How Media Consumption is influenced by the Long Tail
The article discusses how YouTube, a video-sharing website, increasingly pushes viewers to the fringe – the long end of the tail. Typically, viewers will start at the head: they want the hits. Viewers can find these in the trending section or at the top of their home page. YouTube draws its revenue from ad sales […]
Game Theory in Cybersecurity
https://www.news.iastate.edu/news/2018/11/14/cybergametheory In today’s information age, companies seek an effective threat modeling protocol to protect their or their customers’ computer systems and records. Traditionally, threat modeling has adopted a somewhat subjective scale for ranking how much risk a threat poses in a system (there are three levels: low, medium, and high). However, researchers at Iowa State […]
How Information Cascades Created the U.S. Housing Bubble
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/business/02view.html When the housing bubble burst in 2008, it led to devastating effects around the world; homes foreclosed at alarming rates, companies declared bankruptcy, and many people lost their jobs. The failure to recognize this housing bubble is the main reason for the collapsing in financial markets; author Shiller writes, “if people do not see […]
Does the “Rich-Get-Richer” Power-Law Truly Model Wealth Distribution?
In learning about distributions of “value” across an ecosystem, one topic covered in class was the power-law model, which describes the tendency for a great amount of value to be concentrated across a relatively low volume of the population, while an exponentially greater number of individuals concentrate at the lower values. This distribution predicts the […]
Network Dynamics and Evolution
https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/stories/elephants-are-evolving-lose-their-tusks Humans are constantly influenced by the opinions and actions of others, which results in popular trends and the rapid spread of ideas. In fact, behavior permeates all kinds of networks, and it influences a variety of species. Although we may not realize it, evolution is very similar to the spread of behavior. When […]
Information Cascades and Dieting
This article published by the New York times, talks about the health benefits that come along with eating a low-carb diet. Specifically, the article dives deep into one of the biggest studies in weight-loss. Scientist Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian was a key component of this study. In his findings he discovered that the best […]
Warren buffett takes $4 billion stake in JP Morgan
https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/14/investing/warren-buffett-jpmorgan/index.html Warren Buffett is a very well known business man with many investments and special interests in a multitude of different companies. He recently invested a hefty $4 billion in JP Morgan, a high profile bank. This will lead to higher profits from both parties, even as the returns for most big banks have been a dismal this year. This is […]
The Wisdom of Crowds
The “Wisdom of Crowds” is a topic that was briefly mentioned in lecture, but certainly caught my attention as I just ran into it in another context as well. The previous Sunday I was attending an ECO conference and upon walking in, they had each attendee guess the number of candies in a large jar. […]
Amazon Product Reviews – Do they create an information cascade?
http://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-2012/projects/cs224w-033-final.v08.pdf The article Investigating Information Cascades in Amazon Product Reviews discusses whether or not the reviews appended to each product page on Amazon.com follow the wisdom of the crowd and information cascade models. Researchers at Stanford University found that reviews normally did not follow cascade-like behavior, although 31% possibly did. This experiment iterated over 548,552 […]
Information Cascades and the “Hundredth Monkey Effect”
https://medium.com/@EmmaPrice/the-100th-monkey-effect-b669d504e347 In class, we learned about information cascades, in which an individual is influenced and changes their behavior or opinion based on inferences they make by observing other people. I think that this can be closely tied in with a certain Japanese myth or story titled the “Hundredth Monkey Effect”. This story, essentially talks about […]
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