Climate Central’s States at Risk project analyzed historic trends in summer temperatures since 1970 as well as projections for future extreme heat for hundreds of metro areas across the lower 48 states. Using several measures, our findings show that most U.S. cities have already experienced large increases in extreme summer heat and absolute humidity, which together can cause serious heat-related health problems.
We found that scores of U.S. cities home to tens of millions of people will face dramatic increases in dangerous and extreme heat days by the middle of this century if current greenhouse gas emissions trends continue.
According to John Kryk of the Toronto Sun (h/t Seifert), the primary objective of the chips is to determine the prospective impact of shortening the distance between the goal posts. The NFL aims to measure how close extra-point and field-goal attempts come to the uprights.
The US does not enforce national standards for sex education and schools in many states are not required to teach it. Across the country, SIECUS estimates, only 50% of high school students receive sex education that meets the recommendations of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The other half of students receive anything from an incomplete sex education, to education that emphasizes abstinence, to abstinence-only education, with a focus on delaying sex until heterosexual marriage.
One problem has, however, dogged the drone program from the beginning: just like conventional air strikes, remotely targeted missiles and bombs tend to kill the wrong people. Over the last seven years, the count of civilians killed by drones has been mounting. Actual figures are hard to come by, although a number of nongovernmental organizations and journalists have done a good job of collating information from a variety of sources and offering reasonable estimates.
I’ve written on more than one occasion that women’s rights are the most important business ethics issue before us. These last few days, there have been a series of news stories that suggest changes are happening. There is a tremendous range here in terms of importance. For symbolism, I would point to the Miss Teen USA’s abandonment of the swimsuit competition. For importance, I would point to the Marine Corp willingness to allow women to access combat positions. And for sheer practicality (and it is about time) the New York City Council has voted that women will have access to free tampons and pads in schools, prisons and shelters.
Here is a list of five items with the links and short quote from each:
Six months after the Pentagon ordered all combat jobs open to women, seven female Marines are either serving in those posts or waiting to serve, and 167 are performing noncombat duties in front-line units, according to new data obtained by The Associated Press.
Female knights will battle against male counterparts at Bolsover, Kenilworth, Pendennis and Carisbrooke castles.
The grand medieval joust competitions see the knights on horseback, dressed in full armour and armed with a lance.
Traditionally, no women took part in jousting tournaments as all the elite knights were male.
But following in the footsteps of Game of Thrones’ Brienne of Tarth, English Heritage said it had made the decision to allow visitors to see the “most accomplished knights on the circuit”.
The new bill, which passed 49-0, will establish tampon and pad dispensers in the bathrooms of public schools with female students in grades six through 12 in an extension of a pilot program launched last year. It will also require prisons and jails operated by the city to give inmates menstrual supplies as soon as possible after they ask for them. Current prison systems for tampons and pad distribution vary widely across states and facilities, but in many places, incarcerated women are given an insufficient monthly supply or must buy products with their own limited funds from the commissary.
“Pinklining: How Wall Street’s Predatory Products Pillage Women’s Wealth, Opportunities & Futures,” details how sexism and racism are “increasingly exploited and exacerbated by Wall Street and the financial sector.”
The report, which was written by scholar Suparna Bhaskaran, shows how “Wall Street takes advantage of women’s precarious economic position and marginalization to push them deeper into debt,” in a practice Bhaskaran calls “pinklining.”
Structural sexism and structural racism make women and people of color more susceptible to pinklining, the report stresses.
It looks at three primary financial practices in which these inequalities are visible: subprime home mortgage lending, payday lending and higher education lending.
Teenage contestants will no longer compete wearing swimwear in the Miss annual competition, pageant officials announced Tuesday. Starting at this year’s event on July 30, the 14-18-year-old contestants will instead model athletic wear before judges.
The change is part of a commitment to “evolve in ways that celebrate women’s strength, confidence and beauty for years to come,” Miss Universe Organization president Paula Shugart wrote in a letter to the pageant’s state directors.
“This decision reflects an important cultural shift we’re all celebrating that empowers women who lead active, purposeful lives and encourage those in their communities to do the same,” she continued. “Our hope is that this decision will help all of Miss Teen USA’s fans recognize these young women for the strong, inspiring individuals they are.”
