Ethics: May 2005 Archive Page

Often, when studying history, the details are lost in an attempt to fully understand the bigger picture. We do not look at what the individuals faced, the decisions they had to make. This project will not only examine the Holocaust as a whole event, but delve deeper into the history to see what choices people had to make as the Nazis stormed their homes, took them to ghettos, and forced them to dig their own graves.

It will be important to approach this subject with caution and seriousness. It was a horrible experience that we can never recreate or even relate to. As you create your story, pay close attention to the details. Read the stories of those who lived and were able to share with world what they experienced. This project will hopefully draw you into the time period and help you understand it more thoroughly. --[Holocaust Choose-Your-Own Adventure Assignment] (Stories of the Holocaust Wiki Project )

Part of a project that asked students to create a branching narrative (of the Choose Your Own Adventure model) describing the fate of a Jewish family during the Holocaust.

On the one hand, this is an excellent way to get students to imagine all the possibilities, rather than simply following the story of one particular family. I particularly like the concept of an Intersection Point, where it seems events take on a more communal focus.

On the other hand, it would take a strong teacher (and supportive administration) to manage something like this.

Seton Hill has a National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education, and I'm currently involved in doing some editing and design work for them. I don't have any particular knowledge of the subject matter, but I can tell that emotions run high on topics such as simulations (in which students act out the roles of prisoners or guards) and the over-emphasis on rescues (when in fact few people were willing to risk themselves for their Jewish fellow citizens).

Via Weblogg-ed.

Between 1990 and 2000, the over-all mean G.P.A. of high-school students increased from 2.68 to 2.94, which is attributable in part to grade inflation and in part to the fact that students are working harder. Last year, more than a million students took at least one A.P. course. During the nineteen-nineties, the percentage of students taking A.P. or International Baccalaureate classes in math more than doubled, from 4.4 per cent of graduating seniors to 9.5 per cent. My own high school, North Hollywood High, in Los Angeles, had three or four A.P. classes when I graduated, in 1979 (a time when we were told that our most illustrious alumnus was Bert Convy, the game-show host; Susan Sontag had gone there, too, but nobody mentioned her). Now it has twenty-two.

Some schools, responding to the critique that competition has got too bruising, have decided that naming a single valedictorian is part of the reason that today?s students have become so anxious. (Many small private schools came to this conclusion long ago, and never adopted the valedictorian tradition.) --Margaret Talbog --Best in Class (New Yorker)

The educator's anonymous Web log, set at an unnamed university "in the South," spun tales of spoiled-rich "Ashleys" with their $500 sandals and $1,500 handbags, eating disorders, plagiarism and drug use, legal and illegal.

"At this school it seems like every kid is on multiple medications," the professor wrote, describing her charges as "barely literate," prone to emotional problems and "terrified of displeasing Mommy and Daddy." --Thomas Korosec --SMU lecturer takes heat for telling blog (Houston Chronicle)

Liner, the author of "Phantom Professor" weblog, is actively shopping her story around.

"I heard the two words every writer waits a lifetime to hear," she said. "Movie deal."

Ah! Leave it to Hollywood to rescue us from all that pesky soul-searching about boundaries and ethics.

There was one kid who always sat in the front row--let's call him Fester--who recognized me right from the start of class because he'd read one of my short stories in a horror anthology. He was a horror fan. His story was also written from a passion, but I could tell that he truly set out to frighten me, and therefore impress me. And he did this by writing a story about me. --Mike Arnzen --Grossing Out Teacher: A Horror Writer in the Writing Classroom  (Broad Universe)

I love the name... "Fester". His last name is probably Boyle. Arnzen is inviting comments on Pedablogue.

As part of a web design unit, I once gave the class an assignment to create a web page that was so terrible it would make me weep. One student posted a photo of one of my children, with a link that connected to a porn site. I should have probably specified that I was looking for horrid design, rather than horrid content.

