Recent media has criticized Cornell’s cultural living communities for facilitating and encouraging segregated housing. While the housing initiative was clearly made with good intentions, many feel that the implementation of ethnocentric housing actually discourages the diversity Cornell aims to support, or, at very least, limits the interchange and interaction of people from diverse racial backgrounds.
In […]

Russia Plans World’s Longest Tunnel, a Link to Alaska 
Russia recently released plans to build the world’s longest tunnel.  The proposed tunnel would be dug beneathe the bering straight, linking Siberia to Alaska, and would contain a railway, highway, pipelines, power, and fiber-optic cables.  The tunnel would be more than twice as long as the channel tunnel […]

It is interesting to consider the phenomenon of information cascades when people have to make decisions between several choices.  This does not seem to be too big of a deal when making decisions as to where to eat, how to dress, etc. based on what other people are doing.  However, when an information cascade concerns […]

Stochastic Diffusion Search Explination (basic)
Algorithmic Explination ofSDS
Mathmatical Proof
Stochastic Diffusion Search is a process which allows for the testing of a “hypothesis” or to acquire information from a social network. Individual “agents” are used to break down the problem and gather what has been labeled “partial evaluations” of the “hypothesis.” Through the process “agents” and […]

Social networking websites would seem to be the perfect venue for conducting a “Six Degrees of Separation” experiment over a large population. The advantages are that the networks involved are very explicit, and that as long as a large, popular network was used, there would be tremendous amounts of data accessible to the experimenters.
Early on […]

The following article discusses the random nature of movie success in the industry as it exists today:link to article. Academics have slowly come to realize that the heads of film studios who make the decisions on what films to “green light” do no better than an ape throwing darts at a board would […]

http://smallworld.columbia.edu/index.html
In class we discussed Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment that attempted to test the small-world hypothesis. Although his experiment lead to the coining of the famous phrase “Six degrees of separation,” we also mentioned that his results were not particularly compelling for several reasons (e.g. Targets were people […]

http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/public/wsj_software.html
I recently came across an interesting article called “Six Degrees of Exploitation? — New Programs Help Companies `Mine’ Workers’ Relationships For Key Business Prospects”. It is a Wall Street Journal article written by William M. Burkeley and Wailin Wong in August of 2003. Clearly, the article is quite old in technology years and is […]

A friend recently sent me a link to The Six Degrees of Wikipedia, an online tool that finds the shortest path between any two articles on Wikipedia using links in that article. While certainly an addicting little procrastination tool (seriously, try to “beat” it), it is interesting to consider this in the context of […]

In what may be a politically biased article which bemoans flaws in US military intelligence organizations, Julian Sanchez argues that information cascades are a potential reason these flaws occur. He references an article on information cascades which mentions an experiment performed by economists Angela Hung and Charles Plott:
“Subjects were told that they would be picking […]