Links vs Shares on Social Media
One of the main reasons the Internet is so fascinating for people who study networks is the many layers of interaction taking place between an endlessly expanding and evolving crowd. In particular, social media has allowed an unprecedented spread of information, through a variety of different forms. Two of the most well-known are links and […]
Etsy Click-Through Rate Prediction
Paper In this paper, 3 employees from Etsy analyze algorithms to predict click-through rates of ads in the Etsy website. Ads are displayed in a manner similar to that in most online merchant sites; a seller provides a budget, and the Etsy ad platform computes the bidding price for the seller’s given listing. Based on […]
Fake News: The role of information cascades in the latest American Election
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/16/google-ban-foreign-governments-posting-online-election-adverts/ If anyone is familiar with the controversy that surrounded and continues to associate itself with results the latest American presidential election, they are sure to also be familiar with the phenomena of Fake News. Over the course of the presidential race, a wide range of media outlets were filled with articles and doctored […]
How Lies Spread Faster Than Truth with Flawed Information Cascade
Link: http://www.carrollcountytimes.com/columnists/opinion/ph-cc-minnich-020417-20170204-column.html During the current age of social media, reading and spreading lies is much easier than one would believe. The only way one could solve them is through censorship and that within itself causes more problems of false information cascade. This article sites several psychological reasons why one is inclined to believe false news […]
Airbnb: Reinventing hospitality with network effects
Networks effect is applicable to many industries in which all parties benefit from growing number of users and shared resources. From healthcare to social media, understanding networks effects can effectively help businesses understand their competitive advantage in order to establish a dominance in their respective area. Networks effects are also applied to the hospitality in […]
An Algorithm for Auctions
One of the most intellectually engaging aspects of search engines is the way they auction advertising space. Often, search engines are challenged to come up with effective ways to make advertisers bid truthfully (or higher than truthfully), in order to make maximum profits. One proposed solution is the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves method. In this solution, advertisers bid […]
Fighting Fake News
Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/business/media/fight-fake-news.html Of the material we’ve covered in this class, one topic that stood out to me as immediately applicable to current events is the topic of information cascades, and specifically how they relate to fake news. That is, misinformation spreading from one person to the next, and reaching a tipping point after which each person […]
Diffusion in Networks for languages
https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/how-many-people-speak-english-and-where-is-it-spoken In the article from babbel magazine, the author, Dylan Lyons, outlines the history of English as a language. Notably, the humble origins from which English began to its current status as a language now spoken by over 20% of the global population. According to the article, Old English, the ancestor of modern day English, came […]
Facebook and The Fake News Battle
Facebook has had many issues with fake news in recent years, and this has shown to have far-reaching effects. Misinformed masses are unaware of their newly found, incorrect knowledge, and they often share this information, allowing the spreading of “fake news” to perpetuate. This became clear when late last year, it was seen that Facebook’s […]
Statistical Fix for the Replication Crisis and Bayes Theorem
The article suggests that the statistical standard for “statistically significant” is too high to take the fact that many statistically significant results aren’t replicating into consideration. Instead of setting the p-value as 0.05 to mark as “statistically significant”, the author believes that 0.005 seems like a more accurate bar. Although their idea gets rejected by […]
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