By Matt Mackay
The answers to all of these is "yes" according to Joseph C. Pitt (VirginaTech). Doing Philosophy of Technology presents an updated and integrated overview of the most important thinking from this prominent philosopher of technology. Throughout his career Joseph C. Pitt has defended the view that to say anything meaningful about the value of a technology one must know something about that technology and how it functions in the world. This starting point leads naturally to a pragmatist philosophical stance, since it is the real world consequences of introducing a technology that must be the basis for any further normative judgements. Rather, it is claimed that as our technologies transform our world they transform us and the kinds of questions we find important to answer.
Due to the current revolution in brain research the search for the “moral brain” became a serious endeavour. How revolutionary this current research might be, the quest for a localisable ethical centre or moral organ is far from new. The moral brain was a recurrent theme in the works of neuroscientists during the 19th and 20th century. From the phrenology era to the encephalitis pandemic in the 1920s a wide range of European and American scientists (neurologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists and criminologists) speculated about and discussed the location of a moral sense in the human cortex. This book presents the first overview of believers and disbelievers in a cerebral seat of human morality, their positions and arguments and offers an explanation for these historical attempts to localise our moral sense, in spite of the massive disapproving commentary launched by colleagues.
We give more space than usual to the Conference of the Library Association, but, even so, our correspondent has attempted impressions rather than factual accounts of the papers read. Good as those papers were, the main effect of our conferences is to provide for every type of librarian a sense of community and of unity with librarianship in general. This was achieved in a large measure at Edinburgh. Moreover, as our correspondent suggests, there was interest in problems that do not affect, at least at present, many who participated. Nearly every session, general or special, was so well attended, that we can infer that the vitality of interest in library matters is as great as it ever has been; indeed, it is possibly greater.
Short summaryLight-absorbing impurities change the reflectance of snow in different ways. Some particles are heated by the Sun and they sink out of sight. During the process, snow may look darker than pure snow when observed by nadir, but at larger view zenith angles the snow may look as white as clean snow. Thus an observer on the ground may overestimate the albedo, while a satellite underestimates the albedo. Climate studies need to examine how the contaminants behave in snow, not only their total amounts.
