Structural Balance of Harry Potter
While procrastinating and not working on my blog, I absentmindedly scrolled through a BuzzFeed article with fake social media profiles for a few characters of a popular book series, Harry Potter. I realized that the characters of Harry Potter resemble a social network similar to what we talk about in class. Doing some more research, […]
An Alternative Explanation for the Rise and Fall of MySpace
Facebook is most prominent social network there is at the moment. However, it wasn’t always. Other social networking sites like MySpace were once widely used. This article uses a model to explain why MySpace is not as famous as it once was. After its peak in 2008, MySpace started to get abandoned by its users. […]
Game Theory of Washington Political Parties
In the Atlantic’s article about the gridlock in Washington, Mohamed A. El-Erian describes the game theory behind the Democrat and Republican parties’ inability to collaborate. The government has many problems to deal with, and each party feels the need to establish oneself over the other. This is especially prevalent in the much-discussed fiscal debate, where […]
Humanity Gaining a Nervous System : The Internet
The internet that connects us all is a large directed graph, which networks computers, servers, virtual and real machines all over the world. The interconnectedness that the internet signifies has an amazing similarity with the nervous system of human beings. In a sense, the internet is humanity gaining a nervous system. Akin to the nervous system, […]
Search Engine Poisoning Victims
Using the PageRank Algorithm in class, we saw that hubs have higher scores if they have multiple recommendations with high scores, and that authorities have higher scores if hubs with higher scores point to them. The analogy is that we get recommendations from multiple people, and the people who recommended suggestions that were recommended by […]
How Decentralized Social Networks Might Change the Way We Interact Online
What if you could use a social network yet choose who has access to your data? What if you could get paid to see promoted content instead of the social network company profiting off you? What if content creators could be paid fairly for the value that their content creates? What if you were an owner […]
PageRank and Victorian Novels
This article described how Google’s PageRank algorithm could be applied to novels written by Victorian authors in order to find the most influential female and male writers. The novels used in the project are selected from the area the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States from the period 1780 to 1900. The algorithm PageRank […]
Why Google Owns the Web
Google is the most popular search engine in the world. Since its inception in 1998 the company has deposed former search industry giants like Alta Vista, Excite, and Lycos. Google’s unparalleled success is not unwarranted. It’s primarily the result of a mathematical formula called PageRank. This formula has transformed the Internet into thriving […]
Living in the Mobilegeddon
Last April, Google updated their searching algorithm for mobile devices to consider whether a website has a mobile friendly site. If the website does have a mobile friendly site, then it would be higher up in search results. If the website does not have a mobile friendly site, then it would be lower in search […]
The other airline hubs
Though family vacations, friend-filled excursions and personal getaways have packed long filled up the schedules of citizens in developed countries, the way we go about planning these trips has dramatically evolved with technology. What’s more, travel planning appears to be far from settling on a universal system, and instead continues adjusting mobile computing, smarter software […]
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