Every now and then we take a look at ethics in general: what ethics is, how to think about it, and, although you don't have to figure this one out to do engineering ethics, where ethics comes from. Where you say ethics comes from depends on your philosophical presuppositions. People who think the physical universe is all there is will generally say something different about the origins of ethics than those who believe there is something beyond nature, that is, supernaturalists such as myself. But the surprising thing is, even researchers who take no account of supernatural explanations end up with a conclusion about the nature of ethics worldwide, that is surprisingly close to what believers in the supernatural claim.
Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has developed what he calls Moral Foundations Theory. It is based on data gathered from over 100,000 surveys of people all around the world, so you would have a hard time accusing Haidt of ethnocentrism. What he and his colleagues have found, is that our sense of right and wrong can be traced to one or more foundational principles or ideas that essentially all cultures he studied share in common. These principles are: (1) "Harm/care"—the ability to understand pain and other results of harm in others, and to empathize and care for them; (2) "Fairness/reciprocity"—the kind of thing that makes even three-year-olds scream, "That's not fair!!" in every language; (3) "Ingroup/loyalty"—the ability to identify with and sacrifice for a group one belongs to; (4) "Authority/respect"—the sense that legitimate authority and traditions should be obeyed; and (5) "Purity/sanctity"—the notion of sacred spaces and the purity of the human body. On his website (which contains basically all I know about his theory), Haidt traces each of these traits to an evolutionary root. The trait of purity/sanctity, for instance, which Catholic author Flannery O'Connor called "the most mysterious of the virtues," derives from the evolutionary psychology of "disgust and contamination."
The details of each foundational principle (or should I say foundational/principle?) are not as important as the fact that according to Haidt, they are shared universally among all cultures he has studied. This gives the lie to people who say that ethics is always relative to the specific culture, and what is right in one culture could just as easily, and logically, be wrong in another one. Details differ, of course. What passes for modest apparel in Tahiti would not pass muster in Times Square (not now, anyway), but the remarkable thing is that there really are universally shared moral mechanisms or tendencies at all. One would think that evolution would have come up with a splendid and contradictory variety of ethical notions, just as we see a tremendous variety of colors and shapes among birds or reptiles in different parts of the world.
For supernaturalists, this is no surprise. There is an old, somewhat battered, but nonetheless still vigorous concept called "natural law" which says, in a nutshell, the laws of morality are written on the heart of every person, and the Author is God. According to natural law, there are certain innate principles of morality that people know by nature, even if they later convince themselves otherwise for various, often self-serving, reasons. Just as Haidt has found, natural law says these basic principles are universal, though details can vary according to customs and cultures of different peoples. For example, the Christian tradition says a man can have only one wife at a time. Islam and some other religions allow four or more wives at once. But there is no culture anywhere (Margaret Mead notwithstanding) which says you may simply have any woman you like anytime. This is not to say that some people don't act that way; but if they do, they are going against the morality of their culture.
What difference does this make to engineering ethics? In one sense, very little, and in another sense, everything.
In the sense that engineering ethics deals with practical applications of generally accepted ethical principles to specific problems, the field is not that concerned with where the ethics come from—whether evolution or God. This is why engineering societies composed of people from many religions, or no religion, can nevertheless agree on certain basic codes of ethics to follow worldwide. Although bribery is a widespread practice, nearly everybody agrees that to live in a world without bribery would be better than to live with it. People who take and receive bribes make the excuse that they simply couldn't get things done otherwise. While that may be true in a particular case, it doesn't change the fact that a country or system without bribery is a better thing morally than one where you have to bribe people to get even legitimate things done.
On the other hand, if you ask yourself "Why be moral at all?" the origins of moral principles make all the difference in the world. Engineers often pride themselves on their ability to reason logically. If we are really just products of a blind evolutionary process that came from nowhere and leads nowhere—I don't know about you, but if I believed that, I would have trouble just getting out of bed in the morning, let alone devoting years of study to a profession that will produce only a transient gleam in the eternal void. A common alternative, according to mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, is to distract oneself from the awful reality of death, and engineering is as good a distraction as any, for a while, anyway. But in this view, it's only a distraction.
Next time we'll examine some specific technical matter with an ethical angle to it, and life will go on. But every now and then, it's good to ask why right and wrong is there at all, and where it comes from.
Sources: I discovered the Moral Foundations Theory website from reading a piece by skeptic Michael Shermer in the December 2009 issue of Scientific American. The website is at www.moralfoundations.org.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
Air Accidents In Perspective
A good fraction of classic engineering-ethics cases are concerned with accidents involving air transport of some kind, with commercial airline traffic taking the lead in terms of fatalities involving members of the public (as opposed to astronauts, for example). For example, in the early 1970s, problems with a DC-10 cargo door latch led to one near-fatal accident, halfhearted attempts to remedy the problem, and then a serious crash in France on Mar. 3, 1974, that killed 346 people. This case is held up to generations of engineers as an example of how not to fix a mechanical flaw in a life-critical system.
Although we have dealt with individual air accidents in this blog from time to time, before last Saturday I had never come across a book that takes a thoughtful, coherent look at the whole history of air accidents and the intriguing problems associated with investigating them. A small bookstore had opened a few months ago in what passes for downtown San Marcos, and I had a few minutes to poke around in it. (Small independent bookstores are going the way of the newspaper before the onslaught of the Internet, but that is a discussion for another time.) My attention was attracted by a striking photo of the French Concorde in flames as it left the ground, and after perusing David Owen's clear, unsensational prose inside, I concluded to buy Air Accident Investigation.
Owen, a former engineer turned journalist, has the disciplined rhetorical skills that one finds more often than not in good British writers. While not pretending to write an exhaustive history, he does start with the early days of commercial aviation, with an even-handed treatment of both U. S. and European practice. I was intrigued by a photo of what has to have been one of the largest biplanes ever built, a Handley Page H. P. 42 flown by Imperial Airways in trans-Channel service in the early 1930s. It was about four stories high and had four engines clustered around the fuselage. Owen's point in including it was that although there were plenty of accidents back then, early commerical aviation was operated so conservatively that in ten years of use, the H. P. 42 never lost a passenger to a fatal accident.
All this changed after World War II, when jet aviation and economic growth transformed the flying public from a few privileged individuals into hordes of airborne bus passengers. Higher speeds and long over-water flights raised the cost of in-flight mechanical failure to the point that surviving a commercial airline crash was a dubious proposition at best.
Most of Owen's examples date from the period of about 1953 to 1990, and are organized by the type of accident: mechanical failure, weather-related, pilot error, and finally terrorism. One theme that emerged out of the dozens of individual tales of smooth takeoffs followed by unexpected tragedies is the role of metal fatigue in airline safety, or lack thereof. It was metal fatigue, poorly understood at the time, that caused the terrible series of accidents to the first British jetliner, the de Havilland Comet, in the early 1950s. And right up to the 1990s, fatigue continues to exact a toll on airliners, their designers, and maintenance personnel who fail to exercise the utmost diligence in checking for and combating this all-too-common problem. I came away with the strong impression that a modern airliner is a kind of chessboard showing the long history of how human ingenuity can checkmate aluminum's tendency to crack under repeated stress caused by the thousands of takeoffs, flights, and landings in a plane's useful service lifetime. Owen points out that although there is no fixed "retirement age" for airframes, the problem of so-called geriatric aircraft will only increase as the industry's fleet ages.
