8.14

Reading 4: Safety🔗

This assignment is due on Tuesday, November 12 at 11:59pm. Don’t bullshit.

Exercise 1. Watch the video below about the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine.

Exercise 2. Read Medical Devices: The Therac-25 Story by Leveson. Focus on causes.
  • When you follow the link above with your browser, you should see Leveson’s article, as well as a button “<” in the upper-right corner. Use the “<” button to expand the annotation sidebar.

  • You may need to log in to Hypothesis, using the account you created in Reading 1: Limitations of artificial intelligence.

  • **Pay attention to this next step**. This is a common mistake that results in many zeros on the assignment. After logging in, you are not done. You still have to expand the drop-down menu “Public” in the top right sidebar, make sure it says “my groups”, and change it to our course group “211”. You belong to this group because you used the invite link in Reading 1: Limitations of artificial intelligence. If you don’t post to this group, then other students won’t see your annotations, and you won’t get credit.

Exercise 3. Find a place where Leveson describes a decision that contributed to one or more of the Therac-25 accidents. Carefully select it, and Annotate it like this:
  • The decision by …[who?]…

  • to …[do what?]…

  • contributed to one or more of the accidents because …[why?]….