In last Sunday’s Times Magazine, Rachel Louise Snyder writes with news of “a network theory for building a savings account.” When John Caskey, an economics professor at Swarthmore, conducted interviews in two low-income communities, he found that many “didn’t save not because they actually couldn’t [i.e. they couldn’t afford to], but because they believed they […]

hypersearching, as discovered in class, is a powerful tool in attaining a fast and accurate result when searching for a query term. Although it is not implemented globally yet, it would prove to be a very powerful searching mechanism. While surfing the web for my own entertainment sakes, I have found several aspects of Korean web […]

BigChampagne Is Watching You

BigChampagne
In class we recently finished discussing the idea of an information cascade. One application for information cascades that came up was trend-setting. The idea is to jump start a trend (fashion, music, etc.) by targeting and attracting key individuals who have a lot of sway in the industry. […]

We have been talking a lot about network effects where the decisions of one’s peers (fellow decision makers) positively influence one’s choices. Since I am a cynical and jaded college student, this prompted me to investigate more subversive network effects where the decisions of others negatively influence one’s decision. The closest effect I could find […]

Asch Conformity Experiments
Social Conformity was briefly mentioned in class on its connection to information cascades. A famous experiment was done by Solomon Asch in 1951. Participants were faced with this situation. They signed up for a visual experiment and were seated in a room with seven other participants. Unknown to the participant, the seven others […]

Flow of information is a potent theme in today’s world. On one hand, it is the gateway to an aware and well-informed society while on the other; it can lead to socially non-optimal situations and in the extreme case, have dangerous repercussions. One example of such a negative impact is the spread of suicide epidemics. […]

 
http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~arindam/pubs/MiM07_aina.pdf
Peer-to-peer (P2P) networking is the primary method by which pirated music is disseminated.  To combat this epidemic, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has begun to seed corrupt files that track the file downloader’s IP address so that he may be prosecuted. 
The similarity between file sharing via P2P networks and the information cascades […]

The idea of information cascading can be placed in many different human situations. This can be seen by all the examples given in class (ie: fashion, juries, and entertainment). However, with all these human examples, many people can make the argument that all it takes is one strong willed individual to break […]

The phrase “The Long Tail” was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 article “The Long Tail” to describe the business and economic model of internet companies like Amazon and Netflix whose sales revenue from selling only a few copies of millions of items was comparable to sales from selling millions of copies […]

Google gets into the political arena.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-googltics25mar25,1,1251038.story?coll=la-headlines-business
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2004/05/63557
 
We saw in class that Google sells certain keywords to merchants such as Ithaca Calendar Clocks and shopping website like eBay and Amazon. However, sellers and traders are not the only ones buying Google “AdWords”, politicians are seeing the vast reach of internet advertising and jumping in. Back in 2004, […]