Psychology of Intelligence Analysis
Richards J. Heuer, Jr. · CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence (1999) · 1999 · Tradecraft
Public CSI monograph. Pulls 1978–86 internal articles on how analysts judge incomplete information. Chapter 8 is Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. Taught in the Field as published method, not rebranded.
ICD 203, Analytic Standards
Office of the Director of National Intelligence · 2015-01-02 · Tradecraft
Directive of 2 January 2015. Five analytic standards: objective, independent of political consideration, timely, based on all available sources; plus nine tradecraft standards including sourcing, uncertainty, assumptions vs. judgments, and analysis of alternatives. Taught as a writing discipline. The institution is not endorsed.
Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations
UN OHCHR and Human Rights Center, UC Berkeley School of Law (2022) · 2022 · Open Source
International standards for gathering, analyzing, and preserving digital open-source information in a professional, legal, and ethical manner. Written for investigations into serious violations of international law. This program teaches the method at civilian scale and does not claim its authority.
Bellingcat Editorial Standards & Practices
Stichting Bellingcat · n.d. · Open Source
Facts through objectively documented evidence, presented in full context. Accusations only on a sound evidential basis. Anonymous leads must be validated by reproducible open-source methods others can check. Taught as published method, not as any particular investigation's conclusion.
https://www.bellingcat.com/about/editorial-standards-practices/ (opens in a new tab)
NIST SP 800-86, Guide to Integrating Forensic Techniques into Incident Response
National Institute of Standards and Technology (August 2006) · 2006-08 · Forensics
Practical guidance on computer and network forensics: process, files, operating systems, network traffic, applications. Guidance for practitioners, not law. Revised practice lives in later incident-handling guides.
https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/86/final (opens in a new tab)
RFC 3227, Guidelines for Evidence Collection and Archiving
IETF · BCP 55 (February 2002) · 2002-02 · Forensics
Best Current Practice for collecting and archiving evidence of a security incident. Order of volatility and chain of custody are the parts that matter here. A BCP is not a statute.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3227/ (opens in a new tab)
Civic Online Reasoning
Digital Inquiry Group (formerly Stanford History Education Group) · n.d. · Civic Reasoning
Curriculum and assessments built from observing professional fact-checkers. Three questions: Who is behind the information? What is the evidence? What do other sources say? Lateral reading and click restraint. Method study, not a finding certificate.
Crash Course
Complexly · n.d. · Civic Reasoning
Video series used as supporting material in Academy media-literacy lessons. Teaching material, not a primary record. Check the claim against the record it points to.
Accuracy of Deception Judgments
Charles F. Bond Jr. and Bella M. DePaulo · Personality and Social Psychology Review (2006) · 2006 · Evidence
Meta-analysis of 206 documents and 24,483 judges. Average 54% correct lie-truth judgments in real time with no special aids: 47% of lies caught, 61% of truths correctly passed.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16859438/ (opens in a new tab)
Verbal De-escalation of the Agitated Patient (Project Beta)
American Association for Emergency Psychiatry · Western Journal of Emergency Medicine (2012) · 2012 · Evidence
Open-access consensus statement. Ten domains: personal space, do not provoke, one voice, be concise, name wants and feelings, listen, agree or agree to disagree, limits, choices, debrief. Expert consensus for emergency clinicians, not a controlled trial in ordinary public life.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3298202/ (opens in a new tab)
The Effectiveness of Neighborhood Watch
Bennett, Holloway, and Farrington · Campbell Collaboration (2008) · 2008 · Reviews
Narrative review of 19 studies (43 evaluations); meta-analysis of 12 studies (18 evaluations). Associated crime reduction of 16 to 26 percent. Academy Neighbors lesson teaches this headline with the review's own publication-bias finding, which lives in the full paper, not on this landing page.
