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Stephen Downes

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Physics in Action

Graham Glass, Weblog, May 05, 2008

Daniel Lemire, Seb Paquet and I had a great chat today on the nature of networks and the question of whether clustering is necessary for synchronization (among other things). I said today "there's no such thing as the central cricket" (referring to Duncan Watts' example) and Lemire noted that there's no single heart cell that 'takes charge'. In a similar manner, here we have a classic example of synchronization that results simply from connection, without direction. There's nothing magic about it, and you don't need an organizer; as Glass notes, it is simply 'physics in action'.

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