ethics
-
Politics
Quickies: Alito and Kavanaugh Meet with Homophobe, Climate Change Cost US over $500 Billion
The Homophobic Activist Who Won an Audience with Two Supreme Court Justices, the New Yorker: Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh met with an anti-LGTBQ activist only weeks after hearing oral arguments in two LGTBQ discrimination cases, providing yet another example of the partisanship of the court and the need for a strong ethics code. Aaron Belkin, director…
Read More » -
Activism
[Cross-Post] Follow The Money: Why You Can’t Trust the EWG’s Ethically-Challenged Sunscreen Guide
Ed’s Note: Today’s cross-post was written by Jenny Splitter at Grounded Parents. If you want to leave a comment, click through the link at the bottom to go to the full post. ****** It’s hard to find a more successful and widely accepted fear-mongering campaign than the Environmental Working Group’s annual Sunscreen Guide. Every year, the EWG “shames” sunscreens made with scary-sounding ingredients like…
Read More » -
Science
Facebook’s Unethical Research Project
Facebook has apparently conducted a “massive” psychological experiment and published the results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS). The study sought to manipulate the emotional responses of 689,000 Facebook users by controlling the types of content that appeared on their feeds in order to see whether or not emotional traits can be “transferred to others via…
Read More » -
Quickies
Skepchick Quickies 9.13
Well lucky for all of us, Amanda is off saving the world again with her sidekick baby sloth. So, I’ll be serving up this morning’s quickies! Editorial suggests that health care workers who want to provide abortions in opposition to anti-abortion legislation should do so under conscience exceptions. “Conscience means you’re a human being, and human beings vary in their…
Read More » -
AI: Is it ok to post Student Essays?
OMG. I just found a folder with a whole bunch of things I saved from the early 90s, when I was a new Assistant Professor teaching Evolution. I had forgotten I was a “CHILD OF SATIN!†This, I’m sure, explains a great deal for some of you. I am trying to remember how I got this note–I think it was…
Read More » -
Regen Traynor and the Testing of Paranormal Claims
I am a member of the IIG, a volunteer-run organization based out of The Center for Inquiry in Los Angeles, California. The IIG investigates fringe science, paranormal activity and extraordinary claims from a scientific viewpoint. I am a rather new member as I have only actively participated in the group for just under a year. I am quite fond of…
Read More » -
Your brain on (performance enhancing) drugs
In last week’s episode of TWIS, Kirsten and guest co-host Andy Fell reported on an online survey by Nature magazine in which 20% of respondents claimed to have taken medications to improve focus or mental performance. An April Fools’ article about the “World Anti Brain-Doping Authority” apparently spawned this survey, which despite the silliness actually raises some serious questions. At…
Read More »