Engineering Ethics Blog

SOPA, PIPA, and the Wikipedia Blackout

2012-01-23T04:05:00.000-08:00

As regular readers of this blog know, one of my favorite sources of online information is Wikipedia. While not perfect, this largely volunteer-maintained site is a generally reliable, up-to-date, and accurate source of many kinds of information. It is especially good for technical and scientific data where there is a general consensus of agreement, and even in controversial areas it tends to be pretty even-handed. So imagine my surprise last Wednesday when I clicked onto Wikipedia for something and was greeted instead by a blacked screen for 24 hours and a plea for me (if I was a U. S. citizen, which many Wikipedians are not) to contact my congressional representatives to protest the consideration of SOPA and PIPA.

What are SOPA and PIPA? Legislative acronyms for the Stop Online Piracy Act and the (get ready for this one) Protecting Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act. If you read the second title it sounds like they want to protect online threats, not do something to stop them, but I think PIPA comes from the informal title, which is just the Protecting Intellectual Property Act. SOPA is being considered by the House of Representatives and PIPA by the Senate.

Why is Wikipedia (and many other online service providers of various kinds) so upset about these proposed laws? According to the text on the blacked-out screen, the laws pose a potentially crippling threat to the freedom of information exchange. If they were passed in their present form and the Attorney General, or a civil court, or some bureaucrat somewhere, decided that Wikipedia was an internet search engine, then it would be Wikipedia’s responsibility not to link to certain nefarious websites, the list of which the government would apparently determine. (It is not clear to this non-lawyer exactly who would enforce the acts, but you are welcome to read the 10,000-word text of SOPA yourself and figure it out if you so choose.) And if Wikipedia (or any other website falling under the jurisdiction of the act) failed to do its court-mandated duty, the court would be free to impose penalties, probably in the nature of fines and/or injunctions to stop or start doing things.

Well, right there we have a problem. One of the better aspects of the Web is the way that it has grown to its present stature largely without government aid or regulation. True, there are many problems and illegal or immoral things that go on, some of which we have discussed in this space. But overall, Internet commerce and Internet entities such as Wikipedia have behaved pretty well and do no more than reflect the general makeup of society, which is made up mostly of fairly decent people with a few bad apples here and there.

In my limited, non-lawyer view, SOPA and PIPA would try to change that by putting a huge number of Internet entities under the watchful eye of the courts. It is probably not an exaggeration to say they might create for the Internet a regulatory regime not too different from what the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) was for interstate commerce, which kept all kinds of business ranging from bus companies to railroads and trucking firms under its thumb for decades. The difference is that the ICC came to pass to curb genuine piratical abuses by monopolistic railroad companies, who shook down their customers (mostly farmers) shamelessly with exploitative and discriminatory rates. And when the deregulatory fad came to pass a few decades ago, the ICC bit the dust, and with the much greater level of competition in interstate commerce that prevails today, nobody much misses it.

Nothing much like monopolistic exploitation is going on with the Internet organizations targeted by SOPA and PIPA, with the possible exception of Google. The proposed laws’ supporters claim that their only targets are the truly bad actors: the crooks who set up phony or phishing websites, those who sell pirated software, child pornographers using the Web, and so on. But from my (again) limited reading of the proposals, that judgment call is left strictly up to the lawyers enforcing the act. Once power is created, bureaucrats seem to develop an irresistible urge to use it, and so I have concluded that it would be a bad idea to pass SOPA and PIPA in their present form. And I made that opinion known to my Federal legislative representatives here in Texas.

So did several million other people, evidently, because a few days after Wikipedia and many other sites did their blackout bit, Congress announced that it was “indefinitely postponing” consideration of the bills. At the rate Congress gets truly important work done these days, that means you can forget about SOPA and PIPA unless you run out of other things to worry about first.

I am not a libertarian, and appropriate legislation to curb some of the more blatant abuses found on the Internet is a good idea if it can be enforced without an undue burden on the service providers or the public using the services. Most law enforcement has to take a “good-enough” approach, given limited resources. You want enough highway patrols to keep speeders and other vehicular misbehavior down to a reasonable level, but to get the public to obey the speeding laws 100% of the time would require something on the order of a speed-cop Reign of Terror. From my point of view, SOPA and PIPA moved too far in the Reign of Terror direction. I am sure that interested legislators will go back to the drawing board to craft something that will deal with the worst abuses without being so intrusive on the vast majority of sites and users who are behaving themselves, but I do not myself believe there is any big rush about the matter.

Reportedly, major Hollywood interests (copyright holders) were behind SOPA and PIPA, and were disappointed when the proposals went down in flames. It is a disturbing enough time for content providers these days, as file-sharing and online movies become more and more technically facile. The phrase “rent-seeking” has shown up a lot lately in editorials about how powerful business interests have influenced government so as to direct more revenue their way. One could view the SOPA-PIPA business in that light, with what fairness I’m not sure. But it looks like this time, anyway, a grass-roots effort by millions of users (admittedly led by organizations with influence, though not so much financial as merely relational) prevailed over the rent-seekers, if that is the right phrase for them. Unfortunately, Wikipedia can shut down their site for the first time in protest only once. Any more and it will get to be a drag. So the future will reveal how this continuing conflict gets resolved, if it ever does.

Sources: For those policy wonks dealing with a sleepless night or for other reasons, a website has posted the “markup” versions of both SOPA and PIPA at http://www.keepthewebopen.com/sopa and http://www.keepthewebopen.com/pipa, respectively. Though they are mostly of academic interest now, they show just how complicated modern legislation has become.

