Category Archives: Web/Tech

Fair or foul?

Posted on September 19, 2014 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Was the Facebook mood experiment “fair” or “foul” from an ethical perspective? Is it even possible for ethics to produce a determinate or “right” answer to this question? Several armchair philosophers, for example, have concluded that Facebook’s recent study of user behavior is … Continue reading →

Posted in Current Affairs, Ethics, Philosophy, Science, Web/Tech | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Who won the Carr-Benkler wager?

Posted on August 24, 2014 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

The Carr-Benkler wager was a bet made way back in 2006 between Nicholas Carr, an internet critic and 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist who coined the disparaging (but accurate) term “digital sharecropping” to describe Facebook’s exploitative business model, and Yochai Benkler, an internet champion and … Continue reading →

Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Truth, Web/Tech | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Email Externalities

Posted on August 18, 2014 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Emails are an efficient way of communicating with others across the globe and getting things done. The problem, however, is that many email-senders do not always fully internalize the “time costs” that their emails impose on the recipients of such … Continue reading →

Posted in Traffic, Web/Tech | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

A reverse-Facebook experiment

Posted on August 12, 2014 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Our friends at Facebook recently received a lot of bad press for conducting a masssive secret psych experiment on 700,000 of its users without their consent. (Update: The journal that published Facebook’s research published a pusillanimous Expression of Concern but did not … Continue reading →

Posted in Current Affairs, Deception, Web/Tech | Tagged | 1 Comment