Barbara Pierson, the parent of a student convicted of honor charges last academic year, addressed the Honor Committee Sunday night. Pierson expressed her thoughts about the system, giving particular emphasis to the psychological effects that the honor proceedings had on her daughter, whom she described as an “emotional wreck” during the lead-up to her trial. Understandably compounding the emotional impact was the exhausting seven-month length of the process.

To have a case last such an extraordinary amount of time, however, is an anomaly, Committee Chair David Truetzel said, noting that the case’s summer timeframe did not help matters. Nevertheless, this extreme example brings to the fore the emotional hardship that any honor trial places on the accused student. Given the system that is in place, however, only so much can be done to lessen the turmoil.

The typical proceedings for an honor case last about 50 days from the time a complaint is made to when a trial is held, Truetzel said. The first two weeks are spent collecting evidence for the Investigative Panel, which then decides on or around day 16 whether to send a case to trial. If a case moves forward, the accused student then has 10 days to request a trial. The subsequent period varies considerably from case to case, but generally the trial is held within two to three weeks. The entire process is usually conducted in fewer than 50 days, excluding appeals. Naturally, the shorter the proceedings are, the less time there is for anxiety to build in students. Unfortunately, there simply is not much room to condense the honor timetable.

Pierson also indicated that the student adviser assigned to guide her daughter through the process “couldn’t possibly understand” the devastating effect that a case can have on the accused. Because the advisers are neither psychology majors nor associated with any psychological facility, they are ill-equipped to handle the mental health aspect of the trial, Pierson suggested. Truetzel responded to Pierson’s comments by saying that student health and well-being is a top priority of the Committee. Advisers are “trained to know when a situation has gotten out of their control” and when to refer students to counseling professionals, Truetzel said. Students who feel they are unable to stand trial can request time to receive assistance. If an ongoing psychological condition is expected to have contributed to the offense itself, a separate system is in place to evaluate the accused student’s condition.

The concerns raised by Pierson are significant, but the Committee has taken logical steps to address the issues. High-stakes events like trials will inevitably lead to emotional hardship and high levels of stress. Still, without major institutional changes, there is only so much the Committee can do to mitigate these effects. The system may not be ideal, but it is better than all previous versions.

This isn’t to say that problems do not exist. The vague intent clause, for example, has been the source of several controversies in recent years. As far as psychological issues are concerned, however, the Committee has approached the issue in an appropriate manner. It should continue to be flexible and adjust its policy as is needed.

Christopher Hitchens has said that the purpose of putting corrections in a newspaper is not really to correct what the paper got wrong. It’s to point out that everything else in the paper was right.

Last week, The Cavalier Daily published a couple of clarifications and one bona fide correction. That’s a bad week, even if it does mean that everything else in the paper was right. And it doesn’t really mean that.

One of last week’s clarifications was about an unusual twist on a common complaint. Rather than a misquote, it was a misattributed quote. What ran in the paper was apparently an accurate recounting of what was said, but the reporter had the wrong person saying it.

Ideally, there would never be any need for any correction in any newspaper. And some people may say the ever expanding list of errors and misinterpretations explains why newspapers have fallen on such hard times. Those people have a narrow, yet twisted view of the world.

The quaint journalistic custom of printing corrections is really a covenant with readers. It says that the folks who put out the paper will do their best to record things as accurately as they can. And when those folks fail, they’ll take another crack at it.

It’s mostly a newspaper thing.

A former colleague of mine once noticed that a caption in a television story misspelled the name of the principle character in the story. When my colleague asked the television reporter involved what TV people do about things like that, the TV guy smiled.

“It’s like writing on water,” he said.

Corrections are rare among broadcast and online news sources. It’s not because they don’t make mistakes. It’s because they rarely acknowledge mistakes. That’s not just my opinion, it’s the observation of Craig Silverman, a journalist and author responsible for regrettheerror.com and the book Regret the Error. Silverman collects and publishes egregious errors, outright lies and amusing corrections.

