Being seventeen years old, I, like most people classify as having a full-time job on the receiving end of the education system. However, whenever I'm not grinding for high grades and a well-put-together social life, I enjoy playing tennis, reading, writing, sketching, and various nature-related activities. I enjoy hiking and kayaking and do miscellaneous yard work around the house. I also have an internship at a neural science lab, so that's always an option to brag about. I mostly play tennis and badminton now. I used to ski and play on a  travel soccer team until I dislocated my knee, which prevented me from doing anything else intense on the legs. I'd say something interesting about myself would be the fact that I own chickens! Although I guess anyone who is remotely aware of my existence knows that so something else that's interesting is that I like to horde stickers and rubber ducks, none of which I have bought with my own money, but instead something my friends have decided I should have a superfluous amount of. I also have many bullet journals which are excellent creative outlets.  

On the subject of grades, things get a bit complicated. On occasion, when I'm neck-deep in responsibilities, I ask myself why I had bound myself to this fate of being a try-hard workaholic. What compelled me to screw myself like this? Unlike most Asians, I can't even use the excuse of my parents. Actually no never mind, that might not be true. They've drilled in me that education was the only way to move forward in this world. That the defining characteristic of children is "someone with ample time to learn". They've never forced me to take harder classes, I just found that year after year, starting from eighth grade, teachers would recommend me for the harder classes. Then in those classes, I would hear about the various accomplishments and grades of my classmates. Then it'll be the mindset of "oh if they did it, why didn't I?" This might be strange, but grades in my opinion are comparable to a drug. It's there behind both my highs and my lows, my bragging point and my Achilles heel. You strive to achieve it, get happy with the results, get used to the results, then inadvertent peer pressure pushes you to strive even higher.

Do understand that I have a limited pool to choose my favorite memory of high school from. About 50% of my time being there was overrun with the unpleasant experience that is Covid. I barely remember anything from the pre-Covid era, so most of my nice memories are from my junior year. There is one exception though, and that was a slew of text messages me and my friend sent to each other. We were both in Earth Science that year and learning about identifying the different types of rocks. I asked my friend to send me the pictures of the lab we were doing, with the words "send me those gneiss rock lab photos." The joke is that the word "gneiss" is homonymous with the word "nice". The joke is that it's a pun and for the next half an hour, puns were the only thing that was being sent. My friend was at sectionals and I was in the middle of doing homework, but this was a war and I wasn't about to lose the battle. And I didn't. And I ended up screenshotting all of it-a total of six pictures-and sending it to our Earth Science teacher. Which he responded to with more puns. This was when I peaked. It's all been downhill from then. 

The title of my number one favorite memory that actually took place in school is heavily debated but it's most definitely something that happened in Ms. Rudolph's class. It's between the speedwalking contest she had with Mirzad, the time she handed a kazoo to everyone in my class (which to this day I still keep in a little side pocket in my backpack), the rap battles during the talent show, or when I dressed up as Theodore Roosevelt and walked in front of the class with a trans-Atlantic accent and socks stuffed in my black boots so they wouldn't slip off my feet. 

What motivates me in school? Already partially answered in the section about the grades but in a nutshell, the feeling of needing an edge over my peers and the ghostly presence of my trepidation for the future breathing down my neck.

I love learning. I don't love every process of it. I like being surrounded by people that share this passion for learning. I don't like when I'm not.

My friends had done E=mc2 and that's how it was brought to my attention. As stated before, I enjoy learning! I saw the appeal in a self-run research project and plan on using it as an excuse to dig into some topics that I'm really interested in but would have no reason to spend time on otherwise. 

I like to think of myself as a very imaginative kid. Being constantly on the move meant I only spent a year or so at a certain school district, which also meant I couldn't make any lasting friends. I was never lonely though, not with all the stories and characters I made in my head. I wish I had written some of them down. I never had an imaginary friend though. When my sister came up to my mom telling her about her new babysitter "Danny", I started to feel like I'd missed out on having an imaginary friend. That got me thinking. What is an imaginary friend? What makes kids so sure that they exist? It's just a figment of their imagination. What is imagination? So that's how this idea of a project started. 

I know that imagination-or creative thinking-can be split into working memory, abstraction, planning, and cognitive flexibility. I also know that creative thinking isn't controlled by only one part of the brain. The frontal cortex, hippocampus, basal ganglia, and white matter all contribute to creativity. 

A few other questions I wish to delve into include the following:

What does Aphantasia do to the brain?
Are the processes for imagining a smell different from imagining an image?
When does self-awareness start?

