On June 10 of this year, three construction workers died when a section of scaffolding collapsed at a construction site near the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. Because the accident resulted in deaths, personnel from the U. S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration began an investigation shortly thereafter. While it is the normal policy of OSHA not to divulge information on an investigation that is incomplete, leaks do occur. If you keep reading, you will be the beneficiary of one such leak. But first, some details about the accident.
Photographs published at the time showed that the scaffolding was a cantilevered box frame that extended several yards on either side of an elevator-type mechanism that allowed the whole thing to move up and down the side of the high-rise apartment complex under construction. Photos of units on the manufacturer's website show that the scaffolding can extend as far as 25 or 30 feet either side of the mast that supports it. The workers using the scaffolding walk along the frame to do whatever operations the construction job requires.
There's no particular mechanical-engineering magic to cantilevering. Like a branch of a tree that sticks out sideways, the box frame's unbalanced weight has to be supported by the central elevator. In particular, the bolts that keep the top of the box frame attached to the elevator unit are under tremendous tension, since the whole weight of the frame tends to pull the bolts away from the elevator. If these bolts aren't strong enough and fail, the scaffolding will fall away like a branch cracking off a dead tree. That is apparently what happened on June 10.
The following information is what the newspeople call an unconfirmed report from an anonymous source. But I believe it to be reliable. According to the source, the bolts used in the scaffolding that failed were not the required Grade 5 type. If you have ever bought bolts at a hardware store, you may have noticed little patterns of lines on the hexagonal bolt head. These are not just random forging marks. They indicate the quality of steel in the bolt, and in particular, the maximum stress the bolt can withstand. Grade 5 bolts have three embossed lines in a "Y" pattern on the bolt head, indicating that they can take up to 120,000 pounds per square inch of stress under certain defined conditions. Cheaper bolts with no head markings are available. For example, Grade 1 bolts have only about half the stress capacity of Grade 5.
Assuming my source is correct, how did the wrong bolts get there? To answer that question requires that we move from the realm of science to the realm of human behavior. The problem could lie anywhere from the manufacturer of the scaffolding, to the general contractor for the site, to the subcontractor who installed the scaffolding, to the subcontractor's employees who put it together, to someone else who might have lost the Grade 5 bolts and substituted others without knowing the danger it would cause. Presumably the OSHA investigators are also working on this angle of the problem, which will require extensive interviews and inquiries which may never reach a satisfactory conclusion. But this shows the vital importance of apparently minor details, such as three little lines on a bolt head, to the safety of construction workers who probably had nothing to do with the assembly of the scaffolding.
A subsequent news article in the Austin American-Statesman pointed out that Texas has one of the worst records in the U. S. for construction-related fatalities. Pay rates are low, some construction employers opt out of workers' compensation insurance, and since OSHA primarily investigates complaints lodged by workers, the workers have to be their own safety inspectors. Since many speak only Spanish and some are undocumented, their reluctance to undertake this role is understandable. Simply identifying the next of kin of the workers killed in this accident was a challenge to authorities, since their families lived in small towns in Mexico.
How can accidents like this be prevented in the future?
This incident shows how vital the "soft" technologies of training, inspection, and good management can be to safety improvements. Even if we give the benefit of the doubt to the contractor and subcontractors by assuming the use of the cheaper bolts was accidental, the accident reveals a grave deficiency in the way supplies are inventoried and assembly procedures are carried out. No human-operated process can be made 100% foolproof, but if certain bolts have to be Grade 5 in order for a scaffold to be assembled safely, there must be a way to make sure that only Grade 5 bolts go into the system. Simple things like matching spray-paint colors or other wordless guidelines can go far to prevent tragedies like this, especially where non-English speaking employees are involved.
Such measures come too late for the three workers who died when the less expensive bolts apparently failed. But I hope as more details emerge, the lessons of how to avoid this kind of accident won't be lost on those who are in a position to make sure their employees and subcontractors have a safe working environment.
Sources: My source for the bolt information is anonymous for the simple reason that I do not know his name. Published information on the scaffolding collapse can be found on the Austin American-Statesman website at http://www.statesman.com/search/content/news/stories/local/2009/06/17/0617construction.html. Information on the grades of bolts available can be found at http://www.engineershandbook.com/Tables/boltgrades.htm.
Monday, July 06, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
If We Fixed Cars In the U. S. the Way We Fix People
You would typically get auto insurance (including insurance for major repairs) as an employment benefit, and you'd never see the money. If you lost your job, you'd either have to buy very expensive insurance on the open market, or just hope your car didn't break down before you got another job.
If you had insurance, all you'd have to pay at the repair shop would be a small copayment of twenty or thirty dollars. The insurance would cover the rest.
Many people with a car problem would first have to take their car to their primary care mechanic (PCM), no matter what was wrong. If it was the brakes, your PCM would have to write you a referral to a brake specialist before you could get your brakes fixed. Of course, you could just pay for the repair yourself, but that would cost many thousands of dollars.
You could do minor repairs yourself, but for something major like a new starter, you couldn't just walk into the parts store and buy a new one. You'd first have to get a handwritten note from your PCM. Then you'd take the note to a special parts store that has college-trained salespeople licensed to sell the higher grades of auto parts, and buy the part from one of them.
Every auto repair shop would have huge filing cabinets with multicolored file tabs sticking out of them, one file for each car. All the important records on your car would be written by hand.
Minor repairs would be made in small shops, but major repairs would take place in a few giant facilities in each metropolitan area, where hundreds of cars would be collected together for repairs. Getting an estimate for repairs at one of these mega-shops would be next to impossible. Instead, you just take your car in, wait till they fix it, and hope your insurance will pay for it.
Reading a repair bill would be an exercise in mystification. Even professional accountants couldn't explain why the repair shop would charge $674.92 for replacing a U-joint, the auto insurance would pay $407.17, and you would end up owing $103.37.
Mechanics would check for the most unlikely problems even when the issue was a simple one. You might take your car in because the wiper blades needed replacing, and the mechanic might do a stress test on the windshield and charge the insurance company $400.00 for it. But you could rest assured that your windshield wasn't about to shatter spontaneously, which happens maybe once in every 30 million passenger miles.
Auto mechanics would have to go to school for six to eight years after their BS degree and pay back hundreds of thousands of dollars in school loans before getting their license to fix cars. But they would earn almost as much as lawyers do, if they could keep ahead of their own soaring insurance premiums. If you didn't have a government-sanctioned auto repair license and you tried to fix anybody else's car, you could go to jail.
Gasoline additives would be a multi-billion-dollar business, funded with a combination of government support and private money. Universities would have special auto-repair branches and auto-repair research departments to develop new additives and repair techniques.
