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Indiana University Researchers Get $1 Million Grant To Study Memes
An anonymous reader writes with news that the NSF has just awarded a group of researchers a grant to study the life cycle of memes. "Indiana University is receiving nearly $1 million in federal grant money to investigate the genesis, spread, and demise of Internet memes. The grant from the National Science Foundation awards four Indiana researchers $919,917 to for a project called Truthy that will, as the grant's abstract explains, "explore why some ideas cause viral explosions while others are quickly forgotten." (And yes, in case you're wondering, the name was inspired by Stephen Colbert's neologism "truthiness.") The government-funded research is aimed at identifying which memes are organic and which ones are mere astroturf. "While the vast majority of memes arise in a perfectly organic manner, driven by the complex mechanisms of life on the Web, some are engineered by the shady machinery of high-profile congressional campaigns," Truthy's About page explains."
Up the road at Purdue University there are always quite a lot of memes about Indiana University. They're all really negative, so that might affect the study results.
First post, hot gritz, car analogy, robotic overlords, Beowulf cluster.
What's this doing on the homepage... it's from IDLE!
I don't always get paid to surf the Web but when I do, I make sure to get a grant that could have gone to a better cause...
I Cater to the Needs of Stupid People. - from a coffee mug Christmas gift
Haven't read all of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness#Adoption_of_the_term_by_Colbert
But is Colbert's definition a new definition for the word, or was it predefined by someone else beforehand? I'm assuming it was a new definition of a word that existed before, with Colbert popularizing the word itself.
I, for one, welcome our new meme-studying overlords.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
One doesn't have to see the value in stuff that isn't immediately applicable R&D(and I'm not here to debate the point, do as you will); but if you are OK with the concept of such research this actually seems like a pretty good idea:
The question of how and why ideas, 'culture', religions, new scientific hypotheses, etc. are transmitted and compete with one another is really a very long standing one. A lot of the historical study emphasizes 'elite' culture and theory(mostly because everything else was oral record only, and that doesn't keep well; but written works sometimes survive) or religious(high frequency of literacy, and proselytizing is a technology of considerable interest to contemporary religions); but there is also study of popular culture, folk mythologies, what the middle and lower classes were reading and watching(once that became common), and so on.
Cultural transmission is a very solid social science topic, and internet memes have the dual virtues of both potentially being novel(they might actually follow some traditional propagation pattern, might be something new, either way would be interesting to know) and being amenable to large-scale analysis because the internet is just so conveniently searchable and heavily cached in various places. You don't have to like the entire field; but this research project seems like a perfectly reasonable exercise.
Emacs vs. vi vs. viper-mode fence sitters, GNOME vs. KDE, Bill Gates as a Borg, Get Some Priorities (after a major natural disaster or terrorist attack), Less space than a Nomad, .page .widening, my UID is lower than yours, Stephen King is dead, You fail it, You insensitive clod, early versions of Mac OS X (later Windows Vista) taking 20 minutes to copy a 17 MB file, will we see it before Duke Nukem Forever (which became "before Valve releases 3" once DNF finally came out), "Taco snotting" and other slashfic, RTFA (read the fucking article) and its bowdlerization to "the featured article"...
1: Find idiots in government handing out other peoples money (redundant)
2: Apply for grant
3: ???
4: Profit
No brain, no pain.
Obligatory xkcd, you insensitive clod!
This year the federal government moved $550 billion closer to default and the collapse of the dollar.
Just thought I would point that out, since it seems relevant.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Clearly what's needed is to make them into a meme themselves. In this way they can study themselves studying themselves studying themselves...
What better cause than redirecting $919,917 to help market a high-profile congressional campaign.
#goldenfleece
I love memes.
I make sure to catch up with memes twice a month on specialized web sites, but they often come to me while browsing around.
I think they are now a good 33% of what really make me laugh on the web.
The Botched Christ meme and its parodies is a major meme to me, I hope they won't forget this one
Complex ones are still relevant, like language, religion and moral, even if the internet ones are more documented and have a more delimited life cycle. And they are risk to get their funds cut when they find the truth behind the ice bucket challenge,
Or, as the Washington Free Beacon and Fox News say (and several people submitted to /.): Feds Creating Database to Track Hate Speech on Twitter. Seriously.
Of course, it makes sense for Fox News to raise the alarm about attempts to expose astroturfing.
There's federal money in them thar memes, boys.
A million dollars? Really? It took us two years to finally get a little over half a million from the NSF for a program to help women and underprivileged kids get a foot hold into math, science, and engineering programs at our university. At least the money is going toward a good cause. I fail to see how the fruits of the Indiana University grant is going to benefit anyone other than the PI and CoPIs getting funding from this grant.
