A study suggests that the central-western Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS) is approaching a critical transition and will undergo significantly enhanced melting in the near future.
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Edited by Robert M. May, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom (received for review February 18, 2005)
Abstract
The search for unifying properties of complex networks is popular, challenging, and important. For modeling approaches that focus on robustness and fragility as unifying concepts, the Internet is an especially attractive case study, mainly because its applications are ubiquitous and pervasive, and widely available expositions exist at every level of detail. Nevertheless, alternative approaches to modeling the Internet often make extremely different assumptions and derive opposite conclusions about fundamental properties of one and the same system. Fortunately, a detailed understanding of Internet technology combined with a unique ability to measure the network means that these differences can be understood thoroughly and resolved unambiguously. This article aims to make recent results of this process accessible beyond Internet specialists to the broader scientific community and to clarify several sources of basic methodological differences that are relevant beyond either the Internet or the two specific approaches focused on here (i.e., scale-free networks and highly optimized tolerance networks).
Footnotes
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↵ † To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: doyle{at}cds.caltech.edu.
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This paper was submitted directly (Track II) to the PNAS office.
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Abbreviations: RYF, robust yet fragile; SF, scale-free; PA, preferential attachment; ISP, Internet service provider; IP, Internet protocol; bps, bits per second; HOT, highly optimized/organized tolerance/tradeoffs; RND, random; WWW, World Wide Web.
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↵ ** Detailed information about the objectives, organization, and development of the Abilene network are available from www.internet2.edu/abilene.
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↵ †† SKITTER Project. Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, University of California San Diego Supercomputing Center (www.caida.org).
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Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
- Copyright © 2005, The National Academy of Sciences
The “robust yet fragile” nature of the Internet
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