Equal-Pay Day

Today, 12 April 2011, is Equal-Pay Day in the U.S. If you took the median-salary American man and the median-salary woman, and started paying them both on the first of 2010, today is the day when the woman will have finally earned what the man took in through 31 December, about 14 weeks ago.

Of course, it’s not that simple. You can’t just take any man and any woman and make that comparison. The figure that’s used for this is the median income: take all the men’s annual salaries, list them in order of lowest to highest, then pick the one in the middle. Do the same for women’s salaries. Compare. The median of the women’s salaries is about 78% of the median of the men’s. We could use the average (mean) instead of the median, but for these sorts of economic comparisons it’s typically the median that’s used, because it doesn’t suffer from skewing by the extremes at the edges.

The problem is that the majority of the gap comes from the fact that men and women are not equally represented in all the different jobs... and the jobs that employ primarily men just so happen to pay more than the ones that employ primarily women. I can’t imagine how that happened, but, well, there it is. Nurses earn less than doctors. Beauticians earn less than plumbers. Teachers earn less than corporate executives. And so on.

And it doesn’t stop there: what about college-educated women? What about those with PhDs? Because another fact is that more women than men are finishing college, these days, and more women than men are completing PhD programs. Doesn’t that fix it?

No. For one thing, when we look at the fields that women are getting degrees in, we find the same thing: the fields that attract women more tend to be the less lucrative ones.

But also, when we break it down by field we still find differences. In April of 2007, the American Association of University Women released a study titled Behind the Pay Gap (PDF). The study showed that female biological scientists earn 75% of what their male colleagues do. In mathematics, the figure is 76%; in psychology, 86%. Women in engineering are almost there: they earn 95% of what the men do. But less than 20% of the engineering majors are women.

The other argument for why there’s a pay gap is that women and men make different decisions about their lives. Women choose motherhood, a bigger hit against career advancement and salary opportunities than fatherhood. More women work part time. And so on.

The AAUW study looked at that. They controlled for those decisions, and they compared men and women who really could be reasonably compared. They looked at people in the same fields, at the same schools, with the same grades. They considered those of the same race, the same socio-economic status, the same family situations. They didn’t just compare apples to apples; they compared, as economist Heather Boushey puts it, Granny Smith apples to Granny Smith apples.

And they found that even in that case, there’s an unexplained pay gap of 5% the year after college, which increases to 12% ten years later. From the study:

The pay gap between female and male college graduates cannot be fully accounted for by factors known to affect wages, such as experience (including work hours), training, education, and personal characteristics. Gender pay discrimination can be overt or it can be subtle. It is difficult to document because someone’s gender is usually easily identified by name, voice, or appearance. The only way to discover discrimination is to eliminate the other possible explanations. In this analysis the portion of the pay gap that remains unexplained after all other factors are taken into account is 5 percent one year after graduation and 12 percent 10 years after graduation. These unexplained gaps are evidence of discrimination, which remains a serious problem for women in the work force.

It has gotten better: if today the general pay gap is about 20%, 15 years ago it was 25%, and 30 years ago, 35%. The improvement is good news.

But the speed of the improvement is not. The disparity of pay between male-dominated fields and female-dominated ones is not. The gap in pay between highly trained men and women in the same field is not. And that unexplained 5-to-12 percent is certainly not.

Let’s keep pushing that date back, and look for the year when equal-pay day is December 31^st.

When do your wacky ideas get in the way of your job?

There’s been a lot of talk around blogland about the case of Martin Gaskell. Dr Gaskell is an astronomer, and was, in 2007, up for a position at University of Kentucky, where he would be director of the MacAdam Student Observatory. According to all reports, he was highly qualified, and would have been likely to get the job. They then, as we Internet technologists refer to it in very technical terms, Googled him, and found aspects of his religious beliefs that led them to hire someone else.

This, of course, is where the accounts begin to differ. Dr Gaskell sued the University of Kentucky on grounds of religious discrimination; the university said that it wasn’t his religion, in general, that was a problem, but his specific views on things like the age of the universe, things that have direct bearing on the job at hand, that informed their decision.

In November of 2010 (things don’t always move quickly in the court system), a federal judge ruled that the case could go forward, and a date was set for February. Last week — what has prompted the new interest in talking about it — they settled out of court, ending the legal proceedings. The University of Kentucky will pay Dr Gaskell $125,000, without making any admission of wrongdoing.

Paying to make the problem go away is common, but unfortunate: it leaves everything fuzzy. Dr Gaskell’s supporters will claim that they won, and that there was, indeed, improper discrimination against him. His detractors will say that he extorted money from the university. Neither is really true.

More broadly, though, this case isn’t just about Dr Gaskell, and settling with him leaves open the question of when a person’s beliefs — religious or otherwise — make it reasonable to rule that person out for certain jobs. And should religious beliefs have any more protection in that regard than beliefs rooted elsewhere?

Richard Dawkins, in a BoingBoing guest post, has given his opinion on the matter. I mostly agree with him, but I can’t say that unequivocally. Read his essay, either now or after you’re done here.

I’ll answer the second of my questions two paragraphs up before I discuss the first: No, I do not think the reason one believes what one does has any bearing on how we should treat that belief. If you believe, say, that people should be at peace with each other, and that war is always evil, it shouldn’t matter whether you’re a Quaker or you come by that from somewhere else. If you’re vegetarian, what’s the difference whether it’s because you’re Hindu or because you simply can’t bear to see animals die? If you believe that the Universe is about 6000 years old, whether you get that from the bible, from a science fiction story you once read, or from a private sense that came to you one evening, it’s all the same. We shouldn’t be any more critical of what you think because you learnt it in church... but neither should we be more tolerant of it for that reason, if it gets in the way of what we’re working with you for.

And that leads us to the other question: When is it acceptable to say that what you believe is inconsistent with the job we’re hiring you for? Can a vegetarian expect to get a job as the sole food critic for a small newspaper? There’s an obvious issue there, but, surely, a vegetarian Hindu couldn’t reasonably sue the paper and claim religious discrimination. You have to be able to do your job.

Of course, there’d be no reason to prevent a vegetarian from, say, being the director of a university astronomical observatory. It’s likely we’ll all agree on that point.

At issue here, though, is that certain beliefs can damage your credibility to the point that, while they might not stop you doing your job, they could easily make it impossible for people to take you seriously in it. Were I, for instance, to apply for a job as Internet technology advisor for a right-wing tea-party senator, I might very well be able to give sound technical advice while choking back my revulsion to the senator’s political agenda... but could the senator ever trust that I wasn’t trying to undermine her in some way, given what I’ve written in these pages? Of course not.

Where I have a little trouble fully agreeing with Professor Dawkins is about where we draw the line. Between beliefs that can live in the background without having any effect and those that clearly whack one’s job in the face, there’s a continuum, and we have to decide when there’s enough effect to matter.

To be sure, we often think of college professors as being a bit kooky. It’s clear to me that the University of Kentucky people made a reasonable decision in this case, and it bothers me that they had to agree to pay Dr Gaskell off. But other cases are bound to be less clear, and it may be fine to hire the professor with the nutty ideas sometimes... even if the students do have a laugh once in a while, he’ll still have enough credibility to teach them what needs to be taught.

