A company that plans to install cameras at road intersections to catch vehicles running red lights here has hundreds of San Diego motorists up in arms. The motorists, photographed running red lights, allege that the company is engaged in the partnership with Big Brother to make money. Somehow, it is not surprising to learn that a company is motivated by profit. In this case, the profit motive serves the public good. Company trying to catch
red-light runners is sued
for excessive profitsThe issue: A company that will
turn on cameras at intersections to
catch red-light violators here later this
year is being sued in a San Diego court.The Hawaii Department of Transportation has tentatively contracted with Lockheed Martin IMS Corp. to install and operate cameras at intersections beginning in November. The company will install 10 red-light cameras and three cameras -- to be increased to 12 -- to catch speeders, according to department officials.
Lockheed Martin performs similar tasks in more than 40 jurisdictions in the United States, Canada and Australia. It received a national award in October for its operation in the District of Columbia -- called a national model of public-private partnership. D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsay said the operation reduced red-light violations by more than 60 percent at intersections equipped with cameras.
San Diego motorists contend, however, that the cameras should be dismantled because inaccuracies were found at three intersections where the cameras had undergone recent adjustments. Lawyers are asking a judge to throw out all the tickets, which cost motorists $271 each, because of Lockheed's profit motive.
Lawyers for the motorists argued that Lockheed's contract with San Diego calls for it to be paid $70 per ticket, so the company makes more money the more tickets are issued. The city receives $73 for each ticket, and the rest goes to various state funds and for police training. The lawyers contended that Lockheed had a part in choosing intersections with short yellow lights to increase the company's take.
A former Lockheed Martin employee testified in a San Diego court that the company's main concern "was to make revenue and that was it. There was no concern about the safety of citizens." His revelation that a company would enter into a contract with a city for other than altruistic reasons is somehow less than stunning.
The Hawaii contract, awaiting final approval, also calls for Lockheed and the state to divide revenue. As in San Diego, placement of the cameras at intersections here where traffic volume is heaviest -- and violations are more frequent -- will be in the best interests of Lockheed's profitability and of highway safety, as long as the photographs accurately depict violations. The only losers at those intersections will be motorists who run red lights.
PLAGIARISM is the easiest it has ever been because of the simplicity with which a computer can copy and paste a clever phrase, paragraph or more from an Internet flowing with brilliance. Detecting plagiarism also is at its easiest, by merely placing quotation marks around suspiciously clever wordage and conducting an Internet search. Great minds, we all know, don't think that much alike. Internet makes plagiarism
and its detection easyThe issue: The Internet is
tempting many students to
plagiarize in their school work."Plagiarism is the root of all culture," folk singer Pete Seeger remembers his father telling him. Seeger -- or his father -- was joking, of course, but people do have a tendency to store profound word combinations in their memory banks and recall them at opportune times, often without realizing where they came from. There is nothing sinister about that.
However, school teachers are increasingly finding that papers being turned in by students contain passages that have been lifted, without attribution, from the Internet. The process is so easy that many students apparently don't fully realize they have committed theft of the worst kind -- intellectual expression.
"Taking something straight off the Internet and using it as their own, they don't seem to think that's stealing at all," said Melanie Hazen, an English teacher at Montgomery Central High School in Clarksville, Tenn., attending last week's National Education Association's annual meeting in Los Angeles.
More than half of 4,500 high school students questioned in a recent Rutgers University survey said they had downloaded an essay from the Internet or copied at least a few sentences. About 20 percent of college students admitted doing the same thing.
Yesterday's shortcut was Cliffs Notes, now (surprise!) cliffsnotes.com, a method of learning quickly about a literary classic by reading a synopsis and observations to bluff one's way through an examination. That is tame compared with today's estimated 600 cheating sites on the Internet, with essays for sale by credit card for $60 to $100.
Even so, teachers have their own resources on the Internet for detecting cheats; more often than not, they don't need them. "A good teacher knows if that student wrote that or not," said third-grade reading teacher Nancye Jennings of Fairhope, Ala. "Once you've had them in class, you can tell. You get a feel for the way they say things, the way they put words together."
Most students are aware that teachers know that. Fortunately, they also realize that engaging in plagiarism cheats themselves of the benefits of education. That has not changed through the years.
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