I am looking to investigate how the brain works to generate thoughts.

I think I know that internal imaging is related to your self-awareness in a 3-D space. It's a form of perception. I've heard that the ability to create a mental image is a spectrum, with aphantasia being at the bottom of it and hyperphantasia being at the top.  I've heard that the senses all relate to one another.  I've also heard that someone on the autistic spectrum can have a hard time holding mental images. Making mental images also help you remember them more, which I assume also means someone with visual aphantasia has a harder time recalling specific details of an item that someone without it does. A mental image can also differ in detail from person to person--again, the spectrum. 

I know that the frontal cortex, hippocampus, basal ganglia, and white matter all contribute to creativity. I know that creativity is split into different types of thinking, including convergent and divergent thinking. Convergent thinking is defined as when you "combine multiple, sometimes very different, pieces of information and find one solution/thing that links them" (kids.frontiersin). An example of convergent thinking would be thinking of the sky, water, and fish when the color blue is mentioned. The Remote Associates Test (RAT) measures your convergent thinking ability. Convergent thinking is done via the hippocampus which is also in charge of memory. Divergent thinking on the other hand is done by the central, temporal, and parietal regions which are also in charge of sensory information and self-awareness. Divergent thinking is tested by the Torrance Test of Creativity. Divergent thinking is different from convergent thinking in that convergent thinking is "associated" thinking while divergent thinking is about making additions to a prompt. For example, if given the prompt "how to open a can", divergent thoughts would include "using a can opener", "use a knife", or "bite it".  I know you can imagine not only visual stimuli but stimuli from all five senses. I also know that these"imagined stimuli" is also a symptom of several mental disorders. 

[TOPIC CHANGE]

Don't Knows:

What other "unethical" expirements have been conducted?
What was the point of the Nazi twin expirements?
What else do I know of the Monkey Mother expirement?
What were the conclusions of the Stanford Prision Expirement?
What kind of expirements were held during the world wars?
What kind of expirements did the Japanese do during Unit 731?
What defines "unethical" ?
What were the results from the Russian Sleep expirement?
Did the the Russian Sleep expirement actually happen?
What are some older, more historical expirements that were conducted?

NEED to Knows:
What other "unethical" expirements have been conducted?
Did the the Russian Sleep expirement actually happen?
What defines "unethical" ?

What other "unethical" experiments have been conducted?

A list of ones I already knew:
> Dr. Mengele's Twin Experiments
> Monkey Mother
> Stanford Prison Experiment
> Mouse Utopia
> Unit 731

New ones:
> Project 4.1
> Little Albert Experiments
> The Monster Study
> The Aversion Project

When I put "unethical experiments" in a google search, it spits back out a broad expanse of different options. From this pool of different events, I found there to be a spectrum of "unethical experiments". On one end you have the ones that are done with good intention and can be argued to be an injustice--such as the non-consensual use of Henrietta Lacks' cells, the Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study, and early Electroshock Therapies. These eventually lead to great advances in their own respective fields and aren't usually what you first think of when you see the words "unethical" and "experiments" together.  On the other end is the opposite-these are the rather well-known ones such as the Nazi Twin experiments, Unit 731, and  The Aversion  Project. These tend to negatively affect large groups of people with the aggressor showing little or no empathy for the victims. Other unethical experiments are listed not by an individualizing name, but as a category. For example, "Prison Inmates as Test Subjects", "American Experiments on Mentally Ill", and "North Korean Human Experiments" are all grouped together as such. Perhaps there are notable names within the labels, but none that stand out enough to warrant a spotlight. Perhaps I should also group together some of these experiments with each journal post. The Cruel, The Ignorant, and the Morbidly Curious.

My SDA was describing three different unethical experiments--what happened, why they matter, and what were the results. This got me thinking about how I could ask deeper questions, like what line should be drawn for science? This was similar to what I was brainstorming during my reflection. I could split that question into:
> What defines "unethical"?
> What are some "successful" unethical experiments?
> What are some motivations to conduct unethical experiments?

