The Mathematics of Averting the Next Big Network Failure | Wired Science | Wired.com: "Gene Stanley never walks down stairs without holding the handrail. For a fit 71-year-old, he is deathly afraid of breaking his hip. In the elderly, such breaks can trigger fatal complications, and Stanley, a professor of physics at Boston University, thinks he knows why.
‘Everything depends on everything else,’ he said.
Three years ago, Stanley and his colleagues discovered the mathematics behind what he calls ‘the extreme fragility of interdependency.’ In a system of interconnected networks like the economy, city infrastructure or the human body, their model indicates that a small outage in one network can cascade through the entire system, touching off a sudden, catastrophic failure."
