Ethics – Day 1

Ethics – Day 1

Marie VendettuoliJuly 1, 2011

Exercise

1. Indicate any group with which you self-identify using a tick mark

2. Write one (1) new group that isn’t already on the board that you self-identify with. Mark it with a tick

3. Add ticks to the groups that others post, if applicable

Discussion

How many groups did you identify with?

Are all of these by choice?

Are you happy that you are part of all these groups?

Are there any groups you would not like to be part of?

Discussion

How many people do you think self-identify with the same set of groups?

How many groups exist with more than one member?

Do all members agree? Always?

Diversity

What does diversity mean to you?

Yoon & Souza (2009) Different Visual Cognitive Styles, Different Problem-Solving Styles? Proceedings of the International Association of Society of Design Research.http://www.siskiyous.edu/class/guid1/

Even though a campus may become more diverse in terms of the numbers of underrepresented groups present, the level of engagement can still be inconsequential if those representing different viewpoints are not encouraged and supported to express them. . . . And if the wariness about discomfort is stronger than the desire to hear different viewpoints because engaging difference is uncomfortable, then the quest for diversity is hollow, no matter what the demographic statistics on a campus reflect.

Ronald D. Liebowitz, President, Middlebury College

Diversity

Salas, Goodwin and Burke (2008) Team effectiveness in complex organizations

Exercise: Rate each on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree)

1. World hunger is a serious problem that needs attention.

2. Our country needs to address the growing number of homeless.

3. The right to vote is one of the most valuable rights of American citizens.

4. Our government should spend less money on nuclear weapons and more on helping citizens better their lives.

Carkenord, D. M., & Bullington, J. (1993). Bringing cognitive dissonance to the classroom. Teaching of Psychology, 20, 41-43.

1. Do you personally do anything to lessen world hunger (e.g., donate money or food or write your representative)?

2. Do you personally do anything to help the homeless (e.g., volunteer at a homeless shelter or donate money)?

3. Did you vote in the last election for which you were eligible?

4. Do you personally convey your feelings to the government (e.g., by writing your representative or by participating in protests/marches)?

Exercise: Indicate ‘yes’ if you perform a behavior on a regular basis


In how many cases did your answers on the first slide agree with the second?

How does it feel when answers align? Don’t align? Are those feelings positive or negative?

• How will you resolve any negative feelings?


Cognitive dissonance: uncomfortable feeling of holding conflicting ideas simultaneously

Theory of Cognitive Dissonance: People are motivated to reduce dissonance

Change …. Or …

belief justify

attitude blame

action deny


How does your response to cognitive dissonance affect team psychological safety?

Repulsion and diversity post

• Do you think that the author intended for her argument to appear weak and contradictory?

• Do you think that the author intended to insult her people who have positive relationships with their pets? Why or why not?

• How could the argument be reframed from a perspective of cognitive dissonance? Can your own responses be reframed after considering the Theory of Cognitive Dissonance?

When different priorities exist, how do you know who is right?

Guidelines for ethical decision-making

Winer, E. Ethics in Engineering Design

Find a balance between all stakeholders. How easy is this?

Case Study: The Ford Pinto• Late 1960’s, demand for subcompact cars was rising

“The Pinto was not to weigh an ounce over 2,000 poundsand not cost a cent over $2,000”. - L. Iacocca

Crash test revealed a serious defect in the gas tank

What to do?


Image: wikipedia

http://youtu.be/rcNeorjXMrE

Case Study: The Ford Pinto

Other pressures --• Design timeline was accelerated from 43 months to about 25

months• The company culture did not want engineers warranting

safety as a concern• “Safety doesn’t sell” - L. Iacocca


Case Study: The Ford PintoWhen deciding whether to fix the problem, Ford

performed a cost-benefit analysis.Number of vehicles affected 12.5 million

Modification cost per vehicle $11.00

Total cost to fix: $137.5 million

Number of Deaths 180

Settlement per death $200,000.00

Number of Serious Injury 180

Settlement per serious injury $67,000.00

Number of burned out vehicles 2100

Settlement per vehicle $700

Total cost to not fix: $49.53 millionWiner, E. Ethics in Engineering Design

Case Study: The Ford Pinto• There was a solution that would have cost $5.08 per vehicle. It

was not implemented.

