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Information Cascades could explain Viral Photos

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/april/viral-photo-cascade-040314.html The above article describes a model created to predict which photos will go viral on facebook. The algorithm uses the concept of information cascades that we learnt in networks. At any point in the cascade, there is a 50-50 chance that the shares will double. The speed of sharing is found to be an […]

2016 Election Results Based on Different Voting Systems

After the 2016 presidential election, Matthew Davis and David Shor, a senior data scientist at Civis Analytics, a Democratic data and polling firm formed by veterans of the 2012 Obama campaign, analyzed the different outcomes of the elections based on different voting systems. These voting systems include instant run-off voting,  Condorcet voting, and the Borda count method. […]

The math behind Herd Immunity

With the resurgence of preventable diseases in the US due to anti-vaccination campaigns, one wonders how dangerous is it to be unvaccinated in these regions. The answer is that it depends. To get a general idea for the risk of unvaccinated individuals either for medical reasons or by choice, we need to consider Herd Immunity, […]

Predicting Efficacy of Advertisements

Blog inspired by “How Social Networks Influence Online Advertising” By Mathew Young Over the Thanksgiving break, I and many other Cornell students got to do something we rarely do, watch cable tv, go to metropolitan places and shopping malls, and communicate with people outside our bubble. I noticed that I was immediately barraged with advertisements […]

Can cascades be predicted?

As an active facebook user, I was always curious about how, when, where the 50k likes of popular posts started, and speard through the social media and become so popular. There must have been a starting point where it had 0 like, 0 share, but how in the world  it suddenly became 50k likes and […]

IMDb’s private voting system

In class we learned about voting and Arrow’s theorem. Majority Rule works well when there are two alternatives. However, we learned that in Arrow’s theorem, there is no voting system that satisfies unanimity and independence of irrelevant alternatives where there are more than two alternatives, except for dictatorship. IMDb calls themselves “the world’s most popular […]

Facebook’s Research on Information Cascade Prediction

In class, information cascades was introduced with the majority red or blue ball problem. The first few people use probability to determine the ball’s color, and in some situations, this results in a certain red-cascade or a blue-cascade. How does information cascade occur in real life? We have seen examples in which certain technologies really […]

Vine bring success to user through rich-get-richer and cascades

Despite the commonly known 6-second video media platform starting to fade, Vine helped to bring to popularity certain comedic celebrities such as Thomas Sanders (commonly known for his themed vines such as “Storytime”, during which Thomas goes up to random strangers and creates a random scenario by narrating a situation). Thomas’ fame might have occurred […]

Social Contagion and the Prevalence of Drug Use in Homosexual Communities

Social Contagion is defined as the mechanisms through which the spread of ideas, information, opinions and any other type of social experience through imitation and conformity operates within a network. The occurrence we refer to in this class which is quite similar to social contagion is an information cascade. These may occur when people make decisions as a result […]

Decision-making of South Korean President Park Geun-hye’s Scandal

In late October 2016, a political scandal involving South Korean President Park Geun-hye erupted. Choi Soon-sil, a longtime friend and confidant of President Park, was found to have access to top secret national information and to have channeled public money into her own private foundations. Choi, a regular citizen without any special credentials or security clearances, seemed […]

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