Lai Hei Ming (3035055377) CCHU9021 Mid-term assignment Set chosen: Set 1 1.

The central claim made in the study is that anger emotions tend to spread faster and further when compared to other emotions studied, specifically sadness, disgustness, joy. 2. The study sampled from Weibo, an online tweeter-like platform in China, for the emoticons used in the comments and interactions between different users. They surveyed about 200,000 users, with elimination of infrequent users as noise, and performed statistical analysis on the raw connections to get the hop distance, correlation, and quantification of spread. The authors also extracted the words appeared in conjunction with the emoticons to avoid interference caused by improper use of emoticons. 3. The sample size is appropriate and is strong enough to draw a conclusion, and so do the valid data extracted. The statistical analysis and correlation drawn was sufficient and significant as compared with other emotions sampled as it is a summation of standard deviations, therefore it is strongly suggestive of the easier spread of the anger emotions than others compared in the study. However, the study do shows some weakness, such as the use of anger emoticons, as a primary basis for the study, may not necessarily reveal true anger but false anger, empathy, sarcasm etc. As revealed in the keyword analysis, there exists some keywords that obviously might not relate with true anger, such as gun shot may be empathetic, upgrade may be optimistic; conversely in sadness the words the olympics committee may be sarcastic, cups may be just something neutral or nonsense as a social issue. It is also important to note that the use of an anger emotion plus a certain keyword (eg government) may not reveal a true anger towards the government if the sentence is something like (I hate people making nonsense critiques on the government [anger emoticons]), not to mention the study did not further elaborate on what the anger is directed towards which thing or issue. It is understandable, that to sample large amount of data with computer-analyzing techniques is advantageous in terms of sample size control but difficult to analyze the true emotions involved, however, humanmediated analysis should be done for randomly-withdrawn samples from the data set to act as a supplement to ensure the information involved truly has an anger element in terms of social theory. Mathematically, this can be used as a multiplication factor to indicate that approximate how accurate the computer analysis do reveal the true emotions. It is also difficult to judge the extent of spread, especially about the claim of distance of spread, does more connections merit over a large geographical distance, or it refers to network connections? In a cyber world, which is the predominant factor in determining the disastrous outcome is perhaps a more important correlation than simply spreading, and the study gave no clues to how this could affect the outcome of an issue or discussion. 4. The news article reported accurately what the paper presented, however, they did not made subjective analysis into the accuracy of the study and its validity. However, this is appropriately for the news article to serve as a reporter function instead of a critique function. Indeed, the news article did invited opinions from the authors, and other experts from the study field to comment on the study to give a more objective report of the facts to the public. Also, the news article was cautious about that methodologies used such as the number of samples, analytical methods, and use of emoticons as symbols. The title however, is slightly misleading as emotions are hard to infer to have spread among the users, instead, phrases such as hint of anger emotions should be used. Overall, the news article did not infer or made significant bias on

Lai Hei Ming (3035055377) CCHU9021 Mid-term assignment Set chosen: Set 1 agreeing or disagreeing with the study but just merely served as a reporter of the study as well as the different views of the expert, which is objective and well-presented.