Is Facebook Evil?

Law enforcement agencies are increasingly using sophisticated cameras, called “automated license plate readers,” or ALPRs, to scan and record the license plates of millions of cars across the country. These cameras, mounted on top of patrol cars and on city streets, can scan up to 1,800 license plate per minute, day or night, allowing one squad car to record more than 14,000 plates during the course of a single shift.

Bewildered, and at times angry, faculty members at Harvard criticized the university Sunday after revelations that administrators secretly searched the email accounts of 16 resident deans in an effort to learn who leaked information about a student cheating scandal to the news media. Some predicted a confrontation between the faculty and the administration. “I was shocked and dismayed,” said the law professor Charles J. Ogletree. “I hope that it means the faculty will now have something to say about the fact that these things like this can happen.”

|Peter Boettke|

We're finally hearing about the fallout from a massive cheating scandal that shook Harvard University's campus last summer, in which 125 students were investigated for plagiarism and other academic misconduct surrounding their final exams.

While the annual Harvard senior survey of graduating students always provides an informative glimpse into the past, present and future of graduates from the US' most prestigious (whether or not this is deserved is a different question) institution, the topics most interesting for us and our readers revolve, not surprisingly, around money. Here are the key observations of what students in all "non-Harvard" universities across the nation may be missing (or not). First, work plans:

Harvard University has been stripped of a string of U.S. quiz championship titles after a cheating scandal was uncovered by organizers. A competitor from America’s most coveted university was found to have accessed a website that listed questions that were to be asked in the National Academic Quiz Tournament (NAQT). For three successive years, Andy Watkins, a member of Harvard’s “A” team, viewed pages that displayed the first 40 characters of forthcoming questions, NAQT officials said.

"Everything is amazing and nobody is happy"

Until now, Berlin has resisted the US-style publication of information about banks’ capital cushions because it feared the results could be manipulated, could send the wrong signals, and break German laws about commercial secrets. The government’s U-turn is likely to rouse the anger of German banks, which have been in lock-step with Berlin so far in resisting the publication – and under German law they would have to approve any public use of their own data.