The Small-World Phenomenon: Are Cornellians separated by six degrees?
During my orientation week at Cornell University, many incoming freshmen participated in numerous icebreaker activities that helped us get to know the community better. One activity, in particular, came into my mind when Professor Easley and Professor Halpern discussed this idea known as the “small-world” phenomenon — “the idea that the world looks “small” when […]
Understanding the Macroevolutionary Stability of Birds through Networks
Networks have been studied in numerous scenarios in the natural world. A recent study published in Science examined the evolutionary history of fruit-eating bird species and their interactions with seed dispersal networks in numerous regions around the world. The original paper by Gustavo Burin, Paulo R. Guimarães Jr., and Tiago B. Quental was supplemented by […]
Triadic closure in the animal kingdom
https://www.deccanherald.com/content/500949/hyenas-their-own-facebook-algorithm.html Hyenas are carnivorous animals which live and hunt in groups called clans. Some members of such clans can spend their entire lifespan (~19 years) in the same clan. As such, the societal structure of such clans and the relationship between their members is a topic of interest. Even in networks of non-human organisms, we […]
The triadic closure and collaborations between airline companies
In order to understand our marketing today we have learn about the big companies and their selling strategies. A very important strategy is the collaborations between companies. A field where we meet this type of strategy is at the airline companies. Every large airline company communicates with the others about the price of fuel, number […]