Voting in the American League Cy Young Award
The AL Cy Young Award had a recent stroke of controversy. This was largely led by well-known actress Kate Upton, fiancee of the runner up, who made several posts on social media. She expressed her disappointment over the results, and thus anger at the voting system. After further research into the award and how its awardee is […]
Why Does Squarespace Sponsor Every Podcast: Information Cascades
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/why-so-many-podcasts-are-brought-to-you-by-squarespace/392840/ The article discusses a name that anyone who has listened to a podcast in the last four or five years would have heard on multiple occasions: Squarespace. In particular, why squarespace seems to sponsor every relevant podcast in production. The article explores this question by interviewing members of squarespace’s marketing team, however, the information […]
Third Party Candidates and the Voting System
Despite George Washington’s warning, the United States political system has devolved into a two party system. Despite this, the third party candidates play a significant role in the electoral system and popular vote statistics even though these parties rarely win elections. In the 2016 presidential election especially, we saw an interesting outcome based on voter […]
Instant-runoff Voting and Presidential Election
The Vox article examines five alternatives to the current voting system in presidential elections in the United States, namely instant-runoff voting, Condorcet voting, Borda count, approval rating and range voting. It especially discusses instant-runoff voting, which is used in presidential elections in Ireland and India, and which Maine just voted this November to adopt for […]
Evolutionary Game Theory and the origin of life – Molecules
Link: https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/life’s-origin-might-illustrate-power-game-theory Game theory, primarily developed by John con Neumann and his fellow economist Oskar Morgenstern in their Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, found applications in various other fields of research due to its universality. Tom Siegfried, in his article Life’s origin might illustrate the power of game theory, demonstrates how the idea of game […]
Hatchiamals, Cascades, and Endogenous Events
The holiday season is often a time rife with examples of cascades as people turn to the influence of acquaintances and reviewers in deciding what to buy their friends and loved ones. Every once in awhile, however, there is a singular product that sees an explosion in sales around the holidays and creates a notable […]
Facebook Contagion
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/04/how-facebook-contagion-spreads This article is related to the spread of social media websites, specifically Facebook, and tries to explain the elements that may drive you to join such a site. What the article found, was that it is not the sheer number of people you know who have joined the site that will make you […]
Alternative Voting Systems
This article talks about the referendum that (at the time) was going to occur in the UK to determine how voters will continue to elect their representatives. The existing voting system at the time was first-past-the-post (FPTP) or majority rule. FPTP states that each voter get a single vote and the representative with the most […]
Network Effects of Different Types of Users in Platforms
An interesting topic that we have discussed is network effects, which refers to the idea that the potential utility of a product to a given user is highly dependent on the number of individuals who utilize the product. When a product exhibits network effects, it is typically crucial for the company developing the product to achieve […]
Twitter and Emergencies
Source This study, published by the Renssealer Polytechnic Institute, examines information cascades as they are demonstrated on Twitter during emergency situations. The study found a number of characteristics of tweets sent about and during emergencies that differ from non-emergency tweets; mainly, that they tend to contain more URLs, and that there are less directed and […]
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