In tourism, the presence of different stakeholders, sometimes with conflicting interests, requires a clear understanding of how to manage and engage them effectively. Despite the importance of this topic, tourism studies lack a univocal framework for destinations aiming to develop a destination management system (DMS) focused on empowering stakeholder engagement. To fill this gap, this study aims to identify the key dimensions that can strengthen stakeholder engagement in the tourism sector. Particular attention is given to the role of technology in (...) mediating relationships among DMS participants and to the role of ‘intermediary’ stakeholders in facilitating collaboration and engagement. By adopting a cross-disciplinary approach that integrates stakeholder theory, stakeholder engagement and destination management, and by examining a case study of an Italian best practice, DMS Puglia, a technology-enabled framework for stakeholder engagement in a DMS was elaborated. This study contributes to the advancement of the literature on stakeholder engagement in tourism by demonstrating that the structure and composition of a DMS, and the communication methods it enables, along with the role of the destination management organisation and the preparedness of stakeholders to participate in a DMS, significantly influence stakeholder engagement and can strengthen relationships among participants in a technologically advanced tourism system. This study also provides directions to stakeholder bridges about how to effectively improve stakeholder engagement through technology-focused tools and strategies. (shrink)

Although at one level Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain is a sweet, attractive film about a young Parisian doing good deeds, it also offers a compelling analysis of the role of technology in our modern lives. The film paints a world where machines and a mechanistic worldview are appealing because humans have a desire to control their destinies but threatening because humans value freedom. The work of French social theorist Jacques Ellul is especially useful in analyzing these facets (...) of the film as technology and freedom were consistent themes in his various books on the modern milieu. (shrink)

Facing Heidegger s critique of modern technology, the author analyses the question of technology and ethical responsibility and the call for reflexivity towards technology. He examines Heidegger s thoughts about how science and technology conceal the enigmatic and distinctive presencing of Being and exhibits how modern technology has brought unintended consequences and risks. The author extends the deliberation among diverse epistemologies, interested parties and laypersons, a component of reflexive modernization. Such epistemic community opens the way for a new reflexive democratization (...) of technology, in which different actors should be involved in decision making about technology as it affects the society, the environment and individuals.". (shrink)

Destination therapy is the permanent implantation of a left ventricular assist device in patients with end-stage, severe heart failure who are ineligible for heart transplantation. DT improves both the quality of life and prognosis of patients with end-stage heart failure. However, there are also downsides to DT such as life-threatening complications and the potential for the patient to live beyond their desired length of life following such major complications. Because of deeply ingrained cultural and religious beliefs regarding death and the (...) sanctity of life, Japanese society may not be ready to make changes needed to enable patients to have LVADs deactivated under certain circumstances to avoid needless suffering. Western ethical views that permit LVAD deactivation based mainly on respect for autonomy and dignity have not been accepted thus far in Japan and are unlikely to be accepted, given the current Japanese culture and traditional values. Some healthcare professionals might regard patients as ineligible for DT unless they have prepared advance directives. If this were to happen, the right to prepare an advance directive would instead become an obligation to do so. Furthermore, patient selection for DT poses another ethical issue. Given the predominant sanctity of life principle and lack of cost-consciousness regarding medical expenses, medically appropriate exclusion criteria would be ignored and DT could be applied to various patients, including very old patients, the demented, or even patients in persistent vegetative states, through on-site judgment. There is an urgent need for Japan to establish and enact a basic act for patient rights. The act should include: respect for a patient’s right to self-determination; the right to refuse unwanted treatment; the right to prepare legally binding advance directives; the right to decline to prepare such directives; and access to nationally insured healthcare. It should enable those concerned with patient care involving DT to seek ethical advice from ethics committees. Furthermore, it should state that healthcare professionals involved in the discontinuation of life support in a proper manner are immune to any legal action and that they have the right to conscientiously object to LVAD deactivation. (shrink)

Has biopolitics actually become thanatopolitics, a field of study obsessed with death? Is there something about the nature of biopolitical thought today that makes it impossibile to deploy affirmatively? If this is true, what can life-minded thinkers put forward as the merits of biopolitical reflection? These questions drive Improper Life.Campbell argues that a "crypto-thanatopolitics" can be teased out of Heidegger's critique of technology and that some of the leading scholars of biopolitics---including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Peter Sloterdijk---have been substansively (...) influenced by Heidegger's thought, particularly his reading of proper and improper writing. In fact, Campbell shows how all of these philosophers have pointed toward a tragic, thanatopolitical destination as somehow an inevitable result of technology. But in Improper Life he articulates a corrective biopolitics that can begin with rereadings of Foucault, Freud, and Gilles Deleuze. Throughout Improper Life, Campbell insists that biopolitics can become more positive and productively asserts an affirmation techne not thought through thanatos but rather through bios. (shrink)

Selective reproductive technologies, such as preimplantation genetic diagnosis, enable enhanced clinical success rates, create reproductive choices, and produce new commercial opportunities. Drawing upon empirical material acquired during a ten-month period in 2016, this study uses a total of twenty-two in-depth interviews with doctors, CEOs, clinical directors, marketing directors, patient counselors, and embryologists to discuss how traveling for the SRT of gender selection for nonmedical reasons is mediated by fertility clinics and clinicians in Dubai. Multimodal analysis was used to analyze the (...) clinical websites’ key rhetorical and visual features. Meanwhile, interviews and observational studies highlighted the context within which gender selection takes place. Findings revealed that gender selection is promoted as a form of “enhancement” and “family balance,” which, when combined with the ways that Dubai is assembled as a sensory tourist destination, routinize SRTs and lead to an understanding of gender selection as not merely an individualized reproductive journey but an optimization of the family unit. (shrink)

We are used to considering engineering ethics largely a critical enterprise. By pointing out ethical issues and by raising concerns about a technology, ethicists usually criticise rather than promote the technology in question. Of course, from a utilitarianist perspective, an ethicist might come to the conclusion that a certain technology is better than another one or than doing without. However, such conclusions are rare in philosophy and would not be considered uncritical promotion. In this essay I argue that engineering ethics, (...) almost unavoidably, turns into the promotion and popularisation of a technology if that technology does not exist yet but is considered to be emerging in the near future. In other words, ethics of emerging technologies is not only prone to but almost destined to play a propaganda role in the public sphere. As engineering ethics moves from established to emerging technologies ethicists need to be aware that they become useful instruments in the struggle for public attention and funding. (shrink)

Technology innovation has changed the patterns with its advanced features for travel and tourism industry during the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, which massively hit tourism and travel worldwide. The profound adverse effects of the coronavirus disease resulted in a steep decline in the demand for travel and tourism activities worldwide. This study focused on the literature based on travel and tourism in the wake global crisis due to infectious virus. The study aims to review the emerging literature critically to help (...) researchers better understand the situation. It valorizes transformational affordance, tourism, and travel industries impacts posed by the virus COVID-19. The study proposed a research model on reviving the international tourism activities post COVID-19 pandemic to gain sustainable development and recovery. The scholars have debated seeking the best possible ways to predict a sustainable recovery of travel, tourism, and leisure sectors from the devastating consequences of coronavirus COVID-19. In the first phase, the study describes how the current pandemic can become transformational opportunities. It debates the situation and questions related to the emergence of the COVID-19 outbreak. The present research focuses on identifying fundamental values, organizations, and pre-assumptions related to travel and tourism revival and help academia and researchers to a breakthrough in initiating the frontiers based on research and practice. This study aims at exploring the role of technological innovation in the crisis management of COVID-19 tourism impacts, tourists’ behavior, and experiences. The travel and tourism industry’s main stakeholders include tourism demand and organizations that manage tourists’ destinations and policymakers. They have already experienced the stages of responses, recovery, and resetting tourism recovery strategies. The study provides valuable insight into the coronavirus consequences on travel and tourism and practical implications for global tourism and academic research revitalization. (shrink)

At the beginning of the third millenium the aspect of truth comes out to be especially topical. The greatest interest is risen by existentialistic and social aspects of the truth issue. Their correlation studying is the most productive way to research the aspect of truth. An individual life passes under certain circumstances, one of them being social reality. Presence of other people, necessity of communication and correlation of individual and social substances allows emphasizing a social side of the truth aspect. (...) The notion of truth is shaped under condition of intersubjectivity or within the process of social subjects interaction. On the one hand it provides a possibility to take the truth as an objectively existing phenomenon, on the other hand it transfers individual valuables and strivings into generally significant field. So Truth is destined to stay one of the most important and notional for a person concepts (despite of post-modernism attempts not to use it basically), as it legitimates a universal principle of common valuables availability for all people on the earth. (shrink)

