Debunking Myth in Iran

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Wahyu Dhyatmika

Why climate change won’t fit in a tweet (a non-assignment)

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Giovana Girardi

Updated at 17:10

As a journalist, I’ve written about climate change long enough to know that no matter what is your approach to tackle the issue, you will always face some comment of disagreement. I’ve tried everything: longs stories, short stories, beautiful explanatory graphics, bullet key points, pure scientific stories, stories with the human side. You name it. Still there were always some people insisting in don’t believe in it. Period.

This feeling was reinforced when I heard this 14 year old girl, Erin Gustafson, maintain her disbelief in what she calls as a “propaganda” even after a very long explanation with the best scientific knowledge about climate change available today. I had the impression that she simply chose not accept, even with a professor answering absolutely all her questions.

So I had what I thought a brilliant idea. Reach as many climate scientists and communicators as I could to ask their help with this challenge using a new strategy: a tweet with 140 characters trying to convince a skeptical, denier, disbeliever – whatever name you prefer – about climate change.

My intention was to have a nice collection of strong sentences and then work with them in same graphic way. Following the suggestions of “The Debunking handbook”, I imagined the tweets could be effective for at least two aspects: would focus on the facts and be simple enough to be more cognitively attractive. I also suggested them to use not just science, but also emotions and values in their sentences.

I sent 22 e-mails with the same request to renowned climate researchers at MIT, Harvard, Yale e from some Brazilian institutions as well to a few climate communicators from NGOs. Seriously, 22! Hoping that I could get maybe 10. But the result surprised me negatively:

3 positive answers

1 traditional answer suggesting me some papers, but without a tweet

1 “interesting idea, I will think about it”

1 “ I’d be glad to help but I am dealing with a medical emergency with my daughter”

1 “I’m not sure I can reduce this argument to 140 characters”

1 “If I understand correctly, you are asking Prof. XXX to distill mountains of data into a single sentence?”

I guess the last answer was probably what some of the others also thought because the rest 16 14 people invited to participate in this challenge just decided to ignore me.

In a sincere appreciation to those three (two Brazilian researchers and one environmentalist that were my sources in several occasions) who gave me answers (more than one, in fact), I will share them here.

“Believe in science or not, reducing emissions, pollution, preparing ourselves for severe weather is unreservedly good. It is about your and mine welfare.”
Carrlos Rittl, environmentalist, Observatório do Clima

“The problem with deniers is not lack of information. Some of them are paid for the fossil fuel industry, so their concerns are economical not scientific”
Paulo Artaxo, professor of Environmental Physics, University of Sao Paulo, and member of IPCC

Wei-Hock Soon, scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. Released documents showed he has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade.

Wei-Hock Soon, scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, have been claiming that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. Released documents showed he has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade.

“What about we try to build a sustainable society considering the responsible use of natural resources?”
Paulo Artaxo, professor of Environmental Physics, University of Sao Paulo, and member of IPCC

“The extreme events are getting more frequents. The number of days with temperatures above 34ºC has been growing exponentially since 1990.”
Eduardo Assad, agronomist, Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa)

***

I think my unsuccessful task can at least bring some thoughts for discussion. I wasn’t expecting to explain the entire issue just in 140 characters. But imagine something like a campaign in Twitter. If hundreds of smart people, with strong messages, started tweeting these messages with hashtags like #thinkclimate, #changeyourmind, #climatematters. It wouldn’t just be one sentence, but many. Honestly I think could be a powerful thing.

Of course that by myself, for the sake of this assignment, I could have found hundreds of facts to present here as a truth claims about climate change. Just for the record, for me, one of the most eloquent is this:

2014 was the warmest year since 1880. The 10 warmest years in the record, with the exception of 1998, have now occurred since 2000.

But my intention was to use real people, that dedicate their lives to this issue, to help me think in a different way to convince people. I guess the idea of a tweet may have sound offensive and almost absurd. But what shocked me was to find almost no one willing to try something new. At least not here in a school project.

A threat to our democracy… ?

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Austin Hess

Some public officials have been sounding the alarm about a type of crime they say goes unpunished and has devastating consequences for American democracy. These officials have proposed laws in recent years to prevent instances of this crime, but their critics have said that those laws are an overreaction to a tiny problem and that the proposed laws do far more harm than what they’re trying to prevent.

