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12 thoughts on “Friday Cat Blogging – 29 March 2024

  1. S1AMER

    We humans spend time and money trying to find what -- we think -- is just a perfect comfy cat box.

    And -- damned near every damned time -- the cat will go for a free cardboard box (often times, just to rub it in, the box our choice came in).

    Sigh ... living with cats is one of life's most humbling experiences.

    1. Salamander

      My current pair have been known to pull out several Larry Niven paperbacks off the bottom shelf and stuff themselves into the resulting gap on the bookshelf.

  2. lower-case

    Online media is important for society in informing and shaping opinions, hence raising the question of what drives online news consumption.

    Here we analyse the causal effect of negative and emotional words on news consumption using a large online dataset of viral news stories. Specifically, we conducted our analyses using a series of randomized controlled trials (N=22,743).

    Our dataset comprises ~105,000 different variations of news stories from Upworthy.com that generated 5.7 million clicks across more than 370 million overall impressions.

    Although positive words were slightly more prevalent than negative words, we found that negative words in news headlines increased consumption rates (and positive words decreased consumption rates).

    For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%.

    nature paper: Negativity drives online news consumption

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