Ethical Considerations in Research

 

Morals ———–Ethics —————-Law

Is the behaviour described in the examples below related to ethics:

If it is, why and how?
Can you come up with a solution that would solve the ethical problem?

1. You find some good images on the web that would look good on your site.  You copy and paste them to your blog.

• In general using someone else’s work without crediting the creator is unethical
• The answer to this depends on the images and their source and whether the blog is earning money.
• Many images are available under a Creative Commons license allowing free fair use
• Copyright images can be used if permission is obtained from the owner
• Using a copyright images is usually illegal
• There are many websites currently offering free content such as unsplash.com
• There are morality issues as to the massive amount of money made by some businesses selling content on the web.

2. You are in a hurry to finish an assignment and you find the perfect explanation  of a difficult concept on Wikipedia. You decide to copy it into your work.

• Strictly speaking copying directly from a source, while not unethical is academically frowned upon, it is better to paraphrase to show understanding of the concepts.
• APA referencing require the use of quotation marks and in text referencing directly copied material.
• At the bottom of each page Wikipedia has the following statement “This page is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License”
• This means that material on Wikipedia is free and can be copied, shared and adapted
• Provided you give appropriate credit, distribute the content using the same licence and do not restrict access to your content.

3. You are a medical researcher and you think you have discovered a new drug that cures lung cancer.  It worked well on mice although a few of them died of heart problems. You want to test it on people.  You recruit 100 lung cancer patients into your treatment programme. You don’t tell them about the new drug.  You treat 50 patients with usual drugs and 50 with the new drug to see which is better.

• This is definitely unethical, there is no indication of consent in the process
• Additionally, it is not ethical to test without telling the patient they may be taking an experimental drug.
• Additionally, there is no evidence that they were informed of Death as a potential side-effect.
• Today most new drugs are introduced in phases, starting with phase 0 trials on a small set of people to assess the effect of the drug on a body.
• The trials progress through to phase 4 which is after FDA approval and involves thousands of patients
• https://www.nccn.org/patients/resources/clinical_trials/phases.aspx is a good overview.
• This issue can be solved by following standard phases required by regulatory authorities
• There will also be thorough Informed Consent involved at each stage of the process
• Potential side-effects are part of the Informed Consent documentation

4. You are doing your PhD about drug abuse among students.  You interview 30 students about their drug use. You discover that one of the students is actually a fairly big time dealer and you report him to the police.

• The ethics of reporting a study subject to authorities is a tricky issue
• Legally both the users and dealers of drugs are engaging in a criminal act
• What makes the Dealer any different from a user? It boils down to harm
• Potentially the Dealer is subjecting the user to potential serious consequences.
• If the consequences were minimal then I think Privacy and Confidentiality issues should prevent informing the authorities
• A better designed study would solve this
• The students would be anonymised, maybe with a written survey with no personal information
• Additionally the study should specify boundaries, what will constitute behaviour that will be reported, again informed consent would help here
• The students then understand the risks of participation

5. You are a researcher looking at the effect of violent computer games on children.  You recruit 20 children into your study. Over a month you regularly show them images of violence to see if it has an adverse effect on their behaviour.  One of the children becomes quite distressed each time and so you stop showing her images and drop her from the study.

• Ethically this study would never happen
• No researcher wold be allowed to expose children to potential harmful content
• No ethics committee would allow expose to violence in any form
• This problem is solved by doing a retrograde study
• Study groups of children and identify behaviors in those that have been exposed to violence in the past and compare the groups
• The principal of any research should be “first do no harm”

6. You want to research how easy it is to hack into your organisation’s computer system by persuading people to divulge login and password details.  You recruit a small team to ring up key people in the organisation and persuade them to give either their own or their boss’s details.

• This research is not ethical as the subjects do not know they are being studied
• There are also legal considerations of Hacking a company’s system
• Penetration testing of a system is allowed if the company has recruited you to do the testing
• This situation can be avoided by informing staff that an exercise will be taking place in the future, this will affect the results in some way but surprisingly in this situation a significant proportion will still divulge the confidential information

7. You are doing an initial research in area of a town where may bars and pubs are located, to estimate the level of problematic social behaviour in the area. your research is independent from the police, because you want to observe their behaviour as well. You observe both abusive and violent behaviour.