NIST SP 800-61 Rev. 3, Incident Response Recommendations
National Institute of Standards and Technology (April 2025) · 2025-04 · Forensics
Supersedes SP 800-61 Rev. 2 (2012). Incident response recast as a CSF 2.0 community profile. The four-phase model is the older guide. This is the current revision.
https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/61/r3/final (opens in a new tab)
Report to the President of the United States (WMD Commission)
Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the US Regarding WMD (2005) · 2005-03-31 · Tradecraft
The 2005 review of the pre-war Iraq assessments. It finds that working premises became “more or less unrebuttable conclusions”, and that analysts accepted supporting evidence while explaining away evidence pointing the other way. The Casework Cycle baseline lesson rests on this finding. Chapter One (p. 50) says that on the aluminum tubes analysts “erected a theory that almost could not be disproved”.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-WMD/pdf/GPO-WMD.pdf (opens in a new tab)
The Diamond Model of Intrusion Analysis
Sergio Caltagirone, Andrew Pendergast and Christopher Betz · Center for Cyber Intelligence Analysis and Threat Research (2013) · 2013-07-05 · Cyber
Every intrusion event has four core features, adversary, capability, infrastructure and victim, joined by edges in a diamond. Section 7, Analytic Pivoting, extracts one element and uses it to discover related elements.
MITRE ATT&CK
The MITRE Corporation · n.d. · Cyber
A globally accessible knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques based on real-world observations. Tactics are the adversary's objectives; techniques and sub-techniques are the methods. A vocabulary for describing behavior, not an attribution.
Intelligence-Driven Computer Network Defense Informed by Analysis of Adversary Campaigns and Intrusion Kill Chains
Eric M. Hutchins, Michael J. Cloppert and Rohan M. Amin · Lockheed Martin · n.d. · Cyber
Defines the intrusion kill chain in seven phases: reconnaissance, weaponization, delivery, exploitation, installation, command and control, and actions on objectives. The PDF carries no clear publication date; the lesson dates the model to 2011.
The Pyramid of Pain
David J. Bianco · 2013-03-01 · Cyber
Indicators ranked from the cheapest for an adversary to change to the most expensive: hash values, IP addresses, domain names, network artifacts, host artifacts, tools, and tactics, techniques and procedures. Updated 17 January 2014.
https://detect-respond.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-pyramid-of-pain.html (opens in a new tab)
Grand Jury Indicts 12 Russian Intelligence Officers for Hacking Offenses Related to the 2016 Election
US Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs · 2018-07-13 · Cyber
Names GRU Units 26165 and 74455. Infrastructure paid for with cryptocurrency to obscure the funds; the Guccifer 2.0 persona; searches from a Moscow-based server for words that later appeared in the persona's first post. An indictment states allegations, not a verdict.
OlympicDestroyer is here to trick the industry
Kaspersky GReAT · Securelist · 2018-03-08 · Cyber
The wiper's Rich header was forged to match Lazarus malware, while the actual code did not match it. Kaspersky calls it a deliberate false flag planted to look like smoking-gun evidence.
https://securelist.com/olympicdestroyer-is-here-to-trick-the-industry/84295/ (opens in a new tab)
VU#836068, MD5 vulnerable to collision attacks
CERT Coordination Center, Carnegie Mellon University · 2008-12-31 · Forensics
Practical MD5 collisions were demonstrated in 2004; in 2008 researchers built a rogue CA certificate. MD5 “should be considered cryptographically broken and unsuitable for further use.”
The Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552
US Department of Justice, Office of Information Policy · 2022-01-21 · Records
Statute text as amended in 2016: a request must reasonably describe the records; fee categories for commercial, educational and scientific, news media and other requesters; nine exemptions, (b)(1) to (b)(9); a 20-working-day determination and an administrative appeal.
https://www.justice.gov/oip/freedom-information-act-5-usc-552 (opens in a new tab)
FinCEN Removes Beneficial Ownership Reporting Requirements for US Companies and US Persons
Financial Crimes Enforcement Network · 2025-03-21 · Records
Interim final rule: entities created in the United States and their beneficial owners are exempt from reporting; only foreign entities registered to do business in the US must report. Check the regulator on the day you rely on it.
