In the latest New Scientist, Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell attempt to redress what they see as an imbalance in perceptions of how political views affect attitudes to science. It is widely held today – in the wake of books like The Republican War on Science, Christian conservative opposition to evolution and well-documented interference into science policy… Read More »Is progressivism the biggest threat to science?
Geoengineering as a response to anthropogenic climate change is of increasing interest to members of the scientific community. The challenges of developing technologies powerful enough to manipulate the global climate are considerable and varied. As well as the scientific and technical issues, many people (understandably) have concerns about geoengineering. Hence issues of governance are key. As the technologies are in their infancy, it is futile at present to propose detailed regulatory structures, but one place to start is to discuss the values by which the development of geoengineering technologies must be guided. The Oxford Principles, originally proposed in 2009, were one of the first attempts to do so.
A paper now out in the journal Climatic Change, available here, gives an explanation of the values behind the Oxford Principles:Read More »Values for Geoengineering Governance
Earlier this month, I attended a conference on Controlled Human Infection Studies in the Development of Vaccines and Therapeutics. These studies involve deliberately infecting healthy volunteers with a disease (such as malaria, typhoid, norovirus, or salmonella) in a controlled environment. This research has significant benefits for the development of vaccines [some of the benefits are set out here]. Given that these studies could result in the development of new vaccines, they could serve a crucial role in saving many lives. Nevertheless, intentionally infecting humans with diseases is potentially risky. The degree of risk for the volunteers will vary case to case, depending on the disease and the efficacy of treatment.Read More »What’s Wrong with Infecting Humans?
An interesting article from the Guardian has been bouncing around my Facebook feed of late. The author, Damien Shannon, was offered a place to read for an MSc in economic and social history at Oxford University (St. Hugh’s College). Shannon managed to find sufficient scholarships to pay the required fees, but he was not permitted to take up his place because he only had managed to put together £9000 per annum for living expenses, less than the £12,900 required. Shannon is now suing Oxford on the grounds that the required funds are excessive and unfairly exclude students who have neither the resources nor the need for the lifestyle that £12,900 brings. Whether Shannon’s suit has legal merit is far beyond my own competence, but I believe he nevertheless has a point that the required expenses are excessive and unfair. And while this blog post will be primarily discussing the issue of Oxford graduate student living expenses, the general issues will apply to any school with a similarly inflated living expense requirement. Read More »Financial Guarantees and Fair Treatment
“I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think” ― Socrates But sometimes – stuck in a rut, going over the same things in the same environment, again and again – it can be so hard to think. To really, genuinely think, to explore new horizons and find new ideas and wisdoms –… Read More »Think deep thoughts in the snow
New York City contemplates using aerial drones for surveillance purposes, while North Korea buys thousands of cameras to spy on its impoverished population. Britain has so many cameras they cease being newsworthy. The stories multiply – it is trivial to note we are moving towards a surveillance society.
In an earlier post, I suggested surrendering on surveillance might be the least bad option – of all likely civil liberty encroachments, this seemed the less damaging and hardest to resist. But that’s an overly defensive way of phrasing it – if ubiquitous surveillance and lack of privacy are the trends of the future, we shouldn’t just begrudgingly accept them, but demand that society gets the most possible out of them. In this post, I’m not going to suggest how to achieve enlightened surveillance (a 360 degree surveillance would be a small start, for instance), but just outline some of the positive good we could get from it. We all know the negatives; but what good could come from corporations, governments and neighbours being able to peer continually into your bedroom (and efficiently process that data)? In the ideal case, how could we make it work for us?Read More »Enlightened surveillance?
We have a lot of good theories as to why government policies don’t work. Regulatory capture explains why regulating agencies cosy up to the industries they’re suppose to reign in. Politicians’ relentless focus on short term economic growth and desperate chasing of positive headlines causes them to embrace ill-advised short-term measures (and forget about action on things like climate change!). Meanwhile, the civil service’s tenure and lack of accountability allows it to indulge in exuberant nest-feathering wastes of taxpayers’ money. Issues of status and pride saturate the decisions of all ranks of government officials.
These theories are not only intuitive, they are also backed up by research and evidence. And yet…
I started reading a Spanish novel over the Christmas holiday, ‘A Heart so White’ by Javier Marías. One scene described in this book particularly struck me. Juan, the protagonist, reminisces about something he did in the past and now deems as moral wrongdoing. Here is what happened:
I have a relative who faces the following dilemma, though he doesn’t see it as a dilemma. But I do.
My relative is involved in the charitable sector. He has been approached by some representatives of a foreign foundation. He doesn’t know anything about the foundation – those who run the foundation want to keep all substantial details about it secret, for reasons unknown (they may have honourable motives). The foundation has a bank account in the UK, with money transferred into it from abroad: my relative assumes that the money is legally kosher (since the British bank would have had to check for money laundering and so on). Read More »Dirty Money
The American man who held the Guinness World Record for the most permanent transformations to look like an animal was recently found dead in his Nevada home. The man, known by his Native American name Stalking Cat (SC), had since the age of 23, when he had his first tiger stripe tattooed onto his body, undergone a series of body modification procedures aimed at altering his physical appearance to resemble that of a female tiger. In addition to tattooed tiger stripes across his body and numerous piercings, body modification procedures that SC underwent included having his upper lip surgically split, his ears pointed and earlobes elongated, subdermal silicone implants (to change the shape of his face and to facilitate the wearing of whiskers), and flattening of the nose via septum relocation.
A BBC profile on SC from ten years ago states that SC “travels to Phoenix, Arizona to have his surgery carried out by body modification artist Steve Hayward. Cat cannot go under the surgeon’s knife because it is illegal in the United States for a medical professional to alter someone’s appearance beyond what society deems normal.”
What would happen if a person (who, we stipulate, has capacity to make medical treatment decisions under the Mental Capacity Act 2005) wanted to have a similar range of procedures carried out in this jurisdiction?
Read More »Stalking Cat, tiger body modification, and the limits of consent
