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Anders Sandberg

Who is your hard drive working for?

Western Digital, a producer of networked
hard drives that enable users to access their files across the net, has blocked customers
from sharing media files from their drives. Needless to say, users are not
amused and hard at work at finding workarounds. The move is possibly a
pre-emptive way for the company to avoid being sued by the content industry for
providing a means for piracy. The block covers most popular media formats,
regardless of who owns the copyright of the contents. This makes it impossible
for users to share e.g. home videos or their own creations. Who really owns the
hard drive – the customer or Western Digital?

Read More »Who is your hard drive working for?

Honest Opinions or Bullying?

Recently the website SpickMich.de that allows German pupils to anonymously rate their teachers defeated a legal challenge from teachers claiming invasion of personal privacy.
This was just the latest of a series of legal victories for the site. German courts have found that freedom of speech trumps teacher concerns about privacy and mobbing. Rating teachers, the court found, is a value judgement protected by law as long as it does not cross the line into "abusive criticism".

Teacher’s unions are however likely to continue criticising such sites. Andreas Meyer-Lauber, chairman of the union GEW in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia has complained that pupils have no competence to judge teaching quality. "We need an impartial dialog between students and teacher," he said. "The Internet is not an appropriate medium for internal school feedback and self-evaluation."

But maybe that is exactly what the Internet could be?

Read More »Honest Opinions or Bullying?

It is 10 O’clock, do you know what your cells are?

BBC File On 4 recently learned that “millions of pounds
of charity donations and taxpayers’ money have been wasted on worthless cancer
studies”. Labs have been using contaminated cell lines – rather than
experimenting on the cancer cells they thought they had researchers have been
studying other kinds of cancers or even mice cells. Perhaps the most remarkable (and newsworthy)
aspect of the whole affair is that it is not a recent surprise: researchers
sounded the alarm bell – repeatedly – in the early 1970’s. Science noted in
1974 that “a lot of people may have been spending a lot of time and money on
misguided research.” That was 33 years ago, a millennium of time in cell
biology.

Read More »It is 10 O’clock, do you know what your cells are?