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 […]

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. […]

In “Strangers and Friends: Collaborative Play in World of Warcraft,” Bonnie and Harris discuss the strength of weak ties in the popular video game World of Warcraft.  Bonnie and Harris argue that the game offers many possible ways of brief interaction between players and that this in turn makes the game very enjoyable […]

I had heard of the six degrees phenomena before our class. However, one thing that I had never thought about until recently was the potential advantage one could take of such power. Sure, it’s fun to think that I am six people away from people like President Obama, Kevin Bacon, Joe “Six […]

The following article explains how bbm is still an untapped social network:  http://www.marketing.fm/2009/04/29/blackberry-social-network-bbm/There is a very basic, and very useful, network that is created by a simple and popular technology: the BlackBerry. BlackBerry users are connected to each other by the BlackBerry Message, or BBM, service. Only BlackBerry users can be members of this network, and it acts similarly […]

Everybody wants their computer to work. They want to be able to run any application without running into any problems. But as software developers know, it’s never that simple. All applications have bugs - some easier to find, others harder. Many of them are known and are being worked on. For example, Mozilla’s bug tracker […]

           Since the seminal contributions of Akerlof, the pervasive effects of information asymmetry in markets have been studied in numerous contexts. The general idea is as follows: if a market involves sellers and buyers and one party has more or better information than the other, there could be an imbalance of power, resulting in a […]

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 […]

I recently came across this article discussing the privacy implications of a Facebook’s general search tool.  The tool comes into play when someone searches the name of a Facebook user using a general search engine like Google or Yahoo.  Facebook then randomly links the person being searched to eight randomly chosen “Friends” of […]

Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo! make billions of dollars each year by selling slots for internet advertising. Whenever a user enters a search on the website the results page will contain relevant results as well as advertised links. Companies are able to bid on different search queries in order […]