An insurance company, Manulife, has withdrawn a woman’s long-term sick leave benefits associated with a diagnosis of major depression after viewing pictures of her on Facebook:
She said her insurance agent described several pictures Blanchard posted on the popular social networking site, including ones showing her having a good time at a Chippendales bar show, at her birthday party and on a sun holiday — evidence that she is no longer depressed, Manulife said.
Of course, as a psychologist, I cringe at that statement. Evidence of the presence or absence of any mental condition cannot be determined from a handful of photos. According to the woman, she was trying to enjoy herself out on the advice of her therapist, which really makes this a sort of double whammy.
I’m not going to try to guess her true condition myself (check out the 692 commenting armchair psychologists if you are interested in that). I’m more interested, instead, in how far the insurance company was willing to go to obtain information about their client. Concerning such information, Manulife’s spokesperson reasoned, “We can’t ignore it, wherever the source of the information is.”
As a manager or HR rep, is there the same pressure? If you know an employee has been late to work a few times, is the investigation of their publicly available social network resources and history appropriate? The key here, I think, is “publicly available.” If someone posts drunken pictures of themselves unprotected to Flickr, haven’t they given up the right to privacy? But even if that is technically true, do employees feel that way when their photo is discovered? I’m imagining not.
This highlights for me the real trouble with the increasing integration of people’s private lives with the Internet. In the pre-Internet era, if you did something stupid and it was caught on film, it might make the rounds amongst your friends a couple of times before being forgotten. The Internet, on the other hand, has a very long memory. Anything you do that ends up online – and at whatever point in your life you do it – is likely to be online in some form forever. Trying to get a job at 25 or 30, do you want your “hidden” MySpace and Facebook photos from when you got drunk at 20 surfacing during a job interview?
The traditional viewpoint is, of course, too bad for you. You reap what you sow. If you don’t want to be held responsible for anything you ever did, don’t do anything wrong. Is that a realistic tack for the average person? Probably not.
So considering this, I encourage organizations to instead act ethically. Even if delving into employees’ personal lives is legal, it is not usually appropriate. And for you bottom-line people out there, I doubt the information gathered from these nefarious schemes will ever justify the amount of money and productivity lost from wasting time doing the searches in the first place. After all, if they did anything truly of concern, it would probably appear in a traditional background check. If you’re worried, just do that instead!
A recent article in the Telegraph details an addition to the GCSE English exam: a section on text messaging worth 10% of students’ final exam grades. The GCSE is a standardized educational exam for 15- and 16-year-olds commonly used in most of the United Kingdom. The GCSE in particular is used as a college qualification exam and comes in a variety of subjects.
It is unclear exactly what this text messaging section looks like, although the Telegraph notes, “As part of their answer they will be required to include examples of common text shortcuts.”
This seems unwise for a couple of reasons, both related to test validity:
1) Text messaging abbreviations are a bit more fluid than the rest of the language, so I would think the list of “common text shortcuts” is fairly limited: here is a potential list. Is memorizing 100 abbreviations really a valuable skill indicative of one’s mastery of English?
2) What does this possibly have to do with the language skills required in college? The purpose of college entrance exams is to ensure that the students entering college are prepared to do so. It is already a problem in the United States that students simply assume they and every one of their classmates are meant to go to a four-year college without necessarily being ready. This leads to a large attrition rate in freshman classes. There are two solutions to this problem: either a) stricter entrance exams or b) more college programs teaching remedial skills. So if the entrance exams are getting easier, and universities can’t afford the programs they already have, then we appear to be in a downward spiral.
The students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are on strike today, following up on the promises of their union (the Graduate Employees’ Organization [GEO]), a local union of the American Federation of Teachers. The terms of the strike are a bit surprising. It’s not about wages, job security, notification of when contracts are to be expired, or anything that I would normally associated with a strike.
It’s about out-of-state tuition wavers. Apparently, UIUC refused to put wording into its official regulations regarding decisions on these tuition waivers – the typical practice of graduate schools to waive the tuition of graduate students if they perform service (such as teaching) to the university. By the terms of the strike, it doesn’t even look like UIUC is refusing to give tuition waivers. Instead, it appears that the GEO wants to be involved at the bargaining table whenever decisions about tuition waivers are made, and that is what UIUC is refusing.
It was apparently a peculiar set of interactions. It seems that UIUC agreed to all of the other demands of the union except this one. But this demand was evidently brought up very late at the bargaining table, with little time to address it. The GEO views this as an underhanded tactic to sneak new undesirable terms into the agreement.
Despite the fact that there are evidently picket lines of TAs, I’m seeing relatively little chatter about how things are going. A provost evidently sent out misleading mass emails to the students. But how are things going for faculty who rely on TAs for classes, and especially for students whose classes are taught entirely by graduate students? At least one UIUC student and Twitter user apparently feels she has been personally affected already:
LauraCatherineK Hey, #UIUC GEO: Stop picketing, start teaching. I’m not paying $25K a year to go here & not learn anything. This is not the time to strike.
Frankly, considering that the requested change is so minor, it is a little confusing why UIUC would not meet union demands. Is it pride?