All Roads Lead to Philosophy
A few weeks ago, we learned about how the Internet was made up of a set of directed connections–links pointing from one web-page to another. This information that is stored within the internet is organized with these directed connections, and can be viewed as a directed graph. Wikipedia is a very useful resource made up […]
Yahoo!, Interclick, and Targeted Advertising On the Web
Following an example set by Google, most of whose yearly revenue comes from paid advertisements, Yahoo! has decided to focus on targeted advertising as the main mechanism for driving ad revenue back up. They have done this through the acquisition of Interclick, a company whose main business is in serving targeted advertisements.
An Advertisement Cascade
Google AdWords is undoubtedly the largest advertising program out there. It uses the keywords its users type in as a way to match advertisers to users, and ultimately clients to businesses. Over this past summer, Google came out with a brand new addition to their tool that ties together two seemingly unrelated topics we have […]
Network Flow
Network Flow: Max-flow min-cut theorem One interesting topic in the study of networks is measuring flow across networks. Suppose we have a directed network where each edge has a capacity function, c(e). This capacity represents the maximum amount that can flow through the edge. On this network there is a source, s, and a sink, […]
How to Be Noticed By Your Friends: Introducing EdgeRank
We’ve probably all wondered how Facebook decides to sort the various forms of activity on our Newsfeed. How does it determine what appears in our feed, and which posts should appear higher than others? It turns out that Facebook uses an algorithm called EdgeRank to decide for us what we want and don’t want to […]
Greece Plays Chicken
Source: http://business.blogs.cnn.com/2011/11/01/greece-plays-chicken-with-its-people-and-europe/ The Greek government announced recently that they will put the deficit plan up for a nationwide referendum. This move has endangered the recovery of the Eurozone and increased the likelihood of a default. In a sense, the Greek government has entered into a game of chicken with Europe. The Greek bailout plan was […]
The Facebook Newsfeed – a mechanism designed to promote involvement
Recently, a company named EdgeRank Checker, that tracks fan engagement (through gauging increase/decrease in likes and comments) in facebook pages, found that Facebook pages with over 100,000 fans or more had a significantly higher percentage increase in fan engagement with the newly implemented Newsfeed when compared to pages who had between 10,000 to 100,000 fans. As […]
Pre-enrollment and Game Theory
Every semester, with the exception of certain Seniors, there is a particular morning when every Cornell student in the same year is more or less awake at 6:59 am. Why? Pre-enrollment for next semester’s classes. On top of fighting against sleep deprivation, each person will also face the inevitable “Session Timed Out” screen from Student […]
Social Networks Redefining Google Search
Undoubtedly search engines such as Google revolutionized the manner in which we search and obtain results from the World Wide Web. Google’s algorithm and PageRank system has enabled us to efficiently receive results that correspond to our search entries. As we know, Google formulated a PageRank system so that pages with a greater “value” in […]
Facebook and Ad Auctions
Similar to Google, Facebook also runs ad auctions to determine when and where a company’s ad will be displayed to a user. When a company wants to start advertising on Facebook, they have to set up an ad campaign. The first step in this process is to design what the ad will look like and […]
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