2007.04.02 | Doina Bucur

In his legendary commencement address ``Cargo Cult Science'' at Caltech, Richard Feynman urged scientific writers to report their work as honestly as they possiblycan:

``The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judging it in one particular direction or another.''

The temptation not to follow this advice in our writing is strong, on top of thefact that it is so easy to ``fool ourselves,'' to quote Feynman again.

As reviewers, it takes a certain eye to detect in a submission that we are being led to judging it in one particular direction or another.
As Netizens, we are bombarded with false and misguiding information snippets:spam e-mails, phishing attempts, etc.
As citizens, we are also exposed to disinformation: just click on "all X news articles" on any particular story at news.google.com, and see the slant of some group of story tellers in contrast to others.

The goal of this lecture is to review common disinformation techniques used to present stories in the news.

The lecture will be concluded with some chocolate goodies and an exercise session. The audience will be given a simple story and a few minutes to report it in a slanted way, based on the disinformation techniques presented during the lecture.

About the speaker:

Olivier Danvy works as Associate Professor at DAIMI. He defended a PhD thesis (June 1986) and a French Habilitation (January 1993) in Computer Science at the University Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI), and a Danish Doctorate (October 2006) in Computer Science at the University of Aarhus. He has been associated with the BRICS adventure throughout, supervising 12 PhD students with 1 more to go. For better or for worse, he suggested the name "pi-lambda" to the pi-minded and the lambda-inclined programming-language people at DAIMI for the present seminar.

More information about him can be found on the web [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_Danvy].