Answer all questions. (Total 100 marks)

Question 1
In September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly formally adopted the universal, integrated and transformative “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”

In October 2016, the Paris agreement was agreed by 197 UN member nations into a common cause to undertake ambitious efforts to combat climate change.

In January 2017, the new USA administration reversed course from the Paris climate agreement and began to wind down clean power regulation.

A month earlier in December 2016, some twenty tech billionaires and business magnates including George Soros, Bill Gates of Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook; Richard Branson of Virgin group; Jeff Bezos of Amazon; Jack Ma of Alibaba group, were banding together to combat climate change with a new partnership called the Breakthrough Energy Coalition. Through this partnership, the Tech billionaires have committed US$1 billion to invest in early stage clean energy companies over the next 20 years.

Zuckerberg commented in his Facebook that “Solving the clean energy problem is an essential part of building a better world, we will not be able to make meaningful progress on educating or connecting the world without secure energy and a stable climate.”

Bill Gates, who is leading the fund, said: “Our goal is to build companies that will help deliver the next generation of reliable, affordable, and emissions-free energy to the world.”

(a) Discuss the roles of governments in combating climate change. (6 marks)
(b) Illustrate the invisible hands metaphor and the negative externalities on the environment. (4 marks)
(c) Discuss the roles of corporate leaders in driving the effort on global warming solution. (5 marks)

(d) Define sustainable development. (2 marks)
(e) Determine the ways through which an engineer can help to combat global warming. (8 marks)

Question 2
In 1995 Salvador Castro, a medical electronics engineer was working at Air-Shields Inc. in Hatboro, Pennsylvania. He spotted a serious design flaw in a valve used in one of the company’s infant incubators. His technical judgement was that the problem was inexpensive to fix, but the possible consequences of not fixing it could kill infants. Castro did not hesitate and brought the matter to his supervisor. Much to his surprise, nobody acted on his observation for weeks, but Castro did not share his concerns to any peers beyond his supervisors.

Castro decided to confront his supervisor and expressed his intention to notify the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), for which he was swiftly dismissed.

Castro subsequently sued Air-Shields for wrongful termination and his case had been tied up in the Pennsylvania courts for nearly four years. The valve problem was not solved until December 1999, when the FDA forced Air Shields Inc to recall the incubator and fix the problem that Castro had discovered four years prior. In 2001, Salvador Castro was given the Carl Barus Award for Outstanding Service in the Public Interest by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for his strict adherence to the IEEE Code of Ethics.

An open society relies on those who are willing to come forward and reveal wrongdoings. The act of upholding safety is built into certain codes of professional ethics.

(a) Give the primary code of engineering ethics applicable in an open society. (2 marks)
(b) Examine whether the act of Salvador Castro qualifies as whistle blowing. (2 marks)

(c) Give reasons to justify your answer to Question 2(b). (8 marks)
(d) Present FOUR (4) common mistakes that a would-be whistle blower should avoid. (8 marks)
(e) What are the dire consequences to whistle blowing and how does a whistle
blowing protection law help? (5 marks)

Question 3
British Petroleum (BP) is the sixth largest oil and gasoline company in the world, they are known to be a supplier of premium and high quality products. On 20 April 2010, an explosion in the Gulf of Mexico destroyed a BP oil rig named Deepwater Horizon leased from a Switzerland-based Transocean Ltd. The incident killed eleven crew members and set off an uncontrolled eruption of oil and gas which lasted for a total of 87 days, releasing 4.9 million barrels of oil (equivalent to 315 Olympic-size swimming pools) into the sea causing massive ecological damages.

A few months prior to the disaster, the team Deepwater Horizon achieved a record of deepest well ever completed in oil exploration, and had gone an extraordinary seven years without a single accident serious enough to halt operation. Its failure to identify the 2010 accident and the ineffective remedy that lead to the wide spread oil spill, is the result of a series of misjudgments, over-confidence and dubious decisions of favored speed over safety.

The aftermath investigation suggested that the faults lies with three parties: that both BP and Transocean had grown dangerously overconfident and over the years they had systematically operated through “normalization of deviance.” Impressed by the Deepwater team’s good safety record, federal regulators routinely rubber-stamped the BP/Transocean proposals. They failed to recognize the higher risks of disaster as oil exploration technology enabled drilling at deeper seabed while the update of safety regulations, which were designed for shallow water oil drilling, could not keep pace with the new technology.

In the operation of oil rig, regular conduct of the oil well’s pressure tests is crucial to the well’s integrity. Very often the team had succumbed to the normalization of deviance, setting aside data that didn’t conform to their expectations and relying on information that did. The risk further doubled as the BP executive Donald Vidrine who helped direct the drilling operations pushed the oil rig crew to cut corners and skipped safety protocols in disaster recovery operation. In the court trial following the disaster, BP admitted their wrong doing in unsafe use of equipment and unsound rescue procedure when the disaster was imminent. The customers’ opinions on the BP products remain positive though the reputation of the company is impacted.

(a) What is Utilitarian theory? Discuss how the Utilitarian theory may be applicable to the BP oil rig disaster. (8 marks)
(b) What is Virtue theory? Discuss how the Virtue theory may be applicable to the BP oil rig disaster. (8 marks)
(c) Define engineer’s ethics and present how an engineer should respond if he/she disagrees with his/her supervisor’s irresponsible instruction. (9 marks)

Question 4
The use of infusion therapy is gaining acceptance in recent years by patients with serious or chronic infections that do not respond well to oral medication. Cancers, gastrointestinal tract diseases, arthritis, diabetes, multiple sclerosis and congestive heart failure are typical examples. An internal infusion treatment for cancer is known as brachytherapy, which means short-distance therapy. With this method, sources of radiation in high dosage are released into or near the area that needs treatment. The radiation only travels a short distance, so there’s less risk of damaging nearby normal tissues. The effectiveness of the therapy depends on the flow rate, which is controlled by a variable speed motor in the pump. The accuracy of flow rate can be vastly improved by a little microchip embedded in the pump.

Antonius Mattis is an engineer designing a new microchip for the motor control used in internal infusion pump. It has to be tested to pass self-correction in various scenarios of malfunctions. The microchip design is preliminarily completed but is not ready for pump testing and finding consent participants for the testing is not easy.

Antonius was on a flight returning home from a technical conference. He starts chatting with a man named Andrew Carter sitting next to him. When Antonius mentioned that he was involved in infusion therapy pump design, Andrew became very interested and started asking a lot of questions. In the conversation, Antonius found out that Andrew was suffering from a rare form of liver cancer and his condition did not respond well to external radiotherapy. Andrew then said that he would want to take part in the motor testing even if it meant he would only live a couple more years. Antonius explained that his chip design was a year from patients’ testing in schedule, but he did not inform Andrew Carter of the dire consequences should the microchip fail. Antonius readily accepted Andrew’s offer to participate in the testing of new infusion pump and he believed that this was an informed consent.

(a) Is engineering design an experiment? (3 marks)
(b) Compare the similarities between an engineering design and an experiment. (3 marks)
(c) Present the ethical responsibilities for an engineer in testing the design
involving human participants. (3 marks)
(d) Does Andrew have the right to understand the consequences associated with the experimental design? Discuss rights ethic and the importance of informed consent. (8 marks)
(e) Give TWO (2) conditions for a valid consent applicable to the above case. (2 marks)

(f) What is risk acceptability? Give THREE (3) conditions on risk apprehensiveness applicable to Andrew who volunteers himself for the pump testing. Engineering Ethics(6 marks)