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any privacy regulation that's going to make it through Congress has to provide clear ways for companies to continue profiting from data tracking. The key is coming up with an ethical framework in which they can do so, and Nissenbaum may have done just that. 

The traditional model of how this works says that your information is something like a currency and when you visit a website that collects data on you for one reason or another, you enter into a contract with that site. As long as the site gives you "notice" that data collection occurs -- usually via a privacy policy located through a link at the bottom of the page -- and you give "consent" by continuing to use the site, then no harm has been done. No matter how much data a site collects, if all they do is use it to show you advertising they hope is more relevant to you, then they've done nothing wrong.

let companies do standard data collection but require them to tell people when they are doing things with data that are inconsistent with the "context of the interaction" between a company and a person.

How can anyone make a reasonable determination of how their information might be used when there are more than 50 or 100 or 200 tools in play on a single website in a single month?

Nissenbaum doesn't think it's possible to explain the current online advertising ecosystem in a useful way without resorting to a lot of detail. She calls this the "transparency paradox," and considers it insoluble.

she wants to import the norms from the offline world into the online world. When you go to a bank, she says, you have expectations of what might happen to your communications with that bank. That should be true whether you're online, on the phone, or at the teller.  Companies can use your data to do bank stuff, but they can't sell your data to car dealers looking for people with a lot of cash on hand.

Nevermind that if you actually read all the privacy policies you encounter in a year, it would take 76 work days. And that calculation doesn't even account for all the 3rd parties that drain data from your visits to other websites. Even more to the point: there is no obvious way to discriminate between two separate webpages on the basis of their data collection policies. While tools have emerged to tell you how many data trackers are being deployed at any site at a given moment, the dynamic nature of Internet advertising means that it is nearly impossible to know the story through time

here's the big downside: it rests on the "norms" that people expect. While that may be socially optimal, it's actually quite difficult to figure out what the norms for a given situation might be. After all, there is someone else who depends on norms for his thinking about privacy.

Eventually I realised that actions that are individually non-coercive can add up to stable patterns of behaviour that are systematically or structurally coercive, depriving some individuals of their rightful liberty. In fact, rights-violating structures or patterns of behaviour are excellent examples of Hayekian spontaneous orders—of phenomena that are the product of human action, but not of human design. This shift has led me to see racism and sexism themselves as threats to liberty. Racism and sexism have come to matter more to me in that I have come to see them in terms of the political value that matters most to me: liberty. And so I have become much more sympathetic to policies that would limit individual liberty in order to suppress patterns or norms of behaviour that might pose an even greater threat to freedom. So I've become fairly friendly toward federal anti-discrimination law, affirmative action, Title 9, the works. I have found that this sympathy, together with my belief in the theoretical possibility and historical reality of structural coercion, releases me almost entirely from the liberal suspicion that I'm soft on racism (even if I do wish to voucherise Medicare).

this shift in conviction has almost nothing at all to do with a shift in attitude toward any group of people. I say "almost" because it has required that I come to see victims of structural coercion as real victims, really wronged, and thus to see the demand for reform and redress as both legitimate and urgently necessary. And this makes no small difference in one's relationship to those who see it the same way.

Conservatives took the attitudes and behaviors Harrington saw as symptoms of poverty and portrayed them as its direct causes.

In his 1984 book, “Losing Ground,” Mr. Murray argued that welfare programs abet rather than ameliorate poverty. The book dismissed Harrington’s prescription for ending poverty, and Harrington returned the favor. In “The New American Poverty,” published the same year, he called Mr. Murray the right-wing equivalent of a “vulgar Marxist,” a social theorist who believed in a “one-to-one relationship between the economic and the political or the psychological.”

Harrington’s culture-of-poverty thesis was at best an ambiguous impediment to understanding — in later books, he made no use of the term. But in its moral clarity, “The Other America” was ultimately optimistic; it was less an indictment and more an appeal to Americans to live up to their better instincts.

And then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps score and maintains the story of our life, and it's the one that the doctor approaches in asking the question, how have you been feeling lately?

one thing that is very difficult is to have a very clear memory and to realize that it is absolutely untrue. Normally, some memories really have the appeal of a visual perception. You know, when I see things, I normally don't doubt them. Doubting what you see is a very odd experience. And doubting what you remember is a little less odd than doubting what you see. But it's also a pretty odd experience, because some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them and that happens to be the case even for memories that are not true.

