 This is Workshop 3B, the future of skepticism online. We're going to do some crowd sourcing. We're going to talk about crowd sourcing. I'm Tim Farley. We're going to do a little bit of an introduction section here. I'm going to talk about kind of the overview of what we're talking about and then we're going to get into the actual tools. This is, none of this is theoretical. All of this is actual stuff that skeptics are already doing and we need more skeptics to do it. I am Tim Farley. I am a software guy, a researcher. I'm a research fellow for JREF. I advise them on electronic media, internet stuff, that kind of thing, and I blog for them. I've spoken at the amazing meeting before. I've run workshops before. And probably most people know me as the creator of this site, What's the Harm? But lately I do a lot of blogging at sceptools.com and a lot of it is about how skeptics can use tools better on the internet. And the other presenter is Derek Colanduno, who you probably know as the host of Skepticality with Swoopy and he also runs an awesome skeptic event if you guys ever get to Atlanta. In the summer, Skeptrack at DragonCon. It's a really fantastic event. We do probably almost as many panels and stuff as we do here. But it's embedded in this giant science fiction convention. So we get to do, get a lot of exposure to folks who might have not known what skepticism was. Four full days. And we're going to have a special guest presenter at the end, something brand new that I think you'll be excited about. So what am I talking about when I talk about crowd sourcing? Crowd sourcing is a portmanteau of crowd plus outsourcing. And the idea is that you make an open call for participation. You have something that needs a lot of work done. Something that if you were going to do it in a conventional way, you would end up hiring a million interns or a thousand high school students or a whole staff of people to do. But you don't have the money to do that. So you put out an open call and you say, hey, anyone who's out there, can you help us with this project? And they vary. Sometimes you bring knowledge. Sometimes you bring money. Sometimes you bring the ability to do a little bit of work. Sometimes you bring some experience. But it's all about undertaking some kind of a task. And hopefully the idea is you get some mutual benefit. The person who put out the call will get whatever the thing was they want put together. And the people who help will get some benefit in the way of experience or just the knowledge of a job well done or contributing to a good effort. And their crowdsourcing projects are all over the place now. Probably the ones that you hear about a lot or at least have heard about for a few years are the wisdom of the crowd type projects like Wikipedia, that sort of thing. But there's also crowd voting where people vote on different things and try to find the best items in a group. There's crowd funding, which is beginning a lot of attention lately, things like Kickstarter, where folks who might have had to go to investors to start their company can now just put their idea out there and say, hey, here's my crazy idea of a thing I wanna build. Do enough of you wanna do this that you're willing to toss in a little bit of money and you start a company or you start a project. And people have done record albums and built products and built games that way. And actually, inducement prizes are kind of a type of crowdsourcing too. And it's not new. The Oxford English Dictionary actually ran an open call that was essentially a crowdsourcing project for 70 years for folks to send in quotations that went to the sources and uses of different words. And that was a giant crowdsourcing project. It wasn't done on the internet, obviously it was done through the mail. Inducement prizes that there have been many, the SpaceX prize and whatnot. The Orteg prize was the prize that Lindberg was going after when he flew from New York to Paris. He was after a prize. And they basically, essentially, that's a crowdsourcing project. I mean, you have one winner, but essentially you're saying anyone out there who thinks they can fly from New York to Paris, try it, and the one who does it wins. And the Pillsbury Bake Off is another example that went for years and years. So what are the modern ones? What are the internet-based ones? We've got Wikipedia is probably the most famous. It built an encyclopedia with over three million articles. It might be four million by this point. Entirely by just asking people to type stuff, to write about things that they know about. Citizen science projects like Galaxy Zoo, Whale FM, and there's probably a couple hundred of them now, and you're gonna hear more about those projects from Pamela Gay this weekend. Fantastic thing where science is gathering so much data now that we need, and our software isn't smart enough to classify all of it, so we need people to help. And I talked about Kickstarter. Another one is more on the kind of commercial side of it is there's a thing called Amazon Mechanical Turk where literally you can just put jobs out there that have tiny cash values on them, and say, here, are you willing to spell check three sentences for a buck for me, or something like that? And people will sign up and earn money doing it. And the idea here, part of the idea here is to have some inclusion. Have a way that skeptics, all skeptics can help participate in projects that are helping to advance skepticism. You know, there's a lot of great blogs and podcasts. I have a blog, I'm on Derek's podcast. There's many other podcasters here, and they're all doing awesome stuff, but not everybody has time for that, right? Frankly, I don't have time to do the ones that I've committed to most of the time, which if you've looked at my blog in the last few weeks, you know that, because I haven't posted that much because I've been getting ready for this meeting. But the neat thing about crowdsourcing is you can do it in tiny little increments. If you wanna help with Wikipedia, you can literally spend 30 seconds helping with Wikipedia, and then go on about your business, and you've actually accomplished something that helps move the ball forward. And the idea is that by finding ways that skeptics can get involved in this, and advance skepticism through this, we can get more skeptics involved. And you can do it anywhere you have an internet connection, right? So you can do it from your couch while you're watching TV. And we need all the skeptics we can get to help out. Another reason to do this sort of stuff is outreach. Another problem somewhat with blogs and podcasts is they tend to sometimes preach to the choir, right? We tend to build skeptic blogs that talk to other skeptics about skepticism, and it becomes this circular loop. How do we break out of that and actually reach the general public and teach them about the things that we know about, about cognitive biases and pseudoscience and all this good stuff? So the idea is there's so much commerce going on on the internet, and so many different things going on on the internet, there's a lot of opportunities to intercept people while they're on their way to become a victim, of bad information, while they're on their way to become a customer of a homeopath or a psychic or something like that. If you think about how people do that, there are ways to get in front of them using the internet. And it's an awesome opportunity. We didn't have this opportunity before. 30 years ago, how would you intercept someone when they were about to hire a psychic? Would you stand in front of the psychic's building all day? Nobody could have done that. But there are things you can do on the internet to get people's attention right while they're trying to find a psychic. One of the things I'd like to warn you about is you have to think a little bit about what kind of projects you're working on. There's this thing that some people call it slactivism, some people call it clictivism, but it's sort of this false idea that you think you're doing something useful, but really you're kind of spinning your wheels online. There's a lot of kind of feel-good things that people try to get you to do online. And they're great and there's nothing wrong with them, but there's the danger sometimes that you'll lull yourself into the sense that you're actually helping a project when the things that you're doing are actually not doing anything. You have to think about what you're trying to accomplish. Here are some examples of things that can be slactivism sometimes, forwarding emails, retweeting things. That is helpful to get the word out on some things, but if you're just retweeting stuff and feel like you're advancing skepticism just by retweeting stuff all day, maybe it's not helping that much. Clicking like, everybody wants you to click that stupid Facebook like button now. It's useful to get things more visible in Facebook. It definitely is a useful thing to do, but if all you're doing is clicking like, I don't know how much help you're causing to skepticism. Changing your avatar, a big pet peeve of mine I'm gonna talk about on Sunday. It's bombing online polls, which seems to be a big hobby of some folks. Really a tremendous waste of time. Some online petitions are a waste of time, not all of them. Some of them can be very effective. You have to be careful about how you set them up and what your goal is. But, and again, none of these things are inherently wrong. I'm not saying don't do these things. If you wanna change your avatar, by all means, change your avatar. But don't lull yourself into a sense that you're making a difference when all you did was change your avatar. So how do you distinguish? What's a useful crowdsourcing thing that you can do and what's a slactivism? One of the things is, will it achieve a tangible goal? Like, if it's a petition, it has to be a very focused petition with a specific target and a specific goal that's achievable. And if it's a creating content, think about where is this content gonna be a year from now or five years from now? If you're writing a comment on page 15 of a forum thread, is anyone gonna see that a year from now? Probably not. But if you're writing content, for instance, in Wikipedia, maybe it will still be there. And we'll talk about that later. Are there more direct ways you can help? Or are you just doing busy work? So what are we trying to do? What is the idea of all this crowdsourcing stuff? Well, we're trying to do the things that skeptics say they're doing, which is educating the general public about science and critical thinking, right? We wanna break out of this, let's all talk to ourselves about how great skepticism is and how horrible the latest quack of the week is, and let's get out to the public and warn them away from the quack of the week. Another thing is just basically improving the quality of information online. I'm an information guy, a website guy. And so to me, a lot of what skepticism is about boils down to misinformation, right? Fundamentally, misinformation, bad information, whether it's science or conspiracy theory or pseudoscience or whatever, it's all misinformation at its core. And we wanna improve the quality of information online or at least cause the information that's good to be a little bit more visible and perhaps the information that's bad be a little bit less visible. And we wanna warn the public about dangerous things. So all of these projects involve getting involved in a community and we will later in this, we will talk about some projects that were built specifically for skepticism. But a large part of this is kind of co-opting crowdsourcing projects that already exist. And one of the things that you have to be aware of is you have to be aware of community 101. You have to be part of the community, okay? You can't just go in guns of blazing in Wikipedia and say, okay, the skeptics here now, I'm gonna fix all your pages. You have to be part of the community. Wikipedia has been around for 10 years and there's a lot of people who spend a lot of their life on it and they don't appreciate the new guy coming in and making a mess of things. And one of the things you can do to lessen that fear of the new guy is to play by the rules, create an account. That's mainly a Wikipedia thing. Most sites make you create an account. But Wikipedia will let you edit without