(The ride was built in 1961 when the average man in the United States weighed 80 kilograms and the average woman weighed 62 kilograms.) Now some airlines, faced with record high fuel costs, are threatening
impose a "fat tax". Is this an appropriate course of action? Would you
support it? Why or why not?

As the price of oil continues to escalate with a corresponding increase in
jet fuel costs, there needs to be considerations regarding the costs of
operating passenger jets by any airline. Jet fuel costs in fact are the
deciding factor for nearly every airline, no matter how large or small, of
whether they will be profitable or not. The long-standing rules regarding
excess baggage, with higher costs for items over 100 lbs for most airlines
has been a long-standing practice as well, never fluctuating in response to
fuel cost increases or decreases. In the case of baggage and cargo,
airlines would be smart to first start with price increases on these
classes of services than immediately passing the increases in fuel costs
immediately onto customers.
Starting with increasing the baggage and cargo prices is fair to everyone,
because not everyone needs to bring these items, they choose to, yet for
many people, their jobs require them to be in geographically distributed
regions quickly over a short period of time. For many people jet travel is
the only means by which they can efficiently do their jobs. Consider the
role of the travelling sales executive, support technicians, and others who
service a widely distributed geographic region and it's clear that
immediately passing on the price increase on fuel costs to obese and
overweight travellers can impact a person's ability to earn their
livelihood. In addition, increasing the costs to obese or fat passengers
could also be considered discriminatory and illegal as a result. Above all
the decision to choose a "fat tax" is a terrible decision from a customer
relation standpoint as well. While a extremely obsess who physically need
two seat should purchase them, charging people more based on their weight
above some pre-ordained and most likely arbitrary standard set by an
airline is unethical and wrong. Start by increasing the costs of checked
baggage that is over weight limits and preserve relationships with
customers in the process. I wouldn't support a fat tax because it is
discriminatory and susceptible to being arbitrary used by airlines as well.

Mini-Case (50 Marks) - 3 - 5 Page

A) What is the "tipping point"
(http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/index.html) for plagiarism? What
will it take for students to obey the rules? Why do some students
think that the plagiarism rules are not important enough to follow?

Malcolm Gladwell's premise in writing this book was that over time,
seemingly unrelated smaller events, and even the slightest changes in
related events can combine to force large change in unexpected ways.
Gladwell refers to this concept of the rapid propagation of seemingly small
change leading to significant change being viral in nature, referring to
the medical allegories of how a virus spreads through a population. The
examples include those of decaying neighborhoods and escalating crime
throughout New York City neighborhoods in the 1980s and the corresponding
rise in crime. All these factors lead to the gradual degradation of a
neighborhood where Bernie Goetz, a man who is decidedly anti-authoritarian
and victimized once or twice, decides to take matters into his own hands in
a New York subway. Shooting four assailants and killing one of the, Goetz
gets acquitted because it was common knowledge how badly crime had gotten
in New York City at that time. Gladwell brings this example to show how
the power of context frames the tipping point into an entirely new
perspective, in addition to underscoring the point with the role of mavens
as information hubs in viral networks and an excellent overview of the
stickiness factor as it relates to children's programming. In short,
Gladwell creates a defensible and useful framework for evaluating how small
action, no matter how insignificant on their own, can collectively lead to
massive change in a society. The examples of toll cheaters on the subway
being the start of a lack of respect for law and order are a case in point.
There is always the element of risk of being caught, reprimanded or
expelled for turning in work that is plagiarized from another source,
whether it be electronic or printed materials. Students who plagiarized
materials and have not been caught have a sense of being able to overcome
the biggest challenge they face, which is evidence of hours of learning,
analysis and the development of critical thinking skills. To pass off a
plagiarized document or assignment as a proxy for their knowledge when it
fact they have not paid the price to learn is to...

For those never caught there is a sense of invulnerability and no risk if the practice is repeated
dozens of times. This cycle of cheating and plagiarism continues and once
proven to be a proven strategy, becomes shared across students, and a viral
effect of plagiarism occurs. Stopping the viral phenomenon of plagiarism
starts with much more stringent screening approaches to all assignments,
regardless of their grade value, followed by testing of knowledge presented
in previous papers that imply mastery of a subject.
As Glidewell discusses in his book, smaller, less significant actions over
time create a viral effect over the long-term. This is certainly the case
with students who are successful in completing assignments and in some
cases entire courses through the use of plagiarism. The viral effects of
plagiarism are launched as a result through entire student populations.
Once a student, in trust, tells a friend of how they received an
exceptionally high grade or plagiarized material, or when students see each
other completing work by relying on plagiarism and getting away with it,
the perception of risk subsides and this practice seems reasonable. That's
how the viral effects of plagiarism continue to propagate themselves.
Students certainly understand the risks yet with each success in passing
off plagiarized work as their own, the risk, in their minds, diminishes as
the opportunity to use time that would have been invested in working on and
learning class materials, internalizing its concepts, and fine-tuning a
response can instead be used for other pursuits. Plagiarism for many
students is seen as a necessary crutch for either a lack of interest in the
material or a lack of time to complete projects as well. These factors, in
the minds of students, rationalize the use of plagiarism as a crutch. Yet
the fact still remains that even a little success in plagiarism is highly
viral, and the rules against it are minimized with each small success
students have with this unethical practice. The solution to this problem
is not more punishment, but more accountability in class for results.
Measuring the academic performance in class relative to outside work can be
a sign of plagiarism. In addition, the use of software applications
including Turnitin.com and others which can spot copied content. While
plagiarism is grounds for instant dismissal from a class, this isn't enough
to stop the practice; students must be made accountable for the knowledge
they profess to have in documents, and individual oral examinations and
other techniques for driving a high level of personal accountability are
critical. Only through accountability can the viral effects of plagiarism
be countered.

B) While the truism is, "there's no such thing as a free lunch", people
are inundated with amazing offers via email on a regular basis. (See
below.) What can businesses do to ensure that consumer's trust them
and fraudsters do not sully their good names? Is this a problem in all
cultures? What is the "tipping point"
(http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/index.html) for fraud and how
will organizations deal with the consumer backlash?

The widespread use of phishing and online fraud is reaching viral
proportions across all westernized cultures due to the speed and agility of
online criminals who seek to strip people of their personal financial and
identity information to defraud and steal from them. The tipping point of
this began when phishing strategies devised by online criminals proved
successful in getting unsuspecting consumers to opt in to fraudulent
websites and provide account numbers, passwords, and all forms of personal
information. Once phishing and online fraud, including the hijacking of
entire company identities, the viral effects of this were well underway,
and today is visible in virtually every nation in the world in some form.
The rise of authentication technologies online that serve to quantify trust
and verify both a consumer is who they say they are, and conversely, that a
company's website really is for that company and not a fraudulent one are
at the center of this global crime problem. Using authentication
techniques and also setting policies that specifically warn customers that
no personal data will ever be asked for in e-mails is another strategy.
What companies must do is also develop continually new approaches to
battling online phishing of their customers online, develop approaches to
authenticating customers through multiple levels of security, and also
provide 128 bit encryption of their site to ensure it is not easily hacked
into.
Through a combination of policies that include never asking customers for
their logins, passwords or account names in conjunction with progressively
higher levels of security applied to their websites, companies need to
create enough barriers to being either hacked or phished from by online
criminals so as to make their site safe for customers. It is a continual
commitment to improve the security of a site that matters most.