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; […]