Slashdot Mirror
Is the Internet Your Source of Knowledge?
serutan asks: "How much do you rely on the Internet for information? Since getting online 7 or 8 years ago, I have gradually abandoned almost all other sources of news and information, to the point where they've pretty much disappeared from my life. I'm a geek, but at age 49 not exactly a child of the Information Age. I've been surrounded by dictionaries, encyclopedias and similar books for most of my life. I still read fiction in book form, but if I'm trying to look up something and can't find it online in a couple minutes I generally just blow it off, as if there's no other place to look. This realization seems sort of stunning. I'm very curious if other Slashdot readers have become dependent on the Internet to that level, and what their thoughts are on the subject."
For news, and timely information certainly the internet is the place I turn. The evening "News" is so corporate owned and supported that I don't really consider it a reliable source for information. Besides, I don't really know exactly what I get out of keeping up with how many people were murdered or died in fires in the tri-state NY metro area (there is a LOT of that on the news). So, I've just stopped watching. I was never much of a newspaper reader, but of course there is always the New York Times and many other newspapers that bring the information to you with a nice bow on it so you don't have to go scouring elsewhere. But if scouring is your style and you are a real information junky, the scouring certainly isn't that hard.
But if I am going to learn anything in-depth certainly books -dead tree media- is the way to be. My upper limit of reading an article on the crt is about 10 pages. Your mileage will vary there, of course it's highly individual. But maybe that's why places where the information is in digested for you allowing you to scan many stories at once and sample them all, because lengthy readings on a computer monitor are more tedious than kicking back and reading a book.
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
Google says: Your search - "is the internet my source of knowledge?" - did not match any documents.
how many of us could replace the word "Internet" in this posting with "Google"?
Online, I can get the news quicker than waiting for the news or the morning paper -- and better yet, I can compare it from several different sources (thanks, Google News). I can find discussions which sometimes point me to additional sources. I can search for terms that I'm not familiar with. Plus, I'm on the computer eight hours every weekday, and the latest news is just a few keystrokes away.
On the other hand, the Internet is not so good at covering local news; I get that in my morning paper, which is actually easier to read than that same paper's website. (I live in Peoria, Illinois -- a city, but not a metropolis -- so the online news is only updated when the morning edition comes out.) It's also a little lacking when you're looking for non-contemporary topics -- the kind of thing that a good paper encyclopedia or the shelf at your local library gives you more thoroughly, because that kind of research costs money and most of the Internet is still free. More importantly, information online is often generalized and condensed, so if you're looking for in-depth facts on a particular topic, you usually need a book on just that one topic.
In short, information on the Internet is quick and broad, but rarely very deep or complete. A good trade-off in many cases, but certainly not all of them.
I often wonder how anybody did anything prior to the advent of "the source of all Truth and Knowledge."
They bought their porn at that seedy porn shop downtown.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Back in the day, at least.
The rumors of a thousand ill-informed people do not add up to the knowledge of a single well-informed person. So be careful to verify what you read before accepting it as Truth.
And never, never trust MapQuest.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
I think overreliance on the Internet for information is why so many tech stocks bubbled and why so many techies are so insensitive to the effects of technology on people, as well as a sort of social darwinist ideology that the free market correlates perfectly with ability (even at the same time as M$ is bashed albeit often for anti-free market principles) or with public taste. If you don't see it on the screen, it doesn't happen.
That and getting information from games like SimCity (software is the cleanest and highest value of all industries) and Civilization (limited liability is an important moment of progress). The general conclusion is that corporate expansion and economic growth means greater efficiency, which is the way that all people become better off. This seems so self evident based on most of the information you get from the Internet that as soon as I write it I realize that the mere questioning of it will seem absurd to most people. The fact that the vast majority of people in human history did not believe this to be true is something you would have very little indication of from the informatoin available from the Internet. That is to say that the Internet is suffused with a Taylorist, efficiency based ideology.
I don't like the "seediness" you mention... I mean, I'm a regular guy, not some prevert. I just like a little latex, and livestock from time to time.
