Networks of Echoes: Imitation, Innovation and Invisible Leaders is a
mathematically rigorous and data rich book on a fascinating area of the
science and engineering of social webs. There are hundreds of complex
network phenomena whose statistical properties are described by inverse
power laws. The phenomena of interest are not arcane events that we
encounter only fleetingly, but are events that dominate our lives. We
examine how this intermittent statistical behavior intertwines itself
with what appears to be the organized activity of social groups. The
book is structured as answers to a sequence of questions such as: How
are decisions reached in elections and boardrooms? How is the stability
of a society undermined by zealots and committed minorities and how is
that stability re-established? Can we learn to answer such questions
about human behavior by studying the way flocks of birds retain their
formation when eluding a predator? These questions and others are
answered using a generic model of a complex dynamic network-one whose
global behavior is determined by a symmetric interaction among
individuals based on social imitation. The complexity of the network is
manifest in time series resulting from self-organized critical dynamics
that have divergent first and second moments, are non-stationary,
non-ergodic and non-Poisson. How phase transitions in the network
dynamics influence such activity as decision making is a fascinating
story and provides a context for introducing many of the mathematical
ideas necessary for understanding complex networks in general. The
decision making model (DMM) is selected to emphasize that there are
features of complex webs that supersede specific mechanisms and need to
be understood from a general perspective. This insightful overview of
recent tools and their uses may serve as an introduction and curriculum
guide in related courses.