From Dreamcatchers to Soulcatchers

2012-01-16T03:57:00.000-08:00

The day after Christmas, I was asked to contribute to a long paper on the past, present, and future of the social implications of technology. One of the other contributors cited an idea called the “soulcatcher chip” as something that would have profound social implications, if it ever comes to pass.

The phrase “soulcatcher” presumably derives from the word “dreamcatcher.” A dreamcatcher, at least in the original versions made by the Ojibwe and Sioux tribes of native North Americans, was a small frame or loop of willow twigs hung with feathers. Mothers would make dreamcatchers and hang them above their children’s beds to filter out nightmares and send only good dreams to their offspring. I am unaware of any scientific studies on dreamcatchers, but the idea has caught on in the commercial world and you can buy such things to hang on your rear-view mirror.

A soulcatcher chip, as envisioned by former Chief Technology Officer of British Telecomm Peter Cochrane, is a piece of silicon that you would implant in your brain. Early versions would simply be an interface between your brain and the Internet, bypassing all those old-fashioned electromechanical keyboards and eye-tiring display screens. Later versions of soulcatchers would do exactly that: the interface would be broadband enough to “capture all a human’s thoughts and feelings on a single silicon chip,” according to a 1998 posting on the website of Wired Magazine. In the same piece, Cochrane predicted that an external version of the soulcatcher would be available in about five years, that is, by 2003.

As far as I know, that prediction has fallen flat. While functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology has advanced to the point that we can observe which parts of the brain get active when a wide variety of mental events happen, this is very far from directly reading a person’s thoughts in general, or being able to get onto Wikipedia by thinking instead of moving your mouse or typing.

The soulcatcher idea is basically a communications problem, and can be broken down into the parts of transmitting (brain to the external world) and receiving (external world to brain). While fMRI technology has made a fair amount of progress on the transmitting end, the receiving end is much trickier. Implanting stuff in the brain is a risky thing, even if the object you’re implanting is only a protective cover to replace a missing part of the skull, for example. And running wires into the brain, or even silicon-chip substitutes for wires, appears to be a very crude way of conveying data to one’s mental world. While some progress has been made in brain implants as a type of therapy for conditions such as epilepsy and even depression, this is a far cry from conveying novel detailed data into the brain.

The idea of a soulcatcher chip brings up a problem that has up till now stayed within the halls of philosophy departments. When Cochrane asked his wife how many parts of himself he could replace with synthetic components before she rejected him as a machine, she said she was revolted by the idea. This is an indirect compliment to Cochrane, because I can think of some marriages in which the wife would welcome the process (“Let me at that off switch!”). Of course, such speculations will remain hypothetical for some time, perhaps forever, because there is no hard experimental or theoretical evidence that it is even possible to simulate the workings of the human mind with a computer, or to do anything close to downloading all a person’s thoughts and feelings onto a computer.

This is just personal speculation on my part, but there may even be some sort of psycho-physiological uncertainty principle out there, analogous to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of quantum physics. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle says that you cannot measure both the momentum and position of a particle simultaneously with arbitrarily great precision. If you get the momentum exactly right, you will have no idea where the particle was at the time, and vice-versa.

The soulcatcher analogue of that may be that it is impossible to go beyond a certain point in measurement (and especially in two-way communication) with the mind by means of physical actions related to the brain, without seriously disrupting or possibly even destroying the mind you are dealing with. Given the complexity of the brain and its interactions with the mind, any such uncertainty principle will also be more complicated and less straightforward than the physics principle first enunciated by Heisenberg. But that doesn’t mean no such principle exists. It may simply work out that way experimentally before we understand the brain well enough to realize theoretically what the true limitations are.

The dreamcatcher was a physical object constructed by people who wanted to change something the mind was doing, namely, giving their children nightmares. And in the nature of a placebo, it may have well had a good effect, if the mother felt she was doing something positive and became more reassuring to the child as a result. The hopes for a soulcatcher chip are more ambitious: nothing less than the direct connection of one’s mind to external data in a way that would be hard to ignore. If I get tired of surfing the Internet, I can always just turn off the computer and walk away. But if the thing was directly piped into my brain, all sorts of dire possibilities come to mind. So far, computer viruses have stayed outside the body, but what if one got into your brain and you couldn’t get it out? The ethical challenges alone would be enough to stop me from even contemplating such a project, but ethical considerations do not always stop researchers who are fascinated by an idea.

As we’ve seen, the soulcatcher is an idea that is already delayed in transit, if indeed it ever gets here. Even if it never comes to pass, it has given us a lot of mileage in the form of science-fiction tales and movies, and that may be the place where it does as much good as dreamcatchers, if not more.

Sources: The forecast by Peter Cochrane was published at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.11/wired25_pr.html in the Nov. 1998 issue of Wired Magazine. I also referred to the Wikipedia article on dreamcatchers. If all goes well, the May 2012 issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE will carry an article entitled “Social Implications of Technology: Past, Present, and Future.”

Ethics of Calendar Technology

2012-01-08T05:48:00.000-08:00

With the turn of this new year, most people have at least heard about the Mayan calendar sequence ending that allegedly forecasts dire disasters to come on or about December 21, 2012. The Wikipedia article “Mayan calendar” has a quotation from Sandra Noble, who is an expert on ancient Mayan customs and practices. She says that contrary to a lot of the hype that has been promoted about the event, all that it really means is that a “long-count” period of one “b’ak’tun”, lasting 394.3 years, is going to end on that day. Far from prognosticating disaster, the ancient Mayans usually had a huge celebration, a kind of super-New-Year’s-Eve party, whenever they reached the end of a b’ak’tun. She says that the notion of a cycle end as a doomsday date is “a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in.” To the extent that calendars are a type of technology, such misrepresentation is a kind of violation of calendar ethics—if there is such a thing. As far as I’m concerned, there is now.

