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You Be the Judge |
Look below to see how our evaluation of each sources matches with yours. Give yourself points each time the our evaluation matches yours.
Source #1: Excerpt from a Newspaper Article
Newspaper Title: Chicago Sun Examiner
Article Title: The Food on Your Plate
Author: Lori Watson, staff writer
Date: November 24, 2004
The food on your plate may look harmless enough but that's what they want you to think. The food bioengineering industry wants you to believe that your turkey and sweet potatoes are as wholesome and genetically unmutated as the food you might grow in your backyard. What they don't tell you is that genetic modification of plants and animals has run rampant all over the world. The International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (http://www.isaaa.org/) states in their publication, the Global Status of Commercialized Trangenic Crops: 2003 that 67.7 million hectacres all over the world were used to grow genetically modified crops. These plants are clearly taking over and something must be done to stop them.
Our Evaluation
This article gets points against it based on it's lack of Authority (5 points).
The author is just a staff writer and not an expert on the dangers or benefits
of genetically modified food. The author also isn't terribly Objective (5 points).
It is clear she feels that GM foods are dangerous. You would definitely need to
find another article that talks about possible benefits in order to be balanced.
The last area where this article gets points is for the intended Audience (1 point).
If I were doing scholarly research on genetically modified foods a newspaper article
would probably not be a very good source. She does a good job citing where she
got her statistics from, but I would probably have to think twice before I used
this article in my research.
Source #2: Excerpt from a book
Title: Cloning: Do I Really Want a Twin?
Author: Donald Moorman, PhD. Associate Professor of Genetics, East Washington State University
Date: 1982
Human cloning is an interesting discussion topic, but in my professional opinion it is still largely theoretical. A few things will need to occur before cloning can become more than a futuristic possibility. Scientists will need to figure out the human genome which means that they will need to identify all the genes in human DNA. Beyond this they will need to make sense of all the chemical base pairs which number into the billions. Until these things happen, human cloning will never be more than a topic for science fiction.
Our Evaluation
The authority and audience for this information seems pretty clear by the author's
credentials (Ph. D and professor position in Genetics). This lets us know that
he speaking from a scholarly perspective so his audience is likely to be scholarly
as well. He loses a point each for not Citing any sources that support his
information and for being a little bit Biased towards the impossibility of
cloning, but these are really minor complaints and might be resolved further on
in the book. Where we really get into trouble is the date of this book (1982) and
what that means for the accuracy of his information. The Currency (5 points) of
this book is horrible for a changing field like genetics. The Human Genome was
mapped in 2003 and that makes the Accuracy (3 points) of this information really
poor. This book may have been ground-breaking in 1982 but today it is simply too
old to be trusted completely.
Source #3: Excerpt from a website
Website Title: Mark's Funderdome
WebPage Title: Why school uniforms are bad?
Web Address: http://geocities.yahoo.com/enterthefunderdome.html
Author: Mark ?
Date: None given
School uniforms are bad. They keep people from expressing who they are by wearing things like jeans and concert t-shirts. I should be able to wear whatever I want to school because adults get to where whatever they want to work. Plus, I read that only 3% of public schools have uniforms these days so there aren't even that many schools that do it anyway so it must not work very well with kids and parents. I don't think kids would act better in school if they had to wear a uniform because they would be mad that they can't wear the clothes they want.
Our Evaluation
If you scored a 50, you are either super skeptical or a really good judge of sources.
When you don't know the author or date that something is published you're in
trouble. This source got 5 points against it in every category: Authority because we don't
know who the author really is, Accuracy & Citing Sources because he
provides a statistic but doesn't say where he got it so it would be tough to verify.
Currency is tough with the web because so much of it is very current, but without
a date we can't know if Mark's information is up to date. Mark clearly is not
Objective because he states that he thinks uniforms are wrong and in the end we
can't be sure just who he is trying to convince - his Audience could be his parent
or the school board. Either way, it doesn't appear to be a particularly scholarly or useful source.