Van Buren v. United States, 593 US 374
Supreme Court of the United States · 2021-06-03 · Records
The CFAA's “exceeds authorized access” covers entering areas of a computer, such as files, folders or databases, that are off limits to the user. It does not cover misusing information one is entitled to access.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-783_k53l.pdf (opens in a new tab)
Leading Police Consulting Group Will No Longer Teach the Reid Technique
Innocence Project · 2017-03-08 · Evidence
Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates stopped teaching the Reid technique in 2017 because of its reliance on deception and confrontation. Its CEO: “Confrontation is not an effective way of getting truthful information.”
https://innocenceproject.org/news/police-consultants-drop-reid-technique/ (opens in a new tab)
Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction
Elizabeth F. Loftus and John C. Palmer · Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13(5) · 1974-10 · Evidence
“Smashed” produced higher speed estimates than milder verbs, and a week later more false reports of broken glass. The abstract gives no figures; the 41 and 34 mph and 32 and 14 percent are in the paper.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022537174800113 (opens in a new tab)
Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events
Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris · Perception 28(9) · 1999 · Evidence
Record of the 1999 study, pages 1059–1074. Noticing an unexpected object depends on its similarity to the display and on how hard the monitoring task is. The “about half” figure is in the paper, not on this page.
If you're not looking for it, you probably won't see it
Brigham and Women's Hospital · ScienceDaily · 2013-07-19 · Evidence
Trafton Drew, Melissa Võ and Jeremy Wolfe, Psychological Science: 83 percent of radiologists did not report a gorilla inserted into a lung scan, and eye tracking showed most looked right at it.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130719112134.htm (opens in a new tab)
Toward a Theory of Situation Awareness in Dynamic Systems
Mica R. Endsley · Human Factors · 1995-03 · Evidence
The 1995 paper behind the three-level model of situation awareness: perception, comprehension and projection, with attention and working memory as the limits.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1518/001872095779049543 (opens in a new tab)
Anti-Phishing Training (Still) Does Not Work
Andrew T. Rozema and James C. Davis · arXiv · 2025-06-24 · Evidence
12,511 employees at a US financial technology firm. No significant effect of training on click rates (p=0.450) or reporting rates (p=0.417). Click rates tracked lure difficulty: 7.0 percent easy, 15.0 percent hard. Preprint.
Social media experiment reveals potential to 'inoculate' millions of users against misinformation
University of Cambridge · 2022-08-24 · Evidence
Jon Roozenbeek and Sander van der Linden, with Bristol and Google Jigsaw, in Science Advances. Inoculation videos ran in YouTube ad slots to about 5.4 million US users; recognition of manipulation techniques rose about 5 percent on average.
https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/inoculateexperiment (opens in a new tab)
Through the eyes of a burglar: study provides insights on habits and motivations
UNC Charlotte · 2013-05-15 · Reviews
Joseph Kuhns surveyed 422 incarcerated burglars; about 83 percent would check for an alarm, and about half who found one would stop. Funded by the Alarm Industry Research and Educational Foundation.
Rutgers Study Finds Alarm Systems Are Valuable Crime Fighting Tool
Rutgers University–Newark · 2009-02-04 · Reviews
Seungmug Lee, Newark police data 2001–2005: burglaries fell as registered alarms rose. Funded by the Alarm Industry Research and Educational Foundation.
Effects of closed circuit television surveillance on crime
Brandon C. Welsh and David P. Farrington · Campbell Collaboration · 2008-12-02 · Reviews
44 evaluations. CCTV is most effective in parking lots against vehicle crime and less effective in city centers, public housing and public transport; no effect on violent crime. The review itself is Campbell Systematic Reviews, DOI 10.4073/csr.2008.17, which names Welsh and Farrington and the 44 evaluations.
Effects of Improved Street Lighting on Crime
Brandon C. Welsh and David P. Farrington · Campbell Systematic Reviews · 2008 · Reviews
Improved lighting significantly reduces crime. Night crime did not fall more than day crime, so community pride and informal social control are more plausible than surveillance as the mechanism.
