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joanne ye

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | When can you speak ill of the dead? - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8170429.stm

shared by joanne ye on 19 Aug 09 - Cached
  • "It's a hostage to fortune to say nice things when someone dies. And reacting to this one was particularly tricky. For a long time he's been Wacko Jacko. So he wasn't someone who was unequivocally lauded."
  • joanne ye on 19 Aug 09
     
    Case It has been almost two months since Michael Jackson died. Some would call him "the King of Pop" and some would call him "Wacko Jacko". The latter term mostly derived due to his past child abuse cases, which he was never convicted and once acquitted. Problem The judgement of whether Michael Jackson was a good person is hard to reach a conclusion because we will always get both positive and negative accounts. Regardless of whether these accounts constitute misinformation, people (even those who have never met him) continue to talk about him because he was a celebrity (moreover one who had recently passed away). Given his recent death, negative comments (especially if they are misinformation) can really hurt those who love (i.e. family members) or adore (i.e. fans) him. However, positive comments can be misinformation too. Does his recent death make positive misinformation more acceptable? If he really did commit child abuse crimes (note: big assumption here), does that make positive misinformation towards him unjustified (especially to his victims)? Hence, the ethical problem here is the way people should go about talking about other people. Questions 1. We know the old saying, "don't speak ill of the dead". This is in conjunction with Kant's categorical imperative to respect other human beings. Adopting duty-based morality, should the negative comments about Michael Jackson (whether they constitute misinformation or not) be reduced or even stopped? 2. Adopting rights-based morality (specifically the right to free speech) should people be allowed to talk about whatever they want (including new media platform) in whatever way they want to? Should regulation by the authority be implemented? 3. Adopting similar duty-based morality to question one (specifically the virtue of not lying), should positive comments about Michael Jackson (whether they constitute misinformation or not) be increased or even exaggerated? 4. If Michael Jackson really did commit
  • joanne ye on 19 Aug 09
     
    4. If Michael Jackson really did commit child abuse crimes (note: big assumption here), due to the clash of duties (respect VS. not lying), should we talk about those crimes when we discuss about him in a public platform? Does just consequentialism come into play here?
jaime yeo

Spread of HIV misinformation online - 6 views

"HIV denialists" - people who deny that HIV will cause AIDS, have been spreading information about their beliefs on the Internet. There is a cause for concern that such false information will deter...

misinformation online rights truth

started by jaime yeo on 21 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

How facts backfire - The Boston Globe - 0 views

www.boston.com/...how_facts_backfire

Democracy Facts Brain

shared by Weiye Loh on 21 Jul 10 - Cached
  • a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
  • Weiye Loh on 21 Jul 10
     
    How facts backfire Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains By Joe Keohane July 11, 2010
Weiye Loh

Right-wing publisher: We run "some misinformation" - War Room - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

Photoshop Photojournalism Ethics Journalism

shared by Weiye Loh on 12 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • WorldNetDaily regularly publishes falsehoods (e.g. about Obama's birthplace) and wild conspiracy theories (e.g. about Democratic plans to create concentration camps) that have earned the site criticism even on the right. The organizers of the Conservative Political Action Conference, for example, rejected Farah's request to host a Birther panel at the annual event in 2009. That said, WND is influential. Its stories regularly find their way onto the big cable channels (Trump's "$2 million" claim is a good example) and even get picked up by members of Congress.
  • I wrote back to Farah with just one example, the latest, of WND's credibility problem. That would be this column by WND's Jack Cashill on "Barack Obama's missing year." The lead of the column aimed to debunk a famous photo of a young Obama flanked by his grandparents on a bench in New York City. As proof, Cashill embedded a YouTube video that purported to show that Obama had been photoshopped into the picture, and that the real image included only Obama's grandparents.
  • Unfortunately for Cashill the supposed "genuine" image -- the one without Obama -- was itself a sloppy photoshop job that still included part of Obama's knee between his grandparents. This was pointed out by Media Matters about eight hours after Cashill's column was published on WND.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • At that point WND simply scrubbed the first two paragraphs of the story, without so much as an update, let alone a correction. These lines were now gone: In his definitive 2010 biography of Barack Obama, “The Bridge,” New Yorker editor David Remnick features a photograph of a dapper young Barack Obama sitting between his grandparents on a Central Park bench. The bench is real. The grandparents are real. The wall behind them is real. Barack Obama is not. He has been conspicuously photo-shopped in. Who did this and why remains as much a mystery as Obama’s extended stay in New York.
  • When I pointed this out, Farah fired back (emphasis added): Jack Cashill is an OPINION columnist. Admittedly, we publish some misinformation by columnists, as does your publication and every other journal that contains opinion. Bill Press seldom gets anything right in his column, but because we believe in providing the broadest spectrum of OPINION anywhere in the news business, we tolerate that kind of thing. Yes, Cashill’s column contained an egregious error, which we corrected almost immediately, which is far more than I expect you to do in what I assume is a NEWS piece you wrote.
  • I asked Farah if it is standard practice at WND to remove major sections of stories without any correction. To which he responded: How long have you been in this business, punk? My guess is you were in diapers when I was running major metropolitan newspapers. You call what you wrote a news story? You aren’t fit to carry Chelsea Schilling’s laptop. Worm.
Jody Poh