I chose this "need to know" question because although I couldn't just continue describing and explaining new unethical experiments, that would just be research. Asking an ambiguous question like "is conducting unethical experiments ever justified", leaves me room to argue and to think about my answer. Learning about the Common Rule set some guidelines on what is ethical and what isn't, and the circumstances for each experiment are different. There's an argument that can be made here and potential in this question. "Successful" unethical experiments I would have to do some research to find but there are a few at the top of my mind that I can think of. This can be argued too. I, for example, think the Monkey Mother was successful but there will definitely be people who would disagree. This depends on the morals of each person and their personal definition of ethics. The category "The Morbidly Curious" would have most of the morally grey experiments, the ones that can be argued. As for the motivations to conduct unethical experiments, that's also something that can be argued. Curiosity? Definitely. But the field of psychology seems to have a ton of potential for unethical experiments. Would consent be all there needs to make an experiment ethical? The US soldiers consented to be there at the bomb testing but didn't know the truth of what they were consenting to. The government underestimated the damage radiation can cause and the soldiers suffered because of it. Wouldn't that be true for any experiment on things we don't quite understand yet? Then again, how can we understand them without doing such experiments? These are all interesting questions I'd like to go further into. 

> What defines "unethical"?

This is a comprehension question. This is a variation of the "What is meant...?" question. "What is meant by unethical?" It's good to set a baseline when I start asking thought-provoking questions.

 
> What are some "successful" unethical experiments?

The answer to this is subject, open-ended. It's an evaluation question. You're ranking different experiments and choosing one you think did more good than harm. 

> What are some motivations to conduct unethical experiments?

An analysis question. This is asking about the purpose of morally ambiguous experiments and if crossing the line is sometimes worth it and in what circumstances they are. 

> Where's the line to draw for science?

This is the "end goal" question, the need to know. As an application question, this answer will come from balancing the answer to "what are the motivations" and seeing examples of experiments that were successful. If I can answer this, then maybe I can also ask a synthesis question that would lead me to create a hypothetical unethical experiment. 

My "need to know" hasn't changed. My questions have overall remained the same--revolving around subjective answers and opinion-based. To fit the structure of the HOTQs, I can change them into:

How would you rephrase the meaning of "unethical"?
Can you assess the value or importance of unethical experiments?
What motive is there to conduct unethical experiments?
How would you organize a morally grey experiment that would be necessary for the development of the field?

The first few questions will all—in some shape or form—support my "need to know" question. The ethics question will set a baseline, looking at successful experiments will give inspiration, motivations will be considered, and the line that should be drawn for science is in the same boat as the ethics question. 

Sources I will use include:

“30 Most Unethical Psychology Human Experiments.” Best Psychology Degrees | Your Guide to Top Psychology Degree Programs, 20 Sept. 2021, www.bestpsychologydegrees.com/30-most-disturbing-human-experiments-in-history/.

“Five Principles for Research Ethics.” Monitor on Psychology, American Psychological Association, www.apa.org/monitor/jan03/principles.

“What Are The Top 10 Unethical Psychology Experiments?” Online Psychology Degrees, 18 Apr. 2021, www.online-psychology-degrees.org/study/top-unethical-experiments-psychology/.

Essential Question:
How would you organize a morally grey experiment that would be necessary for the development of the field?

Sub-Questions:
What defines "unethical"?
What are some "successful" unethical experiments?
What are some motivations to conduct unethical experiments?
Where's the line to draw for science?

Possible Sources:
“30 Most Unethical Psychology Human Experiments.” Best Psychology Degrees | Your Guide to Top Psychology Degree Programs, 20 Sept. 2021, www.bestpsychologydegrees.com/30-most-disturbing-human-experiments-in-history/.

“Five Principles for Research Ethics.” Monitor on Psychology, American Psychological Association, www.apa.org/monitor/jan03/principles.

“What Are The Top 10 Unethical Psychology Experiments?” Online Psychology Degrees, 18 Apr. 2021, www.online-psychology-degrees.org/study/top-unethical-experiments-psychology/.

===

What?

My essential question came from me brainstorming how to make my questions more complex. There are plenty of grey areas when it comes to science and learning how to deal with them is only going to lead to positive effects for all the different fields.  The sub-questions can be described as my attempt to break down the steps to build an answer for the essential one. By asking questions like "what are some 'successful' morally grey experiments?", I can find already existing examples on to base my conclusion. 

So What?

As stated in the previous paragraph, there are plenty of morally questionable actions you can take in the name of science, especially in psychology. Testing new technology, new treatments, and new approaches all have a certain risk attached to them. If an experiment has willing participants sign a contract but the people running it didn't know of the lasting consequences, is it still ethical if the participants didn't consent to it?
The sources I chose either defined something about research ethics or gave me example experiments to so more data collection on.  One of them I had previously used to answer the more general question of "what other unethical experiments are there?" I'd need to see preexisting experiments to make a conclusion about unethical experiments in general. 

Now What?
I plan on making my next SDA something art related. I'm thinking of doing a SketchNote or a storybook. A book about these experiments would be interesting and I do have the artistic prowess to do it. I'll stay away from anything that requires me to record sounds until I get a microphone of some sort. 

