Do Organizations that 'Fess Up Do Better?

Geoffrey W. McCarthy, a retired chief medical officer for the V.A., wrote, in a letter to the NYT on 9 August in response to an article on radiation overdoses in medical tests about two approaches to how organizations manage information about organizational errors. He notes that the issue illustrates the contradictions between "risk management" and "patient (or passenger or client or consumer) safety."

He notes that the risk manager will say "don't disclose" and "don't apologize" because these could put the organization at legal or financial risk. A culture of safety and organizational improvement, though, would say "fully disclose," not because it will help the patient, but because it is a necessary component of organizational change. The organization has to admit the error if is going to avoid repeating it, he asserts.

This suggests a number of sociology of information connections, but we'll deal with just one here. This example points to an alternative to the conventional economic analysis of the value of information. The usual approach is to "price" the information in terms of who controls it and who could do what with it (akin to the risk manager's thinking above). But here we see a process value -- the organization itself might change if it discloses the information (independent, perhaps, of the conventional value of disclosure or non-disclosure). One could even imagine an alternative pricing scheme that says "sure, Mr. X might sue us, but by disclosing the information we are more likely to improve our systems in a manner that lets us avoid this mistake in the future (along with the risk it poses to us and the costs it might impose on society). Why pour resources into hiding the truth rather than into using the information to effect change?

One rebuttal to this says that an organization can do both, and maybe so. Another would say that this is just mathematically equivalent to what would happen in litigation (perhaps through punitive damages).

But I think that Mr. McCarthy is onto something in terms of "information behaviors." There are, I expect, a whole bunch of "internal externalities" associated with what we decide to do with information. In other places I've examined the relational implications of information behavior. This points to another family of effects: organizational. More to come on this.

Information and Educational Assessment I

In a letter to the NYT about an article on radiation overdoses, George Lantos writes:

My stroke neurologists and I have decided that if treatment does not yet depend on the results, these tests should not be done outside the context of a clinical trial, no matter how beautiful and informative the images are. At our center, we have therefore not jumped on the bandwagon of routine CT perfusion tests in the setting of acute stroke, possibly sparing our patients the complications mentioned.

This raises an important, if nearly banal, point: if you don't have an action decision that depends on a piece of information, don't spend resources (or run risks) to obtain the information.  The exception, as he suggests, is when you are doing basic science of some sort.

Now consider, for a moment, the practice of "assessment" in contemporary higher education.  An industry has built up around the idea of measuring educational outcomes in which a phenomenal amount of energy (and grief) is invested to produce information that is (1) of dubious validity and (2) does not, in general, have a well articulated relationship to decisions.

Now the folks who work in the assessment industry are all about "evidence based change," but they naively expect that they can, a priori, figure out what information will be useful for this purpose.

They fetishize the idea of "closing the loop" -- bringing assessment information to bear on curriculum decisions and practices -- but they confuse the means and the ends.  To show that we are really doing assessment we have to find a decision that can be based on the information that has been collected.  Not quite the "garbage can model of decision-making," but close.

Perhaps a better approach (and one that would demonstrate an appreciation of basic critical thinking skills) to improving higher education would be to START by identifying opportunities for making decisions about how things are done and THEN figuring out what information would allow us to make the right decision and THEN how we would best collect said information.  Such an approach would involve actually understanding both the educational process and the way educational organizations work.  My impression is that it is precisely a lack of understanding and interest in these things on the part of the assessment crowd that leads them to get the whole thing backwards.  Only time will tell whether these scientist-manqués manage to mediocritize higher education or not.

Open Science : A Sociology of Information Topic par excellence

Conference at Berkeley this weekend on changing the way we think about scientific knowledge http://opensciencesummit.com.

From the conference website

Open Science Summit 2010: Updating the Social Contract for Science

July 29-31 International House Berkeley

Synthetic Biology, Gene Patents, Open Data, Open Access, Microfinance for Science, DIY science, DIY Biology, Alternative Funding for Science, Open Source Drugs, Patent Pools, Open Health/Medicine, Patient Advocacy for Innovation

"Ready for a rapid, radical reboot of the global innovation system for a truly free and open 21st century knowledge economy? Join us at the first Open Science Summit, an attempt to gather all stakeholders who want to liberate our scientific and technological commons to enable an new era of decentralized, distributed innovation to solve humanity's greatest challenges."

A Few Limits on Copyright

Until a few days ago, most of us did not know that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998 empowers/requires the Librarian of Congress to "determine whether there are any classes of works that will be subject to exemptions from the statute’s prohibition against circumvention of technology that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work" (U.S. Copyright Office 2010). But it does.

And here's what's changed as a result of James H. Billington's tri-ennial interpretation.

(1) College professors (in general) and students (in film and media studies, at least) can circumvent DVD security measures to include snippets of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment for educational purposes. A similar exemption exists for documentary filmmaking and noncommercial videos.

(2) You can hack programs on your phone if the purpose is to get programs you have legally obtained to work together. This is interpreted to mean you can "jailbreak" an iPhone and load non-Apple apps.