Another factor that is familiar to those who have read a number of engineering-ethics cases is the way that serious accidents have of coalescing from a number of relatively independent small mistakes, each of which if taken in isolation doesn't seem that serious. The investigation of a runway accident between two 747s on the island of Tenerife in the Canaries in 1977 revealed a chain of problems beginning with a terrorist bomb that shut down a better-equipped airport nearby, and ended with fortuitous radio interference during the last control-tower message that could have conceivably avoided the accident. As a result, one 747 trying to take off collided with another on the ground, killing over 500 people in all. This emphasizes the importance of keeping track of the "near-miss" kind of error which could have resulted in fatalities, but didn't simply because other factors were not also wrongly aligned at the time. Good engineering practice is to establish a system for reporting such incidents and making sure that even mildly dangerous problems do not arise in the future.
The book is illustrated with helpful original diagrams that clarify the often complex situations involved in many accidents. Owen's engineering background gives him a confident familiarity with the technical aspects of aviation, but he always makes sure that the essential details are clear enough for the reasonably intelligent reader to follow. Add to this the inherent suspense of reading about unexpected death and destruction, and how investigators painstakingly piece together evidence (sometimes quite literally) after a crash, and you have a book that is both a valuable addition to the engineering ethics literature, and a fascinating read as well. Which is, frankly, an unusual combination, although it need not be.
Owen's book is still in print (in fact, it's in its third edition), so I would highly recommend it for anyone interested in the technology of aviation or the drama of accident investigations. Notably, the rate of serious accidents has fallen off in the last decade or two, largely because jet aviation is now a mature technology. Many of the major ways aircraft and air transportation systems can fail are pretty well known by now and avoidable. We can only hope that, in spite of terrorism and war, air travel safety keeps improving to the point that major air disasters will recede into the distant past.
Sources: David Owen's Air Accident Investigation (3rd edition, 2006) is published by Haynes Publishing, Somerset, England (ISBN 9978 1 85260 614 5).
Although we have dealt with individual air accidents in this blog from time to time, before last Saturday I had never come across a book that takes a thoughtful, coherent look at the whole history of air accidents and the intriguing problems associated with investigating them. A small bookstore had opened a few months ago in what passes for downtown San Marcos, and I had a few minutes to poke around in it. (Small independent bookstores are going the way of the newspaper before the onslaught of the Internet, but that is a discussion for another time.) My attention was attracted by a striking photo of the French Concorde in flames as it left the ground, and after perusing David Owen's clear, unsensational prose inside, I concluded to buy Air Accident Investigation.
Owen, a former engineer turned journalist, has the disciplined rhetorical skills that one finds more often than not in good British writers. While not pretending to write an exhaustive history, he does start with the early days of commercial aviation, with an even-handed treatment of both U. S. and European practice. I was intrigued by a photo of what has to have been one of the largest biplanes ever built, a Handley Page H. P. 42 flown by Imperial Airways in trans-Channel service in the early 1930s. It was about four stories high and had four engines clustered around the fuselage. Owen's point in including it was that although there were plenty of accidents back then, early commerical aviation was operated so conservatively that in ten years of use, the H. P. 42 never lost a passenger to a fatal accident.
All this changed after World War II, when jet aviation and economic growth transformed the flying public from a few privileged individuals into hordes of airborne bus passengers. Higher speeds and long over-water flights raised the cost of in-flight mechanical failure to the point that surviving a commercial airline crash was a dubious proposition at best.
Most of Owen's examples date from the period of about 1953 to 1990, and are organized by the type of accident: mechanical failure, weather-related, pilot error, and finally terrorism. One theme that emerged out of the dozens of individual tales of smooth takeoffs followed by unexpected tragedies is the role of metal fatigue in airline safety, or lack thereof. It was metal fatigue, poorly understood at the time, that caused the terrible series of accidents to the first British jetliner, the de Havilland Comet, in the early 1950s. And right up to the 1990s, fatigue continues to exact a toll on airliners, their designers, and maintenance personnel who fail to exercise the utmost diligence in checking for and combating this all-too-common problem. I came away with the strong impression that a modern airliner is a kind of chessboard showing the long history of how human ingenuity can checkmate aluminum's tendency to crack under repeated stress caused by the thousands of takeoffs, flights, and landings in a plane's useful service lifetime. Owen points out that although there is no fixed "retirement age" for airframes, the problem of so-called geriatric aircraft will only increase as the industry's fleet ages.
Another factor that is familiar to those who have read a number of engineering-ethics cases is the way that serious accidents have of coalescing from a number of relatively independent small mistakes, each of which if taken in isolation doesn't seem that serious. The investigation of a runway accident between two 747s on the island of Tenerife in the Canaries in 1977 revealed a chain of problems beginning with a terrorist bomb that shut down a better-equipped airport nearby, and ended with fortuitous radio interference during the last control-tower message that could have conceivably avoided the accident. As a result, one 747 trying to take off collided with another on the ground, killing over 500 people in all. This emphasizes the importance of keeping track of the "near-miss" kind of error which could have resulted in fatalities, but didn't simply because other factors were not also wrongly aligned at the time. Good engineering practice is to establish a system for reporting such incidents and making sure that even mildly dangerous problems do not arise in the future.
The book is illustrated with helpful original diagrams that clarify the often complex situations involved in many accidents. Owen's engineering background gives him a confident familiarity with the technical aspects of aviation, but he always makes sure that the essential details are clear enough for the reasonably intelligent reader to follow. Add to this the inherent suspense of reading about unexpected death and destruction, and how investigators painstakingly piece together evidence (sometimes quite literally) after a crash, and you have a book that is both a valuable addition to the engineering ethics literature, and a fascinating read as well. Which is, frankly, an unusual combination, although it need not be.
Owen's book is still in print (in fact, it's in its third edition), so I would highly recommend it for anyone interested in the technology of aviation or the drama of accident investigations. Notably, the rate of serious accidents has fallen off in the last decade or two, largely because jet aviation is now a mature technology. Many of the major ways aircraft and air transportation systems can fail are pretty well known by now and avoidable. We can only hope that, in spite of terrorism and war, air travel safety keeps improving to the point that major air disasters will recede into the distant past.
Sources: David Owen's Air Accident Investigation (3rd edition, 2006) is published by Haynes Publishing, Somerset, England (ISBN 9978 1 85260 614 5).
Monday, November 09, 2009
To Patent or Not To Patent: Supreme Court to Judge
Most historians recognize the development of the legal framework of patents as an important, if not essential, part of the Industrial Revolution. The proper function of patents and patent law can perhaps be understood best by considering two extremes.
