http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~ypisan/virtualworlds/readings/tree-house-to-barracks.pdf
With 10 million active accounts, World of Warcraft (WoW) is the most successful massive multiplayer online (MMO) game out there on the market.  One reason for the success of the game is that it caters to many different types of players.  People that want to solo, people that want to tackle the end-game dungeons (player […]

A college education in an Ivy League university is supposed to inculcate strong critical thinking skills and the ability for independent thought, but recent research suggests that  perhaps deep down we aren’t that different from sheep that need to be lead. Researchers from Leed University conducted an experiment where large crowds of up to 200 or more people were told to walk […]

Many people have recently become involved with internet networking sites. The most popular of these being myspace and facebook. These tools help people to organize different networks to which they belong. On facebook users can be separate friends that they have by the different colleges and the different geographical regions they are […]

In our last lecture, we talked about the internet as an information network built to function in a manner similar to natural thought (as laid out in Vanevar Bush’s As We May Think). This would seem to be an extremely logical way to order data, yet there are many systems that defy this natural order. […]

Recently in class we have discussed the ultimatum game and how its results have differed from those that would be expected from purely rational and profit-maximizing individuals. In recent years, the game has been played in numerous different scenarios and has resulted in a number of unique and interesting results. For example, behavior of participants […]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a0jloTW0QDe8
With the recent FCC auction of the 700 MHz band fetching bids that total to more than $19 billion, one has to ask exactly how much is a nationwide wireless network worth, and who can afford it? In rules specified by the FCC before the auction’s start bidders are to submit confidential bids in series […]

The power of gatekeepers on the corporate level is undeniable. In the software industry Microsoft holds most of the power. The reason; the Windows operating system is by far the most widely used platform. If software companies want to reach the consumers they will do well to do so through a Windows compatible program. Users […]

Most shoppers don’t think to bargain. If an item is marked at a certain price, it’s stressful to walk up to a salesperson and ask if the price can be lowered. People aren’t used to haggling, so the idea may seem embarrassing, or just too out of the ordinary to try. How […]

A botnet is a collection of computers, or bots, that have been compromised by some sort of malicious software. This software gives the attacker the ability to control the bot remotely. Botnets can vary greatly in size, from a handful of computers to hundreds of thousands. One such example of a very large botnet […]

Article link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/technology/13face.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=facebook&st=nyt&oref=slogin 
This article talks about the difficulties of quiting Facebook.com. Many people who have joined Facebook and no longer want an account there find it difficlt to completely get rid of it and only finds a solution to “deactivate” their account. By deactiviating the account, the information is still stored by Facebook, and your […]