Mechanics could be hauled into court and made to pay millions for faulty repairs. Mechanical malpractice law would be a lucrative branch of the legal business.
Eventually, things would get so screwed up that the U. S. government would wade into the mess and take over large portions of it, promising to manage things better than the former private owners did. Of course, that's exactly what has happened with the U. S. auto industry already—so maybe it's time to wind up this little fantasy. . . .
Health care in the U. S. is a complex system that can be viewed as a technology. And it is fraught inside and out with ethical implications, so I think the current debate over what should be done about health care is fair game for an engineering ethics blog, broadly defined.
Of course, people aren't cars, and the analogy between car repair and health care breaks down if you examine it seriously. But sometimes casting a familiar situation in a new light will reveal problems in a way that more people can understand. For example, it is a fact that most people don't know they pay an average of $400 a month for health care—either as a deduction from their paycheck, or a contribution from their employer, or typically both. If you had to write a health-insurance check for $400 from your own pocket every month (as some self-employed people do), that single change would bring the reality of health-care costs home in a way that no number of TV ads will do. Most people do pay for their car repairs out of their own pocket. If we had the direct price information that would let us pay attention to the quality and price of health care in the same way we evaluate an auto mechanic's services, it would do a lot to reduce needless health-care expenses.
Eliminating the employer tax deduction for health-care costs, if done the right way, will be a step in this direction. But not if it is done just as a way to raise revenue and make a government-funded public insurance option more attractive.
As the debate develops, it seems to be coming down to a single question: Who can exert more effective discipline on the health-services sector: a set of government bureaucracies that will ration and regulate the system, or an enlightened public which is allowed to see the costs of health care directly and make their own judgments as to which insurance plan and caregiver is best for them? The latter option still has a role for government, possibly as the provider of last resort for insurance or services for those who can't afford them, and as a check on rampantly malicious behavior on the part of powerful institutions.
Either there will be major changes in the way health care is delivered in this country by later this fall, or there won't be. Sometimes no change is better than a bad change. After all, we could be worse off. Surveys indicate that most people are reasonably contented with their present state of health care. The trick will be to help the groups who are under-served without worsening the status of those who like what they have already—and not do something else awful like run the government into bankruptcy in the meantime.
If you had insurance, all you'd have to pay at the repair shop would be a small copayment of twenty or thirty dollars. The insurance would cover the rest.
Many people with a car problem would first have to take their car to their primary care mechanic (PCM), no matter what was wrong. If it was the brakes, your PCM would have to write you a referral to a brake specialist before you could get your brakes fixed. Of course, you could just pay for the repair yourself, but that would cost many thousands of dollars.
You could do minor repairs yourself, but for something major like a new starter, you couldn't just walk into the parts store and buy a new one. You'd first have to get a handwritten note from your PCM. Then you'd take the note to a special parts store that has college-trained salespeople licensed to sell the higher grades of auto parts, and buy the part from one of them.
Every auto repair shop would have huge filing cabinets with multicolored file tabs sticking out of them, one file for each car. All the important records on your car would be written by hand.
Minor repairs would be made in small shops, but major repairs would take place in a few giant facilities in each metropolitan area, where hundreds of cars would be collected together for repairs. Getting an estimate for repairs at one of these mega-shops would be next to impossible. Instead, you just take your car in, wait till they fix it, and hope your insurance will pay for it.
Reading a repair bill would be an exercise in mystification. Even professional accountants couldn't explain why the repair shop would charge $674.92 for replacing a U-joint, the auto insurance would pay $407.17, and you would end up owing $103.37.
Mechanics would check for the most unlikely problems even when the issue was a simple one. You might take your car in because the wiper blades needed replacing, and the mechanic might do a stress test on the windshield and charge the insurance company $400.00 for it. But you could rest assured that your windshield wasn't about to shatter spontaneously, which happens maybe once in every 30 million passenger miles.
Auto mechanics would have to go to school for six to eight years after their BS degree and pay back hundreds of thousands of dollars in school loans before getting their license to fix cars. But they would earn almost as much as lawyers do, if they could keep ahead of their own soaring insurance premiums. If you didn't have a government-sanctioned auto repair license and you tried to fix anybody else's car, you could go to jail.
Gasoline additives would be a multi-billion-dollar business, funded with a combination of government support and private money. Universities would have special auto-repair branches and auto-repair research departments to develop new additives and repair techniques.
Mechanics could be hauled into court and made to pay millions for faulty repairs. Mechanical malpractice law would be a lucrative branch of the legal business.
Eventually, things would get so screwed up that the U. S. government would wade into the mess and take over large portions of it, promising to manage things better than the former private owners did. Of course, that's exactly what has happened with the U. S. auto industry already—so maybe it's time to wind up this little fantasy. . . .
Health care in the U. S. is a complex system that can be viewed as a technology. And it is fraught inside and out with ethical implications, so I think the current debate over what should be done about health care is fair game for an engineering ethics blog, broadly defined.
Of course, people aren't cars, and the analogy between car repair and health care breaks down if you examine it seriously. But sometimes casting a familiar situation in a new light will reveal problems in a way that more people can understand. For example, it is a fact that most people don't know they pay an average of $400 a month for health care—either as a deduction from their paycheck, or a contribution from their employer, or typically both. If you had to write a health-insurance check for $400 from your own pocket every month (as some self-employed people do), that single change would bring the reality of health-care costs home in a way that no number of TV ads will do. Most people do pay for their car repairs out of their own pocket. If we had the direct price information that would let us pay attention to the quality and price of health care in the same way we evaluate an auto mechanic's services, it would do a lot to reduce needless health-care expenses.
Eliminating the employer tax deduction for health-care costs, if done the right way, will be a step in this direction. But not if it is done just as a way to raise revenue and make a government-funded public insurance option more attractive.
As the debate develops, it seems to be coming down to a single question: Who can exert more effective discipline on the health-services sector: a set of government bureaucracies that will ration and regulate the system, or an enlightened public which is allowed to see the costs of health care directly and make their own judgments as to which insurance plan and caregiver is best for them? The latter option still has a role for government, possibly as the provider of last resort for insurance or services for those who can't afford them, and as a check on rampantly malicious behavior on the part of powerful institutions.
Either there will be major changes in the way health care is delivered in this country by later this fall, or there won't be. Sometimes no change is better than a bad change. After all, we could be worse off. Surveys indicate that most people are reasonably contented with their present state of health care. The trick will be to help the groups who are under-served without worsening the status of those who like what they have already—and not do something else awful like run the government into bankruptcy in the meantime.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Should You Worry About Oil Sands?
