Rumors: Classic information cascades
People deal with rumors everyday in their life. From a high school student to a company CEO, there is always some sort of a rumor circulating about in their social network. In a high school for example, a competitive student, say A, might have spite against another student, say B, who is […]
Archive for the 'Education' Category
Monday, March 31st, 2008 2:52 pm
Written by: dijkstra
Monday, March 31st, 2008 2:52 pm
Written by: lfe56
Rumors: Classic information cascades
People deal with rumors everyday in their life. From a high school student to a company CEO, there is always some sort of a rumor circulating about in their social network. In a high school for example, a competitive student, say A, might have spite against another student, say B, who is […]
Posted in Topics: Education
Mainstream Media and Information Cascades
Monday, March 31st, 2008 12:33 pm
Written by: student212
Robert Hansen, a business professor at Dartmouth University, has drawn some interesting conclusions about the role of investigative reporting in the 21st century mainstream media. His argument uses some important aspects of information cascade theory.
The catalyst for his observations stems from the Israeli/Hezbollah conflict we all remember from two summers ago. He believes […]
Posted in Topics: Education
The Semantic Web and Social Networks
Monday, March 31st, 2008 11:43 am
Written by: networksarefun
We have spent much of our time in class discussing how the web is an information network. An evolving extension of the world wide web exists called the semantic web, originally conceived by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) director Tim Berners-Lee. Just like the web, the semantic web is an information network. Unlike the regular web though, […]
Posted in Topics: Education
Individuals and Groupthink
Monday, March 31st, 2008 1:42 am
Written by: shifu
In class, it was mentioned that in aggregate, people tend to make good decisions. This is because while there is variability amongst individuals, their decisions generally tend to fluctuate around the optimal decision. While this does occur in many situations, there are also other conditions that can cause a group to make poor […]
Posted in Topics: Education
Positive Result of an Information Cascade
Monday, March 31st, 2008 12:34 am
Written by: fifo
There have been many examples of information cascades discussed in class, including restaurant choices, routes of travel, fashion/fads and rides at an amusement park. One of the more significant debates of the 20th century and the early part of this century has been on the climate, namely the issue of global warming. This article discusses […]
Posted in Topics: Education
PageRank in different contexts
Monday, March 31st, 2008 12:29 am
Written by: bigT
PageRank is well known as a highly successful link analysis method for deducing the importance of a web page. While the context in which this method is used has been limited to web page analysis, the algorithm does not make much assumptions about the nature of the nodes. This raises an interesting question. Can we […]
Posted in Topics: Education, Technology, social studies
Visualizing Wikipedia and the Art of Drawing Large Graphs
Sunday, March 30th, 2008 11:51 pm
Written by: easy
While we have long since passed graph theory in class, I still find it to be a very interesting topic. As such, when I found some references to trying to create graphs representing Wikipedia, I was compelled to discuss this issue.
In class, whenever we’ve drawn a network or a graph on the board or in […]
Posted in Topics: Education
Sequential Voting as an Information Cascade
Sunday, March 30th, 2008 11:02 pm
Written by: Boolean
Almost two and a half months have passed since the Iowa caucuses, and we seem (at least on the side of the Democrats) to be at least another few months away from choosing a presidential nominee. We hear the constant debates over February momentum and superdelegates, but does this painfully drawn out process to […]
Posted in Topics: Education
Circular Mills and Information Cascades
Sunday, March 30th, 2008 10:37 pm
Written by: klaygenie
Information cascades occur very often in nature. One typical example is the case of army ants. Throughout their history forager ants developed an evolutionary trait whereby, when separated from the group of other forager ants, one ant chooses a random direction and the other “lost” ants simply follow the ant in front of them. Eventually, […]
Posted in Topics: Education
No Comments