761 research outputs found
Measuring Online Social Bubbles
Social media have quickly become a prevalent channel to access information,
spread ideas, and influence opinions. However, it has been suggested that
social and algorithmic filtering may cause exposure to less diverse points of
view, and even foster polarization and misinformation. Here we explore and
validate this hypothesis quantitatively for the first time, at the collective
and individual levels, by mining three massive datasets of web traffic, search
logs, and Twitter posts. Our analysis shows that collectively, people access
information from a significantly narrower spectrum of sources through social
media and email, compared to search. The significance of this finding for
individual exposure is revealed by investigating the relationship between the
diversity of information sources experienced by users at the collective and
individual level. There is a strong correlation between collective and
individual diversity, supporting the notion that when we use social media we
find ourselves inside "social bubbles". Our results could lead to a deeper
understanding of how technology biases our exposure to new information
Automatic instantiation of abstract tests to specific configurations for large critical control systems
Computer-based control systems have grown in size, complexity, distribution and criticality. In this paper
a methodology is presented to perform an ‘abstract testing’ of such large control systems in an efficient
way: an abstract test is specified directly from system functional requirements and has to be instantiated
in more test runs to cover a specific configuration, comprising any number of control entities (sensors,
actuators and logic processes). Such a process is usually performed by hand for each installation of
the control system, requiring a considerable time effort and being an error-prone verification activity.
To automate a safe passage from abstract tests, related to the so-called generic software application, to
any specific installation, an algorithm is provided, starting from a reference architecture and a statebased
behavioural model of the control software. The presented approach has been applied to a railway
interlocking system, demonstrating its feasibility and effectiveness in several years of testing experience
An exactly solvable model for a beta-hairpin with random interactions
I investigate a disordered version of a simplified model of protein folding,
with binary degrees of freedom, applied to an ideal beta-hairpin structure.
Disorder is introduced by assuming that the contact energies are independent
and identically distributed random variables. The equilibrium free-energy of
the model is studied, performing the exact calculation of its quenched value
and proving the self-averaging feature.Comment: 9 page
The egalitarian effect of search engines
Search engines have become key media for our scientific, economic, and social
activities by enabling people to access information on the Web in spite of its
size and complexity. On the down side, search engines bias the traffic of users
according to their page-ranking strategies, and some have argued that they
create a vicious cycle that amplifies the dominance of established and already
popular sites. We show that, contrary to these prior claims and our own
intuition, the use of search engines actually has an egalitarian effect. We
reconcile theoretical arguments with empirical evidence showing that the
combination of retrieval by search engines and search behavior by users
mitigates the attraction of popular pages, directing more traffic toward less
popular sites, even in comparison to what would be expected from users randomly
surfing the Web.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, 2 appendices. The final version of this e-print
has been published on the Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 103(34), 12684-12689
(2006), http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/103/34/1268
Competition among memes in a world with limited attention
The wide adoption of social media has increased the competition among ideas for our finite attention. We employ a parsimonious agent-based model to study whether such a competition may affect the popularity of different memes, the diversity of information we are exposed to, and the fading of our collective interests for specific topics. Agents share messages on a social network but can only pay attention to a portion of the information they receive. In the emerging dynamics of information diffusion, a few memes go viral while most do not. The predictions of our model are consistent with empirical data from Twitter, a popular microblogging platform. Surprisingly, we can explain the massive heterogeneity in the popularity and persistence of memes as deriving from a combination of the competition for our limited attention and the structure of the social network, without the need to assume different intrinsic values among ideas
Short period attractors and non-ergodic behavior in the deterministic fixed energy sandpile model
We study the asymptotic behaviour of the Bak, Tang, Wiesenfeld sandpile
automata as a closed system with fixed energy.
We explore the full range of energies characterizing the active phase. The
model exhibits strong non-ergodic features by settling into limit-cycles whose
period depends on the energy and initial conditions. The asymptotic activity
(topplings density) shows, as a function of energy density , a
devil's staircase behaviour defining a symmetric energy interval-set over which
also the period lengths remain constant. The properties of -
phase diagram can be traced back to the basic symmetries underlying the model's
dynamics.Comment: EPL-style, 7 pages, 3 eps figures, revised versio
Friction Interventions to Curb the Spread of Misinformation on Social Media
Social media has enabled the spread of information at unprecedented speeds
and scales, and with it the proliferation of high-engagement, low-quality
content. *Friction* -- behavioral design measures that make the sharing of
content more cumbersome -- might be a way to raise the quality of what is
spread online. Here, we study the effects of friction with and without
quality-recognition learning. Experiments from an agent-based model suggest
that friction alone decreases the number of posts without improving their
quality. A small amount of friction combined with learning, however, increases
the average quality of posts significantly. Based on this preliminary evidence,
we propose a friction intervention with a learning component about the
platform's community standards, to be tested via a field experiment. The
proposed intervention would have minimal effects on engagement and may easily
be deployed at scale
Characterizing and modeling the dynamics of online popularity
Online popularity has enormous impact on opinions, culture, policy, and
profits. We provide a quantitative, large scale, temporal analysis of the
dynamics of online content popularity in two massive model systems, the
Wikipedia and an entire country's Web space. We find that the dynamics of
popularity are characterized by bursts, displaying characteristic features of
critical systems such as fat-tailed distributions of magnitude and inter-event
time. We propose a minimal model combining the classic preferential popularity
increase mechanism with the occurrence of random popularity shifts due to
exogenous factors. The model recovers the critical features observed in the
empirical analysis of the systems analyzed here, highlighting the key factors
needed in the description of popularity dynamics.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. Modeling part detailed. Final version published
in Physical Review Letter
Transfer matrix solution of the Wako-Sait\^o-Mu\~noz-Eaton model augmented by arbitrary short range interactions
The Wako-Sait{\^o}-Mu\~noz-Eaton (WSME) model, initially introduced in the
theory of protein folding, has also been used in modeling the RNA folding and
some epitaxial phenomena. The advantage of this model is that it admits exact
solution in the general inhomogeneous case (Bruscolini and Pelizzola, 2002)
which facilitates the study of realistic systems. However, a shortcoming of the
model is that it accounts only for interactions within continuous stretches of
native bonds or atomic chains while neglecting interstretch (interchain)
interactions. But due to the biopolymer (atomic chain) flexibility, the
monomers (atoms) separated by several non-native bonds along the sequence can
become closely spaced. This produces their strong interaction. The inclusion of
non-WSME interactions into the model makes the model more realistic and
improves its performance. In this study we add arbitrary interactions of finite
range and solve the new model by means of the transfer matrix technique. We can
therefore exactly account for the interactions which in proteomics are
classified as medium- and moderately long-range ones.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure
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