Science & Technology

The Irresponsible Dr. Oz, Softening The Public Up for Charlatans

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Don't be skeptical! Dr. Oz says it's real.

When Summerlin Hospital had to step in to prevent first-time parents from endangering their infant by using “natural medicine” to treat their sick newborn, it may have been fighting the influence of Dr. Mehmet Oz, Oprah Winfrey’s health-care guru.

The popular “Dr. Oz” is a walking TV and book franchise, a Harvard-educated cardiovascular surgeon who has emerged as the nation’s most persuasive and trusted advocate for unconventional health care, or as Dr. Wallace Sampson, former chairman of the National Council Against Health Fraud, calls it,”faith healing for the masses.” He has testified before a Senate panel to condemn the mainstream medical profession’s failure to embrace “the natural healing power of our bodies,” and its hostility to “hypnotherapists, massage therapists, spiritual healers.” Dr. Oz has, shall we say, an open mind.

In his expose of the popular health talk show host, “Shamblog” writer Steve Salermo wrote in the New York Daily News, Continue reading →

Natalie Portman Ethics, Part II: The Body Double

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

This looks like Oscar, but it's really his body-double, Chip.

Sarah Lane, Natalie Portman’s Designated Ballet Dancer in “Black Swan, ” has caused a controversy by revealing that it was her, not Natalie (okay, maybe Natalie’s head on Sarah’s body), in some/many/most of the dance sequences. This has caused some commentators to suggest that Portman’s Academy Award was based on a sham. The film’s PR flacks made a big deal out of how Portman, with no more ballet training that your sister, worked so hard to acquire professional level dancing skills. Could this have made the difference in the Academy’s decision? Continue reading →

The Ethics of Nailing Barry Bonds

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Is Barry Bonds getting the Al Capone treatment? Should we care?

Baseball’s all-time home run king Barry Bonds is finally on trial for perjury and obstruction of justice relating to his 2003 testimony before a grand jury that he never knowingly used steroids. It looks like he may get convicted too, even though the one man who could harm him most, his trainer and childhood pal Greg Anderson, once again has refused to testify and is in jail for contempt of court. (Many—including me— believe that Anderson has a promise of a pay-off from Bonds.)

Essentially everyone who isn’t actively trying to protect Bonds, completely ignorant of the facts of his career, or mentally handicapped knows he was lying and knew it at the time of the grand jury hearings. Barry has been both lucky and relentlessly dishonest, however, seemingly happy to spend the millions he made while cheating and permanently damaging his sport, and pleased with himself for retiring in possession of baseball’s most prestigious home run records, the most homers in a single season, and the most homers in a career.  That Bonds achieved these, and several of his Most Valuable Player awards, while enhanced with the surreptitiously induced body chemistry of a Bulgarian weight-lifter in the 1972 Olympics doesn’t seem to faze him at all. Meanwhile, critics are dredging up the old rationalizations to defend Bonds, none of which apply to his current fix. Continue reading →

Final Ethics Verdict on TSA’s Feel-Up Pat-down

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I was flying this week, and the security procedures were smoother than ever. Now I am certain that my molestation at check points last year was unethical, and have sufficient evidence to conclude that it was based on government incompetence and willful disregard for my comfort, dignity, and rights.  I am also wondering, more than ever, if the ardent, supposedly liberal defenders of the indefensible feel-up pat-downs have learned anything about the dangers of blind government obeisance and partisan loyalty. I hope so.

The saga so far: Continue reading →

How I Nearly Caused The World To Explode, and Other Travel Musings

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Lots of time to fume and muse about the ethical implications of a frustrating day and an aggravating week while taking an interminable plane trip to Houston: Continue reading →

The SATs: Flat Learning Curve=Unfair Questions

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The secret to acing your SATs? Know your Kardashians!