These stories vary in importance and impact. If we compare the Civil Rights movement of the sixties to Women’s rights today, we are struck by the substantive changes in the law for the first and the miserable to and fro actions of the law in regard to the latter. Suddenly almost overnight the law changed to protect blacks in interstate commerce but for women the right to equal pay, to contraception and even to avoid victimization is a grueling backwards and forward fight with no permanent victories.
But change is happening and I am heartened that in some sense progress is being made.
Below is a brief selection from a very good piece of writing from Slate magazine. It explains how a “reverse order draft” encourages teams to lose undercutting the competitive nature of the sport and simple elementary fairness.
The NBA’s anti-competitive incentive problem is reaching a critical level. One of the things a person comes to know from a lifetime of competing in tabletop baseball games is that a reverse-order draft can rip a league apart. Competitiveness is essential to competition: A league cannot survive with teams actively trying to lose. A reverse-order draft gives the biggest prizes—that is, the best players coming into the league—to the teams with the worst records. This creates an incentive to lose. In an eight-team league in which the futures of players are known, a reverse-order draft will destroy the league. In any season, only two or three teams will have a real chance to win. The other teams are best served by losing as many games as possible. What will happen in an APBA league or a Strat-O-Matic league is that you will have two teams trying to win wind up with records like 53–7 and 48–12, and then you will have four teams wind up with records like 11–49 and 16–44. You have a lot of games that don’t mean anything and a large number of meaningless games absolutely will destroy a league, whether it is a baseball simulation league or a league with real athletes and real fans and really big money.
Elementary business ethics would suggest that when two teams in a for profit league compete both should be trying to win. But under current rules, losing can be an advantage to a team because the lower their ranking the better draft picks they get.
This system encourages cheating. That’s wrong. Let’s have real competition and real games.
It should be an axiom of standard business practice to do no harm to your customer. Most people would agree that killing or injuring your customer base will damage your long term prospects.
Unleash the Pain Within
This weekend, thirty individuals suffered burns at a Tony Robbins seminar entitled “Unleash the Power Within.” According to press reports, there were some 7,000 participants so proportionally the casualty rates are fairly low. Nevertheless, I have been to various seminars over the course of my life and the burn injury rate has been very low.
There have been accusations that those who were burned were not in the proper frame of mind or lacked focus. I’m very sorry but being burned is a matter of science not faith. If you are exposed to a certain amount of heat over a long enough period, you will be burned. Most fire walking experiences involve brief exposure by walking quickly over a short distance on coals that have been allowed to cool.
Apparently, there is an idea that if you can do the “impossible” task of fire walking, you can shatter the mental barriers keeping you from success. Of course, if you are going to revolutionize your life in a three day seminar, probably some kind of dramatic activity is necessary. Three days out of your entire life is a pretty tight, small chunk of time. I tend to think that while you can change rapidly that it is better to focus on long term change such as mastering skills and new ways of thinking. Every day is a part of the process of change if you are thinking and learning.
What about expert advice and fire walking? Here’s a comment from a medical professional on the subject from the Dallas Morning News –
But a burn expert at Parkland Memorial Hospital says it’s no wonder five people were hospitalized and dozens more were treated at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center after the fire-walking session.
“Just don’t do it,” said Stephanie Campbell, the hospital’s burn program manager. “Coal-walking is not an activity that we would ever recommend. We don’t believe there is any safe way to do it.”
And from further down in the same article:
Campbell, however, said feet are no match for burning coals, no matter how focused the participant might be.
“The skin is our body’s major barrier against bacteria and fluid loss,” she said. “When it comes into contact with a heat source that is high enough to cause damage to the skin, it disrupts this barrier. … Full burns can actually require surgery with skin-grafting.”
Maybe we shouldn’t focus on short term revolutionary ways of changing? Maybe change is something we have to do to cope with changing circumstances and that change done with awareness over time may be healthier and more effective than the short term and dramatic? Maybe.
Whatever your feelings about change and the speed and drama of change, I think we can agree that all of us should avoid harming our customers.
The Tribune Publishing Company is now called tronc. Once again George Orwell is fully vindicated. Corporate speak has now dropped to such low levels of intelligence that company names bear strong similarity to minor Disney villains.
