Tag Archives: evaluating the quality of digital resources

How do we discern relevant from irrelevant, credible from unbelievable and reliable from unreliable knowledge claims and sources?

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The Rules of Big Ideas →

Rule One: tell sto­ries and think by anal­ogy. Rule Two: make the point catchy, but make it ambigu­ous. Rule Three: sim­plify and exag­ger­ate. And the Fourth and Final Rule of Big Ideas: play on our nat­ural iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the under­dog by cast­ing the anec­dotes and your over­ar­ch­ing theme in a rebel­lious and rev­o­lu­tion­ary light. Tom Slee skew­ers Clay Shirky’s pop­u­lar essay, Col­lapse of Com­plex Busi­ness Mod­els, and, more gen­er­ally, all big Glad­wellian think-pieces which rely on anec­dote, anal­ogy, manip­u­la­tion, exaggeration.

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When the media is the disaster: Covering Haiti →

The Los Ange­les Times ran a series of pho­tographs of des­per­ate Haitians cop­ing in the after­math of a dev­as­tat­ing earth­quake with cap­tions that kept deploy­ing words like “loot­ing.” Would you enter a col­lapsed super­mar­ket to take food to starv­ing chil­dren and babies? Then you too are a looter. These pic­tures do con­vey des­per­a­tion, says Rebecca Sol­nit, but they don’t con­vey crime. She argues that the media tend to be obsessed with prop­erty and head­lines about assaults on prop­erty, and mis­rep­re­sent events as loot­ing or panic, need­lessly incit­ing hos­til­ity and hys­te­ria on the part of local author­i­ties and caus­ing more suf­fer­ing. When the rest of us con­tem­plate the Haitians’ plight through media reports, we need to remem­ber that:

…what is absolutely accu­rate, in Haiti right now, and on Earth always, is that human life mat­ters more than prop­erty, that the sur­vivors of a cat­a­stro­phe deserve our com­pas­sion and our under­stand­ing of their plight, and that we live and die by words and ideas, and it mat­ters des­per­ately that we get them right.

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Drug Companies, Doctors and Corruption →

Clin­i­cal tri­als are bro­ken. In her review of three recently pub­lished books about the col­lu­sion between influ­en­tial doc­tors and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies, Mar­cia Angell reveals the sys­tem­atic biases inher­ent in the very sci­en­tific method designed ensure best med­ical prac­tices. Knowl­edge trans­la­tion rests on the assump­tion that evidence-based research must make its way into prac­tice. Her con­clu­sion is sickening:

It is sim­ply no longer pos­si­ble to believe much of the clin­i­cal research that is pub­lished, or to rely on the judg­ment of trusted physi­cians or author­i­ta­tive med­ical guide­lines. I take no plea­sure in this con­clu­sion, which I reached slowly and reluc­tantly over my two decades as an edi­tor of The­New Eng­land Jour­nal of Medicine.

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Technology Traps →

I have a love/hate rela­tion­ship with tech­nol­ogy, much of my tur­moil stems from the fact that I do not always have the lux­ury of say­ing no or even, let me think about it, before it becomes a tech­nol­ogy I depend on. This is a symp­tom of what Peter Crabb calls tech­no­log­i­cal traps, con­se­quences of every­day deci­sions to use tech­no­log­i­cal devices that make us feel good when in fact these devices are not good for us or the planet at all:

With the help of human enthu­si­asts and enablers, tech­nol­ogy cre­ates its own self-affirming ide­ol­ogy. It is widely believed that tech­nol­ogy is infal­li­ble. Tech­nol­ogy must not be ques­tioned or crit­i­cized. Human needs are sub­or­di­nate to the needs of devices and sys­tems. If some­thing goes wrong, it must be due to “human error.” The solu­tion to technology-induced prob­lems is always more and bet­ter tech­nol­ogy. In fact, every arena of human activ­ity is always improved when the lat­est, most com­plex tech­nolo­gies are applied. As a con­se­quence of the ascen­dancy of tech­nol­ogy, humans have become demeaned and pow­er­less – second-class cit­i­zens in their own societies.

