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 […]

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 […]

There is one issue on which virtually every member of the baseball punditry agrees: steroids ruined baseball in the 1990s. Players took the illegal drugs because they made them stronger, and this strength enabled them to hit more home runs, which in turn gave them greater leverage in contract negotiations. Major League Baseball […]

The academic paper entitled The Authority of Supreme Court Precedent: A Network Analysis can be found using the following link:
http://jhfowler.ucsd.edu/authority_of_supreme_court_precedent.pdf
 
This academic paper provides an in-depth explanation of how network analysis can be applied to study Supreme Court precedents. A network was constructed that consists of 30,288 majority opinions written by the U.S. Supreme Court […]

hypersearching, as discovered in class, is a powerful tool in attaining a fast and accurate result when searching for a query term. Although it is not implemented globally yet, it would prove to be a very powerful searching mechanism. While surfing the web for my own entertainment sakes, I have found several aspects of Korean web […]

We have been talking a lot about network effects where the decisions of one’s peers (fellow decision makers) positively influence one’s choices. Since I am a cynical and jaded college student, this prompted me to investigate more subversive network effects where the decisions of others negatively influence one’s decision. The closest effect I could find […]

A fairly old article by Andrea Devenow and Ivo Welch written in 1996 still continues to accurately describe the financial world more than 10 years later.
Rational Herding in Financial Economics
The authors describe the success of the Herding and the Efficient Markets Hyporthesis (EMH) by discussing the stock market and the behavior of many investors. […]

The sudden and widespread attention given to the “Vote Different” video clip (also sometimes referred to as “Obama 1984″ or “Hillary 1984″ ) is a dramatic example of the sort of tipping phenomenon that the course is beginning to cover. On YouTube, the commercial has now been viewed almost 3 million times, which doesn’t […]

We are all plagued by spam in our in-boxes and telemarketers calling us at dinner. But, for the most part, cell phones have been free from mass marketing strategies. A patent has been issued (http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5852775-description.html) for a system that may change this. The cellular telephone advertising system would play ads of up to 30 seconds […]

Closely connected to the concept of information cascades is the self-organizing system. Such a system will organize itself without any centralized hierarchal structure, but rather through many automatic decentralized processes.
One particularly striking, if morbid, example of a self-organizing system is an ant mill: first described by naturalist William Beebe, an ant mill occurs when a […]