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Are we just sheep?

People are often influenced by each other, creating what has been called the “herd effect” of people following the crowd, because it seems to them to be the best decision. As discussed in class, there are different effects to consider when making a decision that might be influenced by the crowd. Some effects are informational, […]

Link Analysis Applied to the Flutie Effect

The Flutie Effect references the phenomenon that the success of a university’s athletic program can have positive effects on seemingly unrelated aspects of a school. More specifically, in Devin and Jaren Pope’s study, they test the effect that success of a Division 1 college basketball or football team has on a school’s application statistics.  They […]

Facebook’s Transition to News Feed And Search Engine

Facebook, one of the biggest online social network platforms, is now changing the way we use social media. In recent months, Facebook has been rolling out multiple changes to its functions, such as the Instant Articles features, the Google Now-style cards on notification tabs, and universal search bar. In the past, readers interested in specific […]

Power to the Employees

These articles detail the influence between employees and companies. In the past, it was difficult to find out the company culture and benefits, but now with the availability of information on the internet company culture is becoming increasingly more concerned with employee engagement. Many employees now have the power to post negative or positive reviews […]

Watch out PageRank! Here comes RankBrain: Google’s use of AI to Optimize and Improve Search Results

As we learned in class, PageRank was one of the earliest search optimization algorithms developed by Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and it was implemented early in the company’s history. Using refined text-matching analysis and the number of ingoing and outgoing links and connections to web pages, the PageRank Algorithm is able to […]

Comparative Study of HITS and PageRank Link based Ranking Algorithms

Web-page ranking is an optimization technique used for search engine, and basic page ranking algorithms can be briefly classified into two class: Content-based page ranking which is influenced by number of matched terms, frequency of terms, and location of terms; Connectivity-based page ranking which use two famous link analysis methods: RageRank Algorithm and HITS algorithms. […]

Buying and Selling on Social Networks

Buying and Selling on social networks has become a fundamental thing for people to sell and auction their items on the internet. Buying and Selling has become a vital source of income for many teenagers on the internet, because they can sell an item much higher than its original retail price. Currently, Facebook is testing […]

Peeple: A New Network to Rate People

http://recode.net/2015/10/26/the-people-behind-peeple-the-internets-most-hated-app-arent-going-away/ This app takes the idea of networks and combines it with the basic premise of Yelp. The nodes are people and they are linked to each other through mutual connections and similar interests. The strength of these ties is not only determined by the number of mutual ties, but rather by how a particular […]

Cyberbullying

We’ve talked a lot about social networks and oftentimes there is difference in power of people involved. One positive side is that the person in position of strong power can better negotiate towards deals. Such an imbalance in power can also lead to some bad things, for example, bullying. The attack comes from the strong towards the […]

The Problem with Best Practices

This article discusses the problem of “best practices”, which are practices or ideas that we come to think of as the “best” primarily because everyone else uses them. For example, bankers refused to invest in soft cookies in the late 70’s, because the very successful “Chips Ahoy!” only sold hard cookies. Today, both soft and hard cookies are […]

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