I fact-checked a piece on The Blaze reporting on CNN being awarded the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism on their town hall event titled “The Students of Stoneman Douglas Demand Action.” See my bounce annotations.

American biscuits are known for their simple ingredients, humble origins, and delicious buttery flavor. Contrary to some opinions, they can be made anywhere in the US with enough attention paid to process and basic, not-so-special ingredients.

The hot topic of 2018 (discourse on which triggered by a well intentioned Atlantic article) was the flour used to make the biscuits. True to their low maintenance form, biscuits quire a low-protein more-refined flour: all purpose flour, the most accessible throughout the US. This flour enables a flaky, crumbly texture, closer to a pastry or croissant (optionally made with pastry flour) rather than gluten-full bread (bread flour). For a more delicate texture (but not necessarily more delicious or authentic), you could mix the AP flour with pastry flour.

Next, cold ingredients are key, especially the butter. If the butter is not icy cold, it will combine completely with the other ingredients, and an over mixed dough will lose the flakiness and lightness moisture and fat pockets provide.

Finally, one must not work the dough for more than 10-20 turns. Too much more would melt the butter, over mix, build too much gluten, and toughen up the dough. Rather, once the dough is mixed enough so there are little flour pockets but there are still clear little chunks of butter, roll out the dough and cut out circles using a jar lid or glass. Place on a lightly buttered pan and bake!

As an eager and experimental baker, I love a good baking challenge. So when Amanda Mull of the Atlantic wrote the article that inspired this piece, “Why Most of America is Terrible at Making Biscuits,” I had to test to see if her claims were true. Was most of America terrible at making biscuits? Was I not up to the challenge?

I tested her hypothesis. On first try, my biscuits were terrible and I subscribed to her statement that White Lily flour, not available in most of the US, was key. Upon a second attempt and some follow up research inspired by this NPR article, found her claims to be false.

I fact checked a Breitbart piece documenting a Jake Tapper-Elizabeth Warren interview in which Warren agrees with Tapper that Mississippi should change its flag.
My fact-checking annotation of the article, via Bounce, is here. The CNN piece on which the article is based is here.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this exercise was that the text of the Breitbart piece is not factually incorrect (most of it is verbatim quotes from the CNN piece that broke the story). But the title is vastly misleading. There is a big difference in Warren agreeing with a statement made by Jake Tapper and saying “Get Another State Flag”

I fact-checked a recipe from the popular wellness website Urban Remedy. Their current spokesperson/celebrity figurehead is Cindy Crawford. See my bounce annotations here.

Turmeric, which contains the chemical curcumin, has been the subject of a rather major theoretical flaw in the field of medicinal chemistry. See this opinion piece in Nature.

Climate change is an issue that needs to be addressed now.

Global greenhouse gas emissions need to start declining now to reach the 2°C goals to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

195 of 196 state parties signed the 2015 Paris Agreement with the aim of “Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change” [1].

Although communication of climate science has been able to refute falsehoods used by denialists, a new group of “climate delayers” is trying to forestall regulation by downplaying the urgency of climate change and role of regulation.

The Cato Institute, a well-funded think tank with a history of climate change misinformation, claims that there is “ample time” to develop technologies necessary for emissions reduction.

Climate delayers may make similar claims to stall progress on climate change in order to maintain their (or rather their anonymous funders’) profits. For example, the Cato Institute was founded in part by Charles Koch, whose wealth largely originated from oil refining and chemicals.

I took a look at a trending Breitbart article that claims a massacre of Christians in Nigeria was ignored on the same day as the shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand. I used Bounce to display my fact-check of the article.

Read my piece at:

https://fold.cm/read/JoshCowls/debunking-realdonaldtrump-Lt3Pmduy

Cyberchondria refers to unfounded health concerns perpetuated by medical information found online. WebMD is a popular website and often a top search result for people seeking to self diagnose conditions and symptoms. Its tendency to increase concern for potential conditions and exaggerate the seriousness of symptoms is found at the center of jokes. Specifically, articles online have referred to how easy it is to arrive at a cancer diagnosis on the website.

We cannot determine the validity of the entire WebMD site by fact-checking the answers given by each page, but we can perhaps answer this question – given a symptom, how far away is a person from a diagnosis of cancer on WebMD?

So here is an experiment that attempts to use the physical properties(text and links) of a website to determine it’s message. The goal is to investigate the structure and content of webmd.com in order to determine if and how much it perpetuates the diagnosis of cancer.

The site is a big nest of links so the scope is limited to be the A-Z common topics page. This section lists 482 health related topic pages from Acid Reflux to Zoster (Herpes) Virus. The content examined is further limited to the main article of each of the conditions.

