Find the Author's Name

Tracking down an author's name online can be a tough assignment.

Let's say you want to reference a story about Polly the Polar Bear that you find here.

Who is the author? For this challenge, find the author's first and last name. It CAN be done, although it requires strategy and persistence.

Try the Challenge

If you give up, click the link to the Author Tutorials in the challenge.

Coronavirus Fake News

China Coronavirus

When life gets scary, it's important to think twice about information.


The outbreak of the coronavirus is a good example. As the numbers of people affected and dying grows daily, the amount of misinformation surrounding the outbreak expands globally. Some of the information is considered misleading and unhealthy.

News reports have begun to circulate stories about fake news and the coronavirus. This presents a ripe opportunity to use information fluency to identify fake news claims.

Many people are attracted to a possible solution known as Master Mineral Solution (aka Miracle Mineral Solution or MMS). Here's a sample copied from the testimonial page:

I was teaching a class and all of the sudden, I got a head cold ... This rushed on me like a freight train! I was miserable until evening, then I thought I would take a mega-dose of CDS that I had in the fridge. I just poared some in a glass, added some water to it, and down the hatch! I guess now, it was equal to a 6 drop dose of MMS. Within, say, 2 or 3 minutes, the "cold" left like the wind blowing a raincloud away. Clear as a bell!

Before you go online to place an order--this is also touted as a cure for coronavirus--do some fact checking. 

Try an investigative query like Miracle Mineral Solution coronavirus. Then examine the results:

• Are they positive or negative?
• Who is the publisher?

A summary of the results for the first ten results from this search in Google shows that none of the sources have positive things to say about MMS, using words like "bleach," "QANON," "conspiracy theory," "dangerous," "toxic," "acute liver failure," "vomiting" and more. The sources include rollingstone.com, thedailybeast.com, salon.com, vice.com, businessinsider.com, nypost.com, nymag.com, armstrongmywire.com and inews.co.uk.  These aren't necessarily considered authorities on health issues. But the preponderance of negativity regarding MMS raises a red flag.

Now, if we had confirmation of such claims from a recognized authority, that might convince us not to try MMS. So another query is tried, taking one of the keywords commonly found in the first results: medical authority coronavirus bleach.

The first result includes this information in the snippet (abstract): "But medical authorities, including the US Food and Drugs Administration, have ..."  This invites further reading. Browsing the article, clicking links on the FDA-related information, leads to this page on the fda site: 

FDA warns consumers about the dangerous and potentially life threatening side effects of Miracle Mineral Solution

Here is another Red Flag. If you have students, see what other medical authorities they can find.

Author Detective

Introducing the third revision in our series of Investigative Searching tutorials: AUTHOR.

No need to rely on the old Flash files any longer. There are 11 challenges in this set, from finding the name of an author to evaluating the author's credibility.

Get started here:  https://21cif.com/tutorials/evaluation/author/author-1

Being skeptical about information literacy

Students born in the digital age appear to be seriously challenged by a lack of discernment.

I know this smacks of personal bias. But there is research to support it:

"When it comes to evaluating information that flows across social channels or pops up in a Google search, young and otherwise digital-savvy students can easily be duped, finds a new report from researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education." Source

Access to information is so easy, and there's so much of it, that being discerning is more important than ever. But discernment is not easy. And that's where problems start for information consumers.

Innovators who want to create new products and services for today's market are literally forced to make things easier. Making something harder to do or use has no appeal. I cringe a little when I say that a good practice is to triangulate information. No one's going to do that unless they are really concerned about keeping their job or doing good scholarship.

On the other hand, what's the alternative? Making it easy. Demonstrating gullibility or an inability to think. Unless the stakes are high, most people may be able cope with that label.

While doing the hard thing (investigative searching) seems like the right thing to do, no normal person will volunteer to do it. They have to be made to do it.

In whose hands is the future of information literacy? Developers who can design apps that provide ever-easier access to information by which we can determine the source and reputation of information? Teachers who require students to learn skills that require time and effort?

