Stories have the power to shape our identities and worldviews. They can be factual or fictional, text-based or visual and can take many forms—from novels and non-fiction to conspiracy theories, rumors and disinformation. This Collection includes primary research papers that propose innovative, data-driven approaches to understanding stories and their impact, on such topics as the nature of narrative and narrative thinking, methods to extract stories from datasets and datasets from stories, the role of narrative in science communication, and the transformative power of stories.

Source: collections.plos.org

Nazanin Alipourfard, Buddhika Nettasinghe, Andrés Abeliuk, Vikram Krishnamurthy & Kristina Lerman 
Nature Communications volume 11, Article number: 707 (2020)

 

Social networks shape perceptions by exposing people to the actions and opinions of their peers. However, the perceived popularity of a trait or an opinion may be very different from its actual popularity. We attribute this perception bias to friendship paradox and identify conditions under which it appears. We validate the findings empirically using Twitter data. Within posts made by users in our sample, we identify topics that appear more often within users’ social feeds than they do globally among all posts. We also present a polling algorithm that leverages the friendship paradox to obtain a statistically efficient estimate of a topic’s global prevalence from biased individual perceptions. We characterize the polling estimate and validate it through synthetic polling experiments on Twitter data. Our paper elucidates the non-intuitive ways in which the structure of directed networks can distort perceptions and presents approaches to mitigate this bias.

Source: www.nature.com

Mariano Bizzarri, Douglas E. Brash, James Briscoe, Verônica A. Grieneisen, Claudio D. Stern & Michael Levin 
Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology volume 20, pages261–262(2019)

 

What does it mean to say that event X caused outcome Y in biology? Explaining the causal structure underlying the dynamic function of living systems is a central goal of biology. Transformative advances in regenerative medicine and synthetic bioengineering will require efficient strategies to cause desired system-level outcomes. We present a perspective on the need to move beyond the classical ‘necessary and sufficient’ approach to biological causality.

Source: www.nature.com

Chaos 30, 013153 (2020); https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5122313
Iacopo Iacopini, Benjamin Schäfer, Elsa Arcaute, Christian Beck, and Vito Latora

 

The electricity system is in the midst of large transformations, and new business models have emerged quickly to facilitate new modes of operation of the electricity supply. The so-called demand response seeks to coordinate demand from a large number of users through incentives, which are usually economic such as variable pricing tariffs. Here, we propose a simple mathematical framework to model consumer behaviors under demand response. Our model considers at the same time social influence and customer benefits to opt into and stay within new control schemes. In our model, information about the existence of a contract propagates through the links of a social network, while the geographic proximity of clusters of adopters influences the likelihood of participation by decreasing the likelihood of opting out. The results of our work can help to make informed decisions in energy demand management.

Source: aip.scitation.org

Hiroki Sayama

 

Today’s society faces widening disagreement and conflicts among constituents with incompatible views. Escalated views and opinions are seen not only in radical ideology or extremism but also in many other scenes of our everyday life. Here we show that widening disagreement among groups may be linked to the advancement of information communication technology, by analyzing a mathematical model of population dynamics in a continuous opinion space. We adopted the interaction kernel approach to model enhancement of people’s information gathering ability and introduced a generalized non-local gradient as individuals’ perception kernel. We found that the characteristic distance between population peaks becomes greater as the wider range of opinions becomes available to individuals or the greater attention is attracted to opinions distant from theirs. These findings may provide a possible explanation for why disagreement is growing in today’s increasingly interconnected society, without attributing its cause only to specific individuals or events.

Source: arxiv.org