title: Vande Bharat Express

text: After four years of planning, manufacturing, and testing, Train 18 was inaugurated on 15 February 2019 and was ready to begin service from New Delhi to Varanasi. It was soon renamed to 'Vande Bharat Express' by Railway minister. Prime Minister Narendra Modi flagged off the inaugural run on 15 February 2019, with its commercial run starting from 17 February 2019. It runs on the Delhi–Varanasi route, via Kanpur and Prayagraj, connecting the holy city of Varanasi to the Capital city, reducing travel time along the route by 15%. The train's regenerative brakes are also expected to allow a 30% savings in electricity costs as compared to its predecessor. Operating at a speed of , it will outpace the Shatabdi Express by . Although the trainset has been tested for speeds up to 180 km/h, operational speed has been capped at 130 km/h as an internal report by Indian Railways indicated that just 0.3% of the country's track are capable of supporting such speeds. Every other car on the train is motorized. The 8-hour journey from New Delhi to Varanasi station has the Chair Car CC Class fare of ₹1,440.00 and covers the total distance of about 762 kilometers.


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: After the success of the New Delhi–Varanasi route and the later New Delhi–Katra route, the Railway Board approved the production of 45 new Vande Bharat train sets by 2022. Production was delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic (which caused a 12.5% loss in annual production capacity) and other administrative issues. Despite this, the Union minister decided to move ahead with the schedule and asked the officials to build 10 trains by August 2022.


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: Indian Railways placed orders for 48 second generation Vande Bharat trainsets in January 2021, and an additional 58 rakes in March 2022. In the 2022 Union Budget, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that the government would manufacture 400 more Vande Bharat trains over the next three years.


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: The Railways had ordered 36,000 wheels for Vande Bharat trainsets from Ukraine at a cost of US$16 million. Supplies were disrupted due to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Railways placed orders with companies based in the Czech Republic, Poland, Malaysia, China, and the United States to ensure an undisrupted supply of wheels. In May 2022, the Railways hired Steel Authority of India (SAIL) to produce 100,000 wheels at its Durgapur steel plant. The Railways invited bids in September 2022 to establish a manufacturing plant in India with a capacity to produce 80,000 wheels for high-speed trains annually.


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: The Vande Bharat was designed and manufactured by the Integral Coach Factory (ICF) under the leadership of Sudhanshu Mani as part of the Make in India initiative. It was originally called Train 18. Railway Minister Piyush Goyal announced on 26 January 2019 that the train would be named Vande Bharat Express.


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: The Vande Bharat Express' exterior employs an aerodynamic design intended to reduce air resistance at high speeds. It has a driver cabin at each end, allowing for faster turnaround at terminating stations. The trainset weighs 430 tonnes, and has 16 passenger cars with a seating capacity of 1,128 passengers. Two of the center compartments are first class compartments that seat 52 each, with the rest being coach compartments seating 78 each. The chassis of a coach is 23 meters long, and the frame of the train is made entirely of stainless steel. Alternate coaches are motorized to ensure an even distribution of power and quicker acceleration and deceleration. The cars are interconnected and fully sealed to allow better mobility between coaches and reduce noise. The train features a GPIS-based passenger information system, bio-vacuum toilets, and rotational seats which can be aligned in the direction of travel (only in executive class). Vande Bharat employs a regenerative braking system.


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: The Vande Bharat can reach a maximum speed of 180 km/h. It can accelerate to a speed of 100 km/h in 54.6 seconds and reach its maximum speed in 145 seconds. Trains are equipped with 24 inch television screens that serve as the passenger information and entertainment system. The train's underframe electrical equipment can withstand floods up to 40 centimetres.


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: The assembly of the train takes 8 weeks. About 80-85% of the components that go into the making of Vande Bharat are indigenously sourced. Among the imported components are the wheels, seats, doors, braking system, transformers, and electronic parts such as processing chips, with plans to produce them domestically. The train's seats were imported from Spain, and the wheels were imported from Ukraine.


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: Indian Railways and ICF were also planning the development of Train 20, an upgraded version of Train 18, intended to replace the Rajdhani Express. The new train was planned to have an aluminium body with sleeper coaches.


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: The VB2 trains can accelerate to a speed of 100 km/h in 52 seconds compared to the 54.6 seconds taken to reach the same speed by the older version. The train can reach a speed of 160 km/h in 140 seconds, 5 seconds faster than the first generation Vande Bharat. VB2 is also lighter weighing 392 tonnes compared to 430 tonnes for the previous version. Trains are equipped with larger 32 inch television screens and have Wi-Fi onboard. The air conditioning system onboard the VB2 is 15% more energy efficient than the original Vande Bharat trainset. Other improvements in VB2 include automatic plug doors, touch free sliding doors, emergency communication units, accessible toilets, a more spacious driver's cabin, and reclinable seats in all coaches. To address the seat reclining issues of the previous version, the new rakes will be equipped with a push-back arrangement for smooth reclining. VB2 is equipped with the Kavach train protection system.


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: In addition to the previous facilities, the second version of this train will include upgraded amenities, seating, security and surveillance systems and features designed for emergencies. The new rolling stock will be equipped with new rakes that will be equipped with four emergency windows, disaster lights in all coaches in the event of the light system's failure, fire survival cables inside of door circuits, availability of ventilation for three hours in case of Air Conditioner's power failure and emergency push buttons will also be increased to four per coach. The new coaches are also set to be equipped with a centralised Coach Monitoring System for all types of electricity and climate control, among other new additions. An official added that the new coaches will be provided with a bacteria-free air conditioning system and higher flood protection of underframe electrical equipment to ensure reliability during monsoons up to 65 centimetres.


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: Trial runs for the Vande Bharat 2 (VB2) were completed on 9 September 2022. The first VB2 rake entered service on 30 September 2022. A total of 102 VB2 trainsets have been ordered by Indian Railways. As of October 2022, four VB2s have been built, and about half a dozen are under production at ICF. Sudhanshu Mani said, "Now that ICF has already developed four such trains and have got a hang of the process, they can easily roll out three-four trains per month and around 40 by 15 August next year."


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: The Vande Bharat 3 trainset will introduce sleeper coaches for the first time. It will have three classes - AC-1, AC-2 and AC-3. The VB3 is expected to have a maximum speed of 180 km/h and design life of 35 years.


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: The VB3 is expected to be lighter, more energy efficient, and have better passenger amenities than the VB2. Half of the VB3 trainsets have coaches made of steel, while the other half are made of aluminium with articulated bogies.


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: The fourth generation Vande Bharat trains will have a higher maximum speed of 200 km/h. VB4 coaches will be made of light-weight aluminium alloy. The VB4 is expected to feature improved passenger amenities such as 3-pin socket and USB power socket for every passenger, zero discharge toilet systems, and facilities to accommodate passengers traveling in wheelchairs. The VB4 will also be fitted with a cattle guard that is designed to absorb collisions with animals weighing up to 600 kg, and prevent animals from being swept under the train in the event of impact.


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: At least half of all VB4 trainsets are expected to be tilting trains, which would be the first time the technology is commercially deployed in India. The first VB4 rake is expected to enter service in 2026.


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: The Vande Bharat was designed and manufactured by the Integral Coach Factory (ICF) under the leadership of Sudhanshu Mani as part of the Make in India initiative. The unit cost of the first train was estimated at . A total of two first generation Vande Bharat trainsets were built by the ICF.


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: Indian Railways first floated a tender to manufacture 44 VB2 rakes in July 2020. The agency refloated the tender thrice, the fourth (and final) tender being floated in September 2020. The tender was floated under the Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative and required 75% of the components to be locally sourced. Indian Railways received three bids for the tender and awarded a contract to Hyderabad-based Medha Servo Drives to manufacture 44 Vande Bharat trainsets on 21 January 2021. Medha will build the rakes at ICF (24 rakes), Rail Coach Factory, Kapurthala and Modern Coach Factory, Raebareli (10 rakes each).


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: Indian Railways floated a tender to manufacture an additional 58 VB2 rakes on 28 August 2021. In March 2022, Indian Railways awarded contracts to seven companies to supply equipment and manufacture the 58 trainsets at a total cost of . The seven companies are Medha Servo Drives, Alstom, Siemens, Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), Titagarh Wagons, Saini Electricals and CGL. The ICF will supervise the manufacture of 26 of the 58 rakes. Medho Servo Drives will build propulsion systems under ICF oversight. Siemens will supply propulsion systems to manufacture 16 rakes at the Modern Coach Factory, and Alstom will supply propulsion systems for 9 trains to be built at the Rail Coach Factory. BHEL will supply components for 4 trainsets, while CGL, Saini Electricals, and Titagarh Wagons will build one rake each. All 7 of these rakes are will also be built at the ICF.


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: Indian Railways invited bids to design and manufacture 200 VB3 trainsets in April 2022. The agency estimated that it would cost The estimate includes the cost of upgrading infrastructure at either the Marathwada Rail Coach Factory in Latur or the ICF where the VB3 is planned to be manufactured. A further will be paid to the winning bidders over a 35 year period for maintenance. The bidders would be required to build the first prototype VB3 trainset within 24 months of being awarded the contract.


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: Indian Railways floated tenders to manufacture and maintain 200 VB4 trainsets in July 2022. It also requires the winner to improve infrastructure at a manufacturing unit of the ICF and the Rail Coach Naveenikaran Karkhana (RCNK), Sonipat.


