In the world of digital music, movies, and books, the intellectual property rights of these formats have started to be questioned by many individuals. In a generation of Bit Torrents and Peer-to-Peer file sharing, the many people of the world disregard these rights in order to illegally copy formats of music, movies, and books in […]

 
                In class we discussed the role of evolutionary stability as it applies to a one on one encounter with two distinct alternative strategies. Often when we consider evolution and evolutionary stability, we consider members of the plant and animal world. This world is often much more complex than the simple scenario we […]

Despite the often misreported news articles on biology, there is no clear cut function of a single biological component such as a protein, gene or metabolite. There is no “gene” for lung cancer, rather, there is a genetic network that when perturbed, causes lung cancer. What is more important is a biological component’s relationship with […]

As a chemical engineer with a particular focus on energy systems and energy engineering, the power grid in the United States lends itself well for a study of network dynamics and cascading behavior. In a paper titled “Topology and Cascading Line Outages in Power Grids,” Professor David L. Pepyne studies the relationship […]

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 […]

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/NYTimes/2006-02-09.html
The diffusion of innovation in a social network has many facets that need to be taken into account.  Introduction of such new technology doesn’t always work. Its “relative advantage” compared to practices already in place by a society is a good indicator of how well an innovation will take hold. Also, how complex or observable […]

As mentioned in class, prediction markets are a powerful tool for making conjectures about future events without the need for a panel of ‘experts.’ By aggregating predictions from large amounts of people, their accuracy can actually surpass that of experts.  Sources like the Iowa Electronic Markets and Hollywood Stock Exchange provide investors with opportunities to […]

Links
BBC News - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/more_or_less/5176698.stm
Judith Kleinfeld’s website - http://www.judithkleinfeld.com/
After hearing about the small-world phenomenon and six degrees of separation, it seemed appropriate to search for recent attempts to duplicate Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment from 1967. Some experiments mentioned in lecture today, such as the e-mail experiment by Dodds, Muhammed, and Watts, came up multiple times in […]

“I’m a Mac.” “And I’m a PC,” the actors in a popular Apple ad proclaim. When the actor proclaims that he is a PC, there is no doubt in the viewer’s mind as to what operating system, or OS, he runs. However, Windows was not always inextricably tied to the PC as it is now.
In […]

In September of 2005, players in Blizzard’s incredibly popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft, started dropping dead from a new disease accidentally introduced by Blizzard in an update to the game. The problem started when Blizzard’s programmers added a new instance, which is a separate dungeon disconnected from the outside world that players can enter to […]