News Article on Online Trolling.

[masterpoobaa]

This one made me laugh.
Especially the last line in italics.

http://www.news.com.au/technology/anony ... 6080815072

I don't know Northwestern University where the study was done. A reliable/reputable source?

[Digren]

Northwestern is a relatively large private university in Illinois. It's a member of the Big 10 conference and fields a Division I FBS team for (American) football, though they have only had brief bouts with success.

I'd consider the university a reliable source, though any given school that offers tenure can always have professors whose research is questionable.

[Badenhawk]

Unfortunately the reputation of the news service publishing this story is somewhat questionable, if the Daily Telegraph or, in your case Poobaa, the Courier Mail are anything to go by.

What's really entertaining is the trolling that's started in the blog posts in response to the article. As if to emphasise a point....

[masterpoobaa]

Lol yeah.

As the saying goes "So you read that in the Courier Mail, or is it the truth?"

[Cogglamp]

Northwestern, especially the Kellogg management school, is very well respected in the academia circles. Kellogg itself is a Top 5 B-school and is most generally known for marketing and the social side of business.

[Shyrtandros]

So it states things we already know!

People who are trolls truly are douches down to the core..

While people who are helpful actually are nice people...

Seems simple enough for me..

[benebarba]

I'm a scientist at Northwestern, in the Materials Science Dept, and went there for grad school. It's a pretty big university just north of Chicago (though it has a campus in the city too), has strong programs (at various levels, mind) in Journalism, Business (the Kellogg School is probably the single best known school in the university - but not for research), Chemistry, Materials Science, Medicine and a few others. I forget the various rankings, but those are largely irrelevant anyway because it by no means indicates that *everything* done at the school is high quality work.

It's always good to be a bit skeptical of any research work, particularly when all you have to go on is some random newspaper article. If you can, try to find the original work - though those are usually held by journals that require costly subscriptions. But sometimes you get lucky.


let me see if I can dig up the original article or at least more details.

[benebarba]

Here's a bit longer article with a bit more context, detail and even the name of the forthcoming article:

http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/New ... ition.aspx

[Aedh]

So it states things we already know!

People who are trolls truly are douches down to the core..

While people who are helpful actually are nice people...

Seems simple enough for me..

Some of the best trolls I know are among the nicest people I know.