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Stop Amazon Spam

Link: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2017/02/12/how-stop-seeing-your-amazon-searches-everywhere/97764058/ Commentary The above Q&A(esque) article, written by Rob Pegoraro, creates some insight on how many users are unaware of the way that shopping sites and search engines use algorithms to display advertisements catered to their selective audience’s interests and desires – retargeting. In this particular piece, Pegoraro expands on the practice through expanding on […]

Weighing the Positives

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weighing-the-positives/ In medicine, as well as many other fields in life, the concept of conditional probability and posterior probability play major roles in decision making. These probabilities account for the likelihood of a particular outcome given two different paths, in a process called Bayes’ theorem. For example, in taking a HIV test one can either […]

Information Cascade and Honeybees

Honeybees are incredibly social and intelligent insects and their behavior patterns mirror information cascades. Honeybees utilize their intelligence and social behaviors to communicate information to each other to survive by performing the waggle dance. During the waggle dance, a honeybee returning from the hive will move in a figure-eight formation while buzzing and shaking its rear […]

Emerging Fake Review Strategies and Information Cascades

Source The linked article describes the efforts of five researchers at the University of Chicago to identify and examine the characteristics of an emerging type of fake review generation rooted in the use of neural nets. Compared to more conventional crowd sourced fake reviews which rely on paying a group of people to leave reviews […]

Network Effects in Hollywood Sexual Assault Cases

https://www.wired.com/story/harvey-weinstein-system-change/   Recently, many notable men in Hollywood have been accused of sexual assault, the most notable of them being Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, and Louis C.K.. When allegations against Weinstein, the founder of Miramax and ex-chairman of The Weinstein Company (as well as sexual predator), came into the public’s eye, it was clear that […]

Analysis —Senate Intelligence Hearing On Fake News, Free Speech And Russia

Recently, three major social media tech companies, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, have found themselves entangled in political controversy. Democratic senators argued that these companies allowed the Russian government to influence the 2016 election through advertisements on social networks. On the other hand, the Republicans stated that these companies hindered their campaign by banning Marsha Blackburn’s […]

Network effects on iPhone 8 Price

The price for a 64GB Iphone X is an exorbitant $999, a whole $300 more than the cost of the recently released Iphone 8. The contrast in quality between the two, however, cannot possibly be seen by a reasonable person as justifying the nearly ⅓ discrepancy in price. A number of hypotheses can attempt to […]

Information Cascades and “Fake News”

Analysis —Senate Intelligence Hearing On Fake News, Free Speech And Russia One of the biggest points of debate following last year’s presidential election is the problem of “fake news”, that is, misinformation spreading across different platforms of social media. More importantly, the effect that the spread of misinformation has on real world events. In regards […]

Social media accounts promote skeletal images of women

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-10/uoe-sma101617.php Skeletal images of bodies featuring protruding bones and pencil-thin limbs are being shared and promoted on social media, and University of Exeter shows that Twitter and Instagram accounts like extreme thinness by their actions on photos of others, which eventually promote likeness for others of extreme thinness. The study analysed 730 images posted. It found 26% […]

Losing Our Jobs? No, Just Feeling the Network Effects

2017, and leading into 2018, has seen an unprecedented number of people wanting to have more automation in the workforce. For years, people have spoken about automation and how it could take over the labor force, pushing most places to not implement more automation, however, experts believe that the demand for it in the workforce […]

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