CORE 1929: Communicating with Data: Home

Your individual project involves either spotting or producing "modern BS." If you need some inspiration, here are some favorite examples of things that could be considered "modern BS," selected by the librarians on our team. (Of course, you need not restrict yourself to the topics on this list.) 

Health

• Ivermectin as COVID cure
• Herbalife and other dietary supplements
• Essential oils

Business

• Consumer behaviors/Psychographics
• Bias in Loan Risks Prediction
• Reshoring/Tariffs/local businesses/manufacturing

Psychology

• Power Posing
• Daryl Bem’s ESP Study

Engineering

• Mars Climate Orbiter Crash
• Hyatt Regency Walkway Collapse

Miscellaneous

• Atlantis, ancient aliens, and other pseudoarchaeology
• Hollow earth
• Claims that climate change isn't real / isn't caused by humans

Chapter 1: Bullshit Everywhere

• Vaccines and Autism: A Measured Response
  • Harry "hbomberguy" Brewis's funny and incisive YouTube documentary on the Andrew Wakefield scandal. It's long, but it's funny, entertaining, and very much worth watching.

Chapter 2: Medium, Message, and Misinformation

• How to Escape Clickbait
  • Tedx talk by Dennis Kim
• Colonizing Our Minds in the Age of Social Media
  • Bo Burnham on the attention economy
• For the Wild podcast with Jenny Odell
  • Interview with Jenny Odell, author of How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy 
• There Is No Algorithm for Truth
  • In a talk at the Royal Institute in London, Youtuber Tom Scott discusses the problem of how social media algorithms increase extremism and the spread of disinformation
• From Clicks to Chaos
  • Dr. Soumya Awasthi on “algorithmic radicalisation" and how social media platforms coax users into ideological rabbit holes
• I investigated millions of tweets from the Kremlin’s ‘troll factory’
  • Maksim Markelov's investigation into paid propaganda farms
• The People Onscreen are Fake. The Disinformation is Real. 
  • Adam Satariano and Paul Mozur at the New York Times investigate the use of video deepfakes to spread misinformation

Chapter 3: The Nature of Bullshit

• Algorithmic bias detection and mitigation
  • Examples of algorithmic bias, why algorithmic bias exists, and how it can be mitigated (Brookings Institute)

Chapter 4: Causality

• Tyler Vigen: Spurious Correlations
• Does moderate alcohol consumption reduce the risk of heart disease?
• Northeastern Global News: Is the ‘broken windows’ theory of policing based on correlation or causation?

Chapter 5: Numbers and Nonsense

• Statistics How-To: Misleading Graphs
• Scanning dead salmon in fMRI machine highlights risk of red herrings
• Reinhart, Rogoff… and Herndon: The student who caught out the profs
• You Get What You Pay For (more on Goodhart's Law)

Chapter 6: Selection Bias

• Researchers show parachutes don't work - but there's a catch

Chapter 7: Data Visualization

• TedEd: How to spot a misleading graph

Chapter 8: Calling Bullshit on Big Data

• AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect
• Same symptoms, different care: how AI's hidden bias alters medical decisions
• Typos and slang spur AI to discourage seeking medical care

Chapter 9: The Susceptibility of Science

• Last Week with John Oliver: Scientific Studies
• Cornell food researcher's downfall raises larger questions for science
• Juul bought an issue of a science journal

Chapter 10: Spotting Bullshit

Chapter 11: Refuting Bullshit