even signing up. And I recommend that you never do that because it's just, it's looked at, people take a dim view of anonymous edits. Fill out your bio if there's somewhere where you can say who you are. Do post an avatar. If there's a way to put a little picture, doesn't have to be a photo. You can have whatever piece of art you want. If you can, now I know a lot of people using a moniker or an anonymous name online for various very good reasons. And that's fine. But if you can reveal your identity and you're comfortable with that, that can be good too. For instance, Wikipedia has rules that you're not, you're not, you're supposed to honor if people are being anonymous. But I am very upfront about who I am on Wikipedia. Be nice to other people. Very simple. Participate in the various processes. If there's a friending process or a follow process. If there's ways that you're expected to interact with the other people on the service, do that. Understand the rules. It's very important that every site has its rules, has its expectations of its users. So you gotta do that so that people will feel like you're part of the community. And I always recommend to go slow at first. Now some of the things we're gonna talk about are fairly simple. When we talk about web of trust, there's not a ton to learn on web of trust. So go slow may not apply there, but go slow definitely applies on Wikipedia. There's a big knowledge curve there in terms of learning how things already work. And a lot of people on that site that already know how it works. So you need to go slow at first so that you don't get yourself into trouble. So ask questions, get permission. Most of these sites have ways that you can interact with the other users. One of the things I recommend is to always use as much of the service as you can. For instance, we're gonna talk about leaving tips on Foursquare. And tips are just one of many features of Foursquare. And I would highly recommend that you not just create an account on Foursquare and start creating a million tips. Because people are gonna look at that and say why is this guy not doing anything else on Foursquare? And all of a sudden he thinks he has a million tips for everyone else. So even if you're not that interested in the other features, try to use them to build up a usage pattern. So people say, this is a regular user. This is a person who's using our service. So we are not gonna treat him like he's a spammer or an abuser. So don't be a spammer. Don't just stick with the skeptic stuff. And I think I have a slide, oh yeah, the next slide has it. But don't just be negative. Don't be harshing everybody's mellow all the time. This is wrong, this is wrong. Change this. Try to be positive sometimes. It helps. I know it's hard, because as skeptics we like to debunk things. But there are ways to find positive things to do. One of the things I do, for instance when I edit Wikipedia, is I try to find every once in a while something completely unrelated to skepticism to work on. So I do historic buildings in the town that I live in. I just look on the Wikipedia and find something that doesn't have an article. And I write it and I've spent, there's one article that I probably spent, I don't know, 20 or 30, maybe 40 man hours on, researching, going to the library, looking at microfilm, and wrote a really good article about this 100 year old building. And the idea is to build up a reputation on that site. And as people will see that and say, wow, this guy spent a lot of time on this article. He seems to be really interested in Wikipedia. So if next time when I come in and take someone else's headed out, maybe they'll respect me a little bit better. We have to be aware that we are kind of, in many cases sort of co-opting a little bit some of these tools. They're not explicitly designed to be skeptic. And some communities will be a little averse or at least some people in the community will be a little bit averse. So this comes up a little bit on Web of Trust but I've never had much of a problem with it. Where some people on Web of Trust feel like skeptics using Web of Trust is not an appropriate use of service. So you have to, again, go slow, be a little bit careful. And that's where mixing skeptic and non-skeptic use can be helpful because people will trust you more. If you come in and you're constantly just doing Scientology stuff, people will notice that or the algorithms that they use to manage the site will notice that. And they'll say, you know, this is somebody that's got an axe to grind about Scientology. They may not be doing their homework. And I talked about being nice, be direct and polite. You know, skeptics like sarcasm and like humor. And it's fun and I love it too. Everybody loves a good joke on a homeopath's expense. But these types of projects are not an appropriate place for that because you're trying to reach the general public and they're not gonna appreciate your really clever pun on diluted versus diluted. They're not gonna get it. So just don't do that. Just be very straightforward and explain Avogadro's number and go through this slow, careful thing and save the sarcasm for the blog post that you're gonna write later. And don't forget, and this comes up in a couple of our examples later, to a certain extent the other side is doing this too. Right? So you gotta watch out for negative voting. I've run into this a few times. We'll see some examples on Web of Trust where it became, in fact, one of them affected me personally, where it was clear that somebody that didn't like skeptics was going out and basically doing what I'm telling you to do here but in the opposite direction. And usually there's ways to leave feedback and leave counteracting positive votes and try to counteract whatever the bad guy is doing. We'll talk about that later. Now not really specifically to this, but it helps is specialization. I've recommended this for years for skeptics. Skepticism covers a lot of ground. You think about, just think about all the topics you're gonna hear this weekend by the end of the weekend between UFOs and alt med and conspiracy theories and critical thinking and logical fallacies and ghosts and Psypowers and just go on and on and there's a huge list of things. And it's really hard to be an expert in all of those things. So I really recommend in almost all aspects of skeptic being a skeptic to try to specialize, pick an area out and make that your own because that's the only way you're gonna get really good at it. And we've even seen instances in the last few years where major, major skeptics have kind of tripped themselves up because they have to know all this stuff and it's hard, it's really hard. So occasionally a major skeptic will say something that isn't quite in line with the scientific consensus on this or that and get a lot of heat for it. They can take the heat. You as Joe Sixpack around the corner, nobody knows who you are maybe, they're not gonna give you the credit that they might give a well-known skeptic. So it's something I recommend and it helps out with these crowd sourcing projects too. All right, so that's the intro part. And closing windows so we can save some space and we'll go right to our second section which is about complaining. Rating and complaining. I figured we'd do this right off because skeptics love to complain about stuff, right? So why not do it in crowd sourcing projects? It's kind of a classic technique. We write letters to the editor, we write open letters to the media. Now blogs are often forums for complaining about this or that. The major organizations often release press releases when this, that crazy psychic does something. There's pros and cons to that. It can be very focused and reactive to something that you know the public has been exposed to. But then you can't really control what happens because you're at the whim of the editors if you're writing a letter to the editor or press release whether or not that's gonna see print is up to the whim of some editor somewhere. And you always have the problem, the fundamental problem that you have with a lot of classic skeptical methods, non-digital skeptical methods is our speech never quite has the visibility of the original speech that we're trying to counteract, right? Yuri Geller gets a front page article and then we write a nasty letter. A tiny percentage of the people who see the front page article are gonna see the response letter. But this is something where the internet realm can help us out because there are situations where we can maybe not quite get the visibility that the original does, but we can come pretty close because of the power of internet tools. And it's really exciting that we can get in front of as many people as the bad guy is or get right next, get our content right next to his content in a list. And the first thing and probably one of the most exciting things in terms of just sheer impact, especially when you measure impact versus effort is web of trust. This is a tool, it's actually existed for like five or six years. I just became aware of it about two years ago and I believe it comes out of Finland. And the idea is to try to deal with the problem of there's too many websites and nobody knows which ones to trust, right? There's a lot of really cool, everybody knows Amazon, you can trust Amazon and hopefully they won't lose your credit card number. But if you find joeschickenshack.org who has this really cool canned chicken product or whatever, how do you know you can put your credit card into that website and trust that guy not to steal your money? And web of trust directly addresses that problem and it does it through crowdsourcing. Basically asks the crowd, okay, have you had a bad experience with this website? Did you buy something and then they never shipped it to you? Put in a vote and we will aggregate all those votes and expose them as a rating for each site so that the next guy who goes to the site can know whether or not he should trust the site. And it plugs right into your web browser. So the idea is that as you're browsing this thing is looking up the ratings for these sites and it can tell you. 34 million people have downloaded that browser plugin. And Facebook is now using these ratings to rate the links when people put links into Facebook. So when you click a link that your friend put in, if it has a really low web of trust rating, Facebook will give you a warning. That's 900 million user accounts. So close to a billion users potentially can be affected by a web of trust rating. And the first thing you see is this little red donut that you see up here. And I'll show you a screenshot of where you see that but basically next to a hyperlink on your screen, you'll see that little red donut that says, oh, you shouldn't click this. Or if it's a good link, you'll see a green one. And if you try to load them, you'll get a block message. Let's see what that looks like. Here's Jim Humble. If you're following a couple of years ago, there was a, and actually it's resurfaced recently. A guy named Jim Humble was selling essentially industrial bleach as a medical intervention for Crohn's disease, I think. Anyway, horrible, horrible stuff. And he was selling it on like umpteen sites. He had all these people selling it for them. Well, somebody knuckled down and did the hard work of finding all those sites and giving them bad web of trust ratings. And this is part of a Google result page. So in Google, if I have web of trust installed and I happen to get a search that gets these results, I happen to type Jim Humble, MMS. You can see all those red donuts there that say don't click this, don't click this, don't click this. So hopefully people who aren't even skeptics will see that and say oh, maybe I shouldn't be going to these sites. But what happens if you do? If you do, you see this screen. It starts to load the webpage and if you look, you may not be able to see it but just in sort of grayed out behind that warning is the actual webpage. And you get this giant warning that says this site has a poor reputation. Maybe you shouldn't go there. Now you can click a button and go to the site. It doesn't stop you, it's not censorship. But it says hey look, maybe you don't wanna be here. So that's an awesome way to reach people. It doesn't look quite that impressive on Facebook. But 30 million people can see that warning