In the past year, I have been exposed to the topic of project management in three of my classes. For large projects such as the construction of a chemical plant, there is a lot of integration between planning, organizing and managing resources in order to achieve successful completion. Projects have to achieve set goals while taking into account the scope, time, and budget. Additionally project managers need to optimize the allocation and integration of inputs to meet pre-defined objectives for successful completion. Efficient communication is needed between the project teams in order to achieve the above. I was seeing how the use of networks could help with the organization of a project.

Social Network Analysis is used to develop links between individuals and organizations. However it has not been used frequently to see how computer use affects communication within large, diverse project organizations. Ego-centered networks can establish the range of an individual’s influence, while whole network analysis indentifies the key participants in a specific network. More importantly, network analysis can be used to establish the influence of specific information technology line email or a project intranet.

Many projects use well-understood organizational structures that allow individuals to distribute information to other members of the project team. Because communication is a dynamic process, communications often change during the life cycle of a project. As the project develops, members join and leave the team, disputes develop, and barriers to communication evolve. New communication linkages are also developed while others fade. Then as participants gain experience with each other the initial barriers dissolve and new ones from. In this study it was found that in the early stages managers had high centrality scores and takes on key communications roles in the project. With the use of UCINET, a program to develop sociograms, it can be seen that design-build managers, the project manager, and the superintendent were key to the construction. Subcontractors, design engineers, and owner’s representatives remain relatively isolated from the project network. It is also shown that certain people are isolated from one another such as the electrical and mechanical engineers. With this knowledge, planning teams can better organize their communication system to increase productivity and efficiency.

http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=93476187&sid=1&Fmt=6&clientId=8424&RQT=309&VName=PQD

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2009/05/the-grid-our-cars-and-the-internet-one-idea-to-link-them-all/This article discusses the potential for using meshed networks to create information networks exactly large enough to handle the traffic on them.The way internet is usually accessed is as such (simplified, of course): the connection flows from the ISP through an infrastructure designed to split the connection into smaller pieces headed in different directions. The portion of broadband available to any given person pares down as it reaches his or her router, where it might then be divided again between half a dozen computers. The way this obviously affects the network is by creating a reverse network effect. The same, roughly applies for wi-fi. The more people using a particular wi-fi agent’s supply, the weaker the product (the connection) becomes; the system is designed to accommodate expected maximum capacity, as explained in the article:

“Wi-Fi is like a bridge that connects the highways on either side of the stream. You build it wide enough to handle the maximum traffic you expect. If too much comes, it gets congested. When not enough arrives, you’ve got excess capacity.

However, there is an alternate way to design internet access, called a “meshed network”. Described in the article:

Mesh takes a different approach: Each person who wants to cross throws in a flat rock that’s above the water line. The more people who do that, the more ways there are to get across the river.”

Simply put,  a mesh-network turns a reverse network effect into a calibrated network effect. The more people who are in the network, the easier the access to the broadband becomes, according to the article.The article then applies this technology to cars, who already access several networks (GPS, Bluetooth, Cell phones, etc). By applying mesh-networking, the article argues that each car would have easier access to all the technologies as more cars surrounded them on the highway.Though details do get a bit hazy, its a promising idea that should be getting a substantial investment courtesy of the federal government.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/02/homogecene/The small-world phenomenon, which this class covered in the context of social networks, can also be seen in the world of biology these days.The above article discusses how improvements in transportation methods have brought the disparate regions of the world into a more tightly connected network. In the past, before mechanized travel, movement from one region to another was bounded by the speed at which an organism could move on ones feet. Now, however, an ocean-liner can cross the seas in days; a plane can do so in hours. As a result, organisms can travel to totally alien areas relatively easy, a problem that has gained significant attention from biologists in recent years.This article explains how the problem is particularly pronounced in the great lakes region, where, even though only one of the ports there, Montreal, is a big part of the global shipping network, the network within the the lakes region is very “integrated and dense.” The result is something akin to the small-world effect. In social networks, most people have a concentrated network of friends, where most people are pretty similar and all know one another - the effect of homiphily. However, while most edges run through this dense cluster, some edges stretch far beyond to other clusters of friends; such edges are the ultimate catalyst of the small-world phenomenon. Applying this concept to the article above, and you can see the parallels. Montral is the only major node on the global shipping network, but because the Great Lakes shipping network is so dense, even a remote port in the farthest removed part of the great lakes is just a few steps removed from the larger global shipping network. (”The average Great Lakes port … is only an average of two degrees of separation from 80 percent of the ports in the world.”)This has resulted in a fairly easy time for organisms in transplanting from one region to another, a serious challenge to the world in the future.

