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 […]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/26/technology/26drill.html  
 
The attached New York Times article is titled; On Niche Dating Sites, Many More Women, and the subject of choice is online dating.  One of the issues brought up in the article is the uneven split of men and women visiting these sites; however, I want to take a look at the bigger picture.  Mentioned […]

Homophily Theory

This link discusses the theory of homophily. This theory states that “most human communication will occur between a source and a receiver who are alike.” In layman’s terms it is the theory of why birds of a feather flock together. The article describes why this is: namely that communication flows more freely when the […]

Game theory may help Tatas encounter CSN
Two prominent Indian steel companies, Tata Steel and Companhia Siderurgica Nacional (CSN) , are amidst a raging bid battle for Corus. Principles of game theory are drawn from both sides as each company devises its own strategy in the ascending bid auction that this business interaction has turned into. […]

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 […]

http://www.gametheory.net/News/Items/108.html
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/ethics-biology.html
 
Where are Irrationality, Justice, and Morality in Game Theory?
 
The entire field of game theory seems to be built upon the concept of rationality. In each situation, players will play the strategy which maximizes their individual payoff. Any experience with the real world however, will lead us to the conclusion that this assumption is inherently flawed […]

Here’s a practical application of the bargaining networks that we’ve been discussing recently, and it touches back on the stock market lectures. This article in the New York Times, “When Unequals Try to Merge as Equals“, is about the upcoming (pending approval) merger of the Sirius and XM satellite radio companies. The crux of the […]

The Enron scandal was unveiled in the November 2001 and has underwent a large amount of examination ever since. Many questions arose asking how the public could have been so blindsided. While Enron’s stock continued to plummet from 2000 into 2001, Enron’s stockholders were encouraged to hold on to their stock and assured that the […]

This Business Week article, Peer Innovation and Production discusses the value of opensouce software and how large companies such as IBM whose business models initially revolved around proprietary software are now using the wisdom of crowds as initially experimented with Linux. Many non-software companies are looking at this idea of harnessing peer production as a […]

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.
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