Ethics: October 2003 Archive Page

The feature is particularly troubling to reference-book authors who think they may lose a sale if a user can find "the best place to hike in Chaco Canyon" or "where to find the best airfare to Cuba" by using Amazon's search feature instead. --Monica Soto Ouchi --Amazon's inside look irks authors: Search function previews any page  (Seattle Times)

I think Mike Arnzen said it best -- "As a scholar, I love it. As an author, I hate it."

He never imagined just how unenthusiastic his research sponsors -- and others with a financial stake in atrazine -- would be about his discovery. | Six frustrating years later, Mr. Hayes and his defenders say they know only too well the lengths to which those companies will go to undermine his findings that atrazine may be harmful. --Goldie Blumenstyk --The Price of Research (Chronicle)

The author of this article is careful to check with scientists who say they were unable to repeat Hayes's findings. It would be an irresponsible exaggeration to claim that all corporate research is biased, or that research funded by non-profits or governments is free from similar pressure. In my "Practice of Journalism" class, we are learning to be skeptical of the statistics quoted in agenda-driven press releases, but this article shows the opportunities for the misuse of science are much broader.

P.S. Goldie Blumenstyk? Really?

Once again, Halloween season is upon us, and with it, the wonderful anticipation of dressing up and trick-or-treating for delicious Brach's candy. With that in mind, it's important to remember all the ways that you can make your Halloween safer and more fun. It won't put a damper on anyone's holiday spirits to wear high-visibility costumes when going from house to house, to have kids trick-or-treat with an adult, and to inspect all candy for tampering. Perhaps most importantly, keep in mind that eating just a single kernel of candy corn manufactured by a company other than Brach's Confections will give you a deadly case of full-blown AIDS. --"Patrick Carlin CEO, Brach's Confections" --Generic Candy Corn will Give You AIDS (Onion)

Another great example of The Onion's mastery of social satire.

The problem of spam or unwanted commercial e-mail is usually attributed to outlaws and hucksters -- peddlers of pornography, get-rich-quick schemes and pills of dubious merit -- who use hackers to send their fraudulent messages in ways that cannot be traced. | But the torrent of spam that is flowing into people's electronic mailboxes comes not only from the sewers but also from the office towers of the biggest and most well-known corporations. --Saul Hansell

--Big Companies Add to Spam (NY Times)

[B]ooks at especially high risk include those that sell to the student (particularly college student) market as secondary reading. A student could easily grab the relevant chapter or two out of a book without paying for it. Students certainly have the time and most likely the inclination to do so, and, with the help of some willing colleagues, could print out the entire texts of books in the program. --Authors GuildAuthor's Guild Question Amazon's Full-text Search FeatureThe Imprtance Of)

I found the above via Slashdot, on The Importance Of's overview of the Amazon search controversy.

A high school freshman expelled for writing a fictional account of a student who falls asleep in class and dreams of killing a teacher can return to school Monday while officials reconsider the disciplinary action.... "It was a story about a girl who falls asleep in class, dreams she kills her math teacher, then wakes up and nothing happens," she said. --Girl expelled for writing story about killing teacher (CNN)

And where are all the people who were screaming about the Plame leak? --Glenn Reynolds --Glenn Reynolds on Rumsfeld Memo and Plame Affair (Instapundit)

A good collection of links exploring the media spin on the Rumsfeld memo. Reynolds argues that the leaked document, in which Reynolds critiques the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq war, could have been presented (by the media) as a positive sign that Rumsefeld is sensibly and thoughtfully examining the weaknesses of the military operation. Instead, the press is presenting the memo as a sign of division within Bush's ranks.

She singled out a campaign by Disney - "Remember the magic" - which, she claimed, was used to invoke real or imaginary childhood memories in consumers. | She reported an experiment in which people were shown an advert suggesting that children who visited Disneyland had the opportunity to shake hands with Bugs Bunny. Later, many of those who had seen the advert "remembered" meeting Bugs on childhood visits to the theme park, a feat that would have been impossible, given that the cartoon is a Warner Brothers character. Loftus said: "This brings forth ethical considerations. Is it OK for marketers to knowingly manipulate consumers' pasts?" --David Benady --Selling You a New Past (Independent)

Brewster Kahle wants the world to know that old software is an important part of our cultural history and -- like books, films and other media -- should be preserved. --Daniel Terdiman --Fighting to Preserve Old Programs

Problem? The DMCA prohibits the archiving of software, on the grounds that doing so violates intellectual property rights.