Dave Berry got Silverman’s correction of the year award for this gem:

In yesterday’s column about badminton, I misspelled the name of Guatemalan player Kevin Cordon. I apologize. In my defense, I want to note that in the same column I correctly spelled Prapawadee Jaroenrattanatarak, Poompat Sapkulchananart and Porntip Buranapraseatsuk. So by the time I got to Kevin Cordon, my fingers were exhausted.

Silverman was much less amused by this front page correction in a United Kingdom newspaper:

The Daily Express has taken the unprecedented step of making a front-page apology to Kate and Gerry McCann.

We did so because we accept that a number of articles in the newspaper have suggested that the couple caused the death of their missing daughter Madeleine and then covered it up.

We acknowledge that there is no evidence whatsoever to support this theory and that Kate and Gerry are completely innocent of any involvement in their daughter’s disappearance.

We trust that the suspicion that has clouded their lives for many months will soon be lifted.

As an expression of its regret, the Daily Express has now paid a very substantial sum into the Madeleine Fund and we promise to do all in our power to help efforts to find her.

Kate and Gerry, we are truly sorry to have added to your distress.

We assure you that we hope Madeleine will one day be found alive and well and will be restored to her loving family.

The problems with that “correction” are obvious enough. But at least it did more or less set the record straight.

A paper I used to read regularly ran a story under a headline that said a particular university continued to rise in the U.S. News & Report rankings. Though you couldn’t tell it from the headline or the story, the school actually fell a notch.

Later that week, the same paper published a column attacking a legislator and his legislation for what the columnist considered a flaw in state law. In real life, the flaw predated the legislation by a decade or more.

That Friday, I went to a high school football game. Saturday morning’s paper got the score wrong.

As far as I know, the paper hasn’t admitted or corrected any of those errors. That’s a good way to lose readers’ confidence. Admitting errors — and correcting them — shouldn’t be seen as a negative thing. It’s a responsible thing to do.

When we were children, we may have believed that grownups were omniscient and infallible. Now that we’re grownups, we know that’s not true. So it shouldn’t come as a shock that a newspaper’s staff is neither omniscient nor infallible. As readers, when we see an error, we should point it out, so it can be corrected. That’s fair. And fairness is more than grown-ups can reasonably expect from most things in life.

Tim Thornton is The Cavalier Daily’s ombudsman. He can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com

Half-baked. This term best describes not only dining hall food, but also the new idea of a “reusable to-go container”. A little known fact about our current disposable containers and utensils is that they are not biodegradable. Our current containers are made from corn, and according to a 2006 Smithsonian article “Corn Plastic to the Rescue”, are only biodegradable when they are sent to “a large facility where compost — essentially plant scraps being digested by microbes into fertilizer — reaches 140 degrees for ten consecutive days… But in reality very few consumers have access to the sort of composting facilities that can make that happen.” Kendall Singleton, Dining Service’s Sustainability Coordinator, points out that the large-scale facility used by the University “currently cannot accept Dining’s corn-based plastics, and so they’re ending up in the landfill, which of course is designed to inhibit as much decomposition as possible.” She is “in the process of reviewing this issue, and may be asking our supplier to revert back to recyclable plastic.” In this regard, I support the new reusable containers; however, this plan needs to be better organized.

The biggest loophole in the program is this: what is to stop a student from washing their container and using it to take food from the dining hall after their meal? Dining Services does not trust students with the old disposable containers to not “double dip,” as evidenced by the signs around the dining halls requesting students to not grab to-go containers and eat in the dining hall unless they are willing to swipe twice, or by the fact that the boxes are policed by the workers at the desk. Clearly, Dining Services believes that the honor code does not exist in the food-smuggling ring that is the dining hall, which is why I was shocked to hear that they support the reusable container idea.

Perhaps dining has thought this through and decided to lower the quality of food yet again, to deter people from having any desire to steal, or consume in general, their food. However, no matter how hard Dining Services tries to lower the quality of their food, there will always be something of value. If a student obtained a reusable to-go container, and washed it out at their volition, they could eat at the dining hall and raid the salad bar for all the fresh vegetables, which, if done properly, costs more than the swipe used to enter the dining hall.