Assessing the Extent of Crime Displacement and Diffusion of Benefits
Rob T. Guerette and Kate J. Bowers · Criminology 47(4) · 2009-11 · Reviews
Review of 102 situational crime prevention evaluations: displacement is the exception, and diffusion of benefits may be more likely. The abstract gives no percentages.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2009.00177.x (opens in a new tab)
Elicitation
Federal Bureau of Investigation · n.d. · Tradecraft
Defines elicitation as the strategic use of conversation to extract information without the person feeling interrogated. Lists the techniques, among them flattery, criticism, deliberate false statements, leading questions, the good listener and quid pro quo. Complaint baiting and mirroring are not named in those words.
Re-linked 2026-09-26. Previous URL: https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/elicitation-brochure.pdf, which now lands on the FBI home page. The same FBI brochure, with the same definition and technique list, is served at the FBI’s ucr.fbi.gov address.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/investigate/counterintelligence/elicitation-brochure (opens in a new tab)
SIFT (The Four Moves)
Mike Caulfield · 2019-06-19 · Civic Reasoning
Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace claims, quotes and media to the original context. Much of what circulates has been stripped of context, and the check is whether the version you saw was accurately presented.
https://hapgood.us/2019/06/19/sift-the-four-moves/ (opens in a new tab)
Guide To Using Reverse Image Search For Investigations
Aric Toler · Bellingcat · 2019-12-26 · Open Source
Google alone disappoints more often than not. Yandex, Bing and Google index differently and have different regional strengths, so use more than one. Reverse search is used to trace an image's origin and its duplicates across the web. The guide does not discuss platform metadata stripping.
A Beginner's Guide to Geolocating Videos
Eliot Higgins · Bellingcat · 2014-07-09 · Open Source
Start from landmarks and road characteristics, match them against satellite imagery, switch imagery providers when one is unclear, and recheck the footage for everything that matches or does not match.
Using the Sun and the Shadows for Geolocation
Youri van der Weide · Bellingcat · 2020-12-03 · Open Source
The sun's position and shadows in footage fix the camera direction, and SunCalc checks a claimed date, time and place together from object height and shadow length.
Current Approaches to Automated Information Evaluation and their Applicability to Priority Intelligence Requirement Answering
Brian Ulicny, Christopher J. Matheus, Gerald M. Powell, Mieczyslaw M. Kokar · US Army Research Laboratory (DTIC) · 2010-07 · Tradecraft
Quotes NATO STANAG 2022: source reliability A (completely reliable) to F (reliability cannot be judged) and information credibility 1 (confirmed by other sources) to 6 (cannot be judged), evaluated along two independent dimensions.
https://web.archive.org/web/2026/https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA564414.pdf (opens in a new tab)
NIST SP 800-92, Guide to Computer Security Log Management
Karen Kent and Murugiah Souppaya · NIST · 2006-09 · Cyber
An inaccurate host clock makes its log timestamps inaccurate. Log sources record time in different formats and zones, and normalization stores dates and times in one format. Keep the original logs. Rootkits alter logs, and rotation closes old files.
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublication800-92.pdf (opens in a new tab)
RFC 6962, Certificate Transparency
B. Laurie, A. Langley, E. Kasper · IETF (Experimental; obsoleted by RFC 9162) · 2013-06 · Cyber
Public logs record TLS certificates as they are issued or observed. Each log is append-only, provable with Merkle trees, so a later version is a superset of every earlier one.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6962/ (opens in a new tab)
Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data
ICANN · 2018-05-25 · Cyber
Effective 25 May 2018, the day GDPR took effect. Registrant name, address, phone and related fields are shown as REDACTED FOR PRIVACY unless the registrant consents.
