When I first heard about Amazon Lambda, I was skeptical. It was explained to me as basically "code in the cloud" and my immediate take was "why even bother putting code 'in the cloud'? Why would I take my code over to some flimsy little
Building a Network of Conversation Points Over the summer, I spent the summer working with a good friend Gilad Lotan as a data science intern at Betaworks. It was a good opportunity to see what people are building these days, and see if there would be any room for practical
This last week, I attended a several day seminar about combating online harassment, saw an academic friend get an award for her book on trolling from the Association of Internet Researchers (you should buy it), and I ended the week by seeing this cover from Time: There's something
Back to Rare Pepe Inc As you may remember from several previous posts, I like to put the things I'm building within a clear frame of reference. Specifically, I like to consider the now global, gigantic unicorn startup, Rare Pepe's Inc, a company that connects the
TL;DR: Monthly Active Users is a silly, desperate metric. When Instagram says they have 400 million monthly active users, they mean to say they have about 92 million garbage/bot accounts, about 100 million accounts that posted in the last month, and 300 million private accounts that we can’
Background About a week ago, someone mentioned me in a post on Facebook asking if I knew any way to determine if an account on Instagram with lots of followers is actually just followed by lots of bots and only a few real people - specifically they were interested in
It’s Wednesday, January 1, 2014. You’re the CEO of Rare Pepes, Inc. Your company thinks that Rare Pepes are important, and you want to help people give each other the gift of great Rares. You’ve launched your app in all of the app stores. You think about
Abstract: The growing abundance of trending stories and un-ignorable zeitgeist moments have turned viral stories into the holy grail of content creation. But what does virality really mean, and how can media companies and brands leverage the principles behind shareability and network cascades to build an audience? This panel brings
Background In a previous post, I talked about the laziness of the term "going viral". In it, I talked about how network scientists would investigate such a term, and provided some models that considered the effects of various definitions of information diffusion, and how they produce very divergent
Background 88 Years ago, two men tried to explain the conditions under which a catastrophic epidemic succeeds. The goal of their work was to try to provide a model that accurately described how diseases spread through populations of humans. The work came a decade after the largest pandemic in modern
Some Background Of the few apps I use, Pocket is probably the one I hold in high regard. Pre-pocket, my browser, like any pre-Pocket user, would get ridiculous. In research contexts, I'll use it from time to time to pin articles I'll likely need for a
Abstract Given two networks and some ties between those two networks, how many of those ties must be correctly assigned in order to ensure an accurate representation of the dynamics of rumor spreading across the networks? This paper aims to explore an empirically problematic situation: when joining two networks, resolving