Now that it’s complete, what are your thoughts about this SDA? Are they mostly positive or negative? 

I enjoyed doing this SDA. I liked the process a lot more than making a video. 

Do you feel as though you conveyed a “So What?” That is, did you specify the significance of what you were communicating?

I feel like I could've done more with the "So What?"  but in my mind, the "So What?" is "to provoke thought" or "to shed light on the various unethical experiments done in the name of science". I could've expressed the point of the book more in the introduction.

How much time did you dedicate to this assignment? Did your attention management meet your time management? Time management is carving out the time to work. Attention management is actually putting in the work during that time. What “Cs” do you feel as though you’re hitting? 

3-4 hours were spent. It was hours of intensive sketching/coloring/planning, albeit with a few breaks in between. I can safely say I hit the creativity and curiosity "Cs" (with the curiosity one being my goal) but in a medium like a storybook, I'm not sure if I can say I hit all of the "Cs". I can make an argument for it, like how critical thinking was used to come up with the words that went along with what was depicted in the picture.  

What “Cs” do you need to hit moving forward? Creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, curiosity 

Communication mostly. Also collaboration but that's something I'm not 100% how to go about doing. 

What was the most important thing you learned? 

That I should get my project peer-reviewed first, especially for something like a picture book. That foreword was a last-minute addition that I was thinking of doing but only got the push to do after multiple people suggested it to me. 

This past month we asked, “What are you reading?” What were the vital sources you used to craft this assignment? Why? 

Websites and online articles still remain the primary sources I'm using for my research. It's the most convenient way. 

Looking back, what are you proud of? 

My art pieces.

What do you still need to work on? 

Coming up with a better/more precise foreword. There's definitely room for improvement there. 

How do you think you can use the information gained this month in the future? 

I can definitely create a better, more "interactive" storybook instead of this kind of abstract story I went for here. Again, adding a good foreword too. 

Refer to the HOTQs - Were they helpful in crafting your essential question and sub-question? 

Yes. They provided another level to my questions and allowed me room to think about the answer. 

Two problems within my topic:
> Elon Musk's Neuralink project might be conducting bad science. What's the ethics behind it?
> How ethical is AI in healthcare?

Elon Musk's Neuralink corporation is important because it's a modern example of experimentation that raises questions about how ethical it is. They've been experimenting on animals thus far but are now ready to move on to human experimentation. Neuralink has already applied to the FDA for approval to start. It's a thin line they're walking on and with projects like these, public opinion matters a lot. Attempting to connect the human brain to a computer is something only tackled in sci-fi media and there's definitely going to be a lot of apprehension about technology like this. The first step before commercializing it is convincing the public that it's safe, much like alternating/direct currents back in the day. This problem affects everyone, if not now then in the future because there's no way this technology—if refined—isn't going to change the world. 
Washington Post article about why people believe the FDA should put bans on Neuralink.

AI in healthcare is a problem that narrows now ethics in experimentation to just the medical field. There are four main things that is ethically concerning about AI in healthcare—informed consent to use data, safety and transparency, algorithmic fairness and biases, and data privacy (Source ). If AI is ever implemented and used in high-risk scenarios, how do you ensure that it'd be 100% accurate? With human doctors, you can sue. But for a machine, it can just be passed off as a programming error, a one-in-a-million fluke. This problem will affect everyone, especially those associated with the medical field. AI can improve healthcare, but there are also concerns about how trustworthy a human life is in the hands of computer bytes because after all, a robot doesn't have the necessary human qualities to make moral decisions that depend on empathy and not logic.
Yale School of Medicine article on how AI will change the medical field. 

What would you describe as your biggest weakness in EMC right now? Biggest strength?

My biggest weakness is collaboration. I'm not sure how to go about it. I'm also not sure how to get any other sources besides online articles and websites. My biggest strength right now are the questions I can ask about ethics and the avenues I can go down. I loved learning about unethical experiments in the past but there's also a whole slew of things I can expand on with my topic of ethics in the modern world. 

From your previous 2 identified problems, select the one that is your biggest “Need to Know”:

My biggest need to know is what has already been discovered in the field of "mind uploading" and what moral concerns have been raised because of them. This is important to set a baseline for what's already being done. Moral concerns are especially prevalent for the introduction of AI in healthcare and obviously, with the more specific Elon Musk topic I had discussed in my previous journal post. A HOTQ version of this could be: "Can you elaborate on the reason why ethics is a hamper in advancing revolutionary technology?" 

