andrewducker | Interesting Links for 07-03-2012

Crossposts: http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/2670146.html

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Interesting Links for 07-03-2012

Ken Clarke defends secret courts. I, of course, think they're an awful idea.
(tags: law secrecy security_theatre uk )
6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying
(tags: money income society )
Jews in Scotland may be disenfranchised by a Saturday vote.
Is there a reason why voting has to happen on one day? Give people a week to vote, with daily updates on the ongoing count!
(tags: voting uk scotland independence jews )
Kids born later in the year more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD
(tags: adhd diagnosis children )
Govt. agencies, colleges demand applicants' Facebook passwords. (And they can, frankly, fuck off)
(tags: facebook privacy employment usa )
Dammit, I find myself largely in agreement with esr on Hollywood, piracy and the internet
(tags: censorship politics freedom )
A man who informed police when he found child abuse images on his computer has not been allowed to be alone with his daughter for four months.
(tags: uk Child_abuse )
How I became Amazon’s pitchman for a 55-gallon drum of personal lubricant on Facebook
(tags: lubricant facebook amazon advertising )
On Writers Block
(tags: neilgaiman writing )
I hadn't realised that Gillian Anderson stood on a box for The X-Files
(tags: GillianAnderson x-files tv )
Either be offensive, or don't be offensive. Being offensive and then pretending you weren't is just dumb.
(tags: humour offensive )
Rather than a mansion tax we should be sorting out council tax
(tags: tax uk housing )
Romney vs Mr Burns - can you tell which quote belongs to which one?
(tags: simpsons politics usa )

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I can sort of see it with the student athletes. If just one player accepts a gift from a member of the alumni then the entire team can get suspended - and alumni are very crafty about finding ways to give gifts to athletes.

These guys are already going to university for free while non-athletes have to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year and taking spaces in the student body that could otherwise have gone to people who actually want an education.

If you accept the free ride that student athletes get then it seems reasonable for the university to do everything in it's power to make sure you don't shut down their athletic program because you are too dumb to realize that an alumni giving you a car is a NCAA violation and that if you put up images of you and the car on Facebook you are likely to get caught - should you ever piss off one of your "friends."

(A better solution would be to get rid of sports at the university level, but because sports brings in so much money, that won't happen. Another solution would be to pay the student athletes for playing games since their games bring in millions and millions of dollars for the universities. If they got a check from the school they'd be less tempted to accept cash and gifts from alumni.)

Should the university also be allowed to open their mail, tap their mobile phone conversations, and place bugs in their accomodation?

Because I view this as being equivalent to those.

Any many universities the students are required to have the doors to their dorm rooms open at all times if there is another student in the room and if they provide and pay for their mobile phones they tell them there is tracking software on it.

I only know of one college where they open the student's mail - Simon's Rock - but that's because about 15 years ago a guy got gun parts sent to him through the mail, used them to build an automatic weapon and then shot a bunch of students.

As to whether they should be able to do so or not - it depends. If the students are told in advance that this is what will happen if they choose that university then they have the right to make that choice.

My brother chose to go to a university where he knew that he would have no privacy in his dorm at all. The door would be open if anyone was in the room and if he got caught having sex with a girl he'd be suspended for a semester and if he got caught having sex with a guy he'd be expelled. I thought he was out of his mind to agree to that, but it was told to him upfront before he chose the school.

I suspect these athletes are being given the same choice and deciding that it's worth it in exchange for $80,000 to $100,000 worth of free tuition/room and board.

If they don't want their facebook monitored like that they always have the option of going to the school as an actual student and paying for their education the way non athletes do.

I think a point that may be missing is that in America student athletes are not really students in the conventional sense of the word.

They have their own dorms separate from the actual students, they don't have to pay money to be there, they are special classes created for them to ensure they get passing grades even if they can barely read and write, should they have problems with these easy classes they are then given special tutors (that are usually only available to other students for roughly $150 an hour)for free and are, essentially, employees of the university used for fund raising efforts.

Meanwhile to attract them to the schools alumni (who gamble on the games and have a vested interest in seeing the best players possible come to/stay at the school) are legendary for giving them hookers, $100,000 sports cars and all sorts of other shit - that can get the university in a lot of trouble, and the universities have had a real hard problem stopping alumni from doing so, so there needs to be some checks and balances in place.