In another class, a female student submitted a two-page dramatic analysis making a fairly predictable and juvenile pun on the word "climax." She supplied ample erotic language to illustrate her point, but she mistook the ending of the play for the climax. Some students in the class were stunned when I suggested that her metaphor would be stronger if she recognized that most playwrights give the audience and the characters the chance to fall asleep holding each other after the climax, and that a relationship that ends with the climax is probably an economic transaction. I skewered her -- not for pushing the boundaries, but for the omissions that weakened her claims. (While literature is full of material that is both clever and shocking, in a college English class, you can only get so far simply by making a clever, shocking observation.)

While I don't teach creative writing classes, I do occasionally slip a short fiction assignment here or there. I might give this fall's American Lit classes the option to write a literary parody instead of a traditional close reading, for example. A few years ago, a student who was supposed to give an oral presentation on Huckleberry Finn instead read a made-up chapter that had Huck being seduced by Tom's Aunt Polly. I let him read for a little while, then politely asked him if he was going to do any critical analysis. He said no. I told him that he could sit down, and he did without a fuss. I didn't bother to ask him whether he had written that passage or just found it on the internet, and recorded an F for his presentation. I'd have let him redo the presentation if he'd have asked, but he dropped the course soon after.

A student recently submitted a whodunit in which the prime suspect was an English professor, who is the shell of a great man at the beginning of the story. As part of a workshop in which I demonstrated the value of conflict in fiction, I rewrote a few lines of dialogue and suggested a backstory that would have permitted us to watch the professor breaking down, rather than only showing us the end result. I think students who are just discovering their identities as adults and scholars, and who are used to the clear boundaries that were in place between them and their high school teachers, may feel that seeing their teachers as less than perfect can be liberating and humanizing. This pushing of the boundaries is a part of adolescence, and when students have room to do it thoughtfully and reflectively, it can be a great developmental technique.

From time to time I do appear as a character in a different kind of student writing -- academic blogs. Or, almost as often, the personal blogs in which my students pour out the emotions they don't want to put into their academic blogs. Typically the references are neutral, sometimes they are affectionately mocking. While students do from time to time complain about the workload I assign, only one student has posted an all-out rant.

While I do post links to student blog entries, it's a different matter completely for me to post anecdotes about things that happened offline. I would never post a student's grade, or post a bulleted list of all the things a student did wrong. It's part of my profession to know where those boundaries are, and I've had plenty of mentoring and practice to learn about them.

As these groups lose their remaining original members, others are on stages around the country are using their names, Porter said. Some groups claim an association with the originals, while others say they own the rights to use their titles.

"Imposters bask in reflected glory. None contributed to the respected legacies that they claim to represent and the billing should reflect accordingly," she said, adding that it is a matter of what is advertised versus "what am I getting? The public doesn't know that and they capitalize on it."

Groups that perform without saying "tribute," according to Sonny Turner, an original member of The Platters, are "unequivocally misleading ... (It's) like buying a knock-off Rolex watch." --Amanda Cochran --'Truth in Music' stalls in committee (Tribune-Review)

A high school friend of mine is the drummer for an 80s and 90s cover band called Gonzo's Nose. I've never heard them play, but I do read their website from time to time. It pokes fun at the fact they have been "playing other people's music since 1996".

As I understand it, the music industry lets other performers pay a standard fee if they want to "cover" somebody else's work. I seem to remember a Gonzo's Nose anecodote about band members encountering groupies who don't know what a "cover band" is.
While those fellows are based in the Washington, D.C. area, I wonder how the proposed Pennsylvania legislation would have affected them, if at all.

Rogers' Predator is one of more than 1,200 UAVs in the US military arsenal; three years ago, there were fewer than 100 in the field. Today drones as small as a crow and as big as a Cessna are searching for roadside bombs, seeking out insurgents, and watching the backs of US troops. They're cheap, they can stay in the air longer than any manned aircraft, and they can see a battlefield better - all without risking a pilot.