• A California jury awarded $128 million from an accident involving a Pinto (1979)

• Ford Motor Company became the first American corporation indicted and prosecuted on criminal homicide charges (1979)

• Ford Crown Victoria was found to have a similar fuel tank problem (2002)


Case Study: The Ford Pinto

Was Ford wrong to do a cost benefit analysis? Why or why not?

Other opinions(technical / non-tech)

What happens when one stakeholder’s perspective is weighed more heavily?

Case Study: Edward Wegman


In 2005, Wegman was asked by Congress to investigate the validity of the “hockey stick” graph, which presents research findings supporting global warming

Image: Wikipedia

Case Study: Edward WegmanOverall, our committee believes that Mann’s assessments that the

decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.

… tree ring proxies are typically calibrated to remove low frequency variations. The cycle of Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age that was widely recognized in 1990 has disappeared from the MBH98/99 analyses, thus making possible the hottest decade/hottest year claim. However, the methodology of MBH98/99 suppresses this low frequency information. The paucity of data in the more remote past makes the hottest-in-a-millennium claims essentially unverifiable

Wegman, Scott, Said AD HOC COMMITTEE REPORT ON THE HOCKEY STICK’ GLOBAL CLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/WegmanReport.pdf

A cross section of most temperate forest trees will show an alternation of lighter and darker bands, each of which is usually continuous around the tree circumference. These are seasonal growth increments produced by meristematic tissues in the tree's cambium. When view in detail (Fig. 10.1), it is clear that they are made up of sequences of large, thin-walled cells (earlywood) and more densely packed, thick-walled cells (latewood). Collectively, each couplet of earlywood and latewood comprises an annual growth increment, more commonly called a tree ring. The mean width of a ring in any one tree is a function of many variables, including the tree species, tree age, availability of stored food within the tree and of important nutrients in the soil, and a whole complex of climatic factors (sunshine, precipitation, temperature, wind speed, humidity, and their distribution throughout the year). The problem facing dendroclimatologists is to extract whatever climatic signal is available in the tree ring data and to distinguish from the background noise.

A cross section of a temperate forest tree shows variation of lighter and darker bands that are usually continuous around the circumference of the tree. These bands are the so-called tree rings and are due to seasonal effects. Each tree ring is composed of large thin-walled cells called early wood and smaller more densely packed thick walled cells called late wood. The average width of a tree ring is a function of many variables including the tree species, tree age, stored carbohydrates in the tree, nutrients in the soil, and climatic factors including sunlight, precipitation, temperature, wind speed, humidity, and even carbon dioxide availability in the atmosphere. Obviously there are many confounding factors so the problem is to extract the temperature signal and to distinguish the temperature signal from the noise caused by the many confounding factors.

Original text: Wegman Report (p12):

Case Study: Edward Wegman• tasked a Ph.D. student, Denise Reeves, to prepare the boilerplate. Reeves was no

expert: her knowledge of social networks came from having taken a short course on the topic. Reeves writes the boilerplate "within a few days" and Wegman writes "of course, I took that to be her original work.”

• Wegman gave this boilerplate to a second student, Walid Sharabati, who included it in his Ph.D. dissertation "with only minor amendments.”

• Sharabati was a coauthor of the Computational Statistics and Data Analysis article. He took the material he'd copied from Reeves's report and stuck it in to the CSDA article


• Wegman, Scott and Said. Ad Hoc Committee Report on the ‘Hockey Stick’ Global Climate Reconstruction Congressional Report

• Said, Wegman, Sharabati, and Rigsby. Social networks of author–coauthor relationships Computational Statistics and Data Analysis

• Said, Wegman. Color Theory and Design WIREs Computational Statistics

• Said, Sharabati, Rezazad. Dissertations

What is plagiarism?

How does knowing the literature reduce plagiarism?

Describe the role of each party in the Wegman case. What could they have done differently?

Describe the purpose of peer review. What choices did reviewers make that contributed to the severity of the Wegman case?

How likely is this scenario to repeat? Individual elements?

What does it mean to be a ‘good citizen’ of the academic community?

Exercise: Alpha Motor Company

Describe the ethical dilemma. Was it handled well? Why or why not?

What are the options for future action? Consequences of each option?

Case Study: Elizabeth Goodwin

Research hypothesis: gene laf-1 in C. elegans affects sexual determination by encoding small RNA

Problem: Preliminary research showed inconclusive results and weak correlation.