The extreme wealth of the rich is as great a public menace as the poverty of the poor, and great wealth is a greater problem than high income. Some of the way that money is made is destructive, and much of the way it is spent is even more destructive.

My $15 wristwatch from Target keeps excellent time, and - to my eye - looks pretty damned elegant. But if I were a surgeon or an investment banker, I couldn’t afford to wear it. That, I submit, is a problem.

But there's another reason as well: Every time computers break some new barrier, we decide—or maybe just finally get it through our thick skulls—that we set the bar too low.

the best estimates of the human brain suggest that our own processing power is about equivalent to 10 petaflops. ("Peta" comes after giga and tera.) That's a lot of flops, but last year an IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was clocked at 16.3 petaflops.

in Lake Michigan terms, we finally have a few inches of water in the lake bed, and we can see it rising. All those milestones along the way—playing chess, translating web pages, winning at Jeopardy!, driving a car—aren't just stunts. They're precisely the kinds of things you'd expect as we struggle along with platforms that aren't quite powerful enough—yet. True artificial intelligence will very likely be here within a couple of decades. Making it small, cheap, and ubiquitous might take a decade more.

In other words, by about 2040 our robot paradise awaits.

New encounters — some cordial, some not — have swept Syrians of all stripes out of their comfort zones. That could make a difference eventually, in a war so polarized that opposing sides do not even agree on basic facts, let alone on how to solve the conflict and on who is most responsible.

With a cameraman, they asked them if they would accept Mr. Assad’s ouster through negotiations. Many protesters answered politely, but others yelled “God, Bashar and nothing else!” and began shoving and shouting. A man grabbed Mr. Hadad’s phone and threw it.

“We agreed on one thing,” Ms. Maala said. “The killing in Syria needs to stop.”

a reporter from Al Manar introduced himself by saying, “I’m Hezbollah.”

“Do you think we’re happy you’re slaughtering the Syrians?” Mr. Hadad said he answered. Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia, has intervened on the government’s side. The man replied that Hezbollah was fighting to protect a revered shrine near Damascus.“You killed half of Syria for the sake of a shrine,” Mr. Hadad said, and anger flickered across the man’s face.“If I were in an Arab country, I wouldn’t dare,” Mr. Hadad recalled. He said he then relented and told the man that dialogue between them would help.

This conclusion is surely controversial because many economists attribute the weak recovery to misguided austerity, especially in Europe.

Perhaps history will vindicate this appeal to Keynesianism. Or perhaps not. The fact is that the United States did respond aggressively under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It certainly didn’t embrace austerity. Federal budgets ran massive deficits — $6.2 trillion worth from 2008 to 2013, averaging 6.4 percent of the economy (gross domestic product).Nothing like this had occurred since World War II. Yet, the economy limped along. Why wasn’t this enough?

It’s not just Keynesianism that’s under a cloud. The same fate has befallen monetarism — the doctrine that stable growth in the money supply can promote a more stable economy. Since 2008, the Federal Reserve has poured more than $3.2 trillion into the economy to keep interest rates low and accelerate economic growth. By monetarist reasoning, so much money pumped out so quickly should spawn higher inflation. Some economists predicted as much; it hasn’t happened yet. Consumer prices today are up a mere 1.5 percent from a year earlier.

The Great Recession and financial crisis changed behavior in fundamental ways that economists have yet to incorporate fully into their models or theories

The widespread faith that modern societies were sheltered from deep and sustained economic setbacks has been shattered, causing consumers, business managers and bankers to be more cautious in borrowing and spending. Economic stimulus may offset this caution, but if it signals that the economy is weaker than expected, it may also further depress private spending.

The faith in economics was, in many ways, the underlying cause of both the financial crisis and Great Recession — it made people overconfident and careless during the boom — and the basic explanation for the weak recovery, as stubborn caution displaced stubborn complacency

comparing even the best TV shows with Dickens, or Henry James, also suggests how much the novel can achieve that TV doesn’t even attempt.

Television gives us something that looks like a small world, made by a group of people who are themselves a small world. The novel gives us sounds pinned down by hieroglyphs, refracted flickerings inside an individual.

