http://indystar.gns.gannett.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070305/TECH04/701260385/1001/TECH

The article from USA Today Web sites host wealth of crime-solving clues goes into detail about how web services such as Xanga, MySpace, Facebook, and You Tube are being used to investigate and identify criminals.  It starts by discussing a specific case where a family posted video evidence of a family member’s murderer fleeing the scene of the crime.  Although the murdered remains at large there were thousands of tips and people who responded.  The reason this is being viewed as such an important way to fight crime is the immense exposure the sites have to people ages 18 to 25.  While people of that age may be less likely to watch news reports on television millions are exposed to those sites and some even view the sites mutliple times a day.  Another reason for how importance the evidence is happens to be the fact that those posting on the sites are often young adults or kids and not smart enough to realize they actually have posted evidence incriminating themselves.

These different services that are being used on the web are prime examples of both the web as a network and the social networks we’ve discussed in class so far.  A key aspect of the web as a network in this case is the nature of the web in that there are constantly new nodes and edges created.  The ability of the web to create new information and resources is key because it enables the quick release and spread of information that can be available to law enforcement.  This also happens to be a social network because instead of using the specific websites or pages as nodes we can also discuss the unit of analysis as the individuals involved in the posting.  This information now becomes new nodes law enforcement has edges to.  The more edges and nodes law enforcement is connected to in a social network the more power it gives them.  The more power they have the greater ability they have to do their jobs, solve crimes.

 I too agree this may be a great resource and the future for crime solving, but I also have some concerns.  These sites and the information on them are completly up to the discression of the public, because of this the information on the web is not always accurate or necessarily helpful.  Another situation that arises is the large amount of information on the web and the complexity that sometimes arises when trying to navigate the web as a network or find the specific information you were looking for.  One of the reasons the web happens to be so difficult to navigate is the fact that the web as a network is not a directed graph.  Finally I also believe that so much information and tips coming in about particular crimes could lead to law enforcement having to follow leads that may be fruitless and do nothing but tie up a lot of the time and resources law enforcement may have to offer.  These services being young it will be interesting to see how good of a tool these social sites can possibly be for the purpose of crime solving, but atleast it is a resource thats being explored.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2003/11/01/351942/index.htm

Connectors play a great role in bringing people and ideas together. But it’s not always easy to find a reasonable path along a network to another person with the resources or ideas one may be looking for. There are however some ingenious solutions to this problem. The above article mentions a few companies such as Spoke or Visible Path that can determine network connections within a company by analyzing the email traffic, buddy lists, and address books of the employees, creating a valuable network structure. These programs can help in connecting people within a company be it for similar project goals or even criminal reasons.

This representation of the company network can be a powerful tool when used properly. Productivity can be greatly increased when people with similar ideas begin working together and not on their own in the dark. Similarly it is very easy for someone with this knowledge to find an easy path to someone else they may need to talk (the article lists and example where a friend of a consultant was friendly with his boss and could therefore easily arrange a golf date that led to profitable business arrangements). Such tools could provide companies with enough information to bring even the largest of companies into harmony, where everyone can always know what is going on around them.

A recent article in The Washington Post entitled In High-Tech World, Access To Students Still Difficult discusses the idea that technological progress often hinders college officials’ ability to communicate quickly and effectively with the school’s students, especially in emergency situations.  Students are adopting more and more modes of communication, but there is no standard, reliable method of communication that administrators can use to reach its students.  Email is now ubiquitous, but students often ignore messages or do not receive them at all due to the limited capacity of their Inbox.  Furthermore, students are shifting away from email in favor of social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace. 

Although most students these days carry cell phones on them, their cell phone numbers are dynamic, changing much more often than a landline phone number would. Landline phones, of course, are nearly obsolete when it comes to students on college campuses.  The article describes the efforts that administrators at some colleges are implementing in an effort to keep up with technology and stay connected with their students. These efforts include creating a web portal that each student can customize to integrates all of the information that he or she feels is important. Helping students integrate many communication channels together seems to be the best way for administrators to maintain ties with its students.