Evidence: (attached on the left)

Annotate: (made on the document attached on the left)

Conclusion - What I'm doing over Christmas break: Staying home studying and applying for college while my family goes skiing 

Link to document 

First Article

An Integrated Brain-Machine Interface Platform With Thousands of Channels
Elon Musk
Published Oct 31, 2019

Summary:

This article goes into depth about Neuralink’s first steps toward a scalable high-bandwidth brain-machine interface system. Neuralink has the goal of restoring sensory and motor function as well as treating neurological disorders. Clinical brain-machine interfaces have not yet been widely adopted because of modest channel counts which limited their potential. Channel counts usually refer to how many channels of audio, MIDI, and virtual instruments are being used by a specific project (Sweetwater). Neuralink has 3072 channels, well beyond any previous brain-machine interface systems. Neuralink has a unique approach to brain-machine interfaces which increases its packaging density and scalability in a clinically relevant package. They are able to attach 3072 electrodes per array distributed across 96 threads, all of which are individually inserted into the brain with micron precision to avoid surface vasculature and target specific brain regions.
It's known that you can use microelectrodes for recording action potentials but the problem comes when you try to translate that for long-scale recordings. This requires a system with physical and chemical properties that provide high biocompatibility, safety, and longevity. This device would also be able to remove/install with a practical surgical approach and high-density, low-power electronics to ultimately facilitate fully implanted wireless operation. Most devices for long-term neural recording are arrays of electrodes made from rigid metals or semiconductors which are useful for penetrating the brain, the stiffness limits the number of neurons that can be accessed and read. Neuralink's approach is to use thin, flexible multielectrode polymer probes which would offer greater biocompatibility. The downside to this is that it can't access the brain as easily as its rigid counterpart so its insertion must be facilitated by stiffeners. Then the thin film-like fibers will be independently inserted across multiple brain regions with the help of robots. 
Each thin film array is composed of a “thread” area that features electrodes and a sensor where the thin film interfaces with custom chips that enable signal amplification and acquisition. Neuralink has developed a robotic insertion approach for inserting these flexible probes. Their method allows rapid and reliable insertion of large numbers of polymer probes. Speed and precision are needed to avoid puncturing the vasculature area of the brain.
Neuralink has developed an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) to serial the digitized outputs coming from the electrodes. From there, an Ethernet-connected base station converts the data streams from these systems into multicast 10 GB Ethernet user datagram protocol packets (Musk).
Neuralink has implanted both Systems A and B in male Long-Evans rats. System A reads 1344 of 1536 channels simultaneously while System B can record from all 3072 channels simultaneously. Digitized broadband signals were processed in real-time to identify action potentials (a.k.a. spikes) using an online detection algorithm. This is to test the quality of the recording of widespread neural activity distributed across multiple brain regions and cortical layers. 

Database Used: PubMed

Search Terms: "NeuralLink", "Elon"

Discussion (Paraphrased): 

We have described a brain-machine interface with a high-channel count and single-spike resolution. It is based on flexible polymer probes, a robotic insertion system, and custom low-power electronics. This system serves two main purposes: It is a research platform for use in rodents and serves as a prototype for future human clinical implants. The system [systems a and b] described in this article is important for performance assessments and crucial for the development of signal processing and decoding algorithms. The final clinical devices will be derived from this system. Modulating neural activity will be an important part of future clinical brain-machine interfaces to provide a sense of touch and neuroprosthetic movement control. 

Relevance: This article is directly associated with what I want to research for my midterm SDAs. The field of study Neuralink and this associated article belongs to includes neuroengineering, neuroprosthetics, and neuromodulation. If I want to debate the ethics of this neural modulator, I'll have to understand how it works first. 

Key Terms: Channel Counts, Vasculature, Interface

Citations: Musk E; Neuralink. An Integrated Brain-Machine Interface Platform With Thousands of Channels. J Med Internet Res. 2019 Oct 31;21(10):e16194. doi: 10.2196/16194. PMID: 31642810; PMCID: PMC6914248.

Sweetwater. “Channel Count.” InSync, 24 Dec. 2014, https://www.sweetwater.com/insync/channel-count/#:~:text=Usually%20this%20refers%20to%20how,a%20mixer%20or%20audio%20interface.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7351257/

Research Question: What are the ethical concerns behind Elon Musk's  Neuralink technology?

Overarching Questions: What ethical problems will we face in the future? To what extent might Neuralink's pros outweigh the cons? How far can we go with technology in medicine before a line is drawn? Is technology moving too fast?

