― A Clash of Kings
"Forcing opinions into the mouths of dead writers is a dangerous style of necrophilia, especially when the writer is Adorno"
Adoring Opinions
Opinion polling
Opinion polling
I was rung by an opinion poller yesterday. I was curious. So I took part. And I asked questions.
The person calling me would not say who had paid for the poll.
The poll was very definitely of marginal seats. My seat is marginal.
I asked how I had been selected. Purely on the basis of my telephone number, I was told.
I commented that the call had been one of very few now received on my landline, that my children never use, or answer.
I asked if all calls were to landlines. I was told they were. That is how they could determine they were reaching the right geographic area.
I asked if they realised that this also meant that their polling was very heavily biased towards those who are older, and so inherently more conservative. They are the people who have landlines now.
I got no response. But if this is normal, and I do not know that, no wonder polling is so unreliable. This poll was pre-selected to deliver a Tory bias.
Why the Observer’s opinion polling is wrong
Why the Observer’s opinion polling is wrong
Students Have Easy Access to Ghostwriters for Hire — What Should Teachers Do?
Recently, Eric Winsberg (South Florida), as an experiment, tweeted, “Who could I pay to write a five-page essay for me that I need to turn in for my philosophy class?”
A Collection of Stories for Teaching Ethics
Luc Bovens, professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has created a website that gathers together and organizes various “short stories in world literature by both classical and contemporary writers” that may be useful in teaching a range of questions in ethics and social and political philosophy.
The site is called TESS: Teaching Ethics with Short Stories. Aimed primarily at college and high school students in humanities courses, it gives visitors the option of browsing through its collection of stories geographically or thematically. The themes include “autonomy & dignity,” “luck & irony”, “gender & relationships,” “truth & deception,” and others, as you can see on the image of the theme menu, below:
