This thesis presents results concerning the limiting behaviour of stochastic rumour processes. The first result involves our published analysis of the evolution for the general initial conditions of the (common) deterministic limiting version of the classical Daley-Kendall and Maki-Thompson stochastic rumour models, [14]. The second result being also part of the general analysis in [14] involves a new approach to stiflers in the rumour process. This approach aims at distinguishing two main types of stiflers. The analytical and stochastic numerical results of two types of stiflers in [14] are presented in this thesis. The third result is that the formulae to find the total number of transitions of a stochastic rumour process with a general case of the Daley-Kendall and Maki-Thompson classical models are developed and presented here, as already presented in [16]. The fourth result is that the problem is taken into account as an optimal control problem and an impulsive control element is introduced to minimize the number of final ignorants in the stochastic rumour process by repeating the process. Our published results are presented in this thesis as appeared in [15] and [86]. Numerical results produced by our algorithm developed for the extended [MT] model and [DK] model are demonstrated by tables in all details of numerical values in the appendices. / Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, School of Mathematical Sciences, 2008

Student Number : 0315885J - PhD thesis - School of Journalism and Media Studies - Faculty of Humanties / This study responds to the generalization by traditional agenda setting or media effects studies, especially media agenda-setting hypothesis that people accept as important whatever the media considers to be so; and being so, have the capability to structure issues for its audience. Also, the thesis is uncomfortable with the media’s blanket use of the term ‘mass’ to refer to its audience particularly when considered against the background of Africa’s rurality. This study therefore is an attempt to stake out a new conceptual approach to the media’s agenda-setting capabilities with an emphasis on the ‘other neglected agents of power’, that is, this study’s proposition as ‘the established structures of community’ in Africa, especially rural Africa, in setting be it the media or ‘territorial’ agenda. Using the multifaceted and predominantly qualitative methodology of histories and the triangular orientation of personal interviews, survey questionnaires and content scanning of relevant media, the thesis amongst other issues of conceptual relevance re-awakens the theoretical issue of ‘whose agenda is the media agenda?” and whether the media and its agenda setting capabilities are not an urban phenomenon? The universality and applicability of the theory especially in Africa’s rural setting where language, illiteracy, poverty and the lack of access to modern media constitute obvious barriers is also a major concern of this study. With the above as a background, the three part (I – conceptual framing of the problem and relevant issues, ii – a proposition and iii – data presentation and research findings) study then agues, proposes and concludes that: [a] Media agenda is ‘source’ oriented as its sources quite often are identifiable and that, the media serves better (as against the overwhelming claim of agenda-setting) as a conduit or arena for contending issues, views, opinions, even sentiments; there is therefore no significant category of intellectual analysis called media agenda, at least, in Nigeria. [b] Media is urban based and centred, urban driven and even urban cultured …it is simply an urban phenomenon. [c] Indeed there are significant indicators that the ‘established structures of community’ functions and play major roles both in setting the media-agenda (where there is one) and in political power dynamics. [d] Media agenda is plausible but an ‘uncertain’ agenda; in Africa, especially rural Africa.

Yes / Twitter has become a fertile place for rumors, as information can spread to a large number of people immediately. Rumors can mislead public opinion, weaken social order, decrease the legitimacy of government, and lead to a significant threat to social stability. Therefore, timely detection and debunking rumor are urgently needed. In this work, we proposed an Attention-based Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) network that uses tweet text with thirteen different linguistic and user features to distinguish rumor and non-rumor tweets. The performance of the proposed Attention-based LSTM model is compared with several conventional machine and deep learning models. The proposed Attention-based LSTM model achieved an F1-score of 0.88 in classifying rumor and non-rumor tweets, which is better than the state-of-the-art results. The proposed system can reduce the impact of rumors on society and weaken the loss of life, money, and build the firm trust of users with social media platforms.

The myths and rumours that circulated during the First World War originated with soldiers and the general public, excepting atrocity stories. The British population used these myths and rumours to construct a discourse to explain its involvement in the First World War. This discourse reconciled the experience and understanding of civilians with the new era of Total War, offering hope and consolation in a time of crisis. It also acted as a form of mass, popularly produced propaganda which promulgated pro-war views that supported the British and Allied causes, while demonising the Germans and their methods of warfare. Belief in myths and rumours was equated with patriotism, and criticism decried as pro-German and un-British. The myths were widely disseminated and widely believed by important sections of the population. They drew on concepts palatable to British civilians: ideas of ‘just’ war and a moral cause; the nobility of their sacrifices; the bestiality of the enemy; and the necessity for the subordination of all else to the war effort. Myths about atrocities, spies and the paranormal helped the British public to survive a war that surpassed previous human and disquietude, but also experience. They also hinted at vulnerability, while expressing the unequivocal support which the majority offered the British war effort.