Second Article

The Ethical and Responsible Development and Application of Advanced Brain Machine Interfaces
Andrew David Maynard, Marissa Scragg

Purpose: To address if advanced brain-machine interface technology is to improve lives without causing unanticipated and potentially serious harm while guiding its developers on how to proceed if they are to ensure the value of the technology is fully realized, without overstepping ethical lines.

About the Authors:

[Andrew David Maynard] <Link to Offical Profile at ASU>

• He is a professor at Arizona State University School for the Future if Innovation in Society

• Is the founder of the ASU Future of Being Human community

• He was the Science Advisor to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies

• His work is currently focused on what it will mean to be human in a technologically advanced future

• He was Chief Science Advisor for the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and informed national and global initiatives addressing the responsible development of nanotechnology.

• Since 2008 he has worked closely with the World Economic Forum in a number of capacities and contributed to the WEF/Scientific American annual list of Top Ten Emerging Technologies.

[Marissa Scragg] <Link to Offical Profile at ASU>

• Went to graduate school at Arizona State University 

• Assistant director at the J. Orin Edson Entrepreneurship + Innovation Institute

• Holds a BA in English secondary education and Psychology from Illinois State University

• Helped create the Training and Development Resources (TDR) for new entrepreneurs

Useful Notes:

• Cochlear implants in 1957 was a pivotal point in brain machine interface development 

> First example of such tech

• Users have limited control over implanted brain machine interfaces and the data they produce, leading to challenges with data, device security, privacy, and use autonomy

• Technology needs to improve lives without causing unanticipated and potentially serious harm

• The organization behind this article is developing a framework called "risk innovation" to support pragmatic decisions around ethical innovation within the constraints enterprises face

• It's very difficult to get from a good idea to a successful development

• People have begun to realize that to have long-term value in their technology innovations depends on ethical and socially responsible development and an ability to anticipate and take early action to avoid potential issues

• "Risk innovation" is an approach that states "successful and responsible development of novel technologies cannot be predicated on treating future risks the same way as past risks...will continue to me applicable. Rather, it encourages innovative ways of thinking about and acting on risk, which reveal novel pathways to successful and socially responsible technology innovation"

• At it's core, it's the concept of approaching risk as a threat to value

• Value is defined by the context of the product and the stakeholders/communities potentially impacted by it

• This enables innovators and others to consider the question "risk to whom or what?"

• Risk innovation can provide a starting point for thinking through challenges and opportunities and raise questions about the ethics

• Grouping orphan risks together can provide entrepreneurs with insights on how to focus their resources to protect stakeholder value

Notes: This article provides an example of how tech companies can avoid being put under scrutiny over the ethics of their work/product and how to style their business in a way that will be beneficial to their success in the long run. Useful article for my SDA if I choose to come up with a proposed solution to ethical concerns in the face of a constantly advancing mechanical world. 

Flaws: This is a near-perfect article for the topic I'm researching. The only flaw I can think of is that it only provides an example and vision of how to solve ethical concerns with technology and tech-based businesses in the future. Nor does it exactly relate to Neuralink but that can be overlooked

Vocab: Watershed, anticipatory governance, agile governance, orphan risks, black swan events

Search terms: Neuralink, ethical concerns, neurotechnology, Elon Musk

hawking
Citations:

Maynard AD, Scragg M. The Ethical and Responsible Development and Application of Advanced Brain Machine Interfaces. J Med Internet Res. 2019 Oct 31;21(10):e16321. doi: 10.2196/16321. PMID: 31674917; PMCID: PMC7351257.

“Andrew D. Maynard.” Wikipedia, 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_D._Maynard. Accessed 19 January 2023.

Third Article

Neuralink and Beyond: Challenges of Creating an Enhanced Human

[WIP]

Research

Prior to this assignment, have you used databases? Have you read scholarly articles?

Yes to both, for various English classes. 

 Explain how reading scholarly articles differed from reading other research-based texts?

There's a lot of specific jargon that I have to search up on my own. Scholarly articles are also much more organized, so on that front, it makes reading easier. 

 Did being limited to only scholarly articles help or hinder your: 

It definitely hindered my progress which by that I mean reading and understanding scholarly articles took much longer than normal articles. It also took more time to find a good one I could use. It helped in terms of curiosity as experiments and other articles were directly linked within the text, meaning I could just click on the embedded text to read on. It definitely strengthened my research skills as it was a challenge to tackle all the jargon. 

Describe your process for searching and finding database articles.  What worked for you?  

