New York Times article about new 2008 presidential primary schedule: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/us/politics/04florida.html?_r=1&ref=us&oref=slogin
Before election season even begins, why do prospective presidential nominees spend so much time in Iowa and New Hampshire? What is so important about Iowa and New Hampshire that causes politicians to flock there months (now, years) before an election is even on the horizon? […]

In our brief introduction to evolutionary game theory, we defined an evolutionarily stable strategy roughly as one that tends to drive a fractionally small population of mutant strategies to extinction over time. Our setting for investigating this idea was the Hawk-Dove game played between behaviorally instinctive animals; here we saw that successive generations of […]

Earlier this evening, I navigated to the popular digg.com website earlier to see what was buzzing around the Internet tonight. I was quite surprised to find that there were few, if any, legitimate stories on the front page. Every story was a posting of the (fairly) recently discovered key to “crack” the encryption […]

Energy Use Study Demonstrates Remarkable Power of Social Norms
An interesting extension of the “information cascade” effect. Researchers found that, given information about other people’s energy usage, people will likely adjust their own energy usage to match the “social norm” as presented to them. A study was done on a group in California to observe […]

Over a month ago, a blog post written about customer reviews on carpets made it to the front page on Digg.com with 569 diggs. The blogger noticed on HomeDepot.com that three comments posted within the span of three months seemed to be very similar. He noted:

“I suppose it could be the same person who made […]

MySpace.com was at one point generally perceived as the largest and most popular social networking site, but what does that really mean for its uses for the future?
For example, its use as a learning tool. So, there are always these stories regarding both sides for social networking sites, either schools(teachers, professor, officials) are pro or […]

The article “Scale-Free Networks Provide a Unifying Framework for the Emergence of Cooperation” by F.D. Santos and J.M. Pacheco suggests that structure of a network influences which strategies evolve within a population. Two games one of which is familiar to our class – the prisoner’s dilemma and a variation called “the snowdrift game”- are […]

An information cascade occurs when individuals adopt a new behavior based on the signals and actions of individuals surrounding them. We can also treat this propagation of a new behavior throughout a network as games played between individuals in which the superior strategy is “passed down” to individuals in the “outer levels” of the network. […]

I have been a major league baseball fan for years, but it was not until last week during one of my routine visits to my favorite baseball team’s website (which shall remain nameless as I am embarrassed by their performance), that I realized a small ad in the lower left corner of the screen. […]

At the beginning of this month, a clever illustration of the power of information cascades was carried out in the even seedier underground of politics: partisan blogging. As Josiah Roe, Executive VP of Coptix, Inc., which provides backup DNS hosting for sites such as “georgewbush.com”, writes, his company decided decided to do a little […]