Facebook Mocks Princeton Research

27-01-2014

Facebook debunks a recent article signed by Princeton researchers that predicts Facebook is soon going to reach its imminent demise. To make things rather funny, Mike Develin, a data scientist at Facebook, used the same Google search data to predict engagement trends and discovered that even the Princeton University was in danger of disappearing entirely. Now, Facebook isn't the only repository of human knowledge out there. A search of Google Scholar revealing a plethora of scholarly articles of great scholarliness turned up the following results, showing the percentage of articles matching the query "Princeton" by year,” Develin writes and attaches yet another graph. He goes on and points that since 2009, the percentage of Princeton papers in journals has dropped dramatically. “Sadly, this spells bad news for this Princeton entity, whose Google Trends search scores have been declining for the last several years,” the data scientist goes on. Of course, the entire thing is rather funny, but it does point out what happens when a research doesn’t use actual engagement trends. “We don’t really think Princeton or the world’s air supply is going anywhere soon. We love Princeton. As data scientists, we wanted to give a fun reminder that not all research is created equal and some methods of analysis lead to pretty crazy conclusions,” Develin ends the post where he covers a mock research performed by himself, Laada Adamic, and Sean Taylor.