Ideally, of course, I fully agree with Professor Dawkins: we want clear thinkers in our universities, and accepting people who support discredited or fringe ideas in areas not connected to their main expertise still pollutes the clear-thinking pond. We’d like to select, say, Holocaust denialists, moon-landing skeptics, homeopathists, and idiots who still think that President Obama was not really born in Hawaii, and make sure none of them are teaching at our colleges and universities. It’s a nice goal. In practice, though, we have that sort of situation all the time, and I’m not sure how rigorous I want to be in avoiding it. Should Stanford University have distanced themselves from William Shockley because of his ideas about eugenics? Perhaps, perhaps not.

What’s clear, though, is that we have to prevent every employment decision from being the basis of a religious discrimination suit. In this case, the judge who allowed it to go forward made the wrong choice. It only cost the university $125,000, but it’s set a precedent that makes me very queasy.

More police behaving badly

It’s been a while since I’ve written about rape (some of the most significant ones are here,here, and here). But via BoingBoing I’ve just read about a case in San Antonio that’s unusually disturbing: a police officer on duty handcuffed a suspect — a transgender prostitute — then drove her off to a quiet spot and forced [her] to commit multiple sex acts.

It’s disturbing that it happened, that a law officer would do such a thing. But what’s more disturbing is that the prosecutor charged him not with felony rape, despite the DNA and GPS evidence supporting the victim’s story, but with misdemeanor official oppression. Craig Nash lost his job and was sentenced to one year in jail.

One year, for violently abusing the trust we gave him as an officer of the law.

From what we’re given in the news article, it appears that the victim’s story is legitimate. In addition, a second victim, from a couple of years earlier, came forward. Nevertheless, the prosecutor gave the (former) cop a plea bargain, agreeing to charge him only with the misdemeanor and not to pursue the second accusation.

WTF?

Apart from that, even if the sex had been consensual, an on-duty officer having sex with a suspect is sufficiently wrong at so many levels as to warrant a penalty of much more than a year in jail. Think of the opportunities for abuse that crop up here: threatening women with arrest in order to get sex,^[1] releasing arrested suspects in exchange for sex, and so on.

It makes no difference how good a police officer he was in other ways or at other times. It certainly makes no difference how good a family man he is. None of that mitigates this crime.

We place a great deal of trust in police officers, and we give them a great deal of power. They must be held accountable for the misuse and abuse of that trust and power, and the punishments must be serious, not just slaps on the wrist. Dismissal, of course, but then real prison time, not just a token jail sentence. We have to show no tolerance for abusive or illegal — not to mention vile — behaviour.

I’ll note the related case from Custer County, Oklahoma, wherein former sheriff Mike Burgess had established a systematic system of sexual abuse. He got 79 years in prison.

---

^[1] Personally, I consider this to be fully fledged rape, using a threat of arrest instead of, say, a knife or a threat of a severe beating. I’m not sure where the law would stand on it.

Implicit license

A speaker the other day said something curious, and he repeated it. Several times throughout his talk, he said that most of the information he was giving us is available free of charge on our web site. It’s curious, because his need to say it strays from the model we’ve developed of the worldwide web. That he said it — and not once, but several times — made him seem old fashioned, almost as thought he’d told us to send a self-addressed stamped envelope to get a copy of his presentation.

The part that’s out of place is free of charge, because we assume that now. Of course it’s free of charge: it’s on your web site. The web is a place full of free information, and we take that as the default situation.

Not everything there is free, to be sure. Lots of journals put the papers they publish behind paywalls, and some magazines and newspapers demand subscriptions for ready access to their material. But we mention that when it shows up, because paying is now the exception. We assume information on the web is free unless we’re told otherwise.

On the other hand, we do expect that the information remains the property of those we got it from, unless they say otherwise, at least some of us do. We wouldn’t use someone else’s words without attribution, someone else’s research, someone else’s design, without permission. We might even expect to pay for the use, depending upon what it is we’re using, and for what purpose. And we have lots of discussions about fair use in the process.

But what, exactly, is our fair use of material that’s provided free?

It’s a difficult question, and one with no clear answer. The U.S. fair use doctrine isn’t well defined, and courts take it to mean different things in different situations and at different times. Even cases that are obvious might not be so, depending upon who’s making the judgment. Associated Press tried, to derision and laughter from many professional and amateur bloggers, to limit fair use of their material to fewer than five words. They later said that wasn’t what they’d meant, maybe.

Righthaven, on the other hand, decided not to make any definitions. They just made lawsuits:

In a strategic campaign that is attracting growing interest nationwide in legal and media circles, Righthaven — without warning — has sued at least 86 website owners in federal court in Las Vegas since March for copyright infringement.

[...]

But from the get-go, Righthaven hits copyright violators with lawsuits seeking $75,000 in damages and forfeiture of their website domain names.

Righthaven’s legal initiative has critics calling it a frivolous-lawsuit-and-shakedown campaign aimed not at gaining justice for Righthaven, but at putting money in its pockets — charges denied by Righthaven and its entrepreneurial CEO, Las Vegas attorney Steven Gibson.

[...]

Righthaven’s procedure has been to troll to find an infringement of an R-J copyright to a specific story. It then buys the copyright for that story from the R-J’s owner, Stephens Media LLC, and afterward sues the infringer.

Buying the copyright is an important step because it allows Righthaven to seek statutory damages. (Some of the defendants are arguing that Righthaven lacks standing to sue them because Righthaven didn’t own the copyrights at the time of the initial infringement.)

These are clearly predatory tactics: a good-faith approach, if one really thinks a non-commercial user such as a blogger has overstepped the fair-use line, would be to ask them to take down the offending material. Starting with a large lawsuit is clearly just a way to monetize things.

Now the Electronic Frontier Foundation is calling them on it, having filed a countersuit that claims copyright fraud:

The owner of the Las Vegas Review-Journal has for the first time been hit with a counterclaim over its online copyright infringement lawsuit campaign, with attorneys for the Electronic Frontier Foundation accusing the newspaper of entering a sham relationship with the Review-Journal’s copyright enforcement partner Righthaven LLC — and accusing Righthaven of copyright fraud.

[...]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says the lawsuit campaign threatens freedom of speech on the Internet as Righthaven generally sues without first asking that infringing material be removed from websites or be replaced with links as is the standard practice in the U.S. newspaper industry.

A couple of weeks ago, Groklaw published an interesting analysis of one of the cases, where a defendant got a default judgment set aside and will be allowed to plead his case. It’s particularly interesting because this particular defendant has a situation where an entire column from the newspaper was copied — something that clearly ought to go beyond fair use. Yet the judge, in setting aside the default judgment, ruled that the planned defense is sufficiently reasonable to be heard.

The reasonability of it rests on a few points:

1. The article in question is informational, rather than creative or artistic.
2. The use was non-commercial.
3. The article was available for free from the newspaper’s web site, so financial loss to the newspaper could not be great (there might be loss of advertising revenue, resulting from fewer visits to the paper’s web site).
4. The defense claims that the newspaper gave an implicit license to use the article, by posting it freely on their web site. The judge quotes John S. Sieman, from his paper Using the Implied License to Inject Common Sense into Digital Copyright:

   As the internet has developed into more of an opt-out system, the argument has been made that only the act of sharing information from websites that actively choose to be removed from participating in the system is generally recognized as unacceptable, despite the Copyright Act being an opt-in system.

It’s that last point that’s the most interesting one, and we should follow this case to see where it goes. The defendant has only won the right to argue his case, and he could still lose in the end.

Free speech and firing

Derek Fenton was, until recently, an employee of New Jersey Transit, responsible for some back-office stuff that kept the trains running smoothly. Until recently, because he was sacked last week. No, the trains were still running smoothly, and his sacking had nothing to do with how he did his job. He was fired for having participated, on his own time and with nothing tying him to his employer, in the burning of a Koran in lower Manhattan in protest of the planned Islamic Center there.

You all know, of course, that I think he’s a bozo for that. That said, though, does he deserve to be an unemployed bozo?

The New York Times got some folks to debate the First Amendment issue that this raises:

New Jersey Transit fired an employee last week for burning a Koran in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11 in his off-duty hours. Whether public agencies can control or punish their employees for speech they engage in when they are not on the job has been a matter of dispute. [...] New Jersey Transit said the employee, Derek Fenton, had violated its code of ethics. Assuming he wasn’t dismissed for other reasons, should he have been fired for his action?

All but one of the contributors to the debate are legal experts, and they answer the question from a legal perspective. I, on the other hand, am looking at it from my own moral perspective, instead. As it turns out, this largely agrees with the legal one, but I can be less circumspect, and I need not seek precedent to support my views.

And my views are these:

1. You do not have free speech when it involves your job.
2. Your job gets involved when you are speaking in representation of your employer, or when what you’re doing is during your working hours.
3. You may be representing your employer by being in uniform, by identifying yourself as an employee in some other way (saying so, wearing a name badge, that sort of thing), or by being so well known that we just have to accept that you’re always representing them (Mayor Bloomberg, for example, is always representing New York City).
4. Any employer has every right to sack you if you do or say something that adversely affects your job or your ability to do it, or reflects negatively on your employer.

There seems to be a thread throughout the discussion that makes a point of New Jersey Transit’s being a government agency; I don’t see that this matters. They’re an employer, and what I said above should (remember, this isn’t a legal opinion, but a moral one) apply to any employer, equally, whether public or private.

And, so, here’s the nut of it: Mr Fenton was not on duty, was not doing this at a time when he should have been on duty, was not wearing a uniform, was not presenting himself as a New Jersey Transit worker, and was in no way or sense representing New Jersey Transit. What he did had nothing to do with his job and had no effect on his continued ability to do his job. Mr Fenton’s actions reflected badly only on Mr Fenton, and not — until the firing — on New Jersey Transit.

New Jersey Transit was absolutely wrong in sacking him. They don’t have to like his political views, but, well, I’ve worked with many people over the years with whom I disagreed politically. It’s part of being out in public, instead of holing up in a cabin in Montana. They should give him an apology, and his job back.

The only Times contributor who disagrees with that is also the only one who is not a legal expert, and who is a Muslim representative. Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, likens burning a Koran to burning an American flag:

Burning the American flag is also protected by the First Amendment. But I certainly would fire any of my employees who would consider flag-burning as an act of defiance. It’s not. It’s childish and immature behavior, and those who would do such a thing would be unworthy of public employment.

Childish and immature are good words to describe that sort of activity. I’d add boneheaded, moronic, and a lot of others. But grounds for termination is not one of them, and Mr Al-Marayati is just wrong. Going to sci-fi conventions dressed as a Wookie is also childish and immature behaviour, but you’d better not dismiss your employees for doing it. I would hope that if he fired his employees so frivolously, he would be in for the same difficulties that New Jersey Transit should be getting into for this one.

Licenses for music venues

I’ve been hearing a few things, lately, about a push that the music industry is making to require places that host live-music events to have licenses for the music that’s played there. Here’s an article about it in the Boston Globe, and here’s a radio program that has the article’s author as a guest to talk about it.

The issue here is that if musicians play copyrighted music at a live venue, and the musicians who are performing don’t own the copyright, then the venue — not the musician, or maybe in addition to the musician — is responsible for any copyright violation. And when the copyright owners are the performance rights organizations (such as ASCAP and BMI), they are aggressively enforcing the rule, going out to small venues and shaking them down. To avoid trouble, these small venues — coffee houses, local libraries, and the like — have to fork out around $300 to each organization each year, just in case someone plays a song owned by that organization.

At one level, this sounds good: if I play your song at one of my performances, you should be paid for it. There are some problems with that, though. For one thing, if I’m playing your songs, it should be I who has to have a license from your company. It doesn’t seem that the venue should be responsible for that. For another, as you might expect, it’s mostly the PROs and the major songwriters who benefit from this. Small songwriters — the ones we’d all like to see get their due — get almost nothing from it, because, of course, the PROs have no way to know when someone happens to play your song in the South Salem Library in New York. They distribute the money based on expected balance, and a singer is much more likely to perform a cover of, say, an Eagles song than of one of yours.

Some venues have tried to insist that their performers do only original material, but they’re still getting strong-armed by the PROs, which say — correctly, I suppose — that the venue can’t be sure that the performers are complying with the demand, and if they might play covers, the venue needs to be covered.

That’s prompted some small places to stop having music, and that’s a sad thing. And I wonder where it ends. Square dance callers, who use recorded music and often call dances in school gyms and church social halls, have long had to have BMI and ASCAP licenses. But will the halls now have to get licenses as well? If so, will they refuse to rent their facilities to events such as those, which use copyrighted music? Whom does that benefit?

As I see it...

1. Demanding that both the performers and the venues have licenses from the PROs is abusive.
2. For the most part, performers should be the ones to get the licenses, since it’s they who are performing the copyrighted material, and they who are making the choice.
3. In cases where venues need to be licensed, small venues such as local coffee shops and libraries should be exempt.
4. If performers say they’re only performing their own material, no one should be expected to hold any licenses. Enforcement of this is as enforcement of anything else like it: the PROs will have to do spot checks, and challenge violations. They can’t be allowed to collect from everyone, just in case.
5. There needs to be a way for a performer to make sure the writers of the songs he sings are the ones who get paid from his license money. If I only ever cover songs by Bill Staines, say, then I don’t want Metallica getting my license fees.

The ethics of refills

While we’re talking about Panera... something came up in conversation recently, and I’d like to pass it by my ethics board readers.

When one buys iced tea (and other drinks) at Panera, one gets free, self-served refills. The question is how far free refills should go. I think we’ll all agree that if I buy a sandwich and an iced tea, and refill my tea halfway through eating my sandwich, that’s fine. And I think we’ll all agree that if I bring my own cup into the store, go back and fill it with tea without paying, and leave, that’s not OK.

But how long can I hang out and keep refilling without crossing an ethical line? Is it ever OK to leave and come back, and still get a refill?

If you have a general rule, or any thoughts on the matter, please post a comment. To give some, ah, food for thought (perhaps some cream of broccoli soup in a bread bowl), here are some scenarios, each pushing things a bit further. Where does one draw the line — realizing that buying another cup of tea only costs about a buck and a half, so we’re not talking about a huge issue here — between ethical and unethical behaviour?

In each case, I order an iced tea and...

1. I drink it in the store, then get a refill and immediately leave.
2. I use the Internet for half an hour, getting two refills while I sit there.
3. I use the Internet for three hours, getting many refills while I sit there.
4. I use the Internet all day, getting countless refills. The store never gets very busy, so I’m not preventing anyone from finding a seat.
5. I go to a store next door for five minutes to pick something up. I come back and get a refill.
6. I go for a one-hour walk, coming back to the store. When I return, I order a sandwich and refill my tea.
7. I go for a one-hour walk, coming back to the store. When I return, I refill my tea and use the Internet.
8. I go for a one-hour walk. As I walk past the store again, I drop in, refill my tea, and keep going.
9. I go for a one-hour walk. I walk past another Panera, drop in, refill my tea, and keep going.
10. I go home. I come back later that day to pick up a loaf of bread, and, having brought yesterday’s cup, I refill it.
11. I go home. I come back the next day for a sandwich, and, having brought yesterday’s cup, I refill it.

I have my own thoughts, of course, but I’d like to hear yours. My friend had a fine suggestion for resolving it: go to the person taking the orders, with your Panera cup, and ask... then let them decide. But let’s assume that you have to make the choice yourself; how do you choose?

Unfair use

Yet another politician has used a pop song in an ad without permission, and is being sued for it:

The singer and former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne has sued Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, saying he used the Talking Heads’ song “Road to Nowhere” in a Senate campaign ad without permission.

The song was used in an online video posted in January that attacked Marco Rubio, a fellow Republican who is one of Mr. Crist’s opponents for the seat vacated by Senator Mel Martinez. The governor is now running as an independent.

Haven’t these people figured this out by now? This isn’t the first time, nor the second nor third, that this has happened. It’s not the sort of thing that’s covered by “fair use” principles.

Do they, perhaps, think that they can get away with it because they’re politicians? Politicians seem to think they can get away with nearly anything, so maybe that’s it.

You say “unique” as though it’s a good thing

Today: my third (and, I think, final) thought on the “humans are unique among the animals” thread. [First installment here. Second installment here.]

In the first installment, I quoted Guy Consolmagno as saying that humans are unique in having “this curiosity to understand.” That made me think about what other aspects of our thoughts, personalities, and behaviours are unique, at least as we perceive it. Are we the only species that would be thinking about this, for example? Are we unique in thinking philosophically?

There are certainly many who think we’re the only animals with a sense of morality. One view is that morality comes from God, and that God gave it to us alone — some consequence of an apple and a snake, and whatnot, and then a fall from grace, and Cain being the first murderer, and such.

Do other animals have morality? If it’s unique to us, what, exactly, does that mean?

We appear to be the only animals who commit arbitrary acts of murder and violence against each other. A bear doesn’t wait behind a tree to attack the next bear that comes by. A zebra doesn’t find a family of zebras at night, and trample them in their sleep. Mobs of sharks don’t gather and attack other sharks whose skin is a different shade. And two male snakes who share a nest needn’t fear from other snakes who think they’re an abomination.

We use our “uniqueness” to exert control over other animals, including each other, and it seems we’re the only animals that do that — that tell others of our kind what they may and may not do, that imprison or kill others of our kind who don’t behave “properly”. In the animal kingdom, if you don’t follow a pack leader’s rules, you’ll be driven from the pack... but you’ll be free to go off and make a life on your own, in your own way.

We’re the only ones who will track you down and make you comply or pay the price. We’re the only ones who impose the behavioural norms of some on others — who fight wars to do so. And each of us has a different tolerance for different behaviours; each of us draws his lines in different places. That makes it particularly challenging when groups with different sensibilities mix.

If we’re the only animals who mistreat each other based on different appearance, different social behaviour, different thoughts and beliefs... that makes us unique, but it doesn’t make us better.

Ethics of copying for personal use

Randy Cohen writes a weekly column for the New York Times, The Ethicist. It’s usually a good read: Mr Cohen keeps an entertaining sense of humour as he gives his opinion on ethical points of everyday life. He occasionally arrives where ethics meet technology, as in a recent column that considered whether it’s OK to download an unofficial copy of something you’ve already bought a legitimate copy of.

Randy’s opinion? It’s illegal, unfortunately, but ethical:

An illegal download is — to use an ugly word — illegal. But in this case, it is not unethical. Author and publisher are entitled to be paid for their work, and by purchasing the hardcover, you did so. Your subsequent downloading is akin to buying a CD, then copying it to your iPod.

Buying a book or a piece of music should be regarded as a license to enjoy it on any platform. Sadly, the anachronistic conventions of bookselling and copyright law lag the technology. Thus you’ve violated the publishing company’s legal right to control the distribution of its intellectual property, but you’ve done no harm or so little as to meet my threshold of acceptability.

I fully agree with his evaluation. In fact, I usually take a strong stance against illegal copying. Arguments that content providers are money-hungry megaliths that deserve no accommodation hold no water. Observations that they are actually well served by “sampling”, because it ultimately leads to more sales (of other, related material) are useful, but not relevant. Reminders that there are artists who are happy to have people spreading their work around on the Internet are beside the point.

Because the point is that artists and content providers get to choose, and it’s right that they do. Wise ones will understand the benefits of liberal policies in this regard, and will embrace the technology. I’d be happy to see the rest go out of business. And, yet, it remains their choice, not ours. If they choose an antiquated business model, I’ll cheerfully wave goodbye and give my money to the more enlightened.

But then there’s the question brought up at least in the 1970s, if not earlier, when it became easy to make audio-cassette copies of recorded music. The arguments have been repeated many times since, with video-taping of movies shown on television, copying of rented videotapes, “ripping” and copying of CDs and then DVDs, time-shifting of television programs with DVRs, and so on. In fact, an entire technology — remember Digital Audio Tape (DAT)? — was derailed in the consumer market because of copy-protection issues.

The question of copying digital books is merely the most recent battle in a 40-year war between consumers and copyright holders.

The law is insufficiently clear, and has gone forward and back on the matter, but decisions generally fall in favour of the copyright holders: You generally can’t legally copy a copyrighted work, even for personal use, without permission.

But morally, ethically, when you buy — not rent, not borrow, not use over a common carrier, not view in a public screening, but buy — a copyrighted work, you expect certain rights to what you’ve bought, including at least:

1. the right to read/hear/view (henceforth, “use”) it whenever and wherever you like;
2. the right to lend it to a friend, who can use it and give it back when she’s done;
3. the right to give it away — or even sell it — when you no longer want it, transferring all rights of use to the new owner;
4. the right to keep using it indefinitely, essentially forever.

We can certainly do all of those with paper books. If you can’t sleep, you turn on the light, pick up your book, and read for a while. When you travel, you bring your book with you on the plane or to the beach. You can clearly lend the book out, give it away, trade it, or sell it. And it will always work: you can read it over and over, as long as you want, until the pages fall out.

But different media technologies allow increasing restrictions. Music files that you buy on the Internet may only be playable on the computer you bought them on, and might not be transferrable to another. You might be able to play things on an iPod, but not another brand of music player. You can’t always lend or give things to your friends, and there might be time limits on your own use.

These restrictions have no ethical validity. They’re mostly trying to protect the copyright holders from things they have reasonable rights to want to prevent — copying the material in a way that allows multiple people to use a single purchase simultaneously. But those protection mechanisms cause collateral problems with ethically legitimate uses — even if not strictly legally legitimate, because, as Randy says, the laws lag the technology.

What makes is worse, though, is when it is not accidental: when copyright holders intentionally take advantage of that lag to assert rights that they should not have, to limit use in unethical ways, simply because they can, and because they see an opportunity there.

An opportunity to sell multiple copies of a book to the same consumer, by releasing the digital version later than the paper one. An opportunity to use DVD region coding to prevent discs purchased in Europe from being used in North America. An opportunity to make fans replace their music libraries over time because of how the digital-rights-management software works.

An opportunity to mistreat their customers.

The best we can do when we see that happening is take our business elsewhere. As I said above, wave goodbye and give our money to the more enlightened.

Dominion, part 2

Last week, I noted a comment about an aspect of uniqueness of humans among animals, and I said that it brought up a number of thoughts. Here’s another.

I said this on Thursday:

We want to believe that we’re unique. Dr Consolmagno’s religious learning has taught him that God created us specially, created us in his image. That he gave us dominion over the animals, and so on.

Whether you believe that it’s God’s plan or not — I don’t, as you’ll know if you’ve been reading these pages for a while — it’s clear that we do have some sort of “dominion” over animals. We have the ability, with our intelligence and use of tools, mostly to be in control. We hunt and farm and keep pets, all with efficiency that surpasses what other animals can do in general. We even bring other animals in to help us, as with dogs for hunting and herding. We are the prey of no large animal.^[1]

So what are our moral and ethical responsibilities? We can use animals for pretty much any purpose we like. Should we? Should we use them as workers? Should we keep them as pets. Should we hunt and farm them? Should we use their products (eggs, milk, honey, wool... leather)? Should we eat them?

That’s where I have very mixed feelings. On the one hand, I think we should treat them compassionately and respectfully, and not mistreat them. If we have them work with us, we should treat them well and reward them for their work. If we farm them, we should do it responsibly, keeping them in good living conditions that are comfortable for their species.

On the other hand, I think that our bodies are made to eat animals. We come with the means to do it, and we need the proteins they provide. That many of us have a choice in that matter is a testament to where our intelligence and tool use has brought us... and there are people in many parts of the world who do not have a choice: it’s absolutely necessary for some people to eat animals, and use their skins and other products, in order to survive.

Of course, for those of us tho do have the choice, the question of what choice to make remains open.

And I admit to some inconsistency, some hypocrisy, in that regard. I’m willing to eat animals, but I couldn’t kill them myself (I neither hunt nor fish). And factory farming bothers me a great deal. I was driving through Delaware once, and I followed, for a while, a truck carrying live chickens. They were in tiny cages, stacked up on the truck, and their feathers were being blown all over the place by the wind whipping through, because the truck was going 50 miles per hour and the cages were not well covered. That made me feel very bad about how the chickens I eat (or whose eggs I eat; I’m not sure which these were) are treated.

I choose to wear leather, but not, say, ermine or sable. Is there really a difference? Maybe: we eat cows, and we also use the skins, so the leather can be thought of as a by-product of food production. We use ermine and sable purely for their skins. That makes the difference for me. More inconsistency?

On the difficult subject of testing things on animals, I’m in favour of doing that testing before we use the products on humans. That does mean that I put people ahead of animals; yes, I admit that. Of course, I think we need to make sure the testing is done ethically. Humanely. But I’d rather have a furry animal be blinded because a cosmetic or drug turns out to be hazardous... than have it happen to a human. I do, perhaps arrogantly, put us at the top of a hierarchy.

But none of this is cut and dried, none of it is straightforward to justify, and I think about it a lot. I know that I could live perfectly well by eating and wearing only plants and artificial fibers. I recognize that not doing so is a choice that I make.

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^[1] Interestingly, that leaves it to the very smallest to prey on us: viruses and bacteria, tiny parasites, and such. Over those, we clearly do not have dominion.

Should we boo him off the stage?

Karl Rove: He was King George’s enabler. Does that make him the devil? Maybe.

Does that mean we shouldn’t be listening to him talk? Maybe. I’m quite sure I wouldn’t go hear him.

Does that mean we should prevent him from talking, prevent others from listening to him?

No.

Protesters heckled Karl Rove, the former political adviser to President George W. Bush, off the stage at a book-signing event on Monday in Beverly Hills. About 100 Rove supporters watched as Jodie Evans, the co-founder of the antiwar group Code Pink, walked toward him with handcuffs, calling him a war criminal and saying she was making a citizen’s arrest. Ten protesters interrupted the talk as he promoted his book, “Courage and Consequence: My Life As a Conservative in the Fight.” There were no arrests.

I like the citizen’s arrest bit — that’s clever and appropriate. And it’s appropriate to protest at his speech. But the protest must not go so far as to stop him from speaking. That’s wrong. That’s not the way we do things.

Now, it doesn’t say what the hecklers did, what the audience did, what the organizers did, or what Mr Rove did. It doesn’t say why he left the stage. If his skin just wasn’t thick enough to push through the protest, that’s his fault.

But if the protesters made it impossible for him to speak, that’s their fault. We need to make our points by having good arguments and being right, not by bullying.

Plagiarize! Let no one else’s work evade your eyes.

In case you haven’t been following the latest New York Times plagiarism scandal, you can get a good summary from ombudsman Clark Hoyt’s March 6th Public Editor column:

ZACHERY KOUWE, a Times business reporter for a little over a year, resigned last month after he was accused of plagiarizing from The Wall Street Journal. An internal review of his work turned up more articles — he said he was shown four — containing copy clearly lifted from other news sources.

Mr Hoyt calls for a full accounting by the Times, listing all the instances they turned up where plagiarism was clear, and telling readers what’s being done to address the situation in general, beyond the dismissal of Mr Kouwe.

For Mr Kouwe’s part, according to Mr Hoyt he expressed his own surprise at being shown what he’d done. It’s an honest mistake, he says, editing copied material in without remembering that it had been copied, thinking that it was his own writing.

I find this completely puzzling.

I’ve never worked at a news desk, and have never had the pressure, stress, competitiveness, and tight deadlines for my writing that Mr Kouwe faced, and that his colleagues still do. Perhaps it’s the pressure and deadlines that explain it. Perhaps when one is under that kind of stress, one does forget. And yet....

1. When I get source material, I keep it separate. And I never include it without attribution. Look around these pages: there’s nothing that shows up here written by someone else, unless it’s within quotation marks or in a <blockquote>. I can’t understand how a professional writer can carelessly mix up his own writing with copied material.
2. I know my own writing. Perhaps more to the point, I know what’s not my own writing. Once in a while, there’ll probably be something that could go either way, but in general I can just look at something and say, “That’s not mine; I didn’t write that.”

I want to believe Mr Kouwe when he says that it was an accident. I just find it very hard to. And, anyway, I doubt he’ll be working for any reputable news organization again. But what am I to think when the next journalist makes a similar claim?

In any case, dear readers, be assured that every sentence, clause, or phrase in these pages is my own, unless it’s clearly identified otherwise.

[Thanks to Tom Lehrer for this post’s title.]

Plagiarize!
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes.
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes.
So don’t shade your eyes,
But plagiarize! Plagiarize! Plagiarize!
(Only be sure always to call it, please, “research”.)

— Tom Lehrer, “Lobachevsky”

On security and scanning

The New York Times published, the other day, an editorial about the security system failure that allowed the underpants bomber to get as far as he did. The editorial addresses, in part, the “whole body scanners” that are suddenly in greater favour:

The machines have been criticized by privacy advocates. We’ve had some qualms, too, especially with early versions that showed the outlines of a naked body too clearly. But security officials have managed to blur the images and adopted other procedures that should allay those concerns. What is needed is a rigorous and independent process of evaluation for whole body scanners and other equipment — the Transportation Security Administration has 10 at some stage of development — to figure out what provides the best security at the most rational cost.

In the letters to the editor in response to the editorial, one Steven Cohen comments on the privacy issue:

To the Editor:

You express some reservations about the use of full-body imaging detection systems for airport security and have some “qualms” about “early versions that showed the outlines of a naked body too clearly.”

Are you kidding?

The mere fact that these effective body scanners are discomforting to some privacy advocates shows a sexual uptightness we must overcome when lives are at risk. This is not about voyeurism. It’s about deterring every choice of concealment made by an extremist. To raise our comfort level with trained airport security personnel examining our body images, we need to trust their professionalism, as we do with physicians.

Steven Cohen

I’d normally agree with Mr Cohen that our sexual attitudes and the approach to nudity in our society are silly and stuck in an earlier century. At some level, it’s true that we just need to get over it.

But there’s more going on here. There are consistent reports, more than enough to establish credibility, that those selected in the past for screening by these machines are disproportionately those whom the screeners would like to see naked (spelling it out, here: women with nice bodies). As it’s implemented on the ground, at the airports, by the screeners, it is very much about voyeurism.

As with all of these sorts of things, not all TSA screeners are, nor want to be, peeping Toms; surely the vast majority are not. And, to be sure, there are physicians who violate their patients’ trust, yet we must trust them in general, nonetheless. But the comparison Mr Cohen makes is inapt.

The “trained airport security personnel” are not highly paid professionals who’ve spent years in detailed education and supervised training with the goal of helping to heal people. It’s a low-paid job for which people off the street get minimal training before being assigned to an airport security queue. Despite my belief that most of them are well meaning and proud of the jobs they do, I’m sorry: I do not, in general, trust their professionalism, both because of what I see for myself and because of the reports of others.

As it stands, passengers have a choice between these machines or a “pat down”. Before that changes, and submission to the scanning machines is required, we do have to deal with the issue of voyeurism.

Buy the jar by the jar

I like to freshly grind a peppercorn mix, with black and red and green peppercorns together, and I go through a lot of it. I’ve found a brand that I can readily get, which isn’t too expensive, and which comes in a large enough bottle that I don’t have to buy it too often.

I just bought a new bottle, and to the right is a photo of the old bottle, on the left, and the new one, on the right (click to enlarge). It’s the same brand — they’ve changed the label, as they tend to do. But that’s not all they’ve changed. It’s hard to tell, even with them side by side, but the new bottle is ever so slightly smaller. And look at the labels: on the left, net weight 286 grams; on the right, 276 grams. They’ve given me 3.5% less product, along with some 5% increase in the price of the package — an effective price increase of 8.8%.

I wrote about this sort of thing before, a little more than two years ago, but that’s long enough that I thought I’d mention it again. I find the ethics of it questionable, especially when the manufacturers seek to hide the reduction. Technically, they’re being honest: the package lists the weight of the contents, and they’re not lying about that. But they’re relying on people not looking at the numbers too closely, and they’ve designed the container so that you can’t tell it’s gotten smaller.

Indeed, when I bought the new bottle I was pleased that the price hadn’t gone up more than it had. It was only when I compared the bottles (and labels) that I realized it had gone up by more than I’d thought.

Abuse of representation

After talking, the other day, about the limits of representation, I feel I have to look at the other side: the junior U.S. Senator from Connecticut, Joe Lieberman.

It seems, indeed, that Senator Lieberman is on the other side, these days, no matter what side we’re talking about. So let’s start with a little history, which most of you will know. First, while he’s the “junior” Senator, he’s been in his seat for 21 years; he’s just junior to Senator Chris Dodd, who’s served eight years longer.

Joe Lieberman was a Democrat when, in 2000, Al Gore selected him as his running mate for the presidential election. We liked Joe then, we liberal Democrats, even while we had no illusions about his leanings. He’s always been more conservative than Senator Dodd, but he was on the right side as the Democrats were trying to beat George Bush and move the not-terribly-charismatic Vice President Gore into the White House.

But with George Bush in the White House instead, Senator Lieberman increasingly sided with the Republican President — most notably on the war issue, but also in other areas, such as most of the tax cuts (except on the very highest income levels). Lieberman’s stand on the Iraq war went against the interests of most of his constituents, and his popularity wavered.

In 2006, he was defeated in a primary election by Ned Lamont, a Connecticut businessman with an anti-war platform. Brushing that off, the Senator registered for the general election independently, promising that he was really a Democrat, and that apart from the war issue he would stand with the Democrats in the Senate. His seniority in the Senate, in addition to that promise, was appealing, and the voters of Connecticut backed him over Mr Lamont in the end.

Senator Lieberman did not keep that promise. More and more, he has been siding with the Republicans, blocking Democratic-supported legislation, forcing unfavourable capitulations and bill amendments, and, most recently, threatening to support a Republican filibuster against the health-insurance reform bill unless the bill is modified as he’d like it to be.

He doesn’t claim to be representing the people of Connecticut, but is following his own agenda in his own way. By overriding their own primary-election rebuke of him in 2006, they have, as Senator Lieberman sees it, given him free rein to go where he pleases.

And where he pleases is not pleasing, these days. If his demands are met — and it appears that they will be — we’ll have far weaker health-insurance reform that many of us would like, far weaker than many Democrats in the Senate have been working for. If we get a bill that does not have a public option, that’s partly due to Senator Lieberman. If the upper-middle-aged uninsured are not able to get coverage through Medicare, that’s due to Joe Lieberman as well, even though three months ago he said he supported that.

As Donna Magee, a protester from Baltimore, says in the NPR item, “I voted for him when he ran as vice president. And now he is completely turned the other way and is against all the things that we want.” Well, OK, it’s a little silly to say that you voted for him in 2000: you voted for Al Gore, and Joe Lieberman was along for the ride. And, too, you live in Maryland, not Connecticut, so you’re not one of his constituents. Fine. But Ms Magee’s statement is correct: Senator Lieberman has, over the last eight years, turned the other way, and is now, it seems, against all the things that we want.

And all the things that the majority of the people of Connecticut want, more to the point. He is not representing anyone. Perhaps the worst of it is that he’s taking advantage of his position as a “spoiler”, as the 60th Senator, who can swing over and support a filibuster, to force the 59 real Democrats to accede to his demands. That’s truly abusing his position and violating the trust the voters of Connecticut put in him in 2006.

And, alas, it won’t be until 2012 that they can vote him out. The Senate Democrats can, though, take away privileges, such as his chairmanship of the Homeland Security committee (a position they actually gave him after he left the Democratic fold). Harry Reid, it’s down to you; stop rolling over for Joe.

The limits of representation

There’ve been a couple of setbacks to marriage equality in the northeast U.S. recently. Thursday’s planned vote in the New Jersey state Senate was postponed, and the New York state Senate’s vote a week earlier shot down our state’s proposal by a vote of 38 to 24. The New York state Senate comprises 32 democrats and 30 republicans; all republicans and eight democrats voted against the bill. This is the third time the state Assembly has sent such a bill to the Senate.

One of the eight democrats who helped vote it down is Joe Addabbo, a first-term senator who represents a conservative district in Queens. Much of Senator Addabbo’s district identifies as Catholic, a group that tends to disfavour the idea of same-sex marriage. Even so, GLBT groups campaigned hard for Senator Addabbo, hoping for an ally on gay rights issues, and his vote is widely viewed as a betrayal.

Local talk-show host Brian Lehrer had Senator Addabbo on his radio program two days later, giving the senator a chance to explain his vote. Here’s how he began, at about a minute and a half into the audio:

[...] but at no point did I ever say “yes”. I always promised all, both advocates of the bill, proponents, as well as opponents of the bill that I would keep an open mind. And up to the vote, nobody in the media, and very, very few of my elected-official colleagues, and very few of my constituents, if any, knew of my position.

The reason being, it was my intention to keep an open mind, and by doing so, I felt that I would get a clear indication of where my district stands on this issue. If I was to say that I was against the bill early on, then the only people I would hear from were those who were for it. Conversely, if I said I was for the bill, then the only people I would hear from were those who were... be against it.

Because, I didn’t indicate either way, I feel that of the over 400 emails, faxes, phone calls, conversations that I had with constituents, the 74% who said that they would not want their state senator to vote for this bill was a clear indication where my district was on this issue. And when I took my oath in January to become a state senator, it was to represent the people of the 15th senatorial district, and certainly when you have a clear consensus of the people of the district on a certain issue, that’s the way I think an elected official has to go.

Now, in a post in November I noted that senators, members of the state assembly, and the like “represent their wards, districts, and states in legislative bodies, and it’s they who are expected to fairly represent the needs of their constituents,” so I get what Senator Addabbo is saying, here. So, is he being straight (um...) with us, or is he being disingenuous? Are there limits to representation? Is there a point where the representative’s own moral and ethical sense should kick in and override what he thinks his constituents want? Or is he obliged always to vote as the collective mind of his public?

Brian Lehrer tries to tease that out with a question, but the senator goes nowhere with it:

Lehrer: But if 74% of your callers said to deport all the Hispanics in your district, would you vote for that?

Addabbo: I think it’s a different issue, it’s apples and oranges. Each issue is very different, and certainly, as an elected official, I am the voice of the people of my district, in Albany. And certainly, we take issue by issue.

Lehrer: This is the basis on which to base a vote on civil rights?

Addabbo: You know what?: This is an issue that people have a strong opinion on, and with marriage equality it’s like the spokes of a wheel, there are conversations that you can have on this issue on many levels. Whether it be on the civil rights issue, on the religious issue, on the morality issue. It’s different issues, and it’s different for everyone. And I understand the magnitude of the issue and I understand what it meant to a lot of people... many of those people who had supported me. But, like I said, it makes me be put in a very serious situation, when I have to represent a district, and be their voice in Albany.

But it’s not “apples and oranges”; this is a serious point. How far would the senator take his — admittedly laudable — calling to fairly and rigorously represent his district, even by going against his own views to do so? The senator (probably wisely) refuses to say.

But what’s alarming, here, is that he’s now brought religion into the political arena, as he talks about the spokes of a wheel. One spoke is civil rights, another is religion, another (is it really another, or mostly an aspect of the second?) is morality. As I look at it from the point of view of how our government should be run, I don’t see the religious aspect as being relevant.

We can bring it partially into relevance, though, by saying that he isn’t making his decision based on religion, but based on the opinions of his constituency, and it’s their opinions that are rooted in religion. Can we really question people’s motivations for their stands, and only give credence to those that don’t emanate from piety? Is that reasonable, or even possible?

But when Mr Lehrer pushes one more time for some clue about where the limits to strict representation lie, Senator Addabbo’s answer, still not committing to anything, but telling in its lack of commitment, brings his whole point crashing down:

Lehrer: Do you consider this a civil rights issue?

Addabbo: I can see that argument. I can see the religious argument. I can see the morality argument. Again, I can see the argument on many levels. This issue has that many levels to it.

Lehrer: Do you believe personally that gay marriage should be legal?

Addabbo: You know what?: I’ve always kept my feelings personal, because I am but one opinion. And it’s really an issue that I don’t have strong convictions on either way. That’s why I did keep an open mind, I felt I was most neutral up until the end.

It was that statement that first had me understand that what he’s really doing is hiding behind his constituents on what is, city-wide, an unpopular vote. And the longer he talked, the more clear that became. By doing that, he hopes to have it both ways: he voted his mind, and he can say, “But don’t blame me; I was only doing my constituents’ bidding. Isn’t that what I was elected to do?”

Even as a public representative, one has also been elected to lead. Sometimes one has to take a stand — for civil rights, for public health and safety, for the good of the environment, for the well being of society as a whole — that’s not in line with what the residents of one’s own district want. In any case, whether it is or it isn’t, one should own the decision, and not pass it off with, “It’s them! They made me do it!”

Can they use those logos?

I was having a burger the other day, and I looked up at the TV above the restaurant’s bar. It was playing a campaign ad for Jon Corzine.

That’s the big New Jersey gubernatorial campaign: incumbent Jon Corzine is being challenge by sleazebucket Chris Christie, and both sides are running hugely negative attack campaigns — politics as even more disgusting than usual. Several of Governor Corzine’s ads use quotes from the newspapers to blast Mr Christie; there’s an example over there on the right, from the ad I saw (click to enlarge).

Earlier in the ad, they took other New York Times quotes, simply tagging them as being from the Times. But for this one, they used the logo. Did they get permission for that? I doubt it. I’m not a lawyer, but I also doubt that it’s covered by fair use.^[1]

It’s unlikely, of course, that the Times would sue Mr Corzine for it, but that fact doesn’t make the use proper.

Lots of people who put together business presentations like to stick in a slide or two with company logos all over them, to represent the companies that use the technology or products or services described, who belong to the subject organization, or whatever. There’s an example on the right (click it to go the page whence it came, as long as the page continues to exist).

Again, they almost always do not have permission to use the logos. Such permission isn’t given lightly, at least not by big companies, and it’s a very different thing to use the company’s name, and to use its logo. IBM, for instance, is very picky about the use of the logo, requiring it to be rendered just so, in the right size, with the right colours, against the right background, and so on. Even employees have to apply for permission to use it except in certain pre-approved manners (as with company-distributed PowerPoint templates).

I’ve always refused to use slides like that — sometimes to the scoffing of my colleagues, who preferred the snazzier, logo-filled slide to my mundane list of names.

Am I just being too much of a good Do-Bee? I don’t think so. I think companies have a right not to have their logos used in someone’s advertising, sales pitches, or even technical presentations.
 

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^[1] This, on the other hand, is.

Giving due credit

I just put a selection of photos from the Grounds for Sculpture up on Picasa.[1] As I was doing the captions for the photos, which identify the sculptures in each photo and their artists, I also looked around at other people’s photos from the park. And I noticed something:

Most people don’t care about identifying works of art and giving credit to the artists.

Most of the photos I found were entirely unidentified — no title or caption at all. Most of the others just said things like, “sculpture”, and “another sculpture”. A few put obvious descriptive phrases on them, or whimsical names the photographer made up. Philip Grausman’s “Leucantha” would be called “Woman’s Head”. J. Seward Johnson’s “First Ride” was “Bike Sculpture”, and his “On Poppied Hill” got labelled “The lady on the hill.” Johnson’s “King Lear” was called “Jesus” in one photo, and someone called Bruce Beasley’s “Dorion” a “Space Age Bug”.

Occasionally, when someone did label the photo with a proper title, it was misidentified — one photo had Alexander Liberman’s “Entwined III” labelled as the nearby “Shiva” (by Larry Steele) — but that’s understandable, because the map you get is too small, and when you’re going through it afterward it’s often hard to exactly peg each piece. At least that person tried.

Yes, it’s some bit of trouble to do the labelling, and to get it right.[2] But it’s important. The artists deserve the credit for the work they did, and if you like it enough to put it on the Internet, the artist should get the props for it. Also, when people see your photos and like what they see, a proper caption helps them find other works by the same artist.
 

On a related note, the morning DJs on a local radio station occasionally have call-in contests, wherein the first caller to answer a question wins tickets to some event. One morning, some years ago, the quiz was to identify a song lyric. The caller correctly named the song as “Reason to Believe”, and the DJ added, “Yes, by Rod Stewart.” I sent email.

If you play a clip of Rod Stewart singing the song, saying it’s Rod Stewart is quite proper. If you quote the lyrics, though, Rod had nothing to do with it: the songwriter was the late Tim Hardin, who also wrote the well known songs “Don’t Make Promises” and “If I Were a Carpenter”. Hardin lived a hard enough life, and a short one, and, to honour his memory, he deserves the credit for what he wrote. Too often, we mis-attribute the words to the singer, especially these days when so many songwriters do sing their own songs.

Let’s try to give due credit.
 

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[1] Here’s the GfS offical site, and my earlier blog post in these pages.

[2] And, yes, I posted one photo that’s not identified, because I couldn’t identify it. I will do on my next visit, which will be soon, and I’ll update the Picasa album then. There’s a second one that I don’t think I ever will identify: it was part of a temporary exhibit. I’m going to see if the park has a list of the temporary exhibits in the past, and can identify the piece for me. Of course, if any readers can name either one, please leave comments here.

Scientific garbage: enablers

In Cross-checks on ethics, I wrote about how well-meaning journals and conferences can miss ethics violations that include rigging experiments, making up data, padding the co-author list, and other cheats of that sort. Legitimate publishers of scientific studies and data can only go so far in validating what they’re asked to publish, and sometimes bogus papers get through.

There’s another side to the bogus-publication coin, though: the enablers. These are the journals and conferences that specialize in providing a forum for questionable — or downright garbage — studies and research reports.

At the questionable end are studies whose funding causes conflict-of-interest concerns, ones lacking rigorous methodology, and ones with insufficient data to deduce anything from the results. These problems usually are caught during peer review, if the papers are otherwise honestly written, and the top journals and conferences reject them. It’s easy to see how students, research faculty, and professors, living in a publish-or-perish environment, look to less reputable outlets for their work.

We’ve recently heard that Elsevier colluded with Merck — the pharmaceuticals company that made Vioxx, and that makes Fosamax, Vytorin, and Zocor — to produce a fake journal, one that looks like a peer-reviewed publication, but isn’t:

An “average reader” (presumably a doctor) could easily mistake the publication for a “genuine” peer reviewed medical journal, he said in his testimony. “Only close inspection of the journals, along with knowledge of medical journals and publishing conventions, enabled me to determine that the Journal was not, in fact, a peer reviewed medical journal, but instead a marketing publication for [Merck’s Australian subsidiary].”

In fact, soon after that it came out that Elsevier had a whole series of such “journals”:

Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship, the company has admitted.

This was particularly disturbing because of Elsevier’s reputation, and the extent of their publication world. But they aren’t the only outlet for dicey data. For years, now, there have been publications that will accept your work for a fee. That makes these pay-to-publish “journals” places where you can take that paper that’s been rejected everywhere else, and make it count on your résumé.

As I've participated in peer reviews, I’ve seen papers with no substance, and papers that are so far off topic as to be ridiculous (a mechanical engineering paper submitted to a computer science conference, for instance). Some people will submit anything anywhere, in the hope of getting something published.

But publications with no standards are... well, check this out:

So [Philip] Davis teamed up with Kent Anderson, a member of the publishing team at The New England Journal of Medicine, to put Bentham’s editorial standards to the test. The pair turned to SCIgen, a program that generates nonsensical computer science papers, and submitted the resulting paper to The Open Information Science Journal, published by Bentham.

The paper, entitled “Deconstructing Access Points” made no sense whatsoever, as this sample reveals:

In this section, we discuss existing research into red-black trees, vacuum tubes, and courseware [10]. On a similar note, recent work by Takahashi suggests a methodology for providing robust modalities, but does not offer an implementation [9].

And, yet, the paper was accepted, and The Open Information Science Journal would publish it for an $800 fee, “to be sent to a PO Box in the United Arab Emirates.” The director of publications claims that they knew it was bogus and were just trying to smoke the author out by pretending to accept the paper. That excuse seems unlikely, though I would believe that they’d have taken his $800, had he sent it, and then thrown the paper out.

The article goes on to mention the infamous World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI).[1] That conference, devised by Nagib Callaos (who claims to be a retired professor), and now in its 13th successful year, is basically a conference with no focus and no standards — and, hence, no standing — that exists for the purpose of making money by attracting participants. Speakers must pay the meeting fee to attend, which is what feeds the conference.

Most conferences expect speakers to pay the meeting fee, but what’s different here is the number of people they try to suck in, and the fact that they only allow each speaker to present one paper, and charge an extra fee (see here) if a speaker wants to present a second paper (for example, that of a colleague who didn’t have the money to travel to the conference). I know of no reputable conference that does that.

Other clues about WMSCI are these:

• The peer review process includes a provision for a “non-blind” review in which the author selects the reviewers (see item number 2 here).
• The enormous “program committee” — 284 members (see here). Normally, that’s the list of peer reviewers, but in this case it’s artificially inflated by the inclusion of, essentially, everyone who’s ever agreed to participate in the conference (and probably some who haven’t). It’s nice of Callaos, though, that he claims to have removed “those who manifested no interest.”
• The absence from the program committee of institutions that are respected in the field. There are no PC members from Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, or Georgia Tech, for example. But there is one from Quinnipiac University, a small school in Connecticut that has no doctoral program in Computer Science.[2]
• The unbounded scope (see here) leaves no topic behind. The conference covers everything from user interfaces to information retrieval to object-oriented programming to ethics and computer crime to security and privacy and hacking to artificial intelligence to computer graphics to wireless networks to gaming to....
• The lack of sponsorships from reputable companies and organizations.

A few years ago, in an incident similar to the one engineered by Philip Davis, above, the SCIgen folks at MIT got a nonsense paper accepted to WMSCI 2005, and planned to attend and present the paper with a nonsense presentation (see the “Examples” and “Talks” sections on the SCIgen page). They outed themselves, though and Callaos rescinded the acceptance. And David Mazières, then at NYU, submitted this paper to WMSCI 2005. According to his web page, “We never received official notification of whether the paper was accepted or rejected.” The figures are especially inspired.

Of course, silliness aside, these for-profit-only journals and conferences are a real problem, in that they serve as traps for the unwary. Someone reading a paper and not knowing that the journal isn’t reputable might base a major grant proposal on junk, wasting a lot of time and money and causing much embarrassment. And if you wound up having your paper accepted to a phony conference, would you, once you realized it, be willing to admit that you were hoodwinked. What would your boss, who paid for the trip, think?

Companies and schools involved in research know what the first-tier and second-tier conferences are, their positions decided by other researchers and based on the quality of the work presented and the selectivity of the program committees. In my field, the first tier includes, for example, MobiSys, Ubicomp, and CHI, among a host of others. Second-tier conferences and journals are fine, too — they just don’t draw the best research work as well as the first-tier does. The faculty at any research university will know what’s reputable and what’s not.
 

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[1] Please don’t confuse WMSCI with WMCSA, now called HotMobile, the International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, which is a reputable workshop.

[2] I don’t mean to disparage Quinnipiac University, only to say that its inclusion on a program committee for a real cybernetics and informatics conference wouldn’t be appropriate, especially considering the schools that are not there.