Robert Hansen, a business professor at Dartmouth University, has drawn some interesting conclusions about the role of investigative reporting in the 21st century mainstream media. His argument uses some important aspects of information cascade theory.
The catalyst for his observations stems from the Israeli/Hezbollah conflict we all remember from two summers ago. He believes […]

We have spent much of our time in class discussing how the web is an information network. An evolving extension of the world wide web exists called the semantic web, originally conceived by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) director Tim Berners-Lee. Just like the web, the semantic web is an information network. Unlike the regular web though, […]

In class, it was mentioned that in aggregate, people tend to make good decisions. This is because while there is variability amongst individuals, their decisions generally tend to fluctuate around the optimal decision. While this does occur in many situations, there are also other conditions that can cause a group to make poor […]

With the success of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, interest in one of the key features of the project, wireless mesh networking technologies has dramatically increased. This technologies radically changes norms of network topography and enables increased internet accessibility in inaccessible areas. In a typical end-user network, individuals access the internet via a […]

There have been many examples of information cascades discussed in class, including restaurant choices, routes of travel, fashion/fads and rides at an amusement park. One of the more significant debates of the 20th century and the early part of this century has been on the climate, namely the issue of global warming. This article discusses […]

PageRank is well known as a highly successful link analysis method for deducing the importance of a web page. While the context in which this method is used has been limited to web page analysis, the algorithm does not make much assumptions about the nature of the nodes. This raises an interesting question. Can we […]

Well, this doesn’t relate to things in class necessarily, but I saw today’s xkcd comic and couldn’t resist posting it:

While I’m at it, I thought I’d post a few more network themed things from the interwebs:

On maximizing social welfare:

You may now return to your regularly scheduled blog-posting.

While we have long since passed graph theory in class, I still find it to be a very interesting topic. As such, when I found some references to trying to create graphs representing Wikipedia, I was compelled to discuss this issue.
In class, whenever we’ve drawn a network or a graph on the board or in […]

Almost two and a half months have passed since the Iowa caucuses, and we seem (at least on the side of the Democrats) to be at least another few months away from choosing a presidential nominee. We hear the constant debates over February momentum and superdelegates, but does this painfully drawn out process to […]

Information cascades occur very often in nature.  One typical example is the case of army ants.  Throughout their history forager ants developed an evolutionary trait whereby, when separated from the group of other forager ants, one ant chooses a random direction and the other “lost” ants simply follow the ant in front of them.   Eventually, […]