Hegel has long been considered a major thinker of progress. This paper extends Hegel’s philosophy of progress into an outline of a philosophy of technology. It does this not by directly reading the little Hegel wrote on the subject, but by introducing six central Hegelian ideas that bear on the technological thought. It argues that, for Hegel, (1) mankind is destined to change its destiny; (2) that true change involved qualitative change; (3) that true change is conceptual, and not (...) material, change; (4) that history progresses immanently according to its own laws; (5) that history progresses towards ever greater artificiality; and that (6) artificiality is closely linked to freedom. These ideas cohere into a Hegelian metaphysics of technology, which is supportive of the technological enterprise. This paper is meant both to sketch a metaphysical understanding of the technological enterprise, and to trace the intellectual roots of contemporary technological utopianism. (shrink)

Illuminating, compelling, challenging, at times staggering in its breadth, A Road to Sacred Creation is above all the definitive text for gaining a hold on Rudolf Steiner's nuanced perspectives on technology. Charting both an inner and outer course - part pilgrimage toward greater perception and knowledge, part dramatic, unfolding plot line of the future of humans and machines, the metaphoric “road” of the title is exactly where humanity finds itself today, though the exact route and destination are still to be (...) determined. The map is not yet drawn, but here is a beginning.Taken together, the relevant concepts, ideas, and insights of Steiner - deftly brought into sequence and dialogue as the editor has done in this book - reveal how the work to arrive at a more spiritually imbued technological future not only involves all domains and fields of spiritual science and anthroposophic work, but has its origins in the very core of our being, fundamentally entwined with our moral progress toward freedom and selfless love. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger and Emanuele Severino reflected on the meaning of technology more than anyone else in the twentieth century. Their philosophies are irreconcilable. They converge on this simple recognition and its implications: techno‐science dominates our time. But they disagree even on the interpretation of this domination. Exploring this disagreement will help us understand the leading dynamics of our civilization. Therefore, the intention in this paper is to unveil, for English speakers, the value of Severino’s philosophy in relation to Heidegger and (...) the meaning technology. We will see that, ultimately, their disagreement concerns the originary truth of Being and has repercussions on how they conceptualize technology and the possibility of redemption from it. Heidegger indicated the letting‐be of beings in their freedom as the possible path beyond technology. Severino saw Heidegger’s indication as destined to remain trapped in technology itself. If we understand why this was so – from Severino’s point of view – this may open a new path for us: the path of day, the path that may truly lead beyond technology. The aim of this paper is, finally, to indicate one reason why delving into Severino’s works is truly worthwhile: if it is possible for the truth to unveil itself beyond willing – where Heidegger couldn’t see – then Severino’s works may the place where this possibility appears in coherent conceptual form. (shrink)

Technological dystopias incarnate transhumanist dreams of a this-worldly blissful immortality. Underlying these and others is a globalized technocratic paradigm, the loss of an overarching cosmic world view, rise in consumerism, a gnostic repudiation of the body, and a neo-pelagian aspiration to individualistic self-sufficiency. One response to these transhumanist dreams is to remind ourselves of how nature actually works, its origins, constrains, and future. Our relationship with nature spills over to how we feel standing face-to-face with pain and suffering. In (...) this article I reframe cancer as a journey of maintaining harmony with nature instead of a war against death that we are destined to lose. I argue that understanding the limits and constraints of the natural world help us come to peace with the reality of cancer, and perhaps find meaning in suffering. Instead of avoiding the inevitable at all costs, vulnerability and suffering have their own lessons. In contrast to trans humanist dreams, being human presents an opportunity to welcome the reality of imperfection, to be liberated from our addiction to control and excessive technological manipulation of nature, to draw together as a community, and to live the lessons of each stage of our finite life to its fullest. I hope this reflection, grounded in scientific literature and engaging with richly embodied medical humanities readings, can help us all change how we relate to cancer, from books to bench to biotech to bedside. (shrink)

Considering the technological development today, we are facing an emerging crisis. We are in the midst of a scientific revolution, which promises to radically change not only the way we live and work—but beyond that challenge the stability of the very foundations of our civilization and the international political order. All our attention and effort is thus focused on cushioning its impacts on life and society. Looking back in history, it would be pertinent to ask whether this process is (...) a “quasi” natural event destined to continue its path which forebodes severe ethical, social and political repercussions, or is it the outcome of a particular socio-cultural value system? What then are the different value systems and mind-sets? How do these impact on our perception of the world, our cognition systems and our self-perception? At the core of this revolution are the recent technological developments in information and data processing and the creation of AI and the role of algorithms. Are algorithms quasi “independent” artificial languages for assessing situations, solving problems and taking decisions on fundamental social issues? Or do they rest on the fundament of natural language? What ethical and moral code do they follow? What drivers underlie this technological process? Are these culture specific or universal? Could a change of “cultural perspective” provide us with new insights to steer the process and change its course? (shrink)

In his text, “The Question Concerning Technology”, Heidegger argues that modern mind is unaware of Being’s self-destining which determines Dasein’s relation to their own essence and that of other beings because it is in a delusion of being an ‘efficient cause’. A bluntness of this kind not only endangers human-freedom but also puts natural entities at the risk of losing their authenticity since the modern mode of production regards nature as a reserve that is constantly in the service of human-doings. (...) Accordingly, the discussion carried out in this article is, despite his criticism of the conception of ‘agency’ underlying western metaphysics, whether or not Heidegger overcomes the problem of anthropocentrism in his own philosophy. (shrink)

Are we humans destined to become ‘posthuman’? In this paper, we question the claims of posthumanism, accepting some of its broader insights whilst proposing a more empirically and ethically appropriate ‘vitalist’ response. We argue that despite recent changes in styles of thought that question the uniqueness of ‘the human’, and despite novel technological developments for augmenting human bodies, we remain – fundamentally – persons. Humans, as persons, are constitutively embedded in and scaffolded by the material, social, semantic and cultural (...) niches they have constructed for themselves. An ‘ethopolitical’ response to our present that recognizes this fact not only requires us to engage with the consequences of making lives in the unequal niches that restrict and stunt the personhood of so many human beings at present, but also requires us to broaden the bandwidth of those who are recognized fully as persons. In our conclusion we briefly develop the theme that this emphasis on personhood can be seen as a vitalist – rather than a humanist – stance. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to investigate how cultural meanings associated with the left ventricular assist device inform acceptance and experience of this innovative technology when it is used as a destination therapy. We conducted open-ended, semistructured interviews with family caregivers and patients who had undergone LVAD-DT procedures at six U.S. hospitals. A grounded theory approach was used for the analysis. Thirty-nine patients and 42 caregivers participated. Participants described a sense of obligation to undergo the procedure because of its (...) promise for salvation. However, once the device was implanted, patients described being placed into a liminal state of being neither sick nor healthy, with no culturally scripted role. Consideration of end-of-life decisions was complicated by the uncertainties about how patients with LVADs die. Pre-implantation communications among patient, family, and clinicians should take into account the impact of the technology on meaning, identity, and patient experience. (shrink)

To a greater extent than in other technical domains, research and progress in Artificial Intelligence has always been entwined with the fictional. Its language echoes strongly with other forms of cultural narratives, such as fairytales, myth and religion. In this essay we present varied examples that illustrate how these analogies have guided not only readings of the AI enterprise by commentators outside the community but also inspired AI researchers themselves. Owing to their influence, we pay particular attention to the similarities (...) between religious language and the way in which the potential advent of greater than human intelligence is presented contemporarily. We then move on to the role that fiction, science fiction most of all, has historically played and is still playing in the discussion of AI by influencing researchers and the public, shifting the weights of different scenarios in our collectively perceived probability space. We sum up by arguing that the lore surrounding AI research, ancient and modern, points to the ancestral and shared human motivations that drive researchers in their pursuit and fascinate humanity at large. These points of narrative entanglement where AI meets the wider culture should serve to amplify the call to engage ourselves with the discussion of the potential destination of this technology. (shrink)

