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“Did you hear?!”: Modeling Gossip and Broadcasting

In a university setting, information travel is almost instantaneous. Just minutes after someone’s unfortunate interaction with a friend, close friends know, back-stories are extrapolated, rumors sprout, and surrounding people’s ears have perked in anticipation of learning “what happened.” Encouraged by easy means of communication and the instinctual want to be in-the-know, the spread of gossip is a widely observed phenomenon. Modeled by a fairly common scheme of ladies sharing their knowledge of a scandal via telephone calls, Hedetniemi, Hedetniemi, and Liestman from the Computer Science departments of their respective universities studied the dynamics of communication networks. They found that the spread of information over the networks they used to model the scenarios can be further extrapolated to mathematical models. Using “combinatorics, graph theory, probability and computing,” the researchers found means of representing information travel.

This relates to the direction and flow of ideas within a network. Analogous to the Page Rank concept, we can follow the flow of information in a given set of people. Furthermore, this can allow us to find those most dominant or popular in a group, he or she who receives the most information the fastest. Mathematical models of the flow of information shed light on the very interesting dynamics of people in networks.

Source: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/net.3230180406/pdf

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