I used PubMed and since the topic I'm researching is directly related to a researcher--Elon Musk--it was very easy for me to find related articles. I would just search up Musk's name or/and the name of the company--Elon Musk.   

What did you learn from the experience? 

I learned more about how research articles are structured. I also learned more about a subject that I previously had no knowledge of--Neuralink and brain-machine interfaces. 

Is there something about reading scholarly articles that you found particularly interesting?

How orderly they're structured. That was the best part about reading them. Also how you can go down a rabbit hole by clicking on endless embedded links. 

SDA

What was the most challenging part about this particular SDA?

As stated before, it was all the scientific terms that this topic came with. Scholarly articles are written with the assumption that their readers are already intimate with the subject. Since I wasn't, it took a lot of googling to understand some of the more technical aspects.   

 Did the essential question you started with at the beginning of January get answered in this SDA? 

Yes. I asked about the ethics of Elon Musk's Neuralink and found the details of what the issue is, why is it a concern, and how to somewhat fix it. 

How do you feel as though you met your goal(s)? 

I feel like I've gotten better at structuring my research and finding topics to research that interest me. Writing scripts I feel was also something that I'd gotten better at. I rewrote and changed around the one for this SDA a few times before I was happy with it. 

Which of the 5Cs is your strongest? Weakest? How do you know? 5Cs - communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, curiosity 

Strongest? Probably critical thinking and curiosity due to the amount of information and unknown mechanical terms I had to shift through and condense into a single script. Collaboration is still something I'm not sure how to tackle. I only have a few people I'm familiar with in EMC and even fewer people I see regularly during a school day. 

How will you use what you’ve learned from this midterm in the next month of research?

I can bring with me information on how ethical problems are treated in the science world to next month. For next month I'm thinking of researching ethical issues on animal experimentation in the lab so there's no direct overlap. 

EMC

What have you been proudest of during this midterm and the past few weeks?

Probably how well I was able to paraphrase everything that I researched. Picking out the important parts of each article and how to translate all the jargon was especially difficult. 

 What could we, your coordinators, be doing differently to ensure your success and development in this class?

I'm not sure. I think you're doing fine. 

March Essential Question: What is the process of creating an animal meant for laboratory use?

Essential Question: What are the specifics behind creating an animal meant for laboratory use?

> I have emailed all three candidates from the last journal. I have not yet received a reply but have sent a follow-up email today. 

> I plan on using Anchor to edit and construct my podcast. 

>I've listened to a few Crime Junkie episodes in the past and I listen to some podcasts made by a few influencers that I enjoy. I'll use those as "mentor-casts". 

Interview with Tanner 

Interview Reflection

Task defined: I definitely designed my podcast around the rubric given. I feel that they were helpful in helping me structure the interview and podcast. The timeline was very reasonable.

Purpose: I would've never thought about asking a professional in this field if it weren't for this assignment. It gave me a more modern look on ethics that I would've otherwise had trouble getting.
The most difficult part of this assignment was deciding what parts of the interview to edit out and slimming down the podcast to be between 10-15 minutes long. However, I also feel that it was the most awarding as it made me recognize the most critical parts of the interview and prioritize which information was the most important. It was fun in a way as well.
If I had the chance to interview someone else, I would've chosen better questions to ask. I feel like I could've asked more about the nitty-gritty parts of the guidelines producers of genetically modified models have to follow.
Having that one-on-one interaction was more fun than just simply doing research on the web about the topic. I would come up with questions from the interviewee's answers and could bounce off of them. 

Podcasting: I felt like podcasting worked just fine for this assignment. I wish I had a better mic though, I felt like the audio quality could've been better.
In my opinion, a podcast is definitely the easiest way to incorporate an interview. If I were to do another interview, I would make it into another podcast. 

Spring break? Nothing much, just studying.    

Symposium Speech Draft

Intro to subject matter & why?

Over the last few months, I’ve been researching the ethics behind scientific research--or the line where the justifiable crosses over to the unacceptable. Oxford Dictionary defines ethics as “moral principles that govern a person's behavior or the conducting of an activity”. Why worry about ethics? Well from a modern perspective, technology has advanced faster in the last century than in the entire 200,000 years of humanity. Science is a powerful force for change in modern society. Naturally, with each new invention comes a new set of rules and regulations. With the discovery of nuclear power came the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, and with the advancement of the internet came cyber law. All technology catered toward humanity’s benefits need to consider ethics in its development. It’s not just for a clear conscience--adhering to ethical norms also promotes the goals behind research and establishes universal standards that will enforce the reliability of research results. Ethics is opinionated and is influenced by circumstances that differ in each situation that asks for it. Ethics is the age-old question of the trolly problem and the skeptic behind innovative, self-driving cars. 

