Archive for the ‘Behaviour’ Category
November 14, 2011
Yet another case of predatory behaviour by sports people in authority over young boys. Peter Roebuck committed suicide in S. Africa by jumping out of his hotel window after being questioned by police about drugging and sexually assaulting a young boy. Many people must have known anout his behaviour.
He wrote very well and I always enjoyed his articles. But he had some dark secrets and they are not very pretty. In 2001 he was found guilty of caning 3 young S. African cricketers he was training.
Daily Telegraph Australia: In 2001, the former Somerset cricket captain was given a suspended jail sentence after admitting caning three young cricketers he had offered to coach. Roebuck, of Exmouth in Devon, pleaded guilty to three charges of common assault involving three South African teenagers between 1 April and 31 May, 1999. He had pleaded not guilty to three counts of causing actual bodily harm, which was accepted by the prosecution. Roebuck was sentenced to four months in jail for each count, with the sentences suspended for two years, at Taunton Crown Court. Judge Graham Hume Jones told Roebuck he had abused his power and influence over the boys, who were far from home and far from friends and family.
Update! I see that tributes, and here, are flowing in about his writing and his cricket career. But I am afraid that whatever he may have done well, his sexual predations and the lives of all the young people he has traumatised is too heavy a price.
Better that he had never written a single word if that would have meant that his horrible behaviour to young cricketers under his authority could have been avoided.
(more…)
Tags:Australia, Cape Town, Fairfax Media, Peter Roebuck, sexual assault, South Africa, suicide
Posted in Australia, Behaviour, Corruption, Cricket, Sport | 2 Comments »
October 30, 2011
Retraction Watch carries a report of a Japanese paper being retracted for having been published as many as three times.
For some reason the story immediately brought back memories of the time when I was working in Japan and and all official forms had to be submitted in “triplicate”. I remember my visits to the Japanese Labour Office to apply for extensions of my work permit and the insistence of the clerk that “triplicate” meant three identical things which therefore required that I fill in the same form in ink 3 times. My work saving solution of filling it in once, photocopying it and signing all three copies was not considered to be in compliance.
This got me wondering a little about where and when the requirements for documents “in triplicate” had originated and why it was so popular with government departments all over the world. This particular form from the US Treasury Department is just an example but I like their final claim that their triplicate requirement “is in accordance with the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995”.
(more…)
Tags:in triplicate, origin of triplicate, Roman origin of triplicate, three
Posted in Behaviour, Trivia | 1 Comment »
October 26, 2011
It seems like an exercise of common sense:
The Local – Germany’s highest civil court has set out a process by which web hosts can avoid liability for libellous blog posts, in a decision which Google described as striking a blow for freedom of expression and information in the internet.
… The Federal Court of Justice …. also set out a process which web hosts should follow to avoid any liability.
Someone who believes a blog entry violates the law must inform the hosting company – but allegations of illegality must be “concrete” enough that they can be affirmed “without detailed legal and factual review,” the court ruled.
The allegations must be passed onto the blogger who must respond within a reasonable period – or the blog can simply be deleted. If the blogger decides to defend their entry, the complainant must prove that it is illegal, and if this cannot be done, the entry must remain.
But as regards anonymity this requires that the identity of the blog poster must be known to the host.
Tags:Blog posts, Federal Court of Justice, Freedom of speech, Germany, Google, liability for blog posts
Posted in Behaviour, Germany, Media | Comments Off on German Federal Court sets out rules for site liability for blog posts
October 18, 2011
This is a very strange tale of a prestigious Italian bio-medical Research Institute, a strange priest, tons of money, huge debts, corruption, a suicide, the Vatican and – of course – links to Berlusconi.
It reads like a film script and a subject worthy of a Dan Brown blockbuster.
Alison Abbott writes in Nature:
One of Italy’s most prestigious biomedical research centres now faces bankruptcy, against a backdrop of rumours fed by intrigue among power-brokers, allegations of fraud and corruption, and a violent death. Next week, a court will decide whether to leave the Milan-based San Raffaele Scientific Institute to its fate, or allow a consortium led by the Vatican Bank to rescue it. (more…)
Tags:Da Vinci Code, Giuseppe Profiti, Italy, Luigi Maria Verzé, Mario Cal, San Raffaele, San Raffaele del Monte Tabor Foundation, San Raffaele Research Institute, Silvio Berlusconi, Vatican
Posted in Academic misconduct, Behaviour, Corruption, Italy, Politics, Science | Comments Off on The strange story of the San Raffaele Research Institute, Don Verzé, the Vatican, corruption and a suicide!