This spotlight article reflects on President Xi Jinping's handling of the COVID-19 epidemic and evaluates its specificities by making a brief incursion into the history of Chinese official responses to epidemics. This analysis shows that Xi Jinping's response to the COVID-19 epidemic differs from official responses to the 2003 SARS epidemic and the cerebrospinal meningitis epidemic of 1966–1967, and is used to assert his legitimacy on both the local and the international stage. By sharing data, even if it was not (...) as accurate as claimed, Xi Jinping has presented himself as a trustworthy international partner, leading a country that is at the forefront of scientific research, capable of vigorously implementing epidemic preparedness measures, and destined to become a major player in global health. On the Chinese stage, he showed that the central government has regained control over local public health organizations and that public health is once again a key government priority. As part of his response, Xi Jinping also honored gods of the Chinese pantheon, in a seeming contradiction with communism and science. I argue that, by combining the most advanced technology with a religious heritage, Xi Jinping is skillfully creating an image of himself not only as powerful and modern, but also as a leader undeniably rooted in Chinese tradition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric and Capitalism:Rhetorical Agency as Communicative LaborRonald Walter GreeneIt is a commonplace to describe rhetorical agency as political action. From such a starting point, rhetorical agency describes a communicative process of inquiry and advocacy on issues of public importance. As political action, rhetorical agency often takes on the characteristics of a normative theory of citizenship; a good citizen persuades and is persuaded by the gentle force of the better (...) argument. More radical visions of argument might include strikes, sit-ins, and boycotts in the rhetorical arsenal of good citizenship, and some might even flirt with violence as rhetorical action. This model of rhetorical agency requires a translation of the conceptual apparatus of rhetoric and its alignment with the problematics of democratic theory and actually existing democratic regimes. Classical models that hoped to harness rhetorical agency to the making of the "orator-statesman" (sic) must reimagine political participation in terms of publics and counterpublics, social movements, electoral campaigns, communication media and technologies, as well as supra- and sub-national institutional settings. As the classical norms of citizenship rub against (post) modern realities, a permanent anxiety over the meaning and potential of rhetorical agency seems destined to be lodged in the critical imagination of rhetorical studies. If politics today is, in Jodi Dean's words, "a domain of financially mediated and professionalized practices centered on advertising, public relations, and the means of mass communication," then actually existing rhetorical agency manifests itself in efforts to "raise the money, buy the television time, register the domain names, build the website, and craft the accessible, user-friendly, spectacular message" (2003, 96).If we recognize Dean's description of the political as an accurate description of the rhetorical situation today, rhetorical studies is left with three strategies: It can refashion a deliberative vision of rhetorical agency into a normative ideal for critiquing the structural conditions (capital, media [End Page 188] concentration) of political participation. Second, it can enlarge the field of normatively acceptable ways and means of political participation, for example, by embracing the more spectacular politics associated with visual and body rhetorics. Finally, rhetorical studies can work on the "demand" side and design new strategies and tactics for activating the rhetorical participation of citizens, for example, by encouraging the creation of communicative norms necessary for reinvigorating voluntary and civic organizations. However, while each of these approaches provides a research agenda, none of them gets at the root cause of the anxiety over agency: the attachment of rhetorical agency to a vision of political change. The anxiety over agency pushes rhetorical critics and theorists into becoming moral entrepreneurs scolding, correcting, and encouraging the body politic to improve the quality and quantity of political participation.The purpose of this paper is to offer an escape route from theorizing rhetorical agency as a model of political communication.1 In opposition to a political-communicative vision of rhetorical agency, this paper suggests a different materialist ontology, one that imagines rhetorical agency as a form of living labor. I will argue that rhetorical agency belongs to the domain of communicative labor, a form of labor increasingly necessary to the workings of contemporary capitalist production. In other words, I want to replace a political-communicative model of rhetorical agency with a materialist-communicative model. To highlight the similarities and differences between the two models, I will focus on how the interface between politics, communication, and economics plays out in the Marxist tradition of rhetorical studies. I will organize this tradition into two sections: the first, represented by James Aune, advocates a hermeneutic approach to rhetorical agency, and the second, represented by Dana Cloud, argues for imagining rhetorical agency as a class-based social movement. By focusing on the work of my comrades, the paper risks being received as a "left sectarian" polemic.2 As I will demonstrate in each section, the problem with these two approaches has less to do with Marxism and more to do with how they turn to hermeneutics and social movements to imagine rhetorical agency in the idiom of communication theory. In the third section of the paper I will resituate rhetorical agency into a materialist ontology of labor and capitalist production. In so... (shrink)

Over the coming decades, the so-called telematic technologies are destined to grow more and more encompassing in scale and the repercussions they will have on our professional and personal lives will become ever more accentuated. The transformations resulting from the digitization of data have already profoundly modified a great many of the activities of human life and exercise significant influence on the way we design, draw up, store and send documents, as well as on the means used for locating information (...) in libraries, databases and on the net. These changes are transforming the nature of international communication and are modifying the way in which we carry out research, engage in study, keep our accounts, plan our travel, do our shopping, look after our health, organize our leisure time, undertake wars and so on. The time is not far off when miniaturized digital systems will be installed everywhere - in our homes and offices, in the car, in our pockets or even embedded within the bodies of each one of us. They will help us to keep control over every aspect of our lives and will efficiently and effectively carry out multiple tasks which today we have to devote precious time to. As a consequence, our ways of acting and thinking will be transformed. These new winds of change, which are blowing strongly, are giving birth to a new culture to which the name ‘digital culture’ has been given. It is timely that a study should be made of the different aspects and consequences of this culture, but that this study should not be just undertaken from the point of view of the simple user who quickly embraces the latest successful innovation, in reaction essentially to market forces. The major challenge for this culture resides not so much in the development of even more tiny microchips, faster processors or more refined software, but in the honing of conceptual instruments which will give us the ability to analyse and evaluate the radical changes that this revolution is bringing about and which it will continue to provoke in all of our lives. (shrink)

In this original and compelling book, Jeffrey P. Bishop, a philosopher, ethicist, and physician, argues that something has gone sadly amiss in the care of the dying by contemporary medicine and in our social and political views of death, as shaped by our scientific successes and ongoing debates about euthanasia and the "right to die"--or to live. __The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying__, informed by Foucault's genealogy of medicine and power as well as by a (...) thorough grasp of current medical practices and medical ethics, argues that a view of people as machines in motion--people as, in effect, temporarily animated corpses with interchangeable parts--has become epistemologically normative for medicine. The dead body is subtly anticipated in our practices of exercising control over the suffering person, whether through technological mastery in the intensive care unit or through the impersonal, quasi-scientific assessments of psychological and spiritual "medicine." The result is a kind of nihilistic attitude toward the dying, and troubling contradictions and absurdities in our practices. Wide-ranging in its examples, from organ donation rules in the United States, to ICU medicine, to "spiritual surveys," to presidential bioethics commissions attempting to define death, and to high-profile cases such as Terri Schiavo's, __The Anticipatory Corpse__ explores the historical, political, and philosophical underpinnings of our care of the dying and, finally, the possibilities of change. A ground-breaking work in bioethics, this book will provoke thought and argument for all those engaged in medicine, philosophy, theology, and health policy. "With extraordinary philosophical sophistication as well as knowledge of modern medicine, Bishop argues that the body that shapes the work of modern medicine is a dead body. He defends this claim decisively with with urgency. I know of no book that is at once more challenging and informative as __The Anticipatory Corpse. __To say this book is the most important one written in the philosophy of medicine in the last twenty-five years would not do it justice. This book is destined to change the way we think and, hopefully, practice medicine." --_Stanley Hauerwas, Duke Divinity School _ "Jeffrey Bishop carefully builds a detailed, scholarly case that medicine is shaped by its attitudes toward death. Clinicians, ethicists, medical educators, policy makers, and administrators need to understand the fraught relationship between clinical practices and death, and __The Anticipatory Corpse __is an essential text. Bishop's use of the writings of Michel Foucault is especially provocative and significant. This book is the closest we have to a genealogy of death." --_Arthur W. Frank, University of Calgary _ "Jeffrey Bishop has produced a masterful study of how the living body has been placed within medicine's metaphysics of efficient causality and within its commitment to a totalizing control of life and death, which control has only been strengthened by medicine's taking on the mantle of a bio-psycho-socio-spiritual model. This volume's treatment of medicine's care of the dying will surely be recognized as a cardinal text in the philosophy of medicine." --_H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine_. (shrink)

The past few years has seen a resurgence in the public interest in space flight and travel. Spurred mainly by the likes of technology billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the topic poses both unique scientific as well as ethical challenges. This paper looks at the concept of generation ships, conceptual behemoth ships whose goal is to bring a group of human settlers to distant exoplanets. These ships are designed to host multiple generations of people who will be born, (...) live, and die on these ships long before it reaches its destination. This paper takes reproductive ethics as its lens to look at how genetic enhancement interventions can and should be used not only to ensure that future generations of offspring on the ships, and eventual exoplanet colonies, live a minimally good life but that their births are contingent on them living genuinely good and fulfilling lives. The paper makes the further claim that if such a thesis holds, it also does so for human enhancement on Earth. (shrink)

As portrayed in Andy Clark’s extended mind thesis, human minds are inherently disposed to expand their reach outwards, incorporating and feeding off an open-ended variety of tools and scaffolds to satisfy their hunger for cognitive expansion. According to Steve Fuller’s heterodox Christian vision of transhumanism, humans are deities in the making, destined to redeem their fallen state with the help of modern science and technology. In this chapter, I re-examine Clark’s EMT through the prism of Fuller’s transhumanism, with the aim (...) of unearthing a subterranean influence of theological tropes that are sweeping along beneath the naturalistic veneer of Clark’s thesis. Starting from four theological principles, which Fuller regards as foundational to his version of transhumanism, I review the philosophical narrative which, in Fuller’s view, provides the best philosophical motivation for the contemporary transhumanist project. On the basis of my reconstruction, I show how distant intellectual offshoots of the same principles mobilized by Fuller are also at play in Clark’s EMT – dressed up in secular garb, for sure, and in a materialistically inflected form, yet with a recognizably transhumanist bent. Undertaking this “archeology” of the EMT takes us surprisingly deep into the history of Western thought – to a point where Clark’s evocative “natural-born cyborg” image of humanity, with its emphasis on the radical openness of human nature to transcend itself, comes into view as a subtly blended continuation of certain historically consequential articulations of the Christian doctrine that humans are born “in the image and likeness” of God. (shrink)