For most of history, the world was at one extreme: no patents or patent law at all. If a clever inventor came up with a new way of doing something or building a useful device, he had to keep it secret in order to maintain the competitive advantage his invention provided for him. Because if the goldsmith or millwright next door found out how the invention worked, the original inventor had no legal way to stop the imitator from using his invention. Consequently, processes and techniques were handed down from father to son or closely held in small guilds whose members were sworn to secrecy. And the pace of technological development during much of this time was consequently slow.
Now suppose we have a patent law, but instead of providing a limited-term monopoly to the inventor of twenty years (in current law), suppose it provided protection in perpetuity. Once somebody invented something, no one else could ever use that invention without the inventor's permission. Paradoxically, this opposite extreme would land us in a situation not too different from the one that prevailed before there were any patents at all. More information would be available, but you couldn't use it legally. Or at best, people would spend most of their inventive time and energy trying to get around the ever-growing forest of issued patents, rather than simply concentrating on inventing new stuff that the market needed.
In the last few decades, the situation in U. S. patent law has moved closer to the extreme of perpetual patents on anything—not so much in terms of the time limits on patents, but in terms of what can be patented. Unfortunately, the effect is much the same. If you can do one little tweak on someone else's patented idea and get a patent on it yourself, the situation is ripe for exploitation by patent lawyers and general confusion. By many accounts, that is more or less the state we're in today. Given enough money, I'm pretty sure you can patent anything these days, whether it's been around for decades or not, because the patent office has tended to neglect its former duty to make sure that inventions are original and worthy of patent protection. Although I haven't checked this to be sure, there is the legendary patent on a way a child swings in a yard swing. If this patent really exists, thousands of kids all across America unconsciously risk falling afoul of the patent laws every time they head for the playground.
Today (Nov. 9) the U. S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear their first patent case pertaining to the scope of the patent laws in many years. At issue is more than a single patent decision, although a patent claimed by businessmen Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw having to do with energy-price trading started the ball rolling. In a 2008 decision by the Federal Circuit (a special court that tries appeals of patent cases), Chief Judge Michel radically restricted his court's earlier generous interpretation of the kinds of things that can be patented. The rule he proclaimed says that a patentable process can only be issued if it is related to a "particular machine or apparatus" or transforms an article into "a different state or thing." If carried to its logical conclusion, this decision could invalidate or cast into question thousands of esxisting patents on business methods, software, diagnostic techniques, and many other technologies. A blogger at the intellectual-property website ipwatch.com excoriated Judge Michel for going way beyond the matter at issue, since whatever the Federal Circuit says about patents is the last word unless the Supreme Court says otherwise.
Sudden invalidation of a lot of patents would certainly be disruptive, especially at a time when the technology industry is not doing that well financially. Many high-tech companies are watching this case closely for that reason. The hope is that the Supreme Court will correct what many people perceive as a blunder on the part of the Federal Circuit, but how far they go in correcting the earlier decision could have important implications for the future of patent law in the U. S.
Patent law is a creature of the legislative branch, not the judicial branch, and perhaps all this attention will lead Congress to revisit the state of patent law with a view toward streamlining and modernizing the system. One practical problem that has led to the flood of dubious patents in recent years is the fact that the Patent Office is grossly understaffed. The sense is that rather than give patents the attention they need at the price of taking many years to issue a patent, the Office simply does something close to rubber-stamping in a matter of two years or less. Another problem is that two years is still only a little less than eternity in some businesses such as software, where entire generations of products rise and fall in a matter of months. But Congress is busily engaged on other matters for the time being.
The Supreme Court will take some months to decide this case, so we look forward to revisiting it in the spring, by which time a lot of things will look better, I hope.
Sources: I used material from the following websites: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/08/supreme-court-to-hear-key_n_349964.html (the Huffington Post is not something I routinely visit, but showed up first on a Google search—I don't recommend it for general viewing!), http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2009/11/09/argument-day-in-bilski-at-us-supreme-court/id=7209/, and http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704328104574517882062296034.html?mod=googlenews_wsj.
For most of history, the world was at one extreme: no patents or patent law at all. If a clever inventor came up with a new way of doing something or building a useful device, he had to keep it secret in order to maintain the competitive advantage his invention provided for him. Because if the goldsmith or millwright next door found out how the invention worked, the original inventor had no legal way to stop the imitator from using his invention. Consequently, processes and techniques were handed down from father to son or closely held in small guilds whose members were sworn to secrecy. And the pace of technological development during much of this time was consequently slow.
Now suppose we have a patent law, but instead of providing a limited-term monopoly to the inventor of twenty years (in current law), suppose it provided protection in perpetuity. Once somebody invented something, no one else could ever use that invention without the inventor's permission. Paradoxically, this opposite extreme would land us in a situation not too different from the one that prevailed before there were any patents at all. More information would be available, but you couldn't use it legally. Or at best, people would spend most of their inventive time and energy trying to get around the ever-growing forest of issued patents, rather than simply concentrating on inventing new stuff that the market needed.
In the last few decades, the situation in U. S. patent law has moved closer to the extreme of perpetual patents on anything—not so much in terms of the time limits on patents, but in terms of what can be patented. Unfortunately, the effect is much the same. If you can do one little tweak on someone else's patented idea and get a patent on it yourself, the situation is ripe for exploitation by patent lawyers and general confusion. By many accounts, that is more or less the state we're in today. Given enough money, I'm pretty sure you can patent anything these days, whether it's been around for decades or not, because the patent office has tended to neglect its former duty to make sure that inventions are original and worthy of patent protection. Although I haven't checked this to be sure, there is the legendary patent on a way a child swings in a yard swing. If this patent really exists, thousands of kids all across America unconsciously risk falling afoul of the patent laws every time they head for the playground.
Today (Nov. 9) the U. S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear their first patent case pertaining to the scope of the patent laws in many years. At issue is more than a single patent decision, although a patent claimed by businessmen Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw having to do with energy-price trading started the ball rolling. In a 2008 decision by the Federal Circuit (a special court that tries appeals of patent cases), Chief Judge Michel radically restricted his court's earlier generous interpretation of the kinds of things that can be patented. The rule he proclaimed says that a patentable process can only be issued if it is related to a "particular machine or apparatus" or transforms an article into "a different state or thing." If carried to its logical conclusion, this decision could invalidate or cast into question thousands of esxisting patents on business methods, software, diagnostic techniques, and many other technologies. A blogger at the intellectual-property website ipwatch.com excoriated Judge Michel for going way beyond the matter at issue, since whatever the Federal Circuit says about patents is the last word unless the Supreme Court says otherwise.
Sudden invalidation of a lot of patents would certainly be disruptive, especially at a time when the technology industry is not doing that well financially. Many high-tech companies are watching this case closely for that reason. The hope is that the Supreme Court will correct what many people perceive as a blunder on the part of the Federal Circuit, but how far they go in correcting the earlier decision could have important implications for the future of patent law in the U. S.
