A Tale of Three Hoaxes: When Literature Offends the Law

Literary hoaxes have taken many different appearances, and their ability to continue to evade early detection by publishing houses, readers and reviewers adds to their mischievousness and the intrigue surrounding them. Typically, hoax literature provides a compelling narrative that lures readers into valuing the words being read because they are supposed to be true. Consequently, once the hoax is revealed for what it is, readers often experience strong feelings of disappointment, anger and embarrassment for having been tricked; some are even amused for having been played the fool. Countless times, the book industry has been brought under fire for not catching a hoax before a book is released for public consumption and allowed to ravage unsuspecting readers. Despite cries for reform, few changes have been made and publishing companies have increasingly been hailed into court for resolution of disputes arising from these literary capers. In fact, over the last century, hoaxes have spawned congressional hearings, lawsuits and even criminal prosecution, yet they show no sign of slowing and, if anything, have only grown more prevalent. This article examines the tradition of the literary hoax, and then focuses on three unique examples that resulted in court intervention. Part I provides a brief history of literary hoaxes and samples the many guises they have taken over the years. Parts II, III and IV provide detailed accounts of the hoaxes perpetrated by Arthur Train, Clifford Irving and James Frey, respectively, and explore how Train got away with his mischief, Irving ended up behind bars, and Frey and his publisher became entangled in a class action lawsuit and a multimillion dollar judgment. Part V attempts to reconcile the differing outcomes for Train, Irving and Frey. As there is a dearth of case law clarifying what acts might result in civil liability, an examination of past hoaxes and their resulting litigation lends some lucidity as to what acts might result in imprisonment, monetary damages and public acquittal for one’s literary sins

Spartan Daily, May 27, 1938

Volume 26, Issue 144https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/2781/thumbnail.jp

Sustainability Indicators Past and Present: What Next?

This paper discusses the current state of thought amongst the Sustainability Indicator (SI) community, what has been achieved and where we are succeeding and failing. Recent years have witnessed the rise of “alternative facts” and “fake news” and this paper discusses how SIs fit into this maelstrom, especially as they are themselves designed to encapsulate complexity into condensed signals and it has long been known that SIs can be selectively used to support polarized sides of a debate. This paper draws from chapters in a new edited volume, the “Routledge Handbook of Sustainability Indicators and Indices”, edited by the authors. The book has 34 chapters written by a total of 59 SI experts from a wide range of backgrounds, and attempts to provide a picture of the past and present, strengths and weaknesses of SI development today. This paper is an “analysis of those analyses”—a mindful reflection on reflection, and an assessment of the malign and benign forces at work in 2018 within the SI arena. Finally, we seek to identify where SIs may be going over the coming, unpredictable years

AMBER Alerts and their effectiveness.

Do AMBER Alert messages encourage people to become more face-vigilant? Face-vigilance was measured through a recognition task that instructed participants to search for discrepant faces in friendly, threatening, and neutral crowds. Participants were primed with either an AMBER Alert message or a nonword message (i.e., letters that resembled a real word; e.g., SHUM and LAIP), and then instructed to quickly and accurately conclude whether a discrepant face was present in a matrix of faces. Each participant's performance was measured as the response time for correct responses. The study analyzed data to see whether participants in the AMBER Alert group were able to correctly identify threatening faces faster than participants in the nonword group. Overall, the results confirmed the hypothesis that threatening faces in friendly crowds were more quickly and accurately detected than were friendly faces in threatening crowds. Unfortunately, the results did not show a significant difference in response times (RTs) for correct responses between the AMBER Alert group and the nonword group. As a result, our findings did not support the hypothesis that AMBER Alerts encourage people to become more face-vigilant. Therefore, we were unable to conclude that the AMBER Alert program does in fact galvanize the entire community to assist in the search for and safe recovery of the child

Mystification as a cultural and humoresque phenomenon in modern Czech literature against the background of European cultures (with special reference to Jára da Cimrman)

The subject matter of this dissertation is mystification in Czech literature and culture on the background of European culture. In order to define mystification, the dissertation illustrates various types of mystification from ancient times to modern day. The dissertation describes the categorisations that currently define this area of enquiry. On this background, the dissertation explores more closely the phenomenon in Czech culture, focusing on the mystified manuscripts that played a major role in the Czech national revival of the 19th Century. The major part of the dissertation, however, is an investigation of the peculiar phenomenon of Jára Cimrman. This is done by exploring the various expressions that this phenomenon has taken, ranging from theatre productions to exhibitions. Specifically, the dissertation reviews Cimrman's reception by the Czech press in recent years

A Mixed Method Study of Prospective Teachers\u27 Epistemic Beliefs and Web Evaluation Strategies Concerning Hoax Websites