The experiment looks at each page’s center content section for 2 things – cancer related words(a limited list I found on the internet), and all the out links from that section of the page. It continues to search through the pages until it arrives at either a page with cancer, a page with no links, or a page that is outside of WebMD.

Using this method, the simple web scraper picked up 9714 web pages. Of these,

• 7976 pages do not have cancer related keywords on them.
• 726 pages are cancer related conditions because keywords were found in the main content.
• 1012 information pages had either no outlinks such as liver, or out-links that redirected to a sponsored page like this.

A rat’s nest of a directed network graph was made with a force directed layout from the resulting pages where each page is a node, and each edge a link between pages. The cancer related pages here are colored in red. It is not immediately noticeable which categories of pages have more prominence. However it is clear that there are central nodes in the network where almost every page eventually leads.

 I calculated pageRank for each page(node) to determine its prominence.

PageRank, the more famous part of the google search algorithm measures the relative importance of the page given its links based on one of the algorithms that determines the order of search results. Below are the top 1000 pageranked pages in descending order. We can see that pages with cancer do not have the highest scores, and are distributed throughout the ranking.

Unfortunately, this is a much more complicated project than I expected, so I can only tell you that given what I have seen of the network, cancer related pages do not act differently or hold prominence over other topic pages. However, it is not clear that the scope of the website’s conditions covers cancer related topics proportionally more than it should. Nor is it clear that if a cancer diagnosis occurs, how much of it is driven by the behavior of the medical advice seeker who may tend to travel the path toward the worst scenarios.

If webMD is not about diagnosing cancer, then where are the most likely places that any given webMD query will lead? A few pages with significantly higher centrality and pageRank stood out far from the rest. And these pages focus on 2 things – policy and medicine.

The page which every page eventually leads to is as expected – the disclaimer that states webMD information “are for informational purposes only. The Content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment…”

A equally prominent page is a tool to identify medication. The drug index comes in 3rd, but has the most user input on the website with its thousands of reviews of specific drugs..

And subsequent prominent pages serve similar purposes: privacy policy, and conditions of use.

… to be continued

By Jorge Caraballo, Monica Guzman, Carolyn Libby, Brittany Parker, and Wendi Thomas

Our team applied debunking and persuasion strategies to the debate over whether Donald Trump should be president of the United States.

We were inspired by this L.A. Times editorial against Trump, which dismissed Trump supporters in the first three sentences. We thought it’d be interesting to make the case against Trump in a way that would make Trump supporters feel heard, and make the case for Trump in a way even Trump detractors could pause to consider.

So this is what we created:

• a slideshow message to Trump supporters aimed at gaining their attention and persuading them not to vote for Trump (Wendi Thomas and Monica Guzman)
• A graphic that elaborates on and clarifies the argument made in the slideshow  (Jorge Caraballo and Carolyn Libby)
• a comment or response to a Los Angeles Times’ editorial rejecting Trump in which the author argues that Trump actually would make America great again (Brittany Parker)

First up, the slideshow (click on the pic to open it, and read the whole thing before you move on!)…

And here are a few graphics to strengthen the point…

And finally, our pro-Trump comment:

This election goes far beyond Donald Trump.

Over the past century, the office of the presidency has slowly usurped power from the legislative and judicial branches of government, distorting the system of checks and balances enshrined in our Constitution.

We, as a nation, must DEMAND a return to congressional primacy over the republic as our founders intended. From Ronald Reagan, who abused his authority to provide executive legalization to tens of thousands of illegal immigrants, to Barack Obama, who used federal funds that weren’t appropriated by Congress to fund Obamacare, neither Republicans nor Democrats are immune from the seduction of power. Hillary Clinton, the embodiment of a professional politician who prizes shamelessness and ambition over virtue, would only further poison the well.

For the first time in many, many moons, power truly lies at the ballot box. In order to combat executive overreach and its gross consolidation of power, we must force Congress to act. And to force Congress to act, we must vote for Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is a line in the sand. If our elected officials truly believe that a Trump presidency would be a disaster for this great nation, then they will fight to re-calibrate the balance of power to ensure that the Congress regains its role as the prime legislative authority in the United States.

Our founders understood the danger of tyranny. Executive overreach, growing more rampant with each passing administration, is a threat to our civil liberties and to the rule of law. Our democracy will be best served by voting in a candidate who can break the wheel that rotates Democrats and Republicans out of office, and finally inspire strong bipartisan action in government.

Vote for Trump: let’s make America great again.

Note: To get a better understanding of what drives Trump supporters, we studied their statements in these and other articles:

• The Guardian: “Secret Trump supporters: speak out”
• NYTimes: “We’re sticking with Donald Trump”
• NYTimes: Trump backers express deep and diverse support