7:00 – 5:00 ASRC MKT

• Overview (Research Browser-ish) and their blog. Here it is working with the serendipity corpus: 
• Google is doing a lot to map art with ML, but it lacks a sense of meaning
• Found Visualization of Topic-Sentiment Dynamics in Crowdfunding Projects. Put it in the phase 2 lit review
• It shouldn’t be called the Polarization Game. Need a title. Maybe something from myth?
• Continuing with Suppressing the Search Engine Manipulation Effect
  • In the discussion of Order effects, they talk about primacy effects of lists. A quick Scholar search didn’t turn up any studies of primacy effects of maps (like maybe preference for the local area), but some poking around in this space turned up this: Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics
• Back to game design. Having a problem with integrating PHPUnit and RedbeanPHP. Getting this message when I have two or more tests to run: RedBeanPHP\RedException : A database has already been specified for this key.
  • The answer was to add –process-isolation to the TestRunner args:
  • BTW, clicking on the blue “info” box at the right of the field will bring up the args allowed
  • I went looking for a way to #ifdef some basic exercising code that I like to add at the bottom of php files. Couldn’t find anything, but I figured out this pattern for file SomeClass.php:

    class SomeClass
    {
        public function doStuff(){echo "stuff done!;}
    }
    
    if(strpos($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'], "SomeClass.php" )){
        printf("running from %s\n", $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']);
        $sc = new SomeClass();
        $sc->doStuff();
    }

  • This will only run if the file containing the code is executed directly. It won’t run when called by phpUNIT, for example

4:00 – 4:30

• Chat with Stan about ML to recognize signal outliers. We talked about GAs for a while, and I sent him Zhenping’s ppt.

