Propagation of Information and Misinformation

Part 1, 2 and 3
Scribe prepared by Md. Saiful Islam (MSI)

Chapter 6 part 1

Data
• Data is raw and unorganized
• Information is organized
• All information is Data, but not all data is information

Different methods of information collection

1. Observations

Target is to measure the ratio of smoking cigarettes in general population

• Collect a bunch of people who are addicted to smoking

• Observe their conditions some days while they are regularly smoking
• Perform medical diagnosis
• Produce a health report based on the condition of those people
• Interpret the report and turn it into information

Turning non-quantifiable bits of information such as health condition from smoking cigarettes into quantifiable and useful information
Problems
• Information produced in this way may get influenced by personal bias
• Let's say for your observation you may prefer middle aged people because they can be handled easily. But the effect on them of
smoking cigarette will definitely not be as severe as it would on some older people.
• As a result, if you collect info of middle-aged people information may become biased

Heart beat rate of 85 bits per minute might be normal for you but not so normal for other people
Make sure observation doesn't get influenced by personal bias

2. Experiments

In case of observation we didn't talk about grouping

• In case of experiments you need to divide up people into groups.
• So, in this case one of these groups would smoke cigarette regularly and other would not.
• You would measure the differences between smoking and non-smoking people to produce the health report
• Among the two groups one of them was the control group which consisted of people who smoked no cigarette and another one was
test group which consisted of people who smoked cigarettes
• Information gaining through here is control over variable
• In this case the control was whether they are smoking or not

Problems
• Here the problem is you have to ensure that both the control group and the test group has the same type of population
• if control group mostly consists of older people and the test group mostly consists of younger people then the information gained
won't be quite correct.

3. Surveys

• Bunch of questionnaires which come with information from interested people on specific aspects.
• Example: Teaching evaluation form
• It can be anonymous and non-anonymous depending on the goal of the survey

4. Subjective Estimations
 • subjective view of an expert on a particular topic
• Television programs or news we often see subjective estimation from experts from different political or economic aspects
• Highly depended on personal bias and preferences
• It only collected when there is no other information collection method that works quite well

5. Interviews

• Also taken through a set of questions

• However, interview questions are unorganized and are asked on individual basis
If you try to collect data from a large population it might be more helpful to rely on surveys instead of interviews

6. Existing Sources

• Different publications, government agency, social media transaction record, different organization
• When you are collecting data from existing sources Data cleaning and processing is a huge part of it

Chapter 6 part 2
Information

1. Market analysis

• To sell a product we need to do some marketing for it

• Most cases our budget or other resources are limited
• As resource limited amount of marketing we can do is limited, so we need to make sure marketing process is as effective as possible
• We need to make sure that we can reach maximum amount of people with what we have
• We need to make sure that we are reaching the correct people with our product
• We need to make sure that the product is actually sellable

• Let's say in a specific region you want to sell some dairy products. Before that you have to make sure it is actually feasible in that
area. You don't want to sell it where there is no demand.
• You need some info to understand whether selling dairy product is a good idea
• You need some info that enables you to predict how many people might buy your dairy product

There are various ways

• To do survey and ask people how much they would like these types of products in their region. This kind of survey you can do when
the scope of your business is small
• But when the scope is big for example when you want to sell your dairy product in the entire country manually collecting info like
this often not feasible

YouTube actually gathered information on your preference based on the type of videos you watch

2. Political opinion formation

• Prime example is various election campaigns in election

• We often see political groups shows various statistics in order to justify why general people should vote them
• They often show negative statistics related to their opposing political teams so that general people don't vote them
• The general election of democratic country themselves are another example of information collection

Both experiment and observation are ways of collecting information

Facebook actually recognizes the face and shows you the name of the person. Recognizing people's face is a task of computer vision

Chapter 6 part 3
• Nodes are the people within a social network
• edges are the connections
• Uni directional example: people in Facebook friend list
• Bi-directional example: someone following a public figure in twitter
• if 2 people are following each other it's bi-directional