Tài liệu Weaving Networks pdf

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T ABLE OF C ONTENTS

INTRODUCTION..............................................................................................................................................1

WHAT IS A NETWORK? ...................................................................................5

INTERNET: A900LB MODEM IN THE ROOM...................................................................................................6

FEATURES OF NETWORKS.............................................................................................................................14

THINKING ABOUT NETWORKS......................................................................................................................26

THINKING ABOUT SYSTEMS ..........................................................................................................................31

WHAT MAKES A NET,WORK? ....................................................................................................................36

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF NETWORKS ...........................................................................................................47

NETWORKS IN ACTION ................................................................................61

THE KEYSTONE ADVANTAGE.......................................................................................................................63

THE HIDDEN POWER OF SOCIAL NETWORKS.............................................................................................80

THE TIPPING POINT.......................................................................................................................................86

NEVER EAT ALONE......................................................................................................................................93

THE WISDOM OF THE CROWDS ..................................................................................................................96

EMERGENCE ............................................................................................................................................ 100

WHO RULES AMERICA? .......................................................................................................................... 113

WRAP-UP/SUMMARY .............................................................................................................................. 116

STRATEGY: DESIGNING CLOTH ................................................................119

TO NETWORK OR TO NETWEAVE? ............................................................................................................ 120

JOIN ‘EM: GET IN WHERE YOU FIT IN....................................................................................................... 121

BEAT ‘EM: CLIMBING THE NETWORK........................................................................................................ 127

JOIN US: IF YOU BUILD IT THEY WILL COME ............................................................................................. 136

TACTICS: CHOOSING THREADS...............................................................147

YOU DOWN WITH IPP?............................................................................................................................ 148

MAPPING................................................................................................................................................. 158

MINING:DIGGING FOR GOLD ............................................................................................................... 165

BUILDING AND SHAPING:KNITTING ......................................................................................................... 168

MANAGING NETWORKS:DEPLOYMENT.................................................................................................. 182

SPREADING LIKE WILDFIRE........................................................................................................................ 194

WEAVING WEAVERS................................................................................................................................ 201

ENGAGEMENT: WEAVING THE WEB........................................................203

HUMAN BEING: APHILOSOPHICAL PORTRAIT......................................................................................... 205

HUMAN DOING: A PRACTICAL PORTRAIT ............................................................................................... 225

ON BEING AN ‘I’...................................................................................................................................... 246

ONE-ON-ONE:DEALING WITH AN OTHER ‘I’.......................................................................................... 255

NETWORKING TO NETWEAVING..............................................................292

AVOIDING NETWORKING TRAPS.............................................................................................................. 294

SOCIETY’S GLUE........................................................................................................................................ 295

END ................................................................................................................301

AFTERWORD............................................................................................................................................. 301

APPENDIX A: SNAQUESTIONNAIRE........................................................................................................ 308

THE META-MODEL:QUALITY INFORMATION ........................................................................................... 310

INDEX........................................................................................................................................................ 311

BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................................................................................................................... 312

MISCELLANEOUS...................................................................................................................................... 315

BOOK TITLES .................................................................................................318

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WEAVING

NETWORKS

T HE S CIENCE AND B USINESS OF NETWORKS

AND THE

F UTURE OF NETWORKING

Byron W. Woodson II

Philadelphia, PA

Introduction

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INTRODUCTION

I think many other books on ‘networking’ fall short of giving you a

complete picture of networks and networking. I am writing this book.

These other books on networking do describe a few of the individual

actions you take to be a good ‘networker.’ However, these books fail to

explain how or why these activities work and how what you do fits into

the larger context of the network. In an analogy, other books teach you

how to hook your computer to the internet, but do not tell you what

the internet is!

Imagine someone sold you a book about driving, but never

mentioned traffic lights, roads, and other drivers. They only explain

shifting, turning the wheel, accelerating and breaking. That would be

absurd, wouldn’t it? Would you feel comfortable getting on the road?

Would you know how to plan routes to your destination from where

you started?

To understand networks and networking, at least in the realm of

computers, you have to get certifications and computer science degrees.

There is even a whole branch of science dedicated to researching the

features of networks. But most of these networking books say nothing

about the properties of computer networks or even business and social

networks. They tend to slink by without discussing those things. Send

you off and wish you fun driving, lol (laugh out loud). Who could

possibly pass up the opportunity to relate ‘networking’ to the rich

metaphor of the internet?

The book you hold in your hands is not an introduction to

networking as you know it, nor as you think about it. This is not a feel

good, tip-filled book that promises to having you ‘up and running’ or

‘making millions’ in a matter of weeks or months. Nope. This is that

book about understanding what networks are and how to operate in

them. It is about understanding what you’re doing, and then doing it

well.

