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Introducing Preservice STEM Teachers to Computer Science: A Narrative of Theoretically Oriented Design
This paper narrates the process of designing a curricular unit that serves to introduce preservice science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers to computer science (CS) education. Unlike most literature that focuses on results and findings, this paper explains how a justice-centered approach to CS education informed decisions about the theoretical underpinnings of curricular design choices. Situated in issues related to the gentrification of Austin, Texas, the described curricular unit explores how the increased use of CS and growth of the technology sector are having a direct impact on the historically marginalized residents of East Austin. Connected by a theme that maps are both a form of data visualization and political artifact, the described curricular unit uses CS as a tool to: critique the macro-ethics of politics and society; provide a CS learning environment that can be responsive to the multiple social identities of students; and connect CS to larger struggles for justice and liberation.Educatio
Rogue Science
This review essay considers the tension between the evidence-driven vision of science\u27s mission and the fears of malicious use and terrible consequences that have come to the fore since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. These fears have led some to call for government restrictions on the substance of scientific research and communication. In general, this approach is likely to do far more harm than good. But scientists need to take the problem of social consequences more seriously than they have so far. The author argues in this essay that in some circumstances, when rogue use of science can do large-scale harm and when there are strong grounds for believing that a foe has the will and ability to do such harm, self-restraint within the scientific community is called for.
The following works are reviewed:
Science in the Service of Human Rights, By Richard Pierre Claude, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
Science and Technology in a Vulnerable World, Edited by Albert H. Teich, Stephen D. Nelson and Stephen J. Lita. American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2002
Ishiguro's Inhuman Aesthetics
The question of what it means to be human pervades Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go, which gradually reveals a counterfactual twentieth-century England where clone colonies provide ready supplies of organs for donation. In the tradition of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell's 1984 (1949), the novel envisions a dystopian civil society where clones struggle to comprehend the significance of their own circumscribed personhood. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this interrogation of what it means to be human emerges through a critique of Romantic-inspired assumptions about aesthetics and empathy. While the novel attracts attention for its theme of genetic engineering, its deepest anxieties arguably concern the ethics of artistic production and consumption in an age of multiculturalism and globalization. Through its veneer of science fiction, Never Let Me Go offers an allegory both for national concerns about the state of England and for transnational fears about rising global inequality. In its portrait of the systematic exploitation of the clones and its implicit exploration of vulnerable actors in our modern economic order, the novel indicts humanist conceptions of art as a form of extraction that resembles forced organ donation. If Romantic-inspired views of empathy rely on the claim that art reveals the human soul, Ishiguro's novel implies that the concept of the soul invokes a fundamentally exploitative discourse of use value. In this respect, Never Let Me Go shares in a pervasive late-twentieth-century cultural skepticism about the viability of empathetic art. [End Page 785]
Yet Ishiguro's critique does notâas might be expectedâabandon the ethical potential of works of art. Instead, it makes a case for an ethics offering a very different approach to art and empathy that relies on the recognition of the inhuman. As an alternative to humanist modes of representation, Ishiguro's inhuman style suggests that only by recognizing what in ourselves is mechanical, manufactured, and replicatedâin a traditional sense, not fully humanâwill we escape the barbarities committed in the name of preserving purely human life. Never Let Me Go implies that if there is to be any empathetic connection with Ishiguro's protagonists, it will not occur through the consoling liberal realization that clones are humans, just like us. It will evolve through the darker realization that art, along with the empathy it provokes, needs to escape the traditional concept of the human. The novel thus calls for what seems like a contradiction in terms: an empathetic inhuman aesthetics that embraces the mechanical, commodified, and replicated elements of personhood. While inhuman is often used as a synonym for cruel or unethical, Ishiguro's novel suggests exactly the reverse. As its aesthetics of replication allows us to sympathize with others without recourse to such constraining ideals, Never Let Me Go reinvents empathy for a posthumanist age