October 18, 2011
Perhaps this was one of the critical genetic traits which – in evolutionary terms – helped humans separate from the apes and power ahead to be the leading species on the planet. It is not difficult to imagine that a “cooperation” gene or a “motivation to cooperate” gene – if such a thing exists – could have resulted in a number of “downstream” needs (for communication, language, artefacts, complex social organisations, arts and science) which in turn selected for and influenced the development of the traits which distinguish anatomically modern humans from other primates.
A new paper from the Max Planck Institutes in Leipzig and Nijmegen:
Yvonne Rekers, Daniel B.M. Haun and Michael Tomasello. Children, but Not Chimpanzees, Prefer to Collaborate. Current Biology, 2011 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.08.066
Summary
Human societies are built on collaborative activities. Already from early childhood, human children are skillful and proficient collaborators. They recognize when they need help in solving a problem and actively recruit collaborators.
The societies of other primates are also to some degree cooperative. Chimpanzees, for example, engage in a variety of cooperative activities such as border patrols, group hunting, and intra- and intergroup coalitionary behavior. Recent studies have shown that chimpanzees possess many of the cognitive prerequisites necessary for human-like collaboration. Chimpanzees have been shown to recognize when they need help in solving a problem and to actively recruit good over bad collaborators. However, cognitive abilities might not be all that differs between chimpanzees and humans when it comes to cooperation. Another factor might be the motivation to engage in a cooperative activity. Here, we hypothesized that a key difference between human and chimpanzee collaboration—and so potentially a key mechanism in the evolution of human cooperation—is a simple preference for collaborating (versus acting alone) to obtain food. Our results supported this hypothesis, finding that whereas children strongly prefer to work together with another to obtain food, chimpanzees show no such preference.
Highlights
- ► First study comparing collaborative motivation between children and chimpanzees
- ► Children, but not chimpanzees, prefer collaborative over individual food acquisition
- ► Motivation might be one key factor in the evolution of human-like cooperation
Science Daily:
Researchers from the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the MPI for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen have now discovered that when all else is equal, human children prefer to work together in solving a problem, rather than solve it on their own. Chimpanzees, on the other hand, show no such preference according to a study of 3-year-old German kindergarteners and semi-free ranging chimpanzees, in which the children and chimps could choose between a collaborative and a non-collaboration problem-solving approach. ….
The research team presented 3-year-old German children and chimpanzees living in a Congo Republic sanctuary with a task that they could perform on their own or with a partner. Specifically, they could either pull two ends of a rope themselves in order to get a food reward or they could pull one end while a companion pulled the other. The task was carefully controlled to ensure there were no obvious incentives for the children or chimpanzees to choose one strategy over the other. “In such a highly controlled situation, children showed a preference to cooperate; chimpanzees did not,” Haun points out.
The children cooperated more than 78 percent of the time compared to about 58 percent for the chimpanzees. These statistics show that the children actively chose to work together, while chimps appeared to choose between their two options randomly. ….. Future work should compare cooperative motivation across primate species in an effort to reconstruct the evolutionary history of the trait. …..
Tags:Child, Chimpanzee, Collaboration, cooperation, cooperation gene, Max Planck Institute, Motivation
Posted in Behaviour, Evolution, Science | Comments Off on Humans prefer to cooperate, chimps don’t
October 16, 2011
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The Fox-Werrity scandal keeps growing. Liam Fox may have resigned but as the spotlight falls on his “best man” Adam Werrity, it becomes clear that the brain behind the subterfuge was that of Liam Fox. Adam Werrity was just a pretty boy with a pretty bad degree when he was selected and built up by Fox. (A 2.2 degree is pretty close to a “fail”). He took advantage of the position he was put into to effectively operate a slush fund to pay for his luxury jaunts – all ostensibly for facilitating the contacts between Fox and influential – and risch – backers. But what is clear is that he was nothing more than a front for Fox. If at any time Fox had withdrawn his backing for his “best friend man”, Werrity would have been a zero and he can not point to any real accomplishments of his own.
Werrity only shone in the light provided by his master.
To what extent Fox was running a shadow foreign and defence policy from behind the scenes to satisfy the interests of his backers is the real question that remains. How many defence contracts were placed as a result of the shadow Fox policy is also unknown. How far UK foreign policy was influenced by Fox and his backers is a mystery. I just listened to the UK Foreign Secretary, William Hague, on BBC Radio and his stonewalling of the question of Fox’s influence on UK foreign policy (in Sri Lanka particularly) only raised my suspicions that he too feels he has been duped by his friend. His only real defence (and hope perhaps) was that that government was so large that Fox’s influence could not have penetrated very far.