The Long Path to Nearness takes its place among the recent interdisciplinary work being done at the intersection of philosophy and communication studies. Bringing together Reichian psychoanalysis, the utopian Marxism of Ernst Bloch, and a rigorous phenomenology of communication following Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Ramsey argues that studies of corporeality are a necessary component of a philosophy of communicative praxis directed toward ethical concerns. Arguing for a return to the body to address questions of ethics, Ramsey demonstrates that the communicative disclosure (...) of worldly possibilities arises out of the conjunction of physical and hermeneutical capabilities of bodies and the material potentiality of situations. It is against this backdrop, which includes a detailed description of communicative praxis in a world destined by technology, that Ramsey develops the groundwork for an "ethics of relief." This study will be of interest to students of Philosophy and Communication Studies, as well as those in Cultural Studies and Sociology, who address theoretical issues concerning discourse, the body, and ethics. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence as a buzzword and a technological development is presently cast as the ultimate ‘game changer’ for economy and society; a technology of which we cannot be the master, but which nonetheless will have a pervasive influence on human life. The fast pace with which the multi-billion dollar AI industry advances toward the creation of human-level intelligence is accompanied by an increasingly exaggerated chorus of the ‘incredible miracle’, or the ‘incredible horror’, intelligent machines will constitute for humanity, as (...) the human is gradually replaced by a technologically superior proxy, destined to be configured as a functional (data) component at best, a relic at worst. More than half a century ago, Günther Anders sketched out this path toward technological obsolescence, and his work on ‘Promethean shame’ and ‘Promethean discrepancy’ provides an invaluable means with which to recognise and understand the relationship of the modern human to his/her technological products. In this article, I draw on Anders’s writings to unpack and unsettle contemporary narratives of our relation to AI, with a view toward refocusing attention on the responsibilities we bear in producing such immersive technologies. With Anders, I suggest that we must exercise and develop moral imagination so that the human capacity for moral responsibility does not atrophy in our technologically mediated future. (shrink)

Birthing is a natural phenomenon. However, in the era of modernisation, it has dramatically changed and transformed into a technological affair. Some feminists claim that advances in medicine and assisted reproductive technologies have opened up numerous opportunities and choices for women to free themselves from their destined role of maternity by separating sex from reproduction. But are these technological artefacts always there to emancipate women or just another way to keep them subordinated to serve social needs? Other feminists (...) argue that technology is a controlling tool. It eliminates a woman’s choice and uses her body as a baby-manufacturing machine to perpetuate pervasive social roles and responsibilities. Again, if technology is simply a patriarchal trap, then can technological exclusion be the key to all reproductive issues? It seems not! Technology is the inevitable new reality of the world influenced by socio-cultural practices, values, norms and belief system that has a strong impact on human existence. The present paper is an attempt to critically explore and evaluate the ethical challenges posed by technicization of motherhood from two opposite feminist perspectives. I argue that these ART-centred debates are significant but polarised and insufficient to resolve maternal problems. Thus, we need an egalitarian model of technology that saves women from the threat of technicization, and be able to provide a dignified use of it. The paper discusses the impact of technicization on maternal self in relation to ARTs and proposes suggestions to overcome this problem. (shrink)

Global economic and advanced capitalist agendas have taken on ideological dimensions that are flat, precise and which assert ‘undeniable’ facts. These agendas are gradually shaping a society and its education based on consumerism and a global economic order which is ‘not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist. In the spectacle … goals are nothing, development is everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself’. In this paper, I argue, in line with Debord, that teachers’ work has moved (...) from being predominantly controlled by technicist accountability and pedagogical conformity to become a form of decentred labour. Teachers’ work has been transformed into the role of spectator, one who is destined to simply monitor events in the classroom and in technologized environments, caught between the economic world view and student consumer desire. In such a view, the teacher can do little more than watch while education, subjugated to economic dogma and digitized appearances, presents life as a spectacle of accumulation and desire. (shrink)

The following presentation has for object raise the problem of the human action and the technology. The human and instrumental. The human effort for trying to control (to (limit) the technology, is the Hybris against which the word of Apollo gets up in Delphi. The knowledge of the limits of the man, it is what claims the man and not to the claimed responsibility, with which he believes, there has been delivered him the mission to direct his own destination. The (...) Nosce te ipsum, of the temple of Apollo, is the philosophy, the wisdom that is in the recognition of the limits that mark the essence of the man and that it consists of thinking never trying to exceed them. What will be postulated here, is that the concept of precaution and his Principle, it continues being a determination of the technology, not only a consummation of the instrumental and anthropologic action, but a consummation of the ‘technical’ of the thought. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Unverborgenheit is truth in Heidegger's Greek-inspired view that happens in Entbergen, or bringing forth. Technology is a way of bringing forth and the truths brought forth in ancient and contemporary science-based technologies are essentially different, the latter being destined by enframing or Gestell that is the essence of contemporary science and technology. Here I give an etymological-ecological-feminist interpretation to the essences of ancient and contemporary technologies as ontogeneses and their unconcealments. A turning point is also identified, on the basis (...) of Carolyn Merchant's eco-feminist account of the mental-spiritual change due to technical change of earth-bound practices, specifically mining, during the commercial revolution and the rise of contemporary science. As Heidegger's wording strongly hints to mountains as salvaging the not-yet-concealed, and human relation to mountains as finding the concealed, Merchant's account of the female nature, or Mother Earth, and male science as penetrating her dark plots for secrets to be exploited by humans, and its connection to mining practices, seems in some respects to clarify Heidegger's somewhat dark notions of unconcealment and truth. RESUMEN Unverborgenheit es la verdad en el pensamiento heideggeriano de inspiración griega, esto ocurre en el Entbergen, o desocultamiento. La tecnología es una forma de desocultar, y las verdades desocultadas por las tecnologías de base científica en la antigüedad y en la época contemporánea son esencialmente diferentes; la última estaría determinada por lo dispuesto, o Gestell, que sería la esencia de la ciencia y tecnología contemporáneas. En este texto presento una interpretación etimológico-ecológico-feminista de las esencias de la tecnología antigua y contemporánea como ontogénesis y sus desvelamientos. También se puede apreciar un punto crucial en la aproximación eco-feminista de Carolyn Merchant al cambio mental-espiritual debido al cambio tecnológico de las prácticas ligadas a la tierra, en especial la minería, durante la revolución comercial y el surgir de la ciencia contemporánea. Como la terminología de Heidegger sugiere fuertemente a las montañas como salvando lo todavía no oculto, y a las relaciones humanas con las montañas como encontrar lo oculto, el enfoque de Merchant sobre la naturaleza mujer, o Madre Tierra, y la ciencia masculina que penetra en sus oscuras parcelas en busca de secretos para ser explotados por la humanidad, y su conexión con las prácticas mineras, parece clarificar en ciertos aspectos las oscuras nociones heideggerianas de desvelamiento y verdad. (shrink)

