Furedi on Celebrity

Frank Furedi just published a piece in The Spectator. The full article is on his website, but here's a quote:

"Deference to the authority of the celebrity, makeover guru or healer is underwritten by the decline in the influence of conventional forms of authority. That is why the frequently asserted claim that we live in an age characterised by the ‘death of deference’ bears little relationship to reality. Yes, it has become fashionable to treat traditional forms of authority — monarchy, church, parliament — with derision. Criticism of traditional institutions has become so prevalent that it bears all the hallmarks of classical conformism. Scientists, doctors and other professionals have also experienced an erosion of authority. But the diminishing influence of conventional authority has been paralleled by the rise of a new ‘alternative’ one. We don’t trust politicians but we have faith in the pronouncements of celebrities."

The content reminds me of an earlier posting related to the film 'What the Bleep Do we Know?', though it does seem to follow this emerging thread on the public intellectual as celebrity.

WADA’s Second Gene Doping Symposium

From 4-5 December, the World Anti-Doping Agency hosts its second Gene Doping symposium in Stockholm Sweden. They have already issues a press release for this meeting and, like the NYC meeting in 2002, the proceedings are closed to the media and by invitation only.

At the meeting, I will give a reply to Dr Thomas H. Murray, President of The Hastings Center as part of a session on the ethics and policy implications of gene doping for sport.

One of the greatest catalysts for media coverage at the first meeting was Lee Sweeney's statement that he had been contacted by coaches and athletes who wish to enrol in gene therapy trials, in order to boost their performances. For the media and many other interested parties, this made the issue real and present.

It is likely that this meeting will present some advance on whether detection will be possible and I will argue for a re-definition of the ethics of sport based on a couple of recent pieces I have written. The first – published in the journal Public Understanding of Science – will advance a critique on the way in which gene doping has been discussed in society; the second – published in the European Journal of Sport Science – will argue that anti-doping policy should be replaced with a 'performance policy'.

Together, my conclusion will state that a rejection of gene transfer on the basis of current arguments implied and explicit within anti-doping policy is not justified. The two references are as follows:

Miah, A. (2005). "Genetics, cyberspace and bioethics: why not a public engagement with ethics?" Public Understanding of Science 14(4): 409-421.

Miah, A. (2005). "From anti-doping to a 'performance policy': sport technology, being human, and doing ethics." European Journal of Sport Science 5(1): 51-57.

Making Sports Virtual

How long will it be before we ditch the sports arena and compete as athletes – or view as spectators – within an entirely virtual reality? This is the subject of a new book I am writing for The MIT Press, tentatively titled 'CyberSport: Digital Games, Ethics and Cultures'. It will be written with a colleague of mine in Australia, Dr Dennis Hemphill.

The subject of this book will feature in a Sky One (television) production to be broadcast on December 2 in the United Kingdom. The programme is about sport and technology generally, and it rounds off with a segment about the prospect of making sports virtual.

This project develops some thoughts that have been hanging around for the last five years. An early example of how they work out can be found in this piece:

Miah, A. (2002) Immersion and Abstraction in Virtual Sport, Research in Philosophy and Technology, 21, 225-233

More on Academic Celebrities

At the Celebrity Culture conference, we very nearly had that panel on academic celebrity. On the Monday morning drive down to Ayr, Phil, David P. Marshall (Keynote) and I debated the potential merit of raising this subject in the programme, which is implict of many debates surrounding the public intellectual.

However, as the conference kicked-off, Phil and I became embroiled in the media frenzy, David lost his luggage, Diane couldn’t get into the country, the fire-alarm went off and, in any case, we didnt really have enough time on the programme to put it together.

So, perhaps a follow-up meeting on this subject is in order? I mention this now after having seen Prospect Magazine’s list of Global Public Intellectuals.

