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"Just as important as learning these helpful tools, however, is unlearning and avoiding the most common pitfalls of common sense. Reminding us of where society is most vulnerable to those, Sagan writes: In addition to teaching us what to do when evaluating a claim to knowledge, any good baloney detection kit must also teach us what not to do. It helps us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric. Many good examples can be found in religion and politics, because their practitioners are so often obliged to justify two contradictory propositions.He admonishes against the twenty most common and perilous ones - many rooted in our chronic discomfort with ambiguity - with examples of each in action"

The 20 fallacies: "ad hominem - Latin for "to the man," attacking the arguer and not the argument (e.g., The Reverend Dr. Smith is a known Biblical fundamentalist, so her objections to evolution need not be taken seriously) argument from authority (e.g., President Richard Nixon should be re-elected because he has a secret plan to end the war in Southeast Asia - but because it was secret, there was no way for the electorate to evaluate it on its merits; the argument amounted to trusting him because he was President: a mistake, as it turned out) argument from adverse consequences (e.g., A God meting out punishment and reward must exist, because if He didn't, society would be much more lawless and dangerous - perhaps even ungovernable. Or: The defendant in a widely publicized murder trial must be found guilty; otherwise, it will be an encouragement for other men to murder their wives) appeal to ignorance - the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa (e.g., There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist - and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we're still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. special pleading, often to rescue a proposition in deep rhetorical trouble (e.g., How can a merciful God condemn future generations to torment because, against orders, one woman induced one man to eat an apple? Special plead: you don't understand the subtle Doctrine of Free Will. Or: How can there be an equally godlike Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the same Person? Special plead: You don't understand the Divine Mystery of the Trinity. Or: How could God permit the followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - each in their own way enjoined to

Wonderful post, Kim! These are great guidelines alongside which to test ideas.

Ricochet is an open source effort to make it possible for you to chat privately. In this article we get some insight on why this program is important. Ricochet should be introduced in an user friendly version this November.

Ricochet is an open source effort to make it possible for you to chat privately. In this article we get some insight on why this program is important. Ricochet should be introduced in an user friendly version this November.

It is just when you look for the alternative of quick same day loans with no credit watch that you get an opportunity to deal with the fleeting instabilities. These advances are anything but difficult to infer and very possible for individuals with dreadful low credit.

Google has revealed a project underway at the called The Physical Web to provide "interaction on demand" so that people can walk up and use any smart devices without the need for intervening mobile apps. This would make it possible for users to simply walk up to a bus stop and receive the time until the next arriving bus, without any additional software needed. An accepted open standard is probably some years away, but the promise of an Internet of Things that doesn't require a centralised software hub is appealing, since it democratises control over the system.

Me ha parecido que este tema tiene mucha relación con el vídeo Native science and Western science: Possibilities for a powerful collaboration cuando habla de la teoría de la relatividad de Einstein y del concepto del tiempo como punto de referencia occidental.

On my navigation searching for initiatives to see how Open Knowledge are making the difference on the Latin America society I found this... nowadays unfortunately on South America (and in other places as well) open knowledge initiative are not divulgated. Universities seem to be not interested about promoting these initiatives and few people know about them. I was amazed reading the text from Francisco J. García-Peñalvo (Open Knowledge. Challenges and Facts) and seeing that a lot of Universities on Europe and North America are promoting and working with open and free access to texts and online courses. It's incredible how people have the possibility of learning in a world that each day is more competitive. I really hope that this great news about Brazil helps more and more people to understand the impact and the changings on the educational process.

In this article Abby Clobridge discusses the Scholarly Publication landscape today as it relates to open access journals, and how we need to re-think some of our standards for publishing (both my authors and by publishers).

Part 2 of this article addresses OA and journal impact factors, and part 5 give examples on how libraries/librarians can contribute in spreading OA acceptance.

"The Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) was a three-year research and implementation initiative that took place between March 2010 and August 2013. Hosted by the University of Cape Town, the programme engaged the Universities of Botswana, Namibia and Mauritius in a process aimed at better understanding the dynamics around scholarly communication in the Southern African higher education environment and advancing the open access agenda for the purpose of increasing the visibility of African research. This work was made possible by a grant from the Canadian International Development Research Center (IDRC). This report synthesizes research and findings from the four institutional case studies conducted at the Universities of Botswana, Cape Town, Mauritius and Namibia. It provides an overview the scholarly communication activity systems at work in these four Southern African universities."

Thanks for this article. I think it gives a great overview of the current landscape of scholarly publishing in Africa, and concisely states the problems of visibilities (or the lack thereof).

The possibilities of the Internet for higher Education are widely known, but they are not sufficiently exploited in México, especially given the recent expansion of the so-called Web 2.0. This article discusses the technologies utilized in the next generation of Internet Assisted Univer- sity Educational Programs, or University 2.0, particularly focusing on the potential that these types of innovations offer to blended learning modalities in Mexico. Blogs, Wikis and RSS are revisited, looking for the elements that help to shape the basis of a state of art, and so help to visualize the possible future of Mexican education in this globalized world.

Me gustó mucho la tabla de recursos y su clasificación, es interesante que sea de 2007, ya que presenta otros recursos que tal vez ahora nos parecen un poco desconocidos. Y es verdad, es muy necesario fomentar el acceso en México a los recursos libres y su uso en beneficio de la democratización de la información.

Description: "How 'bridging elites' help on Twitter, perceptions of news by a skeptical public, and Wikipedia pages as newsmaking destinations: all that and more in this month's roundup of the academic literature."

Hi, there I think that we must talk about this issue, is very important to know more about it. Russian hackers have pulled off what is possibly the largest cyber security breach in history, stealing 1.2 billion usernames and passwords and more than 500 million email addresses, security experts say. More than 420,000 websites, including large, well-known sites as well as smaller companies, were targeted by a cybercrime ring dubbed Cybervor.

this is an Public Colombian intitution, that is using the conected learnig as a tool but what see as a problem and a possible cause of inequality is thar in my contry only 10 million people have acces to the web. is this making the gap bigger.

From Book Censorship to Academic Peer Review Mario Biagioli Together with tenure, peer review is probably the most distinctive feature of the modern academic system. Peer review, we are told, sets academia apart from all other professions by construing value through peer judgment, not market dynamics. Given the remarkable epistemological and symbolic burden placed on peer review, it is surprising to find that so little research has analyzed it either empirically (in its actual daily practices) or philosophically (as one of the conditions of possibility of academic knowledge).

"Self-publishing is at a stage analogous to the early days of Wikipedia, when users were reluctant to trust information contained in a communally written encyclopedia. It turns out that online democracy performs quite an effective self-regulating function. "

Good points in the article: There are several good reasons a novelist chooses to self-publish: 1. Because of repeated rejection. 2. To get the book to market more quickly. 3. To have more control over the process. 4. To receive a larger share of the book's earnings. 5. To attract the attention of a major publisher.

With digitization of publishing its now an option to self publicize especially for new writers who thing their work will never be acknowledged. But musicians are also using the self publicizing/promotion and later one it does pays on. I heard of Justin Bieber story of when the mother was busy posting you-tube videos.So its possible to go a "freenuim" way and start with e.g blogging and eventually build a fan/interest base

Since I'm interested in publishing, here's a good start! Open publishing is a process of creating news or other content that is transparent to the readers. They can contribute a story and see it instantly appear in the pool of stories publicly available. Those stories are filtered as little as possible to help the readers find the stories they want.