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Can you make money on YouTube?

Despite all of the advertisements populating videos on YouTube, YouTube actually makes less money than it costs to run the website. Google operates YouTube at a loss each year, spending money on the hardware needed to host videos and doling out advertiser revenue for content creators. Advertisers would rather advertise for people who are already […]

Stereotypes, Search Results, and the Individual

Article: https://hbr.org/2016/10/new-evidence-shows-search-engines-reinforce-social-stereotypes A search engine will return results relevant to your query based off previous search results used by other people in related queries. When googling ‘doctors’ and ‘nurses’, researchers notice that the observed gender distributions based off returned images are often very unrepresentative of actual distributions recorded by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. […]

North Korean nuclear threat puts UN Security Council on Edge

The UN Security Council released a statement back in September calling for its members to more strictly enforce the sanctions currently in place against North Korea. This statement came after North Korea launched more nuclear test missiles, which they had already done on numerous occasions in the past. In addition, the Security Council had even […]

Persuadable Voters, the Web, and Information Cascades

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/25/us/politics/voters-increasingly-turning-to-internet-for-information-survey-shows.html This article discusses a survey of 500 persuadable voters in five Senate battleground states. The survey was conducted jointly by the Global Strategy Group and Public Opinion Strategies, and revealed that the information “most influential” to voters has migrated from television to social media and the web. This is significant since campaigns have historically […]

The Bully Party – The Dilbert Blog

Scott Adams is the author of the well known comic strip, Dilbert. Since the beginning of this election cycle, though, he has also covered and analyzed aspects of each [Trump and Clinton] candidates’ campaign from the peculiar lens of a person trained in the art of persuasion. As such, he praised Trump’s skills as essentially the best he’s […]

Friendship Paradox

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox This article talks explains the “friendship paradox,” a strange result we get from graph theory. The friendship paradox says that your friends, on average, have more friends than you. While this initially seems nonsensical, the article explains it in two different ways. The first is a mathematical proof using an undirected graph showing that […]

Psychology of the Ad

Source: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1904/01/the-psychology-of-advertising/303465/   Advertising came with the advent of trade/commerce. So long as a person could speak or utter words, people, and advertising have had synergy. However, advertising wasn’t always as pervasive as it is now. “The gain in the quantity of advertising can be seen by observing the increase in the number of pages […]

Lemmings of Wall Street

Source: https://newrepublic.com/article/63023/wall-streets-lemmings During one of the lectures, we went over one interesting game: suppose there is a box on the table; this box contains three balls, each with a color of either red or blue. You draw a ball and see its color for yourself; after you put the ball inside the box, you declare which […]

WWW and SEO

The advent of the  world wide web changed the way humans shared and accessed information, but at its core, it is simply a structured digraph of web pages connected by links. As of today (Tuesday October 25, 2016), the web contains at least 4.83 billion pages. The web’s exponential growth has made search engine functionality […]

The bystander effect

On March 13th, 1964, 3:00 AM. When New York bar manager Kitty Genovese arrived at her house, she was assaulted by a bandit with a knife. She screamed loudly to beg for help. There are 38 neighbors for her and a lot of people had witnessed this crime through the window. However, they did nothing […]

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