when they go to one of these websites. And one of the things that we've been doing since we discovered this and the skeptics got interested in it is we've been doing calls to action. And last fall when skeptics got very interested in this Brzezinski character in Houston who is a cancer quack, mostly starting out of England because there was a kid who was sick and they were trying to raise money to send her to Houston. So the British skeptics got interested in it. And there was a lot of chatter on Twitter and I sent this tweet and said hey, do you think Brzezinski is trustworthy? If not, let's go, let's go, change his rating on Web of Trust to indicate that. And I don't have a ton of power on Twitter but it happened that the bad astronomer who does have thousands of followers saw this tweet and incorporated it into a blog post. And several hundred people followed that link and did some voting. And within a couple of hours, this warning started popping up on Brzezinski's website. And a couple of days later, we saw the webmaster for Brzezinski clinics show up in the Web of Trust forums and boy, were they mad. Boy, were they mad. But Web of Trust left the ratings there and that's still that way. In fact, I think I took that screenshot yesterday. So it's still that way. If anybody finds Brzezinski's site, they get that warning right in front of their face. That is some awesome power. And all it takes is a click but it takes a lot of clicks, right? So we need everybody looking. There's thousands of these websites. Brzezinski's a high profile one but we need everybody looking for these sites that are selling this quack stuff or pushing astrology or all the things that we talk about and give them ratings. But let's talk about what those ratings are. You see that there's four donuts on that screen there. They do four different ratings because Web of Trust was designed for a lot of different things. It was designed for scams. It was designed for privacy problems. It was designed for child safety so kids wouldn't go to porn. And there's some settings. So like for instance, you can tell it to prefer the child safety rating if you want. Only a couple of these actually really apply to us. And the main one is trustworthiness, right? That's pretty clear to me that trustworthiness relates to skepticism. Do you trust what is on this website? No, it's cancer quackery. It's nonsense. So give it a bad trustworthy rating. Now vendor reliability, that's a different thing. Vendor reliability has to do with, I gave him money, he didn't send me the product. So I recommend that you don't vote in that unless you have specific knowledge about that because that's not honest. Privacy, same way. Unless you know that you put in your email address and it got out onto a spammer's list, don't vote in the privacy thing. I know the temptation is when you go to Web of Trust, red, red, red, red, but you really don't wanna do that. Let's be honest, trustworthiness and I think child safety. It's kind of oriented toward porn, but I think when you're talking about an anti-vaccine person, child safety, I think it fits. So those are the two that I mainly vote is trustworthiness and child safety. So that's where, earlier when I was talking about, don't spam, don't give ratings that aren't appropriate because people, there are automatic algorithms and moderators on these things. I don't know how much Web of Trust monitors what they do, but certainly they must know that their system gets abused sometimes. So do the right thing and hopefully no one will have reason to doubt your votes. Another thing, and just briefly I'm gonna talk about online reviews, kind of a similar thing. And this is a lot of different sites. iTunes, Amazon, you know, you practically can't turn around without finding some kind of online review. And where the product being reviewed is something that relates to skepticism or relates to the folks that we oppose, like a book about ghosts or something or a good science book, that can help. Cause a lot of times these votes are used to decide which products will show up in recommended lists and things like that. And the negative reviews are a review is a good place to give people a more explicit warning. Cause you can write something. You can say, okay, here's why what's in this book is wrong. And this is a case where you have to be aware of the bad guys making trouble too. And we have seen this where creationists will latch on to the latest Dawkins book on Amazon and go in and write a bunch of negative reviews. And at that point we need skeptics to go in and counter them so that the votes don't get skewed way down just because somebody's being a jerk. Most systems have some way of kind of voting on the vote so that you can feed back against people who are voting maliciously. That's what Amazon's look like, that little button there that says, was this review helpful to you? Yes, no. So use that if you see a review that really, quite clearly looks like someone's being malicious and not honest about the contents of the book. And I, you know, I admonish you to be honest yourself. Don't write negative reviews of books that you haven't read, right? Let's be, you know, let's be ethical about this. You know, get a copy from the library, don't buy it. Or, you know, get a copy from somewhere and read it or buy the book and read it and write a review or at least base your review on some good solid knowledge about what's in the product. And, let's see, where are we gonna go from here? I think this is where we're gonna bring Derek up to talk about Foursquare and Yelp. Since we were just talking about reviews. What is this, the last day? Did it just start? I'm already tired. Oh geez, I haven't turned around since I sat down. A lot of people don't. I'm Derek Alduno. I put my stuff down there. If you ever listen to Skepticality, I'm one of the only voices that are left on the show because Whippy's like full-time working and on like school all the time. So she wants to be on the show but half the time she just is not home. So that's me. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about Foursquare, I think. Is the first one that's coming up here? Hey, look at that. So there's a few different websites where you can leave reviews or tips. Most of these are tips. And this is a little different than Amazon or Web of Trust in a way or even Wikipedia. These are things like people have stores or they have services they offer. And especially things like Yelp and Foursquare, especially because Foursquare is about locations. So it's not a book or it's not a website. It's actually somebody's business or hotel or hotel or place like that. So you can create reviews and offer information about those places. Now this one again, you have to be very careful. You have to make sure that you read all the rules and you follow the instructions because if you don't like the other things, they all have communities and they will get rid of your review. It's happened a few times to some of the skeptics, believe it or not. So don't do what I did and there's my example here. Cause like Wikipedia or anything else, you should kind of have a history of doing like real reviews and tips. And this, I just kind of jumped in and I did this one thing. It's not really quite a tip because I have this tip about a psychic that's in our Atlanta area. And my tip is actually a tip because it talks about the IG. Hey, if this psychic can do what they claim to do, they can win $50,000 and if you're the person who gets them to do it and they win, you get money too. So it is kind of a tip but I should have had something else more than just that. So my example is good and bad at the same time. So you should probably be a little more, I don't know, gentle than I was here. And the thing I reason, I say that is because recently is Bob here? No, he's not. Bob's the head of the IIG Atlanta. He's moving that pretty much in the next week. But anyway, he did this, the same exact thing I have here. I actually copied and pasted his thing. And after I did this, he came to the meeting and said, oh, by the way, I got banned from Foursquare because a bunch of the psychic people from that location started to like complain and Foursquare actually banned him. So that when I say you have to have a little more class, I just copied and pasted what he did. Even though I don't think that's too bad, but I guess he did it on many different places and then they claimed it was spam. So if he used the same exact blurb, I did it on like three places. He did it in many other places. So again? It should be right there on the screen. Oh, I have it right here. Oh, I can't either. It's very small. I forget. It's basically the blurb from the IIG website about if you can prove that you have powers under scientific testing, you win $50,000 and the person who finds you wins about three or 2,000 or something. 5,000, 5,000. Hey. Oh, what have you done? Sorry. Do you know what we're doing now? Here we go. Anyway, it's pretty much what it is. It's almost a... It's this right here. Yeah. So it is a tip and my counter argument about them saying that it was spam, it is a tip. I mean, what the hell? It is your business and you basically gave people a way to like get themselves money and you a lot of money. But they don't like being called out. So there's better ways than just jump in there and call them out. You could do a little class here. I have a little more history on Foursquare because I've done many other reviews for other things like hotels and things. I used to travel about 97% of my life for business and work. So I used to actually write things about the hotels I liked and things like that. So hopefully they won't ban me because I've done this three or four times before I knew that they were doing that. But it's a good way because the nice part about Foursquare, does anybody use Foursquare before? Yeah, everybody has one of these things that's connected to the internet all the time anymore. And when you load that up on Foursquare and now it does tips around you. So if you're in an area and there's a psychic around there and that tip will actually show up. So people who aren't skeptics will see something like that and they'll say, hey, that's interesting. And maybe they'll wanna go to that psychic and win $5,000 and ask their psychic to do it. They're not gonna like that but it does promote the mindset and it does promote critical thinking because therefore they're gonna say, why won't you? You're not gonna get me $5,000? You say you do this stuff. So it could actually have some really cool things. In our way you can use Foursquare. Many of these psychics actually don't have any locations because the locations at Foursquare have to be put in. So many places that you wanna rate, they don't have them. So then create one. Now, me and Tim actually talked about this a little bit because they're like, well, you know, again have to follow all the guidelines and things. Let's say there's a psychic near you and you go on Foursquare and you wanna like put it down and they're not there. Well, you can actually put it in their location, yourself. They don't need permission from them. You can do it yourself. And the weird part about this is you're drawing attention to the psychic or the bad service or the move, merchant, whatever you wanna call them. But, and again, they shouldn't really mind because you're giving them advertisement. They didn't take the time to do. As long as you use all the official information because if you read their terms and guidelines, you can't do anything bad. So you have to actually put in their real stuff. So go to their website, put in all the real information and then you can leave my tip where I should have, in all of these, you really should probably put like a more enticing tip, one that's not as hit you in the head with the book as I did, you know, hey, by the way, I think this guy's a scam. So here, try to win some money because if they're not, hey, you make money. Everybody knows what the really you're saying is that they're not gonna go for this. So it is kind of, you know, to the psychic themselves or the person that owns this store, they're gonna say, oh, they're trying to disparage us. So you have to try to make it soft and fuzzy at the same time because you want more people to be, more full eyes with honey. So anyway, you can, you create