Social Networks and Voting
https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2019/09/13/social-networks-and-voting/ Voter turnout among young people in this country is notoriously low, with just under a third of eligible voters under 30 casting a ballot in the November 2018 election–the highest voter turnout for a midterm election in documented history. People have brought up many potential solutions to this issue, but the most important one […]
Do Big Cities Make You More Social?
https://www.citymetric.com/do-big-cities-make-you-more-social This article discusses a recent study carried out by researchers from MIT and the Sante Fe Institute. The researchers gathered information from phone owners living in the UK and Portugal on how many phone contacts they had, and how often they contacted them. Results showed an interesting connection between city size and residents’ phone […]
The Admission Scheme as a Network
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/national-international/College-Entrance-Exam-Cheating-Scandal-Indictment-FBI-US-Attorney-Boston-507030761.html The 2019 college admission scheme was a criminal conspiracy in which bribery and fraud was used in order to affect the undergraduate admission of various students to top universities in the United States. For our purposes this is an interesting topic because we can analyze the different ties between people involved in this case […]
Facebook Dating
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/facebook-dating-yet-another-positive-091630760.html https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-dating-how-to-use-features-comparison-tinder-hinge-2019-9 Facebook will now compete with Tinder and other dating apps with a new feature, ‘Dating’. Most dating apps have basic features to control who appears on your feed. Tinder, for example, allows you to find people based on gender, age, and even distance from your current location. Facebook’s most distinct difference is […]
Strong and Weak ties within the Democratic Candidates Fundraising Strategies
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/02/us/politics/2020-democratic-fundraising.html The article is focused around various maps displaying the geographic locations of the Democratic candidates’ donors. The amount of money a candidate fundraises greatly influences their chance of becoming the Democratic party nominee. It is also important to recognize that to participate in future debates, candidates must have a minimum of 130,000 unique […]
Lexicographical Distances in the Language Network
This article provides a visualization of how closely interconnected various languages are to each other. This distance is defined to be the lexical distance, and it is calculated by taking the sum of all Brown-Holman-Wichmann distances between two languages using a collection of words classified as “stable word stems” in the article. There are 210 […]
Designing Networks For Life
How a Hub-and-Spoke Model Could Improve Metro Rail Transit This article on the airline hub-and-spoke model as one type of network as well as its potential application to the design of metro rail transits offer some new and interesting perspectives on the concept of networks we learn in lecture. The nodes now represent countries, cities, […]
Social networks to bias votes in the Election process
As the presidential election process is approaching us, this post will expand upon the election process and the influences of the social network that results in a biased voting system. More specifically, connections between components, and decision making based on game theory, which is supported by a study conducted at University of Houston. The article […]
The Strength of the Weak Tie
The NY Times article initially dives into a personal story of one of the harsh realities of adulting: job loss. The response to this in today’s day and age? A simple tweet. The outcome? A new job opportunity. However, it wasn’t an immediate friend that reached out, rather a friend of a friend. The article […]
Learning to Predict Reciprocity and Triadic Closure in Social Networks
I recently read through a research paper, co-authored by Cornell’s own John Hopcroft, titled Learning to Predict Reciprocity and Triadic Closure in Social Networks. The paper was very interesting given its relevance to the class, especially with its emphasis on triadic closures. In recent lectures and textbook readings, we have discussed the difference of strong […]
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