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Physicists Find Users Uninterested After 36 Hours 141

Posted by Hemos from the yawn-show-me-something-new dept.
SuperGrads writes "Statistical physicists working in the US and Hungary have found that the number of people reading a particular news story on the web decreases with time by a power law rather than exponentially as was previously thought. The finding has implications for the study of information flow in social networks, marketing and web design."
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Physicists Find Users Uninterested After 36 Hours More

Physicists Find Users Uninterested After 36 Hours

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  • In related news (Score:5, Funny)

    by lecithin ( 745575 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @12:27PM (#15691838)
    Users Find Physicists Uninteresting After 3.6 seconds.

  • Old news (Score:5, Funny)

    by Percent Man ( 756972 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @12:27PM (#15691846) Homepage
    Are we still talking about this?

  • It's appropriate this time (Score:2, Funny)

    by A beautiful mind ( 821714 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @12:28PM (#15691851)
    Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

  • However ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by blowdart ( 31458 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @12:29PM (#15691862) Homepage
    The story will get posted again on slashdot 37 hours later.

    • Re:However ... (Score:1)

      by Jrabbit05 ( 943335 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @12:31PM (#15691874)
      Only it'll glow a little less.

    • We Just Killed Their Theory (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 10, 2006 @02:06PM (#15692580)
      I can see these physicists really scratching their heads when the article gets slashdotted 72 hours after the published date (July 7).

      • Re:We Just Killed Their Theory (Score:2)

        by tinkertim ( 918832 ) * on Tuesday July 11, 2006 @03:11AM (#15696281)
        Well, not exactly. The key words is 'after its posted' . So since its new news to slashdot, the cycle repeats itself, only this time its slashdot we're metering, not the article.

        What they are talking about is something most of us already know, and understand .. however can't quite articulate.

        Their accomplishment then is not realizing the trend, but finding a way to illustrate it, which led with being able to articulate and substantiate it.

        I understand lots of things that I couldn't possibly hope to articulate. All of us do.

        Found TFA to be quite interesting because they took a very mythotical approach to making an abstract tangible.

  • maybe because it's not "news" anymore? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by holden caufield ( 111364 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @12:30PM (#15691868)
    I'm wondering if these same researches tried to define what their subjects defined as "news"? If something was newsworthy, I'm guessing they likely found out about it over time. Maybe the people didn't read it because they were informed from other sources?

    Sounds like a bit of a flawed evaluation to me.

    • Re:maybe because it's not "news" anymore? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by truthsearch ( 249536 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @12:36PM (#15691924) Homepage Journal
      It might also be relevant that this study was done only on a Hungarian news site. It's possible there would be different results in other countries due to cultural differences and the number of available news sources.

    • Re:maybe because it's not "news" anymore? (Score:5, Informative)

      by The_Wilschon ( 782534 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @12:40PM (#15691950) Homepage
      The "news" in this story is not that people become disinterested in a story, but that the rate at which they become disinterested is quite different from what was expected.

      Furthermore, the study was not done by taking people and finding out how quickly they became disinterested in one story or another. A quick glance at the summary informs us that the subject of the study was the number of people reading a news story (more likely downloading the story) at a given time. That this number decreases with time is obvious. However, it was expected that the decrease would follow an exponential curve, whereas the experiment showed a power law curve instead.

      • Re:maybe because it's not "news" anymore? (Score:3, Informative)

        by yfnET ( 834882 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:11PM (#15692189) Homepage
        To prove the point, they actually did such a reversal in the case of telephone-queue waiting times. Traditionally, these have been assumed to follow a Poisson distribution, but some recent research suggests they actually follow a power law. Analysing the participants’ responses suggests that a power law, indeed, it is.

        ——

        Science & Technology / Psychology [economist.com]

        Bayes rules
        Jan 5th 2006
        From The Economist print edition

        A once-neglected statistical technique may help to explain how the mind works

        IMAGE [economist.com]

        SCIENCE, being a human activity, is not immune to fashion. For example, one of the first mathematicians to study the subject of probability theory was an English clergyman called Thomas Bayes, who was born in 1702 and died in 1761. His ideas about the prediction of future events from one or two examples were popular for a while, and have never been fundamentally challenged. But they were eventually overwhelmed by those of the “frequentist” school, which developed the methods based on sampling from a large population that now dominate the field and are used to predict things as diverse as the outcomes of elections and preferences for chocolate bars.