BBC NEWS | Technology | Defamation lawsuit for US tweeter - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8173731.stm

misinformation defamation ethical law freedom

shared by Jody Poh on 18 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Jody Poh on 18 Aug 09
     
    This news story is about Horizon realty suing a woman called Amanda Bonnen for defamation on Twitter. Amanda Bonnen has micro blogged her feelings towards her apartment on Twitter. She was unhappy with the mould she found in her apartment. This has stirred a response from Horizon realty as it sees the comment she made as false. Also as Twitter is such a widespread network, the company sees that it has to protect its reputation online. Thus, they have decided to sue Amanda Bonnen. Ms Bonnen has already recently moved out of the apartment and has been unavailable to comment on the lawsuit. Her Twitter account has also been deleted. Ethical question: I think many consider posting complaints and comments on Twitter similar to complaining to or having a conversation with friends over coffee. If this is the case, is it ethical or 'right' to be allowed to sue people like Amanda Bonnen? Ethical problem: This case brings up the point of the freedom of speech in public and private spaces. What are the boundaries and definitions of public and private space with the rise of new technologies such as Twitter? On what space (public or private) is Twitter then operating on and how much freedom of speech is allowed?
qiyi liao

Amazon targeted in class action over vanishing e-books - 0 views

www.ecommercetimes.com/...67742.html

privacy breach rights disclosure misinformation

shared by qiyi liao on 19 Aug 09 - Cached
  • qiyi liao on 19 Aug 09
     
    Issue in contention: Amazon deleted legally purchased e-books from Kindle users without prior notice, after learning that these e-books were pirated versions. This ability of Amazon's to "remotely delete digital content purchased through the Kindle store" was never disclosed to its paying customers. In fact, its license terms seem to offer Kindle users permanent access to the files they purchase (see #). Sure, Amazon admits mishandling the issue and promises never to remove content in such circumstances again. However, ultimately, they still own that power to remove, edit content etc. What effects would that have on our society then? Consider Orwell's notion of Big Brother in "1984" (Creepily, one of the books that was removed in this mini-scandal). Also, who is/should Amazon be more accountable to? Its customers? Shareholders? Third-party publishers? (At the end of the day, it's still a profit-seeking corporation.) NB. Kindle is a platform developed by Amazon for reading e-books and other digital media. #Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use.
joanne ye

TJC Stomp Scandal - 34 views

This is a very interesting topic. Thanks, Weiman! From the replies for this topic, I would say two general questions surfaced. Firstly, is STOMP liable for misinformation? Secondly, is it right for...

started by Weiman Kow on 19 Aug 09 3 follow-ups, last by joanne ye on 26 Aug 09
Satveer

Spammed, scammed, jammed: Flu outbreak dominates online buzz - 10 views

This article is about online misinformation on social networking sites such as twitter and in this case it particularly pertains to health. It has got to do with swine flu and how people on Twitte...

http:__www.canada.com_entertainment_Spammed%2Bscammed%2Bjammed%2

started by Satveer on 19 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
Wing Yan Wong

Users Poke Facebook With Lawsuit Over Privacy Policies - 3 views

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/67888.html This article discusses the violation of privacy laws as well as misinformation with regards to users' personal information. It was reported that Face...

privacy personal information

started by Wing Yan Wong on 28 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

The internet: is it changing the way we think? | Technology | The Observer - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...rnet-brain-neuroscience-debate

