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Showing posts from February, 2017

Witches Worldwide to Cast Spell On Donald Trump at Midnight | Observer

Witches Worldwide to Cast Spell On Donald Trump at Midnight | Observer : Tonight at midnight, thousands of witches, other practitioners of magic and even celebrities such as Lana Del Rey will�take part in casting a spell on Donald Trump.�And that’s not all—they plan to do so at midnight on every waning crescent moon until he’s�removed from office.
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Google's Most Popular Search Terms of 2016 | Time.com

Google's Most Popular Search Terms of 2016 | Time.com : Last year , the number one trending search term was "Lamar Odom," the former NBA and reality TV star who was found unconscious in a Nevada brothel last October. "Jurassic World" and "American Sniper" also placed high on Google's rankings from 2015. The term "trending" means that these words and phrases held the highest spike in traffic over a sustained period of time in 2016 as compared to 2015. See below to check out the full list of search queries that made it into Google's top 10 trending list. 1. Powerball 2. Prince 3. Hurricane Matthew 4. Pokémon Go 5. Slither.io 6. Olympics 7. David Bowie 8. Trump 9. Election 10. Hillary Clinton
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What Makes an Image Popular?

Hundreds of thousands of photographs are uploaded to the internet every minute through various social networking and photo sharing platforms. While some images get millions of views, others are completely ignored. Even from the same users, different photographs receive different number of views. This begs the question: What makes a photograph popular? Can we predict the number of views a photograph will receive even before it is uploaded? These are some of the questions we address in this work. We investigate two key components of an image that affect its popularity, namely the image content and social context. Using a dataset of about 2 . 3 million images from Flickr, we demonstrate that we can reliably predict the normalized view count of images with a rank correlation of 0 . 81 using both image content and social cues. In this paper, we show the importance of image cues such as color, gradients, deep learning features and the set of objects pre...
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From Popularity Prediction to Ranking Online News

From Popularity Prediction to Ranking Online News News articles are an engaging type of online content that captures the attention of a significant amount of Internet users. They are particularly enjoyed by mobile users and massively spread through online social platforms. As a result, there is an increased interest in discovering the articles that will become popular among users. This objective falls under the broad scope of content popularity prediction and has direct implications in the development of new services for online advertisement and content distribution. In this paper, we address the problem of predicting the popularity of news articles based on user comments. We formulate the prediction task as a ranking problem, where the goal is not to infer the precise attention that a content will receive but to accurately rank articles based on their predicted popularity. Using data obtained from two important news sites in France and Netherlands, we analyze the ranking effectivene...
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The Top-Ten Effect: Consumers’ Subjective Perceptions of Rankings

EXTENDED ABSTRACT Lists of ranked items (e.g., Business Week ’s top 25 MBA pro - grams, Car and Driver ’s top 10 cars) are ubiquitous in Western cul - ture. From a consumption standpoint, there is considerable evidence that individuals nd these lists informative and in uential. There - fore, it is important to know exactly how the information provided in ranked lists is interpreted by users. Because a ranking is an ordinal scale of measurement, there is no technical reason why an informa- tion user should interpret items at adjoining ranks as having equal differences in the ranked attribute. Yet, in the absence of speci c in - formation about the ranked items, this equidistance seems reasonable for the information user to assume. In fact, even academic researchers have utilized linear functions that imply equidistance when modeling the effects of changes in an organization’s rank on the outcomes and policies of the ranked organizations (Monk...
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Power-law Revisited: A Large Scale Measurement Study of P2P Content Popularity

Abstract —The popularity of contents on the Internet is often said to follow a Zipf-like distribution. Different measurement studies showed, however, significantly different distributions de- pending on the measurement methodology they followed. We performed a large-scale measurement of the most popular peer- to-peer (P2P) content distribution system, BitTorrent, over eleven months. We collected data on a daily to weekly basis from 500 to 800 trackers, with information about 40 to 60 million peers that participated in the distribution of over 10 million torrents. Based on these measurements we show how fundamental characteristics of the observed distribution of content popularity change depending on the measurement methodology and the length of the observation interval. We show that while short-term or small-scale measurements can conclude that the popularity of contents exhibits a power-law tail, the tail is likely exponentially decreasing, especi...
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What Makes Online Content Viral? | Journal of Marketing Research

