So a classic problem that wasted hours of my life when I was younger:
You have three houses: A, B, and C. Your goal is to connect them to three utilities: Water, Gas, and Electricity (W, G, and E)… but none of the lines can cross. It turns out this is impossible if all 6 nodes […]

There is a new search engine called Kosmix, which is putting a new spin on web searching. Their plan is to create a “Home Page for Every Topic.” What this means is making a web site that contains links to relevant information on that topic. Their website is organized in a set way containing relevant […]

The recent boom of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have led to an obscene amount of discussion about where the future of sites like these lie. MySpace has been entrenched as the cream of the networking site crop, however sites like Facebook and Twitter are trying to take bites out of […]

In class today we talked about strategies for garnering the most votes assuming we know the preference peaks of individual voters. We showed that the best thing to do is to adopt the median position, which will inevitably gain the most votes. A natural thought that follows is a reflection on the current state of […]

So I came across a link from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explaining that evolutionary game theory is… totally irrelevant. The million dollar question surrounding evolutionary game theory is “What does it explain about real life?” Well, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is supposed to explain where we came from, so if we follow this path […]

Martin Wolf, Chief Economics Commentator for the Financial Times, posted an article back in August in which he examined the role of the Federal Reserve in saving both the economy and Wall Street. At that time Wolf described what he believed to be a market for lemons in the financial system that was being driven […]

In this election, the candidates have taken advantage of using social networking sites to promote their campaigns. With supportive groups on facebook (One Million Strong for Barack Obama) and some candidates like Mitt Romney getting an account himself, the candidates have sought a whole new area fight over: the internet. Using social networking sites allow […]

In class, we discussed the way “technologies” spread throughout a network via a system of adoption. In the model, nodes adopt a technology if a sufficient fraction of their neighbors has adopted the technology. Although not applied to social networks, the mathematics of models like this has been studied since the 1940s. […]

This article explores how the Syphilis evolved from different forms to become more evolutionary stable.
Syphilis was known to cause “Boils that stood out like Acorns, from whence issued such filthy stinking Matter, that whosoever came within the Scent, believed himself infected. The Colour of these was of a dark Green and the very Aspect as […]

Scientists have found that the brain works like a social network or the internet. The brain carries information from one area to another in the same way that information is spread on the internet or through a social network. Information spreads through small networks of nodes and to get from one node to another only […]