Just like the technology of clocks helps us to regulate and coordinate the way we use short intervals of time during the day, the technology of calendars allows us to plan and coordinate longer intervals involving days, weeks and years. That is why nearly every civilization worthy of the name has come up with some kind of calendar. Although the traditional seven-day week dates back at least to the Babylonian captivity of the Jews around 600 B. C., there are many other lengths of weeks used in other calendars, ranging from the three-day weeks of an early Basque calendar to the 13-day weeks used by the Mayans. In most ancient civilizations, the calendar was used to establish times for religious festivals as well as more practical issues such as the planting of crops. Because religion was a kind of all-pervasive thing to ancient peoples, the calendar was an intrinsic part of their culture, and anyone with the temerity to change it was in effect challenging the foundation of a way of life.

This tie to tradition was an aspect of the calendar appreciated by the French revolutionaries, who in 1793 threw out the Gregorian calendar with its religious associations and replaced it with a novel arrangement of three ten-day weeks in each 30-day month, enamored as they were with the decimal system. (We owe the metric system largely to this same regularizing spirit, which found its proper place in scientific measurements.) The revolutionary French calendar lasted for about a dozen years before the confusion caused by interconverting between the French days and weeks and the traditional ones used by everybody else got to be too much, and they changed it back. A similar stunt was tried by the leaders of the ten-year-old Soviet Union, who foisted a calendar consisting of 72 five-day weeks onto their reluctant citizens in 1929. This attempt failed after only two years, when a six-day week was tried, but led to further confusion and too many holidays. Finally, the whole thing was dropped in 1940 and the Gregorian calendar was quietly resumed.

Since then, there have been no major attempts to fiddle with what many people regard as a God-given system of accounting for days. In Christianity’s early years, believers adopted Sunday, the first day of the Roman week, as their new Sabbath, partly to distinguish themselves from the Jews, who observed their Sabbath beginning Friday night and going to Saturday at sundown. Making Sunday the first day of the week has been a nearly universal practice of calendar-makers until the last few years, when I began to notice European calendars that put Monday as the first day of the week, demoting Sunday to the last day.

I don’t know why, exactly, but this change annoyed me exceedingly. I suppose it was as a Christian, I resented the implied insult to Sunday, which Christians regard as a day set aside by the Lord for rest and avoidance of routine labor. Far from being just another part of the weekend (or something brought to us by labor unions, “the folks that brought you the weekend” as one bumper sticker says), Sunday is supposed to be the day when you stop to realize that what you have depends not only on your own efforts, but is really the gift of God, Who set aside the sabbath because He rested on the seventh day after making the world on the first six days. If God decides to rest after His labors, the least we can do is imitate Him in that regard. That is why Sunday used to be printed in red and lead the week, because it was special, even holy (which just means “set aside for a special purpose”). Holidays were originally holy-days, that is, religious festivals.

So all these traditional religious associations go by the board when you pick up a calendar with Monday as the first day, as I unwittingly did the day I went Christmas shopping for my wife at Half Price Books. I bought it because it had pictures of Volkswagen Beetles. A Beetle was our first car, and my wife has ever since had an unreasonable admiration for those machines. Because the calendar was sealed, I was unable to tell how the weeks were arranged. Imagine my horror (okay, displeasure is closer to it) when she opened it up, hung it on the wall, and I discovered that it was laid out in the European style of Monday first, Sunday last. I fussed about it till she offered to print up little strips of Sundays, one per month, tape them to the left sides of each sheet, and cover up the blasphemous tail-end-of-the week Sundays. I admitted this would be silly and said for her not to do it, but that calendar is going to annoy me for the whole coming year, I can tell.

By such subtle means are cultural shifts manipulated, or at least indicated. I have no idea why European calendar makers demoted Sunday, unless their customers demanded it by saying that Monday is when their weeks begin, and why not put it first? But in that demand itself is expressed the increasing secularization we hear about Europe all the time. And now it’s spreading to the U. S., at least in the form of specialty calendars. I fully expect nothing particularly bad to happen on Dec. 21 of this year, Mayans or no Mayans. But when it comes to the trend symbolized by moving Sunday to the last day of the week, I think the results are becoming plainer every week—and every year.

Sources: I referred to the Wikipedia articles on “week,” “French Republican calendar,” “Calendar,” and “Mayan calendar,” where the quotation from Sandra Noble appears.

Computer Wars, Now and Then

2012-01-02T04:02:00.000-08:00

This Christmas, my wife received not one, but two tablet computers—an iPad and a Nook—from gift-givers who obviously did not coordinate their purchases. It’s too early to tell which, if either, will win her attention, affection, and devotion, which is always the goal when companies introduce new products. But at least no one gave her a TouchPad.

The TouchPad, for those of you who, like myself, were too engaged on other matters to notice, was HP’s attempt to crack the tablet-computer market. Released last July, the device used an operating system called WebOS that HP acquired when it bought the smartphone developer Palm. But according to an article in yesterday’s New York Times, the TouchPad was an example of too little, too late in a number of ways.

