Tag Archives: technology

Stem Cell Update II

Hot off the presses: a stem cell paper connected to the disgraced Hwang laboratory in South Korea has been just retracted for misleading use of  photos that were claimed to be of different stem cells, but were actually the same (doctored) photograph.

The NY Times had a good article a few months ago on spotting doctored photos; Adobe Photoshop is a very useful tool in laboratory work so you can zoom in on areas of interest or clear up some noise. Astronomers also alter the color scales so X-Ray photographs, for instance, correspond to our visible spectrum (you’ll see how some beautiful photos of astronomical objects are called "false color"–this is an example).

Alas, these powerful programs can also be used for cheating.

“Did you mean adoption?”

This is fascinating. Apparently the search engine at Amazon.com was prompting users who searched for "abortion" whether they meant to type "adoption," purely for intersecting reasons of technical and typographical chance. They have changed it, but similar problems are bound to crop up more often as large amounts of information are increasingly subject to user searches by algorithmic sorting of relevance.

Still, it is an excellent example of processes not directly under the control of humans coming up with results that humans perceive as holding a human bias, despite the absence of one. Welcome to the age of miscommunication between people and software.

No, Peter, this isn’t about miscommunication.  It’s about a bunch of whining hypocrits who, despite all their posturing and pontificating about the importance of choice, got their panties all twisted when an algorithmic anomaly presented users with *gasp* a choice.  If they wish to protect the right to abortion, that’s their prerogative; we can argue about that later.  Just don’t sing the praises of choice and then freak out when someone, even accidentally, offers choices for pregnant women that don’t require blind and uncritical acceptance of the supposed necessity of killing their children. 

"I thought it was offensive," said the Rev. James Lewis, a retired Episcopalian minister in Charleston, W.Va. "It represented an editorial position on their part."

You’d think "adoption" was a dirty word or hate speech.  I guess it’s just not the politically correct choice.

Investigating NFP: An Ob/Gyn’s Point of View

If the following podcast had a text transcript I’d consider using it for the last post of this series.  Since it doesn’t, I’ll just point you folks to it so you can listen at your leisure.

Today we have a conversation with Dr Paddy Jim Baggot, MD. He is a Catholic Physician board certified Obstetrician/Gynecologist and Geneticist specializing in preconception health and NaProTechnology, which is a new reproductive science for assisting couples to conceive naturally without the use of artificial reproductive techniques.

He has studied at the Pope Paul VI Institute, a health science research insitution dedicated to following Catholic teaching in all aspects of Human reproduction.

Dr Baggot talks about Humanae Vitae, Donum Vitae, Pope Paul VI’s call for Doctors and Men of Science to "considerably advance the welfare of marriage and the family and also peace of conscience, if by pooling their efforts they strive to elucidate more thoroughly the conditions favorable to a proper regulation of births", the Church’s teaching on artificial contraception, In Vitro Fertilization, new ways to treat infertility, Natural Family Planning, etc….

Is NFP Just Another Form of Contraception?

In the post “French Bishop Urges Vatican to Reopen Debate on Whether 1+1=2”, Funky mentions that:

“Pope Paul VI banned contraception in the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, arguing that sexual intercourse was meant for procreation and any artificial method to block a pregnancy went against the nature of the act.” 

I was inclined by this to comment on that post, but its my hope that others might have input on my thoughts about Humanae Vitae and NFP.

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Something Better Than Blogdigger

The rate of feature development (or lack thereof) at Blogdigger has led me to the decision to move the St. Blog’s Parish Aggregator somewhere else. Can anybody recommend a similar service for managing a publicly searchable list of syndication feeds?

Update: I had a very nice chat with Greg Gershman, one of the men behind Blogdigger. He made some temporary fixes to appease me, so I won’t be moving the aggregator. We also discussed various potential new features on the horizon for the service. I hope they come to fruition. Blogdigger has something unique and it’d really be a shame if they fell behind with feature development. I switched blogging software for that very reason.