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Raleigh, NC
Ruth Suehle is the community leadership manager for Red Hat's Open Source and Standards team. She's co-author of Raspberry Pi Hacks (O'Reilly, December 2013) and a senior editor at GeekMom, a site for those who find their joy in both geekery and parenting. She's a maker at heart who is often behind a sewing machine creating costumes, rolling fondant for an excessively large cake, or looking for the next great DIY project.
Authored Comments
That's an even larger problem that traditional media has always faced--being able to evaluate whether a study was done well and should actually be considered science. And it's only worse now that everybody with a mouse and a modem can look up every other half-brained "study" or "experiment" to use as "evidence."
What it really means is that the new face of journalism, which is likely to include amateurs and part-time journalists, is going to have to be even more careful about whom they cite. And on top of that, there's a greater responsibility on the part of the reader to judge their information sources more carefully. I love io9 and get pop cultural updates through it regularly. But I admit, when I found that debunking first, I described it as, "at least as reputable as whatever Helium is." Which is also, admittedly, a lingering bias on my part about what "real" journalism is. That answer is still a bit unclear for me. Although in this case, I think it has to do with what my idea of io9 is--I think of that as where I see recaps of Fringe, not where I read about science, in the same way that I don't expect to learn about global warming research from Perez Hilton.
I assume that's something that they've already worked out with battle.net Real ID. (But they also want to be clear that Real ID is separate from what they wanted to do with the forums.)
Regardless, they've backtracked and said that the real name plans are on hold for now:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?sid=1&topicId=25968987278