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ranges as though the insects are being guided by an invisible

conductor.

The model confirms Granovetter's observation that it is "the

strength of weak ties" that holds together a social network. The
small-world phenomenon is at the root of the famous "six
degrees of separation" idea. This construct works as long as the

people are alive.

Abstraction of the Construct

The basic node-link-node structure of a network represents in abstract
terms an interaction or relationship between two elements. This could

be two people talking, two computers passing bits of information, two
electrical substations transferring electrons, a sick patient passing a
virus to a healthy person.

Researchers in many fields have abstracted the idea of an interaction

such that it may represent anything that has a hypothesized
relationship with anything else. It has been used to study such diverse
subjects as patterns of academic citations, the common use of
ingredients in recipes, as well as the spread of a bacterium linked to a

disease. Almost anything where a correlation exists or can be
hypothesized.

These relationships can be analyzed using statistical techniques such
as cluster analysis that group like nodes or like links with like. They

can also be illustrated using a mathematical technique called graphical
analysis, which is simply a vehicle for displaying static and dynamic
relationships pictorially that would otherwise be buried in millions of
data points in a database. Software packages now render graphical

analysis easy.

Network analysis finds its biggest use in business facilitating
segmentation analysis; here the attributes of nodes and links are

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