Cloze: Revolutionizing Social Connections That Matter
A new startup company called Cloze has recently upgraded its functionality and features. What this service does is that it determines which of your online connections are your closest relationships based off of various factors. Beforehand, Cloze was only able to do this based off of email data such as frequency, the promptness, and the […]
The Game of Black Friday
Everybody knows about Black Friday. They either partake in the great discounted sales or just mock the crazy people who flock to the stores. Many people don’t think about Black Friday shopping until the shopping season arrives, but researchers, such as those at ShopperTrac, have already begun looking forward at the upcoming season. It has […]
When Hackers Attack the Macs
Today, when you envision somebody using a laptop, it seems as if your first inkling would be to assume it is a Mac (especially on college campuses). One of the biggest factors that has contributed to the decision to purchase a Mac in recent years is often the perceived heightened security from viruses that Mac […]
Social Networking Influencing Our Actions and Voting Habits
While plenty of things are really catchy and influential (take the superhit Gangnam Style for example), Facebook messages are not necessarily what comes to mind first. However, political scientists are University of California, San Diego have uncovered that a single Facebook message that was spread during the 2010 midterm elections drove more than some 340,000 […]
Game Theory in Competitive Bodybuilding
Related resource: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2621538 In the article ‘The Incidence of Anabolic Steroid Use Among Competitive Bodybuilders’, it is mentioned that a very important motivating factor for competitive bodybuilders to use steroids is that significant gains in strength can be achieved by including steroids as part of the training regimen. In a world where no bodybuilders use steroids, […]
The Prisoner’s Dilemma of Honest Pricing
These days, clear prices have become an increasingly rare specimen driven to the edge of extinction. Every price followed by .99 seems to be always also followed by a parade of small hidden numbers that somehow managed to sneak into your bill. For instance a hotel room advertised online to cost $99.99 per night might […]
How our social networks help “get out the vote”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19571053 Does what happens in our online social networks affect our behaviors and decisions in our offline reality? This question was the subject of research led by James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego. While previous research has documented the ways in which behaviors spread within online or offline contexts, Professor Fowler notes […]