Did Candy Crush Saga Tip You?
Around a year ago, one of the most popular games (if not the most popular game) was Candy Crush Saga. This game does not have crazy graphics like Battlefield4 or Crysis or a very frustrating flying bird, but it still somehow became such a craze. In case you are not familiar with the game, it […]
Terrorist Prediction Markets
During the Clinton and Bush administrations, the Pentagon studied whether prediction markets, in which buyers could place bets on geopolitical trends, could provide valuable insights about the future. The idea behind prediction markets is that since betters place bets on what other people believe will happen, betters will make more rational predictions in the aggregate. […]
Global Colonization of Smartphones
This article references the spread of technology (in particular smart phones) on a global scale from a network perspective of 7 billion people. The first question to ask ourselves is how did we go from sending postcards to instant messaging on our smartphones in just a few decades? According to the article smartphones are on track […]
Crowdsourced Content Filtering and Cascades
A lot of commercial web pages and applications exist with their own regulated content, but in more recent past decade, there have been a rise of websites and applications that, instead of generating their own content, rely on users to create their own content (e.g. YouTube, Imgur, tumblr). This has given rise to the role […]
Conformity and Network Effects
As we learned in class, being in a network can greatly affect an individual’s decisions. In particular, somebody could believe that others know more than them, which would impact their decision (information based effect). Also, there is sometimes direct value for following the crowd (direct benefit). For example, when looking for a restaurant, you probably will […]
Paris Information Cascade
http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/19/paris-and-the-trail-of-social-media-misinformation/ One thing I noticed last weekend when the paris attacks occurred was the mass influx of notifications I received. My phone buzzed with Facebook notifications and updates from the ny times. At the time, I was having a conversation with my friends and Paris was the last thing on my mind, but the […]
Renaissance-get-Richer
Popularity and the rich-get-richer models can be found in a variety of fields, from tracking the popularity of a book on the New York Times bestseller list to the growth of bacterial colonies. From a historical perspective, one can analyze the motives of Renaissance scientists like Galileo through these natural models. As a hungering humanist […]
Bayes Theorem: A Real World Application
We all have learned about Bayes Theorem and its applications in statistics, but it is surprising to see how useful this rule is in real world applications. When an Air France flight disappeared in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, many different government agencies created a search team to sweep though and find the airplane. At first […]
Influence of Network Effects
In our study of network effects, we analyzed how “for some kinds of decisions, you incur an explicit benefit when you align your behavior with the behavior of others.” In Alexis Madrigal’s article “WhatsApp and the Erosion of the Network Effect,” the telephone is used to exemplify this idea. Madrigal quotes, ‘“The more people who […]
Yik Yak from a Cascading Graph Perspective
http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/10/yik-yak-has-been-delisted-on-google-play-since-october/ Recently, I find myself opening the popular social app “Yik Yak” less and less. In addition, when I do open the app, posts are less frequent and the number of votes on the most popular posts in the Cornell University/Ithaca area are significantly lower than they were my freshman year. I decided to look […]
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