http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/technology/29google.html
In class we have studied keyword based advertising on the internet: a way to selectively place ads based on search engine keywords, to better streamline the advertising process and avoid ads hitting the wrong markets.  Google has pioneered this method and it has been very succesful for their online business.  Now, Google is looking to […]

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 […]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/30/science/30sharks.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=login
The food chain is a perfect example of a natural graph. This dependency network graphs different species as nodes, and links them to other species/nodes that they consume. However, what would happen if you increased the “flow” along one of these edges? How would this effect the rest of the chain? In a recent study, […]

http://www.portaliraq.com/news/Iraq+Museum+International+finds+cheating+on+eBay__1111434.html
This article discusses a “sniper trap” on eBay. The idea is that the seller and a friend attempt to raise the bids on an eBay auction. As the auction is closing, the seller’s friend poses a fairly high bid, thereby triggering the secret bids of genuine bidders. These secret bids are revealed […]

The canonical example of political Google-bombing was perpetrated in October of 2003, when a large group of bloggers linked the terms “ miserable failure” to George W. Bush’s official White House site biography. Indeed, the internet is one series of tubes that is rife with such politically motivated chicanery. One example, though perhaps not […]

As beefcake points out in a recent post, there is significant need for effective web page filtering. Due to the web’s monolithic size and the dynamic nature of its content, effective filtering becomes very difficult. In class, we focused on exploiting the hyperlink structure of the web to rank pages relevant to a […]

http://www.usatoday.com/money/markets/us/2005-11-10-pink-sheet-cover-usat_x.htm
The article describes the techniques scammers use to profit from the lightly regulated pink sheets stock market. This stock market is known for trading stocks that don’t meet the requirements to be on a larger stock exchanges such as the NYSE. Most of these stocks, which trade at low prices and volumes, are “shell companies,” […]

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 […]

Closely connected to the concept of information cascades is the self-organizing system. Such a system will organize itself without any centralized hierarchal structure, but rather through many automatic decentralized processes.
One particularly striking, if morbid, example of a self-organizing system is an ant mill: first described by naturalist William Beebe, an ant mill occurs when a […]

Circumnavigating the blogosphere today was an article entitled “How to Ace Your Finals Without Studying”. Naturally, as any student would, I read the article hoping to find some divine secret to enable me to ace tests without studying.
The premise of the article is that it is much more efficient to study in a way […]