Follow the Herd – Balmain x H&M 2015
The Balmain x H&M collection released in November of this year sparked mass hysteria (in England especially) among young people who wanted to get their hands on a piece of Balmain without having to pay Balmain prices. What is really interesting to note is the fact that it all started off as a collection for a […]
New Technology Attempts to Change Christmas Shopping
As Christmas shopping season approaches, IBM launched a new application, IBM Watson Trend, which predicts and recommends compatible gifts based on demand and popularity. The goal of the app is to not only predict what the trends are, but also show the reason behind it. Watson predicts these trends by going through millions of social media pages, […]
Next-level Game Theory in Fantasy Football
Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and I know we are all awaiting the inevitable question from our relatives: “Do you have a job yet?” Now, there are many ways to get around this question (which may be the topic of another blog) but more and more lowly millennials are turning to Daily Fantasy Sports […]
How Facebook Beat MySpace
Before Facebook, MySpace was the leading social media website used. But then a college undergrad by the name of Mark Zuckerberg invented the site that effectively ruined MySpace and put it out of business. With MySpace having such a large amount of users, how was Facebook able to so successfully become the social media juggernaut […]
Game Theory in Goal Line Situations
Every week in the NFL, coaches face a hard decision when on their opponent’s goal line. Should they trust their running back and run the ball or should they have their quarterback pass for a touchdown? Recently, with two minutes left in the game, the Giants decided to pass three times in a row against […]
Google’s neural network to compose email responses for you
This article discusses how Google is using deep neural networks to propose automatic replies based on the content of the email. The technology will analyze emails and produce three most sensible responses to the content of the email. This will allow mobile users to quickly respond to emails rather than wasting time typing on a […]
Network Effects in the Legalization of Same-Sex Marriage and other Social Issues
On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court did what individual states had struggled to do for the last decade: legalize same-sex marriage. Before that, activists were harnessing the power of social media and personal networks to change the hearts and minds of those around them. Between May of 2006 and May of 2015, the approval […]
The Social-Network Illusion That Tricks Your Mind: The Majority Illusion
This article discusses many interesting concepts covered in class so far. It mentions the friendship paradox which states that “on average your friends will have more friends than you do” explained by how “the distribution of friends on social networks follows a power law.” This concept holds in other contexts, including one’s coauthors’ number of […]
How Crowds Walk
In the Nature article Mathematical Time Law Governs Crowd Flow, Ron Cowen discusses the curious behavior of crowds that we are all subconsciously aware of, but often find difficult to quantify and predict. Though the article provides satisfactory descriptions of the experiments conducted, the website article page provides a fascinating 3D real-time rendering of those […]
Rich-Get-Richer in Bitcoins
This article discusses how the rich-get-richer phenomena was observed in the bitcoin marketplace. Because all bitcoin transactions are publicly available, it was possible for researchers from MIT to create a graph of nodes representing bitcoin addresses and edges representing bitcoin transactions. Based on this graph, it was clear that bitcoin use experienced two main phases. […]
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