I find Kalev Leetaru's suggestion in Forbes to have value--a developer's solution--for making one aspect of investigative searching easier. Instead of having to conduct a time-consuming search to triangulate information, it may be possible to aggregate tagged information to support or discredit statements:

"a browser or Facebook plugin that automatically identified quotes and factual assertions from an article and compiled a list of all reporting on those quotes and statements would at the very least allow a reader to understand how contested those details are. For example, a rapidly spreading viral meme attributing a certain statement to President Obama this afternoon could instantly be flagged as actually being a quote by Abraham Lincoln from a century and a half ago. A climate change claim that temperatures have actually dropped by 20 degrees over the past century could show that this number comes from a single personal blog, while all remaining reporting and scientific journals report very different results. Or, in the breaking aftermath of a major terror attack, such a tool could draw together all of the conflicting reports of the death and injury toll to offer a better understanding of the extent of the attack as new information emerges."

Such an app doesn't teach the reader how to find supporting documentation, but at least it gives the reader a chance to make up his or her mind by referring to other sources of information. Whether this solves a problem of information literacy or kicks it further down the road is something to consider.

The High Cost of Trust

Trusting information turned tragic when Wei Zexi, from Shaanxi province in China, died on April 12 after undergoing experimental medical treatment promoted on Baidu, the Chinese search equivalent of Google.

The typical hasty grab for digital information is seldom so terminal, but the common denominator is a failure to investigate.  What's different in Wei's case is that Baidu is criticized for failing to investigate the claims made by the advertisers it promoted in search results.

So, who's to blame? A search engine for failing to vet its advertisements? A student for believing information provided by a search engine?

It's always a problem of what or whom to trust. It cannot be assumed a search engine can be trusted, even if the ads at the top of the page are paid by a hospital. It should be interesting how the case will be resolved in China. Breaking Baidu's search engine monopoly, which has been suggested, isn't necessarily an answer. Training searchers to investigate the information for themselves is a more responsible and trustworthy solution.

Start investigating here

Information Fluency Investigative Challenges

Email Spam

source: photobucket

Information Fluency applies to more than academic research.

Here's an example of a spam email that could trip up an unsuspecting friend, especially if the circumstances were right.

I happen to know that my friend Fred is not currently in the Philippines. But if I didn't know that or, worse yet, knew that he was visiting there, I might be less skeptical and more willing to help.

Here's the email, which I assume has been going around the Internet for some time:

Good Morning,

I really hope you get this fast. I could not inform anyone about our trip, because it was impromptu. we had to be in Philippines for Tour. The program was successful, but our journey has turned sour. we misplaced our wallet and cell phone on our way back to the hotel we lodge in after we went for sight seeing. The wallet contained all the valuables we had. Now, our Luggage is in custody of the hotel management pending when we make payment. all we have left are just our Passports. I am sorry if i am inconveniencing you, but i have only very few people to run to now. i will be indeed very grateful if i can get a short term loan from you ($2,600). this will enable me sort our hotel bills and get my sorry self back home. I will really appreciate whatever you can afford in assisting me with. I promise to refund it in full as soon as I return. let me know if you can be of any assistance. Please, let me know soonest.

All hopes on you

Peace

Fred

Interestingly, Fred is the type of person who would sign Peace. This could be a coincidence, but the day is coming when spammers who know something about us, including if we're on a trip, will certainly take advantage of that information.

The conclusive investigative technique I used to verify that this was not the Fred I know (who uses better grammar than this) was to compare the email addresses.  The From email was in fact Fred's. The Reply to was not, but eerily close: an additional letter had been added to the name, as in this example:

original:  ftxyx@yahoo.com   close copy:  ftxyyz@yahoo.com

It pays to check email addresses.

If you have examples to share (even with other solutions), post them here.

Finding a Publication Date

Here's a common problem: You find a resource online that you want to cite, but the publication date is missing.

The case in question here is this article by Joseph Renzulli: A Practical System for Identifying Gifted and Talented Students.

The article references a number of studies and articles from the 1980's. How recent is the article itself?

It's not a hard problem to solve. Normally, start on the page itself and if clues don't reveal themselves, truncate the URL to see if there's a directory with date information, or try Page Info to see when the page was last updated. Upon investigation, there doesn't immediately seem to be a listing of articles on the site and the last update for this page was in 2013. This doesn't seem that accurate since the article is mostly about older findings.

So one investigation technique is to query Google (or another database) with the title of the article.

Try it and see what date you find.