Information Power The mission of the library media program is to ensure that students and staff are effective users of ideas and information. This mission is accomplished: by providing intellectual and physical access to materials in all formats by providing instruction to foster competence and stimulate interest in reading, viewing, and using information and ideas by working with other educators to design learning strategies to meet the needs of individual students. --Information Power: Guidelines for School Library Media Programs (1988), p.1 The mission statement for Information Power: Guidelines for School Library Media Programs is as relevant today is it was in 1988, and so it remains the mission statement for the information literacy standards for student learning as well and for Information Power: Building Partnerships for Learning. Excerpted from Chapter 1, "The Vision," of Information Power: Building Partnerships for Learning.
Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth” world We were guaranteed a free press, We were not guaranteed a neutral or a true press. We can celebrate the journalistic freedom to publish without interference from the state. We can also celebrate our freedom to share multiple stories through multiple lenses. But it has always been up to the reader or viewer to make the reliability and credibility decisions. It is up to the reader or viewer to negotiate truth. News literacy is complicated. People who think their opinions are superior to others are most prone to overestimating their relevant knowledge and ignoring chances to learn more By guest blogger Tom Stafford We all know someone who is convinced their opinion is better than everyone else’s on a topic – perhaps, even, that it is the only correct opinion to have. Maybe, on some topics, you are that person.
The Heroes of America's Startup Economy Weren't Born in America According to the Entrepreneurship Rate indicator of the Inc. Entrepreneurship Index, Inc.'s proprietary benchmarked score representing the health of American startups, the percentage of entrepreneurs who are immigrants is currently close to a 20-year high. Today, they are a large reason the Inc. Entrepreneurship Index has remained relatively stable at 87 out of 100 in the first quarter of 2018, down almost imperceptibly from 88 out of 100 in the quarter prior.
Fact-checking an immigration meme that's been circulating for more than a decade A viral image on social media -- one that’s critical of illegal immigration -- has been circulating for years. The list of claims first circulated in the form of a chain email in 2006, according to Snopes.com. Six years later, we checked several of the claims ourselves. With immigration in the headlines today, these claims are popular again. So we’ll take a fresh look at them here. All told, the list is heavy with claims that are unsupported, misleading, or simply wrong. Manufacturer Confirms Installing Remote-Access Software on U.S. Voting Machines CHANGING ITS STORY. Election hacking is at the top of everyone’s mind right now, thanks to the controversy surrounding the 2016 Presidential election. But a new report by Motherboard suggests the issue is far from new.
Our brains rapidly and automatically process opinions we agree with as if they are facts By Christian Jarrett In a post-truth world of alternative facts, there is understandable interest in the psychology behind why people are generally so wedded to their opinions and why it is so difficult to change minds. We already know a lot about the deliberate mental processes that people engage in to protect their world view, from seeking out confirmatory evidence (the “confirmation bias“) to questioning the methods used to marshal contradictory evidence (the scientific impotence excuse). Now a team led by Anat Maril at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem report in Social Psychological and Personality Science that they have found evidence of rapid and involuntarily mental processes that kick-in whenever we encounter opinions we agree with, similar to the processes previously described for how we respond to basic facts. Now, across four studies, Maril and her team have found that something similar occurs for opinions.
Donald Trump's 'missing' server comments get all of the details wrong Standing beside Russian President Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump answered reporters' questions about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and if he believed Putin’s denials over his own intelligence community’s findings. Instead of answering the question directly, Trump began discussing servers. "You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server -- haven't they taken the server. Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the Democratic National Committee? I've been wondering that, I've been asking that for months and months and I've been tweeting it out and calling it out on social media.
Fake news 2.0: personalized, optimized, and even harder to stop Fake news may have already influenced politics in the US, but it’s going to get a lot worse, warns an AI consultant to the CIA. Sean Gourley, founder and CEO of Primer, a company that uses software to mine data sources and automatically generate reports for the CIA and other clients, told a conference in San Francisco that the next generation of fake news would be far more sophisticated thanks to AI. “The automation of the generation of fake news is going to make it very effective,” Gourley told the audience at EmTech Digital, organized by MIT Technology Review. The warning should cause concern at Facebook. The social network has been embroiled in a scandal after failing to prevent fake news, some of it created by Russian operatives, from reaching millions of people in the months before the 2016 presidential election. More recently the company been hit by the revelation that it let Cambridge Analytica, a company tied to the Trump presidential campaign, mine users’ personal data.
Putin's Pants-on-Fire claim about $400 million donation to Clinton from Bill Browder partners Russian President Vladimir Putin offered a novel idea to advance the Russia investigation during a joint news conference with President Donald Trump in Helsinki. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team could come to his country, Putin said, if Russian investigators were allowed to go the United States to dig into alleged tax evasion by American-born financier Bill Browder and his associates. "Business associates of Mr.
Is NASA Planning to Geoengineer Yellowstone’s Supervolcano Threat Away? Despite repeatedly claiming that the Yellowstone caldera does not pose a super-eruption risk in our lifetimes, NASA has admitted the threat is real and is working to geoengineer a solution to negate that risk. In the realm of of science-based clickbait, no topic is more reliable for delivering page views and social media shares than claims that the pool of magma sitting below Yellowstone National Park is about to erupt in a humanity-ending cataclysm. As we have repeatedly, exhaustingly, and redundantly reported, the likelihood of that mega-disaster’s occurring in the next couple of thousand years is extremely low, and the region is monitored continuously for threatening activity which would provide ample warning if that situation were to change for some currently unknown reason. A perfect example of the pervasiveness of this claim (and, perhaps, the futility of fact-checking it), comes from the apocalypse-oriented website Breaking Israel News. The reference to a “100 ft.
Sean Hannity cites misleading Obama quote in coverage of Russian election meddling Moments before airing his interview with President Donald Trump in Helsinki, Fox News host Sean Hannity slammed former President Barack Obama for his pre-election rhetoric on Russia. But Hannity’s remarks were misleading, and the words he attributed to Obama were taken out of context. "We all know that Russian election meddling is not new at all," Hannity said in his opening monologue on July 16. "And despite this, in 2016, when Hillary Clinton appeared to have a firm lead in the polls — oh, just before the election — it was President Obama who laughed off any notion that American elections could possibly be tampered with."
False News Travels Farther, Faster Than The Truth, MIT Study Finds They say bad news travels fast, but a new study suggests that false news does as well. And, at least on Twitter, it goes even farther than facts. "False news travels farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in every category of information and sometimes by an order of magnitude," said Sinan Aral, the paper’s senior author and head of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. People who use Twitter are novelty junkies, the study suggests, and they often forward surprising, disgusting or fear-inducing information without stopping to check if it's true. Previous research has found that someone who shares novel information gains social status, because they seem to have inside information, Aral says. "Obviously, it's easy to be more novel when you're unconstrained by reality," he says.
I’ve Been Reporting on MS-13 for a Year. Here Are the 5 There’s one thing everyone can agree with President Donald Trump on about the street gang MS-13: The group specializes in spectacular violence. Its members attack in groups, in the woods, at night, luring teens to their deaths with the promise of girls or weed. One Long Island boy told me he doesn’t go to parties anymore because he worries any invitation could be a trap. A victim’s father showed me a death certificate that said his son’s head had been bashed in, then lowered his voice and added that the boy’s bones had been marked by machete slashes, but he didn’t want the mother to know that.