I much prefer the current porn delivery method. ;)
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
Around my house we don't call it "the Internet" anymore. We refer to it as "the source of all Truth and Knowledge."
Interesting - we are your neighbors and refer to your house as "the Dwelling of Eternal Dorkitude".
Are you talking about the Web?
The Web cannot be beat for current events. It's also a great source for directory information: phone numbers, locations, maps, and the like. But it falls flat on its face for in-depth information, unless you're looking for computer and related geekery in all 31 flavors.
Are you talking about USENET?
Great place to find an expert. On anything. This expert may even take the time to talk to you. Since the advent of Google archiving, it's become easier to search newsgroups for back posts--and there is a *lot* of good data passing through USENET.
Are you talking about P2P?
Right now, it's all pr0n and thr33z. I'm not sure this is what you're talking about when you say "information."
Are you talking about subscription-based database and index services, like LEXIS-NEXIS, CompendexWeb, PUBMED, and WorldCat?
These are where the professional and research quality information is on the Internet. They are useful, but expensive, and chances are you don't have access unless you are at a university or a company that pays for a subscription.
Are you talking about intranets?
These can be a source of good information in large companies and organizations. NASA has an excellent one, some of which they mirror to the Web where it's available to all, but the really spiffy stuff is only available to employees.
So to answer your question, I use the Web to follow the news, USENET for hobby interests, P2P for pretty much nothing, databases and intranets for some professional work.
But nothing beats dead trees for in-depth information--if you can find where it's been published. I went to my thesis advisor to tell him I couldn't find a paper that had been published only in conference proceedings from the 80's (it's notoriously hard to get your hands on conference proceedings), only to have him root through a file cabinet and hand them to me. This was in 2002. Professors are scary.
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
I recall a time a friend was going to come visit me. I spoke to him on the phone, and started to give him directions from the main highway. It went thusly:
....
Me: Ok, take the HWY eastbound until you cross the toll bridge, then take the first exit and...
Him: No I looked it up on MapQuest.
Me: MapQuest has our area all screwed up, just write this down, take the first exit, go straight, take the second right and...
Him: nah, I already printed the maps out on mapquest
So, the day comes when he's coming over. I get a call..
Him: Hey, I can't find your house.
Me: Where are you?
Him: I'm at a WalMart
Me: WalMart? What city are you in?
Him: [name of city and closest street sign]
Me: Dude, you passed my street about 75 miles ago. Turn around, go back, take the last exit before the bridge and..
Him: No, that's wrong, MapQuest says..
Me: I FUCKING KNOW WHERE I LIVE!
Him: But but mapquest!
Though, as long as you stick to the more travelled areas, and get directions to businesses, MapQuest more or less comes through. It's just the rural and residential streets it sucks at...
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
This is just as true for my work, as a research scientist, as for general information and news. There has always been one large university library or another within two minutes walk of my office but over the last five years I could count the number of times I have been in it on my hands. Most of the time if I can't download a paper off the web I will just give up and decide it isn't worth reading. After all in the half hour it would take to walk over to the library, search through the journals, read the paper and walk back I could download, print out and skim through a dozen other papers.
It isn't just speed of access either. If I want a copy of a paper journal article I have to muck around with photocopying etc. where as for an electronic article I can download a pdf in seconds and if I want a hard copy I can print it any time I want. Of course there is always the odd really annoying case where there is some data I must have but its only in a table in a 20 year old paper in an obscure hardcopy only journal. That is when you have to resort to scanners and crappy OCR software but again it isn't actually of any use until it is in electronic form.
However on a more serious note there is such a vast amount of stuff, like catalogues of 100's of millions of objects that was just impossible before computers and only really useful using the internet. In some way it is making people lazy but the advantages are just so huge that they out weigh any disadvantages. We have so much data now that there are huge advances to be made just by finding better ways to sort and correlate it (data mining etc.).