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: After the train's inauguration, the Indian Railways reportedly received queries of interest from some countries in Southeast Asia and South America. A Board Member of the Indian Railways stated that the train can be modified according to customer needs. A Railways official stated in November 2022 that the Ministry of Railways was preparing a roadmap to begin exports of Vande Bharat trainsets by 2026. Exports would only begin after 475 trainsets are built for domestic use.


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: The Indian Railways is constructing a 59 km standard gauge test track between Gudha and Thathana Mithri in the Jodhpur Division to conduct trials runs at speeds of up to 220 km/h. The track is expected to be completed by January 2024. The Railways will use the track to test trainsets that are designed to be exported to countries that use standard gauge railways.


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: In February 2019, the newly launched Vande Bharat Express hit a stray bull near Etawah in Uttar Pradesh on its second day of service. The aerodynamic nose of the train which was made of steel with a fibre covering was damaged. A similar cattle run-over was reported on 17 August 2019.


title: Vande Bharat Express

text: In another incident, the front portion of a Vande Bharat Superfast Express was damaged after it collided with a herd of buffaloes in Gujarat on 6 October 2022 days after the semi-high speed train was flagged off by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The train was on its way from Mumbai to Gandhinagar and the incident occurred around at 11:00 am between Vatva and Maninagar station, ahead of Ahmedabad.


title: Mr. Queen

text: Mr. Queen () is a South Korean television series,based on the Chinese web series “Go Princess Go". Directed by Yoon Sung-sik, it stars Shin Hye-sun as Queen Cheorin and Kim Jung-hyun as King Cheoljong. The drama is about Queen Cheorin finding herself with the soul of a modern-day man inside her body, and King Cheoljong striving to be a king who helps his people. It aired on tvN every Saturday and Sunday at 21:00 (KST) from December 12, 2020 to February 14, 2021.


title: Mr. Queen

text: Despite its controversies, the series is the eighth highest rated drama in Korean cable television history, with the last episode reached a nationwide rating of 17.371% and garnering more than 4 million in viewership. It also set a record for tvN by achieving the 5th highest rating in the network's history.


title: Mr. Queen

text: In the modern age, Jang Bong-hwan (Choi Jin-hyuk) is a chef who works at the Blue House. He has a free spirit, but one day finds himself in the body of Queen Cheorin (Shin Hye-sun) in the Joseon period.


title: Mr. Queen

text: King Cheoljong (Kim Jung-hyun), the reigning monarch, is a gentle and easy-going person. However, he is only King in name, while the true power is wielded by the late King Sunjo's wife, Queen Sunwon (Bae Jong-ok), who has relegated Cheoljong to a figurehead.


title: Mr. Queen

text: Queen Cheorin soon discovers that the King is not what he seems, and that he has a dark and suspicious side to him.


title: Mr. Queen

text: In March 2020, Shin Hye-sun was confirmed to be a part of the drama. In June 2020, Kim Jung-hyun, Bae Jong-ok, Kim Tae-woo joined her to play lead roles in the series. In July 2020, Seol In-ah and Yoo Young-jae also joined the cast.


title: Mr. Queen

text: In October the first script reading was held. The stills from filming of the series were released on November 16, 2020.


title: Mr. Queen

text: The series reunites actors Kim Jung-hyun and Seol In-ah who previously acted together in the drama "School 2017".


title: Mr. Queen

text: It also marks the second collaboration of Shin Hye-sun with actors Bae Jong-ok, Kim In-kwon and with whom she acted in the film "Innocence" and the dramas "" and "Legend of the Blue Sea", respectively.


title: Mr. Queen

text: On November 24, 2020, filming was stopped as one of the supporting actors tested positive for COVID-19.


title: Mr. Queen

text: tvN announced that they would be airing a spin-off titled "Mr. Queen: The Secret" (official Korean name: "Mr. Queen: Bamboo Forest)," which featured the secrets and an extended love story of King Cheoljong and Queen Cheorin. It aired exclusively on the streaming service, TVING after the end of the main series' episodes 19 and 20 on February 13–14.


title: Mr. Queen

text: Following its airing, a controversy erupted in episode 2 as the series referred to Korea's national treasure, the Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty as a "tabloid." This drew outrage among viewers and about 700 people filed complaints to the Korea Communications Standards Commission. The series was also criticised as the author of the original Chinese drama has made negative remarks about Korea in their other work. The producers released a statement clarifying their stand and apologising for the controversies, adding that they were not aware of the negative comments made by the novelist.


title: Mr. Queen

text: An 8.0% viewership rating was recorded nationwide for the first episode, making it the second-highest premiere rating of any weekend drama of the network and fifth-highest premiere rating of the network after "Hospital Playlist 2", "Jirisan", "Mr. Sunshine", and "Encounter".


title: Mr. Queen

text: As per Nielsen Korea, the final episode logged a national average viewership of 17.37%, breaking its own highest ratings, thereby making the series 7th highest-rated drama in Korean cable television history.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Confirmation bias cannot be eliminated, but it can be managed, for example, by education and training in critical thinking skills.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Biased search for information, biased interpretation of this information, and biased memory recall, have been invoked to explain four specific effects:


title: Confirmation bias

text: A series of psychological experiments in the 1960s suggested that people are biased toward confirming their existing beliefs. Later work re-interpreted these results as a tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and ignoring alternatives. Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Another proposal is that people show confirmation bias because they are pragmatically assessing the costs of being wrong, rather than investigating in a neutral, scientific way.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Flawed decisions due to confirmation bias have been found in a wide range of political, organizational, financial and scientific contexts. These biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. For example, confirmation bias produces systematic errors in scientific research based on inductive reasoning (the gradual accumulation of supportive evidence). Similarly, a police detective may identify a suspect early in an investigation, but then may only seek confirming rather than disconfirming evidence. A medical practitioner may prematurely focus on a particular disorder early in a diagnostic session, and then seek only confirming evidence. In social media, confirmation bias is amplified by the use of filter bubbles, or "algorithmic editing", which display to individuals only information they are likely to agree with, while excluding opposing views.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Confirmation bias, a phrase coined by English psychologist Peter Wason, is the tendency of people to favor information that confirms or strengthens their beliefs or values and is difficult to dislodge once affirmed. Confirmation bias is an example of a cognitive bias.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Confirmation bias (or confirmatory bias) has also been termed myside bias. "Congeniality bias" has also been used.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Confirmation biases are effects in information processing. They differ from what is sometimes called the "behavioral confirmation effect", commonly known as "self-fulfilling prophecy", in which a person's expectations influence their own behavior, bringing about the expected result.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Some psychologists restrict the term "confirmation bias" to selective collection of evidence that supports what one already believes while ignoring or rejecting evidence that supports a different conclusion. Others apply the term more broadly to the tendency to preserve one's existing beliefs when searching for evidence, interpreting it, or recalling it from memory.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Confirmation bias is a result of automatic, unintentional strategies rather than deliberate deception. Confirmation bias cannot be avoided or eliminated, but only managed by improving education and critical thinking skills.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Confirmation bias is a broad construct that has a number of possible explanations, namely: hypothesis-testing by falsification, hypothesis testing by positive test strategy, and information processing explanations.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Experiments have found repeatedly that people tend to test hypotheses in a one-sided way, by searching for evidence consistent with their current hypothesis. Rather than searching through all the relevant evidence, they phrase questions to receive an affirmative answer that supports their theory. They look for the consequences that they would expect if their hypothesis was true, rather than what would happen if it was false. For example, someone using yes/no questions to find a number they suspect to be the number 3 might ask, "Is it an odd number?" People prefer this type of question, called a "positive test", even when a negative test such as "Is it an even number?" would yield exactly the same information. However, this does not mean that people seek tests that guarantee a positive answer. In studies where subjects could select either such pseudo-tests or genuinely diagnostic ones, they favored the genuinely diagnostic.


title: Confirmation bias

text: The preference for positive tests in itself is not a bias, since positive tests can be highly informative. However, in combination with other effects, this strategy can confirm existing beliefs or assumptions, independently of whether they are true. In real-world situations, evidence is often complex and mixed. For example, various contradictory ideas about someone could each be supported by concentrating on one aspect of his or her behavior. Thus any search for evidence in favor of a hypothesis is likely to succeed. One illustration of this is the way the phrasing of a question can significantly change the answer. For example, people who are asked, "Are you happy with your social life?" report greater satisfaction than those asked, "Are you "un"happy with your social life?"