Spectacle and melodrama remain at the heart of TV, as they do with all arts that must reach a large audience in order to be economically viable. But it is voice, tone, the sense of the author’s mind at work, that are the essence of literature, and they exist in language, not in images.

At this point in our technological evolution, to read a novel is to engage in probably the second-largest single act of pleasure-based data transfer that can take place between two human beings, exceeded only by sex. Novels are characterized by their intimacy, which is extreme, by their scale, which is vast, and by their form, which is linguistic and synesthetic. The novel is a kinky beast.

Televised evil, for instance, almost always takes melodramatic form: Our anti-heroes are mobsters, meth dealers or terrorists. But this has nothing to do with the way we encounter evil in real life, which is why a character like Gilbert Osmond, in “The Portrait of a Lady,” is more chilling in his bullying egotism than Tony Soprano

television and the novel travel in opposite directions.

Mr. Putin’s decisions since the crisis began reflect instincts, political skills and emotions that have characterized his 14 years as Russia’s paramount leader, including a penchant for secrecy, loyalty and respect, for him and for Russia. They also suggest a deepening frustration with other world leaders that has left him impervious to threats of sanctions or international isolation

Because of Mr. Putin’s centralized authority, Russia’s policies and actions in moments of crisis can appear confused or hesitant until Mr. Putin himself decides on a course of action

Mr. Putin, by his own account at a news conference on Tuesday, warned Mr. Yanukovych not to withdraw the government’s security forces from Kiev, one of the demands of the agreement being negotiated.

By the next day, however, Ukraine’s Parliament had stripped Mr. Yanukovych of his powers, voted to release the opposition leader Yulia V. Tymoshenko from prison and scheduled new presidential elections. Russia’s initial response was muted, but officials have since said that Mr. Putin fumed that the Europeans who had mediated the agreement did nothing to enforce it.

The group, the officials and analysts said, included Sergei B. Ivanov, Mr. Putin’s chief of staff; Nikolai P. Patrushev, the secretary of the security council; and Aleksandr V. Bortnikov, the director of the Federal Security Service. All are veterans of the K.G.B., specifically colleagues of Mr. Putin’s when he served in the organization in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, during the 1970s and ’80s.

“He has bit by bit winnowed out the people who challenged his worldview,” Mr. Galeotti said.

The deployment of the Russian forces — which the Ukrainian government has said ranged from 6,000 to 15,000 troops — remains a covert operation, the officials and analysts said, to sidestep international law and the need for approval by the United Nations Security Council, something that Mr. Putin and others have repeatedly insisted was necessary for any military operations against another country.

As long ago as 2008, when NATO leaders met in Bucharest to consider whether to invite Ukraine to begin moving toward membership, Mr. Putin bluntly warned that such membership would be unacceptable to Russia, presaging the strategy that appears to be unfolding now.

What has changed? He consumes a daily diet of nothing except Fox News. He has for a decade or more. He has no email account and doesn’t watch sports. He refuses to so much as touch a keyboard and has never been on the Internet, ever. He thinks higher education destroys people, not only because of Fox News, but also because I drifted left during and after graduate school.

I don’t recall my father being so hostile when I was growing up. He was conservative, to be sure, but conventionally and thoughtfully so. He is a kind and generous man and a good father, but over the past five or 10 years, he’s become so conservative that I can’t even find a label for it.

I do not blame or condemn my father for his opinions. If you consumed a daily diet of right-wing fury, erroneously labeled “news,” you could very likely end up in the same place. Again, this is all by design. Let’s call it the Fox News effect. Take sweet, kindly senior citizens and feed them a steady stream of demagoguery and repetition, all wrapped in the laughable slogan of “fair and balanced.” Even watching the commercials on Fox, one is treated to sales pitches for gold and emergency food rations, the product cornerstones of the paranoid. To some people the idea of retirees yelling at the television all day may seem funny, but this isn’t a joke. We’re losing the nation’s grandparents, and it’s an American tragedy.

