35,359 research outputs found

    Cascading Behavior in Large Blog Graphs

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    How do blogs cite and influence each other? How do such links evolve? Does the popularity of old blog posts drop exponentially with time? These are some of the questions that we address in this work. Our goal is to build a model that generates realistic cascades, so that it can help us with link prediction and outlier detection. Blogs (weblogs) have become an important medium of information because of their timely publication, ease of use, and wide availability. In fact, they often make headlines, by discussing and discovering evidence about political events and facts. Often blogs link to one another, creating a publicly available record of how information and influence spreads through an underlying social network. Aggregating links from several blog posts creates a directed graph which we analyze to discover the patterns of information propagation in blogspace, and thereby understand the underlying social network. Not only are blogs interesting on their own merit, but our analysis also sheds light on how rumors, viruses, and ideas propagate over social and computer networks. Here we report some surprising findings of the blog linking and information propagation structure, after we analyzed one of the largest available datasets, with 45,000 blogs and ~ 2.2 million blog-postings. Our analysis also sheds light on how rumors, viruses, and ideas propagate over social and computer networks. We also present a simple model that mimics the spread of information on the blogosphere, and produces information cascades very similar to those found in real life

    A data-driven analysis to question epidemic models for citation cascades on the blogosphere

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    Citation cascades in blog networks are often considered as traces of information spreading on this social medium. In this work, we question this point of view using both a structural and semantic analysis of five months activity of the most representative blogs of the french-speaking community.Statistical measures reveal that our dataset shares many features with those that can be found in the literature, suggesting the existence of an identical underlying process. However, a closer analysis of the post content indicates that the popular epidemic-like descriptions of cascades are misleading in this context.A basic model, taking only into account the behavior of bloggers and their restricted social network, accounts for several important statistical features of the data.These arguments support the idea that citations primary goal may not be information spreading on the blogosphere.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figures, to be published in ICWSM-13 proceeding

    Lenia and Expanded Universe

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    We report experimental extensions of Lenia, a continuous cellular automata family capable of producing lifelike self-organizing autonomous patterns. The rule of Lenia was generalized into higher dimensions, multiple kernels, and multiple channels. The final architecture approaches what can be seen as a recurrent convolutional neural network. Using semi-automatic search e.g. genetic algorithm, we discovered new phenomena like polyhedral symmetries, individuality, self-replication, emission, growth by ingestion, and saw the emergence of "virtual eukaryotes" that possess internal division of labor and type differentiation. We discuss the results in the contexts of biology, artificial life, and artificial intelligence.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, 1 table; submitted to ALIFE 2020 conferenc

    Social Software, Groups, and Governance

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    Formal groups play an important role in the law. Informal groups largely lie outside it. Should the law be more attentive to informal groups? The paper argues that this and related questions are appearing more frequently as a number of computer technologies, which I collect under the heading social software, increase the salience of groups. In turn, that salience raises important questions about both the significance and the benefits of informal groups. The paper suggests that there may be important social benefits associated with informal groups, and that the law should move towards a framework for encouraging and recognizing them. Such a framework may be organized along three dimensions by which groups arise and sustain themselves: regulating places, things, and stories

    Refashioning Style from the Outside-In: A Pakistani Diasporic Response

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    Pakistan’s traditionalists and modernists hold opposing political, religious, social and nationalist views creating a constant tension within the culture. This tension creates a fashion industry with two extremes, one side reflecting traditional influences and the other reflecting western trends. I address the tension by analysing the craft and context of traditional Pakistani men’s clothing and incorporating traditional construction techniques into garments that reflect aspects of both points of view. In a series of five looks, I extract from influences like Persian, North Indian, Afghani, Colonial and Neo-Colonial, to generate hybridized garments that offer a new perspective, blending traditional elements with the global vocabulary of fashion

    Raising and Rising Voices in Social Media - A Novel Methodological Approach in Studying Cyber-Collective Movements

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    Emerging cyber-collective social movements (CSMs) have frequently made headlines in the news. Despite their popularity, there is a lack of systematic methodologies to empirically study such movements in complex online environments. Using the Al-Huwaider online campaign as a case to illustrate our methodology, this contribution attempts to establish a rigorous and fundamental analysis that explains CSMs. We collected 150 blogs from 17 countries ranging between April 2003 and July 2010 with a special focus on Al-Huwaider’s campaigns capturing multi-cultural aspects for our analysis. Bearing the analysis upon three central tenets of individual, community, and transnational perspectives, we develop novel algorithms modeling CSMs by utilizing existing collective action theories and computational social network analysis. This article contributes a methodology to study the diffusion of issues in social networks and examines roles of influential community members. The proposed methodology provides a rigorous tool to understand the complexity and dynamics of CSMs. Such methodology also assists us in observing the transcending nature of CSMs with future possibilities for modeling transnational outreach. Our study addresses the lack of fundamental research on the formation of CSMs. This research contributes novel methodologies that can be applied to many settings including business, marketing and many others, beyond the exemplary setting chosen here for illustrative purposes
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