Ethic Soup

Verizon Succumbs to Consumer Anger : Scraps $2 'Convenience Fee'

 

Yesterday, Verizon announced its customers would have to pay $2 fees for making payments via phone or online with a credit card.  Today, Verizon shouted a mea culpa and scrapped the controversial fee. About the quick, one-day, about-face:

VERIZON SAYS IT REALLY LISTENS

 "At Verizon, we take great care to listen to our customers," Verizon CEO Dan Mead said in a statement.

Uh huh. But, they sure do have short memories.

You would have thought that the big bananas at Verizon had observed what happened with Bank of America recently. Well, of course, they did!

CORPORATE ARROGANCE

But, corporate arrogance made them think they could get away with it -- charging a fee for every payment that subscribers make on their Verizon phones or online with their credit cards. But that's what they said was going to happen come January 15th.

PA School District Used Laptops to Spy on Students: Follow Up -- Privacy Lawsuit Settled

 

WORSE THAN PEEKING THROUGH A KEYHOLE -- Last Spring a suburban Philadelphia high school took privacy invasion to new heights when an administrator spied on students at home through the kids' laptop webcams. Good God!

The 6,900 students in the Lower Merion School District had no idea that the free Macbooks they received from their schools came with a surveillance program, supposedly to help track missing laptops.

SCHOOL SPIED ON KIDS AT HOME

Instead, the webcams were turned on through remote access to watch what some of the kids were doing in the privacy of their own bedrooms. Harriton High student Blake Robbins (pictured above) was disciplined by his electronic-snooping school administrators for what they thought they saw him do at home.

All this came to light when Robbins' vice principal, Lindy Matsko, advised him that the school had a picture of him "engaged in improper behavior" in his home. Lordy, Lordy! What in the hell was going on?

INVASION OF PRIVACY

Next came the big lawsuit for invasion of privacy. The lawsuit was settled this month. Who was the big winner? It wasn't the kids. 

 

School Secretly Spies on Students at Home with Laptop Webcams

IT'S AN INVASION OF PRIVACY and the outrage is palpable. School administrators distribute free computer laptops to all of its 2,300 students at Harriton High School in Ardmore, PA., a well-heeled Philly suburb. And then they use the laptops' webcams to spy on the teenagers when the students are at home.

It's hard to believe -- your school principal is a Peeping Tom, maybe breaking child pornography laws. And, it looks as if the Superintendent of the school district is lying to cover his own sorry ass along with the heinies of the high school's administrators.

AMERICAN EDUCATION IS A MESS

The American educational system slides lower and lower with each passing day and each news story of abuse by teachers, coaches, counselors, principals -- even school secretaries. I am truly amazed that parents haven't stormed the schools and school board meetings with baseball bats in hand.

If your kid is a student in the Lower Merion School District, you may want to have a one-on-one with Superintendent Dr. Christopher W. McGinley (pictured right). Advise him that parents -- actually no one -- believes his attempt at subterfuge. It's as if he shouted "I do not have a receding hairline."

First, more explanation of what happened, drawing attention that a problem existed.

U.S. Postage Stamps: Same Psychology as Casino Slot Machines

  

"EARLY TV MEMORIES"is the new collection of commemorative stamps issued this week by the U.S. Postal Service, featuring 20 stamps of classic television shows, popular 50 years ago during television's Golden Age. "It's Howdy Doody Time!" once again.

The 44-cent retro-style stamps tug at the nostalgic heart strings of Baby Boomers with photos of "The Lone Ranger," "Howdy Doody," and "Kukla, Fran and Ollie." The first-class stamps include images of "The Twilight Zone," "Dragnet," "The Honeymooners," "I Love Lucy," "Lassie," and "Perry Mason."

Nostalgia rules -- particularly when you are losing a lot of money and need to get revenues up. And, the U.S. Postal Service is losing billions of dollars.

At The Washington Post's Federal Eye blog, Ed O'Keefe asks if the postal service should devote so much time and money to postage stamps, particularly ones that commemorate 50-year-old TV shows, and at a time when it's losing so much money.

It costs around $40,000 to develop and produce a commemorative stamp, according to David Failor, the Postal Service's executive director of stamp services. Commemorative stamps generate somewhere between $250 million and $300 million for the Postal Service, said Failor. "...not nearly enough to make up for the billions of dollars in lost revenue," reports O'Keefe. The Postal Service's Failor added that the stamp program generates a priceless amount of free press and fuels the interests of several million "hardcore" stamp collectors, plus another 10 million to 20 million stamp "accumulators." 

Happy Pi Day Mr. Einstein!

   

Today is Pi day! Let's P-a-r-t-e-e-e !

 Huh?

Okay, you're not a math nerd. You haven't been waiting all year to spend March 14 playing pie-in-the-face with other math nerds. 

But, you should at least be aware.

Today is March 14, or 3.14, which is Pi. Get it? Mathematicians gather to party, celebrating science's most famous strange number -- Pi. And as fate would have it, it's also Albert Einstein's birthday. The party just got exciting.Time to get irrational.

NO FRACTIONS ABOUT IT, IT'S IRRATIONAL

Pi begins with 3.1415926535 ...ad infinitum without repeating. It is the figure obtained when the circumference of a circle is divided by its diameter, and it cannot be expressed as a fraction -- making it an irrational number. Computers have calculated it to more than one trillion digits past the decimal point.

It's fundamental throughout the field of mathematics. You can find it in the measurements of the Great Pyramid. Mathematicians have worked hard trying to find patterns in its infinite string of digits, convinced there is a message in the math.

IT Execs' Top Wishes: Workers With Ethics and Morals

  The top workplace skills that IT execs are seeking among both entry-level and mid-level IT workers are ethics and morals.Those are the qualities at the top of their wish lists, according to the Society of Information Management (SIM).

The results of an online survey with 231 respondents overwhelmingly cited ethics and morals as the traits the executives most desire when hiring IT staff. These virtuous traits easily beat out alternatives like communication skills and business acumen, according to the group which released the results of its annual membership survey at its SIMposium 2008 conferenceat Lake Buena Vista, FLA., yesterday.

Numerous IT executives reported their concerns about staffers doing "unethical things" such as circumventing security systems. This concern has made the issue of ethics and morals paramount to the IT executives, reports Computerworld.

Forget Computer Ethics: More Liars in E-Mail Than Pen and Paper

 MBA students represent our future business leaders. However, a couple of recent studies suggest our business culture will continue its downward spiral of unethical and immoral behavior. The idea that business execs are liars and cheaters isn't exactly news to many, particularly in the midst of the wall street greed that is bankrupting our country. But, some of us are trying to believe that the lack of virtue is still the exception. I mean, we're not talking about everyone in business, are we?

Well...don't get your hopes up.This is sad. Business profs at three universities -- De Paul, Rutgers and Lehigh --have found that MBA students lie a lot more, especially in E-mails. And they cheat. And they're ruder in e-mails.

"There is a growing concern in the workplace over e-mail communications, and it comes down to trust," says Liuba Belkin, co-author of the studies and assistant professor of management at Lehigh, in an article by Science Daily. "You're not afforded the luxury of seeing non-verbal and behavioral cues over e-mail. And in an organizational context, that leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation and, as we saw in our study, intentional deception."