        Recently, however, Bayes’s ideas have made a comeback among computer scientists trying to design software with human-like intelligence. Bayesian reasoning now lies at the heart of leading internet search engines and automated “help wizards”. That has prompted some psychologists to ask if the human brain itself might be a Bayesian-reasoning machine. They suggest that the Bayesian capacity to draw strong inferences from sparse data could be crucial to the way the mind perceives the world, plans actions, comprehends and learns language, reasons from correlation to causation, and even understands the goals and beliefs of other minds.

        These researchers have conducted laboratory experiments that convince them they are on the right track, but only recently have they begun to look at whether the brain copes with everyday judgments in the real world in a Bayesian manner. In research to be published later this year in Psychological Science, Thomas Griffiths of Brown University in Rhode Island and Joshua Tenenbaum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put the idea of a Bayesian brain to a quotidian test. They found that it passes with flying colours.

        Prior assumptions
        The key to successful Bayesian reasoning is not in having an extensive, unbiased sample, which is the eternal worry of frequentists, but rather in having an appropriate “prior”, as it is known to the cognoscenti. This prior is an assumption about the way the world works—in essence, a hypothesis about reality—that can be expressed as a mathematical probability distribution of the frequency with which events of a particular magnitude happen.

        The best known of these probability distributions is the “normal”, or Gaussian distribution. This has a curve similar to the cross-section of a bell, with events of middling magnitude being common, and those of small and large magnitude rare, so it is sometimes known by a third name, the bell-curve distribution. But there are also the Poisson distribution, the Erlang distribution, the power-law distribution and many even weirder ones that are not the consequence of simple mathematical equations (or, at least, of equations that mathematicians regard as simple).

        With the correct prior, even a single piece of data can be used to make meaningful Bayesian predictions. By contrast frequentists, though they deal with the same probability distributions as Bayesians, make fewer prior assumptions about the distribution that applies in any particular situation. Frequentism is thus a more robust approach, but one that is not well suited to
      • Maybe because it is not on the news.google or news.yahoo pages any more? I don't see how you can call this disinterest.

      • Re:maybe because it's not "news" anymore? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by m874t232 ( 973431 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @02:33PM (#15692757)
        The "news" in this story is not that people become disinterested in a story, but that the rate at which they become disinterested is quite different from what was expected.

        "Expected" by who? Anybody reasonably familiar with statistics wouldn't assume that this decay is exponential because there is absolutely no reason to make that assumption; none of the models that commonly lead to exponential decay apply in this case.

        Even though this guy happens to use the web, these kinds of problems aren't anything new. If you put a statistician on it, he'd either use an empirical model for the rate, or model it with a power law.

        I think this "expectation" gives us a lot more about the unfamiliarity of the author with statistics than about the real world.

      • Re:maybe because it's not "news" anymore? (Score:1)

        by zaphod_es ( 613312 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @03:29PM (#15693139)
        The "news" in this story is not that people become disinterested in a story, but that the rate at which they become disinterested is quite different from what was expected.

        The article used the word uninterested which has a completely different meaning. Disinterested means impartial or neutral while uninterested means bored or not interested. For a more detailed explanation [uhv.edu]

    • Re:maybe because it's not "news" anymore? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by twistedsymphony ( 956982 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:44PM (#15692403) Homepage
      I'm wondering if these same researches tried to define what their subjects defined as "news"? If something was newsworthy, I'm guessing they likely found out about it over time. Maybe the people didn't read it because they were informed from other sources?
      Maybe that's exactly right? maybe 36 hours is the saturation point where someone is most likely to have already seen it elsewhere... After-all if YOU haven't seent it yet, it's still news to YOU.

    • Re:maybe because it's not "news" anymore? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Larus ( 983617 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:46PM (#15692422)
      TFA mentions a 'typical news website'. Exactly what is a typical news website? Are we talking NYTimes and WashingtonPost that covers a broad spectrum, or a smorgasbord news bulletin like /. and Digg?

