Ethics: January 2007 Archive Page

I was alone and fueling my own self-destructive spiral. Now, I did have one thing which granted me solace: my MUD. For those of you who don't know, I have invested several years of my life into an online roleplaying community. Yeah, I'm a geek. I own 20 sided dice, too. Anyway, what offered me my greatest joy at that time was a collection of items I had on the MUD. These items were unique, most of them one of a kind. Each of them represented a player who had come and gone that I had known and liked or memorable events to me. Each item of this massive collection held strong sentimental value for me. One night as I was sitting on the MUD, as asshole named Horak decided to exploit a bug in the code of the game that he used to deliberately destroy, irrevocably, all the items in my collection. All my memories of people I actually connected to over the past several years of my life when there was no one I could find outside of the MUD to. And those memories were all I had left of those people, each of them gone for good from my life. Those items destroyed were what I found comfort in during times of depression. Now they were all gone and never coming back.

So let me ask everyone who said she was justified this question: when that happened, should I have found Horak and strangled him in his sleep? Would that have been my best option? Could you honestly support me if I'd've done so? If not, how the hell can you support Mrs. Wright? --John Fish --"That was not just a bunch of stuff that got destroyed, it was ME! (John Fish)

John is a student in my Intro to Literary Study class, where we discussed Susan Glaspell's Trifles. It's a one-act play about the murder of a farmer, told from the perspective of two women who unravel the crime, which the playwright presents as revenge for the death of a canary.

Most of the class thought that the death of the canary was the last straw, and that the murder of John Wright was justified.

In class, I had the students all stand up and move to one side of the room if they thought the murder was justified, and the other if they thought it was not. When I asked of the John Wright had killed a baby, would his murder have been justified? There was a huge motion from "no" to "yes." Then I asked whether the murder would be justified if, instead of killing his wife's pet canary, he had killed a cricket. And what about if he had killed his wife's pet worm? The class was far less willing to excuse Mrs. Wright for wanting to get revenge for the death of something less valuable than a canary.

John's question goes even further... what if Mr. Wright had destroyed Mrs. Wright's virtual property?

We'll have to revisit this topic in class next time...

Sequatchie County High School Principal Tommy Layne said that he initially considered it a joke, but that authorities then found the ninth-graders' online MySpace pages and postings that included the word "kill."

[...]

There was no evidence that the girls had weapons or that an attack had been imminent, Huth said.

The girls, ages 14 and 15, were charged with conspiracy to commit criminal homicide late Wednesday and taken to a juvenile facility. A juvenile court detention hearing was set Friday in Dunlap, about 40 miles northwest of Chattanooga. --Girls charged with conspiring to kill classmates, Oprah (CNN)

Yet another example of a case in which the right to the freedom of speech does not include a right to escape the consequences of the choice to exercise free speech.

Of course the mainstream media will jump on this story, since it involves the internet. I certainly hope this doesn't lead to a permanent mark on the records of the girls involved, but I do think it was perfectly appropriate for the school to take some sort of action.

My partner once worked at a college in South Carolina. Her chair was from the Northeast, and when she had first arrived on campus, she was very concerned about fitting into the Southern culture of politeness and manners. When the first student came to her to explain that her grandmother had died, and that she could not make the midterm because of the funeral, this professor contacted the student affairs office, got the student'shome address, and sent a condolence card to the family.

Guess what? The grandmother wasn't dead. I bet Thanksgiving was a real hoot for that family, that year.

Ever since, the professor makes a point of sending cards to the families when she hears of a death or severe illness. -- Maruice Milieur in a comment responding to the article by Terry Caesar --The Time of Dead Grandmothers (Inside Higher Ed)

That's brilliant. Just brilliant.

I was taking a break from marking papers and idly Googled to see whether any rhet/comp folks had written about freshman comp papers dealing with the death of grandparents. Students who expect to be praised for writing a moving tribute to a loved one can be shocked when the instructor moves quickly from a brief expression of sympathy to a list of grammar and organization suggestions.

Students who write "I'll never forget how I felt when I heard the news" are still reeling from the emotion, which feels very present to them; but if they just list the kinds of things they used to do with their grandmother, they are not communicating effectively to a reader who does not already love the person whose life they wish to commemorate. If they make technical errors like describing their own facial expressions as if a TV camera is on their face, forcing the reader to use an external point of view to guess at the emotional state of a first-person limited narrator, then we're not doing our jobs if we just say "I can tell you miss our grandmother" and give them an A for being a loving grandchild.

