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Social Media Balancing

It is no surprise that social networking is a big part of society. Businesses, students, teens, adults and even Ivy League institutions use the powerful tool daily to portray the image they want (or for other reasons). However it is surprising and shocking is to how on social media sites change and how they change […]

Gaming the Flu: How We Decide to Get Vaccinated, or Not

Already, members of the Cornell community are beginning to come down with the flu, . A recent study at Rutgers by Gretchen Chapman examined the role of game theory in individuals’ decisions to get vaccinated against the influenza virus. The study focused specifically on the choices of young students, as these individuals are historically more […]

Social Networks Can Affect Voter Turnout

We all know social networks can create fads and influence behavior, but a recent study published by Nature shows that social networks can and do impact voter turnout. The study was done by showing messages to Facebook users when their friends voted, with a picture and the text “get out the vote”. The page reminded users […]

Analysis of Social Network Composition

The author of this article, Drew Prindle, discusses the development and evolution of social networking over the past few decades. While the author does not go into intricate technical details regarding the social networks and their structural composition, one can use his/her own knowledge of the properties of networks to analyze and explain the growth […]

Braess’ Paradox in Sports

The sports world turns out to have its own version of Braess’ Paradox. Humorously coined Ewing’s Paradox by sports writer Bill Simmons in 2001, it describes how teams mysteriously play better when their star player is not on the court or field. The name of the paradox refers to Patrick Ewing, whose teams (both the […]

GraphMuse

graphmuse.com This is a project from a recent Cornell graduate that embodies the idea of analyzing connections within a social network. It is essentially a Facebook app (whatever it may be called) that analyzes your network of friends and gives you an output of the various friend groups, or clusters as they put it, you […]

How Can Twitter Protect You From The Flu?

We all know what Twitter is used for. The purpose of Twitter is to update. Whether by companies to announce new products, by celebrities to reach out to fans, by news companies to spread information, or by regular people to tell their friends what they’re up to, Twitter is a brilliant web service that keeps […]

#Kony2012

I remember the first time I saw an Invisible Children presentation at my high school; the organization travelled around the country explaining the struggles in Uganda, displaying their now-famous documentaries, and selling merchandise to raise funds for their cause. Even if we count my high school population as the average (3000, so it’s large and […]

Game Theory in Poker

Popular movies such as “21” and even the “The Hangover” have glamorized card counting and using math and game theory as methods to winning money. This New York Times article reports on overruling of a conviction of a man who ran poker games in a warehouse, on the basis that poker was a game of […]

Are your friends making you fat?

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/magazine/13contagion-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all This article from the NYTimes summarizes a study on social contagion lead by sociologists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler. For many years sociologists had reason to believe that certain behaviors can be contagious, similar to how an epidemic spreads, but there was never any solid proof. What Christakis and Fowler were able to do […]

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