Why Mass Media Ethics Are Still Important

Why Mass Media Ethics Are Still ImportantWhy Mass Media Ethics Are Still ImportantFar away from the computer, microphone or camera, even the most experienced media professionals face situations that test their media ethics. While some questions will be answered by your companys policy manual, others will require you to make a choice that could impact your career. Decide how to handle ethical dilemmas before they confront you. Know the media ethics rules that apply to todays media professionals. Avoid Accepting Payola Payola is usually associated with the radio industry record companies that pay disk jockeys to play their songs. Many media companies, including those outside radio, require employees to sign ethics disclosure fassons. If youre offered money or gifts, ask yourself what the giver wants in exchange so that you avoid accepting payola. Some gifts are harmless. You cover a charity walk and the charity gives you a free T-shirt or lunch thats provided to everyone there. Ot her gifts may have strings attached, and not in obvious ways. You may be offered an expensive meal, a weekend getaway or electronic gear. Weeks or months later, the giver asks for a favor, like news coverage or other exposure. Because youve accepted the gift, the giver hopes youll feel obligated to provide what he wants. Before that happens, check your companys policy on accepting gifts. Some only allow you to accept trivial items T-shirts, coffee mugs, and pens. Others set a dollar amount, typically $100 or less. Or you may find that you can accept a thank-you gift that is offered to other people, like a gift certificate for judging a chili cookoff that was given to every other judge. Let your gut be your guide. If the giver is trying to act secretly, chances are the intentions are not good. Alert your supervisor because others in your company may also be offered the saatkorn thing. Beware the Pitfalls of Political Connections Just because you work in media doesnt mean you don t have political opinions. Some people are paid to give theirs publicly. If you want to appear unbiased, be wary of all the ways that your political leanings may be exposed, because critics are sometimes eager to make accusations of political bias. Thats especially true for those who are always on the lookout for alleged liberal media bias. Going out to dinner with a political candidate isnt a good idea if you are well known, even if you just want to conduct an informal interview. People in the restaurant who see you will draw conclusions that you are chummy with the politician, maybe even a clandestine campaign worker. Remember that some politicians are highly skilled at manipulating the media to their benefit. They may not be at all concerned about your reputation. You can be exposed in other ways. If you attend a candidates fundraiser on your own time, photographs from the event might end up on a campaign website. Even if you simply send a candidate a check, your name could be re vealed in the campaigns financial disclosure forms. Your best bet is to avoid any contact with politicians or their campaigns that are outside an official setting. Stay Away from Business Conflicts of Interest Business owners can cause you the most grief. Thats because many operate on a you scratch my back, Ill scratch yours principle. Say you work in a TV newsroom and call up a nearby grocery store that advertises on your station to do a story on whether shoppers use more coupons when the economy is bad. You get a good story, so the next time you need a grocery store, you call the saatkorn place and go over. In time, that becomes the only grocery store your station uses. Then one day, the grocery store owner calls you to ask you to do a story on the stores newly-refurbished produce department. You politely turn him down because its not big enough news for your station to cover. The owner gets mad and threatens to cancel his advertising contract. That gets the sales department a nd possibly your general manager involved. Next, you may be told to do the story because your managers dont want to lose a client. While you will be forced to obey, you could have avoided the confrontation by going to a variety of grocery stores even those that arent clients so the one store owner doesnt think that you owe him. You should also prepare yourself on what to do when theres bad news involving a client of your sales department. You must resist any pressure to get you to drop the story assignment. Set a Personal Code of Conduct When you work in media, especially if you are well known, you give up some of your personal privacy. You may think its great when someone recognizes your face at the post office. Those same people will also recognize you stumbling out of a bar after one too many. They will talk and what is said will affect your professional reputation. Think you have to be convicted of a drinking and driving charge before you can lose your job? Thats not neces sarily true if you work in media. Many professionals sign contracts with personal conduct clauses, which means that if their conduct could cause harm to their company, they can be fired long before going to trial. Remember that you represent your company every time you step outside your front door. Media pros who are used to getting special treatment because of the job sometimes expect it everywhere they go. Stop yourself from demanding a better table at a restaurant by asking a waiter, Dont you know who I am? The most respected people who work in media are the ones who want to be treated like everyone else and not as though they are entitled to freebies or special treatment just because of where they work. Stop Social Networking from Presenting Problems You would think that people who work in media would know how to handle social networking because its a form of new media. The problem is that guidelines arent set by many media companies until after an employee has gotten into t rouble. Your online conduct, whether in the form of tweets, Facebook photos or message board comments, can be as public as what you say to your audience while on the job. Supervisors are Googling job candidates names more often than ever as a way to check them out. That is why you need to follow these top 5 social networking rules before you get into trouble.?? Thats more of an issue for younger job candidates, who may have posted wild party pictures from their days in college. Google your own name to see if there are potentially embarrassing parts of your past that appear in the search results. Eliminate content that could reflect poorly on who you want to be today and what may cost you a job opportunity in the future. Its hard to stay anonymous when you work in media. If you judge every aspect of your personal and professional conduct through the eyes of your audience, you will go a long way toward making the right ethical choices when faced with tough decisions without running th e risk of sabotaging your media career.

