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A well-writen desconstruction of the bullshit moral panic around "Internet addiction research." -- Howard ""German scientists find 'internet-addiction gene'," said a headline on a German news site last week. Another site reported that scientists have "nailed down the gene responsible for internet addiction." Is it true? No, but its falseness is interesting for what it says both about the nature of our addictions and about how scientific researchers sometimes help journalists sensationalize research."
"'LazyTruth is a free Gmail gadget that automatically triggers fact-checked content when you receive a misleading email forward."
"Over the past couple of years, I’ve been trying to collect every good piece of writing and advice about verifying social media content and other types of information that flow across networks. This form of verification involves some new tools and techniques, and requires a basic understanding of the way networks operate and how people use them. It also requires many of the so-called old school values and techniques that have been around for a while: being skeptical, asking questions, tracking down high quality sources, exercising restraint, collaborating and communicating with team members."
"False information can cost lives. But no information can also cost lives, especially in a crisis zone. Indeed, information is perishable so the potential value of information must be weighed against the urgency of the situation. Correct information that arrives too late is useless. Crowdsourced information can provide rapid situational awareness, especially when added to a live crisis map. But information in the social media space may not be reliable or immediately verifiable. This may explain why humanitarian (and news) organizations are often reluctant to leverage crowdsourced crisis maps. Many believe that verifying crowdsourced information is either too challenging or impossible.The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that concrete strategies do exist for the verification of geo-referenced crowdsourced social media information.The study first provides a brief introduction to crisis mapping and argues that crowdsourcing is simply non-probability sampling.Next, five case studies comprising various efforts to verify social media are analyzed to demonstrate how different verification strategies work."
Robin Good: Critical thinking is a key strategic skill needed by any serious professional curator. "Critical thinking provides the keys for our own intellectual independence..." and it helps to move away from "rashy conclusions, mystification and reluctance to question received wisdom, authority and tradition" while learning how to adopt "intellectual discipline" and a way to express clearly ideas while taking personal responsibility for them. Key takeaways from this video: Critical thinking refers to a diverse range of intellectual skills and activities concerned with "evaluating information" as well as our own thought in a disciplined way.
Critical thinking is not just thinking a lot. To be an effective critical thinker you need to seek out and be guided by "knowledge" and "evidence" that fits with reality even if it refutes what the general consensus may want to believe.
Critical thinkers cultivate an attitude of curiosity and they are willing to do the work required to keep themselves informed about a subject.
Critical thinkers do not take claims at face value but utilize scepticism and doubt to suspend judgement and objectively evaluate with facts the claims being made.
Critical thinkers should evaluate information on the basis of reasoning and not by relying on emotions as claims the factuality of a claim cannot be solely based on the level of emotion that accompanies them or the fact that they may be believed by certain groups. Highly recommended for all curators. 9/10
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OLPL5p0fMg 
Via Robin Good, Sue Beckingham
"This course is designed to teach students how to take skillful possession of their power as citizens by becoming perceptive news consumers. Armed with critical-thinking skills, a firm grasp of relevant history, plus practical knowledge about the news media, students learn how to find the reliable information they need to make decisions, take action or make judgments. At a time when the digital revolution is spawning an unprecedented flood of information and disinformation each day, the course will seek to help students recognize the differences between news and propaganda, news and opinion, bias and fairness, assertion and verification, and evidence and inference."
"When we published the Debunking Handbook, I have to admit, we completely underestimated the impact it would make. A few days after the launch, it suddenly went viral with over 150,000 downloads in a single day. This week, it just ticked over 400,000 downloads. We always planned that the Handbook would be useful not just for climate myths but for communicators having to deal with any type of misinformation."
"Glean Comparison Search is a designed to help its users explicitly explore differing points of view about a topic, and through lessons, come to understand how their own confirmation bias might be impacting their research work."
"Lucas Graves, a doctoral student at Columbia and a research fellow at the New America Foundation, frames a discussion on fact checking by offering a detailed landscape of the fact checking movement. (That discussion is under Chatham House rules, but Lucas has been kind enough to allow me to post notes on his presentation.) He suggests we consider three groups of fact checkers: – Reporters at organizations like the Associated Press or New York Times who conduct occasional fact checking after a debate. We can consider these people professional journalists engaged, part-time, in fact checking. – Full-time, dedicated fact checkers like Politifact, Dactcheck.org, and the Washintgon Post’s fact check columns, which Lucas calls “the elite fact checkers”. – Political and partisan fact checkers, like Media Matters and Newsbusters. They’re engaged, in part as media critics. But they also do work that can be very high quality fact checking. All three types of fact checking appear to be on the rise. So Graves suggests we consider the origins of the movement."
"When I wrote "before I can graduate from MIT" earlier in this post I wasn't lying; I have decided to pursue Truth Goggles for my thesis. I'm definitely not the first person to explore this problem space but there is a lot of room to contribute. New technology has opened up new possibilities, needs have become clearer, and there is a wide variety of possible solutions and unanswered questions just sitting around waiting to be explored."
"A daylong discussion of the future of fact checking at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, November 15, 2011..."
"According to Nieman Journalism Lab, an graduate student of MIT is developing a way to check for lying in political writing as easily as you check for spelling errors. In a partnership with PolitiFact, Dan Schultz is looking to “bridge the gap between the corpus of facts and the actual media consumption experience.” That’s a lot of words to say this – it will know when you’re full of crap. The project is using natural language processing to verify facts, via API, against the information contained in PolitiFact. That is to say that it’s not able to tell a lie from the truth on its own, but rather it does so by pulling in data on phrases that are in a system. Sometime next year, when the project is finished, Schultz plans to open-source it and then the abilities should grow."
