Word: concern
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Given our widespread concern over Internet privacy, which usually only involves a couple of our credit cards, it's hardly surprising that we're not so hot on the idea of letting strangers rifle through our genetic identities. What would happen if, for example, during an interview in the not-so-distant future, a prospective employer shook your hand, walked into a lab and used the traces of you skin to evaluate your life span and your overall cost to the company's health insurance coffers? And let's say you were predisposed to developing breast cancer - how could...
That's a very reasonable concern. But if people who think like Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, have their way, we'll be able to sleep a little easier in our brave new world. Caplan advocates establishing some kind of confidentiality law that would prohibit unauthorized testing and the free exchange of genetic information - a safeguard that would ostensibly provide each of us with a modicum of privacy...
...Monday Night Stoning. (You could base a drinking game on how often the Colosseum, Network and Orwell come up in discussions of VTV.) Stuart Fischoff, professor of media psychology at California State University, Los Angeles, cheerfully admits to enjoying Survivor but adds, "The downside that does concern me is the need to get more excessive and extreme. Let's try a public execution. Let's try a snuff film." On the other hand, TV voyeurism also means millions of ordinary folks are making other ordinary folks, without benefit of surgical augmentation, into stars just for being themselves. Can that...
...course your columnist Michelle Slatalla was joking when she wrote about needing to talk with her 58-year-old mother about going into a nursing home [PERSONAL TIME: YOUR FAMILY, June 5]. While I admire Slatalla's concern for her parents, and agree that as one approaches 60 it is wise to make some long-term plans, I hardly think that 58 is the right age at which to talk about a retirement home unless there are some serious health concerns. In this era, when people are living to a healthy and ripe old age, Slatalla is jumping...
...technology that legally certifies that you are you. That technology is already built into major Web browsers, and this fall Sony will market a device that enables users to sign documents with a thumbprint. Although the bill is a big win for e-commerce, some consumer groups have expressed concern about the potential for online fraud. For good or for ill, President Clinton is expected to sign the bill (presumably the old-fashioned way); it could go into effect as early...