There is suspicion in some quarters that the name was changed to make a corporate buyout more difficult and I see the reasoning. Who wants to go their shareholders and say, “I just offered 425 million dollars for tronc?” It sounds like you tried to corner the market on a rare Malaysian spice.
This is the same kind of thinking that produces Hollywood sequels and short term profit seeking like stock buybacks.
Some people are amused – Tronc: The 30 best jokes about Tribune Publishing’s new name
What are the business ethics here? I can’t help but feel that taking a historical reputation that took a lot of work to make and turning it into a lame joke may be a dis-service and an insult to everyone involved. That probably constitutes a serious ethical violation. I also can’t help but think that when you can only talk in meaningless corporate jargon that the mental equivalent of five year olds have way too much influence in this economy and the larger nation around it.
James Pilant
From Around the Web –
On #Tronc, Journalism, and Its Value | First Draft on WordPress.com – 3rd solution
(I am starting to think one should always vet one’s corporate strategies through Twitter. Just throw ideas out there. See which ones immediately combust in a conflagration made of 4chan and Anonymous and Gamergate.)
I laughed along with the rest of them, but: I know good people at Tribune Publishing. Friends, and ex-friends, people I know to be decent whatever assholes they happen to presently work near. I know lots and lots of good journos, and they deserve better than to watch the place they put their hands and their minds and their blood and their days turn into a national fucking joke.
What’s in a brand? A tronc (Tronc) by any other name … | The Buttry Diary
When we announced TBD’s name, the Washington Post mocked it as “totally brain dead.” As though you should want a brand name the competition would like. Others liked it.
I may blog someday about the branding of TBD, but I’ll tease a bit now with some of the names we didn’t choose (that people actually recommended): WashDay, MonumentaList, IMBY. I’m serious. Branding isn’t easy (unless you already have a long-established brand such as Tribune Publishing …).
But here’s something I said when we were trying to choose a name for TBD (and blogged here when the St. Petersburg Times rebranded itself in 2011): The name doesn’t make the brand, the company’s performance in the marketplace makes
(Today is a guest post from my friend and colleague Steven Mintz, The Ethics Sage.)
Should College Professors Assign Papers to Improve Content on Wikipedia?
Should college professors assign Wikipedia content reviews and edits for course credit? It is an important question because traditionally most college freshmen are told that they shouldn’t use Wikipedia. It’s an unacceptable source for term papers and to assign students a project to check the accuracy and reliability of information on such a site makes me wonder whether professors in their ivory towers have lost perspective on what the purpose of writing is.
The Ethics Sage
In a recent example, students at Emerson College are responsible for Wikipedia’s “theatre and disability” page. The encyclopedia article on minor depressive disorder was revamped by a student at North Dakota State University. And if you ever look up the Wikipedia page on vaccination policy most of what you’re reading comes from a sophomore-level chemistry class at the University of Michigan.
It has been reported that more than 14,000 students have created or edited 35,000 Wikipedia articles as part of a program run by the Wikipedia Education Foundation. The three-year-old nonprofit, a spin-off of the Wikimedia Foundation funded in part by the Stanton Foundation and Google, is determined to convince professors and students that — counter to everything they have ever been told — Wikipedia actually belongs in schools.
In a L.A. Times article on June 20, 2016, Susan Alberts, a biology professor at Duke University who has used Wikipedia in her classroom for the last five years is quoted as saying: “It’s so much better than a term paper, from a student’s perspective. This way, when students write something, someone besides their teacher actually reads it.”
This sounds like a rationalization for a questionable act from my point of view. To say someone else reads it and mean the Wikipedia people makes me wonder what these universities get in return. Is there a financial relationship between those universities that assign Wikipedia projects and the Wikipedia Foundation?
Wiki Ed has developed a program that makes it easier for new classrooms to join up and for hundreds of classes to participate at once. The organization takes care of training students on Wikipedia’s expectations and interface. After that, it works with professors to oversee students as they draft, edit and submit articles, often over several weeks.
I dislike having someone from the organization that is the beneficiary of the writings review those writings as part of the editing process. I believe objectivity may be lost – in appearance if not factually. It’s like having an academic journal work with professors as they write research papers and later decide whether to accept them for publication.
