by Spencer Gardner on December 4, 2012 Avoiding negative
behavior without any positive direction will simply lead back to
bad behavior. After perusing through ACM’s Code of Ethics for
computer professionals and checking out the keywords with this
tool, I discovered a fascinating lexical pattern: - Words with
negative connotations such as violate, harm, prohibit, loss, and
consequence all occurred at least 100x more frequently than in a
regular text in the British National Corpus. - Words with
positive connotations such as benefit, good, improve, aid and
help were nearly non existent. With the first discovery, it’s
obvious and appropriate that those who comply to a code of
ethics need to be warned specifically against behavior they
shouldn’t participate in. But with the second discovery, it’s
clear that ACM is giving no clear direction as to exactly what
computer professional should do. It’s up to the individual to
determine that. Avoiding negative behavior without any positive
direction will lead back to bad