This article applies to our discussion of the strength of ties between entities.  As advancing technology continues to reshape the methods and the number of ways in which students communicate, the strength of the communication links to which school officials and administrators have with the students tends to diminish. Although the various modes of communication that today’s students have likely increases the number of ties that a given student has, this expansion weakens existing links, especially if the existing ties are not maintained through the same mode of communication as the new links.  By integrating modes of communication, administrators, are trying to counter this effect of diminishing ties, since ties made through these integrated channels would not conflict with each other as much as ties made through distinct channels. 

http://www.parc.xerox.com/research/publications/files/5599.pdf

World of Warcraft (WoW for short) is the world’s leading MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game), captivating over 6 million people around the world.  While many would brush aside WoW or any other online game as a gross waste of time that drags people away from real life friendships and relationships, Nicholas Yee and others at the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab say otherwise.  In the paper ““Alone Together?” Exploring the Social Dynamics of Massively Multiplayer Online Games,” Yee and others explore the social intricacies and hierarchies of World of Warcraft.  The key to WoW’s success does not lay in its character development and monster slaying aspects, but rather in the human to human interactions its players experience.  The game coaxes interactive game play by offering incentives and rewards that can only be achieved by teaming up with your fellow players.  These rewards however, are not limited to vast amounts of gold and new more powerful swords and wands.  Players are persuaded to build up their own reputation among others.  Every WoW player remembers the name of that one person who, without any compensation, helped them do a quest they were too low level to do themselves, or the rich high level player who handed out items and money to beginners.  In fact Ducheneaut and Yee argue that such reputation building acts are in fact the ultimate keys to success in WoW.

Throughout the game, though mainly when players reach maximum levels (now capped at 70), players join organizations known as guilds.  Guilds are unique with respect to their hierarchy, style, or even goals (player version player as opposed to player versus environment).  Most serious Warcraft players strive to accomplish the games most difficult tasks, and these tasks can only be completed by joining a powerful and well organized guild.  Ducheneaut and Yee explain how guilds function like any other “real life” social networks.  Skeptics may argue that there is not much real social interaction between players as they can only type messages to each other through WoW’s chat features, however this cannot be any farther from the truth.  Every organized guild owns a channel in one of the many large scale proprietary Voice over IP programs such as Ventrilo or TeamSpeak, in which all guild members can communicate with each other live just like a large telephone conference.  It is only through structure, discipline and above all, teamwork and cooperation that WoW’s most challenging endeavors can be overcome.  While many people still believe there is nothing more to WoW then wasted money and a destroyed social life, Ducheneaut and Yee show that there is clearly more: an intricate social web as delicate as any outside Azeroth. 

http://smallworld.columbia.edu/

Stanley Milgram believed that any individuals of a large population are connected via a few intermediate acquaintances.  His hypothesis and subsequent study lead to the idea of “six degrees of separation” because on average any two people could be connected with six acquaintances.  While this study became well known throughout popular culture, it is not based on very significant empirical findings.  So how small is the world?

A group at Columbia University set out to expand on Milgram’s study and to answer this question.  Their first goal was to measure the lengths of acquaintance chains.  They then wanted to study the effect of race, class, nationality, occupation, and education on people’s connections.  Finally, they wanted to identify what types of information and people lead to the greatest connections.  The study included more than 60.000 e-mail users, trying to reach one of 18 target persons in 13 countries.

The procedure of the study is as follows.  Subjects of the study are told the name of their “target,” or the person with whom they need to be connected.  They then send the target’s name (in a message) to some friends and acquaintances that are closer to the target.  These people then forward the message to a friend or acquaintance of theirs, continuing in this pattern until the target is ultimately reached.  The study asks each participant about their relationship with the person who sent them the message, and the recipient of the message.  The study also asks the participants about their demographic information.

