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Effects of increasing toll prices on traffic.

http://articles.nydailynews.com/2011-08-05/local/29873910_1_toll-hikes-hudson-river-crossings-path-train Recently, in September, the prices for tolls of the bridges and tunnels that head into Manhattan have increased. The increase was a drastic one, rising from $8 to $12 for the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, and the George Washington Bridge, and even higher for the Hudson River crossings, at a staggering $15. It is […]

Information Cascade, Tipping Points, and How Social Networking Has Effected Arab Spring

http://gigaom.com/2011/11/02/social-media-tipping-points-and-revolutions/ In this day and age, the effects of online social networking are a hot topic. People are eager to discuss the social and economic implications of social networking as it pertains to shaping the way people make friends and decide what products to buy and services to use, but social networking has more extreme […]

Information cascades and the acceptance of new technologies

In this day and age, energy is a commodity.  It has also became clear that the traditional sources of energy are being depleted which implies a growing need for alternative sources of energy.  However, there are many technical challenges as well as adverse network effects.  This blog will look into the effects of information cascades […]

Bayes’ Theorem App

http://www.the-hospitalist.org/details/article/1380153/Bayes_Theorem_Theres_an_App_for_That.html In this article in the hospitalist, the author reports on a new app for the iPhone that is designed to doctors make use of Bayes’ Theorem in making decisions about treating patients.  The app is called Medicine Toolkit, and its major function is called Bayes at the Bedside, which contains a database of likelihood […]

Network Dynamics and BlackBerry Messenger

2011 has marked a rough year for Research in Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM), a technology giant best known for making the Blackberry smartphone. In September, RIMM released disappointing earnings for the fiscal 3rd quarter of 2011. Revenues declined over 50% to 4.47 billion and profits fell from $797 million to $329 million compared to the 3rd […]

Status Comments to Affect Websites’ PageRanks

http://www.netmagazine.com/news/google-indexing-facebook-comments-111529 A website’s PageRank value is based on an algorithm that assigns a numerical value to each web page within a set of hyperlinked web pages, with higher values corresponding to an individual web page’s relative importance within that set. This algorithm, trademarked and used by Google, has been key in the company’s success in […]

The Role of Information Cascade in the Acceptance of Unintelligible Texts

http://web.ebscohost.com.proxy.library.cornell.edu/ehost/detail?vid=2&hid=9&sid=50ef468e-dfdb-4168-b00a-23d883c2f903%40sessionmgr11&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=sih&AN=15931005 In the above article, “The Intelligibility of Unintelligible Texts: Authorial Status in Text Evaluation,” Robb Willer explores the effect of the reputation of an author on the judgment of the comprehensibility of texts. An interesting phenomenon has shown up in publications. Journals have published articles that are relatively or incompletely incomprehensible, even to those […]

The Role of Information Cascades in Global Unrest

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/10/mass-movements This article in the Economist discusses a few current phenomena that can be explained by the concept of an information cascade. This is founded by the underlying definition of information cascades: “people making decisions on the basis of their observations of other peoples’ actions.” The first topic discussed is one that is most prevalent […]

Network Effects and Viral Videos

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/07/why-do-viral-videos-go-viral/ An article in “Wired” magazine suggests that videos go viral by triggering visceral emotions in viewers, who then forward the video to their friends.  This article brings up two intriguing questions about network efforts in viral videos. Firstly, is content important in creating a viral video? And second, what are the dynamics of a […]

“Fresh” Pages in Google Search Rankings

As the web has advanced over the years, so has web search. Google, the world’s most popular search engine, recently created a blog post about an improvement to their search algorithm. Beyond Hub and Authority and PageRank, Google has introduced a time dependence into their search, rearranging results by freshness. For example, if we search […]

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