Rumors Research Articles

How emotion type and intensity affect rumor spreading

The implications and contagion effect of emotion cannot be ignored in rumor spreading. This paper sheds light on how decision makers’ (DMs) emotion type and intensity affect rumor spreading. Based on the rank-dependent expected utility (RDEU) and evolutionary game theory (EGT), we construct an evolutionary game model between rumormongers (RMs) and managers (Ms) by considering emotions. We use MATLAB to simulate and reveal the influencing mechanism of DMs’ emotion type and intensity on rumor spreading. The results indicate that the DMs’ strategy choice is not only affected by their own emotion preference and intensity, but also by the other players in rumor spreading. Moreover, pessimism has a more significant influence than optimism on the stability of the evolutionary game, Ms’ emotion is more sensitive to the game results than RMs’ emotion and the emotion intensity is proportional to the evolution speed. More significantly, some earthshaking emotional thresholds are found, which can be used to predict RMs’ behavior, help Ms gain critical time to deal with rumors, and avoid the Tacitus Trap crisis. Furthermore, the evolution results fall into five categories: risk, opportunity, ideal, security and hostility. The results of this work can benefit Ms’ public governance.

DeSilva, Jennifer Mara, ed. The Borgia Family: Rumor and Representation

DeSilva, Jennifer Mara, ed. The Borgia Family: Rumor and Representation

정보・소문 발신지로서의 에도 유곽 - 가부키 작품의 예를 중심으로 -

정보・소문 발신지로서의 에도 유곽 - 가부키 작품의 예를 중심으로 -

An Ugly Slander to Prophet Muḥammad: Assimilating His Marriage with Zaynab b. Jaḥsh to Prophet David and Bathsheba’s Marriage

An Ugly Slander to Prophet Muḥammad: Assimilating His Marriage with Zaynab b. Jaḥsh to Prophet David and Bathsheba’s Marriage

When rumours fly like helicopters: an international conspiracy 'language' for the new reality?

When rumours fly like helicopters: an international conspiracy 'language' for the new reality?

Role of social media during the COVID-19 pandemic: Beneficial, destructive, or reconstructive?

The world is facing the extensive spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus 2. This epidemic puts intensive pressure on healthcare, economic, and social structures. Commitment to implementing effective approaches for public health will take bold interventions by public health professionals and strong leadership by the nation's governing bodies. During this crisis, lack of awareness, knowledge, and preparedness would put people and health care staff at risk. The dilemma is how to pass the knowledge of current disease statistics and its prevention to the general population at a rate equivalent to or better than the spreading epidemic. At the same time, a huge amount of health-threatening misinformation is spreading at a faster rate than the disease itself. The major proportion of this false rumor is disseminated in the web-2 era through social media. Thus, delivering fast, accurate and reliable information addressing critical problems of infection control is, therefore, of key importance. This review outlines both the positive and negative impact of social media during coronavirus epidemic on health-care professionals and on the general population. However, if used wisely and prudently, social media serves as a powerful tool for changing people's behavior and to promote the well-being of individual and public health. The following core competencies are addressed in this article: Medical knowledge, Interpersonal and communication skills, Practice-based learning.

Evaluating volatility persistence of Stock Return in the pre and post 2008-2009 Financial Meltdown

The Nigerian stock market capitalization in 2007 was N 13.181 trillion but due to the meltdown, it reduced to N 7.030 trillion in 2009, indicating over 40% loss of investor’s value. The government, through Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) introduced policies to stem the tide of the crisis. Therefore, this study evaluate volatility persistence of return in the market during pre and post meltdown. The mean reverting and half-life volatility shock of the GARCH model under three error distribution was employed. Finding indicates that return on the exchange exhibit high volatility magnitude after the meltdown but very low volatility magnitude before the meltdown. The generalized error distribution give the best estimate for pre and post meltdown. The study recommend the need to strictly monitor, restrict and regulate desperately optimistic noise (rumour) traders (investors) in the market, shorting to make money.

EFFECTS OF BULLYING ON LEARNING AMONG SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN MUBI EDUCATIONAL ZONE OF ADAMAWA STATE, NIGERIA

