There are only one thing wrong with the book. The workers (for the most
part, anyway) who broke machines had nothing against machines, per se.
What they were up in arms about was their misery and impoverishment.
Breaking the machines was SYMBOLIC.
In a piece about feminism in the New Yorker a few years ago, Ariel Levy
wrote, "There are political consequences to remembering things that never
happened and forgetting things that did." She was referring to the alleged
incidents of "bra burning" that took place in the 1970s. Reports of bra
burning were, to paraphrase Mark Twain, "greatly exaggerated." Rather than
being a story about an actual event, the alleged bra-burning incident was
a simile that a reporter used in comparing feminists to draft resisters
who burned draft cards.
If the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge had still been around
in the 1970s, perhaps they could have issued a tract explaining to women
the support and comfort provided by brassieres.
On Sat, Dec 25, 2010 at 11:12 AM, Harry Pollard
<<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
I suspect, Michael, that this whole subject would be enjoyed by the 19th
century Luddites.
I repeat, it's a red herring designed to avoid the real problems.
Or, as is the newly popular phrase to describe US politicians, it's kicking
the can down the road!
Merry Christmas!
Harry
******************************
Henry George School of Los Angeles
Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042
(818) 352-4141
******************************
-----Original Message-----
From:
<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer
Sent: Wednesday, December 22, 2010 11:52 AM
To: <mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]
Subject: [Futurework] Re: A Robot Stole My Job: Automation in the Recession
Pitfalls of automation on the way to the singularity:
As scary as this scenario is, taken as a model for the larger trend, it's
heartwarming that the financial cohort was reduced to the role of gofers for
the people who actually *do* stuff and that at least *some* critical stuff
got done under the circumstances.
RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Monday 20 December 2010 Volume 26:Issue 25
Also at:
<http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/26.25.html>http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/26.25.html
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2010 18:07:20 -0500
From: "Robert L Wears, MD, MS" <<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]>
Subject: Health information technology risks
Since the ECRI Institute recently moved health IT to its 'top 10
list' of hazardous healthcare technologies for 2011, I thought I
would offer this case in point.
Shortly before midnight on a Monday evening, a large urban
academic medical center suffered a major IT system crash which
disabled virtually all IT functionality for the entire campus and
regional outpatient clinics. The outage affected ADT, financial,
medical records, laboratory ordering and reporting, imaging
ordering and reporting, and pharmacy systems. (Two
semi-independent subsystems, EKG, and picture archiving, were
still functional in a limited sense). The outage persisted for 67
hours, and forced the cancelation of all elective procedures on
Wednesday and Thursday, involving 52 major procedures and numerous
minor procedures (such as colonoscopies). All ambulance traffic
was diverted to other hospitals during the outage (estimated 70
diversions). There were substantial delays in obtaining
laboratory and radiology results on existing inpatients, so
despite the reduction in the numbers of incoming patients, it was
difficult to clear out the hospital as physicians delayed
discharges pending those results. Not surprising to the readers
of RISKS, the outage was due to a concatenation of small failures
and long-standing but unapparent underlying latent conditions.
The triggering event was a hardware failure in a critical network
component. This was repaired but required major servers to be
manually restarted. During restart, the servers halted and
reported critical errors; it was then discovered that certain file
permissions had been changed that prevented the clinical systems
from rebooting, and operators from reverting to prior versions.
(It should be noted that these systems had not been rebooted for
over 26 months). Ultimately it was found that these changes
resulted from an attempt to install "high availability" failover
capability two years prior. The high availability project had
been plagued with problems from the start, and eventually was
halted prior to completion, but some changes that had been made
were never completely rolled back, unknown to the system's
managers. These changes, in the presence of the network fault,
had the effect of triggering an attempt to execute high
availability failover processes that were nonexistent and thus led
to the reboot failures. Once this issue was discovered and
corrected, clinical servers could be restarted. The databases
then underwent extensive integrity checks, and when these were
satisfactory, services were resumed on Friday at 1600.
Backloading the clinical and financial data accumulated during the
outage took considerably longer than the downtime did. There was
no evidence this event was due to external agency, malware,
hacking, etc. Interestingly, no pre-existing data were lost
during the crash and downtime. A previous risk analysis had
estimated direct costs for complete downtime at $56,000 per hour,
so the total direct cost (not including lost revenue from canceled
cases or diverted patients) is likely close to $4 million. As far
as is known, no patients were injured during this event. The
risks here are multiple, but a few salient point are worth
emphasizing. First, it was difficult initially for frontline
workers to convince help desk personnel that the system was
unavailable due to the partitioning of the network secondary to
the initiating hardware failure. Second, it was difficult to
understand the nature of the failure or to uncover the ultimate
cause of the event. Third, the organization was slow in
activating its own internal disaster plan - an incident management
group was not convened until 1530 Tuesday, roughly 16 hours into
the incident. Fourth, the social element of the sociotechnical
system that is a hospital was able to quickly reorganize in
multiple ways and keep essential services operating in at least
some fashion for the duration. Many of these adaptations were
made "on the fly"; one of the most interesting was rescheduling
financial staff (who now had nothing to do, since no bills could
be produced), using them as runners to move orders, materials, and
results around the organization. Fifth, as has been frequently
noted in RISKS, maintenance played an important part in this
failure. The irony of the role of "high availability" resulting
in unavailability is rich indeed. Sixth, as Richard Cook has
pointed out, a working system, even with known flaws, is a
precious resource, so the reluctance to ever submit to a full
restart over the course of two years, which included multiple
large and small maintenance downtimes, is understandable, even
though that might have identified problems like the undocumented
permission and script changes at a time when they might have been
more easily recognized and corrected. As more and more care
delivery organizations with little experience in managing
clinical, as opposed to business, systems install more and more
advanced, clinical HIT systems -- systems that have not been
developed from a safety-critical computing viewpoint -- more
frequent and potentially more consequential failures are likely.
Robert L Wears, MD, MS University of Florida 1-904-244-4405
(ass't) Also Imperial College London
<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected] +44
(0)791 015 2219
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