The Internet revolution and Google have completely restructured information, giving more power to individuals in publishing their ideas on the Internet. Blogs, forums, Pod casts, groups, and personal pages have grown significantly, creating a plethora of individual written content. Our society has trusted Google as the industry leader in organizing all of the […]

The small world phenomenon in social networks is quite a surprising property when one first learns of it [wikipedia: small world phenomenon]. Six degrees of separation - the idea that each person is connected to every other person by a path of length 6 on average - is quite remarkable. Yet we observe […]

Note: This was also posted on my own blog: http://aysz88.livejournal.com/27137.html . It may look better there.
In the February 16, 2007 issue of Science, Brendan J. Frey and Delbert Dueck apply “message-passing” networks to a problem that doesn’t seem particularly natural in that context: how does one cluster large numbers of objects, and then find […]

World of Warcraft (WoW) is one of the largest and fastest growing Mass-Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) with over 7 million users spread across more than 200 different servers. This is due mostly to the revolutionary features that Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. continues to incorporate into the gaming world. With the release of […]

Link
This article talks about how “network theory” can be used to find terrorists. People studying networks have found “surprising commonalities” between airline routes, people’s interactions at cocktail parties, and crickets’ synchronization of their chirps. These people study networks to have an easier time figuring out non-trivial patterns. New algorithms are being developed […]

The Shi, Adamic & Strauss paper “Networks of Strong Ties” (pdf, arXiv) analyzes the importance of strong ties in a social network, in contrast to “The Strength of Weak Ties”. If we recall, the strength of weak ties resides in their ability to connect nodes that are not normally in close contact with each […]

Facebook, evidently searching for masses of programmers to do their evil bidding, has actually found a great way to attract engineers at the same time as screening potential job applicants: programming puzzles.

Problem: (the full text of the long-winded setup to the problem can be found after the jump @ facebook)
Suppose you and 15 friends are […]

Braess’ paradox deals with networks where when users selfishly choose the best route, under certain circumstances, adding additional capacity increases travel time. We also applied the concept of Nash equilibrium to analyze Braess’ paradox. A Stanford professor Sunil Kumar explores the question of how to increase capacity and throughput without risking increasing delays […]

As the debate over global warming rages on, there’s one thing we can all agree on. It’s stupid! It’s like wondering if the can of varnish you drank was half-full or half-empty. Pollution is bad. Period.
[…]

Source: Internet Advertising and the Generalized Second-Price Auction: Selling Billions of Dollars Worth of Keywords by Benjamin Edelman, Michael Ostrovsky, and Michael Schwarz
Pay-Per-Click advertising is the primary source of revenue for internet search companies such as Yahoo and Google. When a user enters a search query, advertisements to sites that match the query are returned […]