As we have begun discussing in lecture, networks can be viewed as the positive and negative relations between various individuals or groups. What happens when everyone in a network teams up against another group and forms a mass plan of destruction? You get a network of terrorists. The most studied terrorist network is that […]

Professor Theodore Lowi of Cornell University’s Government Department often reiterates the theme of not living virtual lives, whether political or…sexual, as he puts it in lecture. He recalls a time when Cornellians left the classroom, took buildings over by force, and marched for change.
Nevertheless, the virtual realm has become one of the battlefields against […]

My friend told me a little about Network Marketing a few years ago and while I did do some research on it then, my gains were pretty limited. However, now that I’m taking a Networks class, I figured this might just be the right time to re-explore network marketing and see if concepts we had […]

Although it’s about three years old at this point, a group of researchers at MIT and IBM have an interesting paper (pdf, Google HTML version) showing interesting visualizations of Wikipedia edits. The visualization they use is derived from the same data as an annotate command in CVS or Subversion would give: it displays which […]

According to Heider’s social balance theoryi, individuals (nodes) in a social network tend to form relationships (+ or - edges between nodes) as follows: “for every set of three nodes, if we consider the three edges connecting them, either all three of these edges are labeled […]

In his paper ” On the convergence of informational cascades” (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6WJ3-45P12S4-N/2/8a374f4e23f6ea6d04deb1891875e7c1) , In Ho Lee discusses the formation of informational cascades when the action space is continuous.
In the basic model of Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer and Welch, each person makes a binary “Accept/Reject” action after considering his own signal and the actions of his predecessors. It turns […]

“Cisco to Buy WebEx”
http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/902812/cisco_to_buy_webex/index.html?source=r_technology
In what appears a very strategic M&A deal, Cisco has decided to acquire a company named WebEx Communications for a very large chunk of cash–$3.2 billion. The former is a leading supplier of networking equipment, such as routers and switches. WebEx, meanwhile, is in the applications sector–providing services which allow […]

As social networking sites become more popular, new companies are trying to break away from the computer to create a more mobile, web-based network.  A recent article in the New York Times highlights two new websites that have brought social networking websites to users’ cellphones.   
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/technology/30social.html
 
The first site is called Kyte (http://www.kyte.tv/home/index.html).  It allows users […]

http://travel.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/dining/05race.html?pagewanted=3
In Kenneth J. Arrow’s paper “What Has Economics to Say About Racial Discrimination,” he proposes that racism still exists in the workplace, though of course not to the same extent as half a century ago. This is very much true, and in the above article we are able to see such racism in the culinary […]

The article “Scale-Free Networks Provide a Unifying Framework for the Emergence of Cooperation” by F.D. Santos and J.M. Pacheco suggests that structure of a network influences which strategies evolve within a population. Two games one of which is familiar to our class – the prisoner’s dilemma and a variation called “the snowdrift game”- are […]