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Fifty shades: should BDSM become part of general sexual education?
“BDSM [Bondage, Discipline, Sadism, Masochism] might be mainstream now, but it has a new PR problem. I blame Christian Grey.” writes ‘sexual submissive’ Sophie Morgan in an article in the Guardian. I started reading E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey but didn’t get very far. It’s very badly written (guess that’s no longer a secret) and,
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A Living Wage?
This week is Living Wage Week. The aim of this campaign is to encourage employers to pay their lowest paid employees a Living Wage – the amount necessary to meet the basic cost of living –rather than the legally required minimum wage. Currently, the minimum wage is £6.19 per hour, whereas outside London the Living
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Do we want “genetically modified children”? Yes, of course!
The agency that regulates fertility treatment and embryo research in the UK, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), has asked for public views on two possible new forms of fertility treatment that promise to prevent the transmission of mitochondrial diseases to children. These diseases can be extremely severe, leading to (among other things) diabetes,
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Four More Years . . .
Today we learnt that Barack Obama will be the President of the USA for another term. Much of the debate preceding Obama’s election victory focused on how each presidential candidate planned to resuscitate the American economy. Time will tell whether Obama will succeed in this area, and we will be able to debate the merits of
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Notice: server back up
Due to a server upgrade, the blog will be unavailable between 11am and 12pm GMT today. Server is now back up. Please report any issues in the comments.
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Could there be a Third Way for Criminal Psychopaths?
Last week, Steven Farrow was convicted of murdering a grandmother and a vicar. 77 year old Betty Yates was stabbed in the face. He had planned to crucify the vicar but had left behind his hammer an nails, instead covering his dead body in pornographic DVDs, party poppers and condoms. Though Farrow is likely to
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Personalised weapons of mass destruction: governments and strategic emerging technologies
Andrew Hessel, Marc Goodman and Steven Kotler sketches in an article in The Atlantic a not-too-far future when the combination of cheap bioengineering, synthetic biology and crowdsourcing of problem solving allows not just personalised medicine, but also personalised biowarfare. They dramatize it by showing how this could be used to attack the US president, but
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The Fable of Speeding and Prance Legstrong
Imagine that the Teetotaler party came to power. They stood for family, safety and old fashioned values. Their first target was the car and the speeding culture. They wanted driving to be as safe as possible. Indeed, they would have preferred it if there were no driving cars at all and people returned to bicycles
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When the science of sexuality meets the politics of gay rights
By Brian Earp See Brian’s most recent previous post by clicking here. See all of Brian’s previous posts by clicking here. Follow Brian on Twitter by clicking here. Gay genes and gay rights: On the science and politics of sexuality If homosexuality has a genetic basis, and if gay sex produces no offspring, why hasn’t
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Singularity Summit: How we’re predicting AI
When will we have proper AI? The literature is full of answers to this question, as confident as they are contradictory. In a talk given at the Singularity Institute in San Francisco, I analyse these prediction from a theoretical standpoint (should we even expect anyone to have good AI predictions at all?) and a practical one (do