Timeout: guidelines for its selection and use

This article focuses on the use of “timeout” as a classroom behavior modification technique, examining whether or not the counselor should suggest its use in a given situation and how to insure its maximal effectiveness once it has been chosen as an appropriate procedure. The authors present some questions to be considered when deciding whether or not to use timeout and give guidelines for its best use. The questions and guidelines are presented in a flow chart format in order to facilitate easy and quick use by practitioners.     

The illusion of pre-enrollment counseling

Concern about attrition of college students has often led to recommendations that more counseling be supplied to entering freshmen. In the present study, student response to pre-enrollment counseling programs suggests that freshmen are able to consider only informational aspects of their entering status. The number of students requesting pre-enrollment counseling varied inversely with the amount of such information available outside of counseling conferences. As long as universities make it incumbent upon the student to adjust to the institution, the student who is not emotionally “bound” to attending a particular college will be seen as needing counseling although the opportunity for such counseling will be illusory. Institutional changes, as well as student changes, must be encouraged if the opportunity for counseling is to become a reality.     

Killer Robots

abstract   The United States Army's Future Combat Systems Project, which aims to manufacture a 'robot army' to be ready for deployment by 2012, is only the latest and most dramatic example of military interest in the use of artificially intelligent systems in modern warfare. This paper considers the ethics of the decision to send artificially intelligent robots into war, by asking who we should hold responsible when an autonomous weapon system is involved in an atrocity of the sort that would normally be described as a war crime. A number of possible loci of responsibility for robot war crimes are canvassed: the persons who designed or programmed the system, the commanding officer who ordered its use, the machine itself. I argue that in fact none of these are ultimately satisfactory. Yet it is a necessary condition for fighting a just war, under the principle of jus in bellum, that someone can be justly held responsible for deaths that occur in the course of the war. As this condition cannot be met in relation to deaths caused by an autonomous weapon system it would therefore be unethical to deploy such systems in warfare.