  • Impulse function (Score:4, Funny)

    by courtarro ( 786894 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @12:33PM (#15691893) Homepage
    Users losing interest in this particular news story follow an impulse function [wikipedia.org].
  • Actually, nobody cares about this sort of thing, and these so-called "statistical physicists" would all be cleaning gutters for a living right now.. except the guy from HR is too terrified to go downstairs and fire them. The last time he tried, they somehow irrevocably proved to him that not only was it statistically impossible that he had arrived to give them their pink slips, but they also proved his trousers, eyebrows, and cat out of existence with nothing more than a slide rule and a whiteboard.

  • Linked (Score:1)

    by olivermoffat ( 211767 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @12:37PM (#15691928)
    One of the authors, Albert-László Barabási, is also the author of a book I really enjoyed Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means
  • as it is that information on the internet changes and updates instantly. It's not that people aren't interested in it as it just gets buried with new news. An article posted 10 minutes ago is now old news. Even on here. I work until 11pm. I come home and scroll down to see if I missed anything good. So between 2:00 when I go to work and 11:30 when I get home there's already at least 10 new stories. Imagine, now, what official news sites are like.

  • Is this The Onion? (Score:2)

    by popo ( 107611 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @12:42PM (#15691960) Homepage


    Local man becomes bored easily reading stories about nothing.

  • old hat? (Score:1, Redundant)

    by gEvil (beta) ( 945888 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @12:43PM (#15691971)
    Most news becomes old hat within a day and a half of being posted...

    Which is where sites like slashdot come into play. Thanks to the dutiful work of the editors, stories that are weeks, months, and sometimes even years old, are often given a new lease on life.

  • Possible other causes? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Todd Knarr ( 15451 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @12:48PM (#15692007) Homepage

    One has to wonder how the site's story policy affects the drop-off. That is, is the drop-off because users are uninterested or not reading, or is it because after that time the story drops off the main pages and becomes hard to find to read?

    • Re:Possible other causes? (Score:2)

      by fossa ( 212602 ) <pat7@gmx. n e t> on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:28PM (#15692295) Journal

      Indeed. For example, the Ask E. T. discussion board [edwardtufte.com] contains all topics on a single page. The topics are all related to information design, and the board no longer accepts new topics which certainly skews things a bit. But I routinley see new responses to topics that are years old, and I myself occasionally read a new topic that was first posted years ago. It isn't "news" per se, but it's an interesting take on a discussion board. I wonder what a slashdot-like site would be like that limited the number of topics (for example, today's MRAM article could be a new post in the MRAM topic), did not allow users to publish any comments with reckless abandon (i.e. had editors that pre-filtered comments), and encouraged longer, well thought out discussion to "when's the next story?".

  • Uninterested already... (Score:1, Redundant)

    by typobox43 ( 677545 ) <typobox43@gmail.com> on Monday July 10, 2006 @12:48PM (#15692012) Homepage
    From the article: "7 July 2006"

    Yup... way to stay on top of things.

  • Physicists determine... (Score:1)

    by TheAtomicElec ( 784987 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @12:49PM (#15692015)
    People have short attention spans...
    15 second sound bite at eleven!

  • Who Knew?!! (Score:2)

    by krygny ( 473134 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @12:52PM (#15692043)
    36 Hours is the exact age of a story before it drops from the bottom of slashdot's Main page.

  • BREAKING NEWS (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 27,000 ( 987534 ) <F27000@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Monday July 10, 2006 @12:53PM (#15692051)
    PHYSICISTS REPORT ARTICLES NOT ON FRONT PAGE READ LESS

    ALSO NOTE THAT SITES HAVE FINITE NUMBERS OF USERS

    And nothing about 'uninterested users'. This implies that, well, a reader is not likely to read an article more than once. Shocking, much unlike the answer to the question who is funding these people?

  • Posted 7 July 2006 (Score:2)

    by MickDownUnder ( 627418 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @12:55PM (#15692072)
    ...will be barely read by anyone 36 hours after it was first posted

    An amazing bit of research; only out by 36 hours.

  • Half-Life (Score:1)

    by SQLGuru ( 980662 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @12:57PM (#15692084) Homepage Journal
    "Barabasi's team calculated the "half-life" of a news document, which corresponds to the period in which half of all visitors that eventually access it have visited. The researchers found that the overall half-life distribution follows a power law, which indicates that most news items have a very short lifetime, although a few continue to be accessed well beyond this period. The average half-life of a news item is just 36 hours, or one and a half days after it is released. While this is short, it is longer than predicted by simple exponential models, which assume that web page browsing is less random than it actually is."

