Links for 2009 08 25

  • The emotional content of large-scale texts: The happiness of bloggers, song lyrics, and presidents
    Very interesting slides from wefeelfine guys

  • The Daily Networker » Blog Archive » Teens Turn Tenners into Tonnes!
    16.000 young UK people were challenged to make a profit AND a difference (social impact) in 1 month with £10! · The largest profit was £736 and the average profit was £42, compared with a return of just 2p from a savings account!
    Jennifer Campbell, one of the award-winning students from St Kentigerns, said:

    “Make Your Mark with a Tenner helped me to develop skills which I don’t think you can ever be taught in a classroom, like using my own initiative and creativity. Because it was our own idea and we were driving the project, rather than being told to do something by a teacher, it made us really motivated to do well and prove ourselves. It’s also made me think much more seriously about the idea of owning and running my own business in the future.”

  • Mechanism Design on Trust Networks | Yahoo! Research
    We introduce the concept of a trust network, a decentralized payment infrastructure in which payments are routed as IOUs between trusted entities. The network structure introduces group budget constraints on the payments from a subset of agents to another on the trust network: this generalizes the notion of individually budget constrained bidders. We consider a multi-unit auction of identical items among bidders with unit demand, when the auctioneer and bidders are all nodes on a trust network. We define a generalized notion of social welfare for such budget-constrained bidders, and show that the winner determination problem under this notion of social welfare is NP-hard; however the flow structure in a trust network can be exploited to approximate the solution with a factor of 1-1/e. Furthermore, this can be turned into an incentive compatible mechanism.
    Ghosh, A.; Mahdian, M.; Pennock, D.M.; Reeves, D.M.; Fugger, R.
    3rd international Workshop on Internet and Network Economics, 2007

  • Cosy social networks ‘are stifling innovation’ – New Scientist
    "The over-abundance of connections through which information travels reduces diversity and keeps radical ideas from taking hold," the paper suggests. And "To enable innovation it may be necessary to reduce the number of social ties between coders".

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