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This is an email from a representative of an unnamed government. Would you wire them a few thousand dollars in exchange for a promised sum of over 2 million dollars?
Would you pay this person $100 to make you more attractive to the opposite sex?
How about your questions about health? Would you trust them to strangers on the internet?
What about this website on global warming? It ends in “dot org”—you’d trust it for personal use or a school assignment. . . right?
This week in Library 1210, you have been learning about evaluating information sources. But evaluating sources from the internet extends beyond the classroom. This short video is about evaluating web resources in the real world.
Have you ever wished that someone would just give you a million dollars out of the blue? Everyone probably has. Some people believe that their dream has come true when they open an email such as this one from a stranger.
Take a moment to glimpse over the text from this email
Does it look familiar? If you read through the entire thing, you would note that they author claims to be a foreign government official who promises to send you millions of dollars in exchange for you wiring him just a few thousand.
A friend of mine, as well as thousands of other people have fallen for this scam. They wire the money overseas, and get nothing in return.
Here is text from a similar email, that claims that the reader has won 3 million dollars in an international lottery (that they somehow don’t remember entering...).
Claiming your winnings requires surrendering your bank account information to the stranger who has sent the email. BAD IDEA, as they then have access to your account, and therefore all of your hard-earned cash.
Does this woman look familiar? If you read magazines such as Maxim, Men’s Health, or Rolling stone, you have probably seen her face amongst the ads in the back pages before. This is Dr. Winnifred Cutler.
Her product, the “Athena Pheromone 10X,” is an aftershave additive that promises to raise a man’s sex appeal to women via the science of pheromones for only $99.50.
For 1/6 th of an ounce of product. there are 8 ounces in a cup. that’s $597 per ounce. $4776 per cup.
Un-cited testimonials praise her products. On top of this, the implications on the website that the product will raise a person’s sex appeal? --Proven to be false in a study that she accidentally cites on her own website.
Clearly, this is not an objective—or possibly even accurate product or website.
Have you ever wanted to know something, but not known how to find the answer, or been too lazy to look yourself?
Sites like Yahoo! Answers are totally great for this—If you’re not too concerned about accuracy. One of the most popular topics on Yahoo! Answers is health.
Individuals post their personal health questions on the site, and anyone with a Yahoo! account can answer it. While the question that I have shown here is pretty benign,
most of the health questions are regarding some pretty serious stuff that you would probably want to ask a doctor about—or at the very, very least, as least consult a more credible website.
As you can see, the answers that this person received are hardly scientific, and don’t even entirely answer the person’s question.
Finally, to hit on a popular topic, let’s say that you have been wanting to learn more about Global Warming—for school or for leisure—your choice. So you type “Global Warming” into a search engine.
In this image from Yahoo’s search engine, you’ll notice that the first link is from Wikipedia. The second link is something called global warming.org, and the 3rd link is to a government website for the Environmental Protection Agency.
You want something accurate, but that is easy to understand. So you choose Globalwarming.org.
So you open the page. Everything looks good. . . right? Ehhh... Well, there seems to be a bit of bias. And the layout looks kind of fishy. If you watch the video and follow some of the links,
you will notice that the site is only slightly about global warming, itself—most of its content is devoted to trying to prove that there is no global warming.
So while this serves very well as an affirmative website for people who don’t believe in Global Warming—
those who are looking for scientific information might want to check out the EPA’s government site, or even check and see if wikipedia has any useful citations instead.
So as you have seen here, there are clearly many good reasons to evaluate the information that you encounter online—even if it’s not for school.
After all, you don’t want to lose all your money,
pay $100 for 1/6 of an ounce of sex-appeal pheromone that has been proven not to work,
Nor do you want to get shoddy health information from strangers
or the wrong information, all together
The End! Thanks for watching!