The fact that Internet companies may record our personal data and track our online behavior for commercial or political purpose has emphasized aspects related to online privacy. This has also led to the development of search engines that promise no tracking and privacy. Search engines also have a major role in spreading low-quality health information such as that of anti-vaccine websites. This study investigates the relationship between search engines’ approach to privacy and the scientific quality of the information they return. (...) We analyzed the first 30 webpages returned searching “vaccines autism” in English, Spanish, Italian, and French. The results show that not only “alternative” search engines but also other commercial engines often return more anti-vaccine pages (10–53%) than Google (0%). Some localized versions of Google, however, returned more anti-vaccine webpages (up to 10%) than Google. Health information returned by search engines has an impact on public health and, specifically, in the acceptance of vaccines. The issue of information quality when seeking information for making health-related decisions also impact the ethical aspect represented by the right to an informed consent. Our study suggests that designing a search engine that is privacy savvy and avoids issues with filter bubbles that can result from user-tracking is necessary but insufficient; instead, mechanisms should be developed to test search engines from the perspective of information quality (particularly for health-related webpages) before they can be deemed trustworthy providers of public health information. (shrink)

Knowing Nature brings together political ecologists and science studies scholars to showcase the key points of encounter between the two fields and how this ...

As a mono-energy-economy, Russia’s fortunes are closely linked to the price of energy. That same link explains why when energy prices hit record highs, there was such strong public support for Vladimir Putin. But when energy prices plummeted in late 2008, Russia found itself with an economic downturn which brought with it, factory closings, worker layoffs and political grumbling. Because of Russia’s inexperience with economic upheaval, Russia is likely to go through greater turmoil and political uncertainty if not unrest, than (...) more traditional market economies which over the years have had to learn how to deal with economic cycles of this sort. (shrink)

After Mao Zedong's death in 1976, China was no longer governed by a totalitarian political system. As China moved to a market economy and opened up to the outside world, the Chinese people enjoyed increasing freedom in their personal, economic, cultural and intellectual lives. However, the Chinese Communist Party still controlled the political system, which meant that when a number of China's intellectuals in the post-Mao period publicly criticized or deviated from party policies, they lost their positions, were ostracized from (...) society and were sometimes imprisoned. Thus, while the post-Mao government allows more artistic and personal freedom, intellectuals who criticize the party's policies and seek fundamental political reforms are demoted, isolated and sometimes imprisoned. Nevertheless, despite the threat of punishment, a small number of them continue to comment on public policies and call for political reforms. (shrink)

The process by which the genetically identical cell lineages of a multicellular organism acquire the propensity to express distinct arrays of gene products is among the most significant and fascinating questions in modern biology. Not surprisingly, this complex process requires control at several levels, each level providing a condition that is necessary but not sufficient for transcription to occur. Evidence suggests that one level of control concerns a region of DNA much larger than the transcription unit itself – the chromatin (...) domain. This domain must be in a specific chromatin conformation in order to permit transcription; other control mechanisms may be required to bring about overt transcription. A hypothesis concerning the nature of chromatin domains and the relationship between early replication and transcription potential is presented. (shrink)

Why was it not until the mid-1980s that the intellectuals, the "democratic elite" of China, initiated a public dialogue about "inalienable" rights in the Western sense? The reason may lie in the impact of events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

When purged of its connection to libertarian forms of capitalism, Ayn Rand’s ethical “egoism” is not an implausible ethical theory. I argue (1) that Rand in fact fails to show the connection between her ethics and the political economy she has championed and (2) that in fact her ethics is at least as compatible with socialism as with capitalism.

When purged of its connection to libertarian forms of capitalism, Ayn Rand’s ethical “egoism” is not an implausible ethical theory. I argue that Rand in fact fails to show the connection between her ethics and the political economy she has championed and that in fact her ethics is at least as compatible with socialism as with capitalism.

During the reign of China’s Communist Party leader, Mao Zedong (1949–1976), any political or academic dissent was brutally suppressed. With Mao’s death in 1976, China, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping and his successors, opened China to the outside world and loosened political controls over the intellectual community. As China moved to a market economy and engagement with the Western world, the party loosened controls over intellectual endeavors. Nevertheless, a small number of intellectuals who criticized party’ policies and publicly called (...) for democratic reforms were silenced and a a number of them were imprisoned. Though, intellectuals enjoyed more personal and academic freedom in the post-Mao era, if they criticized the party’s policies or practices directly, they were ostracized from the intellectual community and a small number were imprisoned. (shrink)

Dai Qing, one of China's most prominent investigative reporters, was born in 1941. She is slightly older than the Red Guard generation which came of age during the Cultural Revolution . She graduated from the Harbin Institute of Military Engineering in 1966—the year that the Cultural Revolution began. Nevertheless, she shares some of the same values as those of that generation.

