Ethics Palace: Where ethical questions go to live or die
worldsfair | June 10, 2008Part of the reason for this post is just to say that I've finally been able to put up the Richard Dawkins' talk at the terry.ubc.ca site. This is essentially his "God Delusion" speech, and it happens to be available at a relatively high resolution (two files totalling about 350Mb) - if you have an hour to spare, it's definitely worth checking out.
Anyway, I quite enjoyed his talk (which was held on the 29th of April), although I suppose I would be giving this opinion as someone who more or less agrees wholeheartedly with him. If you watch the video, you'll find that he is quite funny, and…
bcohen | June 9, 2008
Circa 1976, an editorial cartoon from Bill Mauldin. File this under "everything old is new again"?
bcohen | June 4, 2008
Here's something on sustainable agriculture: Farmfoody.org seeks to connect those who eat food with farms and gardens. Do you eat food? If so, this might be of interest to you.
The site showcases a featured farm, links to an Eat Well Guide, provides a forum for local growers and buyers to interact and arrange meetings, offers recipes, and allows farmers to tag members with foods that they grow and members to tag farmers with foods that they want.
Their premise follows from these basic definitions:
Farm - a farm, vineyard, PYO, Farmer's Market, CSA, a victory garden -- a local producer.…
bcohen | June 3, 2008This post was written by guest contributor Cyrus Mody.*
There's a new study reported in Nature Nanotechnology entitled "Carbon nanotubes introduced into the abdominal cavity of mice show asbestos-like pathogenicity in a pilot study." Or, as the title seems to have been understood by reporters at the New York Times and elsewhere, "Blah NANO blah blah blah ASBESTOS blah PATHOGEN blah blah."
The gist of the original Nature Nano study is this: (1) we know asbestos fibers, once heralded as a godsend, can cause mesothelioma, a cancer of the lining of the lungs. (2) We know this has something to…
bcohen | May 28, 2008Scientists and engineers have helped empower the environmental justice (EJ) movement. But how has their participation changed their own scientific and engineering identities? A workshop this weekend will explore the matter.
(click on the image--a larger pdf version will open in a new window)
This website provides further information about the workshop, including a more substantive overview and a list of participants. For anyone in the Charlottesville area, note that we're hosting a public reception for the event on Friday at 5:00 pm. Stop by, have some spinach dip, talk about…
bcohen | May 27, 2008A new off-off-off Broadway production is in the works. It has: Drama! Intrigue! Denialists Exposed!
It's Bisphenol-A: The One Act Play.
Read on to find out about Endocrine Disruptors! See how the tobacco interest is related to the recent Bisphenol controversies! Hear about Nalgene and the National Toxicology Program report and industry spokespeople! Revel in the claims of lobbyists! Look in on the outcomes of an entire regime of consumer products and late-modern chemical production!
All at the Science Creative Quarterly today and, soon, in limited production at community theaters near…
bcohen | May 20, 2008"In the long run men hit only what they aim at." H.D. Thoreau, Walden
This post's title is the poorly reasoned conclusion to a poorly reported and poorly conducted study. I couldn't tell if it was simply bad reporting at The Boston Globe or bad research. Either way (or both ways) it suggests that evidence is meaningless without a context and that scientific research is meaningless without a fuller recognition of its cultural moorings. Put another way, given data, what are we to conclude?
In this case, "two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling…
bcohen | May 18, 2008Summarizing some points on local food, community supported agriculture (CSAs), and energy, here's a Youtube catch.
By virtue of its length (3 minutes) and forum (You Tube), it necessarily glosses over the structural issues that make food issues as complex as they are (things like economic opportunities, class and race-based contexts, trade policy, energy policy, and...wait for it...consumption patterns), but still, a good synopsis of some basic matters.
bcohen | May 5, 2008Last year we posted a notice of the highest measurement of dioxin ever recorded by the EPA. The reading was from the Tittabawassee River in Michigan, downstream from Dow Chemical's headquarters in Midland and on its way to Lake Huron (see map below). Michigan state safe levels are set at 90 ppt. The EPA standard is 1000 ppt. A hot spot reading on the river clocked in at 1.6 million ppt. Last week, the Bush Administration forced out a senior EPA official who was pushing Dow to clean it up.
I'd noticed the story last year of the EPA measurements in a news link on-line. It spurred this…
bcohen | April 7, 2008
Long time since we had an alternative sponsor, and just at the time I've been starting to wonder if The World's Fair should remain part of the scienceblogs collective. With the Dow Chemical ads back, we also took note of more recent news on the morally debased position the company takes with respect to its purchase of Union Carbide back in 2001 -- and the responsibilities for the 1984 Bhopal leak that one would assume came with said purchase but, per the Dow spokesman, do not: "A Dow official in Midland, Mich., said the firm did not inherit Union Carbide's liabilities when it acquired the…
bcohen | March 21, 2008A public service announcement from The World's Fair.
