Intellpuke: This scenceblog was written by Kevin McCluney and posted on Scientific American's website edition for Saturday, July 16, 2011. McCluney is a postdoctoral research associate in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, also receiving his PhD in biology from this institution in 2010. McCluney conducts research on rivers and streamside animal communities and how water structures these communities. Through a series of peer-reviewed publications, he has shown that many food webs are really water webs, with animals essentially drinking their food rather than eating it. His scienceblog follows:
Have you heard about the highly endangered tree octopus of the forests of the Pacific Northwest? "Ridiculous," you say? But I found a whole webpage devoted to saving them, so they must exist, right? Although this website was created to intentionally mislead students as part of a scientific study, it points out a real problem our society faces in the digital information age: anyone can put anything on the internet. The internet empowers us to educate ourselves and make more informed choices and decisions without leaving our couches. But if we believe everything we find on the internet, we are likely to wind up making some very poor decisions. In this new digital information age, how do we keep from being misinformed? As a skeptical environmental research scientist and educator I have picked up a few tricks that anyone can use to find and select high-quality information from the internet.
1. Don't Be Scared Of Scientific Papers
Aren’t scientific papers too hard to read? While scientific papers may be filled with difficult to understand jargon, anyone can scan them and get the gist (pdf); just skip the confusing words or look them up. If you are still confused and it is important that you understand completely, ask for help from someone trained in the field of interest. For instance, if it is a medical paper, you might take the article to a physician, but not all doctors have the necessary level of scientific literacy to understand the article and you many need a second opinion. | 
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