Watts: Epidemics and Failures

• Page 165 - Watts shifts from talking about real world viruses to that of virusus on the internet.
• On pages 168 and 169 he starts to talk about the SIR model for epidemics and shows a chart to go along with the idea.
• Pages 169 through 172 talk about the 3 phases of growth for an epidemic. He discusses all three (logistic, explosive, and burnout) and has diagrams again to show the differences between the three.
• Watts talks about thresholds for epidemics and the importance of reduction rate in relation to thresholds on page 173.
• Page 175 talks about the small world network and disease spreading on a one dimensional lattice.
• Page 179 discusses diseases spreading on small world networks.
• Watts shows how worst case scenarios arise when a disease cluster reaches a shortcut on page 180 and 181.
• Page 184 - Watts talks about disease flowing along open bonds, and spreading until there are no more susceptible sites to spread to.
• Pages 188 and 189 talk about Microsoft and what their approach to viruses is.
• On page 190, Watts talks about robustness of connectivity that is important to preserve.

In class we discussed and compared viruses in a biological sense versus electronic viruses. The discussion showed that an electronic virus has the ability to spread much faster because of the network it is in, and that electronic viruses won't reach the burnout phase Watts talked about whereas biological viruses will eventually reach the burnout phase. We also talked more about clustering and shortcuts. I thought the shortcut was the most interesting part of the discussion, because I didn't really think too much about it during the reading, but I didn't realize how simple something dangerous could spread so fast and pop up in random areas just because of transportation. We also talked about Microsoft and how a way to reduce the risk of viruses would be to not make identical products, or make it so that an office has different formats for each computer so viruses wouldn't be compatible from station to station, but that would also make the office less efficient because their programs wouldn't be compatible with eachother, and I thought that was an interesting fact.