Reading Response 9: One Unqualified Design

The last chapter works as a summary to the whole book, reminding us to highlight the affinity between human beings and technology and the human-tech designs should be tailored to facilitate our daily life. As a saying goes, if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. In order to design a popular product, precise knowledge of human nature (likes and dislikes, psychological habits, expectations, etc.) is required, as well as the professional, technical skills to design it. It needs a lot of effort to fully implement this design principle, while new items should manage to meet this criteria, problems should be identified from old, existing ones to make improvements.

I just instance an example occurred to myself, and it is a small gadget, a kettle in my house, which lacks comprehensive consideration as to the security issue.

 This is the kettle, having no water in it and no power to boil water.



When the kettle is filled with water and pressed the button to start working, a blue light is automatically turned on, giving the signal of being careful to me, the hot water. Actually, this is a nice design. But one thing captures my attention, what will happen if I press the start button while no water in it? Terribly, the light is still on and the kettle seems to continue working, which may cause a fire when someone does this carelessly.

One thing even worse happened to this kettle. Once I forgot to close its lid when boiling water. At that time, I was sitting at the table, backwards the kettle, unnoticed of my careless. And I was wondering why it is still not done after quite a long time. To my great surprise, when I turned my head and found the water up and down in it, but never reached the boiling point. Damn! This gadget wasted my time, the electricity resource. This item should be designed to refuse obeying people's orders if there is no water in it or the lid is still open. In a word, it must have certain safeguards to prevent potential dangers. 

Reading Response 8: Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The begining paragraph of  the chapter "Political Imperatives I : Technology for Better or for Worse?" brings me back to the year 1945,  which on one hand symbolizes the end of the World War Ⅱand the coming age of peaceful life, on the other hand causes tragedies to some nations, like Japan, although it is one of the "evils" in this war.

Who is the killer to Japan? It is the human technology, the newest and powerful weapon (the atomic bomb) that pushes the whole country into desperate situation. It is very sad to recall this history. The United States dropped two atomic bombs to two cities of Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6, 1945 and  August 9, 1945 respectively, which I think is the most deadly catastrophe technology does to the human beings. All the humanity hope that it is the first, moreover, the last use of this mass destruction weapon. The atomic bombs leveled the two cities at the moment they exploded, and 150,000~246,000 people lost their lives in this terrorism conducted by America. You can refer to this website for detailed information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki

Although the Japanese armies are guilty to invade other nations, but thousands of Japanese civilians are innocent. The USA should apolygize to the Japanese for their cruelty, the technology should apolygize to those innocent souls. Remember that technology should be only used to befenit people, never abuse it as the weapon to do harms. World peace should be put in the first place!

This is a real, precious documentary to this tragedy. Followed is the first part of the film, the full version is on the wbsite :

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Hiroshima+%26+Nagasaki-Original+1945+Documentary&aq=f

Reading Response 7: Asimov's Four Laws of Robotics

We can not imagine what the world looks like if robots can think independently like human brains, command people to be servient to them,  and dominate the world, taking place of human beings. Certainly, it is a catastrophe to us, which is caused by our own hands and difficult to reverse. We do not look forward to meeting this terrible situation, so we must prevent it at the early begining of the robot design process. The Asimov's Four Laws of Robotics meet this expection.

The Zeroth Law: A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. Although the robots are underdeveloped to reach this level that can devastate the human world, designers should not ingnore this potential danger, which has been vividly described in nowadays science fiction. Robots must be programmed to protect all humanity whenever and wherever, never do harm to them, let alone having the idea of governing them.

The First Law: A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm, unless this would violate the Zeroth Law of Robotics. This principle put "safety" in the first place. Today, almost all the products are designed with multiple safeguards to minimize the likelihood that can threaten people's safety, in other words, effective measures taken to guarantee the safety is one of the criteria to judge whether this product is qualified.  A lot of effort has gone into implementation of the safety issue, which is very different from what I experienced several years ago. It is a unforgettable accident that nearly cost my life. One day at the age of 7, I was hurry to rush into the elevator as the door was about to close. The damn thing happened, I was stuck into the two oncoming doors. I struggled with my full strength to save my life, but all my efforts seemed futile and the two doors never stoped pressing on me. At that time, nobody else was around there, and I was desperately painful due to the increasingly great pressure and felt hard to breathe. Great thanks to the God, the "hero" finally came, pressed the open button and saved my life. Although 15 years have past, every time I remind of that day, I am totally in a cold sweat! Thanks to the focus on safety, I dare to go into elevators again.

The Second Law: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the Zeroth or First Law. In the current state, robots have no choice but to obey people's commands. The important implication of this law is to leave some decisions up to the machines on the basis of protecting people when robots are smart enough, which means robots can refuse to perform the task that is unsafe.

