Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Fatally flawed design

An MIT grad student has designed software that would highlight suspicious sentences as a type of fact-checking help.

But there's a problem:
Schultz is careful to clarify: His software is not designed to determine lies from truth on its own. That remains primarily the province of real humans. The software is being designed to detect words and phrases that show up in PolitiFact’s database, relying on PolitiFact’s researchers for the truth-telling. “It’s not just deciding what’s bullshit. It’s deciding what has been judged,” he said. “In other words, it’s picking out things that somebody identified as being potentially dubious.”
So the software is next to useless.

Hasn't Schultz heard of Annenberg Fact Check?  Still biased, but not the joke that is PolitiFact.

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