Month: May 2016

“Trial by Internet” and the Presumption of Innocence

Only a couple of weeks ago, I noted on this blog (in “Philosophy’s Gatekeepers”) that it had been 190 days since the last major breaking-news story about sexual harassment or assault in professional Philosophy. That was a noteworthy fact, And then, last Friday, the Thomas Pogge story broke. I’ll just direct readers to the news coverage…

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#30DaySongChallenge 2016

Each summer, I participate in the #30DaySongChallenge. As regular readers of this blog already know, what that entails is my posting a song in response to a daily prompt for each of the 30 days of June, accompanied with some (long or short) post that accounts for why I chose that song for that day’s…

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Twitter: Now With More Characters, Less Character

Twitter has changed a lot over the last few years, but until recently there was one inviolable rule to which all users were obliged: tweets must be limited to 140 characters or less. Because a computer “character” is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme– letter, number, punctuation mark, or whitespace– the…

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“Grace and Frankie” and the Right to Die

There are so many things about Netflix’s original comedy series Grace and Frankie (now in its second season) to recommend it, not least of which is its pitch-perfect gallows humor.  Orbiting around the decidedly 21st century lives of four septuagenarians– the eponymous Grace (Jane Fonda) and Frankie (Lily Tomlin) and their now ex-husbands, Saul (Sam Waterston)…

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Philosophy’s Gatekeepers

Yesterday’s piece by Jay Garfield and Bryan Van Norden’s in NYT‘s The Stone (“If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is”) has already generated some of the most interesting online discussion about the discipline and profession of Philosophy that I’ve seen since our last salacious exposĂ©. (What are we at now, philosophers? 190 days…

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Not Every Idea Needs a Tool, But Every Tool Needs an Idea

Last semester, I conducted a test-run on a new assignment I had devised for my courses– the “Technology and Human Values” project— and I was, quite frankly, floored by the work that students did for it. The basic assignment is for students to work in groups of four or fewer to devise a merely-possible technological solution…

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