Passive DNS Replication
Florian Weimer · FIRST Conference 2005 · 2005-04 · Cyber
Sensors capture DNS replies and store them, so you can ask what a name resolved to at a time and which names pointed at an address. Each site sees only a localized part of DNS, so coverage depends on where the sensors are.
https://www.first.org/conference/2005/papers/florian-weimer-paper-1.pdf (opens in a new tab)
Autonomous System Numbers
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) · n.d. · Cyber
An autonomous system is a group of one or more IP prefixes run by one or more network operators with a single, clearly defined routing policy. Operators need an AS number to control routing within their networks and to exchange routing information with other ISPs. The page does not discuss hosting resellers or tenants.
https://www.arin.net/resources/guide/asn/ (opens in a new tab)
Comparability of Cause of Death Between ICD-9 and ICD-10: Preliminary Estimates
R. N. Anderson, A. M. Miniño, D. L. Hoyert, H. M. Rosenberg · NCHS · 2001-05-18 · Evidence
Moving from ICD-9 to ICD-10 creates discontinuities in cause-of-death trends between 1998 and 1999. The comparability ratio divides deaths classified under the new revision by deaths classified under the old one; septicemia's ratio of 1.1949 means about 20% more deaths counted under ICD-10 because the coding rules changed, not because more people died of it.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr49/nvsr49_02.pdf (opens in a new tab)
How to post pictures or GIFs
X Help Center · n.d. · Open Source
When location services are on, X reads a photo's Exif data to suggest locations, and it uses Exif data for analytics. It retains Exif data only temporarily to process the photo, and the data is not available to people who view the photo on X.
https://help.x.com/en/using-x/posting-gifs-and-pictures (opens in a new tab)
Social Media Sites Photo Metadata Test Results 2019
IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group · 2019-08-14 · Open Source
In the IPTC's spring 2019 tests, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter displayed no embedded metadata. Twitter stripped the metadata from saved files; Facebook's saved files kept no XMP but kept some rights fields in IIM and Exif. The tests covered caption and rights fields, not GPS location specifically.
Statistics notes: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
Douglas G. Altman and J. Martin Bland, BMJ · 1995-08-19 · Evidence
A study that finds no significant difference has shown only an absence of evidence of a difference, not evidence that there is no difference; the two are quite different statements, especially when a study is too small to detect a meaningful effect.
https://www.bmj.com/content/311/7003/485 (opens in a new tab)
ArtIII.S1.3 Marbury v. Madison and Judicial Review
Constitution Annotated, Congress.gov (Library of Congress) · n.d. · Records
Quotes Chief Justice Marshall in Marbury v. Madison (1803): "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." Interpretation of the law is a separate function from its enactment.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIII-S1-3/ALDE_00013514/ (opens in a new tab)
Heckler v. Chaney, 470 US 821
Supreme Court of the United States (US Reports, Library of Congress) · 1985-03-20 · Records
"An agency's decision not to take enforcement action is presumed immune from judicial review." Whether and how a law is enforced is largely left to the agency's discretion, separate from what the law says.
Guide to Interpreting VAERS Data
Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (CDC and FDA) · n.d. · Evidence
"The report of an adverse event to VAERS is not documentation that a vaccine caused the event." VAERS collects events that follow vaccination whether they are coincidental or caused by the vaccine, so an event that follows another in time is not by that fact caused by it.
https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/dataguide.html (opens in a new tab)
Fraud and Improper Payments
US Government Accountability Office · n.d. · Records
Improper payments are payments that should not have been made or were made in the incorrect amount. "While all fraudulent payments are considered improper, not all improper payments are due to fraud." Error and deliberate wrongdoing are distinct findings.
https://www.gao.gov/fraud-improper-payments (opens in a new tab)
Building Resilient Supply Chains, Revitalizing American Manufacturing, and Fostering Broad-Based Growth: 100-Day Reviews under Executive Order 14017
The White House (archived) · 2021-06 · Evidence
The review found that an approach which "prioritized efficiency and low costs over security, sustainability and resilience" produced the supply chain risks it identified, and that the search for low-cost production concentrated key supply chains in a few nations.