these and you can do it that way. And it works because like I said, if you pull out your phone and you go to the Forest Square and nowadays, no, it tips around me. So they'll pop up. It's kind of a cool, kind of like the web of trust but in the flesh using the internet, whichever that kind of works, maybe. Anyway, and there's another one like Forest Square. There's Yelp, who hasn't heard of Yelp. Yelp is kind of like we're Forest Square, but unlike Forest Square, Yelp can be used for not only locations, it can be for almost any service, is kind of mainly meant for locations but you can use it for other things. Nice part about Yelp, I think last time I looked, Yelp actually has more people that use it more than Forest Square because Forest Square marks itself right at people using mobile phones. You can use the website but it's not meant for that. Yelp is like, I don't know, Wikipedia for reviews of locations and services in a way. So you get more eyeballs at Yelp. Again, they're just as a, they're a lot more vigilant with their monitoring of the Yelp stuff because the Yelp community is hardcore, trust me. So again, don't be like me and just go in there with your skeptic shlong swinging around, say by the way, this guy's trying to make money. Yeah, it doesn't really work. So you can be a little more gentle, but again, it's another great way to draw attention to locations that are already there and you can actually, again, whoa, don't do that. You have the pros and cons to all of his stuff. You do things like you can create a location and it might not get noticed by the owner. So the nice part is if they didn't take the time to put in the location or at Yelp or Foursquare, the nice part is they probably aren't paying attention. So what you put in there might last for a while unless the community gets around to it like they did with Bob. So you have to walk a really gentle line, but if you do it right, I haven't been banned yet and nobody's actually taken away my reviews on either one of these, which I find amazing because I use the same exact wording that Bob used, so I don't know why I got away with it. And then another pro in a way, and this is one that Tim brought up and I never thought about it, you're kind of creating a map of all the merchants of woo in your area that you can point people to, to maybe having people's heads when you talk to friends and family or people in your area, and then you hear the name of some spa that has this nice, fancy New Age name and you hear that, oh, the people there are like offering a high-priced rakey for free. High price for free. Better anyone knows what I mean by that. Here, come in for this soothing music and a foot rub and for $500 and I give you rakey. So things like that. So it's calling a nice map for the community to look at and also you're getting the word out and a lot of people that aren't skeptics at all will see this information, which is the best part is you're not ever saying anything skeptical, really, you're just saying, hey, somebody went to this place and what is this? This recently happened with my wife of all people. I actually recently wrote one of these on Foursquare because I saw a location, a battle place in Atlanta and it happened to be on, what is it, the Samantha takes over lady on Bravo. She mainly does care but now she does everything and she happened to come to some woo place in Atlanta to like help them. It's a chiropractor that had rakey services and all this stuff. I saw it on TV and I said, what the hell is this place? So I went on Foursquare and Yelp and I put all their stuff in there too and they were in there and it was interesting to see those comments because it was on the TV show and they had many unhappy customers. So I put some stuff in there because obviously the people actually had come to that place and they saw it on TV. They said, oh yeah, this guy's a complete fraud. So it was great. Then my wife was like, oh, I didn't realize that it was all crap. It's like, honey, you live with me. How'd you not know? So I don't pay attention. She never listens to my show. She doesn't. So she's like, oh, I didn't know you were on then. She does this all the time. She says, my dad was talking about this. Have you ever had a show about this? Yes, honey. You never listen to my show, do you? Anyway, so yeah. So it's good to have this information because you can point family, friends, things like that. Akon, again, you have to follow the guidelines and rules. Like Tim said, like Wikipedia, like Force Square, especially Yelp, they have a big community and don't go crazy in there and just start stomping around and saying, I'm Mr. Skeptic and I'm gonna point out every single place here that you never should go to. I didn't get, I should have put all my examples because it was like I said, I used to travel all the time. So I had a lot of stuff on Force Square that was just regular reviews, things like, by the way, this hotel, they allow dogs, not just seeing dogs, any dog. And I actually had people comment on my comment and said, hey, I've done this, this is great. So then it builds up goodwill. And then I just have the list of those links. And it's time for Tim again. So you're done with me. Yeah, actually that Force Square screenshot that he showed happens to be right across the street from where I work. So one day I actually saw Bob's now deleted tip come up when I was checking into the- I put the same tip back on the same website that he got banned for. Yeah. Which is a cool new feature that they put in Force Square just recently, like last month where tips, it used to be that the tips would only show up for the place that you were at. But now tips will show up for nearby places if there's no tip where you're at. And the idea is to help you discover, oh, by the way, there's this really cool restaurant across the street you might not have known about. And ours could say, oh, by the way, you could win $5,000 by turning the psychic in to the skeptic police. Uh. Well, yeah, try to word it a little better than that. All right, so we're gonna talk about curation and I'm gonna try to back on time. Curation is the idea of trying to sort of organize the information that's online so people can better find it. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in this area right now. And one of the reasons I bring up a curation is because we've got a lot of stuff. If you look out there, you know, everybody's got their favorite blog and their favorite, everybody goes to Dr. Novella's blog and the Skepticality is one of the top podcasts and we've got our favorites. But if you actually look out there, there are hundreds and hundreds of skeptic blogs out there. There's a lot of good stuff that I think is getting sometimes overlooked. And these are rough figures based on a thing called Skepticator that somebody in Australia built that kind of aggregates it all. And actually these figures are from last summer but at that point there were like 700 feeds that he was aggregating and it was like 250 posts a day. That's a lot of stuff. So how do you find the good stuff? How do you find the really cool articles that you should be telling your skeptic friends about? And I did a census of skeptic podcasts and this is fairly accurate data from 2005 through 2012. This is just surely the number of skeptic podcasts and I just out of sheer laziness didn't even include the atheist podcasts. So this is just the podcasts that have at least some science in it. Not the ones that are just talking about religion or atheism or whatever, which there's a lot of great podcasts to do that too. Like I said, I'm just lazy and didn't want to have to chase all those down but there's like 95 of them now. There seems to be this weird thing where it seems to be flattening off right now but huge, huge growth and there's like 10 different languages and stuff like that. We'll talk about language issues later. So there's a lot of content out there. There's probably 100,000 blog posts. I know as of last summer there were at least 3,800 episodes of various podcasts. That's actually an undercount because when I did my recount this year I realized that I had done a severe undercount last year and there's at least 9,600 videos on YouTube and Vimeo. So that's a lot of stuff to wade through to find the really juicy stuff and skeptics need a way to keep up. They need to find the, I need to know where the really good, who has the best pithiest explanation of homeopathy or acupuncture or whatever. So when somebody asks me about it I can send them right to that resource. And when there's new stuff coming out I need to know about it, right? How do you find out about the latest study or whatever without relying on another blogger? Especially if you're a blogger and you need to find out about this stuff. And if you just Google some of these things depends on the search Google can get really clogged up with the believers, right? It's hard to narrow down and find the good skeptic stuff in amongst all the guys trying to sell you homeopathic Berlin Wall or whatever. So we need better ways to find things and one of those ways is to curate stuff which is someone, you or you or you just making a list or finding a subset of skeptic stuff and saying here's what I think is the good stuff in this category. And one of the keys is looking for patterns or relationships, right? Not necessarily just a category but finding things that kind of relate to each other can be used together and build on that and then publicize your work, right? Let people know that you've built it. And that's kind of the standard way that blogs used to work historically. A lot of bloggers would write at least one but probably five to 10 blog posts per day and a lot of them would be very short. Hey, here's this news story I saw. Here's why it's interesting. Check it out. And the repetition keeps the community engaged and keeps everything going. Now that's kind of changed these days. Some bloggers still do that. I don't do that on my blog but a lot of people have moved that to other medium that we'll talk about in a minute. But another way is to just do a website. My website, What's the Harm, is just a curation project. I didn't create any of that information. All of it is stuff that I found. Some of it was news story. Some of it was stuff that other skeptics had already written about. I just organized it in a new way by putting all the cases on one website so you could find them in one place. So it's a pure curation situation. Here's one that somebody created sometime last year called Skept TV and all it is is a Tumblr. And a Tumblr is just a blog but it's designed to be very simple to post to so you can do those short posts every day. And whoever runs this, I'm actually not sure who exactly runs it. So if you're here, come see me. And they just look for good skeptic videos. And I'm not sure how often they post at this point but it was at least one a day. And so if you wanted to see good skeptic videos, here was a way to do it, right? And that's a curation project, right? Social media for a lot of people. I know a lot of people don't use Twitter, give Twitter a bad rap. It's all about people saying what they had for lunch. No, it's not really. I mean, if you follow a lot of 13-year-old kids, maybe it is. But the way I use it and a lot of my friends use it and I follow a lot of skeptics is we use it to exchange information about skepticism, exchange links. This is just four of my posts from last week sometime. And you can see that I posted two news stories. I posted a tip about TAM, I posted some information about where the schedule was online. And my skeptic history post, which is just something that I do every day just so that I have something to post every day, that's educational. And that's a curation. This is what I'm interested in in skepticism. And if your interests somehow intersect mine, then by following me on Twitter, you can benefit from what I'm curating. And so you can do that too. Now the really interesting thing about this is, now there's interesting side effects of this now. And I wrote a blog post about this a few weeks back. This is a tiny slice out of a Google result page. And this is what I personally get if I type Reiki into Google. And you'll notice that the first one is a Reiki website. But the second one is a skeptic blog post about Reiki. Now that's not a very