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Mark Newman wrote:
> And Rapoport touched on the same ideas even earlier in his work
> on friendship networks, although he didn't specifically discuss
> power-law degree sequences.
>

Indeed.  For that matter, there was a lot of very wonderful technical
work by physicists, biologists, and others on both social and biological
networks back in the late 1940s/early 1950s in the _Bulletin of
Mathematical Biophysics_ (of which Rapoport's work was part).  My sense
is that there is a fair amount of awareness of this literature within
the modern network community, but I'm not sure to what extent the
"scale-free" crowd is cognizant of it....

> Still, as David Gibson points out, one shouldn't blame Duncan Watts for
> this.  In fact, Duncan gives ample credit to the pioneers of the field
> in his new book.

I also noted that he was quoted as asking people to tone down the
hype....not that I expect the message to sink in.  Looks like we're in
for a bubble/crash cycle here -- I hope someone here is collecting data
on this!

-Carter

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