Joana Miguéns | C13
Cisco Systems
San Jose | USA
Carlos saw on the screen “Cisco Systems, San Jose”! He shaked, small chaps… and a strange feeling over his body! In a short time Carlos was sitting in a sidewalk on a Starbucks in San Francisco, and needing a light for the cigarette, he asks a stranger for a match. They fall into conversation; the stranger is an Englishman who, it turns out, had spend the summer in Alentejo, near by Carlos’ home, and works in Intel. "I know it's a foolish question," says the stranger, "but did you ever by any chance run into a fellow named Thomas Bach? He's an old friend of mine, owns a winery in Alentejo..." Carlos exclaims in amazement, “No kidding! Good lord, it's a small world, isn't it?" …
How come it happens so often to meet someone and ended up having common acquaintances! Didn’t all of us met a stranger and ended up having a friend in common? Milgram was a sociologist that contributed to the famous result of the “six degrees of separation”. He showed that people in the United States seemed to be connected by approximately six friendship links, on average. This would mean that I and you are separated from Barak Obama or Bill Gates from only six acquaintances! [1,2]
One week after the two man visited Intel museum, highly quoted in Silicon Valley, and the Englishman took Carlos to the Intel labs, the world's largest semiconductor chip maker. He felt a small thrill. On these labs are the future computing, cloud-computing strategies, virtualization, telepresence technologies... Carlos got enthusiastic and had a long conversation with some engineers. He works on security of scalable networks in Cisco. In a close future we won’t be depending so much on our own laptops and physical resources, that crash all the time! We will rely heavily on virtual machines, which are spawned on demand to meet our needs, and all our computing will be somehow a public resource.
In Silicon Valley Carlos witnesses the development of highly secure technologies to connect people. “When technology meets humanity on the human network, the way we work changes. The way we live changes. Everything changes,” Cisco Systems.
A long day to Carlos, he finally gets home. A familiar smell coming from the kitchen, the stomach was so empty and starving… that smell was too familiar… for a moment his favorite Portuguese dishes were in his mind. He remembers the way his mother makes “arroz de pato”, and that tasting sardines on summer days with a fresh salad and bread from Alentejo… The dinner was a surprise from his Portuguese roommate, it was Bacalhau! The dinner was a moment of true pleasure, a trip back home, with a white wine “Conventual Portalegre”! Carlos was spending too long on the computer, maybe too long! With the internet he could call back home for free, he could listen to his favorite music on Pandora, watch the news on CNN.com, speak with his friends on MySpace and speak with his girlfriend, a French girl living in Paris that he met on a summer holiday in Algarve. His favorite summer spot was Praia da Rocha, that he couldn’t fulfill his memories, not even on the californian beaches. While he was still thing about the coincidence of knowing someone in common with the Englishman, and flashing about his conversation in Intel, he ended up searching on the internet about the internet itself. He had to write a small report about the internet.
Another wave of coincidences…
The internet is supported by routers, like small computers that link together the Internet's smaller local networks. They act like Internet traffic cops, deciding how to send each packet of information to the destination. The Internet map looks like an airline route map. A few central nodes, "hub", connect to a large number of other nodes, and a much larger number of spoke sites have just ending handful of links. On the airline route map, cities would be nodes; on the Internet, routers are the nodes. The huge topology of this web determines its connectivity and consequently how effectively we can locate information on it. Carlos had a feeling of fulfillment… his new acquaintances in international companies, the experience in Cisco and Intel on computing technologies and his research on the internet, the big Net, made him think how positive was his experience beyond frontiers with the program Inov Contacto, an excellent Portuguese case of social networks.
[1] Barabasi, A.-L. (2003). Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life
[2] Milgram, S. (1967) . The small-world problem. Psychology Today 1, 61-67