Network Interactions in Fate/Zero
One of the most popular anime/manga in last decade (according to the list that the community recognizes as the standard for rankings–myanimelist.net) is Fate/Stay Night and the prequels and sequels in the same universe. In the story, seven people, known as Masters, complete for a magical artifact, the Holy Grail, that grants the victor any […]
Horse Racing Made Easy
This article discusses the strategy in actual horse racing. We know that it relatively simple to compute odds for a horse race between a couple of horses and a few bettors, but what happens when there are many more horses and many more bettors? What is a good strategy for the amateur gambler to win? […]
Tie Strength as a Function of Social Media Actions?
Researchers at the University of Illinois have come up with a system to categorize tie strength as a function of actions between friends on social media. They categorize the strength of ties via the following 7 characteristics: Intimacy, Intensity, Duration, Social Distance, Services, Emotional Support, and Structure. I’ll spare the details on how they gather information on […]
Patent Trolls
As we learned in class, patents are a good way to encourage companies to spend money on R&D. Without patents, drug companies would have no incentive to develop new treatments because their competitors could immediately produce a generic brand of the drug and sell it for much less than the cost of research. Patents allow […]
Talking Shade
If you are part of any friend group of large size, say over 20 to 25 people, this is a common occourance. This behavior can be characterized by the following behaviors. Treating each of the people in the friend group as nodes in a directed network graph, Person A lying, exaggerating events, or violating trust […]
epidemic control
Source: http://allafrica.com/stories/201511091951.html This article talks about an international response that was headed by the UK to end ebola in Sierra. This article states that the UK funded 6 treatment centers and also trained over 4,000 Sierra Leonean and international health care workers. The article goes on to list the various other things that the UK did to support […]
Tragedy of the Commons
The “tragedy of the commons” states that in some cases, when individuals act independently of each other and in their own self-interest, it can actually be detrimental overall to the group that the individuals are in by depleting the common resource. Common examples are rhinoceroses (because rhinos don’t belong to anyone, poachers are mindlessly murdering […]
The Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible model and its approximations
An undirected graph G(N,L) with N nodes and L links. The links are represented in a symmetric adjacency matrix A, in the matrix, if there is a link between nodes i and j, then aij =aji =1, if not, aij = 0. The state of a node i is specified by a Bernoulli random variable […]
Contagion in Financial Networks
The recent financial crisis was caused, in part, by the spread of “contagion” through a highly-connected network of financial institutions. Network models can be used to understand how loan defaults cascade through the balance sheets of banks that have contractual obligations to each other, and whether increasing the number of connections in the graph amplifies or dissipates the effects […]
Scandal in Daily Fantasy Sports
A few months ago, a scandal broke involving two daily fantasy football websites, DraftKings and FanDuel, and an employee who won $350,000. Daily or weekly fantasy sports leagues charge a small fee to enter and advertise large pools where players can compete against dozens of opponents and win up to millions of dollars. These websites […]
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