Wichita police testing out 6 body-mounted cameras (via The Wichita Eagle)

From the article by Stan Finger -

A half-dozen Wichita police officers are testing a new body camera system that records everything the officers see and do outside their vehicles.

The field tests began two weeks ago and will continue for another two weeks, Capt. Jeff Easter said Wednesday.

“Anything that they get out of the vehicle on, they’ll record,” Easter said of the officers. “Anything is evidence. You never know what’s going to happen in front of you when you get out on the scene.”

Early results are promising.

“It’s a very good system,” Easter said. “The video quality is amazing. It’s much better than any other camera system we’ve looked at in the past.”

The system is manufactured by Taser, which is letting Wichita police try it out. The head-mounted system resembles a Bluetooth and can also be attached to an officer’s hat or eyewear.

I’m a little surprised that the police are adopting these without any fuss. I have read and directly heard about the police disabling cameras. But apparently it has become a useful tool for the officer.

I’m a little more interested in what this means for the rest of us. I recognize that the technology is available to be purchased now but it is not the same. These things kick on every time an officer exits the car. They keep all of what is seen for a year. This is no short time surveillance camera in a tie. While we are not police officers whose department is willing to spend the $5,000 a year necessary, we will eventually be the beneficiaries of the technology. Soon at a reasonable price you will be able to make a record of everything you see 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It might be useful taking college classes or at a family reunion or in large scale use changing the social fabric of the nation.

Will all Americans adapt their behavior to an utterly continuous recording of themselves by countless others? What will be the long term social effects?

In terms of business ethics, what we have here is the private becoming public. Discussions, comments and negotiations will all be easily recorded in the most informal of circumstances with the ability to keep records for years. Is there a disclosure requirement? Is there going to be an unspoken agreement not to use these in negotiation? Can they be used in court? This kind of evidence could come back to bite you as long as it exists and eventually those records will exist for the course of our lives or longer.

Will states or the federal government regulate their use? That is an important question. There is some regulation of recording phone calls. The grounds for this is that there is no consent from one of the parties. That would be a similar justification for laws on continuous viewing by personal cameras.

These things worry me. We seem as a society to do things without discussion and debate. When we do it turns every single time into a debate over personal freedom versus government regulation whether or not these are significant factors in the issue. Every subject can be classified that way but that doesn’t mean it fits into that box. Surveillance is more of an issue of what can new technology do and “what the effects are.” What are the advantages of this technology? Does it conflict with our customs and morality? What effects will it have in different areas of endeavor; medical operations, trial, sports, sex, and countless others. Once we think about the effects then we can start putting it into legal or regulatory boxes. But in current discussion the boxes come first and we never do the often subtle thinking that allows humanity to make reasonable and intelligent decisions.

James Pilant

P.S.

I went to a “gadget site” on the web. I couldn’t get a price but the system ad read this way. I think you’re supposed to feel like Tom Cruise in a Mission Impossible move.

This High Quality Body Camera set is ready for Covert Operations. This complete set is all you need. At a much better and higher resolution then our lower priced Body Cam, you get what you pay for. This is the best there is. Camera is powered by the DVR unit itself so there is no stupid 9 volt batery to weight you down.

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Net Neutrality: Who Should We Be Most Afraid Of? (via Rebecca Reynolds)

Excellent article on net neutrality. Thoughtful and intelligent. We need more like it.

She asks the important questions. What values are at stake here? What are our choices? But she ties all this in with some history of the developing media of the last fifty years.

Good writing. Please go and have a look.

James Pilant

The idea of open, accessible, unmoderated forums for discourse and exchange inspires me. Afterall, that is what I do for a living: I design processes that enable many people to engage in collaborative decision-making. That technology could push this process open even further, to many more people, to a borderless conversation, a churning think tank for innovation is a possibility I dream of. For this reason, I have been an increasing proponent of … Read More

via Rebecca Reynolds

Bismuth Nanoparticles

I have been telling my students that way back in the 1960′s, there were television series and magazine articles that tried to predict the future. Their aim was not very good. What has come to be was not predictable, what was predicted has not come to be. Reading the future whether by ancient Mayan calendars or scientific speculation is not a matter of certainty. One unpredictable development is that of nanoparticles. Nanoparticles offer often bizarre science fiction like capabilities to many fields in particular medicine.

This is from Science Daily -

Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report that they have designed nanoparticles that find clots and make them visible to a new kind of X-ray technology.

According to Gregory Lanza, MD, PhD, a Washington University cardiologist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, these nanoparticles will take the guesswork out of deciding whether a person coming to the hospital with chest pain is actually having a heart attack.

“Every year, millions of people come to the emergency room with chest pain. For some of them, we know it’s not their heart. But for most, we’re not sure,” says Lanza, a professor of medicine. When there is any doubt, the patient must be admitted to the hospital and undergo tests to rule out or confirm a heart attack.

“Those tests cost money and they take time,” Lanza says.

Rather than an overnight stay to make sure the patient is stable, this new technology could reveal the location of a blood clot in a matter of hours.

This is a positive development. But there should be caution in these developments as well.

From ANSES, French Agency for Food, Environment and Occupational Health and Safety:

At present, there is no routine method for measuring nanoparticles in a soil or water sample. Accordingly, few data are available on the presence of nanoparticles in these two matrices, and knowledge on the fate of nanoparticles in the environment is therefore limited. For the same reasons, it is also difficult to study the effectiveness of current drinking and waste water treatments to eliminate nanoparticles, and it is subsequently hard to estimate population exposure to such particles through water.

