social – Bookmarks

An app that uses Instagram to find lobbyists.

This week, Justin Elliott wrote about new House Financial Services Committee chairman Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) attending a weekend getaway with banking industry officials.

One of the ways he found out who was at the getaway was by using the Instagram photo sharing service, which turned up a snowy snapshot taken by Len Wolfson, a lobbyist for the Mortgage Bankers Association (which had contributed to Hensarling’s PAC). Wolfson has since set his account to private.

The Instagram site has no search function, so finding shots like this can take a lot of digging. However, Instagram has an API with a “Media Search” endpoint that returns data both by timeframe and distance from a certain latitude and longitude — a perfect way to see who’s at a certain place at a certain time.

Stanford Online – CS224W – Social and Information Network Analysis

Stanford Online – CS224W – Social and Information Network Analysis.

This course will focus on how to analyze the structure and dynamics of large networks, how to model links, and how design algorithms that work with such large networks.

Girl Geeks and Boy Kings | Dissent Magazine

“What Facebook has accomplished, by Losse’s account, isn’t the erosion of the boundary between public life and private life, but our divisions between work and pleasure. “