This is a very interesting area of research and relates to our discussions about social networks.  The study examines the strength of connections and how they influence the spreading of information.  Interestingly, intermediate to weak ties are the best and most common types of links used.  This goes along with Granovetter’s idea of weak ties being influential “bridges” to novel information.  In the future, Facebook will be a good way to explore the social network(s) of people throughout the country.

Networks of the 21^st Century

Communications in the world two decades ago would not even be recognizable by today’s standards, especially in the business world. Businesses today not only deal with local or regional concerns, but many face network problems and logistics in global markets. How do these multinational corporations maintain fast, secure and reliable global communication networks? Historically, companies used leased lines to support a wide area network (WAN). This digital or optical network, offered companies a means to expand private networks beyond their geographic areas. A WAN is superior to public networks, such as the internet, in reliability, speed, performance, and security. But leasing lines has become tremendously expensive and costs rise accordingly to distances between offices. Now, as the popularity of the Internet has grown exponentially, businesses have turned back to it as a means of extending company networks. The intranet was first created as password-protected sites designed for employee use only. This has evolved into the virtual private network (VPN) to accommodate the needs of remote employees and distant offices (refer to the link for a diagram of VPNs).

A VPN is a private network (intranet) that uses a public network (internet) to connect distant users together. Instead of using a leased line, physical real-world connection, a VPN uses “virtual” connections routed or redirected from the internet via the company’s private network. VPNs are complicated networks that are maintained within almost every major corporation today. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent each year in order to provide secure, reliable, and scalable network systems. The business world would come to a halt without these reliable networks. I first encountered the massive scope and benefit of these networks last summer during a typical day at work when my computer decided to give me a hard time as it often likes to do. Unable to access a database network, I called tech support which was located in a different building in who knows where. Within minutes, the technician had remotely accessed my computer and like magic my mouse pointer started to move seemingly on its own. He promptly located the problem in the network and I was back in business.

For more on VPNs, its security features, and what makes a VPN click on link:
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/vpn.htm

The picture of the web as a network is simple and intuitive. Indeed, you’ll find many useful applications where a simple model of the web is sufficient to obtain useful results. Just look at Google: internally it models the web just as we have described it in class. Yet Google achieves its success by using a combination of sophisticated algorithms and occasional human intervention.

Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.math.wisc.edu/~swanson/instructional/game_theory.pdf

 In this paper, the author discusses the optimal bluffing strategies for players in a simplified version of poker.  We say that player A bluffs if he bets in a hand where he is certain to have the worst hand, i.e the only way he can win the hand is by forcing the other player to fold the better hand.  It is noted that David Sklansky, the author of “The Theory of Poker”, claims that the optimal bluffing frequency is such that “the chances against your bluffing are identical to the pot odds your opponent is getting.”  The paper gives the example of when Player A bets $20 into a $100 pot, and the odds against him bluffing are 6:1.  If Player B always calls this $20 bet, his expectation is 1/7*(120)+6/7*(-20)=0.  If Player B always folds in this situation, then he neither gains nor loses anything, and so his expectation is also 0.  Thus based on these expected value calculations, it is impossible for Player B to determine whether he should call or fold and therefore this strategy is an equilibrium.

 Although the optimal strategy is an equilibrium, as the paper points out, it is not necessarily the best play.  In the example in the paper, the optimal strategy has an EV of 0 regardless of how the oponnent plays  However, if we know more about our opponents’ tendencies, and what they believe our tendencies to be, we can use this knowledge to our advantage to give ourselves a positive expectation.  Thus we can conclude that these “optimal strategies” should only be used against superior opponents or opponents who have an edge on our play.  For example, if I were to play Rock-Paper-Scissors champion, the optimal strategy would be for me to randomly pick each choice with probability 1/3 to neutralize the champion’s edge.  These examples seem to demonstrate a weakness in game theory.  

 Though game theory allows us to study simplified versions of games, it seems that most games, such as poker, are too complex to be fully understood using game theory.  If player A is capable of understanding his opponents tendencies, what his opponent believes A’s tendencies to be and so on, clearly it is not the best strategy for A to use the neutral EV “optimal strategy” given by game theory. 

