AIM as a Proxy in the Small-World Phenomenon
http://aimfight.com/
In class we discussed the small-world phenomenon (six degrees of separation) and how this result is not entirely surprising if exponential growth between steps are taken into account. The site http://aimfight.com/ gives you a score equal to the “sum of […]

We recently focused on simple tipping phenomena. Typically, these models involve a strictly increasing function, where the number of people attending rises with people expected to attend. However, what if, at some point, additional forces cause this function to begin to decrease - congestion costs, for example?
(Much of the mathematics behind this is […]

I chose to review a paper by Milo, Itzkovitz, Kashtan, Reuven, Levitt, Shen-Orr, Ayzenshtat, Sheffer, and Alon titled “Superfamilies of Evolved and Designed Networks.” This paper tackles the problem of how to characterize networks despite vast differences in scale. It accomplishes this by identifying “network motifs” within the structure of various networks. Here a […]

As pointed out by beefcake [link], finding relevant content often limits users on the internet more than lack of content. Of course, companies like Google have profited greatly from search: utilizing the link structure of the internet to help users navigate. Indeed, web growth these days is very much dependent on the aggregation, […]

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 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 […]

In the 1960’s Stanley Milgram performed an experiment where subject individuals were given a letter and asked to send this letter to an individual unknown to the subject through a chain of personal acquaintances. The result, that these letters flowed a chain of weak personal acquaintances, was used by Mark Granovetter in “The Strength of […]

http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/econ_ostrovsky_internetauction.shtml
Stanford economists say that under Google’s current auction system, inexperienced bidders often end up overpaying, while experienced ones funnel personnel and money that could be used for growing the company into instead figuring out how to beat Google’s system.
The problem is that Google says it is conducting a second-price auction using ideas from […]

Paul Erdős (1913-1996) was one of the most prolific mathematicians of all time, having written about 1500 mathematical articles during his lifetime, mainly with co-authors. Due to his immense output and large number of collaborators (numbering 509), the concept of the Erdős number was concieved as a way to describe the “collaborative distance” between authors […]