Bayes’ Rule – Hidden Markov Models Speech Recognition
Bayes’ rule was studied in class, and taught us some interesting probabilistic principles. Namely, it set up a basis to study all sorts of conditional probabilities. Furthermore, Bayes’ rule can be extended to form Bayesian networks. These networks combine many sources of knowledge into various inferences. These inferences can be visually represented as a sequential […]
Facebook’s Fake News
http://arstechnica.com/staff/2016/11/its-time-to-get-rid-of-the-facebook-news-feed-because-its-not-news/ The first page we see on Facebook is the cascading “News Feed”, which contains shared information from friends and family. Your feed is personalized to you, based on the people you are friends with and the interactions you make on Facebook. Facebook allows media outlets to post of the website and some information […]
Information Cascades and Fake News
Though we often see technology as an enabler of learning, it’s easy to forget that it is more accurately an enabler of the rapid spread of information. There’s no guarantee, however, that this information is accurate. False information can often spread just as easy as genuine information, purely by power of momentum. A recent article […]
Reuters tool to verify news on Twitter
An undoubtedly relevant topic in the news is the criticism of popular social media sites, such as Facebook, that perpetuate the dissemination of false information through fake news sites. Reuters recently released a tool to detect these types of false news articles using an algorithm that closely relates to the contents of the Networks course. […]
Fake News on Facebook
http://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/11/16/13637310/facebook-fake-news-explained Recently, especially in light of the presidential election, the issue of fake news on Facebook has gained a lot of attention and outcry. Many people are voicing their opinions about Facebook’s responsibility to bar fake news from spreading on its platform, and many people are also questioning whether the spreading of fake news in […]
The Dirty Little Secret of Finance: Asymmetric Information
Asymmetric information is present in almost all transactions that happen on a daily basis, whether it be at a lemon stand, or through buying stocks. Asymmetric information is whenever one party in an economic transaction possesses greater material knowledge than the other party; whether it be the seller or the buyer. An example of asymmetric […]
Snapchat “Spectacles” and Cascading Behavior
Snapchat is one of today’s most popular communication channels. Just recently, they released a high-technology pair of glasses called “Spectacles,” which created a huge demand in New York during its release weekend. The glasses are being sold in an interactive vending machine called a Snapbot in a pop-up room located between 59th Street and Fifth […]
Swarm Intellegence
We have seen in the class that aggregating opinions and information from a large number of people is hard to do correctly. One possible pitfall is the information cascade, where the consensus is seen as more accurate than any individual’s opinion, thus preventing new opinions from influencing the set consensus. We have seen the problem […]
Don’t only look at Ro numbers
Recently in class, we’ve been learning about how to calculate the basic reproductive number and use it to interpret epidemic possibilities. However, when looking at RO numbers, we should be careful of what we are actually interpreting and what we should be worried about and what we shouldn’t. First, the issue of looking at […]
How Bayes Rule Helped Solve a Historic Mystery
Article link: https://priceonomics.com/how-statistics-solved-a-175-year-old-mystery-about/ The article is about the mystery behind the Federalist Papers, specifically, who exactly wrote the 12 unclaimed papers. It had been known that John Hay only wrote 5 papers and that 73 others were claimed by either James Madison or Alexander Hamilton, which left 12 without a definite author. As all three men […]
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