Ethics, Technology, and Society

To most who have read Plato’s Euthyphro, this YouTube video will be funny. It captures what I think is the general “tone” of Socrates’ style, which might be the real reason he was put to death by Greek society.

Despite his attitude, Socrates was a brilliant character, and gave structure to many of the most enduring [...]

I recently blogged about the appointment of Dr. Prigent, a VP of Pfizer Canada, to the governing board of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and of the resulting objection raised by leading Canadian bioethicists. I’ll reiterate the problem here, for completeness.
Dr. Prigent is a drug industry representative who works for Pfizer Canada. Pfizer [...]

It amazes me that credit card companies, banks and other large organizations that have mountains of my personal data still cold call me to do telemarketing. Why? Because the number of calls I get from illegitimate fraudsters probably equals or exceeds the number of legitimate telemarketing calls I get from those companies with whom I [...]

If you want to sell the idea of swarm bots as a “good” idea (seems harmless), show them dragging a child to safety. This video is a good example of swarm bots to the rescue. (Notice the expression on the child’s face–mildly freaked out? or simply bored?)

There is an interesting question that pops into my [...]

Wordle is fantastic! You go to their site, and create a word cloud, or Wordle, from a piece of text, RSS feed, tag cloud–basically any text you want. The visuals are a lot of fun to play with. The words it uses in the Wordle are the most frequently appearing words. So Wordle gives you [...]

I came across a great blog post detailing the Top 10 UNethical Psychology Experiments in modern history. It features one of my favourite examples, Little Albert, who I have blogged about in a previous post.
This list includes animal studies as well as human studies, a point to keep in mind given that we still treat [...]

Due to an oversight on my part I never enabled email subscriptions for the Ethics, Technology, and Society RSS feed. I have now enabled the email subscription feature.
Feel free to subscribe by filling out the box over “there ->” on the right of this screen to get all ETS updates via email if you don’t [...]

Yesterday I wrote about the appointment of Dr. Bernard Prigent to the governing board of the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), Canada’s publicly funded health research branch. I also described some of the controversy surrounding that appointment.
Today I received notice that a petition is being circulated calling “for the withdrawal of the appointment of [...]

The CMAJ recently reported that a Pfizer VP has been appointed to the governing council of the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR). Here are a couple of the criticisms raised over the appointment, as taken from the CMAJ article (I would encourage you to read it in its entirety):

“The appointment is “very surprising and [...]

So it’s UNESCO’s World Philosophy Day, and I’m suggesting you celebrate it by taking some time to think.
WTF?, you say.
The intention here is not to suggest that you don’t think. Rather it’s to remind you of what John Stuart Mill said so long ago about the frailty of our capacity to think well–use it, or [...]