The Wiki Ed website says their Wiki Ed program creates a world where any learner can contribute to open scholarship and education for all and that writing for Wikipedia challenges students into analyzing and interpreting information for fairness, accuracy, and reliability.
I doubt the claim that scholarship improves mainly because, as a professor, I don’t see updating Wikipedia information for accuracy and completeness as a scholarly activity. There is no meaningful analytical dimension to such assignments. Divergent ideas on a subject matter are not analyzed for their relationships. Persuasive arguments are not made. This is the essence of creative writing. By its very definition it is not a creative exercise because the thoughts come initially from content on Wikipedia, not from the minds of the students.
Creative writing should help to stimulate “mental motivation” in which students complete a set of writing exercises that combine expressive writing with goal-setting. What is the goal of Wikipedia assignments? It’s a stretch to say it stimulates the minds of students as they go through the process of researching content they did not first identify. Instead, this is content already there. What meaning does it have for students? Perhaps they feel good about improving content on a major site that college students routinely use in their writings. If so, this is not enough to qualify for a rigorous writing assignment.
Other concerns that I have from an academic perspective are Wikipedia assignments should not replace traditional assignments where writing ability is a critical component of the grading process. In the end, Wikipedia assignments are geared toward adding or enhancing encyclopedic content. Contributions to Wikipedia do not contain original research.
To be fair, I suppose one valid way to use Wikipedia assignments could be to assign an independent research project that requires tight writing, neutral tone and relevant citations and then have students present their research in class. Students would write analytical papers and take that content and use it to update Wikipedia. Professors can then grade the paper and include a comparison with the updates to Wikipedia.
Writing at the college level is a process of writing, editing, revising, editing, re-writing, and so on. Writing pieces for Wikipedia fails to meet these standards although I concede that imaginative professors may be able to structure such an assignment in a useful way.
By Steven Mintz, aka Ethics Sage. Dr. Mintz is Emeritus Professor from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He also blogs at http://www.workplaceethicsadvice.com.
This You-Tube video shows men dumping barrels of what appears to be industrial waste. They say they’ve been told to do it and they will lose their jobs if they don’t. “God, forgive us.” One of them says as they dump the barrels.
A voice explains that they have been ordered to dump them and then burn the last two inches of waste material in the bottom.
It is clear from the context that the men doing the work believe they are being ordered to perform an illegal act. If my recollection is correct, the date they give is March 4th.
If any of my kind readers know more about this – please let me know.
One of the key things about ethics is the necessity of truth. There has to be a basic respect for the truth particularly in the form of facts.
One of the most basic human questions is, “what should we eat?” That query has been debated for all time and it is of vital importance. The more you get it right, the more likely you are to live healthier and longer and the more you get it wrong the more likely you are to feel bad and live briefly.
The Strange Truth about Fat
A classic example would the brief popularity of radium dosed health drinks in the early years of the twentieth century, one particular drink being on the market from 1918 to 1928, with the side effect of radiation poisoning which could rise to a fatal dose. We know now that this was a very bad choice, indeed.
But many of our food choices are not so easily resolved. Take the subject of fat. By conventional wisdom, fat is bad – you eat too much and you gain weight. But the conventional wisdom is wrong. The strange truth about fat is that it sort of depends on the circumstances. Read this from the Guardian section on health –
Fear of fat is misplaced and guidelines that restrict it in our diets are wrong, say the Spanish researchers who have followed more than 7,000 people, some eating 30g of nuts or 50ml of extra virgin olive oil a day while others were put on a standard low-fat diet. Their research, they say, should put healthy fats – from vegetables and fish – back on the menu, changing attitudes and the way we eat.
A couple of years ago, I began eating avocados and was shocked to read how much fat was in them but then my follow up studying on the subject indicated that while they did have a great deal of fat in them, this did not seem to translate into weight gain. This was a big challenge to my “fat bad – protein good” diet ideas of the past.
I’d been taught as a child that weight gain was simple mathematics. If you ate more calories than you burned, you gained weight. But now it appears that all this is conditional based on a number of factors.
I know of one diet where the benefits are concentrated on your abdomen, the Abs Diet. The concept here is that certain kinds of food bring fat to certain parts of the body but not necessarily to others. You eat the right ones and exercise and the fat changes locale.
