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Diffusion in Networks and Obesity

In his TED Talk, Nicholas Christakis focused on how social networks affect the behaviors and choices of individuals up to 3 degrees away from each other, and specifically focused on how obesity can spread through social networks similar to an epidemic. The causes of this phenomena Christakis listed were that people of similar backgrounds with similar […]

Why do we still use Facebook?

I realize that I’ve been using Facebook ever since 7th grade! That’s a really long time. I’ve been using Facebook the same way, yet I never get tired of it. Curious, I found an article titled – “Why are we still on Facebook?”. The author, Maria, discusses factors that keep us on Facebook. One major […]

Transfer Students Forced to Live in North Campus Lounges

Transfer Students Forced to Live in North Campus Lounges According to the article titled “Transfer Students Forced to Live in North Campus Lounges”, published by The Cornell Daily Sun, 30 transfer students were forced to live in student lounges of  two of the dorms, converted into temporary housing. This was due to ‘an exceptionally high […]

Ted Talk: The Hidden Influence of Social Networks

Source: https://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_christakis_the_hidden_influence_of_social_networks?language=en   Nicholas Christakis reveals how certain traits and characteristics of a person can spread through a social network, rather quickly and easily. They examined many aspects of daily life, such as voting, obesity, smoking and drinking, and found that people with similar habits tended to cluster together over time. Studies of obesity show […]

How to Use Game Theory to Grow Faithful Followers

Game theory is important when studying networks because it allows users to look at networks in a collaborative way.  Game theory addresses network outcomes that are controlled not by a single user, but by the interaction of many users.  While game theory is used every day to analyze social media networks, in an interview in […]

Networks in Nature? PageRank Can Help

Source: https://www.wired.com/2009/09/googlefoodwebs/ Networks have a broad impact in our everyday lives as they aid in the expression of complex systems that surround us. Often times, however, interpreting these complicated webs becomes an incredible challenge. Thankfully for algorithms like Google’s Page Rank, we have the ability to organize the information presented to us.   The importance of […]

PageRank: Don’t Try Too Hard

For web administrators and developers, search engine optimization, which refers to the process/techniques for causing a website to be ranked highly by a search engine, is of critical importance when it comes to attracting as many users to a site as possible. Achieving this of course requires some understanding of what search engines optimize for and […]

Voter Manipulation Power of Google

https://www.wired.com/2015/08/googles-search-algorithm-steal-presidency/ Obviously, information is a powerful thing. What’s even more powerful is how information is used and how it is accessed. In this day and age, even the smallest piece of information can sway an entire opinion, which could have drastic effects politically. This is why web browser and trending algorithms can have lasting, unintentional […]

The Ranking Algorithm of Google Scholar

Link analysis is an important tool used by Web search engines, while it also plays a part in the study of citations among scientific papers and journals. The standard measure of citation impact, impact factor, is the average number of citations received by a paper in the given journal over the past two years. Here, […]

PageRank on Ecommerce Sites

PageRank has been an extremely important algorithm up Google’s sleeve for the past 20 years. Created in 1998, the original algorithm used the number of links pointing to a web page to determine the value of that web page. Like we saw in class, PageRank also depends on the quality of the pages linking to […]

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