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You’re Sick. Now What? Knowledge is Power. →

Oncol­o­gist Marisa Weiss’s advice to those inclined to research their own med­ical care: it’s manda­tory. “The time you have with your doc­tor is get­ting pro­gres­sively shorter, yet there’s so much more to talk about. You have to pre­pare for this impor­tant meet­ing.” This New York Times spe­cial sec­tion, Decod­ing Your Health, offers use­ful advice on eval­u­at­ing what you might find: a primer on inter­pret­ing med­ical stud­ies shows that “no mat­ter how com­pelling and excit­ing a hypoth­e­sis is, we don’t know whether it works with­out clin­i­cal tri­als”; and self-diagnosis via the inter­net may well prove you have a fool for a doc­tor.

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Taking the Earth’s Temperature →

How do we mea­sure our planet’s global mean tem­per­a­ture, and com­pare it to a record dat­ing back hun­dreds of thou­sands of years, a com­par­i­son cen­tral to dis­cus­sions about cli­mate change? Jor­dan R. Raney’s descrip­tion of the inge­nious but impaired proxy mea­sures from tree rings to coral reefs are meant to encour­age skep­ti­cism for some of the more extreme claims that have been made. Unfor­tu­nately, we still need to make deci­sions about cli­mate change, how­ever incom­plete, uncer­tain the data we have is. In fact, that is the challenge.

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Why the Cloud Cannot Obscure the Scientific Method →

There is lit­tle rea­son not to be enthused over the new avenues of research offered by increas­ingly com­pre­hen­sive and elec­tronic sci­en­tific data sets avail­able to us. But reac­tions to Chris Anderson’s naive claim that the del­uge of data makes the sci­en­tific method obso­lete reminds us why mod­els and the­o­ries are the best tools we have to under­stand­ing our world. For exam­ple, John Tim­mer responds: “Cor­re­la­tions are a way of catch­ing a scientist’s atten­tion, but the mod­els and mech­a­nisms that explain them are how we make the pre­dic­tions that not only advance sci­ence, but gen­er­ate prac­ti­cal applications.”

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Nobody’s A Critic →

Crit­i­cism, laments Mar­tin Meis, no longer defines what is good and bad in cul­ture, and he blames new media. “Basi­cally, cul­ture has been democ­ra­tized. It has been flat­tened out and mul­ti­plied. There are no longer real dis­tinc­tions between high and low. There’s just more.” What he laments is not so much the demise of crit­i­cism per se, which is actu­ally quite robust, but rather the demise of the influ­ence of pro­fes­sional crit­ics and the sanc­tity of their domain. But if the rela­tion­ship between ama­teur and pro­fes­sional critic has flat­tened, so too has the rela­tion­ship between critic and artist. Par­tic­i­pa­tion is a two-way street. Mar­tin Weis on the per­sonal impact made by lit­er­ary critic James Wood’s essay, “What Chekhov Meant By Life”:

Or, to put it another way, Chekhov is more Chekhov when you add James Wood. I pre­fer Wood/Chekhov to Chekhov/Chekhov and I sus­pect that there is sim­ply no such thing as the old Chekhov after Wood got to him. By the same token, Wood is the critic that he is in no small mea­sure because of how he was affected and trans­formed by read­ing Chekhov.

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Digital Forensics →

Fas­ci­nat­ing descrip­tion by com­puter sci­en­tist Hany Farid who works with var­i­ous law-enforcement agen­cies to uncover doc­tored images. Mod­ern soft­ware has made pho­to­graph manip­u­la­tion eas­ier to carry out, but also eas­ier to detect.

I expect that as the field pro­gresses over the next five to 10 years, the appli­ca­tion of image foren­sics will become as rou­tine as the appli­ca­tion of phys­i­cal foren­sic analy­sis. It is my hope that this new tech­nol­ogy, along with sen­si­ble poli­cies and laws, will help us deal with the chal­lenges of this excit­ing yet some­times baf­fling dig­i­tal age.

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Rage Against the Machines →

Main­stream media cov­er­age of games seems to be one of two sorts. Either they are daz­zling accounts of end­less dig­i­tal fea­tures pro­claim­ing their supe­ri­or­ity, or bit­ter dis­counts of their claims as cul­ture, usu­ally advo­cated by rep­re­sen­ta­tives from gen­er­a­tions on either side of the com­puter era. What is lack­ing, says Tom Chat­field, is a seri­ous, mutu­ally well-informed debate about the gam­ing phe­nom­e­non that will be a dom­i­nant cul­tural force in this cen­tury.

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