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Frictionless Sharing and the Interest Graph

This past Thursday, facebook announced some pretty substantial updates to their open graph and introduced the concept of frictionless sharing. Facebook presumably thinks that they can use this frictionless sharing data as an additional input in refining advertising algorithms and making recommendations about what is important to users, but the question remains whether this data […]

The Power of Stupidity

One of the underlying assumptions to game theory is that given a set of strategies, a player will always choose a strategy to maximize his or her own payoff. Such a player is considered to be rational. But let’s be honest, how often is that actually the case? For a species that supposedly rose to […]

Want to Get Published in the Times? Use Twitter in a Novel Way.

Twitter tweets used as a database for a sociological study.

Consolidation of Municipalities

The consolidation of the many jurisdictions into a single one can have many economic merits. By consolidating and having a bigger local jurisdiction, the local government can take full advantage of spatial externalities and any spillover of benefits of any investments by internalizing those effects within the increased borders. This ensures that any investment is […]

(Ab)using Triadic Closure

While traditional brute force hacking remains to be a large problem for users and computers alike, there is a growing problem with ever increasing users online: social engineering. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, social engineering is defined as “the use of deception in order to induce a person to divulge private information or esp. […]

Can Game Theory Save the U.N. Climate Talks?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/sep/06/game-theory-un-climate-talks In several weeks, the UN global climate talks will resume in Panama to discuss what can be done to curtail the global warming that threatens to destroy the environment and ozone layer that has protected us for hundreds of centuries. If nations continue to turn a blind eye to the consequences of global warming, […]

What Would You Do If You Saw Bullying?

http://absarahmed.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/bullying/ http://teenadvice.about.com/od/violencebullying/a/girlbullies.htm As the articles suggest, one of the main reasons for bullying is insecurity. That is, bullies feel that they need to show aggression and power in order for them to “fit” in to society of context. This leads to the idea that when an individual does not express his or her dominance over […]

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