    The half-life (not the game, duh) of a news article is 36 hours. People still continue to be interested beyond that. As an advertiser, I'd be more interested in the 70% life. That time when 70% of the people that will look at it *have* looked at it. I would guess that is closer to four days.

    Layne

  • In related news (Score:2)

    by MECC ( 8478 ) * on Monday July 10, 2006 @12:59PM (#15692099)
    Users found uninteresting in about .036 seconds...

  • Politics (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Raleel ( 30913 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:03PM (#15692128)
    This is why badnews in politics is always released late on friday. By Monday, everyone has ignored it.

  • Should have used this as a test (Score:1)

    by Rodaddy ( 692438 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:08PM (#15692163)
    If only you would have waited 35.5 more hours, we could have proved the articals facts true or false

  • Methodological issues? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gilroy ( 155262 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:09PM (#15692170) Homepage Journal
    I've read the linked article but not the actual Phys Rev paper, so I'm likely blowing smoke but...

    • The "news cycle" is 24 hours, due to historical roots in daily newspapers (augmented by the evening news, etc.) Assume for the moment that people stay interested in a news story. After a day, if the story is ongoing, the original article is likely to be replaced by an update. Real-life example: Over the weekend, the NY Times Science section had these stories in a row: "Shuttle astronauts complete spacewalk", "shuttle astronauts inspect tiles", "shuttle Discovery meets space station", "shuttle Discovery set for launch". (paraphrased) Clearly, the first story in the list is the most recent and, were I looking for news on the Discovery, I'd probably click that one. Even if I really liked the Times' coverage of the rendez-vous, I'm not likely to read that article again if a new one has been posted. Does that mean I've "lost interest" in the shuttle?
    • The results seem drawn from traffic at a particular Hungarian portal and might not have any generalized relevance.
    • Ease of navigation seems important but not addressed. If stories "fall off" the homepage after 36 hours, it would make it look like people were less interested. (Or, really, the fact that some stories are highlit on the front page makes it look like people are more interested than they really are.)

    • Re:Methodological issues? (Score:1)

      by VWJedi ( 972839 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:34PM (#15692332)
      After a day, if the story is ongoing, the original article is likely to be replaced by an update. Real-life example: Over the weekend, the NY Times Science section had these stories in a row: "Shuttle astronauts complete spacewalk", "shuttle astronauts inspect tiles", "shuttle Discovery meets space station", "shuttle Discovery set for launch". (paraphrased) Clearly, the first story in the list is the most recent and, were I looking for news on the Discovery, I'd probably click that one.

      That is pretty typical of many online news sources. In most cases, you don't gain anything by looking at the older articles because 99% of their information is copied into newer articles. You're really getting "new versions" of the same article.

      In this respect, web news is more similar to TV / radio than newspapers. When you watch TV news, you typically get the same stories 30 minutes later with the addition of any new developments. Although most news websites portray themselves as "online newspapers", they are really a mixture of newspapers, magazines, TV / radio news, and other features unique to the web.

    • Re:Methodological issues? (Score:2)

      by jafac ( 1449 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @03:28PM (#15693129) Homepage
      The other thing is that many news articles will recycle old text as they are re-written and modified over those 36 hours or so. If you read an article on a developing story several times, you can see this. Sometimes, if it's not an important issue, you can wait 24-36 hours after a Reuters story is first posted, and read all the original and updated text.

    • Re:Methodological issues? (Score:2)

      by tgv ( 254536 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2006 @03:19AM (#15696297) Journal
      You're completely right. This is psychology done by physicist. Hell, how do they dare to generalize given only one website, and not even a big international one at that?

      Plus, judging from the summary, they didn't separate the articles. Of course, a large group of articles is going to be read only a few times, and a small group is going to be read very often. Zipf already told us so. I can't understand the site, but if they keep some stories longer on the page than others, the effect is entirely explained.

      Another example of bad psychology published in a renowned physics journal?

  • This has something to do with Physics (Score:1)

    by n6kuy ( 172098 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:12PM (#15692191)
    Right?

