Philosophy & Ethics

The safety of early applications of synthetic biology may be adequately addressed by the existing regulatory framework for biotechnology, especially in contained laboratories and manufacturing…

What is Pragmatics? This is a very brief introduction to pragmatics, intended to whet your appetite and encourage you to want to know more. Pragmatic investigations cover the fields of both…

In the former USSR there was a popular joke: When two people sit down to conspire, one of them is a KGB agent and the other is a fool. Behind many conspiracy and denial theories is a common flaw,…

Undergraduates are getting another free pass, ethically, and blame is being shifted to educators because apparently confusion about what constitutes plagiarism,  not malicious intent, is the…

 Assignee's Prerogative vs. Value: A.P. (for short) could be the root of value. A.P. is defined as "the decided worth you assign to your paradigms." (notice I said "your" paradigms, they…

 This began as a response to a comment made on my Blog: Conservatism is Unnatural.  It grew.  People look back on the societies of the past with an amused superiority. They wonder how…

Scientific Hedging A favourite theme in disaster movies is the political figure who tries to keep the local population from being alerted to some impending catastrophe.  Usually, the political…

Terminally ill patients and their family caregivers often feel abandoned by their doctors and feel a sense of "unfinished business" with them, according to a new study by an oncologist at the Seattle…

I have been downloading a cartload of books on my new Kindle lately, since I really enjoy the idea of walking into the subway carrying a rather inconspicuous, very light, yet incredibly large library…

In the past two years, University of Texas Southwestern researchers have used a computer-based text-searching tool they developed, called eTBLAST, to analyze millions of abstracts randomly selected…