We can, and should, do our jobs with tact and kindness. I have read so many "How Much I Miss My Dead Grandparent" or "My Scary Car Crash" or "My Harrowing Illness" or "My Big Game" essays in which students make the exact same mistakes, but there is always a person on the other end of the story, for whom these experiences are powerful and personal, and who has carefully chosen this particular story as the one he or she wants to tell for the personal essay assignment.

Administrators at the Louisiana public university directed editors of the weekly student newspaper, the Gramblinite, to suspend publication this month, citing a range of reasons. Grambling officials said that the newspaper was rife with errors and misspellings and that advertisers and local groups had complained about its lack of professionalism, and they cited a sports article that was plagiarized in large part from a local newspaper.

[...]

But late Thursday, administrators reportedly lifted their suspension of the publication, after reaching an agreement with the students that will require the newspaper's adviser to edit each article for grammar and style before it appears. --Scrutiny for the Student Press? (Inside Higher Ed)

It's stories like this that make me really, really, really appreciate the students who run -- and edit! -- our paper (for which I am the adviser).

As I discussed this type of stuff with a self-fashioned hedge fund manager friend, he determined to sink a more sizable amount into testing the Second Life market. After all, talk about uncorrelated returns. He'd read about Second Life in increasingly more sophisticated business and financial press. The Economist, The Financial Times, etc. All of which touted the large and exponentially growing size of the SL "economy". So a mere $10,000 USD shouldn't be but a drop in the bucket, given the fact SL was supposedly producing virtual millionaires.

Once we started playing with real money in SL, however, the truth about the supposed economy therein quickly came to light:

• You can earn a lot of Linden dollars in SL, in fact fairly rapidly sometimes, but...
  
• If you can actually collect your SLLs from your counterparty - which turns out to be an enormous problem - you can't cash them out for USD easily or profitably.

It turns out that inside the game, counterparty risk is tremendous. In fact, entire banks will suddenly disappear. --Virtual world's supposed economy is 'a pyramid scheme' (Valleywag)

I don't know what any of this means, but I wouldn't have considered investing any money in SL anyway. I really haven't the time to play subscription-based games. Still, I had been a bit surprised by all the mainstream press that SL has been getting.

All those who post unauthorized advertisements, trackback links or pingback links for the purpose of advertising or search engine result position placement benefits, hereby grant to Edward Mitchell and Common Sense Technology a royalty free license to all intellectual property contained on the web site to which you have linked beginning from the date your first such unauthorized comment was posted for a period of 75 years. In consideration of the free Internet ad space that you would have otherwise stolen from me, you agree to compensate me by granting a license to use all material on the linked web site without attribution or credit given to you. --ATTENTION UNAUTHORIZED ADVERTISERS... (Common Sense Technology)

Well, that's one way to deal with comment and trackback spam.

BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese thief has returned a mobile phone and thousands of yuan he stole from a woman after she sent him 21 touching text messages, Xinhua news agency said on Monday.
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Pan Aiying, a teacher in the eastern province of Shandong, had her bag containing her mobile phone, bank cards and 4,900 yuan ($630) snatched by a man riding a motorcycle as she cycled home on Friday, Xinhua said, citing the Qilu Evening News.

Pan first thought of calling the police but she decided to try to persuade the young man to return her bag.

She called her lost phone with her colleague's cell phone but was disconnected. Then she began sending text messages.

"I'm Pan Aiying, a teacher from Wutou Middle School. You must be going through a difficult time. If so, I will not blame you," wrote Pan in her first text message which did not get a response.

"Keep the 4,900 yuan if you really need it, but please return the other things to me. You are still young. To err is human. Correcting your mistakes is more important than anything," Pan wrote.

She gave up hope of seeing her possessions again after sending 21 text messages without a reply.

But on her way out on Sunday morning, she stumbled over a package that had been left in her courtyard only to discover it was her stolen bag. Nothing had been taken.

"Dear Pan: I'm sorry. I made a mistake. Please forgive me," a letter inside said.

"You are so tolerant even though I stole from you. I'll correct my ways and be an upright person." --China phone thief repents after 21 text messages (Yahoo! | Reuters (will expire))

An uplifting human-interest story.

The ubiquity of the cell phone camera means that every moment in our lives is photographable. One consequence of this is an altered perception of the gravity of our day-to-day routines. We are now more aware of ourselves as observers of "history." When a van catches fire in front of our house, we and our neighbors are now out on the lawn recording. We e-mail this to our friends, who testify to the enormity of the event, and then we all await the next sensation. This impulse can be positive, but it also fuels the increasingly destructive American habit of oversharing. The snapshot speaks with a small voice: I'm alive and I saw this. The cell phone camera picture or video is a shout from the rooftop: Check out this crazy thing that happened to me. --Michael Agger --The Camera Phone: The Gadget that Perverts, Vigilantes, and Celebrity Stalkers Can All Agree On (Slate)

The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires first of all recognition of one's own intellectual limits and fallibilities--in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of today's education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, "I can't do this." Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall, just as all of their less talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them. That level of demand cannot fairly be imposed on a classroom that includes children who do not have the ability to respond. The gifted need to have some classes with each other not to be coddled, but because that is the only setting in which their feet can be held to the fire.

