New Media Ethics 2009 course

She said her insurance agent described several pictures Blanchard posted on the popular social networking site, including ones showing her having a good time at a Chippendales bar show, at her birthday party and on a sun holiday — evidence that she is no longer depressed, Manulife said.

Blanchard said she notified Manulife that she was taking a trip, and she's shocked the company would investigate her in such a manner and interpret her photos that way.

Mr Curtis, an American web designer, was unimpressed by his experience using
the the AA.com website, and
made that clear in a
lengthy open letter to the company on his blog, complete with a
suggested redesign of the homepage (see the gallery above), saying he
would be “ashamed” of the site.

He also suggested that they fire their design team.

Mr X, a web designer, responded to the letter, saying in a long email that Mr
Curtis was "so very right" about the problems of the website,
but that it was less to do with staff incompetence and more to do with the
internal culture of the airline.

Mr X also told Mr Curtis that they were improving the website, but that it was
a slow process.

By speaking to Mr Curtis, however, Mr X was in breach of a non-disclosure
agreement (NDA) he had signed with AA, barring him from revealing sensitive
information.

The teenager had not been in school the day before due to a
hospital appointment and had missed the start of a project, so the
teacher allocated her a group to sit with.

"She said I had to sit there with five Asian pupils," said Codie
yesterday.

"Only one could speak English, so she had to tell that one what
to do so she could explain in their language. Then she sat me with
them and said 'Discuss'."

According to Codie, the five - four boys and a girl - then began
talking in a language she didn't understand, thought to be Urdu, so
she went to speak to the teacher.

"I said 'I'm not being funny, but can I change groups because I
can't understand them?' But she started shouting and screaming,
saying 'It's racist, you're going to get done by the police'."

But sometimes the team is aware of these issues and highlights them to management, but the manufacturer still proceeds as before. Why is that? Because in addition to design principles, one must be mindful that there are always business considerations at play as well. Manufacturing two (or more) separate designs for pumps incurs greater costs, eliminates the ability to standardize across pumps, increases holding inventory, and overall increases complexity of business and manufacturing processes, and decreases economies of scale. All this naturally reduces profitability.

It's not just pumps. Even medicines are typically sold in identical-looking vials with identically colored vial caps, with only the text on the vial labels differentiating them in both drug type and concentration. You can imagine what kinds of accidents can potentially happen there.

A year ago, exciting news about publishing 2.0 reached the blogosphere. Thriller writer Paulo Coelho had started to tell people how he was using filesharing networks as a way to promote his books.

Coelho thinks that giving people the possibility to swap his books for free, actually has a positive effect on sales. In a keynote speech at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich he gave some strikingly good examples. When he uploaded the Russian translation of “The Alchemist”, sales in Russia went from around a 1.000 books per year to 100.000 and then to a million and more

But here's an uncomfortable issue: Thousands of babies and infants die every
day in developing countries from preventable and easily treatable diseases and
conditions, like diarrhoea and malnutrition. They do so because of a lack of
basic resources and rudimentary care ... in other words not enough money.

So what about them?

Could the money and effort that saved the twins have been better used to help
perhaps thousands of other babies?

Then again, is there a truly moral dilemma here? Or is it false to
characterise this as an 'either-or' situation?

In 2007, Fiola's bosses became suspicious after the Internet bill for his state-issued laptop showed that he used 4 1/2 times more data than his colleagues. A technician found child porn in the PC folder that stores images viewed online.

Fiola was fired and charged with possession of child pornography, which carries up to five years in prison. He endured death threats, his car tires were slashed and he was shunned by friends.

Fiola and his wife fought the case, spending $250,000 on legal fees. They liquidated their savings, took a second mortgage and sold their car.

An inspection for his defense revealed the laptop was severely infected. It was programmed to visit as many as 40 child porn sites per minute — an inhuman feat. While Fiola and his wife were out to dinner one night, someone logged on to the computer and porn flowed in for an hour and a half.

Prosecutors performed another test and confirmed the defense findings. The charge was dropped — 11 months after it was filed.