VCACS is your Internet resource guide. We write our own articles, and we scour the web for interesting, unusual, or helpful articles about a wealth of topics and report back here.
How to Evaluate Internet Research Sources
Think about the magazine section in your local grocery store. If you reach out with your eyes closed and grab the first magazine you touch, you are about as likely to get a supermarket tabloid as you are a respected journal (actually more likely, since many respected journals don’t fare well in grocery stores). Now imagine that your grocer is so accommodating that he lets anyone in town print up a magazine and put it in the magazine section. Now if you reach out blindly, you might get the Elvis Lives with Aliens Gazette just as easily as Atlantic Monthly or Time.
Welcome to the Internet. As I hope my analogy makes clear, there is an extremely wide variety of material on the Internet, ranging in its accuracy, reliability, and value. Unlike most traditional information media (books, magazines, organizational documents), no one has to approve the content before it is made public. It’s your job as a searcher, then, to evaluate what you locate, in order to determine whether it suits your needs.
Information is everywhere on the Internet, existing in large quantities and continuously being created and revised. This information exists in a large variety of kinds (facts, opinions, stories, interpretations, statistics) and is created for many purposes (to inform, to persuade, to sell, to present a viewpoint, and to create or change an attitude or belief). For each of these various kinds and purposes, information exists on many levels of quality and reliability. It ranges from very good to very bad and includes every shade in between.
The first stage of evaluating your sources takes place before you do any searching. Take a minute to ask yourself what exactly you are looking for. Do you want facts, opinions (authoritative or just anyone’s), reasoned arguments, statistics, narratives, eyewitness reports, descriptions? Is the purpose of your research to get new ideas, to find either factual or reasoned support for a position, to survey opinion, or something else? Once you decide on this, you will be able to screen sources much more quickly by testing them against your research goal. If, for example, you are writing a research paper, and if you are looking for both facts and well-argued opinions to support or challenge a position, you will know which sources can be quickly passed by and which deserve a second look, simply by asking whether each source appears to offer facts and well-argued opinions, or just unsupported claims.
Becoming proficient at selecting sources will require experience, of course, but even a beginning researcher can take a few minutes to ask, “What source or what kind of source would be the most credible for providing information in this particular case?” Which sources are likely to be fair, objective, lacking hidden motives, showing quality control? It is important to keep these considerations in mind, so that you will not simply take the opinion of the first source or two you can locate. By thinking about these issues while searching, you will be able to identify suspicious or questionable sources more readily. With so many sources to choose from in a typical search, there is no reason to settle for unreliable material.
You may have heard that “knowledge is power,” or that information, the raw material of knowledge, is power. But the truth is that only some information is power: reliable information. Information serves as the basis for beliefs, decisions, choices, and understanding our world. If we make a decision based on wrong or unreliable information, we do not have power–we have defeat. If we eat something harmful that we believe to be safe, we can become ill; if we avoid something good that we believe to be harmful, we have needlessly restricted the enjoyment of our lives. The same thing applies to every decision to travel, purchase, or act, and every attempt to understand.
Source evaluation–the determination of information quality–is something of an art. That is, there is no single perfect indicator of reliability, truthfulness, or value. Instead, you must make an inference from a collection of clues or indicators, based on the use you plan to make of your source. If, for example, what you need is a reasoned argument, then a source with a clear, well-argued position can stand on its own, without the need for a prestigious author to support it. On the other hand, if you need a judgment to support (or rebut) some position, then that judgment will be strengthened if it comes from a respected source. If you want reliable facts, then using facts from a source that meets certain criteria of quality will help assure the probability that those facts are indeed reliable.
To Have A Great Occasion Go With A Live Band
Are you considering providing a celebration or other occasion? Would you like it to end up being massively successful? You could work on attracting famous people (if you know any) and have the best caterers to supply the best wine and food within a superb venue. Is that it? Or perhaps there is something that you may have forgotten about? You need music. But not a bland disc jockey churning out the usual songs. As an alternative, you should take on a live band to make the event incredible!