Before we talk about the complicated details about this issue, let’s try to understand how prevalent this specific crime — let’s call it X for now — is by comparing it to more commonly discussed violations of the law.

The FBI compiled the statistics on the violent crimes, and in America there are thousands or millions of instances of these crimes per year. But X is so rare that there are no centralized records of it. An expert on the subject found there were at most only 22 “credible cases” of X between 2000 and 2010, and only 9 more from 2010-2014. Virtually all other analyses find similarly miniscule rates of X. But it’s not a violent or high profile type of crime.

So what is X and why are some politicians so worried about it?

We’re talking about in-person voter impersonation — the possibility that someone would vote using the name and voter registration of someone else, or perhaps the identity of a deceased person. It doesn’t sound like a very effective way to cheat an election and, not surprisingly, is therefore almost never attempted.

Of course, politicians are right to want to ensure that elections are fair and equitable, and if there were a massive epidemic of impersonation, a swift response would be appropriate. After all, in today’s often close elections, even a few tenths of percentage points can make a difference to the outcome. But the “problem” of impersonation in elections is so rare as to have almost no effect.

Even if all 31 of the possible instances of voter misrepresentation in the past 15 years were actually criminal attempts to cheat the vote rather than simple clerical errors, and even if they all had occurred together in even the closest national election during that period, they couldn’t have changed the outcome. In fact, there were 1 billion votes cast during that period, meaning in-person voter fraud accounted for at most .000000031 percent of those votes.

To put it another way, comparing the ratio of impersonated votes to real votes is like comparing your running speed to the speed of light.

Well, even if it’s not a big problem, what’s wrong with still trying hard to prevent it?

Most politicians who say they want to crack down on this type of unlawful voting do so by proposing new, strict laws that require people to have certain types of identification — often photo ID — to vote.

In 2014, 31 states had standing laws requiring some form of ID. Many new laws have been added since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby v. Holder to strike down part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act designed to prevent discriminatory voting laws.

But these laws aren’t harmless. Many people don’t have the right kind of ID already, and getting that ID might be too expensive for some, putting up high practical barriers to people who want to exercise their constitutional right to vote.

A study by a bipartisan government group, the Government Accountability Office, found that 5 to 16 percent of people lacked proper identification depending on the state. It also found that after some states implemented strict voter ID laws, voter turnout decreased as much as two percent or more.

In particular, this type of ID law seem to discriminate against poor people and people from racial minority groups.

From the same study, the direct costs of obtaining the type of ID could range from $14.50 to $58.50, a more significant burden for those of limited means.

In one of the studies considered by the GAO’s analysis, 85 percent of whites versus 81 percent of African-Americans had the correct type of ID. In a study by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, just 8 percent of white respondents who didn’t vote in the 2008 general election cited having the wrong ID as a “major” or “minor” factor in not doing so, compared to 24 percent of Blacks, 28 percent of Latinos, and 78 percent of Asians.

So what are proponents of voter ID laws really trying to do?

There’s evidence that the people proposing strict voter ID laws have more sinister motives. Almost all those proposing stricter voter ID laws are Republicans, and those people less likely to have proper ID and therefore have a higher bar to voting under such laws tend to lean Democrat.

According to the Caltech/MIT study, almost 16 percent of Democrat non-voters cited having the wrong ID as a “major” or “minor” factor for not voting in the 2008 general election, compared to about 9 percent for Republicans.

More importantly, some of the people in favor of such laws admit their intentions. One Pennsylvania lawmaker said an ID law, later struck down, would allow Republican Mitt Romney to win the state in the 2012 presidential election.

What’s the takeaway?

We should be skeptical of those who use vague fears to pass laws that restrict people’s freedom to vote.

Further reading:

UFO Sightings Are More Common Than Voter Fraud

[Comments: I went into this expecting to do a lot of charts/visualizations/maps, but then realized that a number of the sources I was looking at did a great job with the subject, but these would simply never be seen by people with pre-decided views on the subject. So instead I decided to just link to them in the piece without even mentioning the parts of the issue that could turn people off until I had tried to draw in the reader, and then colorfully convey the extent of the “problem” before going into a more detailed argument about the laws. I can’t really tell if the technique works well or if it comes off as patronizing, so feedback is appreciated. I also made sure to avoid using the term “voter fraud,” because it is politically charged and because voter ID laws are irrelevant to the type of voting fraud that is most common.]