At one prestigious university, a sophomore imported 30 biology books from England this fall and sold them outside his classroom for less than the campus-bookstore price, netting a $1,200 profit. Next semester, if all goes well, he plans to expand the operation. | "The only difference is that they say `international edition' in little print on the cover," said the student, who added that he was not certain whether his project raised any legal issues, and therefore asked that neither he nor his college be identified. --Tamar Lewin --Students Find $100 Textbooks Cost $50, Purchased Overseas (NY Times (Reg; expires))

Via KairosNews.

A professor agrees to review a manuscript that is under consideration for publication at a journal. He has promised to keep the paper and its contents absolutely confidential. When he reads it, however, he realizes that his student's experiments will never work; the paper shows that they are futile. Does he keep mum, or does he break the confidentiality rule and tell his student what he just learned? --Ethics 101: A Course About the Pitfalls (NYT (Registration; link will expire))

Another good suggestion from Jim.

The author of one of the books I blogged wrote me an interesting reply, but sent it via e-mail. Can I place her comment in my blog comments without violating some written or unwritten code? --John SpurlockBlogging E-Mailed CommentsE-Mail)

If I were to send a letter to the editor to a newspaper, I shouldn't be surprised if it were published -- that's what a "letter to the editor" is for. If I were to send an e-mail to a website that features published e-mails, I shouldn't be surprised if that e-mail were published -- that's how the site gets its content in the first place.

John's situation is more complex. As I understand it, he has written a traditional print review of a book, but posted a longer version of that review on his blog ("The Blue Monkey Review"). The author could have commented directly on John's blog (indeed, another author has done exactly that). Instead, the author chose to send an e-mail.

I think the context is very important here.

I presume that the audience for my own blog is net savvy enough to know one shouldn't e-mail anything that one wouldn't want to become public. (Though how often we all follow that guidline is open to question.)

Since John is asking the question about an e-mail sent to him by a book author (that is, someone who makes a living by writing), and since the academic subject of their correspondence is presumably not cyberculture or online writing conventions, I'd say I wouldn't think twice about mentioning the e-mail, paraphrasing it in order to write a response, or even quoting a sections for the purpose of defending/explaining/rebutting/continuing the intelletual discourse in another blog entry. It's possible the author simply wasn't familiar with the convention of posting comments in a weblog. Since the author didn't actually type it there, I'd do what I did here -- create a separate blog entry to introduce the e-mail, and link back to the original discussion. Still, before I'd post the whole thing, I'd ask the author's permission. And I'd start blogging my rebuttal while awaiting the reply. If the author doesn't reply after a few days and a telephone follow-up (if possible), I'd paraphrase the e-mail and/or quote selective, and post my response anyway (after briefly explaining my attempts to contact the author).

(And by the way, I did ask John's permission to post his inquriy and blog my response.)

On the surface, it is hard to tell that the story labeled "Study: Fellatio may significantly decrease the risk of breast cancer in women," isn't real. The original Web version has the CNN.com banner along the top of the page, the stock CNN medical graphic along the right side of the article and credits N.C. State University with the study. --Michelle DeCamp --Student fools international newspapers with spoof story (Technician Online)

I recall seeing the "fellatio reduces breast cancer" story on blog lists, but figured it was a (rather stupid) adolescent joke, and didn't know it was a CNN spoof until now. Although the above article (from a student newspaper) claims that legitimate news organizations were fooled by this story, that claim is weakly researched -- the reporter is relying only on the word of the author of the hoax article, and does not offer independent confirmation of his claims about newspapers in Croatia and Chile. This story about a hoax is itself something of a non-story.

On a similar note, Forbes is running 'Is Sex Necessary?,' an article that begins by introducing "one of the most credible studies correlating overall health with sexual frequency" but immediately follows it with a bulleted list of items taken from "Other studies (some rigorous, some less so)." Buried in the article is the observation that some of the connection are associative, rather than causal. For instance, people who are sick in the hospital probably don't have much opportunity to meet sexual partners; thus, healthy people will tend to have more sex than sick people. Older people whose life-long partners have died will probably have less sex than younger people whose parters are still around; and those older people are also probably likely to have more health problems than the younger ones. Did the more frequent sex cause the health in the younger people? Of course not. (A good scientific study would, of course, account for age differenes, and would try to compare two groups that are as similar as possible.)

