The Half-Life of Facts : Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date (Hardcover)

from bezoar44

The Half-Life of Facts is an engaging, popular introduction to several topics within information science. The title comes from the notion that one can measure the rate at which papers within a discipline become obsolete, assigning a half-life to each field. The author explicitly uses 'fact' in a ...

from figre

This turns out to be a fairly timely read as we find ourselves awash in allegations of alternative facts and half-truths and fake news and whatever sobriquet is currently being bandied about to provide a basis for denial. However, don't even think that this is a political book. It has no ax to gr...

from satyridae

I wish I thought that I would be able to remember everything I learned from this book, though Arbesman did give me an out by suggesting that the time has come to outsource our memories to the cloud because that's the best way of getting the latest information. But already I'm forgetting some of t...

from mcelhra

After I saw Samuel Arbesman speak at Tedx Kansas City a few weeks ago, I knew I had to read his book. The premise of his talk and his book is that facts are not really information set in stone, the way we usually think about them. The world is constantly changing and nothing is for certain foreve...

from Razinha

A data driven book, there's a lot of substance here, and Arbeson makes it very readable. Henot only addresses the half-life, but also the discovery, acquisition, spread and defense of the facts of our lives. He also looks at "facts" that aren't, but people still think are. The half-life of misinf...