Gasoline prices have been going up in recent weeks, and one reason they haven't gone up more is oil sands in Canada. As Michael Levi, writing in the current issue of Slate, points out, not too long ago Canada took over from Saudi Arabia as the country supplying the most imported oil to the U. S. And a big factor in Canada's oil exports is their production of oil sands.
It turns out that under a large chunk of northeastern Alberta, Canada, the Athabasca oil sands deposit harbors the oil-sands equivalent of the rest of the world's conventional oil reserves combined. What are oil sands? Sometimes referred to as "bitumen," the hydrocarbons in oil sands are tar-like substances that are too thick to flow out of the formations they are found in, as conventional petroleum does. Instead, you have to dig the stuff out with conventional open-pit mining techniques and then process it to make what is called synthetic crude oil. From that point on, the stuff can be treated more or less like regular petroleum.
Because of the added complexity of extraction, oil sands have only recently been exploited commercially on a large scale, and they still form only a fraction of Canada's total oil output. (Venezuela also has a large oil-sands deposit, but the government of Venezuela is not as favorably disposed toward the U. S. as the Canadian government is, to say the least.) Oil sands have received some black environmental marks, both for the relatively large amount of greenhouse gases that result from producing a barrel of oil-sands petroleum compared to a barrel of conventional oil, and for the problems that used water and mine tailings cause.
So what is the right thing to do about oil sands? Do the environmental issues dominate and make us swear off them altogether? Or should we just arrange some very long-term contracts with Canadian produces and quit worrying about the shrinking oil reserves in the rest of the world?
As Levi points out, neither of these extreme alternatives is wise. While the production end of oil-sands operations does make more carbon dioxide, you still end up burning oil at the consumption end, so economies or conservation elsewhere in the system can make up for the additional burden at the production end. Pollution of water and destruction of land due to poor open-pit mining practices are concerns, but if I know our Canadian friends, they are on top of those issues and have found ways of dealing with them.
All the same, it would be the height of complacency to say along with the rich fool in the New Testament parable, "Soul, you have oil sands saved up for many years. Drive, drink, and be merry." I have said before that for reasons of national security, the U. S. ought to devise a long-term plan to move gradually and even profitably toward increased energy independence. With the global oil market the way it is, namely much like a pickup basketball game with no referee, we are taking chances with our economy by relying too much on unstable parts of the world for our energy supplies. Although some weird things go on in Canada, as a whole its government is a lot more reliable than, say, Iran's, so on balance it's a good thing that we are getting more oil from Canada than we get from Saudi Arabia or other Middle Eastern countries. However, the best outcome would be to move, deliberately and without serious damage to the economy, toward a situation where fossil fuels are gradually phased out in preference to an electricity-based energy economy, perhaps powered largely by nuclear plants. But that's just my opinion.
Nuclear has the dual advantage of not emitting any greenhouse gases and of using fuel that is not primarily found in politically unstable parts of the world. Nuclear plants use uranium, and some types can even produce more fuel than they consume. And it turns out that more than half of all the uranium produced in the world is mined in two countries: Canada and Australia, both of which we get along with pretty well.
The difficulty, as always, is how to implement such a plan in a democracy where short-term considerations tend to dominate political discussions. Somehow we can always agree to keep troops here or there for another few years, but we can't agree on a plan to reduce our dependence on oil so much that we wouldn't need to play global policeman so much. The new administration has made efforts in this direction, but with so many other irons in the fire, energy independence is going to take a back seat (to mix a few metaphors).
In the meantime, we can be grateful to our Canadian friends for developing oil sands in an environmentally responsible way. For the next few years we will need to buy oil from somewhere outside the U. S., and Canada looks like a nice place to get it from.
Sources: Michael Levi's article "Living on Canada's Oil" can be found in Slate at http://www.slate.com/id/2220878/. I also used material from the Wikipedia articles on oil sands and uranium.
It turns out that under a large chunk of northeastern Alberta, Canada, the Athabasca oil sands deposit harbors the oil-sands equivalent of the rest of the world's conventional oil reserves combined. What are oil sands? Sometimes referred to as "bitumen," the hydrocarbons in oil sands are tar-like substances that are too thick to flow out of the formations they are found in, as conventional petroleum does. Instead, you have to dig the stuff out with conventional open-pit mining techniques and then process it to make what is called synthetic crude oil. From that point on, the stuff can be treated more or less like regular petroleum.
Because of the added complexity of extraction, oil sands have only recently been exploited commercially on a large scale, and they still form only a fraction of Canada's total oil output. (Venezuela also has a large oil-sands deposit, but the government of Venezuela is not as favorably disposed toward the U. S. as the Canadian government is, to say the least.) Oil sands have received some black environmental marks, both for the relatively large amount of greenhouse gases that result from producing a barrel of oil-sands petroleum compared to a barrel of conventional oil, and for the problems that used water and mine tailings cause.
So what is the right thing to do about oil sands? Do the environmental issues dominate and make us swear off them altogether? Or should we just arrange some very long-term contracts with Canadian produces and quit worrying about the shrinking oil reserves in the rest of the world?
As Levi points out, neither of these extreme alternatives is wise. While the production end of oil-sands operations does make more carbon dioxide, you still end up burning oil at the consumption end, so economies or conservation elsewhere in the system can make up for the additional burden at the production end. Pollution of water and destruction of land due to poor open-pit mining practices are concerns, but if I know our Canadian friends, they are on top of those issues and have found ways of dealing with them.
All the same, it would be the height of complacency to say along with the rich fool in the New Testament parable, "Soul, you have oil sands saved up for many years. Drive, drink, and be merry." I have said before that for reasons of national security, the U. S. ought to devise a long-term plan to move gradually and even profitably toward increased energy independence. With the global oil market the way it is, namely much like a pickup basketball game with no referee, we are taking chances with our economy by relying too much on unstable parts of the world for our energy supplies. Although some weird things go on in Canada, as a whole its government is a lot more reliable than, say, Iran's, so on balance it's a good thing that we are getting more oil from Canada than we get from Saudi Arabia or other Middle Eastern countries. However, the best outcome would be to move, deliberately and without serious damage to the economy, toward a situation where fossil fuels are gradually phased out in preference to an electricity-based energy economy, perhaps powered largely by nuclear plants. But that's just my opinion.
Nuclear has the dual advantage of not emitting any greenhouse gases and of using fuel that is not primarily found in politically unstable parts of the world. Nuclear plants use uranium, and some types can even produce more fuel than they consume. And it turns out that more than half of all the uranium produced in the world is mined in two countries: Canada and Australia, both of which we get along with pretty well.
The difficulty, as always, is how to implement such a plan in a democracy where short-term considerations tend to dominate political discussions. Somehow we can always agree to keep troops here or there for another few years, but we can't agree on a plan to reduce our dependence on oil so much that we wouldn't need to play global policeman so much. The new administration has made efforts in this direction, but with so many other irons in the fire, energy independence is going to take a back seat (to mix a few metaphors).