This is not a hologram

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Bianca Datta

This week, Carol and I wanted to explore the idea of conveying complex scientific information while debunking some common misconceptions on display technology.

In the upcoming day(s), we’ll work on creating a more immersive presentation that employs parallax, but for now, check out our thoughts on Medium: https://medium.com/@biancadatta/this-is-not-a-hologram-324310087bcc

Adventures in Obtaining Diversity Metrics

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Sophie Chou

This week’s assignment was about debunking myths: employing methods to shine truths into the minds of readers who are often systematically, politically, stubbornly biased against the facts given.

Often it is mind-boggling that these myths are able to persist: issues like human-caused climate change are so heavily supported by scientific evidence and harbor such great consequences, it seems that common sense calls for a belief in its existence. Mythbunking, however, is rarely about common sense, and almost always about human psychology. It’s a surgical operation: “when you debunk a myth, you create a gap in the person’s mind. To be effective, your debunking must fill that gap” [the Skeptical Science Debunking Handbook].

A myth, and thus mythbunking, therefore, seems to be defined not by what class of problem the issue is in (environment, vaccination, gun control), but rather one’s attitude towards the concept at hand. When there is a lag between perception and reality, and an avoidance to voice the reality, despite the support of statistics, then we have a myth of the Skeptical Science kind. Even though the issue that I ended up exploring in the end isn’t as clearly divided as black and white (or maybe it is precisely too much black and white), it follows all of these trademark characteristics.

Although it would be hard to believe that anyone who has spent time at MIT to refuse to acknowledge any skew in demographics, the narrative that emerged out of my attempts to retrieve facts about the degree in which diversity was a problem in recruiting and admissions reinforced myths more subtle and potentially harmful– those of our own misguided perceptions.

Gender Representation is significant issue in both student and faculty body.

In terms of sheer numbers, there are far fewer women than men throughout the lab. In a total of 198 students listed on the Media Lab webpage, only about 25% (or 50 students) were female. 7 out of 27 groups, or about 26% (my own included) have only 1 female student.

Tokenization (not as in lexical analysis, but as in there is a token representation of a minority) is harmful in that it encourages stereotype threat: the risk of confirming to stereotype, leading to underperformance of the individual in a workplace or academic environment (for a summary, see this fact sheet).

Faculty fares even worse in terms of gender, with only 5 female professors out of 31 total, or 16%. Of those 5 female professors, only 2 are tenured faculty, or 6%. This is half the national average for Engineering, last measured in 2011 by the NSF.

Moreover, in my attempts to obtain these statistics, I found it difficult to get a unified response from directors and administrators. In the end, I was advocated against using the data that I had previously found from the official Diversity Committee, whose website does not contain any concrete figures.

As a result, I used language processing on the listings on the Media Lab website and inferred the most probable gender of students and faculty by name, using the Gendre API which searches databases of first and last name combinations by country. It is important to note that my counts are of inferred gender by probability, and an estimate of how a student might actually self-identify.

Although the female students and faculty who are within the lab have a strong and significant presence (such as Pattie Maes, who is the Associate Head of the MAS Program and whose brief report earlier this month prompted me to explore this issue in the first place), this lends an exaggerated effect of parity, which isn’t the case.

The Media Lab has an even bigger problem with minority representation. Whereas gender inequality has made some small but not insignificant strides in the last two decades, the number of URMs (under represented minorities) has stayed extremely low and in some cases worsened. I was asked not to cite these materials in my work. I was not able to use linguistic analysis to try to infer people’s race and ethnicity, for both practical and ethical reasons.

Personality traits predict online behavior

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Sarah Genner

The famous marshmallow test found that self-regulation in childhood can predict future success. The premise of the test is simple: You can eat one marshmallow now or, if you can wait, you get to eat two marshmallows later. The results were astonishing: the preschoolers who were able to wait for two marshmallows, over the course of their lives, have a lower BMI, lower rates of addiction, a lower divorce rate and higher SAT scores.
Similar studies have had success in linking personality traits to online behavior. Introverts disclose more information online than offline, but extroverts generally disclose more about themselves in either situation. Numerous studies have tested the effects of personality traits such as extraversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness on technology use. The findings show that personality dimensions can predict the way individuals interact with digital technologies.

Recent research has found links between extrovert and narcissistic personalities and Internet use. However, these links are statistical correlations, and do not necessarily show causation. Correlations and causations tend to often get confused despite routine warnings in standard statistical texts. The most common illustration of this mix-up is the positive correlation between the number of storks nesting in a series of springs and the number of human babies born at that time.

