For this week, as a theme, I’d suggest “the spread of epidemics in a social network”.   “Epidemic” of course sounds like a disease, but also the spread of new ideas (recycling?) or technologies (solar panels, maybe?) can be thought of as a kind of epidemic.

Here is a link to a TED talk about this sort of idea.  To identify the network nodes which were most likely to be highly connected (and therefore contribute most to the spread across the network) the researchers used a simple trick: have people nominate their friends.  This works because, as we briefly discussed in class, the average person’s average friend is likely to be better connected than the average person.

Remember that, as always, the theme above is only a suggestion.  You are welcome to post on any relevant topic, including one of the earlier suggested themes.  Here is a list of those:

• Blogging theme for week 12 (4/5/2015)
• Blogging theme week 11 (3/29/2015)
• Blogging for week 10 (3/22/2015)
• Blogging for Week 9 (3/15/2015)
• Blogging Theme Week 8 (2/28/2015)
• Blogging Theme Week 7 (2/21/2015)
• Blogging Theme Week 5 (2/9/2015)
• Blogging Theme Week 4 (2/1/2015)
• Blogging Theme, week 3 (1/25/2015)
• Blogging theme, week 2 (1/17/2015)