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A man in a suit speaking at a blue press backdrop, overlaid with a fact-check style banner reading Unsubstantiated
KindSoCIETIE KNoT ModeWorkshop ThreadCritical Thinking
Skills Developed
Evidence EvaluationCritical Analysis
Created By
John Debs — Fellow (College of Science and Medicine)

About this KNoT

What is a BS meter?

Its you're ability to quickly fact check, and argue with a friend at the pub. Or more importantly, confidently check claims made by our politicians, newspapers, companies, and even scientists.

This session is aims to give you confidence that you can quickly estimate, cross-check, and make sense out all of the above. Something you’d like any future leader to be able to do, especially in a world of growth mis- and dis-information.

Preparation

You might like to download the free textbook below, which has some useful content for building estimation skills. Even the early part of chapter 1 will be useful to you.

The Art of Insight in Science & Engineering (PDF)

What You’ll Learn

Fact checking, Estimation, Fermi Questions - this skill has many names. It's something some scientists do a lot, but is a skill anyone can build and broadly useful.

For example:
  • How much does the empire state building weigh?
  • If I made the claim that road transport contributes significantly less Carbon Emissions than electricity generation, could you call me out?
  • Is it true that the power required to run a human being, is equivalent to a bright incandescent light bulb?
Armed with nothing but common sense, some typical numbers, and the skills of arithmetic, you’ll be able to answer the above questions by the end of this session, and continue to use this skill in your everyday life.

How to Complete This KNoT

We want you to come up with your own fact-check question/situation and test it on some of your friends/colleagues over the coming week. Then give a summary and/or reflection on this in your portfolio.

Submit your Completion Task here:

Submit your completion task for this KNoT via the Qualtrics survey (ANU Login required). You have 10 calendar days after the KNoT to submit it.

Writing your reflection

Most completion tasks ask you to reflect on what you did. For prompts, sentence starters, and the five areas a strong reflection covers, see Writing Your Reflection. Your completed tasks come together at the end of the semester in the Completion Evidence.

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