The issue of advertising on the Internet can be problematic. As opposed to advertising on a medium like television or in a newspaper, the market is far more fragmented, with significantly more potential channels available to reach consumers. While search engines, the gatekeepers to the internet, provide a good way to reach a consolidated population of consumers, advertisers looking to advertise on specific websites will have more difficulty reaching lots of people. Which is where advertising networks have stepped in.Advertising networks, such as undertone networks (www.undertone.com) will buy ad space on a large number of websites, and tie all of that ad-space into a network. These networks then offer access to their services — any number of advertising strategies implemented across the entirety of the networks adspace, at varying rates — to interested advertisers.A good example of an ad network is the one detailed in this article: http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/16/technology/music_blogs.fortune/index.htm. Music blogs were having trouble attracting advertisers because they didn’t have a large enough following to make such advertising investments worthwhile. Likewise, advertisers would have liked to reach the demographic represented by these music blogs — tastemakers — but found the market was too fragmented to make advertising there a viable option.An ad network solves both of these problems:For the blogs there is a network effect present. There’s incentive to join such a network that increases the greater the number of other such blogs sign up to be a part of the network, because the more blogs are a part of the network, and the more consumers reachable through the network, the more advertisers will be willing to use the network.Such networks have become more and more common as a way for advertisers to reach consumers on the Internet, and networks such as the music blog network (called vertical networks), which aim to target a particular set of consumer interests, are a great way for an advertiser to reach a consolidated base of potential customers.

Asymmetric information in markets can cause all sorts of problems for buyers looking to find a good deal.  Lemons in the market for used cars decrease buyers’ willingness to pay premium prices and cause good cars not to be sold.  As it turns out, the market for lemons is recently having negative implications for the manufacturers of such cars as well.  Enacted in the 1980s, California’s lemon laws protect used car buyers from the perils of purchasing hazardous used cars.  Under these laws, buyers of such cars can receive refunds directly from manufacturers from used cars still under warranty.  Until now, the laws have worked smoothly.
Unfortunately, as mentioned this article, http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lemonlaw9-2009may09,0,3217006.story , Chrysler’s recent bankruptcy has hindered their ability to make good on requested payments. Many buyers have pending requests of thousands of dollars, but it is unclear whether they will ever receive these payments.  In some situations, consumers have returned their vehicles and are still waiting for a refund check or replacement vehicle. In these cases, they are worse off than if they had simply purchased the lemon without seeking a refund. As this development shows, the market for lemons creates negative outcomes for more than just potential buyers and sellers in the used car market.  Not only do lemons in the market drive away quality products, but as is demonstrated by Chrysler, they also create complications in bankruptcy cases as well.

Everyone has been there, the thought of whether or not it was worth it to stay in that relationship that you have been in that has gone a little sour. There is that probability that you could leave the other one and get over the relationship. There is the probability that the other person could leave you and then you are left with nothing. Or the other options  are that the relationship could get better and things will move on like they were before.

With the above situation we kind of see an application of game theory. The two people are trying to get the maximum benefit to how they see the situation can turn out. Unfortunately there is not a chart showing the best outcomes and rarely can we see the pure Equilibrium choice in this game. The relationship does incorporate many of the different types of “games” that we see in game theory. We have the Prisoner’s Dilemma in break ups. We have the “couple’s game” in which they try to decide if they would like to watch a movie and either they both agree on one that shares their interests or one wins with the other one bored to tears.  These and many more make the actual “relationship” of two people seem to be a lot more complex than it already was.

http://thoughtstreak.wordpress.com/major-old-posts/applying-game-theory-into-everyday-life/

The link above has an interesting flow chart that shows kind of what this post is stating.

http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/10/06/does-closing-roads-cut-delays/

The above article talks about cleaning up traffic and helping it speed a long by closing roads. Now you may ask why this would happen, by all means wouldn’t closing a road just make things more congested and slow everything down? Well according to Braess Paradox, the opposite in fact occurs. The theory behind Braess Paradox is that if a new road was opened that looked as though it would make the trip between destinations A and B a little more faster, every one would take it. This would then make the trip longer and cause people to make it harder on themselves than if they had just taken the regular route.