The encouragement of wisdom requires mastery of analytical building blocks. The gifted must assimilate the details of grammar and syntax and the details of logical fallacies not because they will need them to communicate in daily life, but because these are indispensable for precise thinking at an advanced level.

The encouragement of wisdom requires being steeped in the study of ethics, starting with Aristotle and Confucius. It is not enough that gifted children learn to be nice. They must know what it means to be good. --Charles Murray --Aztecs vs. Greeks: Those with superior intelligence need to learn to be wise. (Opinion Journal)

Wow, some challenging, exciting stuff. I'm taking a break from polishing my syllabi, and I'm glad I came across this.

When I was preparing for my dissertation defense, I knew in advance that my evaluators had every intention of pushing me until I broke. I don't mean that I thought they were out to get me, just that their goal was explicitly to see how well-prepared I was to be a fully-fledged member of the community of scholars. If it had been a job interview, I could have imagined a scenario in which I gave the "right answer" to every question, such that the evaluators would stop asking questions once I satisfied their concerns one way or the other.

Not so with the Ph.D defense. My goal there was to delay the point where I cracked, so that it was as near the end of the hour as possible. In order to support a minor point in my analysis of A Streetcar Named Desire, I mentioned Blanche's reference to Edgar Allan Poe. I know I looked it up when I originally wrote that chapter, but years later when my reader asked me to comment further on it, I drew a blank. I said "I could speculate if you like, but I'd feel more comfortable looking that up."

That was when I saw my professors clicking their pens shut and sitting back in their chairs. Even though I didn't answer the question, I was comfortable enough to admit my limitations.

Am I wise yet? Can I really teach wisdom if I still make stupid mistakes? It's a challenging task.

I'd like to think I've gotten better at teaching students rather than teaching a subject. I'd like to think that my students are learning ethics and other intellectual virtues, along with where the punctuation marks go.

What's it actually like? Does it exploit the tragedy for cheap thrills? Or does it actually have artistic merit -- offering a new way to think about Columbine?

Right off the bat, Ledonne tries to put his critics off guard by delivering precisely the opposite of what you'd expect. Nobody will be able to use Super Columbine to live out explicit fantasies of gore or train themselves to shoot up a high school.

That's because it's anything but a graphically sophisticated, blood-soaked shoot-em-up. On the contrary, Super Columbine was designed to look like a clunky Nintendo game from the mid '90s, with low-rez, pixilated characters the size of sugar cubes, and cheesy MIDI music. When you kill someone, the avatar looks like a mashed red blot.

What strikes you, instead, is Ledonne's attention to narrative detail. He painstakingly researched the killers' life stories using publicly released police investigations of the pair, and the game thus includes all manner of detail I never knew. When I started off in Harris' house, I found a box of Luvox, an antidepressant he was on that prevented him getting into the Marines. When I met up with Klebold in a basement, we sat down in front of the VCR to watch the "I've seen the horror" speech from Apocalypse Now, a movie they apparently loved. --Clive Thompson --I, Columbine Killer (Wired)

I've been sick or caring for sick family members for most of the break, so I haven't had the chance to write my thoughts about "Super Columbine Massacre RPG!" -- the game, that is, rather than simply the Slamdance controversy.

Thompson is one of the few voices out there who actually played the game, and can thus argue that "It uses the language of games as a way to think about the massacre. Ledonne, like all creators of 'serious games,' uses gameplay as a rhetorical technique."

Even Twain scholars seem to have missed his foresight on this subject. I discovered it by accident, in browsing through the 24 volumes of his collected works in the "Author's National Edition." In an 1898 short story called "From the 'London Times' of 1904," he describes an invention called the "telelectroscope," a gadget hooked up to the phone system: "The improved 'limitless-distance' telephone was presently introduced, and the daily doings of the globe made visible to everybody, and audibly discussable too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues." --Crawford Killian --Mark Twain, Father of the Internet (Tyee)

I enjoy teaching Forster's The Machine Stops (1909) each year, but I hadn't heard of Mark Twain's story, "From the 'London Times' of 1904."

Killian concludes:

It is all very melodramatic, but Twain clearly understood the basic concept of the Internet: effortless world travel through an electronic medium. Just past the centenary of his imagined "telelectroscope," we who surf the web should pause to thank America's greatest author -- a man ahead of his time in more ways than one.

