Phil 9.28.19

Politics and computational sociology conference Left 6:45, got there 9:30. Left 9:00-ish, arrived home 10:00

  • Late – it took 2.75 hours to get there. I hope I can find my car…
  • NETWORKS
  • Joseph Shaheen – Target Policy making under the frame of dark networks
    • What is a dark neworks framewook?
    • Oh, no real definition. There are light and gray ones too
    • Centrality is important
    • @josephshaheen
  • Sarah Shugars – The structure of reasoning, inferring conceptual networks
    • What is public opinion – an aggregation of preferences
    • Build a model of individual reasoning
    • What are the nodes – concepts
    • What are the edges – connections between concepts
    • Portrait divergence?
    • @shugars
  • Bruce Desmarais – Network Event History Analysis
    • Bolasso model constant lasso estimatino using bootstrap – sounds like principal component analysis
    • Policy diffusion over time. How do they know that the policies are the same
  • NEWS
  • Jin Woo Kim – The distorting prism of social media
    • Frequent online commenters are unrepresentative of the general public – therefore, more toxic. Feedback loop of likes and toxicity
    • Google Perspective API?
  • Yujin Kim – Polarization in online uncivil comments
    • Lingustic features – partisan language, in-out group pronouns predict incivility?
    • This study used internal NYT data where comments were rejected by the editors? And what does that mean?
  • Maurits van der Ween – Measuring the European public sphere across multiple languages
    • Measure discourse across multiple language over time
    • European identity is maginal and not developing much
    • Imagined Community – Anderson
    • What does it mean to be tightly linked by print?
    • NN translation
    • Topic modeling
  • Pavel Oleinikpc – Finding duplicate stories in local news
    • National news promote polarization due to suppression of local news
    • Need to discriminate between true local news from repackaged national segments
    • Uses closed-caption text
    • Google’s free transcription after 60 minutes per month
    • Normally, teleprompter text is fed into closed caption  unless the text is spontaneous, at which point, the quality drops greatly
    • Locality sensitive hashing?
  • JOURNALISM
  • Sean Fisher – Locating the local
    • Selective exposure – what environmental constraints on news exposure
    • Local news disappear and politics becomes nationalized
    • Will affect how the issue is perceived
    • 3,000 county seats in the US
    • Northeastern developed search terms?
    • No spatial correlations
    • Regression for multi factors, but local searches = local results, national search = national results
  • Andy Guess – Media Literacy <—– This guy
    • WhatsApp fueling fake news in India
    • Calls for media literacy to counter credulous thinking
    • Facebook “news tip” in 2017? Also on WhatsApp.
    • Do these work?
  • Allessandro Vechchiato – Algorithmic bias
    • News delivery Google, social, app, even newspapers is personalized
    • news value vs. entertainment value
    • How bias interacts with self-selection
    • Built news aggregator app
      • Delivers two different biased news feed
      • measure user readership behavior online
    • Bias between hard and soft news
    • Uses patient preferred samples, where users select their preferred bias, and a randomized population to compare
    • Media diets can be manipulated by algorithms that can overcome individual tastes
  • David Lazer – Searching for the truth… <- contact about LMN
    • How much do people access fake news relative to regular news
    • Fake news list Grinberg et al (2019) [repeated violaters of fact checkers]
    • News is defined using a variety of manual and automated methods
  • ATTITUDES AND BELIEF
  • Sarah Dreier – Religiosity and public policy in congress
  • Eric Dunford – Gender Norms and Violent Behavior in a virtual world <
    • Uses Eve Online
    • Six million players
    • Open sandbox – very little restriction on users. Money laundering is a problem
    • 500,000 players
    • Could be used to find nomad/flock/stampede?
  • Nicolas Velasquez – Ecologies of Online Contention: From Hate to Health
    • There is some mapping in physical and network space
    • Movement from untrusted groups to trusted groups in times of uncertainty
    • Policy 4  -fracture groups into smaller groups based on subsumed differences. Fascist vs. racial supremacist
  • Alexandra Siegal – Can Celebrities reduce prejudice? The effect of Mohamed Salah on Islamophobic Attitudes and Behaviors
    • matrix completion method to predict behavior based on surrounding counties. May be useful for satellite diagnosis as well
  • POSTERS