Tonight, I watched Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. What a Valentine's Day movie, I know, but it was much better than I expected. As a lapsing Republican, I was not exactly looking forward to this movie, but I thought I should see it as a documentary. I was really impressed with it, and it will be interesting to see what happens once I spend some more time processing it.

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As a learning professional, today's Dilbert speaks mountains about learning objectives and expectations in and around organizational power (not to mention why what we think and want is often what we do not get.

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Now that I am thinking more about my Google post, I am thinking about Brin's regret. If that choice was "a net negative," why not change their own policy?

It seems Sergey Brin over at Google now regrets his company's involvement of censoring in China. The Guardian reports that the Google motto "Don't be evil" seems somewhat problematic regarding this situation. Brin is quoted as saying: "On a business level, that decision to censor… was a net negative."

So, censoring is negative for business, but it is still acceptable according to Google's Code of Conduct? This states (with the text in bold being my emphasis of their actual words):

Our informal corporate motto is "Don't be evil." We Googlers generally relate those words to the way we serve our users – as well we should. But being "a different kind of company" means more than the products we make and the business we're building; it means making sure that our core values inform our conduct in all aspects of our lives as Google employees.

The Google Code of Conduct is the code by which we put those values into practice. This document is meant for public consumption, but its most important audience is within our own walls. This code isn't merely a set of rules for specific circumstances but an intentionally expansive statement of principles meant to inform all our actions; we expect all our employees, temporary workers, consultants, contractors, officers and directors to study these principles and do their best to apply them to any and all circumstances which may arise.

The core message is simple: Being Googlers means striving toward the highest possible standard of ethical business conduct. This is a matter as much practical as ethical; we hire great people who work hard to build great products, but our most important asset by far is our reputation as a company that warrants our users' faith and trust. That trust is the foundation upon which our success and prosperity rests, and it must be re-earned every day, in every way, by every one of us.

So please do read this code, and then read it again, and remember that as our company evolves, The Google Code of Conduct will evolve as well. Our core principles won't change, but the specifics might, so a year from now, please read it a third time. And always bear in mind that each of us has a personal responsibility to do everything we can to incorporate these principles into our work, and our lives.

While business is business and revolves around increasing value for stockholders, I am still bothered by how they are interpreting this with their censorship. How is a statement of principles, even one which they rightly acknowledge evolves over time, aimed at one set of users (Chinese authorities) while the end-users (those who use the Google services themselves) are manipulated by finding changed results from the searches? 

Google claims, in Serving Our Users:

Google has always flourished by serving the interests of our users first and foremost. Our goal is to build products that organize the world's information and make it accessible to our users.

I suppose Google is selective in providing which information to which users. With Google dominating Web searches, at least in the US, I am increasingly concerned that Google will begin tampering with their censorship here as well for causes or sites or concerns or issues they want to promote. After all, their service is to use, so they do not technically owe end-users anything. They are free to organize "the world's information" in any way they choose. This has interesting implications for maintaining the power they now have, especially for those to whom they choose should benefit from it.

What is to stop them, as they now have a track record?

After watching 24 this evening and hoping our global situation does not worsen after tomorrow’s State of the Union Address, I thought I needed something a little lighter as I finish tweaking my lesson plans for tomorrow night’s class, so I turned to my friend Dilbert.

Today’s Dilbert is the story of my work over the last five year. Click to see it full-size.

Did anybody else see this article in Monday’s New York Times - New York Rabbi Finds Friends in Iran and Enemies at Home. The rabbi attended a recent conference in Iran that, among other things, debated the Holocaust. His group believes the Holocaust has been exploited to justify the existence of Israel. It is about Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, who is the spokesperson for a small anti-Zionist group, Neturei Karta, in the New York area.

I found this story fascinating, since I never heard about Orthodox Jews (complete with hats, beards, dressed in black, etc.) who were anti-Zionists. That just goes to show that today, on the celebration of Martin Luther King, civil rights still take many forms by many different people. I suppose that injustice can happen even within communities that, on the outside, appear so homogenous.

Happy MLK Day, as it reminds us that things are often so much more complicated then they seem on face value. I suppose both silence and voice can go both ways.

Did anybody see this and have the eerie feeling people can be worse than we want to believe? I recall reading about Stanley Milgram’s controversial Yale experiments and both a sick feeling in my stomach as well as a feeling that perhaps entire groups of people who have done horrible crimes against humanity, while claiming they were "just following order," are really no different from most people.

Last night’s recreation was worth seeing and causing me to be disturbed again. ‘Primetime’ Re-Creates a Famous Experiment to Understand How Ordinary People Can Perform Unthinkable Acts.

So, Saddam Hussein has now been put to death, which ends a violent chapter in the history of the people of Iraq. While convicted of crimes against humanity and having undoubtedly done horrible things to some of his people, he also had (at one time) the support of the United States and was able to create a secular Islamic nation that did not have the fundamentalist anger so rampant in the Middle East. I wonder who or what will take his place and if the three groups of people in Iraq, cultures that are seemingly independent and never clearly saw themselves as part of a united Iraq, can indeed form a single nation.

I think of these people here on New Year’s, and wish them and us the best for 2007. Let us work toward making it more peaceful than the previous year. 

So, our friends at Boing Boing explain how the founder of Wikipedia, Jimbo Wales, is planning a new search engine, Search Wikia, to challenge Google and the like. I like the idea that orinary mortals, like us, can have a voice. I just hope that the masses will lead to better results than those done automatically by Google. After all, Wikipedia has been accused of errors as well . . .