Follows in brother’s footsteps: Scott Wu, an eighth-grader at Glasgow Middle, finished first in the 2011 Raytheon MATHCOUNTS National Competition, held last week in Washington, D.C. Wu beat out 222 outstanding junior high math students from across the U.S. to win the honor. For finishing first, he got an $8,000 scholarship and a trip to U.S. Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala. This continues a family tradition, Scott’s brother, Neal Wu, won the MATHCOUNTS competition in 2005.
Social media directs traffic: Facebook is influencing what news gets read online as people use the Internet’s most popular hangout to share and recommend content. That’s one of the key findings from a study on the flow of traffic to the Web’s 25 largest news destinations. The study was released today by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Facebook was responsible for 3% of traffic to the 21 news sites that allowed data to be tracked, according to the study’s co-author, Amy Mitchell. Five of the sites studied got 6% to 8% of their readers from Facebook. The referrals typically came from links posted by friends on Facebook’s social-networking site or from the ubiquitous “like” buttons, which Facebook encourages other websites to place alongside their content. The Facebook effect is small compared with Google’s clout. Google Inc.’s dominant search engine supplies about 30% of traffic to the top news sites, according to Pew.