The study examined the effects of bullying on learning among secondary school students in Mubi Educational Zone. It also investigated the factors associated with bullying and its psychological consequences. The study adopted a survey design. The population consisted of all the secondary school students, out of which a sample of 400 students were selected from four secondary schools through stratified random sampling technique using sex, age and class level as strata. The instrument was adapted from Omoteso (2010) and Asiyai (2015). The validity of the instrument was carried out by two experts both in Counselling Psychology and Test and Measurement, while test-retest method was carried out to determine the reliability of the instrument, and the reliability coefficient was 0.82. Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics such as simple percentage and t-tests analysis. Results showed that the forms of bullying among the students were hitting/ flogging, injuries, threatening, and rumour spreading. Many students had been involved in relational bullying. Watching violent films and retaliation for being bullied in the past were some of the factors associated with bullying. The results also showed that bullying has a lot of effects on students learning. There was a significant difference between the behaviour of male and female students. The study also showed that there was a significant difference in the bullying behaviour of junior and senior secondary school students. In conclusion, bullying has a lot of negative consequences on the children. The children suffer torments and harassments and it can cause life-long damage to the bullied and the bullies. If a school fails to deal with bullying, it can endanger the safety of all the students and teachers. The study recommended that there should be a school-wide education, training and bullying prevention programmes. The teachers should have skills and knowledge in classroom management and control, as a result, a student friendly environment should be established in the classroom. Article visualizations:

Proactive rumor control in online networks

The spread of rumors through online networks not only threatens the public safety but also results in loss of financial property. To serve as a reliable platform for spreading critical information, many work study the problem of rumor control which aims at limiting the pernicious influence of rumors. These methods, however, only assume that users are passive receivers of rumors even if the users can browse the rumors on their own. To overcome this issue, in this paper we study the rumor spread from a proactive perspective and introduce a novel rumor control problem, called users’ B rowsing based rU mor blocK (BUK). Given a rumor set R, BUK can be summarized as targeting k nodes as ‘protectors’ to save nodes in G from being influenced by R as many as possible. Different with the previous studies, BUK considers that the rumors spread via users’ browsing behaviors, and models the propagation based on the random walk model. Theoretical analysis shows that the problem of BUK is submodular, and we propose two greedy algorithms that can approximate BUK within a ratio of (1 − 1/e). However, both of them consume high spaces and thereby cannot be applied to very large networks. Therefore, we further propose a ranking based method RanSel to solve BUK heuristically, which only consumes a linear space to the graph size. The experiments reveal that the effectiveness of our methods outperforms the baseline by 6% to 59.2%, and our methods can achieve such an effective result in reasonable time.

Arabic Rumor Detection using Collaborative Framework over Social Networks and Web

The popularity of social networks and the fast propagation of information on such networks have increased their importance to be the main source of information for people. Any user has an account in social networks can be easily a reporter through posting information. However, social networks dont provide a service to check the truth of the posted information, which makes social networks users not distinguish between truth and untruth. Indeed, the absence of verifying information service may cause a propagation of fake information, so-called ”Rumor”. Which may lead to many serious problems. The researchers addressed the rumor problem through examining the propagation behavior of rumor information by giving the most attention to detect rumor topics instead of verifying individual posts. However, the use of graph metrics in studying the propagation behavior is unsuitable for real time detection because of the high time complexity. Also, examining the propagation behavior of information prevents the early detection of rumors. In this paper, we intend to design a system that detects false information. Our approach differs from others in treating the problem from the information retrieval point of view. More precisely, we perform collaboration between a set of social networks and web resources of information through querying them using the desired post to be verified as query. Then, a set of operations are applied on the information retrieved from social networks and web resources, including date filtering, content semantic matching, user and content features extraction. Our collaborative framework is generalizable to verify the truth of either individual post or topic. Also, we design this framework to detect Arabic rumors as first work in this area, to the best of our knowledge. The proposed algorithms are effective in rumor detection on social network.

Minimization of Dynamic Rumor Influence with User Experience in Social Networks

Minimization of Dynamic Rumor Influence with User Experience in Social Networks

Towards a new sustainable economy of Ploiești

Article 35 of the Romanian Constitution guarantees ”the right to a healthy environment”. Looking at the particular case of Ploiești, the most important city in Prahova county, one could say that this article refers to every Romanian, except those living here. Odd things happen in Ploiești, a city under the blessing as well as the curse of the ”black gold” – oil. People are more and more anxious about the high level of air pollution and recent data extracted from the statistics of the Public Health Department in Prahova only came to amplify their concerns. The lack of continuous measurements of air pollution empowers the rumours about dubious arrangements between local authorities and main polluters. Since the communist era, when it was the second city in Romania by the value of the industrial production, the city of Ploiești has changed. Many of the colossal factories are forever gone and with them their huge negative impact on the environment. However, many things still need to change, because the way we see things has changed. Nowadays, the information is easier to access wherever we are, and people learn fast to turn this to their advantage. Many cities in Romania have managed to surpass their industrial grey past and step into a greener future: Cluj, Oradea or Brașov are just three examples. Although problems never cease to appear, the commitment of the authorities to citizens’ interests is very important. Political leaders of Ploiești must acknowledge that a city without oil is conceivable, while a city without people is an absurdity. The simple things that the local authorities need to do is to assure the population about their commitment and good intentions (continuous measurements, studies on the relationship between air pollution and cancer mortality), to control and regulate the potential sources of air pollution (first of all industry, then transport and household activities), and, most of all, hear the voice of the people !

