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. […]

(1) http://www.prlog.org/10217335-is-six-degrees-of-separation-the-key-to-the-hidden-job-market.html
The Six Degrees of Separation theory, which suggests that that anyone is connected to anyone else within 6 connections of his or her friends and their friends’ friends, has always been a subject of debate. Many people are skeptical that it is in fact true, but research done at Columbia University in […]

The Cornell Daily Sun published on its front page last week, the results of the student trustee election.
http://cornellsun.com/section/news/content/2009/04/22/students-elect-asa-craig-%E2%80%9911-serve-board-trustees
I quickly skimmed through the article, but what caught my eye was the paragraph:
“Out of the 3,423 ballots cast for the 10 candidates, Craig was ranked first on 651 of those ballots. Using the Hare-Clark system, the candidate […]

In class we have been talking about information cascades. We talked about how cascades are easily started and can be based on false information. Professor Easley also talked about how once a cascade begins people tend to ignore the other, private information that they have been given and just continue the cascade. He used the […]

The ongoing efforts to stop drug trafficking have disrupted and disturbed some drug trades temporarily, but have largely had little to no effect on degrading or destroying the networks created to traffic illegal drugs. The reason behind this, Phil Williams argues in his article “The nature of drug-trafficking networks”, is because the network structure of […]

Economics tells you that demand decreases as result of a price increase. This is seemingly not the case for luxury goods. People who aren’t status-seeking often find it absurd for those who spend, for example, thousands of dollars on a purse. Luxury commodity goods have an extraordinary power that their cheaper fellows don’t: representation of […]

Over the next few weeks, the largest act of democracy this world has seen will take place in the most unlikely of places. Though it may seem a long time for such an act to occur, over the course of April and May, a 28 day democratic election will take place in […]

If you have not yet seen a clip of Susan Boyle’s performance last week on “Britain’s Got Talent”, you can help contribute to this network phenomenon by checking out the Youtube video.

Susan Boyle, a forty-seven year old Scottish village dweller, exploded to worldwide fame last week when an online video of her “Britain’s Got […]

Recently in class, we’ve discussed power laws and how they apply to popularity effects, most notably the “rich-get-richer” phenomenon. Essentially, this phenomenon manifests itself when the probability that a person experiences an increase in popularity (or an increase in wealth, social status, etc.) is directly proportional to the person’s current popularity. This makes […]

Provided that no outside information is given and the choice is not changed, a cascade will continue indefinitely. One different choice can disrupt a cascade, making it fragile as stated in class. The model used to introduce cascades was built so people would make the same choice beyond a string of two of […]