The Telegraph today is pretty scathing. Liam Fox: How his best man Adam Werritty brought him down. But it cannot be forgotten that Liam Fox was the one who built Werrity up in the first place.
Liam Fox has only himself to blame. Fiercely intellectual, politically astute and genuinely capable, Dr Fox has in the end come unstuck over a misguided but long-held friendship with a man 17 years his junior.
He met Adam Werritty when his future best man was still a teenager and nurtured him for close to 15 years. He installed Mr Werritty as the head of businesses and charities which had his backing, enabling them to travel the world often at the expense of others.
They may have worked hard but the pair played hard too. They dined together in the finest restaurants, enjoyed marathon drinking sessions and even indulged in occasional bouts of karaoke.
It might have been acceptable behaviour — a giddy mixture of business and pleasure — out of power. But for a Defence Secretary, presiding over multi-million pound contracts and cuts, it proved to be fatal. …..
Werrity is described brutally by The Telegraph as a handsome teenager who the years have not been kind to. And considering that Werrity was only about 18 when as an undergraduate he was singled out by the 35 year old Fox, it begins to seem like the case of a gullible – but not very bright teenager – being seduced and corrupted by a much older and cleverer and unscrupulous man.
Tags:Adam Werritty, Fox Werrity scandal, Liam Fox, William Hague
Posted in Behaviour, Corruption, Ethics, Politics, UK | Comments Off on Sleaze and potential level of corruption rises in the Liam Fox / Adam Werrity affair
October 15, 2011
Professor Ramakrishna Ramaswamy was appointed the Vice Chancellor of the University of Hyderabad in India in June this year and he runs a blog – possibly the only University Vice Chancellor in India to do so.
Ramakrishna Ramaswamy, VC UoH
A central Central University
What is particularly unusual with Ramaswamy’s blog is his attempt to reach out to all levels at the University and abroad. The hierarchical and paternalistic (some would say feudal) tendencies in Indian society in general and at Indian Universities in particular are so strong that they create impenetrable barriers between every distinct academic or management “level”. Normally Vice Chancellors – in my limited experience though my mother was also a Vice Chancellor – keep their distance from the riffraff and zealously protect the access that is allowed to them.
As Prof. Ramaswamy writes
This blog is devoted to matters that are of concern to the community at the University of Hyderabad, and more generally to anyone interested in higher education matters in India. This is not to say it is purposely limited, it is just that some issues tend to be region specific.
and I wish him every success with his attempt. He takes some risk with his blog but I commend the challenge he places in front of his colleagues and students to genuinely participate and not just to “kowtow”.
I note that he is writing all his posts himself but that the comments are generally very politically correct and somewhat timid. The timidity is understandable since a Vice Chancellor wields enormous power at a University. It will take some time for the chains of political correctness to break.
A few interesting posts – like this one on anonymous allegations about corruption.
My impression with some of the comments was of people positioning themselves in front of the “boss” – but this will surely evolve.
Tags:A central Central University, India, Ramakrishna Ramaswamy, University of Hyderabad, VC Blog, Vice Chancellor
Posted in Behaviour, Education, India | 2 Comments »
October 14, 2011
Rupert Murdoch and his family members have about 44% of the voting shares in News Corp and his good friend Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal owns the second largest voting block with about 7% and this gives Murdoch effective control over the composition of the Board and all decisions.
But the smaller shareholders who have been grumbling for some time are beginning to get noisy and even showing signs of resistance.
But the minorities are not rolling over. Their biggest gripe is the “rampant nepotism” in the company, and it is here that Murdoch may eventually have to give ground. ….. Even before the (hacking) crisis, small News Corp shareholders had launched a lawsuit against its “rampant nepotism” for paying £415m for Shine, a television production company founded by Rupert Murdoch’s daughter, Elisabeth.
Reuters reports that at New Corp’s Annual General Meeting in a weeks time, the opposition to Murdoch will be on display:
Rupert Murdoch’s multi-million dollar campaign to win back the hearts and minds of News Corporation’s independent investors suffered a new blow on Friday after another key shareholder group called for his eviction from its board.
Hermes Equity Ownership Services (HEOS), the shareholder advisory service affiliated to Britain’s largest pension fund, issued a rallying cry to investors to vote against all Murdoch family re-elections to the board of the embattled media group at next week’s annual general meeting on October 21. …..
…. The organization, which votes on behalf of the BT Pension Fund and more than 20 other institutional clients running $140 billion of assets, has also called for an independent investigation into the phone hacking scandal that led to the closure of top-selling British tabloid The News of the World….. “The time is right for the company to appoint an independent chairman to rebuild trust, help correct the governance discount, and ensure that the interests of all investors are properly represented,” Jennifer Walmsley, Director of Hermes Equity Ownership Services, said.
