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Wikipedia and Philosophy

Try this for a moment: open up Wikipedia, go to a random article, and click the first link in the article that’s not in a box, italics, or parentheses. Repeat the same process and you should begin to see a pattern. That is, no matter what page you started in, chances are you will end up […]

Google AdWords – Valuing Advertisers

http://www.wordstream.com/articles/what-is-google-adwords This website gives a very detailed breakdown on how Google runs auctions and assigns slots to advertisers. What we covered in class simplifies the process; advertisers were assigned to slots primarily on the basis of their value per click, but we never discussed the advertiser’s relevance to the particular slot. Google has metric of […]

The Rise of the Insta-Mom

Social media marketing has been the new biggest thing — with so many content creators online, it’s relatively easy to find one which fits the image of your product and ask them to advertise it. The latest social media site that this trend has spread to is Instagram. With many Instagram models now taking pictures […]

Fitbits: An Information Cascade

Over the past few years, technology has begun to seep into all aspects of our lives. Thanks to our round-the-clock connection to the internet and access to apps that have been designed to help us improve productivity, people are more efficient than ever before. Along with that efficiency has come a desire – and maybe […]

Information-based Reasoning in the 2016 Presidential Election Campaign

With the 2016 election season now on us, candidates are doing everything that they can to gather votes. From participating in nationally-televised debates to the heavy usage of social media, particularly Twitter, the candidates of both parties are doing their best to make their name the most prominent and the most well-known. This, of course, […]

Using Network Influence to Incite Social Change

We’ve discussed in class how people tend to be influenced by the decisions of others, most recently in the case of information cascades. This topic made me think about how this influence could be harnessed to intentionally foster a change of behavior for the general population. In recent years, social media networks have been flooded […]

Using Information Cascades To Improve Public Health

A May 2015 article from Yale news talks about an experiment performed by Nicholas Christakis, Director of Yale Institute for Network Science. In the experiment, Christakis wanted to see if the successful spread of a public health program could be improved depending on who the initial adopters were. Our initial intuition would lead us to believe […]

The Snapchat Effect

With social media undoubtedly ingrained in our lives today, Snapchat has become one clear favorite with its impressive attraction of over 100 million monthly users. Founded merely four years ago, Snapchat has not only taken the social media scene by storm but it has also redefined how people communicate and interact with each other on […]

Using Wisdom of Crowds in the Medical Field

A professor at the University of Washington set up an experiment where he selected a sample of several hundred random people with no medical experience and asked them to evaluate the performance of surgeons using a set of criteria. The general evaluation turned out to be remarkably similar to the consensus of other surgeons who […]

Is there a reverse networks effect in scale?

http://platformed.info/reverse-network-effects-why-scale-may-be-the-biggest-threat-facing-todays-social-networks/ Networks effects, is the effect the one user of a good or service has the value of the product to other people. The value of a user may increase as more users use it. Many networks like Facebook, YouTube and Skype benefit from this dynamic. This seems like a rich-to-richer dynamic allows to enlarge […]

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