title: Confirmation bias

text: Even a small change in a question's wording can affect how people search through available information, and hence the conclusions they reach. This was shown using a fictional child custody case. Participants read that Parent A was moderately suitable to be the guardian in multiple ways. Parent B had a mix of salient positive and negative qualities: a close relationship with the child but a job that would take them away for long periods of time. When asked, "Which parent should have custody of the child?" the majority of participants chose Parent B, looking mainly for positive attributes. However, when asked, "Which parent should be denied custody of the child?" they looked for negative attributes and the majority answered that Parent B should be denied custody, implying that Parent A should have custody.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Similar studies have demonstrated how people engage in a biased search for information, but also that this phenomenon may be limited by a preference for genuine diagnostic tests. In an initial experiment, participants rated another person on the introversion–extroversion personality dimension on the basis of an interview. They chose the interview questions from a given list. When the interviewee was introduced as an introvert, the participants chose questions that presumed introversion, such as, "What do you find unpleasant about noisy parties?" When the interviewee was described as extroverted, almost all the questions presumed extroversion, such as, "What would you do to liven up a dull party?" These loaded questions gave the interviewees little or no opportunity to falsify the hypothesis about them. A later version of the experiment gave the participants less presumptive questions to choose from, such as, "Do you shy away from social interactions?" Participants preferred to ask these more diagnostic questions, showing only a weak bias towards positive tests. This pattern, of a main preference for diagnostic tests and a weaker preference for positive tests, has been replicated in other studies.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Personality traits influence and interact with biased search processes. Individuals vary in their abilities to defend their attitudes from external attacks in relation to selective exposure. Selective exposure occurs when individuals search for information that is consistent, rather than inconsistent, with their personal beliefs. An experiment examined the extent to which individuals could refute arguments that contradicted their personal beliefs. People with high confidence levels more readily seek out contradictory information to their personal position to form an argument. This can take the form of an "oppositional news consumption", where individuals seek opposing partisan news in order to counterargue. Individuals with low confidence levels do not seek out contradictory information and prefer information that supports their personal position. People generate and evaluate evidence in arguments that are biased towards their own beliefs and opinions. Heightened confidence levels decrease preference for information that supports individuals' personal beliefs.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Another experiment gave participants a complex rule-discovery task that involved moving objects simulated by a computer. Objects on the computer screen followed specific laws, which the participants had to figure out. So, participants could "fire" objects across the screen to test their hypotheses. Despite making many attempts over a ten-hour session, none of the participants figured out the rules of the system. They typically attempted to confirm rather than falsify their hypotheses, and were reluctant to consider alternatives. Even after seeing objective evidence that refuted their working hypotheses, they frequently continued doing the same tests. Some of the participants were taught proper hypothesis-testing, but these instructions had almost no effect.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Confirmation biases are not limited to the collection of evidence. Even if two individuals have the same information, the way they interpret it can be biased.


title: Confirmation bias

text: A team at Stanford University conducted an experiment involving participants who felt strongly about capital punishment, with half in favor and half against it. Each participant read descriptions of two studies: a comparison of U.S. states with and without the death penalty, and a comparison of murder rates in a state before and after the introduction of the death penalty. After reading a quick description of each study, the participants were asked whether their opinions had changed. Then, they read a more detailed account of each study's procedure and had to rate whether the research was well-conducted and convincing. In fact, the studies were fictional. Half the participants were told that one kind of study supported the deterrent effect and the other undermined it, while for other participants the conclusions were swapped.


title: Confirmation bias

text: The participants, whether supporters or opponents, reported shifting their attitudes slightly in the direction of the first study they read. Once they read the more detailed descriptions of the two studies, they almost all returned to their original belief regardless of the evidence provided, pointing to details that supported their viewpoint and disregarding anything contrary. Participants described studies supporting their pre-existing view as superior to those that contradicted it, in detailed and specific ways. Writing about a study that seemed to undermine the deterrence effect, a death penalty proponent wrote, "The research didn't cover a long enough period of time," while an opponent's comment on the same study said, "No strong evidence to contradict the researchers has been presented." The results illustrated that people set higher standards of evidence for hypotheses that go against their current expectations. This effect, known as "disconfirmation bias", has been supported by other experiments.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Another study of biased interpretation occurred during the 2004 U.S. presidential election and involved participants who reported having strong feelings about the candidates. They were shown apparently contradictory pairs of statements, either from Republican candidate George W. Bush, Democratic candidate John Kerry or a politically neutral public figure. They were also given further statements that made the apparent contradiction seem reasonable. From these three pieces of information, they had to decide whether each individual's statements were inconsistent. There were strong differences in these evaluations, with participants much more likely to interpret statements from the candidate they opposed as contradictory.


title: Confirmation bias

text: In this experiment, the participants made their judgments while in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner which monitored their brain activity. As participants evaluated contradictory statements by their favored candidate, emotional centers of their brains were aroused. This did not happen with the statements by the other figures. The experimenters inferred that the different responses to the statements were not due to passive reasoning errors. Instead, the participants were actively reducing the cognitive dissonance induced by reading about their favored candidate's irrational or hypocritical behavior.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Biases in belief interpretation are persistent, regardless of intelligence level. Participants in an experiment took the SAT test (a college admissions test used in the United States) to assess their intelligence levels. They then read information regarding safety concerns for vehicles, and the experimenters manipulated the national origin of the car. American participants provided their opinion if the car should be banned on a six-point scale, where one indicated "definitely yes" and six indicated "definitely no". Participants firstly evaluated if they would allow a dangerous German car on American streets and a dangerous American car on German streets. Participants believed that the dangerous German car on American streets should be banned more quickly than the dangerous American car on German streets. There was no difference among intelligence levels at the rate participants would ban a car.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Biased interpretation is not restricted to emotionally significant topics. In another experiment, participants were told a story about a theft. They had to rate the evidential importance of statements arguing either for or against a particular character being responsible. When they hypothesized that character's guilt, they rated statements supporting that hypothesis as more important than conflicting statements.


title: Confirmation bias

text: People may remember evidence selectively to reinforce their expectations, even if they gather and interpret evidence in a neutral manner. This effect is called "selective recall", "confirmatory memory", or "access-biased memory". Psychological theories differ in their predictions about selective recall. Schema theory predicts that information matching prior expectations will be more easily stored and recalled than information that does not match. Some alternative approaches say that surprising information stands out and so is memorable. Predictions from both these theories have been confirmed in different experimental contexts, with no theory winning outright.


title: Confirmation bias

text: In one study, participants read a profile of a woman which described a mix of introverted and extroverted behaviors. They later had to recall examples of her introversion and extroversion. One group was told this was to assess the woman for a job as a librarian, while a second group were told it was for a job in real estate sales. There was a significant difference between what these two groups recalled, with the "librarian" group recalling more examples of introversion and the "sales" groups recalling more extroverted behavior. A selective memory effect has also been shown in experiments that manipulate the desirability of personality types. In one of these, a group of participants were shown evidence that extroverted people are more successful than introverts. Another group were told the opposite. In a subsequent, apparently unrelated study, participants were asked to recall events from their lives in which they had been either introverted or extroverted. Each group of participants provided more memories connecting themselves with the more desirable personality type, and recalled those memories more quickly.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Changes in emotional states can also influence memory recall. Participants rated how they felt when they had first learned that O. J. Simpson had been acquitted of murder charges. They described their emotional reactions and confidence regarding the verdict one week, two months, and one year after the trial. Results indicated that participants' assessments for Simpson's guilt changed over time. The more that participants' opinion of the verdict had changed, the less stable were the participant's memories regarding their initial emotional reactions. When participants recalled their initial emotional reactions two months and a year later, past appraisals closely resembled current appraisals of emotion. People demonstrate sizable myside bias when discussing their opinions on controversial topics. Memory recall and construction of experiences undergo revision in relation to corresponding emotional states.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Myside bias has been shown to influence the accuracy of memory recall. In an experiment, widows and widowers rated the intensity of their experienced grief six months and five years after the deaths of their spouses. Participants noted a higher experience of grief at six months rather than at five years. Yet, when the participants were asked after five years how they had felt six months after the death of their significant other, the intensity of grief participants recalled was highly correlated with their current level of grief. Individuals appear to utilize their current emotional states to analyze how they must have felt when experiencing past events. Emotional memories are reconstructed by current emotional states.


title: Confirmation bias

text: One study showed how selective memory can maintain belief in extrasensory perception (ESP). Believers and disbelievers were each shown descriptions of ESP experiments. Half of each group were told that the experimental results supported the existence of ESP, while the others were told they did not. In a subsequent test, participants recalled the material accurately, apart from believers who had read the non-supportive evidence. This group remembered significantly less information and some of them incorrectly remembered the results as supporting ESP.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Myside bias was once believed to be correlated with intelligence; however, studies have shown that myside bias can be more influenced by ability to rationally think as opposed to level of intelligence. Myside bias can cause an inability to effectively and logically evaluate the opposite side of an argument. Studies have stated that myside bias is an absence of "active open-mindedness", meaning the active search for why an initial idea may be wrong. Typically, myside bias is operationalized in empirical studies as the quantity of evidence used in support of their side in comparison to the opposite side.


title: Confirmation bias

text: A study has found individual differences in myside bias. This study investigates individual differences that are acquired through learning in a cultural context and are mutable. The researcher found important individual difference in argumentation. Studies have suggested that individual differences such as deductive reasoning ability, ability to overcome belief bias, epistemological understanding, and thinking disposition are significant predictors of the reasoning and generating arguments, counterarguments, and rebuttals.