Those capabilities tell only part of the story. UAVs give rank-and-file soldiers powers once reserved for generals. They push generals into the thick of battle. And they're blurring the lines between the fighter jocks and the grunts on the ground. Firmly entrenched hierachies don't change easily, but drones are reshaping military culture. --Noah Shachtman --Attack of the Drones (Wired)

Just as e-mail and blogging puts into the hands of the people power that was once reserved for executives and publishers, the military technology that gives field operatives access to current information and real-time interaction possibilities means that those field operatives will be held back if they wait for authorization from top-level officials. The increased number of micro-judgements multiplies the opportunities for making a mistake. (Of course, it also multiplies the opportunities for making correct judgements -- choosing not to attack a potential target because a drone helps determine the target isn't a threat.)

The whole thing, from legal decision to command to execution, took five minutes. Tacticians call that time line - target acquisition, deployment of force, order to attack, destruction of target - the "sensor-to-shooter cycle" or "kill chain." It's a measure of any military's reflexes; in Gulf War I, the kill chain was often three days.

It can still take days for satellite pictures to be captured, scoured by imagery analysts, forwarded through the military hierarchy, and passed on to someone with a gun. But that's changing. With an armed UAV, the sensor is the shooter. The kill chain is only one link long.

Random things that I will not miss about high school:

- listening to my classmates whine
- my business law teacher parroting back everything I say in the form of a question
- never getting any input on anything I turn in
- disgusting bathrooms
- listening to my male teachers flaunt their "big, tough guy" persona
- not having enough writing or literature classes
- hearing my teachers talk more about their social life than the subject they teach
- wasting six hours and accomplishing nothing
- tedium
- watching my peers create loud, violent disturbances in class after class, and having teacher after teacher stand back and say helplessly "I don't know what to do with them."
- getting up at 6:21a.m.
- never getting any advice on my assignments and therefore, never becoming a better writer
- watching the teachers try even harder than students to invent excuses for us to not do any work
- counting the seconds and the minutes and the hours until I could go home and have my time truly be mine again

I am ready for college. I am ready to learn how to think and feel for myself again. --Kayla Sawyer --I am dead inside, and I have the educational system to thank (Shameless Digressions)

Kayla wrote this the evening that she finished her last day of classes as a high school student. She's on her way to Seton Hill University in the fall.

She contacted me the other day, saying that she heard SHU journalism majors used blogs, and she wanted to get sarted.

If you have a moment, I hope you'll visit her blog and let her know what you think about her writing. I know I'm looking forward to having her in class.

Maybe when Joe and Mary Sixpack compare the real world they live in with the consistently troubled, violent, sensationalized world the news media present to them day after day, they notice the obvious discrepancies.

A perfect example is crime coverage. If you relied only on newspaper front pages and TV news -- as so many older suburbanites unfortunately do -- you'd be afraid to go out of the house. --Bill Steigerwald --Real vs. media world (Tribune-Review)

The Muslim riots should have been met by outrage and condemnation. From every part of the civilized world should have come denunciations of those who would react to the supposed destruction of a book with brutal threats and the slaughter of 17 innocent people. But the chorus of condemnation was directed not at the killers and the fanatics who incited them, but at Newsweek.... What they [Muslims] need is a blunt reminder that the real desecration of Islam is not what some interrogator in Guantanamo might have done to the Koran. It is what totalitarian Muslim zealots have been doing to innocent human beings in the name of Islam. It is 9/11 and Beslan and Bali and Daniel Pearl and the USS Cole. It is trains in Madrid and schoolbuses in Israel and an ''insurgency" in Iraq that slaughters Muslims as they pray and vote and line up for work. It is Hamas and Al Qaeda and sermons filled with infidel-hatred and exhortations to ''martyrdom." --Jeff Jacoby --Why Islam is disrespected (Boston.com)

Another take on the alleged Koran abuse story -- this one sympathetic to Newsweek without fingering the U.S. military.

