Power Laws, Words, and Iggy
http://www.forbes.com/sites/livbuli/2014/06/10/how-iggy-azalea-is-as-popular-online-as-the-word-apparent/ Power laws describe many phenomena in life. One example is word frequency, where in any corpus representative of a language as a whole, the most commonly used words account for a massive proportion of the overall word count. For example, in English, the word “the” is alone responsible for nearly 7% of all word […]
Bayes’ Theorem May Find the Missing Plane?
A few years ago, in 2009, Air France Flight “disappeared” over the Atlantic Ocean, and it took two years for them to even come close to finding the plane. However, Bayes’ Theorem was used, and within five days, the plane was able to be located. Bayes’ Theorem has also been used in Google’s driverless cars, […]
Information Cascades and Technology
The article I chose discusses the effects of information cascades on two topics: stock prices and revolutions. The author used the 2011 Netflix stock prices as his example. Netflix had screwed over many investors who tried to short its stock. After countless beatings, these short investors gave up leaving Netflix’s stock price in an odd […]
Information Cascades In North Korea
When French photographer Eric Lafforgue visited North Korea in April 2014, his eyes were opened to a world of ignorance. Lafforgue acknowledged that prior to stepping foot in North Korea, he had been aware that citizens were fed propaganda since birth to prevent them from building feelings of animosity towards their government. However, when he […]
WeWork – Network Effects in the co-working space
The concept of ‘co-working’ is not new but is gaining momentum as a viable work space option for the urban entrepreneurs of today and tomorrow. At its core, co-working simply means sharing office space. Co-working as a business, at first glance, resembles any real estate based business. A co-working business must secure attractive space and […]
Superstitions in Baseball – An Interesting Application of Information Cascades
Links to relevant actricles: http://seattletimes.com/html/sports/2002518793_artmoments25.html http://www.academia.edu/1664314/_Don_t_Step_on_the_Foul_Line_Baseball_and_the_Ir-_rationality_of_Superstitious_Belief http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1563418-ranking-the-10-best-superstitions-in-baseball/page/8 There is a unique facet of information cascades that are present in the game of baseball today. A baseball player myself, I watch (and partake) in many of the “superstitions” that have been created and followed for many years. Examples include “not stepping on the foul line”, “not […]
Network Effects in the Competition Between PS4 and Xbox One
The competition between manufacturers of video game consoles, like that between operating system or mobile phone developers, is hugely influenced by network effects and direct benefit effects. Perhaps the most important factor in this situation is that the console with the largest user base is far more likely to have a wider selection of games, […]
How the Low-Fat, Low-Fact Cascade Just Keeps Rolling Along
As seen in class, an information cascade occurs when a person (or people) sees or observes the actions of others, then despite their personal signals or first thoughts, they choose to abandon their preliminary action and engages in the same act. One example from this article is the ongoing cascade that low-fat diets prolong your life. […]
Predicting Microblog Information Cascades
http://static.usenix.org/events/wosn10/tech/full_papers/Galuba.pdf This paper attempts to establish a highly accurate method of predicting viral content on microblogs, such as twitter. To do so, a 300 hour chunk of data was studied. During this time, more than 15 million unique URLs were shared among all Twitter users in 27 million tweets. This study occurred in 2009, so […]
Informational Cascades and the Financial Crisis in the Last Decade
I came across an article that discussed the role of information cascades in the financial crisis of the 2000s. It begins with a description of how cascades work with a investment example: a group of people announce in sequence on whether they would invest in real estate or the stock market. The first person to […]
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