title: Confirmation bias

text: A study by Christopher Wolfe and Anne Britt also investigated how participants' views of "what makes a good argument?" can be a source of myside bias that influences the way a person formulates their own arguments. The study investigated individual differences of argumentation schema and asked participants to write essays. The participants were randomly assigned to write essays either for or against their preferred side of an argument and were given research instructions that took either a balanced or an unrestricted approach. The balanced-research instructions directed participants to create a "balanced" argument, i.e., that included both pros and cons; the unrestricted-research instructions included nothing on how to create the argument.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Overall, the results revealed that the balanced-research instructions significantly increased the incidence of opposing information in arguments. These data also reveal that personal belief is not a "source" of myside bias; however, that those participants, who believe that a good argument is one that is based on facts, are more likely to exhibit myside bias than other participants. This evidence is consistent with the claims proposed in Baron's article—that people's opinions about what makes good thinking can influence how arguments are generated.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Before psychological research on confirmation bias, the phenomenon had been observed throughout history. Beginning with the Greek historian Thucydides (c. 460 BC – c. 395 BC), who wrote of misguided reason in "The Peloponnesian War"; "... for it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy". Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) noted it in the "Divine Comedy", in which St. Thomas Aquinas cautions Dante upon meeting in Paradise, "opinion—hasty—often can incline to the wrong side, and then affection for one's own opinion binds, confines the mind". Ibn Khaldun noticed the same effect in his "Muqaddimah":


title: Confirmation bias

text: In the second volume of his "The World as Will and Representation" (1844), German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer observed that "An adopted hypothesis gives us lynx-eyes for everything that confirms it and makes us blind to everything that contradicts it."


title: Confirmation bias

text: In Peter Wason's initial experiment published in 1960 (which does not mention the term "confirmation bias"), he repeatedly challenged participants to identify a rule applying to triples of numbers. They were told that (2,4,6) fits the rule. They generated triples, and the experimenter told them whether each triple conformed to the rule.


title: Confirmation bias

text: The actual rule was simply "any ascending sequence", but participants had great difficulty in finding it, often announcing rules that were far more specific, such as "the middle number is the average of the first and last". The participants seemed to test only positive examples—triples that obeyed their hypothesized rule. For example, if they thought the rule was, "Each number is two greater than its predecessor," they would offer a triple that fitted (confirmed) this rule, such as (11,13,15) rather than a triple that violated (falsified) it, such as (11,12,19).


title: Confirmation bias

text: Wason interpreted his results as showing a preference for confirmation over falsification, hence he coined the term "confirmation bias". Wason also used confirmation bias to explain the results of his selection task experiment. Participants repeatedly performed badly on various forms of this test, in most cases ignoring information that could potentially refute (falsify) the specified rule.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Klayman and Ha's 1987 paper argues that the Wason experiments do not actually demonstrate a bias towards confirmation, but instead a tendency to make tests consistent with the working hypothesis. They called this the "positive test strategy". This strategy is an example of a heuristic: a reasoning shortcut that is imperfect but easy to compute. Klayman and Ha used Bayesian probability and information theory as their standard of hypothesis-testing, rather than the falsificationism used by Wason. According to these ideas, each answer to a question yields a different amount of information, which depends on the person's prior beliefs. Thus a scientific test of a hypothesis is one that is expected to produce the most information. Since the information content depends on initial probabilities, a positive test can either be highly informative or uninformative. Klayman and Ha argued that when people think about realistic problems, they are looking for a specific answer with a small initial probability. In this case, positive tests are usually more informative than negative tests. However, in Wason's rule discovery task the answer—three numbers in ascending order—is very broad, so positive tests are unlikely to yield informative answers. Klayman and Ha supported their analysis by citing an experiment that used the labels "DAX" and "MED" in place of "fits the rule" and "doesn't fit the rule". This avoided implying that the aim was to find a low-probability rule. Participants had much more success with this version of the experiment.


title: Confirmation bias

text: In light of this and other critiques, the focus of research moved away from confirmation versus falsification of an hypothesis, to examining whether people test hypotheses in an informative way, or an uninformative but positive way. The search for "true" confirmation bias led psychologists to look at a wider range of effects in how people process information.


title: Confirmation bias

text: There are currently three main information processing explanations of confirmation bias, plus a recent addition.


title: Confirmation bias

text: According to Robert MacCoun, most biased evidence processing occurs through a combination of "cold" (cognitive) and "hot" (motivated) mechanisms.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Cognitive explanations for confirmation bias are based on limitations in people's ability to handle complex tasks, and the shortcuts, called "heuristics", that they use. For example, people may judge the reliability of evidence by using the "availability heuristic" that is, how readily a particular idea comes to mind. It is also possible that people can only focus on one thought at a time, so find it difficult to test alternative hypotheses in parallel. Another heuristic is the positive test strategy identified by Klayman and Ha, in which people test a hypothesis by examining cases where they expect a property or event to occur. This heuristic avoids the difficult or impossible task of working out how diagnostic each possible question will be. However, it is not universally reliable, so people can overlook challenges to their existing beliefs.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Motivational explanations involve an effect of desire on belief. It is known that people prefer positive thoughts over negative ones in a number of ways: this is called the "Pollyanna principle". Applied to arguments or sources of evidence, this could explain why desired conclusions are more likely to be believed true. According to experiments that manipulate the desirability of the conclusion, people demand a high standard of evidence for unpalatable ideas and a low standard for preferred ideas. In other words, they ask, "Can I believe this?" for some suggestions and, "Must I believe this?" for others. Although consistency is a desirable feature of attitudes, an excessive drive for consistency is another potential source of bias because it may prevent people from neutrally evaluating new, surprising information. Social psychologist Ziva Kunda combines the cognitive and motivational theories, arguing that motivation creates the bias, but cognitive factors determine the size of the effect.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Explanations in terms of cost-benefit analysis assume that people do not just test hypotheses in a disinterested way, but assess the costs of different errors. Using ideas from evolutionary psychology, James Friedrich suggests that people do not primarily aim at truth in testing hypotheses, but try to avoid the most costly errors. For example, employers might ask one-sided questions in job interviews because they are focused on weeding out unsuitable candidates. Yaacov Trope and Akiva Liberman's refinement of this theory assumes that people compare the two different kinds of error: accepting a false hypothesis or rejecting a true hypothesis. For instance, someone who underestimates a friend's honesty might treat him or her suspiciously and so undermine the friendship. Overestimating the friend's honesty may also be costly, but less so. In this case, it would be rational to seek, evaluate or remember evidence of their honesty in a biased way. When someone gives an initial impression of being introverted or extroverted, questions that match that impression come across as more empathic. This suggests that when talking to someone who seems to be an introvert, it is a sign of better social skills to ask, "Do you feel awkward in social situations?" rather than, "Do you like noisy parties?" The connection between confirmation bias and social skills was corroborated by a study of how college students get to know other people. Highly self-monitoring students, who are more sensitive to their environment and to social norms, asked more matching questions when interviewing a high-status staff member than when getting to know fellow students.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Psychologists Jennifer Lerner and Philip Tetlock distinguish two different kinds of thinking process. "Exploratory thought" neutrally considers multiple points of view and tries to anticipate all possible objections to a particular position, while "confirmatory thought" seeks to justify a specific point of view. Lerner and Tetlock say that when people expect to justify their position to others whose views they already know, they will tend to adopt a similar position to those people, and then use confirmatory thought to bolster their own credibility. However, if the external parties are overly aggressive or critical, people will disengage from thought altogether, and simply assert their personal opinions without justification. Lerner and Tetlock say that people only push themselves to think critically and logically when they know in advance they will need to explain themselves to others who are well-informed, genuinely interested in the truth, and whose views they do not already know. Because those conditions rarely exist, they argue, most people are using confirmatory thought most of the time.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Developmental psychologist Eve Whitmore has argued that beliefs and biases involved in confirmation bias have their roots in childhood coping through make-believe, which becomes "the basis for more complex forms of self-deception and illusion into adulthood." The friction brought on by questioning as an adolescent with developing critical thinking can lead to the rationalization of false beliefs, and the habit of such rationalization can become unconscious over the years.


title: Confirmation bias

text: In social media, confirmation bias is amplified by the use of filter bubbles, or "algorithmic editing", which displays to individuals only information they are likely to agree with, while excluding opposing views. Some have argued that confirmation bias is the reason why society can never escape from filter bubbles, because individuals are psychologically hardwired to seek information that agrees with their preexisting values and beliefs. Others have further argued that the mixture of the two is degrading democracy—claiming that this "algorithmic editing" removes diverse viewpoints and information—and that unless filter bubble algorithms are removed, voters will be unable to make fully informed political decisions.


title: Confirmation bias

text: The rise of social media has contributed greatly to the rapid spread of fake news, that is, false and misleading information that is presented as credible news from a seemingly reliable source. Confirmation bias (selecting or reinterpreting evidence to support one's beliefs) is one of three main hurdles cited as to why critical thinking goes astray in these circumstances. The other two are shortcut heuristics (when overwhelmed or short of time, people rely on simple rules such as group consensus or trusting an expert or role model) and social goals (social motivation or peer pressure can interfere with objective analysis of facts at hand).


title: Confirmation bias

text: In combating the spread of fake news, social media sites have considered turning toward "digital nudging". This can currently be done in two different forms of nudging. This includes nudging of information and nudging of presentation. Nudging of information entails social media sites providing a disclaimer or label questioning or warning users of the validity of the source while nudging of presentation includes exposing users to new information which they may not have sought out but could introduce them to viewpoints that may combat their own confirmation biases.


title: Confirmation bias

text: A distinguishing feature of scientific thinking is the search for confirming or supportive evidence (inductive reasoning) as well as falsifying evidence (deductive reasoning). Inductive research in particular can have a serious problem with confirmation bias.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Many times in the history of science, scientists have resisted new discoveries by selectively interpreting or ignoring unfavorable data. Several studies have shown that scientists rate studies that report findings consistent with their prior beliefs more favorably than studies reporting findings inconsistent with their previous beliefs.