What Makes Online Content Viral? | Journal of Marketing Research : Abstract Why are certain pieces of online content (e.g., advertisements, videos, news articles) more viral than others? This article takes a psychological approach to understanding diffusion. Using a unique data set of all the New York Times articles published over a three-month period, the authors examine how emotion shapes virality. The results indicate that positive content is more viral than negative content, but the relationship between emotion and social transmission is more complex than valence alone. Virality is partially driven by physiological arousal. Content that evokes high-arousal positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions is more viral. Content that evokes low-arousal, or deactivating, emotions (e.g., sadness) is less viral. These results hold even when the authors control for how surprising, interesting, or practically useful content is (all of which are positively linked to virality), as we...
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6 Research-Based Insights About Viral Content | Cision

6 Research-Based Insights About Viral Content | Cision If you’re like me, you probably greet articles about content virality with a healthy dose of skepticism. Of course anyone writing content or posting on social media hopes for the largest possible distribution, but the articles that purport to tell you how to make content go viral are oftentimes less useful than they intend to be. One of the most prolific researchers on the topic of virality and content perpetuation is  Wharton Marketing Professor Jonah Berger , author of “Contagious: How Things Catch On.” One of the great aspects of Berger’s work is that even the most counter-intuitive conclusions that he proposes are supported by sound research (examples of his counter-intuitive findings being assertions that offline word-of-mouth is far more prevalent than online word-of-mouth, or that Cheerios is discussed more frequently than Disneyland). For me, Berger’s research is far more actionable and thoughtful than 99 pe...
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The Science of Virality - Marketing Lessons from Internet Cats

The Science of Virality - Marketing Lessons from Internet Cats : Professor Jonah Berger researches marketing at the University of Pennsylvania. But he’s not studying the science of advertising or market research. He’s asking a more modern question: “What makes ideas viral and products spread contagiously?” Even New York Times writers assumed that, of course, the answer would be “to write anything about sex,” or “to title articles ‘How Your Pet’s Diet Threatens Your Marriage,’ and ‘Why It’s Bush’s Fault.’” But when Jonah Berger and his colleagues analyzed New York Times emailing behavior for three months, they uncovered some unexpected results. While these three traits of viral content shouldn’t be all that shocking: Surprising Interesting Intense The next two discoveries might be a bit more eye-catching: Positive Actionable (practically useful) Remember, this was an analysis of a news website, where the headlines are all doom and gloom and the stories are about other peopl...
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The Emotional Combinations That Make Stories Go Viral

The Emotional Combinations That Make Stories Go Viral New work from Jacopo Staiano of Sorbonne University and Marco Guerini of Trento Rise  sheds light  on the roles that valence, arousal, and dominance play in content that goes viral. The findings indicate that individual emotions may not determine virality — what really matters may be where the emotions fall within the Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) model. This scale is frequently used in psychology to categorize emotions. Each individual emotion is a combination of three characteristics: Valence  is the positivity or negativity of an emotion. Happiness has a positive valence; fear has a negative valence. Arousal  ranges from excitement to relaxation. Anger is a high-arousal emotion; sadness is low-arousal. Dominance  ranges from submission to feeling in control. Fear is low-dominance; an emotion a person has more choice over, such as admiration, is high-dominance.
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The 7 Factors That Make for Viral Content

The 7 Factors That Make for Viral Content 1.  Evoke high-arousal emotions. A study titled “ What Makes Online Content Viral ” by Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman from the University of Pennsylvania analyzed nearly 7,000 New York  Times  articles. They noted a key factor among viral articles was evoking "high-arousal emotions ''  including  a we, excitement or amusement. Content and copy that left readers awe-inspired, excited, or amused were more likely to be shared than low-arousal content that evoked contentment or sadness.
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The Psychology of Viral Content

The Psychology of Viral Content I’ve just finished re-reading the book  Buzz Marketing , authored by a guy named Mark Hughes. No matter what kind of content you are creating, or the niche that you’re in, Mark defines these buttons as ones that are  proven  topics that people talk about. (Please don’t give me that, ‘This won’t work for my niche!’, nonsense) The six buttons are as follows: Taboo Unusual Outrageous Hilarious Remarkable Secrets Okay, so there they are, now go out and create content like this and thank me later! Nah, I’m not going to leave you hanging, let’s dive into what exactly these content types are, and throw in a few examples to boot. Because cats are the most viral thing on the internet, I’ve decided to capture each “button to be pushed” in cat form.
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Scholarly vs. Popular Sources | Get Research Help

