Four short links: 9 March 2018
Truth vs. Falsehoods, Shitizen Science, Open Source Guides, and The Great Slate
- The Spread of True and False News Online (Science) — It took the truth about six times as long as falsehood to reach 1,500 people and 20 times as long as falsehood to reach a cascade depth of 10. As the truth never diffused beyond a depth of 10, we saw that falsehood reached a depth of 19 nearly 10 times faster than the truth reached a depth of 10. Falsehood also diffused significantly more broadly and was retweeted by more unique users than the truth at every cascade depth.
- American Gut: An Open Platform for Citizen-Science Microbiome Research — Although much work has linked the human microbiome to specific phenotypes and lifestyle variables, data from different projects have been challenging to integrate, and the extent of microbial and molecular diversity in human stool remains unknown. Welcome to the platform for “shitizen science.” (via Jonathan Eisen)
- TODO Group’s Open Source Guides — These Open Source Guides are developed by the TODO Group in collaboration with The Linux Foundation and the larger open source community. They collect best practices from the leading companies engaged in open source development, and aim to help your organization successfully implement and run an open source program office.
- Fundraising for Congressional Campaigns (Sarah Jeong) — Maciej Ceglowski’s grassroots fundraising and its huge effect. It doesn’t help that Ceglowski is insistent on giving the candidates briefings on information security. He carries YubiKeys — hardware authentication devices that are the gold standard of two-factor authentication — with him to meetings with those running for office. Beefing up security practices in political campaigns is important, especially given the email hacking that dominated the 2016 cycle—but a strange man showing up to explain two-factor authentication to you is probably a little off-putting nonetheless. After raising nearly a million dollars combined last quarter, “they’re being a lot friendlier to me,” says Ceglowski.
