Although it’s about three years old at this point, a group of researchers at MIT and IBM have an interesting paper (pdf, Google HTML version) showing interesting visualizations of Wikipedia edits. The visualization they use is derived from the same data as an annotate command in CVS or Subversion would give: it displays which […]

The Grand Unified Theory on the Economics of Free
Techdirt recently featured an article summing up the economics of goods when scarcity is removed. Specifically, the author recommends that content creators actively encourage dissemination of their content for free. The idea is that unhampered content distribution will allow your market share to expand greatly beyond […]

Color Popularity in Cars
http://www2.dupont.com/Automotive/en_US/news_events/article20061129.html
The above link is an article about DuPont’s 2006 Color Popularity Report, which is the automotive industry’s standard for analyzing and predicting consumer choices in vehicle color. This decade, silver won its spot as the most preferred vehicle color in the world after overtaking green in 2000 and remaining the top consumer […]

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1361135
The above link goes to a 2005 article titled “Testing for statistical discrimination in health care” that appeared in the journal Health Services Research.
The article describes a study by Balsa, McGuire, and Merdith that was motivated by a 2002 report by the Institute of Medicine. The Institute of Medicine report, titled “Unequal Treatment,” had […]

A recent article that I came upon in the New York Times that I thought is relevant for our class was about social networking moving to cell phones leaving computers. I think this is rather prevalent in social networks as they become more and more dynamic. As technology changes networking evolves, networks naturally develop into […]

According to Heider’s social balance theoryi, individuals (nodes) in a social network tend to form relationships (+ or - edges between nodes) as follows: “for every set of three nodes, if we consider the three edges connecting them, either all three of these edges are labeled […]

Just a few days ago, Dell announced an initiative to offer Ubuntu Linux on a line of its desktop and notebook computers. This has a broad range of implications for the future of Linux. While driver support is sometimes hit or miss in the Linux world, hardware should be fully supported on these […]

http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazette/news/nation/politics/17177869.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/03/AR2007050301261.html
The above articles discuss how the presidential primaries for 2008 have become increasingly consolidated to the beginning of the normal primary season.  Why would this happen?  Indeed, if many states have primaries on the same day, wouldn’t that decrease rather than increase a states influence in the primaries?  Well, this appears to be a classic […]

Flash mobs are a “large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, do something unusual for a brief period of time, then quickly disperse.” These groups are also called “inexplicable mobs”, “smart mobs” or “flash groups”, to name a few. Flash mobs carry out carefully organized and orchestrated “missions”, the first (successful) […]

Nowak and Krakauer (1999) apply evolutionary game theory (EGT) to the development of a proto-language: “The evolution of language“.
The necessary components of an evolutionary game theory model (selection, variation, and replication) have linguistic analogs:
Selection: the process of acquiring new linguistic constructs, usually based on the tension between accurate, facile communication on the one hand and […]