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Social Structures is Changing the Way Talent Acquisition is Approached

New applications including the Kevin Bacon Game, LinkedIn and Facebook are charting connections like never before. Instead of the idea of “six degrees of separation”, proposed in 1929, we are now seeing it be closer to “four degrees of separation”. Charting internal employees’ outside business and their social relationships is about to paint a new […]

Game Theory Optimal vs. Exploitative Play in Poker

Poker is a game of probability, or so most people think. Given a hand, there is a certain probability of your opponent having a better hand. As a result, there is always an optimal decision to make that maximizes expected value. This style of play is called GTO (game theory optimal). Playing true GTO ensures […]

Facebook: the social network

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/technology/facebook-to-change-news-feed-to-focus-on-friends-and-family.html?mcubz=0 Facebook has constantly been one of the biggest social media networking and media-sharing sites. Its value to people around the world is in the potential for users to interact with others and have access to a wide variety of content posted by friends or family. Similarly, news publishers have also been increasingly dependent on […]

Mapping the Human “Dieseasome”

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/05/05/science/20080506_DISEASE.html We are plagued with diseases that affect nearly every part of the body. Each has a unique attack on one or more organs and there are entire fields of study dedicated to learning more about them. The above interactive article from the New York Times shows a connected graph of many of the major […]

LinkedIn – A (Professional) Social Network

Once a Running Joke, LinkedIn Is Suddenly a Hot Social Network. Here’s What Changed This article talks about how LinkedIn has been rising in popularity recently, opening with the fact that Microsoft acquired it for $26 billion. This came to a surprise to many, as LinkedIn is not what most people immediately think of when […]

Networks and Urban Spatial Structure

Several years ago, a group of researchers did a study on urban spatial structure. They used passengers’ transportation record in Singapore to detect roles that different local areas were playing, influences they have and how their regional functions were changing overtime. The researchers mapped out their findings, which showed that Singapore in the short time […]

Triadic closure and balanced relationships

http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/relationships/a42511/interracial-marriage-mother-in-law/   I was reading the magazine Cosmo when I came across this story about a woman becoming friends with her soon to be mother in law. I thought it was a great example of triadic closure as well as balancing triad relationships.   First, the man of the story has two strong connections. One […]

Game Theory in Financial Crises

There have been many financial crises in recent decades across many countries. The most recent international economic crisis came in 2008 and hurt the economies of virtually every country including the United States. Some causes of the crisis were runs on investment banks and financial institutions. A run means that many people withdrew cash and […]

Triadic Closure in Movies

http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~magdon/courses/casp/projects/Jin.pdf Triadic Closure is often studied in research regarding social networks and relationships between individuals, where growing networks trend towards forming triangles to settle psychological and social tensions. However, at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Department of Science, this property is being studied in the scope of the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) and the results are […]

Game Theory in NBA Free Agency

An earlier post (https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2017/09/04/networks-in-nba-rivalries/) mentions the parallels between networks and NBA rivalries. Game theory, another topic from class, is equally ubiquitous in today’s NBA. In determining their futures, players and teams are making sure to evaluate all their options and factor in the decisions of the rest of the league before coming to a conclusion. […]

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