CSEP Winter Break Schedule

The Center for the Study in the Professions will be closed December 24-January 1st during IIT's winter break. We will resume normal hours (9-5, Mon-Fri) on January 2nd.

Journalism Ethics: New York Post Photographer Takes Picture of Man on Subway Tracks

Yesterday, December 4th, a New York Post freelance reporter, R. Umar Abbasi shot an incredible photograph of  Ki-Suck Han, a man who had just been pushed onto the subway tracks at New York's Times Square Station.  The photograph shows Han facing the oncoming train, reaching up to the platform but unable to get off the tracks. The New York Post published the photograph on its front page, accompanied by the headline, "Pushed on the subway track, this man is about to die." 

Now, the incident has sparked a national debate, not only about why no one standing near Mr. Han tried to help him, but also about the ethics of taking and publishing this kind of photo.

Mr. Abbasi has defended his actions saying that he kept taking flash pictures in an effort to warn the train driver to stop in time. "It all went so quickly; from the time I heard the shouting until the time the train hit the main was about 22 seconds."

What do you think? Regardless of the actions of the photographer, do you think the New York Post should have published this photograph on its front page? Did the publication of this photo somehow convey a message, or was it just published for its shock value to sell newspapers?

For more news and different viewpoints on this case,  check out the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Post  and the New York Times,

You may also want to look at media codes of ethics or take a look at a post from the Poynter Institute on the ethics of this case.,

Congratuations to IIT's Ethics Bowl Team!

On December 1^st, IIT’s Ethics Bowl Team participated in the Upper Midwest’s Regional Ethics Bowl at Loyola’s Watertower Campus in Chicago. The team competed against 17 teams from 14 schools around the Midwest, answering questions from a panel of judges about a collection of cases the students have been discussing since the beginning of the semester. The team won two of the four matches they participated in, and of the two teams who scored higher than IIT, both are part of the only four teams who were able to go on to the National Competition The IIT team members are: Ed Feibel (senior, architecture), Kari Finseth (senior, architecture), Alexis Renk (sophomore, biomedical engineering), and Tom Waller (junior, biomedical engineering). The coach is Stephen Harris, Sawyier Predoctoral Fellow in Philosophy, and assistant coaches  Kelly Laas, Librarian of the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, and Rui Chen a first year graduate student in information technology and management.

The Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl is an academic competition with rules and procedures designed to model the best approaches to reasoning about practical and professional ethics. Created and developed by IIT Philosophy Professor Robert Ladenson, the IEB has spread to include well over 120 teams from all over the Unites States and Canada. 

Congratulations to IIT’s Ethics Bowl Team for all of their dedication and teamwork this semester, and an incredible performance on Saturday! The team will have its first meeting next semester on January 14^th during lunch in Siegel Hall Room 218 to informally discuss the cases from the National Ethics Bowl, and begin planning for next year’s competition. If you are interested in being a part of Ethics Bowl, please send an email to iitethicsbowl@gmail.com.

IIT Ethics Bowl competing in Upper Midwest Ethics Bowl, December 1st.

Come support the IIT Ethics Bowl team as they compete in the Upper Midwest Regional Ethics Bowl Competition on December 1st at Loyola's Watertower campus from 9:30 to 5. The team, who has been debating a series of ethics case studies since the beginning of the semester will be competing against 18 other teams from the Midwest.

Check out CSEP's Ethics Bowl website for more information.

CSEP Senior Fellow Michael Davis quoted in Forbes

CSEP Senior Fellow Dr. Michael Davis was mentioned in a recent article in Forbes Magazine called, "Memo to New SEC Chief: Ask the FAA How to Stop the Next Flash Crash." The article cites Davis's recent article in Science and Engineering Ethics discussing ethics and high frequency trading.

Privacy and the Professional Librarian in an Age of Social Media

One of my colleagues at Galvin just sent a me really interesting article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, "As Libraries Go Digital, Sharing of Data Is at Odds With Tradition of Privacy."  The article discusses the the growth of social media use in libraries and how this culture of sharing personal information comes into conflict with librarians' tradition of protecting patrons' privacy. 
 
This tradition, which grew out of incidents in the 70's and 80's where the FBI tried to figure out what scholars were studying by getting library clerks to reveal the reading habits of their patron,  led to the passage of laws in may states to protect this data. Librarians' commitment to protect the confidentiality of patron information has been in the American Library Association's Code of Ethics since 1939, and this commitment has only become more strongly voiced over time, with the 2008 code stating, " We protect each library user's right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or recevied and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted," in article 3 of the code. 

However, as anyone who has walked in to Galvin or another library knows, the use of social media is spreading, from the use of Twitter to connect with students and to share new book purchases, to allowing users to add their own tags to materials in the online catalog. If librarians did end up using patron information in the same way that Amazon or Google did, librarians could develop exciting new search  features that go far beyond showing what books and articles other scholars researching your topic have consulted, and who knows what else. 

Many libraries, as the article points out, have contractual agreements with Amazon that allow library users with a Kindle to check out books for free, and Amazon keeps track of what these patrons check out. So how far can we go in sharing user information when we have the aim of improving the library user experience? Is  librarians' dedication to  article 3 of ALA's Code of Ethics outdated, or is this a standard we should continue to uphold?

The Presidential Campaign and Online Information about You

Companies use your online searching history to personalize the adds that show up in Google and the New York  Times, and now, the Romney and Obama campaigns are doing the same, reports Charles Duhigg of the New York Times on October 13th. According to the article, the campaigns are mining data on individuals, and then are using this data to try and get voters to the polls. In the weeks before the election, millions of voters will get calls from volunteers who will be guided by scripts with detailed information about your life. They will ask questions about how you are planning on spending election day, how you plan on getting to the nearest polling station near you, etc. Later that week, you might find that someone has divulged information about how frequently you or your neighbors have voted in the past. The  thought is (and research backs this up), if you are asked questions about voting, or know that your neighbor or friend is going to go and vote, you might be motivated to also get to the polls on election day.

In the article, both campaigns emphasized their dedication to voter's privacy, but consultants to both campaigns said they had bought demographic data from companies that study details like voter's shopping histories, dating preferences ,and financial problems, put cookies on voters' computers to see what kind of websites they visit, and examine exchanges on social networks to see what issues they care about.

This kind of data mining is not new, just new to presidential campaigns. But it does raise some more interesting ethical questions about if this kind of data should be harvested and used for these kinds of purposes. Is this use better that using it for marketing purposes? Worse? The same? Let us know what you think.