101–110 of 131 posts
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Agreed. The Order of the Engineer is a good place to start and bringing that tradition down into comp-eng/sci would be a nice start. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Engineer
Interesting, had not heard of that. What should we computer programmers, we flexible always trying new things without enough tried and true practices think of real engineers, what should they think of us?
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Patients are the worst at their own health, and often deluded about their ability to manage it. Gwyneth Paltrow and homeopaths don’t rake in money because people make great decisions. When you “empower” patients past their competence you get Steve Jobs in the ground. If he had just been another schmuck, he’d probably still be alive.
Health services are in service of the patients, not on your commoner opinion of what health should be and how it should be imparted.
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Patients are the worst at their own health, and often deluded about their ability to manage it. Gwyneth Paltrow and homeopaths don’t rake in money because people make great decisions. When you “empower” patients past their competence you get Steve Jobs in the ground. If he had just been another schmuck, he’d probably still be alive.
Health services are in service of the patients, not on your commoner opinion of what health should be and how it should be imparted.
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Yeah - I work a lot in healthcare associated infections, and a good 80% of the stuff I read about "We're from Silicon Valley and we're here to help..." just ends with me going "They're going to kill people."
I think this is something that isnt that present in our profession as it should be. If you are an electrical engineer, it is clear and present, that your products might kill someone if you screw up. The same goes for a mechanical engineer. And it will be your responsibility. If you screw up and should have known better, you might even go to jail for negligence. We on the other hand have the Therac-25. We claim to be…
"AECL had never tested the Therac-25 with the combination of software and hardware until it was assembled at the hospital."
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One of the problems I see here, and would love to find a way to solve it, is that software is best developed interatively. I see a lot of software that has some cool ideas, it just needs some tweaks to get rid of ridiculously annoying flaws, or needs to put some more control in the user's hands. Unfortunately, and inevitably, a little tweak in medical software may as well be a tweak on a satellite in space. Like I sa…
Safety first, full stop, no exceptions. Until correctness can be done easily in accessible programming languages with a decent developer pool, iteration in this space, along with other life-critical spaces such as trains, planes (and wouldn't automobiles be nice too?) is sadly a long, manual process compared to web development. Edit: to expand a bit on correctness, think Coq but with the ease of Java or Typescript. E…
Coq but with the ease of
Java or Typescript
Note also that Coq/Isabelle/Agda and their successors will still suffer from a variant of the oracle problem: where should the specifications come from?
Finally note that almost virtually aviation software is formally verified in with interactive theorem proving as of 2018. The extreme levels of reliability in this space have always been achieved with other software engineering methods, including rigorous testing.
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I think this is something that isnt that present in our profession as it should be. If you are an electrical engineer, it is clear and present, that your products might kill someone if you screw up. The same goes for a mechanical engineer. And it will be your responsibility. If you screw up and should have known better, you might even go to jail for negligence. We on the other hand have the Therac-25. We claim to be…
Therac-25 was thirty years ago, and still is the go to example. That made me wonder. If you compare, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bridge_failures#2000–p... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_structural_failures_an... with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_bugs , software doesn’t look that deadly.
Mars Climate Orbiter, 1999: http://articles.latimes.com/1999/oct/01/news/mn-17288. Undetected metric conversion error (though unclear if this was a manual process or software).
Toyota unintended acceleration, 2010: https://www.edmunds.com/car-safety/for-toyota-owners-uninten.... Toyota maintains that it was not caused by software error.
Now let's list some cases where the software did have ultimate control:
Schiaparelli EDM lander, 2016: https://newatlas.com/esa-schiaparelli-mars-crash-inquiry/496.... Faulty decision-making in the automated descent system due to input saturation.
Tesla auto-pilot crash, 2016: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/30/tesla-aut.... Faulty decision-making due to incorrect image analysis. In this case, the additional safety controls (the driver himself) failed too.
Uber car crash, 2018: https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/20/news/companies/self-driving.... Faulty decision-making due to incorrect image analysis, though the investigation is still ongoing, so no definite cause determined (FAFAIK).
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They really are comically bad (Cerner, Epic, Meditech, all of them), but they are effective data silos which is a step up from having that data silo'ed in filing cabinets. People outside healthcare really don't understand the sheer amount of time your physician spends trawling through the medical record in the regular course of doing his or her job. You can think of the patient chart as a shared "My Documents" folder…
These experiences also exacerbate the perception that I referred to before that can basically be summarized as "every previous attempt at making this better ended up being completely terrible ". A whole slew of people want to improve things, but a lot of the time they don't take that responsibility seriously enough -- or know, fully, what that entails -- and when they bail that leaves the next would-be "disruptor" at…
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Its really strange how much punishment doctors seem to receive and how much they're willing to take. The hours alone would be laughable in any other industry.
The hours are, to some extent, imposed by the various medical governing bodies either directly or by artificially restricting the supply of doctors. These bodies are composed largely of doctors so the problem is to some extent self imposed. In the UK doctors are not governed by the working time directive because the UK negotiated an opt out so hospital doctors work ridiculous hours. As far as I can tell this problem…
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> How would that be different if they didn't have a device? They would have died anyway, right? Maybe. If they think that the device will help them in their hour of need, then they may be taking chances they normally would not have. To have something remote brick and then not tell the people that it was bricked is a gigantic ethical violation. > Does the Apple watch not work? Not to a medically relevant level: "Apple…
> Apple Watch cannot detect all falls… If we pick apart disclaimers, I think we will find that nothing works. /gentle_sarcasm
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Interesting, had not heard of that. What should we computer programmers, we flexible always trying new things without enough tried and true practices think of real engineers, what should they think of us?
Real engineers should probably look down on us from a great height.
