Modern Islam and science: an article by Seyyed Hossein Nasr
In “Islam and Science,” an article written for the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, Nasr attempts to give a broad overview of the relationship of Islam to modern science and technology. He makes some key points regarding to criticism of Western science from an Islamic point a view.
Copyright and the public domain
Randy Picker has a fascinating post on the Faculty Blog of the University of Chicago’s law school of the copyright status of scans (by Google, for example) of public domain works. Does the effort of digitizing the work qualify as enough original effort to create a new copyright?
Popper, Kuhn, and Creationism
Since at least McLean v. Arkansas in 1981, Creationists — Christian fundamentalists who oppose evolution — have turned, intriguingly, to philosophy of science to try to justify the inclusion of Creationism alongside evolution in science classrooms.
Google attorney dislikes ACTA too
The still-in-draft Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, beloved of some, is hated by many – including Google, apparently.
Should mandatory open access be extended to all federally funded research?
A consortium of research institutions is lobbying to extend the NIH open-access policy to other federally funded research.
The FCC re-classifies in response to Comcast
Last month, Comcast won its appeal in a federal appeals court in D.C. against the FCC’s attempt to require network neutrality. As predicted by some, the FCC is proceeding with plans to reclassify broadband providers, and thus escape the ruling entirely.
Causation, faith, and intelligent design
There is a philosophical thesis (attributed jointly to Pierre Duhem and Willard Quine) that, when simplified, explains how a given set of facts can produce more than one apparently true conclusion: essentially, different background assumptions lead to different conclusions. A related concept is known as underdetermination: that a given set of evidence can be explained by more than one – potentially conflicting – theory.
Some commonalities of pro- and anti-vaccination rhetoric
Within the context of the contemporary vaccination debate, neither side has a monopoly on a particular kind of argument.
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