A study published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Antonio Rangel of the California Institute of Technology indicates that humans have evolved subconscious mechanisms relating to information cascades.  Dr. Rangel conducted a study in which a group of volunteers was asked to drink and rate the taste of […]

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7175/full/nature06455.html
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7175/box/nature06455_BX1.html
“The coevolution of choosiness and cooperation” from Nature magazine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy
Supplementary Wikipedia article: “Evolutionarily Stable Strategy”
The motivation for analyzing choosiness and cooperation between individuals is to seek a better understanding of biological systems and human societies. The interaction that occurs specifically between non-relatives is what the article focuses on.
The way choosiness and cooperation relate to the […]

Despite ongoing research and constant improvements to online search engines, no user in guaranteed the results he/she desires for any given search. Of course we may believe sometimes that our computers can read our minds – with advances such as AutoComplete and cookie-based recognition – but inevitably we find ourselves modifying search queries and/or scrolling […]

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
 
I find the page rank system that we discussed in class to be overly simple. Yes it works for the application of simple networks that we are looking for, but I really didn’t understand how that could be used on such a large scale. The Wikipedia page that I found on this algorithm really […]

In class last week we focused on keyword-search based advertisement auctions used by search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. While the majority of the revenue of these companies is received through this type of advertisement, all of the big players in the industry are looking for ways to monetize e-mail and social […]

After reading about information cascades in the text, I searched recent articles written about this herd mentality, and came across several that attribute the recent housing bubble to this phenomenon. In an article appearing in the New York Times, Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale University, attributes the unawareness of the looming bubble to herd […]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/villacampa1.html
With its sunny beaches, snow-covered mountains, lush forests, and unique deserts, there’s something for everyone in Azeroth. It wouldn’t be a bad place to visit either . . . that is, if it weren’t inhabited by orcs, elves, demons, undead, and the like. Yes, Azeroth exists in a game–in World of Warcraft to […]

Google recently released a new feature for their AdWords advertising – demographic bidding. This new feature allows advertisers to target their ads to users of a particular age group, by gender, or by combinations of these groups. The feature can be used in conjunction with cost-per-click (CPC: the highest amount you are willing to pay […]

In class we touched on the topic of how web pages get indexed and how search-engines keep track of the new pages. There were various sections on Crawling, Searching the Web and Ranking the Web-Pages. However, it was not quite covered how the most popular search-engine nowadays does it. Hence, I thought it would be […]

The equilibrium-based analysis of traffic routing that we studied earlier in the semester (in connection with Braess’ Paradox) assumes that the traffic delay functions are known in advance by all drivers. Drivers are assumed to be taking the same trip day after day, to experiment with alternative routes, and to develop an instinct about […]