Companies advertise everywhere! While there are a select few ads that make people talk, such as the iPod (what is the name of that song?) and Geico commercials, a majority of ads are just plain obnoxious. With all the buzz about social networks, however, advertisers are picking up on new ways to increase their sales.
The […]

Kaushik Basu, in his paper “Teacher Truancy in India – The Role of Culture, Norms and Economic Incentives”, claims that economists often ignore the role of social norms and culture in economic analysis even though social variables, in many cases, play a critical role in determining economic behavior. He discusses the case of India, […]

Mozilla To Build Social Networking Into Firefox
In early April 2007, sites began popping up all over the internet addressing one of Mozilla’s new endeavors with Firefox: The Coop. The Coop, which will potentially be Firefox’s built-in social network tool, is currently a project in Mozilla Labs. According to its Mozilla wiki, The Coop’s “design was […]

http://www2004.org/proceedings/docs/1p491.pdf
While searching for a relevant topic to do my last blog on, I came across this paper which couldn’t be any more applicable to class discussion and web blogging. Several researchers from IBM and MIT decided to develop an algorithm to model the dynamics of information diffusion through blogging. In their proposal, […]

http://stke.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;303/5659/793
 
In the article, “Evolutionary Dynamics of Biological Games”, Martin A. Nowak and Karl Sigmund discuss the benefits of evolutionary game theory in modeling and understanding the evolution of phenotypes. Classical game theory, in the sense of networks attempting to approach a Nash equilibrium, does not fully explain newly observed population trends in biological studies, “where […]

http://blog.wired.com/games/2007/04/wii_and_the_tip.html
According to a blogger from Wired, Nintendo used a marketing strategy discussed in Malcom Gladwell’s novel, The Tipping Point. Shortly before the launch of the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo invited gamers to “Ambassador Parties” where gamers brought about twenty of their friends to try out the Wii. As the word “ambassador” may suggest, gamers […]

The article entitled “Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and Six Degrees of Separation” by Ivan Misner can be found at the following site: http://www.healthywealthynwise.com/article.asp?Article=5203
 
In this article, Ivan Misner argues that the notion of “Six Degrees of Separation” in which we are all connected to each other by at most six intermediary links is a […]

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1004840
For the past five to ten years, online social networking sites for career development such as Monster and LinkedIn have been growing and developing.  In the past year, LinkedIn has grown in members by 89% to over 8 million members.  This is a huge increase and suggests the usefulness of online social networking sites for career […]

Michael Lewis has sold many thousands of books in the past four years by utilizing a Malcolm Gladwell-like perspective and writing style in analyzing the sporting world. His 2003 book Moneyball is famous for its examination of baseball’s Oakland A’s; despite having one of the lowest payrolls in all of Major League Baseball, the […]

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/perspectives_in_biology_and_medicine/v047/47.2tsonis.pdf
In the 2004 article, “A ‘Small-World’ Network Hypothesis for Memory and Dreams,” which appeared in the journal, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Panagiotis Tsonis links the small world phenomenon with memory processes in the brain. Citing the hypotheses of Watts and Strogatz that the connections between neurons create small-world networks, Tsonis suggests that memory associations […]