Over the next few weeks I will be reading Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel'sWars by Yaacov Lozowick. This book was published last year in Israel and this year, by Doubleday, in the U.S. My plan is to provide not exactly a review of the book but a reflection on it as I read. | But before I begin, I have to say a few things about myself. Like any historian, like any good scholar, I strive to recognize my own prejudices and preconceptions, my own point of view (p.o.v.). This book, dealing with the Zionist movement and the struggle for survival of the state of Israel, draws on my own long connection, in imagination at least, with Israel and Judaism, and it also makes me confront my ideas and ideals about the world I live in. --John Spurlock --Right to Exist (Review) (Blue Monkey Review)

John is chair of the Humanities Division here at Seton Hill University.

From 1860 to 1940, Earth's surface warmed about 0.4ºC. Then Earth's surface cooled about 0.1ºC in the first four decades after 1940 and warmed about 0.3ºC in the next two. For those two most recent decades, temperature measurements of the atmosphere have also been available, and, while these measurements are subject to significant uncertainty, they indicate that the atmosphere's temperature has remained essentially unchanged. Thus, the actual temperature record does not support the claims widely found in environmental literature and the media that Earth has been steadily warming over the past century. --Jack M. Hollander --Rushing to Judgment [The Media and Global Warming] (Wilson Quarterly)

A thoughtful assessment of the gap between what science can prove and what environmentalists and journalists say (and therefore what most people believe) about the Earth's climate. Thoughtful... but dry. That opening paragraph is over 200 words long -- a modest size for an academic paper, but hard to slog through on a computer screen.

But of particular interest to me is the debate carried out in the comments appended to the article. One reader posts a full-length opposing paper into his comment; I guess that's one way to be published... but answering one block of text with another block of text is not terribly efficient. Fisking (copying great chunks from another soure and adding your own contrarian comments in between the lines) would be a more efficient way to challenge premises, critique evidence, and offer alternative conclusions.

Update: "Warmest September on Record, Experts Say." This AP story presents the facts, but downplays the global warming scenario, only making a brief reference in the final paragraph. Kudos to AP writer Randolph E. Schmid, who doesn't conjure up a scary disaster scenario in order to make his story more interesting. Those who doubt the global warming scenario don't deny that certain measurements of temperatures are rising, but they do question the hasty assumption that the rising temperature is the result of human activity.

Is there such a thing as 'bad genes'?

(The fifth of five questions I may be asked tomorrow as part of a panel on DNA and ethics.)

If there are bad genes, then there must also be good genes. It is perhaps unfair to bring up Nazi Germany's aryan supremacy theories every time such a question comes up, but if we want to talk about good and bad genes, we have to talk about who decides which genes are good and which are bad. In the 1947 Arthur Miller play "All My Sons," a character who lost a son in WWII ponders idly that a doctor who invented a way to bring baby boys into the world without trigger fingers would be a millionaire; parents who did not want their sons to be drafted to fight in wars could rest assured that their boys wouldn't be physically capable of firing a rifle.

James Watson, of the famous duo Watson and Crick credited with the discovery of DNA (though let's not forget Barbara McClintock, upon whose early work Watson and Crick built), recently gave a BBC interview in which he says people who score in the lower 10% of achievement tests probably have a gentic disease, and that he feels it is society's duty to screen for stupidity. He downplays the impact of poverty (an environmental concern). He also advocates breeding women to be prettier.

Watson says that low intelligence is an inherited disorder and that molecular biologists have a duty to devise gene therapies or screening tests to tackle stupidity.

"If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease," says Watson, now president of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, New York. "The lower 10 per cent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what's the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, 'Well, poverty, things like that.' It probably isn't. So I'd like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 per cent."

Watson, no stranger to controversy, also suggests that genes influencing beauty could also be engineered. "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."

(From "Stupidity should be cured, says DNA discoverer.")

I didn't see the interview in question so I can't comment on the context -- maybe Watson was joking when he talked about scientifically breeding women to look pretty. But the dark side of that is, who decides? Because Watson is talking about "helping" that lower 10%, I presume he means coming up with some way to fix their genetic problem, rather than, for instance, sterilizing all people who fail a certain test, or using abortion or contraception to "breed a race of thoroughbreds" -- which was at one point the slogan of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood).

