Using Debates to Teach Information Ethics

This experience report details the use of debates in a course on Information Ethics. Formal debates have been used in academia for centuries and create an environment in which students must think critically, communicate well and, above all, synthesize and evaluate the relevant classroom material. They also provide a break from the standard lecture-based learning environment. This report provides advice and suggestions to other faculty faced with teaching a course of this type, based on ten years of experience using debates as a teaching tool in an Information Ethics course

Developing a Predictive Model of Software Piracy Behavior: An Empirical Study

There is, perhaps, no more visible financial dilemma in the software industry today than that of software piracy. In this paper, we detail the development and empirical validation of a predictive model of software piracy behavior by computer-using professionals. The model was developed from the results of prior research in software piracy and the reference disciplines of the theory of planned behavior, expected utility theory and deterrence theory. The study utilized two methods to analyze the piracy decision. A survey was used to test the entire model and an experiment was undertaken to test several relationships between the included variables. The results indicate that the identified factors have a significant impact on the decision to pirate software and that the model is a useful tool in further understanding this behavior. The results add to a growing stream of MIS research into piracy behavior and have significant implications for organizations and industry groups aiming to reduce piracy behavior

Selection and Use of MySQL in a Database Management Course

This paper presents a case study of the selection and use of a software package for an introductory Database Management course in a typical MIS program. Teachers of Database Management face the challenge of providing their students with meaningful experiences with actual database software. The software selected for use in a database course can generally be categorized as one of three types: commercial enterprise software, such as Oracle or IBM’s DB2; personal database software, such as Microsoft Access; or software available for no cost (including open source software), such as PostgreSQL or MySQL. The advantages and disadvantages of each of these types of software are discussed, as is the selection process utilized in this specific case. The teaching approach examined in detail is the use of MySQL on a Linux platform to allow students to create, modify, populate, and query databases. This approach is shown to have several advantages: the software is available at no cost to the students or the institution; it is configurable and manageable by the course instructor without the need to consult specialized database professionals; it provides an enterprise database experience using Structured Query Language (SQL); and using the Internet, it is available to students from remote computers

Students of Government and Political Science in the Peace Corps

This a report about the importance and usefulness of political science majors to the Peace Corps. It is written from the point of view of a Mr. Bradford, presently completing his degree in political science at Swarthmore College, [who] prepared this report during the past summer when he worked as a summer staff intern at Peace Corps/Washington. -- [p.1] He writes on their usefulness in roles in community development, as teachers, in cooperatives, and in future endeavors

Development assistance and the lasting legacies of rebellion in Burundi and Rwanda

Abstract: Rwanda and Burundi have both emerged from civil wars over the past 20 years and foreign donors have provided significant contributions to post-conflict reconstruction and development in the two countries. Yet, although Rwanda and Burundi share several important characteristics, their post-conflict social, political and economic trajectories have been different. This article argues that the nature of the ruling parties in Rwanda and Burundi is key to understanding the countries’ relationships with donors. Rather than seeing aid as an exogenous factor, causing particular development outcomes, it shows how local party elites exert considerable agency over the aid relationship. This agency is influenced by a number of different local contextual factors, including how the parties were established, how they evolved and the ways in which their civil wars ended. Thus, the article provides an analysis of how local context matters in understanding donor–recipient aid relationships, and how the ruling party in Rwanda (the RPF) and in Burundi (the CNDD–FDD) emerged from their respective conflicts with different relationships with international donors

Re-Analysis of Plutonium in Autopsy Tissue : A Case/Control Examination of Nuclear Weapons Sites and Civilian Lung Burden

This research uses advanced statistical techniques to re-analyse the plutonium burden in lung tissue data from “Plutonium in Autopsy Tissue: A Revision and Updating of Data Reported in LA-4875” by McInroy et al. (1979).1 The use of a general linear model has produced new preliminary findings whose potential was not apparent in the findings of the earlier work. Regions surveyed included Los Alamos National Laboratory (NM), Nevada Test Site (NV), Rocky Flats Plant (CO), and Savannah River Site (SC). This model specified a gamma distribution and linked an exponential function to the dependent variable, plutonium burden in lung, controlling for age, gender, year at death, and location near or downwind from a nuclear weapons facility (or not). Communities downwind of all nuclear weapons facilities showed a significantly higher plutonium lung burden than control communities. When aggregated, communities close to or downwind from nuclear weapons facilities (cases) experienced potentially as much as 5.8 times the average plutonium lung burden as communities distant from those facilities (controls), all other variables being controlled for. Cases outnumbered controls by 468 to 212, a factor of 2.2. Women showed a 38% higher overall plutonium lung burden than men across the study span of 1959 to 1976, but this could be partly due to the smaller proportion of women in the study, and the fact that case group membership and pre-test ban death years dominate the female subgroup to a greater extent than the male. Both the 5.8 case/control differential and the 38% differential are highly significant at \u3c0.0001 and 0.0018, respectively. Due to gaps in the data, the absolute values of these factors are less precise than desired, but their high probabilities indicate that the true differences between the case/control and male/female subgroups are extremely unlikely to be insignificant. Although communities distant from weapons facilities bore distinctly lower impacts from airborne plutonium exposure, all Americans were at risk for inhaling plutonium. Compared with communities close to weapons testing field laboratories, communities close to weapons manufacturing facilities experienced at least as great a risk of exposure to airborne plutonium. After 1967, the beneficial effect of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty is visible in the lung statistics, as the yearly coefficients fall from high double digits to the low single digits, and remain there through 1976. Of 901 subjects, 680 lung samples were used in this analysis. Of those, 199 samples (100 cases, 99 controls) failed to produce counts detectable by the alpha spectrometry equipment of the time. The true values of these observations fell between 0.00 and 0.017 decays/min, and were recoded to 0.0035. This document contains two supplementary files, a Map of Autopsies and Weapons Sites and Flowchart - Denominator Derivation of Analysis Dataset Plutonium in Autopsy Tissue Data Re-Analysis . This research was completed money allocated during Round 5 of the Citizens’ Monitoring and Technical Assessment Fund (MTA Fund). Clark University was named conservator of these works. If you have any questions or concerns please contact us at [email protected]://commons.clarku.edu/carolinapeace/1000/thumbnail.jp