Since the development of streaming services, people have been able to watch their favorite movies and television shows on their own time and within the comfort of their own homes. However, with the ever-increasing price that comes with subscriptions to services like Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, and others, consumers are debating whether streaming giants are truly as accessible as they were meant to be.
View More Streaming Services Continue to Raise Prices
For users of the music streaming giant, the end of the year is a time of great anticipation. Spotify Wrapped, the platform’s year-in-review experience for users, summarizes each individual’s listening history, including top songs and artists. While Wrapped’s interactive and shareable elements are a fan favorite, it is important to remember that its reliance on tracking users and storing data is not as harmless as many believe it to be.
View More Spotify Wrapped and the Use of Personal Data
An FDA Anesthesiology and Respiratory Therapy Devices advisory panel met this week to discuss racial and skin-pigmentation bias in pulse oximeter devices. This comes in the wake of research demonstrating that inaccurate blood oxygen readings may have contributed to the greater number of Covid-19 deaths in minority patients compared to white patients.
View More FDA Advisory Panel Asks for Improvements in Pulse Oximeters
The recent release of Blizzard Entertainment’s “Overwatch 2” has sparked many conversations in the gaming community centered around the ethics behind free-to-play video games and the duty that developers have to their consumers. As the game industry continues to shift away from a traditional one-time purchase model, developers must continue to consider what they can do to keep games as fair as possible for all players.
View More Why Ethical Free-to-Play Game Design Matters
A historic heat wave in California has led to high demand for energy usage this past week, but officials have urged millions of residents to turn up their thermostats and shut off their appliances to prevent overwhelming the power grid. However, lawmakers and regulators at the forefront of the state’s green energy initiatives are also feeling the heat.
View More How California’s Heat Wave Almost Broke the State’s Power Grid
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and the richest man in the world, recently purchased enough shares of Twitter to have a 9.2 percent stake, making him the largest shareholder of the social media company. Musk’s appointment to the board of Twitter has brought about questions of free speech, social media deregulation, and the ability of the extremely wealthy to influence the way that our world communicates.
View More Elon Musk’s New Stake in Twitter and the Unchecked Power of Tech Giants
Outage reports in multiple cities following Russian invasion on Wednesday night pose the possibility of direct attacks on Ukraine’s internet infrastructure, resulting in obstacles to the flow of information in and out of the country.
View More Outages in Ukraine Demonstrate the Internet’s Role in Modern Conflict
As part of the Biden administration’s most recent initiatives to combat the rise of COVID-19 cases, four at-home test kits have been offered to each household in the U.S., but the conditions of this offer are yet another example of a consistent pattern of inequities during the pandemic.
View More The Inequitable Offer of 4 COVID Tests Per Household
With the discovery of the Omicron variant of COVID-19, much uncertainty has been injected into the conversation about booster vaccines — from questions about who should get them and when, to the matter of how using vaccine doses as boosters in the U.S. can prevent lower-income countries from receiving first dose supplies.
View More Omicron Variant Causes Public Health Officials to Rethink Vaccine Booster Recommendations
Neural engineering is an emerging interdisciplinary field that utilizes engineering techniques to discover the function and manipulate the behavior of the human brain. Current research in neural engineering focuses on the development of treatments for neurological disorders that deplete the health of the nervous system and explores how the nervous system operates in both health and disease. Neural engineering has huge potential to relieve suffering in those who have lost functionality in their nervous systems, but the further development of this technology raises a number of ethical questions about identity, privacy, responsibility, and justice. These questions must be thoroughly addressed in order to guarantee the most responsible future development and use of neural engineering technologies.
View More The Ethical Challenges of Neural Technology