Scholarly vs. Popular Sources | Get Research Help Definition A scholarly publication is one in which the content is written by experts in a particular field of study - generally for the purpose of sharing original research or analyzing others' findings. Scholarly work will thoroughly cite all source materials used and is usually subject to "peer review" prior to publication. This means that independent experts in the field review, or "referee" the publication to check the accuracy and validity of its claims. The primary audience for this sort of work is fellow experts and students studying the field. As a result the content is typically much more sophisticated and advanced than articles found in general magazines, or professional/trade journals. In brief, scholarly work is: written  by  experts  for  experts based on original research or intellectual inquiry provides citations for all sources used is usually peer reviewed prior to publication To see the ty...
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A survey on predicting the popularity of web content | Journal of Internet Services and Applications | Full Text

A survey on predicting the popularity of web content | Journal of Internet Services and Applications | Full Text Social media platforms have democratized the process of web content creation allowing mere consumers to become creators and distributors of content. But this has also contributed to an explosive growth of information and has intensified the online competition for users attention, since only a small number of items become popular while the rest remain unknown. Understanding what makes one item more popular than another, observing its popularity dynamics, and being able to predict its popularity has thus attracted a lot of interest in the past few years. Predicting the popularity of web content is useful in many areas such as network dimensioning (e.g., caching and replication), online marketing (e.g., recommendation systems and media advertising), or real-world outcome prediction (e.g., economical trends). In this survey, we review the current findings on web content popula...
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Predicting the Popularity of online content

t h e e A s e o F producing online content highlights the problem of predicting how much attention any of it will ultimately receive. Research shows that user attention 9 is allocated in a rather asymmetric way, with most content getting only some views and downloads, whereas a few receive the most attention. While it is possible to predict the distribution of attention over many items, it is notably dif cult to predict the amount that will be devoted over time to any given item. We solve this problem here, illustrating our approach with data collected from the portals Digg (http://digg.com) and YouTube (http://youtube.com), two well-known examples of popular content-sharing- and- ltering services. 
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“Popularity Effect” in User-Generated Content: Evidence from Online Product Reviews

Information Systems Research: INFORMS Online product reviews are increasingly important for consumer decisions, yet we still know little about how reviews are generated in the first place. In an effort to gather more reviews, many websites encourage user interactions such as allowing one user to subscribe to another. Do these interactions actually facilitate the generation of product reviews? More importantly, what kind of reviews do such interactions induce? We study these questions using data from one of the largest product review websites where users can subscribe to one another. By applying both panel data and a flexible matching method, we find that as users become more popular, they produce more reviews and more  objective  reviews; however, their numeric ratings also systematically change and become more negative and more varied. Such trade-off has not been previously documented and has important implications for both product review and other user-generated content we...
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Scarlett: Coping with Skewed Content Popularity in MapReduce Clusters

To improve data availability and resilience MapReduce frame- works use le systems that replicate data uniformly . However, analysis of job logs from a large production cluster shows wide disparity in data popularity. Machines and racks storing popular content become bottlenecks; thereby increasing the completion times of jobs accessing this data even when there are machines with spare cycles in the cluster. To address this problem, we present Scarlett , a system that replicates blocks based on their popularity. By accurately predicting le popu- larity and working within hard bounds on additional storage, Scarlett causes minimal interference to running jobs. Trace driven simulations and experiments in two popular MapRe- duce frameworks (Hadoop and Dryad) show that Scarlett ef- fectively alleviates hotspots and can speed up jobs by . 
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The Top 25 | Pew Research Center

The Top 25 | Pew Research Center Which news providers make it in among the top 25 for total U.S. traffic? While the raw figures for visitors vary from one metrics firm to the next (Nielsen’s unique visitors numbers are often much smaller than those of the ratings agency comScore, for example, and both rely mainly on home-based traffic rather than work-based, which may undercount total news consumption) the list and rank of top sites remains relatively consistent across measuring companies. 
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From Popularity Prediction to Ranking Online News

Abstract News articles are an engaging type of on- line content that captures the attention of a significant amount of Internet users. They are particularly enjoyed by mobile users and massively spread through online so- cial platforms. As a result, there is an increased inter- est in discovering the articles that will become popular among users. This objective falls under the broad scope of content popularity prediction and has direct impli- cations in the development of new services for online advertisement and content distribution. In this paper, we address the problem of predicting the popularity of news articles based on user comments. We formulate the prediction task as a ranking problem, where the goal is not to infer the precise attention that a content will receive but to accurately rank articles based on their predicted popularity. Using data obtained from two important news sites in France and Netherlands, we analyze the ranking effect...
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The Verge: A US-born NASA scientist was detained at the border until he unlocked his phone

