Very simply put, it robbs me of my spare time. If not carefully used, it can enslave me. As I recall, when first reading through Apple's reader's manual, there was a warning saying something like over-use may cause health problems, a warning I dismissed with contempt thinking "what kind of person would use his phone so much it as to hurt himsel...?". I did not yet reach the point of seeking medical attention directly linked to using my iPhone, but I can easily say the time I spend using it is bigger by a factor of 10 at least compared to my last cell phone. I have to admit that I need to actively monitor my iPhone usage, so i don't go over the line.

In conclusion, I would say that on one hand my iPhone usage consumes a lot of valuable time; on the other hand, very few products force me to this situation - this is a great product.

Topsy - a tweet based real time search engine

2009-06-12T01:33:00.000-07:00

Today I'd *like* to talk about a new web 2.0 technology website, it just feels like the right time to do it (plus this is an assignment for my KM course due Monday).

go2web20.net is the place 2go2 for all the recent cool web 2.0 sites. This is where i found Topsy.
Topsy is a search engine that's entirely based on citations of hyperlinks embedded within twitter messages by using the Twitter search API. Big words; let's try to break it down a bit.

Google's search results are ranked mainly according to the number of links pointing to a page, meaning how many other pages have links to this page. The most linked pages that correspond to a search term are the top results. Google sees the web as a network of documents. It's web crawlers index the WWW, which is expensive. That's why it might take Google a while to show rather recent content on it's search results (this is also why it took about a week after creating this blog for it to be found in Google searching for the term "simplenotsimplistic". Still not bitter.)

So it can sometimes be problematic to find recent blog posts on Google (although the more popular blogs are indexed quite frequently). Recently, with the explosion of Twitter, the amount of real time information being published has been increased significantly and it seems this is too much to handle by Google, Yahoo! search, Bing and the other big link based ranking search engines. This is where Topsy comes in.

Topsy sees the web as a stream of conversations. As Michael Arrington describes it, Topsy makes use of the 30+ million twitter users as "an army of little content-finding machines". When searching for a term in Topsy, the sorting of the results are based on the links that were most discussed in Twitter, on who posted the tweets (some authors are more influential than others) and by the other content in the tweet (other than the hyperlink).

Search results can be sorted by their age (similar to the you tube search) by using the bar on the left refining the search to results from "all time" (September 2008 being the oldest results), month, week, day and even hour.
The more influential Twitter authors for the search terms are listed on the bar at the right.

As an example, I searched for the term "Sacha Baron Cohen" on Google and on Topsy. The results from Google (see image) are clearly not real-time. The first result is the Wikipedia page, followed by Cohen's imdb page and a rolling-stone article from 2006.
The Topsy results are different (see image above): the two first results is the trailer of Cohen's new movie (Bruno), followed by Bruno's Facebook page and a news article from June 3rd 2009.

Topsy is a great source of up-to-date information and knowledge. Another Michael Arrington quote sums it up: "For me, someone who’s obsessed with news and stuff that’s happening right now, Twitter search is about 25% of my total Internet searches. The ratio keeps going up over time."
Topsy has a clear advantage over the "traditional (?)" search engines when you need to know what's going on NOW.

Seeya,
Ben

The more I see the less I know

2009-06-08T01:09:00.000-07:00

OK world, I decided I gave you the silent treatment long enough; I hope you learned your lesson...

Today I decided to finally try to live up to the expectation my blog's name has raised in the blogosphere, I hear some bloggers actually went on a hunger strike until I do. To those, I recommend Schulz catering.

The the's "slow emotion replay" begins with this posts' title; this quote is also ascribed to John Lennon and appears in Red Hot Chili Pepper's song Snow (hey oh).

At first this seems reverse to common sense - the more I see I would expect that I also know more. This reasonning can be explained as follows: since the more I see, the more likley I am to witness contradicting facts (or things I cannot understand), my certain knowledge ("what I know for sure" as appears in John Lennon's original quote), lessens.

In Human Factors, we couldn't hope for a better slogan. Ideally, users (of any system) would like to be presented with only the information they need and exactly when they need it.
Less information than needed will result in an inability to react; but the more common case is too much presented information, or information clutter.

Information clutter is a common usability issue that stems from the tendency of system designers to prefer presenting information even when it's relevance is doubtful. The result is overloaded systems where the user has a hard time distinguishing the important information relevant for her goal from irrelevant information. In that sense, the redundant information obscures the information the user needs. The more she sees, the less she know for sure.

While different users (e.g. novices vs. experts) in different situations need different levels of information, it is the system designer's job to be able to identify these users and these situation so that only the right amount of information is shown.

While this identification requires quite complex mechanisms, to the users the system is simple to use.

Seeya!
Ben

I created my first podcast!

2009-05-31T14:15:00.000-07:00

So, if you are really interested to know how i manage my music (and speak Hebrew): check it out.

Enjoy,
Ben

I said, hello world!

2009-05-10T00:50:00.000-07:00

OK, maybe my expectations were a bit high, maybe I shouldn't have quit my day job so fast, but 0 (that's ZERO) comments? 0 followers? 0 requests from Google to place ads in my blog?

Not that I'm blaming you, world. I realize too many people blame you for their problems. I think I may be looking at this the wrong way...

Perhaps the "parlance of our times" requires something different... Something quick and direct. Simple. Not simplistic. Something with birds. The bottom line.

I found it! A Microblog. A medium to just say exactly what I'm doing right now! 140 characters should do it. That's ingenious!

But why stop there? How about a Nanoblog? The next big thing - one word. Like 'eating' / 'Not-working' (don't be petty about the two-wordedness of that last word) / 'nothing', etc.

But again, why stop there? How about a Mininanoblog? JUST ONE CHARACTER! I would best describe my current instantaneous status as 'G'. No 'D'.
You know what?
'$'.
'~'.
'*'.

Sure, world, you would have to use your imagination, but that is the purest way I can think of to tell you about the momentary me.

Come to think of it, I just came up with a better way: The Atomblog. One bit. o/1. That's it.

Maybe that's what it takes to force some comments out of you... Not that I'm an attention freak, far from it. Just thinking out loud, you know.
'B'.

Hello world!

2009-05-07T05:57:00.000-07:00

In this web-log I will post my opinions about the world.

I'll try to make it as sarcastic as f*ck you penguin, as buzzy as tech-crunch and as amusing as fu*k my life.

In actuality, however, it will probably turn out as interesting as fishnet Australia, as thrilling as knitting socks and as profitable as facebook.

Oh, and there should also be something about how simple is good but simplistic is bad (the url was available!) because I'm a Human Factors grad student.

Some posts will be in Hebrew (I think), so for of you non-Hebrew readers - start learning!

See ya!