Consumers Warned to Avoid Fake E-mails Tied to Bank Mergers

Online scammers are taking advantage of tough economic times. While e-mails phishing for sensitive data are nothing new, scammers are taking advantage of upheavals in the financial marketplace to confuse consumers into parting with valuable personal information.

The Federal Trade Commission urges caution regarding e-mails that look as if they come from a financial institution that recently acquired a consumer’s bank, savings and loan, or mortgage. In fact, these messages may be from “phishers” looking to use personal information – account numbers, passwords, Social Security numbers – to run up bills or commit other crimes in a consumer’s name.

+ Bank Failures, Mergers and Takeovers: A ‘Phish-erman’s Special

Logging On for a Second (or Third) Opinion

…paging Dr. Google can lead patients to miss a rich lode of online resources that may not yield to a simple search. Sometimes just adding a word makes all the difference. Searching for the name of a certain cancer will bring up the Wikipedia entry and several information sites from major hospitals, drug companies and other providers. Add the word “community” to that search, Ms. Fox said, and “it’s like falling into an alternate universe,” filled with sites that connect patients.

As a result, said Dr. Ted Eytan, medical director for delivery systems operations improvement at the Permanente Federation, “patients aren’t learning from Web sites — they’re learning from each other.” The shift is nothing less than “the democratization of health care,” he went on, adding, “Now you can become a national expert in your bedroom.”

Source: New York Times

From the article:

New research from Indiana University has found evidence that how we search for things, such as our car keys or umbrella, could be related to how we search for more abstract needs, such as words in memory or solutions to problems. “Common underlying search mechanisms may exist that drive our behavior in many different domains,” explains IU cognitive scientist Peter Todd.

Source: SCiSCOOP

From National Public Radio:

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

Direct to report (PDF, 6 pages).

Source: Harris Interactive

From the intro:

In 2007, 56 percent of American adults-more than 122 million people-sought information about a personal health concern, up from 38 percent in 2001, according to a new national study by the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC). Use of all information sources rose substantially, with the Internet leading the way: Internet information seeking doubled to 32 percent during the six-year period. Consumers across all categories of age, education, income, race/ethnicity and
health status increased their information seeking significantly, but education level remained the key factor in explaining how likely people are to seek health information. Although elderly Americans-65 and
older-sharply increased their information seeking, they still trail younger Americans by a substantial margin, especially in using Internet information sources. Consumers who actively researched health concerns widely reported positive impacts: More than half said the information changed their overall approach to maintaining their health, and four in five said that the information helped them to better understand how to treat an illness or condition.

Source: Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC)

Hat Tip: M.Z.

From the memo summary:

The percentage of internet users who use search engines on a typical day has been steadily rising from about one-third of all users in 2002, to a new high of just under one-half (49%). With this increase, the number of those using a search engine on a typical day is pulling ever closer to the 60% of internet users who use email, arguably the internet all-time killer app, on a typical day.

Direct to Full Text Memo
6 pages; PDF.

Source: Pew Internet and American Life Project

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)

From the article:

“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

Direct to Presentations

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

From the article:

Employees at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory can now use the lab’s search engine to find some useful resources: each other.

Lab employees, information technology personnel and experts on various subject matters can all be located with a few key words.

“[We’re] making the data more contextual and personal,” Scott Studham, the lab’s chief information officer, said at the Gartner InFocus Day gathering today.

Source: FCW

Internet Information and Communication Behavior during a Political Moment: The Iraq War, March 2003

This article explores the Internet as a resource for political information and communication in March 2003, when American troops were first sent to Iraq, offering us a unique setting of political context, information use, and technology. Employing a national survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life project. We examine the political information behavior of the Internet respondents through an exploratory factor analysis; analyze the effects of personal demographic attributes and political attitudes, traditional and new media use, and technology on online behavior through multiple regression analysis; and assess the online political information and communication behavior of supporters and dissenters of the Iraq War. The factor analysis suggests four factors: activism, support, information seeking, and communication. The regression analysis indicates that gender, political attitudes and beliefs, motivation, traditional media consumption, perceptions of bias in the media, and computer experience and use predict online political information behavior, although the effects of these variables differ for the four factors. The information and communication behavior of supporters and dissenters of the Iraq War differed significantly. We conclude with a brief discussion of the value of “interdisciplinary poaching” for advancing the study of Internet information practices.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 352 KB)

Source: E-LIS

The Tenth International Conference on Grey Literature will take place in Amsterdam this December. The conference is titled, “Designing the Grey Grid for Information Society.”

The conference program is now available here.

Source: GL10