The retraction set off a firestorm in the blogosphere and on talk radio. The Bush Administration piled on too. White House press secretary Scott McClellan urged the magazine to help undo the damage to the U.S.'s image by pointing out ways in which "our United States military personnel go out of their way to make sure that the Holy Koran is treated with care." Newsweek wasn't the only media outlet feeling the heat. By inevitable extension, journalism in general was back under a shadow, its reputation already scuffed by a series of incidents, including the Jayson Blair debacle at the New York Times, the fall of Jack Kelley at USA Today, the dubious National Guard memos at CBS, Newsweek's use of a doctored photo of Martha Stewart on its cover, and CNN and TIME's 1998 retraction of the "Tailwind" story that claimed the U.S. had used nerve gas during a 1970 commando mission in Laos. --Richard Lacayo --When a Story Goes Terribly Wrong (Time)

This article follows up on Newsweek's retraction of a story alleging that a U.S. military official confirmed reports that guards flushed a prisoner's copy of the Koran down a toilet.

It has been more than 40 years since Marshall McLuhan wrote that the “medium is the message,” a lesson that Duke University has had to relearn the hard way concerning its iPod giveaway this academic year to some 1,650 first-year students. Almost immediately, the “iPod First-Year Experience” was dubbed a trendy gimmick, and the university went on the defensive, emphasizing that the Apple music player was the device of choice for a variety of educational tasks meant to keep pace with a mobile generation of learners. --Michael Bugeja --The Medium is the Moral (Inside Higher Ed)

1. Know and follow IBM's Business Conduct Guidelines.
2. Blogs, wikis and other forms of online discourse are individual interactions, not corporate communications. IBMers are personally responsible for their posts. Be mindful that what you write will be public for a long time -- protect your privacy.
3. Identify yourself -- name and, when relevant, role at IBM -- when you blog about IBM or IBM-related matters. And write in the first person. You must make it clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of IBM.
4. If you publish a blog or post to a blog and it has something to do with work you do or subjects associated with IBM, use a disclaimer such as this: "The postings on this site are my own and don?t necessarily represent IBM?s positions, strategies or opinions."
5. Respect copyright, fair use and financial disclosure laws.
6. Don?t provide IBM?s or another?s confidential or other proprietary information.
7. Don't cite or reference clients, partners or suppliers without their approval.
8. Respect your audience. Don't use ethnic slurs, personal insults, obscenity, etc., and show proper consideration for others' privacy and for topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory -- such as politics and religion.
9. Find out who else is blogging on the topic, and cite them.
10. Don't pick fights, be the first to correct your own mistakes, and don't alter previous posts without indicating that you have done so.
11. Try to add value. Provide worthwhile information and perspective.
--Guidelines for IBM Bloggers: Executive Summary (IBM)

A good set of guidelines for the blogosphere in general.

Newsweek magazine on Sunday said it erred in a May 9 report that said U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, and apologized to the victims of deadly Muslim protests sparked by the article.

"We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst," Editor Mark Whitaker wrote in the magazine's latest issue, due to appear on U.S. newsstands on Monday. --David Morgan --Newsweek says erred in Koran desecration report (Reuters | MyWay)

A tiny item in Newsweek sparked huge international protests in Islamic countries, launching a huge wave of fresh anti-American sentiment, and leading to clashes in which protestors lost their lives.

The Reuters article cites former Guantanamo prisoners who reported abuse of the Koran, but Newsweek felt the accusations suddenly became newsworthy when a U.S. military official corroborated the claims. Later, that official backed down. Since the impetus to go with the story was based on the U.S. official's confirmation of the story, when that confirmation is withdrawn, Newsweek is left on shaky ground.

Rarely does a journalistic oversight have consequences that are this immediate, this dire, and this uncorrectable:

The report sparked angry and violent protests across the Muslim world from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Pakistan to Indonesia to Gaza. In the past week it was condemned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and by the Arab League. On Sunday, Afghan Muslim clerics threatened to call for a holy war against the United States.