• Again, the ethics are complicated here
• People are being studied with no informed consent of the testing, even though it’s just observation
• But informing then will invalidate the study by changing their behaviour
• Police are not well known for a positive reaction to being observed
• Abusive and violent behaviour has a high potential for harm
• To solve this issue would require defining boundaries in the study as to which types of behaviour would be “acceptable” for the study and what behaviours would require informing a relevant authority

31/05/2019

Disaster

My web site has disappeared into the ether where 0s and 1s go to die.,.

Yesterday morning I had a fully functional web site just waiting for the tutor to visit, interact with and mark for me.

Yesterday afternoon I tried to access the site to add my tutor as an admin for the marking part and WordPress is asking me to install it again, the site has disappeared.

A little investigation into the database, which WordPress uses to store all the web site content and my tables have all been deleted and replaced by another students tables.

Turns out we both have similar names starting with the first 3 letters and this is how the tutor has named our databases and our access codes.

So when he was trying to upload his data the other student must have seen my tables and deleted them mistakenly thinking they were causing problems for his site.

The worst part is the tables were named differently and if he had left them alone both of our web sites would have happily used the same database just accessing their own tables.

A Compromise

Unfortunately there was no backups of the databases on the server, so my data and thus my web site is gone forever. 3  Weeks work have evaporated.

Fortunately I have already recorded a video of the web site as part of the requirements. And I have an updated report with all the functionality of the site discussed, and all the enhancements described.

Given a week with no other work to do I could rebuild the site but its due at midnight tonight, so that’s not on option.

So my tutor has agreed to use the video and my report to mark the site. Not ideal but he understands my work load and work ethic and I anticipate a mark which I would have achieved.

23/05/2019

Finally

A 5 day sprint, and I have a fully functional WordPress dynamic web site with all the bells and whistles and some extras above what the tutor wanted.

http://newsimland.com/~Stewart-Metcalfe/wordpress/

This is currently the link to the site on our tutors server.

Users can visit the site and if they wish to bid on an auction they will register as a subscriber. Berry farmers can register as a grower, and this gives them the ability to add products to the auction as well as post blog posts and access a basic price calculator.

Within the limitations of only using free themes and plugins, I think I have an excellent result and a professional looking site, just ignore the missing information on the front page!

5 days from starting with 2 pages using a WordPress theme, to a functional site, I would never have believed this  possible.

22/05/2019

A Sprinting Week

Its wednesday, and my web site is looking good. In two days I have achieved more than in the past 2 frustrating weeks.

The web-site requires some functionality:

Interactivity with the user

This has so far been achieved with the following elements

• An embedded video at the top of the Home page
• A sub-menu listing and linking to each berry information section on the homepage
• An up arrow at the bottom of the page, returns the user to the top (a plugin called “To Top”
• A Google map on the Contacts page, the user can find and “visit”  our farms.
• A “Contact us” form on the same page, the user can interact with us.

Register and Sign In

I used “Ultimate Member” a plugin for this function. I was able to design a Registration page and other pages were added automatically.

The user can now:

• Register as a Subscriber or a Grower
• Login
• Change their profile
• Logout

The plugin provides other functions I need:

• A page listing of the Berry Growers with their information

Using this page a Grower can register and login, and they can add their own content to the site by changing their profile. The Growers profiles are all visible to any users visiting the site and can be edited at any stage by the individual grower.

A second plugin, “User Menus” has allowed me to customize the Navigation menu depending on whether a user is logged in or not, initially they can see a Register and Login navigation in the menu, but once logged in this changes to display their User Name and a logout navigation. Different menu option are also available for different users (subscribers or growers).

A third plugin, “User Role Editor” allows me to fine tune what each user can access and do on the site. Essential for the blog page and auctions.

View the Growers Details

I managed this functionality with Ultimate Member as discussed above. Users can see all the growers on a Growers Page and can access their individual information.

At the same time Growers can maintain their own profiles, no work needed by the Admin.

A Berry Price Calculator

Built using a neat plugin “Calculated Fields Form”, this function is only available to growers logged in on the site and provides them a tool to calculate a price for their produce. It is based on various attributes which affect a berries quality and using some assumptions on a base berry price, I can calculate a price and include VAT for each type of berry.

Blog Page

This is part of the web sites Community.

Using “User Role Editor” I am going to allow Growers to post and edit their own blog posts on the site, less work for the Admin and more interactivity for the Growers and casual visitors and subscribers.

Auction

The final function to build, hopefully “Ultimate Auction” plugin will be easy to use.

Some neat design features:

A little animation for the Home page headings.