Users quickly found that the WebOS, or something, made the TouchPad’s speed resemble molasses in January compared to its competitors, mainly the Apple iPad OS and Google’s Android. This and the fact that the slew of programs that HP expected developers to produce for the machine failed to materialize, led the firm to announce only seven weeks after the TouchPad’s introduction that it was going to discontinue manufacturing all WebOS devices. Although it has since announced one more production run of the TouchPad, this is thought mainly to be for the purposes of clearing out inventory and meeting unmet obligations to large customers.

Playing catch-up is hard in any game, and especially so in the rapidly moving world of software and novel information and communications technologies such as tablet computers. The fifteen months between April of 2010, when Apple began selling the iPad, and July 2011 might as well have been a decade in more staid industries. And even if HP’s device had been simply a hardware knockoff and used the iPad OS (which Apple would have allowed only if the Indian Ocean froze over), the lead enjoyed by Apple and Google would have made for problems for HP. Add in the totally novel WebOS, which was so new that HP had a lot of trouble finding programmers who could work in it, and you had a disaster in the making.

I was once on the receiving end of a similar situation, though it moved in comparative slow motion because it took place thirty years ago. IBM (remember them?) introduced its personal computer in 1981, and inspired a similar mad rush on the part of other computer makers to come up with rivals for the then-burgeoning PC market. One logical candidate to win the race was the Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard, Mass., which had shown IBM a thing or two with its PDP line of mini-computers. Back when an IBM mainframe needed the floor space (and air conditioning) of a small house, you could stow a PDP-8 in a couple of relay racks the size of a large closet. So you’d think DEC would know how to out-hardware IBM.

DEC tried, and the result was a thing called the Pro-350. It looked more or less like an IBM PC, only it ran some software that DEC had cooked up on their own. And to use it, you had to either write your own software or wait for programmers to write some and buy it from them. At the time I was a young assistant professor and knew that I needed some kind of a computer. I asked the advice of another professor in my department, who I later learned used to work for DEC. He said for me to buy a Pro-350, and I’d never regret it.

Let us say merely that he turned out to be a false prophet. I spent a good chunk of my start-up research money on that Pro-350. Because I could program in FORTRAN back then, I was able to write a few programs and run them on the thing (it had a FORTRAN compiler that worked halfway decently). But as other people started to buy word processing software, spreadsheet software, and other pre-packaged applications for their new IBM PCs, I was stuck with either writing my own FORTRAN for these things, which was as ridiculous as building my own laboratory building to do research in, or waiting for versions that would run on the Pro-350 to come onto the market. I’m still waiting.

I wound up using the thing as a terminal to get into the department’s mainframe for a few years, but eventually I bought a Mac at home and the world was never the same after that. DEC struggled on for another decade or so by mainly maintaining its fleet of aging computers for former customers, and was bought by Compaq (which is now itself history) in 1998.

The lesson here, if there is one, is that if you’re going to compete in the consumer electronics business with something new, you’d better be first with something that works really well, or else you’re probably wasting your time and money. As I said, it’s too early to tell whether the Nook or the iPad will win out here at our household. But so far, the iPad has worked flawlessly, whereas I had to spend a couple of hours twiddling with our wireless network after my wife spent even more time trying to get her Nook to see our base station before we could get it to connect. Not a promising start for the Nook in 2012.

Sources: The New York Times article on the TouchPad appeared online at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/technology/hewlett-packards-touchpad-was-built-on-flawed-software-some-say.html. I also referred to Wikipedia articles on the TouchPad, the iPad, and DEC.

Enhancing the Humans of the Future

2011-12-24T04:50:00.000-08:00

The summer 2011 issue of The New Atlantis carries a series of articles addressing the question of enhancing humanity through technical means: cyborgs, indefinite extension of lifespan, uploading one’s mind to computers, and other dreams of a group that call themselves “transhumanists.” It is a question fraught with implications for engineering ethics, because engineers will be the people who will develop many of these technologies if they come to pass.

In many ways, we are already living in a future where human performance is enhanced beyond what the “natural” human body can do. Is there an essential difference between a man who climbs into the cab of a backhoe and does the work of fifty men with shovels, or five hundred men digging with their fingers, on the one hand; or a man whose mind has been uploaded into a computer that controls a giant robot which can dig ditches as well as a man with a backhoe can, on the other hand? We are accustomed to seeing construction workers use powerful machinery all the time. But we might be surprised to see a gang of giant robots show up at a construction site, especially if we strike up a conversation with one and it claims to have a name, a Social Security number, and opinions on the upcoming Presidential election.

To my way of thinking, a human being with the freedom to get in a backhoe cab in the morning and get back out of it in the evening, is better off than a man (if that is still the right word) who has been permanently embodied in some piece of hardware subject to all the ills of engineered machinery, including obsolescence, breakdowns, and power failures. If all the imaginable enhancements to human performance become reality, a given human being can’t choose them all because some of them will be incompatible with others. And in making a choice, he or she will be shutting a lot of doors, not only to enhancements that are incompatible with the set chosen, but also to the door of living as a normal, natural human being with the incredible and even now not fully understood flexibility that life as a natural human being implies.

Great wisdom is found in old myths, such as the myth of King Midas. To a certain frame of mind, what better gift could be received than that of turning everything you touch into gold? If you substitute for gold the ability to achieve all the transhumanist dreams of indefinite lifespan, superhuman intelligence, artistic ability, athletic ability, vision, hearing, and so on, I think the myth’s point is still valid. Oscar Wilde is alleged to have said, “When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.” Depending on how the thing is done, we may find that at least some of the supposedly desirable enhancements so fondly wished for turn out to be curses in disguise.

