13,845 research outputs found
The Anatomy of a Scientific Rumor
The announcement of the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle at CERN will
be remembered as one of the milestones of the scientific endeavor of the 21st
century. In this paper we present a study of information spreading processes on
Twitter before, during and after the announcement of the discovery of a new
particle with the features of the elusive Higgs boson on 4th July 2012. We
report evidence for non-trivial spatio-temporal patterns in user activities at
individual and global level, such as tweeting, re-tweeting and replying to
existing tweets. We provide a possible explanation for the observed
time-varying dynamics of user activities during the spreading of this
scientific "rumor". We model the information spreading in the corresponding
network of individuals who posted a tweet related to the Higgs boson discovery.
Finally, we show that we are able to reproduce the global behavior of about
500,000 individuals with remarkable accuracy.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure
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Methods of Studying False Memory
The study of memory is one of those domains in psychology which has clear practical relevance. Think, for example, about people with Alzheimer’s disease. Devastating dysfunction experienced by these patients makes it abundantly evident that our memory constitutes an overarching and critical role in our daily life. However, in the study of memory, there is another memory phenomenon that also carries with it enormous theoretical and practical implications, namely, memory illusions. That is, people frequently claim that they remember details or even an entire event that never actually happened. These false memories can have serious consequences when they appear in the testimony of witness, victims, or suspects in legal cases (Howe & Knott, 2015; Otgaar, De Ruiter, Howe, Hoetmer, & van Reekum, in press). A person, for example, might falsely remember that he/she was sexually abused when he/she was a child, and this memory illusion might lead to false accusations that may result in wrongful convictions
False News On Social Media: A Data-Driven Survey
In the past few years, the research community has dedicated growing interest
to the issue of false news circulating on social networks. The widespread
attention on detecting and characterizing false news has been motivated by
considerable backlashes of this threat against the real world. As a matter of
fact, social media platforms exhibit peculiar characteristics, with respect to
traditional news outlets, which have been particularly favorable to the
proliferation of deceptive information. They also present unique challenges for
all kind of potential interventions on the subject. As this issue becomes of
global concern, it is also gaining more attention in academia. The aim of this
survey is to offer a comprehensive study on the recent advances in terms of
detection, characterization and mitigation of false news that propagate on
social media, as well as the challenges and the open questions that await
future research on the field. We use a data-driven approach, focusing on a
classification of the features that are used in each study to characterize
false information and on the datasets used for instructing classification
methods. At the end of the survey, we highlight emerging approaches that look
most promising for addressing false news
From Public Outrage to the Burst of Public Violence: An Epidemic-Like Model
This study extends classical models of spreading epidemics to describe the
phenomenon of contagious public outrage, which eventually leads to the spread
of violence following a disclosure of some unpopular political decisions and/or
activity. Accordingly, a mathematical model is proposed to simulate from the
start, the internal dynamics by which an external event is turned into internal
violence within a population. Five kinds of agents are considered: "Upset" (U),
"Violent" (V), "Sensitive" (S), "Immune" (I), and "Relaxed" (R), leading to a
set of ordinary differential equations, which in turn yield the dynamics of
spreading of each type of agents among the population. The process is stopped
with the deactivation of the associated issue. Conditions coinciding with a
twofold spreading of public violence are singled out. The results shed a new
light to understand terror activity and provides some hint on how to curb the
spreading of violence within population globally sensitive to specific world
issues. Recent world violent events are discussed.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figure
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