Index of Topics Addressed on the Online Ethics Center

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Confidentiality and Other General Ethical Issues

Disciplines

Diversity

EducationalIssues/Workplace Settings Issues

Ethics Education

Famous Cases

Legal

Research Conduct

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Confidentiality and Other General Ethical Issues

Privacy & Confidentiality

• confidentiality for engineers
• trade secrets
• classified information
• database confidentiality

General Ethical Issues

• ethics and the law
• ethics and economics
• ethics and prudence
• preferences vs. values
• pedagogy
• lying, deception
• self-deception
• negligence
• trust, distrust
• accountability
• ambiguity, moral ambiguity
• sensitivity
• rights
• obligations
• responsibilities, general
• conscientious objection
• corruption

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Disciplines: Fields of Interest

• Aeronautical Engineering
• Business
• Civil/Structural Engineering
• Computer Science
• Education
• Electrical Engineering
• Environmental Engineering
• Nuclear Engineering

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Diversity

General Diversity

• diversity
• role models and mentors for science and engineering majors
• in the federal government
• intervention programs for women and minorities in science and engineering

Diversity: Race and Culture

• research and cultural diversity
• national origin
• minority experiences
• prejudice
• ethnicity and science and engineering
• attrition rates among minority science and engineering majors

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Diversity: Gender and Sex

• gender diversity
• sexual preference
• women in science and engineering
• attrition
• college women's performance in math and science
• success and women science majors
• improving academic environment for women
• special advising needs of women
• gender differences in performance and attitudes in the workplace
• performance and advancement
• math-science curriculum
• gender gaps in salaries

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Issues in Educational and Workplace Settings

Educational and Workplace: Conflict of Interest

• conflict of interest/conflicting interests and commitments
• see also: conflicts of interest in research

Educational and Workplace: Safety

• public safety
• worker safety
• consumer safety
• laboratory safety

Educational and Workplace: Design

• and the environment
• process

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Educational and Workplace: Pedagogy

• the use of cases in teaching
• role playing
• active learning
• ethics across the curriculum (or the pervasive method)

Educational and Workplace: Competency

• criteria for competence
  • in management
  • in science and engineering
• incompetent superiors
• substance abuse

Educational and Workplace: Environmental Issues

• global
• chemical
• nuclear
• levels of toxicity
• endangered ecosystems
• disaster relief
• technological disasters

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Educational and Workplace: Fraud, Financial

• in government contracting
• consumer fraud

Educational and Workplace: Fraud, Scientific

• see research misconduct

Educational and Workplace: Gifts and Payments

• gifts and payments
• commissions
• bribes
• kickbacks
• gifts to officials

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Educational and Workplace: Professionalism

• in computing
• professional responsibility
• ethical codes and guidelines from professional societies
• code violations
• employment offers, withdrawal of
• signing off (on drawings, plans, etc.)
• the media
• professional advice
• consulting relationships
• contracts
• professional societies; technical and scholarly societies
• bidding, competitive bidding, underbidding
• letters of recommendation
• competition (fair, unfair)
• trade (fair, unfair)
• code violations
• ethics officers
• ethics support
• unions
• raising concerns

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Educational and Workplace: Copying

• copying, benchmarking, and reverse engineering

Educational and Workplace: Quality

• product quality, responsibility for
• consumer/consumption information

Educational and Workplace: Risks

• risk assessment

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Educational and Workplace: Organizations, Ethical Responsiveness of

• harassment, sexual harassment, and aggression
• supervisors and managers
• workplace relationships
• communication
• confidential advice
• misappropriation of company/laboratory resources
• travel
• favoritism
• gossip
• subtle inequities, micro-inequities
• prejudice
• performance review
• hiring and termination

Educational and Workplace: Occupational Hazards

• hazardous waste
• worker protection

Other Ethics Issues In The Workplace

• corporate ethics
• drug testing

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Ethics Education

• engineering ethics
• research ethics
• computer ethics

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Famous Cases

• Roger Boisjoly's Attempts to Avert the Challenger Disaster
• William LeMessurier's Emergency Repair of the Structural Supports for New York City's Citicorp Tower
• Rachel Carson's Campaign to Control the Use of Pesticides
• Fred Cuny and Disaster Relief
• Inez Austin: Protecting the Public Safety at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation

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Legal: Property, Intellectual Property, Proprietary Knowledge

• copyrights
• business plans & intellectual property
• software ownership
• software
• unlawful software duplication and distribution, piracy
• copying, benchmarking, and reverse engineering

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Research Conduct

Research Conduct: Computers and the Internet

• privacy
• encryption and national security
• system security
• safety & performance
• unlawful software duplication and distribution, piracy
• hacking
• correcting errors in databases
• ethics of internet use

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Research Conduct: General

• criteria for competency
• disciplinary differences in standards of practice
• data integrity
• falsification and fabrication
• interpretation of results
• medical information
• misappropriation
• misrepresentation
• NSF definition of misconduct
• plagiarism
• presentation of results
• probabilistic data testing
• research integrity
• research misconduct
• research regulations
• whistleblowing

Research Conduct: Conflict of Interest

• conflict of interest/conflicting interests and commitments
• see also: conflicts of interest in the workplace

Research Conduct: Mistakes

• correction
• errata
• mistakes

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Research Conduct: Publication and Credit

• acknowledgment
• authorship
• collaborative research
• data ownership
• invention
• plagiarism
• premature claims
• student & post-doc authorship

Research Conduct: Research Subjects

• animals in scientific research
• human biological material
• human subjects
  • children subjects
  • dementia subjects
  • mentally ill subjects
• informed consent from human subjects

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Research Conduct: Working Relationships in the Lab

• mentoring
• bias in mentoring
• supervisor trainee relationship
• thesis committee, role of
• changing your advisor
• endless dissertation
• atmosphere of lab & competition among students
• thesis requirements and approval
• credit

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