ICD 206, Sourcing Requirements for Disseminated Analytic Products
Office of the Director of National Intelligence · 2015-01-22 · Tradecraft
Analytic products must carry source reference citations that identify the originator, the document and its date, so a reader can discover and retrieve each source, with source descriptors on each source's quality and credibility.
Getting Started with Primary Sources
Library of Congress · n.d. · Records
Primary sources are "original documents and objects that were created at the time under study"; secondary sources are "accounts that retell, analyze, or interpret events, usually at a distance of time or place."
https://www.loc.gov/programs/teachers/getting-started-with-primary-sources/ (opens in a new tab)
Find a Case (PACER)
Administrative Office of the US Courts · n.d. · Records
"PACER allows anyone with an account to search and locate appellate, district, and bankruptcy court case and docket information." Federal court filings are held on the courts' own dockets.
https://www.uscourts.gov/court-records/find-a-case-pacer (opens in a new tab)
About the Federal Register
Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration · 2018-08-08 · Records
The Federal Register is published every business day by the Office of the Federal Register and carries federal agency regulations, proposed rules, public notices, executive orders, proclamations, and other presidential documents.
https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/the-federal-register/about.html (opens in a new tab)
Data Brokers: A Call for Transparency and Accountability
Federal Trade Commission · 2014-05 · Records
Data brokers draw on state and local government records, including real property and assessor records and court records. Consumers often cannot access the information brokers hold about them or correct errors in it.
Rule 901. Authenticating or Identifying Evidence
Federal Rules of Evidence (Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School) · n.d. · Evidence
"To satisfy the requirement of authenticating or identifying an item of evidence, the proponent must produce evidence sufficient to support a finding that the item is what the proponent claims it is." An item offered as evidence must itself be shown to be what it is claimed to be.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/rule_901 (opens in a new tab)
47 U.S.C. § 317, Announcement with respect to certain matter broadcast
United States Code (Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School) · n.d. · Records
Broadcast matter for which money, service or other valuable consideration is paid must be announced as paid for or furnished, and by whom, at the time it is broadcast.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/317 (opens in a new tab)
Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers
Federal Trade Commission · 2019-11 · Evidence
Influencers must disclose any financial, employment, personal or family relationship with a brand; telling followers about such relationships "allows people to weigh the value of your endorsements." Payment is disclosed so the audience can weigh it, not because paid content is false.
The spread of true and false news online
Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy and Sinan Aral, Science 359 (authors' copy, MIT Media Lab) · 2018-03-09 · Evidence
In about 126,000 rumor cascades on Twitter from 2006 to 2017, falsehood "diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information"; humans, not bots, drove the difference. How far something spreads does not show that it is true.
https://politics.media.mit.edu/papers/Vosoughi_Science.pdf (opens in a new tab)
The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model
Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews, RAND Corporation · 2016-07-11 · Tradecraft
Describes high-volume, rapid, continuous and repetitive messaging that does not wait to check facts, and cites research that repeated exposure to a statement increases its acceptance as true.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html (opens in a new tab)
Criminal Victimization, 2023
Susannah N. Tapp and Emilie J. Coen, Bureau of Justice Statistics · 2024-09 · Evidence
About 45% of violent victimizations and 30% of property victimizations were reported to police in 2023. Counts of reported crime depend on how many victims report, not only on how many crimes occur.
Writing Survey Questions
Pew Research Center · 2021-05-26 · Evidence
"Even small wording differences can substantially affect the answers people provide." In one example, 51% favored an end-of-life policy under one wording and 44% under another; Pew tests alternative wordings on split samples to find such effects.
https://www.pewresearch.org/writing-survey-questions/ (opens in a new tab)
Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs
Charles S. Taber and Milton Lodge, American Journal of Political Science 50(3) (abstract record, RePEc EconPapers) · 2006 · Evidence
Two experiments on affirmative action and gun control found "strong evidence of a prior attitude effect such that attitudinally congruent arguments are evaluated as stronger than attitudinally incongruent arguments." People held arguments they agreed with to a lower standard than arguments they opposed.
