New Epidemic Scare May Have Rapid Spread
https://afro.who.int/news/climate-change-increases-risk-outbreaks-africa Epidemics have had a devastating presence the history of the world. Diseases like Smallpox, Malaria, Cholera, Polio, and AIDS have spread through countries rapidly causing harm to many and killing even more. These outbreaks have happened all across the globe; however, it is most often that we hear about epidemics on the African continent. […]
Christopher Blair: Fake News Artisan
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/the_godfather_of_fake_news https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-41147572 The short biographic/long interview piece above looks into the life and works of Christopher Blair, who has spent the last few years deliberately writing fake and sensational news articles. Some examples of the headlines of his articles include “• BREAKING: Torture Chamber in Bill Clinton’s Basement Described As A ‘Kill Room’” and “• BREAK ING: […]
Spam-Purging Social Media Sites
This article, published by CNN, briefly discusses recent actions taken by Instagram in order to eliminate fake accounts, likes, and comments on pictures across the social media platform. The reason behind the move was millions of likes, comments, and followers from fake instagram accounts that were being run by some third party bot. The company […]
Information Cascades in Cryptocurrency Bubbles
Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.11348.pdf (Herding behavior in cryptocurrency markets by Obryan Poyser) This academic paper discusses the boom in value experienced by cryptocurrencies, attributing this growth to a speculative bubble in the market due to social “follow-me” investing behaviors. Cryptocurrencies are virtual currencies that are produced, tracked, and shared in a decentralized fashion. These cryptocurrency markets are […]
The Influence of Early Respondents: Information Cascade Effects in Online Event Scheduling
https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/134703/Romero%20et%20al%202017%20%28WSDM%29.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y This essay was on the Influence of Early Respondents regarding Information Cascade Effects in Online Event Scheduling. It talks about when filling out a schedule, what effects are there that might affect a person decisions. It investigates whether this difference is due to information cascade effects in which later respondents adopt the decisions of […]
Cascade and Instagram
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2017/03/28/why-instagram-is-the-top-social-platform-for-engagement-and-how-to-use-it/#692878c636bd In this article, it talks about why Instagram is so popular in different aspects. The first aspect is the mobile functionality that people can easily use their mobile phone, usually, smartphone, to check the information and to use it. Therefore, it is really easy and accessible for users to use. The second feature is […]
YouTube’s Interesting Advertisements
We’ve all happened upon a 30-second, unskippable advertisement while perusing YouTube. However, in recent times, this seems more infrequent-did something actually change, or are our memories simply false? The typical ad that one would find on a site like Google works based on clicks; each click on an ad costs the advertiser some amount of […]
Cascade of misinformation
https://futurism.com/cape-town-water-crisis-pushed-back This article is about the spread of “fake news” through the Internet, and that in fact “fake news” propagate faster than “factual news” in a social media network. We have touched upon information cascade in class, and I thought this article very effectively analyzes how information spread in a social network. Many […]
Reverse Network Effects
Source: https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/03/reverse-network-effects-todays-social-networks-can-fail-grow-larger/ This article talks about the “Reverse Networks Effects”. What this term essentially means is that we normally would think that for social media networks, when the user base grow larger and larger, the social media networks become more and more stable; however, sometimes it is possible that even under an enormous user base, social […]
I just can’t resist!!
Many people would vehemently deny when told that a large percentage of their decisions are based on observations of what others are doing. Little do we know that it is near impossible to make choices solely based on personal resolve. A lot of studies have been carried out to prove this hypothesis from way long […]
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