On the news front the effect of the internet is just as profound. Not so much in speed as in variety of topics and points of view. Potentially everyone can be a journalist and contribute. Where things are lacking are in the searching and filtering aspects? The infomation may be there but even with Google it can be hard to find. Sites such as Slashdot in a way try to fill this niche but obviously there is only so much news they can cover.
What is really needed is some sort of distributed and semi(or fully)-automated system where good sources that individuals find can be distributed to everyone who whats them. It would be best implimented as some sort of web of trust where you would select a number of individuals whose opinions you trust and base on their recommendations and those of people they trust etc. new sources would be suggested to you which you can then rate etc.
The evening "News" is so corporate owned and supported that I don't really consider it a reliable source for information.
Agreed. Here is an interesting experiment to try. Find a major news story, preferably on Iraq or Afganistan. (It can be something else, but Iraq and Afganistan will yield more results.)
Check the story first on CNN
Then check the subtle changes in perception on the same story from these sites:
BBC NEWS
Globe and Mail
Then note the radically different opinions on:
Aljazeera
Antiwar
Note, I am not asking you to agree with any of the above opinions, or websites. Just begin to notice the different perceptions you can gain insight to on news stories on the net. This kind of insight cannot be gathered by watching local news, like NBC, CBS, or even the "most trusted" views of CNN.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
If you actually visit a hospital and work with doctors and nurses on a daily basis, you will see that those who are not currently doing pure research work, but instead clinical work, are constantly in contact with patients or administering the programs they work with. Doctors and nurses are acutely involved in the care of patients spend a huge amount of time with them. Having one doctor take on five times as many patients is not going to work simply because he has access to an online database. In fact, there has been research done, especially after mortality rates increase in individual hospitals in an effort to improve the care given at those hospitals, which shows that as the number of patients each nurse is responsible for increases, the mortality rate increases by double-digit percentages, especially in ICUs.
You seem to be greatly confused about just how weighed down with information doctors and nurses are; doctors, for one, go to school that long for a reason. The human body is a very large and complex set of systems that isn't easily mastered. It's simple to sit at a terminal and type in a list of symptoms; it's quite another thing to know how the diagnosis pertains to the patient, whether or not the diagnosis is correct, and how the treatment will affect the patient. Doctors aren't simple databases that accept symptoms and wads of cash as an input and spit out diagnoses and treatments.
You betray your own argument with this line, as well:
By removing doctors to increase their bottom line, wouldn't they then still be charging the same, or at least a similar, amount? You state that "technology," this magical panacea, will cause the demand for doctors to go down (wrong, because care-provider to patient ratios are definitely linked to the health of patients), and again cause the salaries for existing doctors to go down (in some weird scenario of yours, because it seems to me that when a field becomes more specialized, the salaries of the specialists goes up), which will drive down the demand for medical education (which doesn't make sense either because of the above and because people enter health care, every now and then, out of the pure pleasure of helping others, not out of obligation), which will drive down the price (which again doesn't make sense because universities are either private or public: public tuition rates generally do not fluctuate in that manner, and private schools are going to charge private school costs, the same as they always have; you don't think that Art History majors pay significantly less than Biology/Pre-Med majors at private schools, do you? Why then would the cost of post-grad private education go down?). If what you say is true and those costs do go down and the hospitals do remove doctors, how can they increase their bottom line by any way except charging more than the care costs?
It seems to me that what you're saying is it's the insurance companies and the health care institutions that are over-charging and that they will continue to do that no matter what happens with the number of docs out there. So who's to blame? The doctor who puts in 80 hour weeks and has to juggle 20 patients a day, and as a reward for improving the health of people is given the opportunity to own a Porsche, or the executive of a health insurance company who said little Jimmy couldn't get the liver transplant he needs to survive because mommy's health plan doesn't cover that, and is given the opportunity to own a Porshe a
With around 425 replies so far (including trolls and flaimbait) I don't expect anyone to reade this, but I'm bored, so I'm going to write it anyway:
:)
I've become *almost* entierly dependent on the internet for news and information. Everyday, there are about a dozen sites that I load up (including slashdot, google news, and my local news paper's site) to get my news. When I want to look up information, I always spend time wading through the internet, looking for it there.
