Spread of Disease
Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180614212651.htm This article discusses how large-scale disease outbreaks are studied through networks and how mathematical models have a practical application in public health. The model that is explained is the Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) model, which takes human behavior and communication into account when looking at spread of disease. For example, people will adopt measures […]
Branching Process on the Measles in Europe
www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/health/measles-europe.html Donald G. McNeil’s article addresses the rise of measles in Europe within the last year. Measles has quadrupled in its cases from being a low 5,273 in 2016 to a whopping 21,315 in 2017. The largest outbreaks of the disease were in Romania, with 5,562 cases, and Italy, with 5,006 cases (McNeil 2018). McNeil addresses […]
Are “group projects” always easier?
Distributed Sensemaking: Improving Sensemaking by Leveraging the Efforts of Previous Users Kristie Fisher, Scott Counts, Aniket Kittur As our lectures have talked some aggregate behaviors and ‘wisdom of crowd’, crowdsourcing seems like a good topic to discuss. By definition, essentially, crowdsourcing is a sourcing model that divides a task or project among participants in order […]
Targeted Advertising and Election Result Implications
The 2016 election was controversial due to unconventional campaigning tactics and rumors of Russian interference on social media. Although fake news is mentioned tirelessly when reminiscing about the election, the simple use of targeted advertising on social media, specifically Facebook, is rarely discussed. Just as retail companies use “cookies” to advertise their products in a […]
Chronic Wasting Disease Epidemic Among Deer Populations
Zoonotic diseases are infections that move from animals to people. These diseases are responsible for some of the world’s most deadliest epidemics, including the avian influenza and the plague. In Wisconsin, an increasing number of deer are being diagnosed with the fatal Chronic Wasting disease. This diseases is always fatal as it causes the spongy […]
Misinformation Cascades
Link to Article This article discusses the spread of misinformation in the internet age. The author notes how, in the past, humans received information from a few well-vetted media sources. Now, we take in information from a nearly innumerable amount of sources which are not regulated in any meaningful manner. This relates to the course […]
Cancer: A New Game?
A recent study offered a new perspective to cancer, potentially revolutionizing the effectiveness and feasibility of cancer treatments. The danger and incurability of cancer itself is in part due to evolutionary game theory, in which malignant cells are prone to evolving resistance, making it more likely for the cancer to spread with neighboring cells. As […]
Minimalism’s Tipping Point
In class we learned that a tipping point is an unstable equilibrium in which if a slightly more or less fraction of the population uses/buys a good then there will be upward or downward pressure to other equilibrium points. The concept of a tipping point can be applied generally to situations where humans are inclined […]
Cascading Thresholds
Article source: https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2011/10/26/information-cascades The article discusses information cascades observed in different situations like the Arab Spring and the financial crises. For example, the article talks about how protests in New York City may have influenced protests in Boston and other US cities. More interestingly, these protests also spread to many other cities outside the […]
Social Products and Overambitious Seeding
This article talks about product developers and how they often use the ideas we’ve talked about in class such as network effects and network diffusion to get people to adopt their products. Product developers count on people influencing each other to adopt the product and aim to find the right number and right group to […]
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