The Text overlying the images changes colour as the background colour scrolls behind the text.

 

 

20/05/2019

Monday – Positive again

After taking a break from the Web assignment last week, I have finally had some success this weekend.

Taking a small break and working on an AWS cloud assignment allowed me to break out of the frustrating cycle I found myself in at the beginning of last week, going in circles and getting nowhere.

This weekend I was again trying to create pages on the web site hosted on the tutor’s server, I kept getting update and publishing failures and any attempt just didn’t work, even the internet couldn’t answer my problems and give any useful advice.

The solution to the problem was to poll my classmates and see if they had the same problems and how they were able to fix them.

A few messages later and I had some potential approaches to try.

Delete Existing WP from Server

I started by deleting everything WordPress related from the server, my colleagues had uploaded WordPress to the server directly from their local machines and not via a zip file which I then unzipped on the server.

This was a time consuming process using the WinSCP app to communicate with the server, so I also investigated the GITBash console and found that using command lines in Linux, I was actually able to delete files and individual folders at a quicker rate than WinSCP, a good learning experience enabled by a slow running App. I now have a “clean” server.

Install new WP on Server

The next step was to download the latest WordPress install zip file and extract it to a new folder on my local machine. Then using WinSCP, I uploaded the entire WordPress folder to the server. Time consuming again, but now I have a clean updated WordPress installed and running on the server.

For some reason this approach and also changing the database tables prefix from wp_ to wp1_ fixed my “unable to publish” and “unable to update” errors.

Choose and Install a WP Theme

My experience with the Astra theme and plugin was not a successful one, so I chose a different theme – Hestia. A modern popular and top-featured theme with recent updates and more than 100 000 installations. Hopefully this will be relatively bug free and easier to use, and more importantly work with the numerous plugins the web site needs.

The server is not allowing me to download the theme from within WordPress, a work around to this was to download and install the theme in WordPress on my local machine, this creates a new folder in the wp-content/themes folder and this entire folder can the be uploaded to the server.

I can now activate the theme on the server and start again to build my web site. I have already built a home page on my local machine, I can’t simply upload this to the server but having the experience of building it using Elementor as a page builder made this a faster pain free process, except for the Images!

Uploading Images and other Media to the Server

The server does not support directly uploading images to the web site from within WordPress. I know where the images are stored by WordPress in the wp-contents/upload folder, so I was able to use WinScp to copy all my images to the server.

But this ran into a problem, WP stores the information about the media in a database table, so WP doesn’t know about the files that have been directly uploaded and can’t display them in the Media List.

An internet search found a plugin to fix this, Add From Server lets WP know about all the media files. So now I can add the images to my Home Page.

In Conclusion

I have had a successful weekend learning about WordPress and trouble-shooting some issues due to the server we are using to publish this web site, an excellent learning experience.

I now have a functional web site with a Home page, a Blog page and a Contacts page.

And more importantly, I am feeling positive again about this project and can now tackle the functionality required by the site.

 

Week 10: Updating Week 8 and Peer Review

Brainstorming the project (from week 8 blog)

This has been updated to complete Part 3: Making a choice

Making a Choice

• Choose one of the questions and make a more detailed description of what I would do to answer/explore the question i.e. a first draft of your list of activities

I have chosen to build on Question 4:

Q4: How can I build a neural network to recognise and classify an image?

• Write a title for this possible project.
  • Building a Neural network to recognise and classify a face in an image

The project will have 2 components:

1.       A research and learning element to explore the topics of NNs, ML and face recognition
2.       Building a NN to detect and analyse a face in an image

Activities

•         I have already taken the first step, as part of assignment 2 I read an academic article on Face detection which introduced me to the field of computer vision
•         Research into Computer Vision using a search engine to find relevant articles
•         Research using Google Scholar for academic articles on Computer Vision, specifically general overviews of the subject
•         Lynda courses

o   Neural Networks and Convolutional Neural Networks Essential Training is a course I have already started

o   Deep Learning: Face Recognition

o   Classify images and detect rectangles

•         CourseRA tutorials

o   Convolutional Neural Networks a course I am already studying

•         Exploring and using Microsoft Azure’s cloud based Face or Computer Vision services

 

Peer review

I have chosen to peer review Cam’s blog post for the Areas of Interest document.

1: An Interesting area of IT

Web apps  power the world today and as you have stated there are web apps for every conceivable thing we do in life.

This is a good discussion of the power of apps in today’s world with an interesting discussion of what you do and don’t know.

