Larry Lessig, the creator of the Creative Commons and a prominent name in Internet law, recently launched Change Congress. Change Congress is a multipartisan movement created to reform politics by combining existing data and ideas in a “Google-mashup” which will ultimately allow voters to see which candidates support change. The problem which Lessig sees in […]

http://realtytimes.com/rtpages/20041020_siliconvalley.htm
The Silicon Valley is located south of San Francisco in beautiful nothern California. In addition to year-long sunny, 80 degrees weather, the Silicon Valley is also the home of the DotCom boom, Stanford University and three public high schools that rank top 50 in the nation.

The Silicon Valley is also known for its ridiculous […]

Have you ever gone to the movies and worried about who you’re going to sit next to?  This comic illustrates the common dilemma moviegoers face when filling the theatre aisles.

www.xkcd.com/173
The complex relationships between each pair of people in a group can be reflected in an acquaintance graph, such as the one shown above in the comic. […]

Let’s face it, after hearing about Spitzer’s adventures at The Emperor’s Club a couple of days ago, the first website most of you visited was not CNN.com, but MySpace - I know I did. After spending a couple (ok, give me more credit than that - 15) minutes looking at “Kristen’s” bikini picture, a thought […]

The lingering threat of war between two nations is unsettling, especially if both sides understand the consequences of their actions.  A particular example of this is the Cold War, the power struggle between the US and the Soviet Union over nuclear arms, among other things.  In the article(see link at bottom of post), game theory […]

Watching Monty Python the other day, I found my thoughts wandering once again back to Networks 204 and Gladwell’s description of a syphilis epidemic in Baltimore: how it spread from the projects along local highways during summer months and contracted during the winter. Explicitly drawing a connection between contagious viral diseases and transportation networks […]

On February 15th Stephen J. Dubner posted an interesting compilation of opinions regarding the net effect of the technological boom of social networking on his the Freakonomics NY Times blog.  He asked a variety of renowned experts on social networking and technology through their latest studies at some of the leading universities in the United […]

www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/05/BAGFVDQ1S.DTL  In 2005, Thomas Schelling won the Nobel Prize in Economics for, in the words of the Nobel committee, “having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis.” Schelling is attributed to having helped the United States avoid nuclear warfare with the Soviets during the Cold War, and, once again, his strategies may be […]

http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=97779
This article from the Turkish Daily News compares a current, controversial topic occurring in Turkish society to the prisoner’s dilemma zero-sum game. The discussion is about the ramifications of the move to lift a ban nationwide on students wearing head-covering scarves on university campuses. The article begins by describing what a polarizing issue this has […]

http://machinist.salon.com/feature/2008/03/07/clay_shirkey_interview/
The recent increase of the Internet’s ability to create global, ad hoc groups that can amass enormous influence over social, political, and economic institutions signals a significant shift in the power of the medium and, more broadly, all media. This is the argument of Clay Shriky’s new book, “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of […]