Chores calls!

Trump, Qanon and an impending judgment day: Behind the Facebook-fueled rise of The Epoch Times

• By the numbers, there is no bigger advocate of President Donald Trump on Facebook than The Epoch Times. The small New York-based nonprofit news outlet has spent more than $1.5 million on about 11,000 pro-Trump advertisements in the last six months, according to data from Facebook’s advertising archive — more than any organization outside of the Trump campaign itself, and more than most Democratic presidential candidates have spent on their own campaigns. Those video ads — in which unidentified spokespeople thumb through a newspaper to praise Trump, peddle conspiracy theories about the “Deep State,” and criticize “fake news” media — strike a familiar tone in the online conservative news ecosystem. The Epoch Times looks like many of the conservative outlets that have gained followings in recent years.

7:00 – 4:00 ASRC GOES

• Dissertation
  • I just found out that the UMBC, UMD, and TSU are Jan 2 – 22. I’ll be doing my defense in there somewhere
  • Working on the TACJ section
• Add controllers for the reaction wheels so that a “go to AZ=30, EL=20, R= -10” can work
  • Getting close:
  • 
• Next task is to subclass the ReactionWheelController to pitch, roll, and yaw controllers, so that they can manipulate their data separately
  • Voltage should control the velocity and direction of the wheel
  • Simulator can be told to add drag to a wheel
• I think Communications of the ACM is the next place to try the AI Weapons paper. It’s 5,000-ish words, so it looks like it should fit:
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• Finished TAAS article and letter. Notified Antonio

ASRC GOES 7:00 – 4:00

• Adding the journalism framing example to the introduction
• Continue to work all data transfers into the Data Dictionary so that effective, tagged training in the sim can happen
  • done-ish? Need to do another layer and figure out how to set up the command and response buffers – done

Data Dictionary as a spreadsheet

7:00 – 4:00 ASRC GOES

• Dissertation
  • More introduction. Finished the first pass. Maybe add something about journalism, and how the system could create something new?
• Put the commands and responses in the DB so we get tagging
• Add controllers for the reaction wheels so that a “go to AZ=30, EL=20, R= -10” can work
• Have the dictionary save to a database?

7:00 – 5:00 ASRC GOES

• Antonio has the TAAS paper
• Dissertation
  • Starting at the beginning. Paragraphs have been written!
• Demo at NOAA today
  • Change the timeseries filename to include date and time information – done
  • Demo went well. Bruce helped a lot, which means he’s on board with the concepts
• Thinking about maintaining anonymity on JuryRoom
  • Anonymity is the default
  • In the menu, there is something that says “You are posting as XX”, where XX is a 2-character label that is generated for every Jury.
  • In the same spot is a “Post as Yyyyy”, where Yyyyy is the login name. Clicking that will reverse the statements so that the bar reads “You are posting as Yyyyy”
  • If posting, all players get a color, rather than their Icon
  • In the database, the presence of a label is a flag for anonymous posting. If the user is presenting as themselves, then that string is NULL, so it’s an easy test.
• Social learning strategies regulate the wisdom and madness of interactive crowds
  • Why groups of individuals sometimes exhibit collective ‘wisdom’ and other times maladaptive ‘herding’ is an enduring conundrum. Here we show that this apparent conflict is regulated by the social learning strategies deployed. We examined the patterns of human social learning through an interactive online experiment with 699 participants, varying both task uncertainty and group size, then used hierarchical Bayesian model fitting to identify the individual learning strategies exhibited by participants. Challenging tasks elicit greater conformity among individuals, with rates of copying increasing with group size, leading to high probabilities of herding among large groups confronted with uncertainty. Conversely, the reduced social learning of small groups, and the greater probability that social information would be accurate for less-challenging tasks, generated ‘wisdom of the crowd’ effects in other circumstances. Our model-based approach provides evidence that the likelihood of collective intelligence versus herding can be predicted, resolving a long-standing puzzle in the literature.
• Locally noisy autonomous agents improve global human coordination in network experiments
  • Coordination in groups faces a sub-optimization problem^1,2,3,4,5,6 and theory suggests that some randomness may help to achieve global optima^7,8,9. Here we performed experiments involving a networked colour coordination game¹⁰ in which groups of humans interacted with autonomous software agents (known as bots). Subjects (n = 4,000) were embedded in networks (n = 230) of 20 nodes, to which we sometimes added 3 bots. The bots were programmed with varying levels of behavioural randomness and different geodesic locations. We show that bots acting with small levels of random noise and placed in central locations meaningfully improve the collective performance of human groups, accelerating the median solution time by 55.6%. This is especially the case when the coordination problem is hard. Behavioural randomness worked not only by making the task of humans to whom the bots were connected easier, but also by affecting the gameplay of the humans among themselves and hence creating further cascades of benefit in global coordination in these heterogeneous systems.

7:00 – 4:30 ASRC GEOS

• Dissertation and TAAS – working out the research plan section
• More satellite sim.
  • Got the graphics part done! Now for sparklines and the physics sim

• Waikato meeting
  • Suggested added quote or snippet to notification
  • Arron can recruit antibubblers
  • Advertise on FB and Reddit? Twitter really isn’t a debate forum

7:00 – 3:30 ASRC GEOS

• Send George a note about Dad
• Scan hotel receipt (done) and fill out expense report – started, but couldn’t make it work. I need to get a new charge number. Spent hours on this trying to submit a travel expense report that didn’t have exceptions. SAP Concur is as bad an application as I have ever used.
• Write down thoughts on inhibition and excitation in groups. Basically, when a group is engaged in discussion, some links are excitatory – a small group will engage in discussion, while others participate less or not at all – they are inhibited. These kind of discussions are almost always mediated by an explicit or implicit leader. The consensus that develops is greatly influenced by who is excited and who is inhibited. Also discuss typicality, or the clustering of belief around central items (examples of furniture have chairs and tables as high typicality examples)
• Dissertation
  • Work on flowchart(s)
• Generalize cube, size in 3 dimensions and normals from cross products
• Change cylinder so that normals are from cross products – done, after considerable flailing.
• Start on sphere and cone?
  • Cone!