Side note: Sanger is on record as stating that the woman, not the state, should make decisions about childbearing, but and many of her contemporaries did support programs that encouraged the sterilization of illiterates, the "feebleminded", etc. A 1927 Supreme Court case upheld the forced sterilization of certain classes of people, so her eugenic beliefs were not that far from the mainstream at the time. Naturally, pro-life activists want to play up Sanger's involvement in the eugenics movement, and pro-choice activists want to distance themselves from Sanger's more controversial statements.

Jurassic Park was a cautionary tale about genetic manipulation. Could that actually happen? Why or why not?

(The fourth of five questions I may be asked tomorrow as part of a panel on DNA and ethics.)

I've only seen the first two movies, so I can't really comment on the technical details as presented in the books (where I imagine they are presented in more detail). I hope I don't get asked this question. But a few minutes with Google yields the following:

• According to the BBC, a grove of plants that are survivors from the Jurassic age was found in Australia about 10 years ago, and cuttings from those plants will be marketed to gardners in 2005. But those plants weren't re-constructed -- they simply happened to survive all that time.
• Dolly the sheep was in fact cloned from a parent, but she started off as a living cell. And she was recently put to sleep because she aged prematurely -- suggesting that science has to progress a lot further to make a successful cloning even with live tissue.
• IN 2002, Japanese scientists announced a plan to clone a mammoth from frozen tissue samples. Somebody thinks this is possible, or they wouldn't be trying it. But the mammoth sample is about 25,000 years old. Success with a 25,000 year-old mammoth wouldn't necessarily indicate progress towards cloning an animal extinct for 65-million-years.
• I gather that fossilization is a lot more destructive than freezing. I don't know much about the digestion of prehistoric mosquitos, but I don't imagine that being in the stomach of an insect would be the best environment to preserve a blood sample.

Will the human genome diminish humanity by taking the mystery out of life?

(The third of five questions I may be asked tomorrow as part of a panel on DNA and ethics.)

We've had the human genome all along; its been here all along, just like gravity existed before Newton. What's new is the Human Genome Project -- is a vast scientific effort to identify and catalogue all 3 billion DNA subunits that describe our genetic blueprint. Techniques for creating "designer babies," if legal, will be available only for the rich and the elite.

The ancients who were curious about the stars and the planets but couldn't comprehend them resorted to their imagination, telling each other stories about gods. Science has more recently turned those heavenly bodies into planets and solar systems, but we still managed to tell each other science-fiction stories about aliens and computers and robots. Now that computers and robots are part of our daily lives, and now that immigration and global communication has brought us into increasigly close contact with "alien" cultures in other parts of the world, our science-fiction has in recent decates been filled with stories of cyberspace and robot-human hybrids. Because I wear glasses and have a filled tooth, I am in some sense part machine; I am a cyborg. In very recent years, we've seen a rise in fantasy/mythology -- a return to magic and a retreat from technology. Are we going full circle? Probably not.

My point is that we are soo good at imagining that I don't think we will run out of unexplainable things that bother us. Case in point -- the rise in conspiracy theories, or reports of crop circles, alien abductions, tabloid sightings of Elvis and JFK, auctions of Beatles memorabilia, people who collect PEZ or structure their whole life around Disney theme parks.

The worst-case scenarious that have long been part of the science-fiction scene will increasingly penetrate to philosophers, who will write densely footnoted tomes, and somebody will write an incomprehensible postmodern epic interpreting the genome, which will be the subject of countless academic conferences and English Lit dissertations. But for the rest of us, making babies the old fashioned way will still be fun, and the information gained from the sequencing project will probably help more of those babies lead long and healthy lives.

What are the potential injustices or misuses of DNA information?

(The second of five questions I may be asked tomorrow as part of a panel on DNA and ethics.)

According to the Human Genome Project's website on genetic legislation, no laws have yet been passed regarding the use of genetic information in healthcare, employment, and so forth.

Already, insurance companies collect all sorts of statistical data about life expectancy and risky lifestyles. A smoker who gets a lot of speeding tickets and is a member of a skydiving club is a bad insurance risk -- but all of those risks are rootted in chosen behavior. Is it ethical for an insurance company to charge higher rates to a person whose genes might indicate an increased risk for, say, heart disease, or sickle-cell anemia? As it happens, heart disease and sickle-cell anemia are both conditions that affect people of African descent at a higher rate than other populations -- so if you permit companies to set different rates based on genetic information, that opens up a can of worms. Who determines which genes are desireable, and which are not? (My answer to this one spills over into my answer for "Are there such a thing as 'bad genes'?")

