A quick rant about one of my lectures today...
One module I am taking as part of my Computing course is "Social Aspects of Computing", a subject that I really think is important to cover as computer scientists have a huge effect on the modern world, through new technologies and interfaces that we use everyday. I think it's important to get context around society and societal issues as software we could be writing in the future may well affect many lives.
However I think that there's quite a few issues with the course - first of all it feels like the lecturer, who will remain nameless, is far too biased against modern technology (ironic isn't it) and regularly takes sides in debates. I call it our 'weekly dose of fear' about what the internet might do to us...
Secondly, and more importantly, there's quite a few things he's plain wrong about. I had a rant on Twitter earlier about his one of his latest lectures in which he talks about genetic discrimination. OK, fair enough, it *may* be an issue in the future, but the simple fact is that genetic analysis that could lead to discrimination is many, many years away from us. A quote from the lecture slides: "a drop of blood is easy to get and easier to analyse" in relation to future employers genetically discriminating against potential employees. Seriously, I can't think of a single instance of an employer getting hold of potential employee's blood, but I find the second part even more problematic. Blood DNA analysis is *not* easy to do. First the sample DNA is relatively small, so it needs to be duplicated using PCR. This is getting cheaper and easier, but it requires a large and expensive machine with specially trained scientists to operate it. Then the entire genome needs to be analysed, an enormous task - the human genome has over 3 billion base pairs (the simplest code level of DNA). This is vastly expensive and massively time-consuming. Think about it, if hospitals aren't taking samples of your DNA to analyse your genome, then businesses are definitely not screening people for certain genes.
I'm pretty disappointed that such an important topic is so mishandled. It's not like there's not enough important issues to be discussed; I'm pretty sure we're not going to cover the Digital Economy Act or net neutrality.
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