http://waderoush.typepad.com/twr/2005/03/james_surowieck.html
The article written by Rhody about a talk given by Surowiecki bring up a few valid points about the benefits and problems brought about by the ability to share information between people. He begins by mentioning that information taken from many sources can provide a diverse set of ideas that will greatly aid in solving […]

When dealing with any large network of users, be it social, technical, or some amalgamation of both, a discussion of network externalities will often yield fruitful results. As peer-to-peer filesharing systems are often large in both scope and impact on modern computer users, one might expect that there would be a host of literature discussing […]

           A recent article called “France Launches Digital Library”  by Helana Spongenberg of BusinessWeek.com discusses Europeana, a digital library that France is introducing as its supplement to the European Digital Library. What struck me in reading this article was that the creation of Europeana was described as a substitute for US search engines.  The article discusses how major search […]

A Simple Model of Fads and Cascading Failures

Maximizing the Spread of Influence through a Social Network (click on “Full Text: PDF” to view article)
Our class discussion of information cascades has mostly centered around a scenario in which individuals receive information about a particular choice and make a decision based on their information as well as […]

On March 20, 2007, Jaxtr launched the public beta version of its free widget, which “allows users to connect their personal phone to their digital personality.” Users can put this widget on their favorite social networking sites and blogs such as Blogger, Craigslist, eBay, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, MySpace, YouTube, and Wikipedia. During the […]

Google has launched a new AdSense/AdWords beta feature called “Pay-Per-Action” that lets advertisers to pay for ads only after a user clicks on the ad and completes a certain “action”, such as buying a product or filling out an application. This seems like a natural progression from the newspaper-style cost-per-impression, through the internet’s pay-per-click […]

There is a very deep ocean of information relating to game theory.  In sticking with my theme of relating classic examples back to class topics, I found an amazing game theory website.  gametheory.net has an amazing depth of information and is a great resource for all game theory topics.  If one were interested in combinatorics, they could […]

Political Information Cascade
(http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30F1FFF3E540C708EDDAA0894DF404482)
The Presidential political race is almost upon us as most notably in the news democratic contenders begin to set their platform agendas. Before either party can rally behind their presidential candidate, the party members through the presidential primary must elect a candidate. The ‘Primary’ as it is known has two phases. First, party […]

“Obesity runs in families - and friends, too”, by Alvin Powell of the Harvard News Office, can be found here:
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/03.08/09-obesity.html
 
            This article summarizes some of the conclusions made from the Framingham Heart study by Nicholas Christakis, professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School and professor of sociology in the Faculty of Arts and […]

http://www.orgnet.com/orgchart.html
http://waderoush.typepad.com/twr/2005/03/james_surowieck.html
 
In an article called Organizational Hierarchy: Adapting Old Structures to New Challenges, Vladis Krebs says the structure of government is not efficient as it could be because it has not adapted to the agile and creative structures like those seen in the business world.  Krebs uses the example of the hierarchy of the
US intelligence community […]