Kanye Isn’t All He’s Cracked Up To Be
Kanye west is often considered one of the most highly visible and socially influential people of all time, but when considering his actual influence, he has none. The article “Hacking the system of social influence: How can we use the mechanics of influence to drive behavior for public good?” Discusses how our daily lives aren’t always […]
Approaches to Network Sampling
The advent of the internet and online social networks has yielded large-scale graphs with millions of nodes. There is huge potential in analyzing these networks for sociologists, epidemiologists, mathematicians, and others. However, with this possibility comes new challenges, including processing the enormous amount of data that comprises these networks. Because the task is so computationally […]
Social Media and Organized Crime
The success of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter has transformed the complexity of social ties among people. These interconnected social ties are generally regarded as positive advancements; technological progress has facilitated distant travel, global communication, and digital interaction. However, social media has also been exploited by the Mafia to broaden their influence in […]
How Real Are Online Friendships
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/02/how-real-are-facebook-friendships/384780/ With the social medias available today, making a connection between people has become seemingly effortless. Yet, how real are these “friendships” we form on social medias? While social medias like Facebook place every type of social connection into a single “friend” group, these connections can have many different meanings for us, ranging from one-night […]
Social Networks Represented in Human Memory
In social networks, people act and react to form social relationships based on their perceived state of the social network. A collaborative study led by Matthew Breashears of Cornell University analyzes how people remember and perceive these networks. Social networks are remembered in small microstructures, called triads, as opposed to individual dyadic relationships. As Breashears […]
Twitter Utilizes Ad Network to Share Promoted Material
Source: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/20/twitter-opens-ad-network-to-promoted-tweets-video.html As described in this recent CNBC article, social media giant Twitter announced that it will grant its advertisers the ability to share their content, including videos and, of course, tweets, to a network of more than 700 million people contained in MoPub. MoPub was acquired by Twitter over two years ago and is a […]
Hyena Friend Preferences
Source: http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/news/making-friends-friends-benefits-hyenas-penn-biologist-finds The article highlights a new breakthrough in animal behavioral research conducted by scientists from the University of Pennsylvania, the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, and Michigan State University. The researchers, led by Amiyaal Ilany of the University of Pennsylvania, examined the behavior of hyenas and how they decided which other hyenas to […]