http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.415?cookieSet=1
This paper published by sociologists McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook touches on a number of topics that have been discussed in class and, for me, brings the study of social networks around full circle. In their paper, these researchers discuss the existence of homophily in the following categories: race and ethnicity, age, religion, education, occupation, social […]

MySpace.com was at one point generally perceived as the largest and most popular social networking site, but what does that really mean for its uses for the future?
For example, its use as a learning tool. So, there are always these stories regarding both sides for social networking sites, either schools(teachers, professor, officials) are pro or […]

The other day in class, Professor Kleinburg spoke briefly of Judith Kleinfeld, the psychologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who wrote a paper discrediting Stanley Milgram’s famous “six degrees of separation” findings, and his “small world problem.” To find some more information on Kleinfeld’s problem with Milgram’s famous study, I found the paper in […]

http://travel.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/dining/05race.html?pagewanted=3
In Kenneth J. Arrow’s paper “What Has Economics to Say About Racial Discrimination,” he proposes that racism still exists in the workplace, though of course not to the same extent as half a century ago. This is very much true, and in the above article we are able to see such racism in the culinary […]

http://oracleofbacon.org/
 
The common game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is an example of the small world phenomenon.  The object of the game is to connect a given actor to Kevin Bacon through connecting movie roles in as few steps as possible, but no more than 6 steps.  The website http://oracleofbacon.org/ has several tools on it to […]

The article “Scale-Free Networks Provide a Unifying Framework for the Emergence of Cooperation” by F.D. Santos and J.M. Pacheco suggests that structure of a network influences which strategies evolve within a population. Two games one of which is familiar to our class – the prisoner’s dilemma and a variation called “the snowdrift game”- are […]

http://infoweb.newsbank.com/iw-search/we/InfoWeb?p_action=doc&p_topdoc=1&p_docnum=1&p_sort=YMD_date:D&p_product=AWNB&p_text_direct-0=document_id=(%2011896FD25C08D970%20)&p_docid=11896FD25C08D970&p_theme=aggregated4&p_queryname=11896FD25C08D970&f_openurl=yes&p_nbid=D62H49REMTE3Nzg5NDQ4NS42MTEwMzM6MToxMToxMjguMjUzLjAuMA&&p_multi=NYTB
This article was written a bit after the shooting at Virginia Tech, and talks about the tension in other universities and schools across the nation in the days following the attack. Many schools canceled classes in response to various threats and suspicious activities. These incidents highlight the way in which diffusion and network effects, as […]

Large peer to peer networks can be very difficult to manage, and a solution developed by researchers in Cambridge is to structure the network as a social network. Their inspiration was the way in which information (gossip) travels person to person through a group of people. A large network modeled this way means […]

“Building the Infinite Internet” by Scott Woolley, April 23, 2007
http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2007/0423/068.html
As the internet continues to grow in size, there is a greater and greater need to find efficient ways to transfer data between servers and computers. According to the article, Akamai Technologies Inc. provides methods to overcome some of the archaic rules of the internet […]

We talked in class about Google Trends, and touched on the idea that Google was increasingly using information collected from users as they searched to improve its engine. It appears that these two things actually go hand in hand, and that Google trends […]