Connecting people across the digital divide is as much a social effort as a technological one. We are developing a community-centred approach to learn how interaction techniques can compensate for poor communication across the digital divide. We have incorporated the lessons learned regarding social intelligence design in an abstraction and in a device called the SoftBridge. The SoftBridge allows communication to flow from endpoints through adapters, getting converted if necessary, and out to destination endpoints. Field trials are underway with (...) two communities in South Africa: disadvantaged Deaf users and an isolated rural community. Initial lessons learned show that we have to design user interfaces that allow users to understand and cope with delay. We also learned that social concerns are often more important than the technical issues in designing such systems. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:This Birth and ThatSurrogacy and Stratified Motherhood in IndiaAmrita PandeIn 2006, i came across a short newspaper article about the emergence of a new industry in India—the industry of paid birth or commercial surrogacy. People from all over the world could now hire Indian women to give birth to babies for them, for a fraction of the cost of surrogacy elsewhere and with no government regulations. After some digging (...) around, I quickly realized that there was scarcely any objective, academic research about this new industry, and so began my ethnographic journey to the first clinic in not just India but in fact in the entire Global South to have a flourishing trade in both national and transnational surrogacy.1Academic inquiry into surrogacy arrangements is adequately interdisciplinary and has generated feminist, ethical, legal, and social debates for more than three decades (see, for example, Andrews 1987; Anderson 1990; Bailey 2011; Brennan and Noggle 1997; Hochschild 2012; Markens 2007; Oliver 1989; Ragoné 1994; Pande 2011; and Teman 2010). While defenders of surrogacy advocate it as a manifestation of women’s freedom and choice, much of the scholarship has displayed intense anxiety about this practice (Corea 1986; Dworkin 1983; Harding 1991; Neuhaus 1988; Raymond 1993; Roberts 1998b; and Rothman 1988). One view is that surrogacy reduces women to a mere breeder class, to the class of prostitutes, and another is that it is just another form of baby selling. Others consider the development of such reproductive technologies as a form of class and gender-based exploitation of women’s bodies. Two additional trends in this scholarship are worth emphasizing. First, [End Page 50] much of the debating takes place in abstraction and is rarely based on the actual experience of surrogates.2 Second,much of this work is about surrogacy in the Global North. This is not altogether surprising, since commercial surrogacy is a very recent phenomenon outside of the Global North.In this essay, I address these two gaps in the literature by analyzing the birthing narratives of surrogates in a clinic in India. As the surrogates compare their experiences of giving birth as a surrogate mother to their previous pregnancies, they underscore the paradox of an industry based on pro-natal technology in an otherwise anti-natal state. As importantly, these narratives are a clear manifestation of a global trend of “stratified motherhood”—“the hierarchical organization of reproductive fecundity and birth experiences that supports and rewards the maternity of some women while despising or outlawing the mother-work of others” (Rapp 2001, 469).Surrogacy in IndiaThe moral and ethical ambiguity surrounding surrogacy has made many countries, including China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, and some U.S. states ban surrogacy altogether. Some countries have imposed partial bans, for instance Australia (Victoria), Brazil, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, South Africa, and the UK. Canada, Greece, South Africa, Israel, and the UK permit gestational surrogacy, subject to regulations. Then there are other countries with no regulations at all, such as Belgium, Finland, and India (Markens 2007; Teman 2010). Apart from the recent spurt of surrogacy in India, commercial surrogacy is most prevalent in California, USA, and Israel, where surrogacy is tightly controlled by the state and restricted to Israeli citizens. The Indian structure is closer to the liberal market model of surrogacy in California, where surrogacy births are primarily managed by private, commercial agencies that screen, match, and regulate agreements according to their own criteria (Pande 2009).India is not the only country to experience a rise in transnational surrogacy. Couples from countries such as the UK, Japan, Australia, and Kuwait, where surrogacy is either illegal or restricted, have hired surrogates in the United States to bear babies for them. However, while the total cost of such transnational packages is roughly between $100,000 and $120,000, in India the package costs one-third of that amount. Another factor that explains the popularity of India as a destination for transnational surrogacy is the informality of the market. Although commercial surrogacy is not illegal in India in 2002, currently there are no laws regulating surrogacy in clinics. Fertility clinics... (shrink)

The biological body: The body as thing in a postphenomenological perspective In phenomenology the lived body (le corps vécu) is considered as the subject of reflection while the biological body (le corps objective) is destined for medical sciences. As an alternative I give a view on the basis of the philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner who thinks a person as a subject to have a lived body (Leib) and a biological body (Körper) from an eccentric or third perspective (excentric positionality). (...) A person experiences herself from that eccentric point of view as a lived body and at the same time as a biological and instrumental body. These two perceptions can only be characterized as a dual aspect (Doppelaspekt), and cannot be separated from each other. Plessner moreover considers the biological body as a thing among other things. I place this bodily thing in a postphenomenological perspective as worked out by Don Ihde and discuss the idea to consider it as a mediating thing between the person who has it and at the same time is it as a lived body in the world she lives in. I work out the effects on the person in case of organ transplantation or implantation of artefacts in the postphenomenological perspective of the embodiment and the hermeneutic relation. I conclude that from that perspective both relations appear to be too simple to elucidate what really takes place in a patient and suggest that in case of incorporation of organs or artefacts the postphenomenological mediating relations should be expanded to a triadic (semiotic) variant of mediating technologies that considers the biological body itself as mediating thing in order to encompass the whole of the human experiences including meaning. (shrink)

Stem cell tourism—the flow of patients from home countries to destination countries to obtain stem cell treatment—is a growing business in China. Many concerns have been raised regarding fraudsters that operate unsafe stem cell therapies and an officialdom that turns a blind eye to the questionable technology. The Chinese regulatory approach to stem cell research is based on Guidelines and Administrative Measures, rather than legislation, and may have no binding force on certain institutions, such as military hospitals. There is no (...) liability and traceability system and no visible set of penalties for non-compliance in the stem cell legal framework. In addition to the lack of safety and efficacy systems in the regulations, no specific expert authority has been established to monitor stem cell therapy to date. Recognizing the global nature of stem cell tourism, this article argues that resolving stem cell tourism issues may require not only the Chinese government but also an international mechanism for transparency and ethical oversight. A stringent set of international regulations that govern stem cell therapies can encourage China to improve stem cell regulation and enforcement to fulfill its obligations. Through an international consensus, a minimum standard for clinical stem cell research and a central enforcement system will be provided. As a result, rogue clinics that conduct unauthorized stem cell therapies can be penalized, and countries that are reluctant to implement the reconciled regulations should be sanctioned. (shrink)

L’évolution industrielle nous destine à vivre dans des environnements technologiques caractérisés par une dissémination informatique totale dans la multitude et d’objets connectés capables de traitement sémantique et d’interaction informationnelle avec les humains. Dans ce contexte d’Intelligence ambiante se déploient des dispositifs domotiques d’Interactions dites naturelles Homme / machine. Ainsi de Google Home présenté comme : « une enceinte à commande vocale qui fonctionne avec l'Assistant Google ». On pourra tout aussi bien discuter avec les agents de la concurrence : Amazon (...) Echo, Apple HomePod, etc. Ces dispositifs nous conduisent à interroger une étape contemporaine majeure de « la révolution technologique du langage » et de son automatisation, qui fait des machines de réels sujets parlants, inscrits dans un « couplage humano-machinique ». Dans ce contexte fortement marqué par les affordances, nous observons les modalités de cette interaction artéfactuelle et dite naturelle, caractérisée notamment par une simulation conversationnelle et une personnalisation des dispositifs technologiques. La perspective est celle d’une linguistique post-dualiste et non logocentrée, dans la lignée du courant de l’analyse du discours : Texte-Discours-Interaction. (shrink)

Foucault's discussion of the panopticon is the best-known engagement with visual epistemology, the relationship of sight and knowledge. Yet the panopticon is only one form of visual epistemology and all technologies of perspective position and situate their subjects. As a colloquial statement of visual epistemology we might say: you are how you see. This essay focuses on the cinematic episteme or how the technology of cinema configures a way of seeing and way of knowing. Specifically this essay takes up a (...) narrower question of visual alterity. Beginning from Hegel's discussion of consciousness, it asks how within and through film we recognise our self and how can we see the other? To carry out the analysis, the essay attends in particular to two films Baby I will Make You Sweat (1994) and La Moderna Poesia (2000) by experimental and underground artist Birgit Hein. These films combine incongruous and even conflicting representational strategies that particularly enable an exploration of visual alterity. Both films on the one hand narrate a highly subjective experience of self/other relations within the context of a travel narrative: a woman seeking to recapture some sense of life, travels to an unfamiliar destination, enters into new environments and takes up relationships, sometimes intimate, with strangers. On the other hand they both rely on a form of aesthetic abstraction that leaves the film without renaissance perspective, panoptic organizing, shot-reverse shot, continuity editing, i.e. an of the typical representational strategies of alterity found in narrative films. (shrink)

Ouvrage partagé en cinq chapitres: Sacré technique et techniques de sacralisation - Les techniques de la ruse - La ruse ontologique de la technique - Les ruses de la raison technicienne - Enigme et destin de la technique. Ce que les auteurs appellent "les ruses de la technique", c'est cette manière dont se déroule, "à travers l'histoire des civilisations humaines, le lent glissement de la technique d'un pôle sacré de transgression à un pôle sacré de l'ordre cosmique.".