This is the stuff of science-fiction novels, and the point of such tales is generally to make us realize that we really have a wider and more complicated set of values than we often think we do. Midas found that he loved his daughter more than he loved gold, but he fully realized this only when he touched her by mistake. In my view, the whole transhumanist program of wanting whatever we can imagine suffers from a severe lack of philosophical and emotional depth. If Ray Kurzweil is a good example of the transhumanist frame of mind (and I think he is), his books about the future blessings of transhumanism are great at explaining how we may get there technologically. But the most you will find with regard to moral philosophy is the fact that he cites as his moral exemplar a fictional hero of novels for boys: Tom Swift.

Now I was an admirer of Tom Swift myself, from about the age of ten when I found “Tom Swift and His Television Detector” in my grandmother’s attic, left over from when her boys were growing up in the 1930s. I continued to enjoy the series when it was revived for a time in the 1960s, but when I went away to college I slowly began to realize that the cardboard world of technological whizzes whose inventions always made for good and banished evil was just that: two-dimensional, unsophisticated, and inadequate for helping me to understand the complex ambiguous world that real technology exists in.

I don’t think Mr. Kurzweil and his transhumanist friends have realized that Tom Swift couldn’t fix all our problems, and neither can we simply by acting like Tom Swift. Almost without exception, the transhumanists are people who disclaim any serious belief in the Judeo-Christian God and an afterlife of rewards and punishments. If you don’t have a hope of heaven, your only chance to get there is to make it yourself, and that’s what the transhumanist movement is trying to do.

I do not fault their motives. Kurzweil has personally developed machines to help blind people read, and I am sure that he and his fellow transhumanists sincerely believe that their plans are the best possible thing for humanity. But they rarely take into account the fact of original sin, and the fact that somehow, the limited scope of power, space, and time that living in normal human bodies gives us is the ground from which every human achievement has sprung.

Like most heresies, the hope of indefinite human enhancement takes a small idea which is proper in its place in the overall scheme of things, and blows it up out of all proportion. The myths of Midas, of Frankenstein’s monster, and even Oscar Wilde all tell us that we had better think in a more in-depth and multifaceted manner about the promise of human enhancements before we cross a line that we may regret crossing someday.

Sources: The summer 2011 edition of The New Atlantis carries extended discussions on “Science, Virtue, and the Future of Humanity.” The Oscar Wilde quote was found at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/o/oscarwilde139151.html. I consulted the Wikipedia article on King Midas, which says that the incident of Midas touching his daughter was first presented in a short retelling of the legend by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The Air France 447 Crash: The Rest of the Story

2011-12-19T04:35:00.000-08:00

On June 1, 2009, the aviation world was shocked to learn of the disappearance of Air France flight 447 over the Atlantic Ocean during a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. All 228 people aboard died, and it took until April of 2011 to recover the flight-data recorder from its watery grave. Until then, the main clues as to the cause of the crash of the fly-by-wire Airbus 330 were some telemetered data received during the final moments of the flight that indicated the airspeed instruments had been iced up and were giving false readings. While serious and potentially confusing to pilots, it seemed like an insufficient reason by itself to make a modern jet aircraft fall out of the sky.

We now have a much fuller picture of what happened that day, thanks to the diligent efforts of the French air-accident investigation agency and the publication of a book about the crash that contains a complete transcript of the words spoken in the cockpit and captured by the flight’s voice recorder. As it turns out, the frozen pitot tubes that sense airspeed were only one of a number of confusing factors that led to a fatal mistake on the part of one of the two co-pilots. So human error combined with mechanical problems, as it so often does in accidents of this kind.

An article in Popular Mechanics magazine presents the following story. The trouble began when around 2 AM local time, the plane entered a region of frequent thunderstorms near the equator. A large airliner such as the Airbus carried a complement of a captain and two co-pilots. Shortly after 2 AM, the captain left the cockpit in charge of the two co-pilots as he went to take a nap. Instead of taking evasive action to avoid a large line of thunderstorms in their path, the co-pilots decided to maintain their course. They shortly entered the thunderstorm area, where the pitot tubes iced up. At this point a critical transition in the operation of the airplane occurred.

The Airbus 330 is one of a new generation of fly-by-wire aircraft in which a computer is in the path between the pilots’ controls and the actual control surfaces of the plane. The normal flight mode is autopilot, in which the computer is basically flying the aircraft. But certain unusual conditions, such as the pitot tubes icing over, make the autopilot trip out and hand control of the plane over to the pilots. Because of several other distractions in the cockpit, it is not clear that the junior co-pilot realized this happened about 2:10 AM. The airplane was experiencing turbulence, ice crystals on the windshield, and strange electrical phenomena such as St. Elmo’s fire. While we will never know why co-pilot Bonin (the one with least experience) did what he did, the fact remains that at 2:10, he pulled the stick back and basically kept it there until it was too late to correct his mistake.

Even non-pilots such as myself know that if you try to make a plane climb too steeply, its airspeed falls. Eventually the airflow past the wings is insufficient to provide enough lift, and the plane “stalls.” In a stall, the plane becomes a piece of metal falling through the sky. The only remedy is to reorient the craft by pushing the stick forward to get air flowing past the wings in the right direction and recover enough lift to pull out of the resulting dive. But you need a lot of room to do this in. Once the plane stalled, it began to lose altitude rapidly—almost two miles a minute—and the stall began at an altitude of about seven miles.

If the captain had arrived from his nap earlier, or if the senior co-pilot had shoved his colleague out of the way and done the right thing with both sticks, the stall might have been recoverable. But the confusion that happened next was also abetted by the fly-by-wire situation.

