The IEEE article “Overview of Sensor Networks” (Aug 2004) provides a concise summary on what wireless sensor networks are, their applications, and the challenges in their design.  Wireless sensor networks are collections of small computing devices with some sensing ability constrained by low computing capability and low energy restrictions.  Each device is ineffective on its […]

The brain is one of the most profound networks we can study and implements information cascading in a unique framework. The brain is a network of many neurons that provide one-way signals to each other, similar to the linear model presented in class. Neurons signal other neurons to fire by releasing neurotransmitters at […]

Recently we’ve talked about the “wisdom of the crowds” in information cascades. In particular, how two consumers’ decision to choose to go to restaurant A instead of B may cause all subsequent consumers to make the same choice. This scenario embodies this notion that herds of people might make a better choice than a single […]

The sudden and widespread attention given to the “Vote Different” video clip (also sometimes referred to as “Obama 1984″ or “Hillary 1984″ ) is a dramatic example of the sort of tipping phenomenon that the course is beginning to cover. On YouTube, the commercial has now been viewed almost 3 million times, which doesn’t […]

In the 1960’s Stanley Milgram performed an experiment where subject individuals were given a letter and asked to send this letter to an individual unknown to the subject through a chain of personal acquaintances. The result, that these letters flowed a chain of weak personal acquaintances, was used by Mark Granovetter in “The Strength of […]

Paper on network effects in the video game market
In the course we have been recently discusing network effects. Indeed, network effects and positive feedback loops have received a great deal of attention, academically and otherwise. In a market with network effects, competition among multiple incompatible systems is intense, because a small, initial advantage confers a […]

We are all plagued by spam in our in-boxes and telemarketers calling us at dinner. But, for the most part, cell phones have been free from mass marketing strategies. A patent has been issued (http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5852775-description.html) for a system that may change this. The cellular telephone advertising system would play ads of up to 30 seconds […]

In class, we talked about the Web as a network. We also mentioned that much information on the Web is not indexed by search engines and is part of the internet’s “dark matter.” This content is also known as the deep Web, invisible Web, hidden Web, or Deepnet. The deep Web consists […]

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Danny Hillis and his start-up company, Metaweb Technologies, are trying to change the Internet. Hillis is trying to create a new way that the world’s digital information is stored. In his vision, the internet would be a public centralized database that would allow computers to automate many of the services that […]