Ethics, Technology, and Society

Citizen Lab is a great site to troll if you’re at all interested in cyberactivism. Centered at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies, this group, directed by Ronald J. Deibert, endorses the strong normative claim that the Internet ought to be “protected and preserved” as an “open public commons”.
In addition to publishing [...]

The Associated Press is reporting on a study in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) which finds that Pfizer seriously misrepresented drug trial results related to their epilepsy drug Neurontin.
You can find a more complete report of both the NEJM article and the AP piece at Udo Schüklenk’s blog.
It’s been a bad stretch for [...]

I’ve added some links to sections of the United Nation Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) web site.
They have useful collections of information within their Social and Human Sciences section on hot topics, news and events, declarations, and reports organized around various themes, such as:

Philosophy
Ethics
Bioethics
Ethics of Science and Technology

As with most of the United Nations [...]

Here’s Adam Yamaguchi’s documentary on the looming population crisis in Japan and the potential of humanoid robots as a solution. Sound crazy? It might not be.
One interesting theme in this documentary is that populating Japan with robots is seen as a better policy compared to one of broadened immigration. Foreigners, Yamaguchi argues, are a more [...]

In this post I explain how to install the BOINC Manager software and attach to your first project.

As you read this blog post your eyes are capturing the light emitting from your computer screen. Your brain is busy taking in the information and processing it into meaningful sentences and ideas. You’re hard at work (don’t feel guilty if this is on company time).
You and your computer are “turned on” so to speak, [...]

I recently Googled myself. Admit it, you have too. This time I decided to check the Google Image results and I noticed that my Facebook profile pictures are appearing as top hits in the search results. This raises interesting concerns for anyone who thought their profile pics were somehow restricted to being viewed as search [...]

Well here’s a great product that offers a good balance between the environmentally wasteful pre-packaged tea bags (Tetley and the like), and “loose-leaf in a cup”. These Finum tea filters allow you to portion the tea leaves so you get exactly the strength of brew you like, without having the wasteful paper, staple, and string [...]

Here’s a great introduction to the copyright issue surrounding sampling. After watching it, check out Public Enemy’s “Caught, Can We Get A Witness?”.
“The World’s Most Important 6-second Sample”

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When it comes to religion, it is unfortunate how unreflexive our public policy wonks seem to be. Nineteen years after the first RCMP cadet was permitted to wear a turban the issue of wearing religious headdresses in public institutions–this time in the Quebec public service–is in the news again. Recently it was the French government [...]