If you decide to hire a live band for the party, the atmosphere will become energized. This is what you want. Live music will make your guests want to spend the full evening dancing on the dance floor. In an instant it should turn the surroundings electric and cause the guests to shout and yell for more. Undeniably it is the perfect recipe for a winning party.
From a wedding reception to a child’s birthday celebration, your own anniversary or a company event, employing a live band is really a guaranteed route to make the occasion a success. Parties like birthdays or weddings can have a varied guest list and different moods to cater to, thus performance bands are available in the marketplace for hire who cater to these types of functions expressly. However, if you’d like to host a function for friends where everyone is a rock and roll lover, it is best to choose a live band devoted to that particular kind of music. Alternative possibilities include hiring a decade band if you would like songs from a particular decade, or a tribute band in the event that all of your friends are followers of a legendary musician or group. A lot of people love the classic rock sounds of the 1970s and 1980s. For this particular group, you would want to consider BOSTYX. This is a classic rock Boston tribute band and Styx tribute band. BOSTYX integrates the two major American classic rock artists Boston and Styx into one incredible tribute show.
Creativeness is what makes a party the talk of the town. The more creative that you are, the better it is. The simplest way to do this can be to select a concept first. Imagine somewhat out of the box and think of a fun concept. Even if it’s the typical older theme such as Halloween, you can always be resourceful in the way you plan the event around it. Work with themed decorations, and drinks and food that match up with the concept. One might also include a specific themed dress code for guests. But what can definitely make your theme shine will be your live band churning out the ideal songs.
When you plan a reunion event hire a decade band or tribute band who will perform music that was prominent at the time when you were all at college. In this case the evening will be nostalgic with old friends hearing old tunes from bands like Boston and Styx, making it extra special and truly memorable for the attendees.
Repair Your Online Reputation
A Wall Street hopeful we’ll call Jim didn’t expect to see much when he Googled his name, but right there, at the top of the page, was an old campus news blog detailing a bar brawl in which John was arrested. Though accurate, the story was posted before charges against the otherwise model student were dropped. Now the five-year-old blog is embedded in cyberspace, with no follow-up piece to clear his name. “It’s the first thing that pops up,” says Jim, 27. “If potential employers type in my name, they’re going to hire the other guy.”
Clearly, you no longer have to be a paparazzi-plagued star to be misrepresented on a worldwide stage. Anyone can say anything online (it’s estimated that 1.6 million blog posts are created daily), and dozens of new gadgets, as well as more-powerful search engines, give us easy access to all those indiscriminate bits of information. This convenient yet terrifying reality has created a whole new brand of damage control: Internet reputation repair. Businesses such as FixYourSearchResults.com specialize in managing your online legacy and online reputation repair, and business is booming. “Anyone can have their image tarnished on the Internet, no matter how good a person they are,” says Reggie Wright, a search-engine optimization specialist. “We’re the next generation of public relations. From here on out, you need to own your first few Google pages.”
For those of us who still don’t know the difference between megabytes and RAM, “owning” online search results seems as elusive as harnessing vapor. But these rep agents for hire can push offending material down off the first couple of pages—which is a page beyond where most users venture. They do it by creating hundreds, even thousands, of links between third-party Web sites and positive content about you or your business. The labor-intensive service runs anywhere from $1,000 to $30,000, and it takes about six months to see all those negative hits clear off the first page. There are no guarantees, but according to Jim, who went with Fix Your Search Results, “things are already moving in a better direction.”
The reputation-repair industry is already looking toward the next step in image control: forging your own online legacy before someone else does. “We’re now encouraging a proactive approach, building a wall of positive content so if negative stuff comes along, it has a harder time rising to the top,” says Mr. Wright. This means publicizing your own positive news—awards, community service, school honors—to pre-empt bad news.
But in the end, should our online reputations really matter, when we’re all now subject to the whims of search engines and the mood swings of anonymous bloggers? “I shouldn’t care what others think,” says Jim. “But do you know anyone who can honestly say they don’t care what’s said about them? I didn’t think so.”