Watching Monty Python the other day, I found my thoughts wandering once again back to Networks 204 and Gladwell’s description of a syphilis epidemic in Baltimore: how it spread from the projects along local highways during summer months and contracted during the winter. Explicitly drawing a connection between contagious viral diseases and transportation networks […]

At the beginning of the semester we were given a sheet depicting numerous real life models of a variety of social networks. Most of edges concerned interaction between nodes, such as the spread of informational e-mails, friendships within organizations and clubs, or the outbreak of a disease. This blog focuses on a more theoretical […]

The Game theory, which we learned in class, can be applied to athletes with doping. The game played is similar to prisoner’s dilemma. Say there are two athletes, A and B. A thinks if B doesn’t take any drugs, then it will be in A’s best interest to take them. A taking the drugs will […]

Social ties might not only predict power or influence over others, but also may have an effect on cognitive health as we age. In the New York Times article Forget Something? Then Read This, Richard Friedman discusses the importance of socializing in old age. Friedman mentions that scientists have known for a […]

Some people are so careful about avoiding sickness while others simply take it as a fact of life. It’s no wonder the flu spreads so easily when things like hand holding, plate sharing, and simply passing pens around can so easily spread germs. I find that many of us also hold a personal […]

In response to several blog posts earlier on this semester, describing our course’s broad application to biological networks (such as this one, this one, and this one) I highlight that Piers J Ingram, Michael PH Stump and Jaroslav Stark published research in 2006 demonstrating that network effects in biology are not only often poorly understood, but […]

Large social networks - a good thing to have. It means more friends, more contacts, and more connections, simply, but researches at the Virginia Ann Arbor Health Care System and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor have recently conducted a study that implies that a large social network may also be a health […]

The Office of Population Research at Princeton University explores historic, present and future trends in population growth, decline and control, which in turn has consequences for network structure and interaction, economic viability, social mobility, governmental regulation and environmental capacity. One of the most famous experiments conducted in this field is the Princeton European Fertility […]

In class, we explored the advantages of being embedded in a network. As opposed to a node that lies on the fringes of a network, a node in the center of a network has edges with every node in the network, which allows it to interact with these other nodes directly. The influence of this […]

Just from the two beginning weeks in class and the wide range of blog posts, it is clearly evident that networks play a dominant role in all of our lives. Referencing the latest post about research in the neural field, we could say that networks are “hard-wired” into our systems. Merely cataloguing some of my […]