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By Root 776 0

more successful than MySpace in restraining corporate marketing, had not yet emerged as the dominant social-networking site.

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In his later book The Black Swan, Taleb cites the hilarious example of two Bloomberg News headlines, issued just a half hour apart on December 15, 2003. At 1:01 p.m.: U.S. TREASURIES RISE; HUSSEIN CAPTURE MAY NOT CURB TERRORISM. At 1:31 p.m.: U.S. TREASURIES FALL; HUSSEIN CAPTURE BOOSTS ALLURE OF RISKY ASSETS.

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Translation: To the candidate who is Barack Obama I sing this corrido with all my soul He was born humble without pretension He began in the streets of Chicago Working to achieve a vision To protect the working people And bring us all together in this great nation Viva Obama! Viva Obama! Families united and safe and even with a health care plan

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Indeed, the site may even have done harm: as the science writer Farhad Manjoo pointed out, all research on myths indicates that “repeating a claim, even if only to refute it, increases its apparent truthfulness.” For example, three days after Norbert Schwarz, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, showed subjects a CDC flyer attempting to dispel myths about the flu vaccine, he found that his subjects misremembered, on average, 40 percent of the false statements as being true. So just by writing this paragraph as I did, listing the anti-Obama smears, I likely spread misinformation among at least a few readers. Apologies.