Ridiculous Study That Got $1 Million from the U.S. Government

Indiana University has received grant money from the National Science Foundation Fund worth $ 919,917 from the U.S. government for studying the popularity behind memes.

Memes of famous leaders, actors, movie scenes, cartoons, especially the sims, and various other image and video content are getting viral these days. Scientists don’t know why and how people took a liking to memes and how long will this liking last?

Every trend, product as per economics has a beginning stage, growth, peak sales, and decline. Thus, researchers have been particularly showing interest in finding out when will the meme culture be replaced by another trend?

Fil Menczer from the Central Networks and System Researchers of Indiana University along with his team have created an algorithm that will study the trend of a viral tweet of different genres and analyze why it is popular.

Currently, the algorithm is named ‘Truthy” inspired by Stephen Colbert’s truthiness, it works only for political tweets that go viral and researchers are recreating it to support all kinds of memes. The recreated algorithm will help to identify when a meme became viral and for how long will it stay viral?

Important terms you should know:

1. 1. The meme was derived from the Greek work Mimeme meaning “that which is imitated”
   2. Gardenhosing- The process of collection of viral memes by the algorithm
   3. Data Mining- The process of using the collected data to acquire meaningful information

Researchers say that the algorithm will also be useful to identify political tweets, inorganic social media traffic, and other personally promoted tweets that go viral.

Let’s see if you can score 10/10 on this quiz now.