Patent law is a creature of the legislative branch, not the judicial branch, and perhaps all this attention will lead Congress to revisit the state of patent law with a view toward streamlining and modernizing the system. One practical problem that has led to the flood of dubious patents in recent years is the fact that the Patent Office is grossly understaffed. The sense is that rather than give patents the attention they need at the price of taking many years to issue a patent, the Office simply does something close to rubber-stamping in a matter of two years or less. Another problem is that two years is still only a little less than eternity in some businesses such as software, where entire generations of products rise and fall in a matter of months. But Congress is busily engaged on other matters for the time being.
The Supreme Court will take some months to decide this case, so we look forward to revisiting it in the spring, by which time a lot of things will look better, I hope.
Sources: I used material from the following websites: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/08/supreme-court-to-hear-key_n_349964.html (the Huffington Post is not something I routinely visit, but showed up first on a Google search—I don't recommend it for general viewing!), http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2009/11/09/argument-day-in-bilski-at-us-supreme-court/id=7209/, and http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704328104574517882062296034.html?mod=googlenews_wsj.
Monday, November 02, 2009
Toxic Drywall: All the Housing Market Needs
As if Florida homeowners didn't have enough to worry about already since many of them are "under water" financially, a recent report I heard on National Public Radio revealed that many thousands of houses in Florida and at least six other states may have been built with toxic drywall imported from China. People living in these houses have reported many kinds of health problems, ranging from acute sinus infections to nosebleeds and insomnia. Besides the health hazards, anything made of copper in these houses tends to turn black and often fails. Think wiring, plumbing, and air conditioning coils. How can something like this happen, and what can be done about it?
The "how" is fairly easy to answer, at least in general terms. Drywall is a sandwich made of cardboard surfaces on either side of a core made of partly dehydrated calcium sulfate, otherwise known as gypsum. Although there are places where you can mine gypsum, increasingly the material is obtained from flue-gas desulfurization plants associated with coal-fired power generation. Coal with a lot of sulfur in it releases the sulfur when it's burned, and if you don't de-sulfurize the flue gas that results, you get a terrible air pollution problem. Scrubbers can capture the sulfur, but the byproduct is a lot of sulfate stuff which can be purified into calcium sulfate by processes I have no clue about, not being a chemist.
But I can easily imagine that if someone who wanted to profit from the hot market in drywall caused by the building boom earlier in this decade got careless about converting impure flue-gas-derived gypsum to calcium sulfate suitable for making drywall, they might accidentally leave in some chemicals (such as iron sulfide in an acidic matrix) that, upon getting moist, would release hydrogen sulfide. And hydrogen sulfide is very nasty stuff. Its toxicity is comparable to hydrogen cyanide, which is what California used to use in it gas chamber for executions. Nobody wants to live in a gas chamber.
Something like this apparently happened in China when a good amount of Chinese drywall was imported to the U. S. and used in several states to build houses. If this hypothesis is correct, the first place you'd expect to hear about problems is where the average humidity is highest, and that's Florida. Sure enough, as long ago as 2004 complaints began to emerge in that state about weird rotten-egg odors, blackened and failing copper air-conditioner tubing, and wiring faults. Although the Environmental Protection Agency has reportedly investigated the problem, their findings are "not conclusive," so any redress from the government will be delayed if it arrives at all.
That's probably how it happened; now, what to do?
The parties involved are: the Chinese manufacturers of the defective drywall, the importing and marketing firms that sold the stuff in the U. S., the builders who used it to build houses, the homeowners who live in these houses, the financial institutions holding mortgages on the houses, the insurance companies insuring the houses, and various governmental regulatory agencies whose responsibilities touch on a problem like this. Already you can see the legal tangles just waiting to happen. Because of the lack of recourse many homeowners have run up against, someone has organized a Chinese Drywall Complaint Center that acts as a clearinghouse for information and news on the problem. Misery may love company, but that doesn't get rid of the toxic drywall.
This is an example of how a novel problem can take longer to solve than one we've dealt with before. As far as I know, the only similar situation involved polyurethane insulation that emitted formaldehyde gas or other toxic materials. Formaldehyde is not something you want to smell a lot of either, but it's not nearly as toxic as hydrogen sulfide. And it doesn't leave physical traces behind like blackened pipes and wiring. Another complicating factor is that the defect doesn't show up immediately. Evidently months or years of exposure to high humidity brings out the problem, and so builders who bought the defective drywall and installed it promptly can legitimately claim they had no idea it would do this. On the other hand, if the stuff fell off the ceiling as soon as they put it in, they would have known something was wrong immediately. So there is the time-bomb aspect to the situation as well.
Any time an international border appears between the perpetrators of a wrong and the victims, things are more complicated than otherwise, and that is the case here as well. Probably some rough justice will happen as the next importer of Chinese drywall finds that their market has disappeared, but that is unfair to the Chinese drywall manufacturers who are doing things right, assuming there are some. Unfortunately, in the rather xenophobic United States, most people think of China in simplistic terms and don't consider that it's at least as complicated as the U. S., if not more. But the Wild-West aspect of China's economy makes it hard for its government to enforce any kind of uniform regulations or safety codes, with the result that a few grossly negligent firms can put lead paint on children's toys, or melamine plastic in pet food, or hydrogen-sulfide-emitting compounds in drywall and get away with it, at least until the newshounds get involved. And then the whole country gets a black eye that only a minority of companies deserve.
As for the consumers who are stuck with toxic drywall, they still have few recourses. Not enough is known about the problem even to recommend a remediation strategy. It's pretty clear that tearing out all the old drywall in a house and putting in new non-toxic wallboard would probably cost more than tearing down the whole place and rebuilding from scratch. So insurance companies, builders, and even the government agencies involved are reluctant to pay for or recommend such an extreme course. What may happen is that people will simply walk away from such houses, many of which are underwater anyway, and take the consequences. Which won't help the banks any.
In the meantime, if you're looking to buy a cheap foreclosed home, take a look at the copper fixtures in it first. If you see any black corrosion, it's probably not a bargain after all.
Sources: Text relating to the NPR report on this subject is available at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114182073&ps=cprs. As long ago as last March, Time Magazine posted an online article on the subject at http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1887059,00.html. The Chinese Drywall Complaint Center website is Http://ChineseDrywallComplaintCenter.Com/. I also used material from the Wikipedia articles on drywall and hydrogen sulfide.
The "how" is fairly easy to answer, at least in general terms. Drywall is a sandwich made of cardboard surfaces on either side of a core made of partly dehydrated calcium sulfate, otherwise known as gypsum. Although there are places where you can mine gypsum, increasingly the material is obtained from flue-gas desulfurization plants associated with coal-fired power generation. Coal with a lot of sulfur in it releases the sulfur when it's burned, and if you don't de-sulfurize the flue gas that results, you get a terrible air pollution problem. Scrubbers can capture the sulfur, but the byproduct is a lot of sulfate stuff which can be purified into calcium sulfate by processes I have no clue about, not being a chemist.
