Compelled Nonuse of Information promotes oligarchic control of a populace. This paper presents guidelines for identifying and responding to oligarchic control that results from CNI. CNI is a group of information behaviors that lie beyond the control of the individual. The six CNI types, which incorporate many sub-types, are: intrinsic somatic barriers, socio-environmental barriers, authoritarian control, threshold knowledge shortfall, attention shortfall, and information filtering.

Today, the speed at which science and technology is progressing around the world is so fast that any lag in this race may result in irrevocable consequences for certain countries. For emerging scientific powers such as Iran, this issue is a matter of the country's reputation. This study seeks to investigate plagiarism in different fields of science in Iran. With the growing number of scientific publications in Iran, several reports about the increase of plagiarism in Iranian academia have been published. (...) Hence, the current study aims to investigate whether there is any difference between plagiarism volumes in different fields of study in Iran. If so, what about other countries? Specifically, we will examine if there is any significant difference in these statistics among five countries: Iran, United States, Turkey, Australia, and China.We analyzed one percent of the articles published by Iranian researchers in international journals in 2010 and 50 articles by authors from the United States, Turkey, Australia and China . Our tool was the premium version of a plagiarism checker software named Dustball. Using the software, we could detect the exact percentage of copy and pasted text from other sources.Our results show that there was no trace of plagiarism in 6 out of 27 fields under consideration for Iranian papers. Unfortunately, most cases of plagiarism were reported in three scientific fields, with medicine on top of the list. Generally, there were 8 fields with plagiarism of 30 percent or more. Our results for other countries illustrate that in medicine, the United States, Turkey, Australia and China had a plagiarism rate of 18 percent, 38 percent, 32 percent and 36 percent respectively and the rate in the field of engineering was 12 percent, 34 percent, 28 percent, 36 percent respectively. The paper suggests that more frequent instances of plagiarism in Iranian articles are due to the unawareness of the international standards of science writing and editing. According to our interesting results about other countries, we find that in the field of engineering, Iran with an 11 percent plagiarism rate has the best situation even relative to the United States with 12 percent but in medicine Iran has the higher rate .The main limitation is this study pertains to the validity of the plagiarism checker software. In Iran, access to strong and free plagiarism checker software is not provided. However, for covering this limitation, we purchased an account from Dustball that offers 3 times more powerful detection. Moreover, while the application of the above-mentioned software might be considered a limitation for this study, the software tends to under-report the plagiarism percentage in scientific papers. (shrink)

There are dangerous drug wars south of the U. S. border. We are desperately building fences and patrolling the borders to prevent drugs from entering America. We have even distributed powerful guns to Mexico, trying to trace them to the drug lords. American presidents ceremoniously appoint powerful drug czars to wage war on illicit drugs. But why are Americans such a receptive, really exploding market for cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and cannabis? One major cause of America's drug abuse epidemic is the (...) relentless erosion of our American character. To paraphrase Pogo, ‘We have found our enemy in the war on drugs, and it is US." Is there a cure? Yes, but it is doubtful that we have the courage and will to claim it.What is character disorder? How is it connected to drug abuse? What is the role of psychotherapy in the cure of our American character disorder and by extension, our substance abuse epidemic? This essay will address this elusive topic. (shrink)

Copyright infringement on the Internet runs much deeper than file sharing sites for movies, music, and eBooks. Commercially viable work published online is subject to repackaging and sale as information products, turn-key websites, and most of all, as content fodder for the vast network of "black hat" websites built to misdirect search engines and profit from advertising.

Some might argue that a right to access information is problematic, as it requires too much from others. Being a "positive right," the possession of which foists upon others a duty to provide something, an RAI might be thought to contrast with a "negative right," such as the right not to be harmed. Here, other people have duties only to refrain from performing certain actions. The critics this paper is concerned with continue that positive rights are problematic, where negative rights (...) are not, since the former obligate people to do something, which is more taxing than obligating people not to do something. So according to a critic of RAIs, such rights are difficult, if not impossible, to justify.This paper takes no position on whether an RAI is positive or negative. It also does not argue whether positive rights can be justified or not. Instead, it argues that, if an RAI is positive, then so are intellectual property rights . This is significant, as critics of RAIs may hold to IPRs. . This paper argues against that one cannot reject an RAI on the basis of its being a positive right without also losing their justification for IPRs. If this is correct, then, proponents of intellectual property who reject an RAI must find independent justification for the former, which itself will not extend to the latter.This is good news for the defender of RAIs, since the sting is removed from one potential criticism thereof. If people have an RAI, this is not anymore burdensome than other rights currently in effect. (shrink)

Diversity has been an articulated priority in library and information services for some time, with underrepresentation and recruitment having been central to diversity goals in the profession. However, among librarians, the level of representation of members of minority groups continues to be well below that of the population overall. The extent to which diversity efforts have been undertaken in libraries is not well-documented, as a part of the overall limited amount of original research in this area, thus providing little basis (...) for indicating success in achieving diversity-related goals in recruitment, diversifying collections, or enhancing organizational climates. Of the limited empirical research on diversity in the profession, little has addressed the bases for the limited progress. The explanations for the limited progress have included the pervasiveness of racism and discrimination, lack of commitment in the profession, as well as the suggestion of a lack of a pipeline of individuals from minority groups to be recruited into the profession .Building on prior discussions that have attempted to further explain the limited progress, the article focuses on the fact that many aspects of the competing rationales in favor of and against diversity and preceding concepts, from slavery, the women's suffrage movement, and the mid-20th century case of Brown v. Board of Education, through later 20th and 21st century civil rights cases, have framed the issues in ethical terms. The potential implications of the emphases on the ethical dimensions of the diversity rationales include the limited progress on diversity goals and the inability to identify common ground among those on competing sides of the debates. (shrink)