Why is it that alumni giving athletes sports cars is something that "can get the university in a lot of trouble" (hookers I can see, but cars are legal to own)?

It's against the rules for third parties to give student athletes anything at all to encourage them to go to or stay at a given school.

Some schools have been shut out of competition for years at a time when it came out that alumni were giving gifts to the athletes (which cost the schools millions of dollars in revenue a year.)

The schools agree to be the monitors and enforcers of the NCAA's rules and if the student breaks the rules, the school gets shut out. (Which ends up being grossly unfair to the students who didn't take the bribes.)

weird

The idea is they want to spread good athletes among as many teams as possible and don't want all the best athletes to end up at two or three schools that have the richest alumni who can offer the best bribes.

This all came to a head about a decade or so ago when people started noticing that a ton of talent was suddenly choosing to go to University Of Nevada Las Vegas - an educationally sub par school.

Turns out that professional gamblers (some of whom hadn't even gone to the school) were giving the students tons of gifts to entice them there so they could stack the deck in their favor by betting on the teams.

Some of the players were actually illiterate, but the gamblers were even paying people to impersonate the kids in class and take their tests for them.

Everyone pretends that college football is still an amateur competition, like any other varsity match, when actually it's an incredibly popular, lucrative and pervasive professional sport. As part of this charade, "student" atheletes are obliged to accept compensation and bribes only in a small subset of officially sanctioned ways, and anything else is A Moral Outrage (TM).

A side effect is that there's an incredible pressure on schools to conceal it if the atheletes show up sub-par academically. Remember in Buffy, where the school principle bullies Willow into "helping" an athlete? I think it's like that, but an awful lot more so, not because the schools are stupid, but because they make lots of money from the games, so can only fund themselves by perpetuating the situation.

It's a truly awful system and I can't fault the universities who want to do everything they can to crack down on the rampant bribes.

Yeah. I don't know it first hand, I just know sensible people (like you) have described how ridiculous it is sometimes! :)

It's really amazing too the clever ways the alumni and gamblers try to get around the system. A few years ago when they realized that giving gifts/cash directly to the student was too obvious, they started buying houses and shit for the student's parents, or paying off their entire family's mortgage and credit card debt.

The UK is lucky that their student athletes are actually student athletes and not simply fund raising machines.

The real fault of this is the NFL. When they decided that all professional football players had to have university degrees that encouraged universities to build stadiums so they could have the players the NFL wouldn't accept yet, make money off the games and then give the football players meaningless degrees four years later.

Eventually they realized that it was a waste to simply make money off of this during football season and just expanded the practice to their other sporting programs.

I can't help but think that the alumni must be almost as thick as the players if they risk having their team barred from competition by bribing their own players.

They think they are smart enough to get away with it - which is the downfall of most criminals.

Interestingly, it's widely believed that Moe Dalitz was the first guy to come up with the idea of bribing players to go to certain schools.

He was smart enough to get away with it. But most of the alumni assholes didn't have years of experience as criminal masterminds behind them before they decided to try to bribe people.

I have a vague memory that back in the 80s, one college's football programme was suspended because the coach paid for the flights to enable one of his students to attend his mother's funeral. Which seems a little harsh.

I also find it amusing that while it is possible to be "academically ineligible" as a college athlete, former Washington Redskins defensive end Dexter Manley managed to play four seasons at Oklahoma State despite being (in his own words) "illiterate".

I remember that 80s thing too. I think it was just the NCAA trying to make it as clear as possible what their "no tolerance" rule meant - since so many, many people seemed to think they could get away with almost anything.

Do you remember when three UNLV players were photographed sitting in the hot tub of Ritchie "The Fixer" Perry?

http://www.reviewjournal.com/images/business/perryhottub.jpg

I also remember in the early 90s I think it was a Michigan player who got caught accepting a suitcase with $280,000 in cash inside it and tried to explain it away as a "private student loan" - even though he had a full scholarship already.

I think the point is, not "it's creepy and weird for the school (or government) to tap its employees phones" (although it is), but that it's catastrophically dumb to panic and say "AGH! I don't understand the internet but I think the problem is real, so I will pick a solution at random regardless of how harmful it is and YELL AT ANYONE WHO DISAGREES."

