Month: February 2021

Variants v. Vaccines – Tomas Pueyo

2021 promised to save us. The vaccines were finally here. It was a matter of time. Then B117 arrived, exploded in England, collapsed its healthcare system, and spread across the world.

Each country is now in a race between new variants—the English one, the South African one, and the Brazilian one—and mass vaccinations to stop them. What will happen in your country? Will it be saved by vaccines? Or will it suffer like the UK a new wave of deaths?

When will you get back to the new normal?

To answer that, let’s understand what happened in the UK, gather what we know about B117, look into the vaccines, and forecast what will happen between now and the summer.

Read the full article at: tomaspueyo.substack.com

Foundations of complexity economics

W. Brian Arthur
Nature Reviews Physics volume 3, pages136–145(2021)

Conventional, neoclassical economics assumes perfectly rational agents (firms, consumers, investors) who face well-defined problems and arrive at optimal behaviour consistent with — in equilibrium with — the overall outcome caused by this behaviour. This rational, equilibrium system produces an elegant economics, but is restrictive and often unrealistic. Complexity economics relaxes these assumptions. It assumes that agents differ, that they have imperfect information about other agents and must, therefore, try to make sense of the situation they face. Agents explore, react and constantly change their actions and strategies in response to the outcome they mutually create. The resulting outcome may not be in equilibrium and may display patterns and emergent phenomena not visible to equilibrium analysis. The economy becomes something not given and existing but constantly forming from a developing set of actions, strategies and beliefs — something not mechanistic, static, timeless and perfect but organic, always creating itself, alive and full of messy vitality.

Read the full article at: www.nature.com

You’re Definitely Wrong, Maybe: Correction Style Has Minimal Effect on Corrections of Misinformation Online

Cameron Martel, Mohsen Mosleh, and David G. Rand

Media and Communication  Vol 9, No 1 (2021): Dark Participation in Online Communication: The World of the Wicked Web

How can online communication most effectively respond to misinformation posted on social media? Recent studies examining the content of corrective messages provide mixed results—several studies suggest that politer, hedged messages may increase engagement with corrections, while others favor direct messaging which does not shed doubt on the credibility of the corrective message. Furthermore, common debunking strategies often include keeping the message simple and clear, while others recommend including a detailed explanation of why the initial misinformation is incorrect. To shed more light on how correction style affects correction efficacy, we manipulated both correction strength (direct, hedged) and explanatory depth (simple explanation, detailed explanation) in response to participants from Lucid (N = 2,228) who indicated they would share a false story in a survey experiment. We found minimal evidence suggesting that correction strength or depth affects correction engagement, both in terms of likelihood of replying, and accepting or resisting corrective information. However, we do find that analytic thinking and actively open-minded thinking are associated with greater acceptance of information in response to corrective messages, regardless of correction style. Our results help elucidate the efficacy of user-generated corrections of misinformation on social media.

Read the full article at: www.cogitatiopress.com

Scriptinformatics: Extended Phenetic Approach to Script Evolution, by Gábor Hosszú

Scriptinformatics, in other words, scriptological informatics or computational scriptology, as a branch of applied computer science (informatics), deals with the investigation concerning the evolution of graphemes in various scripts and with the exploration of relationships between scripts, where the scripts could be any sequence of symbols of cultural origin, such as historical writing systems or urban graffiti. In a scriptinformatic research, the machine learning, artificial intelligence and bioinformatics tools are used (Hosszú 2010a; Hosszú 2017). It deals with phylogenetic (phyletic) modelling, developing the necessary algorithms and the phenetic, evolutionary and statistical analyses of features of the studied scripts (Hosszú 2014b; Hosszú 2019: 120).

Read the full book at: real.mtak.hu