A US-born NASA scientist was detained at the border until he unlocked his phone The Verge Two weeks ago, Sidd Bikkannavar flew back into the United States after spending a few weeks abroad in South America. An employee of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Bikkannavar had been on a... Read the full story Shared from Apple News Sent from mobile 
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Apple's Campus 2 repeatedly delayed by emphasis on perfecting small details, profile says

Apple's Campus 2 repeatedly delayed by emphasis on perfecting small details, profile says : The company's insistence on perfection created a "domino effect" pushing back other parts of the project, according to Reuters, citing former construction managers. In one example, Apple managers told construction crews that the main ring's polished concrete ceiling panels had to be perfect both inside and out. This translated into each of the thousands of panels involved having to be approved both by Apple's team and the general contractor. Apple was also reportedly obsessed with doorways, insisting that they should be completely flat without any threshold —the argument being that if staff had to change their gait, it would risk distracting them. "We spent months trying not to do that because that's time, money and stuff that's never been done before," one of the construction managers said.
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This Is the Biggest Threat to the Future of Football | Footwear News

This Is the Biggest Threat to the Future of Football | Footwear News : Each year, the Silver Spring, Md.-based organization analyzes team sports participation in America, for 13 major sports including football, basketball, baseball, cheerleading and tennis. In�its most recent data set, for 2015 (SFIA is in the midst of finalizing its 2016 numbers), it recorded an across-the-board increase in team sports participation among young people. That’s the good news. “The bad news is that the core participation numbers for people who play between 13 and 25 times per year has gone down over a five-year period in some significant way,” Tom Cove, president & CEO of SFIA, told FN. “Of those 13 major sports, only three increased [in core participation]: ice hockey, lacrosse and rugby.” Why is this decline important�to the sports industry? First, core participants�matter to manufacturers as consumers. Casual players won’t spend much on shoes and gear, but regular players will. “Their families...
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How to Reinvent the Newsroom for the Mobile Age - Innovation

How to Reinvent the Newsroom for the Mobile Age - Innovation : How to Reinvent the Newsroom for the Mobile Age 27 Jan | Posted in News Report 2016, Newswheel by Innovation Media Consulting 0 Likes Share this: Facebook Twitter Google LinkedIn Over the past 20 years, INNOVATION has designed many multimedia newsrooms and some of them are currently industry benchmarks around the globe, so here are some suggestions with the best ‘dos’ and the worst ‘don’ts’ for what we call Transmedia Newsrooms. You will need to invest in new facilities but, at the end of the day, you will save a lot of money because these integrations are one of the most aggressive and efficient strategies for making a real digital transition. You will always need “media architects”, some of whom have designed hundreds of fantastic “open-space” newsrooms. Other companies, who decided to try to reinvent the wheel instead of trusting their experts, produced some very bad, and very expensive, failures. 1) ...
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Matrix field | Drupal.org

Matrix field | Drupal.org : new co-maintainer will be focusing on D7 development and as such all the old D6 tickets have been closed. Any new development will solely focus on D7 with a possibility of a back-port to D6.
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Zero-sum game - Wikipedia

Zero-sum game - Wikipedia : The zero-sum property (if one gains, another loses) means that any result of a zero-sum situation is Pareto optimal. Generally, any game where all strategies are Pareto optimal is called a conflict game.[2] Zero-sum games are a specific example of constant sum games where the sum of each outcome is always zero. Such games are distributive, not integrative; the pie cannot be enlarged by good negotiation.
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The Data That Turned the World Upside Down - Motherboard

The Data That Turned the World Upside Down - Motherboard : The approach that Kosinski and his colleagues developed over the next few years was actually quite simple. First, they provided test subjects with a questionnaire in the form of an online quiz. From their responses, the psychologists calculated the personal Big Five values of respondents. Kosinski's team then compared the results with all sorts of other online data from the subjects: what they "liked," shared or posted on Facebook, or what gender, age, place of residence they specified, for example. This enabled the researchers to connect the dots and make correlations.
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How Anime 'Your Name' Became an Unlikely Phenomenon | Hollywood Reporter

How Anime 'Your Name' Became an Unlikely Phenomenon | Hollywood Reporter : The low-budget Makoto Shinkai-directed megahit is now the highest-grossing Japanese film in history. Makoto Shinkai's body-swapping, time-shifting anime Your Name may have missed out on an Oscar nomination, but it has been setting records both in Japan and overseas, single-handedly driving both the domestic film industry and studio-distributor Toho to record revenues last year. And it isn't finished yet.
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