Objective: Demonstrate an awareness of issues concerning the authenticity, reliability, and bias of the data gathered.
Narrative:
* Include artifacts and describe in narrative why information offered by a particular site on the Internet or other electronic resources may or may not be reliable.
To demonstrate that I can discern the difference between reliable and unreliable data on the Internet, I evaluated two Internet sources: one website and one image.
The first example is a webpage dedicated to figuring out who will win the 2008 Presidential Election. This page consists of tables, charts and formulas to break down the information. This website is unreliable, bias and has no authenticity. First, we do not know who the authors are and how reliable the information, that they presented, is. We do not know how they came up with the equation that was used to predict the electability. For an example this chart predicted that either Wesley K. Clark, Albert A. Gore Jr., William B. Richardson, or Christopher J. Dodd would be nominee's for the Democratic Presidential candidate. Currently, we know for sure that these candidates are not all all nominee's for the upcoming Presidential election. This is why I say that this page,Predicting the 2008 Presidential Election, is not a valid source.
For the second example, I will evaluate an image off the internet. The authenticity of this photo is definately undetermined. The captions from the photo say that a great white shark attacked a Pave Hawk helicopter off the South African Coast. The thing is that in the background, there is a visable beam from the Golden Gate bridge. With clues as such described how can this photo be found reliable. Reliability is another important feature to help evaluate this image. This image was altered to fit a story that the so-called "photographer" wanted. Here you can view the image and the story: Shark Attacks Helicopter.