But I can easily imagine that if someone who wanted to profit from the hot market in drywall caused by the building boom earlier in this decade got careless about converting impure flue-gas-derived gypsum to calcium sulfate suitable for making drywall, they might accidentally leave in some chemicals (such as iron sulfide in an acidic matrix) that, upon getting moist, would release hydrogen sulfide. And hydrogen sulfide is very nasty stuff. Its toxicity is comparable to hydrogen cyanide, which is what California used to use in it gas chamber for executions. Nobody wants to live in a gas chamber.
Something like this apparently happened in China when a good amount of Chinese drywall was imported to the U. S. and used in several states to build houses. If this hypothesis is correct, the first place you'd expect to hear about problems is where the average humidity is highest, and that's Florida. Sure enough, as long ago as 2004 complaints began to emerge in that state about weird rotten-egg odors, blackened and failing copper air-conditioner tubing, and wiring faults. Although the Environmental Protection Agency has reportedly investigated the problem, their findings are "not conclusive," so any redress from the government will be delayed if it arrives at all.
That's probably how it happened; now, what to do?
The parties involved are: the Chinese manufacturers of the defective drywall, the importing and marketing firms that sold the stuff in the U. S., the builders who used it to build houses, the homeowners who live in these houses, the financial institutions holding mortgages on the houses, the insurance companies insuring the houses, and various governmental regulatory agencies whose responsibilities touch on a problem like this. Already you can see the legal tangles just waiting to happen. Because of the lack of recourse many homeowners have run up against, someone has organized a Chinese Drywall Complaint Center that acts as a clearinghouse for information and news on the problem. Misery may love company, but that doesn't get rid of the toxic drywall.
This is an example of how a novel problem can take longer to solve than one we've dealt with before. As far as I know, the only similar situation involved polyurethane insulation that emitted formaldehyde gas or other toxic materials. Formaldehyde is not something you want to smell a lot of either, but it's not nearly as toxic as hydrogen sulfide. And it doesn't leave physical traces behind like blackened pipes and wiring. Another complicating factor is that the defect doesn't show up immediately. Evidently months or years of exposure to high humidity brings out the problem, and so builders who bought the defective drywall and installed it promptly can legitimately claim they had no idea it would do this. On the other hand, if the stuff fell off the ceiling as soon as they put it in, they would have known something was wrong immediately. So there is the time-bomb aspect to the situation as well.
Any time an international border appears between the perpetrators of a wrong and the victims, things are more complicated than otherwise, and that is the case here as well. Probably some rough justice will happen as the next importer of Chinese drywall finds that their market has disappeared, but that is unfair to the Chinese drywall manufacturers who are doing things right, assuming there are some. Unfortunately, in the rather xenophobic United States, most people think of China in simplistic terms and don't consider that it's at least as complicated as the U. S., if not more. But the Wild-West aspect of China's economy makes it hard for its government to enforce any kind of uniform regulations or safety codes, with the result that a few grossly negligent firms can put lead paint on children's toys, or melamine plastic in pet food, or hydrogen-sulfide-emitting compounds in drywall and get away with it, at least until the newshounds get involved. And then the whole country gets a black eye that only a minority of companies deserve.
As for the consumers who are stuck with toxic drywall, they still have few recourses. Not enough is known about the problem even to recommend a remediation strategy. It's pretty clear that tearing out all the old drywall in a house and putting in new non-toxic wallboard would probably cost more than tearing down the whole place and rebuilding from scratch. So insurance companies, builders, and even the government agencies involved are reluctant to pay for or recommend such an extreme course. What may happen is that people will simply walk away from such houses, many of which are underwater anyway, and take the consequences. Which won't help the banks any.
In the meantime, if you're looking to buy a cheap foreclosed home, take a look at the copper fixtures in it first. If you see any black corrosion, it's probably not a bargain after all.
Sources: Text relating to the NPR report on this subject is available at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114182073&ps=cprs. As long ago as last March, Time Magazine posted an online article on the subject at http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1887059,00.html. The Chinese Drywall Complaint Center website is Http://ChineseDrywallComplaintCenter.Com/. I also used material from the Wikipedia articles on drywall and hydrogen sulfide.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Effects of a News Media Fast
Since most news media nowadays are electronic in either their production, distribution, or delivery, and this blog is about engineering ethics, which relates to the right use of technology, including news media, I think the following personal reflection on a recent experience of mine falls within the greater ambit of what I'm trying to do here.
Recently I had been feeling more than the usual amount of hassle and anxiety. Ever since I began teaching, fall semesters have always been more stressful than spring semesters, and for various reasons this one has been worse than usual. Of late I had fallen into the habit of taking in the following news media daily, if not more often: National Public Radio news once or twice a day (at least half an hour total), the Austin American-Statesman newspaper, a well-known biweekly conservative magazine, and the magazine's daily set of blogs online as well which I read during lunch. The health-care debate was the nominal reason for such newshound behavior, but beyond a certain point the desire to hear or read news becomes its own justification—in other words, a habit.
Among the spiritual disciplines of both Christianity and other religions is the discipline of simplicity—of doing without things that are not necessarily harmful in themselves, but can distract us from more important matters if not placed under conscious control. Muslim believers around the world recently wrapped up the large-scale spiritual discipline called Ramadan, which involves a total dawn-to-dusk fast that runs for several weeks. The 19th-century author and preacher George MacDonald said something which I cannot find the exact quote for, but the sense was, "A man is diminished by anything outside himself which he thinks he cannot do without"—other than God, that is.
With these thoughts as background, I decided at the beginning of last week to go a whole week without listening to, watching, or reading any news media.
Of course I was immediately faced with the question of what constitutes "news media." I think my closest brush with breaking the fast happened in a doctor's office when I picked up a trade journal on radiology, and read about some recent advances in medical imaging technology. I suppose technically that was news media, but not the kind I was trying to avoid. For the most part, I succeeded in avoiding the thing I had sworn off from.
The point of any fast is not to see how many gold stars you can get by following the rules, but to practice the discipline of resisting one's desires, ordering them instead to a vision of the good. My vision of the good involves Christianity, but I recognize that other people follow other visions of the good as well.
So much for the reasons; what were the results?
Well, obviously I had more time to devote to other things, although frankly I didn't notice it that much. One consequence was that I hauled out an old portable CD player and instead of listening to NPR during a half-hour of exercise, I listened to the sound-track album of the Coen brothers film "O Brother Where Art Thou?" I don't know much about the art of sound recording (as opposed to the science), but that CD is one of the clearest and most fun-to-listen-to music recordings I have. The film itself was a rare combination of comedy, tragedy, and history (being based on Homer's Odyssey), and I found my ability simply to enjoy the music was greater than I have experienced for many months. I can liken it to what former smokers say about being able to smell flowers for the first time in years, soon after they quit smoking. I don't know how far we can take the analogy between cigarette smoke and news media, but there seems to be some subtle connection there.
I can't say my whole life turned into a tranquil drifting on calm seas. There were plenty of minor troubles (for instance, in a moment of haste I broke my wife's favorite coffee cup, a promotional item from Hewlett-Packard I received years ago with a liquid-crystal coffee thermometer on the side and Maxwell's Equations printed inside), but I perceived an overall lowering of an annoying kind of background tension or angst that had been bothering me for many months—really, ever since the health-care debate geared up in earnest last summer.
