The Washingon Post reports on how students and others looking for information over-rely on the Internet and trust it too much. A lot of this has been remarked on before, of course. I wrote about this myself back in 1996.
The examples that the writer turns up, though, are interesting. Like this distressing tale:
Superficial searching habits can have tragic consequences, illustrated last year at Johns Hopkins University. A physician-researcher performed a test of lung function on a healthy 24-year-old woman, administering a large dose of a particular chemical. The woman then died of lung and kidney failure. The doctor had searched online for information about the drug but had failed to turn up any literature warning of its dangers — information that medical librarians later did find online after the woman died.
