Viral videos can reach global penetration traveling through international channels of communication similarly to real diseases starting from a well-localized source. In past centuries, disease fronts propagated in a concentric spatial fashion from the the source of the outbreak via the short range human contact network. The emergence of long-distance air-travel changed these ancient patterns. However, recently, Brockmann and Helbing have shown that concentric propagation waves can be reinstated if propagation time and distance is measured in the flight-time and travel volume weighted underlying air-travel network. Here, we adopt this method for the analysis of viral meme propagation in Twitter messages, and define a similar weighted network distance in the communication network connecting countries and states of the World. We recover a wave-like behavior on average and assess the randomizing effect of non-locality of spreading. We show that similar result can be recovered from Google Trends data as well.

 

Video Pandemics: Worldwide Viral Spreading of Psy’s Gangnam Style Video
Zsofia Kallus, Daniel Kondor, Jozsef Steger, Istvan Csabai, Eszter Bokanyi, Gabor Vattay

Source: arxiv.org

Is Chinese urbanization going to take a long time, or can its development goal be achieved by the government in a short time? What is the highest stable urbanization level that China can reach? When can China complete its urbanization? To answer these questions, this paper presents a system dynamic (SD) model of Chinese urbanization, and its validity and simulation are justified by a stock-flow test and a sensitivity analysis using real data from 1998 to 2013. Setting the initial conditions of the simulation by referring to the real data of 2013, the multi-scenario analysis from 2013 to 2050 reveals that Chinese urbanization will reach a level higher than 70% in 2035 and then proceed to a slow urbanization stage regardless of the population policy and GDP growth rate settings; in 2050, Chinese urbanization levels will reach approximately 75%, which is a stable and equilibrium level for China. Thus, it can be argued that Chinese urbanization is a long social development process that will require approximately 20 years to complete and that the ultimate urbanization level will be 75–80%, which means that in the distant future, 20–25% of China’s population will still settle in rural regions of China.

 

Chinese urbanization 2050: SD modeling and process simulation
GU Chao Lin, GUAN Wei Hua, LIU He Lin

SCIENCE CHINA Earth Sciences 60(6), 1067-1082(2017);  10.1007/s11430-016-9022-2

Source: engine.scichina.com

The massive spread of fake news has been identified as a major global risk and has been alleged to influence elections and threaten democracies. Communication, cognitive, social, and computer scientists are engaged in efforts to study the complex causes for the viral diffusion of digital misinformation and to develop solutions, while search and social media platforms are beginning to deploy countermeasures. However, to date, these efforts have been mainly informed by anecdotal evidence rather than systematic data. Here we analyze 14 million messages spreading 400 thousand claims on Twitter during and following the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and election. We find evidence that social bots play a key role in the spread of fake news. Accounts that actively spread misinformation are significantly more likely to be bots. Automated accounts are particularly active in the early spreading phases of viral claims, and tend to target influential users. Humans are vulnerable to this manipulation, retweeting bots who post false news. Successful sources of false and biased claims are heavily supported by social bots. These results suggests that curbing social bots may be an effective strategy for mitigating the spread of online misinformation.

 

The spread of fake news by social bots

Chengcheng Shao, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Onur Varol, Alessandro Flammini, Filippo Menczer

Source: arxiv.org

The managed-metabolism hypothesis suggests that a cooperation barrier must be overcome if self-producing chemical organizations are to transition from non-life to life. This barrier prevents un-managed, self-organizing, autocatalytic networks of molecular species from individuating into complex, cooperative organizations. The barrier arises because molecular species that could otherwise make significant cooperative contributions to the success of an organization will often not be supported within the organization, and because side reactions and other free-riding processes will undermine cooperation. As a result, the barrier seriously limits the possibility space that can be explored by un-managed organizations, impeding individuation, complex functionality and the transition to life. The barrier can be overcome comprehensively by appropriate management which implements a system of evolvable constraints. The constraints support beneficial co-operators and suppress free riders. In this way management can manipulate the chemical processes of an autocatalytic organization, producing novel processes that serve the interests of the organization as a whole and that could not arise and persist spontaneously in an un-managed chemical organization. Management self-organizes because it is able to capture some of the benefits that are produced when its management of an autocatalytic organization promotes beneficial cooperation. Selection therefore favours the emergence of managers that take over and manage chemical organizations so as to overcome the cooperation barrier. The managed-metabolism hypothesis shows that if management is to overcome the cooperation barrier comprehensively, its interventions must be digitally coded. In this way, the hypothesis accounts for the two-tiered structure of all living cells in which a digitally-coded genetic apparatus manages an analogically-informed metabolism.

 

Self-Organization and The Origins of Life: The Managed-Metabolism Hypothesis
John E. Stewart

Source: arxiv.org

How cooperation can evolve between players is an unsolved problem of biology. Here we use Hamiltonian dynamics of models of the Ising type to describe populations of cooperating and defecting players to show that the equilibrium fraction of cooperators is given by the expectation value of a thermal observable akin to a magnetization. We apply the formalism to the Public Goods game with three players, and show that a phase transition between cooperation and defection occurs that is equivalent to a transition in one-dimensional Ising crystals with long-range interactions. We also investigate the effect of punishment on cooperation and find that punishment acts like a magnetic field that leads to an “alignment” between players, thus encouraging cooperation. We suggest that a thermal Hamiltonian picture of the evolution of cooperation can generate other insights about the dynamics of evolving groups by mining the rich literature of critical dynamics in low-dimensional spin systems.

 

Thermodynamics of Evolutionary Games
Christoph Adami, Arend Hintze

Source: arxiv.org