7:00 – 5:00 ASRC MKT

• Suppressing the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME)
  • Robert Epstein, (American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology) Epstein and Robertson have found in multiple studies that search rankings that favor a political candidate drive the votes of undecided voters toward that candidate, an effect they call SEME (“seem”), the Search Engine Manipulation Effect.
  • Ronald Robertson (Northeastern University) I design experiments and technologies to explore the ways in which online platforms can influence the attitudes, beliefs, and behavior of individuals and groups. Currently, I am a PhD student in the world’s first Network Science PhD program at Northeastern University and am advised by Christo Wilson and David Lazer.
  • David Lazer (Northeastern University) professor of political science and computer and information science and the co-director of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks
    • Who Wants to Deliberate – and Why?
  • Christo Wilson (Northeastern University) Assistant Professor in the College of Computer and Information Science atNortheastern University. I am a member of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute and the Director of the BS in Cybersecurity Program in the College.
  • Abstract: A recent series of experiments demonstrated that introducing ranking bias to election-related search engine results can have a strong and undetectable influence on the preferences of undecided voters. This phenomenon, called the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME), exerts influence largely through order effects that are enhanced in a digital context. We present data from three new experiments involving 3,600 subjects in 39 countries in which we replicate SEME and test design interventions for suppressing the effect. In the replication, voting preferences shifted by 39.0%, a number almost identical to the shift found in a previously published experiment (37.1%). Alerting users to the ranking bias reduced the shift to 22.1%, and more detailed alerts reduced it to 13.8%. Users’ browsing behaviors were also significantly altered by the alerts, with more clicks and time going to lower-ranked search results. Although bias alerts were effective in suppressing SEME, we found that SEME could be completely eliminated only by alternating search results – in effect, with an equal-time rule. We propose a browser extension capable of deploying bias alerts in real-time and speculate that SEME might be impacting a wide range of decision-making, not just voting, in which case search engines might need to be strictly regulated.
• The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections
• Quantifying search bias: Investigating sources of bias for political searches in social media
  • From the Abstract: It is important to distinguish between the bias that arises from the data that serves as the input to the ranking system and the bias that arises from the ranking system itself. In this paper, we propose a framework to quantify these distinct biases and apply this framework to politics-related queries on Twitter.
• Making Sense of Conflicting Science Information: Exploring Bias in the Search Engine Result Page
  • Abstract: Currently, there is widespread media coverage about the problems with ‘fake news’ that appears in social media, but the effects of biased information that appears in search engine results is also increasing. The authors argue that the search engine results page (SERP) exposes three important types of bias: source bias, algorithmic bias, and cognitive bias. To explore the relationship between these three types of bias, we conducted a mixed methods study with sixty participants (plus fourteen in a pilot to make a total of seventy-four participants). Within a library setting, participants were provided with mock search engine pages that presented order-controlled sources on a science controversy. Participants were then asked to rank the sources’ usefulness and then summarize the controversy. We found that participants ranked the usefulness of sources depending on its presentation within a SERP. In turn, this also influenced how the participants summarized the topic. We attribute the differences in the participants’ writings to the cognitive biases that affect a user’s judgment when selecting sources on a SERP. We identify four main cognitive biases that a SERP can evoke in students: Priming, Anchoring, Framing, and the Availability Heuristic. While policing information quality is a quixotic task, changes can be made to both SERPs and a user’s decision-making when selecting sources. As bias emerges both on the system side and the user side of search, we suggest a two-fold solution is required to address these challenges.
• The Network Structure of Exploration and Exploitation
  • David Lazer (Northeastern University)
  • Abstract: Whether as team members brainstorming or cultures experimenting with new technologies, problem solvers communicate and share ideas. This paper examines how the structure of communication networks among actors can affect system-level performance. We present an agent-based computer simulation model of information sharing in which the less successful emulate the more successful. Results suggest that when agents are dealing with a complex problem, the more efficient the network at disseminating information, the better the short-run but the lower the long-run performance of the system. The dynamic underlying this result is that an inefficient network maintains diversity in the system and is thus better for exploration than an efficient network, supporting a more thorough search for solutions in the long run. For intermediate time frames, there is an inverted-U relationship between connectedness and performance, in which both poorly and well-connected systems perform badly, and moderately connected systems perform best. This curvilinear relationship between connectivity and group performance can be seen in several diverse instances of organizational and social behavior.
• Polarization Game
  • Might as well do this right, so…. Unit Testing Tutorial Part I: Introduction to PHPUnit
• Fika – Not an official one, so Wanajanat, Julie, May(?) and I went over CM and LMN

7:00 – 4:30 ASRC MKT

• Asked Wayne yesterday if I could have a desk in the HCC lab, since I’m going to Columbia for no good reason these days.
  • In support of this, got my laptop updated with code bases, PHP, database, etc.
• Working on getting up the motivation to start combining the db and code pieces. So as a way of avoiding this, tweaked the CHIIR DC submission by using part of my abstract from the HCIC poster and using that browser mockup instead of the one that I put together the other day. I’m conflicted in that it has a word cloud, but I could argue that a word cloud is a reasonable boundary object for someone glancing through the papers and looking at the pictures. I also fixed the populations chart so that the terms line up with the simulation screenshots. 
• The RedBeanPHP file didn’t make it into subversion, so I downloaded it at home, verified that everything runs and committed it in the right place.
• Ok, I think the plan will be to write a test harness that produces a threaded discussion with multiple users and votes for a solution that writes into the DB and is then able to retrieve the thread. To do that I’m going to need one-to-many and many-to-one, so I need to read more of the RedBeanPHP docs
  • Note that the name of the list has to match the type of beans it contains. So, the ‘ownProductList’ contains beans of type ‘product‘, a pageList contains pages, an ‘ownCarList’ contains ‘cars‘ and so on. This convention is used to create the database mapping, in case of the shop, every product record will get a ‘shop_id’field.
  • Ok, I think this is what I want to do:

    <?php
    /**
     * Created by IntelliJ IDEA.
     * Date: 10/20/2017
     * Time: 3:10 PM
     */
    require_once 'libs/rb.php';
    R::setup( 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=polarizationgameone', 'root', 'postgres' );
    R::fancyDebug(TRUE);
    
