Loss of Privacy

If you haven’t done anything wrong, then what do you have to hide?  This is the comment that I run across most often when people hear what I have to say about keeping our privacy private and how the the government should stop intruding in our lives.  If you’re innocent, then why worry so much about whether the government knows what you’re up to?

Well, for one, I don’t want anyone to know what I do in the privacy of my own home.  I don’t think the government needs to know if I like checking out The Communist Manifesto while eating the strawberries I picked out at the supermarket.

Humans abuse whatever power they are given.  It’s a fact.  Law enforcement personnel are normal citizens just like you and me.  Why is it a good idea to allow them access to our lives with only the assurance that they won’t peer into things that aren’t relevant.

As humans, we all have secrets that we don’t want others to know about.  It could be something as simple as temporarily seeing a psychologist over a little depression to something more serious, such as cheating on your spouse.  We all have our vices that we prefer others not find out.  I’m sure you didn’t report your profits from that ebay sale on your taxes.

When you called in sick yesterday, were you really sick or were you taking a “mental health” day?  After you made that u-turn in the middle of the road, did you drive to the police station to report that you broke the law?  Of course not.  These small infractions are inherent to our way of life.  Everyone makes these small mistakes, that are technically illegal, but they aren’t a big deal because they really aren’t harmful.

This is why, as little as four years ago, the idea of tattooing a person for identification purposes was considered to be left to the realm of the tin-foil hat crowd.  If you take a serious look at governments throughout history, they are rife with abuse.  Humans, it seems, cannot hold power for very long before they start to abuse it.  However, you need not look further than the US government of the past few years.  It has increasingly moved further into the private lives of citizens by tracking them in as many ways as they can.

This has become easier since 9/11 because they are doing it to help “protect” you.  There are more CCTV cameras tracking your movements and automated license plate readers to record everywhere you go.  The government uses a wide range of information gathering on its citizens, many that you have never heard of before.  Japan has started tracking their shoppers in the ritzier sections of Tokyo.  RFID tattoos is just another way to track you for no useful purpose other than to spy on you and keep track of everything you do.

It seems innocuous until you see the end result of what it can do.  For now, the RFID tattoos are being placed on cattle, with a possible use on US soldiers.  We know that Joe Citizen is next.  It might not be a big deal today but in ten years, when the readers are much, much cheaper, it will be.

Now, you may still be thinking, “so what?” and “who really cares?”  The reason you should care is because, once this tracking is placed into any number of databases, those databases can, and will be hacked.  Then, your employer can keep you from getting that raise because he sees you like to go to the bar each night after work.  Your wife sees that you like going to the nudie bar during lunch.  Or, the IRS learns that you won a few dollars on the scratch and match but didn’t report it to them.

In a matter of a few years, every American citizen is going to be observed, tracked, stored in a database, and controlled.  If you’re still not convinced that this is dangerous, and wrong, then, please, go ahead and be chipped, tattooed, tracked and suppressed.  I prefer to keep my privacy, even if that means being forced to move to another country because my fellow Americans were too damned lazy to fight for the protections and freedoms we used to hold so dear.

America faces a shortage of teachers, especially in fields such as math and science.  Yet, despite the fact that people are fleeing the profession, school districts continue to make prospective teachers jump through more hoops in order to obtain employment.

Because of the shortage of teachers, school districts have made it easier for people to become teachers through lateral entry.  This occurs when a person wishes to become a teacher but did not go to college to study education.  These people are college graduates and will require more classes to meet the specific requirements to obtain a teaching license.  Teachers from other states have also found it easier to move to another state and obtain a teaching license through reciprocity, a process that may entail one or two specialized classes for the new state to obtain a teaching license.  This is a good way to get new teachers into the profession and decrease the shortages but, it does not address the enormous hassles required to become a teacher.