title: Confirmation bias

text: However, assuming that the research question is relevant, the experimental design adequate and the data are clearly and comprehensively described, the empirical data obtained should be important to the scientific community and should not be viewed prejudicially, regardless of whether they conform to current theoretical predictions. In practice, researchers may misunderstand, misinterpret, or not read at all studies that contradict their preconceptions, or wrongly cite them anyway as if they actually supported their claims.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Further, confirmation biases can sustain scientific theories or research programs in the face of inadequate or even contradictory evidence. The discipline of parapsychology is often cited as an example in the context of whether it is a protoscience or a pseudoscience.


title: Confirmation bias

text: An experimenter's confirmation bias can potentially affect which data are reported. Data that conflict with the experimenter's expectations may be more readily discarded as unreliable, producing the so-called file drawer effect. To combat this tendency, scientific training teaches ways to prevent bias. For example, experimental design of randomized controlled trials (coupled with their systematic review) aims to minimize sources of bias.


title: Confirmation bias

text: The social process of peer review aims to mitigate the effect of individual scientists' biases, even though the peer review process itself may be susceptible to such biases Confirmation bias may thus be especially harmful to objective evaluations regarding nonconforming results since biased individuals may regard opposing evidence to be weak in principle and give little serious thought to revising their beliefs. Scientific innovators often meet with resistance from the scientific community, and research presenting controversial results frequently receives harsh peer review.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Confirmation bias can lead investors to be overconfident, ignoring evidence that their strategies will lose money. In studies of political stock markets, investors made more profit when they resisted bias. For example, participants who interpreted a candidate's debate performance in a neutral rather than partisan way were more likely to profit. To combat the effect of confirmation bias, investors can try to adopt a contrary viewpoint "for the sake of argument". In one technique, they imagine that their investments have collapsed and ask themselves why this might happen.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Cognitive biases are important variables in clinical decision-making by medical general practitioners (GPs) and medical specialists. Two important ones are confirmation bias and the overlapping availability bias. A GP may make a diagnosis early on during an examination, and then seek confirming evidence rather than falsifying evidence. This cognitive error is partly caused by the availability of evidence about the supposed disorder being diagnosed. For example, the client may have mentioned the disorder, or the GP may have recently read a much-discussed paper about the disorder. The basis of this cognitive shortcut or heuristic (termed anchoring) is that the doctor does not consider multiple possibilities based on evidence, but prematurely latches on (or anchors to) a single cause. In emergency medicine, because of time pressure, there is a high density of decision-making, and shortcuts are frequently applied. The potential failure rate of these cognitive decisions needs to be managed by education about the 30 or more cognitive biases that can occur, so as to set in place proper debiasing strategies. Confirmation bias may also cause doctors to perform unnecessary medical procedures due to pressure from adamant patients.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Raymond Nickerson, a psychologist, blames confirmation bias for the ineffective medical procedures that were used for centuries before the arrival of scientific medicine. If a patient recovered, medical authorities counted the treatment as successful, rather than looking for alternative explanations such as that the disease had run its natural course. Biased assimilation is a factor in the modern appeal of alternative medicine, whose proponents are swayed by positive anecdotal evidence but treat scientific evidence hyper-critically.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Cognitive therapy was developed by Aaron T. Beck in the early 1960s and has become a popular approach. According to Beck, biased information processing is a factor in depression. His approach teaches people to treat evidence impartially, rather than selectively reinforcing negative outlooks. Phobias and hypochondria have also been shown to involve confirmation bias for threatening information.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Nickerson argues that reasoning in judicial and political contexts is sometimes subconsciously biased, favoring conclusions that judges, juries or governments have already committed to. Since the evidence in a jury trial can be complex, and jurors often reach decisions about the verdict early on, it is reasonable to expect an attitude polarization effect. The prediction that jurors will become more extreme in their views as they see more evidence has been borne out in experiments with mock trials. Both inquisitorial and adversarial criminal justice systems are affected by confirmation bias.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Confirmation bias can be a factor in creating or extending conflicts, from emotionally charged debates to wars: by interpreting the evidence in their favor, each opposing party can become overconfident that it is in the stronger position. On the other hand, confirmation bias can result in people ignoring or misinterpreting the signs of an imminent or incipient conflict. For example, psychologists Stuart Sutherland and Thomas Kida have each argued that U.S. Navy Admiral Husband E. Kimmel showed confirmation bias when playing down the first signs of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.


title: Confirmation bias

text: A two-decade study of political pundits by Philip E. Tetlock found that, on the whole, their predictions were not much better than chance. Tetlock divided experts into "foxes" who maintained multiple hypotheses, and "hedgehogs" who were more dogmatic. In general, the hedgehogs were much less accurate. Tetlock blamed their failure on confirmation bias, and specifically on their inability to make use of new information that contradicted their existing theories.


title: Confirmation bias

text: In police investigations, a detective may identify a suspect early in an investigation, but then sometimes largely seek supporting or confirming evidence, ignoring or downplaying falsifying evidence.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Social psychologists have identified two tendencies in the way people seek or interpret information about themselves. "Self-verification" is the drive to reinforce the existing self-image and "self-enhancement" is the drive to seek positive feedback. Both are served by confirmation biases. In experiments where people are given feedback that conflicts with their self-image, they are less likely to attend to it or remember it than when given self-verifying feedback. They reduce the impact of such information by interpreting it as unreliable. Similar experiments have found a preference for positive feedback, and the people who give it, over negative feedback.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Confirmation bias can play a key role in the propagation of mass delusions. Witch trials are frequently cited as an example.


title: Confirmation bias

text: For another example, in the Seattle windshield pitting epidemic, there seemed to be a "pitting epidemic" in which windshields were damaged due to an unknown cause. As news of the apparent wave of damage spread, more and more people checked their windshields, discovered that their windshields too had been damaged, thus confirming belief in the supposed epidemic. In fact, the windshields were previously damaged, but the damage went unnoticed until people checked their windshields as the delusion spread.


title: Confirmation bias

text: One factor in the appeal of alleged psychic readings is that listeners apply a confirmation bias which fits the psychic's statements to their own lives. By making a large number of ambiguous statements in each sitting, the psychic gives the client more opportunities to find a match. This is one of the techniques of cold reading, with which a psychic can deliver a subjectively impressive reading without any prior information about the client. Investigator James Randi compared the transcript of a reading to the client's report of what the psychic had said, and found that the client showed a strong selective recall of the "hits".


title: Confirmation bias

text: As a striking illustration of confirmation bias in the real world, Nickerson mentions numerological pyramidology: the practice of finding meaning in the proportions of the Egyptian pyramids. There are many different length measurements that can be made of, for example, the Great Pyramid of Giza and many ways to combine or manipulate them. Hence it is almost inevitable that people who look at these numbers selectively will find superficially impressive correspondences, for example with the dimensions of the Earth.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Unconscious cognitive bias (including confirmation bias) in job recruitment affects hiring decisions and can potentially prohibit a diverse and inclusive workplace. There are a variety of unconscious biases that affects recruitment decisions but confirmation bias is one of the major ones, especially during the interview stage. The interviewer will often select a candidate that confirms their own beliefs, even though other candidates are equally or better qualified.


title: Confirmation bias

text: When people with opposing views interpret new information in a biased way, their views can move even further apart. This is called "attitude polarization". The effect was demonstrated by an experiment that involved drawing a series of red and black balls from one of two concealed "bingo baskets". Participants knew that one basket contained 60 percent black and 40 percent red balls; the other, 40 percent black and 60 percent red. The experimenters looked at what happened when balls of alternating color were drawn in turn, a sequence that does not favor either basket. After each ball was drawn, participants in one group were asked to state out loud their judgments of the probability that the balls were being drawn from one or the other basket. These participants tended to grow more confident with each successive draw—whether they initially thought the basket with 60 percent black balls or the one with 60 percent red balls was the more likely source, their estimate of the probability increased. Another group of participants were asked to state probability estimates only at the end of a sequence of drawn balls, rather than after each ball. They did not show the polarization effect, suggesting that it does not necessarily occur when people simply hold opposing positions, but rather when they openly commit to them.


title: Confirmation bias

text: A less abstract study was the Stanford biased interpretation experiment, in which participants with strong opinions about the death penalty read about mixed experimental evidence. Twenty-three percent of the participants reported that their views had become more extreme, and this self-reported shift correlated strongly with their initial attitudes. In later experiments, participants also reported their opinions becoming more extreme in response to ambiguous information. However, comparisons of their attitudes before and after the new evidence showed no significant change, suggesting that the self-reported changes might not be real. Based on these experiments, Deanna Kuhn and Joseph Lao concluded that polarization is a real phenomenon but far from inevitable, only happening in a small minority of cases, and it was prompted not only by considering mixed evidence, but by merely thinking about the topic.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Charles Taber and Milton Lodge argued that the Stanford team's result had been hard to replicate because the arguments used in later experiments were too abstract or confusing to evoke an emotional response. The Taber and Lodge study used the emotionally charged topics of gun control and affirmative action. They measured the attitudes of their participants towards these issues before and after reading arguments on each side of the debate. Two groups of participants showed attitude polarization: those with strong prior opinions and those who were politically knowledgeable. In part of this study, participants chose which information sources to read, from a list prepared by the experimenters. For example, they could read the National Rifle Association's and the Brady Anti-Handgun Coalition's arguments on gun control. Even when instructed to be even-handed, participants were more likely to read arguments that supported their existing attitudes than arguments that did not. This biased search for information correlated well with the polarization effect.