The departure of Griego Erwin, who wrote three columns a week, continues the run of recent embarrassments for newspapers, many of which have cost writers their jobs.

Last week, USA Today Pentagon correspondent Tom Squitieri resigned under pressure after lifting quotes from another newspaper and using other quotes without attribution.

That followed on the heels of the resignation of veteran Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Al Levine, who pilfered information from two Florida newspapers without crediting them.

Los Angeles Times reporter Eric Slater was dismissed last month when editors at the newspaper could not verify information in an article he wrote about fraternity hazing at Cal State Chico.

The recent headliner in the string of news scandals was bestselling author, sports columnist and TV personality Mitch Albom, who was suspended from the Detroit Free Press for describing a scene in the stands at an NCAA basketball tournament game before the game had been played.

With polls showing journalists already held in low esteem, the run of bad news has alarmed many in the business. --James Rainey --Newspaper Columnist Resigns After Inquiry (Yahoo! News (will expire))

No one at Southern Methodist University knew -- for sure -- who The Phantom Professor was. The professor's blog, like those of many untenured academics, was anonymous and the university was never named. --Scott Jaschik --'The Phantom Professor' (Inside Higher Ed)

A professor blogs anonymously, venting about the campus crime and the wealthy socialites in her classes. SMU officials admit that they know about the blog, they admit that they worry about the blog, and they admit that they think Elaine Liner might be the blogger. I'm not sure about the timeline of events, but an editorial in the school paper is involved.

Elaine Liner doesn't get rehired.

Fired for blogging? Is this a first amendment issue?

The First Amendment reads, in its entirety, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

What, exactly, does Congress have to do with Southern Methodist University's decision not to rehire a popular and talented writing professor?

"SMUAshley" is right: "You had free speech -- your blog was published. What you don't want is consequences of that speech."

Liner might have been better off saving all those stories for a tell-all book, after she has carefully scrubbed it clean from any details that might identify individuals.

Come to think of it, might sell even better now, given the publicity it has received.

How many other American journalists, perhaps not as secure in their position as I, have thought to do a story and decided that it's too close to the bone, too questioning of the American government or its actions? How many times was the risk that our own government might come in and rifle through our apartment, our homes or take us away for questioning in front of our children a factor in our decision not to do a story? How many times did we as journalists decide not to do a story because we thought it might get us into trouble? --Molly Bingham --Home from Iraq  (Courier Journal)

This is an extension to the point raised by Time's exposure of the Hawaiian Good Luck Sign. It's possible to be a good journalist without revealing everything that you know. A reporter's obligation to tell the truth without bias conflicts with the right to privacy of sexual assault victims. Journalists also regularly protect the names of minors.

It's troubling enough when an American news reporter wants to refers to US forces as "us". What happens when the American forces become "them"?

MIT Technology Review Online on March 21 retracted two stories written in whole or in part by Michelle Delio, citing the publication's inability to confirm a source. On April 4, InfoWorld edited four articles by Delio to remove anonymous quotes.... Penenberg provided Wired News with a list of 24 stories that contained sources he could not confirm... Delio, in communications with Penenberg and Wired News, stands by her reporting and the existence and accuracy of her sources.

[...]

Wired News is not retracting any of these stories. Rather, we are appending notes to the stories, indicating what we have been unable to confirm about them and editing them, as noted, where appropriate. By keeping these stories posted and clearly marked, we hope that our readers can help identify any sources whom we cannot track down. --Wired News Releases Source Review (Wired)

Interesting development. I've probably linked to dozens of Delio's stories. I think I once sent her an e-mail that was critical of a phrase that I thought was biased, but that's insignificant.

Keeping the articles up, noting which details are unconfirmed, usefully takes advantage of the flexibility of electronic text.

--Hawaiian Good Luck Sign (USS Pueblo.org)

Communist North Koreans captured the U.S.S. Pueblo, imprisoned its crew, and began using them for propaganda purposes, coercing them to write apologies and trotting them out at press conferences that North Korea used to its advantage.