For anyone, whether you attended college to specifically become a teacher, been a teacher for many years, or are moving, laterally, into the profession there is a lengthy application process, which deters many from applying.  Often, newly graduated teachers see the process and decide that it is not worth the hassle to jump through the numerous hoops only to be underpaid, under appreciated, and overworked for the rest of their lives.

The process starts as any other job.  You must fill out an application.  This, depending on the school district, is done online or by paper.  You must also send in your resume.  This is where the redundancy begins.  The application has the usual name, address, universities attended, etc.  Then there is the awards, recognitions, qualifications, endorsements, student teaching, references, etc.  Your resume already lists these items, yet you are required to duplicate this information.

The next part of the application is the questions.  These range from 5-15 handwritten questions asking you about how you would approach a particular subject or problem, how you deal with students, and why you want to teach in their particular school.

There is also the criminal background check authorization and the fingerprint card.  Every teacher has to have a background check to make sure they aren’t dangerous to students.  You must also have your fingerprints taken by an authorized member of law enforcement.  You must pay the fee ($10-20 depending on the state) to have your fingerprints taken.  Then, you must pay another fee ($85-100) so that the school district can investigate you.  These fees must be paid in each state that you apply to, regardless of the fact that the FBI already has this information from your last teaching job.

More frequently, schools are moving to an additional online questionnaire, aimed at getting to know you better.  There are typically 25-40 questions and range from how you act in the classroom, to conflict resolution, to gaging your personality.  There is no particular right or wrong answer to these questions.  They are completely subjective to the school you are applying to.  Many of these questionnaires you take once and then give all the schools in a particular state access to them.

One school may be looking more towards an authoritarian type of teacher, while another school may be looking for someone who excels at conflict resolution.  You may be a dream teacher in one district and a nightmare in another.  You also never find out the results of the questionnaire, nor do you know how a particular school district scores or what kind of person they are looking for.  The only thing you can do is answer the questions honestly and hope for the best.

If this hasn’t deterred you from becoming a teacher, there is still more to the application process.  After you have finished all of the above, you’ll get a call for an interview.  Your interview will consist of more questions, some are identical to the handwritten questions you already completed.  Now you must answer them, and more, in front of the hiring committee.  The hiring committee has 3-5 members of the school and can include principals, vice-principals, teachers, and sometimes superintendents.

Once you have finished this, there is the mini-lesson that you must perform.  This consists of a typical daily lesson plan, shortened from the usual length to about fifteen minutes.  Those interviewing you will pretend to be the students while you conduct your lesson.

By this point, you are exhausted.  You hope that you only have to do this once but, more typically, you will do this many times as you interview at school district after school district.  This is only the beginning as you learn that, by the time you’re hired and the next summer comes, you’re too tired from jumping through even more hoops all year long, being away from your family, and spending 50-70 hours per week at work to enjoy a proper vacation.  You just want to sit on the couch and sleep for several weeks so that you can refresh yourself and gear up for another school year full of hoop jumping.

You never actually got to teach your students all they should know.  Instead, you pushed them through, like cattle to a slaughter house, with cursory knowledge that is “good enough” to pass state exams so that the state can get more money from the federal government.

At some point during the summer, you start to think, “Why the hell did I ever pick this as a career?” and you seriously debate a career change where you can actually have peace in your life for longer periods of time other than the eight weeks you get off in the summer, a summer which is spent entirely in finding your sanity again.

It never ceases to amaze me how people continue to act like idiots.  You would think that there are enough of them out there already as examples so that people would stop and think before they start down the path to stupidity.

Erin Callahan Lambert, 28, who apparently was intoxicated during Flight 179 on Sunday, was taken into custody after the plane landed at San Francisco International Airport, authorities said. She was charged Monday with assaulting a flight attendant and interfering with the performance of duties of flight crewmembers.

Just what did Erin do that got her into so much trouble?  Well, first of all, she got completely hammered on this flight.  There is some question as to whether she was a bit loony before the flight, if she was completely or partially drunk before she boareded the plane or if she really had that much to drink in three hours.

