Tag: Information evaluation

Information independence!

Intersections

We live in a world awash with misinformation and disinformation. “Misinformation is false or inaccurate information—getting the facts wrong. Disinformation is false information which is deliberately intended to mislead—intentionally misstating the facts.” Disinformation in particular, often leveraged through X, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms, and created by political, corporate, criminal, and other bad actors besieges us on a daily basis. It’s a never…

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How to identify fake academic publications?

Intersections

One of the most important parts of any search for information–whether academic or for personal reasons–has always been to think critically about the information you find; to be skeptical, to not assume the information must be true and/or objective just because it happens to come from a particular source or person. No one is entirely objective. And we/human beings are easily misled. Our entire digital…

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The “power of the summary”: why do we prefer and trust AI-generated summaries over doing the summarization ourselves?

Quick bibliographies

The easy answer is that it is much faster and requires less effort to click a button and get a custom summary of academic papers and their connections–rather than spending the time and mental effort to do it yourself. Or, is this preference just an extension of the utility of abstracts that have been used to summarize academic papers for decades–long before the public rise…

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Fake papers are contaminating the world’s scientific literature, fueling a corrupt industry and slowing legitimate lifesaving medical research

Intersections

Frederik Joelving, Retraction Watch; Cyril Labbé, Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA), and Guillaume Cabanac, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (from The Conservation) Over the past decade, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale and dissemination of bogus scholarly research, undermining the literature that everyone from doctors to engineers rely on to make decisions about human lives. It is exceedingly difficult…

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Can Voters Tell When Politicians are Lying?

Featured Article

“… Dishonesty in politics is a long-standing tradition. Many politicians have clearly benefitted from telling voters what they want to hear or what they want to believe, and history is filled with examples of politicians lying to cover up crime and corruption.” “Dishonesty in politics is important because it poses a threat to electoral accountability. Citizens who can detect political lies are more safeguarded against…

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What is Alzheimer's disease?

Alzheimer’s Disease, Climate Change, Cancer, and more — keep up to date on science topics that matter to you with CuratedSci

CuratedSci

Keep up-to-date on science topics that matter to you. Avoid being inundated by hundreds or thousands of articles or misled by out-of-date AI-generated summaries. Get current science news from five well-known, respected sources. For Alzheimer’s disease, climate change, cancer, and other topics, use CuratedSci. Questions? Please let me know (engelk@grinnell.edu).

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