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The Email Cascade

http://www.nethistory.info/History%20of%20the%20Internet/email.html   Emailing began as simply writing messages to people and saving them where the intended recipient could see it. In its early stages, messages could only be shared by users of the same computer. The earliest email system was called MAIBOX and was first used at MIT in 1965. The invention gained usage in […]

How Reddit.com became popular

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-fake-accounts–2 Reddit.com is a popular website that is used for open forum discussion and sharing hyperlinks. How did reddit triumph over the hundreds of other similar websites? According to this article and the video that it cites, they “just faked it ‘til they made it.” Reddit’s founders “populated the site’s content with tons of fake […]

The Implications of Social Media Bots

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/20/fashion/social-media-bots-offer-phony-friends-and-real-profit.html?ref=technology&_r=0 The writer of this article describes something that seems almost trivial upon reading about it. It involves creating thousands of fake accounts on various social media websites, and then marketing these “fake friends” for sale. While this seems silly and that it would hardly effect anyone but lonely people on the internet, the effects […]

Clusters Preventing Spread of Hillary Clinton’s Influence to More States

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/clinton-probably-cant-expand-the-2016-map-and-if-she-does-it-wont-matter/ FiveThirtyEight is a news site that bases all of their articles and discussions on statistics. This article discusses the merits of the Hillary Clinton political agenda for the 2016 elections. Her goal, to have more success as a democrat than in the 2014 midterm elections, is to spread her influence to several states that […]

#GamerGate: When Information Cascades are Dangerous

http://www.n3rdabl3.co.uk/2014/10/tide-turning-gaming-says-anita-sarkeesian-way-going-gamergate/ The above article from tech site n3rdabl3 outlines and criticizes the internet gaming phenomenon known as “#GamerGate”. The entire history of the hashtag movement is described in the post, but a brief outline is thus: A disgruntled ex-boyfriend of game designer Zoe Quinn (falsely) accused her in a blog post of having personal relations […]

“Unboxing” Videos and Market Segmentation

http://blogs.wsj.com/cmo/2014/11/19/as-unboxing-explodes-on-youtube-brands-look-to-ride-the-wave/ With the growing attachment of consumers to social media, companies are becoming more and more pressured to advertise using popular media sites such as YouTube and Facebook.  Social media is a great vessel to connect companies to the right kind of audience. On YouTube, for example, it makes sense to run a Maybelline mascara […]

How Google+’s Structure Prevents Its Success

Now more than three years old, Google+ continues to attract a huge amount of focus from the company.  Yet, why can’t Google, the most popular website on the Internet, make Google+ successful?  The graph below shows the level of interest in Google+ vs a few other other social networks that began growing traction around the […]

Information Cascade, Momentum in Stock Market, and Bubbles

Momentum Effect Smart Money and Bubble I Smart Money and Bubble II In the information cascade model, people that make decisions early can have a dominating effect on public opinion. In essence, the early deciders’ private information is overvalued, and the later deciders’ is undervalued. Is it good or bad? In the real world, experts […]

Network Effects behind E-commerce

As online-shopping being the most popular way of shopping among young people, e-commerce is becoming the major field of market for young people, especially females, since it breaks out the limit of shopping areas, saves the ultimate shopping time for the consumers, and visualize the sales and comments for a single product. According to a […]

Strengthening Information Cascades with Uniformed Individuals

During lecture, Dr. Easley warned against the inherent weakness of information cascades — that they could very often be “false” cascades and cause the majority of people to make the wrong decision. Research conducted by Iain Couzin at Princeton University hints at ways a cascade might be strengthened against making poor decisions. A assumption we’ll […]

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