Facebook and Princeton University are embroiled in what will inevitably be the nerdiest standoff in history.

A few Princeton epidemiologists got together, did some research, and published a paper on a very dubious premise: that if you look at Facebook as an infectious disease, then 80% of its hardcore users may well have “recovered” and abandoned the service by 2018.

Which is a bit of an odd way of looking at things – and the people at Facebook didn’t take to it too well.

In retaliation, Facebook have published their very own study, which shows that Princeton will have no undergraduate students left by 2021.

Facebook data scientist, Mike Develin, wrote:

Using the same robust methodology featured in the paper, we attempted to find out more about this ‘Princeton University. You won’t believe what we found!

In Facebook’s revenge-study, Develin found a five-year-long decline in published journal articles from Princeton academics, and a similar drop in Google Trends results for the university.

By assimilating and imposing the Google trends on top of undergraduate application numbers, he was able to conclude that “future generations will only be able to imagine this now-rubble institution.”

But eventually, Facebook dropped the act.

We love Princeton … we wanted to give a fun reminder that not all research is created equal — and some methods of analysis lead to pretty crazy conclusions.

[Source : Mashable]