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Hi! My name is Christine and this is my space on the web. I am a Computer Science and Biology student at UBC.

You are currently browsing the See-Why blog archives for June, 2010.

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Jun
28
2010

3 Minute Philosophy – Kantianism

Filed under CPSC430

The textbook’s (Ethics for the Information Age, by Michael Quinn) discussions of the different ethical theories is really through, but rather dry and in the middle of reading my textbook the other day I started searching youtube. I found a video that explains Kantianism in 3 minutes using lots of humour. Humour is a really great way to learn and internalize concepts. And yeah I pronoucned Kant’s name “Can’t” in my head before watching this video (and attending lecture). There is also one on John Locke and Thomas Hobbes (Social Contract Theory). Much gratitude to the creator of these videos! Let’s press that “Like” button extra hard.

If were to take the last example the video gave about an axe murder appearing at your door and asking you the location of your innocent children so that he could hack them all to tiny pieces and apply the other workable ethic theories from the textbook, would you be morally obligated to reveal the location?

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Tagged: ethics, kantianism, social contract theory, utilitarianism || Write a comment


Jun
27
2010

CPSC430 – Facebook and Livejournal

Filed under CPSC430

I’m taking a course, CPSC430 Computers and Society. I need to keep a journal on the course material, and I thought since this blog is pretty much empty and just space wasting I’ll use it for the course and kill two birds with one stone. The course is offered by the Computer Science department, but unlike all the other courses offered by the department, especially upper level courses does not require copious amounts of programming. In fact, it requires no programming and seems more like an arts course at a glance. I’ve just completed CPSC304, Intro to Relational Databases and the amount of time I spent programming for that was huge – morning till night haha (but it was fun)! Instead of programming, the project for this course seems to be an essay, and lectures seem to consist of discussions and debates. Quite different, but should be interesting. So here goes!

Last lecture, we read an article about the history and controversy surrounding Facebook’s raise to success: The Battle for Facebook. The gist of it is that Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook by stepping over and spurning people, including allegedly stealing the idea from another group of Harvard students now running ConnectU, his college roommate, other people giving him help and advice and so on. However it is undeniable that Zuckerberg’s talents, skills and drive were also integral parts of making Facebook a success, despite his questionable morals.

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Tagged: ethics, facebook, livejournal || Write a comment


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