highly ranked skeptic blog. And the only reason it shows up in my results is because I'm friends with that person on Google Plus. And you'll notice it has a little person icon to the left of the blue link. And right underneath it, it says Angela Mead and shared this. So the only reason that result shows in my Google results is because I know Angela Mead online. And that's a powerful thing. Now of course she's just showing me a skeptic post, but imagine if you had family members who were thinking about going to a Reiki person and you had posted stuff online, there's a way to insert something right into the Google results that they'll see. Right? And all you do to do that is just post a link on Google Plus and make sure you're friends with the people that you're trying to reach. So that's a cool effect of curation that's come from new features that Google's built. Just briefly, I'm gonna talk about Freeze Page or website. There's a lot of situations where quacks and psychics and whatnot will get caught saying something they shouldn't say online, like making a claim that's illegal or trying to make a prediction retroactively. And there are tools like Freeze Page is one, Website is another, there's a number of different ones that allow you to, if you've ever had to link to pages that are fairly old, you know they disappear. It's the horror of maintaining what's the harm is all the news links on what's the harm are expiring all the time and people are emailing me, oh, this link is broken, this link is broken. And that's why these services exist because if you wanna cite something, like if you wanted to cite a web article in a paper, a scientific paper, the only way to cite it and know that the person who's reading your paper could see your citation is to use Website. Well, we can use that to capture, say, the predictions page on sylviabrown.com and see what Sylvia Brown was predicting last April. And then if she then says, oh, well last April, I predicted that there were gonna be two chimpanzees loose in Las Vegas today. I don't know if you saw the news, but there were some chimpanzees loose. Strange things you find out when you go up to your hotel room and turn the TV on. And if she tried to go and edit her webpage and lie and say that she had predicted that, you could go back and do that. And then skeptics have done this. There was a case a couple of years ago with a psychic to the stars psychic Nicky. And when Heath Ledger died, she obviously went right to her, here's my predictions of who's gonna die this year site and stuck Heath Ledger's name in it and a skeptic blogger caught her doing it because he had done a freeze page of her predictions page. So that is an awesome power, but that's something again where we need a big crew of people doing this stuff because there's a lot of these sites out there and nobody, we don't have massive multi-million dollar organizations to do this on a massive scale. So we need you to pick one psychic and you to pick another psychic and get this done. There's a lot of services that you can use for curation type things, organizing stuff. And they all work in slightly different ways. You've got social media like Twitter and Facebook which sort of pushes out your curation to other people. There's the bookmarking sites like Delicious, Reddit, Pinterest. These are ways where you collect what you're interested in in a place where people can come see it. Reddit is interesting because it has a special skeptic section. So that's a fun way to sort of help skeptics organize in a group curation essentially of here's what skeptics find interesting today is the skeptic Reddit. And then we're gonna talk about the Q&A sites in a second, the Stack Exchange. And then of course just simply emailing stuff out is the old fashioned way of doing it. And again, specialization I think is the key. Curation doesn't make any sense unless you've got some sort of slice that you're trying to curate. I specialize in harm stories, skeptic history. I do a little bit of infosec and technology. But I don't do like alt med theory. I don't do conspiracy theory stuff. There's a whole lot of stuff that I don't post on because I let other people be the experts on that. So let's talk about Q&A sites. These are kind of, it's kind of a new type of website that's just come out in the last couple of years or at least the good ones have just come out in the last couple of years. There've been a lot of really crappy Q&A sites over the years. And the idea is to post answers to very focused questions. People have these questions of how do I reset the input on the back of my Marantz receiver so that it's in stereo again? Or just some crazy thing that you know somebody on the internet knows the answer to that. And the idea is that if you collect enough of those questions in one place, Google will start bringing people to you. Well, how do you collect enough answers in one place? You do it through crowdsourcing. And there's a lot of people who just happen to know I happen to have solved that problem. So I know the answer to that. Let's collect what I know, and then it'll be there for someone else to benefit from. And the idea is that these sites solve it better than the older sites. There's a bunch of older sites. There was one for programmers called Experts Exchange, which became a kind of a joke because if you read the name carefully, it looks like it says expert sex change. But it was horrible and everyone hated it because they would show you the question and they would show you the page and then they would put these ads in front of the answers or they would tell you you had to subscribe before you would see the answer. And it was just this blatant attempt to we might have this information you need, but you have to pay us $19.95 first. So there was a guy, a couple of guys who decided we can do this better than them and put them out of business. And they built this thing called Stack Exchange. And this is their diagram. They claim that they are sort of in the intersection of sort of four different types of websites. A Wiki, which is sort of a group edited database of articles. A blog, which is a sequential set of articles. A forum, which is people responding together to topics. And something like Reddit where people are finding things that are interesting and the interesting stuff bubbles to the top. And they claim that their site is designed to be the intersection of all four of those, that little star right in the center. And the way it works, the way they make it enticing and the way they get you to answer questions on the site is they've done what they call gamification. And this is a big part of Foursquare too. One of the things that makes Foursquare addictive and makes people want to do it is they've turned it into a game. You get points and you get badges and stuff. It seems really stupid, but there's this in some people's brains, there's this little weird thing where you like those little rewards. And because fundamentally Foursquare is pretty boring, right? You're logging where you're going. And it's gotten, there's some other benefits. I've actually gotten money from Foursquare, like American Express will give me discounts on things and stuff like that. But the gamification, basically they put points, they put badges, and the idea is you're trying to raise your reputation. You're trying to be able to say, hey, I answered the most questions, I'm a smart guy. And it incentivizes everybody to come up with good material and get the good material up to the top and make the site better and everybody feels invested in what they're doing. And of course you have manual moderation too, because you've always got jerks on the internet that are gonna start to ruin things. So you gotta have some people watching. But a lot of the moderation is done automatically through this game system. So they've been very successful with this. They got several million dollars of investment money last year, they're now at 87 different topics. They started with programmer stuff. They've now got photography, server management, you name it, a lot of it is technical stuff. There's two million users, four million questions, eight million answers. It's all free, actually all the content I think is licensed, and they did a skeptic site for us. Richard Stelling in the UK, they had a process where you could suggest the topic and he put in skepticism and it was debated and they kicked around some ideas and they launched the darn thing. So here's a question that someone wrote, which is, and this gives you an idea of what the site is about, what formal education did L. Ron Hubbard have? That's a very specific question that goes to, what is Scientology about? Was this guy qualified to tell us anything about anything? The answer is no. But rather than write a 5,000 word essay about why Scientology is terrible, this page answers that one specific question. And they've done some technical things that I won't get into on how this page is designed and what the URL is, so that these pages rank really highly in Google. So if you do a search like L. Ron Hubbard, formal education, this is the number one answer. And that's a powerful thing because if I wanted to put a website up that said this exact same thing and for it to be the number one answer, I'd have to do a lot of work to do that. I actually wrote that answer because I happened to have read the article in New Yorker that came out last February that had the exact answer to this. And I wrote the answer up and I footnoted it and hyperlinked it and you can see to the left of the question and to the left of the answer are some up-down arrows and a number. That's where the voting goes on. And so the questions get voted on and the answers get voted on and the good ones pop to the top and at some point the questioner chooses an answer that they like and that's what that green check below the 11 next to the answer is. The green check says, yes, I think you've answered this question correctly. And of course with skepticism, it's a little mess clear cut than the technical sites like if I ask you a question about a camera, at some point we're gonna be able to figure out what the right answer is. Skepticism sometimes the answers are harder than that but it still works amazingly well. So this is a great example of its curation because you're curating information but it's also a good example of how you can get information into Google and solve a very specific skeptic problem without having to do all that crazy stuff of setting up a blog, setting up a website, understanding what SEO is, all that nonsense when spending any money because they're already spending the money. And one of the things you can do is they've made it easy recently to ask and answer your own question. So you can, if you happen to in your reading and skeptic travels find some little tidbit that is hard to find and you feel like it answers a very specific question, just go to Stack Exchange and answer, write a question and there's a way you can click the button and say I'm gonna answer this question and write the answer. And they actually have a specific badge for that and it's a great way to put these little skeptic gems out there on the internet so people can find them. There's another site called Quora which is basically the same concept, it's different software. The only reason I mention it is it's gotten a lot of attention. So a lot of people are on Quora so it might, and I've seen a few skeptic topics pop up on Quora so it might be an interesting place to put some skeptic content from time to time or at least keep an eye on if people are asking questions. But certainly the skeptic Stack Exchange is a go-to place to go. And I think we're doing, oh we did all right on that. Okay so let's bring Derek back up and he's gonna talk about captioning. So another big way, Tim brought up the podcast thing earlier. You saw how many podcasts are out there. The thing about podcasts is that most of them are just radio shows so they're not in text form. So they don't get searched by the search engines because they don't know what's in that audio file. Google doesn't search everybody's podcast, it can't. So one of the things that we can crowdsource or help other things like skeptic media with is create the transcripts for every piece of skeptic media that's mainly just audio. And this extends to things