Something I’m fascinated with right now — expressive responding in polls. Consider this chart which recently made the rounds: That’s right, after the election, Republican confidence in the economy skyrocketed, from -46 to +27. Meanwhile, Democratic confidence moderately declined. But what does that mean, really? Does that mean that partisan identity is so strong that… Continue reading

Today’s assignment: Was novel reading a reason for admitting women into an asylum in the 1800s?   Continue reading

So, given the Twitter user name on this one, you can probably ignore it. But just in case an uncle at Thanksgiving wants to know, what are these pictures really of? Where do they come from? Here’s a picture for you to source: Continue reading

My University of Mary Washington talk was exciting because it was new territory, but a tad less concise than I generally like. It was about an hour. That’s too bad about the length, because the talk was a really great introduction to the subject, and I need an intro I can link to for beginners.… Continue reading

There are many ways in which wiki is the perfect vehicle for a fact-checking site. First, the nature of the wiki consensus helps guarantee a fair treatment of issues from multiple perspectives. Second, the nature of wiki (when a particular scale is met) is that it is quick to respond to new information — much… Continue reading

There are a couple of grafs in a recent NYT article that sum up our current civic information environment. From a story about Trump voters being surprised Trump is cutting their benefits comes this gem: Moreno was sitting at a table with his boss, Rocky Payton, the factory’s general manager, and Amy Saum, the human… Continue reading

This is floated into my view from alt-right Facebook earlier today: It’s a set of tables from an unknown source showing that there were appx. 15 million Jews in the world in 1933 and 15 million in the world in 1948, the implication being that the Holocaust never happened. Now, if you’re like me, your… Continue reading

My solution to the post-truth crisis is to develop a culture of collaborative explanation and exploration via development and use of new and different tools. My belief is that humans have a couple modes of working with truth. Some are adversarial and propagative, and some are exploratory and collaborative. The adversarial mode is killing us.… Continue reading

From a great New Yorker article that ran last month: In a study conducted in 2012, they asked people for their stance on questions like: Should there be a single-payer health care system? Or merit-based pay for teachers? Participants were asked to rate their positions depending on how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the… Continue reading

I’ve talked about how you have three basic moves in web investigations: Check for previous work Go upstream Read laterally These can be used on simple claims (“Bernie Sanders shouted ‘Death to America’ at a Communist rally”) to get an answer quickly. But the real reason I like this set of moves is that they… Continue reading