Echoes of No Thing seeks to understand the space between thinking which Martin Heidegger and the 13th-century Zen patriarch Eihei D ogen explore in their writing and teachings. Heidegger most clearly attempts this in Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) and D ogen in his Sh ob ogenz o, a collection of fascicles which he compiled in his lifetime. Both thinkers draw us towards thinking, instead of merely defining systems of thought. Both Heidegger and D ogen imagine possibilities not apparent (...) in the world we currently inhabit, but notably, find possible, through a refashioning of thinking as a soteriological reimagining that clears space for the presencing of an authentic experience in the space which emerges between certainties. Jenkins elucidates this soteriological reimagining through a close reading of both authors' conceptions of time and space, and by developing a practice of listening that is attuned to the echoes that resonate between the two thinkers. While Heidegger often wrote about new beginnings (as well as about gathering oneself, preparing the site, clearings, and practicing) in preparation for the evental un-concealing of truth, nowhere is this as present as in the enigmatic, difficult, and in fact beautiful, Contributions. To call a text beautiful, especially a work of philosophy, risks committing an act of disingenuity, and yet Contributions, like Jacques Derrida's Glas or Walter Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project, rises to this acclaim through its very resistance to a system, its refusal to be easily digested, or even understood. Contributions is unfinished, partial, even at times muttered; it is the beginning of a thinking which takes place on a path and as such cannot imagine--or refuse--its final destination. It invites us to take up towards, but not to insist on, its thinking; it is a "turn" away from the reason and logic of a technologized world and returns philosophy--as a thinking--to a place of wonder and awe. D ogen's Sh obogenz o, from another culture and time entirely, is also a beautiful text, for similar reasons. The Sh obogenz o, gathered first as a series of talks given by Eihei D ogen (and later composed as written texts) details the process of understanding which leads, for D ogen, to a position of pure seeing, or satori, and yet these talks are not simply rules for monks, nor merely imprecations and demands for a laity; rather, they open a being's thinking to the possibility of something purely other and work as a transition across worlds that also opens us to an other world. What both thinkers illustrate, as do the other thinkers drawn on in this project--most notably, those philosophers associated with the Kyoto School, who were both intimately aware of D ogen's work, and studied, or studied with, Heidegger--is that world is not a fixed, stable entity; rather it is a fugal composition of possibility, of as yet untraversed--and at times un-traversable--spaces. Echoes of No Thing seeks to examine, within the lacunal eddies of be-coming's arrival, that space between which both thinkers point towards as possible sites of new beginnings."--https://punctumbooks.com/titles/echoes-of-no-thing-thinking-between-heidegger-and-doge n/, accessed 06/05/2020. (shrink)

Recent advances in Information and Communication Technology have had a strong impact on how members of the global financial community interact. In particular, communications for purposes of financial disclosure have evolved from traditional written reports or oral presentations to new ICT-driven forms. This study describes the generic profile of earnings calls, that is, conference calls during which company executives present periodic financial results to investment analysts connected via telephone and the Internet. A qualitative discourse analysis performed on the transcripts of (...) 20 earnings calls revealed a rather consistent structural patterning, as well as evidence of intertextuality and interdiscursivity that shows how the financial community has shaped its own distinctive communicative practices. For additional interpretive insights, a professional informant from the financial sector was consulted. These findings enhance our understanding of a spoken genre that is destined to play an increasingly important role in corporate financial disclosure. (shrink)

Un révolutionnaire sommeille en chaque Français, prêt hier comme aujourd'hui à briser les rentes et les privilèges. Dans le même temps, un expert l'observe et le dirige, planifiant autoritairement la société. Et un geek lui tape sur l'épaule, l'entraînant dans le monde inconnu des nouvelles technologies qui fourmille de promesses et de menaces. Ces trois influences parfois contradictoires nous font tourner la tête. Gaspard Koenig propose donc de les interpréter à la lumière d'une nouvelle philosophie politique, fondée sur l'autonomie individuelle. (...) Car ce dont la France a besoin, ce n'est pas d'un énième diagnostic économique, mais de principes solides dont on pourra déduire des réformes radicales. Revenons au modèle révolutionnaire, ce «jacobinisme libéral» incarné par le député du tiers état Isaac Le Chapelier. Rejetons la tentation planiste, léguée par le régime de Vichy et responsable encore aujourd'hui de tant d'injustice et d'exclusion. Apprenons à maîtriser l'utopie numérique, en imaginant un nouvel humanisme qui réponde aux défis de la Silicon Valley et un Etat 2.0 qui nous redonne le contrôle de notre destin numérique. Pays des libertés, la France meurt de servitude volontaire. Terminons, enfin, notre Révolution! Et chacun deviendra son propre maître. (shrink)

Guilt and fear today have developed an unexpected quality: they contribute powerfully to the survival of humanity. The feeling of guilt proceeds from an elementary awareness: although the unequaled progress of science and technology in the twentieth century has undoubtedly ameliorated the conditions of human life, it also has given rise to an infernal logic of genocide and crimes against humanity, in which almost all nations, directly or indirectly, have participated and participate still. This awareness is joined to another, which (...) is itself accompanied by a primordial fear: for the first time in history, science and technology have endowed humanity with the power to destroy itself and the planet, without furnishing humans with the means of escaping their destined role as sorcerer's apprentice, for no science can tell us what to do with science. It is this double feeling of guilt and fear that pushes contemporary man to search feverishly for ethical foundations capable of furnishing discreet regulatory principles to underpin decisions and actions. From the point of view of contemporary humanity, ethics must be able to confer meaning and perspective on an existence which apparently has neither: “Now,” writes Hans Jonas, “we shiver in the nakedness of nihilism in which near-omnipotence is paired with near-emptiness, greatest capacity with knowing least for what ends to use it.”. (shrink)

The first promising results from “streamlined,” minimal genomes tend to support the notion that these are a useful tool in biological systems engineering. However, compared with the speed with which genomic microbial sequencing has provided us with a wealth of data to study biological functions, it is a slow process. So far only a few projects have emerged whose synthetic ambition even remotely matches our analytic capabilities. Here, we survey current technologies converging into a future ability to engineer large‐scale biological (...) systems. We argue that the underlying synthetic technology, de novo DNA synthesis, is already rather mature – in particular relative to the scope of our current synthetic ambitions. Furthermore, technologies towards rationalizing the design of the newly synthesized DNA fragment are emerging. These include techniques to implement complex regulatory circuits, suites of parts on a DNA and RNA level to fine tune gene expression, and supporting computational tools. As such DNA fragments will, in most cases, be destined for operating in a cellular context, attention has to be paid to the potential interactions of the host with the functions encoded on the engineered DNA fragment. Here, the need of biological systems engineering to deal with a robust and predictable bacterial host coincides with current scientific efforts to theoretically and experimentally explore minimal bacterial genomes. (shrink)

Clerical workers are an important segment of the work force. Catholic social teachings and eucharistic practice shed useful morallight on the increase in contingent work arrangements among clerical workers. The venerable concept of “the universal destination of the goods of creation” and a newer understanding of technology as “a shared workbench” illuminate the importance of good jobs for clerical workers. However, in order to apply Catholic social teachings to issues concerning clerical work as women’s work, sexist elements in traditional Catholic (...) social teachings must be critically assessed. Participation in the Eucharist helps share a moral stance of inclusivity and sensitivity to forms of social marginalization. While actual practice fails fully to embody gender or racial inclusivity, participation in the inclusive table fellowship of the Eucharist should make business leaders question treating contingent workers as a peripheral work force. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Medical Tourism:Crossing Borders to Access Health CareHarriet Hutson Gray (bio) and Susan Cartier Poland (bio)Traveling abroad for one's health has a long history for the upper social classes who sought spas, mineral baths, innovative therapies, and the fair climate of the Mediterranean as destinations to improve their health. The newest trend in the first decade of the twenty-first century has the middle class traveling from developed countries to those (...) with emerging economies to avoid treatment delays, prohibitive costs for life-saving procedures, or simply high costs for elective surgery. Others leave to have access to assisted suicide in countries that have legalized it: Belgium, The Netherlands, and Switzerland. This new era of globalization in health care has arrived without the benefit of international standards, government oversight, or ethical and legal review.Howard Staab, a self-employed carpenter from North Carolina, flew to India for his medically necessary heart surgery, scheduled a side trip to the Taj Mahal, and returned home to work in North Carolina. He spent a total of less than $10,000, instead of the $200,000 required from the local hospital (I, Milstein and Smith 2006).At first blush, the outsourcing of medical care to India seems to be a particular solution for a particular problem. However, the particularity of Mr. Staab is not unique. His experience is emblematic of those patients in the United States with a medical need for major and elective procedures, but who also must bear the total cost of these procedures. These middle-class, under-insured Americans go abroad.In tandem with increasingly aggressive marketing campaigns, American hospitals and companies have begun to leverage their connections in Asia to grow the medical tourism business into a major economic force. What are the consequences of this?Several authors point to the effect on the host country's population, particularly the poor, to be pushed farther down the queue to receive adequate, affordable care. Resources are applied to the foreign trade instead of building the local [End Page 193] medical infrastructure. Another potential problem is the obligation of the home-country physician to provide follow-up care. What are the legal ramifications when the procedure was illegal to begin with? Are there opportunities for redress for medical errors?These factors may be converging into a "perfect storm" for health care in the U.S., in which the potential participation of the major insurance companies in promoting offshore care will be the tipping point in the precarious structure that represents the economic currents in health care. Third-party administrators and self-funded employers may be on the cutting edge in 2009 by providing incentives to employees to travel overseas for care.I. Economic ConsiderationsConnell, John. Medical Tourism: Sea, Sun, Sand and... Surgery. Tourism Management 27: 1093–1100, 2006.As evidence of the interest of traditional tour operators in this newer twist on the industry, the author explores medical tourism as an element of the growth of world tourism. In promoting medical tourism, he urges consideration of such issues as the privatization of health care, the foundational role of technology, and uneven access to health resources.Dunn, Philip. Medical Tourism Takes Flight. H and HN: Hospitals and Health Networks: 40–44, November 2007.Writing for U.S. health care executives, Dunn emphasizes that the reality of medical tourism competes with the local medical center for patients and their insurance dollars in a significant way. He examines the possibility that U.S. insurance plans soon may offer to pay for what is currently a cash only business and that the economic impact to the local medical center could be significant or even devastating.Frontiers of Health Services Management [Selected Articles] 24 (2), Winter 2007.In "Managing Healthcare Services in the Global Marketplace" (pp. 3–18), Bruce J. Fried and Dean M. Harris consider legal, ethical, and financial implications of the international workforce. In "Globalization of Health Care" (pp. 19–30), Lynn Schroth and Ruthy Khawahja point out that the transfer of comprehensive management expertise and intellectual property from U.S. medical centers to international sites is driving the success of collaboration between U.S. and foreign health care centers. In "Is... (shrink)

