Some people are so careful about avoiding sickness while others simply take it as a fact of life. It’s no wonder the flu spreads so easily when things like hand holding, plate sharing, and simply passing pens around can so easily spread germs. I find that many of us also hold a personal […]

In response to several blog posts earlier on this semester, describing our course’s broad application to biological networks (such as this one, this one, and this one) I highlight that Piers J Ingram, Michael PH Stump and Jaroslav Stark published research in 2006 demonstrating that network effects in biology are not only often poorly understood, but in their example […]

Large social networks - a good thing to have. It means more friends, more contacts, and more connections, simply, but researches at the Virginia Ann Arbor Health Care System and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor have recently conducted a study that implies that a large social network may also be a health […]

The Office of Population Research at Princeton University explores historic, present and future trends in population growth, decline and control, which in turn has consequences for network structure and interaction, economic viability, social mobility, governmental regulation and environmental capacity. One of the most famous experiments conducted in this field is the Princeton European Fertility […]

In class, we explored the advantages of being embedded in a network. As opposed to a node that lies on the fringes of a network, a node in the center of a network has edges with every node in the network, which allows it to interact with these other nodes directly. The influence of this […]

Just from the two beginning weeks in class and the wide range of blog posts, it is clearly evident that networks play a dominant role in all of our lives. Referencing the latest post about research in the neural field, we could say that networks are “hard-wired” into our systems. Merely cataloguing some of my […]

In an article published last summer in the New England Journal of Medicine, Christakis et al investigate the spread of obesity as a social contagion. Using the dataset from the Framingham Heart Study, they performed a longitudinal study (1971-2003) to study how social networks contribute to individual’s body mass index, or BMI. The […]

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 […]

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1361135
The above link goes to a 2005 article titled “Testing for statistical discrimination in health care” that appeared in the journal Health Services Research.
The article describes a study by Balsa, McGuire, and Merdith that was motivated by a 2002 report by the Institute of Medicine. The Institute of Medicine report, titled “Unequal Treatment,” had […]

http://pubs.wri.org/pubs_content_text.cfm?ContentID=575
One of the largest problems facing environmentalists is that of cascade effects surrounding the possible extinction of one species or another. Especially when a “Keystone” predator, one that controls the surrounding population, vanishes, the effect creates a cascade, where the predator’s main pray multiplies and drives out other minor pray, and then in turn consume […]