Is our fate in our genes or in our stars?

(The first of five questions I may be asked as part of a panel on DNA and ethics.)

I'll take "in our stars" as a metaphor for something like "determined by the cosmos," rather than a literal reference to astrology.

I don't think the average person has any real understanding of what genes do or how they affect us; Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene" notes that the function of a gene is to replicate itself, and goes so far as to say that our bodies are simply machines that our genes use to replicate ourselves. My genes don't really care whether I personally live or die -- they don't have a will of their own, of course, but they spread when they happen to inhabit machines whose behavior leads to the production of a lot of genes; this offers a genetic explanation of why I personally work hard to support my family, and why I wouldn't hesitate to hurl my body in front of an oncoming car if I thought that doing so would save my children, or to kill with my bare hands, if necessary, order to protect my children. Doing so wouldn't be an act of free will on my part -- it would be instinctive.

Since genes are part of the cosmos (that is, they are part of the physical reality in which we live), a choice between "genes" and "stars" is a bit of a tautology.

I'd personally rather address the question that this prompt begs -- namely, what role does fate play in human lives? Christian theology positions God outside of time -- all our decisions and actions are known beforehand by God. But Christian theology also places a premium on the value of free will -- God's foreknowledge does not affect our free will; without free will, we deserve neither a reward or punishment for our actions. If God does know how our lives will turn out, it is because he knows in advance all the effects of each of our free-will choices will be. Even if all the actions in my life will take me to a single pre-determined end, every action that I take to get there is, from my perspective, free.

Genes certainly determine some important things... I was tall at an early age, and my build is such that I might have made a fair basketball player. My genes probably had very little to do with the fact that I preferred reading to athletics, had little patience for practicing free-throws, and basically never bothered to learn the rules of the game -- so while I have a physical frame that might have made me athletic, I didn't have the will.

There are enough studies that suggest that identical twins, when separated, differ from each other sufficiently that genetics alone do not account for all or even most of our personality and identity. I recall reading even that the spots that form on cloned animals are different from their parent; so even genetically identical individuals don't follow the same physical path.

Weather forecasting involves such complex mathematics that, for all practical purposes, it is impossible to gather enough data to usefully predict beyond a few days, what a given weather pattern will do. Over the years, however, we have gotten so much better at forecasting weather that where used to predict just a few days in advance, now we can predict a week or so in advance; and with more accurate satellite data and better computer models, we can remove much of the guesswork and increase the accuracy of our forecasts.

My guess is that as our technology develops, we will be able to isolate more and more genetic influences on our behavior, but unless some future totalitarian state (or maybe an HMO) starts using genetic information to control the environment of certain individuals, genes won't have nearly as much influence over our lives as the scary sci-fi scenarios suggest.

Here's a suggestion that has worked for me: After leaving an employer, send your former boss and some co-workers very polite and thankful e-mails. Mention how much you enjoyed being there, knowing them, how much you learned and so forth. | Most of the time, you will get a reply. Bingo! There's your letter of reference, header and all, indicating where it came from. | Print it and place it into your portfolio. --K.K., writing in to Joyce Lain Kennedy's career advice column --Use E-Mail Notes as References[?] (Job Center, Dallas Morning News)

K.K. is right about the value of not burning one's bridges, and Kennedy is right to offer her "sunny thanks" for an optimistic and upbeat suggestion. But I wouldn't recommend re-using a personal e-mail from a former employer as if it were a formal letter of reference.

Most people who use e-mail professionally do understand that e-mail is anything but private, but asking permission before reusing somebody else's words in another context is at the very least a matter of common courtesy. (In fact, some companies, including my own university, require employees to append to every message legalese that explicitly prohibits the forwarding or sharing of e-mail upon which K.K.'s suggestion depends.)

Were I to learn -- from a potential employer, perhaps -- that a student had not even offered me the opportunity to revise a personal note for a more formal audience, I would wonder why the student felt it necessary to trick me into writing a letter of reference. My doubts would affect the enthusiasm I would be able to muster when called out of the blue to assess the skills and attributes of a student I might not have seen in years.

