New Media Ethics 2009 course

In terms of processing power, speed, memory, and so on, how do Macs and PCs actually compare? And does Apple innovate in terms of basic hardware quality as often or less often than the likes of HP, Compaq, and other producers? This question is of broader interest from an economist's point of view because it also has to do with the age-old question of whether competition or monopoly is a better spur to innovation. In a certain sense, Apple is a monopolist, and PC makers are in a more competitive market. (I say in a certain sense because obviously Macs and PCs are substitutes; it's just that they're more imperfect substitutes than two PCs are for each other, in part because of software migration issues.)

Schumpeter argued long back that because a monopolist reaps the full reward from innovation, such firms would be more innovative. The case for patents relies in part on a version of this argument: companies are given monopoly rights over a new product for a period of time in order for them to be able to recoup the costs of innovation; without such protection, it is argued, they would not find it beneficial to innovate in the first place.

others have argued that competition spurs innovation by giving firms a way to differentiate themselves from their competitors (in a way, creating something new gives a company a temporary, albeit brief, "monopoly")

ommentators have repeatedly told us in recent years that the gap between rich and poor has been widening. It is true, if you compare the income of those in the top fifth of earners with the income of those in the bottom fifth, that the spread between them increased between 1996 and 2005. But, as Sowell points out, this frequently cited figure is not counting the same people. If you look at individual taxpayers, Sowell notes, those who happened to be in the bottom fifth in 1996 saw their incomes nearly double over the decade, while those who happened to be in the top fifth in 1995 saw gains of only 10 percent on average and those in the top 5 percent actually experienced decline in their incomes. Similar distortions are perpetrated by those bewailing "stagnation" in average household incomes -- without taking into account that households have been getting smaller, as rising wealth allows people to move out of large family homes.

Sometimes the distortion seems to be deliberate. Sowell gives the example of an ABC news report in the 1980s focusing on five states where "unemployment is most severe" -- without mentioning that unemployment was actually declining in all the other 45 states. Sometimes there seems to be willful incomprehension. Journalists have earnestly reported that "prisons are ineffective" because two-thirds of prisoners are rearrested within three years of their release. As Sowell comments: "By this kind of reasoning, food is ineffective as a response to hunger because it is only a matter of time after eating before you get hungry again. Like many other things, incarceration only works when it is done."

why do intellectuals often seem so lacking in common sense? Sowell thinks it goes with the job-literally: He defines "intellectuals" as "an occupational category [Sowell's emphasis], people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas -- writers, academics and the like." Medical researchers or engineers or even "financial wizards" may apply specialized knowledge in ways that require great intellectual skill, but that does not make them "intellectuals," in Sowell's view: "An intellectual's work begins and ends with ideas [Sowell's emphasis]." So an engineer "is ruined" if his bridges or buildings collapse and so with a financier who "goes broke… the proof of the pudding is ultimately in the eating…. but the ultimate test of a [literary] deconstructionist's ideas is whether other deconstructionists find those ideas interesting, original, persuasive, elegant or ingenious. There is no external test." The ideas dispensed by intellectuals aren't subject to "external" checks or exposed to the test of "verifiability" (apart from what "like-minded individuals" find "plausible") and so intellectuals are not really "accountable" in the same way as people in other occupations.

It’s too soon to say that Twitter and Facebook destroy the mental foundations of morality, but not too soon to ask what they’re doing.

In the paper, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 13 people were shown documentary-style multimedia narratives designed to arouse empathy. Researchers recorded their brain activity and found that empathy is as deeply rooted in the human psyche as fear and anger.

They also noticed that empathic brain systems took an average of six to eight seconds to start up. The researchers didn’t connect this to media consumption habits, but the study’s press release fueled speculation that the Facebook generation could turn into sociopaths.

Ambrose invented pop history. He was the historical advisor on Saving Private Ryan and wrote the book Band of Brothers, that miniseries about WWII that starred the guy from Office Space.

In 1995, an almost unknown historian named Thomas Childers published the book Wings of Morning. It was a well-received but relatively obscure novel about the crew of a specific B-24 bomber during WWII. Ambrose was a fan of the book and, as a firm believer that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, he proceeded to plagiarize the fuck out of it for his hit 2001 novel, The Wild Blue, which was the account of a different group of B-24 crewmen. Ambrose ripped off whole passages of text and stole several sentences and descriptions word for word. Then he got his book published and just sort of hoped no one would notice.

but fortunately for truth, he got caught. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard noticed what was going on and revealed it to the world. Ambrose was fast to respond. He had cited Childers' book in his bibliography (although he hadn't come close to listing everything he 'borrowed' from his fellow historian's work) and basically claimed that he'd just "forgotten" to attribute the stolen passages in the text, like he was supposed to.

