Social networks are constantly in flux between balanced and unbalanced states. At the most basic level, a social network involves three individuals (or nodes) and the positive/negative relationships between them. The friend of my friend is my friend; the friend of my enemy is my enemy; the enemy of my enemy is my friend. These […]

In an article published last summer in the New England Journal of Medicine, Christakis et al investigate the spread of obesity as a social contagion. Using the dataset from the Framingham Heart Study, they performed a longitudinal study (1971-2003) to study how social networks contribute to individual’s body mass index, or BMI. The […]

Professor Theodore Lowi of Cornell University’s Government Department often reiterates the theme of not living virtual lives, whether political or…sexual, as he puts it in lecture. He recalls a time when Cornellians left the classroom, took buildings over by force, and marched for change.
Nevertheless, the virtual realm has become one of the battlefields against […]

Social Networking helps Peer-to-peer lending loan $300+ million in 2 years
Above is an article about the facilitation of loaning and lending through internet social networks. In light of ever increasing loan rates, peer-to-peer lending has grown popular in moving money from individual lenders to those looking for competitive loan rates. The biggest name in peer-to-peer lending, […]

Welcome to the course blog for INFO 204. This is a course which will cover how the social, technological, and natural worlds are connected, and how the study of networks sheds light on these connections.
Topics include: how opinions, fads, and political movements spread through society; the robustness and fragility of food webs and financial markets; […]

Even though class is over, the topic of networks still appears everywhere I go.
For instance, this website, walk2web, which constructs graphs which constructs a complex graph from an initial input URL, which attempts to link the different websites that are somehow related to each other (hyperlinks, etc).
Try it, you’ll be surprised at the complexity […]

Pharmacologists can be well-connected.
John J. Abel is regarded as the founding father of pharmacology, after forging the field in the late 19th century. Along with 18 colleagues, he founded American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET), and is most famous for his work isolating epinephrine and crystallizing insulin. Abel published nearly a hundred papers.

Check […]

As has been discussed over the course of this class, online advertising has shown to be very profitable for search engines basing the advertisements shown to keywords. Keyword-based advertising is a win-win for the search companies and the advertisers; because people are seeing results that are customized to what they are looking for, the […]

http://blog.tooreal.net/articles/gmail/
Back in 2003 when web-based email services were dominated by Hotmail and Yahoo! who offered a paltry 4MB of space for the average ‘free’ user, web-mailing was such a pain I hardly used my Yahoo! account. April 1 2004: Enter Gmail, with a 1GB storage limit, a fresh user-friendly interface with several neat features, and […]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_%28online_game%29
Utopia, a highly addictive online multiplayer strategy game, is one of the most popular games on the internet. I used to be a huge fan, back in my secondary school days, and I was helplessly addicted — but it was a lot of fun. Utopia allows for the formation of social networks completely separate […]