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More 5inShare Email Print A defendant in the Atlanta Public Schools case turns herself in at the Fulton County Jail on April 2. (David Goldman/AP) Earlier this week at The Atlantic, Emily Richmond asked whether high-stakes testing caused the Atlanta schools cheating scandal. The answer, I would argue, is yes... just not in the way you might think. Tests don't cause unethical behavior. But they did cause the Atlanta cheating scandal, and they are doing damage to the teaching profession. The argument that tests do not cause unethical behavior is fairly straightforward, and has been articulated by a number of writers. Jonathan Chait quite correctly points out that unethical behavior occurs in virtually all professions -- and that it occurs particularly when there are clear incentives to succeed. Incentivizing any field increases the impetus to cheat. Suppose journalism worked the way teaching traditionally had. You get hired at a newspaper, and your advancement and pay are dictated almost entirely by your years on the job, with almost no chance of either becoming a star or of getting fired for incompetence. Then imagine journalists changed that and instituted the current system, where you can get really successful if your bosses like you or be fired if they don't. You could look around and see scandal after scandal -- phone hacking! Jayson Blair! NBC's exploding truck! Janet Cooke! Stephen Glass! -- that could plausibly be attributed to this frightening new world in which journalists had an incentive to cheat in order to get ahead. It holds true of any field. If Major League Baseball instituted tenure, and maybe used tee-ball rules where you can't keep score and everybody gets a chance to hit, it could stamp out steroid use. Students have been cheating on tests forever -- massive, systematic cheating, you could say. Why? Because they have an incentive to do well. Give teachers and administrators an incentive for their students to do well, and more of them will cheat. For Chait, then, teaching has just been made more like journalism or baseball; it has gone from an incentiveless occupation to one with incentives.

Chait refers to violations of journalistic ethics -- like the phone-hacking scandal -- and suggests they are analogous to Major-League steroid use, and that both are similar to teachers (or students) cheating on tests. But is phone hacking "cheating"

Phone hacking was, then, not an example of cheating. It was a violation of professional ethics. And those ethics are not arbitrarily imposed, but are intrinsic to the practice of journalism as a profession committed to public service and to truth.

The Secret Service’s interim director has demoted four of the agency’s senior executives as part of a management shake-up after a series of scandals, the agency said Wednesday.

Julia Pierson, resigned amid criticism of the agency after a man with a knife climbed the White House fence, ran through the North Portico doors and into the East Room before he was tackled by agency officers.

“The Secret Service has suffered from a lack of leadership and that has had a detrimental impact on security, training, protocols, and overall culture,” said Mr. Chaffetz, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee and an ardent critic of the Secret Service.

Gov. Chris Christie insisted during his latest trip to New Hampshire that the fallout from the George Washington Bridge scandal wouldn't have been as nearly as intense if he were a Democrat.

argued to early-primary voters Hillary Clinton escaped scrutiny for clearing the private server housing emails from her tenure as secretary of state because she's a Democrat and he declared "bias is on full display" when that's compared to his own controversy.

"Could you imagine if my response the day after

We gossip over email, flirt via text, tweet whenever pithy inspiration strikes, bitch about our bosses on gchat, sometimes while we are actually at work. (Or so I’ve heard.) It’s stream of consciousness with an indelible paper trail—and while many of us would argue we’re better people than our streams of consciousness might suggest, a transcript likely would indicate otherwise.

My perspective has shifted after this brush with internet infamy. I’ve had a front row seat and a backstage pass, and what this experience has left me with, more than anything, is an acute awareness of the fact that my own home (yours too, my friend) is made of glass.

Way more problematic than what any person says in their private correspondence—no matter how sexist, racist, or tasteless—is the fact that this voyeurism has become so accepted that we have no shame, no sense that what we’re doing amounts to peering into a stranger’s bedroom window. But the more we accept it, the more it becomes routine, and the more we are all at risk.

Volkswagen said on Thursday that its emissions cheating scandal began in 2005 with a decision to heavily promote diesel engines in the United States and a realization that those engines could not meet clean air standards.

Some employees, the company found, chose to cheat on emissions tests rather than curtail Volkswagen’s American campaign.

“There was a tolerance for breaking the rules,” Hans-Dieter Pötsch, the chairman of Volkswagen’s supervisory board, said

The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter.

Facebook and Snapchat and the other social media sites should rightfully be doing a lot of soul-searching about their role as the most efficient distribution network for conspiracy theories, hatred, and outright falsehoods ever invented.

I’ve been obsessively looking back over our coverage, too, trying to figure out what we missed along the way to the upset of the century

If you touch our shores with your corrupt enterprise, whether that is through meetings or through using our world class financial system, you will be held accountable for that corruption

Our investigation revealed that what should have been an expression of international sportsmanship was used as a vehicle in this broader scheme to line executives' pockets with bribes totalling $110 million [£71m], nearly a third of the legitimate cost of the rights to the tournaments involved,

"Nobody is above or beyond the law

THE Republican presidential field has become a showcase of evangelical anti-intellectualism. Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann deny that climate change is real and caused by humans. Mr. Perry and Mrs. Bachmann dismiss evolution as an unproven theory.

In response, many evangelicals created what amounts to a “parallel culture,” nurtured by church, Sunday school, summer camps and colleges, as well as publishing houses, broadcasting networks, music festivals and counseling groups.

Fundamentalism appeals to evangelicals who have become convinced that their country has been overrun by a vast secular conspiracy; denial is the simplest and most attractive response to change.

we live in a “Matrix”-infused “conspiracy culture,” according to social scientists, where one is thought to be impossibly simple to not understand that the world is ruled by collusion and machination.

journalists have allowed too much of their personalities to creep into their work.

