Are our political stances influenced by others around us?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/like-mother-like-son-will-your-parents-influence-how-you-vote-1938511.html This article contains a collection of interviews where people describe the influences of their upbringing and their parents on their political beliefs. There is the story of Keith Lander, who’s staunch conservative stance was influenced by his strong Christianity upbringing; There is Keith’s son Ric, who is a liberal but felt strong pressure from […]
Information Cascades and News Stories
When one watches the news on television, reads it online, or gets their information from any other source, it often seems that all media outlets are reporting on the same thing. This makes sense when it comes to important worldwide events. However, it seems that time and time again obviously fake or incorrect news stories […]
Power networks and their properties.
Networks have interesting and varied properties. The first kind of network to be studied, by Erdos and others, was the random network. This kind of network can be constructed by randomly connecting a set of nodes by edges. Thus, the plot of the degrees of each node follows an exponential decay distribution. Such networks were […]
Pool of Money
http://money.cnn.com/2011/07/26/technology/internet_scam_artists/index.htm Everyone has received those e-mails in their inboxes from a Nigerian prince who “needs help” wiring money to an account. Most of us know enough to automatically send it to our trash bins. Some may wonder why the scammers even bother sending out those obviously fictitious e-mails. Who would fall for that? The reality […]
Network Effects in Credit Card Standards
When it comes to credit card technology, America seems behind much of the world. America still uses old magnetic “swipe card” technology , which makes identity theft easier than the newer E.M.V. or “chip and pin” type cards prominent in Europe and Asia. These cards have a chip and require a PIN number to be […]
Cornell Pre-enrollment Network Effects
Assuming I’m not the only one who is going to be franticly refreshing Student Center every 2.5 minutes during Add/Drop to see if someone drops that critical last course that just didn’t quite fit during Pre-enrollment, some of you may have noticed the relationship between Pre-enrollment and Chapter 17 of our Networks text. Chapter 17 […]
The Power of Crowds
http://www.cracked.com/article_19431_5-mind-blowing-things-crowds-do-better-than-experts.html I stumbled across this Cracked.com article on crowds and the amazing things they do everyday. It reminded me of information cascades because the things they do come from an influence of some sort. In the first case, the US Navy is using people on the internet to make decisions and map out strategies against […]
Beating the Information Cascade
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8739376/Scientists-find-they-can-control-how-people-react-to-group-pressure.html After hearing so much about information cascades, and the way information—particularly wrong information—can spread, it’s easy to feel a bit depressed. It seems like social conformity is an unbeatable force, dooming us all to an eternity of being laughable subjects in Asch experiments. For those who don’t know, social psychologist Solomon Asch put forth […]
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