Halfway through the six-hour flight, she got out of her seat, walked to the back of the plane and decided that now was a good time to use her cellphone.  Two flight attendants tried to get her off the phone, which is illegal to use during flights.  She refused, stating that she was calling 911 because the plane was being hijacked.

Eventually, she returned to her seat but grabbed her luggage, including a dog carrier with her dog, and headed to the bathroom.  When she was told that she had to leave her belongings behind, she told the crew that they would have to kill her and her dog.  Then she locked herself in the bathroom.

A few moments later, Erin decided that she needed to exit the plane and briskly walked to the front of the cabin, proclaiming that she had to get off the aircraft.

Fight attendants and passengers stopped Erin, forced her into her seat, and was handcuffed by the purser.  Not to be deterred, she got out of the handcuff, forcing the crew to tie her with plastic zip-ties.

“During the entire assault, Ms. Lambert was yelling profanities, cursing and spitting on the flight attendants and other passengers,” Gilhooly wrote.

After all this, Erin refused to speak to the FBI and asked for an attorney.  I guess that, by the time the plane landed, she had sobered up enough to remember that she never should have had a drink to begin with.  She now faces federal charges for allegedly making statements about a hijacking, trying to open a cabin door and fighting with flight attendants.

We’ve all used it. Some love it. Some hate it. We know that Wikipedia has a wealth of information but, there are inherent dangers in relying on accurate information on a website that allows its users to edit that information. Many college professors forbid their students from using it precisely because there have been too many errors in submissions and spam vandals continue to flood the site.

The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, admitted in 2005 that there are online quality issues, many of which still need to be resolved. Two main issues with Wikipedia remain the garbled mess that passes as facts on the site and that it is difficult to check every little detail.

Those who favor Wikipedia say that if you see something wrong, then edit it yourself. This merely puts the responsibility onto you to make sure items are correct. This disregards the fact that you came to Wikipedia in the first place to verify the accuracy of something you heard or to learn something new.

Wikipedians also point to the few errors in Encyclopedia Britannica, claiming that paper versions of encyclopedias aren’t always correct either. First, Encyclopedia Britannica has only a handful of errors, all of which have been corrected in their online version. Second, putting the attention on someone else’s mistakes is no way to claim that your are better. Wikipedia continues to be full of badly written prose, factual errors, and endless apologies for the errors that needed to be fixed.

Also, claiming that Wikipedia is faster than the alternatives doesn’t make it accurate. It is merely saying, “use us, we’re faster” and does not touch on the numerous problems their site faces.

There is also the issue of the quality of submissions, even when they are 100% accurate.

As a delicious illustration, Wikipedia appears to have a quality problem with the word “quality” itself. While Merriam Webster online offers us eight major definitions, including “a) degree of excellence : GRADE … b : superiority in kind”, and the Cambridge Dictionary three, of which two are “how good or bad something is and of a high standard” Wikipedia’s sister project Wiktionary definition begins this. “1 – (uncountable) general good value”

Is it acceptable to only have one definition for the quality? Shouldn’t it have more definitions? Why is this considered acceptable on Wikipedia?

More arguments are listed over the submissions of Bill Gates and Jane Fonda. In February, 2006, the Times Online wrote a piece about saboteurs who stalk Wikipedia, sometimes making daily changes over and over again to the same articles. John Seigenthaler found his biography entry to be riddled with mistakes that he described as “false and malicious” in 2005. The most recent problem that I have come across was Barack Obama’s entry.

Then we have the issue of paying for the “correction” of entries on Wikipedia. Microsoft tried to hire people to adjust entries. Wikipedia has also begun a policy of tagging all external links on its site as “nofollow,” rendering those links invisible to search engines. It is still unclear if this is a positive or a negative. There is also problems with admin and how they manage to keep their positions.