After all the anger, debate and controversy in the Sixties over affirmative action and the Scholastic Aptitude Tests, with the case finally being made to the public’s satisfaction that including test questions  based on cultural references likely to be unfamiliar to African-Americans or lower-income students (such as, famously, questions about yachting) negatively affected their test scores, wouldn’t you think that it would have been thoroughly understood by the people who make up the SAT scores that questions with a cultural bias were inherently unfair and incompetent questions?

Here is the prompt for the essay question in the SAT test given to high school students across the country last week : Continue reading →

Nuclear Crisis Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Meltdown! Radiation! Mutations! Well, I guess that's all we have to know.

I just heard, for the twelfth time, Sen. Joe Lieberman telling “Face the Nation” that the United States should put the brakes on nuclear energy plant construction “right now until we understand the ramifications of what’s happening in Japan.” Meanwhile, the anti-nukes crowd is out in full force, seeing Japan’s crisis as their opportunity to scare the bejesus out of the public, which is nervous about nuclear energy anyway since they know nothing about it, other than that something bad happened at Three-Mile Island, the Russians had a catastrophe at Chernobyl,  Jane Fonda made that scary movie, “The China Syndrome,” where they shot Jack Lemmon— “And don’t they make bombs with that nuclear stuff?”—and the fact that Homer Simpson works for a nuclear plant that creates three-eyed fish and is run by that evil old Montgomery Burns. Continue reading →

“An Army of Fake Personas”? I DO Trust the Military, I DO Trust the Military…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Why does the Air Force want to recruit these people?

Raw Story reports that a United States Central Command spokesman recently confirmed that the US Air Force had solicited private sector vendors for something called “persona management software.” The technology would allow an individual to “command” virtual armies of fake, digital personas across multiple social media portals.

The “personas” would have detailed, fictionalized backgrounds to make them undetectable as fake to outside observers, and there would be sophisticated identity protection to support the deception,  preventing suspicious readers from uncovering the real person behind the account. The program would also fool geolocating services, so these “personas” could be virtually inserted anywhere in the world, providing ostensibly live commentary on real events, even while the operator was not present.

Hmmmm. Continue reading →

Unethical Website of the Month: “University of Redwood”—Or Perhaps We’re Doomed

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

 

Oregon's Reed College...and, in Universe Beta, the "University of Redwood"

“University of Redwood” exists only in cyber-space, the mutated virtual clone, or perhaps evil twin, of Oregon’s prestigious Reed College. The imaginary institution consists only of a website, which rips off most of the features of Reed College’s website, with pictures of Reed’s faculty as the imaginary “Redwood” faculty, photos of Reed alumni as “Redwood” graduates and even a parallel universe history of the school. Reed’s history section begins,

 

“Reed College was founded in 1908, and its first classes were held in 1911. Reed is named for Oregon pioneers Simeon and Amanda Reed. Simeon Reed had been an entrepreneur in trade on the Columbia River; in his will he suggested that his wife could “devote some portion of my estate to benevolent objects, or to the cultivation, illustration, or development of the fine arts in the city of Portland, or to some other suitable purpose…”

Coincidentally, “Redwood” has a very similar background, according to its site: Continue reading →

Home-Grown Mengeles, And What We Must Learn From Them

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Josef Mengele: researcher, utilitarian, monster

We knew, or should have known, that this extremely ugly shoe was bound to drop eventually.

Last autumn, when the U.S. apologized for federal doctors infecting prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis 65 years ago, it put us on notice that a vile and unethical cultural standard had taken hold of the American medical and scientific communities in the 20th century, one that held  it was “right” for the weakest, most powerless and most disposable of human beings to be tricked, coerced or bribed into serving as subjects for experiments that could lead to miraculous cures and treatments for the rest of the population. This–depriving human beings of their rights and lives in the interest of science—is “the ends justify the means” at its worst. But the Guatemala experiments proved that this was once flourishing and respectable in the U.S. scientific and medical research communities, so it would have been surprising if there weren’t more stories of home-grown Mengeles, and sure enough, there were. The U.S. acknowledged as much when it apologized for the Guatemalan tests. Now we have details. Continue reading →