Taking the media by storm is news of an online group named Anonymous and its efforts to debilitate the Church of Scientology. For those who haven’t been following the back-and-forth between Anonymous and the CoS, the former is a mysterious “hacker” group which – three weeks ago – posted this YouTube video threatening the […]

I’d like to point out five very exciting articles / links that people should definitely check out:

Finance / Investing: Researchers from Harvard Business School have found that portfolio managers do better when they invest on firms they have personal connections with (went to college / grad school with). In fact returns on ‘connected’ investments were […]

In class, we’ve recently discussed various types of global networks containing giant components: social networks, computer networks, and economic networks. But one of the largest and most effective giant components is sitting right behind your eyes. The brain is the most connected network your body, and consequently the most complex. It’s estimated […]

My paper topic was to look at social phenomenon through the theoretical and visual tools established by nonlinear optical theory. If interested you should read the section of the paper that gives a brief introduction about optics. The thrust of it is simply that Social Systems can be considered complex nonlinear dynamical systems and so […]

In our brief introduction to evolutionary game theory, we defined an evolutionarily stable strategy roughly as one that tends to drive a fractionally small population of mutant strategies to extinction over time. Our setting for investigating this idea was the Hawk-Dove game played between behaviorally instinctive animals; here we saw that successive generations of […]

Energy Use Study Demonstrates Remarkable Power of Social Norms
An interesting extension of the “information cascade” effect. Researchers found that, given information about other people’s energy usage, people will likely adjust their own energy usage to match the “social norm” as presented to them. A study was done on a group in California to observe […]

In a recent Wired interview[i], Fred Vogelstein asked Google CEO Eric Schmidt about the current number and future scale of Google’s data centers, to which Schmidt responds, “I think my overall description would be in the dozens. There are a few very large ones, some of which have been leaked to the press. But in […]

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 […]

http://stke.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;303/5659/793
 
In the article, “Evolutionary Dynamics of Biological Games”, Martin A. Nowak and Karl Sigmund discuss the benefits of evolutionary game theory in modeling and understanding the evolution of phenotypes. Classical game theory, in the sense of networks attempting to approach a Nash equilibrium, does not fully explain newly observed population trends in biological studies, “where […]

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 […]