The notion of six degrees of separation has infiltrated popular culture to a very wide extent, particularly for connecting celebrity individuals, i.e. six degrees of Kevin Bacon. It is not suprising that this theory has mainly been applied to high-profile people, as the original Milgram experiment was oriented towards a New England stockbroker. However, as we all know, networks are not confined to the realm of human nodes. Can a small-world phenomena exist in […]

Our handouts on information cascades showed how, by using a series of observations of other peoples decisions people often come to conclusions about what decision they should make. The handout on network effects then showed how positive externalities also helped to ensure the dominance of a particular strategy. The novel “The Tipping […]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6615047.stm
Last night Digg.com had a user rebellion: tens of thousands of users bombarded the digg homepage with the AACS’s HDDVD encryption key. Digg had previously said it would delete all references to the key - like wikipedia and boingboing, among other blogs, have. But, users revolting. For nearly five hours last night, every single […]

Todd is a local of Central New York and will soon be attending Cornell as a non-traditional undergraduate. Within the past year, he has enthusiastically become a member of the greater eBay community. His combination of life experiences as well as his new favorite past-time of buying and selling on eBay made him an excellent […]

http://www.infozech.com
 
Infozech, an India based company, is a company pioneering the field of telecom billing. This means that it provides ways for companies that provide telecommunication services to bill and manage their customer networks. Large companies (most frequently in India or nearby countries) consult with Infozech to find unique solutions to satisfying every customer. The cases […]

 http://www.bioone.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1666%2F05008.1#I0094-8373-32-1-1-F01
Species extinction is a big topic of discussion these days. Whether global warming, habitat destruction, or other various sources are being pinned as the culprits, loss of biodiversity is indeed a serious issue that we are facing. However, what are the mechanisms driving this extinction cascade once a disturbance occurs and how do ecosystem parameters […]

With the advent of the internet, the world seems infinitely smaller than it has ever been in the past. When the experiment was performed, doubtless six degrees of separation seemed infinitely short, unbelievable in a world with six billion people. As times have changed, however, this fact seems less startling. In a […]

A question one would like to think about is whether the small world phenomenon has been changed with the increase usage of the internet. With online communities, the ability to meet people who you have never actually physically met, does this make our world even smaller? Watts and colleagues at Columbia University (New York) conducted […]

We recently spoke in class about information cascades and the impact of having all of your friends move to a new type of device. We used the example of two different instant messengers: A and B. Assuming all of your friends used A, we then evaluated the likelihood of people switching to B. This decision was […]

http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/45930;jsessionid=baagGcSyTPpJry?fulltext=true
According to Professor Paul Turner, “the temptation to cheat appears to be a universal fact of life. In the struggle to survive and reproduce that drives evolution, selfish individuals may be […]