This dissertation is an ethnographic exploration of gossip and rumour around the fear and distrust that surrounds a local hospital in KwaNdebele that has acquired a reputation as a slagpale (an Afrikaans term for slaughterhouse). Using ethnographic data gathered over an 18 month period, I examine how gossip (ukuhleba) and rumour (amahemuhemu) capture patient voices of discontent with hospital service while also being a means by which patients seek to discipline medical professionals and to warn others about possible abuse when visiting the hospital. The focus on gossip and rumour answers an often neglected question in scholarship, which is how patients respond to the widely reported power that medical professionals exercise over them? Furthermore, having broadly traced the uses of gossip and rumour in resistance to biomedical technologies to the 1800s, this dissertation moves beyond a focus on patient responses to examine the logic underpinning this resistance. To do this I compare three categories of traditional healers in KwaNdebele. I found that gossip and rumours also circulated about traditional healers although unequally among the three types. There is particular suspicion around non-initiating healers called amagedla who are thought to practice outside ancestral structures of control. I read the emphasis on ancestral regulation as a metaphor for communal control and accordingly conclude that biomedicine and its practitioners similarly meet with much resistance particularly because they are far removed and disempowering to what are often semi-literate and illiterate residents. Finally, the dissertation focuses on stories of hospital hauntings and deaths said to be connected with a diminishing traditional practice of ‘fetching’ the spirits of those who die at the hospital and shows that discourses around hospital deaths and burial rites are intimately connected to broader considerations that extend beyond the hospital setting to encompass socio-economic changes and resultant anxieties. These considerations are framed through an idiom of a call for a return to tradition and ultimately express a perceived crisis of social reproduction in post-apartheid KwaNdebele. / Dissertation (MSocSci)--University of Pretoria, 2018. / UP Postgraduate Merit Bursary / NRF Scarce Skills Master's Scholarship / Anthropology and Archaeology / MSocSci / Unrestricted

Darbą atliko Vilniaus Pedagoginio universiteto Socialinių mokslų fakulteto Sociologijos ir Politologijos katedros Politinės sociologijos magistrantūros studentė Nijolė Milašienė. Darbo tema – jaunimo imlumo gandams ypatumai (VPU studentų atveju). Darbo vadovas – prof.habil.dr. V.Pruskus. Darbo apimtis – 60 psl. Darbo tikslas. Atskleisti jaunimo imlumo gandams ypatumus, įtakos veiksnius bei šio reiškinio suvokimą ir vertinimą. Uždaviniai: pateikti gando kaip socialinio reiškinio fenomeno sampratą ir jo interpretacijas įvairiose socialinėse teorijose; išsiaiškinti gando kilimo priežastis ir jo socialinę paskirtį; išnagrinėti visuomenės imlumą gandams aspektus; aptarti veiksnius skatinančius jaunimo imlumo gandams ypatumus; remiantis tyrimu, nustatyti socialinių, ekonomikos ir filosofijos mokslų specialybės studentų imlumo gandams ypatumus, juos sąlygojančius veiksnius ir jų vertinimą. Hipotezės: tikėtina, kad jaunimas domisi gandais, nes jie skatina ieškotis išsamesnės, tikslesnės informacijos – pasitvirtino; imlumą gandams labiausiai įtakoją šeima ir žiniasklaida – pasitvirtino; ekonominiams gandams imlesni ekonomiką studijuojantys studentai negu socialinius mokslus studijuojantys studentai – nepasitvirtino; politiniams gandams imlesni socialinių mokslų studentai negu filosofijos mokslų studentai – nepasitvirtino; gandai reikalingi, nes skatina oficialius informacijos teikėjus teikti visuomenei iššsamesnę ir visapusiškesnę informaciją – pasitvirtino. Tyrimo objektas. Jaunimo... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The work was made by Nijolė Milašienė, Political sociology master‘s degree student of VPU Social sciences faculty Sociology and political sciences department. The subject of the work is youth‘s peculiarities in receptivity for the rumours. The director of the work is prof.hab.dr. V.Pruskus. The largeness of the work is 60 pages. The purpose of the investigation is to ascertain the VPU students’ receptivity for the rumours and the factors that influence it with reference to the investigation. For actualising this purpose there were tasks raised: • to represent the rumour’s as the social phenomenon conception and to discuss the interpretations of rumour in different theories; • to represent the causes of raising rumour and the social destination; • to inspect the aspects of society’s receptivity for the rumours; • to analyse the distribution of rumours among youth (students); to ascertain factors that influence youth’s (students’) receptivity for the rumours and to distinguish types that are current among the youth (students). Hypotheses of the investigation: 1. it is probable that rumours stimulate to look for more comprehensive, precise information – was proved; 2. the receptivity for the rumours influence the most family and mass-media – was proved; 3. students that study economics are more receptive for the economical rumours than students that study social sciences – was not proved; 4. social sciences’ students are more receptive for the political rumours than... [to full text]

