How Not To Get Duped When Buying HDMI Cable

How Not To Get Duped When Buying HDMI Cable

Snopes.com

 http://www.snopes.com/

Debunkers of Fictions Sift the Net

By BRIAN STELTER

It is one of the paradoxes of the Internet.

Along with the freest access to knowledge the world has ever seen comes a staggering amount of untruth, from imagined threats on health care to too-easy-to-be-true ways to earn money by forwarding an e-mail message to 10 friends. “A cesspool,” Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, once called it.

David and Barbara Mikkelson are among those trying to clean the cesspool. The unassuming California couple run Snopes, one of the most popular fact-checking destinations on the Web.

For well over a decade they have acted as arbiters in the Age of Misinformation by answering the central question posed by every chain letter — is this true? — complete with links to further research.

The popularity of Snopes — it attracts seven million to eight million unique visitors in an average month — puts the couple in a unique position to evaluate digital society’s attitudes toward accuracy.

After 14 years, they seem to have concluded that people are rather cavalier about the facts.

In a given week, Snopes tries to set the record straight on everything from political smears to old wives’ tales. No, Kenya did not erect a sign welcoming people to the “birthplace of Barack Obama.” No, Wal-Mart did not authorize illegal immigration raids at its stores. No, the Olive Garden restaurant chain did not hand out $500 gift cards to online fans.

The Mikkelsons talk matter-of-factly about why these stories spread the way they do.

“Rumors are a great source of comfort for people,” Mrs. Mikkelson said.

Snopes is one of a small handful of sites in the fact-checking business. Brooks Jackson, the director of one of the others, the politically oriented FactCheck.org, believes news organizations should be doing more of it.

“The ‘news’ that is not fit to print gets through to people anyway these days, through 24-hour cable gasbags, partisan talk radio hosts and chain e-mails, blogs and Web sites such as WorldNetDaily or Daily Kos,” he said in an e-mail message. “What readers need now, we find, are honest referees who can help ordinary readers sort out fact from fiction.”

Even the White House now cites fact-checking sites: it has circulated links and explanations by PolitiFact.com, a project of The St. Petersburg Times that won a Pulitzer Prize last year for national reporting.

The Mikkelsons did not set out to fact-check the Web’s political smears and screeds. The site was started in 1996 as an online encyclopedia of myths and urban legends, building off the couple’s hobby. They had met years earlier on a discussion board about urban legends.

Mr. Mikkelson was a dogged researcher of folklore. When he needed to mail letters requesting information, he would use the letterhead of the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society, an official-sounding organization he dreamed up. They would investigate the origins of classic tall tales, like the legend of the killer with a prosthetic hook who stalked Lovers’ Lane, for a small but devoted online audience.

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, users overwhelmed the Mikkelsons with forwarded e-mail claims and editorials about the culprits and the failures of the government to halt the plot, and the couple reluctantly accepted a larger role. They still maintain a thorough list of what they call “Rumors of War.”

Less than a year later, Snopes became the family’s full-time job. Advertisements sold by a third-party network cover the $3,000-a-month bandwidth bills, with enough left over for the Mikkelsons to make a living — “despite rumors that we’re paid by, depending on your choice, the Democratic National Committee or the Republican National Committee,” Mr. Mikkelson said.

Much of the site’s resources are spent on investigating political claims, even though the Mikkelsons say politics is the last subject they want to write about. (Barbara cannot even vote in American elections; she is a Canadian citizen.) Claims relating to President Obama are now the top searches on the site but “even when there were Republicans in the White House, the mail was still overwhelmingly anti-liberal,” Mr. Mikkelson said.

In late August, Mr. Mikkelson studied an e-mail chain letter titled “The Last of the Kennedy Dynasty” purporting to explain why the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy was unfit for acclaim. Some of its 10 bullet points were true (yes, Mr. Kennedy was cited for reckless driving while in college), but others were misleading assumptions (no, his accomplishments were not “scant”).

Mrs. Mikkelson rolled her eyes at her husband’s plans to fact-check the chain letter. “That’s ephemera,” she said.

