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Twitter and Gender Targeted Advertising

As we have been learning in class, advertising on the Internet has changed the way advertising is done.  For example, the terms entered into a search engine will return advertising results relevant to what the user may be looking for.  The same occurs with Facebook, in which the pages people like and the topics they […]

Samsung Galaxy S3 vs. iPhone 5

Samsung Galaxy S3 vs. iPhone 5? Many people around the US are now debating which smart phone to buy. Personally I have a historic phone from 2002 so I am purely neutral on the topic. Samsung as people say, “declared war” on apple when they released a commercial blatantly stating their new product the Samsung […]

Farms and First Pages

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303505504577406751747002494.html It’s a familiar scene. I accidentally type in “.com” instead of “.org” and now I’m on a sketchy-looking website. It’s just links after links: “Sam’s Club,” “Chrome,” and “Nitromethane.” Why does this website even exist? I glance back up at the URL. It looks like I spelled everything correctly. Oh wait, no I didn’t. […]

Information Cascades in Elections

Don’t waste your vote!  It’s election season in America and debate rages about the merits of the two major party candidates.  Choosing to vote for a third party candidate can be seen as a waste; after all, it’s not like they have any chance of winning.  But why is that?  It is in fact a […]

Applications of Network Flow

My resource is the original paper by Ford and Fulkerson discussing the concept of max flow through a network. In their paper they define the problem of max network flow, as well as give a proof of the max-flow min-cut theorem. This concept of network flow has gathered the attention of many with many applications […]

Information Cascade in Growing Atheism in America

Information cascade is a concept that well explains a crowd inclining toward a single decision. It explains that you are usually better off following the crowd because the people in the crowd may know something you do not know (information-based) and because it is often the case that being part of a crowd has value […]

Instagram and Direct Benefit Effect

The photo-sharing app Instagram debuted in October 2010. Initially, the app was downloaded less than 10,000 times per day here in the U.S. By April 2012, that number had grown by a factor of 10. The interesting aspect is that downloads and “shares” on Twitter increased very modestly until around February 2012, after which there […]

Black Days for BlackBerry

In the news we hear about companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and Sony competing for their share of the smartphone market. Since their emergence, smartphones have transformed the field of communication technology and historic design and business battles are being waged. The Apple iPhone, the Windows Phone, and the Samsung Galaxy have all been […]

What Can the Forest Fire Model Tell Us About the Behavior of Actual Forest Fires?

In class recently we have discussed the ubiquitous nature of power laws in describing the distribution of many different phenomena. One example given in class was the number of websites with a particular number of in-links had a distribution proportional to 1/(# in-links)^2. This discussion reminded me of an article I came across in my […]

Colorado Housing Crisis

Recovering from the housing crisis caused by the economic downturn of 2008, Americans are slowly gaining interest in entering the market again as buyers. Just as we have studied, prices are often the most efficient way to clear a market and create a perfect matching. This idea of a perfect matching (in which every buyer […]

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