Earlier in the semester we discussed that we live in a small world, in which there are, on average, “six degrees of separation” between all individuals. However, in aSmallWorld (ASW), an exclusive online social network, everyone is connected by at most three degrees of separation. The following is the site’s description of itself:
ASMALLWORLD is […]

http://www.hinduonnet.com/2005/03/12/stories/2005031208552000.htm
The above article talks about the effect that walking has on world cricket. For those of you unfamiliar with the game, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket
In short, cricket is a game played between two teams where, much like baseball, there exists a batsman, a bowler who throws the ball at the batsman, and the fielders who try […]

http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/economy_finances/report-79659.html 
Research conducted at the University of Bath, UK, and University of St Gallen, Switzerland showed that many corporations are wasting millions of dollars by offering contracts to celebrities to appear in advertisements for their products.  The study showed that the use of ordinary people in advertisements is more effective than high profile, global superstars such […]

A new Australian online dating website utilizes the philosophy of “six degrees of separation,” which we previously discussed in class. This idea proclaims that everyone in the world is separated by only six other people. Contrary to many other online dating services, this new site (MeetMyFriend) “allows users to introduce their single friends to the […]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/business/09cell.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&oref=slogin
The above article is titled “Text Generation Gap: UR 2 Old (JK)” and is from the business section of the NYTimes. The article’s publishing date is March 9, 2008.
As the title suggests, the article is about the function of text messaging and how it continues to impact and change our society. Specifically, the article focused […]

How to participate in a low bid auction
Above is a short article I found interesting about low bid auctions. A low bid auction is actually an auction where the lowest bid wins… with one exception: the bid must be unique. So in theory you can bid one cent on an item, but if someone else […]

Lately in class, we have been discussing the evolution of information networks. With the creation of these networks, we have all benefited from rapid search, aggregation of data from diverse sources, and presentation of data based on ratings of relevance. With such speedy access and facilitation of information flow, how could these information networks ever […]

Who Rises to Power in American Business?
Please find summarized here the above-linked Question and Answer with Anthony J. Mayo, co-author of the book
Paths to Power: How Insiders and Outsiders Shaped American Business Leadership
.
The book itself, which came out in January 2007, is “the first book in fifty years to exhaustively analyze the demographics of leadership […]

A giant component is a connected set of nodes that consists of the majority of the network. In many networks, the formation of a giant component is unavoidable. I investigated the time taken for a giant component to develop in a social network. I varied the rate at which people made friends, and observed […]

In a study at Kansas University conducted by Michael Vitevich, an attempt is made to map out the words of our vocabulary as they are represented in the human brain. What Vitevich hopes to learn from charting out our vocabularies in the brain is how victims of brain trauma regain their language skills, but […]