Leveraging PageRank algorithm within the Hadoop ecosystem for outlier detection
Outlier and fraud detection have a variety of applications within the Hadoop Ecosystem: Proximity and distribution model based algorithms are the most commonly used methods of detection within the open source Hadoop community and have a wide range of applications in various verticals which include: finance, security, and intrusion detection in cyber security. In determining fraud […]
Amazon vs. Google
Right now, Google has a market capitalization of 395 billion dollars, the second largest in the country. An alarming ninety six percent of Google’s revenue comes from advertisements on a pay per click system, where advertisers pay Google a certain amount of money per click of their advertisement (and the price per click is determined […]
Pay Per Click Advertising, Asymmetric Information, and Moral Hazard
Pay Per Click marketing, or PPC, is a method of advertising that has rapidly gained popularity in recent years. It’s a system by which advertisers’ websites are placed in designated regions of web pages, commonly on search results and different social media outlets. In exchange for this placement, the advertisers pay a fee every time […]
Three Degrees of Influence – How far can you reach people?
Three Degrees of Influence Recently in lecture, a topic was mentioned: “Six degrees of separation”. This is a theory where a stranger can be connected to you indirectly through approximately six links of “a friend of a friend”. However, we wonder sometimes how far a node can span its influence to. Nicholas Christakis, proposed the […]
Using Trustworthiness to Weight Sources in Search Algorithms
Article: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/414623/google-bias-search-engine-based-facts-wesley-j-smith Throughout the past couple weeks in class, we have paid particular attention to search algorithms such as Google Search and their methods of displaying results for a given search query. The goal is simple: to order pages in terms of significance and relevancy. Working towards this goal, however, is not quite as straightforward. As […]
A visual representation of the Internet as a Graph
http://internet-map.net/ is an interactive website in which you can zoom in and out of a large map of what initially seems to just be a bunch of circles. However, as you zoom in, it becomes apparent that each circle is representative of a certain website on the Internet, with websites with more traffic appearing larger on the […]
Structure of the Brain: Does a Strongly Connected Giant Component exist?
When we think of the human brain as a large network, one natural inquiry we may have is how is it structured. Upon consideration of the structure of the web and its underlying strongly connected giant component, one may question whether or not such a giant component also describes the structure of the brain and if so, […]
Social Networks in Music: Soundcloud
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-07-10/can-soundcloud-be-the-facebook-of-music- In my previous blog post I looked into the popular music streaming service Spotify and highlighted the social aspect of it that made it a big network. However, Spotify does not include any interaction between artists, or from the artists to the listeners. Any interaction with the artist is completely one-sided: it’s a big […]
The Power of Search Engines in Elections
While just about everyone is fully aware of how useful the internet can be for finding new information, many individuals are unaware of the immense power that the search engine companies have in influencing social outcomes. Companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple, among others, can exert this influence on a variety of important social issues, but this […]
How School Shootings Spread – Information Cascades and Thresholds of Violence
How do tragedies such as school shootings spread? In his article, Thresholds of Violence, Malcolm Gladwell attempts to explain why. Gladwell utilizes several case studies in attempts to understand what it is that motivates someone to take the final steps to commit such an atrocious act of violence. Gladwell writes that discovering a pattern in […]
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