Why Rational Abstention Doesn’t Make Sense When You Consider Network Effects
A popular philosophical notion for voting abstention is based in economic rationalism. The theory, entitled, Rational Abstention, posits that your individual vote in something like a presidential election truly doesn’t matter. The theory reasons that the only time an individuals vote will ever matter is when there is a direct tie and the individual’s vote […]
Networks and Extinction
Since ecological systems are complex networks of interactions between different species, network dynamics can be used to predict the effect of human activity on ecological systems. This paper studies the dynamics of pollination network, and find tipping points between between extinction and survival, as we would expect based on what we’ve learnt from this class. The […]
Social Media Information Cascade and Fake News
Earlier in the semester, we learned about the degrees of separation. Although it is commonly believed that the number of connections required to get from one person to any one else in the world was six. However, over 90% of Facebook users were connected by just give hops. According to this article, the average number […]
HIV Epidemic
The HIV epidemic first broke in the 1980s, and although prevention efforts have increased in the last decade, 36.7 million individuals still live with the disease and 2 million new individuals are infected every year with no end in sight. The spread of HIV can be represented by the branching process model we discussed in […]
The 2016 Election, Third party candidates, and the promotion of the “Irrelevant Alternative”
We have recently seen the end of one of the most turbulent election cycles in American history. One remarkable trend about this election was the prominence of two Third-Party Candidates, Gary Johnson of the Libertarian party and Jill Stein of the Green Party. The two gained notable press during the early election news cycle, both […]
Autistic People Can Solve Our Cybersecurity Crisis
ARTICLE To this day there is a very dark stigma that people on the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are incapable of having the intellectual ability to join the workforce. In fact, the majority of people on the ASD are unemployed due to the fact that there is not enough funding to help train them to […]
Maines new ranked voting a step in the right direction?
The article discusses Maine’s recent referendum to change the voting system to a “ranked-choice voting for state and federal elections.” In recent elections, third party candidates have played a crucial rule in the outcome of elections. Causing the decided winner to not win anywhere near majority, but instead end up with around 40% or so. […]
Borda Count and the Ranking of Science Olympiad Teams
In the Borda count, a set of k alternatives are ranked based on the rankings of individual voters. The alternatives receive points based on each voter’s rankings. For each voter, the first ranked alternative receives k – 1 points, the second ranked alternative receives k – 2 points; more generally, the nth ranked alternative receives […]
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