Recent years have seen the rapid growth of private think tanks within the neoconservative movement that conduct "policy research" biased to their own agenda. This article provides an evidence-based rebuttal to a 2002 report by one such think tank, the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), which was intended to discredit 20 alleged myths about single-payer national health insu...

The spreading of news, memes and other pieces of information occurring via online social platforms has a strong and growing impact on our modern societies, with enormous consequences, that may be beneficial but also catastrophic. In this work we consider a recently introduced model for information diffusion in social media taking explicitly into account the competition of a large number of item...

In computational intelligence, the term ‘memetic algorithm’ has come to be associated with the algorithmic pairing of a global search method with a local search method. In a sociological context, a ‘meme’ has been loosely defined as a unit of cultural information, the social analog of genes for individuals. Both of these definitions are inadequate, as ‘memetic algorithm’ is too specific, and ul...

Spiral Dynamics is a theory describing the development and interactions between individuals, cultures, organizations and cultures. Its origins parallel those of Value Methodology and the founders of both methodologies met regularly and exchanged ideas. One methodology addresses the process of innovation (VM) while the other examines how people and organizations respond to the notion of innovati...

We are developing RGeme (Rhythmic Meme Generator), an artificial intelligence system for the composition of rhythmic streams inspired by Richard Dawkin's theory of memes. The system is based on intelligent agents that learn from examples and interact by generating rhythms. The system has two broad stages. In the first one, the learning stage, which is the main focus of this paper, Agents are tr...

Cultural evolution occurs through the transmission of cultural traits, and we consider the meme as the unit of cultural transmission. We construct an agent-based model representing the processes by which cultural transmission occurs and to link these to the community-scale phenomena arising from agent interactions. We base our model on small communities of e-Puck robots, and following work on m...

We investigate the predictability of successful memes using their early spreading patterns in the underlying social networks. We propose and analyze a comprehensive set of features and develop an accurate model to predict future popularity of a meme given its early spreading patterns. Our paper provides the first comprehensive comparison of existing predictive frameworks. We categorize our feat...

The process by which social movements move through time and space can be understood as a process of innovation diffusion of memes or ideas. This process of diffusion may be traceable through computational linguistics and map geocoding of the linguistic memes employed by such movements. A Visualizing Information Space In Ontological Networks (VISION) method is described and illustrated with web-...

This article investigates the values expressed by good morning memes—an understudied subgenre of social media inspiration featuring a “good day” wish—and criteria that users from different countries and generational groups adopt to evaluate them. Expressed were detected through content analysis 414 memes in English Italian, while insights about evaluation derived 20 semistructured interviews wi...

This article explores if and how populist elements are expressed in Internet memes within German-language political discourses. is done by conducting a data-based investigation rooted the discourse historical approach multimodality theory. Memes with varying alignments analysed regards to they express either of following features style: appeal people vs. elite, use bad manners, performance cris...