Sean P. Gorman

Spatial Small Worlds: New Geographic Patterns for an Information Economy

Networks are structures that pervade many natural and manmade phenomena. Recent findings have characterized many networks as not random chaotic structures but as efficient complex formations. Current research has examined complex networks as largely a nonspatial phenomenon. Location, distance, and geography, though, are all vital aspects of a wide variety of networks. The authors examine the US portion of Internet infrastructure as a complex network and the role distance and geography play in its formation. From these findings implications are drawn on the economic, political, national security, and technological impacts of network formation and evolution in an information economy.

Fixed and fluid: stability and change in the geography of the Internet

Abstract The geography of todays Internet infrastructure is grounded in the fiber installations, routers, switches and central offices that guide electronic messages around the world. While the location of hardware is relatively fixed, the task of identifying the locations where data and information are stored is a far more difficult task. Advances in technology have created a very fluid definition of the location of information that has become increasingly distributed and ethereal. This paper examines the current structure and location patterns of Internet infrastructure hardware in the USA and how content distribution networks and peer-to-peer networks have disrupted traditional information location. The comparison of the two provides insight into how the geography of infrastructure hardware is influencing Internet technology and business.

Where are the Web factories: The urban bias of e–business location

The Internet has been considered the great equaliser for business, allowing distant locals to compete with large metropolitan regions. Recent research points to a different geography, where domains and connectivity cluster predominantly in large urban areas. The question remains, are new businesses of the Internet economy doing the same or avoiding metropolitan areas? This paper examines the head and branch locations of the top 40 e–business integration firms in the USA. The analysis of the distribution of these locations will provide insight to what regions most benefit from the Internet economy. Further, the data should provide a useful comparison to metropolitan trends for domain and connectivity agglomeration.

An Application of Complex Network Theory to German Commuting Patterns

Simulating the structure and evolution of complex networks is an area that has recently received considerable attention. Most of this research has grown out of the physical sciences, but there is growing interest in their application to the social sciences, especially regional science and transportation. This paper presents a network structure simulation experiment utilizing a gravity model to identify interactions embodied in socio-economic processes. In our empirical case, we consider home-to-work commuting patterns among 439 German labour market districts. Specifically, the paper examines first the connectivity distribution of the German commuting network. The paper next develops a spatial interaction model to estimate the structure and flows in the network concerned. The focus of this paper is to examine how well the spatial interaction model replicates the structure of the German commuting network as compared to complex network models. Finally, the structure of the physical German road network is compared to the spatial flows of commuters across it for a tentative supply-demand comparison.

Tethered connectivity? The spatial distribution of wireless infrastructure

At current growth rates, the number of wireless subscribers will surpass that of fixed telephones in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. This fundamental shift in telecommunications has led many to believe that wireless technologies will break the ‘tyranny of geography’, help close the digital divide between core and periphery locations, and allow firms to be more footloose. This paper will examine the spatial distribution of wireless infrastructure in the United States to determine if the core–periphery relationship of cities is altered by wireless technologies. To do so the analysis will compare wireless infrastructure with Internet infrastructure and telephone switch infrastructure with a focus on data infrastructure in all three categories. The infrastructure datasets will be then compared with population distributions to determine their impacts on a spatial digital divide. The results of the study will provide a snapshot of the geography of wireless technologies, a comparison with other terrestrial communications, and insight into the policy of infrastructure delivery.

Moving from Protection to Resiliency: A Path to Securing Critical Infrastructure

The events of 9/11 brought renewed focus to critical infrastructure, but the security of infrastructure has been and continues to be an issue outside the scope of any one event or country. Oil pipeline attacks in Iraq, massive blackouts in Italy, the United States, and Russia, submarine cable failures in the Atlantic, accidental and intentional failures of infrastructure are an increasing and complex problem. The issue of infrastructure security is a global problem both is applicability and connectivity. All nations are dependent on infrastructure and many of these infrastructures cross international borders and some span the globe. A problem facing all nations is that they have the responsibility for securing infrastructure but critical aspects are owned by the private sector. This though is only one of many problems facing infrastructure security: 1) infrastructures are interdependent on each others reliability 2) infrastructures are large, dynamically unsynchronized, and complex 3) sharing information about infrastructure vulnerabilities is severely hampered by fears of regulation and competition. Along with these direct obstacles there are larger economic forces that complicate the issue. The markets driving infrastructure are geared towards maximizing efficiency to increase profit and not maximizing protection, which can result in public vulnerabilities.

Real-Time National Stability Engineering: Mapping the 2009 Afghan Election

The re-building of institutional capacity in post-disaster and post-war zones requires massive engineering efforts. The needs of people on the ground in these situations are often approached from the top-down via emergency groups, NGOs, and governments (Jones, Wilson, & Rathmell, 2005). For actors on the ground, research has shown that such efforts may require ad-hoc capacity to adapt, understand, share, and quickly assess their situational context (NRC, 2007). In the study outlined below, participants were plagued by a variety of barriers ranging from lack of power to lack of trained technical personnel. In a report on improving geospatial support for disaster management the National Research Council identified several critical barriers to successful response to emergencies: a combination of lack of adequately trained staff and technically complicated geospatial software tools, lack of agreement and means for successful data distribution, and data “format[s] which are unrecognizable or unusable [for] responding agencies (NRC, 2007: 157).” A collection of researchers, open source software projects and companies has been developing technology to advance the delivery of geospatial and data sharing capabilities to non-technical users in ad-hoc environments. Recently, a few of these participants coordinated a volunteer effort to test how individual actors might apply such technology in Afghanistan.

The Repercussions of Being Addicted to Oil: Geospatial Modeling of Supply Shocks

In a world addicted to oil and the prodigious infrastructure that produces it there are distinct spatial variations in oil dependence and vulnerability. Depending on a country’s location, it will have dependencies of different sources of oil. Disruptions in any one source of oil will have differing impacts in both the magnitude and breadth of countries affected. To begin to understand such a volatile landscape this paper will review pertinent literature surrounding oil shocks and propose a model of how they can be geospatially modeled. Specifically the modeling will calculate an Oil Import Vulnerable Import Index, an Oil Dependency Index, and the percentage reduction in import diversity for 63 countries.