DARPA Hybrid Insect MEMS
"DARPA seeks innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs, possibly enabled by intimately integrating microsystems within insects, during their early stages of metamorphoses. The healing processes from one metamorphic stage to the next stage are expected to yield more reliable bio-electromechanical interface to insects, as compared to adhesively bonded systems to adult insects. Once these platforms are integrated, various microsystem payloads can be mounted on the platforms with the goal of…
bcohen | February 21, 2008This post was written by guest blogger Jody Roberts.*
19 February 2008 was an historic day. For the first time in history, the price of oil at the close of the U.S. markets sat above $100. Ok, it was by only a penny, but that penny was probably the most significant penny anyone's see in years. And when you consider that in 2006 the U.S. consumed just over 20 million barrels of oil everyday, those pennies start to add up pretty quickly. The other major news event of the day was of course the announcement by Fidel Castro that he will step down from his top position in Cuba after nearly 50…
bcohen | February 13, 2008Watch to see if Cuke Skywalker joins (the genetically modified) Darth Tater to rule the grocery store. And don't blame us for the humor. Just the messengers, folks.
Be warned, spoiler below the fold...
Omigod-omigod-omigod...Darth Tater is Cuke's father!!
What? What? Too much?
bcohen | February 12, 2008As a follow-up to Dave's prior post, I add here reference to a discussion about the same topic in response to an Orion article last Fall. The essay by Janisse Ray, "Altar Call for True Believers: Are we being change, or are we just talking about change?," was followed by over 200 comments. It offers a good canvas of the matter of green academics and the meaning of a greened academia.
She confronts the same moral issue raised in the story Dave cites, along the way posing this scenario:
A global-warming speaker is invited to a village ten miles from Brattleboro to speak. She accepts. There…
bcohen | February 5, 2008Here's a link to a question about ethics and science:
In reference to Craig Venter's road towards "the world's first artificial organism," Good Friend of The World's Fair and guest contributor Oronte Churm asks:
"has there [ever] been a greater gap between the capabilities of science to create new technologies and the public's understanding of that science"?
I'll leave the question open and solicit comments, especially since it comes up semesterly in my courses here in the engineering school and I wouldn't want my students to think I have a single read on this. For here, I offer a few…
bcohen | January 7, 2008The writer, blogger, teacher, and, we're proud to say, World's Fair guest contributor Oronte Churm has a remarkable small essay over at The Education of Oronte Churm, called The Calculus of Military Service. He writes of his own past military experience and his own dawning awareness of the effects of military training on the subsequent lives of soldiers. That subject is vast, but in this well-researched small piece Churm brings it together with grace and clarity. When reading it I thought, this is either an example of (a) why and how blogging can actually be a legitimate literary and…
bcohen | December 10, 2007"Never has so little been asked of so many at such a critical moment."
Michael Maniates, a professor of environmental science and political science at Alleghany College, contributed a compelling op-ed to the Washington Post recently, "Going Green? Easy Doesn't Do it." Maniates basic point is captured both in the title of his essay and the quote I excerpted above. As related to the old industry-sponsored ad campaign, he's saying that Iron Eyes Cody isn't asking much of us.
He writes, ostensibly, to call attention to some recent books appealing to maintaining the status quo by suggesting we…
bcohen | December 6, 2007Waterboarding. This is the topic for debate in our modern world. We go on and on about progress in civilization, yet we're talking about torture. Here are three recent views on the subject: This Modern World, The Onion, and Doonesbury. It's the torture satire trifecta.
(And for those who stay with us, a bonus feature for the atheists with the Doonesbury reference below.)
(source)
Conservation Group Condemns Waterboarding As Wasteful
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WASHINGTON--National Water Watch, a Washington-based conservation group, criticized the government's use of waterboarding Monday, calling the…
bcohen | November 30, 2007Continuing with cartoon week here at The World's Fair, we offer this one from Herb Block, circa 1977:
I'll leave this without undue editorializing, instead wondering if readers will offer their own take on this thirty-year old view of research agenda-setting, policy making, and government of scientific medical research.
bcohen | November 28, 2007Our alternative sponsor for November (arriving very late in the month) is a Tom Meyer cartoon.
(by Tom Meyer, SF Chronicle cartoonist, as reprinted in Ann Vileisis's Kitchen Literacy, p. 213)
We offer this, as always, to call attention to favorite Sb sponsor Dow Chemical (though I haven't seen the Dow ads for a while -- then again, I haven't been here for a while). It seems that a crew testing Michigan's Saginaw River recently found dioxin contaminations from Dow in amounts heretofore unheard of ("about 20 times higher than any other find recorded in the archives of the U.S. environmental…