Battling Fake News and Developing Digital Literacy Skills in the Legal Profession

Alternative facts? Truthiness? Post Truth? Hardly a day passes without someone making a reference to fake news. But why should lawyers care and what can information technology professionals and the legal academy do about it?In order to fulfil a lawyer\u27s duty of technology competency, digital information literacy is essential. Legal professionals must be able to locate, evaluate and use online information effectively. Evaluation of the reliability of digital information is a complex skill that must be mastered for the successful practice of law.This program will discuss digital information literacy in the context of fake news. The session will provide an overview of fake news including tracing the history of its origin. We\u27ll discuss why it matters and the consequences of failing to detect fake news. Tips and tools for evaluating the credibility of news sources will be provided as well as strategies for creating successful information literacy programming

The Song Sparrow and the Child: Claims of Science and Humanity

For centuries public claims on behalf of science have been made about our nature and the nature of the world as a whole. Over the twentieth century such claims on behalf of science have grown deeper and stronger. More and more they are total claims, cosmological in the largest sense, and they have evoked opposition equally deep and strong. There is the scientist in all of us. There is, too, the lawyer and law in all of us, which we realize the moment we serve as a witness or citizen juror. This book explores what the legal mind and ear can contribute to resolving this deep and growing conflict within and among us. The question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them. This was the prescient epigraph William James adopted for his lectures on pragmatism at the beginning of the twentieth century. In it is why this conflict is so deep at the beginning of the twenty-first and its resolution so important for our future together. We know that conventional limits and restraints can change with belief about the ultimate nature of things. The twentieth century has its warning examples, most gruesome where total vision has appeared in social and political thought. The connection between what we think about the nature of the world, and what we allow ourselves to do, is now widely felt, and, with good reason, widely feared. Our question here will be whether there are, in fact, openings in the total visions of today. The visions are of the facts of the world. What are the facts about the visions? The juror in us might naturally ask of a person testifying to them, How am I to take what you are saying? Do you actually believe what I hear you to say? This is empirical inquiry that we all engage in all the time without much thinking how we do it. At our best, especially in important matters, we reach for all the evidence. We listen to all a person says before concluding what any part of it might mean, and we treat what a person does as evidence of the meaning of what a person says. In this way we will be addressing here how far belief about the ultimate nature of things has actually changed over the twentieth century, in scientist or nonscientist. We will try to let ourselves be told what science is, on behalf of which people speak, and we will wonder how antiscience could ever really be a stance to take. Throughout, we will be asking how any total vision of the world can claim the true allegiance of human beings living and thinking together in it. This book is also about belief-or not-in spirit. The child learns to speak. The song sparrow comes to sing a beautiful song, special not just to its kind but to its individual throat and tongue. They are often compared, the development of individual song in the song sparrow and language in the child. Experiments that would be gruesome and called atrocity in a human context are performed on the young song sparrow. What is it that holds us back from performing the same experiment on the child-or letting it be done? What really, in thought and actual belief today? On such large questions touching our basic view of each other and ourselves, and other creatures too such as the song sparrow, we should be having a conversation or open meditation. The discussion ought not to be primarily argumentative, as we tend to understand argument. Binding you to me by successful moves of my mind would lose all that can be hoped for. It cannot be merely descriptive, with us absent from the picture. Nor should it try to move from one proposition to another whose meaning or truth depends on having done with the first. In any conversation or meditation we return more than once to the questions and examples with which we begin, and we will do so here. An earlier book of mine took a form that was meant to merge with and give the reader an experience of its subject, which was the legal form of thought. The form of this book too .reflects what we are talking about, a world that really does include ourselves.https://repository.law.umich.edu/books/1112/thumbnail.jp

How to use context for phonetic learning and perception from naturalistic speech

Infants learn about the sounds of their language and adults process the sounds they hear, even though sound categories often overlap in their acoustics. This dissertation is about how contextual information (e.g. who spoke the sound and what the neighboring sounds were) can help in phonetic learning and speech perception. The role of contextual information in these tasks is well-studied, but almost exclusively using simplified, controlled lab speech data. In this dissertation, we study naturalistic speech of the type that listeners primarily hear. The dissertation centers around two main theories about how context could be used: top-down information accounts, which argue that listeners use context to predict which sound will be produced, and normalization accounts, which argue that listeners compensate for the fact that the same sound is produced differently in different contexts by factoring out this systematic context-dependent variability from the acoustics. These ideas have been somewhat conflated in past research, and have rarely been tested on naturalistic speech. We start by implementing top-down and normalization accounts separately and evaluating their relative efficacy on spontaneous speech, using the test case of Japanese vowel length. We find that top-down information strategies are effective even on spontaneous speech. Surprisingly, we find that normalization is ineffective on spontaneous speech, in contrast to what has been found on lab speech. We, then, provide analyses showing that when there are systematic regularities in which contexts different sounds occur in - which are common in naturalistic speech, but generally controlled for in lab speech - normalization can actually increase category overlap rather than decrease it. Finally, we present a new proposal for how infants might learn which dimensions of their language are contrastive that takes advantage of these systematic regularities in which contexts different sounds occur in. We propose that infants might learn that a particular dimension of their language is contrastive, by tracking the acoustic distribution of speech sounds across contexts, and learning that a dimension is contrastive when the shape changes substantially across contexts. We show that this learning account makes critical predictions that hold true in naturalistic speech, and is one of the first accounts that can qualitatively explain why infants learn what they do. The results in this dissertation teach us about how listeners might use context to overcome variability in their input. More generally, they reveal that results from lab speech do not necessarily generalize to spontaneous speech, and that using realistic data matters. Turning to spontaneous speech not only gives us a more realistic view of language learning and processing, but can actually help us decide between different theories that all have support from lab speech and, therefore, can complement work on lab data well

