Tuesday, July 01, 2025
"Perceived Community Alignment Increases Information Sharing"
Title: Perceived Community Alignment Increases Information Sharing
Authors: Elisa C. Baek, Ryan Hyon, Karina López, Mason A. Porter, and Carolyn Parkinson
Abstract: It has been proposed that information sharing, which is a ubiquitous and consequential behavior, plays a critical role in cultivating and maintaining a sense of shared reality. Across three studies, we test this theory by investigating whether or not people are especially likely to share information that they believe will be interpreted similarly by others in their social circles. Using neuroimaging data collected while people who live in the same residential community viewed brief film clips, we find that more similar neural responses across participants is associated with a greater likelihood to share content. We then test this relationship using two behavioral studies and find (1) that people are particularly likely to share content that they believe others in their social circles will interpret similarly and (2) that perceived similarity with others leads to increased sharing likelihood. In concert, our findings support the idea that people are driven to share information to create and reinforce shared understanding, which is critical to social connection.
Thursday, July 11, 2024
RIP Barry Wellman (1942–2024)
He was one of the people who welcomed me warmly to the Sunbelt community (though he did make a point to inform me, with much spittle flying in the process, of course, that the Dodgers shouldn't have left Brooklyn).
I figured (but never officially knew) that Barry had been sick for a while, given his sudden lack of activity starting a couple of years ago on Facebook and SOCnet after always making a point of stressing that the point of such social gathering spaces (including social media) was to be very active, so he always purposely did that.
(h/t through the SOCnet mailing list)
Thursday, June 08, 2023
"Detecting Political Biases of Named Entities and Hashtags on Twitter"
Title: Detecting Political Biases of Named Entities and Hashtags on Twitter
Authors: Zhiping Xiao, Jeffrey Zhu, Yining Wang, Pei Zhou, Wen Hong Lam, Mason A. Porter, and Yizhou Sun
Abstract: Ideological divisions in the United States have become increasingly prominent in daily communication. Accordingly, there has been much research on political polarization, including many recent efforts that take a computational perspective. By detecting political biases in a text document, one can attempt to discern and describe its polarity. Intuitively, the named entities (i.e., the nouns and the phrases that act as nouns) and hashtags in text often carry information about political views. For example, people who use the term “pro-choice” are likely to be liberal and people who use the term “pro-life” are likely to be conservative. In this paper, we seek to reveal political polarities in social-media text data and to quantify these polarities by explicitly assigning a polarity score to entities and hashtags. Although this idea is straightforward, it is difficult to perform such inference in a trustworthy quantitative way. Key challenges include the small number of known labels, the continuous spectrum of political views, and the preservation of both a polarity score and a polarity-neutral semantic meaning in an embedding vector of words. To attempt to overcome these challenges, we propose the Polarity-aware Embedding Multi-task learning (PEM) model. This model consists of (1) a self-supervised context-preservation task, (2) an attention-based tweet-level polarity-inference task, and (3) an adversarial learning task that promotes independence between an embedding’s polarity component and its semantic component. Our experimental results demonstrate that our PEM model can successfully learn polarity-aware embeddings that perform well at tweet-level and account-level classification tasks. We examine a variety of applications—including a study of spatial and temporal distributions of polarities and a comparison between tweets from Twitter and posts from Parler—and we thereby demonstrate the effectiveness of our PEM model. We also discuss important limitations of our work and encourage caution when applying the PEM model to real-world scenarios.
Sunday, January 16, 2022
The `PrickRank' Algorithm
People love to correct others (often obnoxiously, but at least one acquires info).
Google has PageRank, and social-media platforms like Twitter have this `PrickRank algorithm'.
(This monicker is destined to become a classic, just like FIPO.)
Sunday, January 09, 2022
The Donkey Kong Visual Illusion
Horizontally aligned rows appear to tilt alternately. pic.twitter.com/80pfmXPql6
— Akiyoshi Kitaoka (@AkiyoshiKitaoka) January 9, 2022
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
"Twitter" in 1803: The Finger of Contempt
Twitter: 1803 style
— Mason Porter (@masonporter) March 24, 2021
Now where did I put my 👉Finger of Contempt? https://t.co/Y1yoNVLMtm
(h/t David Blau)
Tuesday, March 16, 2021
My Top-5 Emoji: The Power of Positive Thinking
😱🙄🤔🙀🤢
— Mason Porter (@masonporter) March 16, 2021
Yup. My top-5 emoji certainly do appear to be my aesthetic.