In older aircraft, the two pilot sticks are mechanically coupled together, so only one message goes from the cockpit to the ailerons. If two pilots disagree on what to do with such a stick, they find themselves literally fighting a tug-of-war in the cockpit, and most reasonable people would react by at least talking about what to do next.

But even in the autopilot-off mode, the Airbus sticks could be moved independently, and the plane responds to the average of the two sticks’ motion. To my ears, this sounds like a software engineer’s solution to a human-factors problem. In the event, even though the senior pilot eventually did the right thing with his stick, the computer averaged it with Bonin’s all-way-back stick, and the stall continued.

The rest of the story is short and bitter. About 10,000 feet above the ocean, the captain returned. Cursing, he realized what was happening, but no power on earth could have saved them at that point. Two miles of air was not enough to stop tons of aluminum and human bodies from plunging into the ocean less than a minute later.

What can be learned from this tragedy? Pilots of fly-by-wire craft around the world now have a vivid bad example not to follow, for one thing. Also, I hope the software and hardware engineers working on the next Airbus rethink their strategy of independent sticks and averaging. While human-machine communication is important, this accident emphasizes the fact that interpersonal communication in a crisis is vital. That single additional channel of communication through a mechanical link between sticks might have been enough to avoid this accident.

Despite such avoidable tragedies, air travel is still one of the safest modes of transport. But it stays that way only by the constant vigilance, training, and competent execution of duty by thousands of pilots, engineers, maintenance people, traffic controllers, and others. Let’s hope that the Air France 447 disaster teaches a lesson that makes air travel even safer in the future.

Sources: The Popular Mechanics article which carried much of the cockpit transcript appeared online at http://www.popularmechanics.com/print-this/what-really-happened-aboard-air-france-447-6611877. I also referred to the Wikipedia article on the Airbus series. And I thank James Bunnell for drawing my attention to this article. I blogged on the Airbus crash on June 8, 2009, the week after it took place.

MythBusters to HouseBusters: The Case of the Errant Cannonball

2011-12-12T04:10:00.000-08:00

I forget when I first saw an episode of MythBusters, the TV show in which dubious claims, urban legends, and other questionable contentions are placed under the searching glare of experimental investigation by a gang of enthusiastic, ironic performers/technicians/scientists. The show has been around in some form or other since it was originated by an Australian production company in 2002, so it could have been any time in the last decade. I still regard watching it as somewhat of a guilty pleasure, partly because it is, first and last, entertainment, and why would someone with a Ph. D. in electrical engineering watch an actor (Adam Savage’s original career) and a guy whose only earned degree is in Russian linguistics (Jamie Hyneman) knock around a huge workshop and pretend to be scientists? Because they’re fun to watch, and in the only sense that matters, they really are scientists. So when I saw a news report that one of their experiments—with a cannonball, it turns out—had gone seriously awry, I had to confess to mixed feelings.

First, the details that are presently known about the accident. For several years, the MythBusters team has used the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office bomb range for filming episodes involving explosives. Apparently this is an area in a natural valley supplemented by earth berms that would stop small flying shrapnel or bullets. But as the show’s personnel were testing a cannon that fired a 30-pound, ten-inch iron projectile, misaiming caused the ball to ricochet off the berm and fly about 700 yards into a nearby neighborhood, where it shot completely through a house and ended its career by smashing the windows of a minivan. Photos of the entry and exit points showed animated-cartoon-like round holes in the wallboard. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but use of the bomb range was suspended pending an investigation, and Savage and Hyneman have announced that any further such tests will be conducted farther away from civilization, in a more distant county. The test site where the accident occurred is about 40 miles east of San Francisco.

Until now, the show has maintained an almost unblemished safety record, except for one other less serious incident, also involving explosives. The producers always include one or two warnings during each episode on the order of “kids, don’t try this at home,” and when especially dangerous work comes up they consult qualified experts for advice. Considering the hair-raising things they do, this record is an admirable achievement, but because the show is so highly visible (Hyneman and Savage were recently awarded an honorary doctorate by a Dutch university for their promotion of science education), they have an extra obligation to do things safely.

If the show’s stars had gone through the usual science-education mill and gotten their Ph. D.s in the normal way, they might have made halfway decent experimental physicists, perhaps. But the world would be lacking a good example of how the scientific method can be applied to everyday questions that people wonder about. Could Archimedes really have invented a way to set fire to a ship using the rays of the sun? Will putting aluminum foil on your car really keep cops from being able to use their radar guns on you? And so on.

Hyneman and Savage are really doing what used to be called “natural philosophy,” back when philosophy really meant the love of knowledge, and not some arcane specialty that you have to get a Ph. D. in to understand, which is mostly what it means today. Before about 1800, most science was done simply because people were curious and wanted to know whether a thing was true or not. There were no huge funding agencies, no boards of proposal review or journal referees—just a few curious guys (it was nearly all guys then) who got together in coffee shops and wrote each other letters about their experiments. And because there was almost no organized industry producing scientific instruments, they had to build almost all their equipment and experiments themselves.

Hyneman ran a special-effects shop before getting involved with MythBusters, and so the very hands-on demands of that type of work (especially before digital technology took over movies to the degree it has) gave him a set of skills that fits very well into the kind of things required by the MythBusters shows. So his lack of formal scientific training isn’t really a disadvantage—instead, he goes about things the way the average guy with time on his hands might look into them. And if you spend some time on YouTube you will find a thriving subculture of amateur scientists who have happily filmed exploits with everything from multi-megavolt Tesla coils to using high-voltage electric-utility capacitors to explode watermelons. Hyneman and Savage are the heroes of such people, who probably make up a good percentage of their viewership.