Wikipedia is an enormous undertaking and it strives to be the reference on the web but it has to work harder at creating content that is easy to read, understandable, and correct. You will probably never be able to use information from Wikipedia for your college papers or PhD. thesis precisely because there is no way of telling from one moment to the next whether or not the information is accurate. Colleges rarely allow you to quote from any type of encyclopedia because the information contained in it is also short and general. If you are looking for more detail, Wikipedia is not the place to go. However, it is a great quick and dirty tool for people who just need to know a few simple things and use it as a jumping off point for more detailed, referenced, and fact-checked material.

With the recent sponsoring of the PERFORM ACT, Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein are set to create mandatory DRM for podcasts, even if they are free or licensed under the Creative Commons, I am reminded of an early musical pirate, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who allegedly copied one of the most famous pieces of music, Miserere, despite threats of excommunication.

Some time before 1638, Gregorio Allegri wrote Miserere for the end of Easter celebrations.  Though Miserere was used as early as 1518, Allegri’s version was wildly popular and, soon after it’s first performance, became the only version used in church services.

The Pope was impressed to the point that he enacted a prohibition on Allegri’s Miserere, banning it from being used outside of the Sistine Chapel.  Making copies was also forbidden, leading to excommunication if you were caught with or sought a copy.  Despite the harsh restrictions, three copies were known to exist.

One was owned by the King of Portugal; another was in the possession of the distinguished composer, pedagogue, and theoretician Padre Giovanni Battista Martini (1706-1784); and a third was kept in the Imperial Library in Vienna.

Enter, 11 year old Mozart.  He and his father had been traveling through Italy and arrived at the Vatican in time for Easter services on April 11, 1770.  They heard the beautiful Miserere and, that night, Mozart sat down and wrote the version he had just heard from memory.  He returned on Good Friday with the manuscript hidden in his hat, listened to Miserere again, and made a few minor corrections.

Later in the year, Dr. Charles Burney, a noted music historian, met with Mozart and Martini in Bologna and, upon his return to England in 1771, published Miserere, thus ending the Pope’s grasp on Miserere.  It is unknown, however, whether Burney obtained his copy from Mozart, The Pope, or Mozart’s teacher, Martini.

Mozart’s hand-written copy has not survived, leading to speculation as to whether or not the story is true.  There is evidence that the event occurred, including two letters that his father, Leopold, wrote to his wife, that Mozart did indeed write it down and the story is included in Friedrich von Schlichtegroll’s obituary of Mozart.

Mozart, however, would be welcomed amongst today’s pirates.  He cared not for the consequences (excommunication) of his actions, nor is it surprising that he was intelligent enough to remember the entire composition and write it down from memory.

Mozart was faced with the same restrictions on a popular piece of music of his time that many filesharers know and understand all too well.  The Pope had his own version of DRM, which threatened the very souls of the people who wanted to hear Allegri’s Miserere.  Excommunication meant that you were never going to heaven.  Your soul would be lost and you would be shunned by your community.  Today, if you make a copy of a piece of music, the RIAA wishes to take as much money as they can from you, thus ruining your life.  You can lose everything you own paying off the debt you owe to the RIAA and are shunned by most in your community.

What had been a common practice, copying music to spread and share its beauty and joy, was stifled by the Pope, who wanted to own a monopoly on what was, at the time, one of the most cherished pieces of music ever heard.  Today, the RIAA wants the government to implement more restricted terms upon music that you have heard or purchased.  They do not want you to be able to make a copy, nor do they want you to loan copies to friends.

Much like Mozart, pirates of today have thumbed their noses at what they believe to be an idiotic policy.  Many pirates share their files even though there is a risk of arrest, prison, and/or financial ruin.  Mozart would, most likely, enjoy the company of the pirates that inhabit 21st century planet Earth.  He would probably even join them on their quest to eliminate DRM schemes, allowing copies of everything to be freely shared among the world’s population.