During the UNESCO session of the World Library and Information Congress held in Quebec, Canada, in August 2008, Mr Abdul Waheed Khan, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, awarded the winner of the international Information Literacy Logo Contest. The winner is a young Cuban designer, Mr Edgar Luy Perez from Havana.
A new Web site called “Hospital Compare” evaluates hospital death rates around the country and shows how individual hospitals stack up against the national average. Guests discuss the reliability of the data on the site and describe the measures hospitals are taking to improve performance.
Source: NPR
From the Computerworld article:
The recent growth of information sources such as blogs, social networks, news aggregators, microblogs like Twitter, instant messaging and e-mail has been exponential. And with broadband penetration among active Internet users expected to break 90% this year, according to Internet marketing firm Website Optimization LLC, there aren’t many people today who haven’t experienced some form of information overload.
Source: ComputerWorld
An Online Hoax Becomes a Source About a Suspect
It was not hard, in the end, to figure out that the Web site was a hoax, however tantalizing the site was for reporters eager to fill out details on the fugitive life of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader reincarnated as a hippie guru of alternative healing.
Any public search of the site, dragandabic.com, which was named for the identity Mr. Karadzic assumed, could have revealed that the Web address was registered after Mr. Karadzic was arrested last week on charges of war crimes. And, oddly enough, a returning visitor would notice that it was being updated while he was in jail.
Still, the site — with a brief biography, conveniently in English and Serbian, along with some favorite Chinese proverbs — became, in the days after the arrest, a prime source of information for newspapers and Web sites around the world, including news agencies like Agence France-Presse and Reuters and publications like Le Monde.
On Wednesday, in a first and pretty much virtual interview, a person who claimed responsibility for the site said that was exactly his intent.
Source: New York Times
Hat tip: Caryn Baird
‘Tabloid’ spam is worm’s newest turn
No, presidential candidate Barack Obama was not found dead in a “shock accident.” John McCain was not “found unconscious in a toilet.” Will Smith wasn’t “found dead in bathtub” either. And Britney Spears has not broken her arm in a “freak poolside accident.”
The truth is quite a bit more subtle. A Microsoft security upgrade in April largely dismantled a network of hijacked computers used by criminals to send spam, and the hackers are desperately trying to rebuild it. To entice users to click on the links that will infect their computers with the notorious Storm worm, they have dispatched an avalanche of e-mail with fantastic news headlines in recent weeks. The average Net user is getting about 60 of the phony news bulletins per day, says the security firm MessageLabs.
Source: Red Tape Chronicles
Need Press? Repeat: ‘Green,’ ‘Sex,’ ‘Cancer,’ ‘Secret,’ ‘Fat’
The original pitch landed in the inbox with a whiff of medical authenticity overlaid with a snicker-inducing headline: “Toxic Ties to ‘New Shower Curtain Smell’ Evident, According to Latest Laboratory Testing.”
There was a news conference, this release said, at New York University Medical Center. It was led by a doctor representing an obscure if official-sounding group that few people have heard of, the Center for Health, Environment and Justice. There were revelations about how shower curtains that are “routinely sold at multiple retail outlets” and can “release as many as 108 volatile chemicals into the air.”
Thus, the Toxic Shower Curtain Story was born.
ABCNews.com picked up on it, only to debunk it. With varying amounts of credulousness, other outlets ran with it as well, including U.S. News & World Report, The Daily News in New York, MSNBC.com and The Los Angeles Times. The gist of some of the coverage was that it was all a tempest in a bathtub, though other reports took the information at face value.
How do stories of this ilk get such bounce from major news organizations?
Those who make their living composing news releases say there is an art to this easily dismissed craft. Strategic word selection can catapult an announcement about a study, a product or a “breakthrough” onto the evening news instead of to its usual destination — the spam folder or circular file.
“P.R. people want to invest time in things that are going to get picked up, so they try to put something to the ‘who cares?’ and ‘so what?’ test,” said Kate Robins, a longtime public relations consultant. “If you say something is first, most, fastest, tallest — that’s likely to get attention. If you can use the words like ‘money,’ ‘fat,’ ‘cancer’ or ‘sex,’ you’re likely to get some ink in the general audience media.”
…
David B. Armon, the president of PR Newswire, a distribution service for public relations professionals, likens writing a news release to writing a headline for the front page of a newspaper: every word has to do heavy lifting.“It’s a lot more scientific than it used to be,” Mr. Armon said, “because you’re not just trying to get media pickup, but to get search engine attention.”
Source: New York Times
Falling exam passes blamed on Wikipedia ‘littered with inaccuracies’
Wikipedia and other online research sources were yesterday blamed for Scotland’s falling exam pass rates.
The Scottish Parent Teacher Council (SPTC) said pupils are turning to websites and internet resources that contain inaccurate or deliberately misleading information before passing it off as their own work.
The group singled out online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which allows entries to be logged or updated by anyone and is not verified by researchers, as the main source of information.