(3) You can hack programs on your phone if the purpose is connect it to a telecommunications network you are authorized to connect to. In other words, you can hack your Iphone so it works on Verizon.

(4) You can hack a video game you own if it's just for testing or fixing security flaws as long as you don't use the information you get from the process to help folks violate copyright.

Dongle

(5) If you own software that's protected by a dongle and you can't use it because the dongle is broken and no replacement available then you can hack the software to get around the dongle.

(6) If you have an ebook and all existing ebook editions disable read-aloud, then you can hack it to make it read-aloud. In other words, if the copyright owner doesn't offer to sell a read-aloud enabled version then you can break the controls that prevent read-aloud on a copy you own. Note that it seems that the publisher could offer for sale a million dollar read-aloud-enabled version to get around this. Presumably, the exception won't unravel retroactively -- the question will be was the read-aloud-enabled version available on the day you hacked the control.

Sources

---

U.S. Copyright Office. 2010. "Statement of the Librarian of Congress Relating to Section 1201 Rulemaking."

Wortham, Jenna. 2010. "In Ruling on iPhones, Apple Loses a Bit of Its Grip," New York Times July 26.

Regulating the Supply of Law

From the "Friends and Relatives of the Department" Files...

The ways that states regulate professions is a topic of sociological interest.  The degree to which citizens have access to legal services to solve legal problems is a topic of sociological interest. As argued previously on this blog("Equality, Information and the Courts Redux," "Democracy and the Information Order," "Courts and the Information Order," "Suing for Information"), the way the courts work is a topic of sociology of information interest. In this op-ed, these issues come together in a sociologically interesting way. You may recognize the author of the piece as my sometime co-author (and wife).

-- Dan.

A case for legal aid at Wal-Mart

By Gillian Hadfield

Friday, March 12, 2010

The United States stands largely alone in advanced-market democracies in drastically restricting where and how people can get help with their legal problems. In all states, under rules created by bar associations and state supreme courts, only people with law degrees and who are admitted to the state bar can provide legal advice and services of any kind. [Read More]

Technologically Induced Social Alzheimers

David Pogue has a nice little piece called "Why We Make Home Videos" on the NYT website. It's basically a personal tale in defense of home videos, but he starts out reminding readers of something he's written about a number of times, data rot.

Data rot is the tendency for technology to evolve so fast that we are all left with lots of information stored on media for which there no longer exist a device to play it. The implication of this is that society as a whole "has" lots of information that it might have no way of accessing. Hence the title of this post. Of course the ironic thing is that the social problem is hardware outstripping the memory while in the personal case its sort of the hardware failing the memory.

But it points to an interesting idea: perhaps the explosion of information -- and our general capacity to store, move, and process it -- comes with some self limiting counter tendencies. One is complexity -- too much information, no one has the synoptic view or cleverness to understand what it means. Another is the connect the dots problem I've written about here. Yet another is data rot -- backwards compatibility always has its limits.  I wonder if anyone has sat down to map out what sorts of information are likely to move into the darkness of rot when.  Are all the data on punch cards gone from the social memory yet?  How about all those 24 inch fixed disk platters we used to get mounted on our System/370 machine?  I know my college thesis on it's 8 inch IBM Series/1 diskette is basically lost to time.  What else?



Related Posts
"The More Information the Better"?
What Society Knows

Three Kinds of Information Sensitivity

OK, a naive meditation on three modes of paying attention to the world.

Pretend you are a politician, perhaps a senator or member of congress. What do you pay attention to?

Some would have us believe that poll numbers are the most important. You open your mouth, emit a sound bite, the media disseminates it, people react and respond to polls, and you adjust accordingly. Depending on your point of view, that's either democracy in action or appalling pandering. In either case, the opinions/reactions of "the people" are aggregated via some presumably reliable and accurate method.

Another theory would be that you are listening to powerful interests who have your ear and who donate to your campaign. Your comments are probably a little more proactive than reactive -- they've let you know what they want to hear and so you make sure you say it. But as above the whole thing is a cycle -- we get the initial attention by saying things and then it cycles from there. In this case, though, the method for aggregating the reactions (and pre-actions) of donors is harder to suss out. Tally up the dollars? Is there a pecking order? Or a "one topic each" rule?

A third approach would be that you apply accepted methods of policy analysis and make use of trustworthy data to decide what policies would best achieve desired aims. Here information is aggregated and decisions made using generally accepted (and open) methods. Of course, deciding on those aims is an information problem that can bring us right back into one of the first two approaches, but we'll set that aside for the moment.

My guess is that a system COULD run on any of these three approaches to information processing. What presents a challenge to govern-ability, though, is when one or more of these is the public face of what's going on while another one is what's going on behind the scenes. Or, worse, when the actors themselves don't really have a handle on when they are using one or another to try to ascertain how to govern.

And yes, this could be seen as an attempt to translate direct democracy, some variation on aristocratic pluralist democracy, and technocracy (help me on the terms, polisci friends) into information terms.