CNN News: Southwest grounds 44 planes
One year ago, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) found that Southwest Airlines failed to meet inspection requirements. More recently, the airlines put three employees on administrative leave and began conducting an internal investigation of allegations that it flew aircrafts without proper inspections. This triggered curiosity in the House Transportation […]

In class we’ve talked about information cascade. One of the aspects is that when the majority of participates chose to accept/reject, it’s rational for you to mimic what they did no matter what signal you’ve got. The reason is that if more people chose to accept/reject, it is more probable that accept/reject is the right […]

Warren Buffet has written a great deal on value investing, a technique to investing that he has used to consistently outperform the S&P 500 over the past 20 years.  A short summary of his work can be found here  .  Value investing is not a new concept, it was most famously written about by Ben […]

Most of us have a list of friends at that numbers in the hundreds or even thousands, but I’m sure that most of us only consider some proper subset of them friends. Whether the complement of that set is the remnant of people who randomly friended you before coming to Cornell or just people […]

Is the magic of Google’s ad network wearing off?
This blog post from BloggingStocks raises that exact question. Google built its empire on the idea of contextual, text-based ads that are relevant to the content that the reader is interested in. This simple system, described fully in chapter 11 of the test, allowed the search company to […]

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-scientology062590b,1,279442.story?coll=la-news-comment
For the past several years, the Church of Scientology has received a great deal of media attention. Tom Cruise publicly proclaiming his alliegance to the church and the increase in the membership of high-profile celebrities are some of the examples. According to the article on the L.A. Times, the Church of Scientology sees active recruitment […]

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http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2212947/microsoft-friends-social-networks
The above article discusses Microsoft’s plans to integrate their Windows Live system into leading online social network services. Windows Live is a set of online features that can be accessed through a browser that include instant messaging, search engines, and web security. Microsoft seeks to open up new ties to networks such as […]

Throughout this course, we have discussed the internet as an amazing tool for connecting people across the world, which “has made possible entirely new forms of social interaction, activities and organizing, thanks to its basic features such as widespread usability and access” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet). As the most frequently visited websites, sites such as Google, Yahoo, […]

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20152/
On January 30th, 2008, two undersea cables connecting Europe with Egypt and  the Middle East with India were cut.  These cables were fiber-optic cables providing Internet access to and from the regions.  Immediately large portions of the Middle East and India were without Internet access because these cables were bottle necks for Internet activity.  The […]

In class we discussed how online search engines make high revenues through keyword based advertising. From the advertisers’ perspective, this form of advertising is an excellent way to ensure that their ads are viewed by users who have expressed a similar interest through their online query (word search). However, it is not always the case […]