Ethics: November 2007 Archive Page

Ars Technica:

Earlier this month, Pennsylvania's Express-Times reported on a local school librarian who put up her own "Just Say No to Wikipedia" signs in the computer lab. The entire Warren Hills Regional School District in New Jersey has also blocked access from all school computers. The basic problem, according to officials, is that Wikipedia's unverified accuracy and ease of use are making it too tempting for students to use as a primary source.

Wikipedia officials certainly don't dispute that characterization and have never held the site up as a tool for academic work, except as a jumping-off point. But the New Jersey response is interesting in that it represents an extreme response to the problem.

Perhaps it's a necessary one, though. I checked in with my wife, a college professor who assigns plenty of papers to her students. Despite an unceasing stream of comments about how Wikipedia cannot be used as a scholarly source, students without fail will use it every semester and cite it in their work, even in upper-level classes. The site is just so easy to use that the temptation to do so can be overwhelming... especially when it's 1 AM and the library has closed.

Students are still citing Wikipedia even after the professor says it's not an acceptable source? If the students are simply dropping off their papers on the last day of class, and they have no chance to get feedback or correct their mistakes, then it's no wonder that each new set of students will make the same mistakes.

But if the same students keep doing it, perhaps that needs to add a homework assignment where students have to submit their sources two weeks before the paper is due, so that students who bomb that assignment have time to learn what other sources are available.

Many students have heard their teachers warn them against using the site, but only after I show them how easy it is to edit an article, and they realize that they, too, could add whatever they want, does it really sink in that they have to be critical about what they read (not just on Wikipedia, but everywhere).

Banning the site deprives them of the chance to learn that lesson.

As preparation for writing a traditional research paper, students could add to the Wikipedia entry for their school or community, or they could look for other acceptable sources and add them to the Wikipedia entry.

When students are writing about some areas of popular culture, culture, user-authored sites such as Wikipedia and Urbandictionary, or game databases like MobyGames are actually far more useful than academic sources (which take months or even years to appear).   

Regardless of the subject, a reading assignment could involve reading a discussion about "neutral point of view" or "notability" in a contested article, so that students can see for themselves just how knowledge is constructed in Wikipedia. They could compare the "neutral" Wikipedia article to a pair of articles that argue "for" or "against" a particular interpretation

This story brings Facebook shaming to another level.

It tells the story of an intern at a bank who emails his bosses about needing to take a day off work in October to take care of some family business in New York City. But his bosses discover a picture of him at a party in Worcester, Massachusetts, uncovering his duplicity. Worse, his boss attach ed the picture to a response email to him and BCC the entire North American staff of the bank. And, even worse, in the picture the intern--a young man named Kevin--is dressed a fairy--complete with green wings and a star-tipped wand. "Nice wand," the boss adds in his email.

Uh, no, it doesn't.

Interesting rhetoric, via YouTube. It re-mediates an animation that takes far too long to load, which is credited to Vishal Agarwala, who is apparently an undergraduate at the University of Florida.

The presentation is a useful tool for informing young people exactly why Facebook works so hard to get young people to love Facebook. A call for action, it is naive (right up there with the perennial freshman comp thesis statement, "Advertisers should stop hurting women's self-esteem by publishing images of idealized women"), and when judged by the standards of journalism, it is alarmist and one-sided.

Yes, young people should know why corporations want their personal information.

Sorry, but you can't put the real you on Facebook if you want to protect your privacy.

Politico.com:

Only 20 percent said they'd exchange their vote for an iPod touch. But 66 percent said they'd forfeit their vote for a free ride to NYU. And half said they'd give up the right to vote forever for $1 million.

BBC:

A Dutch teenager has been arrested for allegedly stealing virtual furniture from "rooms" in Habbo Hotel, a 3D social networking website. The 17-year-old is accused of stealing 4,000 euros (£2,840) worth of virtual furniture, bought with real money.

Mike Edwards, a civilian instructor at West Point, reflects on the academic reaction to a new army field manual that plagiarizes large swaths of complex material, sometimes verbatim, from published sources. Part 1, Part 2.

The scandal, though, is this: according to anthropologist David Price, the published version of the Army's FM 3-24 on Counterinsurgency is deeply and thoroughly plagiarized, particularly in its Chapter 3, which patches together a wide range of verbatim or minimally edited passages from prominent sociological and anthropological texts without any sort of sufficient documentation in order to establish a series of definitional terms for use by officers, NCOs, and soldiers seeking to implement counterinsurgency tactics in the field.

