Over the Line: Ethical Issues in the Media Coverage of the Bernie Fine Scandal

On Nov. 17, 2011, sports media conglomerate ESPN aired a story in which Bobby Davis and Mike Lang, stepbrothers and former ball boys for the Syracuse University men’s basketball program, accused Bernie Fine, then an assistant coach for the Syracuse men’s basketball team, of sexually abusing them as children. As the story developed, the reporting methods used by ESPN and The Post-Standard, the daily newspaper in Syracuse, were put into question. This report looks at what these news organizations did in their investigative reporting of the allegations against Fine and analyzes whether or not it was morally acceptable. To do this, the report considers the accepted ethics of journalism to use as a lens through which these events can be examined, as well as articles and interviews, including those about the investigation and those looking at the reporting that went behind it. It concludes that while both ESPN and The Post-Standard were correct in not publishing the allegations when they were first received in the early 2000s, these media outlets did not act as ethically as expected at various points throughout their investigations

A decision support system to improve performances of airport check-in services

The recent remarkable increase in air passenger traffic has been fostering a considerable congestion of the airport facilities. In this context, traditional procedures employed for check-in operations have been supported by alternative methods, based on the use of self-service options (kiosks, web services, app for mobile phones, etc). However, even if such innovations are contributing to improve the service level provided to passengers, field investigations suggest that traditional procedures will be employed also in the future, especially for medium and long-haul flights, where baggage dropping is required. For this reason, the passengers allocation problem at check-in counters is attracting growing attention by the scientific community and several decision support tools, involving both optimization and simulation methods, have been proposed. Most of the available approaches aim at deciding the optimal number of check-in counters to be activated, in such a way to balance the operative costs and passengers waiting times. Such approaches assume that the service capacity (in terms of available check-in operators and counters) is given and determined on the basis of physical constraints (related to the available space in the terminal) and of staff scheduling decisions made at a tactical level. The present contribution tries to overcome this limitation, by proposing a decision support system, based on a mathematical model, capable of designing optimal check-in policies by also incorporating staff scheduling decisions. The model is tested on some real-world case studies; computational results are evaluated, along with the practical usability of the approach

Measurements of W gamma and Z gamma production in pp collisions at root s=7 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

"The integrated and differential fiducial cross sections for the production of a W or Z boson in association with a high-energy photon are measured using pp collisions at root s = 7 TeV. The analyses use a data sample with an integrated luminosity of 4.6 fb(-1) collected by the ATLAS detector during the 2011 LHC data-taking period. Events are selected using leptonic decays of the W and Z bosons [W(e nu, mu nu) and Z(e(+)e(-), mu(+)mu(-), nu(nu) over bar)] with the requirement of an associated isolated photon. The data are used to test the electroweak sector of the Standard Model and search for evidence for new phenomena. The measurements are used to probe the anomalous WW gamma, ZZ gamma, and Z gamma gamma triple-gauge-boson couplings and to search for the production of vector resonances decaying to Z gamma and W gamma. No deviations from Standard Model predictions are observed and limits are placed on anomalous triple-gauge-boson couplings and on the production of new vector meson resonances.