The Crowd Isn’t So Wise After All
In modern society, we often rely on the “wisdom of the crowd,” which is the idea that decisions made by large groups of people are as good or better than decisions made by individuals. Our justice system relies on the wisdom of the crowd through trial by jury, and our government depends on the wisdom […]
Group Think and Crowds
In chapter 16 we are introduced to the phenomenon of information cascade. Although everyone has some incomplete private information, they will suspend their private information in favor of the crowd’s information, even if that information is misleading. In the experiment shown in class, there is a 1/9 chance that first two students will draw […]
Hub and Authority Scores in the Context of Domestic and International Airports
As we have studied recently, the Hub and Authority Score Rule addresses the issue of determining which web pages serve as great hubs and great authorities. An algorithm determines these characteristics of webpages that shows these values based on the number of pages they connect to and how important those pages are. The Hub and […]
Predictive Marketing
Predictive marketing is the practice of extracting information from existing customer datasets to determine a pattern and predict future outcomes and trends. This premise has been around for decades, however in the past, pulling useful data from the vast pool information available on the web was grueling. Today, with the dawn of big data, tools […]
Should you negotiate?
While many of us in this class aren’t quite ready to begin entering the workforce as graduates, salary negotiation is still a very important topic for us. Whether it be for internships, part time job or anything of the sort, recent studies show that typical college graduates don’t even consider salary negotiation. A study […]
On the Proliferation of Mobile Web Publishing Platforms
Recently, there have been a lot of stories in the news concerning the state of advertising as it relates to publishers on the mobile web. Bluntly, it sucks. Load times are slow and download sizes are huge, even though top-of-the-line phones these days are more powerful than many old laptops and mobile readership increases by […]
Google’s new RankBrain Adds Machine Learning and AI to its Search Algorithm
In Chapter 13 we learned about the overarching structure of the internet and how it is pretty much a giant tangled “web” of nodes connecting to a bunch of other nodes in a directed graph. We also learned that despite this complexity, on a macroscopic scale, the internet does seem to have a large structure […]
Matching the Marriage Markets
The extent to which the concepts and methodologies we learn in “Networks” are applicable to the world is incredible. I find myself extrapolating things I’ve learned in this class to every part of my life, especially in social situations (for example, how are the strongly connected groups in a house party connected? and how does the […]
Altruism in Animals: A best response?
We have examined the Prisoner’s Dilemma in Game Theory where we found that prisoners often confess when they should cooperate with each other and stay silent. When we think about this logic in terms of animal behavior, we might wonder how cooperation could ever arise in animals. However, the difference between the prisoner’s scenario and […]
What Happens in the Brain when Negotiating about Money
http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/588791/11840974/1303404072337/Sanfeyetal_science03.pdf?token=s0kK621g1FBnLUeWv6vimfc6F%2F8%3D In this scientific article titled “The Neural Basis of Economic Decision-Making in the Ultimatum Game”, Sanfey et al. discuss a study they conducted where the brains of nineteen participants were scanned as they played the ultimatum game. As we learned in class, this game involves negotiating about money. During each iteration of the game, […]
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