Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Dihydrogen Monoxide Website Evaluation

I decided to do Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division. The address to this website is http://www.dhmo.org/. I accessed this page on 4/1/11, because I was linked from another website. The domain of DHMO is .org, which tells me that anyone could have made up this website. In this case, I feel that the domain lessens the credibility, because anyone can make up a .org website. This could mean it's not a reliable source. To even find the author or anything about the website, you have to look in the "Press Kit", this tells me that he is possibly trying to hide something. The author is Tom Way, who is a software consultant, writer, MAGICIAN, marathon runner, public speaker and computer science professor at Villanova University. He doesn't even have a background in science, which definitely lessens the website's reliability. He does have his contact information: director@dhmo.org, http://www.dhmo.org/, http://www.csc.villanova.edu/~tway. He also states in his contact information that he lives in Newark, Delaware. "I am findable if you look." If I was creating a hoax website, I would not tell people where I live. As stated on the website,"The original purpose of the site was as a sort of writer's therapy to blow off steam about all the devious (and sometimes just ignorant) ways the truth is bent to prove a point by some in the media, politics, sales, environmental activism, organized religion, web site authoring, etc." It says that this is not a hoax or a prank, but an educational tool. I think that if you are creating a website, it should educate people with the truth, not to make up a fake chemical and try to scare people. Some people will believe anything that they read online, therefore I think this website simply shouldn't exist because it's fake. Their target audience is a person with some academic maturity and some understanding of chemistry. If you're trying to inform someone, it should not be based off of assumed prior knowledge. I think this website is not reliable and is trying to deceive people with less knowledge. This is, however, a good website for students to evaluate for credibility.

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