that aren't just audio because some skeptic video is also not searchable either. It's for the same reason. So things like podcasts, podcasts, they have a very hard time getting any Google juice because they don't show up in the search engine. Because what I talked about last week on Skepticality is probably not on Google right now. Because it's not text, it's just money audio. This is going around on, going on quite a bit lately. Monster Talk, if either Blake or Ben is here, they actually take donations to pay for transcription services so they can get their shows transcribed and then have a show notes page that links to the entire actual episode as an article in a magazine. And that gets searched by Google. Great stuff. But they actually have people like, when Tim brought up things like crowdsource funding, that's what they use. They get people to donate a little bit of money and then they actually have professional people go and transcribe the stuff and then they actually have a back catalog of all their episodes in text form. That's a great way to do it. Skepticality's Guide Universe, everybody knows them. They see them every morning after this one doing their live show. They actually use the same idea but they actually have a wiki and they make everybody, they have people go out there and actually type in their, whoa, transcript for them in a wiki. So then people go in, they actually listen to the show and they tape it all in. And then over time, when people have time, they eventually actually fill out their episodes in a wiki format. Some places have an advantage. If Mr. Skeptoid is here, I don't like you because his show is very short and he actually prescripts everything and then reads from a script so he has a really easy time at this. He just puts his file up there and says, hey, Google, come get it. So he has a really good, great way to do that. So most of the shows don't have that luxury. So like me, we do a Skepticality. We have, gosh, we have a long form interview or two episodes every episode. And then we have three or four other reoccurring segments every time and then I'm not requiring people like Tim and all the people who actually contribute to my show to give me those scripts. I could do that, but I've been to, I don't know, absent minded to actually ask that question because I could probably do that because I probably do have scripts, but I don't think about it. But so most people go, well, what can I do to help this problem? I don't have time to do, I mean, most people go say, well, I don't have time to do a podcast, but I want to help. So you can help. There are really cool services that make this a really easy job. All right, I'm talking about three versions of this. There's one that Tim found is called Amara. It's actually, his real name is Universal Subtitles, but they have that fancy Brandon name, which is Amara. And then there's a free system. Now, Amara Universal Subtitles is actually mainly for videos, YouTube or what's the other one? Avimeo, it's for that type of thing, not audio. Transcribe, which is a free system. They're both, the other one's free too. But it's just a open source project where you can go and it has the same features, but it's just for audio, not video. Then what this happens is you can then use these transcriptions for YouTube because the best things to do, which is what I do, every episode of Skepticality, if you see that picture of me and Swoopy in cartoon form in Skepticality, and then I have the episode and the date, I put that on YouTube, all it is is that picture, and then I have under it on the video, it's just the sound file. And then I get a lot of actually, it's amazing how many hits I get on YouTube, and there's no video, it's just the audio. And a lot of people subscribe to my channel on YouTube almost as much as they do on my normal feed, which is just Skepticality. And I don't know why they would do it that way, but they do. A lot of people are just YouTube fanatics, and that's what they do. And all it is is a radio show with a picture that just stays there. If I was, if I had enough time in my life, I would actually make a little slide show of it to make it more interesting, but I don't have that time. So the nice part about YouTube is you can put captions, closed captions in YouTube, and the words that you're hearing actually show up on the screen. If you have a transcription, that's the problem. I don't have all my stuff transcribed. So the Amara, Universal Subtitles, this is actually a screenshot of me using that service. This is my latest episode, and you can see in the bottom right is the Control System, where you can, it tells you, you can put Shift, Tab, and you can go backwards, and you can go forward a little bit, and then you can listen to the actual show, and then type in that little box under the picture what is going on at that time, and then you hit Return, and then you can actually create the subtitles. At the end of this process, you say, okay, I'm done. And then it shows you the subtitles, and then you can scrub around on the video and say, okay, does this match? And they can match up the thing, and then you say, okay, and then it sends those subtitles to that YouTube video, so when people go there, and they click the thing, and say, I wanna see the subtitles, they're there. Well, it's kinda cool. Well, some people, like, you know, then you can actually, those subtitles actually get searched by Google, because guess what, Google owns YouTube. So if you help up podcasts like mine, because I try to do this, but I mean, I don't have enough time to do every single episode, but if people help podcasts this way, their content, even though it's audio, all the words end up in Google, and Google owns YouTube, and therefore, you get higher rankings. The thing is, this works for video. Here's one that's called, the worst name ever, really? It's actually what it's called, W-R, really, but it's, because it's really, yeah, really. This is just for audio. Same thing, but it's just audio. Nice part is, you can do this, send the file to the webmaster of that show, and say, hey, put this on your website, because if you actually put that in your show notes, as a page, that people can click on, Google will actually search that. So when somebody types anything that was talked about in that episode, it'll pop up in the Google search results. So that's another way you can really do it. And I just talked about this, because this shows you what actually it looks like. Here's another way you can help out. If you don't want to use the funky tool, you can actually go to any video on YouTube, upload the actual audio file with a little picture, and then YouTube will actually try to translate it. You can't really see what it's saying there. It's, Google's trying to understand my voice, which is really bad, since my voice is kind of fake, because I had to relearn how to talk completely. But it doesn't matter, because even my interviewee had really terrible translation as well. But you can actually go there, and YouTube can download these Google provided captions and actually try to correct them that way. So you can, it can probably help, maybe, but it is there, if you can call it that way. But it tries, not that well. But whoever here has used Google Voice, oh, wow, okay, a couple people. If you ever use the voicemail version of that, I tie that now to my iPhone, so when people actually send my voicemail, actually it gives me the actual, what Google thinks they said, which is entertaining more than actually useful. But it does an okay job for I get an idea. It was my dad, I understand that. He blurs around, I guess I know what my dad literally says. So it tries, badly, but it tries. But like I said, transcripts boost visibility a lot, because Google likes words more than anything else. Text words on a page, because that's what you search with. Until we all get that weird search that they're trying to make, so you can shove it in a video and then it'll try to find something like it, because has anybody here tried the fancy Google picture search? Yeah, how well did that work? Not that great, but they're trying. But until they get there, really, transcripts are the way to go. Then here are some links to the things I talked about. Here is the link to the MonsterTalk page on skeptic, because Skepticality and MonsterTalk are the official podcasts of Skeptic Magazine. And so their website is off of skeptic.com and they actually have a page there where you can actually donate to their transcription effort. Skeptoid already knows that show, but you can actually go there and actually see all his transcripts for every episode. There's the link to, hey, look, I did Skeptoid twice. Yeah. SGU has a link to their, they actually have a, is there a hard core? They actually have a domain just for their transcript effort, which is kind of cool of them. So actually have that so you can actually go there and see how they use their wiki to do this. Here's a link to Amara, which is actually their website. It's not Amara, it's actually the name of their company. It was the Universal Subtitles. Don't ask me. And there's the, really, really, and then YouTube. If you didn't know how to get to YouTube, I don't know if I can help you or not. So I'll go back to Tim again. Yeah, one of the things you can do with Universal Subtitles is it makes it easy to post multiple language. So, yeah, you had a mention of it on there. And so the idea being that you could transcribe it and then people could come in and line by line translate it into another language and we can get a lot of the skeptic content into other languages, which would be very cool. I occasionally have folks ask me for translations of what's the harm. We're gonna talk about, Wikipedia, and I've got way too many slides here because we gotta make sure we leave time for Shane. So I'm going to gloss over a lot of the slides here, but I'm gonna talk about the main thing. Wikipedia is probably the big project that a lot of folks have been working on, mainly because Susan Gerbick really jumped on this. I blogged about Wikipedia. There've been a lot of skeptics working on Wikipedia for years and years, but we started looking at it a little bit more carefully and saying, hey, skeptics should pay close attention to this. Now, a lot of people are skeptical of Wikipedia, right? There've been famous incidents where it's gotten things wrong, and how could an encyclopedia that's written by everybody possibly be any good, there's no central authority, there's a lot of problems with it, but if you really look at it carefully, it actually works amazingly well. But I would argue that it doesn't matter whether or not it's working well. Because of, and we've mentioned it several times here, search engine results. Google knows everything, right? And everybody relies on that. So therefore, we need to make sure that Google has results that people want to see or has results that we want people to see matching the queries they're gonna make. Now, here's the thing, here's a fairly illegible slide, but this has like several hundred skeptic terms, like cryptid, debunking, faith healer, feng shui, Gansfeld, homeopathy, iridology, these are all our core topics. And for every single one of these, the number one hit in Google is the Wikipedia article on that topic. So guess what? Because of that Google, let me back up a second, that Google gullibility issue, that's where people are gonna be learning about these things, whether we like it or not. Now you can rant and rave and say, get off my lawn and say you hate Wikipedia, but like it or not, people are learning about homeopathy from Wikipedia. And so I feel like we have to go edit that article, right? We might stink, but we have to, because people are using it. And even the ones that are not number one, there's a number two or a number three hit, and there's technical reasons why Wikipedia ranks so highly. Now the alternative is to try to rank highly ourselves, but that's a very difficult thing to do. And there are pros and cons, obviously if you build your own website, you have more control, you can specialize it better, you can include topics that Wikipedia would say no to, and then the users are coming to you instead of going to Wikipedia. Of course the problem is that's a lot more work, you have a lot of competition, like for instance trying to