The flavor connection

This combines many things I like: cool data, a creative idea, a nice infographic. Check this out: from the Scientific American: a network of flavours describes our food.

Link to the article.

This is the original article by Yong-Yeol Ahn, Sebastian E. Ahnert, James P. Bagrow & Albert-László Barabási. Published in Nature Scientific Reports, one of the most often downloaded Nature SR papers of all time.

Paper in Scientific Reports

Asteroids!

My data is bigger than yours!

My data is so big that it can only be measured in theory!

Nicholas Christakis on Social Networks

Nicholas Christakis from Harvard talking about connections between Social Networks and health. Are your friends making you drink, smoke, gain weight? Well, you know... watch the video!


Nicholas Christakis - On Health and Social Networks from Cambridge Nights on Vimeo.

The strength of weak ties II: Response

The Facebook data team responds to the "filter bubble" topic, and publishes insights about the diffusion of information in Facebook.

"Today, Facebook is publishing a study that disproves some hoary conventional wisdom about the Web. According to this new research, the online echo chamber doesn’t exist."

Read the entire story (highly recommended) here.

The strength of weak ties I: The online "filter bubble"

Related to todays lecture on the strength of weak ties: Eli Pariser talking about hidden filters and algorithms used to select content in social media like Facebook.

Your friends have more friends than you do!

Steven Strogatz from Cornell is writing about the friendship paradox in social networks. Read this:

"You spend your time tweeting, friending, liking, poking, and in the few minutes left, cultivating friends in the flesh. Yet sadly, despite all your efforts, you probably have fewer friends than most of your friends have. But don’t despair — the same is true for almost all of us. Our friends are typically more popular than we are."

Don't believe it?  Read Steven's beautiful essay in the New York Times.

Steven has a lot more to say about (social) networks, and we will discuss some of his papers in class.