DSCI 490 Capstone Winter 2024 - Health

The coronavirus pandemic struck the world in a very distinctive way: experience from past pandemics or from more recent outbreaks could give us only a limited understanding of how the situation was likely to unfold. In this context, and with cyberspace being increasingly used to support health-related decision making and to market health products, potentially harmful behaviours have been carried out by individuals propagating non-science-based health (mis)information and conspiratorial thinking. This includes, among other actions, boycotting the use of masks and physical distancing, proactively opposing the use of the COVID-19 candidate vaccines, and promoting the use of useless or even dangerous substances to prevent or resist the virus. By relying on a virtual ethnography approach carried out on Italian-speaking alternative lifestyle and counter-information online communities, this book shows how the nature of personal interactions online and the construction of both personal and group identities through the development of an 'us vs. them' narrative, are central to the creation and propagation of medical misinformation. This book is essential reading for researchers in the social, health, and data sciences and also professionals interested in scientific communication.

We live in the Information Age, with billions of bytes of data just two swipes away. Yet how much of this is mis- or even disinformation? A lot of it is, and your search engine can't tell the difference. As a result, an avalanche of misinformation threatens to overwhelm the discourse we so desperately need to address complex social problems such as climate change, the food and water crises, biodiversity collapse, and emerging threats to public health. This book provides an inoculation against the misinformation epidemic by cultivating scientific habits of mind. Anyone can do it--indeed, everyone must do it if our species is to survive on this crowded and finite planet. This survival guide supplies an essential set of apps for the prefrontal cortex while making science both accessible and entertaining. It will dissolve your fear of numbers, demystify graphs, and elucidate the key concepts of probability, all while celebrating the precise use of language and logic. David Helfand, one of our nation's leading astronomers and science educators, has taught scientific habits of mind to generations in the classroom, where he continues to wage a provocative battle against sloppy thinking and the encroachment of misinformation.