Category Archives: Technology and Society

Economics, Health, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Cancer

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Have they really found a cure?

…the developments at Penn point, tantalizingly, to something more, something that would rank among the great milestones in the history of mankind: a true cure. Of 25 children and 5 adults with Emily’s disease, ALL, 27 had a complete remission, in which cancer becomes undetectable.“

It’s a stunning breakthrough,” says Sally Church, of drug development advisor Icarus Consultants. Says Crystal Mackall, who is developing similar treatments at the National Cancer Institute: “It really is a revolution. This is going to open the door for all sorts of cell-based and gene therapy for all kinds of disease because it’s going to demonstrate that it’s economically viable.”

Also:

“I’ve told the team that resources are not an issue. Speed is the issue,” says Novartis Chief Executive Joseph Jimenez, 54. “I want to hear what it takes to run this phase III trial and to get this to market. You’re talking about patients who are about to die. The pain of having to turn patients away is such that we are going as fast as we can and not letting resources get in the way.”

Yes. Faster please.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Technology Law

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…will soon be reshaped by people who don’t use email:

as Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Parker Higgins convincingly argues, it’s not the justices’ lack of personal experience with technology that’s the problem; it’s their tendency to not understand how people use it. Returning to Justice Roberts’s concerns about villains with two phones: if he is in fact unaware of how common that behavior is – he certainly didn’t watch Breaking Bad – then that suggests a major gap in his understanding of society.

This lack of basic understanding is alarming, because the supreme court is really the only branch of power poised to confront one of the great challenges of our time: catching up our laws to the pace of innovation, defending our privacy against the sprint of surveillance. The NSA is “training more cyberwarriors” as fast as it can, but our elected representatives move at a snail’s pace when it comes to the internet. The US Congress has proven itself unable to pass even the most uncontroversial proposals, let alone comprehensive NSA reforms: the legislative branch can’t even get its act together long enough to pass an update our primary email privacy law, which was written in 1986 – before the World Wide Web had been invented.

So the future of our privacy, of our technology – these problems land at the feet of a handful of tech-unsavvy judges.

Kind of scary.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Executions

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I’ve asked this question before, but don’t recall if it was ever resolved. Just before the Shuttle flight one pad rat was killed and others injured from hypoxia when they entered an area with a nitrogen purge:

When the workers stepped into the compartment, they would not have smelled anything peculiar or have had any other warning that they were entering a deadly area. All five men were reported to have passed out almost immediately, and soon afterward they were evacuated from the compartment. Dies Aboard Helicopter

John Bjornstad, a 50-year-old senior chemical technician, died aboard a helicopter that was carrying him to a hospital in nearby Titusville. The medical authorities explained that the nitrogen itself was not poisonous – it makes up nearly 80 percent of ordinary air – but such an exposure deprives a person of all oxygen. He dies of what is known as hypoxia, which is lack of oxygen.

Seems like a pretty painless way to go to me. Why not just a gas chamber and run nitrogen through it until brain death?