Rating: 
Summary: Our World is Small
Review: "Our world is small". This idea may be relevant if our life is an integral part of a continuously evolving and self-constituting system. Duncan J. Watts described it in his book "Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age" nicely. To support this idea, he gives illustration about a project that he heads up involving collecting data from 150,000 people. He also gathers opinions and research results from different areas to develop his idea. Like a network, it covers materials all the ways from the study of social structures to the study of advanced physics.
The idea of "small world" is interesting because it describes that everyone is connected by an average of only six degrees of separation. Everyone means every people in the world. For example, a teacher in Indonesia may know a professor in Honolulu. A professor in Honolulu may know an engineer in Bangladesh. An Engineer in Bangladesh may know a manager in Nairobi. A manager in Nairobi may know an artist in Paris. An artist in Paris may know an athlete in Sidney. An athlete in Sidney may know a farmer in Vermont. This is an idea that I never consider to think it before.
This book gives inspirations and provides new perspectives. It has a great impact to view our world and it reminds us how closely things could be related unexpectedly. Watts has reinvigorated the interest in the small world phenomenon. He has also raised the provocative questions about the importance of those more ephemeral connections for the outcomes experienced by individuals, organizations, social movements, and society as a whole. The most impressive about his book is how he tries to tailor and modify a model and a basic of ideas into account unique features of different contexts. He shows a wonderful sensitivity to how the particular features of the model need to be modified if the contagion phenomenon in which one is interested involves a biological virus, a computer virus, or a technological innovation.
In my opinion, some of the challenging ideas in Watt's book are in the area of organization design. In his book, Watts argues that the ability of organizations to adapt depends on the degree of which they can take on small world properties, thereby efficiently reducing the social distance between individuals who may need to be connected. However, the changing of organization into a small world depends on the limitation of volume of information that could be processed along any particular path. Therefore, a key characteristic of adaptable world organizations is the capability of identifying overburdened connections reducing the information burden on those connections. This capability may be enhanced to the degree of organizations group. At the high levels in the organization, there will be a high density of ties, and there is a decreasing density of ties as it moves down to the low levels in the organization.
In conclusion, Watt's book attempts to help me understand the new and exciting field of network and complexity. It offers me a snapshot of a riveting moment in science, when understanding things like disease, epidemics, tragedy of September 11th or financial panic seems almost within my reach.
Rating: 
Summary: "New" Science of Networks?
Review: At the core of this book, which is easy to miss especially due to all of the wonderful examples of how connected we all are and that make you want to sing "It's a small world after all," is the argument that a new science of networks has been developed and that this science of networks is "new" because in the author's own words its view has "as an integral part of a continously evolving and self-constituting system." (Read: we don't view the network as static and it's structure as explicit like the previous models). Duncan Watts uses the first two chapters to make this argument so that he can go on to talk about how exciting this new science of networks is and what an integral role he played and is playing in it. After all, how could he and his publishers sell so many copies of this book if they couldn't make grand claims like they do on the side-cover of the jacket where they say, "...Duncan Watts, one of the principal architects of the new science of networks, lays out nothing less than a new way to understand our connected planet?" The main problem I have with this book is that like many science books written for lay-people by self-important scientists, such as Laszlo Barabasi and Stephen Wolfram, who extol their scientific research as a singular event of such magnificent proportions that nothing less than a scientific revolution a la Karl Popper would suffice in recognition of the brilliance of their ideas, you have a situation where the author at some point decided not to actually mention the competing work and ideas that either pre-existed or co-evolved with his own work because doing so would diminish the work's importance. Instead, they choose to go the route of setting up a straw man, whether it's intentional I know not, where they identify a few strains of ideas that are clearly not as powerful as their own in the context in which they are explained and then proceed to knock them down in order to motivate the significance of their own accomplishments. Wolfram did this by simply claiming to have invented the field of cellular automata and then failed to cite all of the other work in the area. In this case, Watts uses centrality measures and block models as his strawman, both widely used in sociology and indeed normally only used on static graphs thus supposedly making