In the new era of technology, internet turns to be one of the main sources of information, since it is considered cheaper and easier to use. Hence in tourism, two main pull factors influencing potential tourist to visit a destination are recognized as nature and culture which a destination offers. The acceptance of culture as one of the important factors in tourists’ motivation, heritage sites become popular in many countries especially those which are nominated as world heritage sites. This paper (...) is to analyze the condition of available online information about George Town world heritage spots (Penang, Malaysia). As far as heritage is one of the products of tourism and tourism, on the other hand, is a big help for sustainability of heritage sites, providing sufficient information about tourism heritage sites as a promotional key is very important. Top ten tourism websites were chosen and content analysis was performed to find the current situation of those websites. By recognizing heritage as tangible and intangible, the result shows that although the intangible heritages need more concern in sustainability matter, but the information about them are not as complete as the tangible ones. Lack of proper information was seen in most websites and the focus of information was more on tangible heritage and among intangible heritage, the main focus was on food. To support the result of analysis, in-dept interviews were conducted by couple of heritage offices in the city. The main reason behind the lack of sufficient information about intangible heritage seems to be the lack of complete list of them and moreover, promoting this division of heritage needs negotiation with the local residence involving in those activities. The paper suggests providing a complete list of George Town world heritage as far as some of them are disappearing lately, and keeping this valuable world heritage sustainable for next generation needs detailed study and completing the list as soon as possible. In this regard those intangible heritages which are in hazard of disappearing can be maintained by the effort of key holders of the field. Moreover, providing the mentioned list helps the information providers, especially related websites to focus equally on tangible and intangible George Town world heritage. (shrink)

Résumé Après une mise en perspective historique du processus de financiarisation, l’article prête plus particulièrement attention au rôle de la finance dans le gouvernement des externalités, et cela à un double niveau. 1?) Le premier a trait à la revanche des externalités négatives. La surexploitation de la planète résultant de deux siècles d’une croissance hyper-productiviste fait désormais peser sur l’économie mondiale une incertitude structurelle, qui pèse tant sur les prix des ressources non renouvelables que, plus fondamentalement, « sur le prix (...) de l’avenir tout court ». Or c’est la finance qui, faute de mieux, va être « sollicitée pour donner un prix au futur ». Ce constat est d’autant plus fort que le développement des activités visant à solder les externalités négatives est destiné à jouer nécessairement un rôle majeur dans la dynamique du capitalisme. Après la convention boursière Internet et celle immobilière, il est ainsi fort probable que la prochaine convention boursière porte sur les énérgies alternatives et les activités liées à la réparation des dégâts de la croissance. 2?) Le deuxième niveau concerne le rôle croissant des externalités positives liées au processus de production et de circulation des connaissances. Plus précisément, la révolution des technologies de l’information et de la communication (TIC) et la montée de l’immatériel se traduisent par deux effets convergents et éminemment contradictoires, auxquelles la finance apporte une réponse. D’une part, les TIC permettent la numérisation et la codification de tout ce qui est répétitif dans l’activité mentale en dépréciant la valeur marchande de l’information. Or, et nous avons là une première contradiction, ces connaissances codifiées et numérisées (dites de niveau 1) présentent un problème majeur d’appropriation privative. Leur coût de production initial est certain. En revanche, leurs coûts marginaux sont très faibles ou nuls, ce qui rend de plus en plus difficile l’exécution des droits de propriété intellectuelle. D’autre part, ce même processus d’automatisation des activités mentales répétitives et de codification de la connaissance déplace le cœur de l’activité créatrice de valeur vers les connaissances tacites, difficilement codifiables : les connaissances dites de type 2, constituées par le triptyque créativité / intelligence / innovation. C’est le modèle paradigmatique du travail immatériel reposant « sur la coopération entre cerveaux travaillant sur ordinateur et reliés par le réseau (Internet). » Or l’assujettissement de cette forme de la coopération productive en réseau ne peut être qu’indirecte et formelle. Dans ce cadre, la finance est alors destinée à remplir toujours davantage deux fonctions structurelles. Elle seule permet de subsumer le travail immatériel, tout en actualisant l’évaluation à la juste valeur ( fair value ) des actifs immatériels, dans un contexte d’incertitude structurelle où la « valeur des biens connaissances oscille de rien à des valeurs incommensurables et à des prix de monopole qui sont des prix politiques ». (shrink)

