Many news outlets are often focused on reporting about the same subject at the same time.  At the moment swine flu has taken the spotlight.  The more time spent on one topic, the less time there is to devote to an examination of other subjects.  Though this convergence of focus may to some […]

http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~seclab/projects/torpig/index.html
Botnets - legions of computers controlled by malware and coordinated by a malicious botmaster - are used for many purposes, including spamming, launching distributed denial-of-service attacks, and stealing personal information, but until recently they had never been used for academic research. In early 2009, researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, used a vulnerability […]

The practical applicability of solving the problem of finding the shortest path between two nodes in a network can be motivated by considering the problem of a transportation network. Consider a network in which each node represents an airport and each edge between nodes n1 and n2 is weighted proportionally to the […]

http://www.chicagomaroon.com/2004/3/12/a-treatise-on-dating-the-prisoners-dilemma
The above article explains an interesting comparison between the prisoner’s dilemma which we discussed in class and dating using game theory. Like the prisoner’s dilemma game, this explanation shows why deception is a dominant strategy.
In class we learned about the prisoner’s dilemma which is a situation where two prisoners are caught by the police, put […]

In the current day and age, networking, both in the social and business atmosphere has become extremely important. Networking websites like Facebook and LinkedIn rank supreme, and the continued advancement of technology drives people to “stay connected.” It is a reasonably well known fact that any sort of “connections” when searching for jobs, can prove […]

http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles.htm
 
             The internet has changed the method in which businesses can connect with people and distribute their message.  For example, in the modern electronic age, the spending on internet advertising has exploded as companies take advantage of the cheapness and efficient nature of online advertisements that target users more precisely.   As a result, the rate of spread […]

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=8133592#
In this scene from The Princess Bride, my favorite movie ever,Westley(The Dread Pirate Roberts) challenges Vizzini to a duel of wits.  In this duel Westley will poison one of without Vizzini knowing which of the cups is poisoned. Vizzini will then choose which cup each of them will drink.  As we see Vizzini spouts many […]

When it comes to professional relationships, more information is going to be transmitted generally speaking to people with more edges that branch out into the network.The more edges a person has linking them to other people, the smaller the average length of pathways between them and any other random person in the group. Information travels […]

The idea of Six Degrees of Separation, published originally by Stanley Milgram, has recently received some support from a study conducted by Microsoft. Using data from their MSN Messenger, Microsoft determined the average distance between any two people to be about 6.6 degrees. In their study, they determined acquaintances as people who had sent at […]

I came across an interesting and highly relevant article on MSNBC.com on Wednesday entitled “Grab Customers with Long-Tail Keywords.” Its application to the class merely based on the headline alone should be obvious: in our discussion on the distribution of popularity in networks we devoted a class to referencing the long tail phenomenon. […]