Try logging on to New York Times. you may realize that there are not any links to other news articles other than articles that originate from New York Times. Try another news source, such as CNN. Again, you won’t be able to find an article that links to New York Times or other News sources. […]

Schelling’s neighborhood model tells us that the integration of groups in unstable given that two types of people do not want to be in a minority the size of which is somewhere around less than one third of the population. This was said to be the […]

Source: Million-Dollar Murray
This article from the New Yorker tells the story of a homeless man in Reno, Nevada. He is constantly being arrested for drunkiness and needs to go to the hospital for various injuries. The story serves as a segway to the nature of homelessness in the United States. The article references a study […]

If you have been reading the news lately, you will have read about Don Imus, a former CBS radio host who was fired last Thursday for calling members of Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed ho’s.”
What led to his firing? At a superficial glance, perhaps it was completely due to Imus’s bad judgment in using offensive […]

Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?
This weekend’s New York Times Magazine has an article from Duncan Watts on the topic of network effects. The article covers many of the topics that we have covered in class, including the “rich get richer” effect and the MusicLab experiment. Watts draws from examples such as Harry […]

Recently, much work has been done to investigate the structure and dynamics of large social networks. Through datasets from online social networking sites, computer scientists are given an unprecedented look into the networks many of us form everyday. One of the key research questions that has arisen is about the growth of online […]

While doing one of my normal perusals of Wikipedia, I came across some assertions on the value of social networks relative to their sizes. Metcalfe’s law, which was originally applied to early Ethernet networks, states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users. This makes […]

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2004/05/cascading_syste.html
The article, “Cascading System Failure,” by John Robb, pulls social networking theory and information cascading ideas from harmless social networks into today’s terrorist groups. Its main points are about modern nations’ fragility in losing key nodes and how it affects their distribution […]

http://www.citizen-times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200770411153
The above article, “Put ‘Broken Windows’ Theory to the Test on Litter,” is an editorial endorsement for a litter-reduction act in North Carolina. The author claims that the state’s excessive litter accumulation is due in part to an information cascade in which people are more apt to litter if there is already trash on […]