technology
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Doing New Things in Teaching (with more words added later)
(Explained using only the ten hundred words people use the most often, just like at that one not-real place I found with my computer. I wrote this using a thing the guy who makes that not-real place made to help people to write more simply.) I work at a big college (the kind that has… Continue reading
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Adventures in Applied Actor-Network Theory
The first step is to admit you have a problem, right? Well, I have a problem with computers or, more specifically, with broadband Internet service: my capacity to wallow in distraction seems almost boundless. I can sit for hours, hopping from site to site, tracking this blog and that, contributing to that discussion thread or… Continue reading
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On Quitting Social Media . . . Again
I offer no manifesto here, no call to arms against the evils of technology. I note only in passing that the pendulum is swinging the other way, and I find myself inclined to disengage from the internet, for a while, to see if it’s still possible to focus on other things . . . like… Continue reading
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Hydraulic Fracturing: Risk v. Acceptable Risk
I have said that the first day of our workshop on hydraulic fracturing, in November, brought out a long list of risks related to hydraulic fracturing and, indeed, the engineers and scientists who participated were quite adept at identifying such risks and possibilities for mitigation. Something else came out during those first sessions, though, which… Continue reading
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Hydraulic Fracturing: The Project
As I have been hinting, I’m currently caught up in a collaborative project on engineering, ethics and policy related to hydraulic fracturing. The idea for the project began to take shape in conversations I was having with my colleague, Chloé Arson, who is over in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech.… Continue reading
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Death By Robot
“Death by robot is an undignified death, Peter Asaro, an affiliate scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, said in a speech in May at a United Nations conference on conventional weapons in Geneva. A machine ‘is not capable of considering the value of those human lives’ that it is… Continue reading
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Self-Driving Cars: A View from the Sidewalk
I have not been following the hype over self-driving cars closely enough to tell whether it’s a passing fad or something more enduring. As is often the case with emerging technologies that excite people’s imaginations, many claims for the benefits of self-driving cars come across as exaggerated, almost utopian. In any case, benefits are cast… Continue reading
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Object Lessons
My post about the cyclotron case – “The Other End of the Beam” – has made me wonder whether I could build a course in practical ethics, or perhaps just the introductory segment of a course, around a single, physical object. I’d come across a brief account of the idea of an object lesson, which… Continue reading