7,440 research outputs found
Sport in a Credit Crunched Consumer Culture
This brief rapid response article suggests a few ways in which modern competitive sport and large-scale sport events have developed in line with the logic of (late) capitalist modernity. It considers the impact of the credit crunch for recent trends in sport and suggests that the sociological study of sport faces the same concerns as other sociological domains of interest during the current economic conditions whilst having its own specific public issues and private troubles to consider.Sport, Physical Activity, Credit Crunch, Capitalism, Consumer Culture
This Just In: Fake News Packs a Lot in Title, Uses Simpler, Repetitive Content in Text Body, More Similar to Satire than Real News
The problem of fake news has gained a lot of attention as it is claimed to
have had a significant impact on 2016 US Presidential Elections. Fake news is
not a new problem and its spread in social networks is well-studied. Often an
underlying assumption in fake news discussion is that it is written to look
like real news, fooling the reader who does not check for reliability of the
sources or the arguments in its content. Through a unique study of three data
sets and features that capture the style and the language of articles, we show
that this assumption is not true. Fake news in most cases is more similar to
satire than to real news, leading us to conclude that persuasion in fake news
is achieved through heuristics rather than the strength of arguments. We show
overall title structure and the use of proper nouns in titles are very
significant in differentiating fake from real. This leads us to conclude that
fake news is targeted for audiences who are not likely to read beyond titles
and is aimed at creating mental associations between entities and claims.Comment: Published at The 2nd International Workshop on News and Public
Opinion at ICWS
The Impact of Crowds on News Engagement: A Reddit Case Study
Today, users are reading the news through social platforms. These platforms
are built to facilitate crowd engagement, but not necessarily disseminate
useful news to inform the masses. Hence, the news that is highly engaged with
may not be the news that best informs. While predicting news popularity has
been well studied, it has not been studied in the context of crowd
manipulations. In this paper, we provide some preliminary results to a longer
term project on crowd and platform manipulations of news and news popularity.
In particular, we choose to study known features for predicting news popularity
and how those features may change on reddit.com, a social platform used
commonly for news aggregation. Along with this, we explore ways in which users
can alter the perception of news through changing the title of an article. We
find that news on reddit is predictable using previously studied sentiment and
content features and that posts with titles changed by reddit users tend to be
more popular than posts with the original article title.Comment: Published at The 2nd International Workshop on News and Public
Opinion at ICWSM 201
Extending emission line Doppler tomography ; mapping modulated line flux
Emission line Doppler tomography is a powerful tool that resolves the
accretion flow in binaries on micro-arcsecond scales using time-resolved
spectroscopy. I present an extension to Doppler tomography that relaxes one of
its fundamental axioms and permits the mapping of time-dependent emission
sources. Significant variability on the orbital period is a common
characteristic of the emission sources that are observed in the accretion flows
of cataclysmic variables and X-ray binaries. Modulation Doppler tomography maps
sources varying harmonically as a function of the orbital period through the
simultaneous reconstruction of three Doppler tomograms. One image describes the
average flux distribution like in standard tomography, while the two additional
images describe the variable component in terms of its sine and cosine
amplitudes. I describe the implementation of such an extension in the form of
the maximum entropy based fitting code MODMAP. Test reconstructions of
synthetic data illustrate that the technique is robust and well constrained.
Artifact free reconstructions of complex emission distributions can be achieved
under a wide range of signal to noise levels. An application of the technique
is illustrated by mapping the orbital modulations of the asymmetric accretion
disc emission in the dwarf nova IP Pegasi.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures; accepted for publication in MNRA
Different Spirals of Sameness: A Study of Content Sharing in Mainstream and Alternative Media
In this paper, we analyze content sharing between news sources in the
alternative and mainstream media using a dataset of 713K articles and 194
sources. We find that content sharing happens in tightly formed communities,
and these communities represent relatively homogeneous portions of the media
landscape. Through a mix-method analysis, we find several primary content
sharing behaviors. First, we find that the vast majority of shared articles are
only shared with similar news sources (i.e. same community). Second, we find
that despite these echo-chambers of sharing, specific sources, such as The
Drudge Report, mix content from both mainstream and conspiracy communities.
Third, we show that while these differing communities do not always share news
articles, they do report on the same events, but often with competing and
counter-narratives. Overall, we find that the news is homogeneous within
communities and diverse in between, creating different spirals of sameness.Comment: Published at ICWSM 201
NELA-GT-2018: A Large Multi-Labelled News Dataset for The Study of Misinformation in News Articles
In this paper, we present a dataset of 713k articles collected between
02/2018-11/2018. These articles are collected directly from 194 news and media
outlets including mainstream, hyper-partisan, and conspiracy sources. We
incorporate ground truth ratings of the sources from 8 different assessment
sites covering multiple dimensions of veracity, including reliability, bias,
transparency, adherence to journalistic standards, and consumer trust. The
NELA-GT-2018 dataset can be found at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/ULHLCB.Comment: Published at ICWSM 201
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