There are three broad camps in contemporary debates over bioethics. In the name of human rights and human dignity, “bio-conservatives” tend to support restricting, regulating and stigmatizing the technologies that allow us to create, manipulate and destroy embryonic life. In the name of scientific progress and human freedom, “bio-libertarians” tend to oppose any restrictions on what individuals, doctors and researchers are allowed to do. Then somewhere in between are the anguished liberals, who are uncomfortable with what they see as the absolutism of both sides, and who tend to argue that society needs to decide where to draw its bioethical lines not based on some general ideal (like “life” or “choice”), but rather case by case by case — accepting this kind of abortion but not that kind; this use of embryos but not that use; existing developments in genetic engineering but not, perhaps, the developments that await us in the future.

at least in the United States, the liberal effort to (as the Goodman of 1980 put it) “monitor” and “debate” and “control” the development of reproductive technologies has been extraordinarily ineffectual. From embryo experimentation to selective reduction to the eugenic uses of abortion, liberals always promise to draw lines and then never actually manage to draw them. Like Dr. Evans, they find reasons to embrace each new technological leap while promising to resist the next one — and then time passes, science marches on, and they find reasons why the next moral compromise, too, must be accepted for the greater good, or at least tolerated in the name of privacy and choice. You can always count on them to worry, often perceptively, about hypothetical evils, potential slips down the bioethical slope. But they’re either ineffectual or accommodating once an evil actually arrives. Tomorrow, they always say — tomorrow, we’ll draw the line. But tomorrow never comes.

All societies use a mix of approaches to address offensive speech. In international law, like at the European court of human rights and more and more jurisdictions, there is growing feeling that the law should really be a last resort and only used for the most extreme speech – speech that incites violence in a very direct way, or that is part of a campaign that violates the rights of minorities to live free of discrimination. In contrast, simply insulting and offending others, even if feelings are very hurt, is not seen as something that should invite a legal response. Using the law to protect feelings is too great an encroachment on freedom of speech.

Our laws are written very broadly, such that any sort of offence, even if it does not threaten imminent violence, is seen as deserving of strict regulation. This probably reflects a very strong social consensus that race and religion should be handled delicately. So we tend to rely on strong government. The state protects racial and religious sensibilities from offence, using censorship when there’s a danger of words and actions causing hurt.

in almost all cases, state action was instigated by complaints from members of the public. This is quite unlike political censorship, where action is initiated by the government, often with great resistance and opposition from netizens. In a string of cases involving racial and religious offence, however, it’s the netizens who tend to demand action, sometimes acting like a lynch mob.

Despite a gradual change for the better, pre-puberty transgender cases are still a noticeably tabloid-exploitative, morally and ethically ambiguous matter.

The only problem is that many young children grow out of the identity confusion when they hit puberty. Oh, and the initial hormone blocker treatment is irreversible.

But then that's essentially the crux of the argument: does immaturity necessarily equal a lack of self-awareness? And when exactly is a right time for the all-important gender reassignment?

In America, children under 16 can be prescribed hormone 'blockers' to prevent the onset of puberty, with a view to then follow with hormone treatment to become their new gender. This film follows the American experience.

Using incorrect gender terms in such program as Bodyshock feels to me like almost mocking the whole idea of it. It seems disrespectful to those who decided to tell their stories, and to all others who have been born in bodies which do not reflect their actual gender

Bodyshock SHOULD be using the correct terms for thes children - Josie and Kyla should be refurred to as she and her, not he and his. Chris should be reffured to as he. Getting the gender terms wrong on a program about sex changes only reinforces the publics perceptions that it is okay to refure to transsexual people by the gender they were born as, and it's not.

LONDON - Scientific advances including techniques allowing patients to grow new joints inside their own bodies will allow the elderly to remain active well beyond their 100th birthdays, researchers claim. British scientists are working on a system which should allow the elderly to buy body parts "off the shelf" and even regenerate their own damaged joints and hearts. Their ultimate aim is to fix up the body with customised replacement parts grown to order. They have already carried out human trials on heart valves which are still working four years after they were transplanted. At the University of Leeds, Britain's biggest bioengineering unit and the world leader in artificial joint replacement research is coordinating a project that aims to give people 50 active years after the age of 50."It is the rise of the bionic pensioner," said Professor Christina Doyle, whose company is working with the university to develop the new technologies. "The idea is when something wears out, your surgeon can buy a replacement off the shelf or, more accurately, in a bag."The university is spending £50 million ($114 million) over the next five years on the new project. The main thrust of the research centres on a method of tissue and medical engineering which the university is at the forefront of developing. Led by the immunologist Professor Eileen Ingham, they are pioneering a technique of stripping the living cells from donor human and animal parts, leaving just the collagen or elastin "scaffold" of the tissue. These "biological shells", which could be for knee, ankle or hip ligaments, as well as blood vessels and heart valves, are then transplanted into the patient whose own body then invades them replacing the removed cells with their own. The technique, which could be available within five years, effectively removes the need for anti-rejection drugs. It is similar to the recently developed system of using stem cells to regrow organs outside the body, but costs about a tenth of the price.