Science & Technology

A Brief Rant Against Irresponsible Misinformation

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Bill Wambsganss makes an incredibly easy play in Game 5 of the 1920 World Series

I was watching baseball on television all day yesterday, and had to see more commercials than are good for me. It struck me that despite the advent of the so-called “Information Age,” commercials seem to be written by increasingly ignorant writers, and ads that contain blatantly incorrect facts make it to the air where they rot innocent young brains and delight badly-educated  old ones.

Since the average TV commercial must be seen by literally hundreds of writers, executives and technicians on its way to this carnage, what does this tell us? It tells us that the education system is just as bad as we feared, and that these irresponsible people don’t care enough about being accurate to do a 20 second Google Search so they won’t misinform people. Making such a search is called due diligence and responsible conduct. Not doing so is called lazy, negligent and unethical. Continue reading →

Law, Ethics, and the One-legged Baby Who Never Should Have Lived But Is Glad He Did

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

It's a wonderful, wrongful, life. Wait..what?

A Palm Beach County jury has awarded $4.5 million to couple Ana Mejia and Rodolfo Santana in an unusual “wrongful life” lawsuit.  Their child Bryan was born with only one limb, a leg, and their lawsuit on his behalf alleged that Dr. Marie Morel and OB/GYN Specialists of the Palm Beaches Hospital botched an ultra-sound procedure that should have detected the abnormality.If it had accurately told them what Bryan would be like, they argued, they would have had him aborted.

The jury-awarded damages will cover prostheses, wheelchairs, operations, attendants and other needs it is assumed that Bryan will have during his estimated 70-year life.  “It will give piece of mind to these people that no matter what happens to them, their son will be all right,” Mejia’s attorney told the jury.

The legal issues are interesting; the ethical issues  more so. Continue reading →

The History Channel’s Unethical Science Fiction

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

Apparently cable TV needs some basic ethics rules, particularly focusing on integrity. SyFy, the science fiction channel, includes professional wrestling prominently in its programming, as well as movies that qualify as horror or fantasy but have no science, fictional or otherwise, in evidence. Chiller, the horror channel, includes movies that are pure suspense or science fiction, as well as re-runs of the reality show “Fear Factor,” which would belong on the Stupid Channel if there was one (other than E!, of course.) This week, a religious program was on Chiller; I have no idea what that was about. Meanwhile, The Learning Channel has become the Child Exploitation Channel, led by the “Jon  & Kate plus 8” franchise, spin-offs and imitators. What are we learning? Not much, except that the names of cable channels mean little or nothing.

Nevertheless, while it is sloppy and false branding to show “Apollo 13” on the SyFy channel, it is considerably worse to show fiction and fantasy on The History Channel, which is what The History Channel has been featuring recently with “Ancient Aliens,” a series that presents the wacko theory that aliens visited Earth centuries ago as fact. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Nobel Prize Recipient Ivar Giaever

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

"You keep using that word 'incontravertible.'; I do not think it means what you think it means."

Nobel Prize winning physicist Ivar Giaever just resigned as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in protest over the group’s official position that

 “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring,” the APS stated. “If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.”

Giaever, an 82-year-old Norwegian, sent an e-mail to the APS  announcing his resignation, saying he  “cannot live with the statement” on global warming. Giaever wrote:

“In the APS, it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is ‘incontrovertible?’ The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.” Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Incompetent Elected Official of the Week: Sen. Claire McCaskill”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Karl Penny’s Comment of the Day is further reflection on the futile effort to turn back the tide of new technology, which Senator McCaskill apparently believes can be accomplished with a good marketing campaign, making her a candidate for institutionalization.  A prize for the first reader who identifies what a klepsydra was!

“Jack, sometimes I get a little nostalgic about older technologies, generally ones that figured so prominently in my youth, but have now gone the way of the klepsydra. I get nostalgic enough that, almost, for a moment, ideas like Sen. McCaskill’s seem to make sense, and a gleam comes to me eye, and I begin to think, “Yeah….” Then I remember that it’s daylight out, and however pleasant dreams can be, they’re just dreams.

“I also remember that there are reasons—good reasons—why I and millions of others adopted email, wrote documents on a computer, listened to music through an MP3, read my books on a Kindle, and played games on a computer. Truth to tell, most of us don’t really miss those older technologies, except in brief spurts. I have an old Olympia Portable typewriter in a closet. I must have typed a million documents on that thing, from my freshman year of high school through college. Letters, papers, notes, forms, checks (!) even. It was so indispensable, I took it with me most everywhere. Now, it just sits in that closet, and I hardly ever take it out even to look at. The last time it saw any use was last year, when a local high school was doing a play, and they needed an old manual typewriter as a prop. Now, it’s back in the closet.

“Sen, McCaskill may have successfully deluded herself, but I don’t think she’s going to delude much of anyone else, and thank heaven. But, if this is what passes for progressive thought among our elected leaders, then God help us all.”

Incompetent Elected Official of the Week: Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo)

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

This box of rocks also has an idea about how to save the Postal Service, and it's probably better than Sen. McCaskill's.

