How do Airlines Screen Pilots?

A Germanwings flight crashed in the French Alps on March 24th while flying from Spain to Germany. The alleged reason for the tragic accident is that the copilot crashed the plane in a particularly bad instance of depression that had effected him his entire life. Many are questioning the fact that this pilot was allowed to fly a passenger jet with this mental illness, how was this problem left unknown, how did he get his job or even his license to fly passenger flights if he had had problems with severe depression?

These are all reasonable questions, and many have been answered in many news articles since the crash. The question I have not seen answered is as follows: how loose is the screening for pilots in the modern airline industry?

If this very sick man was allowed to fly a commercial jet then who else could get one of these licenses? Airline passengers go through fairly strenuous security to even travel by air but this incident has me thinking about the pilot's screening.  In the case of this flight 150 people died because the pilot made a selfish act, but what if it had been worse than selfish. It is little comfort to the families and friends of those lost, but while the pilot had control of the plane he could have taken that plane and run it into the middle of a town, or even a major city. If this man had been malicous rather than depressed then this situation could have been much worse. Should we require more screening for pilots, mentally and physically, to make sure this never happens again?

Is it Good We No Longer Give Lethal Injection?

Many states are having to abandon the strategy of lethal injection as a way of carrying out capital punishment because they can no longer get the necessary drugs from European pharmaceutical suppliers. The reason that States can no longer buy the drugs is because European companies that are opposed to the death penalty don't want their medicinal product to be used for murder.

These companies may have the goal of ending capital punishment but they are not succeeding. The death penalty continues, except states have now reverted back to executions by firing squad. Though I don't agree with capital punishment, if criminals do get charged with a death sentence I would argue that the companies are doing the Nation a favor. I would argue that if capital punishment has to happen, the firing squad is actually a better practice.

Firing squads are a simpler, more efficient solution. As awful as it is to call one murder better than another due to efficiency and cost effectiveness, if criminals have to be executed by law it is better to make it faster and easier. Both the executioners and the prisoner benefit from abandonment of the lethal injection. The executioners in the case of a lethal injection walk away knowing that they have murdered, in the case of a firing squad one out of the 5 marksmen shoots a blank so there is always a chance that you didn't fire the lethal shot.

Criminals in the case of both executions are allowed their last words, standing up. In both cases they get to see who is killing them. In both cases if everything goes right the criminals die very quickly and supposedly painlessly--but lethal injections more often don't meet the last condition. If the executioner misses the correct vein the prisoner will die in a very slow and painful way. A firing squad will almost never fail, and if a criminal has to pay with his life, it is done better with a firing squad.

Is American Culture Becoming Central?

Since the United States is such a young country compared to some of the other superpowers it sometimes seems that we don't have as rich of a culture. France has the largest cycling race in the world, Germany has Oktoberfest. America is a melting pot so we celebrate and recognize all cultures, but it also feels like Americans should have an event to call their own.

This year I realized that March Madness has become a cultural phenomenon for Americans. The tournament brings people together in a way nothing else can. Due to the brackets, people can come together behind teams that they would never root for, or even watch. I also think that it speaks to our focus on educational success as well since the tournament is made up of college teams rather than professionals. March Madness lets Americans cheer for their favorite teams, the teams they wagered money on, and on a different level--the up and coming generation.

As Americans come behind the common enemy, root for the underdog, all focus on the same event--the country comes together. America has always been famous for its mix of cultures, the melting pot idea is central to U.S ideology, but I think every nation--on some level--has to be a complete piece. As our country ages it gains tradition and history. March Madness, for better or for worse, has become a huge part of American culture, and it's here to stay.

Two Truths and a Lie

Recently in Photography Class we did a project mimicking the ice breaker game "two truths and a lie." For those of you who haven't played the game the premiss is a person says 3 facts about themselves and the other people playing have to guess which one of the facts is a lie. The game is fun, especially with people you have just met, but as a photography project it was especially interesting. The theory was that one picture in a series of 3 would be manipulated, and during a "critic" with the class the other students had to guess which was the manipulation, or the "lie."

At face value the project seems kind of dull, a guessing game with no real value. However when a little more thought is applied to the project, it is an interesting criticism of our modern society. The point is that the class cannot see what you have changed. The criticism is that it is so easy to fabricate events through photoshop, or even with darkroom photography; that people today never truly know what happened and can never know what is a lie. In the modern media, ideas, events, and outcomes can be changed through photo and audio editing--does this mean that the public cannot trust what we learn and see?

The idea is a frightening one, but once the class reached the end of the project, most people could see what was manipulated. Since the class was told to think critically about the 3 pieces and determine which was true and which was false, the fabrication was usually picked out. I believe the comparison of this project and the modern media holds true. If the public knows to think critically about the what they see, then they will not be convinced of false information. Nothing should be taken at face value, whether it be art or news, never be sure that something is not fabrication--is not "the lie."

Dying the River

Every Saint Patrick's Day weekend in Chicago, the Chicago River turns green. The famous tradition started when Mayor Richard J. Daley held office. He originally wanted to dye the lake, but had to settle for the river. The dye is 100% environmentally safe but I would argue that dying the river is still perilous for the Chicago River.