Surprisingly, the correlation between the number of storks nesting and the number of human babies born does not prove the stork brings babies.

A very common mistake made by news media journalists—one has to believe it is quite often a deliberate mistake—is the interpretation of correlations as causations. I argue it is a deliberate mistake because it makes headlines sound more snappy: “Smartphones encourage narcissism”, “The Internet ‘Narcissism Epidemic’”, “The rise of the selfie and digital narcissism.” Such headlines and entire media reports are reinforcing the myth that technology causes narcissism, even though the studies many news reports rely on have found a correlation only.

Similarly, some journalists use data from long-term studies to claim that the current generation is more narcissistic than the generations before. But how do these studies link to increased use of web-based technologies? The answer is that they do not, but for those who are willing to believe technology is the cause of many downsides in our culture, it is easy to see proof of their suspicions. In reality, there are many other potential causes of higher narcissism levels, such as increases in general individualistic tendencies in Western societies over the last decades.

Indeed, the idea that individuals with personality traits like extraversion, neuroticism, or narcissism are more likely to engage in active use of social media technologies is much more evidence-based than the idea that social media causes these traits. If studies test narcissism levels of social media users and non-users, it is not surprising when they find higher levels among active social media users because previous research on personality traits supports the hypothesis that narcissistic personalities are more active social media users. But no study up to date has been able to prove that the stork (or in this case, technology) brings the babies (narcissism).

Unsung values: To protect and serve

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Léa Steinacker

Here is my Medium story on claims around implicit racial bias and law enforcement.

Time to end prohibition, this time on drugs (debunking “warcotics”)

Posted on March 10, 2015 by David Jimenez

The US has gone to war 14 times since the end of the II Word War, combating from Korea to Afghanistan. But there is one war that historians usually fail to add to the list, and it is the one Washington has been fighting – and losing – for the longest period of time.

The war on drugs, launched in its modern version by Richard Nixon in 1971, and still presented as a success by it supporters, has failed to reduce consumption in the US or diminish the business of the drug cartels. It has increased drug related crime, provoked an explosion of incarcerations in the developed world and aggravated conflicts in different parts of the world, as the example of Mexico clearly shows. Aren’t we repeating the mistakes of the years of alcohol prohibition, in a much bigger scale?

Five charts suggests that a new approach is needed and could have a bigger chance to work. It would have to include the legalization and regulation of drugs and the allocation of the billions spent today in “warcotics” in addiction treatment, crop alternatives in countries were drugs are produced and tobacco like health campaigns to educate people on the dangers of drug consumption.

Continue reading →

Truth Claim: The Measles Vaccine

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Gideon Gil

You have done everything you can to protect your child.

You breastfed her.

You put her in a car seat.

You insisted he wear a bike helmet.

You decided not to vaccinate your child against measles because of the risk of a serious side effect.

The US Centers for Disease Control says about 1 in 3,000 people suffer a seizure after getting the shot.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOXOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

That’s similar to the risk of developing breast cancer during pregnancy, according to the American Cancer Society – a chance millions of women accept annually.

Still, since measles is uncommon in the United States and the death rate is less than 1 in 1,000, many parents decide against vaccinating their children.

That seemed like a reasonable choice — until last December. That’s when someone with measles visited Disneyland, sparking an outbreak that has now stricken 142 people in seven states. Most were unvaccinated.

Measles is more infectious than even Ebola. And unlike Ebola, it can be spread by a child who looks perfectly healthy – no sneezing, no cough, no fever, no rash. The germ can survive in the air or on surfaces for up to two hours. A child could have been infected simply by getting on a Disneyland ride after the infected visitor.

One Disneyland ride, Peter Pan’s Flight, lasts 130 seconds. In two hours, at least 50 children could have ridden on the same car as the infected person and been exposed to measles.

The vaccine is the only way to protect your child against measles.

Myth debunked: MACs Do Get Viruses

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Charles Kaioun

For this assignment, I wanted to explore video making as I think it is a powerful way to captivate attention and transmit a message. The style is inspired from BuzzFeed’s videos which are typical of this kind of subject… Hope this will convince you…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvax_UrMVh8

Future of News and Participatory Media

Treating newsgathering as an engineering problem… since 2012!

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