The last law in the sery is that a robot must protect its own exsistence as long as such protection does not conflict with the Zeroth, First, or Second Law. Definitely, a robot cost unaccountable efforts, such as money, time, intelligence, perspiration, ect. Protecting themselves is equal to protecting fortunes for human beings. Try to insist to the four laws in the design process, robots will have a more bright future and serve us in better ways.  

Reading Response 6: Reporting System

In the health care sector, even though putting a lot of attention to it, there do exists deadly accidents. It doesn't mean the doctors or nurses are all bad apples, but for the health care area is so complicated that even a slight mistake can lead to catastrophies and it still remains a lot of unkown knowledge, which need continuous practise. Usually, when medical errors occur, they are punished, fined or even sued so that they fear to volunteer information about problem areas that are in need of improvement, which has no benefits to gain experience and improve patient's safety. As a result, someone else will make same mistakes and threaten more lives, which is actually a vicious cycle. The right activity should perform in this way,

It is urgent to recognize that "blaming and shaming" attitude is inappropriate because it does little help to reduce tha rate of incidents. It is crucial to know“inevitable human fallibility and how feedback at the organizational level can play a critical role in identifying errors, fixing problems that cause errors, and thereby enhancing patient safety”.
Due to the legal liability and the medical culture of personal accountability, we should consider developing a reporting system like the one applied in the aviation area, the ASRS(Aviation Safety Reporting System). The five design principles can also be adopted by the health care sector. The principles are:
1.Voluntary. "No one has to report, but anyone can."
2.Confidential. The system protects private information about the one who report errors, such as the identitication, preventing them exposed to public.
3.Non-punitive. It can protect them from getting harm to their reputation, not to be blamed.
4.Objective. It is suggested that the system should be operated by a respected, authoritative third party to index information and create the database.
5.Independent. The reporting organization can not regulate the medical staff.
Obeying those principles, they will not fear reporting errors and provide resourceful, invaluable profiles to improve the health care area.

What I have learned from the chapter"Management Matters" can also make sense to the education field.
Students are normally afraid of having exams and getting scores, because teachers and parents may blame them, and they may be shameful of relatively poor learning outcomes. Do not keep yourselves in the passive mood, just regard exams as the instrument to identify studying problems. "We can not undo the past, but we can learn from it by looking to the future".

Reading Response 5: Key Factors in Teamwork

Most work have to be done by teams, but a team, whether having a large or small scale, is actually a complex syestem that requires much effort to organize.Those key factors should be taken into consideration when cooperating at the team level.

1.A good leader.

Teamwork does not mean that you are working alone, the tasks are divided up into individuals. If all the people are working on the same stuff at the same time, ingoring other parts, potential disaster would occur like the Flight 401. The three crew members were all focusing on the pesky light bulb, unnoticed of the disengaged autopilot so that unexpected accident happened, and it should had been avoided if all of them were arranged to do specific work before. As a lesson, leadership is crucial in teams, which needs a outstanding leader who can take an authoritative role by setting priorities, delegating tasks, and making sure that all the important responsibilities are covered. As every team member has distinct physical and phychological characteristics, the leader should be skilled at assigning tasks according to their strengths and weaknesses and be brilliant, brave, calm to make quick but right decisions when facing emergencies. Futhermore, every team need a leader who is willing to listen to and adopt other's opinions instead of a domineering, macho one who intimidates other members, which may results in a deadly mistake.

2. Communication

Team memebers should exchange their ideas at times, knowing what others are doing or how the whole project is going, not based solely on independent, selfish behaviour. Only by having more communications, even a glance out of the corner the eye, can they wok as a entity, cooperating and coodinating well to process the project toward the ultimate goal.

3. Respect

The down side of bringing people together with different backgrounds and training is they have different perspectives and ways of seeing and talking about the world, which leads certain conflicts. For example, surgeons and anaesthetists always argue about the appropriate time to administer anaesthetic. In reality, they both seek for their own convenient, one not want to monitor the unconscious patient for long periods while the other hate wasting their valuable time, both ignoring the patient's situation. So "respect" here means respect the reality, they should adopt the method beneficial to the patient (the optimal time to administer it acoording to patient's health status) not to themselves. In addition, the work team comprises people having diverse level of knowledge, such as new starters, professionals, experts. Juniors should respect and learn from those experienced experts, more importantly, those experts should listen to juniors' advices and not critique or refute it immeadiately. In a word, respect, affinity is essential to a viable team.

Another point is recognizing and coping well with cultural differences. As globalization makes the world smaller place and requires people from different nationalities to work together. A perfect plan for one country may be totally useless, even lead to side effects for another country due to the custom, religion or other specific reasons. So whether to adopt a plan in international team work depends on the real situations in the target country. Those above are the limited facors facilitating teamwork, there still be a wide range of it to be explored.