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In praise of insult
You have no right to be free from insult. Indeed, sometimes you may deserve to be insulted. Let us take a case that brings this into sharp focus: the Tory chief whip who lost his job because… well, we still don’t know exactly why because it now turns out that what the police claimed at…
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The Situational Judgement Test – a great tool for the wrong job?
Next week, thousands of final year medical students will sit a Situational Judgement Test (SJT) as part of the application for their first medical jobs. This will be the second year that the Foundation School Application System (FPAS) has used the SJT, which was developed by the Improving Selection to the Foundation Programme group (ISFP), and replaced the…
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Invasion from the blue planet: are we protecting Mars too much?
Are we overprotective of Mars? That is the claim made by Alberto G. Fairén and Dirk Schulze-Makuch in a recent commentary in Nature Geoscience. They argue that current planetary protection policies that try to prevent bodies in the solar system from becoming contaminated by Earth-life are too costly, inhibit scientific exploration and might actually be unnecessary because…
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Keeping pace?
If you receive an implanted pacemaker for your heart, does it become your property? When it is no longer any use to you (because you have died), do you have to give it back?
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The new offence of ‘wilful neglect’ – what’s new?
It was announced last week that a new offence of ‘wilful neglect or mistreatment’ is to be created for NHS hospital staff whose conduct amounts to the deliberate or reckless mistreatment of patients. This offence will be modeled on an existing offence under the Mental Capacity Act which punishes the wilful neglect or ill-treatment of…
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Lifespan Enhancement and Punishment
At a recent Uehiro Centre work-in-progress meeting, Rebecca Roache, Anders Sandberg and Hannah Maslen discussed the potential impacts of transformative technologies on our punishment practices, and the moral significance of some of these impacts (link to the audio here). It’s a rich area: in this comment I want to consider just one of the many…
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If you’re female, your face is worth 48-67% more than mine
If you’re a young woman, your face is worth between 48-67% more than that of a young man. That’s the gist of the Judicial College’s Guidelines for the Assessment of General Damages in Personal Injury Cases, 12th Edition (2013) – one of the canonical texts used by lawyers. For ‘Very Severe Scarring’ ‘in relatively young…
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Some Thoughts on James Burke’s Vision of the Future
By Luke J. Davies. Luke is on Twitter! Follow him here. In 1973 James Burke made a series of predictions about how the world would be in 1993. He got a lot right: the wide spread use of computers at home and in schools; the data collection and storage that use makes possible; the development…
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Ethics of Editing the Book of Life
It’s got Nobel Prize written all over it. The scientific innovation, CRISPR, which enables accurate ‘editing’ of DNA (compared to current techniques where a viral vector introduces the DNA at random), has had one team member “jumping out of my skin with excitement”. Still at basic science level, it has already been hailed as a…
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Closing down comments
Popular Science has decided they will no longer permit comments on their new articles. If you are a ‘vexing commenter’, a ‘shrill boorish specimen’, rather than a ‘delightful, thought-provoking commenter’, it now turns out you were never welcome. Of course, they have a perfect right to close their comments: it is their website. Their reasons…