Okay. The previous post was the usual Steve drivel. Now to the surfing stuff. I have been reading Rheingold’s article, “Crap Detection 101.” He comes up with some basic ideas about how to utilize the web effectively and accurately.
Rheingold:
Again, it’s up to the consumer of the information to decide which images, videos, tweets are authentic. As always happens when there is a high demand for separating signal from noise, people began to put together filters for doing that – and human tools for sorting the more trustworthy information.
His article is full of handy links.
Here are few I liked:
Follow The Developments In Iran Like A CIA Analyst by Mark Ambinder
Rheingold quotes this one:
Ambinder recommends watching for disinformation,
looking for patterns in the geographic location of sources (but warns against assuming that everything that resembles a pattern really is one),
examining your assumptions
and looking for sources that contradict them.
This is a tool R shows his fourteen year old daughter to use as one source check.
This is another: It’s the “Top Research Universities Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index”
The 2007 index compiles overall institutional rankings on 375 universities that offer the Ph.D. degree. One can use it to check on the authority of an expert.
R recommends finding at least three verifications of any questionable fact or credential. Cool beans.
A free soft ware called Publish or Perish.
Here’s the blurb from the site:
Are you applying for tenure, promotion or a new job? Do you want to include evidence of the impact of your research? Is your work cited in journals which are not ISI listed? Then you might want to try Publish or Perish, designed to help individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage.
And of course FactChecked.org.
A couple other articles in the NYT that caught my attention this morning:
What History is Good For by David M. Kennedy. Haven’t finished this one yet, but I do like the title.
Don’t Touch ‘A Moveable Feast’ by A. E. HOTCHNER
At first I was skeptical about this article’s description on the NYT home page: Hemingway’s work was intended for publication, and Scribner should have protected it. But as it turns out, it wasn’t about protecting copyright from the public, instead it was about protecting the integrity of Hemingway’s work posthumously from his dang relatives. Makes sense:
As an author, I am concerned by Scribner’s involvement in this “restored edition.” With this reworking as a precedent, what will Scribner do, for instance, if a descendant of F. Scott Fitzgerald demands the removal of the chapter in “A Moveable Feast” about the size of Fitzgerald’s penis, or if Ford Madox Ford’s grandson wants to delete references to his ancestor’s body odor.
Finally, “Lost in the Cloud” by Jonathon Zittrain
As usual I seem to see the internet a bit differently that people thinking so economically. But still it’s kind of interesting.