NFTs, speculative trading, and information cascades
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are a relatively young financial security that have generated a lot of buzz for their explosive growth in price and volume traded. A graphic published by Reuters reveals that the NFT sales on OpenSea, a popular marketplace, more than quadrupled between July and August. The boom in NFTs may be viewed as […]
Network Structures in the GPU Shortage: Suppliers, Scalpers, and Buyers
With a combination of the COVID-19 pandemic, a constrained global supply chain, the US-China trade war, and a rise in crypto demands, the GPU shortage grew to an enormous problem that has been prevalent for more than a year now. However, from this GPU shortage, one can witness a network structure brewing, specifically the relationships […]
Venetian Trading Networks
One important aspect of trading networks is who has power. In lecture, we learned that those with more power have more connections, and this allows them to maximize their payoffs. Conversely, those with few connections have little power and therefore end up with lower payoffs. This principle plays out in real life when looking at […]
The Importance of Understanding Bayes Theorem: Medical Consequences
In the following article from the Washington Post (October 5th, 2018), Daniel Morgan talks about how doctors misinterpret test results which lead to detrimental decisions for the patients. Daniel Morgan talks about how the availability and accessibility of tests have resulted in more frequent testing of patients but on the other hand, has caused doctors […]
Bayes Rule: COVID Tests and Drug Screening
From class we learned about Bayes Rule which states P(A|B) = P(A AND B) / P(B) = (P(B|A)P(A)) / P(B). This is one of the most important laws of probability that has many practical real-world applications. Bayes rule allows one to calculate conditional probabilities that are useful. Generally, it allows us to calculate probabilities from […]
Information Cascades and the Stock Market
Stock prices often move in weird ways. Recently this has become particularly prominent due the presence of social media which has allowed people to have louder voices on their “stock picks”. This has driven the market caps of lackluster companies to great heights. This phenomena also works in the opposite way. Minor setbacks can tank […]
Misinformation and the Marriage Proposal Information Cascade on Reddit
Reddit is an online forum where users can post text, images, videos, any many other types of content. Other users can respond to the original post, and upvote or downvote images. Reddit is a community that is extremely casual, where communities form about any topic ranging from college classes, news opinions, funny memes, and more. […]
Impact Factor and Web Search Ranking
https://www.resurchify.com/if/impact-factor-search Impact factor is a coefficient used to evaluate the influence of academic articles. After learning about web structure, I found this mechanism similar to link analysis in web search, such as the Hub-Auth algorithm. The impact factor (IF), also named as Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is determined by calculating an average number of citations […]
Rumor Cascades
Online social networks can facilitate the spread of both true and false information. They provide a rich substrate for rumor propagation in how rumors with different truth values, verifiability, and topic spread. By referencing known rumors from Snopes.com, a popular website documenting memes and gossip, Facebook tracked the propagation of thousands of rumors appearing on […]
What Bayes Theorem Tells Us About Rapid Covid Tests
Lateral flow tests, also known as LFTs, are rapid covid tests designed to give quicker results than PCR tests. However, this speed means that the LFTs are often more inaccurate. According to the UK government, the LFTs have a false positive rate of around 1/1000. However, because of our understanding of Bayes Theorem, and according […]
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