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Cooperative Networks and Mythology

I am presently reading a book called Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, which explores the evolutionary and historical factors that have shaped human beings, modern civilization, and culture. One of the concepts he writes about is how myths and imagination have set sapiens apart as a species and greatly contributed to their success. Harari notes […]

A Proposal for the definition of “snowball” hero in Dota 2 using Conditional Probability

Something’s that has always puzzled me about Dota 2 is that heroes with less than 50% win rate are consistently picked. While team composition is important i.e. you can’t just put the highest win % heroes on the same team and hope to win, in a vacuum you would still expect heroes that contribute to […]

Information Cascades and Innovation

As we learned in class, if the difference between the number of acceptances before a node and the number of rejections before a node is more than 2, then regardless of that node’s private signal, he or she will ignore it and go with the earlier majority. Although the article linked below avoids our terminology, […]

Game Theory Analysis of Superbowl 49 Ending

The Seattle Seahawks suffered one of the most memorable Superbowl losses of all time when the Seahawks, just a yard away from victory, threw a last minute interception to the Patriots. The Seahawks were down 4 points with 26 seconds left. They had 3 more attempts to move the ball one more yard. The Seahawks […]

The Refugee Crisis in the context of the Paris attacks

http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/random-harvest/why-the-paris-attacks-could-worsen-europes-migrant-crisis/ http://www.wsj.com/articles/paris-stadium-attacker-entered-europe-via-greece-1447698583 This article addresses the tragedy that occurred in Paris over the weekend, looking at the reverberating effects it will continue to have. More than just the unfathomable crime of taking human lives, especially innocent ones, the article addresses the very persistent and long-lasting fear that will develop, and like a set of dominoes, […]

Following Crowds

Studies show that people are very inclined to join the crowd. When a few ringers looked up in the sky for 60 seconds, a bunch of people surrounding them eventually joined in to look up as well. The amount of ringers looking up varied from a few to several people. The study showed that the […]

Rich Streamers get Richer

Twitch.tv is a website for streaming video games online. People sign up for accounts, and then they can broadcast their gameplay over the website. Aside from the sheer enjoyment of playing games, it is fun for the players to share their experience with their viewers, the more viewers the merrier. Also, of course, more viewers means […]

Fake Reviews on Amazon

Since the rise of e-commerce companies, there appears to be rise in false reviews online as well. In large companies such as Amazon, Yelp, and TripAdvisor, there appears to be a shocking large amount of reviews written by people who never bought nor tried the product. These fake reviews arise for the purpose of increasing […]

Danger of Manipulating Google’s PageRank

Overstock recently released its earnings report and is blaming the change in Google’s search algorithm on hurting its growth. However, this is not the first time Overstock has had a painful experience with Google’s PageRank algorithm. In 2011, Overstock ran a promotional program that gave discounts to students with .edu email address’s who wrote posts […]

Information Cascades in Election Season

Election season, the only time the majority of Americans care about the political decisions being made in the country. Yet in today’s political atmosphere the actual stances of stances have begun to matter far less as voters get more information on candidates from secondary sources rather than the candidates themselves. Thanks to social media, information […]

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