title: Confirmation bias

text: The is a name for the finding that given evidence against their beliefs, people can reject the evidence and believe even more strongly. The phrase was coined by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler in 2010. However, subsequent research has since failed to replicate findings supporting the backfire effect. One study conducted out of the Ohio State University and George Washington University studied 10,100 participants with 52 different issues expected to trigger a backfire effect. While the findings did conclude that individuals are reluctant to embrace facts that contradict their already held ideology, no cases of backfire were detected. The backfire effect has since been noted to be a rare phenomenon rather than a common occurrence (compare the boomerang effect).


title: Confirmation bias

text: Confirmation biases provide one plausible explanation for the persistence of beliefs when the initial evidence for them is removed or when they have been sharply contradicted. This belief perseverance effect has been first demonstrated experimentally by Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter. These psychologists spent time with a cult whose members were convinced that the world would end on 21 December 1954. After the prediction failed, most believers still clung to their faith. Their book describing this research is aptly named "When Prophecy Fails".


title: Confirmation bias

text: The term "belief perseverance", however, was coined in a series of experiments using what is called the "debriefing paradigm": participants read fake evidence for a hypothesis, their attitude change is measured, then the fakery is exposed in detail. Their attitudes are then measured once more to see if their belief returns to its previous level.


title: Confirmation bias

text: A common finding is that at least some of the initial belief remains even after a full debriefing. In one experiment, participants had to distinguish between real and fake suicide notes. The feedback was random: some were told they had done well while others were told they had performed badly. Even after being fully debriefed, participants were still influenced by the feedback. They still thought they were better or worse than average at that kind of task, depending on what they had initially been told.


title: Confirmation bias

text: In another study, participants read job performance ratings of two firefighters, along with their responses to a risk aversion test. This fictional data was arranged to show either a negative or positive association: some participants were told that a risk-taking firefighter did better, while others were told they did less well than a risk-averse colleague. Even if these two case studies were true, they would have been scientifically poor evidence for a conclusion about firefighters in general. However, the participants found them subjectively persuasive. When the case studies were shown to be fictional, participants' belief in a link diminished, but around half of the original effect remained. Follow-up interviews established that the participants had understood the debriefing and taken it seriously. Participants seemed to trust the debriefing, but regarded the discredited information as irrelevant to their personal belief.


title: Confirmation bias

text: The continued influence effect is the tendency for misinformation to continue to influence memory and reasoning about an event, despite the misinformation having been retracted or corrected. This occurs even when the individual believes the correction.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Experiments have shown that information is weighted more strongly when it appears early in a series, even when the order is unimportant. For example, people form a more positive impression of someone described as "intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, envious" than when they are given the same words in reverse order. This "irrational primacy effect" is independent of the primacy effect in memory in which the earlier items in a series leave a stronger memory trace. Biased interpretation offers an explanation for this effect: seeing the initial evidence, people form a working hypothesis that affects how they interpret the rest of the information.


title: Confirmation bias

text: One demonstration of irrational primacy used colored chips supposedly drawn from two urns. Participants were told the color distributions of the urns, and had to estimate the probability of a chip being drawn from one of them. In fact, the colors appeared in a prearranged order. The first thirty draws favored one urn and the next thirty favored the other. The series as a whole was neutral, so rationally, the two urns were equally likely. However, after sixty draws, participants favored the urn suggested by the initial thirty.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Another experiment involved a slide show of a single object, seen as just a blur at first and in slightly better focus with each succeeding slide. After each slide, participants had to state their best guess of what the object was. Participants whose early guesses were wrong persisted with those guesses, even when the picture was sufficiently in focus that the object was readily recognizable to other people.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Illusory correlation is the tendency to see non-existent correlations in a set of data. This tendency was first demonstrated in a series of experiments in the late 1960s. In one experiment, participants read a set of psychiatric case studies, including responses to the Rorschach inkblot test. The participants reported that the homosexual men in the set were more likely to report seeing buttocks, anuses or sexually ambiguous figures in the inkblots. In fact the fictional case studies had been constructed so that the homosexual men were no more likely to report this imagery or, in one version of the experiment, were less likely to report it than heterosexual men. In a survey, a group of experienced psychoanalysts reported the same set of illusory associations with homosexuality.


title: Confirmation bias

text: Another study recorded the symptoms experienced by arthritic patients, along with weather conditions over a 15-month period. Nearly all the patients reported that their pains were correlated with weather conditions, although the real correlation was zero.


title: Confirmation bias

text: This effect is a kind of biased interpretation, in that objectively neutral or unfavorable evidence is interpreted to support existing beliefs. It is also related to biases in hypothesis-testing behavior. In judging whether two events, such as illness and bad weather, are correlated, people rely heavily on the number of "positive-positive" cases: in this example, instances of both pain and bad weather. They pay relatively little attention to the other kinds of observation (of no pain and/or good weather). This parallels the reliance on positive tests in hypothesis testing. It may also reflect selective recall, in that people may have a sense that two events are correlated because it is easier to recall times when they happened together.


title: Elin Nordegren

text: Elin Maria Pernilla Nordegren (; formerly Woods; born 1 January 1980) is the Swedish-born ex-wife of professional golfer Tiger Woods. Nordegren has worked as a model and nanny.


title: Elin Nordegren

text: Nordegren was born in Stockholm. Her mother, politician Barbro Holmberg, is the former Swedish migration and asylum policy minister as well as the former Governor of Gävleborg County. Her father, Thomas Nordegren, is a radio journalist who has served as a bureau chief in Washington, D.C. She has an elder brother, Axel, and a twin sister Josefin Nordegren. Nordegren and her sister had summer jobs as cashiers in supermarkets to finance their studies. She started modeling in 2000, and appeared on the cover of "Cafe Sport" magazine in the summer of 2000.


title: Elin Nordegren

text: In May 2014, Nordegren graduated from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, with a degree in psychology, receiving the outstanding senior award.


title: Elin Nordegren

text: Nordegren took a job in Champagne, a Stockholm clothing store where she met Mia Parnevik, wife of Swedish golfer Jesper Parnevik, who hired Nordegren as the au pair to their children, the job requiring her to move full-time to the U.S. Tiger Woods was introduced to her during the 2001 Open Championship. For the previous year, Woods had asked to be introduced to Nordegren, who was seeing someone else at the time. "She had no interest in Tiger and he was OK with that," Mia Parnevik said. "There was a big line of single golfers wanting to meet her. They were gaga over her." At the time, she had hopes of becoming a child psychologist. In November 2003, Woods and Nordegren attended the Presidents Cup tournament in South Africa and became officially engaged when Woods proposed at the luxury Shamwari Game Reserve.


title: Elin Nordegren

text: They were married in October 2004, by the 19th hole of the Sandy Lane resort in Barbados. Woods rented the entire complex for a week, including three golf courses and 110 rooms, costing almost


title: Elin Nordegren

text: Nude photographs purporting to be of Nordegren began circulating on the Internet. Despite them being fakes, Irish magazine "The Dubliner" published the nude photographs and stated they were of Nordegren. On 16 November 2006, Nordegren filed a libel suit against "The Dubliner". Nordegren won €125,000, and "The Dubliner" was required to publish a lengthy apology in a variety of venues.


title: Elin Nordegren

text: In 2007, Woods announced the birth of the couple's daughter, Sam Alexis, a day after finishing second in the U.S. Open. On 2 September 2008, Woods announced they were expecting another child in late winter. Nordegren gave birth to a boy, Charlie Axel, in 2009.


title: Elin Nordegren

text: In December 2009, her marriage to Woods was the subject of extensive media coverage after Woods admitted to infidelity, which had been revealed following his single-vehicle accident near the family's Florida home. After Woods' infidelity was revealed, Jesper Parnevik was quoted as having said, "I'm kind of filled with sorrow for Elin since me and my wife are at fault for hooking her up with him, and we probably thought he was a better guy than he is." Woods announced he would take an "indefinite break" from golf to work on his marriage. These efforts were unsuccessful, however, as Nordegren and Woods finalized their divorce in the Bay County Circuit Court in Panama City, Florida, on 23 August 2010. Nordegren's legal team included her sister, Josefin (who is licensed to practice law in England and Sweden) and several of Josefin's U.S. colleagues at international law firm McGuireWoods.


title: Elin Nordegren

text: Using the $100 million she received from her divorce from Woods, she purchased a $12 million Florida mansion built in the 1920s. She had the entire structure demolished after an architect advised that it made better sense to start over than to try bringing the home up to current hurricane safety codes. Before demolishing the home in December 2011, she allowed Habitat for Humanity to come into the home for four weeks and salvage anything they found of value. The contents of the estate were auctioned at a Habitat for Humanity warehouse, including a fountain with water spouting out of three lions' mouths, five refrigerators, temperature-controlled wine coolers and other furniture.


title: Elin Nordegren

text: In June 2019, it was announced that Nordegren was expecting her third child, her first with former National Football League player Jordan Cameron. Nordegren gave birth to a son in October 2019.