Because I believe in the power of positive thinking. https://t.co/XizplVRldD
Sunday, November 22, 2020
A Visual Illusion: Game-and-Watch Style
(Tip of the cap to Sydney Padua.)This may be the strongest optical illusion I’ve ever seen.pic.twitter.com/J8fCqbQUJ1
— Siqi Chen (@blader) November 22, 2020
Sunday, November 15, 2020
Revenge of the Oxford Comma: 2020 Edition
Update your lesson plans, we have a new perfect example for Oxford commas. https://t.co/gm1K8IHkGv
— Laura Ansley (@lmansley) November 14, 2020
(Tip of the cap to Jan van den Heuvel.)
Saturday, September 12, 2020
Usage of the Word 'Oy'
Usage of the word 'oy' from The Joys of Yiddish: "It is uttered in as many ways as the utterer's histrionic ability permits." pic.twitter.com/Jwz5YmK5oM
— Mason Porter (@masonporter) September 13, 2020
Tuesday, August 25, 2020
"Networks of Necessity: Preventing COVID-19 Among Disabled People and Their Caregivers"
New white paper: "Networks of Necessity: Preventing COVID-19 Among Disabled People and Their Caregivers": ftp://ftp.math.ucla.edu/pub/camreport/cam20-33.pdf
— Mason Porter (@masonporter) August 25, 2020
by Michael R. Lindstrom, MAP, Hannah Shoenhard, Sarah Trick, Thomas Valles, Joseph M. Zinski
Please read and circulate. pic.twitter.com/z33lSFx8dE
Sunday, August 16, 2020
Establish Dominance in Academia
Further pedagogical counsel from @ProfChrisMJones and @nlmtys.
— Carl T. Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom) August 16, 2020
You could be a hardass about attendance, or.... pic.twitter.com/Pa8095kmGA
"Rotating" Cubes: An Impressive Visual Illusion
One of the most powerful motion illusions I've seen: The cubes appear to be rotating in opposite directions – but they're not actually moving at all… 😮
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) August 15, 2020
Credit: @jagarikin pic.twitter.com/RgUFskZbZU
(Tip of the cap to Philip E. Tetlock.)
Tuesday, August 04, 2020
When a Math Problem Comes Along, You Must Whip it!
When I return to teaching offline, clearly I should go full Devo. pic.twitter.com/udqmPGZ9Kw
— Mason Porter (@masonporter) August 5, 2020
Be Both the Doctor and the Kid
The Doctor.
— Jordi Lafebre (@jordilafebre) August 4, 2020
The Kid.
Be both.
🦋A new post about creativity👇:https://t.co/E7vaCJbOT2 pic.twitter.com/uKAcHMzUzX
(Tip of the cap to Sydney Padua.)
Monday, July 20, 2020
Cardboard "Fans" at Dodger Stadium
To make the cardboard fans at Dodger Stadium more realistic, one should only start placing them in the stands after the 3rd inning starts. ;)
— Mason Porter (@masonporter) July 21, 2020
(I write this as a die-hard, lifelong @Dodgers fan!) pic.twitter.com/t3EXkIXF2w
Sunday, June 07, 2020
The COVID-19 Graduating Class
I bought one of these for each graduating member of my research group. pic.twitter.com/H8W7Dxg2aF
— Mason Porter (@masonporter) June 7, 2020
Friday, May 29, 2020
Topography Will Tear Us Apart
Unknown Topographies https://t.co/uyNZF9G7TX
— Brian Glaser (@bsglaser) May 29, 2020
(Tip of the cap to Dave Richeson.)
Monday, April 20, 2020
A Paper Called "Lunch Menu" on Google Scholar
"Lunch Menu" by T. B. Dishes and P. Kids also exists, cited 14 times https://t.co/8RR1rvYfKs
— Hiroki Sayama (@HirokiSayama) April 21, 2020
Saturday, March 14, 2020
Preparing to Teach Classes in Cyberspace
In preparation for online lecturing, I am practicing using Zoom with my cousin.
— Mason Porter (@masonporter) March 14, 2020
There appears to be a time lag. pic.twitter.com/GgRI95tku9