After a long night of tossing and turning last week, I decided to pick up a magazine to lull myself to sleep. Unfortunately, the only stack in my fraternity’s bathroom was of Playboys, and the obvious thing to do with those would only serve to keep me up even longer. Then I remembered what my […]

I’d like to point out five very exciting articles / links that people should definitely check out:

Finance / Investing: Researchers from Harvard Business School have found that portfolio managers do better when they invest on firms they have personal connections with (went to college / grad school with). In fact returns on ‘connected’ investments were […]

My paper topic was to look at social phenomenon through the theoretical and visual tools established by nonlinear optical theory. If interested you should read the section of the paper that gives a brief introduction about optics. The thrust of it is simply that Social Systems can be considered complex nonlinear dynamical systems and so […]

According to Heider’s social balance theoryi, individuals (nodes) in a social network tend to form relationships (+ or - edges between nodes) as follows: “for every set of three nodes, if we consider the three edges connecting them, either all three of these edges are labeled […]

In our brief introduction to evolutionary game theory, we defined an evolutionarily stable strategy roughly as one that tends to drive a fractionally small population of mutant strategies to extinction over time. Our setting for investigating this idea was the Hawk-Dove game played between behaviorally instinctive animals; here we saw that successive generations of […]

In a recent Wired interview[i], Fred Vogelstein asked Google CEO Eric Schmidt about the current number and future scale of Google’s data centers, to which Schmidt responds, “I think my overall description would be in the dozens. There are a few very large ones, some of which have been leaked to the press. But in […]

The article “Scale-Free Networks Provide a Unifying Framework for the Emergence of Cooperation” by F.D. Santos and J.M. Pacheco suggests that structure of a network influences which strategies evolve within a population. Two games one of which is familiar to our class – the prisoner’s dilemma and a variation called “the snowdrift game”- are […]

In what may be a politically biased article which bemoans flaws in US military intelligence organizations, Julian Sanchez argues that information cascades are a potential reason these flaws occur. He references an article on information cascades which mentions an experiment performed by economists Angela Hung and Charles Plott:
“Subjects were told that they would be picking […]

AIM as a Proxy in the Small-World Phenomenon
http://aimfight.com/
In class we discussed the small-world phenomenon (six degrees of separation) and how this result is not entirely surprising if exponential growth between steps are taken into account. The site http://aimfight.com/ gives you a score equal to the “sum of […]

We recently focused on simple tipping phenomena. Typically, these models involve a strictly increasing function, where the number of people attending rises with people expected to attend. However, what if, at some point, additional forces cause this function to begin to decrease - congestion costs, for example?
(Much of the mathematics behind this is […]