http://www.oneseason.com/
OneSeason.com is a relatively new site that describes itself as “a virtual sports trading platform with social features and content for sports fans. The system provides sports enthusiasts with a way to compete, interact and have a vested interest in their passion(1).”1 Run by E-Global Sports Network, inc. OneSeason.com allows users to […]

http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/arrow.htm
The article above discusses Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, which states that dictatorship is the only procedure for aggregating individual preferences to produce a complete, transitive group ranking that satisfies the two following conditions:
- Pareto principle: If all the individual rank A over B, then the group ranking must have A over B.
- independence of irrelevant alternatives […]

Recently, there has been an international panic over the idea of the swine flu. Much in the same way the flu itself is contagious and travels through a branching network, the panic of becoming sick or infected is passing throughout the world. Much of this is due to an information cascade. Because […]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090406132056.htm
Considering evolutionary game theory, in class we have discussed two strategies of Dove and Hawk, symbolizing passive, cooperative behavior and aggressive behavior, respectively.  We found that even though Doves do well against one another (share food), Hawks do so well against Doves that Dove cannot be an evolutionarily stable strategy, even though Hawks do poorly […]

 ftp://ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/tr/TR-2006-186.pdf
 This article describes yet another experiment to prove that any two nodes in a network can be connected by at most 6 steps.  More specifically this experiment was referenced on page 34 of the text.  Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz looked at of 200 million Instant Messenger users and created a social network linking users […]

I can’t help but think of all the wrong decisions our species has made throughout its history because of information cascades. Information cascades, as we have learned in class, have the ability to be wrong. An important example would be in a trial with a jury. If a jury decides to vote […]

About a month or two ago, I was given a small box emblazoned with the iconic, yellow, rectangular logo of “National Geographic.”  Across the box was a graphic of the silhouette of a lone man walking across a patch of land.  The box was a kit as part of “The Genographic Project,” […]

I had heard of the six degrees phenomena before our class. However, one thing that I had never thought about until recently was the potential advantage one could take of such power. Sure, it’s fun to think that I am six people away from people like President Obama, Kevin Bacon, Joe “Six […]

Throughout this course we have studied the use of social networks as it relates to several different applications. The above article talks about the use of social networks to combat terrorism.

One key example of the use of social network analysis to understand terrorist cells is the analysis of the September 11th […]

In class we discussed different aggregation techniques and also were showed Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. Even though it is impossible to produce a perfect ranking system, companies such as Amazon.com work toward creating the best recommendation system they can. When glancing through Amazon.com, one can see different recommendation systems at work including “Frequently Bought […]