[ I know—I need some Republican IEOTWs. There have been a lot of Democrats lately. The problem is that the things presidential candidates say don’t qualify (Michele Bachmann’s claim that she could lwoer gas prices to $2 would have been a sure winner), and the Democrats have been unusually inept lately.]

From the New York Times, discussing the U.S. Post Office’s impending insolvency:

“An overarching trend that has fueled the Postal Service’s crisis — and reduced annual mail volume by 22 percent since 2006 — is that Americans are e-mailing, paying bills electronically and reading shopping catalogs and news online.

“Noting that some great books have been written based on letters sent by the Founding Fathers and by soldiers, Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, urged the postmaster general to run an advertising campaign urging Americans to send more letters to each other.

““There is something special about receiving a piece of first-class mail, knowing that it comes from someone you care about,” she said. “I really believe that if someone would begin to market the value of sending a written letter to someone you love, you might be surprised what it will do for your Christmas season.”

That’s brilliant, Claire: spend money the Post Office doesn’t have to urge more people to use an archaic method of communication they no longer use since it is slower, less reliable and more expensive than the alternative, because there’s “something special” about it! That’s going to turn everything around. Continue reading →

God, Beck, and the Confirmation Bias Trap

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Hurricane Irene proves that God agrees with Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck says so, and he must be right, because God agrees with him. Hurricane Irene proves it.

Policy makers, decision-makers, journalists, and indeed all of us have an ethical obligation to be on the alert for confirmation bias, that insidious human tendency to interpret all external phenomena as confirmation of our established opinions and beliefs. Why do we have the obligation? We have it because confirmation bias makes us dogmatic, inflexible, close-minded, incompetent, and, in a word, stupid. Life can make us wiser, but not if we misinterpret everything so as not to disturb our most cherished certainties. Continue reading →

Calvin College, Forfeiting Its Right To Exist

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

As further proof of evolution, the chimp is behaving exactly like his distant relatives, the adminsitrators of Calvin College

I don’t know what the exact point is that marks where a religious school’s departure from legitimate adherence to its core beliefs metastasizes into a nuisance to society and civilization by affirmatively encouraging life-crippling ignorance. I do know, however, that Michigan’s  Calvin College has passed that point.

Two religion professors at Calvin wrote scholarly papers suggesting that new discoveries in genetics and evolution raised questions about the literal reading of Genesis that could no longer be brushed aside. Neither professor questioned the existence of God or the role of their church, but they argued that the findings of rigorous, modern science may require a theological re-examination of literalist Biblical teachings. Readers of The Banner, the publication of the Christian Reformed Church in North America, promptly blew a Biblical gasket:

“To protect the church and college from false teachers and contrary orthodox beliefs it would be right to let these guys go,” said one commenter. “Clearly, professors who deny the scriptures as interpreted by our creeds and who have broken the promise they made when they signed the Form of Subscription should be fired,” said another. From yet another: “Why is it that so many Christians and academics in Christian colleges seem more concerned about keeping in step with what the world teaches than they are about what God’s Word teaches? Are we ashamed of God’s Word in the face of the beliefs of our worldly peers?”

Calvin investigated the two professors, and as a consequence one of them, John Schneider, resigned the tenured position he had held for 25 years, as part of a settlement with the college. Continue reading →

Texas Gov. Rick Perry: Ethics Hero REVOKED, Integrity Missing

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Wow, that was fast.

Rick Perry has Jenny McCarthy's vote back...and that's worth a little more cervical cancer, right Governor?

It didn’t take long for newly-minted GOP presidential contender Rick Perry, now leading in the polls, to tell us what we needed to know about his values and integrity.

He doesn’t have them.

Back in 2007, I awarded Perry an Ethics Hero designation for leading Texas to become the first state in the nation to mandate vaccination of young girls for the human papilloma virus, or HPV, which is sexually transmitted and can cause cervical cancer. “Requiring young girls to get vaccinated before they come into contact with HPV is responsible health and fiscal policy that has the potential to significantly reduce cases of cervical cancer and mitigate future medical costs,” Perry said then in a news release explaining his executive order. Now, however, Perry is declaring what I thought was a courageous decision four years ago “a mistake.”

I hereby revoke his Ethics Hero award. Continue reading →

The Folly and Threat of the Pew 13%

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

From the just-released Pew survey about American attitudes and practices regarding their mobile phones:

“Cell phones can help prevent unwanted personal interactions – 13% of cell owners pretended to be using their phone in order to avoid interacting with the people around them.”

For information and education of those 13% of cell phone owners, here is what I know about you because you engage in this practice:

  • You are rude.
  • You are disrespectful.
  • You are cowardly.
  • You are ignorant
  • You are a liar.

I am sure these same people will happily enter their opinions on blogs about what is and isn’t right about America, despite having avoided all but the most sanitized interaction with it—using pseudonyms to hide their identities, of course. They don’t want interaction, the mutual exchange of  opinions, or to have to deal with anyone who might shatter their ossified, unshakable view of the world with a different perspective. Continue reading →