This week I did not attend this weeks symposium, however I read through the blog post that Adrian sent out and made a couple of notes.

Barabasi:

• It started off talking about the power laws and how nature normally hates them., because ordinary systems follow bell curves, however this changes if it has to undergo a phase transition. The theory of phase transitions is that the path from disorder to order is determined by the powerful forces of self-organization and power laws. Power laws are the major factor of self-organization in complex systems.
• The power law makes us abandon the idea of scale, as there is no intrinsic scale in these networks.
• This first part is all about how the power law transitions from disorder to order.