Fake News

Fake News

While fake news may not be a recent invention, it is one that has certainly one that has taken on a new context given the rise of social media and the effectiveness of efforts for motivated parties to mislead others. This season is a collection of interviews with researchers looking at this topic.

Fake News
Fake News

This episode kicks off our new theme of "Fake News" with guests Robert Sheaffer and Brad Schwartz.

The Spread of Fake News
The Spread of Fake News

How does fake news get spread online? Its not just a matter of manipulating search algorithms. The social platforms for sharing play a major role in the distribution of fake news. But how significant of an impact can there be? How significantly can bots influence the spread of fake news?

Spam Filtering with Naive Bayes
Spam Filtering with Naive Bayes

Today's spam filters are advanced data driven tools. They rely on a variety of techniques to effectively and often seamlessly filter out junk email from good email.

Human Detection of Fake News
Human Detection of Fake News

With publications such as "Prior exposure increases perceived accuracy of fake news", "Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning", and "The science of fake news", Gordon Pennycook is asking and answering analytical questions about the nature of human intuition and fake news.

Ant Intelligence
Ant Intelligence

If you prepared a list of creatures regarded as highly intelligent, it's unlikely ants would make the cut. This is expected, as on an individual level, ants do not generally display behavior that most humans would regard as intelligence. In fact, it might even be true that most species of ants are unable to learn. Despite this, ant colonies have evolved excellent survival mechanisms through the careful orchestration of ants.

Algorithmic Detection of Fake News
Algorithmic Detection of Fake News

The scale and frequency with which information can be distributed on social media makes the problem of fake news a rapidly metastasizing issue. To do any content filtering or labeling demands an algorithmic solution.

Click Through Rates
Click Through Rates

A Click Through Rate (CTR) is the proportion of clicks to impressions of some item of content shared online. This terminology is most commonly used in digital advertising but applies just as well to content websites might choose to feature on their homepage or in search results.

The Knowledge Illusion
The Knowledge Illusion

Kyle interviews Steven Sloman, Professor in the school of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. Steven is co-author of The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone and Causal Models: How People Think about the World and Its Alternatives. Steven shares his perspective and research into how people process information and what this teaches us about the existence of and belief in fake news.

Quality Score
Quality Score

Two weeks ago we discussed click through rates or CTRs and their usefulness and limits as a metric. Today, we discuss a related metric known as quality score.

Fake News Midterm
Fake News Midterm

In this episode, Kyle reviews what we've learned so far in our series on Fake News and talks briefly about where we're going next.

Deep Fakes
Deep Fakes

Digital videos can be described as sequences of still images and associated audio. Audio is easy to fake. What about video?

False Discovery Rates
False Discovery Rates

A false discovery rate (FDR) is a methodology that can be useful when struggling with the problem of multiple comparisons.

Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus
Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus

In this episode, our guest is Dan Kahan about his research into how people consume and interpret science news.

The Louvain Method for Community Detection
The Louvain Method for Community Detection

Without getting into definitions, we have an intuitive sense of what a "community" is. The Louvain Method for Community Detection is one of the best known mathematical techniques designed to detect communities.

Modeling Fake News
Modeling Fake News

This is our interview with Dorje Brody about his recent paper with David Meier, How to model fake news. This paper uses the tools of communication theory and a sub-topic called filtering theory to describe the mathematical basis for an information channel which can contain fake news.