In the meantime, we can be grateful to our Canadian friends for developing oil sands in an environmentally responsible way. For the next few years we will need to buy oil from somewhere outside the U. S., and Canada looks like a nice place to get it from.
Sources: Michael Levi's article "Living on Canada's Oil" can be found in Slate at http://www.slate.com/id/2220878/. I also used material from the Wikipedia articles on oil sands and uranium.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Health Care as Systems Engineering
This summer promises a great debate over health care in the U. S. It is pretty sure to be great in the sense of historic or significant; what is not so clear is whether the outcome will be great either in the sense of good and positive, or in the ironic sense ("Great! That's just what I needed!"). One perspective that may help us judge the quality of the debate and the outcome is to view health care through the lens of systems engineering. But since health care deals with the most intimate aspects of human life, ethical considerations also show up at all levels, from individual decision-making to nationwide policy.
It is well known that the U. S. pays more per capita for health care than most other industrialized nations, but by many measures we are not that much more healthy than the other countries are. In other words, we're not getting what we're paying for, if we think that spending more health dollars per person will make everybody that much healthier. Viewed as a system with inputs (health care money and resources) and outputs (people treated by the system), our system does not work as efficiently as it could.
Over the last several weeks I have read of certain parts of the country where the health outcomes per Medicare dollar (which is an easy statistic to obtain) are much better than the national average (e. g. Green Bay, Wisconsin, where President Obama recently spoke on the issue), and other areas where they are much worse (e. g. McAllen, Texas, which a recent New Yorker article identified as in the second most expensive county in the country, measured in Medicare-dollar-per-patient terms). One reason for these identifications appears to be the idea that if we can just figure out what the good places are doing right, we can replicate these successes and do away with whatever bad or evil mischief is going on in the expensive places. How likely is that to succeed?
Atul Gawande, the author of the New Yorker piece, thinks the root problem in McAllen lies in the disconnected, revenue-driven nature of the medical culture there. He says many doctors view their practice as a way of making money, and if you want to practice medicine that way there are few barriers to stop you. By contrast, he cites places like the Mayo Clinic, where doctors on salary receive no incentives for ordering extra tests, and participate in meetings designed to improve patient care systematically by coordinating it to eliminate needless and duplicative tests, among other things. He admits, though, that discouraging the former behavior and encouraging the latter will be a long, tricky process.
I think a key element in the solution, if one can be found, lies in a careful study of incentives and disincentives. Although people can't always be relied upon to do the rational thing, most people will make choices they perceive to be in their own best interest. Of course, perception can be distorted through propaganda and so on, but especially where pocketbook matters are concerned, most people make fairly optimal decisions if given the opportunity to do so. One trouble with health care as it exists today is the same problem I have noticed with the college-textbook market: the people who pay for the goods or services (students or patients) are not the people making the decisions (professors or doctors). Although one doctor quoted by Gawande says allowing patients more of an economic stake in medical decision-making is like relying on "the sheep to negotiate with the wolves," it doesn't have to be that one-sided. If people were in economic control of their own health-care expenditures rather than having to rely on their employer (if they have a job in the first place), I think some way could be developed so that the Mayo-Clinic-type coordinated operations and their lower cost per patient could be packaged to be more appealing in an open market, compared to the multiple-stop-shopping of places like McAllen. The comparison is a little unfair, but think of shopping at Wal-Mart versus going to a third-world village market with its street of shoemakers and street of roasted-goat vendors. The streets full of private vendors are colorful and make for great vacation photos, but if all you want is a pair of shoes you'll go to Wal-Mart.
Of course, efficiency can be carried too far, and if we let even the Mayo Clinics coalesce into one giant monopolistic medical provider, the outcome is likely to be bad. But an appropriate level of market openness in which consumers could see economically efficient, good care for what it is, and choose it, would avoid the coercion and potential for debilitating bureaucracy that so many proposals involve.
Healing is a deeply ethical activity. The oldest known professional code of ethics—the Hippocratic Oath—deals with the ethics of medicine, and many religious leaders such as Jesus made healing an important part of their ministry. The problems Gawande and others have identified when healers start to put money over patient care merely demonstrate that the system, whatever form it takes, must have professionals in it whose philosophy or faith makes healing an end in itself, not primarily a means to wealth. Whatever happens to U. S. medical care after this summer's debate, I hope the designers do not lose sight of the fact that, like doctors themselves, they cannot fix the problem the way you would fix a balky lawnmower engine. All they can do is try to create an environment for people of good will to do even better than they are doing now.
Sources: Atul Gawande's article "The Cost Conundrum" appears in the June 1, 2009 issue of The New Yorker.
It is well known that the U. S. pays more per capita for health care than most other industrialized nations, but by many measures we are not that much more healthy than the other countries are. In other words, we're not getting what we're paying for, if we think that spending more health dollars per person will make everybody that much healthier. Viewed as a system with inputs (health care money and resources) and outputs (people treated by the system), our system does not work as efficiently as it could.
Over the last several weeks I have read of certain parts of the country where the health outcomes per Medicare dollar (which is an easy statistic to obtain) are much better than the national average (e. g. Green Bay, Wisconsin, where President Obama recently spoke on the issue), and other areas where they are much worse (e. g. McAllen, Texas, which a recent New Yorker article identified as in the second most expensive county in the country, measured in Medicare-dollar-per-patient terms). One reason for these identifications appears to be the idea that if we can just figure out what the good places are doing right, we can replicate these successes and do away with whatever bad or evil mischief is going on in the expensive places. How likely is that to succeed?
Atul Gawande, the author of the New Yorker piece, thinks the root problem in McAllen lies in the disconnected, revenue-driven nature of the medical culture there. He says many doctors view their practice as a way of making money, and if you want to practice medicine that way there are few barriers to stop you. By contrast, he cites places like the Mayo Clinic, where doctors on salary receive no incentives for ordering extra tests, and participate in meetings designed to improve patient care systematically by coordinating it to eliminate needless and duplicative tests, among other things. He admits, though, that discouraging the former behavior and encouraging the latter will be a long, tricky process.
