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 […]
Why can’t you stop playing Farmville?
The age of online social gaming has truly begun. The average online gamer today spends most of his time playing flash games on Facebook rather than on more traditional outlets such as miniclip.com or shockwave.com. The main factor differentiating these two kinds of websites is that games on Facebook rely immensely on the social aspect of gaming, […]
Controversial Radio Spectrum Auction?
Recently the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) conducted a radio spectrum auction that provides several frequency bands to Korean telecommunications companies. The regulator auctioned three blocks of radio bands: 800 megahertz (MHz), 1.8 gigahertz (GHz) and 2.1 GHz. The companies were eager to win the right to use the frequency as it allows the companies to […]
Connections throughout Basketball History (a small world)
A network of professional basketball players throughout history follows the small world phenomenon as well as any other instance. We can discuss the, perhaps, surprising links between every basketball player from past to present. Like the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon or Erdős number, the same concept can be applied to the NBA and all […]
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