On the other hand, I would be pleased and flattered if the student who receives an informal e-mail of praise from me were to foward my own words back to me, with an enthusiastic note saying something like, "Thank you so much for these kind words. I know you are very busy, and probably get requests for letters of recommendation all the time... but would you mind if I used this e-mail as a letter of reference?"

Such a request -- particularly if it were accompanied by a subtle bulleted list reminding me of the student's accomplishments and updating me on his or her activities since our last contact -- would probably motivate me to block out a bit of extra time and reach for the official letterhead.

The student who demonstrates professionalism and a mastery of communication skills -- especially when making polite, subtle requests for recommendations -- will get a much better letter from me.

Without getting into the politics (other than to say I find Sept 12 to be a useful, thought-provoking piece, and exciting new genre for games), I'm not sure why Greg and some of his commenters are so vitriolically opposed to calling Sept 12 a simulation. --Simulation Aggravation (GrandTextAuto)

"Sept 12" is an interactive political cartoon -- a very short game in which you, as the player, target a city that contains some terrorists and many civillians. The weapons you fire cause a great deal of collateral damage, so that you inevitably kill some civillians, causing more civillians to become terrorists. It's a simple message -- too simple, really, since it's easy to convince yourself that the problem is that you don't have the right kind of weapon. Wouldn't a sniper rifle make more sense? But that's not the question the makers of the game intend to raise. And the fact that there are already terrorists in the game before you fire the first shot raises a chicken-or-egg question that the game isn't equpped to answer.

At any rate, I enjoy reading (and sometimes participating in) the meaty debates that go on in the comments on GrandTextAuto -- it's like making a short, free visit to a really good academic conference, where you don't have to sit through pompous 40-minute presentations, but can instead get right to the Q & A with intelligent, articulate, and opinionated people.

Letters from hometown soldiers describing their successes rebuilding Iraq have been appearing in newspapers across the country as U.S. public opinion on the mission sours. | And all the letters are the same....Sgt. Christopher Shelton, who signed a letter that ran in the Snohomish Herald, said Friday that his platoon sergeant had distributed the letter and asked soldiers for the names of their hometown newspapers. Soldiers were asked to sign the letter if they agreed with it, said Shelton, whose shoulder was wounded during an ambush earlier this year. --Many soldiers, same letter  (The Olympian)

These are your panel questions. You will be asked some of them, not necessarily in this order:

1. Is our fate in our genes or in our stars? Explain.
2. What are the potential injustices or misuses of DNA information?
3. Will the human genome diminish humanity by taking the mystery out of life?
4. Jurassic Park was a cautionary tale about genetic manipulation. Could that actually happen? Why or why not?
5. Is there such a thing as "bad genes"? Explain.

Please be sure to tell your students about this. I think it will be interesting and entertaining for everyone. I look forward to it.

Thanks,

Marcy



Marcia Pietrala

Reference and Public Services

Reeves Memorial Library

Seton Hill UniversityDNA Ethics Panel QuestionsE-Mail)

I was asked to participate in a panel on DNA ethics, to be held [at 6 pm] at the Seton Hill library Thursday evening. I'm hardly a genetic expert, but I thought, what the heck? I often ask my students to write and speak about subjects that are new to them, so it's only fair to give it a try myself. I have in the past ranted about eugenics in this blog.

Order and Respect in the ClassroomLitreracy Weblog)

[Note: I've changed the title of this entry and edited it slightly -- mostly by changing which words I used to link to Mike Arnzen's blog. The previous version the previous version implied an association that I didn't mean to create.]

On his PEDABLOGUE, Mike Arnzen confesses he raised his voice at his students today, because they were rustling papers and preparing a portfolio to be collected at the end of the period, rather than paying attention to his lecture. I also had a lot of students submitting work today, but I specifically asked them not to use binders -- just a staple or a clip was fine. I admire my colleague for trying to get some serious teaching in the day before a vacation -- I just used the day to preview some upcoming assignments and grade part of a quiz in-class, and let them go about 5 minutes early.

Due to the power differential in a classroom, I try to be very careful about raising my voice or getting mad. I try to smile almost all the time; I've felt since high school that, when I listen to recordings of my own voice, I often sound annoyed or angry. [And sometimes, I let students get away with behavior that would offend me if I were a fellow student. I was already pondering this issue when I learned that...] According to Stuart Twemlow, there's a problem in schools -- teachers are bullying their students. See the article responding to Twemlow, on "Irascible Professor."