Somewhat to my regret, I noted that the Wikipedia biographies of both stars list them as sympathetic with the skeptic or atheist turn of mind. While such a philosophy may be an advantage in their particular line of work, it is by no means a necessity. Most of the natural philosophers of the past were believers of some kind or other, and that didn’t keep them from investigating the world they regarded as created by God. Many of them thought that learning about the natural world and its wonders was itself a kind of worship, because in doing so they discovered more of the mind of God.

Atheists or no, the MythBusters people deserve credit for popularizing both science and how to do dangerous things safely. Their latest mishap, although attention-getting, could have been a lot worse, and I’m sure they will be more careful in the future while investigating questions from the past, such as whether a cannonball could really breach a stone wall. And I’m glad they are continuing a long-established tradition of science for science’s sake—even if they are interrupted by messages from their sponsors.

Sources: I relied on reports of the cannonball incident from the San Jose Mercury-News at http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_19490275, as well as the Wikipedia articles “MythBusters,” “Jamie Hyneman,” and “Adam Savage.”

Technology Becoming Culture: Self-Winding Watches Return (Sort Of)

2011-12-05T04:03:00.000-08:00

The other day I went into a watch store in an outlet mall. After finding what I wanted (a gift), I was standing near the cash register and noticed sitting on the counter a couple of cubical leather-covered boxes, about five inches on a side. There was an oval dingus on the front of each and some chrome-plated knobs or controls too.

After the saleslady rang up my purchase, I asked her what the boxes were. “They’re self-winding watch winders. You put the watch on it and it winds it for you.” If this were a work of fiction, I could make up a lot of humorous dialogue at this point, but the only other thing I actually found out from her about the watch-winders was that self-winding mechanical watches are now back in style, at least in certain circles of young people who I suppose have enough money to spend on themselves for things like that. And I went out of the store realizing that I had found yet again another example of Technologies Becoming Culture.

Here is the pattern, as exemplified by the self-winding mechanical watch. Before there were wristwatches, there were pocket watches. And before there were pocket watches, there were pendulum clocks. And we can go all the way back to Egyptian water clocks if you want. The point of this romp into the past is to show that the line from water clock, to pendulum clock, to pocket and then wristwatch, and on from there to the electronic (quartz) wristwatch, is a connected progression in the same technical direction: from large, bulky, inconvenient, and inaccurate (relatively) to smaller, lighter, easier to use and maintain (less winding, etc.), and more accurate. After all, the main point of a watch is (or used to be) to know what time it is. Mechanical watches were accurate enough for all usual purposes as far back as 1900, assuming you set them and wound them once a day. Then the self-winding watch was introduced, which has a weight that is slung back and forth by the movement of the wrist of a reasonably lively human being, and obviates any need for winding. But then you have to remember to set it whenever it gets a little fast or slow, which could be anywhere from daily to weekly or so. And when digital electronic watches came along, the quartz element was so much more accurate than the mechanical balance wheel that you could go literally months without having to set your watch at all, unless you wanted it to be accurate to the second all the time. So from a technical point of view that takes the simple, straightforward position that the virtues of a watch are accuracy, low need for maintenance, and reliability, the quartz watch wins hands down (so to speak).

That’s technology. Now for the culture.

By culture, I mean things such as social attitudes, beliefs, self-images, traditions, memories, fashions, and so on. Everything besides technology, in other words. When the digital watch came in, the mechanical watch people were down but not out. For a while they moved into Breitling territory—super-expensive craftsman-made watches for the rich and famous. But there’s only so many rich people in the world, and sooner or later a marketing team got together with an advertising team and decided to make old-fashioned self-winding watches cool again for lots of people.

They used to be cool for purely technical reasons: you didn’t have to wind them like the non-self-winding kind. But that was back when the only point of comparison was mechanical watches that didn’t wind themselves. Now the self-winding mechanical watch is cool because it harks back to an earlier era when people actually had to move around a lot during the course of a day, instead of sitting for eight or ten hours in front of one piece of electronics or another, not moving your wrist farther than it takes to type or wiggle a video-game control stick. But what if you’re one of these young people who bought a cool self-winding watch, only you don’t move around enough to keep it wound?

We have just the thing for you: a self-winding watch winder, which can plug in a power outlet or (wait for it) runs on batteries! So you can have a self-winding mechanical watch that’s really a battery-powered electric watch, if you trace the energy back far enough. The battery feature, I guess, is for those Caribbean-island excursions where you run your solar-powered computer to keep in touch with the office by satellite.

Anyway, for as long as the fad lasts, the self-winding mechanical watch, formerly thought to be dead and buried by technological progress, has been resurrected by the culture mavens and now enjoys a second life, together with its accessories. I tell this story in an engineering ethics blog not because there’s anything wrong with buying a watch for purely cultural rather than practical reasons, nor anything specifically wrong with buying a self-winding watch winder, though I detect a faint smell of corruption around it somewhere. But the main lesson here is that people buy things for all sorts of reasons, not just technical ones, and if some clever marketers put old-fashioned technology in a new light, you’d be amazed at what they can revive and sell more of.

Sources: While the exact location of my purchase is classified (my wife may read this blog, after all), those incredulous souls who think I must have made this all up out of lack of material are directed to the website http://www.buywatchwinders.com/, where you can peruse dozens of different makes of watch winders costing anywhere from $45 up to more than I would pay for a watch. But then, I’m a notorious tightwad.