From the extract:
"This service could mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda, and assist in the preservation of open debate. "
Or more aptly:
"This service could mitigate free speech, detect anything we don't agree with and allow us to control the message"
I can has 1 millon doler grant?
>> It could benefit marketers or anyone who wants to spread a message.
The multi-billion dollar marketing industry is WAY ahead of you. We are well aware of memes (as self-perpetuating brands or slogans) and have been successful launching quite a few of our own on behalf of our well-heeled customers for the past 80 or so years, e.g.,
"Bud" "Wise" "Er"
"So easy a caveman could do it."
"... Burma Shave"
"War on Women"
So...we're good over here. Why don't you just send that $1M back to the taxpayers?
It isn't hard to waste money, when it isn't yours.
And to believe there are Americans out there pining to give big G more tax income!
Shut up and take my money!
Have gnu, will travel.
assist in the preservation of open debate
That has got to be the most beautiful characterization of censorship I have ever read.
But when I do, it is to study memes :)
Spend a million dollars, and astroturf the meme "evil republican congress people are trying to influence you with memes".
Back in reality-world:
http://www.freedomworks.org/co...‘one-nation’-just-liberal-astroturfing
http://mashable.com/2008/08/08...
http://lonelyconservative.com/...
http://dailycaller.com/2013/02...
First line of the second paragraph of the first link in the summary:
"We also plan to use Truthy to detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution."
According to whom? So are they the repository of all Truth so they can determine what is misinformation and what isn't? And WTF is "social pollution"? One G-manÃ(TM)s Ãoesocial pollutionà is another free manÃ(TM)s First Amendment right.
It seems to me that whatever political party can effectively use this data first, has a great weapon in its arsenal.
Richard Dawkins invented meme specifically in relation to religion, in his book The Selfish Gene.
This was in 2011, if you look at NSF's award page. And just to put things in perspective.. This sort of money is enough to pay for four graduate students (50% effort), some very limited summer time of two professors over the course of four years, and a modest amount of travel to conferences. It's a very good grant from a great source that allows you to get some good work done, but it doesn't go as far as the uninitiated might think.
With u.s. money a coup detat is financed. The new rulers want to ethnically cleanse one of their minorities in a fit of chauvinism.
They use mi 24 combat helos and su 24 frogfoot tankbusters for the cleansing.
The victicms dont allow themselves to be easily slaughtered. New york and london are really pissed about the victims.
Berlin plays the dumb vasall dog as always.
After all they ned to tell you the truth about the benevolent nsa and why it is ok to keep gazans in a a big jail.
Also, the saudis are nice people who really dont own slaves.
Not.
...but I'm finding it hard to really get too worked up about.
We are planning to buy almost F-35s at a price of approx. $188 million per. This is a plane that in the words of Rand corp (hardly an anti-military outfit) "can't turn, can't climb, can't run" well enough to dogfight.
We are planning to buy a total of 10 Ford class aircraft carriers, at a cost of more than $11 billion per ship. The Chinese seem to think they can neutralize our carriers with cheap ballistic missiles and attack subs. Lots of experts think they may be right. But even if they aren't that will leave us with twice as many fleet carriers as the rest of the world combined.
Compared to that, I think a million bucks to study the life cycle of memes is a bargain.
$1 millon we don't have :(
Here's a meme you can study: My name is Jimmy. Gimmie, gimmie, gimmie! I want some of that million.
Find out how!
All the memes are NSF work.
but based on public behaviors over the last decade, this research is to learn how to weaponize and control memes.
government control of attitude through collusion with advertising companies or media outlets is bad enough. Having this attitude control independent of even commercial media sources is even worse.
The main topic is memes, not the Federal deficit.
"TLDR", being a meme, many of which were quoted here, is actually ON TOPIC.
Which is funny all on its own, being that it is probably one of the few times that a reply such as TLDR is actually ON TOPIC, and it is funny as a reply to trolls who are trolling the topic with idiotic insinuations of "useless research causes Federal budget to collapse".
And it's triple funny cause though THEY are aware of being off-topic, moderators are not.
There...
Now...
Place your right forefinger on your right cheek, just above the right corner of your mouth, and your left forefinger at your left cheek, just above the left corner of your mouth.
With fingers in that position push the cheeks of your face gently upward.
While holding your cheeks in that position, open your mouth slightly, take a deep breath, and say "Ha!" rapidly three times while breading out with each "Ha!"
It may take a little practice to get it right first couple of years.
Observing how other humanoids perform the laughing ritual may help.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens