Computer Ethics

English Articles of Computer Ethics

The ethical use of computers and other types of electronic information technology (IT) devices is known as ‘‘computer ethics’’ or ‘‘cyber ethics.’’ These concepts informally emerged beginning in the 1950s with the invention of mainframe computers initially used by U.S. government agencies, followed by colleges and universities. However, the term ‘‘computer ethics’’ was not articulated until Walter Maner did so in the mid-1970s. The ideas behind computer ethics involve complex considerations about how to behave properly—i.e., according to the laws, social customs, and moral standards of society—when using IT devices and information systems including the Internet. All forms of technology, including IT, used by people that allow people to access and use public and privately owned networks along with information should involve responsible use of computers, cell phones, PDAs, and other devices. For example, if a person uses a computer to access and share information over the Internet, he should do so in ways that comply with applicable civil and criminal laws and/or in ways that do not violate the rights of or harm other people. This, the essence of cyber ethics, can be difficult to achieve in certain instances. Today the ability to access information quickly online has created an ‘‘on-demand society’’ consisting of many people who frequently do not consider the possible harm they may be causing to other people.

The first users of computers faced many unprecedented challenges having to do with network access along with the use and exchange of data. As computer use and complexity increased, opportunities arose that allowed even more and comparatively unrestricted access to information via the Internet. Over time users were empowered with newer technologies and also were conditioned to access and respond to information in a variety of ways, according to their own interests, often with little adult or managerial oversight. Consider the modern practice of ‘‘flaming’’ that occurs when people disrespectfully interact with each other online. Frequently this happens when a person comments or posts something in a defamatory, insulting, or hostile manner about another person or organization only to have it negatively reacted to. Such online ‘‘shouting’’ can disrupt chat forums, blogs, and other online community exchanges, causing emotional harm or worse to people or organizations involved or named.

Computer/cyber ethics is a critical issue in modern societies in which millions of people now use many types of IT devices in their everyday lives. Cybercrime statistics along with an increasing number of research studies indicate that young people as well as adults do not behave ethically online, and that, beginning with a person’s earliest exposure to computers, he can easily become a victim and victimizer of other people.

Academic misconduct, piracy, cyber bullying, and other forms of online abuse and cybercrime cause harm in various ways, but what is considered responsible use of IT devices and information systems varies among people and situations. Not everyone, for example, believes that pirating music is wrong, even though it is illegal: while many young people would never think of stealing a music CD from a store in a shopping mall, they will use peer-to-peer networks to illegally download songs without paying to do so. What do you think about this issue? Can you think of other cybercrime issues or online behaviors that are controversial? Today society debates cyber ethics in areas pertaining to copyright and other intellectual property rights issues, the creation and enforcement of laws, formulation of public policies, professional codes of conduct, information security practices, software license agreements, and hardware reseller’s mandates, among other issues. Technology use struggles against regulation, with consumers, businesses, and governments all seeking to predominate over what constitutes the ethical use of computers. With no uniform standards on computer use, a few employment sectors and professional membership associations are creating their own codes of conduct. At the organizational level these frequently take the form of ‘‘acceptable computer/network use policies’’ and may be complemented with cyber ethics training. Unfortunately, the results amount to a ‘‘wild west approach’’ to cyber ethics, with conflicting interests among different populations and groups of computer users. In cyber ethics, there is no such thing as ‘‘model traffic laws’’ as exist throughout the United States when it comes to operating motor vehicles. All too often ITusers make up their own ‘‘rules’’ when using the Internet, which is the social equivalent of everyone driving any way they desire with little or no regard for other motorists.

The results of this lack of uniformity is that overall guidance on good behavior and best practices tends to be absent from users’ initial computer experiences and in their continued decision-making processes. Thus children, when first taught how to use computers or portable gaming devices, are seldom provided with age-appropriate instruction in cyber ethics. The same is true for millions of youth and young adults who may go through their entire educational preparation in middle school, high school, and college without receiving any cyber ethics training. Since most users of computer technology lack any formalized ethical instruction, it is no surprise that the social and economic impacts and levels of harm caused by cybercrimes are increasing.

As users age, their exposure, experience, and technical capabilities to engage in cybercrime activities increase. Lacking cyber ethics education along with instruction in information security and Internet safety contributes to online  victimization and offenses. In recognizing this, many institutions and organizations are providing guidance, information, and model practices and policies related to sound use of IT devices. I-SAFE, Inc. and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) are two nonprofit organizations that develop online instructional resources for teachers, parents, and youth that relate to using computers responsibly. Adults need to review the current information on technology and educate themselves on impact in areas of concern. For example, businesspeople and business owners need to understand their firm’s policies on the use of technology, or, if a person owns a business, he needs to ensure that he has a policy aligned with his corporate goals. Educators and government officials need to create ways to enable parents and members of the community to learn basic computer etiquette, and then provide uniform instruction options for students and others. To stay current on the issue, a person need only search the Internet on the term ‘‘ethical computer use,’’ ‘‘computer ethics,’’ and ‘‘cyber ethics,’’ or, where available, take a course having to do with the philosophy of ethics that emphasizes controversial online behaviors.

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Child Labor

English Articles Child Labor

According to the INTERNATIONAL LABOR ORGANIZATION (ILO), some 250 million children between the ages of Bonded labor is otherwise known as debt bondage or peonage. It is outlawed by the 1956 UN Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of SLAVERY, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery. Bonded labor involves a business transaction whereby an advance payment is made to a (usually destitute) family, who in exchange hands over their child to an employer. The amount paid may be as little as $15 depending on the type of work and the age and skill of the child. In theory the child can work off his debt, but in practice this almost never occurs; the child is unable to work off the debt, and the family is seldom able to buy the child back. Unscrupulous employers debit a variety of “expenses” or deduct “interest” from their paychecks, effectively keeping them in debt indefinitely. In some cases, bonded labor agreements are multigenerational, meaning that each generation in a family is obliged by the contract to turn over a child to an employer, often for no payment at all. As the child gets older, he or she may be freed but only on condition that another younger child from the family is offered as a replacement.

Millions of children work as bonded child laborers in countries around the world—15 million in India alone, where the practice has a long tradition. (If all forms of child labor in the country are taken into account, as many as 60–115 million children may be employed, the largest number of working children in the world.) These children, some as young as four or five, are put to work in fields, stone quarries, and mills or sent out into the streets to pick rags. Some work as indentured domestic servants. Their fates are grim: old age by 40, death by 50.

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Silent Reading

English Articles Silent Reading

Reading to oneself, without producing any sound or moving the tongue or lips. A relatively new technique of reading, in historic terms, silent reading contrasts with and has different purposes from oral reading, which is concerned with pronunciation, enunciation, voice control and communication. Until the early 20th century, students universally learned to read orally, because reading was the core of family recreation in the home before radio and television. As a result of eye-movement research just before World War I, silent reading was found to increase reading rates, reading comprehension and the ability to infer word meanings from their context. For several decades thereafter, silent reading replaced oral reading as the sole goal of reading instruction. More recently, however, most schools have taught both oral and silent reading, each of which provides students with different sets of essential skills.

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Schools Without Walls

English Articles Schools Without Walls

So-called openspace schools, with few interior partitions, allowing groups of students to work in separate areas of a huge, open space. An outgrowth of escalation in school construction costs in the decades following World War II. Especially effective in elementary schools, schools without walls are particularly conducive to team teaching. Seated in different parts of a huge room, on carpeted floors that minimize noise, groups of students and their teachers work on one topic at a time, and, when appropriate, a second teacher specializing in another subject may arrive to introduce applications of the first subject to a second subject. Groups of students will join or separate, according to what they are studying. In simplest terms, a group studying Egyptian history with one teacher would learn the plane and solid geometry of the pyramid from another, the origins of language and hieroglyphics from a third teacher, art from a fourth and geography and political science from a fifth. Various groups might work together or apart, according to a schedule of team teaching determined by the faculty.

From the construction point of view, schools without walls eliminate all costs of partitions and their attendant insulation and wiring. When needed, portable folding partitions, portable chalkboards and other movable equipment can substitute for all materials that conventional walls might support. White-taped “alleyways” solve the problems of student traffic flow during and between classes. OPEN EDUCATION, or open classroom techniques, that developed in preschools of the 1930s and 1940s, schools without walls provided enormous appeal to both progressive educators and to taxpayers and school boards eager to cut the escalation in school construction costs in the decades following World War II. Especially effective in elementary schools, schools without walls are particularly conducive to team teaching. Seated in different parts of a huge room, on carpeted floors that minimize noise, groups of students and their teachers work on one topic at a time, and, when appropriate, a second teacher specializing in another subject may arrive to introduce applications of the first subject to a second subject. Groups of students will join or separate, according to what they are studying. In simplest terms, a group studying Egyptian history with one teacher would learn the plane and solid geometry of the  pyramid from another, the origins of language and hieroglyphics from a third teacher, art from a fourth and geography and political science from a fifth. Various groups might work together or apart, according to a schedule of team teaching determined by the faculty.  From the construction point of view, schools without walls eliminate all costs of partitions and their attendant insulation and wiring. When needed, portable folding partitions, portable chalkboards and other movable equipment can substitute for all materials that conventional walls might support. White-taped “alleyways” solve the problems of student traffic flow during and between classes.

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Ornithology

English Articles Ornithology

The branch of zoology devoted to the study of birds. Like entomology it has a substantial hobbyist following, mainly because of the aesthetic appeal of the brightly coloured plumage that many birds exhibit and the fascination of their ability to fly. The observation of patterns of bird migration had a particular scientific significance in ancient times by assisting agricultural calculations; the arrival of a particular species in a locality was often employed as a signal when calendars were still primitive.

This utility undoubtedly assisted various bird species to acquire a reputation as omens, although the establishment of carrion crows and vultures as birds of ill omen had a more obvious cause. Various legendary birds were added to traditional bestiaries, including the giant roc, but the most important was the phoenix, which continually renewed its life by rising afresh from its own funeral pyre—a symbol of regeneration that guaranteed it frequent literary citation. Significant symbolism was also granted in the West to the dove, as manifest in its use by Noah in the aftermath of the flood, and the owl, as manifest in its association with Athene, the Classical goddess of wisdom.

Eagles eventually became significant symbols of empire and ostriches acquired an entirely unwarranted reputation for burying their heads in sand to avoid unpleasant sights. The symbolic potential of birds allowed them to be used in a significant series of allegorical literary works ranging from Aristophanes’ fifth-century b.c. satire The Birds through such Medieval works as a twelfthcentury dialogue between The Owl and the Nightingale, such Renaissance works as Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parlement of Fowles (ca. 1380) and ‘‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’’ in The Canterbury Tales (ca. 1387), such post-Renaissance poems as John Webster’s ‘‘Call for the Robin Redbreast and the Wren’’ (1612) and William Davenant’s ‘‘The Lark now Leaves His Wat’ry Nest’’ (1650), such Romantic poems as Percy Shelley’s ‘‘Ode to a Skylark’’ (1820) and John Keats’ ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale’’ (1820), such post-Romantic poems as Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘‘The Eagle’’ (1891), such moral fables as Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘‘The Ugly Duckling’’ (1845) and Maurice Maeterlinck’s L’oiseau bleu (1909; trans. as The Blue Bird ), and such calculated mockeries as Edward Lear’s ‘‘The Owl and the Pussycat’’ (1846) and James Thurber’s ‘‘There’s an Owl in my Room’’ (1934), to earnest fabulations such as Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973).

The progress of ornithological science made hardly any impact on this tradition, and remained overshadowed by it even in literary works desirous of offering more naturalistic accounts of bird life. The postal service role played by owls in the literary phenomenon of the early twenty-first century—J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series—testifies to the residual  authority of the symbolic tradition.

The domestication of various bird species was important in the addition of protein to the human diet, in the form of eggs as well as meat, and acquired a new significance after the invention of writing, when quills became significant instruments of inscription—a role they maintained until the invention of the steel nib in the late eighteenth century. Magical eggs and quill feathers feature abundantly in folklore, and hence in fairy tales, but literature took more inspiration from the fact that certain birds are capable of imitating human speech, as famously represented in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘‘The Raven’’ (1845). This equipped them for such purposes as forming courts to put humankind on trial, as they do in such literary fantasies as the second volume of Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’autre monde (1662)—an idea recapitulated in such twentieth-century works as Geoffrey Dearmer’s They Chose to Be Birds (1935) and James Blish’s Midsummer Century (1972), and tacitly echoed in such stories of *Nature’s rebellion as Frank Baker’s The Birds (1936) and Daphne du Maurier’s ‘‘The Birds’’ (1952; film, 1963). Satires featuring avian cultures, such as Samuel Brunt’s A Voyage to Cacklogallina (1727) and Anatole France’s L’ıˆle des pingouins (1908; trans. as Penguin Island ), also draw upon this resource.

