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Tag Archives: Technology

CRISPR and the Ethics of Genome Editing

Joel Eissenberg, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Associate Dean for Research at Saint Louis University School of Medicine.  In Our Image: The Ethics of CRISPR Genome Editing , Joel C. Eissenberg, De Gruyter | 2021 Humanity has been busily modifying plant and animal genomes for centuries. It has long been a dream to speed up and target that process. Additionally, the promise of molecular cloning included the hope of curing...

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Tort

When Fox News and Newsmax recently accused voting machine manufacturer Dominion Voting Systems of rigging the 2020 election results, Dominion quickly and vigorously struck back at the two with a threat of civil lawsuit; a suit claiming that they, Dominion, had been harmed by the actions of Fox News and Newsmax. Consequent Dominion’s filing, Fox and Newsmax began to quickly and forthwith profusely apologize for and correct their ‘misstatements’....

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Zooming in on the Defects of PowerPoint

Zooming in on the Defects of PowerPoint  I’ve just finished several days of staring, hour after hour, at the year’s economics meetings via Zoom.  What really struck me, beyond the content of the talks, was the way Zoom exacerbates “death by bullet point”. PowerPoint’s capabilities encourage speakers to load up their slides with lots of text and graphics, which then leads the audience to glue their eyeballs to the slides and not the speaker. ...

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Are we headed to fresh water shortages?

(Dan here…I lifted reader Michael Smith piece on water use in open thread Dec. 22. The topic is well worth writing about…AB used to discuss this issue regularly starting in 2008 during the severe drought in the US when the southeast was contemplating court action amongst themselves to ensure their own supplies.. Search “water” in AB for a sample) Michael Smith writes: I should probably write a longer piece on this but I’ll try to summarize...

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Distribution

These days, the nation, the world, is faced with the problem of how to distribute wealth, wealth that is being created using less and less labor input? How to distribute the profits from highly capitalized, highly automated, production? Unions, that had been much a part of the solution to the distribution problem in the early 20th century, are becoming more and more irrelevant. A new economic model is desperately needed. Since the dawning of the...

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All My Children

Though more different than alike, they do have a lot in common. All are, in some way, progeny of the microprocessor. Some were born in around Silicon Valley, others quite distant. The first generation was born in the US early in the last third of the 20th Century. The second was born near the end of the late 20th — early in the 21st Century. None of them could have been born in an earlier era. Microsoft* 1972, Apple*1976, and Oracle*1977, were...

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Hegel [and Marx] on labor and freedom — Daniel Little

So does labor fulfill freedom or create alienation? Likewise, does technology emancipate and fulfill us, or does it enthrall and disempower us? Marx's answer to the first question is that it does both, depending on the social relations within which it is defined, managed, and controlled. It would seem that we can answer the second question for ourselves, in much the same terms. Technology both extends freedom and constricts it.... Adding to what David Little says in this post, Hegel and...

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Ray Downs — U.S. intel agencies warn against using Chinese brand smartphones

I'll bet Tim Cook is crapping in his pants. Although the FBI, NSA and CIA warned against the use of phones made by Chinese companies, Wikileaks revealed last year that U.S. intelligence agencies have the capability to hack into Google and Apple phones, as well as laptops and televisions. UPIU.S. intel agencies warn against using Chinese brand smartphones Ray Downs

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