get on that first page of results for homeopathy, that is a hard nut to crack. There's a lot of competition out there. And you've gotta do that in an ad hoc basis for every topic. Another way to look at this is traffic. And I looked at this actually after last year's TAM because of a remark Susan Gerbick made to me, I actually ran a year's worth of traffic numbers because Wikipedia is completely open, all their traffic numbers are published, and I know my traffic numbers for What's the Harm. And those two grad, these are four topics, each of which have a page specifically about them on Wikipedia, and each of one has a specific page on them on What's the Harm. And the two on the left are very high ranking pages on Wikipedia, homeopathy and chiropractic. And they're the two top pages on What's the Harm that are specifically about a topic. And I lose big time to Wikipedia. Wikipedia's getting like 50 times the amount of traffic that I am, or sometimes 100 times the traffic I'm getting. And even the two topics where I do really well in Google, attachment therapy and ozone therapy, who knows why, What's the Harm ranks like number one or number two on those two topics, I'm still like 18 times, Wikipedia still has 18 times the amount of traffic that I get. So that's a sobering graph there that I can do all I want to my page but Wikipedia is still gonna get more traffic on theirs. So we need to be making sure that the content out there is as skeptical as possible. And Wikipedia is built that way, I'm gonna start going fairly fast. I think most of this slide deck is posted somewhere, we're gonna post these slides anyway. But Wikipedia has what's called the five pillars which is neutral point of view, it's free content, you should be respectful and civil but they don't have firm rules. And the idea is to have sort of a framework but encourage people to come in. So they want us in there. They want as many editors as possible, even skeptics. And there are a lot of skeptics who are fairly high ranking editors on Wikipedia. There is a, I will admit to you, there's a lot of disadvantages to Wikipedia, it's not an easy thing, it's not like Web of Trust where you can go in and start clicking red, red, red and make a difference right away. It's a huge culture, there's a lot of lingo, people fling these three letter acronyms around like NPOV and expect you to know what that means. There's lots and lots of guidelines and rules and sometimes it's not clear which ones are rules and which ones are essays written by someone. I've gotten lost in their help files sometimes. They have a rule about civility but it sometimes turns into kind of a joke. People do get very uncivil and yell at each other on there. And we don't have control over it, right? Ultimately we can write all we want and someone else can delete what we write. But they are welcoming to new editors and they need new editors. They actually kind of have a problem right now where early on in Wikipedia there was sort of not really a land grab but they needed articles very badly. So there was a lot of room for people to come in and write stuff. Now, not so much, it's kind of filled in so it's harder to find things to write about that you're not gonna get some pushback on. So, but there's a lot of good advantages to it. It's really easy. You don't have to know HTML or programming. Like for instance, create a hyperlink. You just use a bracket and the URL and the name of the link and a bracket which is much easier than you have to do in HTML. If you wanna create a heading, it's just a couple equal signs in the heading and a couple equal signs and all stuff like that to do the basic formatting on the page. You don't have to write an entire article. Most of the things you do on Wikipedia are a little tiny edits. So if you can learn how to use the editor and learn how to fix spelling and things like that. And a lot of times if you make a mistake other people will come in and fix it for you so you don't have to worry too much about you're changing Mount Rushmore, you're not. It's going to get fixed. But one of the things that's really good about Wikipedia is if you really read the rules of Wikipedia they are pro skepticism, okay? They have a rule called reliable sources. You have to have a source that is a real source not some crazy guy's blog post like an actual paper or a news article. You have to have a neutral point of view. You can't go off on the crazy and say homeopathy is real. You gotta be neutral about it because clearly there are a lot of people who say it's not real. There's a notability thing so you can't just put every conspiracy theory in the world in there. They don't belong in Wikipedia. And there's a whole set of rules about what they call fringe theories so that the real crackpots can't get their articles in there for very long and no original research which more crackpot stuff. So I kind of see two roles for skeptics on Wikipedia. One is to obviously edit the pseudoscience and paranormal articles and try to make them as skeptical as possible. You have to be aware that articles like homeopathy and chiropractic and oh heaven help you if you go into the Scientology articles. Those articles have been poured over for years and have thousands and thousands of edits on them so you have to be really careful when you go in and edit them. But at the same time there's hundreds of other articles that need a lot of work and you can do quite a lot and not attract a ton of attention if you're working in some more obscure topic. But another thing and this is kind of what I focused on for a lot is create articles about skepticism. I wrote Richard Saunders bio on Wikipedia. I wrote Harriet Hall's bio on Wikipedia and that's a great way for them to promote themselves and to be considered more important or at least here Richard Saunders is a real guy. Look he's in Wikipedia if someone doesn't know who Richard Saunders is. And again that's something that a lot of the other folks on Wikipedia don't really care that much as long as you do your homework and put the footnotes and stuff in there. So I have a few tips and I'll go through these very quickly. They mostly intersect with what we talked about in community. Create an account. Create an account. Don't edit anonymously. It actually gives you some advantages. You can look at your own stuff. You can get notifications. Create what's called a watch list. That's a list of articles that you're interested in and then Wikipedia can very easily show you every time those articles get edited. So you can kind of keep an eye on them to see when the nuts come in and try to vandalize them. Start small. Start with little things. Spelling errors. My first edit was I was researching something for what's the harm where a guy got eaten by an alligator. Don't ask. But it was at this historic site in Pakistan and I wanted to, I was adding a map feature to what's the harm and I wanted all the cases to be on the map and it's like well where is this place where they have all these alligators at this temple and I figured out where it was on the map and Wikipedia has a thing where you can put a map location on an article so I put that in there and that was my first edit. Simple stuff like that can get you started and then you build up a history and that makes, lets people trust you. Look at this guy. He's been editing for two years before he wrote his own article so maybe we should be a little bit more respectful of him. Don't be, this is more jargon. Wikipedia calls it an SPA, a single purpose account. Don't go in there and just edit Scientology. They take a very dim view of that. In fact there have been giant wars over that particular topic but homeopathy or whatever. Don't just go in and focus in on your skeptical topic. Do some other stuff. Edit things about your school, your favorite band, your hometown. Avoid the battlegrounds. Look in the history of the article. Don't go into L. Ron Hubbard and start changing things immediately. If you look in the history of that article you'll see people have been fighting over that article for years. Not a good first choice. Do use the features to communicate with other people. There are ways that you can leave messages to other editors and stuff and I will admit it's extremely clunky and 1987 vintage web stuff and it's horrible but try to use it and talk with the other editors and people will trust you more. Imitate other pages. If you're trying to create a page find one that's like it and copy what it is. The big thing you have to do with Wikipedia is you have to kind of be a little zen and once you put something on Wikipedia you just have to separate yourself from it and say okay that's not mine anymore. Because if you get possessive about the text and somebody comes in and changes it that's a recipe for a lot of heartache. Creating articles about skepticism I already talked about that. A big thing that Susan emphasizes in her project and I emphasize too is try to create links to skeptical resources and articles. So if I find something in skeptical inquirer that's a good source for some other article I'll stick that in as a footnote and hopefully that will lead people to skeptical inquirer when they're reading that article. There's a thing called the scratch space that you can use especially if you're creating a new article you can do your work in there and people will ignore you instead of working in the real article. Because if you change something in the real article and someone else cares they'll get in your face pretty quickly but if you do your work in your scratch space you can work quietly. The friends theories notice board is actually it's kind of entertaining actually to read because it's sort of like a catalog of what nut jobs are showing up at Wikipedia push their crazy theories this week and you learn about some interesting crazy skeptic stuff that's like wow I didn't know anybody believed that. So it's kind of fun to read but it also sort of shows you where the battlegrounds are that week. And the big thing is to footnote like crazy monkey. That's my defensive maneuver is just footnote everything like you're writing a paper for a really anal retentive professor college and that becomes your defense and you find good sources for everything and you say look I have sources for everything. And the nice thing about it and here's just one little quickie thing on the end is they added this thing called Google Knowledge Graph and a lot of it is drawn from Wikipedia now and if you live outside the United States you probably haven't seen this yet but it's in the Google results so when you do a Google search a panel like this will sometimes appear on the right hand side and it's supposed to be kind of a summary so like if you search for a movie it'll be a summary of what that movie's about and if you search for people you get stuff like this and this is the Cancer Quack Stanislav Brzezinski and with people it shows you related people, right? So down here the related people are Max Gerson and other famous Cancer Quack. Julian Whitaker I don't know who he is and Suzanne Summers, but look at right there number three Reese Morgan, why is he there? He's a skeptic in Wales and he's there because he got involved in an argument online with Brzezinski and that all got documented in his Wikipedia bio and so now people look for Brzezinski and maybe a few of them click on Reese and maybe some of them learn about skepticism maybe not all of them but it's a way to get their attention. So Wikipedia, I've got a bunch of posts on my blog I recommend you go to Susan Gerbick's blog it's called Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia you can just Google that and she's got all sorts of stuff where she's organizing people to target certain articles and things like that. She was gonna be here but her playing she's like literally on a plane right this second. So yeah. All right so let's get our super secret guest up here that I teased on Twitter. This is Shane Greenup, he has built a tool called Rebutter and we've been talking about co-opting projects for skepticism, this is one that's built essentially for skeptic stuff. Hi everyone, so I'm from Sydney, Australia and we started building Rebutter in February this year so it's still very new we're in the public beta development stage. And the whole thing spawned from an event that happened about a year