    // create or get the scenarios
    $CREATE_SCENARIOS = TRUE;
    
    if(isset($CREATE_SCENARIOS)){
        echo "CREATE_SCENARIOS defined\n";
    }else{
        echo "CREATE_SCENARIOS not defined\n";
    }
    
    // create or get a random number of users between $minPlayers and $maxPlayers
    $CREATE_PLAYERS = NULL;
    $minPlayers = 3;
    $maxPlayers = 5;
    $numPlayers = rand($minPlayers, $maxPlayers);
    if(isset($CREATE_PLAYERS)){
        echo "CREATE_PLAYERS defined\n";
    }else{
        echo "CREATE_PLAYERS not defined\n";
    }
    
    // create a game using the scenarios and the players
    
    // for $numTurns, randomly choose a player to add a chat message
    $minTurns = 10;
    $maxTurns = 20;
    $numTurns = rand($minTurns, $maxTurns);
    for ($t = 0; $t < $numTurns; $t++){
        // connect to a previous statement or set thread_parent to zero
        // write the statment
        // maybe vote for a message?. At the end, some games need to have agreement.
        // a player changing votes pulls their vote from any previous message.
        // produce a list of posts with votes. It'll be something between 0 and $numPlayers
        // if a post has $numPlayers votes, its won. Allocate points to all players and some more to the 
        //  player with the winning post
        
        // print the status of this turn
        echo "$t\n";
    }
    
    // reconstruct the game from the database to compare and validate
    
    
    R::close();

7:00 – 2:00 ASRC MKT

• Read this in Understanding Ignorance last night in the section The Ethics of Belief: Beliefs are factive; they aspire to truth. It would he absurd, as the British philosopher Moore observed, to say “It is raining, but I don’t believe it is raining.” To believe is to take to be true. Beliefs may be false, however, and they may be false without being morally wrong. Yet there are beliefs we judge to be morally wrong.
• Thinking about the relationship of trust and awareness. Assume there is some function f() that maps trust and awareness to the same scale of [0.0, 1.0] (LaTex):
  • 
  • Where behavior is near 1.0, behavior is healthy, since awareness and trust are aligned. You can have low awareness and low trust or high awareness and high trust.
  • As trust approaches zero, there is a tendency towards skepticism. As trust approaches 1.0, there is a tendency towards gullibility.
  • As awareness approaches 1.0, there is also a tendency towards skepticism. But if awareness nears zero while trust is any larger value, behavior approaches infinity, which is the stampede state.
  • I think I can incorporate this into the polarization model

• Set up MySQL and the polarizationgameone database. Ooops, the view is slightly out of date. Need to commit the last changes!
• Starting with RedBeanPHP tutorials.
• Pretty cool. This creates an entry in the db:

  R::setup( 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=polarizationgameone', 'xxx', 'yyy' );
  
  $book = R::dispense( 'book' );
  $book->title = 'Learn to Program2';
  $book->rating = 20;
  $book->price = 29.99;
  
  $id = R::store($book);

• This finds and prints:

  $books = R::find( 'book' );
  
  foreach ($books as $b){
      printf("book[%d] title = %s, price = %.2f, rating = %d\n",
          $b->id, $b['title'], $b['price'], $b['rating']);
  }

• find() has a second argument that is SQL, so you can do things like $book  = R::find( ‘book’, ‘ rating > 4 ‘). There is a third argument for bound values, e.g. $books = R::find( ‘book’, ‘ title LIKE ? ‘, [ ‘Learn to%’ ] ).
• find works with views as well, but there has to be an integer ‘id’ field

