Your beliefs, inferences, preferences, and decisions are only as good as your information, the values you assign, your ability to organize your premises into good arguments, and your ability make decisions consistent with your values. Your upbringing and your education will give you a foundation of background knowledge and values.  However, augmenting and revising that foundation in light of current information is essential to good reasoning and decision making. You might be surprised to know that:

According to a 2001 Gallup Organization poll:

That number changed very little in 2005, when Gallup again polled Americans about the paranormal.  The 2005 report, entitled "Three in Four Americans Believe in Paranormal," reports that about 73% of Americans believe in one or more of ten paranormal phenomena included in the poll.

Similarly, Gallup polls from 2009, 2007, 2006, 2004, and running back as far as 1982 show that approximately

Despite what many people consider definitive refutation from the bipartisan 911 commission report, many people continue to believe as they did in  August 2003 when a Washington Post study found:

In a 2010 poll conducted by for The Daily Kos by the nonpartisan polling firm Research2000 discovered that 

Nearly two years later and after the release of his long form birth certificate, a YouGov poll from January 2012 suggests that the numbers have remained unchanged.   The YouGov poll shows 37 percent of self-identified Republicans responded false to the statement, "Barack Obama was born in the United States."  35 percent of self-identified Republicans responded "not sure."

For those who doubt Obama's citizenship, I recommend either the urban legends page on this myth or the Factcheck.org cite

Bad information and argumentation can be found in many places. For example, according to an study published in the 2003 Annals of Internal Medicine reports that, "Thirty-eight percent believed that exposure to air during lung surgery causes cancer to spread."  A belief for which no evidence exists.  Likewise, many people believe that saliva can transmit the HIV virus.  In fact, there are only four fluids that can transmit HIV: blood, semen, breast milk, and vaginal fluids. Nor can mosquitoes can carry the virus; mosquitoes suck blood from the body and do not inject it.

If you find yourself interested in widespread but false beliefs, an excellent book on the topic is discussed here

Avoiding false or poorly-evinced beliefs, cultivating true or highly-evinced beliefs, getting the most out of your life, and being responsible in your dealings with other people [even other animals ;-)] all require that you take an active role in gathering, organizing, and evaluating information.  One of the best ways for you to accomplish this goal is to create an information ecosystem for yourself.  An information ecosystem consists of a set of places you regularly go to gather information or evaluate claims.  The internet has become a primary source of information for younger Americans, and it has vastly expanded the sources available to the average person.  Of course, the downside of the internet is that anyone can create content, and a great deal of content lacks sophistication, proper source citation, and/or what one might call "commitment to the truth."  Similarly, the lines between news, entertainment, and advertisement have become troublingly blurred over the last twenty to thirty years.  In three articles New York Times from August 31st and September 1st 2012 the journalists point to two manifestations of this trend developing in politics.   One article discussing campaign speeches, one article discussing campaign messages generally, and the one discussing 2012 Republican National Convention and the influence of super-PACs.  Thus, you must exercise care in the formation and maintenance of you information ecosystem.  One ought to populate one's ecosystem primarily with sources one identifies as relatively reliable information sources.  I would strongly suggest that students include a suite of debunking sites, like Snopes and Factcheck.org that dedicate themselves to evaluating the veracity of claims circulating in the media and on the internet.  One ought likewise include a mix of opinion and analysis sources--most slanted towards one's own views, but some slanted in the opposite direction.  A mix of opinion and analysis sources prove useful in that they provide a counterweight to balance one's own idiosyncrasies as well as insight into the diversity of opinion on a given subject.

