Challenger, Ethics, Statistics

Harty's Ethics:

• Dorothy A. Winsor
• there is a general difficulty of either sending or receiving bad news, particularly when it must be passed to superiors or outsiders. 
• the Challenger accident
• managers and engineers viewed the same facts from different perspectives- knowledge is not simply seeing facts but rather interpreting them
• bad news is not often passed upwards in organizations
• the three organizations surrounding the Challenger viewed each other as outsiders
• communication failed
• the physical cause of the explosion was the failure of a rubber seal in the solid rocket booster
• bad news is often not believed
• the engineers were sufficiently worried about the O-ring problem
• memo voiced concern
• the second memo was more dismissive of engineers fears
• managers and engineers did not communicate well
• DARRELL HUFF
• how to lie with statistics
• statistics are often used to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify
• sample with the built-in bias-you can prove anything you want to by letting your sample bias itself
• the truncated graph-chopping off the bottom
• the souped-up graph-changing the proportion between the ordinate and the abscissa
• the well-chosen average-means versus median
• the insignificant difference or the elusive error-errors in sampling studies
• the one-dimensional picture
• the ever-impressive decimal- makes it sound more certain, less like an approximation
• the semiattached figure-no connection really between the data and the point
• the unwarranted assumption- making assumptions about casual relationships between 2 things, like college cigarette smokers making lower grades
• Dan Jones
• are you doing your best to document a product accurately?
• are you knowingly omitting essential information?
• are you exaggerating features to a point of lying?
• Carolyn D. Rude
• legal and ethical issues in editing
• intellectual property: copyright, trademarks, patents, trade secrets 
• copyright- protects authors of original works
• product safety- legally obligated to warn of risks of products on labels
• sued for libel