One of the prerequisites to the improvement of knowledge needed to assess the risks of nanoparticle presence in water is therefore the development of data acquisition tools.

More bluntly, if nanoparticles get in the water or soil, we can’t detect them and we don’t have any idea what to do if we do detect them.

That’s a substantial downside.

The French Agency recommends tough regulation -

Given this context, the Agency stresses the need to set up a system for listing and controlling the marketing of all products containing nanoparticles.

There is always going to be the question whether or not we are rushing into a technology that has the potential for enormous destruction.

I can point out based on my experience in the field of business ethics, that when confronted by the opportunity to make billions of dollars, safety concerns shrink in importance.

There is a great deal of opposition based on ideological grounds. But is it wish to allow private companies with financial stakes in positive outcomes to determine acceptable risks? There are not only many accounts of businesses that developed products without proper testing. There are accounts of businesses that when informed of serious problems closed their eyes to the danger. And lastly, there are literally thousands of cases where dangerous substances were casually dumped in the water, soil or air.

I believe regulation is necessary.

James Pilant

Wichita police testing out 6 body-mounted cameras (via The Wichita Eagle)

From the article by Stan Finger -

A half-dozen Wichita police officers are testing a new body camera system that records everything the officers see and do outside their vehicles.

The field tests began two weeks ago and will continue for another two weeks, Capt. Jeff Easter said Wednesday.

“Anything that they get out of the vehicle on, they’ll record,” Easter said of the officers. “Anything is evidence. You never know what’s going to happen in front of you when you get out on the scene.”

Early results are promising.

“It’s a very good system,” Easter said. “The video quality is amazing. It’s much better than any other camera system we’ve looked at in the past.”

The system is manufactured by Taser, which is letting Wichita police try it out. The head-mounted system resembles a Bluetooth and can also be attached to an officer’s hat or eyewear.

I’m a little surprised that the police are adopting these without any fuss. I have read and directly heard about the police disabling cameras. But apparently it has become a useful tool for the officer.

I’m a little more interested in what this means for the rest of us. I recognize that the technology is available to be purchased now but it is not the same. These things kick on every time an officer exits the car. They keep all of what is seen for a year. This is no short time surveillance camera in a tie. While we are not police officers whose department is willing to spend the $5,000 a year necessary, we will eventually be the beneficiaries of the technology. Soon at a reasonable price you will be able to make a record of everything you see 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It might be useful taking college classes or at a family reunion or in large scale use changing the social fabric of the nation.

Will all Americans adapt their behavior to an utterly continuous recording of themselves by countless others? What will be the long term social effects?

In terms of business ethics, what we have here is the private becoming public. Discussions, comments and negotiations will all be easily recorded in the most informal of circumstances with the ability to keep records for years. Is there a disclosure requirement? Is there going to be an unspoken agreement not to use these in negotiation? Can they be used in court? This kind of evidence could come back to bite you as long as it exists and eventually those records will exist for the course of our lives or longer.

Will states or the federal government regulate their use? That is an important question. There is some regulation of recording phone calls. The grounds for this is that there is no consent from one of the parties. That would be a similar justification for laws on continuous viewing by personal cameras.

These things worry me. We seem as a society to do things without discussion and debate. When we do it turns every single time into a debate over personal freedom versus government regulation whether or not these are significant factors in the issue. Every subject can be classified that way but that doesn’t mean it fits into that box. Surveillance is more of an issue of what can new technology do and “what the effects are.” What are the advantages of this technology? Does it conflict with our customs and morality? What effects will it have in different areas of endeavor; medical operations, trial, sports, sex, and countless others. Once we think about the effects then we can start putting it into legal or regulatory boxes. But in current discussion the boxes come first and we never do the often subtle thinking that allows humanity to make reasonable and intelligent decisions.

James Pilant

P.S.

I went to a “gadget site” on the web. I couldn’t get a price but the system ad read this way. I think you’re supposed to feel like Tom Cruise in a Mission Impossible move.

This High Quality Body Camera set is ready for Covert Operations. This complete set is all you need. At a much better and higher resolution then our lower priced Body Cam, you get what you pay for. This is the best there is. Camera is powered by the DVR unit itself so there is no stupid 9 volt batery to weight you down.

Net-neutrality complaints pile up (via wan k choi)

Amen.

Competition is very important in a free market system. But when companies like Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and other who want to keep regulators from regulating those companies keeping them from becoming gatekeepers of the internet whether it be mobile or cable, then I have to say let there be regulations. Comcast is already a large company in the area where I live. I don’t have the option of choosing another service provider since there is either … Read More

via wan k choi

My Friend, Jen, Argues For Normative Ethics!

My friend, Jen, commented on my earlier post, Personal Change Doesn’t Equal Social Change. He is kind to agree with me but I found his comments significant and I want to share them. So, I present Jen!

I agree with this post, and I think the shift has to start somewhere in education. Business ethics as a discipline needs to evolve beyond what it currently is. Currently, most of business ethics focuses on adhering to laws and other governmental regulation while maximizing profit. There is little motive for taking into account ethical concerns which do not have some sort of legal impetus. This shift will likely happen as slowly as the shift away from ethics and morality in business, but it must begin with education of those who are newly venturing into the corporate world. Business majors, MBAs, etc. need some sort of educational motivation to effect change as they move into the working world, which I believe will come in the form of making business ethics more of a normative field.