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If You Provide It They Will Pay

Have you ever pirated something? Pirated software and media account for billions of dollars in losses each year for the software, music, and video industries. Companies have attempted to mitigate the damages they suffer from this problem through aggressive litigation and deterrents such as education about copyright infringement. While this has had some affect, I […]

Google “Insights for Search” feature and it’s relation to Facebook.com

Facebook.com launched in February 2004, and has since become the world’s most popular social networking site. Many of us have seen the movie “The Social Network” and found out that Facebook started out in Ivy League colleges, then spread to other school exponentially. In fact, watching that movie could provide for an interesting lesson as […]

Individual Selfish Actions Can Affect Entire Cities

In an article on roads and urban travel, Linda Baker uses Braess’s paradox to discuss a counterintuitive result to a major transportation change in Seoul. She reports that the replacement of a six-lane highway with a five-mile-long park actually improved the city’s flow of traffic. Most people, including many traffic engineers, would think that a […]

Gunrunning Networks

In Charlie Savage’s article, “Guns Inquiry Urges Action Against 14 in Justice Dept.”, Savage describes the accusations made against 14 current federal officials towards neglecting to take action against illegal weapon deals.  Michael Horowitz, the inspector general, claimed that the majority of these officials are prosecutors and agents in the Arizona based group in the […]

Freshman Roomate: Friend or Enemy

Freshman year at Cornell, or at any college or university, most students are assigned at least one “random” roommate. Brad Herzog, a Cornell Alumni, comments on this process in his article “The Fickle Finger of Freshman Fate”. Herzog makes the point that one’s freshman roommate can become a best friend for life or a worst […]

The success of a venture lies in who they are connected to

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/business/media/barry-diller-and-scott-rudin-form-e-book-publishing-venture.html?_r=0 Barry Diller, Frances Coady, Evan Ratliff of Atavist and Scott Rudin have joined together through Atavist for a new venture into the e-book market. The endeavor seems precarious when they have to contend with such giants as Amazon, which has the largest foothold in the market. But that is not to say they have […]

Using Game Theory to Understand the Social Dynamics of Vaccination

Could game theory one day be implemented as a model for public health decisions? Gretchen Chapman, a psychologist at Rutgers University, made use of game theory to examine the social dynamics surrounding flu vaccination. From a public health viewpoint, society is better off if we vaccinate more young people—young people, though less likely to die […]

Decentralized Torrent Network to Avoid Government Interruption

Peer-to-peer,P2P, networks have been the dominant means of content piracy since the advent of Napster at the turn of the millennium. Nowadays, BitTorrent clients have become the mainstay, as their fast transfer speeds facilitate large data transfers. However, the government and content protection groups, like the MPAA, have recently been trying to exert pressure to […]

Network Stability

The classic way to start any article about networks is to write a list of supposedly surprising and diverse phenomena that can be described as a network. Roads. Nerve cells. Friendships. Ecosystems. The internet. Fortunately for you, I won’t list them all because you have all probably read that list many times before (whoops). [Or in video form: link]. When […]

Ramsey Theory on Structurally Balanced Graphs

Informally, Ramsey theory is the idea that complete disorder is impossible. As applied to graph theory, it states that for any numbers p and q, there exists a minimal number R(p,q) such that a complete graph(denoted Kn) on R(p,q) vertices, whose edges are colored red or blue, contains either a red complete graph of size […]

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