Internet law expert Frank Pasquale is among those who have advocated for search result algorithms in the U.S. to be regulated by the government.
I think this may be a good idea but also would there just be another way to spread hate speech. I feel like once it stops in one area individuals who still want to get their point across will find a way to do it.
"People equate the position of search results with how true they are," Epstein explains. "What's higher is better. What's higher is truer."
This is definitely not the way to think about searches because a lot of the times the top searches are sponsored.
In the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin shooting, the ADL reported that multiple hate groups used inaccurate Internet posts about crimes against white people as a "propaganda tool" for white supremacy.
Just like we learned last week, fake news travels very quickly on social media, so this makes a lot of sense.
We do our best to prevent offensive terms, like porn and hate speech, from appearing, but we don't always get it right,
I also think this would be a problem in society because some would call this censorship....
" 'Every bit of motivation came from things he saw on the internet. That's it. ... 'He is simply regurgitating, in whole paragraphs, slogans and facts — bits and pieces of facts that he downloaded from the internet directly into his brain.' "
I love how the attorney places the blame on the internet. Sure, he saw hate on the internet but it was his own actions that put him in that situation. The internet is just a platform where information is held.
This is the crux of the problem: Google can only show you information if it exists on the web.
If google can only show you information that exists on the web then we need to find a way for more information to be accessible, if that is possible.
Oftentimes, “best answer” means “top result,” which itself translates to “what most users clicked on
These are definitely two different things but somehow google and other search engines have found a way to correlate them.
the Amazon Echo–like home-assistant chatbot speaker that’s supposed to answer any question automatically and accurately (key word: supposed to).
I think this is a very important statement. We all just kind of assume that google has the correct answer because it's google. We just want information to be quick and correct and are gullible in that nature.
In short, social media seems to systematically amplify falsehood at the expense of the truth, and no one—neither experts nor politicians nor tech companies—knows how to reverse that trend.
Or one actually wants to reverse the trend?
“The key takeaway is really that content that arouses strong emotions spreads further, faster, more deeply, and more broadly on Twitter,”
This is definitely true. If you have a headline that can make someone cry, get excited, or is just relatable, in a sense it will spread a lot more quickly.
Twitter users seem almost to prefer sharing falsehoods.
I am a big time twitter user and this is very true. Sharing falsehoods the majority of the time produces more likes and retweets. Individuals on twitter want to be famous and get their name out there and if it means sharing a false story they are willing to do it along with arguing about it for more attention.
“It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information,” said Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led this study. “And that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature.”
Fake news always has a better story because it is fake. We want the juicy stories and real media isn't always as interesting.
By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.
I think with all social media, especially twitter, we want everything to be fast. We want to be able to read a headline of two lines and know exactly what happened and as long as that headline grabs our attention we absent-mindedly share that information. Fake news travels faster because it's more interesting and grabs more attention. On twitter, the majority of individuals are on there for laughs and gossip. It takes 2 seconds to read a tweet or a headline and it takes an additional second to like or retweet it. Everyone just wants fast paced media and stories.
There’s really no excuse not to do this for things you share. It not only allows you to share from a more authoritative source, which is good for society and the economics of publishing, but it allows you provide your readers helpful context. Compare this:
If we continue to share things without fact checking them we are just as much a part of the problem because we are helping in the spread of false information.
Literally thirty seconds, if you know how to do it:
I think as a society we are lazy and gullible. If something is written as an article, we just believe it because as a society we have started to lose skepticism and we believe everything that we see. We have to start believing things with a grain of salt. It takes a short amount of time to fact check articles but living in a fast paced society, we want everything at the snap of a finger and we just expect it to be true.
I did what I encourage students to do in such cases: as a sanity check, make sure that the person being quoted as an academic expert has a publication record in the relevant area, preferably with a cite or two.
It is very important to do research on researchers to see if they have any connection to different businesses and if they are knowledgeable in their said field. For example, if we think about Dr. Phil most of us think that he is a medical doctor like a psychiatrist but he actually only has a PhD in clinical psychology. It is very important to research individuals because it could very easily be fake news.
Well, says a student, they make their money selling supplements, and so they have an incentive to talk down traditional medicine.
I learned a lot about this particularly in my health statistics class. Everything is a business and their job is to push their product in any capacity that they can. Some businesses even hire researchers that will highly rate their products in exchange for money. You have to question everything, researchers and products because with money and privilege businesses can bamboozle consumers.
hey don’t want to spend their trust anywhere, and they think many things are equally untrustworthy.