2:00 – 4:30 IRAD? Working on A2P material

7:00 – 3:30 ASRC MKT

• Gotta renew the IRB. For some reason I’m not using my school account for this…
  • Done! Good through 17-Oct-2022
• Looking for a nice way to have PHP interface with the database using object relational mapping (ORM). Looking at RedBeanPHP and FatFreeFramework. I think I’m going to start with RedBean. It looks like something I might have written.
• Spent some time with Aaron walking through what’s important in getting into the UMBC HCC MS program
• Found this conference that might be good to go to, though it sounds intimidating as hell
  • 6th International Conference on Learning Representations
  • April 30 – May 3, 2018
  • Vancouver Convention Center, Vancouver, BC, Canada
  • The performance of machine learning methods is heavily dependent on the choice of data representation (or features) on which they are applied. The rapidly developing field of deep learning is concerned with questions surrounding how we can best learn meaningful and useful representations of data. We take a broad view of the field and include topics such as feature learning, metric learning, compositional modeling, structured prediction, reinforcement learning, and issues regarding large-scale learning and non-convex optimization. The range of domains to which these techniques apply is also very broad, from vision to speech recognition, text understanding, gaming, music, etc.

6:30 – 11:30 ASRC MKT

• Google’s AI can create better machine-learning code than the researchers who made it, based on this from Google’s research blog: Using Machine Learning to Explore Neural Network Architecture
• http://alife2018.alife.org/, http://alife.org/conferences-other-future
• Working on review – done!
• What examiners do: what thesis students should
  know The advice for thesis students is: first, treat your examiners as friends who want you to pass, and write calmly without agonizing about getting it perfect. Aim to make your thesis reader-friendly, and do a thorough proofread to remove distracting errors. Identify the field(s) you will contribute to, and make your thesis interesting and convincing for examiners from this field. Write a draft, get feedback and use this to improve your thesis. Help your examiners to follow your train of thought: explain what you are doing and why, especially if your thesis differs from what they would expect. Convince your examiners that you have a sound interpretation of the literature, an important topic and an appropriate method, and that your conclusions make a significant, publishable contribution to your field. When you have submitted, expect lots of examiner comments, most of which can help you improve.
  • Thesis examiners tend to:
    (1) be broadly consistent
    (2) expect a thesis to pass
    (3) judge a thesis by the end of the first or second chapter
    (4) read a thesis as an academic reader and as a normal reader
    (5) be irritated and distracted by presentation errors
    (6) favor a coherent thesis
    (7) favor a thesis that engages with the literature
    (8) favour a thesis with a convincing approach
    (9) favour a thesis that engages with the findings
    (10) require a thesis to be publishable
    (11) give summative and formative feedback

6:30 – 5:00 ASRC MKT

• Stochastic Modeling And Analytics In Healthcare Delivery Systems: This book focuses on the research and best practices in healthcare engineering and technology assessment. With contributions from researchers in the fields of healthcare system stochastic modeling, simulation, optimization and management
• I just realized that the Research Browser is Augmented Data Discovery, and is about to 2-3 years out from peak hype. Something to think about while writing proposals and pitching to management. 
• Starting to look through Risk Taking to see if I can find scenarios
  • Add fields for user
    • Age – done
    • Gender – done
    • Game name (change by game so that a small number of players don’t recognize each other easily over repeated games
  • Something to think about is whether one scenario would be to create a scenario which is then used in the game.
  • Found it! Appendix E! Aaaaaaaaaaaand Adobe Acrobat is busted so I can’t scan it. Reinstalling. And it’s better, but still busted. Scanned in Photoshop, which works just fine
• Tweaking CorpusManger so that the TF-IDF output has counts rather than the floating point value to see if that produces better results in search. This is from the serendipity corpus:
  • TF-IDF raw: information serendipity system encounter discovery serendipitous visualization 
  • TF-IDF normalized: information encounter serendipity system datum discovery serendipitous
  • BOW raw: information serendipity system encounter serendipitous discovery result
  • BOW normalized: visualization computer information search system serendipity encounter
  • That works much better with the wordrank algorithm. Keeping it.
• Fika, talked a little about CM and LMN. Wajanat and Julie are interested. Maybe as a way of quantitatively ranking the centrality of concepts and people in a qualitative study.

