Whistleblowing

In the United States, legal protections vary according to the subject matter of the whistleblowing, and sometimes the state in which the case arises. In the United Kingdom, the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 provides a framework of legal protection for individuals who disclose information so as to expose malpractice and matters of similar concern. Canadian protection for whistleblowers is notoriously poor by English-speaking countries' standards.

Thomas Alured Faunce is an Associate Professor jointly in the College of Law and Medical School at the Australian National University (ANU) at Canberra Australia. His main area of research has been health technology law and policy and in 2009 he was awarded an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship to study nanotechnology and global public health. Faunce has promoted the idea that whistleblowing, particularly in healthcare, needs to be recognised as having a stronger academic foundation in virtue ethics.

New Brunswick is the only Canadian Jurisdiction Providing Specific Protection for Whistle blowers.

Dr Shiv Chopra wrote the book, “Corrupt to the Core”. He claims that even as head of the UN Commission on Vaccine standardization he never did find a single double blind study showing either vaccine safety or vaccine effectiveness.

Double-blind describes an especially stringent way of conducting an experiment, usually on human subjects, in an attempt to eliminate subjective bias on the part of both experimental subjects and the experimenters.

In most cases, double-blind experiments are held to achieve a higher standard of scientific rigor.

In a double-blind experiment, neither the individuals nor the researchers know who belongs to the control group and the experimental group. Only after all the data have been recorded (and in some cases, analysed) do the researchers learn which individuals are which.

Performing an experiment in double-blind fashion is a way to lessen the influence of the prejudices and unintentional physical cues on the results (the placebo effect, observer bias, and experimenter's bias). Random assignment of the subject to the experimental or control group is a critical part of double-blind research design. The key that identifies the subjects and which group they belonged to is kept by a third party and not given to the researchers until the study is over.

Double-blind methods can be applied to any experimental situation where there is the possibility that the results will be affected by conscious or unconscious bias on the part of the experimenter. Computer-controlled experiments are sometimes also erroneously referred to as double-blind experiments, since software may not cause the type of direct bias between researcher and subject. Development of surveys presented to subjects through computers shows that bias can easily be built into the process. Voting systems are also examples where bias can easily be constructed into an apparently simple machine based system. In analogy to the human researcher described above, the part of the software that provides interaction with the human is presented to the subject as the blinded researcher, while the part of the software that defines the key is the third party.

An example is the ABX test, where the human subject has to identify an unknown stimulus X as being either A or B.

Which shape would you call "Kiki" and which "Booba?" is such example.

Of course neither shape has an actual name but the suggestion they do leads to a decision on the part of the person to whom that question is asked.

Some Canadian Whistleblowers http://fairwhistleblower.ca/wbers/canadian_wbs.html

There’d be no need for retaliation if people simply did “What’s right?”

“There has to be a better way!”