http://mashable.com/2014/05/14/yahoo-buys-blink/?utm_cid=mash-com-li-main-link

http://www.psfk.com/2014/05/applebees-private-chat-app.html#!M99ND A new app was released that allows anyone inside an Applebee’s restaurant to anonymously chat with one another. “The app itself may seem a little ridiculous, but it points to the very real possibility of restaurants – or any establishment, for that matter – creating their own location-based social networks, which they can take advantage of by using it to send promotional messages or create in-store communities, and they can even throw in perks and incentives for members to join in.”

The robust defenses that yeast cells have evolved to protect themselves from environmental threats hold lessons that can be used to design computer networks and analyze how secure they are, say computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University. Read More at: http://www.scientificcomputing.com/news/2014/05/molecular-neural-bacterial-networks-provide-security-insights

General Stanley McChrystal makes a case for sharing knowledge beyond the traditional need-to-know model and talks about the benefits of information dissemination. In his explanation of the significant culture shift from “who needs to know” to “who doesn’t know, and we need to tell, and tell them as quickly as we can” you can see the need for mapping knowledge networks and communication networks and understanding the connections between them. http://www.ted.com/talks/stanley_mcchrystal_the_military_case_for_sharing_knowledge

In the wake of the Arab Spring, the US sponsers social media to secure democratic change. http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/04/28/3431430/foreign-social-networks/

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/social-networking-technology-unlocks-mystery-chimp-civil-war-n103206 Notes of the Chimpanzees were taken over a four year period. The alpha male had died and some of the chimps followed a male named Humphrey, in the North. Others followed two brothers, Hugh and Charlie, in the South. One of the software pieces that helped figure out the social ties between chimps was UCINET. It showed that the chips decided who to stay with based upon the amount of time they had spent together before the alpha male, Leakey, passed away.

In the United Kingdom, Tower Hamlets Primary Care Trust allocated their 34 local practices into 8 geographical networks, equipped with a network manager, administrative assistant, and an educational budget to deliver care packages for diabetes, childhood immunization, chronic obstructive lung disease, and cardiovascular disease. Tower Hamlets PCT outpaced England and surrounding PCTs in the coming years in reducing deaths due to cardiovascular disease and increasing the amount of cholesterol prescriptions.

The gponline article can be found at: http://www.gponline.com/local-gp-practice-networks-save-lives-boost-qof-scores-study-finds/cardiovascular-system/myocardial-infarction-left-ventricular-dysfunction/article/1293427

The British Journal of General Practice paper can be found at: http://bjgp.org/content/64/622/e268.full.pdf+html

A short answer: less than $4/month. Data brokering is a multibillion dollar industry to collect, analyze and sell your personal information. Would you rather sell it by yourself? Tom Brewster @ BBC put his information on EBay including “one month’s worth of browsing history, posts from Facebook and Twitter accounts, three email addresses in frequent use and 10 photos.” It is a no-go. Only 31 viewers in 7 days. Later, he did manage to sell his data from Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts to DataCoup for $4 a month. It’s an interesting experiment on the data privacy issue. Read more at: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140509-how-much-is-your-facebook-worth

If you’ve ever been on a subway or public bus, you know the rules. Don’t make eye contact, stay as far away from other people as the space allows, and for the love of God, don’t talk to anyone. But what if the rules are wrong? Behavioral scientists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder approached commuters in a Chicago area train station and asked them to break the rules. Read about what happened here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/26/opinion/sunday/hello-stranger.html?smid=tw-nytimes

“We Heart It” has 30 million monthly active users. Most of them are teenage girls. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/05/07/30-million-people-use-this-social-network-and-youve-probably-never-heard-of-it/