Why Global Inequality Matters: Derivative Global Egalitarianism

This article integrates empirical and normative discussions about why global economic inequalities matter in critically examining an approach known as derivative global egalitarianism (DGE). DGE is a burgeoning perspective that opposes excessive global economic inequality not based on the intrinsic value of equality but inequality\u27s negative repercussions on other values. The article aims to advance the research agenda by identifying and critically evaluating four primary varieties of DGE arguments from related but distinct literatures, which span a number of disciplines, including economics, international relations, and political philosophy. Overall, DGE offers a number of persuasive arguments as to why current levels of global inequality are of concern, but aspects of DGE beg further philosophical and empirical examination. By situating DGE within the wider theoretical and empirical contexts, this article provides resources for its critical assessment and theoretical development

An Integrative Design? How liberalised modal empiricism fails the integration challenge

The idea that justified modal belief can be accounted for in terms of empirically justified, non-modal belief is enjoying increasing popularity in the epistemology of modality. One alleged reason to prefer modal empiricism over more traditional, rationalist modal epistemologies is that empiricism avoids the problem with the integration challenge that arise for rationalism, assuming that we want to be realists about modal metaphysics. In this paper, I argue that given two very reasonable constraints on what it means to meet the integration challenge for modality, empiricism is currently at best on a par with, but potentially worse off than, rationalist alternatives, with respect to the integration challenge

Is Authority Always Constructed and Contextual? A Classical Challenge to the Framework for Information Literacy

The 2015 Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (or Framework) is the latest effort of academic librarians to provide relevant guidance for the teaching of information literacy. One claim made within this “living document,” in line with current academic trends of constructivism and social constructivism, is that “Authority is Constructed and Contextual.” Questions are raised concerning authority’s relationship to the idea of truth, and an effort is made, largely through a Socratic method of inquiry, to delve into the meaning of the Framework’s statement on authority using the further explanations provided concerning this particular “frame,” as well as the context of the entire document. Connections between the nature of authority, responsibility, and the ethical direction of the Framework are considered, and the relevance of the matter of truth is brought to bear here as well. Finally, the conclusion is reached that in light of the investigation’s findings, the current statement that “Authority is Constructed and Contextual” is fraught with significant difficulties, and a statement akin to “Issues of Authority are Contextual and Nuanced” is warranted instead

Beauty and Testimony

I ask whether, and how far, it is possible legitimately to acquire the belief that a given item is beautiful on the basis of someone's testimony that it is. This is an issue that concerned Kant. Kant held that testimony could never be a legitimate source of such judgements, and clearly took his account of aesthetic judgement to explain this fact. I argue that Kant's theory does not, in fact, provide the materials for a satisfactory explanation. Was Kant at least right about the explanadum? While broadly sympathetic to his views on that, I also suggest ways in which they need qualifying. I consider alternative explanations of why testimony should, in general, not be a legitimate source of aesthetic judgement, especially those rooted in anti-realism about the aesthetic. I find these two no more obviously correct, at least in their current state of development

The Significance of Future Generations

We find meaning and value in our lives by engaging in everyday projects. But, according to a recent argument by Samuel Scheffler, this value doesn’t depend merely on what the projects are about. In many cases, it depends also on the future generations that will replace us. By imagining the imminent extinction of humanity soon after our own deaths, we can recognize both that much of our current valuing depends on a background confidence in the ongoing survival of humanity and that the survival and flourishing of those future generations matters to us. After presenting Scheffler’s argument, I will explore two twentieth century precursors—Hans Morgenthau and Simone de Beauvoir—before returning to Scheffler to see that his argument can not only show us why future generations matter, but it can also give us hope for immortality and a blueprint for embracing a changing future

Setting the scene: Why research matters

This chapter introduces the current field of research in counselling and psychotherapy. It first takes a historical perspective in describing the strong move in British psychotherapy and counselling towards ‘evidence-based’ practice. This shift is illustrated through a discussion of the focus on therapies that are evidence-based in the NICE guidelines and the NHS/IAPT context. The increasing emphasis on research in training curricula for counselling and psychotherapy programmes is considered as part of this move towards a more research-oriented profession. Turning to the importance of research in counselling and psychotherapy, the chapter secondly discusses reasons why counsellors and psychotherapists should engage with research about what they are doing, arguing for the value of research findings in challenging assumptions and beliefs about their work. Throughout, the chapter seeks to develop in trainees and practitioners a critical awareness of the political and social contexts of research