Large peer to peer networks can be very difficult to manage, and a solution developed by researchers in Cambridge is to structure the network as a social network. Their inspiration was the way in which information (gossip) travels person to person through a group of people. A large network modeled this way means […]

“Building the Infinite Internet” by Scott Woolley, April 23, 2007
http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2007/0423/068.html
As the internet continues to grow in size, there is a greater and greater need to find efficient ways to transfer data between servers and computers. According to the article, Akamai Technologies Inc. provides methods to overcome some of the archaic rules of the internet […]

An information cascade occurs when individuals adopt a new behavior based on the signals and actions of individuals surrounding them. We can also treat this propagation of a new behavior throughout a network as games played between individuals in which the superior strategy is “passed down” to individuals in the “outer levels” of the network. […]

 Racial networks can be represented, in network theory, by groups that have links to each other, and fewer individual links to other racial networks. These groups help sustain triadic closure between other racial networks, which creates a great amount of stability with the whole worldwide racial network. Several articles I have read talk about how […]

The Erdös Number Project
Just as the idea of the small-world phenomenon famously inspired “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” in the movie industry, so too do mathematicians have their own version of the game. This one centers around the late Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös, who had a reputation for, among other things, publishing an incredibly […]

article:  The Sky-high Club
James Surowiecki, the author of The Wisdom of Crowds, wrote an article for the New Yorker on the finding that CEO connections lead to increased pay.  He begins the article by discussing the ex-CEO of Home Depot, who was given two hundred million dollars despite the fact that he did not do […]

Stanley Milgram’s small-world experiment, popularly termed as the “six degrees of separation” model, claimed that two perfectly random people were typically only six connections away from each other, assuming a connection to be an acquaintance they knew by name. The threory essentially made the world seem a lot small, by proving that we were all […]

Three years before the Cuban Missile Crisis, noted philosopher Bertrand Russell compared nuclear brinkmanship to a game of Chicken; the idea that superpowers should stockpile nuclear weapons and make generally vague yet scary threats against each other in order to create situations more advantageous to them was analogous to two reckless car drivers waiting until […]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=a8XwoOb8Nczo&refer=japan
This article deals with Toyota’s new division called Scion. Scions are marketed towards younger people. Toyota’s plan is simple; they sell cheap reliable cars, and market them solely to “edgy young dudes of the world.” This means that they are not advertising through the usual mediums of TV and print. Instead all advertisements are being […]

 
http://shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html
This article discussed the emergence of power law models and popularity imbalance in the popularity of web-blogs. Addressing the common observation that a small group of web-blogs account for a disproportionally large amount of web traffic, the article explains that it is not individuals’ […]