Spreading the Good News: Analyzing Socially Shared Inspirational News Content

Spreading good news

N atural selection means that an individual with a beneficial mutation is more likely to pass on its genes to its offspring. This ‘vertical’ process means that, eventually, the entire population can share the same beneficial mutation at the same location in the genome. However, beneficial mutations can also spread ‘horizontally’ so that they are shared between two (or more) locations in the gen...

No News is Good News

It seems plausible that an increase in stock market volatility raises required stock returns, and thus lowers stock prices. We develop a formal model of this volatility feedback effect using a simple model of changing variance (a quadratic generalized autoregressive conditionally heteroskedastic, or QGARCH, model). Our model is asymmetric and helps to explain the negative skewness and excess ku...

The Good News and the Bad News

There is much that is attractive about Michael Burawoy’s examination of the critical turn to a public sociology. I find plausible his account of the academic nature of 1970s radical sociology especially that mobilized notions such as Althusser’s “theoretical practice.” I also was cheered to read the account of the positive developments currently in train in the USA and especially with how socia...

NO news is good news.

Socially Driven News Recommendation

The question of how to recommend and manage information available in the Internet is an active area of research, namely concerning news recommendations. The methods used to produce news rankings by the most popular recommender systems are not public and it is unclear if they reflect the real importance assigned by the readers. Also, the latency period between the publication of a news item and ...