Bioethics of Xenotransplantation: Three Religious Perspectives
The recent explosion of biotechnology has raised many ethical and religious questions among faith communities. Many of these faith communities are attempting to balance modern technology and historical religion. Using xenotransplantation as a case study, the transplantation of genetically engineered animal organs into human beings, this article follows three major religious traditions through the discernment process of how to deal faithfully with this new technology. In addition, the role of the biotechnology industry and the pressures that researchers face are also explored in the context of investigating how to effectively integrate science and religion into future bioethical discussions
Wellness, Health, and Salvation : About the Religious Dimension of Contemporary Body-Mindedness
Alluding to the enormous investments in wellness, health, and anti-aging by affluent US society today the article focuses on the anthropological and religious implications of this phenomenon by stating that the pursuit of such caring for the body has superseded the quest for salvation. The first section provides a historical background analysis of how the contemporary semi-religious bodymindedness came about, while the second part analyses wellness, health, and salvation from a phenomenological point of view. It shows that any body image which does not address human frailty turns into something utterly inhumane while a religiously informed anthropology, in contrast, not only accepts frailty, dying, and death as realities of life but situates these experiences within a broader frame of reference and meaning thereby setting people free to leave behind at the proper time anxieties and worries about body-upkeep and to embrace life in the face of death
THE INFLUENCE OF ACCOUNTING STUDENT MORAL REASONING AND ETHICAL SENSITIVITY TOWARD UNETHICAL ACADEMIC BEHAVIOUR
In the context of education in Indonesia, the phenomenon about the
deterioration of moral values has become a kind of red light urging all parties, to
immediately see an important synergy for the development of character education.
Professional assessment cannot be separated from the basic value of honesty. This
study aims to determine the influence of accounting student moral reasoning and
ethical sensitivity toward unethical academic behaviour.
The samples in this study are 200 respondents and the questionnaires were
distributed to the accounting major student of economic and business faculty in
Diponegoro University, Semarang. All questions were measured using a Likert
scale with 5 rank answers from never to always. The data were processed using
SPSS 23. Data analysis method used is quantitative analysis using validity test,
reliability test, normality test, classic assumption test, multiple linear regression
analysis tests, t-test, and f-test.
The result of this study showed that the moral reasoning and ethical
sensitivity variables have a significant influence on unethical academic behaviour
on an accounting student who is studying accounting major in Diponegoro
University, Semarang
Climates of suspicion: 'chemtrail' conspiracy narratives and the international politics of geoengineering
Concurrent with growing academic and policy interest in âgeoengineeringâ the global climate in response to climate change, a more marginal discourse postulating the existence of a climate control conspiracy is also proliferating on the Internet. Here, the term âchemtrailsâ is used interchangeably with the term geoengineering to describe the belief that the persistent contrails left by aeroplanes provide evidence that a secret programme of large scale weather and climate modification is on-going. Despite recent calls for greater appreciation of the diverse ways in which people conceive of and relate to ideas of climate control, and widespread acknowledgement of the importance of democratic public engagement in governance of geoengineering, the chemtrail conspiracy narrative has received very little attention in academic work to date. This paper builds on work highlighting the instability of the distinction between âparanoidâ and ânormalâ views, and examines the chemtrail conspiracy narrative as a discourse rather than a pathology (either psychological or sociological). The analysis finds that while some elements of the chemtrail narrative do not lend themselves to democratic processes of deliberation, and potential for engagement with more mainstream discourse appears to be low, nevertheless certain elements of the discourse (such as the moral outrage at the idea of powerful elites controlling the climate, or the importance of emotional and spiritual connections to weather and climate) highlight concerns of relevance to mainstream geoengineering debates. Furthermore, the pervasive suspicion that characterises the narrative and its reminder of the key role that trust plays in knowledge creation and the justification of beliefs, signals what is likely to be a perennial issue in the emerging international politics of geoengineering
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