Satire

It's Tuesday, March 11th.

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer -- often referred to as Elliott Ness for his fierce anti-corruption crusades -- has apologized to his family after a report that linked him to a prostitution ring.

Currently, his advisors say this should all have no effect on his political future ... though they are re-thinking the whole "untouchable" branding campaign.

This is The Current.

Redefining Cheating - Student

A video posted on YouTube describing how to hide exam answers in the label of a Coke bottle is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to on-line cheating aids, something teachers have been fighting for years. But a case of alleged cheating at Ryerson University in Toronto has raised some interesting questions about what constitutes cheating and whether our understanding of cheating is changing.

Chris Avenir, a first-year engineering student at Ryerson, faced expulsion for administering a group on the social networking web site Facebook. He says it was a study group, the online equivalent of sharing lecture notes in the library. The university says students used the group to cheat by posting answers to exam questions and that Chris Avenir is responsible for that.

Nora Loreto is the President of Ryerson University's Student Union and joined us in Toronto.

Redefining Cheating - Ryerson Clip

Ryerson said that Chris Avenir was charged with academic misconduct because of what he was doing, not how he was doing it. James Norrie, Director of Ryerson's School of Information Technology Management, has some thoughts about the case.


Redefining Cheating - Expert

One of the fundamental disagreements in this case is over how to define cheating.

In 2007, Michael Grabowski conducted a study about the ways that students' perceptions of cheating were changing. He's a Professor of Film and Communications at New York University and The College of New Rochelle and he joined us from New York City.


Redefining Cheating - Satire

Whether you call it "cheating" or "sharing," our friends at The Content Factory in Winnipeg got to wondering how it might affect some students when they go out into the job market.


Listen to The Current:Part 1



The Current: Part 2


Indonesia Women's Radio

Ten years after the end of the Suharto regime, Indonesia is a country in transformation. That change is especially evident in the country's media. For decades, Indonesia's print and broadcast media were stifled under Suharto's strict rule. But after he stepped down, thousands of local papers, magazines and television stations opened up. As many as 1200 new radio stations hit the air waves. And a surprisingly high number of those radio stations are targeting women.

The CBC's Natasha Fatah was in Indonesia earlier this year. While she was there, she visited two radio stations with very different approaches to serving their female listeners. Natasha joined us in Toronto.


Listen to The Current:Part 2



The Current: Part 3


Diet For a Hungry Planet - Food Waste

According to a report from the University of Arizona, nearly half of all the food ready to harvest in the United States never gets eaten. It's either plowed under in the fields or tossed into the garbage by stores or consumers along the way. And food waste isn't just an American problem. A study released earlier this year by the British Government found that British households throw out about a third of the food they buy.

As part of our ongoing series "Diet for a Hungry Planet", we're looking at why so much food gets wasted and what we could do about it. We began with one, admittedly rather extreme solution -- dumpster diving. Paul and Britt belong to an international group called Food Not Bombs. Among other things, the group advocates dumpster diving to highlight the amount of perfectly good food that we throw out every day.CBC Radio's Calgary Producer Michael O'Halloran met up with them in the wee hours of the morning to see what they could salvage from the bins behind a Calgary supermarket.

We were joined by Timothy Jones, a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona in Tuscon.


Last Word - History of Sin

Bishop Gianfranco Girotti heads the Vatican body that oversees the absolution of sins. On March 9, 2008, he said that a changing world needs new ways of seeing evil. According to the Bishop, new mortal sins should include spoiling the environment and genetic manipulation.

It has been fourteen centuries after Pope Gregory the Great came up with the original seven deadly sins, but that doesn't mean the church has been standing still on the issue. We closed this episode with James Martin, the author of A Jesuit Off Broadway, and his take on the history of sin.

Listen to The Current:Part 3

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