Principal speaker
Dr Heather Shearer
I have a foreboding when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
Carl Sagan, 1999. "The Demon Haunted World'
As researchers, you are experts in identifying whether something is accurate-or are you? Perhaps this was true 20 or 30 years ago, but nowadays, fake news, deep fakes, AI and predatory publishers make sorting truth from trash increasingly difficult. Yet, even more than when Carl Sagan wrote this 32 years ago, this ability is increasingly important.
This workshop will introduce you to some critical thinking tools, to help you evaluate information (in academic publishing as well as popular social/media); as well as interactive exercises. It will provide you with the ability to quickly identify dodgy data, and to easily explain why a claim is inaccurate, to anyone-conspiracy theorists, pseudoscience promoters, or climate change deniers.
You don't need to be a quantitative researcher or to have any statistical knowledge to attend.
· Spotting dodgy data (is it too good to be true)?
· What are logical fallacies?
· Suspicious statistics (p-hacking, population sizes, chart axes, correlation and causation)
· Big data (GIGO, more is not necessarily better)
· Publication problems (publication bias, predatory journals, positive results)
· Fake news (social media, multimedia, election interfering)
· Future directions (AI, deep fakes, unreal people)
· How to refute rotten research?
Event categories
RSVP
RSVP on or before Wednesday 23 October 2019 , by email red@griffith.edu.au , or by phone 0755529107 , or via http://www.cvent.com/d/pyqf2r/4W