Google recently announced they are researching the use of estimations of trustworthiness of websites to help prioritize results returned from search requests. This excites people who hope that pseudoscience and crazy conspiracy theories will get less attention, but it upsets people who are worried that the results will be biased: “I worry about this issue greatly,” said … [Read more...] about Some Speculation About the Google Truth Machine
Science
Random Thoughts About Hillary Clinton’s Email
Hillary Clinton is taking some heat for using her own private email account for her State Department email. I haven't been following the story very closely, but I have a few random thoughts:I keep hearing that she turned over 55,000 pages of email. Pages? Who measures email in pages? People who use email either talk about the number of messages, or they talk about how many … [Read more...] about Random Thoughts About Hillary Clinton’s Email
Experts and Quackery
Over at Ethics Alarms, Jack Marshall is blogging about a recent British Medical Journal study of TV medical talk shows which found that, basically, Dr. Oz is talking out of his ass. Jack makes a good point, but this throw-away line caught my eye: For some reason medical experts have waited over a decade to actually check out the snake oil Dr. Oz has been selling to credulous … [Read more...] about Experts and Quackery
Mother Jones’s Weak Math
Steve Marmel posts this infographic he apparently got from Mother Jones magazine that purports to show institutionalized racism in Ferguson, Missouri:[Image reads: Institutional racism by the numbers. In 2013 in Ferguson: 483 black people were arrested, 36 white people were arrested, 92% of searches and 86% of car stops involved blacks.]I wonder if either Marmel or … [Read more...] about Mother Jones’s Weak Math
Considering a Geiger Counter
It probably says something about me that I'm thinking of buying a Geiger counter.It's not that I really have a need to detect radioactivity, exactly. But you know all those CSI shows where they pull out the UV light and shine it around a crime scene to find suspicious stains? If you tried that at home, the ultraviolet light would probably find all kinds of messes -- where … [Read more...] about Considering a Geiger Counter