Archive for the 'Education' Category

Formula for Love?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/29/science/29tier.html?scp=10&sq=game+theory&st=nyt
At the end of the day, it can be well argued that love is what we all strive for as individuals. Unfortunately, love is a tricky thing and by that, I mean difficult and hard to find just the right person who will love you and all your weird tendencies. In response to this, online […]

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Disrupting Black Market Trade

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071017-comp-sci-researchers-use-economic-theory-to-disrupt-malware-black-markets.html
This article by Justin Berka discusses an interesting campaign underway by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, the International Computer Science Institute, and the University of California, San Diego. The goal is to analyze and befuddle online black market interactions.
According to Berka, the researchers employ two similar strategies to choke Black Market trade. Both methods operate […]

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Market Clearing Prices and the Housing Market

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23335173/
In the above article, the Associated Press states that housing sales dropped .4 percent this month, the slowest pace observed since 1999.  The median price of a home has also dropped 5% in price since this time last year.  With this news, it becomes apparent that a bipartite preferred seller graph can explain what is […]

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Juicycampus.com: Social Network

The recent release of the new website Juicycampus.com has created much controversy on college campuses across the country. It is a public blog that allows students on college campuses to make anonymous posts regarding current gossip that’s going around. Students are able to search the sight by simply typing in one’s name to see […]

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The complicated process to make decision during poker game

As many people already know, poker is not just a card game. As other gambles, opponents’ decision matter, and statistical probability also matters when one expects the result. However, different from many gambles that players have to play regardless of their hands, in poker, players can fold after looking at their hands. Also, different from […]

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Power in the Trade Network of Ancient Mesopotamia

In the fifth millennia BCE, Western civilization began to take shape on the fertile banks of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The rich soils of Mesopotamia provided strong incentive for humans to create large, organized settlements, subsisting on the power of agriculture. Eventually, these agricultural settlements became what most scholars recognize as the […]

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Game Theory Applied to Presidential Elections

http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/industries/government/article/games-played-vote_482985_18.html
This Fox Business article discusses how game theoretic strategies might be applied to voting for a president. In particular, it cites Wisconsin as being a state where voters are allowed to vote for any of the candidates in the primaries, regardless of party affiliation. The article points out that this means a Republican […]

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The weakness of weak ties

In chapter 2 of the book we discussed the importance of weak ties. In Particular, we talked about Granovetter’s findings based on the interviews he conducted. From these discussions we then concluded that weak ties in networks are more powerful than we may think at first. A question that came to my mind after this […]

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The Impact of Social Networks on Democratic Transitions

In his paper, “Social Networks, Civil Society, and the Prospects for Consolidating Russia’s Democratic Transition” (2001), James Gibson uses the concept of social networks to explain how strong and weak ties between individuals can facilitate the democratization process in Russia.
The literature on civil society suggests that democracy requires high levels of public association between individuals […]

Posted in Topics: Education, social studies

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Who are becoming the “bidges”?

 paper link
http://www.jstor.org/view/00018392/di015549/01p0039q/1?frame=noframe&userID=80fde168@cornell.edu/01c0a8347300501bed2f9&dpi=3&config=jstor
As we know, there are certain people play as bridges between social networks. These kind of people can build weak ties between networks, thus can sometimes have more opportunity, like job interviews, and information. What characteristics do these people uniquely have? How much do other people in the networks care about them? What influence […]

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