Business Ethics: Privacy

本稿は，義務論的倫理学の視点から社会の中にある道徳基準について概観し，ビジネス環境におけるプライバシーの重要性について論証することを目的としている。ビジネス環境においては，模範的な人でさえプライバシーを侵害する可能性は否めない。本論では，多様な視点からプライバシーについて詳述するため，たとえば９月11日のテロ事件後にアメリカで起きた個人情報に関する事例等も用いている。義務論的倫理学の中で取り扱われる道徳原理を軸とした場合，個人のプライバシーを守ることは最重要課題であるといえるだろう

Differential Sentencing Patterns among Felony Sex Offenders and Non-Sex Offenders

More than thirty years ago, commentators noted that there is doubtless no subject on which one can obtain more definite opinions and less definite knowledge than in the area of the sentencing of sex offenders.1 The literature is no less deficient today. There are numerous assertions to the effect that sex offenders receive draconian penalties2 while certain feminist theorists maintain that sex offenders receive overly lenient treatment.3 In both cases, however, the unanswered question is, In relation to what

Ideology and Intolerance: The Case of Colonialism

Ideology has a stranglehold on academia as much as anywhere else. Numerous authors have noted that liberal/progressives dominate the discourse in our universities and are loathe to tolerate any position that does not toe the ideological line. We are fortunate to have a journal that is explicitly devoted to positions that run counter to conventional wisdom. I look at Bruce Gilley’s work on colonialism as exemplifying something that both runs against the usual narrative and typifies academia’s lack of tolerance for such works. Gilley sees much to commend in colonialism, particularly British colonialism, although he examined the colonialism of other European countries. Because of this, both he and the editor of the journal that published his article received threats of violence and were attacked personally and professionally, and the article was retracted (but republished in another journal). This article examines the academic response to Gilley, the literature on colonialism other than Gilley’s. I find that most of it supports Gilley’s viewpoint in terms of the objective benefits received by nations colonized by the British in terms of economic, health, civil rights, and democratic advances. Space constraints make it necessary to limit the analysis to British colonies

Ideology in Physics: Ontological Naturalism and Theism Confront the Big Bang, Cosmic Fine-Tuning, and the Multiverse of M-Theory

The most profound questions that philosophers and scientists have asked across the centuries have been metaphysical and existential, such as “What is the meaning and purpose of life, why are we here, and why is there something rather than nothing?” There can be no definitive answers to these questions, so those who pose and propose answers to them necessarily engage ideology. Some physicists have become philosophers in that they are attempting to answer these profound questions with highly speculative theories as, for instance, Hawking and Mlodonow’s book The Grand Design (2010) which they tout as providing new answers to age-old questions by positing a multiverse that created itself. Other physicists impugn these efforts as putting physics in a no-man’s land and wanting to relax the empirical and falsifiable criteria for judging the usefulness of a theory. These theories are offered in response to the remarkable precision of the initial conditions of the Big Bang, and the exquisite fine-tuning of nature’s laws for intelligent life. Theistic or deistic physicists see these things as the mark of a designer; atheist or agnostic physicists call this a as an affront to science and offer the multiverse hypothesis as an alternative. The ideological battles are thus between ontological naturalists (there is no reality beyond the physical) who lean toward atheism, and methodological naturalists (there is a mental and spiritual reality as well as a material one) who lean toward theism or deism

Constraining Coronal Heating: Employing Bayesian Analysis Techniques to Improve the Determination of Solar Atmospheric Plasma Parameters

One way of revealing the nature of the coronal heating mechanism is by comparing simple theoretical one dimensional hydrostatic loop models with observations at the temperature and/or density structure along these features. The most well-known method for dealing with comparisons like that is the $\chi^2$ approach. In this paper we consider the restrictions imposed by this approach and present an alternative way for making model comparisons using Bayesian statistics. In order to quantify our beliefs we use Bayes factors and information criteria such as AIC and BIC. Three simulated datasets are analyzed in order to validate the procedure and assess the effects of varying error bar size. Another two datasets (Ugarte-Urra et al., 2005; Priest et al., 2000) are re-analyzed using the method described above. In one of these two datasets (Ugarte-Urra et al., 2005), due to the error estimates in the observed temperature values, it is not posible to distinguish between the different heating mechanisms. For this we suggest that both Classical and Bayesian statistics should be applied in order to make safe assumptions about the nature of the coronal heating mechanisms

When Heads Were Headlines

A history of phrenology in the United States. Theories of Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Christoph Spurzheim. Visit of Johann Christoph Spurzheim to Boston for public lecture series. Death of Spurzheim in Boston. Activities of Orson Squire Fowler. Phrenological lecture tour of the Fowler brothers. Establishment of Fowlers & Wells publishing company. Fading of phrenology in the 20th century