  • Heh. (Score:5, Funny)

    by wfberg ( 24378 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:14PM (#15692207)
    Good luck in explaining the spike in traffic 3 full days after the article was posted.

    Suckers!

  • Three things to consider (Score:2, Interesting)

    by WillAffleckUW ( 858324 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:17PM (#15692223) Homepage Journal
    1. If you go on vacation, and spend the usual two to four weeks relaxing, ignoring all the news except maybe browsing the headlines one day a week, as I frequently do, does the news not have equal importance? In other words, perhaps most of what we call "news" is temporary by nature, and grows less relevant with the passage of time. Please note this doesn't relate to medical/health/science news, as I've read many scientific papers from years ago that are just as relevant today as they were then. Also, for those in the US and Japan, yes, the world understands you don't get much vacation, but that's your problem.

    2. How much of the news is what we call 'entertainment' news? How much is 'sports' news? Such news quickly ceases to have relevance, other than to fans of both media.

    3. Perhaps the lack of investigative journalism, the lack of crafting of news into stories that take days to write, has led to the current situation where news quickly becomes staledated? I've read many an old copy of The New Yorker, and most of the stories about news are still relevant today, maybe one-fourth becoming less so due to the passage of time. Consider the skill and the medium used.

  • Physicists are not the best people.... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by tobiathan ( 946741 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:18PM (#15692225)
    ...to be studying this sort of thing. In any subject where the laws of Physics apply, physicists are very well suited to look at the data. Since humans are so prone to actions that defy any logic or reason, a behavioral psychologist would be better suited to have an opinion. Let's pose this question back to Steven Hawking.

  • Well, duh! (Score:2)

    by FridayBob ( 619244 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:19PM (#15692237)
    Being so smart and everything, you'd think they would have bothered to check how many new articles usually appear on Slashdot in a 36 hour period. I once tried running an RSS feed reader for a while with links to only a few sites, but quickly became so inundated with interesting stories to read that I was soon wasting way too much time. Living in this Internet, information society, immersed in so much new data every day, it's almost as easy to forget it all again; that's why advertisers keep hammering at you every time you turn on your TV. I only remember more of it when the subject matter is relevant to my work or other interests. The physics stuff is always interesting, but I'm not a researcher in that field and it's probably not going to result in any new products for me to buy any time soon either. What's more, most of my friends aren't interested in that stuff, so I don't even get to discuss it with anyone -- i.e. next...

  • Coincidence (Score:1)

    by Joebert ( 946227 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:20PM (#15692239) Homepage
    If you think you're reading the news, be warned that this story -- and any other on the web -- will be barely read by anyone 36 hours after it was first posted.
    ------------
    In Europe, where Cialis has been studied longer, the drug is dubbed the "weekend pill," because its effects last up to 36 hours.


    I just thought this was funny.

  • NEWs? (Score:2)

    by andrewman327 ( 635952 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:28PM (#15692291) Homepage Journal
    Silly me, I thought that the word news contained the word new, meaning that it isn't news if it isn't new. I am glad that a team of scientists was able to study this coorelation.

  • Exponent? Power? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:33PM (#15692328) Homepage
    Color me ignorant, but I thought exponentials and powers were the same thing?
    Or are they talking about natural exp -vs- a higher order power, like 4 or 5?

    • Half Life = Exponential! (Score:2, Informative)

      by CarbonRing ( 737089 ) * on Monday July 10, 2006 @02:06PM (#15692585)
      Any rate that decays continuously with a half-life can be described by a function of the form C*e^(-kt) where t is time, C is the initial rate (at t = 0), and the constant k = ln(2)/(half life), with half-life measured in the same units as time.

      A power law relationship is something of the form y = A*t^k, which cannot be used to model a rate with a half life, since the time to reduce the rate by half depends on where you start, and increases as time increases.

      Also any exponential function (with negative k) eventually decays faster than any power law function. The power law can start decaying faster, but since the half life will increase with time, the exponential function with a constant half-life will always eventually get under it. (L'Hospital's rule is your friend.)

      So to say that something that can be described with a half life follows a power law rather than a exponential function, and decays faster than an exponential function, indicates a complete ignorance of the methematical terms. This also calls into question the validity of everything else the article says.