I think a key element in the solution, if one can be found, lies in a careful study of incentives and disincentives. Although people can't always be relied upon to do the rational thing, most people will make choices they perceive to be in their own best interest. Of course, perception can be distorted through propaganda and so on, but especially where pocketbook matters are concerned, most people make fairly optimal decisions if given the opportunity to do so. One trouble with health care as it exists today is the same problem I have noticed with the college-textbook market: the people who pay for the goods or services (students or patients) are not the people making the decisions (professors or doctors). Although one doctor quoted by Gawande says allowing patients more of an economic stake in medical decision-making is like relying on "the sheep to negotiate with the wolves," it doesn't have to be that one-sided. If people were in economic control of their own health-care expenditures rather than having to rely on their employer (if they have a job in the first place), I think some way could be developed so that the Mayo-Clinic-type coordinated operations and their lower cost per patient could be packaged to be more appealing in an open market, compared to the multiple-stop-shopping of places like McAllen. The comparison is a little unfair, but think of shopping at Wal-Mart versus going to a third-world village market with its street of shoemakers and street of roasted-goat vendors. The streets full of private vendors are colorful and make for great vacation photos, but if all you want is a pair of shoes you'll go to Wal-Mart.
Of course, efficiency can be carried too far, and if we let even the Mayo Clinics coalesce into one giant monopolistic medical provider, the outcome is likely to be bad. But an appropriate level of market openness in which consumers could see economically efficient, good care for what it is, and choose it, would avoid the coercion and potential for debilitating bureaucracy that so many proposals involve.
Healing is a deeply ethical activity. The oldest known professional code of ethics—the Hippocratic Oath—deals with the ethics of medicine, and many religious leaders such as Jesus made healing an important part of their ministry. The problems Gawande and others have identified when healers start to put money over patient care merely demonstrate that the system, whatever form it takes, must have professionals in it whose philosophy or faith makes healing an end in itself, not primarily a means to wealth. Whatever happens to U. S. medical care after this summer's debate, I hope the designers do not lose sight of the fact that, like doctors themselves, they cannot fix the problem the way you would fix a balky lawnmower engine. All they can do is try to create an environment for people of good will to do even better than they are doing now.
Sources: Atul Gawande's article "The Cost Conundrum" appears in the June 1, 2009 issue of The New Yorker.
Monday, June 08, 2009
The Air France Crash: More Questions Than Answers
The crash of Air France flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on the last day of May is bad news for a number of reasons. The deaths of all 228 people on board make it the worst air disaster since 2001. And while advancing technology has enabled investigators to recover a limited amount of flight data through a remote data link that was operating at the time of the crash, the deep waters where the plane went down may prevent the recovery of the "black box" containing voice and detailed data recordings.
What do we know today, eight days after the crash? There were thunderstorms in the area that night, and early speculation centered on the possibility of a lightning strike to the plane. Although lightning hits planes hundreds of times a year, relatively little damage usually occurs and most modern aircraft can be considered essentially (though not totally) lightning-proof. Evidently, there was a satellite or other radio-mediated data link which was continually feeding certain types of flight data to the ground. Examination of this data shows that the flight speeds during the last minute or so of the flight became "incoherent," followed by a loss of cabin pressure and failure of electrical systems. While this information will be helpful in deciphering what went wrong, it apparently lacks the detail that flight data recorders can preserve. One can imagine a day when such radio links will take the place of, or at least duplicate, the capabilities of flight data recorders so that mechanical recovery of the black box will no longer be so urgent. The black box is designed to emit a sonar signal for 30 days after the crash, so the underwater recovery crews gearing up to find it are operating under tremendous time pressure, not to mention the water pressure at depths exceeding 20,000 feet. The box may never be found.
Recent news reports have focused on the fact that the plane's Pitot tube, the device that measures airspeed, had not yet been replaced with a newer model as the plane's manufacturer Airbus recommended. A Pitot tube is a small tube that faces directly into the airstream. The difference in pressure between the air inside the tube (which is blocked off and registers what is called "stagnation pressure") and the ambient or "static" air pressure, is an indication of airspeed, which is the most important kind of speed to know about when you are trying to fly a plane. These days, when most parts of a flight except for landing and takeoff are under automatic control, the airspeed data from the Pitot tube forms part of an elaborate computer-controlled feedback loop that maintains constant speed, altitude, and other flight characteristics.
The old saw about computers regarding "garbage in, garbage out" goes double when a feedback loop is involved. If enough ice forms on a Pitot tube to plug up the entrance, the indicated airspeed goes way below what is actually the case, and either the automatic pilot guns the engines inappropriately or the real pilots may take incorrect action based on faulty airspeed data. This is exactly what happened to an Argentine DC-9 flight in 1999, which resulted in a spectacular crash, killing all aboard.
Although I have no independent information on this, I hope that modern aircraft such as the Air France A330 that crashed have more than one means of measuring speed: either a second Pitot tube (which of course would be just as likely to ice up as the first one), or other means such as radar altimeter and speed measurements or GPS-based airspeed indicators. But whether the autopilot takes all these other inputs into consideration, and whether the real pilots do too, I don't know. Clearly, if the Pitot tube was involved in this crash, the right thing to do in the circumstances wasn't done.
All flight-critical Pitot tubes have heaters to prevent icing, but evidently the one on Flight 447 was deficient or non-optimal in some way, or else Airbus wouldn't have recommended replacing it. Of course replacements can be recommended for all kinds of reasons, some of which have nothing to do with safety. All that will come out in the investigation report, which will take months or more to complete.
Despite this crash, the general trend in air safety has been a positive one. More people fly every year, and so the safety record per passenger mile is even better than the raw statistics on crashes would indicate. But this record can be maintained only through the painstaking work of investigators, engineers, regulators, inspectors, and the pilots and crews who actually do the work. Most of the time the system works well, and the silver lining in every accident is the fact that it carries with it potential answers to problems that need to be addressed to improve safety even further. I just hope they are able to recover the flight data recorders in order to develop a complete picture of what went wrong, and to teach us how similar situations can be avoided in the future.
We will revisit this accident when more information is available, and in the meantime, our sympathy is with the relatives and friends of those who lost loved ones in this tragedy.
Sources: I drew on reports from Fox News at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525117,00.html and an Associated Press report obtained from Yahoo News at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/brazil_plane, as well as the Wikipedia article "Pitot tube."
What do we know today, eight days after the crash? There were thunderstorms in the area that night, and early speculation centered on the possibility of a lightning strike to the plane. Although lightning hits planes hundreds of times a year, relatively little damage usually occurs and most modern aircraft can be considered essentially (though not totally) lightning-proof. Evidently, there was a satellite or other radio-mediated data link which was continually feeding certain types of flight data to the ground. Examination of this data shows that the flight speeds during the last minute or so of the flight became "incoherent," followed by a loss of cabin pressure and failure of electrical systems. While this information will be helpful in deciphering what went wrong, it apparently lacks the detail that flight data recorders can preserve. One can imagine a day when such radio links will take the place of, or at least duplicate, the capabilities of flight data recorders so that mechanical recovery of the black box will no longer be so urgent. The black box is designed to emit a sonar signal for 30 days after the crash, so the underwater recovery crews gearing up to find it are operating under tremendous time pressure, not to mention the water pressure at depths exceeding 20,000 feet. The box may never be found.