Twemlow (with his associates) has a few academic articles on his website, www.backoffbully.com, but as you can guess from the name that website markets videos and a curriculum to school systems. Of the articles posted on his site, one -- "Feeling Safe in School (PDF)" is identified as having been published elsewhere in a shorter form; when it was peer-reviewed, apparently parts of it were cut. The bibliography for that paper mentions at least four articles by the same researchers (in varying combinations of names) that hadn't yet been published.

So... researcher makes claims about a problem. Researcher also happens to sell videos and other materials to solve that problem.

I trust that the academic peer-review process will do its job and ensure the accuracy of Tremlow's published works and the validity of his research methods. There's nothing wrong with making an honest buck, but this is a potential conflict of interest. A good journalist should notice and be skeptical. There's a difference between cynics and skeptics, of course -- I don't want to exaggerate the issue. Nevertheless... keep an open mind, but double-check publicity information coming from somebody with a product to sell (something the TV reporter duped by the "Hunting for Bambi" hoax didn't do).

In a statement, SunnComm Technologies Inc. said it would sue Alex Halderman over the paper, which said SunnComm's MediaMax CD-3 software could be blocked by holding down the "Shift" key on a computer keyboard as a CD using the software was inserted into a disc drive. --Ben Berkiwitz --Princeton Student Sued Over Paper on CD Copying (WashPost/Reuters)

Whoops -- I just saw an update: SunnComm backed down.

On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. "I still see my hands coming off the railing," he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, "I instantly realized that everything in my life that I'd thought was unfixable was totally fixable--except for having just jumped." --Tad Friend
--Letters from California: Jumpers (New Yorker)

Once the system is in place, patrons will be asked to stand in front of a camera to have their picture taken and will then swipe their drivers' licence, or possibly show some other form of identification, that will automatically give the establishment the patron's name and age and show if he or she has caused trouble at any other bar on the network. --Lori Cuthbert and Amy O'Brian --High-tech targets bad bar customers (Canada.com/Vancouver Sun)

Does anyone remember when SCMODS was a joke?

Raelians have made fun of the media that gave such extensive coverage to their cloning story. --Brigitte McCann --Rael's Clones a Hoax? (Calgary Sun)

This article refers to the burst of media attention this odd sect got over claims that a human had been successfully cloned.

Forty-five percent of Americans believe the news media in this country are too liberal, while only 14% say the news media are too conservative. These perceptions of liberal inclination have not changed over the last three years. A majority of Americans who describe their political views as conservative perceive liberal leanings in the media, while only about a third of self-described liberals perceive conservative leanings. --Are the News Media Too Liberal? (Gallup)

About as many people who say the news media is middle-of-the-road say the news is too conservative, while far fewer say the media is too liberal. The poll also notes that about twice as many people identify themselves as conservative as identify themselves as liberal, so the opinions of conservatives count more heavily in general in this poll. I'm having my "practice of journalism students" read samples from "Bias" and "What Liberal Media," so I'm blogging this to remind me of it later.

A very outgoing young man in my class ("Troy") keeps a blog (Internet diary) about his schoolwork, partying, and politics. As I read his entries, including his grousing about my class, I tell myself that I am not eavesdropping, and that he is entitled to write whatever he likes in a public forum. Yet his field is public-school teaching, for which I think his openness about his life might hamper his chances of getting a job. Should I advise him or let it go? -- Letter posted to "Ms. Mentor" advice column --Keeping a Lid on Your Blog (Chronicle)

I can't help thinking of the middle-school teacher fired over a website he created when he was 19. When does the online confessional become too public?

Surely not all the bells and whistles are defensible, college officials concede, but given the expectations of students who have grown up with DVD players in their own rooms, any campus without, say, a nightclub and a food court is as obsolete as an eight-track cassette.

"These are not frills," said Daniel M. Fogel, president of the University of Vermont. "They are absolute necessities."

The University of Vermont plans to spend up to $70 million on a new student center, a colossal complex with a pub, a ballroom, a theater, an artificial pond for wintertime skating and views of the mountains and Lake Champlain. --Greg Winter (registration; will expire) --Jacuzzi U.? A Battle of Perks to Lure Students  (NY Times)

And people wonder 1) why students can't find time to do their homework and 2) why college tuition is skyrocketing. Note that no single college has every one of the extravagant luxuries mentioned in this article -- the overall feeling of pandering to the whims of potential students is exaggerated because the author has chosen to focus on the most extravagant luxuries he found. Still, it is amazing. Via Arnzen's PEDABLOGUE, where I posted a relevant quote from Malcolm X.