Nicola Bruno, cofounder of Effecinque and a journalist fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford) goes the startup route "with the intent of being relentless hunters of news and human filters of information."... Heres what got my attention: As the digital flood sweeps into our lives every imaginable kind of information, much of it offering nothing more than a smoke screen to blur or distort our view, figuring this out is crucial. Who or what can help us see beyond the smoke? Will software like Stats Monkey give us reason to believe that we are swimming only in facts with its mechanical certainty? And what will be the role of journalists in a media landscape in which reporters and news items are little more than commodities, and, in the case of reporters, a soon-to-be redundancy? http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/09/from-nieman-reports-how-can-we-build-better-filters-for-growing-flows-of-information/
Via janlgordon
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It seems obvious, but college students (and everybody else) need to spend some time looking at how they evaluate the information they find online -- or which is sent to them. This is not detailed, but it's reasonable, with some good resources. -- Howard "With the exponential growth of the world wide web, students need a more critical eye to sift through the bulk of information available online. While the Internet speeds up access to information, it also paves to the publication of anything, by anyone anywhere. Gone are the days when articles must be critiqued and evaluated before publication. Today, scholarly articles are not just buried in the bounty files of information. Their unscholarly counterparts also outnumber them. This reality reinforces the importance of critically evaluating online information. College students should learn the art of evaluating web-based information to make the most of them."
A graduate student at the MIT Media Lab is writing software that can highlight false claims in articles, just like spell check.
"This paper criticizes the checklist model approach (authority, accuracy, objectivity, currency, coverage) to teaching undergraduates how to evaluate Web sites. The checklist model rests on faulty assumptions about the nature of information available through the Web, mistaken beliefs about student evaluation skills, and an exaggerated sense of librarian expertise in evaluating information. The checklist model is difficult to implement in practice and encourages a mechanistic way of evaluating that is at odds with critical thinking. A contextual approach is offered as an alternative. A contextual approach uses three techniques: promoting peer- and editorially-reviewed resources, comparison, and corroboration. The contextual approach promotes library resources, teaches information literacy, and encourages reasoned judgments of information quality."
"Any automated corroboration method would rely on a corpus of information that acts as the basis for corroboration. Previous work like DisputeFinder has looked at scraping known repositories such as Politifact or Snopes to jump-start a claims database, and other work like Videolyzer has tried to leverage engaged people to provide structured annotations of claims, though it’s difficult to get enough coverage and scale through manual efforts. Others have proceeded by using the internet as a massive corpus. But there could also be an opportunity here for news organizations, who already produce and have archives of lots of credible and trustworthy text, to provide a corroboration service based on all of the claims embedded in those texts. A browser plugin could detect and highlight claims that are not corroborated by e.g. the NYT or Washington Post corpora. Could news organizations even make money off their archives like this?"
"Building upon a process- and context-oriented information quality framework, this paper seeks to map and explore what we know about the ways in which young users of age 18 and under search for information online, how they evaluate information, and how their related practices of content creation, levels of new literacies, general digital media usage, and social patterns affect these activities. A review of selected literature at the intersection of digital media, youth, and information quality — primarily works from library and information science, sociology, education, and selected ethnographic studies — reveals patterns in youth’s information-seeking behavior, but also highlights the importance of contextual and demographic factors both for search and evaluation. Looking at the phenomenon from an information-learning and educational perspective, the literature shows that youth develop competencies for personal goals that sometimes do not transfer to school, and are sometimes not appropriate for school. Thus far, educational initiatives to educate youth about search, evaluation, or creation have depended greatly on the local circumstances for their success or failure."
"This useful Firefox addon will automatically display some of the most known citation indices (h-index, g-index, e-index) for any author, when querying on Google Scholar."
"Google is by no means alone in how it plays with numbers. This deception happens nearly every day and is especially rampant in Silicon Valley where new business models are created and standard metrics aren’t always available. It also reflects the optimistic nature of the Valley. We want to see exponential growth. We see hockey sticks everywhere. Even worse, these statistics get thrown around in the echo chamber and presented as fact. And as they get reblogged and retweeted, they lose the disclaimers that made them technically true in the first place. Every time I see a statistic, I try to figure out how much it was tortured. I want to know what it really means as opposed to what the person who is telling me the stat wants me to think it means."
"As I see it, the best things schools can do for kids is to help them learn how to distinguish useful talk from bullshit. I will ask only that you agree that every day in almost every way people are exposed to more bullshit than it is healthy for them to endure, and that if we can help them to recognize this fact, they might turn away from it and toward language that might do them some earthly good."
Hoax List from About.com: Current Internet hoaxes, email rumors and urban legends debunked - your resource for information on all the latest misinformation on the Net.
"Yet another combination is emerging: the layering of reference and context onto the information you read. What this even comprises is difficult to say exactly, but MIT Media Lab grad student Daniel Schultz (@slifty) has one idea: a browser script that automatically checks what you’re reading against reliable, substantiated facts. It’s a simple idea with innumerable approaches, problems, and implications — which means we’ll probably be dealing with it for a long time. Some things like this already exist. For instance, many websites have add-ons that let you, say, double click on a word to have it defined for you. Simple enough: send the word as a query to a database, and display the result. Not so easy when you want to evaluate a statement like “Senator Durbin has consistently argued that the US should have a stronger economic presence in the Balkans.” It’s a minefield of potential stumbling blocks, open to interpretation and argument."
"A look at how fact checking started at American magazines and has spread and evolved over time. By Craig Silverman of RegretTheError.com."
"Hypothes.is: an "open-source Internet platform to crowdsource peer-review on information everywhere." It's a peer review system to check, verify and critique content all over the Web - and beyond. "Improving the credibility of the information we consume is humanity's grandest challenge,"
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This is an interesting article to show to students and get their responses about credibility and trustworthiness.