This week, I’m presenting a paper at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. My goal is to engage academic ethicists in a conversation about agile software development.
Given the year in employment I’ve had in the last year and what’s going on at my current employer this week, it is a gift that I was able to attend and I’m grateful for it.
The New York Times describes what happened to United Airlines stock value on September 8th, How a Series of Mistakes Hurt Shares of United
Investors wiped out $1 billion of the market value of UAL, United’s parent, within minutes of an erroneous news flash on Bloomberg screens about a United bankruptcy. Google and the Tribune Company, the owner of The South Florida Sun-Sentinel, whose Web site was the source of the article that led to the headline, soon blamed each other for causing the fiasco.
A chain of mistakes and vulnerabilities led to United Airlines six year old bankruptcy being reported as fresh news. Investors reacted, destroying value to the point that trading of UA stock had to be stopped until the situation could be cleared up.
Two features on a Tribune run website started the chain. One allowed an old article to appear in the most viewed box. The implementation apparently doesn’t prevent obscure articles from filtering to the top in off hours.
The second displayed the old article on the Sun-Sentinel site with today’s date but no original publish date.
Google crawled the article. It’s age and lack of original publish date confused the automated news search into interpreting the article as current.
Then a private analyst published it without independent verification. Then Bloomberg included that analyst’s report in their feed.
This led to the panic selling. Trading was resumed and the stock recovered much of its value but don’t mistake that many people lost alot of money.
The Times focuses on the relationship between newspapers and search engines. You can also focus on the pressure of news agencies to keep up with “breaking news” on various platforms. You can focus on a loss of discipline among editors.
I’d like to highlight how two casually implemented features on a website indirectly led to serious harm. I can’t imagine a print editor allowing an old article to appear without an original publish date. So how was it acceptable to allow online content to appear that way?
Given the relevancy algorithms Google is known to use, how much was the behavior of Tribune’s “most viewed” area intended to create exactly the behavior that backfired in this case, i.e. to create referential links back to Tribune for old content.
There’s plenty of blame to go around but how much sits with those who defined, accepted and implemented this behavior?
From the Washington Post, Days Before Scandal, Interior Got Ethics Award:
The inspector general said Wednesday that federal officials in the Mineral Management Service’s royalty-in-kind program allegedly were plied with alcohol and expensive gifts from industry representatives, and in some cases had sex and did drugs with them. The Denver-area office takes in roughly $4 billion each year in oil and natural gas reserves from companies drilling on federal and Indian land and offshore.
But, on Monday, the Interior Department was praised for “developing a dynamic laminated Ethics Guide for employees” that was a “polished, professional guide” with “colorful pictures and prints which demand employees’ attention.” The guide, the award noted, was small enough for employees to carry. Interior also was lauded for having held a four-day seminar for its ethics advisors nationwide.
Written policy, mandatory training and a whistle blowing mechanism simply insulate organizations from legal liability. They are the surface show of reform not reform itself.
What did the management of the Interior Department think it was accomplishing with a formal ethics guide and why did it matter to them that it was laminated and “small enough for employees to carry.”
I keep the best part of myself on small pages sheathed in plastic in my back pocket, like a condom, in the event I have cause to use it.
Over a year ago, my daughter were walking down a Chelsea sidewalk.
A homeless man walking in front of us froze so suddenly we stopped in our tracks.
He glared at an advertisement showing a human cadaver casually posed it’s skin removed to expose, muscles, tendons, veins, arteries and nerves. Vital organs extending out from its half rib cage.
“not right…”
The man turned to the people flowing past him. “They shouldn’t do that!”
Bodies’ Exhibitors Admit Corpse Origins Are Murky:
“After more than two years of assurances that the cadavers on display in a popular South Street Seaport exhibit were legally obtained in China, the company that runs the exhibit admitted on Thursday that it could not prove that the bodies were not those of prisoners who might have been tortured or executed.” — May 2008 NY Times
In a settlement with the State of New York, the exhibitor has promised refunds to anyone who has seen the exhibit and have changed their policies around acquiring new bodies.
The article quotes a man visiting the exhibit, “When you’re dead, you’re dead. What difference does it make?”
Steven Doc List and I held a 20 minute presentation and 60 minute open space on software ethics.
I think the format works. Software ethics is not rules or reason, it is navigating essential complexity in building software and in moral choice. Descriptions that “abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence” (Fred Brooks)
We embrace essential complexity using the values and practices of agile software development.
We can become better software developers using the same tools we use to build better software.
We can learn through practice to recognize and accept responsibility for the intended benefit and unintended harm we create.
We can retrospect on our actions and their consequences, engage in a conversation with our peers, learn from, challenge, and support each other.