Standard Grade pass rates were down for the first time in four years last year and the SPTC is now calling for pupils to be given lessons on using the internet appropriately for additional research purposes “before the problem gets out of hand”.
Source: Scotsman.com
Health News Review
From What We Do:
What news stories are reviewed?
HealthNewsReview.org reviews news stories that make a therapeutic claim about:
- Specific treatments
- Procedures
- Investigational drugs or devices
- Vitamins or nutritional supplements
- Diagnostic and screening tests
Who conducts the reviews?
A multi-disciplinary team of reviewers from journalism, medicine, health services research and public health assesses the quality of the stories using a standardized rating system. Stories are graded and critiques are published on this website.
+ Things You Should Know About Medical Research Stories
+ Tools and Links
Information Literacy from the Trenches: How Do Humanities and Social Science Majors Conduct Academic Research? (PDF; 697 KB)
This article examines the ways in which students majoring in humanities and social sciences conceptualize and operationalize course-related research. Findings are presented from an information-seeking behavior study with data collected from student discussion groups, a student survey, and a content analysis of professors’ research assignment handouts. Results indicate that students first use course readings and library resources for academic research and then rely on public Internet sites later in their research process. Students adopt a hybrid approach to course-related research. A majority of students in this study leveraged both human and computer-mediated resources to compensate for their lack of information literacy. In particular, students faced problems with determining information needs for assignments, selecting and critically evaluating resources, and gauging professors’ expectations for quality research.
Source: College & Research Libraries, forthcoming (Alison J. Head)
Blogger turns out to be Hernando’s assistant county attorney
In a local Internet forum, a poster pitches his new online news site touting it as an alternative to the “two dead-tree media sources” now informing readers of the news of Hernando County.
The writer states that his report would appear “without the agenda-driven bias” of the other sources. “That’s why I call myself Mr. News,” the poster proclaims.
Turns out, a more accurate title would be: Mr. Assistant County Attorney.
Source: St. Petersburg Times
Note: RS Senior Editor Shirl Kennedy worked on this story.
“Some of the biggest technology firms, including Microsoft, Intel, Google and I.B.M., are banding together to fight information overload. Last week they formed a nonprofit group to study the problem, publicize it and devise ways to help workers — theirs and others — cope with the digital deluge.”
Source: NY Times
The conference took place last month in Chicago was titled: Librarian as Architect, Planning, Building, and Renewing.
Source: LOEX
+ Researchers’ ‘Facebook’ launched (via EurActiv)
+ Misinformation tangles the web (via IWR)
+ 28 New Documents added to CIA Electronic Reading Room
+ The Associated Press Unveils Findings Of Anthropological Research At World Editors Forum
+ WorldWind (a 3D digital globe) Releases Updated Saturn Add-On
E-mail on military deaths is shaky on facts
A spam e-mail making the rounds in the military community serves as a reminder that facts can be flexible when they are launched anonymously into the vast void of cyberspace.
The e-mail, entitled, “Some very interesting statistics: Military losses, 1980 through 2006,†states that more U.S. service members died on active duty during the eight years of the Clinton administration, when there were no major U.S. military conflicts, than in the first six years of the George W. Bush administration, during which the military was fighting two large-scale wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The e-mail offers year-by-year U.S. military death totals from all causes — operations, illness, accidents, suicides, etc. — from 1980 through 2006.
The data supposedly were taken from a periodically updated Congressional Research Service report on the subject, which in turn is based on statistics compiled by the Pentagon’s Defense Manpower and Data Center.
There’s just one problem: The figures listed in the email are wrong. They vary markedly from the figures published in the cited CRS source document.
…
The claims of this particular e-mail are easily disproved. But the online proliferation of such anonymous documents highlights a serious concern for researchers and scholars about how to separate fact from fiction within the vast quantities of raw material online — and being consumed by users who often have no easy way to gauge the reliability of the information they see.The Web site of The Sheridan Libraries, the main research facility at Johns Hopkins University, includes a lengthy “how to†guide for evaluating Internet information that underscores the difficulty.
“When you use a research or academic library, the books, journals and other resources have already been evaluated by scholars, publishers and librarians,†the Web site states. “Every resource you find has been evaluated in one way or another before you ever see it.â€
Online, however, “none of this applies — there are no filters,†the library Web site states.
Source: Army Times
Hat tip: Secrecy News
As centers of lifelong learning, museums and libraries contain a wealth of resources and information that can help youth fulfill their vast potential. To assist museums and libraries in their development of effective and engaging youth programs, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has published Nine to Nineteen: Youth in Museums and Libraries; A Practitioner’s Guide, the newest resource in the Museums and Libraries Engaging America’s Youth Initiative series.
The guide features several examples of successful youth programming from around the country, as well as useful information for planning exemplary youth programs. In the guide, practitioners can find resources on funding, evaluation, and out-of-school programs gathered from those working in the youth and community development, education, and informal learning fields. Nine to Nineteen is geared toward museums and libraries, but is also useful to community planners, youth development leaders, and educators who want to connect with the many types of organizations and institutions that serve youth in our communities.
Source: IMLS