On hearing news, all U.S. politicians disappear to Argentina.
If there ever was a device created to drive a politician
crazy, Intel Corporation’s “Dispute Finder”
is it. Debuted last week at the Intel Research Day event, the technology is a
Firefox extension that can be installed on your computer that will
automatically highlight any text that is disputed by a reputable source, thus
alerting you when what you’re reading could be complete BS.
Robert Ennels of Intel showed off the Dispute Finder
technology during an interview with Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat. On clicking
some text, the app loads a page listing all the reputable sources that disagree
with what you’ve just read.
In an example, they looked at stories on the Web claiming
that the Iranian elections were rigged. Dispute Finder then went to work. With
the text about the rigged elections highlighted, clicking the Dispute Finder
brought up an article from the Washington Post stating that their public
polling of Iranians three weeks prior to the election showed that Ahmadinejad
had a lead by a 2 to 1 margin, contrary evidence from a reputable source.
Ennels explains the reasons behind the development of the
Dispute Finder. “Often
when you are reading a website that is presenting only one side of the issue,
they won’t tell you that there is a alternative point of view out there by a
reputable source.”
One potentially powerful application of the technology is a
television widget that reads the close-captioned text of a program. When claims
are made during the TV program, such as a presidential debate, the alternative
claims identified by Dispute Finder could be flashed on the bottom of your
screen.
Imagine if you will that this technology was on during last
year’s televised Vice Presidential debate. When Gov. Sarah Palin claimed that
President Obama had voted to raise taxes on families making $42,000 a year your TV screen would have been
flashing DISPUTED
across the bottom. It would then have presented you with the actual fact that
it was a vote to raise taxes on single people making $42,000 a year. And when Sen. Joe Biden said McCain
wouldn’t meet with the President of Spain you would have received another DISPUTED
message, as McCain only said he wouldn’t commit to a meeting, not that he
wouldn’t meet at all.
The most exciting of all the applications for this
technology is what Ennels calls a “BS
Detector.” This is a small device that you can carry in your pocket that
picks up the audio to everything that you listen to and then buzzes you if it
detects something disputed. So say you are having a conversation with an Exxon
executive about the oil company’s deep commitment to finding alternative
resources of energy, there is a strong possibility that your BS detector will
be buzzing like a bee.
There are great websites out there like FactCheck.org that have been enormously
helpful in informing the public about what is true and what is false. But they
require you to look it up. Having
a fact checker on your computer, TV or in your pocket that does the work for
you means very little excuse for not having all the information. If the
technology proves to be marketable, it may become a force in making public
dialogue considerably more responsible to the truth.
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