Accuracy of forecasts in strategic intelligence
David R. Mandel and Alan Barnes, PNAS 111(30) (PubMed record) · 2014-07-29 · Tradecraft
The accuracy of 1,514 strategic intelligence forecasts was assessed; "both discrimination and calibration of forecasts was very good." Miscalibration was mainly underconfidence: analysts assigned more uncertainty than their accuracy warranted. Calibration is measured against the record of outcomes.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25024176/ (opens in a new tab)
Distinguishing Between Factual and Opinion Statements in the News
Amy Mitchell, Jeffrey Gottfried, Michael Barthel and Nami Sumida, Pew Research Center · 2018-06-18 · Evidence
In a survey of 5,035 US adults asked to sort news statements into factual and opinion, a majority correctly classified at least three of five in each set, only a little better than random guessing. Both Republicans and Democrats were more likely to call a statement factual when it appealed to their side.
News in a Digital Age: Comparing the Presentation of News Information over Time and Across Media Platforms
Jennifer Kavanagh and others, RAND Corporation · 2019-05-14 · Evidence
"News content has generally shifted from more-objective event- and context-based reporting to reporting that is more subjective, relies more heavily on argumentation and advocacy, and includes more emotional appeals." The shift was modest in print and stronger on television and online.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2960.html (opens in a new tab)
Removing Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior From China
Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Cybersecurity Policy, Meta (Facebook) · 2019-08-19 · Tradecraft
"We're taking down these Pages, Groups and accounts based on their behavior, not the content they posted." The platform treats an influence operation as coordinated, deceptive behavior, whether or not its content is false.
https://about.fb.com/news/2019/08/removing-cib-china/ (opens in a new tab)
Reliance on emotion promotes belief in fake news
Cameron Martel, Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand, Cognitive Research 5 (2020) · 2020 · Evidence
Heightened emotionality predicted greater belief in fake (but not real) news headlines, and greater emotionality predicted decreased discernment between real and fake news; experimentally inducing reliance on emotion increased belief in fake news.
Re-linked 2026-09-26. Previous URL: https://cognitiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41235-020-00252-3, which now redirects to the same article on Springer Link.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41235-020-00252-3 (opens in a new tab)
Bringing Dark Patterns to Light
Federal Trade Commission, staff report · 2022-09 · Records
"Dark patterns can be found in a variety of industries and contexts, including ecommerce, cookie consent banners, children's apps, subscription sales, and more." Examples include fake countdown clocks, false low-stock messages, and false claims about others' activity, such as "24 other people are viewing this listing."
https://www.ftc.gov/reports/bringing-dark-patterns-light (opens in a new tab)
Using EDGAR to Research Investments
US Securities and Exchange Commission, Office of Investor Education and Assistance · 2018-09-04 · Records
The 10-K "provides audited annual financial statements, a discussion of material risk factors for the company and its business"; the 8-K discloses material events before the next scheduled report. Proxy statements "may include compensation and other information about the company's or fund's board and executive officers." Forms 3, 4 and 5 report insiders' holdings and transactions. Schedules 13D and 13G are "filed when a party acquires more than five percent of a class of a company's registered voting securities."
https://www.sec.gov/oiea/Article/edgarguide.html (opens in a new tab)
UCC § 9-502, Contents of financing statement
Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School · n.d. · Records
A financing statement is sufficient if it names the debtor and the secured party and indicates the collateral. It "may be filed before a security agreement is made or a security interest otherwise attaches."
https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/9/9-502 (opens in a new tab)
Glossary of Legal Terms
Administrative Office of the US Courts · n.d. · Records
A docket is "a log containing the complete history of each case in the form of brief chronological entries summarizing the court proceedings." A case file is "a complete collection of every document filed in court in a case."
SPJ Code of Ethics
Society of Professional Journalists · 2014-09-06 · Open Source
Under "Act Independently": "Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived. Disclose unavoidable conflicts."
https://www.spj.org/spj-code-of-ethics/ (opens in a new tab)