Recent news reports have focused on the fact that the plane's Pitot tube, the device that measures airspeed, had not yet been replaced with a newer model as the plane's manufacturer Airbus recommended. A Pitot tube is a small tube that faces directly into the airstream. The difference in pressure between the air inside the tube (which is blocked off and registers what is called "stagnation pressure") and the ambient or "static" air pressure, is an indication of airspeed, which is the most important kind of speed to know about when you are trying to fly a plane. These days, when most parts of a flight except for landing and takeoff are under automatic control, the airspeed data from the Pitot tube forms part of an elaborate computer-controlled feedback loop that maintains constant speed, altitude, and other flight characteristics.
The old saw about computers regarding "garbage in, garbage out" goes double when a feedback loop is involved. If enough ice forms on a Pitot tube to plug up the entrance, the indicated airspeed goes way below what is actually the case, and either the automatic pilot guns the engines inappropriately or the real pilots may take incorrect action based on faulty airspeed data. This is exactly what happened to an Argentine DC-9 flight in 1999, which resulted in a spectacular crash, killing all aboard.
Although I have no independent information on this, I hope that modern aircraft such as the Air France A330 that crashed have more than one means of measuring speed: either a second Pitot tube (which of course would be just as likely to ice up as the first one), or other means such as radar altimeter and speed measurements or GPS-based airspeed indicators. But whether the autopilot takes all these other inputs into consideration, and whether the real pilots do too, I don't know. Clearly, if the Pitot tube was involved in this crash, the right thing to do in the circumstances wasn't done.
All flight-critical Pitot tubes have heaters to prevent icing, but evidently the one on Flight 447 was deficient or non-optimal in some way, or else Airbus wouldn't have recommended replacing it. Of course replacements can be recommended for all kinds of reasons, some of which have nothing to do with safety. All that will come out in the investigation report, which will take months or more to complete.
Despite this crash, the general trend in air safety has been a positive one. More people fly every year, and so the safety record per passenger mile is even better than the raw statistics on crashes would indicate. But this record can be maintained only through the painstaking work of investigators, engineers, regulators, inspectors, and the pilots and crews who actually do the work. Most of the time the system works well, and the silver lining in every accident is the fact that it carries with it potential answers to problems that need to be addressed to improve safety even further. I just hope they are able to recover the flight data recorders in order to develop a complete picture of what went wrong, and to teach us how similar situations can be avoided in the future.
We will revisit this accident when more information is available, and in the meantime, our sympathy is with the relatives and friends of those who lost loved ones in this tragedy.
Sources: I drew on reports from Fox News at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525117,00.html and an Associated Press report obtained from Yahoo News at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/brazil_plane, as well as the Wikipedia article "Pitot tube."
Friday, May 29, 2009
Does the U. S. Need a Cyber Czar?
On Friday May 29, President Obama is scheduled to announce a plan to name a “cyber czar” whose responsibility will be to oversee computer security both in and outside the federal government. The term “czar” in Russian originally meant an emperor whose reign was maintained by the authority of God. Somehow I doubt that such overtones of meaning are intended by the PR people who put together these news releases and the members of the press who report them. But it is a good place to start asking whether the U. S. really needs such a czar for this increasingly important area of technology, and what the good and bad aspects of such an appointment might be.
From time to time we have discussed various cyberthreats in this blog, and so far, none of them have turned out to be the Armageddon of viruses or cyberattacks. The trend in recent years, however, is not reassuring. Back when email was a novelty engaged in by a few nerds and their friends, the worst motivation of those who wrote viruses or produced spamware was a kind of intellectual mischievousness: “Gee, can I really get away with this?” But eventually, people figured out there was serious money to be made, either quasi-legitimately via spamware advertising of kooky products, or illegally via shakedowns and blackmail threats (“If you don’t want your whole website to go down next Tuesday, leave $100,000 in unmarked bills in the trash can next to the entrance of the Kremlin tonight.”). And in the last year or two we’ve seen pretty definite evidence that nations are using cyberattacks as part of more conventional warfare, as when Russia evidently coordinated a cyberattack on Georgia’s government websites last August during its attack on contested territory between the two countries.
So the threats are real, no doubt about that. The question is, can we defend ourselves better against them if we have some centralized governmental authority taking some as-yet-undefined actions? That question has to be answered in the context of how things are done currently.
Like the Internet itself, the U. S. system (if you can call it that) of defense against cyberattacks consists of a not very organized, highly distributed network of specialty firms, companies who simply want to use the Internet legitimately without hindrance, and the various governmental entities who use computers, which is (I hope by now) all of them. Judging by various reports, the private firms seem to do a better job of security and upgrading, including defense against attacks, than the government does. But this may simply be an artifact of accessibility. Reporters can file requests under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a wide variety of government records, but there is no such privilege with regard to the internal documents of private firms. So if (to take an example) Bank of America makes a big goof in purchasing vulnerable ATM machines that can be programmed to spurt out piles of twenty-dollar bills to a waiting kid on his tricycle, as long as they catch the problem and fix it before it hits the news wires, no one is the wiser. But let that happen in a government agency, and reporters can get all the documentation on it they want, usually.
That doesn’t mean the government is necessarily less competent in dealing with cyberattacks. One danger I can foresee is that of burdensome regulations in what is historically a very unregulated industry. If Microsoft had to prove to some government bureaucrat that its new software upgrade is bulletproof against cyberattacks before it could be released, we’d all still be running OS/2 on our PCs (except for those of us using Macs). But the advance reports indicate that the new cyber czar won’t have even the authority of a cabinet official, nor Presidential access of the highest level.
So if the new czar can’t do much, why should we bother? One aspect of the situation appears to pertain to public education. I suppose if the President talks about what you as an individual can do to improve computer security, a certain number of people will pay more attention, but it does seem like it might be a needless expenditure of political capital. On the other hand, if we are made aware of the cost of cyberattacks in terms of centrally analyzed statistics publicized by the government, that might motivate some changes.
This problem resembles environmental issues in that it is essentially a global, not strictly a national matter. The Internet knows no boundaries, and in fact many if not most cyberattacks on U. S. institutions come from abroad. That means a solution, or more likely a range of solutions, will have to have international aspects to it: international agreements, international coordination, and so on. And for this the federal government is probably the best choice.
In sum, let’s wait and see how czar-like the new czar acts. There is no need to worry that the designee will take over the universe, even the cyber-universe. And there is a lot of room for improvement both in the public and the private sector. But government can do only so much, and it will be interesting to see whether the person chosen makes a positive difference, or disappears after the next federal initiative grabs all the headlines.
