Slashdot Mirror
Algorithm Distinguishes Memes From Ordinary Information
KentuckyFC writes: "Memes are the cultural equivalent of genes: units that transfer ideas or practices from one human to another by means of imitation. In recent years, network scientists have become increasingly interested in how memes spread, work that has led to important insights into the nature of news cycles, into information avalanches on social networks and so on. But what exactly makes a meme and distinguishes it from other forms of information is not well understood. Now a team of researchers has developed a way to automatically distinguish scientific memes from other forms of information for the first time. Their technique exploits the way scientific papers reference older papers on related topics. They scoured the half a million papers published by Physical Review between 1893 and 2010 looking for common words or phrases. They define an interesting meme as one that is more likely to appear in a paper that cites another paper in which the same meme occurs. In other words, interesting memes are more likely to replicate. They end up with a list of words and phrases that have spread by replication and can also see how this spreading has changed over the last 100 years. The top five phrases are: loop quantum cosmology, unparticle, sonoluminescence, MgB2 and stochastic resonance; all of which are important topics in physics. The team say the technique is interesting because it provides a way to distinguish memes from other forms of information that do not spread in the same way through replication."
Sorry, but a "meme" is a picture of a humorous animal with a joke in Impact font at the top and bottom. The word used to mean something else, but that definition got outcompeted by one that was better at replication.
At first I was excited by them using my preferred definition of meme in the first sentence of the summary, then I saw the list" loop quantum cosmology, unparticle, sonoluminescence, MgB2 and stochastic resonance" and realized that it may as well be Yo dawg, I heard you like memes, so I put a meme in your meme, or I can haz cheezburger?. So they mined the journal for words and phrases... meh, those aren't memes
I'd offer you a custom plugin, but it's like over 9000 dollars.
it's so rare to see the word 'meme' used in its true sense any more. I'd love to see Internet memes called 'netmemes' to disambiguate the terms.
For human evaluation, they compared their "meme list" to a set of phrases selected at uniform random from papers with enough citations. This is worthless; any half-way intelligent method will outperform that. If you had physicists come up with a list of 20 important phrases de novo, it would probably not have a huge amount of overlap with their "memes."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Such study. Much Science. Very Physics...
Common, we were all thinking it, right?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This is Slashdot; shouldn't you be looking for comments about pink ponies covered with hot grits?
Good, inexpensive web hosting
...by fitting the definition of meme.
I'm impressed they can get that out of plain text, but 'algorithm' led me to expect something really clever.
But the writers of TFA are still misusing the word. All learned knowledge is memetic: It's silly to pull arbitrary words from an information stream and pretend only they are memes. The word they should be looking for is "important" or "central". The software is pulling ideas more central to the science. That's excellent work and well worth doing... It's just not directly related to memes.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
But the writers of TFA are still misusing the word
Actually no, they are not. By using citations to create a directed graph of papers they are specifically looking for words or phrases that are highly likely to be inherited by descendant documents and also much less frequently spontaneously appear in documents (i.e. not used in any of the cited documents). They really are interested in the heritability of words and phrases.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
"What's a meme?"
"It's an idea that replicates in a virus-like manner."
"How do we distinguish an idea from a meme?"
"By whether the idea replicates in a virus-like manner."
"..."
From the sidelines, I predict the theists will win if solely due to the Dawkins clan's self-stupification.
I'd like this for detecting when managers are high on this or that buzzword and need to be reigned in.
Super! That way you could leverage maximum critical infrastructure buy-in.
At least that's my take away.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I've got a script to identify social memes:
wget knowyourmeme.com | grep -i "$1"
Haven't done a lot of debugging yet.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
At last we have a way to filter out memes appearing in Slashdot posts. We should consider using a Beowulf cluster of CPU running the algorithm. However - call me old fashioned (and it wouldn't be the first time) - I think that in Soviet Russia memes would distinguish algorithms, and indeed Natalie Portman could confirm this.