Internet Polarisation

shared by Weiye Loh on 15 Aug 10 - Cached
  • American magazine the Atlantic lobs an intellectual grenade into our culture. In the summer of 1945, for example, it published an essay by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineer Vannevar Bush entitled "As We May Think". It turned out to be the blueprint for what eventually emerged as the world wide web. Two summers ago, the Atlantic published an essay by Nicholas Carr, one of the blogosphere's most prominent (and thoughtful) contrarians, under the headline "Is Google Making Us Stupid?".
  • Carr wrote, "I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going – so far as I can tell – but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."
  • Carr's target was not really the world's leading search engine, but the impact that ubiquitous, always-on networking is having on our cognitive processes. His argument was that our deepening dependence on networking technology is indeed changing not only the way we think, but also the structure of our brains.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Carr's article touched a nerve and has provoked a lively, ongoing debate on the net and in print (he has now expanded it into a book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains). This is partly because he's an engaging writer who has vividly articulated the unease that many adults feel about the way their modi operandi have changed in response to ubiquitous networking.
  • Who bothers to write down or memorise detailed information any more, for example, when they know that Google will always retrieve it if it's needed again? The web has become, in a way, a global prosthesis for our collective memory.
  • easy to dismiss Carr's concern as just the latest episode of the moral panic that always accompanies the arrival of a new communications technology. People fretted about printing, photography, the telephone and television in analogous ways. It even bothered Plato, who argued that the technology of writing would destroy the art of remembering.
  • many commentators who accept the thrust of his argument seem not only untroubled by its far-reaching implications but are positively enthusiastic about them. When the Pew Research Centre's Internet & American Life project asked its panel of more than 370 internet experts for their reaction, 81% of them agreed with the proposition that "people's use of the internet has enhanced human intelligence".
  • As a writer, thinker, researcher and teacher, what I can attest to is that the internet is changing our habits of thinking, which isn't the same thing as changing our brains. The brain is like any other muscle – if you don't stretch it, it gets both stiff and flabby. But if you exercise it regularly, and cross-train, your brain will be flexible, quick, strong and versatile.
  • he internet is analogous to a weight-training machine for the brain, as compared with the free weights provided by libraries and books. Each method has its advantage, but used properly one works you harder. Weight machines are directive and enabling: they encourage you to think you've worked hard without necessarily challenging yourself. The internet can be the same: it often tells us what we think we know, spreading misinformation and nonsense while it's at it. It can substitute surface for depth, imitation for originality, and its passion for recycling would surpass the most committed environmentalist.
  • I've seen students' thinking habits change dramatically: if information is not immediately available via a Google search, students are often stymied. But of course what a Google search provides is not the best, wisest or most accurate answer, but the most popular one.
  • But knowledge is not the same thing as information, and there is no question to my mind that the access to raw information provided by the internet is unparalleled and democratising. Admittance to elite private university libraries and archives is no longer required, as they increasingly digitise their archives. We've all read the jeremiads that the internet sounds the death knell of reading, but people read online constantly – we just call it surfing now. What they are reading is changing, often for the worse; but it is also true that the internet increasingly provides a treasure trove of rare books, documents and images, and as long as we have free access to it, then the internet can certainly be a force for education and wisdom, and not just for lies, damned lies, and false statistics.
  • In the end, the medium is not the message, and the internet is just a medium, a repository and an archive. Its greatest virtue is also its greatest weakness: it is unselective. This means that it is undiscriminating, in both senses of the word. It is indiscriminate in its principles of inclusion: anything at all can get into it. But it also – at least so far – doesn't discriminate against anyone with access to it. This is changing rapidly, of course, as corporations and governments seek to exert control over it. Knowledge may not be the same thing as power, but it is unquestionably a means to power. The question is, will we use the internet's power for good, or for evil? The jury is very much out. The internet itself is disinterested: but what we use it for is not.
  • Weiye Loh on 15 Aug 10
     
    The internet: is it changing the way we think? American writer Nicholas Carr's claim that the internet is not only shaping our lives but physically altering our brains has sparked a lively and ongoing debate, says John Naughton. Below, a selection of writers and experts offer their opinion
Weiye Loh

Viscount Monckton, another fallen idol of climate denial | George Monbiot | Environment... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...monckton-climate-change

Climate Science Denial Media

shared by Weiye Loh on 21 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Viscount Monckton's assertions have been comprehensively discredited by professor of mechanical engineering John Abraham, at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota.
  • As Abraham explains at the beginning of his investigation, his scientific credentials didn't mean that he was automatically right, any more than Monckton's lack of scientific credentials meant that he was automatically wrong. Every claim Monckton made would be judged on its merits. Where Monckton gave references, Abraham would follow them up, seeking to discover whether he had accurately represented the papers he cited, or whether the authors of those papers agreed with his interpretation. Where he did not give references, Abraham would see whether Monckton's claims were consistent with published scientific data.
  • The results of Abraham's investigation are astonishing: not one of the claims he looks into withstands scrutiny. He exposes a repeated pattern of misinformation, distortion and manipulation, as he explains in the article he has written for the Guardian. Some of Monckton's assertions are breath-taking in their brazen disregard of facts. He has gravely misrepresented papers and authors he refers to, in some cases he appears to have created data, graphs and trends out of thin air: at least that was how it appeared to Abraham when Monckton gave no references and his graphs and figures starkly contradicted the published science.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The problem is that people like Lord Monckton, Ian Plimer, Christopher Booker and James Delingpole act as an echo-chamber for each other's discredited beliefs. However nutty their views are, they will be affirmed by other members of the closed circle.
Weiye Loh