I do, however, use real books for programming (O'Reilly mostly) and physics (my text books from college). I also tune into BBC World News every evening to get my overview of world news (and it doesn't hurt that anchor girl Mishal Husain is rather attractive).
Okay. I'm gonna go do something else now.
I agree that healthcare is astronomically expensive, but these days, it's not doctors making it that way.
A BIG part of the problem is actually the legal system. The doctor charges a lot because he has to pay more than many people make a year in malpractice insurance.
Then there's the way that every single thing costs 5 to 10 times as much as it should because it is a 'medical supply' and so possibly the target of litigation. The doctor has to use those (and pass the high cost on) since otherwise, some lawyer will pounce on that, even if it couldn't possibly be related to a bad patient outcome.
Then, of course, there's the medications themselves, and the hospital (which, in turn costs so much because it also has to carry a heavy insurance policy) and because it has to treat patients who can't pay. The latter should be handled by a national healthcare system, but instead the polititians choose to hide the cost through unfunded mandates.
Finally, there's the need to run every test in the book just to make sure there's no way for a lawyer to claim negligence.
In turn, the insurance is outrageously expensive because of the considerable risks and the staggering payouts.
The net result is that some people get really over the top medical care, and the rest get none at all. There is no middle ground, and there can't be as long as the current legal climate prevails.
One thing that might help would be if the doctor didn't have to hire a small army of administrators just to handle the insurance claim forms.
Eliminating the doctor won't help. Much of the doctor's fee savings will be absorbed elsewhere in the system to pay for the extra insurance coverage needed now that the doctor's policy isn't there to pay out.
Reference librarians are one of the finest research resources available in the US.
My degrees are in hard science (chemistry, physiology) and law and I could never have completed my undergrad or grad degrees without the assistance of these professionals.
When I'm faced with difficult legal issues I'll ask the reference librarian BEFORE I start to avoid wasting time. I know that I talk wth librarians more than just about any other professional and they are invaluable.
As I said in the subject line: librarians are the original database managers. Dewey is dead and the OCLC / Library of Congress rule - but it takes a professional only a few minutes to narrow my searches where I might well have spent hours getting to the same place.
Quick: find me authority for the legal proposition that an employee has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the material stored on a computer used in the workplace - and, while you're at it find me authority for the rights to the data where the original computer used in the workplace was purchased by the employee but the data from the first machine has been transferred through three upgrades to the employer-owned computer. Let's add a dollop of employer policy that they recognize certain rights in the employee's work - and add that the employee is a public-sector employee with tenure.
Find that --- good luck on the web.
"Now if only technology could some how re-direct pharmaceutical r&d into actually curing diseases (when was the last time that happened, like 50 years ago?)"
That's a load of crap, troll. Think for just a second and you'll realize this statement is horribly wrong, and so are all the comedians and political pundits that like to spout if off. The reason few diseases are "cured" is because the vast majority of diseases without a cure already are viruses. A massive number of diseases were cured when antibiotics were developed, but that doesnt help against viruses. Killing a virus is an order of magnitude harder. Furthermore prescription drugs can only be patented for a relatively short time (why we have generic drugs). The first company to come up with a way to reliably cure viruses stands to make millions more then they could ever hope in treatment drugs. Treatments which cost millions to develop are often replaced by new more effective treatments in short order. If they released a safe, effective cure, the market for it would be huge, and more benefitial then blowing billions to be one of a hundred potential treatments. As for vaccines, imagine how much money would be made from holding the patent for the HIV vaccine? It'd be like a license to print money. The real reason drugs cost so much is the massive R+D costs, plus the massive FDA certification costs, plus the often large production costs (Many new drugs are extremely volatile and difficult to produce in mass), plus the need to recoup all those costs in the short period in which they are the preferred treatment. Drug companies aren't saints by any means, but it is just good business sense for them to develop and release the best medicines within reach of our technology.