Teachers need to be equipped with the tools necessary to evaluate content on the Internet and determine if it is a credible source, or a hoax website since they are expected to instruct and prepare students on how to evaluate the sites which is now a relevant phenomenon. The purpose of the mixed‑method study was to obtain an understanding of the web evaluation strategies of prospective teachers regarding the evaluation of hoax websites and how their epistemic beliefs may influence their evaluation. Another aspect of this study was to find out what outcomes resulted from providing guidance, or not to prospective teachers before evaluating the hoax websites. Seventy‑two prospective teachers from undergraduate education courses completed an online questionnaire, where they evaluated four websites (two hoaxes and two credible) and completed questions regarding their epistemic beliefs. Two groups of prospective teachers were selected. Group A was the control group and Group B was the experiment group. Group A simply took the online questionnaire. However, Group B was provided with an overview of a specific web evaluation strategy, the WWWDOT Framework, before taking the online questionnaire. Sixteen participants were interviewed. Interestingly, almost half of the participants (48.6%), trusted at least one of the hoax websites. The study concluded that teaching the WWWDOT Framework helped to increase the number of people that did not trust the aesthetically appealing hoax website in Group B. Regarding epistemic beliefs, prospective teachers, who displayed feeling‑based epistemic beliefs, tended to trust the hoax website that was aesthetically appealing in Group A. The qualitative results provided additional insights and supported the quantitative data. The qualitative research suggests that lateral reading, spending sufficient time to read and evaluate and knowing the definition of a hoax website as being the most important web evaluation strategies displayed by those that did not trust the hoax websites

Old Southwest humor from the St. Louis reveille, 1844-1850

Includes glossary and textual apparatus.This book collects selected humorous essays from the Daily Reveille, a St. Louis daily journal, from the years 1844-1850.Hoaxes and predicaments. The second advent ; 'Squire Squegle's twelve ; June bugs ; The man who was looked at ; A crawfish story ; Puss-eyeism vs. Mormonism ; Dropping the subject ; Speculation in whiskers, or, shaving in a broker's office ; "That last julep!" : a short temperance story! ; An incident before marriage -- The river. Captain Sopht ; "Passenger ashore" ; "Fast on a bar" ; Of the deference due to steamboat waiters ; A fight in the hold ; "Picked up!" ; Tom Harris' wink ; A free country ; The "Three sixes" : a pilot's dream ; Bob White's adventure at Vicksburg ; Who's at the wheel? -- Ring-tailed roarers and tall tales. Squire Funk's awful mistake ; Lige Shattuck's reminiscences of Mike Fink ; Judge Magraw's yarn about a mocking bird and a jackass ; A buffalo tale : from the papers of the late John Brown ; A great blow out in Michigan ; "Panther Evans" ; "Fighting the tiger" -- Frontier theater. A fifth act resurrection ; The flying machine ; Stage directions ; Behind the scenes ; "Old sol" : once more ; Getting on the "Free list" ; Manager for a minute ; Getting rid of Brandon -- Eccentric characters. "Loafer Jim" ; The ambitious man ; Kicking a yankee ; "Kicking a yankee" ; Queer characters ; A sucker in search of the planters' house ; "Solitaire" and a Peter funk ; Full of life ; The lethean! -- Army life. Tennessee tactics ; A night attack ; Whipping a circus ; The barrel movement : a sketch of camp life on the Rio Grande ; The nimble shilling! : a sketch of early history -- A satiric look at frontier institutions. Valor and its "Better part" ; A duel in Fairview : being a sequel to the historical society (from the papers of the late John Brown) ; The pumpkin dance and moonlight race. One of the western border tales ; Khaustiff correspondence ; A lyncher's own story ; Popular entertainments -- "The fun of our settlement." Eight letters by Bill Sapper to his cousin.Digitized at the University of Missouri--Columbia MU Libraries Digitization Lab in 2012. Digitized at 600 dpi with Zeutschel, OS 15000 scanner. Access copy, available in MOspace, is 400 dpi, grayscale

Argumentum ad misericordiam - the critical intimacies of victimhood

This article discusses the widespread use of victim tropes in contemporary Anglo-American culture by using cultural theory to analyse key social media memes circulating on Facebook in 2015. Since the growth of social media, victim stories have been proliferating, and each demands a response. Victim narratives are rhetorical, they are designed to elicit pity and shame the perpetrator. They are deployed to stimulate political debate and activism, as well as to appeal to an all-purpose humanitarianism. Victimology has its origins in Law and Criminology, but this paper opens up the field more broadly to think about the cultural politics of victimhood, to consider how the victim-figure can be appropriated by/for different purposes, particularly racial and gender politics, including in the case of Rachel Dolezal, and racial passing. In formulating an ethical response to the lived experience of victims, we need to think about the different kinds of critical intimacies elicited by such media

Philosophy, A Challenge To Post-Truth, Also in Indonesia

This article insists that it is the task of philosophy to challenge untruth under the guise of truth. In the first part the author follows how philosophy changed from teachings of wisdom to critique of false truth claims: beginning with Eastern philosophy, with special consideration of Javanese wisdom, through Greek philosophy where philosophy comes into its own right, to M­edieval philosophy, until enlightenment clearly establishes philosophy as criticism. Hegel and Critical Philosophy are given special attention. In the second part the author stresses the importance of critical philosophy for Indonesia. He exemplifies this on three widely accepted untruths: untruth about what happened in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966, the claim that Pancasila is incompatible with liberal democracy, and the claim of religious extremism to present truth about religion. The article ends with appeal to defend our democratic freedoms without compromise