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Showing posts from February, 2007

Information Economics : The Long Tail

What's powerful about the long tail is the sheer size of it. Average borders carries around 100,000 titles, yet just more than a quarter of amazon's earnings comes from outside these 100,000 titles. And the thrilling part is this is market is growing - and rapidly! In fact most successful internet businesses capitalize on the long tail in some way or the other. Google gets most of its revenue from the long tail, so does ebay. The two important aspects they overcome are : scale geography expaning not only existing markets but creating new ones! In fact as these companies offered more and more they realized demand followed supply!! The act of vastly increasing choice seemed to open up demand for that choice.\ These niche markets account for anywhere between 25% to 50% of their total revenues and these are not sold by their mortar and brick competitors! The essential lesson to learn is: A very very big number (the tail) multiplied by a very small number (demand) still equals a ver

Information Search Retrieval : Memory

If homomorphism between two domains is not well established then analogies are susceptible to two kinds of errors: errors of commission - when irrelevant information is imposed on the target domain. errors of omission - information transferred covers only part of what it pertains to. Memory becomes manifest whenever the behavior of a system is influenced by events that occurred n the past and information about them then must have been retained by the system in some way. An implication of the above is that memory becomes not the property of a system but that of the observer-object relationship because it arises from the inability of the observer to explain the behavior of the system and fully predict it in the absence of full information. K makes an assertion that a system possesses memory if its history behavior cannot be explained by either his psychological processes or the technical processes in place. Social Memory explains history determined behavior by reference to structural f

thank god it's friday ?

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So it's 10:47 pm, and i'm sitting here in the shapiro library......with a few other people around, on a friday evening. And what am I doing here on a friday evening ...... trying to model network growth patterns through various preferential attachment algorithms. And the worst part of it is.....I'm loving it ! :) We'll actually that has more to do with the fact that I think I've just managed to solve the ten point bonus problem- that too on NetLogo which I just started a couple of hours (ok 4 hours!) ago and which I thought was going to take me a significant part of the night!!!! I guess i deserve the excitement ? ;)