I appreciate the thought o work by yourself and research and build an app, but the Fisheries presentation has some potential as a work place as they need some apps developed for their staff, this might be a better option to focus your research and built something the company can use.

Your resources show a large number of tools available to assist you with this project.

2. Identifying a project

Your questions are a good starting point, like me you ran out of questions as you had identified some good questions early.

You picked three questions very relevant to your interest.

Firstly do the research, then figure out where to start, this is always the trickiest part of any project, taking the first steps.

The last question explores the process of how an app is created.

Three good questions which if you put the all together are the building blocks of a project which will see you design and build a useful app.

3. Making a choice

There is not much detail here, you have made a choice of what you would like to do, although I think this will change as you explore the potential work place experience to build an all for a company.

My only criticism: You have not discussed what you would do to further explore the Web app development process or started a list of activities you could pursue.

4. Ethics

I like your thoughts here, how many of those apps out there are actually just time wasters built and deployed just because someone could. With little though of the effect the app could have on individuals.

I would never have thought that building an app would have ethical considerations.

14/05/2019

A frustrating week

From the Web course point of view I have ad a frustrating few days.

I feel like I am going in circles, chasing my tail and not actually achieving anything.

Having a rather broken site at the beginning of the week, I attempted a restart.

I decided to investigate loading WordPress on the tutors server and rebuilding the site.

Unfortunately the WordPress plugin and theme – Astra– I had used was not interested in the server and proved to be incompatible, i was unable to upload images and content using the Elementor site editor, and attempting to trouble shoot and bug fix was becoming frustrating – WordPress is supposed to be a relatively straight forward CMS to use, so I think I will have to abandon this approach.

Next I tried uploading a theme to WordPress on the server and after some help from the tutor I now have a theme on the server, but with some effort and I am reconsidering the server option. I think I may have to redirect my approach to this. Hopefully a break will allow my brain to reset and I can start over with a fresh approach and attempt to use a simpler theme and plugins which will be compatible and allow the functionality I need.

AWS Project 1: A Medical Company

This blog was started based on comments made in class that the project 1 would be marked from a blog post. This changed to screenshots in the report, so this blog post was stopped.

Introduction

This project requires us to assess the current infrastructure of A Medical Company and to discuss the requirements, architecture and infrastructure required to move their systems to the Amazon Web Services cloud.

The company has built an online medical social networking and diagnosis assistance application  (“the App”) which connects patients and doctors for the following:

• Online appointments
• Remote consultation
• Remote diagnosis
• Electronic prescriptions
• Payment services
• Document and image uploading
• Text extraction from documents
• Image conversion to multiple formats

Currently the Development and Test infrastructure is deployed with a physical server hosting company.

The company is about to launch the App and wishes to take advantage of cloud technologies to support the expected rapid uptake and growth.

This blog will chart the projects progress on AWS.

Creating a IAM policy to access an S3 bucket

There is a default policy which allows access to all permissions and actions on a S3 bucket, but for better security we have created a JSON file which limits only to List, Get and Put actions, this allows us to read and write to the S3 and list its contents, all we need for the role so the app can access the files in the S3 bucket. I used the Visual editor to create a policy and then modified it in the JSON editor.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:Put*",
                "s3:Get*",
                "s3:List*"
            ],
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

I was then able to create the EC2-S3AccessRole and attach this policy, the EC2 instances can now access the S3 bucket to add and remove files from storage.

Identification and Access Management

IAM for System Monitors

This was achieved by selecting only the action they have permission to perform.

Users and Groups

Created as per the specifications.

Roles

Created a new policy and a role to allow EC2 instances to access the S3 bucket, restricted to List, Read and write actions.

 

Password Policy

Applied as per specifications.

 

13/05/2018

Broken

My WordPress site is now broken.

The Register button in the navigation menu no longer directs the user to the registration page but just stays on the Home Page, something has interfered with the link.

Another bug I have found is the issue with different users, in theory the Ultimate member plugin should allow a Grower to register and then have permission to write and edit a blog entry themselves, but this doesn’t happen, thy just constantly redirect to the home page, they can’t see or edit their own profile or any blog posts.

I have tried to trouble shoot the issues with no luck so far.

Next step is to role back and remove the plugin and start over.

Auction

I have trialed Ultimate Auction as my auction plugin but the free version only allows the admin to create a auction entry and the site needs Growers to add to the  auction, I will have to try some other plugins.

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