For me, in the sciences we have been taught to question everything. Curiosity and skepticism are key in creating new knowledge. So in my opinion, I think not trusting is a viable option.
This is not about doing gotcha with industry. It’s about how to restore trust.”
We definitely need to work to restore trust in the pharmaceutical industry but the only way, would be to limit the privileges of big companies and there doesn't seem like a valid way to do that at this moment.
research can be biased and that it can be difficult for medical journals to unmask the problems.
This is a very true statement. Research and statistics can be manipulated in many ways to get desired outcomes. There needs to be some sort of system in place to hold individuals who are manipulating science accountable. If we think about the anti vaccination example, a researcher manipulated data to make that claim and individuals are still holding on to that idea today, even though it has been proven false. Researchers have a lot of power and privilege and they affect society in a lot of ways and they need to be held accountable.
Company executives seeking to promote their drugs can design research that makes their products look better. They can select like-minded academics to perform the work. And they can run the statistics in ways that make their own drugs look better than they are.
This is something that we discussed in my Health Statistics course. If we are basing the validity of experiments off of statistics, there's no way to tell if the statistics were manipulated for favorable outcomes. Also, correlation does not mean causation.
A Food and Drug Administration scientist later estimated that the drug had been associated with 83,000 heart attacks and deaths.
Money is becoming way more important than the safety of individuals. How can researchers report favorably for a drug that can potentially kill individuals just for money?
The trial had been funded by GlaxoSmithKline, and each of the 11 authors had received money from the company. Four were employees and held company stock. T
This goes back to privilege. Companies who have an exponential amount of money have the ability to hire researchers to "research" their product. If researchers are getting paid to give a favorable report of certain drugs then they are going to do just that.
It found that science professors at six major research universities were likely to rate male job candidates as more qualified than female candidates to be hired as laboratory managers, even though the study assigned the hypothetical male and female applicants identical qualifications.
On campus if you look at the majority of science professors, they're males. Men are given a privilege and women continually face bias.
"If I were to give people a vita of two people who had the exact same number of publications and one person was first author on a lot of papers and the other had publications in the same journals but was second through fourth author, I guarantee you people will prefer first,
This is a big problem in academia. Even the name placing on a published article can alter your chances of a job in academia. This isn't particularly fair but this is how it works.
To be hired on the tenure track in those fields by a top research university, young scholars increasingly must have publications on their CV's by the time they finish their doctoral degrees.
This is kind of the point that I brought up in my last annotation. To get jobs in academia you have to be published a certain amount of times just to prove yourself.
Scholarly publishing, more than anything else, is the measuring stick of professors' research productivity.
I've been hearing a lot that department chairs, especially in the social sciences, hire professors based on if they think that they will publish books and articles. I remember eating lunch with new candidates for one department here at Wake Forest, and there was a very competitive candidate that was graduating from a very well known university but they didn't pick her because they didn't believe she would produce the most research. I think it is disheartening that we base jobs on their research productivity, instead of potential but this is how academia works.
Were women and men equal in this fundamental coin of the academic realm, a currency that buys tenure, promotions, and career success?
Women and men have never been equal in the academic realm. Men have privilege over women in academia which allows them more opportunities for these promotions and tenure. It takes a lot of energy for a woman to get in the same position that a man is, and they could be overqualified but that is how society is. Think about this in terms of minority women, who are even more at a disadvantage because they have two things working against them, their race and gender.
I learned from my Latin American colleagues that they are essentially forced to cite North American or Western European researchers in all their work in order to get published, even if/when they have fellow Latin American colleagues whose work is more on point.
Minorities have to play a game to be recognized for their work. It is sad but this is the way it has always been and I am not surprised at all.
But because it was not a priority for the white, colonial scholarly commons agenda, it was relegated, literally and physically, to the margins, ghettoized from the main discourse.
This is something particularly relevant in the classroom. If there is a topic that the vast majority, who happen to be white, don't want to address then it won't be addressed. Something like this similarly happened in my PREPARE class this week. With reworking the PREPARE objectives, I suggested that we needed to focus on intersectionality in regard to sexual assault and abuse in orientation because in the videos and discussions it focuses on normative, white heterosexual couples. I got responses from white women that this wasn't that important and it basically got tossed. This is academia.
