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Barnacle Boys and Information Cascades

R.I.P Stephen Hillenburg, creator of SpongeBob, 11/27/2018. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103170924 Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? Now if you don’t know the answer to that question, it is likely that you live under a rock. Let’s talk about SpongeBob SquarePants. This show is arguably one of the most influential cartoons of our lifetimes. At the […]

Veganism as a Movement and Collective Action

The article studies the vegan movement in terms of those in and not in punk sub-culture in how they define and and practice veganism based on the differing aspects of their social networks. It ends with the conception that maintaining the lifestyle is dependent upon strong social networks that are also supportive of the movement […]

Everyone’s Swiping Right: The Power of Cascading Behavior for Tinder

The now colloquial term “swiping right” has been popularized by the viral dating app Tinder, which was launched in 2012 as a new way for people to meet each other and build relationships. For dating, an extremely social activity that nearly everyone takes part in, it only makes sense that Tinder would utilize the broad […]

Network Diffusion with Social Media Influencers in Marketing

Source: https://firebrandtalent.com/blog/2015/09/improving-influencer-marketing-with-data-science/ As social media becomes a growing presence in the lives of consumers everywhere, marketing companies are eager to optimize their efforts in convincing people to use their products. Recently, marketing agencies have dedicated a lot of their efforts toward identifying influencers in various communities – individual accounts that influence a large number of accounts […]

Network Diffusion In The Spread Of Alcohol Use Among Middle Schoolers

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3768163/   The authors of this study studied the effects of network diffusion on the onset of alcohol use among adolescents. They tested 8 hypotheses, most notably that exposure to peers who already drink is predictive of increased risk of an adolescent’s own onset. Other hypotheses included that the effects were stronger for girls and […]

Fake News and Information Cascades

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146   The article refers to the power of social media networks such as Twitter, and Instagram in spreading fake information. The article explains how robots and natural algorithms share fake and truthful news articles at the same rate. So, the fact that fake news spreads so fast and is sensationalized suggests that humans tend […]

Network Effects: Do They Even Matter?

Link: https://hbr.org/2018/06/why-network-effects-matter-less-than-they-used-to   The concept of network effects can be summed up in one idea, the value of a product increases the more people use it. An example from the class was as the number of people attending a party increases, so does the appeal of the party to another individual. Another easy example to help […]

An Application of Automata in Game Theory

https://courses.cs.cornell.edu/cs2800/2017sp/handouts/pass_tseng_discmath.pdf (p. 128-130) A while ago, while reading through supplementary reading for CS 2800 for deterministic finite automatas (DFAs), I came across a connection with DFAs and game theory with the general idea being that we can model certain games using DFAs (in this case, prisoner’s dilemma). Seeing a crossover of two different courses that I […]

Network Diffusion and Gaming (and some Cascades)

https://www.quora.com/Regarding-gaming-consoles-should-I-buy-the-console-most-of-my-friends-have-or-the-one-I-like-the-most (debate regarding buying consoles because more friends have it vs. the one you like more). Let’s say you want to buy a video game console, such as a PlaySation 4 or an Xbox One. You like the Xbox One better, but a certain fraction of your friends are have the PlayStation 4 and you […]

Why is everyone majoring CS? Information cascade?

Source: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~csedsum17/presentations/GrowingEnrollments-Discussion.pdf   It is no secret that the amount of people majoring in CS has been blowing up the last few years. Just look the the Cornell CS enrollment reports from the last few years and see for yourself. What is particularly interesting is this cycle is not new, look at the attached graph showing […]

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