Ethics Advancement and Internet Sites
摘要
The Internet has become such an omnipresent service, which in the view of many, it has already upgraded from slave to master, and quite a tyrannical one. Whatever the feelings, scientific information would not flow worldwide without the tool, in such unlimited amounts. It is currently estimated that 4.7 billion people use its electronic resources (60% of the planet population). Just the four big names in the field (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook) store a total of 1200 petabytes of files, each petabyte corresponding to 1015 bytes. If it corresponded to text only, that would represent over 670 billion pages. The Medline database is a more pertinent paradigm as it deals with indexed scientific journals. Other publications such as books, theses, congress proceedings, non-indexed journals, court minutes, or press reports are, with few exceptions, uncovered. It still contains close to 30 million articles, or over 300 million pages. Given that a human being rarely reads more than 700 pages/week (a reasonably thick book), that would signal over eight thousand millennia to peruse such files, if all of them were available online. These ruminations could look rather aimless and out of focus, yet they point toward the incontrovertible need for careful curation of the key internet addresses, so that the interested researcher will minimize wasted time and likely find helpful material. That’s the objective of the chapter, listing a choice of useful sites as well as general internet resources, nearly all of them cost-free.