A river of bright green water makes the Chicago River seem like something out of fantasy, it does not show the river for what it is: an ecosystem. The idea green water reenforces is that the only relation between living organisms and the water is the waste that humans dump into it. What a lot of city residents don't realize is that there is life in the Chicago River, and despite the green dye not being dangerous it puts citizens of Chicago in a dangerous mindset.

Along withe green dye, trash gets thrown into the Chicago River. The majority of life in the river was killed when the direction of the flow was changed, and when the river pollution was at its peak. Since then the river has become clean enough to be home to beavers and even some rumored otters. The river dying is a great tradition but it is important to remember that there is life in the river, no matter what color it is.

Is Higher Education a Business?

President's Day Weekend is a time of year that many high school students visit colleges, touring the campuses to help them make a decision on where to go. This year I joined the group, traveling from one college to another in North Carolina. I saw 3 very different Colleges: University of North Carolina, Duke, and Elon. The first is a large state school with 18,000 undergraduates, the second is a medium sized private university with around 7,000 undergraduates, the third is a small private college with about 5,000 undergraduates.

Each school was in a different town, with a different kind of student attending them; what was remarkable was the how much each tour mimicked the other two. It seemed that each school boasted all the same traits. Each tour mentioned how many clubs it had, and the fact that students could start their own clubs based on their own unique interest. Each tour mentioned one card that could be spent on stores and restaurants around campus as well as used for laundry. Each tour mentioned their many different options on how to find the perfect roommate.

These similarities made the schools seem like competing companies rather than educational institutions. The mention of the same features sounded much like Samsung and Apple comparing cell phones, or like McDonald's and Burger King trying to make theirs the fast food chain of choice. Rather than try to present the school in a way that showed what student life would be like the schools seemed to just be checking off boxes that matched them to the competition. When one school builds a new fitness center, the rest build a fitness center and a new dining hall. The escalation takes the education that a student is getting secondary and the facilities and programs outside of studies the primary concern. These tours don't focus on academia, instead they try and compete for student attention; the schools try to one up each other rather than really show a student what it is like to attend the University.

What is the point of touring if all the schools say the same thing? Schools aren't corporations, so they shouldn't act like them.

The Unfortunate Changes to Sports Journalism

In my last blog I wrote about the over-blown reporting on the deflated footballs in the recent AFC Championship Game. My point in writing it was to accent the blurred line between news stations advertising and news stations reporting the news. Some would argue that the football scandal isn’t important news, but what I found interesting was how sports news is reported today and how it has evolved over time.

Sports writing seems to be a lost art. Today we see sports news that is over-simplified, written to provoke reactions in readers and viewers, when there was a time when sportswriting involved thought-p-provoking analysis and apt comparisons of sports to other aspects of culture. One of the finest examples of this art was the work of the master sports writer, A.J Liebling, a writer for the New Yorker magazine in the 40s and 50s who specialized in boxing. In a recent piece about Liebling’s work called, "What Boxing Writing Can Teach Us About Everything: A.J.Liebling on Moore-Marciano," Carlo Rotella detailed the journalist's work on one specific fight. In the article Rotella praises Liebling’s ability to reach the lower and upper classes, and his ability not to just recount the fight in detail but to provoke thought about the nation and the athletes while doing so.  To Rotella, "contrasting the variety of ways of seeing becomes the point of [Liebling’s] piece, dramatizing the process of making sense of what would appear to most readers as opaquely chaotic violence."  Who would use such language to describe even the most ambitious stories reported on Sportscenter today?

 

A.J. Liebling

While the purpose of Liebling’s writing is to make the reader see boxing as more than a fist fight, even as a metaphor for American life, modern sports reporters are not critics, nor are they artists; the aim of sports journalism today is to provoke a reaction or to boost viewership. Rather than "contrast a variety of ways of seeing" reporters present a one-sided view of an issue and repeat it over and over again. Rather than focus on strategy in football, reporters try to bring out the violent nature of the sport to promote their networks and raise Nielson Ratings. Rather than focus on the sport itself, sports news has abandoned stories about sports for sports as scandal. Athletes are no longer sportsmen; people care more about what they do off the field than on it. Cheating scandals, domestic violence and how much money the coaches and players make have become top stories, replacing the actual game. Months were spent on the Ray Rice issue, on stations like ESPN and magazines like Sports Illustrated rather than on the game of football; more focus is put on mistakes athletes make than on their plays.

Above all, sports news has also been over-simplified. Rotella cites an article Liebling wrote characteristically entitled "Ahab versus Nemesis." Just the title is a literary reference to Moby Dick, but Rotella finds references to culture beyond the title in the article itself, which contains analogies to Euclidian geometry, opera, and Aristotle's Poetics. Liebling had a skill to bring critical analysis to the world of sports; rather than focusing on deflated footballs or a man unjustly beating his wife, he wrote about the beautiful style of one boxer being beaten by a thug; then asked the bigger question, what does that mean about our values?

I suggest you read Rotella's piece and even Liebling's writing, so you can read more into the sports you watch.