    • Re:Exponent? Power? (Score:5, Informative)

      by DaoudaW ( 533025 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @02:08PM (#15692595)
      The difference is whether the independent variable is the base or the exponent. A power function is something like f(x)=x^(.5) whereas an exponential function could be f(x)= (.5)^x.

    • Re:Exponent? Power? (Score:1)

      by Killio ( 102774 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @05:13PM (#15693871)
      Exponential: 1^2, 2^2, 3^2, 4^2, 5^2...

      Power law: 5, 5^2, 5^3, 5^4, 5^5...

  • Does nobody else... (Score:1)

    by sfontain ( 842406 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:39PM (#15692369)
    ...find it strange that we have physicists doing research about news story lifespans? How is this relevant to physics?

  • Hungarian sites are popular (Score:1)

    by us7892 ( 655683 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:39PM (#15692373) Homepage
    "To get a fuller understanding of such networks, Barabási and colleagues decided to study the visiting patterns on a popular Hungarian news and entertainment portal..."

    I didn't know that popular Hungarian sites existed.

    That's the first flaw in this study. They need a better cross-section of sites, preferably not popular Hungarian sites...

  • They're Right! (Score:1)

    by Eliman ( 614899 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:40PM (#15692381)
    My interest in the article decreased quite powerfully as I read the opening paragraph!

  • What about missing blond females? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by toupsie ( 88295 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:41PM (#15692385) Homepage
    Missing blond females seem to stay in the news a lot longer than 36 hours. Most of the advertising revenue of the cable news networks is based on blond female becoming missing. Fox News, CNN and MSNBC would be reduced to covering real news if it weren't for them. I wouldn't be surprised if most weren't missing due to a conspiracy of cable news producers preying on them. They all those news vans just sitting around.

  • The article says the equation to describe how interest in a news story drops off over time is not as is expected. But there are no equations in the story. They do not have an equation for the old model or for the new model for how interest in a story drops off!

    This is just lame reporting of science news.

  • Personal research (Score:2)

    by Hoi Polloi ( 522990 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:49PM (#15692436) Journal
    Lets see..."If you think you're reading the news, be warned that this story -- and any other on the web -- will be barely read by anyone 36 hours after it was first posted. [*yawn*] That's the message from a team of statistical physicists who have analysed how people access information online. [*scratch*] Albert-László..."...huh? Pay attention to what now?

  • How is this physics? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nigham ( 792777 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:51PM (#15692455) Homepage
    Physics is the science of nature, and I don't think human nature is included.

  • Huh? (Score:1)

    by mantar ( 941076 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @01:57PM (#15692505)
    I'm sorry... you lost me somewhere around "Statistical physicists"...

  • One slight problem... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pla ( 258480 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @02:04PM (#15692574) Journal
    Okay, folks - Since I have yet to see any non-humor comments on this topic, I'll break the ice. From TFA:
    Thanks to automatically assigned "cookies", the scientists were able to reconstruct the browsing history of about 250,000 visitors to the site over the course of a month.
    [... and ...]
    Although the average half-life varies for different types of sites, the decay laws identified are likely to be generic because they do not depend on content, but are manly determined by a user's visiting and browsing patterns.
    So, what do we see here?

    This trend depends on user browsing patterns rather than content, but also depends on users allowing cookies to live for not only longer than one browsing session, but for a full month.

    Thus, much like that classic problem of proving the external validity of any research done by a college psych department on their own undergrads (which usually results in 80-90% female and at least half freshman participants), this study has a pretty glaring flaw - It only really says anything about MSIE users (and even then, only MSIE users dumb enough not to use some form of cookie management) rather than users in general. While that almost certainly includes the majority of visitors to many sites, it doesn't safely extend to the larger population of all web surfers.



    Additionally, I would point out one more glaring source of error... It fails to normalize each unit of time against the remaining base of users - So, for example, if 90% of the regular visitors to a site see an article within an hour of posting, that leaves only 10% (plus the negligibly-small number that re-read the same article over and over, except on Slashdot where you can use FP refreshes as a solid measure of workday boredom). That, IMO, says far more about how long the typical (MSIE-qualified as above) user can go without a news fix, rather than how long an article remains interesting.