Now, initially, when I saw this, I immediately got out all my old FMs: not a single works cited among them. David Price writes that "The cumulative effect of such non-attributions is devastating to the Manual's academic integrity," but apparently fails to grasp that this is in some ways a matter of genre: FMs are manuals for use in the field rather than the library, and the sergeants and lieutenants and captains who will put them to use are far less interested in where ideas come from than in matters of implementation. Some officers I've spoken to have echoed the observation that Army writing is community property and definitionally in the public domain, which likely contributed to the habits of mind that led to the failures of documentation. I don't believe that excuses the plagiarism -- particularly given Price's point that "The most damning element of the Manual's reliance on unattributed sources is that the Manual includes a bibliography listing of over 100 sources, yet not a single source I have identified is included" -- but it does help to explain it.

Clive Thompson, from Wired:

I know I'm the underdog; I know I'm probably going to get killed anyway. I am never going to advance up the Halo 3 rankings, because in the political economy of Halo, I'm poor.

Specifically, I'm poor in time. The best players have dozens of free hours a week to hone their talents, and I don't have that luxury. This changes the relative meaning of death for the two of us. For me, dying will not penalize me in the way it penalizes them, because I have almost no chance of improving my state. I might as well take people down with me.

Or to put it another way: The structure of Xbox Live creates a world composed of two classes -- haves and have-nots. And, just as in the real world, some of the disgruntled have-nots are all too willing to toss their lives away -- just for the satisfaction of momentarily halting the progress of the haves. Since the game instantly resurrects me, I have no real dread of death in Halo 3.

I do not mean, of course, to trivialize the ghastly, horrific impact of real-life suicide bombing. Nor do I mean to gloss over the incredible complexity of the real-life personal, geopolitical and spiritual reasons why suicide bombers are willing to kill themselves. These are all impossibly more nuanced and perverse than what's happening inside a trifling, low-stakes videogame.

But the fact remains that something quite interesting happened to me because of Halo. Even though I've read scores of articles, white papers and books on the psychology of terrorists in recent years, and even though I have (I think) a strong intellectual grasp of the roots of suicide terrorism, something about playing the game gave me an "aha" moment that I'd never had before: an ability to feel, in whatever tiny fashion, the strategic logic and emotional calculus behind the act.

Patti Dobranski, Tribune-Review

"The secret state police were at the door. They came to arrest my father. On Nov. 9, at 8:30 p.m., I lost my German citizenship. I said 'Let's get out of this hellish country.' I just wanted to go somewhere else."

But Nov. 9, 1938, was more than Blaustein's personal hell. It would become known as "Kristallnacht" or "The Night of Broken Glass," full of screams of despair as the Nazis began their attack on the Jews by burning synagogues and looting homes and businesses. This night would mark the beginning of the end of 6 million Jews across Europe at the hands of the Hitler's Nazis.

The 81-year-old Mt. Lebanon, Allegheny County, resident told his story Tuesday night to a crowd that gathered inside St. Joseph Chapel at Seton Hill University for the 19th annual Kristallnacht Remembrance service sponsored by the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education.

I was in the back of the room, where the acoustics were not very good, so I was glad to find this account of Blaustein's speech.

Cringely

Google Personalized Search now uses the terms from previous searches to help fine-tune the next search, which seems good in principle, but if someone searches first on "childcare" then later on "insurance" they are likely to be served ads for insurance for children, which might not interest them at all.

There are other issues like problems with Google Analytics, and the blogosphere, if you know where to look, is full of this stuff (check my links to the right, please). But what's worst is that this is all taking place in the context of a Google customer support system that is effectively broken. They say it isn't broken, but if it takes weeks to get an answer, customer service is broken.

Google's defense, of course, is that the company will make everything right once you prove to them that they made a mistake. But Google is defendant, judge, and jury. And even if they face reality and do the right thing, it may already be too late for smaller advertisers. An algorithmic change by Google can result in AdWords budgets that worked well for years becoming suddenly depleted. All of the advertiser's money is gone, often with little to show for it. Worse still, there is no money left for ads that might generate revenue. Google says it will do the right thing, but doing that six months later has no effect for a merchant five months out of business.

Google appears to simply not understand this. Maybe with so many big jets parked at Moffett Field they've forgotten what it is like to run a business on little capital. Maybe they don't care.