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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.
May 2010 / 5 min.
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?
May 2010 / 3 min.
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.
May 2010 / 3 min.
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.
May 2010 / 1 min.
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.
May 2010 / 1 min.
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.
May 2010 / 4 min.
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.
May 2010 / 3 min.
The Stored Communications Act and you
It’s always good to remember that storing your email on someone else’s server is a potential problem.
April 2010 / 2 min.
The splintering of the Internet is not a new phenomenon
There has been increasing discussion around the concept of the “splinternet”: that proprietary devices like the iPad or proprietary sites like Facebook are acting to splinter the old, connected Web into discrete, fragmented, and self-contained units. But the “golden age” was hardly golden, and today’s Web is, if anything, better than it used to be in terms of interconnectivity. Certainly it’s important to recognize fragmentation issues today, but let’s not pretend it’s a new problem.
April 2010 / 3 min.
My first look at historical shifts in anti-vaccination rhetoric
There is a long history of opposition to vaccination, opposition that dates back to its earliest uses in Europe and North America to fight smallpox. Opponents have made claims ranging from accusations that vaccination interferes with “God’s will” to claims that it actually contributed to the spread of smallpox instead of preventing it.
April 2010 / 2 min.