Thesis

Ethics satisfy basic human needs, promote credibility, and will be more important than ever in the future as our society is developing into one where common people are becoming increasingly reliant and entwined with technology in every field from medicine to digital yet becoming more and more distant from them. A majority of people can't tell you how 5G works, yet are convinced it'll bring more harm than good. Vaccines started with one bad rep and with how quickly misinformation spreads, those without a clear understanding of them grew more and more paranoid. 

Symposium Speech Draft

Body Paragraphs

Over the course of my research, I reached out to a scientist working with one of the hotspots of science ethics--using animals as part of research. I interviewed Dr. Karunakaran, a senior application scientist who is involved in the process of developing genetically modified modes--specifically rodents. In talking to him, I’ve come to realize that based on the number of regulations and accommodations alone, ethics are just as important to the scientists in the lab as they are to the people out of the streets. Lab animals serve a crucial role in the steps it takes to produce vital medicines and treatments for human conditions. They are necessary for the development of medicine and technology that will eventually benefit human society. 

Ethics in science have multiple different meanings. It’s not just standards that address the use of human and animal subjects in research, it’s also standards that address the methods of experiment design, data analysis, and reporting.  

We live in an era where there’s a disparity between science and people. Especially in America. It became especially apparent in the recent COVID-19 pandemic, where it was revealed just how deep the longstanding distrust of the government and the medical field ran. Many accredit the beginning of vaccine doubt to Andrew Wakefield’s infamous article in the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet. His article linked the MMR vaccine to autism. The MMR is a combined vaccine given to children around 9 to 12 months of age, offering prevention against measles, mumps, and rubella. The article has since been proven false and removed from the paper. Wakefield’s medical license was also removed by the authorities for his critically flawed research and “callous disregard” for the children in his care. This is an iconic example of scientific misconduct and is, by all definitions, unethical. 

That's just the most infamous one. There are millions of articles online all claiming their scientific credibility, quoting researchers from acclaimed universities around the world. Besides the unethical nature of publishing groundless facts you see as fake news, the topic of ethics is also a concern that will carry on well into the future. Another chunk of time I spent researching ethics in science was spent doing some digging into Elon Musk's Neurolink project.  The company's mission is to build devices and invent new technologies that could expand the horizons of human capability. They are developing brain-computer interfaces that have the ability to connect the human brain to digital computers. In its final form, it would be able to give mobility back to the paralyzed, sight back to the clinically blind, and freedom to those who have never had the chance to know it. Concerns arose when Neurolink devices were declared finished with animal testing and were ready to move on to human testing. A lawsuit had been filed for the "apparent egregious violations of the Animal Welfare Act related to the treatment of monkeys used in invasive brain experiments...[by Neurolink]." In an article published by Vox, since 2018, the company has tested on and killed at least 1,500 animals. The ethical concerns Neurolink raises will undoubtedly have to be addressed before it becomes mainstream. Showing again the importance of ethics in scientific research for the development of any kind of product to be released to the public. 

Symposium Speech Draft

Introduction 

Hello everyone and thank you for coming out tonight. My name is Kathleen Guo and throughout the course of my senior year, I’ve been researching the topic of ethics in science research. It’s impossible to tell when and when the first concept of ethics began. The concept of a moral scale emerged from the Greek Sophists of the fifth century BCE, a robust theory of ethics was proposed in Ancient China by "Kongzi"—better known in the Western world as Confucius—in around 551 BCE, and a code of ethics is recorded in the old testament. Ethics satisfy basic human needs, promote credibility, and will be more important than ever in the future as our society is developing into one where common people are becoming increasingly reliant and entwined with technology in every field from medicine to digital yet becoming more and more distant from them.

Conclusion
Ethics is the key to building a bridge between the sciences and the citizenry again. Quality, widespread, accurate information can make or break a company, a medication, a future. It is not only a fundamental aspect of respect for the customers that will consume your product, but it’s also standards to be a respected and well-recieved scientist, or engineer, or anything where you need to experiment with something that’s scarcely if ever done before. It sets guidelines for the future, a good example. The spotlight on Neurolink is a result of it exploring the unexplored, pushing the boundaries of science and medical devices. Thus it’s malpractice sets the standard that this kind of experimentation and technology is dangerous and cannot be trusted. Vaccines got pushed into the spotlight because of necessity during the pandemic, thus old articles were brought up, unethical in it’s nature of sharing flawed information.