orco Mutagenesis Causes Loss of Antennal Lobe Glomeruli and Impaired Social Behavior in Ants

• An example of how group behavior patterns reveal a mediated communication problem – Life inside ant colonies is orchestrated with diverse pheromones, but it is not clear how ants perceive these social signals. It has been proposed that pheromone perception in ants evolved via expansions in the numbers of odorant receptors (ORs) and antennal lobe glomeruli. Here, we generate the first mutant lines in the clonal raider ant, Ooceraea biroi, by disrupting orco, a gene required for the function of all ORs. We find that orco mutants exhibit severe deficiencies in social behavior and fitness, suggesting they are unable to perceive pheromones. Surprisingly, unlike in Drosophila melanogaster, orco mutant ants also lack most of the ∼500 antennal lobe glomeruli found in wild-type ants. These results illustrate that ORs are essential for ant social organization and raise the possibility that, similar to mammals, receptor function is required for the development and/or maintenance of the highly complex olfactory processing areas in the ant brain
• 
• Some random thoughts while riding.
  • The difference between a ‘large group’ and a ‘small group’ is the threshold at which multiple incremental interactions can happen between all members.
    • A group that has a fully connected trust network is fundamentally different from a group that doesn’t. A ‘large group’ requires transitive trust.
      • From HBR: It’s not just biases inside our heads that skew our judgment. We often rely on trusted third parties to verify the character or reliability of other people. These third parties, in effect, help us “roll over” our positive expectations from one known and trusted party to another who is less known and trusted. In such situations, trust becomes, quite literally, transitive. Unfortunately, as the Bernie Madoff case illustrates, transitive trust can lull people into a false sense of security. The evidence suggests that Madoff was a master at cultivating and exploiting social connections. One of his hunting grounds was the Orthodox Jewish community, a tight-knit social group.
    • This can be affected by communications technology in many ways, which the above study points to.
    • Again, the relationship between awareness and trust becomes an issue.

7:15 – 8:15, 1:00 – 4:00 ASRC MKT 9:00 – 1:00 IRAD

• IRAD – Finished with the CSEs and documented everything
• The Credibility Indicators Working Group
• Social Networks Journal
• Found out about the IEEE Vis conference, which consists of VAST, INFOVIS, and SCIVIS. There were a slew of mapping related papers that I found for phase 2 of the PolarizationGame study:
  • A Visual Analytics Framework for Identifying Topic Drivers in Media Events
  • ConceptVector: Text Visual Analytics via Interactive Lexicon Building using Word Embedding [VIS17 Preview] with Jaegul Choo (UTOPIAN) and Nicholas Diakopoulos (Ex UMD)
  • Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data
  • PhenoLines: Phenotype Comparison Visualizations for Disease Subtyping via Topic Models
  • SOMFlow: Guided Exploratory Cluster Analysis with Self-Organizing Maps and Analytic Provenance
  • Visual Exploration of Semantic Relationships in Neural Word Embeddings
  • Visualizing Nonlinear Narratives with Story Curves [YouTube]
• Running these through the LMN tool and normalizing docs produces visualization narrative story visual topic analysis concept. Running that through Scholar turns up  
  • A Comparison between Concept Maps, Mind Maps, Conceptual Diagrams, and Visual Metaphors as Complementary Tools for Knowledge Construction and Sharing
• Working on PolarizationGameOne schemas
  •  
  • Remembered how to do mysql views:

    Create or replace view message_view AS
    SELECT u.login, s.title, cm.message, cm.thread_parent
      FROM table_chat_message cm
      INNER JOIN table_users u ON cm.owner_id=u.id
      INNER JOIN table_game g ON cm.game_id=g.id
      INNER JOIN table_scenarios s ON g.scenario_id=s.id;

  • Next steps are to write some PHP code to read and write to the appropriate tables, then start to work out an interface