title: Myspace

text: Myspace (formerly stylized as MySpace) is a social networking service based in the United States. Launched on August 1, 2003, the site was the first social network to reach a global audience, and had a significant influence on technology, pop culture and music. The site played a critical role in the early growth of companies like YouTube, and created a developer platform that launched the successes of Zynga, RockYou and Photobucket, among others. From 2005 to 2008, Myspace was the largest social networking site in the world.


title: Myspace

text: In July 2005, Myspace was acquired by News Corporation for $580 million, and in June 2006, it surpassed Yahoo! and Google to become the most visited website in the United States. It generated $800 million in revenue during the 2008 fiscal year. At its peak in April 2008, Myspace and Facebook reached 115 million unique users, but Myspace narrowly lost to the newly emerging Facebook in terms of global users. In May 2009, Facebook surpassed Myspace in its number of unique U.S. visitors. Since then, the number of Myspace users has declined steadily despite several redesigns. By 2019, the site's monthly visitors had dropped to seven million.


title: Myspace

text: In June 2009, Myspace employed approximately 1,600 employees. In June 2011, Specific Media Group and Justin Timberlake jointly purchased the company for approximately $35 million. On February 11, 2016, it was announced that Myspace and its parent company had been purchased by Time Inc. for $87 million. Time Inc. was in turn purchased by Meredith Corporation on January 31, 2018. On November 4, 2019, Meredith spun off Myspace and its original holding company (Viant Technology Holding Inc.) and sold it to Viant Technology LLC.


title: Myspace

text: In August 2003, several eUniverse employees with Friendster accounts saw potential in its social networking features. The group decided to mimic the more popular features of the website. Within 10 days, the first version of MySpace was ready for launch, implemented using ColdFusion. A complete infrastructure of finance, human resources, technical expertise, bandwidth, and server capacity was available for the site. The project was overseen by Brad Greenspan (eUniverse's founder, chairman and CEO), who managed Chris DeWolfe (MySpace's starting CEO), Josh Berman, Tom Anderson (MySpace's starting president), and a team of programmers and resources provided by eUniverse. It was during this early period in June 2003, just prior to the birth of MySpace, that Jeffrey Edell was brought on as chairman of parent company Intermix Media.


title: Myspace

text: The first MySpace users were eUniverse employees. The company held contests to see who could sign up the most users. eUniverse used its 20 million users and e-mail subscribers to breathe life into MySpace and move it to the head of the pack of social networking websites. A key architect was tech expert Toan Nguyen, who helped stabilize the platform when Greenspan asked him to join the team. Co-founder and CTO Aber Whitcomb played an integral role in software architecture, utilizing the then-superior development speed of ColdFusion over other dynamic database driven server-side languages of the time. Despite having over ten times the number of developers, Friendster, which was developed in JavaServer Pages (jsp), could not keep up with the speed of development of MySpace and cfm. For example, users could customize the background, look and feel of pages on MySpace.


title: Myspace

text: The MySpace.com domain was originally owned by YourZ.com, Inc., intended until 2002 for use as an online data storage and sharing site. By late 2003, it was transitioned from a file storage service to a social networking site. A friend who also worked in the data storage business reminded DeWolfe that he had earlier bought the MySpace.com domain. DeWolfe suggested they charge a fee for the basic MySpace service. However, Greenspan nixed the idea, believing that keeping the site free was necessary to make it a successful community. MySpace quickly gained popularity among teenagers and young adults. In February 2005, DeWolfe held talks with Mark Zuckerberg over acquiring Facebook, but rejected Zuckerberg's offer to sell Facebook to him for $75 million. Some employees of MySpace, including DeWolfe and Berman, were able to purchase equity in the property before MySpace and its parent company eUniverse (now renamed Intermix Media) were bought.


title: Myspace

text: In July 2005, in one of the company's first major Internet purchases, News Corporation purchased MySpace for US$580 million. At the time of the acquisition, the company was seeing 16 million monthly users and was growing exponentially. News Corporation had beat out Viacom by offering a higher price for the website, and the purchase was seen as a good investment at the time. Within a year, MySpace had tripled in value from its purchase price. News Corporation saw the purchase as a way to capitalize on Internet advertising and drive traffic to other News Corporation properties.


title: Myspace

text: After the acquisition, MySpace continued its exponential growth. In January 2006, the site was signing up 200,000 new users a day. A year later, it was registering 320,000 users a day, and had overtaken Yahoo! to become the most visited website in the United States. ComScore said that a key driver of the site's success in the US was high "engagement levels", with the average MySpace user viewing over 660 pages a month.


title: Myspace

text: In January 2006, Fox announced plans to launch a UK version of MySpace. During 2006, MySpace launched localized versions in 11 countries across Europe, Asia and the Americas, including MySpace China with Solstice. At the time, Travis Katz, senior vice-president for international operations, reported that 30 million of the site's 90 million users were coming from outside of the United States.


title: Myspace

text: The 100 millionth MySpace account was created on August 9, 2006, in the Netherlands. That same month, MySpace signed a landmark advertising deal with Google that guaranteed MySpace $900 million over three years, over 55% more than the price News Corporation had paid to acquire the business. In exchange, Google received exclusive rights to provide Web search results and sponsored links on MySpace. When the deal was signed, Google chairman Eric Schmidt said, "When we looked at what was growing on the Web, all our internal metrics pointed to [MySpace] [...] It's important to move Google to where users are, and that is where user-generated content is."


title: Myspace

text: By October 2006, MySpace had grown from generating $1 million in revenue per month to $30 million per month, half of which came from the Google deal. The remaining 50% came from display advertising sold by MySpace's in-house sales team. In November 2006, Myspace announced a 50-50 joint venture with Softbank to launch the site in Japan.


title: Myspace

text: In mid-2007, MySpace was the largest social-networking site in every European country where it had created a local presence. By July 2007, Nielsen//NetRatings reported the company's "active reach", or the percentage of the population that visited the site, was anywhere from 10 to 15 times higher in Spain, France and Germany than for runner-up Facebook; in the United Kingdom, MySpace led Facebook by two-to-one in terms of reach.


title: Myspace

text: On November 1, 2007, MySpace and Bebo joined the Google-led OpenSocial alliance, which already included Friendster, Hi5, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Ning, and Six Apart. The alliance's goal was to promote a common set of standards for software developers to write programs for social networks. Google had been unsuccessful in building its own social networking site Orkut in the American market, and was using the alliance to present a counterweight to Facebook.


title: Myspace

text: By late 2007 and into 2008, MySpace was considered the leading social networking site, and consistently beat out its main competitor Facebook in traffic. Initially, the emergence of Facebook did little to diminish MySpace's popularity; at the time, Facebook was targeted only at college students.


title: Myspace

text: At its peak, when News Corporation attempted to merge it with Yahoo! in 2007, Myspace was valued at $12 billion.


title: Myspace

text: On April 19, 2008, Facebook overtook MySpace in Alexa rankings. In May 2009, Facebook surpassed MySpace in the number of unique U.S. visitors. Since then, Myspace has seen a continuing loss of membership. There are several suggested explanations for its decline, including the fact that it stuck to a "portal strategy" of building an audience around entertainment and music, whereas Facebook and Twitter continually added new features to improve the social networking experience.


title: Myspace

text: A former MySpace executive suggested that the $900 million three-year advertisement deal with Google, while being a short-term cash windfall, was a handicap in the long run, as it required MySpace to place even more ads on its already heavily advertised space, which made the site slow, more difficult to use and less flexible. MySpace could not experiment with its own site without forfeiting revenue, while Facebook was rolling out a new, clean site design. MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe reported that he had to push back against Fox Interactive Media's sales team, who monetized the site without regard to user experience. In 2012, Katz described how News Corporation had put significant pressure on MySpace to "focus on near-term monetization, as opposed to thinking about long-term product strategy," while Facebook focused user engagement over revenue.


title: Myspace

text: Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, noted of social networking websites that "companies might serially rise, fall, and disappear, as influential peers pull others in on the climb up—and signal to flee when it's time to get out." The volatility of social networks was exemplified in 2006, when Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal launched an investigation into children's exposure to pornography on MySpace. The resulting media frenzy and the site's lack of an effective spam filter gave the site a reputation as a "vortex of perversion". Around that time, specialized social media companies such as Twitter formed and began targeting users on MySpace, while Facebook rolled out communication tools that were seen as safe in comparison to MySpace. In addition, MySpace had particular problems with vandalism, phishing, malware, and spam, which it failed to curtail, making the site seem inhospitable.


title: Myspace

text: These have been cited as factors why users, who as teenagers were MySpace's strongest audience in 2006 and 2007, had been migrating to Facebook, which started strongly with the 18-to-24 group (mostly college students) and has been much more successful than MySpace at attracting older users.


title: Myspace

text: News Corporation chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch was said to be frustrated that MySpace never met expectations as a distribution outlet for Fox studio content and missed the US$1 billion mark in total revenues. This resulted in DeWolfe and Anderson gradually losing their status within Murdoch's inner circle of executives, as well as DeWolfe's mentor Peter Chernin, president and COO of News Corporation, departing the company in June 2009. Former AOL executive Jonathan Miller, who joined News Corporation in charge of the digital media business, was in the job for three weeks when he shuffled MySpace's executive team in April 2009. MySpace president Tom Anderson stepped down while Chris DeWolfe was replaced as CEO by former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta. A meeting at News Corporation over the direction of MySpace in March 2009 was reportedly the catalyst for that management shakeup, with the Google search deal about to expire and the departure of key personnel (Myspace's COO, SVP of engineering, and SVP of strategy) to form a startup. Furthermore, the opening of extravagant new offices around the world was questioned, as Facebook did not have similarly expensive expansion plans but still attracted international users at a rapid rate. The changes to MySpace's executive ranks were followed in June 2009 by a layoff of 37.5% of its workforce (including 30% of its U.S. employees), reducing employees from 1,600 to 1,000.