Third, as an ethical matter, pseudoscience is not — contrary to popular belief — merely a harmless pastime of the gullible; it often threatens people’s welfare,

It is precisely in the area of medical treatments that the science-pseudoscience divide is most critical, and where the role of philosophers in clarifying things may be most relevant.

some traditional Chinese remedies (like drinking fresh turtle blood to alleviate cold symptoms) may in fact work

There is no question that some folk remedies do work. The active ingredient of aspirin, for example, is derived from willow bark, which had been known to have beneficial effects since the time of Hippocrates. There is also no mystery about how this happens: people have more or less randomly tried solutions to their health problems for millennia, sometimes stumbling upon something useful

What makes the use of aspirin “scientific,” however, is that we have validated its effectiveness through properly controlled trials, isolated the active ingredient, and understood the biochemical pathways through which it has its effects

In terms of empirical results, there are strong indications that acupuncture is effective for reducing chronic pain and nausea, but sham therapy, where needles are applied at random places, or are not even pierced through the skin, turn out to be equally effective (see for instance this recent study on the effect of acupuncture on post-chemotherapy chronic fatigue), thus seriously undermining talk of meridians and Qi lines

Asma at one point compares the current inaccessibility of Qi energy to the previous (until this year) inaccessibility of the famous Higgs boson,

But the analogy does not hold. The existence of the Higgs had been predicted on the basis of a very successful physical theory known as the Standard Model. This theory is not only exceedingly mathematically sophisticated, but it has been verified experimentally over and over again. The notion of Qi, again, is not really a theory in any meaningful sense of the word. It is just an evocative word to label a mysterious force

Philosophers of science have long recognized that there is nothing wrong with positing unobservable entities per se, it’s a question of what work such entities actually do within a given theoretical-empirical framework. Qi and meridians don’t seem to do any, and that doesn’t seem to bother supporters and practitioners of Chinese medicine. But it ought to.

what’s the harm in believing in Qi and related notions, if in fact the proposed remedies seem to help?

we can incorporate whatever serendipitous discoveries from folk medicine into modern scientific practice, as in the case of the willow bark turned aspirin. In this sense, there is no such thing as “alternative” medicine, there’s only stuff that works and stuff that doesn’t.

Second, if we are positing Qi and similar concepts, we are attempting to provide explanations for why some things work and others don’t. If these explanations are wrong, or unfounded as in the case of vacuous concepts like Qi, then we ought to correct or abandon them.

pseudo-medical treatments often do not work, or are even positively harmful. If you take folk herbal “remedies,” for instance, while your body is fighting a serious infection, you may suffer severe, even fatal, consequences.

Indulging in a bit of pseudoscience in some instances may be relatively innocuous, but the problem is that doing so lowers your defenses against more dangerous delusions that are based on similar confusions and fallacies. For instance, you may expose yourself and your loved ones to harm because your pseudoscientific proclivities lead you to accept notions that have been scientifically disproved, like the increasingly (and worryingly) popular idea that vaccines cause autism.

Philosophers nowadays recognize that there is no sharp line dividing sense from nonsense, and moreover that doctrines starting out in one camp may over time evolve into the other. For example, alchemy was a (somewhat) legitimate science in the times of Newton and Boyle, but it is now firmly pseudoscientific (movements in the opposite direction, from full-blown pseudoscience to genuine science, are notably rare).

The verdict by philosopher Larry Laudan, echoed by Asma, that the demarcation problem is dead and buried, is not shared by most contemporary philosophers who have studied the subject.

the criterion of falsifiability, for example, is still a useful benchmark for distinguishing science and pseudoscience, as a first approximation. Asma’s own counterexample inadvertently shows this: the “cleverness” of astrologers in cherry-picking what counts as a confirmation of their theory, is hardly a problem for the criterion of falsifiability, but rather a nice illustration of Popper’s basic insight: the bad habit of creative fudging and finagling with empirical data ultimately makes a theory impervious to refutation. And all pseudoscientists do it, from parapsychologists to creationists and 9/11 Truthers.

The borderlines between genuine science and pseudoscience may be fuzzy, but this should be even more of a call for careful distinctions, based on systematic facts and sound reasoning. To try a modicum of turtle blood here and a little aspirin there is not the hallmark of wisdom and even-mindedness. It is a dangerous gateway to superstition and irrationality.

“coupled with the concerns about drug-resistance. . . one should only use antibiotics when you really need antibiotics.”