Propane vulture cannon
Let’s get right to it. Did the Town of Bunn really install a propane cannon on top of a school to fend off vultures?
Link: https://www.townofbunn.org/docs/Propane%20Cannon.pdf
OK, I’ll let you sleuths get to it. Meet me below and we’ll talk!
So the answer is…
Yeah, looks like it. But there’s a lot of things to look at here, so lets go through them.
First of all, there are some useless strategies that we should dispense with. Ways that students might form an opinion of this that aren’t really good.
It’s from a dot org, for example. Students think this is a sign of trustworthiness, but it is as meaningless as saying “This car is safe because its color is blue.”
Students might also think it’s not trustworthy, because it “mis-spells decibel”. I honestly don’t know if this is an error, or some way of spelling decibel I’m not aware of, but frankly neither do your students, so it’s not a great thing to hang a judgement on. Even more importantly, everyone makes errors sometimes. Even the town of Bunn, talking about their propane vulture cannon. Even CNN, even the White House.
Are spelling errors meaningless? No, I wouldn’t say so. Particularly when it comes to phishing attacks they can be an indicator something is wrong. But rather than seeing the occasional spelling error as evidence, start seeing it as a reminder to SIFT.
Finally, a bad way to go about this vulture cannon problem is to use a “plausibility filter.” It’s comical, but some folks think the best way to figure this out is to have students ask “Does this make sense? Would this even work? Would a town really do this?” I mean, maybe you have some background in vulture propane cannons? But I actually don’t have a knowledge base here to work with.
As per usual, there a couple ways to go about this. In fact, this works much like the Mike DeWine example (also true) from a few days ago.
First, we can see if this is an authoritative URL for the town. Is this the town’s website? For that I’m going to check first in Wikipedia.
We search, using the URL + “wikipedia” and the wiki page floats to the top.
Then we look at the listed website. It’s a match.
That’s probably enough, though we note that we don’t know which December/January this vulture propane cannon thing occurred. So if we wanted to we could look for news stories. But note that we may not find a bunch of news stories. This isn’t about an ancient aliens statue or a vaccine lottery. So we’re prepared for failure here.
In this case however, we needn’t have worried. Everyone loves a propane vulture cannon:
As usual, walk students through this incrementally, as we have here. Ask:
How could we find out if this really is the town website? Wikipedia is the best first stop, but were that to fail, going up to the home page of the site isn’t a bad strategy either.
Demo the Wikipedia + URL move
Ask students what they see on the page that indicates this is the sort of page they think it is (the Town of Bunn page).
Ask what search terms they might use to look for news stories.
Execute the search, then talk about propane vulture cannons!
Until next time…