The story is not a particularly good technological thriller, yet the story seems to be as much about Dreyfuss Affair as it is about the telelectroscope. Given that context, I think the story is worth a closer look.

The 1954 American Quarterly article "Mark Twain and the Austrian Edison" refers to Twain's interest in Jan Szczepanik. Szczepanik, the inventor whose death is blamed on the innocent Clayton, is not merely a character on Twain's story, but an historical figure, among whose many inventions was a forerunner of the television called the telelectroscope.

The term telelectroscope predated both Szczepanik's invention and Mark Twain's story. Twain himself was an early adopter of technology, perhaps most notably the typewriter; to him, an inventor was a "poet in steel." Yet, cynical as always, in this story he demonstrates that the wonders of technology do not change human nature. As new types of evidence emerge, twisted human nature will continue to distort reason in the service of old prejudices. The crime story exists merely to set up this political statement, on a topic of great concern to literary figures and intellectuals at the time.

If I had the time, I might also investigate what Twain was talking about when he mentioned a "new paragraph added to the Constitution in 1899." Was that just a plot device to get around the double-jeopardy rule in the US legal system, or would the original audience have recognized it as a reference to something that was being debated at the time, just as the original audience would have understood the "French precedent" to be a reference to the Dreyfus affair?

Recently, I tried to help a faculty member at my college submit a grant proposal to a National Institutes of Health competition. I soon discovered that one can no longer submit a grant to NIH directly. One has to submit it through Grants.gov. I estimate that it took me more than 25 hours to try to submit the grant. After 37 error messages (I have them saved, because no one would believe me without cyber evidence), I am still not sure the proposal was received.--Carol Kolmerten --Why Grants.gov Should Be Abolished (Chronicle)

This article struck terror into my once-hopeful heart.

Whatever one thinks of the game's content, the game went through an extensive judging process and was deemed a finalist by a jury of game experts. To have the game pulled based on either pressure from backers or a fear of liability is to say that independent games do not deserve the same respect and conscientious protection by artistic venues as independent films. Would a difficult, perhaps controversial, film be pulled from the festival under the same circumstances? Of course not -- and it had never happened in the history of the festival. That is the point of having a festival such as Slamdance, to confront those moments when media and sensibility and culture are in conflict. To offer a place where the independent independents can be seen, appreciated, lauded or condemned -- but not hidden or refused.

[...]

[A] festival honoring a "philosophy of design" must be open to more than just beautiful independent games or independent games that make us feel good; and, that those striving to support independent game making must be ready to defend games that are difficult and provocative in terms of their content, as well as games that are challenging and innovative in their game play. We support such games and it is in that spirit that we withdraw our sponsorship. --USC Interactive Media Division Withdraws Slamdance Sponsorship (Ludicidal Tendencies)

The fallout over Slamdance's decision to pull Super Columbine Massacre RPG! continues.

Here, Bullet

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta's opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
[...] --The horror, the horror of Iraq, in poetry (SF Gate.com)

Fascinating reading.

Slamdance finalist Super Columbine Massacre RPG has been officially kicked from the festival due to mounting pressure from protesters and the loss of sponsorship, the game's creator told Kotaku Thursday night.

This is the first time in the Slamdance Festival's 13-year history that a game or film has been removed from the festival due to criticism or outside pressure. --Exclusive: Columbine Game Kicked From Competition (Kotaku)

I cited this game as an example in a paper I gave at the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education in November. My point was that the young audience that Holocaust educators want to reach has a different set of moral and aesthetic responses to games than the adults who don't have much to say beyond dropping their jaws. The Holocaust deniers and other promoters of hate and violence already have their issue-oriented games out there. While I think it's exaggerating to suggest that a Jew-bashing game is going to have much impact (those games, like the Christian-themed evangelical games typically have poor production values and won't really attract the interest of someone who doesn't already share the world view that the game is trying to promote). There is enough social commentary embedded within this particular RPG that I think it moves beyond cynical exploitation, and really attempts to use a popular medium in an effective way.

The designer, Danny Ledonne, speaks eloquently and thoughtfully about his creation (in this article and elsewhere on Kotaku).

Update, Jan 6: Ian Bogost offers a good overview of the Slandance controversy. It looks like it wasn't external pressure from advertisers after all, but one person's concern about what MIGHT happen if the game were to be part of the show.

I teach plenty of safe classics, but I also teach books that contain disturbing and threatening ideas. I find it amazingly hypocritical that Slamdance (an indie film festival, founded to protest commercialism at Sundance) would override the artistic decisions of the panel that agreed to let the Columbine game into the competition.