Networks and the election
In his blog post Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, predicts a landslide victory for Trump. He argues that Clinton supporters bully and intimidate Trump supporters. He therefore, cannot in good conscience support Hillary. Scott Adams has been following the election closely and reporting the results based on who has been winning in the “persuasion” game. […]
VCG Advertising on Facebook vs. GSP Advertising on Google
Google and Facebook handle advertising in different ways. Google’s AdWords has advertisers bid for a spot on a particular results page when someone searches a keyword. Facebook’s advertising system, developed in part by John Hegeman (Facebook’s chief economist), is the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves auction (VCG). Before Facebook, VCG was essentially no more than an “academic exercise”. The […]
An Algorithm for Soccer Fans
It is no doubt that Pagerank has become one of the predominantly famous algorithms developed by computer scientists. Though, it has long been associated with Google’s search engine optimization, its applications in analyzing real-world issues may be much more broad. As mentioned in class, the algorithm functions by counting links that point to a certain […]
Facebook Advertisement Trends
Anyone scrolling through their news feed on Facebook will see a consistent column of ads on the right of their screen as well as ads spread out in amongst the feed. They will also notice that the advertisements are selected very carefully based on items they’ve recently looked at but from the same set of […]
“Google posts”
What Google’s experimental content podium means for SEO Search Engine Optimization is a constantly shifting, highly competitive field. Its success is contingent on the search methods of major search engines—particularly Google—and so it is also a very unstable field. Google has recently been experimenting with a new feature called Google posts. They are currently […]
Watching Black Mirror’s ‘Nosedive’ Episode as an Illustration of Hubs and Authorities
A friend and I recently watched ‘Nosedive’ the first episode of the third season of Black Mirror. This British series, mildly dystopic, explores what the consequences of our modern technologies might be. In ‘Nosedive’, we are presented with a society whose individuals are so attentive to (even obsessed with) their online social network personas. Plain […]
Fighting The Digital Market’s Own “Invisible Hand”
In class, we have been talking a lot about advertisements and how search engines sell ad slots to buyers in a lucrative market. However, let’s take a look at the dangers present with all these advertisement schemes. Aman Brar, the author of the article, suggests that there exists a “digital hand” that replaces the “invisible […]
Tiffany Hu Blog Post 2 – Power
http://fortune.com/2016/08/02/facebook-snapchat-2/ The article describes how powerful Snapchat has gotten. It explains how Facebook attempted to buy Snapchat for three billion dollars. However, Snapchat did not agree. In Snapchat’s gaining popularity, its power has similar increased as well. The article further describes how Facebook, which owns Instagram has copied some of Snapchat’s features. However, users […]
Syria and Game Theory
As the Syrian Civil war enters into its 5th year, Syrian Government backer Russia has become more invested in intensifying its efforts to take more territory and reinforce its current gains by escalating the force, despite the mounting civilian casualties. Russia has been currently been pressing its advantage on Aleppo to try to claim the […]
Facebook’s Ad Price-Setting
https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/how-much-facebook-ads-cost I was interested in how modern websites price their online advertisements, so I decided to look at Facebook’s policy of ad pricing. Facebook lets advertisers ‘set a budget’ for the ad. This budget can be set as either a daily or lifetime budget for the ad. The advertiser then makes a bid. […]
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