In a recent NY Times article, Social Networking’s Next Phase, the future of online social networking is discussed. It seems that the online social networking craze will be headed in a different direction, according to sources such as Cisco and the co-creator of Netscape. Because Facebook and MySpace are immensely popular networks, many people with many dissimilar interests end up bunched together. These systems are not designed to enhance flexibility, which results in difficulty when trying to gather small groups of people with similar interests together. The existing social networks limit the power of the individual and restrict people from building their own worlds. The future of social networking seems to lie in the smaller, more flexible networks such as Tribe.net, where users have more power to build their own communities. Eventually, the experts say that social networking sites will become as common as any other web site.

Considering the popularity of MySpace and Facebook, this is much more than a minor shift in the interests of the users. If as many of these social networking websites pop up as the experts claim, what will remain of the current popular communities? Though it is true that a problem with a tremendous social network such as Facebook is that it restricts any personalization of a user’s “homepage” to a few lines describing themselves, it seems implausible that people will actually be able to “network” with all these networking sites around. Though allowing the user to be creative is certainly a feature to overlook, it is this uniformity (to a certain extent) that allows users to be part of a single network and thus meet each other. Anyone can design a website and be creative with it, but if it stands alone, it will not be visited. Small websites and groups need to stick together to have influence, or be visited, and that is the very reason these social networking communities are created. Creating many micro networking sites will be like going backwards to the times before MySpace and Facebook existed–this is simply counterintuitive.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/wireless/0,70826-0.html?tw=wn_index_1

http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/27/autos/parking_auction/index.htm

http://www.spotscout.com

BTW, I’m being totally honest when I say I typed this before the previous post was posted. Hopefully, it’s not completely the same in terms of content.

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When it comes to buying or selling stock, a trader acts as a middleman for the transaction. In the near future, it may be possible and common for people to do something similar with parking spaces. A small start-up company in Massachusetts, SpotScout (http://www.spotscout.com) is trying to capitalize on the growing prevalence of web-enabled cell phones by creating a real-time marketplace and network that will allow members of the network to find a parking space or auction off the one they’re about to vacate. “Spotcasters” can even rent out their own driveways for the day and have it listed as an available parking space for others who are searching for one in the area.

Many of the concepts we have been studying in class relate to the ideas behind this start up company. In essence, SpotScout is acting essentially as a trader between two commuters or anyone else who just wants to park somewhere. By exploiting the available technology, this service would create many edges between many different people that would otherwise never have been formed, even if the edges that do form are only temporary. Unlike a trader, however, SpotScout takes only a fixed percentage of each transaction and is not trying to exercise power over those who are buying or selling their parking spots. In a sense, it is weakening the amount of power it has by connecting so many people, because the more people that are connected, the more options each person has.

Second, it addresses the game that commuters play against each other; finding a parking spot as quickly and as close to their destination as possible. Use of this service can be modeled as another strategy that players can choose to deploy. The payoffs could be higher or lower, depending on the value of the parking spot to each person, the prices they have to pay for it, and the value they can receive by selling it to others when they leave (to be technical, the service does not allow people to buy or sell actual public parking places; rather, what’s being bought and sold is the information that one person is leaving a parking spot soon and is willing to let another person claim it for a price).

Auctions are also inherently related, since people can auction off a parking spot they either own or are about to vacate. “Seller” values would not be very high since without the SpotScout service, they would be leaving their driveway empty or leaving the parking spot without receiving any value anyways. Bids for parking spots, on the other hand, could potentially be very high, depending on the person searching for a spot.

What are the benefits of creating such a network marketplace? SpotScout claims that its service is optimal socially and individually. A person can save a lot of time and hassle by finding a parking space in advance without having to circle around the street. If more people know exactly where they are going to park, traffic congestion is reduced which means people get where they want to go faster. Environmentally, less gas is burned so pollution is also reduced. In short, SpotScout can potentially benefit everyone because it helps minimize externalities that result from widespread use of public goods.