Sources: An Associated Press article describing the results of a Presidential study of cyber security and related issues can be found on the Business Week website at http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D98FEMQO1.htm. My blog “War Comes to the Internet” was posted on Sept. 8, 2008.
From time to time we have discussed various cyberthreats in this blog, and so far, none of them have turned out to be the Armageddon of viruses or cyberattacks. The trend in recent years, however, is not reassuring. Back when email was a novelty engaged in by a few nerds and their friends, the worst motivation of those who wrote viruses or produced spamware was a kind of intellectual mischievousness: “Gee, can I really get away with this?” But eventually, people figured out there was serious money to be made, either quasi-legitimately via spamware advertising of kooky products, or illegally via shakedowns and blackmail threats (“If you don’t want your whole website to go down next Tuesday, leave $100,000 in unmarked bills in the trash can next to the entrance of the Kremlin tonight.”). And in the last year or two we’ve seen pretty definite evidence that nations are using cyberattacks as part of more conventional warfare, as when Russia evidently coordinated a cyberattack on Georgia’s government websites last August during its attack on contested territory between the two countries.
So the threats are real, no doubt about that. The question is, can we defend ourselves better against them if we have some centralized governmental authority taking some as-yet-undefined actions? That question has to be answered in the context of how things are done currently.
Like the Internet itself, the U. S. system (if you can call it that) of defense against cyberattacks consists of a not very organized, highly distributed network of specialty firms, companies who simply want to use the Internet legitimately without hindrance, and the various governmental entities who use computers, which is (I hope by now) all of them. Judging by various reports, the private firms seem to do a better job of security and upgrading, including defense against attacks, than the government does. But this may simply be an artifact of accessibility. Reporters can file requests under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a wide variety of government records, but there is no such privilege with regard to the internal documents of private firms. So if (to take an example) Bank of America makes a big goof in purchasing vulnerable ATM machines that can be programmed to spurt out piles of twenty-dollar bills to a waiting kid on his tricycle, as long as they catch the problem and fix it before it hits the news wires, no one is the wiser. But let that happen in a government agency, and reporters can get all the documentation on it they want, usually.
That doesn’t mean the government is necessarily less competent in dealing with cyberattacks. One danger I can foresee is that of burdensome regulations in what is historically a very unregulated industry. If Microsoft had to prove to some government bureaucrat that its new software upgrade is bulletproof against cyberattacks before it could be released, we’d all still be running OS/2 on our PCs (except for those of us using Macs). But the advance reports indicate that the new cyber czar won’t have even the authority of a cabinet official, nor Presidential access of the highest level.
So if the new czar can’t do much, why should we bother? One aspect of the situation appears to pertain to public education. I suppose if the President talks about what you as an individual can do to improve computer security, a certain number of people will pay more attention, but it does seem like it might be a needless expenditure of political capital. On the other hand, if we are made aware of the cost of cyberattacks in terms of centrally analyzed statistics publicized by the government, that might motivate some changes.
This problem resembles environmental issues in that it is essentially a global, not strictly a national matter. The Internet knows no boundaries, and in fact many if not most cyberattacks on U. S. institutions come from abroad. That means a solution, or more likely a range of solutions, will have to have international aspects to it: international agreements, international coordination, and so on. And for this the federal government is probably the best choice.
In sum, let’s wait and see how czar-like the new czar acts. There is no need to worry that the designee will take over the universe, even the cyber-universe. And there is a lot of room for improvement both in the public and the private sector. But government can do only so much, and it will be interesting to see whether the person chosen makes a positive difference, or disappears after the next federal initiative grabs all the headlines.
Sources: An Associated Press article describing the results of a Presidential study of cyber security and related issues can be found on the Business Week website at http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D98FEMQO1.htm. My blog “War Comes to the Internet” was posted on Sept. 8, 2008.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Ethics Education: How Can You Tell?
One reason I started this blog was to use it in a short (four-week) engineering ethics segment of a freshman course for engineering and technology majors. When you teach something, you obviously expect the lessons to make some kind of positive change in your students. You hope that they will be able to do or understand something that they couldn’t do, or didn’t understand, before you went to work on them. With technical subjects such as circuit theory or computer programming, it’s fairly easy to tell whether the students learn what you want them to learn. That’s what exams are for. But how can you tell whether ethics instruction has achieved its goal, which is to turn students into ethical engineers?
In an ideal world of infinite educational-evaluation resources, you would do a longitudinal study of two groups of students: one group who took engineering ethics, and a second matched cohort of students who took the same courses as the test group except for the engineering ethics parts. You would then follow every student, doing in-depth interviews and gathering third-party information about the ethical aspects of their work over their entire careers. And at the end of this process (which would take thirty-five years or so), you could write a paper saying we know for sure that X number of students who took Y ethics module thirty-five years ago were Z per cent more ethical than the control group of students who didn’t. Only, of course, Z might turn out to be negative. All it takes is one determined crook in your test sample to throw everything off.
And that ties in to something I learned last week. It’s not only universities that try to improve their students’ ethics with educational modules; companies and governments try it too. In particular, every employee of the state of Illinois has to take a brief online ethics module periodically, up to and including (I presume) the governor. You may have heard the name Rod Blagojevich in the news over the last six months or so. He is the (now ex-) governor of Illinois who was impeached for trying to sell the Senate seat vacated by now-President Obama. This was hardly ethical behavior under any standard, yet Blagojevich was following a tradition honored by numerous Illinois governors, of engaging in indictable behavior. If anyone was trying to evaluate the ethics education of Illinois employees and included the governor in their sample, they are going to have a lot of trouble showing that it helps.
But wait. Should one or two spectacularly bad apples spoil the barrel? That is, you are always going to have what are called “outliers.” If you are familiar with a Gaussian distribution, often called a “bell curve,” you know that it looks like a hill with gently sloping sides. If one of these distributions represents some measure of “ethicalness” (an ugly word, but I can’t think of a better one), then the peak of the hill represents the bulk of students who have what you might call typical or average ethics. Mother Teresa would be in the right-hand tail of the distribution, way off to one end, and the ex-governor would be somewhere in the left-hand tail.
You can make the argument that even though ethics education doesn’t prevent the occasional Blagojevich, if it moves the whole distribution to the right it makes the average person more ethical, which is worth something. But then you get into the utilitarian bind of evaluating the worth of ethics to society in general. Is it better that most people in a profession are a little more ethical even though some are still news-worthily unethical, or would it be better if somehow we could prevent only the worst ethical lapses and leave the rest alone? And all this assumes that there is some fail-safe way to evaluate ethics education other than the impossibly expensive and lengthy longitudinal study I described above, which is by no means clear.
