What is the best site for checking hoaxes?

I really want most urban legends to be true. - from My Biases
They told me I was gullible... and I believed them.-  from Doug's t-shirt says

Tomorrow is April Fool's Day. A great time to pass along a good urban myth or two - or more likely, receive them from one's colleagues.

Where do you head first to check out whether that long circulated story about cookie recipes, Kentucky Fried Rat or a tourist photo taken from the top of the World Trade Center dated 9/11 has any basis in reality? And more importantly,  do you teach or kids and staff to verify the accuracy of those amazing factoids received by e-mail?

 

These are my standby sites to check hoaxes

• Snopes - the granddaddy of urban legend checkers. Wide scope and good search engine. Very current.
  
• Truth or Fiction - this is a new site for me. Concentrates on information spread via e-mail.
  
• Hoaxbusters. (U.S. Department of Energy) Hmmmmm, off line today. Good site if you believe the government can be trusted.

Going to keep this short. I need to send a box of Neiman-Marcus cookies to a terminally ill boy and get my mail to see if that check from my Nigerian partner has come yet. Remember not to put your PIN number in backwards or the police will be summoned and that cell phone use causes Alzheimer's.

Really. 

 Oh, check these out!

Gmail Custom Time
 
 Virgle: The Adventure of Many Lifetimes

 
 

 

One in, one out

I thought about Mr. Creosote this morning after getting an e-mail from Miguel Guhlin inviting me to join his Diigo network.

No, Miguel, it wasn't the body shape that triggered the connection.

For those of you who may not know or remember, Mr. Creosote was an archetypal glutton played by Terry Jones in the 1983 Monty Python movie The Meaning of Life. Creosote eats, vomits and eats more until a final mint, as I remember, causes his entire body to horrifically explode.

I am worried that Diigo just might be that final 2.0 mint. At what point does one's social networking time commitment become so consuming that one figuratively explodes?

I am therefore adopting the same rule I apply to adding books to my bookshelves, clothing to my closet and RSS feeds to my reader - for every item I add, I toss one as well.

I believe it to be the only path of sanity and survival. Entirely too much of my life is already taken up by trying to keep up.

So, for those of you who kindly ask me to try something new, please include in your invitation that which you belive I should also dump.

Much obliged.

Oh, I am guessing our classroom teachers feel much the same way I do - if not more so. As technology "pushers," do we ever suggest those things that can be dropped - or only things we think they should be adding?

Does the intangible have value?

Like most posts having to do with the ethical use of information, last Tuesday's "If I can't get it legally is it OK to steal it?" drew a number of comments. Among them were those by Peter Rock, a teacher in Taiwan, who often weighs in on these issues. More often than not, we disagree on issues. Our conversation this week, in part, went like this:

Me: [Intellectual Property is] not a legal term but a common means of describing a general category of property

Peter: It doesn't describe property at all. Copyright, trademarks, and patents are not property. While there is an entire industry devoted to making the public think in terms of "property", this does not make it so. This does not make the intangible tangible.

Me: Ah, but the intangible can have even greater value than the tangible. You think I have a future as a Zen master?

Peter: No, but the RIAA or MPAA might be interested in your services. But seriously, how does the fact that an intangible can (depending on the particular comparison) have more value than a tangible back up the "property" view? I'm not following. Can you explain this? 

I'll do my best. I am no economist, but some of this seems to be common sense. This is how I would look at the components that give a thing economic "value" and justify its price:

Price = Materials + Production Costs + Intangible Value

For example, if I were to buy a book for $10 and the materials and production costs were $4, its intangible value would be $6. (I am including things like transportation, marketing, editing, etc under production.)

So it seems to me we could have some fun putting things on a scale of low to high intangible value:

Low intangible value: gold bullion, gasoline, raw meat -> -> -> High intangible value: jewelry, DisneyWorld tickets, gourmet meal.

You can do this within a product category such as cars, too. Assuming all cars have a (relatively) similar cost in materials and production then:

Low intangible value: Toyota Corolla -> -> -> High intangible value: Lamborgini

Information or entertainment packages are interesting here. But I think you could place these on a scale as well:

Low(er) intangible value: physical books, CDs, DVDS -> -> -> High intangible value: mp3 files, live concerts, e-books.

(But I would argue that even on the low side, the bulk of the value in information and entertainment is intangible.)

Peter, it seems to me (and I am happy to stand corrected), that you are arguing that if you can bring the cost of material and production of something to near zero, one is also obligated to bring the intangible value of that thing to zero as well. Personally, I don't believe that.

Pink in A Whole New Mind uses the Michael Graves designed toilet brush as an example of how real value can be added to something through design, and that this value-added, intangible component is growing as the amount of disposable income in the world grows as well. It's an idea I hope my own children internalize - especially my son who hopes to earn a living doing production and design work.

Anyway, this is how I would explain how something intangible can have even more value than the tangible. I appreciate the challenge. As always, Peter, you make me think harder about things than I really care to do!

Now I am trying to put "experience" on a low to high tangibility scale.

Low intangible value: visit to the chiropractor-> -> -> High intangible value: attending a Broadway play.

Sort of works.