I have now stepped off the no-news-media wagon, deliberately, commencing with the Sunday paper yesterday. But I'm seriously considering making a news media fast a part of my routine. Much news these days is repetitive anyway, since it consists of recycling or tweaking the same things to fill the 24-hour cycles of a growing number of media outlets. So if you ignore the whole mess for a week, you're not likely to be seriously behind unless we have another 9/11 tragedy or something equally earthshaking during your fast.
One of my favorite authors, C. S. Lewis, was a professor of English at Oxford and Cambridge University, and famously ignored newspapers and radio most of his life. He used to say that if anything really important happened, someone would tell him about it sooner or later. It wasn't his job to keep up with the latest developments, and if your job does require you to do that, a media fast wouldn't be practical. But unless you'd be endangering your livelihood by doing so, I recommend trying it for a week or so. You may be surprised at the results.
Recently I had been feeling more than the usual amount of hassle and anxiety. Ever since I began teaching, fall semesters have always been more stressful than spring semesters, and for various reasons this one has been worse than usual. Of late I had fallen into the habit of taking in the following news media daily, if not more often: National Public Radio news once or twice a day (at least half an hour total), the Austin American-Statesman newspaper, a well-known biweekly conservative magazine, and the magazine's daily set of blogs online as well which I read during lunch. The health-care debate was the nominal reason for such newshound behavior, but beyond a certain point the desire to hear or read news becomes its own justification—in other words, a habit.
Among the spiritual disciplines of both Christianity and other religions is the discipline of simplicity—of doing without things that are not necessarily harmful in themselves, but can distract us from more important matters if not placed under conscious control. Muslim believers around the world recently wrapped up the large-scale spiritual discipline called Ramadan, which involves a total dawn-to-dusk fast that runs for several weeks. The 19th-century author and preacher George MacDonald said something which I cannot find the exact quote for, but the sense was, "A man is diminished by anything outside himself which he thinks he cannot do without"—other than God, that is.
With these thoughts as background, I decided at the beginning of last week to go a whole week without listening to, watching, or reading any news media.
Of course I was immediately faced with the question of what constitutes "news media." I think my closest brush with breaking the fast happened in a doctor's office when I picked up a trade journal on radiology, and read about some recent advances in medical imaging technology. I suppose technically that was news media, but not the kind I was trying to avoid. For the most part, I succeeded in avoiding the thing I had sworn off from.
The point of any fast is not to see how many gold stars you can get by following the rules, but to practice the discipline of resisting one's desires, ordering them instead to a vision of the good. My vision of the good involves Christianity, but I recognize that other people follow other visions of the good as well.
So much for the reasons; what were the results?
Well, obviously I had more time to devote to other things, although frankly I didn't notice it that much. One consequence was that I hauled out an old portable CD player and instead of listening to NPR during a half-hour of exercise, I listened to the sound-track album of the Coen brothers film "O Brother Where Art Thou?" I don't know much about the art of sound recording (as opposed to the science), but that CD is one of the clearest and most fun-to-listen-to music recordings I have. The film itself was a rare combination of comedy, tragedy, and history (being based on Homer's Odyssey), and I found my ability simply to enjoy the music was greater than I have experienced for many months. I can liken it to what former smokers say about being able to smell flowers for the first time in years, soon after they quit smoking. I don't know how far we can take the analogy between cigarette smoke and news media, but there seems to be some subtle connection there.
I can't say my whole life turned into a tranquil drifting on calm seas. There were plenty of minor troubles (for instance, in a moment of haste I broke my wife's favorite coffee cup, a promotional item from Hewlett-Packard I received years ago with a liquid-crystal coffee thermometer on the side and Maxwell's Equations printed inside), but I perceived an overall lowering of an annoying kind of background tension or angst that had been bothering me for many months—really, ever since the health-care debate geared up in earnest last summer.
I have now stepped off the no-news-media wagon, deliberately, commencing with the Sunday paper yesterday. But I'm seriously considering making a news media fast a part of my routine. Much news these days is repetitive anyway, since it consists of recycling or tweaking the same things to fill the 24-hour cycles of a growing number of media outlets. So if you ignore the whole mess for a week, you're not likely to be seriously behind unless we have another 9/11 tragedy or something equally earthshaking during your fast.
One of my favorite authors, C. S. Lewis, was a professor of English at Oxford and Cambridge University, and famously ignored newspapers and radio most of his life. He used to say that if anything really important happened, someone would tell him about it sooner or later. It wasn't his job to keep up with the latest developments, and if your job does require you to do that, a media fast wouldn't be practical. But unless you'd be endangering your livelihood by doing so, I recommend trying it for a week or so. You may be surprised at the results.
Monday, October 19, 2009
The Deep Corruption of State-Sponsored Gambling
Long-time readers of this blog (both of you) know that I am no friend of gambling. One way to express my stand succinctly is to place myself on a spectrum of opinion ranging from the pro-gambling extreme of no legal or moral restrictions at all, to the anti-gambling extreme of total prohibition root and branch, all the way down to the private Saturday-night poker game among friends. On a scale where 0 is total-pro and 100 is total-anti, I'm about 85. I see no reason to interfere with small-scale gambling among friends and acquaintances, but when gambling becomes a large-scale business from which people earn their living, I start to get uncomfortable. Some new information I ran across recently has turned mild discomfort into acute dismay. But it is a dismay that few people share.
Like any habit, gambling can be addictive. Just as packs of cigarettes carry health-warning labels and booze ads caution users to "drink responsibly," many ads for lotteries and casinos feature 1-800 numbers to call in case you think your gambling is becoming a problem. What I didn't realize until I read Maura J. Casey's article in the November First Things magazine, is that many casinos make a huge fraction of their profits from a small number of gamblers who, by almost any definition, are addicted to the slots. And the slot machines are where an increasing amount of casino revenue comes from.
Casey cites a study by Harrah's, one of the big Las Vegas operations, that revealed the source of 90 percent of their profits: only 10 percent of their customers. Other studies from places as diverse as Nova Scotia and Australia confirm this pattern. So a very small number of people pour money into slots and other games literally as fast as they can push the buttons, and these people make the casinos profitable. And Casey shows how Harrah's has turned to scientific studies to optimize the design of slot machines so that people are not distracted by anything else and can play as often as ten to fifteen plays per minute. Clearly, someone in that state is not a fully rational individual, making the so-called informed choice that casinos claim as their justification for existence. "We're not forcing anyone to play," they say, but when you have a multi-million-dollar corporation with state-of-the-art monitoring and design teams on one side, and some poor cabdriver from Hoboken on his two-week vacation on the other side, most people would say it's not a fair contest.
Add to this the well-known fact that poorer populations spend proportionally much more of their income on gambling than wealthier folks do, and you have a classic case of exploitation. Not only do poor people spend more (one study cited in Scientific American showed that people who earn less than $12,400 a year spend an average of $645 a year-—over 5% of their gross income—on lotteries alone), but one neuroeconomist has found that simply feeling poor makes you more likely to gamble.
