Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
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Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. · Nov 2016
Comparative StudyFor blacks in America, the gap in neighborhood poverty has declined faster than segregation.
Black residential segregation has been declining in the United States. That accomplishment rings hollow, however, if blacks continue to live in much poorer neighborhoods than other Americans. ⋯ Because black-white differences in neighborhood poverty declined much faster than black-white segregation, the neighborhood poverty disadvantage of blacks declined faster than black segregation-a noteworthy finding because the narrowing of the racial gap in neighborhood poverty for blacks has gone largely unnoticed. Further analysis reveals that the narrowing of the gap was produced by change in both the medians and shapes of the distribution of poverty across the neighborhoods where blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asians reside.
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We study the network dismantling problem, which consists of determining a minimal set of vertices in which removal leaves the network broken into connected components of subextensive size. For a large class of random graphs, this problem is tightly connected to the decycling problem (the removal of vertices, leaving the graph acyclic). ⋯ Building on the statistical mechanics perspective, we propose a three-stage Min-Sum algorithm for efficiently dismantling networks, including heavy-tailed ones for which the dismantling and decycling problems are not equivalent. We also provide additional insights into the dismantling problem, concluding that it is an intrinsically collective problem and that optimal dismantling sets cannot be viewed as a collection of individually well-performing nodes.