Game Theory of Selling Cigarettes
Recently, CVS announced that it will stop selling cigarettes in its chains by October 1st to try and rebrand itself. With pressure from many public officials and the health conscience groups CVS looks to capture a new market in its rebranding. This has left comparable competitors, Rite Aid and Walgreens, in a game of who […]
Nature’s Solution to Braess’s Paradox
In searching for a blog topic, I came across this panel discussion of how human traffic relates to swarming and flocking behavior in the natural world. I found it particularly interesting when one of the speakers discussed ants and their spontaneous organization of pheromone trails. Even though some ant societies can contains as many as 20 […]
Using Network Theory to Analyze Soccer
It is no secret to any soccer fan that FC Barcelona, the famed Spanish club, has its own unique style of play. However, identifying that style is not as simple. Luckily researchers at the Qatar Computing Research Institute have have helped make the distinction through network graphs. These network theorists look specifically to the passes […]
Optimizing Food Delivery
In densely populated areas like Manhattan there is a huge demand for restaurant delivery. This raises an issue for restaurant owners who have to figure out logistics for how to best handle this demand which includes hiring new people and figuring out routes. Not only is this hard on the managers but it is also […]
Topic-based Clusters in Egocentric Networks on Facebook
Homophily suggests that people tend to bond over similarities- perhaps a love of the same subject or a common experience. This theory seems very natural, as similarities give people more to share and connect. The idea of homophily has been tested and proven many times between two people, pre-defined social groups, and over global patterns. […]
Game Theory and Civil Disobedience in Hong Kong
Right now in Hong Kong, there are thousands of civilians occupying the busiest boulevards of the normally bustling city. They are demanding democratic elections and the immediate resignation of Leung Chun-Ying. The article below describes the current situation. https://time.com/3450175/watch-whats-at-stake-in-hong-kong/ By translating this scenario into a game, we can try and predict the outcome: 2 Players: […]
Networking in Hong Kong
On September 26th of this year, a student-led pro-democracy protest broke out in Hong Kong. Though cell phone towers and means of internet have not been shut down by the government, protesters have taken precautions in order to stay connected. Between Sunday and Monday of this week, an app called FireChat was downloaded by 100,000 […]
How much is your information worth?
Upon reading the linked article, the first thing that I noticed, 11 words in, was the existence of a social network called Ello. In actuality, I had come across the brand a few days earlier, but I had dismissed it as a random name. Yet there I was reading about it. The gist of this […]
Braess’s Paradox and Diseases
In class, we discussed Braess’s Paradox, the phenomenon that adding an edge in a network, such as building an extra road, can actually decrease the efficiency of a system due to Nash Equilibrium. Four scientists, Hai-Feng Zheng, Zimo Yang, Zhi-Xi Wu, Bing-Hong Wang, and Tao Zhou have observed a similar phenomenon in epidemiology, the branch […]
Joker, the Economist
Christopher Nolan’s film The Dark Knight, is critically acclaimed as one of the best movies of all time (ranked fourth on IMDb’s top 250 movies of all time list). The character that is widely recognized as the driving force for this movie is the main villain of the movie, the Joker. The Dark Knight was […]
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