Case Study: Elizabeth GoodwinGrant: 2R01GM051836-13• Falsified Figures 5A and 5B by reusing figures from two of her earlier published

papers and falsely labeling them to claim results that had not been achieved in her laboratory.

• Falsified Figure 7B by reusing a figure from one of her published papers and both relabeling it to claim she had detected the STAR-2 protein rather than the TRA-l protein actually detected and modifying the image in the application to disguise its origin.

• Falsified Figure 8C by using a figure produced by one of her students and relabeled it to show that RNAi treatment of C. elegans led to increased expression of the TRA-2 protein when this result had not been obtained by the student.

• Falsified the table on Page 20 of the application showing phenotypic frequencies of worms expressing star-2 (ok483) mutants by significantly overstating the level of aberrant phenotypes and fabricating certain categories of phenotypes not seen by the student conducting the research.

http://writedit.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/findings-of-scientific-misconduct-9/

Case Study: Elizabeth GoodwinGrant: 1R01GM073183-01• Falsified Figure 5 because she used the same two lanes in both Figure

5 and Figure 7, although they were flipped horizontally in one of the figures to disguise their reuse. In Figure 7, the lanes illustrated an effect on laf-1 during developmental stages of C. elegans, and in Figure 5, the same lanes purportedly illustrated an effect on laf-1 noncoding RNA. A witness testified that the result in Figure 5 had not been observed, while that in Figure 7 had, indicating that the claims for Figure 5 were falsified.

• Falsified Figure 8 by reusing photographs prepared by a student that identified the location of rRas-l expression in adult worms and claiming instead that the images illustrated the location of laf-1 mRNA. The images had been enlarged and cropped to disguise their location.

http://ori.dhhs.gov/misconduct/cases/Goodwin_Elizabeth.shtml


• Graduate Student saw incorrect figures and claims of experiments not performed on a grant application

• Grad students as a group decided to ask Dr Goodwin for clarification

• Notified department chair• Formal investigation, UW-M• Investigation, FBI


• Fine: $500• Restitution

$50,000 Dept of Health and Human Services$50,000 University of Wisconsin, Madison Scholarship Programs

• Exclusion from contracting or subcontracting with U.S. Government for three years

• Exclusion from peer review, board or advisory committee associated with U.S. Public Health Services

• Two years probation• Resigned


Graduate Student, Chantal Ly• Completed 7 years of PhD at time of

misconduct• Was told that her work was not usable and

had to find a new research topic• Left graduate school


• 2 students quit graduate school, found lab jobs

• 1 student transferred to another school• 1 student switched to a law program• 2 are finishing PhDs at UW-M


Grad students still at UW-M:• Jacqueline Baca, in early stage of degree, was

transferred to another lab• Amy Hubert, an advanced student defended 2

years later– Dissertation based on research she did after

disagreeing with Goodwin


Describe various actions to take upon discovery of falsification. What are the consequences?

What are the pressures that whistleblowers face? Is it better to keep quiet or have high standards?

What is falsification of data? How much editing is okay?

Privacy

How do you manage your online presence? Why is this important?

In our daily lives

• Music/movie downloading – is it okay? Why or why not?

• What is net neutrality? Why is this an important issue?

Social Justice

• Why should we care? What does ‘social justice’ mean in terms of HCI?

• What is the digital divide? How does new technology encourage or reduce this gap?

• What does it mean to design for accessibility? When is it too expensive to do so?

Homeworkdue Thurs, July 7

Research and respond to the following two cases:1. Mattel Toy Corp.2. Space Shuttle ChallengerFor each, provide:

(a) your opinion of whether it was handled correctly or not correctly (b) defend your position with data (c) identify what should have been done (supported with data)

Find a case that seems interesting at: http://ori.dhhs.gov/misconduct/cases/(a) summarize the case(b) provide your opinion of whether it was handled correctly or not correctly(c) respond to two other interns’ case descriptions

Watch and respond to this video: http://youtu.be/vtdJ4uUTGdoNote: this CBC News clip is contains language that has been bleeped out; this occurs in the last 9 seconds of the video only.

Categorize posts as ‘Ethics’

http://ori.dhhs.gov/misconduct/cases/

http://ori.dhhs.gov/misconduct/cases/

http://youtu.be/vtdJ4uUTGdo



Ethics – Day 1

Documents

Transcript of Ethics – Day 1