Listeners who have come to hate the labels believe their favorite artists no longer need the labels. If only that were true. Maybe Prince can afford to cast his label aside and go directly to the fans. But he did so only after becoming a household name. The vast majority of musicians will never find an audience large enough to let them quit their day jobs without a staff of marketing and promotions people who know how to book a tour, make a video and get their CDs into stores... --Jeff Howe --Listen, It Isn't the Labels, It's the Law (WashPost)

The link will be dead soon, of course, as is the case with all WashPost articles.

Google is engaged in a battle royale with rivals Overture -acquired by Yahoo - and Sprinks for the lucrative classified text ad business. Initially welcomed as the potential savior of small websites, including blogs, Adwords payments have trickled away in recent weeks, webloggers note. --Andrew Orlowski --Google shafts blogger, adds gagging clause to Adsense (Register)

Is Google turning evil? Has Orlowski found a new target?

In other words, a White House leaker is leaking to the Washington Post about Novak's White House leakers, but the leaker to the Post draws short of dribbling out the identities of who leaked to Novak and whom else they tried to leak to. The Post source does, however, pass stern judgment on Novak's leakers, saying the leaks were "wrong and a huge miscalculation, because they were irrelevant and did nothing to diminish Wilson's credibility." --Jack Shafer --The Plame Game (Slate)

I noticed this story deflating very fast this morning.

'Finding out the name of Joe Wilson's wife' (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Something has been bothering me all day. Either the front-page flap over the 'outing' of a CIA operative is a farce, or sloppy reporting is contributing to the FUD factor.

The controversy involves the charge that someone in the Bush administration leaked the identity of CIA operative (undercover agent currently serving in a hostile country? desk-bound Beltway analyst?) Valerie Plame, as revenge against her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, who discredited reports on Iraq's efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction (thus undercutting Bush's strongest arguments for launching the assault on Saddam Hussein).

On CNN, when anchor Bill Hemmer introduces a clip, he says:

This is Bob Novak on 'CROSSFIRE' explaining, in part anyway, how he went about finding out the name of Joe Wilson's wife and how he then went about printing it in mid July.

The Washington Post briefly covered this issue back in July (as given in a copy of this WashPost article found via a random Google).

Schumer said the disclosure of the wife's name and CIA relationship "was part of an apparent attempt to impugn Wilson's credibility and to intimidate others from speaking out against the administration." He called for the FBI to investigate Novak's source, because intentionally identifying a covert CIA officer is a crime.

Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether Wilson's CIA wife was an undercover agent or an analyst, and thus whether revealing her name was a serious security breach, an inconvenience, or trivial... someone on Fark posted a link to the biography of Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, IV on the Middle East Institute's website. The page is dated 2002, and it was in The Wayback Machine when I checked it earlier. Anyway, at the bottom of the bio, we read: "He is married to the former Valerie Plame and has two sons and two daughters."

If it's true that Novak is the first person who identified Wilson's wife as a CIA employee, then the problem isn't that Novak mentioned her name, but rather that Novak mentioned her job.

Update: It's early in the AM now, and I just noticed Novak's column for 01 Oct 2003.

Blogger sleuthing at its finest... way back in July, Dust in the Light put together the pieces I just assembled above. Note particularly the Newsday quote

Wilson, while refusing to confirm his wife's employment, said the release to the press of her relationship to him and even her maiden name was an attempt to intimidate others like him from talking about Bush administration intelligence failures.

Once again, is this controversy over the release of her name, or the publication of her occupation? I'm not trying to pass judgement on the validity of the accusations -- Novak is a conservative, and thus his efforts to downplay the seriousness of the incident could be politically motivated. But if you make that argument, you open yourself up to the counter-argument that every liberal who insists that the case is serious must be politically motivated... that way lies more FUD.

Good grief... if you Google "Joseph Wilson biography", the first hit is the 2002 web page that names his wife.

I'm just wondering whether mainstream reporters will be able to address the "finding out the name of Joe Wilson's wife" meme. Or is that up to bloggin' fools like me, who read other blogs until the wee hours of the morning?

I'm going to bed now.