I’d like to point out five very exciting articles / links that people should definitely check out:

1. Finance / Investing: Researchers from Harvard Business School have found that portfolio managers do better when they invest on firms they have personal connections with (went to college / grad school with). In fact returns on ‘connected’ investments were better by huge magnitudes, upwards of 4-8%. You can find the paper here, and there’s an interesting discussion + video here.
2. Entrepreneurship: Researchers from Harvard Business School found “… that an individual is more likely to become an entrepreneur if his or her co-workers have been entrepreneurs before”. A good case for homophily or its converse effect. See the paper here.
3. ‘Socializing’ Search: One of the great early advantages of Google’s search technology was Pagerank. It considered hyperlinks as votes for popularity, and thus created a massive ranking of web pages that didn’t rely on page content. Now people want to use social network information (the kind that we see in Facebook) to augment web search technology: Pages your friends like might be pages you like yourself. Check out the MIT Technology Review article here.
4. Internet Structure and Robustness: For Dubai and many other places, the internet shut down on January 30th, 2008. Who to blame? A ship cut through a critical fiber optic cable. The resulting blackout was, not surprisingly, devastating for the area. Oddly, the internet was originally designed for robustness against failure (ala nuclear threat from soviet russia). See the news article here. People could discuss how this relates with bottlenecks, betweenness, and policy issues such as net neutrality.
5. Palantir and Combating Terrorism: jerseygirl15 points out the networked nature of terrorist cells. One might also argue that analyzing network structure (say within the telecommunications network — phone calls) could reveal information about who might be a national security risk. Ethical and legal issues are definitely well noted.. And of course, the government is definitely interested in such analysis. One company that creates such software is Palantir Technologies, a startup based in Palo Alto. You can check out their website here. There’s not too much there in ways of product description, but this points towards a clear industry being built around analyzing graph data.

Here is some more detailed information + abstracts:

The Small World of Investing: Board Connections and Mutual Fund Returns

http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/08-055.pdf

We find that portfolio managers place larger bets on firms they are connected to through their network, and

perform significantly better on these holdings relative to their non-connected holdings. A replicating

portfolio of connected stocks outperforms a replicating portfolio of non-connected stocks by up to

8.4% per year.

Peer Effects and Entrepreneurship

http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/08-051.pdf

We find that an individual is more likely to become an entrepreneur if his or her co-workers

have been entrepreneurs before, or if the co-workers’ careers involved frequent

movement between firms. Peer influences appear to be substitutes for direct experience:

the effects are strongest for those without exposure to entrepreneurship in their family of

origin, and for those who have engaged in little inter-firm mobility themselves.

Social Search

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20138/

When the user enters a search query, results related to, produced by, or tagged by members of her social network are given priority. Lower down are results from people implicitly connected to the user, such as those relating to friends of friends, or people who attended the same college as the user […] each user gets a different set of results from a given query, and a set quite different from those delivered by Google.

Analyzing the Internet Collapse

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20152/

Multiple fiber cuts to undersea cables show the fragility of the Internet at its choke points.

Interesting, because the internet was designed originally for robustness; seemingly not the case anymore