Ethics: December 2007 Archive Page

Spokesman Review:

"Our editors (Wednesday) night noticed the similarities in the two photos," said Paul Emerson, Tribune managing editor. "We are not crime-stoppers here. It is just a weird coincidence. If it did solve a crime, I'm glad it happened. I have seen nothing like this in my 26 years as Tribune managing editor."

A Tribune employee, originally alerted police about 3 a.m. Thursday to the obvious similarities between the men in both pictures.

The employee wanted police to see the front page before Millhouse did. The employee pointed out Millhouse was clearly the man police were seeking, sporting his blue- and black-checkered jacket and dark-colored, hooded sweatshirt in both pictures.

The New Statesman:

With only few days remaining in 2007, the indications are the global temperature for this year is the same as that for 2006 - there has been no warming over the 12 months.

But is this just a blip in the ever upward trend you may ask? No.

The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001. Global warming has, temporarily or permanently, ceased. Temperatures across the world are not increasing as they should according to the fundamental theory behind global warming - the greenhouse effect. Something else is happening and it is vital that we find out what or else we may spend hundreds of billions of pounds needlessly.

I've blogged on this topic before (pro-warming, pro-debate, pro-conspiracy). It's been interesting watching the way journalists (some of them committed environmental activists) have constructed the public understanding of the scientific debate. Politicians, business executives, and leaders of environmental groups can all be excused for their rhetorical excesses, but not the reporters.

Does the emotionally loaded term "global warming" mean "Humanity is recklessly endangering the environment by releasing excessive greenhouses gases into the air," or does it mean "The earth is now warmer than it was when glaciers covered most of Europe and North America"?

I'm misquoted on your December press page.

What I wrote was

When students are writing about some areas of popular 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). 

http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog/permalink/banning-wikipedia-at-school-go/

But the quote appears as

When students are writing about popular culture, user-authored sites like Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary are far more useful than academic sources.

I hope you will repair the inaccuracies.

(Submitted Dec 8... I'll give them a while to respond before I publish this.)

Yahoo! | AFP:

The Greek myth that ancient Spartans threw their stunted and sickly newborns off a cliff was not corroborated by archaeological digs in the area, researchers said Monday.

Like the myth about lemmings hurling themselves to their death, this new detail, found from a study of bones found iat the base of the site, will take a while to spread. I'm just filing this away in case I need to mention it the next time I teach Lysistrata.

After watching the children until about 2pm today, I rousted my wife from the bedroom so she could give them a late lunch. While I was fiddling with my blogging templates and sort of puttering around until it was time to go to campus (I'm volunteering to serve dinner to the students during the big "Christmas on the Hill" dinner party), I heard an unusual amount of screaming and thumping upstairs.  Then the screams turned to laughter -- well, my son was laughing, and my wife was trying not to. 

A few minutes later, my five-year-old daughter had stuffed a few toys in a plastic suitcase, and was standing at the front door in her pink coat and Hello Kitty boots, ready to run away.

I asked her where she wanted to go, suggesting that perhaps I could give her a ride.

Her eyes got wide. "You mean you want me to go?"

"Of course I don't want you to go, but you won't get very far on foot, so maybe I could drive you. Were you thinking the train station or the airport?"

While my daughter processed that, my wife explained what had happened.  Both children were misbehaving during lunch, so much so that Mommy had to call Santa. In order to make sure the elves knew who had been naughty, my wife said she would spell their names over the phone.  She spelled Carolyn's name to howls of protest; then, before she got to Peter's name, the phone started beeping to signal the line was dead.

Peter started dancing around the kitchen, saying that God saved him from punishment.

My daughter, whose sense of justice is well-developed enough to know that she and her brother were both being equally naughty, was offended.

I managed to coax her out of her coat and boots by telling her that Peter would write a letter to Santa explaining what happened and asking that he receive the same punishment as Carolyn.  Perhaps if Carolyn also wrote a letter that showed how much she appreciated Peter's selfless act, maybe Mommy and Daddy would be able to make it all work out.

From a speculative essay by Richard M. Stallman:

In his software class, Dan had learned that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing. (They used this information to catch reading pirates, but also to sell personal interest profiles to retailers.) The next time his computer was networked, Central Licensing would find out. He, as computer owner, would receive the harshest punishment--for not taking pains to prevent the crime.

Heh. Lightweight. That's funny. Via Information Week.

Zuckerberg said that when Facebook considered Beacon it hoped to let people share information across sites with their friends. He said it had to be clear and easy to control, while also being "lightweight so it wouldn't get in people's way as they browsed the Web."

Information Week:

One of the most prestigious U.K. universities has begun to scan the social networking sites seeking snapshots and other evidence of misbehavior that qualifies for formal disciplinary action. Students at Oxford University are outraged that school leaders are scanning Facebook and disciplining students based on what they find there.

Macworld has new info on the scope of the information Beacon gathers on Facebook users:

While users' activities on the Web are tracked in various ways for different purposes, most commonly with tracking cookies in banner ads, the Beacon implementation is one Berteau has never come across before in terms of the details of users' actions that it's able to capture and send back.

These latest findings build on Berteau's report on Friday that Beacon stealthily tracked the activities of users on affiliate Beacon sites even if they were logged off from Facebook and had previously declined having their activities reported back to their Facebook friends.

Over the weekend, Facebook confirmed that Berteau's report on Friday was accurate, but said that it deletes the data it gets under these circumstances.

Still, Friday's findings deepened the privacy concerns surrounding Beacon since its introduction several weeks ago. And the admission Monday added to the concerns, since it contradicted what had, until then, been the official company line about this issue.

Thanks for the link, Karissa.

Via CNN. Here's a heartbreaking detail I hadn't noticed in previous coverage.

When Megan's mother returned home, she found her daughter crying at the computer. After reading the messages, she criticized her daughter for using inappropriate language, Banas said.

Telling her mom that "I can't believe you're not on my side," Megan ran upstairs and hanged herself, Banas said.

Inside Higher Ed offers short stories on two student papers that are struggling to keep their administrations at bay:

At Oklahoma State University, the editors of the Daily O'Collegian, the more than 80-year-old campus newspaper, have for several weeks refused to let the articles they write for the print publication appear on ocolly.com, the newspaper's online portal, because the student journalists are at odds with the university administration's publications board over who should have the power to hire and fire staff for the online operation.

And the editor of the student newspaper at Connecticut's Quinnipiac University has been threatened with the loss of his job in the wake of his public criticism of a university policy that bars the weekly Quinnipiac Chronicle from posting articles on its Web site until after they have already appeared in print. The editor, Jason Braff, argued that the policy impaired the newspaper's ability to keep the campus informed, but Quinnipiac officials said it was designed to improve the accuracy of the Chronicle's reporting, "in light of a student's enthusiasm to release 'breaking news.'"