I am ashamed to admit that the Texas state lottery—a thing I thought the Baptists here would never allow—uses some of its revenues to support higher education, and indirectly pays my salary. I don't feel strongly enough about it to quit my job, though. That is one of those prudential judgments one has to make, like paying taxes despite the fact that the government spends some of your money on things you don't approve of. But this pattern of government sponsorship of gambling—either directly in the case of state lotteries, or indirectly in the case of state taxation of casinos—creates a deeply corrupt conflict of interest.
When poor, defenseless people are exploited by large, well-funded, well-organized corporations or institutions, there are only a couple of ways they can seek redress. They can organize themselves, but this is hard and poor people generally don't have a lot of free time to devote to organizing boycotts and going on protest marches. Or they can turn to the government for help. By any reasonable political philosophy, one important function of government is to defend people who cannot defend themselves against the depredations of powerful interests. But in the case of legalized gambling, the powerful interests either are supporting the government, or are the government. So this explains how hard it will be to turn back the corrupting tide of state-sponsored gambling that has seeped into nearly all states (Utah and Hawaii being the only exceptions by now), and that has insinuated itself into state budgets as what many view to be an essential revenue stream, especially in these fiscally constrained times. So there is almost a built-in barrier against doing anything through the legislative process to turn back the tide of legalized gambling.
I have a natural hope and a supernatural hope about this matter. The natural hope is that history's pendulum will eventually swing back. Lotteries were common in the early days of the republic—I believe Harvard's founding was partially funded through a lottery. But in the 1800s, public opinion turned against gambling, and if it has happened once, it could happen again. My supernatural hope is that God will act where governments refuse to help the exploited. I don't know when, where, or how, but that's up to God. As for the people responsible for the exploitation, well, the sooner they realize what they're doing and stop it, the better.
Sources: Maura J. Casey's article "Gambling with Lives" appears on pp. 37-41 of the November 2009 issue of First Things. The Scientific American piece on neuroeconomist George Loewenstein's study of how feelings of poverty affect gambling can be found at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=dangers-irrational-brain. And one of the many studies showing how poor people spend a larger percentage of their income on gambling than other groups can be found at http://www.buffalonews.com/426/story/789628.html.
Like any habit, gambling can be addictive. Just as packs of cigarettes carry health-warning labels and booze ads caution users to "drink responsibly," many ads for lotteries and casinos feature 1-800 numbers to call in case you think your gambling is becoming a problem. What I didn't realize until I read Maura J. Casey's article in the November First Things magazine, is that many casinos make a huge fraction of their profits from a small number of gamblers who, by almost any definition, are addicted to the slots. And the slot machines are where an increasing amount of casino revenue comes from.
Casey cites a study by Harrah's, one of the big Las Vegas operations, that revealed the source of 90 percent of their profits: only 10 percent of their customers. Other studies from places as diverse as Nova Scotia and Australia confirm this pattern. So a very small number of people pour money into slots and other games literally as fast as they can push the buttons, and these people make the casinos profitable. And Casey shows how Harrah's has turned to scientific studies to optimize the design of slot machines so that people are not distracted by anything else and can play as often as ten to fifteen plays per minute. Clearly, someone in that state is not a fully rational individual, making the so-called informed choice that casinos claim as their justification for existence. "We're not forcing anyone to play," they say, but when you have a multi-million-dollar corporation with state-of-the-art monitoring and design teams on one side, and some poor cabdriver from Hoboken on his two-week vacation on the other side, most people would say it's not a fair contest.
Add to this the well-known fact that poorer populations spend proportionally much more of their income on gambling than wealthier folks do, and you have a classic case of exploitation. Not only do poor people spend more (one study cited in Scientific American showed that people who earn less than $12,400 a year spend an average of $645 a year-—over 5% of their gross income—on lotteries alone), but one neuroeconomist has found that simply feeling poor makes you more likely to gamble.
I am ashamed to admit that the Texas state lottery—a thing I thought the Baptists here would never allow—uses some of its revenues to support higher education, and indirectly pays my salary. I don't feel strongly enough about it to quit my job, though. That is one of those prudential judgments one has to make, like paying taxes despite the fact that the government spends some of your money on things you don't approve of. But this pattern of government sponsorship of gambling—either directly in the case of state lotteries, or indirectly in the case of state taxation of casinos—creates a deeply corrupt conflict of interest.
When poor, defenseless people are exploited by large, well-funded, well-organized corporations or institutions, there are only a couple of ways they can seek redress. They can organize themselves, but this is hard and poor people generally don't have a lot of free time to devote to organizing boycotts and going on protest marches. Or they can turn to the government for help. By any reasonable political philosophy, one important function of government is to defend people who cannot defend themselves against the depredations of powerful interests. But in the case of legalized gambling, the powerful interests either are supporting the government, or are the government. So this explains how hard it will be to turn back the corrupting tide of state-sponsored gambling that has seeped into nearly all states (Utah and Hawaii being the only exceptions by now), and that has insinuated itself into state budgets as what many view to be an essential revenue stream, especially in these fiscally constrained times. So there is almost a built-in barrier against doing anything through the legislative process to turn back the tide of legalized gambling.
I have a natural hope and a supernatural hope about this matter. The natural hope is that history's pendulum will eventually swing back. Lotteries were common in the early days of the republic—I believe Harvard's founding was partially funded through a lottery. But in the 1800s, public opinion turned against gambling, and if it has happened once, it could happen again. My supernatural hope is that God will act where governments refuse to help the exploited. I don't know when, where, or how, but that's up to God. As for the people responsible for the exploitation, well, the sooner they realize what they're doing and stop it, the better.
Sources: Maura J. Casey's article "Gambling with Lives" appears on pp. 37-41 of the November 2009 issue of First Things. The Scientific American piece on neuroeconomist George Loewenstein's study of how feelings of poverty affect gambling can be found at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=dangers-irrational-brain. And one of the many studies showing how poor people spend a larger percentage of their income on gambling than other groups can be found at http://www.buffalonews.com/426/story/789628.html.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Washington Metro Deaths: The Accident that Wasn't Supposed to Happen
One of the things I like the most about visiting Washington, DC is its efficient, clean, and easy-to-use subway system. Whenever I need to visit Washington, I usually fly to the Baltimore-Washington Airport and then take public transportation from there. A car is a liability in Washington, as far as I'm concerned, because you can get to most places of importance on the subway. Washington's Metro is one of the newer of the nation's major public subways, having opened in 1976, and from the start it embodied computer-controlled systems of signaling and braking. So along with many other admirers of that system, I was shocked to read last June 23 of an accident the previous day that ultimately claimed the lives of a train operator and eight passengers. What went wrong?
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), in its slow, methodical way, is still investigating, but a compilation of news reports on Wikipedia can allow us to get a fairly good idea of what may have happened. The accident happened during the afternoon rush hour, just after 5 PM. As is often the case, Train No. 214 on the Red Line, one of the major north-south arteries, was stopped between the Takoma and Fort Totten stations, waiting for another train to clear the Fort Totten stop.
