I read an article this morning on the New York Times – Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?

The entire article was interesting, discussing different skills gained by reading online vs. reading books, as well as the concern that online reading may fracture attention spans, making reading books that much more difficult.

What really jumped out at me, though, was this:

Web readers are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy. In one study, Donald J. Leu, who researches literacy and technology at the University of Connecticut, asked 48 students to look at a spoof Web site (http://www.zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/) about a mythical species known as the “Pacific Northwest tree octopus.” Nearly 90 percent of them missed the joke and deemed the site a reliable source (emphasis mine).

Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

I’m wondering if this lack of critical thinking skills is a side effect of all the information available on the Internet, or if the Internet has just exposed a wider problem, the fundamental lack of critical thinking by a majority of the US population.

This subject has been on my mind recently, due in part to family members who send e-mails “proving” that the presidential candidate they do not support did something horrible, and therefore is obviously not qualified to be leader of the free world, commander-in-chief, etc.  These emails amount to little more than character assassination, and the scary thing is, people believe them and don’t bother to check the facts (easily done online) for themselves.

In the future, traditional reading skills may not be as important as the ability to determine reliable sources, and critical consideration — not just comprehension — of what is read.

Smithsonian.com has an interesting essay by Richard Conniff on the development of evolutionary theory.

We call it Darwinism, for short. But in truth, it didn’t start with Darwin, or with Wallace either, for that matter. Great ideas seldom arise in the romantic way we like to imagine—the bolt from the blue, the lone genius running through the streets crying, “Eureka!” Like evolution itself, science more often advances by small steps, with different lines converging on the same solution.

What many fundamentalists seem to forget (or choose to selectively ignore), is the fact that Darwin was a product of his time, and had he not published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, someone else (namely Alfred Russel Wallace) surely would have.

Alfred Russel Wallace
Co-founder of the theory of evolution

While a debate between presidential candidates concerning the scientific issues facing our country seems unlikely, at least until a Democratic nominee is chosen, a poll by the Science Debate 2008 team shows that 85% of Americans want to hear the candidates’ positions on science and technology.

Additional poll results are available here.

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Image credit: Science Debate 2008 Poll (May 2008)

If you’re interested in the real story behind the new ID movie, Expelled, the NCSE has set up the Expelled Exposed website, with links to reviews and other analysis.

Scientific American also has a series – Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed – Scientific American’s Take, with commentary from Michael Shermer.

Update: One of my fellow grad students has a review of the film in our student newspaper. Kudos, Mark!

Daniel Dennet, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins in a discussion of religion and science. This is the first 10 minutes of a two hour program, the rest of which is available online or on DVD. Food for thought.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There’s a new piece of creationist propoganda making the rounds. Expelled is a “documentary” which several prominent figures in the scientific community were conned into appearing in under false pretenses.

Last weekend, at a premier at the Mall of America, Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers attended a screening. Well, Dawkins did. Myers was escorted out by the theater manager and a security guard.

They filmed this piece shortly afterward.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I watched this with my 13 year-old daughter this afternoon. For her, it was a way to connect all of these events and people she had heard about – Vietnam and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example. For me, it put Lennon’s music in historical context, providing a deeper understanding of the message.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you haven’t seen The U.S. vs. John Lennon, it serves as a stark reminder of the lengths to which a government will go to try to protect the status quo. Particularly galling was the clip of J. Edgar Hoover extoling “God-fearing Americans” and “people of faith” to support the war in Vietnam.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There’s a movement afoot. Towards open-access academic journals. Traditionally, academics published their works in peer-reviewed journals, the more widely recognized, the better. If you want to read a scientific publication, you had to access it through a subscription held by your institution. If they lacked a subscription to a particular publication, many times you were out of luck, unless you contacted the author directly and asked for a reprint, or waited weeks for interlibrary loan (which can be a real pain if you’re in the middle of writing an article of your own).

Open-access journals are also peer-reviewed, but academic work is disseminated free to the public. Several open-access journals have started in the last few years, including all the publications from PloS. The National Institutes of Health requires that any scholarly work funded by the agency be made freely available through PubMed, though finding free articles here is still hit and miss.

The faculty of the College of Arts & Sciences at Harvard voted this month to require that all faculty publications be open-access to encourage freedom of information.

Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.

Stuart M. Shieber, a professor at FAS, said, “There is no question that scholarly journals have historically allowed scholars to distribute their research to audiences around the world. But, the scholarly publishing system has become far more restrictive than it need be. Many publishers will not even allow scholars to use and distribute their own work. And, the cost of journals has risen to such astronomical levels that many institutions and individuals have cancelled subscriptions, further reducing the circulation of scholars’ works.

There are also smaller, more specialized journals going open-access as well. For those anthropologists with a museum focus, the University of Iowa is hosting Museum Anthropology Review

whose purpose is the wide dissemination of articles, reviews, essays, obituaries and other content advancing the field of material culture and museum studies, broadly conceived.

The more universities that adopt open-access policies, and the more journals that make their offerings available for free, the better for everyone.

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Sources: Harvard to collect, disseminate scholarly articles for faculty

FAS February 2008 Agenda (pdf)