The Self-Driving Automaton

The Self-Driving Automaton The Self-Driving Automaton The Self-Driving AutomatonThe autonomous car is easy. Yes, compared to the doltish vehicles of decades past, completely dependent, as they were, for all navigation on the people at their wheels- be they drunk, sober, passive, aggressive, reckless, homicidal, suicidal, erratic, law-fearing, or plain bonkers- the self-driving auto is a marvel to behold. But, to get a human-free car to safely guide itself through the streets and highways of our land, theres already a baseline to go by the rules of the road. And our computational wonderthings are very good at following rules.But theres aelendher arena of transportation thats more lawless. Or, at least, the rules are unspoken (and have no weight in a court of law). The sidewalk. Navigating the strips on concrete that line our streets is a much more subtle affair, dependent on body language, unconscious conventions, and social and cultural norms. Google Chauffeur installed on a smaller machine wouldnt do too well on a pedestrian pathway. Now a team of researchers at Stanford has taken up the challenge of creating a self-navigating machine for the sidewalk. Their R2D2-sized autonomous automaton is named Jackrabbot, after its hare-like form. To successfully steer itself through the complex world of walkways, Jackrabbot relies on several methodologies. The traditional CNN deep learning approaches are not sufficiently adequate, says Silvio Salvarese, a professor of computer science and the director of Stanfords Computational Vision and Geometry Lab. What my group is trying to do is integrate more traditional machine learning with neural networks.Analyzing human interactions on unigelnde sidewalks. Image StanfordThe goal is to have a robot that moves like a pedestrian. To do so it has to understand a lot more than human to human interactions. The sidewalk, after all, hosts skateboarders, bicyclists, hoverboarders, wheelchairs, dog walkers, and squirrels in addition to unadorned people out for a stroll. You can landsee that the complexity of interaction is much richer than that between humans, says Salvarese. For example, pedestrians and bikes use a lot of conventions and subtle cues, in close proximity, without accidents- well, sometimes accidents, but mostly not.To understand this complexity, and get it into the Jackrabbot, the team collected a massive data set of interactions on collegiate walkways. What we did is fly a drone over the Stanford campus, says Savarese, and we recorded hours and hours of footage of all possible actors that populate the campus pedestrians, bikes, skateboards, strollers. All these agents and trajectories are for learning inter-class relationships. The data also includes non-agents such as sidewalk, grass, trees, fountains, and staircases.A side effect of the project is that, in learning how to best inform Jackrabbot on how to navigate among humans, theyve learned a lot about how humans navigate among humans. Their da ta could be used by civil engineers and sociologists hoping to better understand the flow of humanity. And their technique neednt be limited to understanding human interactions. In fact, one colleague at the school has put the team and their practices to use in an attempt to track the relationships of hens in large colonies. And, of course, those autonomous cars could make use of the approach. Theres more to the rules of the road than the rules, after all. At urban intersections with stop signs, self-driving cars will have to understand when walker hesitation is just a safety check, and when its a sign that the right of way had been surrendered. More immediate applications for the Jackrabbot could include assisting shoppers, patrolling the campus as a mobile information booth, and solving the last mile problem (that is, unloading deliveries of cargo delivered by self-driving truck).So far, Jackrabbot has done the majority of its meandering indoors. Itll spend more time outside on th e pathways of the Stanford campus this fall, when then team is sure all safety issues have been worked out. Then finally, perhaps, robots will become the autonomous things they were first imagined to be.Its an exciting time for AI, says Savarese. My group is really trying to help make an ecosystem where humans and robots are interacting in successful and imaginative ways.Michael Abrams is an independent writer.Pedestrians and bikes use a lot of conventions and subtle cues, in close proximity, without accidents- well, sometimes accidents, but mostly not.Prof. Silvio Salvarese, Stanford University