Political ecology and science studies have found fertile meeting ground in environmental studies. While the two distinct areas of inquiry approach the environment from different perspectives—one focusing on the politics of resource access and the other on the construction and perception of knowledge—their work is actually more closely aligned now than ever before. Knowing Nature brings together political ecologists and science studies scholars to showcase the key points of encounter between the two fields and how this intellectual mingling creates a (...) lively and more robust ecological framework for the study of environmental politics. The contributors all actively work at the interface between these two fields, and here they use empirical material to explore questions of theoretical and practical import for understanding the politics that surround nature-society relations, from wildlife management in the Yukon to soil fertility in Kenya. In addition, they examine how various environmental knowledge claims are generated, packaged, promoted, and accepted (or rejected) by the different actors involved in specific cases of environmental management, conservation, and development. Finally, they ask what is at stake in the struggles surrounding environmental knowledge, how such struggles shape conceptions of the environment, and whose interests are served in the process. (shrink)

But the dangers to abnormal discourse do not come from science or naturalistic philosophy. They come from the scarcity of food and from the secret police. Given leisure and libraries, the conversation which Plato began will not end in self‐objedification ‐ not because aspects of the world, or of human beings, escape being objects of scientific inquiry, but simply because free and leisured conversation generates abnormal discourse as the sparks fly upward.

But the dangers to abnormal discourse do not come from science or naturalistic philosophy. They come from the scarcity of food and from the secret police. Given leisure and libraries, the conversation which Plato began will not end in self‐objedification ‐ not because aspects of the world, or of human beings, escape being objects of scientific inquiry, but simply because free and leisured conversation generates abnormal discourse as the sparks fly upward (Rorty 1979, 389).

Gonzalo Munevar has recently suggested that a criterion for scientific success and scientific progress can be found in the ability of a culture to "get along better" with the help of that science, and that as a consequence there is much to be said in favor of a proliferationist approach to scientific methodology. I argue that there are severe constraints upon the possibility and desirability of proliferation even under these conditions. I offer some tentative suggestions for defining areas to which (...) the limited resources available for scientific research may be most constructively put. (shrink)

It is a remarkable fact that in the past ten years the Philosophical Index shows a mere handful of entries under the heading ‘poverty.’ This is remarkable because of the widespread interest found in the population in general and among philosophers in particular in the identification, analysis, and solution of moral and social problems, and the cultural consensus that poverty is just such a problem. Perhaps the lack of philosophical attention reflects the assumption that there is no conceptual problem with (...) ‘poverty': we all know pretty much what it is, we simply disagree about the principles which can legitmately be implemented to eliminate it. There is some evidence for this in the fact that literature on distributive justice abounds even where the literature on poverty is scarce, and discussions of related issues, such as famine, population ethics, etc., take for granted that the concept of poverty is not problematic. (shrink)

The “Why question” approach serves as a pedagogical tool to facilitate student comprehension of various forms of philosophical justification for motives, behavior, and values in arguments about cultural relativism. The author's approach focuses on two examples of justification arguments to examine and explain why and how people discover what their values are and to what extent this process is culturally relative. The first example in the model is from the perspective of the present state of Western culture and the second (...) example is derived from Inuit Eskimo culture. The philosophical significance of this approach and its application to lived examples allows students to recognize the difference between roots and causes in philosophical debates. Incorporating this approach into the classroom acquaints students with a range of legitimate forms of inquiry and equips them to situate their own philosophical inquiries within that range. (shrink)

Whatever is distributed must first be produced, and since the recipients are also the producers there will be constraints on distribution determined by productive necessity. Standard theories of distributive justice systematically ignore these constraints. In light of these considerations I define what it is that must be produced and how it must be distributed in order to assure continued production. Desert, equality, entitlement, and the other values normally associated with distributive justice must take a back seat to the need to (...) assure that there is anything to distribute at all. (shrink)