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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]