The whole truth is both too much and not sufficient

Lawyers and fans of legal drama will recognise the phrase “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”. But relevance is also required. In a different context, students often mistakenly believe that quantity of truth will compensate for any deficiencies in quality and relevance.

The curricula of the various Australian jurisdictions, and the National Curriculum, encourage students to conduct research on the Internet. There is a wealth of good information on the Internet; there is also a lot of poor information. Students should learn to interrogate sources to discover if the author has expert knowledge in that area, and if the publisher or website has any quality assurance protocols.

Correctness and quantity of information does not compensate for deficiencies in quality and relevance. Useful scientific information has appropriate precision, accuracy and conciseness.

The Internet gives access to databases, to vast amounts of information, to primary and second-hand data, and to summaries and analyses of information. Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling often said that the use of computers is not a substitute for thinking, and the same is true of the Internet. Teachers will always be needed to guide students on the appropriate use of learning tools on the journey of discovery that we call education.

Pedagogy, police training, D/discourses – “truth” and situated identities and meanings

Qualitative and quantitative methods were used in this research to distinguish the prevailing D/discourses (words, tools, beliefs, thinking styles) in police training and to analyse the ‘discourse-practice’ (Cherryholmes 1988, p.1) framework of policing in a training environment. The manifestations, functions and consequences of the D/discourses raise concerns about the efficacy of training (its doctrinal intent and value versus its educative intent and value) and its implications for individuals’ identity, subjectivity, agency, learning, and “membership” within the policing community. The literature revealed that police training acts as a formally sanctioned vehicle for police culture, subcultures, and D/discourses. This is complicated by (a) the predominance of pedagogical training practices that support a trainer-centred approach and standardised lecture format for training, (b) police training focusing predominantly on law enforcement at the cost of higher-order conceptual skills, and (c) Australian and international studies of police management education which reveal a subculture resistant to theoretical analysis and critical reflection, and a set of unconscious and unchallengeable assumptions regarding police work, conduct, and leadership. A backdrop to this research and findings is the agenda of Australian and New Zealand police services for police to become a profession.

Opening up a can of worms: how do decision-makers decide when witnesses are telling the truth?

Correctly determining witness credibility is integral to a fair trial. Assessments of credibility made by the triers of fact are made, amongst other things, by reference to behavioural stereotypes that are commonly thought to be associated with lying and truth-telling. These stereotypes are worthless but pervasive. In this study, potential jurors were given information such as would be given by way of judicial direction and/or expert testimony on those behavioural indicia that are useful in detecting deception. Major changes in perceptions of what does and does not work were found. This has significant implications for the conduct of criminal trials. Recommendations are presented which, it is argued, can be of real, practical, assistance in enabling decision-makers to assess the credibility of witnesses. © 2013 The Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law.

‘A cataclysm of truth from the crisis of falsehood’: reading Habermas on Calvino

Interest in the possibility of a Habermasian approach to literary criticism has recently been sparked by several book-length contributions from scholars working in the field of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. This article seeks to clarify the conceptual stakes in the current debate, which concern whether literature makes truth claims or merely imaginatively discloses new perceptions with a truth potential, by returning to Habermas’s most extended encounter with a literary work since the 1970s. Against the background of the philosophical issues, I re-read to Calvino’s highly self-reflexive If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller to show that in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas has managed to get everything backwards. Literature here reads philosophy alright, but not in the sense of the ludic deconstruction of rational argumentation into rhetorical play that Habermas supposes. Using the notion of an ontological poetics of self-reflexive literature, and with some help from Lacanian psychoanalysis, I interpret Calvino’s novel as a sustained meditation on the connection between authentic literature and the desire to read. In this light, it not only looks like Habermas has missed his polemical target, but, also, and more significantly, it becomes clear that abandonment of the link between literature and truth is misguided.

6 million spam tweets: a large ground truth for timely Twitter spam detection

Twitter has changed the way of communication and getting news for people's daily life in recent years. Meanwhile, due to the popularity of Twitter, it also becomes a main target for spamming activities. In order to stop spammers, Twitter is using Google SafeBrowsing to detect and block spam links. Despite that blacklists can block malicious URLs embedded in tweets, their lagging time hinders the ability to protect users in real-time. Thus, researchers begin to apply different machine learning algorithms to detect Twitter spam. However, there is no comprehensive evaluation on each algorithms' performance for real-time Twitter spam detection due to the lack of large groundtruth. To carry out a thorough evaluation, we collected a large dataset of over 600 million public tweets. We further labelled around 6.5 million spam tweets and extracted 12 light-weight features, which can be used for online detection. In addition, we have conducted a number of experiments on six machine learning algorithms under various conditions to better understand their effectiveness and weakness for timely Twitter spam detection. We will make our labelled dataset for researchers who are interested in validating or extending our work.