Why are prominent news media retractions so rare? Using data from a survey experiment in which respondents view simulated Twitter newsfeeds, we demonstrate the dilemma facing news organizations that have published false information. Encouragingly, media retractions are effective at informing the public – they increase the accuracy of news consumers’ beliefs about the retracted reporting more than information from third parties questioning the original reporting or even the combination of the two. However, trust in the news outlet declines after a retraction, though this effect is small both substantively and in standardized terms relative to the increase in belief accuracy. This reputational damage persists even if the outlet issues a retraction before a third party questions the story. In a social media environment that frequently subjects reporting to intense scrutiny, the journalistic mission of news organizations to inform the public will increasingly conflict with organizational incentives to avoid admitting error.

Relative indentation is the input signal estimating contact force model parameters, so the signal is required to have a higher precision to ensure the accuracy of the estimated contact force model parameters. However, in the impact experiment, the vibration displacements in multiple directions are often coupled in the relative indentation, resulting in a large error of the measured relative indentation. This paper presents an experimental correction method for the relative indentation. Firstly, the relative indentation is decoupled by the established model of the spatial position of the hammerhead relative to the sample to reduce the errors caused by the rotation of the pendulum boom and the vibration of the base. A pendulum impact test device is established to verify the correction method of relative indentation. The results show that the maximum relative error between the contact force estimated by using the corrected relative indentation as the input signal and the measured contact force is less than 3%. The estimated contact force is in good agreement with the measured value, and the correlation coefficient is above 0.92. It shows that the experimental correction of the relative indentation has achieved good results, which verifies the accuracy of the correction method.

We present the reasoning behind a retraction noting that even small, honest errors can result in significant changes in findings.

Changes in the altitudes of glacier snowlines (ELAs) and the altitudes of montane vegetation belts (VBAs) measure Quaternary climatic change. An accepted ‘correction’ to such changes by deducting the amount of contemporary sea level fall is wrong, since the air displaced by the ice sheets approximately fills the space left by the falling sea level and so there is no overall downward movement of the troposphere. This also causes a reduced cooling at the lowered sea level relative to that at the former inter-glacial sea level, about 1°C at the Las Glacial Maximum, which reduces the discrepancies previously noted by others between terrestrial and marine estimates of sea-level cooling. The change in temperature is indicated by the product of the ELA or VBA lowering and the environmental lapse rate (ELR). Prior estimates of ΔELA (−900 ± 135 m) and ELR (−6° ± 0.1°C km−1) would indicate a cooling of −5.4°C at interglacial sea level and −4.4°C at glacial sea level, although glacial-period ELRs are not known reliably. Established ELA corrections for local epeirogenic uplift or subsidence are appropriate.

Conspiracy theories are prevalent among the public. Governments frequently release official documents attempting to explain events that inspire these beliefs. However, these documents are often heavily redacted, a practice that lay epistemic theory suggests might be interpreted as evidence for a conspiracy. To investigate this possibility, we tested the effect of redactions on beliefs in a well-known conspiracy theory. Results from two preregistered experiments indicate that conspiracy beliefs were higher when people were exposed to seemingly redacted documents compared to when they were exposed to unredacted documents that were otherwise identical. In addition, unredacted documents consistently lowered conspiracy beliefs relative to controls while redacted documents had reduced or null effects, suggesting that lay epistemic interpretations of the redactions undermined the effect of information in the documents. Our findings, which do not vary by conspiracy predispositions, suggest policymakers should be more transparent when releasing documents to refute misinformation.

This paper explores the circumstances in which a change in the land register should be stigmatised as a mistake and thereby introduce the discretionary power to correct it. Recognising the importance of clarifying the concept of mistake, due to its role in controlling the reliability of the register, the paper reviews and rejects various possible determinants for mistake. It proposes an account of mistake which rests on a set of rigid legal constructs about entitlement and registration and which pays respect to various traditional attributes of property.

The Guide to the expression of uncertainty in measurement (GUM) requires, “that the results of a measurement have been corrected for all recognised significant systematic effects and that every effort has been made to identify such effects”, before the issue of evaluating their uncertainty is tackled. In addition, the GUM also requires that a model is used, expressing the functional dependence of the measurand on identified input quantities. The paper discusses the inter-relations between the so-defined two sets of influence quantities and proposes to unify their treatment.

This article attempts to align a familiar task of classroom teaching, eliciting from students correct answers about their lessons, with a major organizational domain in studies of natural conversation, that of conversational repair. Numerous studies have analyzed correction sequences in classroom discourse, and our discussion pays special attention to McHoul's (1990) treatment of “repair in classroom talk.” McHoul directly measures the findings on repair in studies of natural conversation to the regularities of correction sequences in classroom lessons. It is argued, contra McHoul, that repair is a different, and prior, order of discursive work, and one that premises the very possibility of classroom correction. Further, the difference may have wider relevance for understanding repair and correction as “co-operating” organizations of talk-in-interaction more generally.

This paper investigates an RTK-GPS correction generation technique suitable for low-rate (<600 bps) data-link. We combined correction filtering algorithm with an efficient transmission technique which is based upon correction scheduling. The correction scheduling technique can reduce the required amount of correction data as well as the latency effect on RTK-GPS positioning accuracy. We processed real time GPS data to evaluate the performance of the RTK-GPS correction generator for low-rate data-link. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed techniques can lower the required bandwidth of data-link up to 500 bps, maintaining the high accuracy of RTK-GPS.