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Twitter Twaddle and the Psychology of Crying (Screaming) Wolf

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


The Dow Jones Industrial Average and Twitter, both cultural mainstays that suffer at times from acute alphanumeric ADHD, collided at ultra-high velocity on April 23 to induce an institutional chain reaction. The half life of the "flash crash" stretched a couple of minutes—and then the market came roaring back.

But fewer than 140 characters sufficed to send the ticker spiraling down a poetic 145 points, with losses reaching $200 billion at one point. Symmetries in the natural world are so mind numbingly gorgeous, eh?

According to the Wall Street Journal, algorithms in institutional computers that scan news feeds took at face value a hacker-placed tweet on the AP's Twitter feed. The bogus report of an explosion at the White House triggered automatic sell orders. Let's hope our ICBMs don't use the same software.


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This all came less than a week after social media's wisdom of crowds had tagged as suspicious more than one person who had not left a pressure cooker bomb in a backpack near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Among social media titans, Twitter is a great place to retrieve news pointers, join a 24-hour party (as my colleague Ferris Jabr likes to emphasize) and retrieve the minutest musings of friends and family. But it has always served equally as a hyper-kinetic wire service for rumor.

That seems obvious but we—and I mean even we at Scientific American–need to sometimes revisit the initial ardor that suffuses the reporting on a new medium. We reported in 2010 that Chileans after an earthquake had started using Twitter to sort truth from fact, maybe no longer such a good idea as the micro-blogging site continues to attract anyone and everyone, including apparently hackers from the Syrian Electronic Army who broke into the AP.

Press reports suggested the possibility of two-step verification for Twitter as one solution to tighten up security. But requiring the input of a code sent to a cell phone before being able to log on and tweet what's for dinner seems kind of a non-starter. Could this be the ultimate use for the much-vaunted Google Glass, allowing retinal security scans before logging on to an account?

Probably not. The upshot should be that it's always going to be tough to sort the wisdom from the noise in 140 characters when looking for a bombing suspect or placing a million-dollar sell order.

Source: White House

 

Gary Stix, Scientific American's neuroscience and psychology editor, commissions, edits and reports on emerging advances and technologies that have propelled brain science to the forefront of the biological sciences. Developments chronicled in dozens of cover stories, feature articles and news stories, document groundbreaking neuroimaging techniques that reveal what happens in the brain while you are immersed in thought; the arrival of brain implants that alleviate mood disorders like depression; lab-made brains; psychological resilience; meditation; the intricacies of sleep; the new era for psychedelic drugs and artificial intelligence and growing insights leading to an understanding of our conscious selves. Before taking over the neuroscience beat, Stix, as Scientific American's special projects editor, oversaw the magazine's annual single-topic special issues, conceiving of and producing issues on Einstein, Darwin, climate change, nanotechnology and the nature of time. The issue he edited on time won a National Magazine Award. Besides mind and brain coverage, Stix has edited or written cover stories on Wall Street quants, building the world's tallest building, Olympic training methods, molecular electronics, what makes us human and the things you should and should not eat. Stix started a monthly column, Working Knowledge, that gave the reader a peek at the design and function of common technologies, from polygraph machines to Velcro. It eventually became the magazine's Graphic Science column. He also initiated a column on patents and intellectual property and another on the genesis of the ingenious ideas underlying new technologies in fields like electronics and biotechnology. Stix is the author with his wife, Miriam Lacob, of a technology primer called Who Gives a Gigabyte: A Survival Guide to the Technologically Perplexed (John Wiley & Sons, 1999).

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