Metacritic and “Objective” Opinions
http://www.metacritic.com/about-metascores The site Metacritic serves as an aggregator of critical opinions on music, movies, video games, and other forms of entertainment. As is explained in the article linked to above, Metacritic combs through the reviews of established critics, assigns their opinion of the piece of entertainment a numerical score out of 100 (if they have not […]
Bias in data collection
There is a problem with algorithms that are that are supposed to rank pages for each person’s search in search engines. Because these algorithms use the user’s past data to make an inference, the results they show can be unintentionally biased. The data or the algorithms have no explicit knowledge of social inequalities. The bigger […]
Viral Memes
In class, we talked about epidemics and the spread of diseases. The S-I-R model is one of the models used to analyze how certain epidemics spread throughout a population, usually represented as a network. Each person (node) in the network is either susceptible (at-risk), infected, or recovered. If a susceptible node is adjacent to an […]
Language, Zipf’s Law and the rich getting richer
Chapter 18 of the course book covers power laws, which describe distributions in which the occurrence of the k-th item in some set is proportional to 1/k^a, where a is some power. We saw that power laws are related to the rich-get-richer phenomena, in which the visibility of certain items is increased by their already increased visibility. […]
Rumors and Social Media
Two weeks earlier, a national outrage in China toward the nursery industry was sparked by a series of article, images, and videos on the Internet that alleged children were drugged and molested in a kindergarten in Beijing. In the article that was widely read and reposted on WeChat and Weibo (the Twitter equivalent social media […]
Rotten Tomatoes and the Market for Movies
When deciding whether to purchase a movie ticket, the most relevant question to a consumer is likely “Is this movie good?” or perhaps “Will I like it?” Average consumers have only a limited set of information with which to answer this question: trailers, studio press, opinions of similar movies, etc. Some consumers, however, have considerably […]
Trump and the ‘information cascade’ created a cultural reckoning
https://www.ft.com/content/6973e6d6-d047-11e7-9dbb-291a884dd8c6 This article summarizes the current sexual harassment allegations that have come out in waves post the election of Donald Trump. The author Gillian Tett is investigating the reasoning behind the rise of allegations which she believes are not due to increase in sexual predators but due to the cascade of information. She believes this stems […]
Different Voting Techniques For Multiple Alternatives
In class we have discussed ways in which to vote for more than two options in as fair a way as possible, however, we continue to have problems where each voter may vote dishonestly to try to improve their outcomes. Other voting methods exist that, while they may not eliminate the issues with voting on […]
Bitcoin as a result of network effects, information cascades
Bitcoin has surged in value in the past week: On Thanksgiving, Bitcoin was valued around $8,000 – today (6 days later) its value has topped $11,000. What could have caused this young cryptocurrency – with fewer than 1 million active users just one year ago, and labeled a “fraud” by JP Morgan’s CEO – to […]
The Role Of Information Cascades in Public Sexual Harassment and Assault Allegations
In recent months and weeks there have been a number of accusations of sexual harassment and assault levied against many high-profile media figures, politicians, and celebrities, including Charlie Rose, Sen. Al Franken, Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K., Kevin Spacey, and countless others. The information has been widely spread and disseminated through social media phenomena such as […]
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