Comparative observations of variation in wild and domestic birds played a crucial role in supplying Charles Darwin with the evidence he needed to support his theory of evolution by natural selection. The Origin of Species begins with a long discourse on the selective breeding of pigeons, whose mechanism is then analogised to the natural differentiation of the finches specialised for life on different Galapagos Islands. Birds also made a considerable exemplary contribution to the understanding of sex, not in physiological terms but in terms of their frequent sexual differentiation; male birds often have elaborately coloured plumage, whose effect is often further enhanced by elaborate competitive displays of singing, occasionally augmented by ‘‘dancing’’ and nest decoration; various aspects of this art of display are taken to extremes by such species as peacocks, birds of paradise, and bowerbirds. Speculative explanation of the genetic economics of brilliant plumage and elaborate courtship behaviour became a key factor in the development of sociobiology, but their analogical relevance to human behaviour was noted long before, elaborately depicted in metaphor and literature. Studies of birds also played a major role in the development of the behavioural science of ethology, particularly in revealing the role of psychological ‘‘imprinting’’ in establishing bonds between chicks and their mothers.

This too seemed to have some analogical relevance to human behaviour. Literary reflections of this kind of scientific research, and the potential for its confusion with human affairs, include Graham Billing’s Forbush and the Penguins (1966; film 1971 as Mr. Forbush and the Penguins). The most extensive literary use of birds is concerned with the mysterious mechanics of their flight, whose inspirational quality is extensively celebrated in poetry, as exemplified by Charles Baudelaire’s ‘‘L’albatros’’ (1857; trans. as ‘‘The Albatross’’) and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘‘The Windhover’’ (1918). It gave rise to cautiously modified hopes of technical mimicry, from the myth of Daedalus and Icarus to aeronautical designs of imaginary ‘‘ornithopters’’ and such literary extravaganzas as Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751). Images of winged humans often symbolise transcendent freedom, as in Barry Pain’s Going Home (1921), J. G. Ballard’s ‘‘Storm Bird, Storm Dreamer’’ (1966) and The Ultimate Dream Company (1979), Vera Chapman’s Blaedudd the Birdman (1978), and William Mayne’s Antar and the Eagles (1989); by the same token, the clipping of wings—often done to restrict the movement of domesticated species—becomes a striking metaphor of female oppression in Inez Haynes Gillmore’s feminist allegory Angel Island (1914).

Science-fictional images of birdlike aliens extend the various elements of this symbolism in a striking fashion, notable examples including Otis Adelbert Kline’s ‘‘The Bird People’’ (1930), Francis Flagg’s ‘‘The Land of the Bipos’’ (1930), Poul Anderson’s The People of the Wind (1973) and ‘‘The Problem of Pain’’ (1973), R. Garcia y Robertson’s ‘‘A Princess of Helium’’ (1999) and ‘‘Bird Herding’’ (2000), James Van Pelt’s ‘‘A Flock of Birds’’ (2002), and Carol Emshwiller’s series including ‘‘All of Us Can Almost …’’ (2004). In the twentieth century, several bird species became significant symbols of the dangers of extinction, largely because of publicity given to the recent fates of the dodo—ironically echoed in Howard Waldrop’s ‘‘The Ugly Chickens’’ (1980)—and the once-common passenger pigeon. The discovery of relics of giant birds in New Zealand—as featured in such stories as H. G. Wells’ ‘‘Aepyornis Island’’ (1894) and Gregory Feeley’s ‘‘A Different Drumstick’’ (1988)—lent further impetus to this symbolism, and the particular fascination of giant flightless birds was further represented in Robert Reed’s ‘‘In the Valley of the Thunder Quail’’ (2000).

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Franklin’s Academy

English Articles Franklin’s Academy

The academy founded in Philadelphia, in 1751, by Benjamin Franklin and his supporters, who espoused his idea of practical, free, universal public education. Chartered as the Academy and Charitable School in the City of Philadelphia, classes began with about 145 boys. The school was unusual (and was the source of some controversy) because it was the first academy open to boys other than the sons of the elite and because it all but eliminated theology as the central course of the curriculum.

The six-year curriculum was unique for the era, in that had it had three departments: English, Latin and Mathematics. English was initially given equal weight with Latin and Greek, the original scriptural languages and, therefore, central to all studies of the Bible and theology at elitist academies. The curriculum also included vocational courses on gardening, mechanics, commerce and science, and studies of history and government. Although Franklin later called his academy “a failure” because of traditionalist modifications to the curriculum, his innovations formed the basis of the modern, practically oriented liberal arts education that became the heart of curricula at most 19thand 20th-century colleges. Five years after it opened, Franklin’s Academy expanded its curriculum and changed its name to the COLLEGE OF PHILADELPHIA. In 1791, the year after Franklin died, the college assumed its present name, the University of Pennsylvania.

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