Five-O App Rates PD
http://tech.co/teens-create-app-rate-police-brutality-2014-10 Spurred by recent cases of police brutality in Ferguson and other towns, a group of teens from Decatur, Georgia created a Yelp-like app for rating local law enforcement called Five-O. Caleb, Ima, and Asha Christian created a system where users can submit their interactions with police officers and rate the encounter. Using skills […]
Network Effects of File Sharing on the Music Industry
When thinking about online file sharing one might initially assume it has a negative economic effect on those invested in creating or distributing music. In reality the question is not so simple and researchers have not come to a consensus on the effect. The cited paper discusses the relationship between file sharing and concert ticket […]
Facebook & Fake Likes
What exactly is a “like” on Facebook worth? To some companies (especially ones just starting out) a Facebook like can mean quite a lot. Businesses have realized that in order to remain relevant in today’s world, it’s imperative to stay connected with their audience via social media. This is why many businesses consider boosting their […]
The Ice Bucket Racket
Raising more than $115 million for ALS research, the ice bucket challenge was an immense success in appealing to the people. While other foundations how since tried similar tactics, none of them has been nearly as successful. The nature of our altruism is the interest of many researchers. While there is a lot of evidence […]
EBOLA: A Susceptible Infectious Removed (SIR) model.
It has been reported by the World Health Organization (WHO) and by the affected countries that there have been approximately 5,504 Ebola related deaths and 14,413 cases reported. These figures may be an understatement seeing as to not all cases may have been reported. To better understand the spread of the highly dangerous yet containable […]
I didn’t have enough Facebook friends to prove to Airbnb I was real
Social networking relies on nodes of friends connected by hyperlinks to pages of stronger and weaker connections. The majority of content on social media like Facebook is linked via a navigational “backbone” reachable through Friend Lists and Mutual Friends connected by edges of clickable navigational links to nodes of Profile Pages. One middle-aged mother tried […]
Cascades on Facebook
Some questions arise when we start thinking of social networks: 1) How is our exposed affected? 2) How does success spread? 3) Is information predictable? 4) Is it reliable? Lada Adamic, a data scientist at Facebook, talks about the factors of social networks that affect the spread of information. Using the information from users’ profile […]
Color Spread
A workshop for the 2013 British Science Festival conducted an experiment in the form of a game called Color Spread to model and teach about the diffusion of information within social networks. At the start of the workshop, participants were given numbered labels to be able to track who spread particular colors. A few seeds […]
The Subjectivity of User Reviews
In the information cascade model presented in class, the world is assumed to be in one of two possible states for everyone. Either it is a good idea to make a particular choice or a bad idea. The herding experiment and its Bayes’ Rule model are explained using the urn example where the urn is […]