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OLDaily - Text Edition by Stephen Downes Feb 07, 2017
An Ethics Primer
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Feb 04, 2017
Many readers will find this section unnecessary, but for
many others the range and variety of ethical theories
extant may be new to them. It is my objective here to show
that a significant number of questions and assumptions in
dialogue around ethics are open for discussion. Ethics is
by no means a complete or closed discipline; it is a living
study that has been shaped and formed by thinkers from the
ancient world through to the modern era.
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Algorithms and insults: Scaling up our understanding of
harassment on Wikipedia
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I've seen this type of result before, but it's worth
reiterating. "Registered users make two-thirds (67%) of
attacks on English Wikipedia, contradicting a widespread
assumption that anonymity is the primary contributor to the
problem." The other two observations are also consistent
with my own experience of Wikipedia (and speak to why I
don't get myself involved in editing Wikipedia documents):
"Only 18% of attacks were followed by a warning or a block
of the offending user" and "While half of all attacks come
from editors who make fewer than 5 edits a year, a third
come from registered users with over 100 edits a year."
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Gavagai and TZQQA
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I thought this was a fun post. Quine's thesis on the
indeterminacy of translation is that in the case of a
radical translation - that is, a translation of a
completely unfamiliar language - we don't have sufficient
evidence to be certain of the meaning of any specific word
- 'gavagai', say - in the other language. What's amusing
here is that this theory is applied to teens' use of text
messaging. What does 'TZQQA' mean, anyways? "There is
nothing in linguistic meaning, then," says Quine, "beyond
what is to be gleaned from overt behavior in observable
circumstances."
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Next Generation Repositories
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The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR
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a part of its efforts to define a vision for resource
repositories. "The vision is to position repositories as
the foundation for a distributed, globally networked
infrastructure for scholarly communication, on top of which
layers of value added services will be deployed." the
current report outlines 12 user stories that help define
the functions to be supported. This is a draft for public
comments (which will be open until March 3). You can
comment paragraph-by-paragraph right on the web page.
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“Xenophobiaâ€
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You can split a lot of hairs by saying that 'xenophobia'
means 'fear of foreigners' and then saying you don't fear
them , you just want them treated differently. The
traditional Greek suffixes (-mania, -philia, -phobia)
doesn't seem to leave us any alternatives. But there are
some
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I like 'xenovilic', meaning 'one who vilifies foreigners',
for example, by treating them differently. So the Canadian
Federation of Students could say that differential fees are
'xenovilic' and avoid the brunt of Alex Usher's argument
(which is essentially say "no they're not").
Now it's true that xenovilia is popular
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worldwide
http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1302&context=facpub.
But should it be? Is there a good rational (morally
justified, politically economic, etc) argument to support
treating foreigners differently? Usher argues, "services go
in priority to people who pay taxes in that jurisdiction."
But what about infants and children, and the disabled, and
the poor, who pay no taxes? No, the "he who pays" argument
doesn't work. Finally, and as an aside, the goal of
international trade agreements is to eliminate xenovilia -
that is, to ensure foreigners and domestic businesses are
treated the same way in each others' countries. They do
this very imperfectly, and they do not extend their
protections to people, which ultimately is their Achilles
heel.
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
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