Google Fighting Back Against Link Spam
One important way that search engines such as Google can rank web pages is by analyzing the structure of the internet. By analyzing links that go from one website to another, search engines can score websites; this allows the search engine to determine the best authorities for certain topics and the best hubs of information […]
Monopolistic Traders in Rural Areas – What Hospitals and Collegetown Bagels Have in Common
The city of Ithaca, New York is Cornell University’s home base. It is almost rural in comparison with urban hubs such as Boston and NYC. However, when contrasted with the surrounding areas of Dryden and Lansing NY, Ithaca feels extremely developed. Despite being the largest municipality in the area, there exists a lack of options […]
Negotiating Worker’s Wages: Bargaining and Power in Networks
In class, we discussed bargaining and power in networks. In any kind of network, there is a focus on the way that power is manifested between pairs of people or companies and their links larger social to others in a larger network. In power exchanges, the act of bargaining takes into account the idea of […]
Increased partisanship from targeted ads
Advertisement is a large part of the revenue for certain companies, like Google and Facebook. By auctioning off ad slots to certain advertisers, these companies are able to maintain a large revenue stream, despite the fact that Google and Facebook provide a free service to the majority of the public. When these companies post the […]
How Recommender Systems Work
The recommender systems usually work in several steps. The first step is called “candidate generation.” In this step, systems pick out a few recommended “candidates” for the users from thousands or millions of contents. Then, if the candidates come from different candidate generation systems, additional scoring systems are used to normalize the scores. Assuming that […]
Determining Influential Users on Social Networks
Social networks have many users with different interests and reasons for connecting with other users. This characteristic makes topic specificity “important when analyzing the hub and authority users as it provides the context to user hub or authority.” (Roy et al) For example, if there were two influential users with similar hub and authority values […]
Bidding, Auctioning, on Higher Education Admissions
College admissions season is one of the most pressing and stressful times for students. Weather your applying as a potential undergraduate, graduate, or even medical student, it comes down to numerous factors cumulating in a single admission. That being said, there are some commonalities that are reflected in each admissions sector. For one, you grades […]