Trains have been waiting on tracks ever since there were trains and tracks, and in the pre-automation days a system of block signals was devised to warn oncoming traffic that the block of track ahead was occupied. When the engineer saw a yellow signal, he was to slow down, since it meant that there was another train in the block beyond the next one. Blocks were spaced far enough apart to allow plenty of room to stop the fastest train moving at a legal speed, and for the most part the system worked as long as engineers were paying attention and the signals were working.
While we will never know exactly what the oncoming train operator saw (she was killed in the accident), we do know from records that her train, No. 112, left the Takoma station at 4:57 PM. From what I understand, the Metro trains can operate in either an "enhanced" manual mode or a completely automatic mode. Operators can delay the train's departure to accommodate laggards who won't pull their arms out of the doors, for instance, but the system is also automatically supervised by braking sensors that presumably stop the train long before it could collide with another one. However, if the operators do their job, these emergency systems rarely come into play, and I can see how both operators and maintenance people might get lazy about making sure the automatic safety systems are in working order. According to reports, Train 112 was in automatic mode when the collision occurred.
At any rate, some time before 5:03 PM the operator of Train No. 112 applied the manual brake. This wasn't enough to keep her train from plowing into the rear of 214, telescoping onto the rear cars. "Telescoping" in a train collision means that one car rides up on top of another, usually doing great damage to both cars since the stationary car smashes much of the moving car's insides and vice-versa. Any people who happen to be in the way do not usually make it out unscathed. Although members of the U. S. Army who were present made heroic rescue efforts, they were not sufficient to prevent the nine fatalities and numerous injuries that resulted.
In tests on June 25, NTSB officials found that the track circuit located at the site of the stopped train failed to detect a test train placed on it. This is highly significant, since a similar failure would account for the accident. If the automatic systems didn't receive a signal that the No. 214 was stopped on the tracks, they would not have engaged and the only thing that would have averted the accident was a manual intervention by the operator. Why wouldn't the track circuit work?
The apparently simple task of figuring out whether a multi-ton railcar is present on a set of tracks is not as easy as it seems. Signaling currents have to be detected in an electrically noisy environment with large AC power currents running nearby to run the cars. The system has to work despite corrosion and oil on tracks, varying pressure on wheels, and a number of other factors. Down here in Texas, a new surface commuter rail system in Austin has been delayed repeatedly for many months partly because the train-detector track circuits have not yet worked properly. Perhaps a whole new concept of train detection is called for if the present systems are so flaky. But I'm not a railway engineer, of either the driving or designing kind, so I will refrain from second-guessing those whose job it is to fix such problems.
While we will have to wait to see what the NTSB ultimately concludes about this accident, it looks like it may well have been a fatal example of the old "garbage in, garbage out" saying. If the automated distributed braking systems don't have valid data to work with, they're not going to stop the train. And a harried, overworked (or perhaps inattentive) operator can't always be counted on to take action when she sees that a collision is imminent. Some of the Metro tunnels snake around and bend in ways that make it impossible to see far enough ahead at all points to avoid a collision, even if you paid all the attention in the world.
In the meantime, the next time I go to Washington, I'll still take the Metro. But I may make it a point to get into one of the middle cars.
Source: The Wikipedia article on this accident appears at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Washington_Metro_train_collision and was my primary source for this blog.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), in its slow, methodical way, is still investigating, but a compilation of news reports on Wikipedia can allow us to get a fairly good idea of what may have happened. The accident happened during the afternoon rush hour, just after 5 PM. As is often the case, Train No. 214 on the Red Line, one of the major north-south arteries, was stopped between the Takoma and Fort Totten stations, waiting for another train to clear the Fort Totten stop.
Trains have been waiting on tracks ever since there were trains and tracks, and in the pre-automation days a system of block signals was devised to warn oncoming traffic that the block of track ahead was occupied. When the engineer saw a yellow signal, he was to slow down, since it meant that there was another train in the block beyond the next one. Blocks were spaced far enough apart to allow plenty of room to stop the fastest train moving at a legal speed, and for the most part the system worked as long as engineers were paying attention and the signals were working.
While we will never know exactly what the oncoming train operator saw (she was killed in the accident), we do know from records that her train, No. 112, left the Takoma station at 4:57 PM. From what I understand, the Metro trains can operate in either an "enhanced" manual mode or a completely automatic mode. Operators can delay the train's departure to accommodate laggards who won't pull their arms out of the doors, for instance, but the system is also automatically supervised by braking sensors that presumably stop the train long before it could collide with another one. However, if the operators do their job, these emergency systems rarely come into play, and I can see how both operators and maintenance people might get lazy about making sure the automatic safety systems are in working order. According to reports, Train 112 was in automatic mode when the collision occurred.
At any rate, some time before 5:03 PM the operator of Train No. 112 applied the manual brake. This wasn't enough to keep her train from plowing into the rear of 214, telescoping onto the rear cars. "Telescoping" in a train collision means that one car rides up on top of another, usually doing great damage to both cars since the stationary car smashes much of the moving car's insides and vice-versa. Any people who happen to be in the way do not usually make it out unscathed. Although members of the U. S. Army who were present made heroic rescue efforts, they were not sufficient to prevent the nine fatalities and numerous injuries that resulted.
In tests on June 25, NTSB officials found that the track circuit located at the site of the stopped train failed to detect a test train placed on it. This is highly significant, since a similar failure would account for the accident. If the automatic systems didn't receive a signal that the No. 214 was stopped on the tracks, they would not have engaged and the only thing that would have averted the accident was a manual intervention by the operator. Why wouldn't the track circuit work?
The apparently simple task of figuring out whether a multi-ton railcar is present on a set of tracks is not as easy as it seems. Signaling currents have to be detected in an electrically noisy environment with large AC power currents running nearby to run the cars. The system has to work despite corrosion and oil on tracks, varying pressure on wheels, and a number of other factors. Down here in Texas, a new surface commuter rail system in Austin has been delayed repeatedly for many months partly because the train-detector track circuits have not yet worked properly. Perhaps a whole new concept of train detection is called for if the present systems are so flaky. But I'm not a railway engineer, of either the driving or designing kind, so I will refrain from second-guessing those whose job it is to fix such problems.
While we will have to wait to see what the NTSB ultimately concludes about this accident, it looks like it may well have been a fatal example of the old "garbage in, garbage out" saying. If the automated distributed braking systems don't have valid data to work with, they're not going to stop the train. And a harried, overworked (or perhaps inattentive) operator can't always be counted on to take action when she sees that a collision is imminent. Some of the Metro tunnels snake around and bend in ways that make it impossible to see far enough ahead at all points to avoid a collision, even if you paid all the attention in the world.
In the meantime, the next time I go to Washington, I'll still take the Metro. But I may make it a point to get into one of the middle cars.
Source: The Wikipedia article on this accident appears at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Washington_Metro_train_collision and was my primary source for this blog.
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