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Should an Increase in Financial Aid for Colleges Result in Raised Tuition?

The Bennett Hypothesis 2.0 For the Center of College Affordability and Productivity Secretary William J. Bennett previous made the claim that “financial aid in recent years have enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that Federal loan subsidies would help cushion the increase.” This led to the Bennett Hypothesis which claims that […]

The Carna Botnet

https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/13/ http://census2012.sourceforge.net/paper.html The Carna Botnet started out as an ethical hacking experiment in 2012. A cybersecurity researcher used Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) to scan for random devices that had the default telnet login username and password. They found that over 100,000 devices had these features and could easily be accessed. However,  to scan this many […]

The Ego Network of a ‘Drone Swarm’

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2017/01/10/watch-the-pentagons-new-hive-mind-controlled-drone-swarm-in-action/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4ab55987e347   From civilian toys use to military weapons, drones are quite a hot topic in today’s world, and someone seems to be doing something new with a drone every day. The use of drones in the military is fairly well known, where pilot-less vehicles perform tasks ranging from surveillance to actually intervening with force. […]

Winner’s Curse and the English Premier League Transfer Window

Every summer, European clubs compete to sign the most talented players in what could be compared to a common value auction. “Common value” means that the value of item is the same for all bidders involved, although they may not be sure of what that exact value is. In September of last year, Premier League […]

Mixed Strategy in Baseball Pitches

https://www.fangraphs.com/community/how-game-theory-is-applied-to-pitch-optimization/ In class we discussed the mixed strategy involved in soccer penalty kicks. A very similar scenario reveals itself when considering the decision making done in baseball by a pitcher and batter. The pitcher is armed with an arsenal of pitches aimed to outplay the batter. On the other hand, the batter is tasked with […]

prejudice among AI robots

This recent Engadget article reports on a research study from MIT and Cardiff University, in which AI robots demonstrated an evolving pattern of prejudice.  There have been several past instances of discriminatory AI—due, for example, from unintentionally biased training data.  In this case, however, the artificially intelligent machines learned intrinsically to follow prejudiced behaviors.  It is a profound […]

Ego Networks in Entity Set Expansion

http://www.cond.org/wsdm-egoset.pdf You sit down in front of your computer and type a query into Google. When you look at the results, you see sites that directly match your query, but you also see sites that are exactly what you’re looking for without containing the actual text of your search. How does Google do this? Entity set […]

Fighting Criminal Activity Using Social Networks

Source: https://hackernoon.com/fight-crime-with-social-network-analysis-7a879d4a65ea In this article, Daniel Barta discusses the how social network analysis can be used to fight crime. An important point that he brings out is that in a group one individual influences others more and this can be used to fight crime by identifying such individuals and rehabilitating them. As a result, these individuals […]

How we showed Homer’s Odyssey is not pure fiction, with a little help from Facebook

Source: https://phys.org/news/2018-09-homer-odyssey-pure-fiction-facebook.html This article is an interesting look into how we can use modern social networking systems to determine the connectivity of humans, both past and future. The article looks into how realistic forms of fiction and their social networks are, bringing up the Marvel universe and Lord of the Rings as early examples. However, […]

Game Theory and Disease Outbreak

Game theory can be applied to various situations in the world, and one interesting one that I came across was preventing the spread of harmful diseases from around the world. In an article written by mathematicians Istvan Kiss and Nicos Georgiou, the pair explain how things like weighing the costs of vaccinations, disease quarantine (in […]

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