Institutional Repository
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Pages
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- Risk-Benefit Analysis Concerning Public Safety and Health
- This module looks at the use of risk-benefit analysis to answer questions engineers often face when making decisions about public safety and health. It explains how risk-benefit analysis can be used in answering questions such as “how safe is safe enough?” and then defends the thesis that this form of analysis cannot provide answers to questions about public safety and health. While risk-benefit analysis offers guidance for policy decisions, it does not provide an adequate basis for reaching or for justifying these decisions. The module looks at the ethical basis and free market justification of this form analysis, and then looks at the practical methods that risk-benefit analysis employs and the difficulties faced in using these methods, such as the predictability of harmful events occurring, and the human factor. Includes bibliography of related materials., Sponsorship: Exxon Education Foundation, The Module Series in Applied Ethics was produced by the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions in under a grant from the Exxon Education Foundation. This series is intended for use in a wide range of undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education programs in such areas as science and/or technology public policy, and professional ethics courses in engineering, business, and computer science.
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- Some Paradoxes of Whistleblowing
- By "paradox" I mean an apparent- and in this case, real-inconsistency between theory (our systematic understanding of whistleblowing) and the facts (what we actually know, or think we know, about whistleblowing). What concerns me is not a few anomalies, the exceptions that test a rule, but a flood of exceptions that seem to swamp the rule. This paper has four parts. The first states the standard theory of whistleblowing. The second argues that the standard theory is paradoxical, that it is inconsistent with what we know about whistleblowers. The third part sketches what seems to me a less paradoxical theory of whistleblowing. The fourth tests this new theory against one classic case of whistleblowing, Roger Boisjoly's testimony before the presidential commission investigating the Challenger disaster (the "Rogers Commission"). I use that case because the chief facts are both uncontroversial enough and well-known enough to make detailed exposition unnecessary. For the same reasons, I also use that case to illustrate various claims about whistleblowing throughout the paper., Business and Professional Ethics Journal, Vo. 15, No.1. pp.3-19.
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- Technology Assessment : A Historical Approach
- This module discusses the unique role engineers play in technology assessment; or the “process of discovering the potential benefits and risks of new technologies, weighing the social gains against the social costs, and then taking steps to influence the rate and direction of technological change.” This module deals with the ethical decisions of James Watt and his assessment of the steam engine, and Thomas Edison and his assessment of electricity. The module then looks at the more modern example of nuclear power, and shows the problems that arise when engineers fail to properly access the moral and ethical issues raised by the technologies they develop. Includes discussion questions and an annotated bibliography of related materials., Sponsorship: Exxon Education Foundation, The Module Series in Applied Ethics was produced by the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions in under a grant from the Exxon Education Foundation. This series is intended for use in a wide range of undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education programs in such areas as science and/or technology public policy, and professional ethics courses in engineering, business, and computer science.
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- Unscrambling Ethics for Managers
- Though people tend to wonder what there is to talk about when discussing business ethics, many conversations with business faculty at IIT have lead the author to believe that ethics is large part of business practice. The author explores why business people can be timid when talking about ethics and discusses three major questions surrounding this topic. One, is it possible to teach ethics to people who are no longer children, two, how do you spot ethical problems, and 3, how can you approach ethical problems., Talk delivered to Frontenac Company Seminar, Carefree Colorado, April 26, 1988.
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- Whistleblowing : Ethical and Legal Issues in Expressing Dissent
- This module discusses the history of whistleblowing and some of the ethical ethical dilemmas faced by whistleblowers, including the conflicting values of loyalty to one’s employer and protecting the public good, clashes between professional judgment and organizational authority, and the legal aspects of whistleblowing. It also includes a summary of the Browns Ferry Case (Weil, 1977) and discussion questions. Includes annotated bibliography of related materials., Sponsorship: Exxon Education Foundation, The Module Series in Applied Ethics was produced by the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions in under a grant from the Exxon Education Foundation. This series is intended for use in a wide range of undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education programs in such areas as science and/or technology public policy, and professional ethics courses in engineering, business, and computer science.
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- “Broader Impacts” or “Responsible Research and Innovation”? A Comparison of Two Criteria for Funding Research in Science and Engineering
- Our subject is how the experience of Americans with a certain funding criterion, “broader impacts” (and some similar criteria) may help in efforts to turn the European concept of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) into a useful guide to funding Europe’s scientific and technical research. We believe this comparison may also be as enlightening for Americans concerned with revising research policy. We have organized our report around René Von Schomberg’s definition of RRI, since it seems both to cover what the European research group to which we belong is interested in and to be the only widely accepted definition of RRI. According to Von Schomberg, RRI: “… is a transparent, interactive process by which societal actors and innovators become mutually responsive to each other with a view to the (ethical) acceptability, sustainability and societal desirability of the innovation process and its marketable products (in order to allow a proper embedding of scientific and technological advances in our society).” While RRI seeks fundamental changes in the way research is conducted, Broader Impacts is more concerned with more peripheral aspects of research: widening participation of disadvantaged groups, recruiting the next generation of scientists, increasing the speed with which results are used, and so on. Nevertheless, an examination of the broadening of funding criteria over the last four decades suggests that National Science Foundation has been moving in the direction of RRI., Sponsorship: European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme grant number 321400.