them inferior to his "new" models. (Ironically, the small world model, which he is most famous for and implicitly argues was the watershed event of the evolution of the "new" science has no real concept of dynamics build into it either unless you consider tuning a parameter as "dynamic".) If Watts was being honest and had done his homework he would have toned down the rhetoric and mentioned such work as the many statistical models of networks that abound in the literature, models of social networks dynamics, for example, exponential random graphs, such as the work by Snijders, Pattison, Skvoretz, etc. Another problem I have with this book is that the models he describes as being part of the "new science of networks" are not backed up by reliable data. He describes one of the great achievements being that his model which takes into account different social dimensions produces results very similar to Stanley Milgram's results, the only real data set on finding targets in a small world network that exists. But earlier in the book he admits that this data is very small, unreliable, and even questionable in its veracity. Furthermore, he describes a project he is heading up involving collecting data (email chains) from 150,000 people but he doesn't even wait until this project is completed to report its findings. In other words, it could turn out that the findings invalidate the models he has built. (You have to wonder "Why the rush to print?") So all he has done so far, from what I can tell, is give a possible explanation for how small worlds might be created and used to navigate through without actually verifying whether these models are emprically reasonable. Funny enough, a point he mentions throughout the book is that there are many different ways, e.g. different parameters one could use, to do this. Although I think this book is very informative and actually has a lot to say, for example, nice vignettes about the process of scientific discovery, the revolutionary self-important tone of his book, the exaggeration of how powerful these models are, and the omission of other strong work which actually complements this work, will, in my opinion, only help to make this "new" science a passing fad much like chaos theory was a decade ago.
Rating:
Summary: An entertaining and illuminating read!
Review: Contrary to some recent remarks from an apparently aggrieved reader, I think Six Degrees is actually quite different from most books claiming to cover new and exciting scientific developments. Far from being self-aggrandizing, I found it's tone remarkably humble and generous to others. Watts, in fact, is the first person to call his subject the "new" science of networks, and goes to considerable lengths to acknowledge, even glorify, his intellectual predecessors. He doesn't mention every scientist who has made contributions: it's not meant to be a text book, thankfully. Watts also has bigger fish to fry than simply the importance of networks in everything under the sun. His real message is that social reality has to be understood both in terms of the way people are connected and also the way they behave. So focusing on individual behavior to the exclusion of their interactions misses half the story, but so does just focusing on the interactions (as much of network theory has done). It's true that many of the ideas are quite old (and Watts again is the first to point this out), but the way they are put together is new, and that is what is so interesting about it. The results are often quite deep and thought provoking, which means you have to actually read the book to understand what's in it, but Watts always comes up with an entertaining anecdote or analogy to make even the hardest concepts palatable and interesting. Overall, it's a great, fun read about a fascinating subject that really makes you think. And what more can you ask from a book?
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Summary: A peek under the blanket of the incredible world of networks
Review: Duncan Watts is an amazing researcher. He and Steve Strogatz, his PhD supervisor, according to Mark Buchanan-author of Nexus and former editor of the scientific journal Nature, discovered the scientific proof of the 'small-worlds' phenomenon which had eluded scientists for three hundred years. This book chronicles discoveries and findings of his own, his colleagues and others since his famous 1998 paper with Strogatz which proved that we are all connected to each other in fewer than six handshakes. This mathematician is now a professor of social science at Columbia and continues his ground breaking work. We have not heard the last of him. His work scientifically demonstrates just how powerful social networks are...highly recommended to all who would like to figure out, from a people perspective, what makes the world go around.
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Summary: Great Book! The amazing new science of networks made easy.
Review: Duncan Watts presents his findings and discoveries in the amazing new science of networks in a most deferential way; he is quick to acknowledge the contributions of others and modestly understates the significance of his own amazing findings. He did, after all, with Mark Strogatz, in 1998 mathematically prove the small worlds phenomenon--the fact that we are all connected to each other in six handshakes or less. I always recommend his book in my networking seminars, which are based on The Frog and Prince: Secrets of Positive Networking. Those who have read his book are fascinated. So am I. Darcy Rezac.
Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating Book, Difficult Content
Review: Duncan Watts' book is a fascinating read about the science of networks with a particular focus on the "small-world" theory that he and a fellow researcher were active in pioneering. Be warned, though, this is a book for sophisticated readers with a background in math and science. For a more general, and highly stimulating read, I would definitely recommend Barabasi's highly compelling "Linked" as several other reviewers have done. Watts' book digs much deeper into the science, and though the "wow" factor is there throughout the book, you definitely have to work harder to get to it! (I also recommend Malcolm Gladwell's excellent book "The Tipping Point"). The strong points to Watts' book are (1) the material is fascinating, (2) Watts is not just an observer, but an active researcher in the field, and (3) his writing style is engaging, and mildly self-deprecating, and (4) he finds the right balance in the detail level of his discussions: he presents enough detail to keep you challenged but he generally avoids getting bogged down into the really low detail levels that can make you lose sight of the bigger picture. The weak points to Watts' book are (1) this is not a book for a generalist audience: you have to have some math or science in your background to appreciate his discussions, and (2) here I'm being picky, but too often Watts mentions a concept and then says something to the effect of "we will discuss this later in the book". It's a given that this book builds upon its discussions as you progress through it. This constant reminding gets annoying, because you're not going to reach some point later in the book and say to yourself "so that's what Duncan meant on back in Chapter 1 when he said we would discuss it later." Overall I was impressed with Watts' book, and the bibliography alone should provide months of additional reading ideas if you're interested. This is a book that will require several re-readings for most of us, but the effort pays off because it makes you view the world in a different way.
Rating:
Summary: Great book, perfect complement to Barabasi's Linked
Review: Duncan Watts' book is the perfect complement to Barabasi's Linked in two ways: (1) it focuses on small-world networks rather than (mostly) scale-free networks. (2) It focuses on the social and economic sciences -mostly human networks. Six Degrees is deep, accurate and at the same time clear and easy to read. For all those who liked the Tipping Point but were looking for more meat, Six Degrees makes the concepts accessible without sacrificing depth. As you may have guessed from this review, I loved the book!
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Summary: An Excellent Look at the Science of Networks
Review: Duncan Watts' book Six Degrees is a fascinating look at the early days of a "new" science. The book takes its title from Six Degrees of Separation (or Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon if you prefer) and examines the small-world concept in a number of different networks....both social and technological. The book also explains the research that indicates that we should expect many, if not most, networks to demonstrate such properties. The book is also a wonderful look at the process of scientific discovery. It highlights the growing importance of interdisciplinary work in tackling many of today's problems. Physicists and mathematicians may have much to say on this new science, but especially when looking at human networks, the social scientists have their own unique contributions to make. You also get to see the "small world" in action as chance encounters play an important role in the story. I also agree with several of the other critiques of an earlier review about the author's arrogance or lack thereof. I thought Mr. Watts was very generous in highlighting the contributions of both his predecessors as well as his contemporaries. Even noting several times that he should have thought of something, but hadn't. That said, is Mr. Watts enthusiastic about and proud of his work? Absolutely. And I think that is great... we ought to love what we do for a living and be genuinely excited about sharing it with others. Only time will tell how important this new science of networks turns out to be. But I am glad that Mr. Watts chose to write this book and I recommend it highly.
Rating:
Summary: The best book yet on networks
Review: Duncan Watts' first book, Small Worlds, was an academic sensation that documented his pioneering work on the ties that connect us. 6 Degrees expands these ideas but is written in elegant language engaging to any intellectually curious person. The book is a guide to the connected age with interesting commentary on emergence, epidemics, the madness of crowds, trends, and fads. Reading this book will make you see the world differently.
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Summary: Definitely a monumental work
Review: I enjoyed reading this book and recommend it highly to anyone who would like to know why this "world" is so small. I completely disagree with one reviewer in his comments that the author of this book suffers from the self-importance exultance syndrome. Yes, we have all suffered from the annoyance "larger than life" figures that some authors try to impose on us while we have been looking the hidden beef. But, not in this case. In fact, I feel the presentation is thoughtful and humble. Moreover, the writing is elegant, lucid and crisp. The book gives a clear picture of an important emerging field, provides the background of where it came from, and give a vision of how it may evolve. I cannot but admire the creativity, diligence and the vision of the author. Putting down the book, I can still hear the echo of the gasp the author uttered, "How did we miss that?" How can this not be a good read?
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