This thesis explores oral communication in St. Gallen through the lens of the linen merchant Johannes Rütiner (1501-1556/7). By reconstructing Rütiner's network of informants and probing four genres of communication within their respective social contexts - jokes, gossip, rumour, and memory narratives -, it explores early modern sociability, the circulation of information, and the relationship between oral testimony, manuscript, and print. Sixteenth-century St. Gallers relied heavily on informal, oral networks to provide them with news and information of all kinds. An individual's access to information was thus to a large degree determined by the social networks within which they spent their life. As St. Gallers sought to secure a place for themselves in such circles, they in turn used jokes, gossip, and information of all kinds as a form of "communicative social capital", allowing them to present themselves as witty, well-connected, and knowledgeable. Rather than treating the instability of oral narratives as evidence of the inherent unreliability of the spoken word, this study proposes to analyse their evolution as a key to early modern mentalities. It also calls into question some of the dominant narratives regarding the printing revolution. Not only did oral communication continue to play a central role in the dissemination of information in the first half of the sixteenth century, but existing systems of "source criticism", developed in the context of dominantly oral networks, moreover cast doubt on the reliability of anonymous prints: because they made their trust in a piece of news conditional on their trust in the messenger, Rütiner and his fellow citizens often preferred oral narratives provided by familiar, trustworthy informants.

In today’s world the internet and social media are omnipresent and information is accessible to everyone. This shifted the advantage from those who have access to information to those who do so first. Identifying new events as they emerge is of substantial value to financial institutions who consider realtime information in their decision making processes, as well as for journalists that report about breaking news and governmental agencies that collect information and respond to emergencies. First Story Detection is the task of identifying those documents in a stream of documents that talk about new events first. This seemingly simple task is non-trivial as the computational effort increases with every processed document. Standard approaches to solve First Story Detection determine a document’s novelty by comparing it to previously seen documents. This results in the highest reported accuracy but even the currently fastest system only scales to 10% of the Twitter stream. In this thesis, we propose a new algorithm family, called memory-based methods, able to scale to the full Twitter stream on a single core. Our memory-based method computes a document’s novelty up to two orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art systems without sacrificing accuracy. This thesis additional provides original work on the impact of processing unbounded data streams on detection accuracy. Our experiments reveal for the first time that the novelty scores of state-of-the-art comparison based and memory-based methods decay over time. We show how to counteract the discovered novelty decay and increase detection accuracy. Additionally, we show that memory-based methods are applicable beyond First Story Detection by building the first real time rumour detection system on social media streams.

Vietnam War literature is a reflection of a sustained tension between politics and history on the one hand and morality and the effect of the war on human nature on the other hand. Although the authors under discussion urge the reader to forget the political, moral and historical milieu of the Vietnam War, it is impossible to separate the war from those three factors and by extension, the literature that stems from it. I have chosen Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War (1977) and Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk (1983) because I think they represent, perhaps in the simplest and least obtrusive way, the voices of 55 000 men whose names appear on a black, granite wall in Washington. The authors chose to write their respective memoirs for the Everyman who died in, or lived through, the aberration that was Vietnam. Through their reconstruction of the war and their experiences, they keep the demand for recognition of those who fought (whether morally sanctioned or not) in Vietnam for their country. While American society tried to force the war from its psyche because so many of them thought it was unjust, immoral and unnecessary, authors like Caputo and Mason demanded that the nation examine itself on the whole and reconsider its political endeavours. But perhaps one of the starkest revelations is their portrayal of the corruption of innocence, loyalty and idealism of those soldiers who represented their country abroad.

(English) Ph.D. Thesis Contemporary Legend and Rumour in the Czech Republic. Origin, Genesis and Social and Cultural Function of Domestic Urban Folklore in International Context Petr Janeček Presented study analyzes character, origin, genesis and social and cultural functions of specific type of prosaic oral narratives transmitted in contemporary oral and non-oral tradition on territory of the Czech Republic. Main attention is given to realistic narratives with primary informative and entertaining function, which are usually presented by their tellers as at least potentially real story or information about actual, genuine happenings of both local and social importance, but whose variants, versions and editions simultaneously circulate over wider geographical and temporary horizon. Because of that, these narratives are labelled by international folkloristics as folklore genres of "contemporary legend" and "rumour". After overview and critical analysis of history of international studies of these two genre concepts, their terminology and genre (both formal and thematic) characteristics in international and Czech folkloristics are presented, as well as relationship of these genres to similar contemporary folklore forms, especially gossip, conspiracy theories, anecdotes and jokes, demonological...