Ailing Airline Auctions
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-41636582 In Europe’s airline industry, the competition is fierce. With rising fuel prices and terror attacks in popular tourist destinations, airlines are struggling to keep up. Now as the Italian airline company Alitalia continues to struggle, it has received numerous offers for parts of the company. As of Monday, Alitalia announced that it had received […]
On the origins of power
In Chapter 12, we discussed the idea of power in social networks, specifically the idea that power is, to some degree, a property of a network structure. The chapter is careful not to make the claim that having power is merely about “[holding] a pivotal position in the underlying social structure”. As it very reasonably […]
Assigning Authority to Videos on the Youtube Platform
In the past few years, it has been apparent to the world that the Youtube platform’s policies have been undergoing many changes whether it be the introduction of ads mid-video, the growing number of official Youtube channels belonging to Television corporations ( the presence of late night talk shows especially has been growing on Youtube), […]
Russians Influence US Election using Facebook Ads
This article talks about the Russian operation to influence the 2016 election using ads through various social media outlets, with Facebook being one of them. After Facebook did an investigation, they found that the Russians spent “tens of thousands” of dollars on these ads, paying for over 3000 Facebook ads that were seen by over […]
New Roads Can Make Traffic Worse
Link: https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/ This article dives into the mystery of traffic congestion. How is it that when new roads are added traffic doesn’t decrease? This is a puzzle that traffic engineers have wrestled with for many years – going as far back as the 1960s; they have been unable to draw any conclusions until recently because […]
Amazon in the World of Online Advertising
Since the dawn of the web, there have been a multitude of online selling/shopping sites, all presenting different means with which transactions are performed (ie. craigsList, eBay). However, in recent years, one website in particular has been dominant over the others — Amazon. As one of the few websites that offers free two-day shipping with […]
The Power of Trumpery in Networks
Trumpery, as Cairo said it during the “Visual Trumpery” seminar, means worthless nonsense, something showy and deceitful at the same time (https://visualtrumperytour.wordpress.com). While also acknowledging the danger of trumpery in data visualization field, I also want to introduce the danger of trumpery in the power of networks. As how we are taught in the class […]
A New Model of Social Networks
Recently, Heather Mattie and colleagues at Harvard University have released a new study called “The Social Bow Tie” which analyzes the distributions and strength of relationships in social networks. The researchers studied two social networks: the network of 70,000 people in 75 rural villages in India, and 50,000 mobile phone users from a European country. In […]
Power Dynamics in the Workspace
Conventionally in the work industry, people perceive their power or value within their company as determined by their titles or positions within the network. It was often assumed that the higher employees are in the job hierarchy, the more control over others and freedom they would have in the network. However, with newly emerging roles […]
Google Search: From PageRank to RankBrain
Until recently, Google’s PageRank algorithm was determined by hundreds of factors chosen by engineers at Google without the use of machine learning. The basic premise of PageRank is that it allows sites to “vote” with links. More specifically, the most popular sites have votes with higher weights, while less popular sites have weaker votes. This […]
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