Now, this is not my field and I don’t know and I don’t expect to know absolute answers to that basic human question, “What should we eat?” But I do know that science moves and that facts can change and that as, a thinking human being, I have to move with the facts.
It’s a vital moral lesson. Unless morality and ethics are discussed and reasoned through using the best and most accurate information possible we will ere and not do what is best.
In a way, the discussion of food is a microcosm of all other vital subjects. Some facts may be in disputer. Other beyond. There is and will be a great deal of controversy. And yet, decisions must be made and they will be imperfect as we lack total information. But we have a duty as moral creatures to act on the best information possible.
Our duty is not to be always right but to try to do right.
My Colleague, Jayaraman Rajah Iyer, Responds to the Ethics Sage
Yesterday, I posted a brief segment from The Ethics Sage’s blog post, The Ethical Link Between Our Beliefs and Our Actions. Afterwards I received the selection below from Jayarman Rajah Iyer. He tells me it is from one of his books and is copyrighted but gave me permission to post it as a standard blog post, which is what we have now.
Jayaraman Rajah Iyer
Please read the work of my distinguished colleague.
James Pilant
Dilemma exists because of the truth. Truth is paradoxical; it contains the opposite values. That’s why Truth is illogical. “Logic” means something, which doesn’t have an opposite, which is straight, which is not paradoxical. Truth is always paradoxical; and so it has opposite values, and therefore there is a moral dilemma.
Equation
When X^2 = 4, what is x? X = √4, going further √4 = ? √4 Ξ ±2. Ξ, is a symbol with three dashes meaning – identically equal to. Without this symbol Ξ, the equation is not accurate. In this equation X acquires two values that are not just equal but identically equal to +2 as well -2.
X acquires two opposite “values” and not opposed to each other. They are in the same plane. ±are two aspects of a single movement, like a pendulum. One second it could be sitting in one and the next at the other end. When we stand on the equator and look at North Pole and South Pole they are so far apart. But it is no different from a small coin having two sides head and tail, when North and South Poles are watched from the moon. Poles apart, true but Earth is a single indivisible unit. Genghis Khan and Gandhi are in the same plane but with different values. Both belong to the same species. It is like identifying left hand and right hand but they are part of the single inseparable unit. That’s the truth. Truth always and completely involves opposite values, and then only it can be truth.
Prof. Mintz writes: Q: “What are Donald Trump’s true beliefs? Does he love Mexicans and employ thousands of them as he says even though he will act to build a wall at the border and he disparages a judge with a Mexican heritage? What about Hillary Clinton? She seems to say one thing one day (i.e., supports the Trans-Pacific Pipeline deal) just to change her position on the TPP like a chameleon and pledge to veto it simply because Bernie Sanders adopted a position against it that appeals to the general Democratic electorate.” UQ
Opposite values give a clue. Illustratively: “I used to smoke 40 cigarettes a day, now I don’t”. There is something missing in this statement that could give raise to some doubts. When the person is found smoking a few minutes later one can get a reply: “I used to smoke 40 earlier, now I smoke 45 cigarettes a day”. The statement has a shortfall that none of the other reasoning would be able to dig out the truth. Inference would at the most, confirm that this person doesn’t look like a nonsmoker. If a person wants to make certain to the other person to communicate clearly, then he has to say: “I used to smoke 40 cigarettes a day, now I have given up smoking”. A clarity is clearly evident in the statement without any doubt. In the said statement: “I used to smoke 40 cigarettes a day, a. now I don’t and b. now I have given up smoking”, ‘giving up smoking’ gives the clarity for the opposite value.
Let us view the statement: “The fat Mr.X doesn’t eat during daytime”. Though Mr.X does not eat during daytime, he still remains a fat fellow. How? We guess that he must be eating at night. There is something contradictory about an individual not eating and still not being thin. Our guess that he eats at night does not belong to the category of inference. To make an inference there must be a hint or clue in the original statement itself. There must be a “reference” like smoke from fire, thunder from clouds. Here there is no such reference.
Donald Trump never categorically stated that he hates Mexicans. He only said he would build the wall to protect employment within. Trump said U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel had “an absolute conflict” in presiding over civil fraud proceedings against Trump University because he was “of Mexican heritage.” Does it mean Trump says all Mexicans hate USA?
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