"Ever Since This World Began" from Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013) by Masha Tupitsyn continent. The audio-essay you've recorded yourself reading for continent. , “Ever Since the World Began,” is a compelling entrance into your new multi-media book, Love Dog (Success and Failure) , because it speaks to the very form of the book itself: vacillating and finding the long way around the question of love by using different genres and media. In your discussion of the face, one of the (...) themes of Love Dog , I think there is something to be said about the surfaces media create and how you constantly manipulate them in your work. This seems important for thinking also about your book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film ; a book on film written in tweets, interposing already three sets of expectations and pushing the boundaries of each medium's faciality, it's surface tension. In Love Dog , is there another kind of facial interaction? Perhaps the discursive faces of approaching love as topic and love as method? If so, how did/do these intersect for you, do/did they drive the creation of this book? MASHA TUPITSYN With LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to pay homage to the work modernism has done on subjective time and chronological time by carrying that experiment over into the digital economy. Because LACONIA is a time-based work of cultural criticism that employs the aphorism to look at 21 st century American culture, it is also an archival work of cultural mourning and memory. And in Love Dog , which is also a work about mourning as it relates to love, I wanted to think with all my senses, and to reflect that in the writing itself by using a multi-media form. LACONIA tackled the sound bite and the promotional image--the everyday language of consumer culture--which often wants to communicate ideological agendas through the repetition of a single image or reductive phrase. I had always been interested in the approaches of artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and essayistic, typographical filmmakers, like Chris Marker and Godard. In both cases, I felt it was important to try to compose a book in which deep—critical—thinking happens in so-called immediate, informal, and disposable contexts. That is, in places where you are either not supposed to be serious or are not required to take things seriously. To me the most intervention is needed in every day instances of culture and representation. In order to do that, I had to utilize and interrogate the very structures I was critiquing. In other words, the writing had to materialize in that live, digital, public space. It couldn’t simply happen at home on a piece of paper or in a word document on my computer that no one could see until it was finished. It had to unfold in real time, amidst everything else. And it had to literally be surrounded by the cultural landscape I wanted to assess. In both LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to know how and if we can get away from what we cannot get away from? From which there is no respite. Given this, I don’t think hypertexts can really be called hypertexts anymore. Hypertexts are simply the world today. This is not only the way we read the world now. It is the way the world reads. Likewise, interfaciality, as you put it, works on a number of levels for me, both on and off the page. There is my relation to epistemological and phenomenological surfaces—the screen, the body, the face, the voice, gender; the official story. Then there is the way this dovetails formally, and to which the digital adds yet another dimension. It’s also where sound comes into Love Dog (giving the book a sound; giving tonality to the book’s ideas and feelings). As Anne Carson pointed out in her essay “The Gender of Sound,” the two are connected, and of course so are love and gender. In “Ever Since This World Began,” I wanted to think about the phenomenology of the voice, which is why I visualize the sonic in the book and why in my writing about faces, I look at the tonal aspects (the things a face voices and a voice faces) of a face. This was standard to do when images and faces were “silent” in the silent era. Those images/faces were extraordinarily audible. The greatest screen face, to me, is still Falconetti’s in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc . We can hear her face—even though there is no actual sound on screen of her speaking. The internet is a similarly “silent” space where actual voices are lacking. So intertextuality goes with interfaciality. I’ve also talked a lot about how categorization worked when it came to the reception of my first book, Beauty Talk & Monsters . How despite the fact that Beauty Talk is a text that crisscrosses form and content in a variety of ways, not pinpointing its exact genre—choosing one genre over another—only made things worse. Fiction was the category people were most adverse to me using, even though of course there is a lot of fiction in the book. Part of how fiction works in Beauty Talk is in the reader not knowing exactly where the fiction resides. In Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend , for example, everything matters. Everything is political, whether it’s real or imaginary, film or reality. In Weekend , life is not a game and neither is the game a game. The game is really life. Either everything is important or nothing is. But many people want clear answers and demarcations so that they can decide what is important and what is not important. My use of the “I,” subjective criticism, made everything “real” in Beauty Talk . But fiction is in the construction. It is in the blending. This is why I perforate the movie screen and connect the onscreen and the offscreen; the official story and the backstory. Although I don’t think there is a difference between onscreen and offscreen anymore. Nor is there a dialectic. It’s all screen all the time now. Non-fiction, on the other hand, was more tolerated as a moniker. Unlike Love Dog , Beauty Talk wasn’t explicitly or tangibly (what is tangible is a question in all these books) working with digital forms or within this digital economy, so some people resisted the book’s hypertextuality or intertextuality because they couldn’t see its other forms, if that makes sense. It was a problem of invisibility; of how to make something appear (this is where Nietzsche, big presence in Love Dog , comes in—the nature of appearances). Something people don’t necessarily want to see. Some readers couldn’t see the way forms were interfacing in that book. On the surface, Beauty Talk was simply a text about media culture—the domination of entertainment as a mode of being and knowing—and most readers could only see that one side of the book. But as Godard puts it in Wim Wenders’ documentary about the future of cinema, Room 666 , “Films are made, images are made, when there’s no one looking. That’s what the invisible is, that which we don’t see. That’s what the incredible is, that which we don’t see. And cinema shows you that which we don’t see, the incredible.” We are living in the aftermath of narrative and temporal collapse, which means we don’t read or feel in the same way. I began to use digital forms in my writing because I don’t see us as traditional book people anymore. I would add that power also resides in the invisible, in the things we make invisible by making them visible. Or it did for a long time. The new face of power is quickly becoming so-called transparency, which is even more corrupt because even though we now live in a behind-the-scenes culture, and see and know how the mechanisms of power and corruption operate, we still don't change. The world still doesn't change. Finally, another important thing that Godard says in Room 666 that relates to Love Dog is: “I’m here in front of the camera, and yet in my body and in my head, I’m behind it. My world is the imaginary and the imaginary is a journey between forwards and backwards.” This idea of visible/invisible, foresight and hindsight , backwards and forwards is an important dialectic in relation to time and the idea of the destinal. This is why I wanted Love Dog to travel, literally, figuratively, and discursively. You have to be open to not knowing. To epistemological, geographical, chronological, and emotional aporias. In Love Dog my story is both visible and invisible to me. Sometimes I could see where I was going. Other times I was completely in the dark existentially. Truth procedure, which love is, as bell hooks and Badiou tell us, requires expedition and openness to possibility. Unless you want a story you already know, but that is not truth procedure. So I tried to create this backwards and forwards journey in the book—this sense of travel and motion, hope and doubt—by jumping between forms, media, time; traveling to different places, texts, and emotional registers. The book’s “Time-Jump series,” which mostly takes the form of music—songs—but also a series of “green” videos that I shot, is the most obvious tribute to this idea of subjective and chronological time. continent. Your work aligns with writers that play with the form of their language, or have assumed the role of performance artist at some point: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson to name a few representing varied approaches that show up in Love Dog . At the risk of ossifying the work, or missing the point—as these experimental modes of writing stack-up in piles of published works, do they approach a genre? MASHA As I noted in my book Life As We Show It , in Chelsea Girls the poet Eileen Myles points out, “You can’t get money without a category.” More importantly, you can’t get a category—or respect, rank—without a clear genre. This makes genre and gender an obvious pair. The two words are even linked etymologically and both genre and gender concern taxonomies of legitimacy—of sorting through what and who is valuable. So the words share common prejudices. The things one does not want to read is often synonymous with who one doesn't want to read about. Therefore a break-up of or with genre is maybe the genre or anti-genre that could be said to link these writers. Avital Ronell breaks up with philosophical tradition and modes of inquiry. Like Nietzsche, she revaluates methods of evaluation, testing out things you are not supposed to use philosophy to test (and, by the same token, testing philosophy in ways it’s not supposed to be tested), like drugs and stupidity—where philosophy fails and we fail philosophy. And Chris Kraus does something similar in her experimental fiction, using different forms to put female subjectivity “to the test,” so to speak. All these female writers and thinkers have tried to destabilize the systems that have been set up in (and against) writing. Thus missing the mark with genre, even intentionally, means that we have missed the point in some sense as writers and thinkers. And that to me is a good thing, however difficult. We’ve started at the wrong point and gone somewhere else instead. We’ve acknowledged that writing and thinking are also about failure, and that failure is always embedded in the act of writing and in our reasons for writing. So that missing the point is also the point. Derrida insisted: “We must invent a name for those ‘critical’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.” But how can you give something that resists and deforms, a name? Wouldn’t the name also be deformed? Isn't this why the aforementioned writers get hyphenated descriptors like ficto-criticism? Do we need a proper name to be able to read something carefully? I don’t think so. I don’t need it as a reader. I’ve always taken a work on its own terms. But for most people, if you don’t have an address, people don’t know how to find you. A lot of time, they won’t even know how to look. And in some cases, they’ll think you’re not even worth finding. You are not on the map because you have to literally make the map in order to exist. In her essay, “The Gender of Sound” Carson asks, “Why is female sound bad to hear?” I think for the same reason something uncategorizable (pedagogically, creatively, racially, and sexually)—Other—is hard to read. *For an audio recording of Florida , read by Masha Tupitsyn click here . continent. : We're also curious to hear know how you see the significance of 'performance' (and why the label sticks to the shoes of these authors like toilet paper) in describing this kind of writing work? MASHA I think I responded to the parenthetical portion of this question in my previous answer. As far as how performance relates to Love Dog , in Acker’s Don Quixote , which is another big presence in the book, she writes, “there is no other reality than anthropomorphism.” In Don Quixote , the dog is human and the human is dog. Which brings us to the title of Love Dog and the totemic function of the dog in the book: giving human things animal characteristics and animal things human characteristics. Rather than investing all our human love ideals into dogs, which we do constantly as a culture of dog lovers, I wanted to put the dog into love. It is the difference between the consumption of love as a patriarchal institution or status position and the essence of a type of radical and liberatory relation that would benefit humans in their bonds with other humans. So the dog in Love Dog is not simply the book’s cover or performative affect, so to speak. Love has always needed the dog, which is why the dog is the very embodiment of belief in love . Recall Argos The Great Dog and Odysseus. Argos is the only one who remembers and recognizes the ragged and old Odysseus even after his 20-year absence. So love is the high ideal and the dog, both common and dependable, is the bridge between the sacred and the profane. The dog is the house of love. And because Love Dog is a digital project, it seemed impossible to think about the post-human, technology, the virtual, or difference (which Badiou says is essential to love in In Praise of Love ) without thinking about animal-being and being-animal. Instead of simply “performing” these ideas and characteristics as literary affects, I’m interested in being-becoming. Which means the book’s tropes, leitmotifs, series, and even its titles are in service of that truth procedure. In other words, I actually want to live this way, not just write this way. And, more importantly, I want to live this way not just think this way. So Love Dog became both my totem animal and my autobiographical animal. This made the book organic, anthropomorphic—beyond literary. See the trailer to Masha Tupitsyn's new book available now from Penny Ante Editions. (shrink)

The introduction of self-driving vehicles gives rise to a large number of ethical issues that go beyond the common, extremely narrow, focus on improbable dilemma-like scenarios. This article provides a broad overview of realistic ethical issues related to self-driving vehicles. Some of the major topics covered are as follows: Strong opinions for and against driverless cars may give rise to severe social and political conflicts. A low tolerance for accidents caused by driverless vehicles may delay the introduction of driverless systems (...) that would substantially reduce the risks. Trade-offs will arise between safety and other requirement on the road traffic system. Over-reliance on the swift collision-avoiding reactions of self-driving vehicles can induce people to take dangerous actions, such as stepping out in front of a car, relying on its fast braking. Children travelling alone can violate safety instructions such as the use of seatbelts. Digital information about routes and destinations can be used to convey commercial and political messages to car users. If fast passage can be bought, then socio-economic segregation of road traffic may result. Terrorists and other criminals can hack into a vehicle and make it crash. They can also use self-driving vehicles for instance to carry bombs to their designed places of detonation or to wreak havoc on a country’s road system. (shrink)