Annoyed janitor turns off cryo-freezer destroys decades of scientific work
nypost.com
nypost.com
The real root cause of this unfortunate and horrible failure is a lack of monitoring and human checking. Lab leadership should have to answer why security wasn’t all over this. At some point, it’s cheaper to make it someone’s job to check the thing than it is to miss the alarm!
Could you elaborate?
I'm sure some IT person is tut-tutting getting ready chide the hypothetical researcher for not following the 3-2-1 rule, or something, but science researchers aren't IT people and they can be expected to not follow IT best practices.
Anyway, their life’s research is on a set of these drives, with plenty of duplication to avoid the disk failure gnome. One day, all the drives disappeared. Tuns out the researcher normally left the drives on a desk, unsecured, in a ground floor office on an urban college campus. No cameras could see the office, so it could have been anyone.
It’s literally a miracle that stuff didn’t walk 24/7.
If, when it really matters, the actual & on-hand operating staff for $SYSTEM cannot understand even basics of the controls for $SYSTEM - then you're control UI is a complete failure, and you'll end up f*cked.
(Though given what was at risk - I also wonder why the controls were not behind padlocked plexiglass covers. And there was no remote monitoring system with 24x7 on-call staff. And...)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/166042073896
This reads like “I didn’t back up my hard drive”
In this case, it would probably stop someone from making a mistake but you can also kill the power in an emergency.
But I think they’re trying to make it sound like it was an honest mistake, rather than carelessness / bad intent, which I assume matters from a legal point of view.
Unless they are all randomly off and on for some strange reason
I think I'd go on sabbatical for a year or so if something like that happened. I literally wouldn't be able to handle coming in the next day or month or at least few months.
Why not lock the door to the room with the freezer? Why was there no backup power? What did they think would happen if the breaker broke?
Obviously, the lab can't foresee every risk. I just hope they don't consider the lawsuit as the last step in solving their problems.
You can't really prevent this kind of thing other than automated battery backup mobile network connected alerts.
A worker can't be expected to read a sign, now if they had thoroughly trained him maybe, but it doesn't sound like that's the case. It's not outside the realm of possibility that some cleaning staff might not be very literate or maybe English isn't their first language, etc...
Obviously the employee may suffer some blowback, like having a hard time getting their next job, but probably no life-destroying consequences
(Btw - does anyone know a link to that paper that identified the earliest cultures of HIV? I’d love to read about the fieldwork that led to the discovery of those ancient samples that had somehow remained viable in a, uh, less than stable developing-at-best county.)
This is fundamentally a design problem: annoying sounds should be used for emergency situations involving immediate rectification, not “fix this sometime in the next week.”
> Byline: today
> when the worker … shut off the circuit breaker Sept. 17, 2020
The purpose of an alarm is to alert someone. Maintenance had been scheduled, and after that point the beeping served no purpose. The primary fault lies with the person who designed the alarm, there should have been an option to silence it.
I also find it hard to assign any blame to the alarm designer. If there was a way to permanently silence the alarm, that was specifically added to prevent unnoticed loss of temperature. That would be a much worse design. Accounting for human nature.
I’m fairly confident momentary silence is part of the aforementioned torture technique. Did you not think about the article when you read it?
Reminds me of the "instructions to use a space toilet" in "2001 A space oddysey".
Some of us are old enough to remember people carelessly pressing the OK button in a Windows dialogue without reading the mesage in it.
Everybody wants to stop an annoying sound.
Same news. Not the intern's/janitor's fault. It is the lab's director's responsibility
The ol' "but we put a sign on it" excuse. It's decades of research and they put a sign on it. It's the lab's fault.
you don't plug cryo-freezer with a tiny valid temp. range into the standard outlet with no UPS, put up a bunch of signs ("please don't unplug") and no monitoring.
sounds like the samples were worth exactly the same value as the contents of that shared fridge at work, which is also apparently a 20 year science project, and uses the exact same security system.
Not sure why people are letting them off the hook. They're not supposed to use their brains, as they will always do the wrong thing. When they run into something they dim't have explicit orders to deal with, they should stop.
(a bit offensive but) maybe the process shall be followed/improved ?
In any case, when workplace accidents happen, the liability is on the business entity, not the individual, who is an agent of the entity.