Baron cancels sleepover; ethically justified maimings dispensed via handheld keypads

Today's 21st century marketing lecture was meant to be devoid of Steve Duke. It wasn't.

Perhaps the thought of skipping the ethics lecture to jet off to one-time guest-speaker Ed Baron's Key West abode struck Duke as a tad too ironic. From the confusion pervading the ensuing PowerPoint slides, ("real truth may not come from juxtaposing extremes; it may come in a gray area in between") we're betting it was just a bad breakup.

Didn't slow down Friday's lecture, though. The keypad clickers employed by ASG for voting and tested on Medill freshmen a few weeks ago were back for an ethics questionnaire culminating in a scintillating ethical dilemma. A bargain-bin video posed freshmen-cum-train-conductors an impossible choice: mow down five immobilized invalids on the tracks or flip a magic switch, derail the train, and avert their deaths but kill another innocent bystander waiting at the platform.

And the students vote to maim! Fully 66% (come to think of it, a suspect portion) of respondents said Fuck the invalids. Apparently the prevailing logic was that these people were on the tracks and should therefore die instead of the poor woman waiting at the platform. It evidently escaped freshmen that the five people on the tracks were undoubtedly unable to move for some reason -- perhaps tied to the tracks or deaf -- and just as innocent as the latte-sipping woman awaiting the next train. And, on that note, why is the train unable to stop if people are waiting for it at a nearby platform? Wouldn't it be stopping? Here's to the hope that Duke posts the video on YouTube for public perusal. Who knows -- it may just turn up on the final.

Daily roundup: NU vs. Evanston, ASG vs. Flicker, limbs vs. whiskers

Friday's odd-job throwdown edition:

• Try the harmonica.

• Tech moves on from regrowing human limbs to developing human whiskers.

• The Devo Duo ante up in the increasingly caustic Evanston-NU battle royale. Seems that the overzealous city may seize the NU-owned parking lot it may want to transform into a government hub. Constitutional whoop-ass. Woot.

• Forum gives the Flicker Film Festival folks a "guest column" to open fire on ASG for wrongly accusing them of bouncing checks and reducing their budget as a result. They call it a "capricious dispensation of discipline." Egregiously lenghty sentences ensue.

• Though its headline may be an embarrasment to journalism, the Schlossberg Friday roundup remains a lovely read.
  

Daily roundup: Today in boring man-made structures: CCS, Tech and parking lots.

From Thursday's snow-slickened editions:

• Tech is leaking gases again, but this time they're not exploding.

• ASG puts the slapdown on the Flicker Film Festival for forging signatures.

• EIC Ryan Wenzel "risk[s] sounding melodramatic" to tell public editor David Spett he was really, really mean to say the Daily's website could use an overhaul. Does anyone else think the better retort to this is to simply say, We don't devote twelve column-inches to the glaringly obvious?

• The good columnist says Kim Jong-Il looks "exactly like a thumbs-up with a smiley-face drawn on it." Other than that, it's pretty much a morbid exercise in international-relations-flavored black humor.

• More NU-owned parking lots are being built to accomodate the cars expelled when Evanston's government moves in to that other one. Or something.

• This just in: CCS is just as boring as you thought.