Transmitting Obesity through Social Networks: The Underwhelming Influence of Social Norms
In a study published in 2007 in The New England Journal of Medicine, Christakis and Fowler found that obesity is clustered in social networks and that having a close relationship with someone who becomes obese drastically increases an individual’s chance of becoming obese. This study (also mentioned in another blog) begs the question of how […]
Possible Early Warning Sign for Market Crashes
Wing-Yee Man (wm235) Blog Post #1 October 1, 2011 http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/market-panic-signs/#more-54374 Possible Early Warning Sign for Market Crashes This article is about warning signs for market crashes. Researchers who analyze the behavior of stock markets have found that one sign is the measure of co-movement, or the likelihood of stocks to move in the same direction. […]
Walmart’s Power in Negotiations
With thousands of stores around the world, Walmart is an extremely powerful corporation in the discount retail industry. This article discusses one of Walmart’s business strategies, to keep its accounts payables high and its accounts receivables low. Accounts payables is money Walmart owes to its suppliers, while accounts receivables is money owed to Walmart by […]
Bachelor Paradox
You would never think of a marriage proposal like a game. However, according to Mark Gimein, the whole process is very similar to an auction and has roots in game theory. It all begins with the desire and need for an available, sociable, and attractive man. Unfortunately, this requirement is difficult to fulfill due to […]
Chinese Real Estate Market-Application of Game Theory
Since 2007, in order to deal with the serious problem of inflation, Chinese government has raised the interest rate 6 times and the required reserve ratio 10 times (in that year CPI reached 4.8% and hit 6.9% in November). Unlike the western market, Chinese government utilized the fiscal and monetary policies to the very extent […]
The Euro Debt Crisis and Networks
The resource that I have decided to look at was an MSNBC article that is about the current European debt crisis, which could pull the entire world economy into a downward turn. As mentioned in the very beginning of the article, the main components of this current debt crisis are the 17 nations who use […]
Face Recognition via Social Network
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~zickler/papers/Autotag_IVW2008.pdf The linked research paper provides an interesting and practicle method of face recognition in personal photos. Traditional face recognition method simply compares the face in a photo to some known faces, and then generates a “similarity score” showing how similar the faces are. If the similarity score reaches some certain value, then the system […]
Bipartite Graph for US News and World Report
As high school seniors begin filling out college applications for January 1st, many seniors are beginning to notice the small numbers beside the words ‘Percent Acceptance’ on the colleges’ websites. These small numbers for competitive schools have been getting smaller and smaller each year. A company that keeps track of all of the percent acceptance […]
Customers want to see faces, not screens.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/story/2011-09-26/groceries-bag-self-checkout/50553020/1 The article focuses on the decline of self-serve registers at supermarkets. According to the article, self-serve stations became popular in supermarkets about ten years ago. At the time of its creation, automated self-service was quite an exciting idea given the technology of the day. The fact that you could bypass an entire shopping queue […]