TikTok’s Booming Success — Where Did It Come From?
Everyone with a phone and an online presence has at least heard of TikTok. It’s the newest, viral success social media that allows its users to post, share, and view short videos tied to music or sound. Much of this success is due to the platform’s ease of use. It’s incredibly easy to pick up […]
Game Theory Optimal (GTO) Texas Holdem Poker Theory
Game Theory Optimal (GTO) poker is “an umbrella term players use to describe the holy grail of no-limit holdem playing strategy” (MasterClass). In general, the optimal theory dictates that the player is always making the decision that returns the most profit in the long run. For example, when the player is faced […]
Facebook’s Future Plans and Their Implications on Networks Research
This past month, Facebook recently rebranded with the name “Meta.” Although their social media site will still be named “Facebook,” the company aims to distance itself from being “just a social media company,” as they own various other products like Instagram, Oculus (a virtual reality headset), and Whatsapp and have begun to delve into industries […]
Information Cascades and Medicine
Information cascades are fascinating because they don’t necessarily sway individuals into good behavior or bad behavior, they just build on decisions made by a finite few. This is illustrated in how witnessing someone jaywalk can sway a cascade to follow them if a few others are in a rush but can equally enhance caution to […]
Google, User Privacy, and the Evolution of Digital Advertising
On November 3rd, 2021, Steve Swan, product manager at Google, announced that the search engine would be offering a new functionality that allows publishers to share private first-party identifiers with Google’s programmatic demand. This announcement comes at a time of uncertainty for many digital advertisers: with initiatives like Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) having potential […]
VCG and how it has revolutionized Facebook’s advertising
Companies rely on their advertising to attract customers but also to make money from other companies advertising on their platforms. Facebook is a prime example of the latter. They have advertisements tailored to their users, but the question is: how does Facebook decide which companies are advertised where and when their advertisements show up? They […]
How Monkeys Learned to Wash Potatoes
There is a myth that dates back to 1965 of a “collective consciousness” within monkeys found on small islands off the coast of Japan. The “Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon” as it began to be called, was based on the studying of free-roaming macaques. In 1952, scientists introduced sweet potatoes to the monkeys on Koshima Island, tossing […]
Housing prices in 2021 and how it applies to Networks
The housing market in the United States has been subject to historically high divides between housing prices and median household income especially as a result of the pandemic. As more people lost their jobs as a result of COVID-driven unemployment, the average house price to income ratio has risen drastically. From 2019 to 2021, this […]
How SEO Improved the Internet
On February 27th, 2021, Loren Baker shared a brief history of search engine optimization in Search Exchange Journal (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-101/seo-history/). SEO is extremely important to the public today. It has revolutionized the way we browse the internet and how the internet browses us. In today’s world, search engine optimization (SEO) is a fairly familiar concept […]
Bayes’ Theorem and its application to COVID-19 Testing
Source: https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/21149 Bayes’ Theorem is a critical part of our course relating to information cascades. It allows us to determine the probabilities of events that are dependent on each other occurring, given known information about some of the events. This article implements Bayes’ Theorem to a topic that has dominated our society for over a […]
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