Stuff Harvard, MIT, Stanford & Caltech People Like

Re:Stuff Harvard, MIT, Stanford & Caltech People Like by dm8 on Wednesday August 01, 2012 @03:09AM (#4321566)

Berkeley, sadly, is perhaps too large and diverse for an overall characterization.

So true. As a Cal alum, I think he is spot on here. :-)

I pulled about 400 followers from each school, and added a couple filters, to try to ensure that followers were actual attendees of the schools rather than general people simply interested in them

How did he ensure followers were actual attendees of the schools programmatically? It would be really hard to find out this type of information. And can be considered as borderline creepiness in some cases.

EDIT: He also works as a data scientist at Twitter. So I'm sure he has access to lot more internal data rather some sort of mashup between Twitter, FB, LinkedIn APIs.

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Re:Stuff Harvard, MIT, Stanford & Caltech People Like by aggie on Wednesday August 01, 2012 @03:55AM (#4321668)

How did he ensure followers were actual attendees of the schools programmatically?

He mentions in the comments "I basically just checked that they didn't follow any other schools (from a small list). It's certainly not the greatest filter, but it did seem to work for a small number of people I hand-checked."

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Re:Stuff Harvard, MIT, Stanford & Caltech People Like by oraj on Wednesday August 01, 2012 @03:11AM (#4321573)

400 people might not be a lot to go through if you have lots of spare time on your hands.

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