What I would really like to see is the death of the biodegradable forks and for Dining Services to give away some of the precious commodity that is their utensils. By now, I am sure that all of the University is convinced that these utensils are not practical, and the knives are for decoration. The loss of function for sustainability would be somewhat palatable, except that it has been realized that they are not significantly better then the old system. Not to mention, the utensils hinder the reusable program — when a student grabs a “biodegradable fork,” that is still a problem. The dining containers are only half the problem, and half sustainable. Therefore, I propose the dining hall give away utensils using a system of barcodes and self-service.

In order to improve the sustainable containers by the addition of utensils, I propose we add barcodes to every container, and a select amount of forks. I also do not believe that a student should have to “join the program” by paying a deposit fee, because that requires intentional action by the student, hindering the growth process of this program. A student should simply be able to go to the cashier for the day and ask for a container and whatever utensils they wish. Then student should then be able to slide down the counter and be able to “check out,” much like the library, their utensils using a self-service machine. This way, lines will not be congested and more people will be able to use the service, thus making it more accessible.

In the age of environmental awareness, it is important to find programs that are not simply “better” than the original. The reusable container only fixes half the problems of the non-degrading “biodegradable corn plastics.” According to Kendall Singleton’s blog entry on September 16th, only “100 people are on board at this point,” a number that could be greatly improved by making the program something that people could automatically be a part of without going through the inconvenience of registering and remembering their card numbers to be exchanged for boxes.

Ashley Ford is a Viewpoint writer for The Cavalier Daily.

After a trial version launched in March, the University’s iTunes U channel officially became available to users last Tuesday.

The University officially launched its own iTunes U channel last Tuesday, allowing professors, schools and departments to post their own content directly to Apple’s web-based media application.

Professors can provide content exclusively to students in a particular class by linking the course’s Collab site to iTunes or can choose to make content available to the general public by adding their courses to the University’s public site, said Jonelle Kinback, assistant director of web communications in the Office of Public Affairs.

Mike McPherson, associate vice president and deputy chief information officer, said the site connects course material with students’ lives in a way that few other media sources can.

“With the predominance of iPods and iPhones and iPod Touches as music and video players, making course materials available in a format that is very easily downloaded to the player that most people have is a win,” he said.

A trial version of the channel launched last March, Kinback said, to allow departments and schools to get a feel for how to post content and what content was best suited for the site. Now that the site is fully operational, she said she hopes it will serve as a tool that will allow students and followers of the University to subscribe to content they find most interesting and engaging.

The main page of the University’s public site scrolls through new and featured content, highlighting recent events and the latest postings, Kinback said.

Amanda Lotas, audio-video editor in the Strategic Communications Office, selects the items featured on the main page, and said the Darden School is doing the most right now in terms of the amount of files and features available both publicly and privately.

“They do a great job maintaining their site,” she said, noting that Darden’s audio series, “GreenPod,” and UVa Today’s weekly radio show are two of the site’s most downloaded features. Lectures from figures such as Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammad Yunus, who recently spoke at the University, also are available for download.

“I think if we lay out in the open events that are going on and people who come to visit to give lectures and so many other things, then I think that’s going to make the community more excited about having the University in their midst,” Lotas said.

The Admissions Office also has added content aimed at prospective students, which, Lotas said, will allow the University to be portrayed in new and engaging ways. Prospective students can explore the site to get a direct feel for the University’s classes and course structure, Lotas said.

Fourth-year College student Chris Hooe said he is excited about the new channel, though he has yet to visit it. “I think it’d be good to have as another resource for students to go to,” he said.

Students in some classes have even begun generating their own content, said third-year College student Dane Cash, whose Modernist British Fiction class creates podcasts for the site as part of its curriculum.

“If this was 10 years ago, we would have just made a display board,” Cash said, noting how technology has changed the way students learn.