Month: September 2014
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By Gordon Hull Several months ago, I argued here that big data is going to make a big mess of privacy – primarily because of a distinction between “data,” understood as the effluvia of daily life, generated by such activities as moving around town or making phone calls, and “information,” which implies some sort of…
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By Catarina Dutilh Novaes I am working on a paper now (together with my student Leon Geerdink, for a volume on the history of early analytic philosophy being edited by Chris Pincock and Sandra Lapointe) where I elaborate on a hypothesis first presented at a blog post more than 3 years ago: that the history of…
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By Roberta L. Millstein In a summer overly stuffed with horrible and depressing news, it's comforting to find a good tidbit here and there. A few of these recent tidbits have been about particular wild animals: A baby orca was born in Puget Sound and given the designation L-120, bringing the population of the "L…
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The first reading in my Philosophical Issues in Literature class this semester–which focuses on the post-apocalyptic novel–is Nevil Shute's On The Beach. I expected, more often than not, moral, ethical, and political issues to be picked up on in classroom discussions; I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the very first class meeting–on Monday–honed in on an epistemic…
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Especially given the attention we've paid to the case here (see our new tag, and also Samir's posts here and here, and Eric Schwitzgebel's here), it is important to note that Steven Salaita had a press conference today, at which he issued this following statement. The full audio of the statement and the press…
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One of the few productive things that came out of the recent kerfufle about ableism was a useful discussion of where we should draw the line between what seem like acceptable uses of terms like "blind review", on the one hand, and obviously offensive terms like "spaz," on the other. And if we can…
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New APPS readers probably remember Helen De Cruz's excellent post on the polarized debate surrounding evolutionary science (which was picked up by NPR), as well as Roberta Millstein's follow-up post on the perhaps equally polarized debate concerning climate change. Both posts cite the work of Dan Kahan, who has a distinct take on these issues:…
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I still keep wondering why even pretty good bands so reliably founder on Beatles' covers. Maybe it's as simple as this: Because of their experiences in Germany, the Beatles were one of the best live bands in rock history, When added to the complexity of their melodies this sets a very high bar for covers,…
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It seems apropos to introduce a small point of order: New APPS is a group blog, which means that there are many authors here and we all speak for ourselves–and only ourselves. A case in point would be my strong disagreement with Jon Cogburn's post below. I find it to trade in a series of…
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Sept 10th is Internet Slowdown Day, a day devoted to drawing attention to the issue of 'Net neutrality, which is in greater peril than it has been in a long time. Amy Goodman has all the details here.
New APPS 