He agreed, but the Kennedy report wound up being the Web site’s most-searched subject the next weekend.

The Mikkelsons employ two others full time to manage the enormous volume of e-mail to the site. Increasingly, curious readers are sending videos and photos as well as e-mail, requiring even more investigation. They publish on average one new article each day.

The enduring articles are the ones about everyday fears: computer viruses, scams, missing children. Some e-mail chain letters, like the one offering users $245 for forwarding the message, never fade away.

“People keep falling for the same kind of things over and over again,” Mr. Mikkelson said. Some readers always seem to think, for instance, that the government is trying to poison them: Mrs. Mikkelson said rumors about AIDS have been recycled into rumors about swine flu vaccines.

For the Mikkelsons, the site affirms what cultural critics have bemoaned for years: the rejection of nuance and facts that run contrary to one’s point of view.

“Especially in politics, most everything has infinite shades of gray to it, but people just want things to be true or false,” Mr. Mikkelson said. “In the larger sense, it’s people wanting confirmation of their world view.”

The couple say they receive grateful messages from teachers regularly, and an award from a media literacy association sits atop the TV set in Mr. Mikkelson’s home office.

It is not just the naïveté of Web users that worries the “Snopesters,” a name for the Web site’s fans and volunteers. It is also what Mr. Mikkelson calls “a trend toward the opposite approach, hyper-skepticism.”

“People get an e-mail or a photograph and they spot one little thing that doesn’t look right, and they declare the whole thing fake,” he said. “That’s just as bad as being gullible in a lot of senses.”

But even though Snopes pays the bills for the couple now, through advertising revenue, they doubt they are having much of an impact.

“It’s not like, ‘Well, we have to get out there and defend the truth,’ ” Mrs. Mikkelson added. “When you’re looking at truth versus gossip, truth doesn’t stand a chance.”

At Snopes, a Quest to Debunk Misinformation Online - NYTimes.com

Cool Tools: Corrective Swim Goggles

Corrective Swim Goggles

I wear glasses (not contacts). Swimming underwater without glasses, using average swim goggles gave the world a uniform pathetic watery blur. A few years ago it finally dawned on me that I could get corrective goggles. I was surprised to discover that goggles with prescription corrective lenses were not much more expensive than plain ones -- less than $10. These "optical" goggles are magic. For only a few dollars more my underwater vision is crystal clear. Anit-fog, fair fit, and prescription built in. So many brands make them (and of course many models are more expensive) that I wonder if I am the last person in the world to learn about them. In any case I only have experience with the ClubSwim models. They are available in a limited choice of diopters in half point increments from -2.0 to -7.5.

ClubSwim Antifog Optical Pro II Goggles
$8
Available from SwimOutlet

TYR Corrective Optical Performance Goggle
$15-21
Available from Amazon

Here is another brand:
SPQ
$10

And another for $10

Cool Tools: Corrective Swim Goggles

Free AudioBooks at BooksShouldBeFree.com

Score Free AudioBooks at BooksShouldBeFree

You can find quite a few free audiobooks online but they're frequently scattered all over. Save yourself the run around by checking out the thousands of free audiobooks cataloged at BooksShouldBeFree.

BooksShouldBeFree houses thousands of books in the public domain, available as both MP3s and as iTunes format audiobooks. Each entry for a book includes links to the full text, supplemental text, and reviews.

The reviews are particularly helpful because they are specific to the actual audiobook recording and not just the book in general so you get feedback like "The use of character voices in this record was excellent" or "I love the story but this recording was a rather flat reading of the text.", information relevant to your enjoyment of the book in audio form.

BooksShouldBeFree is a free service and requires registration to use. Have a favorite place to find free audiobooks? Let's hear about it in the comments.

BooksShouldBeFree [via MakeUseOf]

Score Free AudioBooks at BooksShouldBeFree - Audiobooks - Lifehacker

Safety Mode on YouTube

YouTube Blog: Safety Mode: Giving You More Control on YouTube

Excerpt: It's easy to opt in to Safety Mode: Just click on the link at the bottom of any video page. You can even lock your choice on that browser with your YouTube password. To learn more, check out the video below.