This book is about months and years of fun work, after all you will be

making hundreds of friends along the way. This is the kind of book

where make mental notes of things, and write stuff in the margin that

nobody else sees. This is the book that will give you those eureka and

‘oh’ moments that explain what other books haven’t. This is the kind of

book that builds character first, intelligence at a good pace and your

Weaving Networks

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money slowly. Okay, there’s a little exaggeration in there, but you get

the gist.

What’s in a name

The first inkling I remember having about something deliberately

weaving and uniting different things was in the novel Chick Pea by Isha

Schwaller De Lubicz. In this book, a young Egyptian boy was tutored

to watch how animals shuttled back and forth in the natural world. He

was to watch the animals for a few days to understand the

interconnection between their activities and lifecycle.

I’ve also picked up the name netweaver by browsing through a few

blogs on the internet about Social Network Analysis and Organizational

Network Analysis. There are a few organizations popping up with the

explicit focus on building networks by introducing people, businesses

and organizations with like or complementary skills. This kind of

awareness and activity characterizes netweaving and the netweavers that

do it...

BOOK OVERVIEW

Purpose:

This book will teach each reader to understand what networks are and

how they work. The reader will also learn to measure, map, manage,

shape and build social networks, whether for business, community

service or social ends.

Beginnings

This section explains the reason for the book, the overall gist of the

book, and how it came about.

What’s all this Network Stuff?

In order to get you started networking like a master you have to know

what a network is. The hazy ideas that people walk around in their

heads is not good enough. This chapter conveys the structure of

networks from the science of network, yep, there’s a whole science that

studies networks. In this chapter I put the science of networks into

context as well as introduce you to the terminology of networks. This

will help you understand what’s in the rest of the book. It will also give

you a deeper understanding of networks than most others.

Networks in Action

While the previous section looks at the structure of networks, we now

start looking at networks actually working. This section puts the flesh

on the skeleton of the last section, showing you how networks operate

Introduction

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in business, the economy, teams, super-networkers and social classes.

The aim here is to give you multiple viewpoints and filters so that when

you look at networks, you can notice a lot more of their subtle nuances

than their basic structure.

Designing a Cloth: Strategy

Having looked at basic network structure, and some real-world

examples of networks, now you can start to plan what kind of

networking you will be doing. All networking is not the same; there are

different purposes for which we network. We will address the

differences between these broad strategies, or stages, here.

Choosing a Pattern: Tactics

Whichever strategy you choose, you will need a plan of action to

execute that strategy. Hence, we have a section on the tactics of

networking. This chapter sharpens your ability to detect what’s going

on in the networks around you. This chapter also shows you how to

approach and interact with actual networks.

Weaving the Net: Engagement

Once you plan your work, you have to work your plan. To excel at

networking, you have to be a better than-average communicator. This

section shows you how to drastically improve your ability to listen and

speak with impact. This is where your networking plan meets the

people in your networks, where the pedal meets the metal. Being a

good networker is not just about knowing people, but about building

solid relationships with people. This section teaches you to form these

lasting relationships.

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WHAT IS A NETWORK?

Just like you would need to know what a car and roads are before you

start driving, it would be prudent to first understand what a network

“is” before we go about talking about ‘networking.' This section will be

simple, obvious and important, all at the same time.

Before we talk about any kind of network like a business or social

network, we’ll first talk about physical networks, nets. Why? It profits

people to think about the metaphors that guide their thinking. By

examining literal networks, a lens through which we look at social,

political and business networks, we can see where these kinds of

networks are similar to and differ from physical networks.

We give the name ‘net’ to a group of strings knotted and/or woven

together, in some pattern, for some purpose. The purposes of nets

range from catching fish, to keeping bugs out of our homes (screens,

duh). We even use a kind of net in our kitchen to drain water out of

spaghetti (colander), or sift flour into a fine powder (sifter). You’re even

wearing nets (hopefully, especially if you’re in public) in the form of

your clothes.

We can think of cloth as a tightly-woven net of string not meant to

catch (fish, bugs) or separate (flour, spaghetti) but to cover our bodies.

Curtains and drapes do not cover our bodies, but are woven to keep

the sun out of our houses. Nets have different purposes. We make

some nets are designed for their substance (cloth). me nets are

designed for the spaces between their substances (strainers). People

design other nets for the substances between their spaces (fishing nets).

We can understand a net as an interlacing of materials, for some

purpose. I could wax poetic about the nature of materials, density of the

net, the space(s) between the materials and how different nets serve

different purposes, but that’ll be beating a dead horse. I talk about these

physical nets because at some other points in the book this discussion

will be directly applicable.1

1 Refer back to physical nets somewhere

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But we’ll not be talking about physical nets. We’ll talk about abstract

networks. The nets we are talking about are the ties and connections

between people, businesses and organizations. We’ll use the example of

networks in the world of computers, biology, and other arenas to shed

light on how people connect to each other.