“less analysis and more reporting, less personality and more facts.”

The big story everyone is chasing is whether President Trump is a Russian stooge. Wrong. That’s all a smoke screen. Trump is actually a Chinese agent. He is clearly out to make China great again. Just look at the facts.

That’s called l-e-v-e-r-a-g-e, and Trump just threw it away … because he promised to in the campaign — without, I’d bet, ever reading TPP. What a chump! I can still hear the clinking of champagne glasses in Beijing.

O.K., Mr. President, let’s assume for a second that climate change is a hoax. Do you believe in math?

Maybe what’s needed are different units for measuring the Trump administration’s failures and scandals, since the standard metrics aren’t registering. His record should be quantified in scales that a Fox News viewer might be more familiar with: not body counts or dollars, but Benghazis and Solyndras.

For instance, sometimes pundits try to put the 183,000 covid-19 deaths in context by noting that cumulative deaths per capita in the United States are double those of Canada, quintuple those of Germany, 20 times those of Australia, 90 times those of South Korea, and so on.

here’s a different way to contextualize this national trauma: The number of lives lost to covid-19 is roughly equal to the death toll of 60 9/11 attacks.

The Hwang Woo-suk saga is illustrative of the serious deficiencies in the self-regulation of science. His fraud was uncovered because of brave Korean television reporters. Even those efforts might not have been enough, had Dr. Hwang’s team not been so sloppy in its fraud. The team’s papers included fabricated data and pairs of images that on close comparison clearly indicated duplicity.

Yet as a cautionary tale about the price of fraud, it is, unfortunately, a mixed bag. He lost his academic standing, and he was convicted of bioethical violations and embezzlement, but he never ended up serving jail time

Although his efforts at cloning human embryos, ended in failure and fraud, they provided him the opportunities and resources he needed to take on projects, such as dog cloning, that were beyond the reach of other labs. The fame he earned in academia proved an asset in a business world where there’s no such thing as bad press.

GEORGE Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 has had “doublegood” sales this week after one of Trump’s advisers used the phrase “alternative facts” in an interview.

Orwell's novel 1984 is a bleak portrayal of Great Britain re-imagined as a dystopian superstate governed by a dictatorial regime.

Many concepts of the novel have crossed over to popular culture or have entered common use in everyday life - the repressive regime is overseen by Big Brother, and the government's invented language "newspeak" was designed to limit freedom of thought. The term "doublethink" - where a person can accept two contradicting beliefs as both being correct - first emerged in the dystopian landscape of Airstrip One.

People are really good at self-deception. We attend to the facts we like and suppress the ones we don’t. We inflate our own virtues and predict we will behave more nobly than we actually do. As Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel write in their book, “Blind Spots,” “When it comes time to make a decision, our thoughts are dominated by thoughts of how we want to behave; thoughts of how we should behave disappear.”

In centuries past, people built moral systems that acknowledged this weakness. These systems emphasized our sinfulness. They reminded people of the evil within themselves. Life was seen as an inner struggle against the selfish forces inside. These vocabularies made people aware of how their weaknesses manifested themselves and how to exercise discipline over them. These systems gave people categories with which to process savagery and scripts to follow when they confronted it. They helped people make moral judgments and hold people responsible amidst our frailties.

We live in a society oriented around our inner wonderfulness. So when something atrocious happens, people look for some artificial, outside force that must have caused it — like the culture of college football, or some other favorite bogey. People look for laws that can be changed so it never happens again.

Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like “knight.” No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.“Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn’t mean they’re optimal,” John Quijada, a fifty-four-year-old former employee of the California State Department of Motor Vehicles, told me. In 2004, he published a monograph on the Internet that was titled “Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language.” Written like a linguistics textbook, the fourteen-page Web site ran to almost a hundred and sixty thousand words. It documented the grammar, syntax, and lexicon of a language that Quijada had spent three decades inventing in his spare time. Ithkuil had never been spoken by anyone other than Quijada, and he assumed that it never would be.

his “greater goal” was “to attempt the creation of what human beings, left to their own devices, would never create naturally, but rather only by conscious intellectual effort: an idealized language whose aim is the highest possible degree of logic, efficiency, detail, and accuracy in cognitive expression via spoken human language, while minimizing the ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness that is seemingly ubiquitous in natural human language.”

Ithkuil, one Web site declared, “is a monument to human ingenuity and design.” It may be the most complete realization of a quixotic dream that has entranced philosophers for centuries: the creation of a more perfect language.

scholars covet thy neighbor's data. They're attracted to the very large and often fascinating data sets that private companies have developed.

It's the companies that own and manage this data. The only standards we know they have to follow are in the terms-of-service that users accept to create an account, and the law as it stands in different countries.

the "sexiness" of the Facebook data that led Cornell University and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) into an ethically dubious arrangement, where, for example, Facebook's unreadable 9,000-word terms-of-service are said to be good enough to meet the standard for "informed consent."

Describing the atomic bomb (which had only two months before been used to flatten Hiroshima and Nagasaki) as an “inherently tyrannical weapon,” he predicts that it will concentrate power in the hands of the “two or three monstrous super-states” that have the advanced industrial and research bases necessary to produce it. Suppose, he asks, “that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate?”

The likely result, he concludes, will be “an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.” Inventing the term, he predicts “a permanent state of ‘cold war,"’ a “peace that is no peace,” in which “the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.”

the destruction of privacy widens the existing power imbalance between the ruling factions and everyone else, leaving “the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes,” as Orwell wrote, “still more hopeless.