Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Confrontational Computing
It's pretty well accepted that the Internet has become home to an astounding amount of useful information--as well as a ton of misleading and inaccurate gibberish, making it a challenge to figure out what to trust. A new tool from Intel's research labs aims to solve that problem through something they've called the Dispute Finder or confrontational computing.
Available as a Firefox plug-in, the Dispute Finder highlights controversial sections of a web page or news story and provides links to contradictory facts and viewpoints. For example, this page here claims that human activity hasn't contributed to global warming; the dispute resolver, pictured below, highlights the text in pink and points toward links that say that make the reverse claim.
The project is crowdsourced and allows users to mark inaccurate pages, submit links to contradictory claims and vote up or down submitted content to attempt to ensure that only genuine inaccuracies get flagged. There are also long-term plans to link the backend to television and audio so users can be alerted of false claims through other media.
In general, I think it's an intriguing concept that offers the possibility of seriously improving information filtering and helping users make sense of confusing, and often contradictory data.
That said, I'm not sure how well the service will handle the interpretation of complex data, where different claims and opinions can stem from distinct descriptions of the same information. For example, a couple weeks ago I described an article from Time magazine that claimed something called the "warrior gene" provided a genetic basis for violence because males with the gene had double the risk of joining a gang, meaning they had a 3 percent chance of joining the gang. Like I said then, depending on the emphasis--double the risk, which sounds scary, or a 97 out of 100 chance of being unaffected, which sounds unspectacular--the warrior gene can sound frightening or overhyped and I'm not sure how the Dispute Finder will handle that sort of data.
(Full disclosure: I know the project's lead through social channels.)