It would be completely boneheaded to think about networks without

referring to the most famous one of all: the Internet. Not only is

looking at the internet obligatory, it is probably one of the only

networks that we can actually trace its history and growth with any bit

of rigor. We can’t do that with networks of epidemics, proteins or ideas

with as much precision. here we go. I’ll look at the history and

development of the internet.

INTERNET: A 900LB MODEM IN THE

ROOM

A while back, some really smart people invented what we today know

as computers. They were big, expensive (half a million apiece), took up

whole rooms and basements in buildings. For the most part, before the

1970’s only very large companies, the federal government and a few

universities had computers.

As manufacturers made computers faster, more flexible and cheaper,

a few more businesses, universities and government departments could

and wanted to use them. When computers were originally designed,

they were relatively self-sufficient universes unto themselves. Even two

of the same computers from the same company couldn’t talk to one

another. Nowadays to get your computer to work you almost have to

be connected to the internet. My, how things have changed.

Logins and Time-sharing

In the 60’s and 70’s, more and more universities bought computers

for their researchers to use. Many of these computers were bought with

grants from the federal government to do research.

With multiple researchers wanting and needing computer time, a

problem arose that the computers, for the most part, could only do one

set of things at a time. If it was a gender, we could say computers were

men. As a researcher, in order to do your work, you had to be at the

computer, putting in your data and giving the computer instructions,

from dusk 'til dawn, and from start to finish. This meant you had to

work at odd hours to get your job or research done. This was a pain.

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As more and more researchers gained access to computing it was

necessary to have two things: the ability for multiple people to tell the

computer to do things, and the ability for the computer to know who is

telling it what to do. me enlightened programmers created two things:

the login and time-sharing.

We are familiar with logins. We do it with our computers and email all

the time. Before logins, a computer couldn’t separate the commands

and files from one user to the next. After logins, computers were able

to sort out and process different files from different people. This made

it easy so when one researcher told the computer to delete something it

didn’t delete another person’s files.

Time-sharing is not as famous as logins, but just as important. Back in

those days, computers were remarkably slow. We have faster

computers even in low-end calculators. when a researcher wanted to do

something, it usually took a long time. As computers could only do one

thing at a time, one researcher had to do all of his or her calculations

and programs. Only when they were finished could another researcher

run their programs and calculations.

Logins and time-sharing enabled multiple people to work with a

computer at the same time. The computer was able to sort out the files

of each user and it could also keep the instructions of each user

separate. This enabled four or five people to log in, start and run a

program, and come back after other people worked on the computer.

The problem solved is just like getting an education. When you go to

school, you do not have two months of math, then two months of

English and so forth. Early computers were designed this way, where

users needed large blocks of time to get what they wanted done. With

time-sharing and, people were able to do what we experience as

scheduling. In a school schedule, you take part of one class, switch to

another, and so on. The process would still be slow, but researchers

could do bits and pieces of their shtick over weeks instead of all￾nighters days in a row.

Proliferation of computers

As time went on, computers became cheaper as more were built, and

more companies got into the game. As the fields of computing and

manufacturing were developing fast, each new computer model was

almost one-of-a-kind, much like cars today. Every year a new model

comes out, the parts of the previous model do not work on the new

car.

Weaving Networks

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What seems counter-intuitive today was that even computers that

were the same model and from the same company couldn’t talk with

one another! As time passed, some programmers were requesting that

the computers they bought would be able to talk to one another. Of

course it would be frustrating to have two half-a-million dollar

computers sitting next to each other but not able to talk. Computers

weren’t designed or programmed to talk to other computers, regardless

of distance. The programmers sometimes literally had to learn a new

programming language for each computer!

mewhere in there, after the development of time-sharing,

manufacturers came up with what’s now called the ‘client-server’, back

then the ‘master-slave’, relationship between computers. Before, if you

wanted to connect to a computer, you had to be sitting right in front of

it to work on it. The master-slave relationship enabled a user to log into

a computer from various places through a remote computer terminal.

The big machine itself was the ‘master’ computer where all the

computation and processing took place while the remote ‘slave’

computer terminal was more like an access point to the ‘master’

computer than a computer in its own right. It is kind of how Google is

not on your computer, but you can access its pages through the

internet.

I need a network

They say the decision to build the internet was spawned by Bob

Taylor, head of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).

Taylor was upset that he had three different computer terminals in his

Pentagon office. He thought it was bone-headed to have to have three

separate terminals to log into three different computers. He wanted to

be able to only have one computer, and be able to log into all three of

those computers.

Parallel to his pet peeve, a lot of universities were also requesting

money from the ARPA for more computers. It seemed as if every

university wanted their own computer. Now, with the advances in time￾sharing, he realized it would be a lot more cost-efficient if he could

enable other researchers to use the computers that already existed.

