Moral (dis)engagement with anthropogenic climate change in online comments on newspaper articles

Anthropogenic climate change (ACC) is widely acknowledged to be morally significant, but little is known about everyday moralising around ACC. We addressed this gap via quantified thematic analysis of 300 online comments to British newspaper articles on ACC, drawing on Bandura’s moral disengagement theory. Moral disengagement through denial of ACC was widespread. Other disengagement strategies, such as palliative comparison and diminishing agency, occurred less often. There was also some moral engagement, most often through assertions of the existence of ACC and/or its harmful effects. Moral disengagement was significantly more common in comments on right wing than left wing newspapers, while the opposite was true of moral engagement. While Bandura’s framework provided a useful starting point to make sense of ACC moralising, it did not capture moral concerns that extended beyond its ‘harm / care’ remit. In particular, many ‘denial’ comments included a ‘dishonesty’ discourse, whereby ACC proponents were accused of deception for ulterior motives. To classify this discourse as moral disengagement obscures its engagement with a different set of moral issues around trust and honesty. We suggest that Bandura’s theory represents one possible ‘moral landscape’ around ACC, and could be extended to encompass a broader range of moral concerns

Examining user comments for deliberative democracy: a corpus-driven analysis of the climate change debate online

The public perception of climate change is characterized by heterogeneity, even polarization. Deliberative discussion is regarded by some as key to overcoming polarization and engaging various publics with the complex issue of climate change. In this context, online engagement with news stories is seen as a space for a new “deliberative democratic potential” to emerge. This article examines aspects of deliberation in user comment threads in response to articles on climate change taken from the Guardian. “Deliberation” is understood through the concepts “reciprocity”, “topicality”, and “argumentation”. We demonstrate how corpus analysis can be used to examine the ways in which online debates around climate change may create or deny opportunities for multiple voices and deliberation. Results show that whilst some aspects of online discourse discourage alternative viewpoints and demonstrate “incivility”, user comments also show potential for engaging in dialog, and for high levels of interaction

Ancient genomes reveal a high diversity of Mycobacterium leprae in medieval Europe.

Studying ancient DNA allows us to retrace the evolutionary history of human pathogens, such as Mycobacterium leprae, the main causative agent of leprosy. Leprosy is one of the oldest recorded and most stigmatizing diseases in human history. The disease was prevalent in Europe until the 16th century and is still endemic in many countries with over 200,000 new cases reported annually. Previous worldwide studies on modern and European medieval M. leprae genomes revealed that they cluster into several distinct branches of which two were present in medieval Northwestern Europe. In this study, we analyzed 10 new medieval M. leprae genomes including the so far oldest M. leprae genome from one of the earliest known cases of leprosy in the United Kingdom-a skeleton from the Great Chesterford cemetery with a calibrated age of 415-545 C.E. This dataset provides a genetic time transect of M. leprae diversity in Europe over the past 1500 years. We find M. leprae strains from four distinct branches to be present in the Early Medieval Period, and strains from three different branches were detected within a single cemetery from the High Medieval Period. Altogether these findings suggest a higher genetic diversity of M. leprae strains in medieval Europe at various time points than previously assumed. The resulting more complex picture of the past phylogeography of leprosy in Europe impacts current phylogeographical models of M. leprae dissemination. It suggests alternative models for the past spread of leprosy such as a wide spread prevalence of strains from different branches in Eurasia already in Antiquity or maybe even an origin in Western Eurasia. Furthermore, these results highlight how studying ancient M. leprae strains improves understanding the history of leprosy worldwide

Maintaining the sanitary border: air transport liberalisation and health security practices at UK regional airports

This article was published in the journal, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers [Wiley, published on behalf of the Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) / © The authors]. The definitive version of this article is available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/This paper contributes to ongoing debates surrounding the governance and security of global mobility regimes through a theoretical and empirical examination of the extent to which air transport liberalisation and contemporary practices of infectious disease governance demand a reconceptualisation of national borders. Recent outbreaks of SARS and H1N1 influenza, which spread rapidly around the world via air travel, illustrated the ability of pathogens to disrupt patterns and practices of human mobility and directly led to the introduction of new health screening technologies at airports that were designed to restrict the spread of infection and maintain a sanitary border. Yet while medical specialists have debated the effectiveness of the various screening techniques, and privacy campaigners have expressed concern over some of the technologies that have been deployed in an attempt to intercept these disease threats, there has been no exploration of the extent to which recent regulatory and structural changes within the global aviation industry have exacerbated the challenges of safeguarding public health and simultaneously transformed practices and spatialities of sanitary border control by re-siting national borders within a range of offshore and domestic locations. Drawing on official airport passenger statistics from the UK, this paper contends that, in transforming the spatialities of contemporary patterns of aeromobility, the progressive liberalisation of the commercial aviation sector (and the dramatic rise in passenger numbers, flights, and airports handling international services it effected) – has had unintended and hitherto unexplored consequences for the governance of infectious disease mobility and the material deployment of sovereign sanitary territoriality by creating more points through which an infectious disease may enter or leave a country and moving the border inside UK regions

Bell's 'Lorentzian Pedagogy': A Bad Education

Bell’s 'Lorentzian Pedagogy' has been extolled as a constructive account of the relativistic contraction of moving rods. Bell claimed advantages for teaching relativity through the older approach of Lorentz, Fitzgerald and Larmor. However, he describes the differences between their absolutist approach and the relativistic one as philosophical, and claims that the facts of physics do not force us to choose between them. Bell’s interpretation of the physics of motion contraction, and therefore of constructivist as opposed to principle approaches, is indeterminate. His flawed pedagogy never directly addresses the difference between Fitzgerald and Lorentz contractions

On the sovereign independence of spacetime

ABSTRACT: Special Relativity is not a branch of electromagnetism: it does not depend on light’s having a constant, limiting speed. If the theory is true, it depends on no matter theory. Rather, very general and familiar symmetries of space and time impose the form of the Lorentz transformation on every matter theory, independently of any that obeys it. I explore this and its metaphysical consequences

Lost Opportunity: how Einstein 1916 ingored Minkowski 1908

Einstein’s (1916) first survey of General Relativity is deeply flawed in its informal introductory section, Part A. He presents the salient feature of the new theory as the mere lifting of coordinate restrictions on Special Relativity rather than its being a spacetime theory of gravity. Minkowski (1908) developed a different conception of Special Relativity, independent of light and signalling, with spacetime as its immediate and principal consequence. If Einstein had begun general relativity from that basis he would have avoided the many errors into which Part A fell