There was a lot of talk about building a “global” scholarly commons, but essentially this commons was being built by and for the global north.
Everyone wants to have "global" conversations but if we only allow privileged white males to start and create these conversations it can never encompass this "globalness" that they're reaching for.
While there were several people present from other knowledge traditions—and the group leaders congratulated themselves again and again during the course of the meeting on the “diversity of voices” at the table
I think this is important because you can give individuals from minority communities a seat at the table in the name of "diversity" but did you actually give them the opportunity to speak up and voice their opinion? The majority of the privileged think if they give minority individuals a seat at the table, then they've done their job, but if you don't give them the opportunity to voice their opinions, then it was no point at all. It was all just a show for "diversity" and in my opinion that's even worse.
This scholarly communication conversation, like virtually all other scholarly communication conversations, was centered around, directed by, and saturated in the values and ideals of the white North American and Western European, neoliberal researcher.
Most of the conversations in academia are centered around the privileged, which are white males. The privilege, given to white males allows them to be in places where they get to start these conversations and the majority of the time they center the conversations on that they know. This is frustrating in academia when you come from a minority community, but it just shows what privilege gives you in society.
For a company that generates billions of dollars in revenue, the loss of $10 million per year will not be catastrophic financially.
To actually make an impact, more universities will need to drop their subscription as well.
The UC system was paying the company more than $10 million a year for journal access.
This is an incredible amount of money just for journal access, but in a society that is so research driven it is a necessity.
charges institutions to access and publish research
Like I said in the last article, these journal sites are businesses!! They charge for access and they charge for publication. The open access publication charges that put on authors limits their publications unless they have a big university behind them.
The University of California System has canceled its multimillion-dollar subscription contract with Elsevier, an academic publisher.
This is a very big deal, particularly for individuals in the sciences. As a biology major, I use this site to find journals for my lab reports, research, general curiosity, etc. If we canceled our subscription, it would definitely create an impact. I think we all might relate to reading an abstract and finding an article that fits perfectly with our research just to find out we don't have access to it.
This may seem like a counterintuitive approach, but among my students it was a literally jaw-dropping illustration of a paywall that none of them knew existed.
This is very real. The majority of the time, individuals don't even know the privilege that they hold, and until they are educated and gain an awareness nothing will change.
nd if those contacted for off-the-grid support had not taken the time to do him a series of modest solids he would not have been able to produce this amazing, best-selling fermentation bible.
It seems like information privilege is highly associated with economic privilege.....
Wikipedia editing is only one way to encourage students and faculty to produce participatory work that leverages paywalled information resources for the public good – encouraging capstone and other student project uploads to OA repositories is another
In theory, it would be a good idea to leverage paywalled information but Wikipedia is not a credible source in any academic setting, so this could be beneficial for general knowledge but not for reliable research?
seem
This also calls into question how do we create safe spaces when we live in a society, where individuals don't believe they are necessary?
“I think the voices are loud but what are they yelling?
This goes back to my previous statement. You can rally and plan speak outs but if you don't have someone at the table where legislations and decisions are being made, they'll never know what you are fighting or advocating for.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire argues against the banking model, in which education “becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.”
I think this is a very interesting analogy, that I've never thought of before. We are in a sense just being pumped up with knowledge from our professors in the education system. I believe this needs work though. Any ideas for improvements?
Presence is perhaps the most obvious issue to address when working at a distance, but it’s not always the simplest to address.
With all forms of online learning, lacking a presence from a teacher or even students creates feelings of isolation. I think this is why in most online classes, professors want you to interact with each other whether that be in forums, discussions, or creating some sort of group assignments or projects. They try to address this feeling of detachment but it usually isn't as simple as that.
or example, a grade-oriented environment is associated with increased levels of cheating
I definitely agree with this statement. In a lot of my biology classes that have been competitive, I've seen quite a bit of cheating going on to secure good grades. While this is not okay on any level, it speaks to what a competitive environment will do to your morals.
Grades tend to diminish students’ interest in whatever they’re learning.
We have shifted to a society where students are only motivated by grades. Students are disengaged from learning and are driven only to receive an above satisfactory grade. Through this students have learned to just do an assignment for the sake of doing it, instead of actually trying to learn about the topic. I remember in my calculus class, a student told the professor "Only teach me what's going to be on the exam, and the additional stuff, don't worry about it". This just speaks to how grades have caused students to only care about them, which leaves them disengaged in the classroom.