So unfortunately I ran out of time last week to properly reflect on the reading this week… But here are a few key take aways:

‘How does individual behaviour aggregate to collective behaviour?’

‘What makes the problem hard, and what makes complex systems complex, is that the parts making up the whole don’t sum up in any simple fashion. Rather they interact with each other, and in interacting, even quite simple components can generate bewildering behaviour.’

By network, we ‘could be talking about people in a network of friendships, or a large organisation, routers along the backbone of the Internet or neurons firing in the brain. All these systems are networks.’

‘Real networks represent populations of individual components that are actually doing something – generating power, sending data or even making decisions.’

‘Networks are dynamic objects not just because things happen in networked systems, but because the networks themselves are evolving and changing in time, driven by the activities or decisions of those very components.’