CEE 5804

For my interview, I initially had trouble selecting and finding a participant to speak with. I was able to find several resources related to various stakeholder perspectives from congressional hearings. These perspectives included the airlines, the FAA, and representatives associated with airline unions. The documents helped provide additional context to the case and provided background knowledge on the case. Through a connection, I was able to identify an individual who works at Boeing and agreed to speak with me about their perspective on the case. The individual I interviewed did not wish to be named or recorded but I was able to meet with them over Zoom for an hour-long interview. I was able to download the “Live Transcript” and take notes during the interview. They currently work for Boeing in an Information Technology centered role. Their perspective as a current employee is useful in considering the impact of the 737 Max controversy and how it has impacted the company over the p...

Last week we listened to the different book talks and I learned a lot about different historical events related to ethics. I thought it was interesting to hear about the other topics and how the books connected to the course themes.  Overall, in each of the cases, there were examples of scientific misconduct and its impact on the public. Hearing about the Ghost Map and how the key actors were able to work together to find the source of a cholera outbreak in London was relevant to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The other book Plastic Fantastic talked about research fraud and I found it particularly relevant to the current culture of academia and research. It was nice to hear about the topics of the other books and make connections to course themes and relevant topics.

This past week I was shocked to learn of the case of Dr. Shawn McElmurry and Dr. Kasey Faust. Dr. Faust was one of our guest speakers and hearing her story firsthand was even more shocking than the initial readings for the week.  As a graduate student, there are many ways in which the system does not protect us. Dr. Faust detailed how her external committee member, Dr. McElmurry, not only misrepresented his experience in Flint but also used her work while keeping her at an arm's length from the other Flint researchers. It is horrifying to think that anyone on your committee would take your data and use courtesy authorship on one paper to misrepresent their experience to exploit a public health crisis. Hearing about these experiences made me think a little more carefully about how I trust and engage with others. While I do believe that there are good academics and advocates, situations like this make me remember that there are also bad players.

This week I finished reading the book I chose for our book review assignment, Bad Blood by John Carreyrou. The topic of the book was the rise and fall of the start-up company Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes. Reading this book was very interesting given the course topics we have been discussing. Although, many of the major case studies have been related to water crises there are similar ethical dilemmas in the public health sector that Theranos operated in. One of the most surprising things that I found while reading was how many powerful celebrities and political figures were involved with Theranos. Through her networking Holmes was able to recruit the financial backing and support of individuals such as Oracle founder Larry Ellison, former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, Rupert Murdoch, former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, General James Mattis, and former director of the CDC William Foege amongst many others. The support and financial backi...

One of the chapter's that we read this week from the Young Professional's Survival Guide focused on the topic of "Why Things Go Wrong". Related to ethics in the workplace, there are common pitfalls one can avoid in order to try to keep things from going wrong. Oftentimes ethics can be a slippery slope and avoiding these pitfalls can help keep a professional on the "right" track. In the chapter, the authors introduced several dangers that lead professionals to cross the boundary into unethical actions. Some of these dangers included incrementalism, rationalization, and pressure from outside sources. I found several of the psychological experiments used as examples of dangers to be quite interesting and it lead me to consider the overlap of ethics in academic science and the workplace. The two experiments that were used as examples and that stood out to me in this study were Zimbardo's Stanford Prison experiment and Milligram's electric shock study. Th...

In this blog post, I will discuss background information related to the context I have selected for my final project. I will be exploring the Boeing 737 Max crashes and subsequent groundings which occurred between 2018 and 2020. This case is a current, real-world controversy that involves engineering, public policy, the environment, and members of the public.  In 2018 and 2019 the Boeing 737 Max passenger aircraft was involved in two major plane crashes which resulted in the death of 346 people. Following these crashes the aircraft was grounded from all travel across the world from March 2019 and December 2020. This 20-month grounding by the Federal Aviation Association (FAA) was the longest recorded for a U.S. airliner and cost Boeing $20 billion in direct costs and an estimated $60 in indirect losses (Isidore, 2020). While the plane was grounded, a series of investigations were conducted by the FAA, Congress, and multiple other government agencies. Reviews by engineering panels ...