svsaraf

What site was used for searching the picture of the camera?

Recent Stanford alum here. I think it's difficult to parse out exactly why CS is becoming popular at Stanford now.

I would argue that the principal reason for the popularity of CS is because of the amazing teaching in the introductory courses, not the recent tech acquisitions or news coming from Silicon Valley.

Very few departments at Stanford put in the kind of effort to bring students along that I've seen in computer science (most prominently, the use of an army of qualified undegraduate students to serve as TAs for the introductory courses). Almost every engineering student I know has taken an intro CS course, and an easy majority of everyone else has at least attempted to do so as well. They're fun, easy, and accessible.

I would be interested to see the same sort of effort put into say, introductory physics or chemistry. The now-second most popular major, Human Biology, also represents a very big effort to reach out to students.

I should have been more clear. Keith seems to indicate that views from other users don't affect your first_degree.php. I disagree, here was my process:

I built a dummy account in incognito that is friends with with my regularly used profile (A) and a profile owned by a friend of mine (B). All friend requests were made from A & B TO the dummy. I then checked the first_degree.php of the dummy, as expected, me and my friend were first. Perhaps not surprisingly, the next people on the list were the intersection of A & B 's friend lists.

Now I logged back in to A, knowing that B wasn't searching for the dummy, and searched for the dummy a few times a day for a couple days (I learned about first_degree a couple weeks ago).

Checking the dummy's first_degree showed that friends passed A & B had more of A's friends.

My guess is that Keith is right in general. I might not be able to move myself up the ladder of the dummy, but I can change the Facebook Social Graph by changing my viewing behavior. The machine generated list uses that graph to determine first_degree. Even if it's indirect, it means first_degree can be influenced by searches of others. Or I'm wrong!

As some have mentioned, doing a couple of tests with dummy accounts seems to indicate that a friend visiting your page can influence your first_degree.php, which would explain why there are a few people who you never stalk who happen to be on your list.