Connectivity is sometimes not a Good Thing
While watching the presidential debate this past Saturday, I was painfully reminded of the polarization of American society and the driving factors behind it, specifically social media. This got me thinking about how social media reflects our society today and whether or not the advent of the internet has had a positive effect on […]
Centrality in the Pharma industry
As we have learned in class, information flows through nodes of networks. The more center you are in your network, the more information you can both spread and receive from your neighboring nodes. This centrality gives you more power in the network compared to other nodes. You can choose who in the network to exchange […]
The Strategy of Auctions: Baseball Style
This article, just released by Forbes a few hours ago, informs the public of a once in a lifetime auction that will take place next week. This auction, being held at Christie’s in NYC (a famous auction house), will include nearly 500 items from baseball’s history that is expected to sum to over $5 million. […]
Public transaction records in the Bitcoin blockchain
The past year has seen an explosion of interest around “blockchain” technology, described on Wikipedia as a “distributed database that maintains a continuously-growing list of records called blocks secured from tampering and revision” (Wikipedia, original article). Success of the technology is demonstrated by the Bitcoin network, which employs such a data structure to record Bitcoin […]
The Network Theory of Sports
This article proposed a novel application of network theory: to study the passing strategies of soccer teams. This network is constructed using the players as nodes and the passes as edges. This relates naturally to the first lecture of this course, when we described the versatility and growing number of applications for applying networks. With […]
The Power of Your Position in a Network
Traditionally, within a large organization where hierarchical structures reign, it is easy to think that the people at the top ultimately have the most influence and the greatest ability to create change in the workplace. However, according to a study done by writers at Harvard Business Review, this is not the case. They have found […]
China’s Decreasing Export Market And Power in Relationships
The strength of power in a relationship is affected by each party’s alternative option. For example, if a person only has one friend, who is very popular and has a hundred friends, then this person is considered to be weaker in the relationship, because his popular friend has a lot more option than he has. […]
Facebook gives us what we want–literally
Facebook has embarked on a new way to spread ads among its 1.7 billion users. Groups! A Facebook group is a unique interface on Facebook that allows a user with particular interests to interact with other users of the same interests. Whether it be games, movies, sports or more, users can find a group that pertains […]
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