In the above article,  Hyejin Youn and Hawoong Jeong, of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and Michael Gastner, of the Santa Fe Institute, all looked at the congestion of major cities in the world. Through testing they realized that a few streets that had been opened in New York City and others actually inhibited traffic from flowing in a better and more natural manner.

With new social networking sites arriving on the Internet scene in what seems daily, the major ones  such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace, all seem to be making this small world a little bit smaller. It used to be that when you left an area or moved away from an old home you could still write letters, the occasional phone call or even an email every now and then. Now though with these sites and their ability to keep people in contact from across the world, people have been connecting more and more with their old friends and contacts.

Especially with the new addition of “Your friends know this person so maybe you do to…” at least on Facebook, the ability to branch out your own personal network increases tenfold. Apply this a few times and you can go from getting to know your friend from Spain for example. The site says that he/she knows this person in Madrid, and you drop them an email asking about the city. Eventually after a few conversations you become aquainted and you now know someone in another country and can branch even further from there. Add on top of that the immense size of groups that you can join to find like minded people from around the world on this one site, the world definately seems to be a bit smaller.

http://social-networking-tagging.suite101.com/article.cfm/six_degrees_of_facebook

Network theory has some very unusual applications in everyday life. One specific example comes from the analysis of eye movement through use of an eye tracker. Eye trackers trace the movement of the eye when looking at a picture. When an individual looks at an object, he or she does not look at it in a scenic way; rather the eyes fixate on a point and then move sporadically with saccades focusing on specific aspects. Saccades are quick simultaneous movements of both eyes in the same direction. These points of fixation, when analyzed, form a unique network. In analyzing eye movements, regard each saccade as an edge and each fixation as a node—where nodes cluster, like around the eyes, you’re forming nodes of a high degree of connectivity.

Take for example the analysis of a photograph, when an individual looks at a face, most of their time looking is spent in a triangle between the two eyes and the mouth area. These are the nodes with the highest degree of connectivity and have the greatest power. Further, it can be seen that there are other nodes that do not have as much connectivity but are still well connected are areas such as the hair.

It would be simple to come up with an algorithm using simple graph theory to characterize a saccade. Applications for this are extremely interesting in the field of advertising and a lot of time is spent in analysis of the focus of human eye movement in order to adapt marketing to natural human tendencies.

Source: http://courses.cit.cornell.edu/bionb2220/secure/Slides/L40_2009_slides.pdf

It’s always been public knowledge that fatty foods are bad for you. For most people it’s just a no brainer. But this belief is actually a result of an information cascade.  In the case of fatty foods and its effect on health, the information cascade began with Ancel Keys, a diet researcher during the 1950s. Keys believed Americans were suffering from heart disease because we were eating more fat than our ancestors.

The problem with Keys assertion was that is wasn’t necessarily true that our ancestors’ diets were lower fat. Our ancestors actually consumed higher ratios of meat in their diet than modern era diets. Secondly even though more cases of heart disease were being reported it didn’t necessarily mean people were in worse health. This was can be attributed to the fact that people were living longer and people were more likely to see a doctor who could diagnose the heart disease.

The main evidence Keys used was a comparison of diets and heart disease rates in the United States, Japan as well as four other countries. The results concluded that more fat correlated with more disease, with the U.S. at the top of the list.  But critics have concluded that if Dr. Keys had analyzed all 22 countries for which data was available he would not have found a significant correlation.

As doctors were unsure of whether fatty foods caused heart disease they just agreed with the only research that was available. As more and more people began to follow the herd it eventually became public knowledge and soon enough the American Heart Association and the Surgeon General confirmed that diets high in fat cause heart disease. But when the theories were tested in clinical trials, the evidence up negative.  Analysis of the clinical trials of low-fat diets in 2001 concluded that they had no significant effect on our health.

As we learned in class, information cascades is when one observes the actions of others and makes a decision based on what everyone else is doing regardless of what their own information suggest because one assumes there must be a reason why everyone else is choosing to do so. This case is an example of one huge cascade where everyone followed the herd as they didn’t have research of their own and understandably so.  It is important to understand that although it’s been proven that fatty foods don’t cause heart disease it doesn’t necessarily mean fatty foods are good for you.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/science/09tier.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2