    • Re:One slight problem... (Score:1)

      by bigg_nate ( 769185 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @03:12PM (#15693004)
      I'm sure the fact that they only looked at data from origo.hu is a larger source of bias than the fact that they only looked at IE users. But I don't think that's a reason to write off the results entirely -- just a reason to take them with a grain of salt. I think it's reasonable to guess that if the distribution follows a power law for Hungarian IE users, then it also follows a power law for American Linux users (though the mean may be a little off).

      It fails to normalize each unit of time against the remaining base of users - So, for example, if 90% of the regular visitors to a site see an article within an hour of posting, that leaves only 10%

      I have no idea what this means.

  • Summary misstates article (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Nurf ( 11774 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @02:09PM (#15692604) Homepage
    If you read the article, it says the distribution of half-lives of stories decreases as a power law, not that hit rates on stories decrease as a power law.

    Half lives are a measurement of exponential decay. Individual stories still decrease in hits exponentially over time. If you look at lots of stories, the decays are distributed according to a power law.

    The article directly contradicts the Slasdot summary.

    Hits on stories do decrease exponentially.

    I am stunned that I am the only one so far who seems to have picked up on this. Did anyone actually read the article, or did they just read into it what they were told they would see?

    • Re:Summary misstates article (Score:2)

      by 200_success ( 623160 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @03:26PM (#15693111)

      Actually, the PhysicsWeb article is confusing in itself. The first (bold) paragraph says that "the number of people who read news stories on the web decays with time in a power law". The sixth paragraph says that "the overall half-life distribution follows a power law". Perhaps both statements are true, perhaps one of them is inaccurate.

      The professor's website [nd.edu] doesn't seem to mention this research, so we can't tell what the actual findings were.

  • explanation for superstition? (Score:1)

    by snakeplissken ( 559127 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @02:27PM (#15692708)
    from the end of tfa:

    "How the priors are themselves constructed in the mind has yet to be investigated in detail. Obviously they are learned by experience, but the exact process is not properly understood. Indeed, some people suspect that the parsimony of Bayesian reasoning leads occasionally to it going spectacularly awry, with whatever process it is that forms the priors getting further and further off-track rather than converging on the correct distribution.

    That might explain the emergence of superstitious behaviour, with an accidental correlation or two being misinterpreted by the brain as causal. A frequentist way of doing things would reduce the risk of that happening. But by the time the frequentist had enough data to draw a conclusion, he might already be dead."

    i'm intrigued by the idea that otherwise sane people insist on believing stupid stuff because that's how their brain 'is designed to work', if a brain is hardwired to these types of judgements then it's no surprise that apparently obvious 'frequentist' arguments don't work sometimes.
         

  • was exponential really "expected" ..? (Score:1)

    by Montecristo6 ( 398332 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @02:35PM (#15692774)
    I do wonder whether the authors really "expected" the distribution of the numbers of readers to be exponential ... I only follow this literature for curiosity's sake, but even so I've read quite a few papers lately finding power law distributions in various human communication networks (emails, letters, social groups), social animal groups, etc. The results describing power laws in various cuts of the Internet are also very well known. As some of the studies suggest, power laws arise in "bursty" communications, when the items involved are held in a queue, which organised by priority. For instance, if you respond to emails from a few special people very promptly, handle those from most others with a bit more proscrastination, and shelve a few for a very long time, the wait times between your communications will follow a power law.

    In short, I bet that people working in the field would by now consider a power law the reasonable first hypothesis, when investigating a phenomenon of this sort. The mention of the refuted expected exponential is a bit of gentle scientific sensationalism. ;)

  • rediscovering the wheel (Score:3, Interesting)

    by idlake ( 850372 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @02:49PM (#15692860)
    How interest in news items evolves over time, how it depends on communication, links, and recommendations, has been the subject of research for decades. E-commerce sites use detailed models of this in order to determine when to remove items from the front page.

    It is true that many people use exponential decay models, but that's not because they don't know any better, it's because exponential decay is computationally simple and works well enough. It's like using a linear approximation to a non-linear problem.

    I think it's pretty telling that Barabási is publishing this in physics journals, not in statistics or web-related publications. This may be news to physicists, but it isn't news to anybody who actually works in the field and knows their stuff. The reviewers at Phys. rev. simply aren't qualified to determine whether this kind of work is novel and correct.

  • I, for one, (Score:1)

    by jitterman ( 987991 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @03:23PM (#15693092)
    welcome our statistically insignificant overlords -- for the next 36 hours or so I guess.

