What is the Power of Big Tech? Part 1

Over the past few decades, companies have focused on maximizing profit and decreasing competition. Top tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, and Amazon have evaluations greater than the GDP of a majority of countries in the world. These companies abuse their power, and the government is unable to efficiently regulate their growth.  Mergers

Imitation Economies in Collectivist Environments Part 2

Social Lens  When considering imitation and collectivism, one must examine both ideologies from a social perspective. Specifically, examining how individuals react using behavioral economics. Behavioral economics is the interdisciplinary combination of economic theory and psychology. It allows the measuring of social, emotional, and psychological factors in decision making and its biases. A team of MIT

Imitation Economies in Collectivist Environments Part 1

Over the last several decades, key innovations have spurred the creation of modern-day industries and social tendencies. For companies to situate themselves in high-growth markets, they must implement successful imitation strategies. Companies that pioneer new products and operational strategies set trends for others to follow. During the pandemic, many legacy clothing retailers like J. Crew

The Social Implications of Affordable Housing in the Twin Cities Part 1

Introduction According to a group of Harvard researchers, affordable housing is crucial as wages stagnate and housing costs rise, causing millions of Americans to be housing cost-burdened (Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, 2018). Housing cost-burdened means that a household is spending more than 30% of its income on housing. Approximately 50% of

Social Mobility Paper

Upward Intergenerational Social MobilityLeon Luo, Mark Fu, Tony Pappas Project Overview This project uses statistics and model building to predict the Intergenerational Social MobilityRate, as defined in Chetty et al. 2020. This project, an intersection of data science and socialscience, consists of data collection, statistical analysis, data revision and merging, and model build-ing. The project

Deepmind AlphaFold

Over the past couple of years, I have followed the work of DeepMind’s groundbreaking developments. I have been most fascinated by the intersection of biology and AI through AlphaFold, an AI program that performs predictions of protein structure.  AlphaFold generates the most accurate 3D protein models of all time. With this level of accuracy, we

TEDxYouth@MinnetonkaHS

As of December 1st, the TEDx event speeches from earlier this year at Minnetonka High School were posted to the TEDx YouTube page. I had the opportunity to host this event in October and thoroughly enjoyed the messages conveyed by the speakers. This was our 4th annual TEDx event, and the entire event revolved around