Bayes’ Rule and Athletes Doping
Years ago, scientists wanted a sure-fire method of catching professional athletes who use doping to enhance their performance. However, scientists are not always able to easily detect these drugs in a given athlete’s system. Something scientists can watch out for are certain effects that performance enhancing drugs cause in the human body. Using the knowledge […]
Big Data: A self-fulfilling prophecy?
Something I found interesting about prediction markets was the idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy, and how it can be embedded into network behavior and the outcomes that manifest because of it. This seems very similar to the ideas behind machine learning–when we give a computer information inputs, it produces a certain output by weighting the […]
The Global Epidemic and Mobility Model
In class we looked at epidemics and the spreading of an infection through the population in the form of a network. The Global Epidemic and Mobility Model or GLEAM for short is an epidemic computational model that simulates the spreading of infectious diseases in a structured population where multi-layered transportation networks exist. The GLEAMviz simulator […]
Tragedy of the Common Living Space
https://icebergking.wordpress.com/2015/08/07/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-apartment-hygiene/ The article discuss the descent into the unsanitary that five roommates sharing living space experienced one summer. While not on the cutting edge of academia, this does have practical implications for students and relevance to the class. The author describes how, at first, pristine levels of hygiene are maintained. But then one spill or […]
Modeling Wage Increase Using Market with Asymmetric Information
CNN Money reported on December 3, 2015 that American wages “may finally go up”. The article cites the need for better, more talented workers as the reason for the potential increase. North Carolina restaurant owner Greg Hatem says, “We’re fine paying more to bring in better people.” Furthermore, the article reports, “This year Hatem bumped […]
Cascading Networks in MLB Free Agency
Cascading behavior, as we learned in class, can be found in a large number of different networks, and in theory it works very well. The concept behind it is relatively simple; there are two states that a node can be in, and all nodes are initially in the first state (A) with the exception of […]
How Information Cascades in Social Media are leading to ‘Misinformation’
Social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, is a platform for people expressing all sorts of emotions: grief, anger, joy etc. Recently, with the Paris attacks, both Facebook and Twitter were heavily used as mediums to sympathize with Paris and provide support and help in any way possible, but it was also, unfortunately, a source of […]
Information Cascades and Fake Amazon Reviews
When and individual draws on information other than their own private information to make informed decisions, a phenomenon known as an information cascade can occur. The decision-making is not simply mindless imitation, however. Instead, it is the result of drawing rational inferences from limited information. This process is particularly prevalent in the world of e-commerce, […]
Viral photos and information cascades
All of us at some point have seen viral Facebook photos, and have wondered how did these become so popular so that millions of people have shared it worldwide, whereas your latest profile is yet to get a like. Some photos became so popular that they have become de-facto pictorial representations for some emotions or […]
World of Warcraft and Disease Propagation
World of Warcraft, a popular multiplayer game, suffered from a glitch where a virtual plague spread quickly and decimated the server population. This started when Blizzard, the game developers, released a boss who would cast the spell “Corrupted Blood”, which would drain the life of the effected player over the span of a minute. In […]
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