Social networks (SNs) are a traditional subject of study in social sciences [1–3] and may be tackled from many perspectives, including complexity and dynamics [4–6]. Recently, they have attracted much attention after their tremendous growth through the internet. A SN is a set of people, ‘actors’, with a pattern of interactions between them. In principle, there is no restriction
I’m going to do another science post, but this one I can tie back to advertising. As you may have heard, an extra second added to the official timekeeping record Saturday triggered several popular Internet services to crash over the weekend, including LinkedIn, Reddit and Quantas airline’s reservation system. Enough problems were documented around the
Amazingly, I’m not writing about science, but I’ll do my best to make this post as dry and uninteresting as my science posts. Anyway, one of the great tactics of guerrilla marketing is to buy keywords of competitors (or, in some cases, people whom you are trying to impress), but a case in Wisconsin may
Here’s another one of those headlines that captures attention for all the wrong reasons: “Japanese scientists have devised a mathematical formula that can predict the box office performance of a movie based on the level of related activity on social networks and other websites before and during its release.” I’ve had the opportunity to read
This is one of those things you may have heard whispers about – it’s not exactly a secret, but it’s not common knowledge either. So in case you haven’t heard, the way search engines work is about to change – dramatically. Last month, Google rolled out its “knowledge graph”, which serves up facts and services in response
Ah, physics humor. Anyway, it’s been too long since I made a pure science post. I’ve been trying to wean myself off, but when I saw Jon Cartwright’s article on physicsworld.com, I couldn’t help myself. According to the article, an international team of physicists has proposed a new device that could detect the presence of