How You Can Best Demonstrate Respect in Your Workplace

How You Can Best Demonstrate Respect in Your WorkplaceHow You Can Best Demonstrate Respect in Your WorkplaceAsk anyone in your workplace what treatment they most want from their bosses and coworkers at work. They will likely top their list with the desire for their employer and coworkers to treat them as if they deserve to be treated with dignity and with respect. Respect is when you feel admiration and deep regard for an individual. You believe that the person is worthy of your regard and admiration because of the good qualities and capabilities that they bring to your workplace. After feeling the respect and regard, you demonstrate them by acting in ways that show you are aware of your colleagues as people who deserve respect. As such, you recognize that they have rights, opinions, wishes, experience, and competence. They have the right for you to regard them through this referential lens. Respect in Popular Music Popular songs sing about the need for respect. It is that univer sal of a need among humans. From Aretha Franklin R-E-S-P-E-C-TFind out what it means to me. to Train Everybody needs a little respectEverybody needs a little timeEverybody needs a little respectEverybody needs a little. Everybody needs a little respect. You know when you have respect. You know when you dont. You cant tough respect but you can feel it emanating from your coworkers and bosses- and you can feel it when it does not. How Employees Judge Whether They Are Respected You can hear respect in a persons tone of voice, in their nonverbal communication, and in the words, they use to address you. You can see respect in how your coworker or boss deeply listens to you and asks questions to make sure they understand your point of view. You judge respect by the way in which your organization, your bosses, and your coworkers treat you. You see it in how your organization establishes new rules and policies, how they introduce the new procedures to employees, and in how they compensa te, recognize and reward you. You see the degree of their respect in how often they ask your opinion, run work changes that affect your job by you before implementing them, and delegate meaningful assignments. But what is respect really? And, how is respect demonstrated at work? 138 Watch Now Workplace Etiquette You Should Know Tips for Demonstrating Respect You can demonstrate respect with simple, yet powerful actions. This is a list of ways in which you can demonstrate respect for others in your workplace. unterstellung ideas will also help you avoid needless, insensitive, unmeant disrespect, too. Try them your colleagues and managers will respect you more for trying. Treat people with courtesy, politeness, and kindness.Encourage coworkers to express opinions and ideas.Listen to what others have to say before expressing your viewpoint. Never speak over, butt in, or cut off another person. Listen, really listen, and stop formulating rebuttals and responses in your mind when y ou need to focus on listening to the other person.Use peoples ideas to change or improve work. Let employees know hat you used their idea, or, better yet, encourage the person with the idea to implement the idea. Never insult people, use name calling, disparage or put down people or their ideas.Do not nit-pick, constantly criticize over little things, belittle, judge, demean or patronize. A series of seemingly trivial actions added up over time, constitutes bullying.Be aware of your body language, the tone of voice, and your demeanor and expression in all of your interactions at work. People, who are radar machines, are hearing what youre really saying in addition to listening to your words.Improve your own ability to interact with coworkers and bosses in a way that emphasizes the knowledge you have gained from your awareness of people and your emotional intelligence. It will make you more able to offer sympathy, relate with empathy, and step into the shoes of those with whom you wo rk. Treat people the same no matter their race, religion, gender, size, age, or country of origin. Implement policies and procedures consistently, so people feel that they are treated fairly and equally. Treating people differently can constitute harassment or a hostile work environment.Include all coworkers in meetings, discussions, training, and events. While not every person can participate in every activity, do not marginalize, exclude or leave any one person out. Provide an equal opportunity for employees to participate in committees, task forces, or continuous improvement teams. Solicit volunteers and try to involve every volunteer. Praise much more frequently than you criticize. Encourage praise and recognition from employee to employee as well as from the supervisor.The golden rule does apply in the workplace, or, as professional speaker Leslie Charles, says frequently, You want to implement the platinum rule at work treat others as they wish to be treated. There are many ot her ways to demonstrate respect at work. You will want to make your job become meaningful work. Respect is a cornerstone of meaningful work. These ideas constitute a solid foundation but your imagination and thoughtful consideration will bring you many more. Implemented consistently at work, these respectful actions help ensure a respectful, considerate, professional workplace. You can be certain that a respectful workplace brings benefits for all stakeholders. Want More Information Related to Respect? ?40 Ways to Say Thank You at Work20 Ways to Tell Your Employees That You Care