http://shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html
This article discussed the emergence of power law models and popularity imbalance in the popularity of web-blogs. Addressing the common observation that a small group of web-blogs account for a disproportionally large amount of web traffic, the article explains that it is not individuals’ […]

http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html
As our notes state, popularity is the idea that while most things are known to an immediate circle, a few rise above and become widely accepted and/or admired by a more global community. Being a popular programming language is not different. Paul Graham writes a whole essay on what makes a programming language […]

At the beginning of this month, a clever illustration of the power of information cascades was carried out in the even seedier underground of politics: partisan blogging. As Josiah Roe, Executive VP of Coptix, Inc., which provides backup DNS hosting for sites such as “georgewbush.com”, writes, his company decided decided to do a little […]

http://www.cut-the-knot.org/Curriculum/Combinatorics/ThreeOrThree.shtml
A famous theorem in combinatorics known as the Friendship Theorem states the following:
“In a party of six people, there are at least three mutual acquaintances, or there are at least three mutual strangers.”
It is clear that this statement is equivalent to saying that if we use a bicoloring of the edges in the complete graph […]

Yesterday, MIT’s dean of admissions stepped down after admitting to lying about her academic credentials when she was hire, 28 years earlier. Marilee Jones had claimed to have degrees from three different New York colleges, when in fact she did not have a college degree at all. She had initially been hired for a position […]

http://press.meetup.com/archives/000464.html
Last presidential election race saw a change in the way politicians informed America on their positions both domestic and foreign. Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s manager for the 2004 presidential election, learned about a small Internet website called Meetup.com. The website connects people together with other people who share a similar interest. These like-minded individuals form […]

http://www.healthywealthynwise.com/article.asp?Article=5203
While browsing the internet I came across this article, and the title attracted my attention. Sadly, the article was not about Santa Claus nor the Easter Bunny, but it did analyze and attempt to debunk the six degrees idea. While the article does a good job exposing possible problems with the theory, its claims can […]

An important aspect of graph structure is a clique or cluster: a highly connected component of nodes. For example, a clique within a social network might be a group of friends that all know each other. If we have a graph that represents countries that are trading partners, we could identify a cartel […]

According to a paper by Len Skerratt in 2000, there is substantial evidence that financial markets do not react to information exactly as suggest by the efficient market hypothesis as argued by many. How can this be? One of the main explanations contribute the discrepancies to exogenous imperfections such as transaction costs. However, Skerratt focuses […]

Duncan Watts, of Watts-Strogatz model fame, is in the process of conducting a modernized version of Stanley Milgram’s original 1967 “small world” experiment as mentioned in class. Watts, now at Columbia University is the principal investigator on the the Columbia Small World Project. In this version of the experiment, people can volunteer […]