In contemporary society, global disease outbreak has become an increasingly alarming concern for healthcare practitioners, researchers, and government protection agencies. With the increase in the number of new diseases developing and periodic recurrences of diseases thought to be history, it is difficult to track all of these occurrences and determine whether these […]

It is a widely spread belief that with the onset of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, people will be able to keep in close contact with more friends and family. You can share a close relationship with a friend on the other side of the world and even their daily activities can be streamed […]

Epidemics, no matter what form they take, strike a daunting blow to the human psyche. Because of the devastation that epidemics cause, many people seek to create working models of them so that predictions can be made regarding future outbreaks (and, thus, the proper precautions can be taken to lessen the severity of the […]

The long anticipated return to home for the US soldiers doesn’t seem so far away anymore; president Obama has come up with a detailed plan for the pullout of every US troops from Iraq to bring them home by the end of 2011 in the latest. Understandably, most people-both Iraqis and Americans-have been hoping to […]

It is undeniable that our world is becoming increasingly more intertwined and connected by the day. Through the use of cell phones and Internet social networks, anyone can find out what their friends and family are doing at any point in time. While calling someone on a cell phone costs a certain amount of money, […]

Robert Putnam, noted political scientist and professor at Harvard University, has completed several works expressing his concerns over the declining civil and social capital in America. In particular, his book “Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of the American Community” (http://www.bowlingalone.com/), discusses this by describing the massive decline in membership in traditional civic, social, and […]

There is undeniably a subset of the human population that can be categorized as exceptional negotiators. What separates a good negotiator from a poor one? An effort was made recently by two research scientists at Columbia University to answer this question. The goal of their work was to ascertain the extent to which emotion plays a role […]

The New York Times article EBay is Planning to Emphasize Fixed-Price Sales Format Over Its Auction Model discusses EBay’s possible transition from an auction-based format to a direct purchasing option. Although the auction format has been quite successful in the past, EBay has seen a drop in their gross merchandise volume, or the total […]

Gale and Shapley’s stable marriage problem, dating back to 1962, is an extension to the perfect matching concept that we have discussed in class.

The problem is as follows:  If there are n men and n women (and we assume heterosexual marriages), is there a way for each person to marry one other person such that […]

Link: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/kiva_11_million_in_loans_to_developing_nations.php
Since the beginning of class, we have learned about the concept of networks as a web representing the relationships between people, computers, ideas, etc. Nodes are connected to each other by edges and we can analyze the relationships between the nodes or predict what would happen in the network as time moves […]