Noam Chomsky tops the bill followed by:

Position Name Total votes

2 Umberto Eco 2464
3 Richard Dawkins 2188
4 Václav Havel 1990
5 Christopher Hitchens 1844
6 Paul Krugman 1746
7 Jürgen Habermas 1639
8 Amartya Sen 1590
9 Jared Diamond 1499
10 Salman Rushdie 1468
11 Naomi Klein 1378
12 Shirin Ebadi 1309
13 Hernando De Soto 1202
14 Bjørn Lomborg 1141
15 Abdolkarim Soroush 1114
16 Thomas Friedman 1049
17 Pope Benedict XVI 1046
18 Eric Hobsbawm 1037
19 Paul Wolfowitz 1028
20 Camille Paglia 1013
21 Francis Fukuyama 883
22 Jean Baudrillard 858
23 Slavoj Zizek 840
24 Daniel Dennett 832
25 Freeman Dyson 823
26 Steven Pinker 812
27 Jeffrey Sachs 810
28 Samuel Huntington 805
29 Mario Vargas Llosa 771
30 Ali al-Sistani 768
31 EO Wilson 742
32 Richard Posner 740
33 Peter Singer 703
34 Bernard Lewis 660
35 Fareed Zakaria 634
36 Gary Becker 630
37 Michael Ignatieff 610
38 Chinua Achebe 585
39 Anthony Giddens 582
40 Lawrence Lessig 565
41 Richard Rorty 562
42 Jagdish Bhagwati 561
43 Fernando Cardoso 556
44= JM Coetzee 548
44= Niall Ferguson 548
46 Ayaan Hirsi Ali 546
47 Steven Weinberg 507
48 Julia Kristeva 487
49 Germaine Greer 471
50 Antonio Negri 452
51 Rem Koolhaas 429
52 Timothy Garton Ash 428
53 Martha Nussbaum 422
54 Orhan Pamuk 393
55 Clifford Geertz 388
56 Yusuf al-Qaradawi 382
57 Henry Louis Gates Jr. 379
58 Tariq Ramadan 372
59 Amos Oz 358
60 Larry Summers 351
61 Hans Küng 344
62 Robert Kagan 339
63 Paul Kennedy 334
64 Daniel Kahnemann 312
65 Sari Nusseibeh 297
66 Wole Soyinka 296
67 Kemal Dervis 295
68 Michael Walzer 279
69 Gao Xingjian 277
70 Howard Gardner 273
71 James Lovelock 268
72 Robert Hughes 259
73 Ali Mazrui 251
74 Craig Venter 244
75 Martin Rees 242
76 James Q Wilson 229
77 Robert Putnam 221
78 Peter Sloterdijk 217
79 Sergei Karaganov 194
80 Sunita Narain 186
81 Alain Finkielkraut 185
82 Fan Gang 180
83 Florence Wambugu 159
84 Gilles Kepel 156
85 Enrique Krauze 144
86 Ha Jin 129
87 Neil Gershenfeld 120
88 Paul Ekman 118
89 Jaron Lanier 117
90 Gordon Conway 90
91 Pavol Demes 88
92 Elaine Scarry 87
93 Robert Cooper 86
94 Harold Varmus 85
95 Pramoedya Ananta Toer 84
96 Zheng Bijian 76
97 Kenichi Ohmae 68
98= Wang Jisi 59
98= Kishore Mahbubani 59
100 Shintaro Ishihara 57

10x Human-Machine superperformance

I am a long-distance member for one of Yale’s inter-disciplinary bioethics group, which soon receives a talk from Professor Deb Roy. Taking a closer look at Roy’s work draws me even nearer to the work at MIT. I visited there in April this year and was struck by the breadth of creative invention taking place there.

This project 10x Human-Machine Symbiosis is discussed in an outline paper available from its website, wher Roy explains ths relationship between art, science and design.

In my various travels, I have found the richest of environments where a range of disciplines and views inform an approach to a problem, where it is difficult to characterise researchers as having expertise in specific domains. The more intriguing researchers seem to be those who apply a set of understandings to a range of applications.

More recently, I have been drawn towards architecture in work related to technology – such as William Mitchell’s ‘city of bits’ – to research surrounding media spectacles – the Situationist Internationale are integral to a course I wrote on Spectacle. Today, I was reading an article about Unifying Urbanism, which described a use of communication technology within the city to de-fragment its evolving character. I struggle to separate out disciplinary perspectives when writing about culture. Far too much is connected.

“Genetic Technologies Launches Sports Gene Test in Japan”

The launch of the SportsGeneTest in Japan was announced in the Washington Post in mid-September. Here is a quote from the press release:

“GTG director, Professor Deon Venter, himself a former British Ironman Triathlon champion, attended the launch. Professor Venter commented, “Japan represents a significant market for the ACTN3 SportsGene Test(TM), with highly influential sporting and government bodies keen to explore the relationship between genetics and sporting performance. Japan is an extremely technologically-sophisticated country and is now taking a leadership position in the science of optimizing a person’s sports potential according to their inherited genetic capabilities.”