A Study on the Rumor and the Ideologized Ethics

A Study on the Rumor and the Ideologized Ethics

Book Review: Rohith Vemula, #Caste Is Not a Rumour: The Online Diary of Rohith Vemula and Kanhaiya Kumar, From Bihar to Tihar

Rohith Vemula, #Caste Is Not a Rumour: The Online Diary of Rohith Vemula. New Delhi: Juggernaut, 2016, E-book, 268 pp., ₹250. Kanhaiya Kumar, From Bihar to Tihar. New Delhi: Juggernaut, 2016, 200 pp., ₹250, ISBN: 978-8193237274 (Paperback).

Rumor Propagation Analysis Model Inspired by Gravity Theory for Online Social Networks

Rumor Propagation Analysis Model Inspired by Gravity Theory for Online Social Networks

Taking rumours seriously: Why organ thieves matter to malaria control

This article documents what happened when a group of researchers tried to gain consent to carry out a survey for a malaria-related research project in the Sabah region of Malaysia at the end of 2015. Within weeks, rumours had begun to spread on social media that the team were fake and using the guise of a research project to steal organs. The refusal to participate is often considered only relevant to researchers in so far as it has implications for the project itself. However, non-participation in research is a valuable area of inquiry in its own right, precisely because of what it reveals about what lies beyond the research project. Rumours that contribute to non-participation are indicative of the murky space of social relationships and connections that surround health. In fact, as is illustrated in this case study, rumours do not just reveal or represent this interconnected world, they also incite affect. It is within this space that bodies are put at risk of a number of health issues ranging from malaria to organ theft and it is thus here where researchers should focus more attention.

Detecting Online Rumors with Sentiment Analysis

Detecting Online Rumors with Sentiment Analysis

AH1N1 impact on the Mexican pork meat market

espanolSe estiman los efectos de la influenza AH1N1 en el consumo de carne de puerco a traves de un modelo de demanda de consumo AIDS (por sus siglas en ingles) para el consumo de carne en Mexico. Adicionalmente, los efectos indirectos a traves de la economia mexicana son calculados con un modelo de equilibrio general. Se concluye que el presunto riesgo de contraer la influenza AH1N1 mediante el consumo de carne de puerco provoco perdidas economicas de 94 millones de dolares. El rumor afecto a los sectores: porcino, de venta de granos y de manufactura de alimentos, bebidas y tabaco. Las familias pobres rurales fueron las mas afectadas. EnglishThis article presents estimates of AH1N1’s effects on the consumption of pork through an Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) for meat consumption in Mexico. Additionally, indirect effects through the Mexican economy are estimated using a general equilibrium model that captures the effects of intersectoral relationships and the induced effects by the circular flow of income. It is concluded that the presumed risk of contracting AH1N1 via pork consumption provoked total economic losses of $94 million. The rumor affected the pork sector, the grains sector and the manufacturing sector of food, beverages and tobacco. The poor rural households were the most affected.

Web Users’ Group Attitudes to Online Rumors

Web Users’ Group Attitudes to Online Rumors

Study on risk factors of recurrence in papillary thyroid microcarcinoma and papillary thyroid carcinomas with 1-2 cm diameter

Objective To explore risk factors of recurrence in papillary thyroid microcarcinomas(PTMC)and papillary thyroid carcinomas with 1-2 cm diameter. Methods From January, 2008 to December, 2010 in PLA General Hospital, 323 eligible patients received first surgery and diagnosed pathologically with papillary thyroid cancer≤2 cm were analyzed retrospectively. According to rumor size, patients were divided into PTMC and PTC of 1-2 cm, which were investigated recurrence factors. Results Finally we indentified 320 PTC≤2 cm, including 218(68.1%)PTMC and 102(31.9%)PTC of 1-2 cm with a median follow-up time of 72.5(55-90)months.32 cases(10%)of patients relapse, includig 22 cases(10%)in PTMC and 10 cases(9.8%)in PTC of 1-2 cm. In the clinical characteristics analyses of PTC≤2 cm, the PTC of 1-2 cm was different from PTMC in age, lymph node metastasis and TNM stage. The univariate analysis showed that tumor location and lymph node metastasis influenced recurrence of PTMC and PTC of 1-2 cm, while tumor foci and extrathytoidal extension were risk factors of recurrence in PTMC but not in PTC of 1-2 cm. Lymph node metastasis was independent factor which influenced the recurrence of PTMC and PT C of 1-2 cm according to COX multivariate analysis. Conclusion Disease recurrence did not differ significantly between the PTMC and PTC of 1-2 cm and lymph node metastasis was an independent recurrence factor. (Chin J Endocrinol Metab, 2016, 32: 391-394) Key words: Papillary thyroid carcinomas; Recurrence