The notion of six degrees of separation has infiltrated popular culture to a very wide extent, particularly for connecting celebrity individuals, i.e. six degrees of Kevin Bacon. It is not suprising that this theory has mainly been applied to high-profile people, as the original Milgram experiment was oriented towards a New England stockbroker. However, as we all know, networks are not confined to the realm of human nodes. Can a small-world phenomena exist in […]

[1] http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/02/16/dell-pays-tribute-to-digg-with-new-ideastorm-site/
[2] http://www.mozilla.pk/blog/2007/05/02/linuxopensource-grows-ubuntu-to-be-packaged-in-dell-desktops/
[3] http://atomiq.org/archives/2006/01/how_much_wisdom_is_there_in_digg.html
As the semester is winding down, the latest topic to arise in the course is voting, and its implications within social networks. A great example of this, and its influence on contemporary social networking, can be viewed with Dell’s new IdeaStorm site. [1] The site, opened in February, has […]

Our handouts on information cascades showed how, by using a series of observations of other peoples decisions people often come to conclusions about what decision they should make. The handout on network effects then showed how positive externalities also helped to ensure the dominance of a particular strategy. The novel “The Tipping […]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6615047.stm
Last night Digg.com had a user rebellion: tens of thousands of users bombarded the digg homepage with the AACS’s HDDVD encryption key. Digg had previously said it would delete all references to the key - like wikipedia and boingboing, among other blogs, have. But, users revolting. For nearly five hours last night, every single […]

Todd is a local of Central New York and will soon be attending Cornell as a non-traditional undergraduate. Within the past year, he has enthusiastically become a member of the greater eBay community. His combination of life experiences as well as his new favorite past-time of buying and selling on eBay made him an excellent […]

Earlier this evening, I navigated to the popular digg.com website earlier to see what was buzzing around the Internet tonight. I was quite surprised to find that there were few, if any, legitimate stories on the front page. Every story was a posting of the (fairly) recently discovered key to “crack” the encryption […]

http://www.infozech.com
 
Infozech, an India based company, is a company pioneering the field of telecom billing. This means that it provides ways for companies that provide telecommunication services to bill and manage their customer networks. Large companies (most frequently in India or nearby countries) consult with Infozech to find unique solutions to satisfying every customer. The cases […]

 http://www.bioone.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1666%2F05008.1#I0094-8373-32-1-1-F01
Species extinction is a big topic of discussion these days. Whether global warming, habitat destruction, or other various sources are being pinned as the culprits, loss of biodiversity is indeed a serious issue that we are facing. However, what are the mechanisms driving this extinction cascade once a disturbance occurs and how do ecosystem parameters […]

With the advent of the internet, the world seems infinitely smaller than it has ever been in the past. When the experiment was performed, doubtless six degrees of separation seemed infinitely short, unbelievable in a world with six billion people. As times have changed, however, this fact seems less startling. In a […]

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/zunestory.asp
www.zune.net
Late last year, Microsoft launched its new mp3 player, “Zune”, with an interesting catchphrase - “Welcome To The Social”. Its new, killer-app-wannabe technology was a system to interact wirelessly (using 802.11b) with other Zune users to download and listen to music that they had on their own Zunes.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, they’re fighting a […]