Synthetic biology, which aims to design and build organisms that serve human needs, has potential applications that range from producing biofuels to programming human behaviour. The emergence of this new form of biotechnology, however, raises a variety of ethical questions - first and foremost, whether synthetic biology is intrinsically troubling in moral terms. Is it an egregious example of sc…
This book updates and advances the theory of expected utility as applied to risk analysis and financial decision making. Von Neumann and Morgenstern pioneered the use of expected utility theory in the 1940s, but most utility functions used in financial management are still relatively simplistic and assume a mean-variance world. Taking into account recent advances in the economics of risk and un…
World trade is governed by the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The WTO sets rules of conduct for the international trade of goods and services and for intellectual property rights, provides a forum for multinational negotiations to resolve trade problems, and has a formal mechanism for dispute settlement. It is the…
An updated edition of a guide to the basic science of climate change, and a call to action.The vast majority of scientists agree that human activity has significantly increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere--most dramatically since the 1970s. Yet global warming skeptics and ill-informed elected officials continue to dismiss this broad scientific consensus. In this updated edition of his au…
Emerging biotechnologies that manipulate human genetic material have drawn a chorus of objections from politicians, pundits, and scholars. In Humanity Enhanced, Russell Blackford examines them in the context of liberal thought, discussing the public policy issues they raise from legal and political perspectives. Some see the possibility of genetic choice as challenging the values of liberal dem…
Based on the author's thesis (doctoral - Stanford University, Department of Communication, 2011) issued under title: A new way to think about press freedom : networked journalism and a public right to Hear in the Age of "Newsware."Reimagining press freedom in a networked era: not just a journalist's right to speak but also a public's right to hear.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
The issues of mental causation, consciousness, and free will have vexed philosophers since Plato. In this book, Peter Tse examines these unresolved issues from a neuroscientific perspective.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
"The book is a scientific biography of American neurophysiologist and cybernetician Warren S. McCulloch, one that places his life and work in historical context. By focusing on the various identities that he assumed throughout his life's major work--the study of the brain and mind--the book examines the intermingling of McCulloch's professional and personal worlds, and by doing so provides a mu…
A guide to the everyday working world of engineers, written by researchers trained in both engineering and sociology.Everyday Engineering was written to help future engineers understand what they are going to be doing in their everyday working lives, so that they can do their work more effectively and with a broader social vision. It will also give sociologists deeper insights into the sociotec…
"A Bradford book."This collection of contemporary essays by prominent contemporary thinkers on the topics of determinism and free agency concentrates primarily on two areas: the compatibility problem and the metaphysics of moral responsibility. There are also essays on the related fields of determinism and action theory. The book is unique in that it contains up-to-date summaries of the life-wo…