Outstanding introduction to ethical complexities

Analysis: an introduction to ethical concepts.

The idea that everyone has a right to life does not mean that it is never permissible to kill. In theory, like any other right it can be overridden or outweighed by other rights and claims; and most of us accept, for instance, that it is forfeit by the armed soldier in battle. But it does mean that only such special and unusual circumstances can justify the act of homicide. In effect it is anot...

Introduction to International Ethical Standards Related to Genetics and Genomics

The rapid advances in genetic knowledge and technology raise various, sometimes unprecedented, ethical dilemmas in the scientific community as well as the public realm. To deal with these dilemmas, the international community has prepared and issued ethical standards in various formats. In this review, seven international standards regarding genetics and genomics will be briefly introduced in c...

Introduction to special issue: ethical dilemmas in social network research

Toward the beginning of the article that leads off this special issue, Rebecca Goolsby recalls a short but intensive burst of messages on the SOCNET listserve1 concerning the ethics of military funding of social-networks research. One of the postings, from Marya Doerfel, a young faculty member at Rutgers, particularly struck me.2 An excerpt follows (reprinted here with the permission of the mes...

An Introduction to Sociolinguistics

Introduction to circular data

In many diverse scientific fields, the measurements are directions. For instance, a biologist may be measuring the direction of flight of a bird or the orientation of an animal. A series of such observations is called ”directional data”. Since a direction has no magnitude, these can be conveniently represented as points on the circumference of a unit circle centered at the origin or as unit ...