Professor Theodore Lowi of Cornell University’s Government Department often reiterates the theme of not living virtual lives, whether political or…sexual, as he puts it in lecture. He recalls a time when Cornellians left the classroom, took buildings over by force, and marched for change.
Nevertheless, the virtual realm has become one of the battlefields against […]

Social Networking helps Peer-to-peer lending loan $300+ million in 2 years
Above is an article about the facilitation of loaning and lending through internet social networks. In light of ever increasing loan rates, peer-to-peer lending has grown popular in moving money from individual lenders to those looking for competitive loan rates. The biggest name in peer-to-peer lending, […]

My friend told me a little about Network Marketing a few years ago and while I did do some research on it then, my gains were pretty limited. However, now that I’m taking a Networks class, I figured this might just be the right time to re-explore network marketing and see if concepts we had […]

 What’s in a name? As the Internet continues to increase its presence in the lives of people around the world, a new Wall Street Journal article discusses just how important a role your name and its Google results can have.  For a while now, most savvy social-networkers have realized that ill-conceived content on sites like […]

Our class discussion on information cascades and pluralistic ignorance reminded me of a situation that occurred several months ago that exemplifies these issues.
Towards the beginning of Winter Break, a high school friend used Facebook to invite around 140 people to a party at a beach house. The invitees included the entirety of our high school […]

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 […]

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1361135
The above link goes to a 2005 article titled “Testing for statistical discrimination in health care” that appeared in the journal Health Services Research.
The article describes a study by Balsa, McGuire, and Merdith that was motivated by a 2002 report by the Institute of Medicine. The Institute of Medicine report, titled “Unequal Treatment,” had […]

According to Heider’s social balance theoryi, individuals (nodes) in a social network tend to form relationships (+ or - edges between nodes) as follows: “for every set of three nodes, if we consider the three edges connecting them, either all three of these edges are labeled […]

Flash mobs are a “large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, do something unusual for a brief period of time, then quickly disperse.” These groups are also called “inexplicable mobs”, “smart mobs” or “flash groups”, to name a few. Flash mobs carry out carefully organized and orchestrated “missions”, the first (successful) […]

Nowak and Krakauer (1999) apply evolutionary game theory (EGT) to the development of a proto-language: “The evolution of language“.
The necessary components of an evolutionary game theory model (selection, variation, and replication) have linguistic analogs:
Selection: the process of acquiring new linguistic constructs, usually based on the tension between accurate, facile communication on the one hand and […]