ASRC MKT 7:00 – 8:30, 2:30 – 3:00, IRAD 8:30 – 2:30

• Reconfiguring the CSEs
  • ScholarlyArticle – uses the ScholarlyArticle schema
  • MOBY_DICK – points to https://americanliterature.com/author/herman-melville/book/moby-dick-or-the-whale/*
  • A2P_ONLY_ORG
  • A2P_ONLY_US
  • A2P_ONLY_NET
  • A2P_ONLY_GOV
  • A2P_ONLY_EDU
  • A2P_ONLY_COM
• Google Knowledge Graph Search: developers.google.com/knowledge-graph
• Research-browser-ish: https://rivium.io/
• Visualizing Dataflow Graphs of Deep Learning Models in TensorFlow (pdf)
• Fixed the populations figure for the CHIIR DC and the CHIIR paper
• Refitting the proposal to the following spec:
  • The proposal must be no longer than 3 pages and
    contain the following contents:
    • Title of research proposal, Name of student, Stage of degree (e.g.,
      2nd year PhD), Affiliation, Name of supervisor(s)
    •  Abstract
    • Motivation
    • Research questions
    • (Planned or ongoing) Methodology
    • Progress made so far
    • Future plan
    • References
  • *Mentors*On our list of mentors are so far: Dr. Pia Borlund, Dr. Katriina Byström,
    Dr. Rob Capra, Dr. Luanne Freund, Dr. Diane Kelly, Dr. Heather O’Brien, Dr.
    Ian Ruthven, Dr. Max Wilson.
• From keyword search to exploration: Designing future search interfaces for the web Read! Max Wilson and Ben Shneiderman. Downloaded and (maybe?) sent to kindle

7:00 – 9:30, 5:00 – 7:00 ASRC MKT

• Writing up review. I also stumbled across a good book on Complex Systems in Finance and Economics that is tangentially related to the paper. They have a chart on page 764 that shows the development trajectories of the multiple threads in the related fields.
• Radiolab did a revisit to the trolley problem with respect to self-driving cars. In the end discussion, they state that the problem is a small edge condition. I think under normal conditions that’s true. Under catastrophic conditions like a post earthquake evacuation, every trip could be the trolley problem. With TaaS, who gets picked up first? who has priority on the road? Pinged Radiolab about that. Curious if they will respond.
• Good chat with Cindy. She found a bunch of stuff, including this part about moral dilemmas. We also started thinking about the chat game design. And we found her comments! Seems like WordPress isn’t alerting me when they get submitted.
• Nvivo for Mac

ASRC MKT 7:00 – 4:00

• Found this, noted it and forgot about it –  need to read: Constructing Semantically Scalable Cognitive Spaces
  • 
• kialo
  • Kialo is an easy to use, yet powerful tool to engage in thoughtful discussion, understand different points of view, and help with collaborative decision-making.With Kialo, you can take on issues big or small, build consensus on a topic, and explore every aspect of a discussion. Kialo allows you to be more thorough and thoughtful about the issues that matter most to you, and the world around you.

    Our Mission: Making the world more thoughtful.

  • Note that in the screenshots below that there is a sense of the core discussion from which viewpoints radiate. They don’t appear to be pole pairs though.
  • 
• This reminds me of Facilitating Diverse Political Engagement with the Living Voters Guide
  • 
• Reviewing JCSCW paper for Wayne. Done. Need to write up the review.
• Risk of Adverse Cognitive or Behavioral Conditions and Psychiatric Disorders
• Architecture discussion with Aaron (and Cindy?) 2:00 – 4:00.
  • Stray thought – could the game live on Facebook?
  • Instant Games Now Available on Messenger and Facebook News Feed
• Worked with Aaron on his presentation for a couple of hours.

