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Business: Network effect is good but not enough

When the telephone first came out, it was a marvelous technology. For centuries, communication was limited by distance. How fast your love letter gets to your fiancé in the Wild West depended on how fast your horse was. Surprisingly, when the telephone came out it didn’t catch on as soon as one would think it would. […]

More Complex Traffic

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/article81344977.html This article was particularly interesting to me, since the area that it discusses is my hometown. I live off exit 32 of interstate 77 in North Carolina, outside of Charlotte. For over ten years now, I’ve watched traffic get worse and worse on this part of the highway until it took me over half […]

Information Cascades in Economic Bubbles

Information cascades, as discussed at length in class, can be used to explain many phenomenon in economics. Information cascades can even be used to explain irrational human behavior associated with economic bubbles. Economic bubbles are characterized by an extraordinary up-bid in the price of an asset that is followed by a rapid decline. Often times, […]

Misinformation on Social Media – Bots and Echo Chambers

Misinformation, or so-called “fake news,” has been under close scrutiny lately, especially with the large role it played in the 2016 United States Presidential Election. False articles and news stories have been circulating social media and are becoming more and more difficult to differentiate from real, reliable information. Just how this happens and why it is […]

Observing voting trends in dense groups of a society

In Networks, we have discussed how a new technology can be incorporated into a society. In general, depending on the nature of the ties within a dense community (such as a neighborhood, a group of college friends, a friend group of working colleagues, etc), a community can choose to adopt a new technology or to […]

Disease Spread in Honeybees

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/02/140227-bumblebee-honeybee-disease-declines-science-pollinators-disease/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130510-honeybee-bee-science-european-union-pesticides-colony-collapse-epa-science/ For years, news of the decline of honeybee populations has spread, arousing concern and confusion since the deterioration cannot be traced to any single cause. Many theories have been presented surrounding this phenomenon, including environmental changes, overuse of pesticides, and the rapid spread of disease among domesticated honeybees. Focusing just on the disease […]

Facebook Struggles with “Filter Bubbles”

Facebook has been receiving a lot of attention for the potential role they may have played in the 2016 U.S. Election. Researchers are claiming that the social media giant likely influenced the outcome of this election through its widespread distribution of fake news stories. However, the underlying issue with the spread of these news stories […]

How does Saccharomyces deal with utilizing sugar

It is a common sense that all living organisms need sugar to generate energy in order to sustain themselves. As for saccharomyces, they usually use glucose for nutrients. If there are no glucose presenting, they could use other sugar as substituents like sucrose. However, they have to convert it into glucose in order to utilize. […]

Information Cascade and Fake News

Information cascades have interesting effects in the proliferation of fake news across social media platforms. Social media has recently faced criticisms for its role in propagating fake and misleading news that are indistinguishable from real news. Influential companies such as Facebook has helped formulate the views of its users by introducing fake news to a […]

Disease Models: Determining the Network

Network theory provides a number of different ways to model disease spread in a network. There is the SIRS model, the SIR model, the SI model, and branching tree model, and many more complex models. However, all of these models assume you know the network structure of the population. In a big city, it is […]

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