How to Avoid Being Hoodwinked by Misinformation
There you are. You are stopped at a traffic light waiting for it to turn and you hear the hum of your phone notification. Google Maps is letting you know there is a delay ahead and offering to reroute you to save time. The light is still red and you drum your fingers on the … Continue reading Traffic Lights, Detours, and the Data that Drives Us
Raise your hand if you are a data scientist and you have used ChatGPT to help you write your code or maybe generate a photo like the one above. Exactly what I thought. Many have discovered the usefulness of ChatGPT to not only write thank you notes but to also write code. And this is just the … Continue reading What a Data Scientist Really Needs to Learn: Nothing
What is the difference between misinformation and disinformation and how do you know? This is the first part of building your data defense superpower and a pillar of our new book published by Rowman & Littlefield, Data Duped: How to Avoid Being Hoodwinked by Misinformation. Let’s start at the beginning. There are many terms out … Continue reading Misinformation vs. Disinformation: Why Knowing the Difference Matters
Can your happiness be measured by a number? For many the emotion of happiness is as subjective as the individual. Yet, we see plenty of grocery store check-out magazines touting new studies showing you how to improve your happiness in just a few simple steps. Amazingly it is always 10 or fewer, and what could … Continue reading Flaws in Measuring Happiness
Since the introduction of ChatGPT3 last November and its protégé ChatGPT4 last month, there has been frenzied anticipation about how this form of AI will transform all of us in nearly unimaginable ways. While ChatGPT has been impressive in its capability it has also demonstrated the limits of its knowledge by providing incorrect or misleading … Continue reading What ChatGPT Tells Us About Misinformation: The Black Mirror Effect
With the launch this month of our book, Data Duped: How to Avoid Being Hoodwinked by Misinformation, we hope we are bringing curious readers closer to understanding data. Not just the math and statistics, but also provide some insights into how data is used in many of our everyday interactions. For example, that not-so-random advertising … Continue reading Welcome to Data Duped
In late 2017 Luis Martinez had an idea. He was curious about data and its manipulation in particular by governments. Martinez was not anti-government but more curious about how different governments report data and if it could be relied upon as truthful. And if it was not, how can government numbers be verified? That is … Continue reading When Light is Data – A Creative Alternative to Checking Sources
Consider this. Do your odds of being struck by lightning increase if you stand outside during a thunderstorm holding a golf club? Do your odds of winning the Mega Millions Lotto get any better when you buy more tickets? With the latest lottery promising to top $1.5 billion it makes you wonder. Often, we hear … Continue reading Lotteries, Lightning and Other Ways to Improve your Golf Game
The news is a ripe place to find misleading information and being data duped. No matter if it is online, in print or broadcast many news outlets know too well the temptation to create a eye-grabbing headline.
Presenting data as a graph can help share a lot of information quickly. And sometimes if a viewer looks too quickly they might miss something. However, the risk of being data duped is compounded by typical errors in composition. Scale, orientation, choices of which data to place on the X and Y axis and many … Continue reading Deceiving Data Visuals
Data Duped 