Individuals are able to effect massive online social change through the viral sharing of memes. Sharing is initially influenced by meme creators and secondarily by meme consumers, whose individual sharing decisions accumulate to determine total meme sharing. By investigating meme creation as a separate process from meme sharing, we hope to create an account of online sharing that includes featu...

Abstract Mathematical Internet memes are examples of how the creative thrust characterising Web 2.0 environment reaches field mathematics, translating mathematical statements into a new digital form endowed with an epistemic potential that is capable initiating process argumentation. The research presented in this paper aims to shed light on memes, contributing building body knowledge that, pro...

This paper reviews a number of recent approaches to put memetics to the test of quantitative measurability. The focus is on the selection criteria for the spreading of memes put forward by Heylighen (1997), which include utility, novelty, simplicity, coherence, authority and proselytism. The general hypothesis is that memes scoring higher on these criteria will survive longer and be more preval...

Recent years have seen the rapid growth of private think tanks within the neoconservative movement that conduct "policy research" biased to their own agenda. This article provides an evidence-based rebuttal to a 2002 report by one such think tank, the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), which was intended to discredit 20 alleged myths about single-payer national health insu...

The spreading of news, memes and other pieces of information occurring via online social platforms has a strong and growing impact on our modern societies, with enormous consequences, that may be beneficial but also catastrophic. In this work we consider a recently introduced model for information diffusion in social media taking explicitly into account the competition of a large number of item...

In computational intelligence, the term ‘memetic algorithm’ has come to be associated with the algorithmic pairing of a global search method with a local search method. In a sociological context, a ‘meme’ has been loosely defined as a unit of cultural information, the social analog of genes for individuals. Both of these definitions are inadequate, as ‘memetic algorithm’ is too specific, and ul...