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- Empirical Modeling of Public Safety to Voice Traffic to Aid Emergency Capacity
- An RF measurement system with high time resolution is implemented to determine the statistical characteristics of various channels in the Land Mobile Radio bands. The applicability of simple statistical models to the observed data is investigated, as well as their validity over short and long periods of time. The results show that the statistics of the idle and holding times of communication on these channels vary significantly over time and demonstrate daily periodicity, requiring non-stationary models to accurately represent them. Over short durations of time however, conventional distributions such as the exponential and lognormal may adequately characterize the properties of these quantities, allowing convenient and compact representations of the data. Results based on empirical data are presented to quantify the probability of stationarity for voice traffic within a time span of given length. The findings are useful for network planning or streamlining, network simulation and modeling, and investigation of dynamic spectrum access., Sponsorship: National Science Foundation, Federal Communications Commission, Motorola, Cleversafe, Roberson & Associates LLC
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- The City in the Landscape: Alfred Caldwell's Broader Perspective on Urban Design
- Alfred Caldwell was among the first full- time American professors Mies van der Rohe hired at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Many have admired Mies’s architecture since the 1920s, and know that his ideas were also transmitted as a professor, first at the Bauhaus in Europe and then as Director of the Department of Architecture at IIT. Caldwell, a practicing landscape architect and protégé of Jens Jensen, is perhaps less widely known, but was a major influence on IIT’s program especially in the areas of construction, landscape, and architectural history. Caldwell completed a Master of Science in City Planning with a thesis entitled The City in the Landscape: A Preface for Planning, which can be considered a manifesto of both his professional ideas and IIT’s planning pedagogy. In addition to his own works, Caldwell collaborated with Mies and architect Ludwig Hilberseimer, Director of City and Regional Planning at IIT and former Head of Building Theory at the Bauhaus, on the design of built works which left behind artifacts representing the ideal of “the city in the landscape.” This communication examines the broader perspective on urban design influenced by the symbiotic disciplines of architecture, city-regional planning and landscape as manifested in the individual and collaborative built work and pedagogy of Caldwell, Hilberseimer, and Mies.
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- Engineering Ethics in China
- This article describes China’s century-long concern with the professional ethics of engineers, especially a succession of codes of engineering ethics going back at least to 1933. This description is the result both of our own archival research and of “philosophical history”, the application of concepts from the philosophy of professions to the facts historians (or we) have discovered. Engineers, historians, social scientists, and philosophers of technology, as well as students of professional ethics, should find this description interesting. It certainly provides a reason to wonder whether those who write about codes of professional ethics as if they were an Anglo-American export unlikely to put down roots elsewhere might have overlooked many early codes outside English-speaking countries. While code writers in China plainly learned from Western codes, the Chinese codes were not mere copies of their Western counterparts. Indeed, the Chinese codes sometimes differed inventively from Western codes in form (for example, being wholly positive) or content (for example, protecting local culture).
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- Repository Refresh: A New Theme for repository.iit
- This year, Illinois Tech's Institutional Repository was given it's first significant visual upgrade since its creation in 2012. The application of a new theme harmonized the repository's look with that of the university and library web sites, added more fluid and natural mobile responsiveness, and brought the repository up to contemporary standards in terms of style and functionality. This poster highlights some of the new features of the new theme, and identify some of the challenges that arose when modifying this theme for use at IIT.
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- Towards In-Network Semantic Analysis: A Case Study involving Spam Classification
- Analyzing free-form natural language expressions “in the network”—that is, on programmable switches and smart NICs—would enable packet-handling decisions that are based on the textual content of flows. This analysis would support richer, latency-critical data services that depend on language analysis—such as emergency response, misinformation classification, customer support, and query-answering applications. But packet forwarding and processing decisions usually rely on simple analyses based on table look-ups that are keyed on well-defined (and usually fixed size) header fields. P4 is the state of the art domain-specific language for programming network equipment, but, to the best of our knowledge, analyzing free-form text using P4 has not yet been investigated. Although there is an increasing variety of P4-programmable commodity network hardware available, using P4 presents considerable technical challenges for text analysis since the language lacks loops and fractional datatypes. This paper presents the first Bayesian spam classifier written in P4 and evaluates it using a standard dataset. The paper contributes techniques for the tokenization, analysis, and classification of free-form text using P4, and investigates trade-offs between classification accuracy and resource usage. It shows how classification accuracy can be tuned between 69.1% and 90.4%, and how resource usage can be reduced to 6% by trading-off accuracy. It uses the spam filtering use-case to motivate the need for more research into in network text analysis to enable future “semantic analysis” applications in programmable networks.
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- State Street Village (now Jeanne and John Rowe Village), Illinois Institute of Technology
- 3301 South State Street , Chicago, Illinois