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Why Pay for Fake Twitter Followers?

SOURCE:  http://www.kernelmag.com/features/report/2730/paypal-social-media-don-bought-followers-too/ The article above describes how the director of social media for the internet’s financial service giant, Paypal, is suspected to have paid for most of his 225,000 Twitter followers. With that many followers, he became a suspect when the number of people actually interacting with or retweeting his posts was close to zero. […]

The Foreign Policy Agenda: Nuclear Nonproliferation

In the wake of the 2012 election, and Obama’s subsequent re-election, the nation will face some serious challenges, especially when it comes to the foreign policy and defense decisions to be made within the next four years. The November 11th editorial article, “Foreign Policy Agenda,” in the New York Times highlights that “One of Mr. […]

Amazon’s hidden secret: fake reviews

On many massive retailer sites today, there persists a hidden but large problem: Fake reviews. In this blog post, we will observe the effect and extent of those reviews on Amazon – the largest online retailer of goods. While fake reviews are a two way street, with people blatantly and outright criticizing a good or […]

Train Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger: The Many Effects of PEDs in Baseball

In any form of competition, there is a pride that comes along with being the best, or one of the best at something. Now imagine there was a circulation of millions of dollars, fans, and life opportunities involved in this equation as well. The will of the person to succeed is strong, but sometimes the […]

Network Effects in Search Engine Feedback Data

“Search Engines that Learn from Implicit Feedback”  is a summary of research done by Thorsten Joachims and Filip Radlinski at Cornell University on the effect of user behavior on search results.  Implicit feedback uses the actions of the user to modify the order and contents of search results.  Search algorithms like PageRank don’t always deliver […]

Information Cascades and the Efficient Market Hypothesis

According to the Efficient Market Hypothesis, the market prices of traded assets such as stocks reflect their true value as the market mechanism helps all publicly available past and current information to be absorbed by the prices.  There are strong, semi-strong, and weak forms of this hypothesis based on the types of information absorbed by […]

Finding Gas in NYC

Hurricane Sandy has caused much more damage than expected to the East coast. One of the damage that continues to affect parts of the East coast is the gas shortage. The damages by Sandy have affected the gasoline distribution center in New York City and are felt by many commuters. Some stations remain without power […]

“Over-the-Top” Messaging Takes Advantage of Network Effects

Oftentimes, whether a person chooses to purchase and use a product can be influenced by others using the product. As we learned in class, this is called a network effect. A direct or positive network effect occurs when a good or service becomes more attractive as the number of users of that product increase. This […]

Overloaded: Filtering Social Networks

The relevance of social networks on the internet has been growing in relevance over the past few years. These networks have been developing into a powerful hub of information about what is going on in the world around. A lot of the new trends and breaking news of events, happening both locally and worldwide, can […]

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