Besides seeking the removal of Murdoch and sons James and Lachlan, HEOS — whose members hold 0.5 percent of News Corp’s shares — Hermes is also withholding support for the re-election of directors Arthur Siskind and Andrew Knight, citing concerns for their independence. …… Earlier this week, Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. (ISS) said Murdoch and 10 other News Corp directors should be ousted from board in the wake of the phone hacking scandal, which it said “laid bare a striking lack of stewardship and independence.”
The ISS statement prompted News Corp, which has bought back more than $1 billion of its stock since August, to step up its appeal for shareholder support with a letter that reiterated its strong financial performance in the face of the flagging global economy.
… “There is a huge problem with shareholder democracy at News Corp — it breaches what we see as a fundamental shareholder right of ‘one share, one vote’,” (Walmsley) said.
But 51% of the voting shares is a clear controlling interest no matter which way you look at it and no matter how loud one may shout for “one share one vote”. It will be difficult to overcome and minority shareholders who are truly upset may have no other option than to vote with their feet. HEOS with its 0.5% can make noise but cannot really do much else. Murdoch is canny enough to make sure that won’t happen. He just needs to ensure they get an attractive return even if the “Murdoch” discount holds back the share value. So my expectation is a lot of noise but no real change. Perhaps James Murdoch will give up one of his Board positions just to placate the noisiest opposition.
Tags:corporate ethics, corporate governance, Hermes Equity Ownership Services, minority shareholders, News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch
Posted in Behaviour, Business, Ethics | 2 Comments »
October 14, 2011
Berlusconi clings to power in Italy, while Håkan Juholt continues wallowing through his mire in Sweden and Liam Fox resigns in the UK.
Strange are the ways of politics and ethics. And even when ethics seems to win – as in the Liam Fox affair – there is a sense that the victory is superficial.
Berlusconi will probably hang on by his finger nails as Italy goes the way of Greece. Juholt has probably ensured that his party – the Social Democrats – will lose members and the next election. In the UK the full extent of the dubious antics of Liam Fox’s “best man” have yet to be revealed and David Cameron is struggling with the lack of competence in his Cabinet.
It is tempting to conclude that the common thread is that ethics and competence cannot survive together. But I refuse to believe that it is impossible to be competent or a politician without sacrificing your ethics – even if such examples are difficult to find.
Tags:Håkan Juholt, Italy, Liam Fox, Silvio Berlusconi, Sweden, Swedish Social Democratic Party, UK
Posted in Behaviour, Ethics, Politics | Comments Off on Europe this week: ethics loses as Berlusconi and Juholt continue while Fox resigns
October 14, 2011
I was not much impressed by the “back-room” election of Håkan Juholt as the leader of the Swedish Social Democrats and nor have I been very impressed by his performance to date. But the current media storm over his “failings” (excessive housing and travel expense claims, vacillation on immigration and citizenship and embellishing his credentials as a young politician) is I think entirely fuelled by forces within his own party which have decided to take revenge for the manner in which they were ignored and overridden in the battle for the party leadership. The timing and the drip feeding of all the revelations over the last week screams of an “inside job”. There are some who are now blaming the media feeding frenzy – which no doubt exists – but it was surely initiated – and perhaps orchestrated – by a few of his party “colleagues”.
But this internecine feuding will surely keep the Social Democrats out of government for a long time to come.
Irrespective of whether he will actually be found to have broken any laws or parliamentary rules, his position and that of his party has been destroyed for the next election in 2014. The prevailing perception – that will surely dominate the next election – is of a party which is supposed to represent workers, weaker members of society and the downtrodden but where the representatives are a grubby, greedy, hypocritical lot looking for every possibility of lining their own pockets. They have opened themselves up for unending attacks regarding their ethics. All social democratic politicians can now be accused of embodying a “do as I say and not a do as I do” mentality.
Needless to say, the left-wing of the party which organised the coup which made Juholt the party leader 6 months ago are now whining and busy blaming the “neo-liberal” wing for leaking and initiating the whole affair. As one of them- Daniel Suhonen – puts it:
Maybe Juholt needs to go, maybe he deserves it. But the story of how this has happened for probably all the wrong reasons, and how the trap was sprung by the
neo-liberal, right-oriented social democrats in the county of Stockholm has yet to be revealed.
Tags:Daniel Suhonen, Håkan Juholt, Infighting within the social democrats, Politics, Social Democrats, Sweden, Swedish Social Democratic Party
Posted in Behaviour, Media, Politics, Sweden | Comments Off on Swedish Social Democrats commit suicide as they destroy their own leader
The k2p blog 