Spatially variable response of Himalayan glaciers to climate change affected by debris ... - 0 views

www.nature.com/...ngeo1068.html

Glaciers Climate Science AGW

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Controversy about the current state and future evolution of Himalayan glaciers has been stirred up by erroneous statements in the fourth report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change1, 2.
  • Variable retreat rates3, 4, 5, 6 and a paucity of glacial mass-balance data7, 8 make it difficult to develop a coherent picture of regional climate-change impacts in the region.
  • we report remotely-sensed frontal changes and surface velocities from glaciers in the greater Himalaya between 2000 and 2008 that provide evidence for strong spatial variations in glacier behaviour which are linked to topography and climate.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • More than 65% of the monsoon-influenced glaciers that we observed are retreating, but heavily debris-covered glaciers with stagnant low-gradient terminus regions typically have stable fronts. Debris-covered glaciers are common in the rugged central Himalaya, but they are almost absent in subdued landscapes on the Tibetan Plateau, where retreat rates are higher. In contrast, more than 50% of observed glaciers in the westerlies-influenced Karakoram region in the northwestern Himalaya are advancing or stable.
  • Our study shows that there is no uniform response of Himalayan glaciers to climate change and highlights the importance of debris cover for understanding glacier retreat, an effect that has so far been neglected in predictions of future water availability9, 10 or global sea level11.
Weiye Loh

Skepticblog » The Linus Pauling effect - 0 views

skepticblog.org/...the-linus-pauling-effect

HIV_AIDS Denial Science Falsifiability

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • So if syphilis causes AIDS, and not HIV, where is the evidence? As microbiologist and epidemiolist Tara Smith points out in her excellent blog, Margulis offers none. Instead, she says to the credulous and uncritical interviewer: The idea that penicillin kills the cause of the disease is nuts. If you treat the painless chancre in the first few days of infection, you may stop the bacterium before the symbiosis develops, but if you really get syphilis, all you can do is live with the spirochete. The spirochete lives permanently as a symbiont in the patient. The infection cannot be killed because it becomes part of the patient’s genome and protein synthesis biochemistry. After syphilis establishes this symbiotic relationship with a person, it becomes dependent on human cells and is undetectable by any testing. Great. Just what we need: an untestable hypothesis promoted by assertion and reputation, not something concrete that scientists could test (although most specialists in microbiology would say the evidence is clear that the HIV retrovirus, and not the spirochaete bacterium Treponema pallidum, is the true cause of AIDS).
  • Has she never actually LOOKED at the hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers documenting the structure of the HIV virus, and the clear documentation of that virus in patients that suffer and die from AIDS? Or the fact that patients treated with anti-retrovirals manage to suppress their AIDS symptoms? Or the disaster in South Africa, when the government became active AIDS deniers, spread misinformation and myths about AIDS, and the infection rate shot up? Not even the hard-core AIDS deniers like Peter Duesberg deny that the HIV virus exists!
  • she slips outside the realm of science entirely, and becomes a full-fledged AIDS denier. My jaw just dropped when I read the following: There is a vast body of literature on syphilis spanning from the 1500s until after World War II, when the disease was supposedly cured by penicillin. It’s in our paper “Resurgence of the Great Imitator.” Our claim is that there’s no evidence that HIV is an infectious virus, or even an entity at all. There’s no scientific paper that proves that the HIV virus causes AIDS. Kary Mullis said in an interview that he went looking for a reference substantiating that HIV causes AIDS and discovered, “There is no such document.”
  • Weiye Loh on 14 Apr 11
     
    The phenomenon is a familiar one: let's call it "the Linus Pauling effect." A highly respected and honored senior scientist, largely out of the mainstream and not up to date with the recent developments (and perhaps a bit senile), makes weird pronouncements about their pet ideas-and the press, so used to giving celebrities free air time for any junk they wish to say, prints and publishes it all as if it is the final truth. The great Linus Pauling may have won two Nobel Prizes, but his crazy idea that megadoses of Vitamin C would cure nearly everything seems to have died with him. William Shockley may have won a Nobel for his work on transistors, but his racist ideas about genetics (a field in which he had no expertise) should never been taken seriously. Kary Mullis may have deserved his Nobel Prize for developing the polymerase chain reaction, but that gives him no qualifications to speak with authority on his unscientific ideas about AIDS denial and global warming and astrology (he hits the trifecta for pseudoscientific woo).
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