16. juni 2006

College ethics classes backfire I've long thought that ethics classes and ethics training are bull. By the time you reach college, university or a business career, it's way too late to teach people to be ethical (or, moral, as is the correct word). No course or seminar is going to convince any crook that he has to change. Maybe professor Tony Buono now agrees with me. Last fall, Bentley College management professor Tony Buono taught a class on corporate scandals with colleagues pitching in from finance, accounting and even the philosophy department. The four picked through the cases of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and Shell. At the end of the semester, the number of students in a simulated trading room who were caught in misconduct or misusing information for insider trading was significantly higher than at the beginning. The students said, "You taught us how to do it," Buono recalled. My admittedly trivial prediction: The big corporate scandals are not behind us. 9:25:46 PM    comment []  trackback []

Hamas: Let them eat cake The EU is backing an aid plan for Palestine that bypasses the Hamas-lead government. EU spokeswoman Emma Udwin said it was considering an initial 100m euros (£86m), and wanted to have the funding mechanism operating by early July. A Hamas official dismissed the plan, saying it ignored democratic realities. Information Minister Youssef Rizqa said a funding plan that bypassed the Hamas government would widen the gap between the people, the Hamas government and the Palestinian presidency, led by the Fatah faction. That is precisely the plan, I think. 8:06:22 PM    comment []  trackback []

Iran has no plans to make nukes, but has plans to use them Iran threatens to use the nukes it has no plans acquiring: Iran's defense minister on Thursday vowed that his country would "use nuclear defense as a potential" if "threatened by any power." Speaking following a meeting with his Syrian counterpart Hassan Ali Turkmani in Teheran on Thursday, Iranian Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar emphasized that Iran "should be ready for confronting all kinds of threats." Pretty much speaks for itself. 6:20:11 PM    comment []  trackback []

- Press coverage of terrorism leads to more terrorism I have written repeatedly that terrorism is a media strategy, pure and simple. When the press covers terrorist attacks, it leads to more attacks. More ink equals more blood, claim two economists who say that newspaper coverage of terrorist incidents leads directly to more attacks. It's a macabre example of win-win in what economists call a "common-interest game," say Bruno S. Frey of the University of Zurich and Dominic Rohner of Cambridge University. "Both the media and terrorists benefit from terrorist incidents," their study contends. Terrorists get free publicity for themselves and their cause. The media, meanwhile, make money "as reports of terror attacks increase newspaper sales and the number of television viewers." The researchers counted direct references to terrorism between 1998 and 2005 in the New York Times and Neue Zuercher Zeitung, a respected Swiss newspaper. They also collected data on terrorist attacks around the world during that period. Using a statistical procedure called the Granger Causality Test, they attempted to determine whether more coverage directly led to more attacks. The results, they said, were unequivocal: Coverage caused more attacks, and attacks caused more coverage -- a mutually beneficial spiral of death that they say has increased because of a heightened interest in terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001. This is quite obviously true, but also a massive dilemma. Should the press really stop publishing news about dramatic acts of terrorist attacks? That is almost unthinkable. Bruno S. Frey suggests not naming the groups and whoever claims responsibility. That may be a good compromise, even as us avid followers of the war on terror want to know even such details. I am not going to blame the press over this; it is simply a demand from the audience to learn as much as possible about acts of large scale violence. Terrorism requires a serious response. How can a democratic society determine how to react to terrorism if the voters are not informed about its nature? I see no easy solution to this dilemma. 12:04:25 AM    comment []  trackback []

© Copyright 2006 Jan Haugland. Last update: 01.07.2006; 12:22:46.