All education involves some degree of faith, which is the certain knowledge of things we don’t see yet. Even if my students pass exams on digital logic or electromagnetics, I can’t say for sure what they’re going to do with those pieces of knowledge and ability. I can only trust that they will remember them and use them somehow in a good way. Experience has shown that the vast majority of our students do just that, although I can’t instantly pull up tons of documentation to prove it.
In the last several years, whenever the National Science Foundation funds programs to augment and encourage engineering ethics education, it insists that the outcomes of these programs be evaluated by some independent means. Their argument is that taxpayer money is being used for these programs, and the agency has to go back to Congress and show that the money did some good. Although the motive is laudable, I have questions about the method. The same person who told me about the online ethics course in Illinois is an expert in evaluating ethics education, which he admits is not a perfect process either. The preferred way is to administer a survey in which students answer questions about hypothetical ethical situations. As I say, it’s better than nothing. But it seems to me that the process of evaluating ethics education mainly to generate some paperwork to send back to Washington is motivated by the same spirit that causes the government of the state of Illinois to insist that all its employees take the online ethics module. In both cases, the ostensible motive seems to differ from the real motive.
Ostensibly, one is doing something that will genuinely improve (or measure) the ethics of the target population. But in reality, both the online ethics module and the ethics evaluation process serve mainly to shift responsibility for any possible bad outcomes. If another Rod Blagojevich shows up, Illinois government administrators can say, “Well, we did all we could—we made him take that ethics module.” And if despite all efforts, the next couple of decades turn up a few engineers who, despite taking NSF-evaluated engineering ethics education, go ahead and do something unethical anyway, the National Science Foundation can turn to Congress and say, “Well, we did all we could—we evaluated those programs with the best available evaluation instruments.”
Am I saying we should chuck all attempts at evaluation, or even ethics education? By no means. But let’s be realistic about what we’re trying to do, and not pretend that it’s capable of more than it can really do, which is simply to give us some reason to hope, but not to be certain, that we are making people more ethical.
Sources: Michael Loui, professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told me about these matters. I would point you to some information about Rod Blagojevich, but I think he’s already had more attention than he deserves. And my definition of faith is taken from the New Testament book of Hebrews, 11:1.
In an ideal world of infinite educational-evaluation resources, you would do a longitudinal study of two groups of students: one group who took engineering ethics, and a second matched cohort of students who took the same courses as the test group except for the engineering ethics parts. You would then follow every student, doing in-depth interviews and gathering third-party information about the ethical aspects of their work over their entire careers. And at the end of this process (which would take thirty-five years or so), you could write a paper saying we know for sure that X number of students who took Y ethics module thirty-five years ago were Z per cent more ethical than the control group of students who didn’t. Only, of course, Z might turn out to be negative. All it takes is one determined crook in your test sample to throw everything off.
And that ties in to something I learned last week. It’s not only universities that try to improve their students’ ethics with educational modules; companies and governments try it too. In particular, every employee of the state of Illinois has to take a brief online ethics module periodically, up to and including (I presume) the governor. You may have heard the name Rod Blagojevich in the news over the last six months or so. He is the (now ex-) governor of Illinois who was impeached for trying to sell the Senate seat vacated by now-President Obama. This was hardly ethical behavior under any standard, yet Blagojevich was following a tradition honored by numerous Illinois governors, of engaging in indictable behavior. If anyone was trying to evaluate the ethics education of Illinois employees and included the governor in their sample, they are going to have a lot of trouble showing that it helps.
But wait. Should one or two spectacularly bad apples spoil the barrel? That is, you are always going to have what are called “outliers.” If you are familiar with a Gaussian distribution, often called a “bell curve,” you know that it looks like a hill with gently sloping sides. If one of these distributions represents some measure of “ethicalness” (an ugly word, but I can’t think of a better one), then the peak of the hill represents the bulk of students who have what you might call typical or average ethics. Mother Teresa would be in the right-hand tail of the distribution, way off to one end, and the ex-governor would be somewhere in the left-hand tail.
You can make the argument that even though ethics education doesn’t prevent the occasional Blagojevich, if it moves the whole distribution to the right it makes the average person more ethical, which is worth something. But then you get into the utilitarian bind of evaluating the worth of ethics to society in general. Is it better that most people in a profession are a little more ethical even though some are still news-worthily unethical, or would it be better if somehow we could prevent only the worst ethical lapses and leave the rest alone? And all this assumes that there is some fail-safe way to evaluate ethics education other than the impossibly expensive and lengthy longitudinal study I described above, which is by no means clear.
All education involves some degree of faith, which is the certain knowledge of things we don’t see yet. Even if my students pass exams on digital logic or electromagnetics, I can’t say for sure what they’re going to do with those pieces of knowledge and ability. I can only trust that they will remember them and use them somehow in a good way. Experience has shown that the vast majority of our students do just that, although I can’t instantly pull up tons of documentation to prove it.
In the last several years, whenever the National Science Foundation funds programs to augment and encourage engineering ethics education, it insists that the outcomes of these programs be evaluated by some independent means. Their argument is that taxpayer money is being used for these programs, and the agency has to go back to Congress and show that the money did some good. Although the motive is laudable, I have questions about the method. The same person who told me about the online ethics course in Illinois is an expert in evaluating ethics education, which he admits is not a perfect process either. The preferred way is to administer a survey in which students answer questions about hypothetical ethical situations. As I say, it’s better than nothing. But it seems to me that the process of evaluating ethics education mainly to generate some paperwork to send back to Washington is motivated by the same spirit that causes the government of the state of Illinois to insist that all its employees take the online ethics module. In both cases, the ostensible motive seems to differ from the real motive.
Ostensibly, one is doing something that will genuinely improve (or measure) the ethics of the target population. But in reality, both the online ethics module and the ethics evaluation process serve mainly to shift responsibility for any possible bad outcomes. If another Rod Blagojevich shows up, Illinois government administrators can say, “Well, we did all we could—we made him take that ethics module.” And if despite all efforts, the next couple of decades turn up a few engineers who, despite taking NSF-evaluated engineering ethics education, go ahead and do something unethical anyway, the National Science Foundation can turn to Congress and say, “Well, we did all we could—we evaluated those programs with the best available evaluation instruments.”
Am I saying we should chuck all attempts at evaluation, or even ethics education? By no means. But let’s be realistic about what we’re trying to do, and not pretend that it’s capable of more than it can really do, which is simply to give us some reason to hope, but not to be certain, that we are making people more ethical.
Sources: Michael Loui, professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told me about these matters. I would point you to some information about Rod Blagojevich, but I think he’s already had more attention than he deserves. And my definition of faith is taken from the New Testament book of Hebrews, 11:1.
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