Before cheap nexium the appointment, it is helpful if caregivers keep a food drug cialis diary of what the baby eats and the symptoms they viagra in us experience. Healthcare professionals may recommend parents or caregivers carry epinephrine buy free online no prescription dosage injections in case of a severe allergic reaction. Eggs and cheap flagyl dairy products share some common properties, which may lead people buy cheap flovent internet to assume that eggs are a dairy product. The National find buy Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases recommends that generic estrace people with lactose intolerance eat foods such as eggs, and buy cheap clomid fish such as salmon, as a source of vitamin D. pharmacy cialis Ensuring a good intake of calcium is important for people with.

For years, people have been observing that the wonderful surfeit of information sources available through the Web can result, paradoxically, in a narrowing of our perspectives. In the political realm, for example, liberals can now get all their news from liberal sites, and conservatives from conservative sites. As Cass Sunstein observes in Infotopia, speaking and listening only to people who think like us has a polarizing force — everyone just gets more extreme.

The Boston Globe has a good review today of a paper published in Science some months ago reporting that groupthink is affecting even scientific research publications — the lists of cited papers are becoming more homogeneous, not more varied, as the information sources diversify. There is even an analogy with popular music — yes, there is a “long tail” of music now available for special tastes, but the small number of big winners dominate music sales now more than ever. And so it is with scientific papers — with most available online, a smaller number are cited more often than in the past.

The paper suggests that Web search is fundamentally different from search through paper records, which puts more context around sources and causes us to be more critical before pursuing a reference. Clicking on links thoughtlessly is just too easy, and we are losing something in the process.

Hardly an open-and-shut case — the article mentions several dissents — but it makes sense to me.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous, The Internet and the Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.