The giant online auction company, eBay, has announced a policy change to increase the trader fee (commission) charged during a transaction between buyer and seller. Beginning in May, 2008, the company will also introduce a new feedback policy that no longer allows sellers to offer feedback of its customers. eBay reported that some […]

The Office of Population Research at Princeton University explores historic, present and future trends in population growth, decline and control, which in turn has consequences for network structure and interaction, economic viability, social mobility, governmental regulation and environmental capacity. One of the most famous experiments conducted in this field is the Princeton European Fertility […]

Last Call: Analog Cell Phone Service Disappearing:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,142119-c,cellphones/article.html
When one thinks of networks one usually thinks of a large cellular network. On February 18 analog cell phone service will be shut down permanently. AT&T and Verizon, the “biggest U.S. mobile operators” decided that there will be no more analog service offered […]

Taking the media by storm is news of an online group named Anonymous and its efforts to debilitate the Church of Scientology. For those who haven’t been following the back-and-forth between Anonymous and the CoS, the former is a mysterious “hacker” group which – three weeks ago – posted this YouTube video threatening the […]

I’d like to point out five very exciting articles / links that people should definitely check out:

Finance / Investing: Researchers from Harvard Business School have found that portfolio managers do better when they invest on firms they have personal connections with (went to college / grad school with). In fact returns on ‘connected’ investments were […]

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 […]

After reading the notes on the power distribution, I read further into the topic by looking at one the of references. What fascinated me about it, was the practicality of it in the business world, obviously walmart would pick a sales distribution like the normal that would die off quickly rather than, a […]

 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 […]

Although it’s about three years old at this point, a group of researchers at MIT and IBM have an interesting paper (pdf, Google HTML version) showing interesting visualizations of Wikipedia edits. The visualization they use is derived from the same data as an annotate command in CVS or Subversion would give: it displays which […]