The Slowing of Madagascar’s Plague Epidemic
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2017/plague-madagascar-slowing/en/ The article from the World Health Organization describes current status of the plague epidemic and the general countermeasures that were taken to fight the spread of the plague. The outbreak started at the beginning of August this year. To date, 2348 cases were identified and treated, including 202 deaths. To combat the disease health […]
Are we Prepared for when an Epidemic Turns into a Pandemic?
Link: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130711-what-if-a-pandemic-strikes Getting a flu shot is generally an annual event for most of the population. We are told that getting a yearly flu shot can help prevent against strains of the flu. Generally, a new strain of the flu develops every one to two years, which is why there is constantly a different formula […]
Lemons in the Illicit Drug Market
This study analyzes why increasing public opposition to illicit drug use, along with the prevalence of drug demand reduction policies (such as those used by large companies to deter employees from using drugs) has not altered the rates of heroine and cocaine use and has actually led to a decrease in price of retail drugs […]
Information Cascades and Sexual Assaults
https://www.ft.com/content/6973e6d6-d047-11e7-9dbb-291a884dd8c6 Information cascades is an interesting concept that is applicable to many different areas and fields of interests. In “Trump and the ‘information cascade’ created a cultural reckoning,” Gillian Tett explained how information cascades is one of the major reasons why there has been a significant increase in recent sexual harassment allegations. In the […]
Experienced vs. Novice — The unique network of bettors at the racetrack
Some people make careers out of handicapping horse racing. For others, gambling on horse racing is as uncalculated as playing the roulette table. As a result, there are many ways to approach the sport of horse racing. From the varying levels of the triple crown to low stakes claiming races, fans and enthusiasts participate at […]
Net Neutrality, FCC Faked Comments, and Networks
http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/11/29/public-comments-to-the-federal-communications-commission-about-net-neutrality-contain-many-inaccuracies-and-duplicates/ This article is a summary of a study about the comments that the FCC is using in their argument to repeal net neutrality. It details what data methods they used to conduct their study and what they consider matching or similar. Right now, I’m very interested in Net Neutrality. This is because I use […]
Analysis —Senate Intelligence Hearing On Fake News, Free Speech And Russia (Information Cascades)
This article assessed the impacts of information technologies and social media on politics. It begins by mentioning the impacts of social media on our society by talking about how some political figures have been using social media ads to win votes. It notes that social media sites also have the task of screening out hate […]
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 […]
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