7:00 – 9:00, 10:00 – 5:00 ASRC MKT

• Playing with getting LaTex to do the correct formatting without using the new template. Getting pretty far, and starting to think that maybe the way to do this is from scratch? Yeah, I know, this way leads to madness…
• What I should be doing is looking into the way to build the game and save the data. Should this be a browser plugin? A standalone web page? Where does the back end live?
• Possible platforms to use
  • Twillo (free to expensive, based on support): Documentation
  • Applozic (free to expensive, based on users): Documentation
  • Smooch (free to expensive, based on time??): Documentation
  • Messagebird (free to expensive, based on Monthly Active Users [MAU]): Documentation
• Studies that used created chatrooms and gamification.
  • Designing for reportability: sustainable gamification, public engagement, and promoting environmental debate
    • There is a growing emphasis in many countries on matters such as participation in e-government, e-democracy, the provision of forums for online debate, and so on. A critical issue in all of these cases is one of encouraging engagement across a broad spectrum of potentially interested parties and stakeholders. In this paper, we use an ethnographic study of an online event, designed to encourage debate, to explore some critical issues in how the mechanisms productive of debate have shifted in company with the Web 2.0 phenomenon. By contrasting this with a prior study of how players managed their gameplay in a multiplayer pervasive game, we focus upon how different ways of constructing games and events can have serious implications for their ordinary everyday reportability in routine face-to-face interactions. We conclude that designing for reportability should be an active consideration when designing the resources for online debate and consider some ways in which that might be accomplished.
  • Bicker Manor: a cross-media environmental campaign using missions
    • In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a cross-media environmental campaign called Bicker Manor. We describe how the experience allowed players to participate using mobile phones by sending SMS and MMS messages, the web and interactive television. We describe how the experience used characters to playfully challenge players to complete missions with an environmental twist, before describing a generic, reusable mission framework and implementation with associated authoring and orchestration tools. Finally, we briefly describe the pilot of the experience and initial findings from an ongoing evaluation.
  • Analysing How People Orient to and Spread Rumours in Social Media by Looking at Conversational Threads
    • As breaking news unfolds people increasingly rely on social media to stay abreast of the latest updates. The use of social media in such situations comes with the caveat that new information being released piecemeal may encourage rumours, many of which remain unverified long after their point of release. Little is known, however, about the dynamics of the life cycle of a social media rumour. In this paper we present a methodology that has enabled us to collect, identify and annotate a dataset of 330 rumour threads (4,842 tweets) associated with 9 newsworthy events. We analyse this dataset to understand how users spread, support, or deny rumours that are later proven true or false, by distinguishing two levels of status in a rumour life cycle i.e., before and after its veracity status is resolved. The identification of rumours associated with each event, as well as the tweet that resolved each rumour as true or false, was performed by journalist members of the research team who tracked the events in real time. Our study shows that rumours that are ultimately proven true tend to be resolved faster than those that turn out to be false. Whilst one can readily see users denying rumours once they have been debunked, users appear to be less capable of distinguishing true from false rumours when their veracity remains in question. In fact, we show that the prevalent tendency for users is to support every unverified rumour. We also analyse the role of different types of users, finding that highly reputable users such as news organisations endeavour to post well-grounded statements, which appear to be certain and accompanied by evidence. Nevertheless, these often prove to be unverified pieces of information that give rise to false rumours. Our study reinforces the need for developing robust machine learning techniques that can provide assistance in real time for assessing the veracity of rumours. The findings of our study provide useful insights for achieving this aim.
  • Sarah-Kristin Thiel has a lot of work in this area
    • Playing (with) Democracy: A Review of Gamified Participation Approaches
  • From game design elements to gamefulness: defining “gamification”
  • Gamification for Behavior Change: Lessons from Developing a Social, Multiuser, Web-Tablet Based Prevention Game for Youths
• I think this may be a book with scenarios in it: Risk taking: A study in cognition and personality. It comes up in the literature a lot. Ordered.
• Here’s one of the studies that uses the above: Correlates of Risky Decision-Making. It identifies a risk-taking personality type. Is this an explorer? Can this test be used on individuals and groups?