Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for December 27, 2019

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(Edited)
Authored by @remlaps

What makes us susceptible to disinformation?; Coinbase sunsets earn.com, ramps up Coinbase Earn; The story of retraction for a plagiarized eye image in the New England Journal of Medicine; Life without cell phones as an extra credit project for students; and a Steem essay discussing recent advances towards harvesting human replacement organs from animals like pigs and baboons

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  1. How Disinformation Hacks Your Brain - This is a politically charged article, but I'm just focusing on the science under discussion. The illusory truth effect is a phenomenon where repetition makes humans more willing to believe untrue statements. According to cognitive scientists, this is because of fluency, which is the notion that as the brain becomes more familiar (fluent) with untrue statements, it is less likely to challenge them. Closely related to fluency, our memories also make us more susceptible to false information because the brain tends to use familiar memories as a heuristic for trustworthiness. Another factor that leads to belief in false claims is the illusion of explanatory depth, or the belief that we know and understand more about the issues that we care about than we actually do. Finally, the article suggests that the addition of digital media to the news landscape may be exploiting all of these weaknesses and making us even more vulnerable to disinformation than were our counterparts in the past.

  2. Coinbase Phases Out Earn.com, Doubles Down on Coinbase Earn - Users of Coinbase owned earn.com are advised to withdraw their holdings by February of 2020, as the web site is being sunsetted. The site was acquired by coinbase in April of 2018. In contrast, "Coinbase Earn" on the company's main site is set to activate more campaigns and add new cryptocurrencies. Users of Coinbase Earn can receive cryptocurrency by watching short training videos and answering follow-up quiz questions.

  3. How a plagiarized eye image in the NEJM was discovered - The image in question appeared in the December 5 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), prime publishing real estate for medical professionals, but Rajesh Rao recognized it from an article by a different author in a different journal, and illustrating a different eye condition. In fact, Rao had shared the picture on his own instagram feed, and it belongs to Mark Clark, of Wake Forest University. Clark had even won an award for the photo in 2014, and it appeared on the cover of Ophthalmology in December, 2015. When Rao contacted the NEJM, they retracted the article with the plagiarized photo, but declined to publish Rao's letter. Rao argues that publishing his letter would have been a suitable recognition of the time he spent verifying the problem and also instructive to help readers understand a mechanism by which plagiarism sometimes occurs.

  4. I asked my students to turn in their cell phones and write about living without them. - After a class did poorly on a test, a professor offered extra credit if they would turn in their cell phones for 9 days and report on life without them. A third of the class, 12 students, accepted the challenge. Initially, students said they felt frightened, disoriented, lost, or frustrated. After the time without the phones, however, they reported that the phones had actually disconnected them from the "real world". In particular, students found a sense of relief at not needing to answer floods of texts and social media posts. They also reported that having a phone had decreased their productivity and caused them to compromise their integrity, by doing things like texting in class, for example. Another observation was that when they gave up their phones, they felt more engaged with the world around them, and saw their phone-carrying peers as distracted. Parents were supportive of the experiment, and one parent even offered to join the experiment. Students worried about safety and security, however - wondering what they would do in the event of a crime or medical emergency. The experiment was first carried out in 2014, and then repeated more recently. In the more recent context, many responses were similar, but there was an added sense of inevitability. Students reported that it was a nice experiment for a short time, but not practical in the long term.

  5. STEEM Humanized Pigs As Organ Donors - In this post, @kralizec describes recent work where scientists used CRISPR's gene editing capability in order to make pigs that are able to breed and reproduce, their cells are non-threatening to the human immune system, and they don't experience excessive clotting in the organs. According to the post, these advances may be followed by similar testing in baboons, and may also pave the way for growing life-saving human replacement organs in the future. While the potential benefits to humans are undeniable, there is an ethical trade-off because of the impact that it has on the animals. This concern is captured in a comment on the post by @felipejoys. You may wish to click through and join the discussion. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @kralizec, and a 5% beneficiary setting has been applied for @felipejoys.)

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