Master of Science

thesisNormalization of deviance has been thoroughly studied and proven to have a dramatic impact on the medical industry, particularly in the field of anesthesiology, and for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Few such studies have been conducted in the mining industry. This research was designed to show whether normalization of deviance is occurring within the subculture of mining engineers. This research project was based on a cross-sectional surveillance of a group of mining engineers and consultants belonging to the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration (SME). There were three hypotheses for this research: 1) there is a correlation between ethics, compensation, risk tolerance, and normalization of deviance; 2) there are either positive or negative associations between each of the independent variablesâ€"ethics, compensation, and risk toleranceâ€"to the dependent variableâ€"normalization of deviance; 3) the data would make it possible to predict normalization of deviance among mining engineers. All three hypotheses were proven true in this study. This research is important because it shows that normalization of deviance exists among mining engineers

New Methods in Human Subjects Research: Do We Need a New Ethics?

Online surveys and interviews, the observations of chat rooms or online games, data mining, knowledge discovery in databases (KDD), collecting biomarkers, employing biometrics, using RFID technology - even as implants in the human body - and other related processes all seem to be more promising, cheaper, faster, and comprehensive than conventional methods of human subjects research. But at the same time these new means of gathering information may pose powerful threats to privacy, autonomy, and informed consent. Online research, particularly involving children and minors but also other vulnerable groups such as ethnic or religious minorities, is in urgent need of an adequate research ethics that can provide reasonable and morally justified constraints for human subjects research. The paper at hand seeks to provide some clarification of these new means of information gathering and the challenges they present to moral concepts like -privacy, autonomy, informed consent, beneficence, and justice. Some existing codes of conduct and ethical guidelines are examined to determine whether they provide answers to those challenges and/or whether they can be helpful in the development of principles and regulations governing human subjects research. Finally, some conclusions and recommendations are presented that can help in the ask of formulating an adequate research ethics for human subjects research.Human Subjects Research, Online Research, Biomarkers, Biometrics, Autonomy, Privacy, Informed Consent, Research Ethics

Lurkers, Creepers, and Virtuous Interactivity: From Property Rights to Consent to Care as a Conceptual Basis for Privacy Concerns and Information Ethics

Exchange of personal information online is usually conceptualized according to an economic model that treats personal information as data owned by the persons these data are ‘about.’ This leads to a distinct set of concerns having to do with data ownership, data mining, profits, and exploitation, which do not closely correspond to the concerns about privacy that people actually have. A post-phenomenological perspective, oriented by feminist ethics of care, urges us to figure out how privacy concerns arrive in fundamentally human contexts and to speak to that, rather than trying to convince people to care about privacy as it is juridically conceived and articulated. By considering exchanges of personal information in a human-to-human online informational economy — being friends on social networking sites — we can identify an alternate set of concerns: consent, respect, lurking, and creepiness. I argue that these concerns will provide a better guide to both users and companies about prudence and ethics in information economies than the existing discourse around ‘privacy.