title: Myspace

text: In 2009, MySpace implemented site redesigns as a way to get users back. However, this may have backfired, as users generally disliked tweaks and changes on Facebook.


title: Myspace

text: In March 2011, market research figures released by Comscore suggested that Myspace had lost 10 million users between January and February 2011, and had fallen from 95 million to 63 million unique users in the previous 12 months. Myspace registered its sharpest audience declines in February 2011, as traffic fell 44% from a year earlier to 37.7 million U.S. visitors. Advertisers were reported as unwilling to commit to long-term deals with the site.


title: Myspace

text: In late February 2011, News Corporation officially put the site up for sale for an estimated $50–200 million. Losses from the last quarter of 2010 were $156 million, over double the previous year, which dragged down the otherwise strong results of News Corporation. The deadline for bids, May 31, 2011, passed without any above the reserve price of $100 million being submitted. It has been said that the decline in users during the most recent quarter deterred several potential suitors.


title: Myspace

text: On June 29, 2011, Myspace announced in an email to label partners and press that it had been acquired by Specific Media for an undisclosed sum, which was rumored to be as low as $35 million. CNN reported that the site sold for $35 million, and noted that it was "far less than the $580 million News Corp. paid for Myspace in 2005." Murdoch went on to call the Myspace purchase a "huge mistake", and "Time" magazine compared it to Time Warner's 2000 purchase of AOL, which saw a conglomerate trying to stay ahead of the competition. Many former executives have gone on to further success after departing Myspace.


title: Myspace

text: On February 11, 2016, it was announced that Myspace and its parent company had been bought by Time Inc.; On January 31, 2018, Time Inc. was in turn purchased by Meredith Corporation, who went on to sell a number of Time Inc.'s assets, including (as it announced on November 4, 2019) selling its equity in Viant, the parent company of Specific Media, back to Viant Technology Holding Inc.


title: Myspace

text: In May 2016, the data for almost 360 million Myspace accounts was offered on the "Real Deal" dark market website, which included email addresses, usernames and weakly encrypted passwords (SHA1 hashes of the first 10 characters of the password converted to lowercase and stored without a cryptographic salt). The exact data breach date is unknown, but analysis of the data suggests it was exposed around eight years before being made public, around mid-2008 to early 2009.


title: Myspace

text: Since YouTube's founding in 2005, Myspace users had the ability to embed YouTube videos in their profiles. Realizing the competitive threat to its new Myspace Videos service, the site banned embedded YouTube videos from its user profiles, which was widely protested by Myspace users, prompting the site to lift it shortly thereafter.


title: Myspace

text: There were a variety of environments in which users could access Myspace content on their mobile phones. In early 2006, mobile phone provider Helio released a series of mobile phones utilizing a service known as Myspace Mobile to access and edit one's profile and communicate with and view the profiles of other members. Additionally, UIEvolution and Myspace developed a mobile version of Myspace for a wider range of carriers, including AT&T, Vodafone and Rogers Wireless. In August 2006, Myspace began offering classified ads, which grew by 33 percent during the following year. It previously had an instant messaging tool called MySpace IM. Myspace used an implementation of Telligent Community for its forum system.


title: Myspace

text: Shortly after Myspace was sold to News Corporation in 2005, the website launched their own record label MySpace Records, with JD Mangosing as CEO, in an effort to discover unknown talent on Myspace Music, a service onto which artists can upload songs, EPs and full-length albums. As of June 2014, over 53 million songs have been uploaded to the site by 14.2 million artists. Artists such as The Summer Obsession, Nicki Minaj, Lily Allen, Owl City, Taylor Swift, Hey Monday, The Bigger Lights, Danger Radio, Hollywood Undead, Waka Flocka Flame, Just Surrender, Cute Is What We Aim For, Every Avenue, Lady Gaga, The Downtown Fiction, Stereo Skyline, The Friday Night Boys, Mayday Parade, We Are The In Crowd, All Time Low, Meg & Dia, Forever The Sickest Kids, Anarbor, The Maine, My Favorite Highway, Sean Kingston, Farewell, The Audition, Arctic Monkeys, Copeland, Paramore, Katy Perry, Colbie Caillat, The Cab, Tyga, 3OH!3, Secondhand Serenade, Lil Durk, Ice Nine Kills, Bring Me the Horizon, and Drop Dead, Gorgeous gained fame and recognition through Myspace. Over eight million artists have been discovered through the site. In late 2007, the site launched The MySpace Transmissions", a series of live-in-studio recordings by well-known artists.


title: Myspace

text: On March 18, 2019, it was revealed that Myspace had lost all of its user content from 2015 and earlier in botched server migration with no backup, meaning that over 50 million songs and 12 years' worth of content were permanently lost. In April 2019, the Internet Archive recovered 490,000 MP3s (1.3 terabytes) "using unknown means by an anonymous academic study conducted between 2008 and 2010". The songs, which were uploaded between 2008 and 2010, are collectively known as the "MySpace Dragon Hoard".


title: Myspace

text: On May 16, 2007, Myspace partnered with news publications National Geographic, the New York Times and Reuters to provide professional visual contents on its social-networking Web site.


title: Myspace

text: On August 8, 2007, Myspace partnered with satire publication "The Onion" to provide audio, video and print content to the site.


title: Myspace

text: On October 22, 2007, Myspace launched its first original web series "Roommates", which intended to give its users a television-like experience with the interactive benefits of the Internet.


title: Myspace

text: On April 21, 2008, Myspace signed a deal with Byron Allen's Entertainment Studios that brought programming such as the syndicated series "Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen", "Entertainers with Byron Allen", "Beautiful Homes and Great Estates", and "Designer Fashions & Runways" to MySpaceTV.


title: Myspace

text: On March 10, 2010, Myspace added new features including a recommendation engine for new users that suggests games, music and videos based on their previous search habits. The security on Myspace was also accounted to, with the criticism of Facebook, to make it a safer site. The security of Myspace enables users to choose if the content could be viewed for "friends only", "18 and older" or "everyone".


title: Myspace

text: In October 2010, Myspace introduced a beta version of a new site design on a limited scale, with plans to switch all interested users to the new site in late November. Chief executive Mike Jones said the site was no longer competing with Facebook as a general social networking site; instead, it would be music-oriented and would target younger people. Jones believed most younger users would continue to use the site after the redesign, though older users might not. The goal of the redesign was to increase the number of Myspace users and how long they spend there. BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield said, "Most investors have written off MySpace now," and was unsure whether the changes would help the company recover.


title: Myspace

text: In November 2010, Myspace changed its logo to coincide with the new site design. The word "my" appears in the Helvetica font, followed by a symbol representing a space. The logo change was announced on October 8, 2010, and appeared on the site on November 11. In the same month, Myspace integrated with Facebook Connect – calling it "Mash Up with Facebook" in an announcement widely seen as the final act of acknowledging Facebook's domination of the social networking industry.


title: Myspace

text: In January 2011, it was announced that the Myspace staff would be reduced by 47%. Despite the new design, user adoption continued to decrease.


title: Myspace

text: In September 2012, a new redesign was announced (but no date given), making Myspace more visual and apparently optimized for tablets. By April 2013 (presumably before), users were able to transfer to the new Myspace redesign.


title: Myspace

text: In June 2013, a redesign resulted in users losing access to all of their previous blog material. Users who lost access to their contributions and historians lamented this sudden and unannounced deletion of access.


title: Myspace

text: Since early 2006, Myspace has offered the option to access the service in different regional versions. The alternative regional versions present automated content according to locality (e.g., UK users see other UK users as "Cool New People," and UK-oriented events and adverts, etc.), offer local languages other than English, or accommodate the regional differences in spelling and conventions in the English-speaking world (e.g., United States: "favorites," mm/dd/yyyy; the rest of the world: "favourites," dd/mm/yyyy).


title: Myspace

text: On February 5, 2008, MySpace set up a developer platform allowing developers to share their ideas and write their own Myspace applications. The opening was inaugurated with a workshop at the MySpace offices in San Francisco two weeks before the official launch. The MDP is based on the OpenSocial API, which was presented by Google in November 2007 to support social networks to develop social and interacting widgets, and can be seen as an answer to Facebook's developer platform. The first public beta of the MySpace Apps was released on March 5, 2008, with around 1,000 applications available.


title: Myspace

text: At QCon London 2008, MySpace Chief Systems Architect Dan Farino indicated that the site was sending 100 gigabits of data per second out to the Internet; 10 gigabits of which was HTML content and the remainder was media such as videos and pictures. The server infrastructure consists of over 4,500 web servers (running Windows Server 2003, IIS 6.0, ASP.NET and .NET Framework 3.5), over 1,200 cache servers (running 64-bit Windows Server 2003), and over 500 database servers (running 64-bit Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005), as well as a custom distributed file system which runs on Gentoo Linux.