Tag: credibility

Online Reputation Services

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2008-03-16

5:10 am

2 Comments on Online Reputation Services

Geekery

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This did­n’t real­ly belong in that last post, espe­cial­ly after I added oth­er stuff. So aren’t you lucky? You get anoth­er one!

A while back, I noticed that an old post in which I had pub­lished my Opin­i­ty ID badge in order to claim this blog had bro­ken links. I checked their site, and found a notice say­ing that they’d be back up in two days.

Well, after sev­er­al months, that notice was still up. Unless they’re talk­ing about some­thing like Plu­ton­ian days,1 I think they’ve missed their tar­get.
Con­tin­ue read­ing “Online Rep­u­ta­tion Ser­vices” →

Date Night, Reading, School Stuff

by

2007-11-14

11:53 am

4 Comments on Date Night, Reading, School Stuff

College, Family, Kvetching, Reading

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I was a naughty girl today, too caught up in read­ing A Few Demons More to do my home­work. Bad girl.

To be fair, I was also tak­ing care of my Katie baby, who had a fever and was near­ly deliri­ous. She real­ly fits the chron­ic fatigue syndrome/ME diag­nos­tic cri­te­ria more than those for fibromyal­gia, but what­ev­er it is, she’s miss­ing way too much school.

Wednes­day is one of my reg­u­lar date nights with Sam, and I cer­tain­ly was­n’t going to put that off for school stuff, so I fig­ured I’d just hop online and make my required four posts after he went to bed, then join him quick­ly.1

Whoops! Not so fast!

My crit­i­cal think­ing class, which I fig­ured to be a “gimme” (required for every DeVry stu­dent regard­less of major, obvi­ous­ly designed to be one of the first class­es every­body takes) sur­prised me this time. Both thread­ed dis­cus­sions required research and thought.

The first was about con­sumer finance, which isn’t exact­ly con­tro­ver­sial. We had to use the school’s library site to access a peri­od­i­cals data­base, though, and choose at least two arti­cles relat­ed to some par­tic­u­lar aspect of con­sumer finance. Then we had to “share” one of them in the dis­cus­sion, explain­ing why we chose it and how it was rel­e­vant. That’s a big field to nar­row down, and the data­base had annoy­ing­ly NOT-fresh infor­ma­tion on my cho­sen angle.

The sec­ond, though, had us ana­lyze a Hitler Muse­um site 2 that claimed to be total­ly free of bias. Yep, pull the oth­er one, it’s got bells on! We had to eval­u­ate the site based on 5 or 6 dif­fer­ent mea­sures of cred­i­bil­i­ty. Even thought the site was obvi­ous­ly very pro-Hitler, find­ing cred­i­ble sources (mean­ing not Wikipedia) to dis­prove var­i­ous claims took some time.

I was high­ly dis­turbed by the num­ber of my class­mates that declared the site free of bias. Obvi­ous­ly, there are peo­ple who are in seri­ous need of this course! I knew that many peo­ple take in media fair­ly unques­tion­ing­ly, but a pro-Hitler web site put up by some anony­mous twit? In 2007?

The man­age­ment class stuff was very easy, just ques­tions about diver­si­ty and entre­pre­neur­ship. Yay for easy!

I’m final­ly done and can go cud­dle up with mah sweet­ie. I wan­na get the Holo­caust revi­sion­ism out of my head, though, to avoid bad dreams, so I might end up read­ing for a bit first.

1 I have got to go back to start­ing the week’s class stuff on Mon­days. Real­ly.

2 No, I’m not going to link to that!