Hosted by Dr. William J. Frey

Safety and Risk Educational Laptops Bus and Nat Env Therac

Row 1, Col 1 A thing’s risks are fully known and judged acceptable in light of accepted value principals. What is safety?

1,2 These laptops are designed for use by children in developing nations. What are the MIT latops?

1,3 The study of how living things—plants and animals—interact with one another in the Earth’s unified natural system, or ecosystem. What is ecology?

1,4 The Therac-25 machine at this institution was put back into operation on April 7, Four days later, another patient com- plained of burns. What is ETCC or the East Texas Cancer Center?

2,1 The scientific and exact process of determining the degree of risk. What is a risk assessment?

2,2 Physical surroundings (like a classroom) enable or instrument certain kinds of actions while they block or constrain other kinds. What is one way Socio-Technical Systems embody values?

2,3 Development that “meets the needs of the present [generation] without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. What is sustainable development?

2,4 A race condition produced demands which exceeded the memory and processing capacities of the computer controls. What was the central flaw in the design of the software controls developed for the Therac-25 machine?

3,1 How people view risk depends on its voluntariness, the control they have over it, certain dread, and unknown factors, and the benefits they expect from it. What is the Risk Perception?

3,2 This court decision found the state of Texas guilty of inequitable education funding. What is Edgewood Decision of 1967?

3,3 In this view, the world’s resource base, the air, soil, minerals, and so forth, is essentially finite, or bounded. What is set forth by the notion of limited carrying capacity?

3,4 Double pass electron accelerator, dual mode, and more computer control. What are three new features offered by the Therac-25 units over the previous 20 and 6 models?

4,1 The potential that something unwanted and harmful may occur. What is risk?

4,2 Laptops allow for digitalizing textbooks, graduating computer-literate students, and solving the digital-divide. What is were advantages cited for the Texas Laptop project?

4,3 This term refers to the amount of land and water a human population needs to produce the resources it consumes and to absorb its wastes, given prevailing technology. What is the ecological footprint?

4,4 This presented a serious obstacle to identifying and solving the central problem in the Therac-25 Case. What is the lack of communication between stakeholders on the operational history of the Therac-25 unit?

5,1 “Subjects, to the degree that they are capable, [should] be given the opportunity to choose what shall or shall not happen to them.” What, according to the Belmont Report, is informed consent?

5,2 Instead of properly disposing of spent laptop and desktop computers, many so-called re- cycling companies send these parts to developing nations where valuable metals are mined and the other parts carelessly cast into dumps, irrigation canals, and rivers. What is exporting harm?

5,3 Three hundred million of these become obsolete every year, making this the fastest-growing part of the waste stream. What is electronic waste?

5,4 New responsibilities delegated to the software controls in the Therac-25 model. What are monitoring machine status, accepting treatment input, and setting up machine for treatment?