Information Cascades in Advertising Methods
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21678216-authenticity-being-peddled-cure-drooping-brands-its-real-thing In class we learned about the concept information cascades, which occurs when a person observes the actions or behaviors of others and follows regardless of their own predispositions or private information. The “cascade” occurs when people sequentially follow the crowd based on the decisions of people made before them. In this article, this […]
Using Bayes Theorem to Classify Incoming Emails
It is often important to reinforce topics learned in the classroom with real world examples. For instance, when taught purely based on theory, the real world importance of Bayes’ Theorem can easily be lost. The ability to calculate conditional probability based on other known probabilities is crucial to several pieces of technology we interact with […]
Apple’s New Search Algorithms and Manipulating App Store Search Results
Sarah Perez, a writer for TechCrunch.com, has written two articles that chronicle the recent changes to the Apple App Store’s search engine and shed light into the possibility of Apple self-promoting apps. On November 13th, in her article, “Apple’s App Store Get A Smarter Search Engine” she describes what has changed in the search engine […]
The Good Judgment Project and Geopolitical Forecasting
Over the last two years, two researchers have conducted an experiment to explore whether or not there is a way to identify individuals with exceptional ability to predict geopolitical events. Together, Barbara Mellers and Michael C. Horowitz created the “Good Judgment Project” an online prediction market consisting of volunteers who had a Bachelor’s degree or […]
Epidemic Disease- MERS
The outbreak of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) aroused tremendous amount of fear and panic in South Korea last May and June as more and more people contracted the disease, with some infected patients dying as a result of MERS. We can illustrate this epidemic disease as a contact network with a “patient zero” […]
Tech Unicorns and Network Effects
Today’s tech world is all being young, aggressive and cutting-edge. Every year there is a list of top 10 startups to watch, and yet few have made successful transition to the scale-up phase. In this article, the author talks about the difficulty for tech “unicorns”, startups that are worth more than one billion, to scale […]
The Washington Post states that network effect is one of the “most important business theorems of the past 50 years.” Simply put, it is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. For example, today, why would you get MySpace when you can […]
Presidential Candidates: Where the rich get richer
During the first Democratic Party debate of the election season, two candidates headed in with widespread name recognition and leading positions in the polls. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders held commanding leads of 45 and 29 percent of the electorate respectively, over the rest of the Democratic candidates who polled at or below 1 percent […]
Small Businesses and Diffusion through Networks
This article describes what happens when “a culture is driven by the need for money to make more money.” Families and small businesses are charged increasingly much to stay in their communities due to investors and developers. As they leave, they are replaced by those that can pay the upkeep costs, businesses that make money […]
Science and Influence: The Clicks Have It
In 2001, researchers Hendrik P. van Dalen and Kene Henkens, published a study called “What makes a scientific article influential?” In their study, they used the number of times an article was cited to determine how influential an article actually was. They found that the number of citations was very unevenly distributed over the articles […]
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