The October 18, 1968 issue of Time revealed that the men of the Pueblo, while appearing to cooperate with the North Koreans (out of fear for their lives) were actually giving their captors the finger. Korean culture did not recognize a raised middle finger as a gesture of contempt.

The North Koreans, learning the truth through the magazine, punished their prisoners severely.

The Time photo caption makes a witty allusion to Marshall McLuhan. The men had reasoned that their captors would probably learn the meaning of the gesture sooner or later, but the ethics of exposing a prisoner's only means of communication is troubling.

For future reference... here's another troubling photo.

Update: My brother-in-law, Robert, notes that I got a historical detail wrong in this entry... I've deleted the offending passage. Thanks for the correction.

Prof Roy Spencer, at the University of Alabama, a leading authority on satellite measurements of global temperatures, told The Telegraph: "It's pretty clear that the editorial board of Science is more interested in promoting papers that are pro-global warming. It's the news value that is most important."

He said that after his own team produced research casting doubt on man-made global warming, they were no longer sent papers by Nature and Science for review - despite being acknowledged as world leaders in the field.

As a result, says Prof Spencer, flawed research is finding its way into the leading journals, while attempts to get rebuttals published fail. --Robert Matthews --Leading scientific journals 'are censoring debate on global warming' (Telegraph)

This is my favorite conspiracy theory.

I spend so much time trying to drill into the heads of my students that information published in peer-reviewed academic journals is more valuable in a term paper than random stuff you find on the internet. But here's another reminder that the peer-review process is only as good as the peers doing the reviewing.

College administrators have been enthusiastic supporters Eve Ensler?s play The Vagina Monologues and schools across the nation celebrate ?V-Day? (short for Vagina Day) every year. But when the College Republicans at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island rained on the celebrations of V-Day by inaugurating Penis Day and staging a satire called The Penis Monologues, the official reaction was horror. --Christina Hoff Sommers --Why Can?t They ?Just Get Along?? (National Review Online)

At first, I thought this was an Onion article. This is both sad and hilarious.

An analysis of the language used in real estate ads shows that certain words are powerfully correlated with the final sale price of a house. This doesn't necessarily mean that labeling a house "well maintained" causes it to sell for less than an equivalent house. It does, however, indicate that when an agent labels a house "well maintained," she is subtly encouraging a buyer to bid low.

So consider the terms in the box on the previous page: A "fantastic" house is surely fantastic enough to warrant a high price, right? What about a "charming" and "spacious" home in a "great neighborhood!"? No, no, no, no, and no.

In fact, the terms that correlate with a higher sales price are physical descriptions of the home itself: granite, Corian, and maple. As information goes, such terms are specific and straightforward - and therefore pretty useful. If you like granite, you might like the house; but even if you don't, "granite" certainly doesn't connote a fixer-upper. Nor does "gourmet" or "state-of-the-art," both of which seem to tell a buyer that a house is, on some level, fantastic.

"Fantastic," meanwhile, is a dangerously ambiguous adjective, as is "charming." These words, it turns out, are real estate agent code for a house that doesn't have many specific attributes worth describing. "Spacious" homes, meanwhile, are often decrepit or impractical. "Great neighborhood" signals to a buyer that, well, this house isn't very nice but others nearby may be. And an exclamation point in a real estate ad is bad news for sure, a bid to paper over real shortcomings with false enthusiasm.

If you study an ad for a real estate agent's own home, meanwhile, you see that she emphasizes descriptive terms (especially "new," "granite," "maple," and "move-in condition") and avoids empty adjectives (including "wonderful," "immaculate," and the telltale "!"). She patiently waits for the best buyer to come along. She might tell this buyer about a house nearby that just sold for $25,000 above the asking price, or another house that is the subject of a bidding war. She is careful to exercise every advantage of the information asymmetry she enjoys. -- Levitt and Dubner --Cracking the Real Estate Code (Wired)