before we started working on it. Someone shared this link on Facebook and it was a press release article saying that a study had shown that vaccinated children suffer from more illnesses than unvaccinated children. I'm like that sounds like an interesting study I think I wanna look at that. So I clicked through and I looked at the study and of course it was a self-selected biased group at vaccineinjury.info identifying how healthy their unvaccinated children were and comparing that data with CDC data. So I could see straight away the problems with the article. But what I wanted to do was I had a friend on Facebook that thought that this was a good article to share and I wanted them to understand why it wasn't what the problem was. I didn't just wanna say it's wrong because they'd say whatever that's your opinion. But I also didn't wanna put the time in I didn't have the time at that point in time to go through and systematically address all the claims raised in it. So I wanted to find someone else that had already done it because I've been around long enough to know that someone else had already written a rebuttal to it. So whenever you're looking for things on the internet where do you go? I went to Google and I typed in most obviously I think of the title of the article and what I got was copy after copy after copy of the same article. I got at least three pages worth of exact copies of that one article because someone did a press release and every quack website out there thought great this is awesome this shows definitively vaccines hurt people. So they copied it. I searched for about half an hour adding rebuttal reply to answer to trying to find this rebuttal to it. And I just couldn't find one. And I knew what I wanted at the time was just some magic button off the website where you just click on it and take you to a rebuttal of it. That's what I wanted. And I looked for a year trying to find someone else that had done it. And I couldn't find anything. There's a lot of web annotation services out there. Some of you may be familiar with them where you can do a plug-in installation and you can highlight text on a page and comment on it. But none of them are quite what I wanted. I didn't want specific detailed analysis of a page. I just wanted to click a button and see someone else's pre-written article that opposed it. So we started working on it and that's obviously the idea to connect just a direct link between a claim article to the rebuttal of it. And so this is what it looks like in practice. The implementation of it is a browser plug-in. So you need to install this into your browser, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome. At the moment, we've only developed in Chrome because we're still developing. We're very close to launching and as soon as we do that, we'll start expanding into Firefox first and then probably Internet Explorer and Safari. So what we have here is in the top right hand corner is the little rebuttal symbol. You browse to a page. Now, this is a Wall Street Journal article. Wall Street Journal, huge paper, right? So many people will read this and here's an article here telling them that 16 scientists all think that there's no need depending on global warming. Unfortunately, what the people reading this article don't know is how many hundreds of blogs would have reacted to this addressing it. So with our plug-in installed, we've currently got nine rebuttals to that page in our plug-in. So someone using it visits that page and alert actually pops up on the page. It lasts about five seconds but that number stays on our icon. You click on our plug-in and this drop-down comes down, giving you a few links. Not all of them because we wouldn't fit. So we just give four and you click through and see the bigger list if you want to or just click straight through to one of the rebuttals there. So how the whole thing works is we have to be crowdsourced. At the moment, there's no software engineer or system on earth that can identify the natural language of claims versus rebuttals context. Someone has tried something similar but it's very challenging. So we need people to participate, to identify a rebuttal. To see a rebuttal article and go, this is a rebuttal, I can add it to rebuttal. Exactly as the story that I told you at the beginning where I found a page which I wanted rebutted, that's very hard to add unless you can Google it and find a rebuttal. But when you start at a rebuttal and all being skeptics, you're more likely to read the rebuttal first. You read the skeptic blogs and they are rebutting someone. So when you read these blogs and you read blah blah said and that's full of whatever, when you read that just think this is a rebuttal, I can add it to rebuttal. And once you're at that stage, adding it to rebuttal takes about 20 seconds. I'm going to demonstrate that in a few minutes. You also have the ability to subscribe to subjects and pages. Now this is really interesting for bloggers and for people who just want to stay up on current topics and what's happening in the news in particular areas. So if you subscribe to something like homeopathy, every time someone adds a rebuttal to a homeopathy website, you'll get an email. And more interestingly, every time someone goes to a homeopathy article and there's no rebuttal for it and they hit the request button to the next thing there, you'll get an email of that as well. So that brings me to the next thing, you're able to request rebuttals. So sometimes when I found that natural news article about vaccines, I couldn't find the rebuttal. So if I had had this tool, I could have gone request a rebuttal and then had an email sent out to all the people that are subscribed to that topic. And if right now, if I had have requested a rebuttal for that today, I guarantee there'd be at least 10 people subscribed to that tag who would know of the rebuttal that's currently in the system, which is respectful insolence. Because most people I think he probably know of that blog and would've just known that he's covered it already. At the time, I didn't know anything about the blog and I suspect most people out there were the same sort of skeptic that I was a year ago, which is, you're skeptical, we know that it's crap, but we just don't subscribe to the blogs, listen to the podcast, not everyone does that. So how do we reach those people that aren't sure, that aren't part of the community? So that's what we wanna do, he's reaching out. And yeah, and the final thing there is at the moment we're building a requests and rebuttals feed, so more like the Reddit sort of format where you have that curated page of time decaying feed of rebuttals and requests in the system. So create more of a community feel for it. And just quickly, the last thing on this before I do the demo is, so we launched Public Beta in March, we started working February and since then we've already got 2,000 users and we're growing every day, 600 links in the system. Now that's the number we really wanna get a lot more of, we wanna get a lot more links because there's so much content being created. And we've got 1,200 plugin click-throughs and that's the deal with the actual plugin. People can navigate via the website as well, but what we've been tracking here is how many people are just browsing and they land on a page and then the plugin gives them an alert and they can click through. So people are using it now. I will quickly open up the demo. So this is a page I came across the other day when I was trying to find some things to rebut. This article is quite amazing. The guy that runs the natural news wrote it himself, apparently, and he tells everyone what skeptics actually believe and it's a hilarious read. But anyway, I managed to find a rebuttal for it. So actually I probably should have started. What will often happen is you read respectful insolence and the title is a pyromaniac in a field of straw men or a black hole of burning stupid incinerating every straw man in the universe. It's a fun rebuttal. So if you subscribe to this blog and you read it, it's quite obvious what he's doing and he'll usually link to the page that's being rebutted. So it's clear what's happening. All you need to do at this point is click on the rebuttal icon, pops down. This page is the rebuttal, click. Go to the other page, rebutter. This page is the source, click there. And now the URLs are source and rebuttal URLs. A quick comment, since this is a straw man argument and then some tags, just so everyone knows what topic it is, so I'll go. I can't see the screen while I'm typing it. Doesn't matter. Let's get science, let's do the science. So I just hit enter and we're on 4G at the moment, so. And then I've just added that now with the typo and everything. I'll fix that later. And now there is a page. So this is one of the good things we have in the system is Google actually recognizes this page over time. So as we get more action, we'll get more Google attention for it as well. But yeah, we have the source page, the rebuttal page and I actually made an error. I didn't select, I can hit edit now. This is a direct response, I should have done that. So we have the ability to differentiate between direct rebuttals and general. And that's important because in this case, this article is directly rebutting this page. But sometimes a simple example is answers in Genesis could be rebutted by the Wikipedia article in evolution. Generally it provides the evidence that contradicts the claim page. So I like to differentiate between those two because I think they're two important differences. One last part of the demonstration is, here's another page. This is an article they put on just the other day, just as a simple example of, there's currently no rebuttals to this. So if you're looking at this and you're like, well that's dodgy for whatever reason. You can click on that and then there's just a button to submit a request. Select your tags, so is it the health homeopathy. That'll do health and homeopathy, submit. And that goes into our feed of requested rebuttals and anyone that's subscribed to health and homeopathy will be emailed with the alert that someone wants to rebuttal to this. And someone knows of any that can add it. So that's it, it's that simple. Adding it takes 20 seconds, requesting takes three seconds. And the consequence of this is when we reach out to the wider community, and that's happening organically. We posted to Reddit one comment in the Reddit subreddit of skepticism and it's spread to hack and use, life hacker. Someone from New Scientist contacted me, is doing an article on error checking on the internet. So we're getting a lot of natural spontaneous growth from it, which is very exciting. So what I'm really trying to do, particularly here at TAM, is to find as many skeptics as I can who are subscribing to the blogs, the skeptic blogs who can read it and go, this is a rebuttal, add it, just take the 20 seconds so that as we grow into the general population, every time someone adds the homeopathy rebuttal, someone's saying, well, homeopathy is real because here's a study that shows there was an effective rate or something. There's someone that's subscribed to that tag that can then react to it, yes, but there's this statistical error with it. There's someone there to react. We need that skeptical core to make sure we have got the rebuttals for every page to get added. So that's rebutter. If anyone wants to come and ask any questions after, I'm happy to do so, and I have some t-shirts and actually on the forum table outside, I've got some fridge magnets, which I've got like right a leg on them. So thank you. Let's give old Mike a web of trust rating while we're here. That was, web of trust is also a plugin that comes down the same way. So I just hit that and hit the rate. And I don't like Mike. And that's as easy as web of trust is, right? Click, click. You can also leave comments. Oh, I already left a comment here. But you can leave comments down here and you can vote on the comments. So it's super easy. Start doing this stuff. It takes five seconds. You can take a few minutes out of the day and do a little bit of this. If everybody who's here at TAMM started doing this a couple minutes a day, imagine the change we would make. And I'm sorry we ran a little bit over time, but I hope you got something out of it.