Sustainable Development
True or False: over half of the world’s population lives in urban areas
True
The contaminant in the water from the Flint River.
What is lead?
The joints of the Citicorp Building were fixed over the course of 8 weeks at this odd time.
What is nighttime?
The SDGs were created by this international organization.
What is the United Nations?
Your team discovers that a water-treatment plant algorithm occasionally fails during high demand hours, but fixing it will push the project over budget. The company wants to ship anyway. What is the ethical issue?
Prioritizing cost/schedule over public safety & reliability.
The Brundtland Commission report in 1987 defined sustainable development as, “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of ______ to meet their own needs”
What are future generations?
The Flint crisis revealed that infrastructure failures often disproportionately harm these communities.
What are low-income and minority communities?
True or False: The Citicorp building evacuation plan was accessible to the public.
True or False: The UN Sustainable Development Goals are intended to be achieved by just developing nations.
What is false?
You are asked to draft the public-facing safety summary for a new battery storage facility. Your manager instructs you to “simplify” by removing mention of a rare but catastrophic failure mode. What ethical dilemma does this present?
Lack of transparency / misleading the public / withholding material risk information.
Increasing production of goods and services is a goal of this system in Heckert's model.
What is the economic system?
Name one of the five states that combined have 42% of America's lead pipes.
What is New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Michigan, or Illinois?
This sort of person discovered the structural issues.
What is an undergraduate student at Princeton?
What is 2030?
You're a contractor inspecting a bridge and notice unusual cracking. Your supervisor says: “Don’t file anything yet. We can document it after the state contract renews.” What is the ethical issue?
Pressure to falsify or delay safety reporting to protect contracts.
The three objectives of a sustainable society identified by Heckert.
Social Objective
Ecological Objective
Economic Objective
Failing to maintain information on pipe materials is an example of poor ______ in engineering practice.
What is documentation (or record-keeping)?
The Citicorp design issue was partly due to building codes testing only this type of wind direction.
What are perpendicular winds?
The number of SDGs established by the UN.
An AI model (you helped develop it) used for flood-risk prediction performs significantly worse in low-income neighborhoods because of missing historical data. Management wants to continue using the model since “it’s still better than nothing.” What ethical concern arises?
Algorithmic bias harming vulnerable communities.
Name one of the development goals of Singapore by 2030.
Ecological Objective
Quadruple solar energy by 2030
Plant 1 million more trees (Singapore is approx. twice as large is Philadelphia)
Cut waste sent to landfills by 30%
Economic Objective
Make state-of-the-art buildings 80% more energy efficient
Social Objective
20% of schools carbon neutral
Produce 30% of nutrition locally
Half of buses + taxis electric by 2030
Nine people died from this disease, a direct result of drinking the contaminated water.
What is Legionnaires’ disease? (aka a waterborne form of pneumonia)
The Citicorp Building is now about to withstand this magnitude of disaster.
What is a 1-in-700-year storm?
Name 3 of the UN's SDGs
A chemical plant’s emergency generator fails two out of ten tests, but the engineering lead argues that “statistically it’ll probably work” and wants to avoid reporting it because regulators are already monitoring the plant. What is the ethical dilemma?
Ignoring or downplaying known safety defects; violating duty to protect public welfare.