Off the top of my head, reasons why it's a disaster include:

* Decreases security by training people to give out their passwords
* Reduces accountability. "How did that questionable stuff get on your facebook account?" "Well, you can't prove it's me, maybe the coach did it, after all, he has my password."
* Even worse, will be a giant legal clusterfuck if they ever admitted something illegal on facebook. "It wasn't me, it was my coach." "My coach leaked my facebook password and someone ruined my reputation, I'm suing for damages."
* Randomly breaches the privacy of everyone who foolishly friends one of the students. I assume they don't come with warnings "Full name Joe Dobbs (spied upon by UoA, DHS, etc, etc)". May there be legal problems with the coach (in effect) posing as one of their sudents on facebook.

Notice that these are problem with giving up the password. Being required to friend someone in authority is problematic as several of the problems still apply, but avoids the worst ones.

It's like saying "We need to tap your phones to make sure you don't bring the university into disrepute. In order to do so, we need your social security number, birth certificate, and a copy of your passport doctored to show your coach's face instead of your own to make the arrangements with the phone company." Even if you accept the spying is necessary, can you see the potential pitfalls in giving your coach control over your identity like that? I mean, I'm sure universities DO do that sort of thing, but I think they should find a non-stupid way of doing it instead.

(Or, preferably, not at all. And preferably give up the charade of college sports :))

I do see the problem - but see no other solution other than giving up college sports and/or changing NCAA regulations.

Well, other solutions would be difficult and probably involve thinking and spending money. It looks to me like the current "la la la I assume the problems in privacy violation only affect other people not me so I'll stick with it" attitude is worse in the long run, but since I don't know the problems I may well be wrong.

After all, maybe most students are too stupid to make illegal deals on a different social networking platform, but some may not be.

Off the top of my head, other possible solutions would be:

* Install spyware on the student's computer, so you can _see_ what they do, but not by default impersonate them
* Require passwords, but have a well-thought-out policy in place under what circumstances they can be used, and what oversight there is.
* Put pressure on facebook et al to have a "supervision" mode usable by parents and some employers/schools, where someone can give someone else read-only access to their account

I mean, the thing is, to me, "spying on email" is like "spying on phone calls". We have specific laws that you're not allowed to spy on someone's personal phone calls (unless they use your phone to do it?) regardless of whether you have a really, really good reason, honest, unless you get a court order.

I think those laws are a good idea, and should apply to email and so on similarly.

I can see an argument for "some people have to give up their right to privacy for their job", although I _hope_ there's a better way. But it seems bizarrely inconsistent to say "you have an absolute right to privacy on phones, no right to privacy on facebook, and people can sp on you on LJ but they just don't bother." Surely there's no possible way ALL of those can be right?

The thing is if the athletes were actual students at the school for the purpose of learning and had been enrolled in a normal process I'd be against anyone at the school looking at their Facebook. but, since they are essentially employees (and well paid ones at that!)they have the right to sign away their privacy.

After all, they could simply pick a school that won't ask for their Facebook password. Hell, maybe some schools could use that as a recruiting tactic!

I really don't think the coaches will be looking through to see what comments the players are making. I think they'll mostly be looking to make sure there isn't a picture of the kid standing next to a Ferrari.

I almost certainly am being too idealistic here, but I don't think it's ok for employers either.

I wrote a long post and deleted it because I started rambling, but I think "it's ok to give people readily abusable power because you trust them never to take advantage of it, even if nothing's stopping them" and "it's ok, if people want it, the free market will provide it" are arguments that seem insidiously reasonable, but don't actually work in real life...?

I think if you offer someone something of value worth well over $100k, you have the right to ask them for something in return - particularly if their fuck ups could cost your organization millions and millions of dollars.

Would you trust an 18 year old not to fuck up your $20 million a year sports program without oversight?

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cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com - 2012-03-07 18:56 (UTC) - Expand

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bart-calendar.livejournal.com - 2012-03-07 21:42 (UTC) - Expand

The other thing is that the facebook monitoring won't stop the schools from creating specialized classes for these kids that are bribes in an of themselves. A degree from Georgetown University, for example has a huge value for a kid when he graduates and enters the job market. Part of this is that, in general, Georgetown is a difficult university to graduate from because for most students the classes are difficult.

Which is why some people got upset when it came out that in a math class that only the athletes could take on the final exam - which was multiple choice - was the question: "How many points does a three-point field goal account for?"

Even better, all of the classes for the athletes were taught by the same teacher who was paid $250,000 a year to design the curriculum and "teach" the students.

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