The reverse auction strategy
Airlines typically book more travelers than a flight can carry, with the assumption that some people will fail to arrive for their flight, in order to minimize the number of empty seats. Clearly this runs the chance of having too many passengers waiting to get on the same plane. The usual response to this is […]
Social Networking and Career Connections in Fraternities
Greek Life’s Impact on Student Career Development Greek Life at many universities is often looked down upon for its budding reputation for being a center for college mishaps and mistakes. What people often overlook is the immense amount of social networking the occurs as a result of joining a fraternity or sorority. I can attest […]
Information Cascades and Fake News: Solutions to This Problem
Ever since the rise of the Internet, the spread of fake news has become inevitable. We can attribute this to information cascades. Often times, the situation goes like this: someone will see an article on an unreliable news source, say Buzzfeed. Following the BBC article linked below, suppose that the subject of the fake article […]
Man’s Not Hot
Unless you were living under a rock, you have probably heard of Big Shaq, and no, not the ‘quite big’ basketball player. Well, Michael Dapaah had as at-the-time-of-this-writing achieved more than 50 million views on his Man’s not hot video . Whereas the quality content of the video is up to subjective debate, his meteoritic rise […]
Weak to Strong Ties
https://community.lithium.com/t5/Science-of-Social-Blog/From-Weak-Ties-to-Strong-Ties-Community-vs-Social-Networks-3/ba-p/6834 This article by Michael Wu explains the theory and process that transform weak ties into strong ties. The exposition of his article explores the principle of the strength of weak ties as taught in INFO 2040. He states that the importance of weak ties lies in their vast numbers and diversity. Weak ties […]
Information cascades on Twitter
New study explains why fake news is perceived as real on Twitter This article discusses fake news in relation to Twitter. Specifically, it examines the importance of retweets as a huge factor for people when trying to identify if something on Twitter is true and legitimate information. A study was conducted by researchers in South Korea […]
The Panama Papers and Graph Technology
The article linked below discusses the engineering behind the Panama Papers leak. Mossack Fonseca, one of the world’s primary offshore money holders, had its internal database leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). Aside from the legal and social implications of this leak, the technology at work behind the scenes is an important […]
Wikipedia as Prime Example of an Information Network
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/12100516/How-Wikipedia-changed-the-world.html The article discusses how Wikipedia has revolutionized the internet and the spread of knowledge over the last 16 years. Articles have been written in about 25o languages and there are about 38 million articles on wikipedia. The idea behind wikipedia was a crowdsourcing platform whose mission is to spread knowledge not to make a […]
Fake News, Information Cascades and Brexit
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-fake-news-google-facebook-0904-story.html It is widely believed that the outcome of the Brexit referendum was largely affected by the potentially false news that was often spread in favour of Britain leaving the EU. Fake news, or at least somewhat false news, is in no way a new phenomenon but it does seem to have proliferated in recent […]
How an Information Cascade Ruined a Small Town
Twin Falls, a small town in Idaho with an increasing amount of Middle Eastern refugees (especially Syrian), saw a case where a 10-year-old and a 7-year-old refugee male from Iraq and Sudan were accused of committing some form of sex act with a 5-year-old girl. Due to extreme events that recently occurred in Germany and […]
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