Ethics

Ethics are something that most people believe in and most people don’t live out very well.  When it comes to clear cut things like drugs, stealing, murder, and other obviously wrong things, the vast majority of society fully respects these laws and don’t break them.  But when it comes to things like speeding or cheating or taking illegal shortcuts, etc, many people do not respect the law and find it easy to avoid.  I for one thought that I could speed and not get caught and for the two years after I got my license this was true.  But then everything went wrong and in four short months, I found myself in two accidents, with two tickets, on court supervision, and a huge bill to pay.  I have to say that I was lucky.  I learned my lesson without anyone getting hurt which looking back on my wild driving habits is a miracle.  But it shouldn’t have taken getting caught to change my habits.  I should have known all along that reckless driving is not acceptable just as many other habits that break the law are not.

Cheating is one of these things that is absolutely unacceptable.  Whether it is in high school, taking the ACT, in college, or in the workplace, cheating is unethical and will eventually have consequences.  One thing many people don’t realize is that even if they say they never get caught, they are only hurting themselves more in the long run.  In fact it would be much better if high school teachers cracked down and gave zero’s for cheating on tests to teach kids a lesson than have them continue those habits until they get kicked out of college or sued in the workplace.  Successful cheating encourages more cheating and whether or people care about ethics or not the benefits are not worth the risks!  Furthermore, from an ethics standpoint, which I find even more important than eventual success, the accumulated guilt of cheating your way to success must be awful.  I personally am proud of my success as a student, an athlete, and a person (aside from driving) because I know that I have earned every bit of it.  If I had cheated my way here, I for one, could not live with myself!

Everything thus far has been fairly straightforward.  Most people probably agree with what I have said so far because I haven’t really specified what I mean by cheating.  What I mean by cheating includes a wide variety of situations.  This includes taking shortcuts in work that save money but put the product in danger.  This includes using insider knowledge at one company in another to benefit the company.  This basically includes everything that is against the law and in the end it not only is the right thing to do ethically but saves money over time.  Look at the story of the Ford Pinto where Ford did a cost analysis and decided it was a better idea to put people’s lives in danger than to spend tons of money to recall the defective cars.  Not only was that unethical but in the long run people found out about that analysis and they lost way more money than they would have had they been honest.  Look at BP and the oil rig disaster in the gulf recently.  Sure they probably saved lots of money taking shortcuts but I can assure you that they lost way more money when the deepwater horizon blew up in their face, not to mention the future money they lost due to a collapse in their image as a company.

In the end, it is always better to be honest than to take unethical shortcuts even if you think you won’t get caught.  It is the right thing to do and even if you don’t care about what is right (which you should anyway), it will probably make you more successful in the future.

engineering ideas

Here are a few of my engineering ideas:
Build a bridge from Alaska to Russia.
Build robots who play different sports.
Build a helicopter sports car.

iFoundry Revealed sorta

In modeling iFoundry as a system, I have broken it down into pieces that makes the system as a whole easier to understand.  There were other things that I could have included in the system like the history and how it evolved, but I decided to make it simpler by only including things directly relevant to the operating of iFoundry at the moment.  The diagram itself is decently easy to understand.  There are various levels and sublevels starting with the founders and administrators of the overall program.  Using funding from the university, iFoundry (now more thought of as iEFX) is broken into subcategories.  There is the class part of iEFX and the iCommunity component.  The class has a lecture and lab weekly.  The iCommunity has a group iHouse meeting and then breaks up into individual iTeams.  Students participate in all of these and give feedback to the top of the chain with the administrators.  Students can also become ELA’s in the future who help with the labs while TA’s teach the lecture.  The entire purpose of the iFoundry is to take students from the Engineering Community, improve their engineering skills and put them back into the community with a deeper knowledge of what it means to be an engineer and how to best utilize their skills.  Whether or not this happens is debatable but the purpose is the same nevertheless.

To tell you the truth, I did not really gain that much insight from doing this analysis.  I already knew the system and this was just basically a way to organize my thoughts which I already knew.  Had this been a more complicated system, this probably would have helped much more.  I think the most interesting part of this diagram is at the bottom left where the purpose of iEFX is summed up.  iEFX takes students from the engineering community, teaches them how to be great engineers, then puts them back in the community with that knowledge.  The entire system is designed to do just that.  I don’t really see any unintended consequences that some entities actions might cause other than the feedback the students give.  If the feedback is bad, the top of the system needs to rethink the entire system.