New Study Looks at Peer Pressure and Implications for Preventing

The above article is from HealthNewsDigest.com. The article points out that “friends’ substance use is one of the most powerful influences that lead adolescents to use themselves.” However a three-year Weill Cornell Medical College study found that students with “competence skills had a long-term […]

Presumably, many of us have been to other parts of the country and heard things that sounded weird to our ears, other than just an accent. There are many normal differences we are often aware of, such as the name for a sweet carbonated beverage. In fact, people often rally on this debate, […]

Reference: “Innovations and Technological Spillovers” by M. Ishaq Nadiri – pdf at http://ideas.repec.org/p/cvs/starer/93-31.html
Recently in class we began discussing the idea of diffusion in networks. This notion of diffusion can be useful for modeling many things including the spread of information or rumors, the epidemiological problem of disease outbreaks, or (as mentioned in class) the […]

“Meet Hollywood’s Latest Genius”
http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-random27jul02,1,1850294,full.story?coll=la-headlines-magazine&ctrack=1&cset=true
In his article, Leonard Mlodinow examines the unpredictability of Hollywood; he explores how much of a studio’s success is due to executives making the business choices and how much of it is random. Recent research has suggested that films, no matter what the budget, are subject to unpredictable factors arising during […]

Sites referenced:
http://www.moneycontrol.com/india/news/pressnews/juxtconsultshaadicom/shaadicomadjudg/market/stocks/article/271619 
www.shaadi.com
Shaadi.com is the number one matrimonial website in the world. A quick look at the website reveals it has recently won a spate of titles, including most user friendly matrimonial website in India, the subject of the article posted. Shaadi.com has capitalized on the role of the matchmaker in arranging in Indian weddings with […]

Power Law Distributions in Real and Virtual Worlds
The above link is an article that compares the pattern of size of global domains to the geographical distribution of the global population. One of the interesting points made in this article is that web pages are often closely linked to the economic and technological growth […]

http://www.cjpf.org/crime/crime.html
 
There is a controversy over our current correctional system. Is it an effective deterrent to make people not commit crimes or not? There is evidence to show that it can go either way. For example we talked about in class how if clean up petty crimes people are less likely to commit bigger crimes, so […]

In class, we’ve started to study network effects and externalities.
In this post, I’m primarily looking to explore two questions. Firstly, how can we better describe network effects in terms of quantifying them? Secondly, what would it look like to filter the first question through a web lens?
It turns out that the process of quantifying the […]

http://blogs.business2.com/business2blog/2005/11/prices_law_and_.html
 
 
The network effects that explain the huge growth of peer-to-peer production and organizations should not be overestimated. Metcalfe’s Law and Reed’s Law both give overly optimistic formulas for calculating the net value of a network. Metcalfe’s Law dictates that a network’s value is […]

Recently we’ve been talking about information cascades, and lately network effects, mostly in the context of tangible consumer goods and services. A more intangible example of both of these phenomena is going on right now, across the country. Although the first primary is more than eight months away, fund-raising has already started. This article in […]