  • Physicist find... (Score:2)

    by Richy_T ( 111409 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @05:45PM (#15694066) Homepage
    That these "statistical physicists" are really just "social scientists" who have worked out that everyone has twigged that "social science" is not scientific at all and are looking for renewed credibility.

    (Speaking as a physicist)
  • With "exponential" just a special case with the base being e?

  • Pardon me but... (Score:2)

    by SonicSpike ( 242293 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @09:17PM (#15695199) Journal
    ... I didn't RTFA... well, not all of it anyway.

  • Duh. (Score:4, Funny)

    by StikyPad ( 445176 ) on Monday July 10, 2006 @10:00PM (#15695379) Homepage
    Current tags: boring, slownewsday, yawn, uninteresting and duh.

    Put another way: Slashdot -- Now with 20% real nerds!
  • 'If it bleeds, it leads'

    A tired old newsmedia saying imortalized by Kelsey Grammer's Robert Hawkins in 15 MINUTES [imdb.com] proves that nothing drives ratings up like death and misfortune.

    Just look at just 3 historical events to generate 'wall to wall' coverage...

    The President Kennedy Assasinaton (1963-11-22)

    The Challenger disaster (1986-01-28)

    and of course

    9/11 (2001-09-11)

    I've only seen snippets of the Kennedy Assasination coverage on TV mostly from archival footage so I can't comment.

    For the Challenger disaster I happened on to it one day while running an errand. Truly a national tragedy shared by (seemingly) the entire US population thanks to nonstop coverage by CNN who got 'the scoop of the century' by still covering Space Shuttle launches after the 'big 3' networks gave it up to dish out more 'mass media entertainment'. The drawback, if it could be said of it, was that the CNN coverage that day was highly repetitive but I guess it was designed that way to accommodate people watching at different times of the day.

    The same thing could be said for 9/11 coverage that day -- repetitive and somber. The thing that stuck out in my mind was that the 'big 3' networks became 'little CNNs' with around the clock news coverage for a few days afterward with NO commercial breaks at all (surely at great expense) - just the usual station identification stuff and on-screen 'watermarking' (which I hate but understand is necessary in an ad-soaked visual mass media like broadcast television).

    Anyway, this kind of media coverage gives the average viewer a carthartic, detached, reassuring 'glad it wasn't me' kind of feeling. I don't know if that is ultimately good or bad but it does fuel ratings and drive/generate ad revenue for the networks.

    Ultimately, it's all about the eyeballs and how much cash to extract from their owners in exchange for goods and services.... Just look at how assinine and silly commercials have become lately. The best of the bunch right now to me is the (in)famous Avis XM Satellite Radio TV commercial with 3 guys in the car lip-syncing to a rap song which I was able to find via GOOGLE - it was a bit difficult to get the MP3 of the song but I got it! :) No, I won't reveal where and how to get it because I don't want to Slashdot the source and drive up their bandwidth bill and you have to 'jump through hoops' to get the MP3 itself anyway.

    Thank goodness for the VCR. I use it regularly to watch shows and zip past the ads for stuff I am eminently not interested in or have seen already. You can save around 15-20 minutes an hour watching previously recorded broadcast TV shows by bypassing the ads - you aren't missing much if most/nearly all the ads they show on TV do not interest you. If they ever make PVRs unable to fast forward/rewind to skip ads at least VCRs will be around for awhile in spite of their inferior sound and picture quality when compared to PVRs... :) Maybe that's the ultimate reason why there was the push in the U.S. to adopt 'digital TV' and dump the current analog model...it would obsolete incompatible analog VCRs and 'enforce' ad viewing/DRM with certain 'broadcast flags' when recorded/played back with approved PVRs... :P

    Commercials, as wasteful and scattershot they are are the price one pay to get 'free television' in the U.S. The better, more expensive UK model would never work in the US - people would either 'go without' or 'cheat the system' to get their TV fix. Case in point: Who watches PBS programming during 'pledge drive' time then turn away/fast forward (previously recorded material) to avoid the pledge breaks interspersed within like 'standard' commercials. Just about 'everybody' I gather. But the nice thing about PBS is you get content that is pretty close to the advertized run time like hour-long

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