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This commentary on the 2018 special issue of the Journal of American Folklore, "Fake News: Definitions and Approaches" argues that digital networks have enabled fake news by amplification. Fake news by amplification occurs when small- scale events become amplified through the convergent actions of everyday users, mass media gatekeepers, and social media algorithms. Events that are amplified risk becoming distorted as they circulate, with users supplying their own context and interpretations. The resulting fake news is difficult to counter because it goes beyond questions of fact and enters the realm of interpretation, enabled by widespread networked belief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The faceless, tall, eerily long-limbed humanoid clad in a black suit emerged in an online forum as a pair of photoshops and a half-dozen lines of text. Soon, this so-called "Slender Man" began appearing in images, videos, stories, and blogs across the Internet. By sharing, discussing, and commenting on these artifacts using participatory media, users create legendary narratives and audio/visual "evidence" that present researchers with a new kind of digital folk practice. Enabled by the affordances of digital and social networks, this digital legend cycle serves as an example o f a new form of digital folklore that combines the generic conventions of oral and visual storytelling with the collaborative potential of networked communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many researchers have studied Internet topology, and the analysis of complex and multilevel Internet structure is nontrivial. The emphasis of these studies has been on logical level topologies, however physical level topologies are necessary to study resilience realistically, given the geography and multilevel nature of the Internet. In this paper, we investigate the representativeness of the synthetic Gabriel, geometric, population-weighted geographical threshold, and location-constrained Waxman graph models to the actual fibre backbone networks of six providers. We quantitatively analyse the structure of the synthetic geographic topologies whose node locations are given by those of actual physical level graphs using well-known graph metrics, graph spectra, and the visualisation tool we have developed. Our results indicate that the synthetic Gabriel graphs capture the grid-like structure of physical level networks best. Furthermore, given that the cost of physical level topologies is an important aspect from a design perspective, we also compare the cost of synthetically generated geographic graphs and find that the synthetic Gabriel graphs achieve the smallest cost among all the graph models that we consider. Finally, based on our findings we propose a graph generation method to model physical level topologies, and show that it captures both grid and star structures ideally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this experimental study, 44 undergraduates completed five computer-based instructional lessons and either two multiple-choice tests or two fill-in-the-blank tests. Color-coded borders were displayed during the lesson, adjacent to the screen text and illustrations. In the experimental condition, corresponding border colors were shown at posttest. In the control condition. border colors in the posttest were mismatched with those used in the lesson. Participants were not informed of this color manipulation. Based on Tulving and Thomson's (1973) encoding specificity principle, the experimental group should remember significantly more content. Conversely. Murnane, Phelps. and Malmberg's (1999) ICE theory predicted that color-coding will have little effect on memory retrieval, since participants did not explicitly and actively integrate the topics with the color-coding scheme. Results generally favor ICE theory, however, the effects of practice/feedback varied by test format and color condition. A topic color test measured the number of topic-color associations that were implicitly encoded and remembered. Gender and format differences were detected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several letters to the editor in response to article the related to changes in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure published in a previous issues of periodical are presented.