Once one develops an ecosystem, a wise practice is to occasionally step outside of the normal mix and calibrate the accuracy and slant of one's ecosystem.  Check out sites from other countries, sites to which one hasn't been to before, etc..  Compare the reporting and emphasis of these sources to those in one's ecosystem.  If one's system has taken on too much of a slant or some of the sources prove insufficiently reliable, one can modify one's ecosystem.  One can add newly discovered sites as well.  Even within one's ecosystem one ought to develop an awareness of the actual origins of the information in one's ecosystem sources.  For instance, though media watchers generally consider the Washington Post  a relatively right-leaning paper, the Post employs Ezra Klein who has emerged as a very influential left-leaning journalist.  Likewise, a very large percentage of news stories in major newspapers draw upon or simply reproduce reports generated by the Associated Press (AP).  The AP is huge news gathering organization that provides a great deal of content to most news sources--especially international news content.  Despite its ubiquitous presence in US news most people have very little knowledge of this organization, or awareness when that they are reading AP articles. The AP provides an economy of scale allowing news outlet to focus their own reporting resources to stories within their target market or within their target specialty.  However, reliance upon the AP also results in a narrowing of available information and perspective in US news coverage.  Practically, one might think that a particular ecosystem source, say the LA Times, proves particularly important in that it generates important original information when one could actually find essentially the same story in USA Today.

The information awareness assignment is designed to help students develop and/or calibrate and refine their own information ecosystems.  Below you will find a large list of five different types of news sources from diverse viewpoints with links to their web sites.  Most of the most popular standard news outlets are not linked below.  I assume that you are aware of CNN, etc..  More importantly, gathering information from a variety of sources and challenging your own perspective by exploring alternative viewpoints will give you a much greater depth of perspective.

As noted above, it is equally important to understand who actually generates the news that you read in newspapers and magazines.  Very few information outlets generate all their own articles.  Additionally, you should try to develop a sense of the integrity of the news and information outlets that you visit regularly.  Independent and political blogs can break legitimate news, but they more often fail to properly fact-. check their reports and improperly distort the details to misrepresent the reality on the ground.  Based upon their journalistic practices as demonstrated over time, you can learn whether to trust what you read or hear on many, many internet sources and even on some high profile news outlets.  For example, the following e-mail was widely circulated on the internet.  FOX NEWS and many congress people, ex. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R. Minn.), cited FOX and other outlets in further propagating this false claim:
 

In actuality, this "story" first broke in the US on extremely partisan right-wing blogs like, http://www.breitbart.com/, known for their lack of journalistic integrity.  The original source for this article was a rural Indian newspaper, Press Trust of India.  They cited an unnamed Indian official.  The report was specifically denied as "absurd" by the White House and the Department of Defense.  To put the claims in perspective, the US spends 178 million dollars a month to run the entire war in Afghanistan.  34 warships represents 10% of the entire US navy.  None of the news outlets that reported this "story" ever cited a source, nor did they retract the story when its obvious falsity became clear. 

Your assignment:

Go to AT LEAST 8 SITES, one site from each category on the large list (below)--including at least one magazine, one SSFC site (science, skepticism, and fact-checking), one national newspaper, one international newspaper, one miscellaneous non-partisan political site, non-partisan government watchdog site, one left-leaving information source, and right-leaning information source.  Read the article titles and a few article summaries (when given) on each site you choose.  Finally, read ONE full article from ONE of the sites you choose on the large list.  Next, go below the large list and visit one of the three most common news outlets listed below the large list.  Read an article on the same topic from one of the three sources there (listed immediately below the list of 8 news sources).  Once you've done your reading, answer the questions on the quiz in beachboard (The questions are also given here.).

1.) What is an information ecosystem?

2.) What eight sources did you visit?  Your magazine [1], your science, skepticism and debunking site [2], your national newspaper [3], your international newspaper [4], your miscellaneous source [5], your non-partisan watchdog source [6], your left-leaning news source [7], and your right-leaning news source [8].   

3.) Were you aware of these sources of information before now? 

4.) Were you aware of the websites for these sources of information before now? 

5.) What news source, long-list news source, did you choose? 

6.) Which of the three major news sources did you choose? 

7.) Look at the cover page of each news source.  How many articles are "headline" articles (featured prominently, e.x. pictures) in the long-list news source?  How many articles are "headline" articles (featured prominently, e.x. pictures) in the major news source? 

8.) Are headline articles on each main page the same articles? 

9.) What article did you read from the sources on the long list?

10.) Did the articles in the major and long-list sources report the same facts in the same fashion? 

11.) Did one source provide more information than the other?

12.) Did one source provide more analysis than the other?

13.) Did the major news source have a headline article on that topic, or did you have to look around?

14.) Where did each news source get their article?

15.) Which article did you find the most useful?  Why?

16.) On a scale of 1-5 how useful was this exercise?