What he envisioned was having one terminal to be able to log in to

multiple remote computers. This would be cheaper in the long run for

the ARPA both because computers were real expensive, and because

most universities didn’t use the full horsepower of their computers

anyway.

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But to do this, he needed some way to connect all these different

universities and researchers. Roberts pitched to his boss, on the fly with

no preparation, the idea to build a network that enabled other

researchers to plug into other computers, even if they didn’t have their

own computers. He got a cool million. That was back in 1966, which

translates to about $6 million in 2008 dollars. Imagine that. Building the

core of the internet only cost $7 million!

Roberts told his boss that he knew it was feasible, stretching the truth

a little because he had already seen a demonstration of two computers

talking with one another. A year earlier, Tom Marill showed Roberts

that it was possible by connecting two different computers using a full￾duplex connection2

. Marill set it up so that the computer would group

messages, send the message and check to see whether the message

arrived. If it didn’t get a signal that the message arrived, it would send

the message again. He called this back-and-forth a ‘protocol’ as it

sounded like the process of diplomacy.

With this experience under his belt, Roberts thought that simply

enabling a few other computers to do the same things with one another

would be relatively easy.

Creating a network

One of the early problems that stalled the creation of the original

internet was that it would be real costly in man-hours. The original

proposal was to program all the computers to communicate with the

other computers. This demanded that each university somehow learn

how to translate programs and instructions from one computer to

another, much like Marill did. This was costly because each university

would have to pay its programmers to do this. Aside from that, when

computers are programmed to share time, the computer actually has to

spend some of its own power to think about who should get what time.

Adding another function would also add another layer of things for the

computer to do and reducing the percentage of the computer dedicated

to actual work. Even more, most of the universities who already owned

computers didn’t really need to talk to other computers. Remember, the

idea was for other new researchers to log into the existing computers.

All in all, the universities they were against the idea of such a network.

2 Full duplex means that both computers can send and receive messages at the same

time (like phones) while half-duplex means only one can send at a time (walkie-talkies)

Weaving Networks

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All this resistance was discovered during the first meeting at Ann

Arbor where Taylor and Larry Roberts, who Taylor brought in to be in

charge of building the network, of ARPA pitched the idea of such a

network to the universities. As you can see things were borderline

disastrous. During the meeting one attendee, Wes Clark, passed up a

note that said “you have the network inside out.” Intrigued, Roberts

and Taylor drove Clark to the airport so learn more about what he had

to say. Clark suggested that they instead of building a network where

each of the computers had to do all the translating themselves, to build

a network of smaller more specialized computers would handle all the

translation and traffic between the computers. We now call the network

between these specialized computers ‘routers’

and the network that they exist on a ‘subnet.’

This idea solved a few critical problems. No longer did the host

universities have to figure out how to translate from one computer

language to the next, they would only have to figure out how to talk to

the specialized computer. The specialized computers themselves could

be programmed to handle and route the traffic among themselves more

easily as they would all speak the same language. This also enabled the

network be directed under the control of one group, ARPA or whoever

won the bid to build the network, instead of the smattering of

universities and researchers. Can you say eureka!

After going back to the drawing board and following through with

this idea, the ARPA folks pitched the idea to the same audience who

was more receptive to having to do less work. After the second

meeting, ARPA put out a request for a proposal (RFP) to companies

across the nation to design and build a network that enabled researchers

from any of the major universities to log into and use one another’s

computers. The bid was to create a network of “interface message

processors” or IMP’s for short. This was especially dicey as most of the

requirements and questions surrounding how to build such a network

theoretical or new.

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Despite what we think about crony politics and ‘pay-for-play’, the bid

was won by the company that had the smartest people and the most

thoroughly researched idea on how to put the network together. Its

research in preparing its proposal for the RFP alone cost it $100,000.

That company was BBN, standing for Bolt, Baranek and Newman. In

its heyday BBN was called Boston’s “third university” since it hired

mostly dropouts from Harvard and MIT. No wonder they were smart

enough to figure it out.

How to play whisper down the lane: building

the router

the folks at BBN went head first into figuring out how to design a

network of computers, and related things like how to pass messages

between them, how to talk to the other computers, you know, minor

details. A lot of the big questions they answered in the course of

preparing their proposal, so they could get right to work on the nitty￾gritty.

One of the critical aspects of this network, if it was to work, was how

to relay messages from one station to the next. There was actually a

large theoretical battle between Paul Baran3

and AT&T about the

feasibility of what we now know as digital networks. AT&T was against

even the possibility of digital networks as its own equipment at the time

was all-analog. You think moving from analog to digital television was

something? Imagine how hard it was, or would be, for the whole phone

3 Reproduce the network diagrams