Wave Shield Revisited: Maybe Cell Phones Can Cause Brain Cancer

2011-11-27T18:30:00.000-08:00

Over a year ago, I blogged about a product called a Wave Shield, sold to reduce the amount of RF (radio-frequency) radiation reaching one’s head while using a cell phone (“mobile phone” to non-U. S. readers). While I allowed that the existing body of research contained some slight indications that so-called “non-ionizing” radiation such as from a cell phone can have biological effects, the tone of my piece was pretty critical and came close to accusing the Wave Shield people of exploiting false fears. I now have cause to reconsider my words.

Back then, I wrote “The best I can tell from the decades of research is that, if there is any deleterious effect of cell-phone use in terms of causing brain cancer or other serious health problems, it is a very small effect and probably insignificant compared to most other elective hazards of daily life, such as using cell phones while driving.” I still stand by that statement, but I now have more information that makes me question my earlier critical tone.

Last week Mr. Howard Kalnitsky, who is evidently the CEO of Wave Shield, came across my year-old blog and wrote me to protest my treatment of his product. I asked him for solid evidence that cell phones can cause cancer, and he directed me to some websites and a book. The book is Disconnect: The Truth about Cell Phone Radiation, What the Industry Has Done to Hide It, and How to Protect Your Family, by a biomedical researcher named Devra Davis, who has in recent years turned to writing and advocacy in the environmental health area.

Davis’s book is a history of the way scientific research into the question of whether cell-phone radiation can cause biological harm to people has been funded, manipulated, and often suppressed by the cell-phone industry and others whose interests align with that industry. I have to admit that Davis has done her homework. She has interviewed numerous prominent figures such as Om P. Gandhi, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Utah; Franz Adlkofer, a prominent German biomedical researcher; Louis Slesin, editor of the iconoclastic independent publication Microwave News; and Allen Frey, who (according to Davis) published important work about how microwaves can lower the vital blood-brain barrier as long ago as 1975.

The gist of the book is that there in fact are numerous repeatable, verifiable effects that cell-phone emissions have on living tissue. Besides the aforementioned fact that it allows substances to cross the blood-brain barrier that normally protects the brain from a variety of harmful toxins, different researchers in various labs have all demonstrated that RF radiation can break DNA strands. This is one of the hallmarks of X-rays, and is the one of the important causes of cancer in people who are overexposed to ionizing radiation (such as X-rays and radiation from radioactive materials). And though the accepted wisdom was that RF radiation, whose quanta have insufficient energy to directly cause ionization of an atom, therefore could not cause such damage, there is apparently abundant experimental evidence that it does.

Davis doesn’t stop there. She cites numerous epidemiological studies of populations that use cell phones as well, some of which reveal increased rates of brain cancer. Such studies are difficult for a number of reasons. In many advanced countries, it’s hard to find a representative group of people who do not use cell phones to be the control group. And because the technology is constantly changing as people upgrade their phones, you may start out comparing apples but end up comparing oranges, so to speak, especially if the study is a good longitudinal one covering several years. Longitudinal studies are almost necessary in this field, because one of the main illnesses of interest—brain cancer—has been shown to have a long latency period, ten to thirty years, from the initial onset of the disease microscopically until symptoms appear. So it is a nasty problem to tackle.

Nevertheless, researchers have enough evidence to say that heavy use of cell phones can lead to a doubling of your chances of getting brain cancer over the historical normal rate. If you are a young person (under 21, say) and use one heavily for ten years, the risk factor may increase to as much as four times. The Central Brain Tumor Registry of the U. S. says that the incidence of primary malignant tumors in the brain and central nervous system for the years 2003-2007 was 6.5 cases per 100,000 person-years, and about an equal number of non-malignant tumors occurred in that period. To put this in perspective, that is about one-tenth the diagnosis rate of lung cancer, for instance. So if you smoke, don’t worry about brain cancer from your cell phone. You’ve got much worse problems to think about.

On the other hand, doing something that is only 10% as hazardous as smoking, relatively speaking, is not good if you can avoid it without serious inconveniences. Davis has a two-page section at the end of her book describing practical steps you can take to minimize your risk of developing health problems from cell-phone use, short of throwing your phone away. She advises not to keep a turned-on phone next to your body all day. Use a headset so your phone isn’t next to your brain. She is ambivalent about products such as Wave Shield, because they can interfere with the phone’s transmissions and cause it to emit even more energy than otherwise. The amount of energy delivered to the brain falls off very fast with distance, so having the thing even a half-inch away from your ear is a big improvement over clamping it to your head. And Davis notes that in recent years, many cell-phone marketers have inserted fine print in the instruction books telling users not to hold the phone right next to your head. As if anybody reads such stuff except lawyers.

And lawyers are exactly why such language is included, I’m sure. The most telling fact for me in Davis’s book is the news that some insurance companies are no longer willing to insure cell-phone firms against losses due to suits involving cell-phone-related health issues. When that happens, you know things are serious. It is in fact a glimmer of hope, because while the lack of research money has stifled much good work in this area, lack of insurance money may force the phone manufacturers to both acknowledge that their products may be dangerous, and find ways to make them less so. Let’s hope so, anyway.

Sources: Thanks to Howard Kalnitsky for informing me of Davis’s book and other resources on this issue. Devra Davis’s book Disconnect was published in 2010 by the Penguin Group. Her foundation’s website can be found at http://www.environmentalhealthtrust.org/. I used statistics from the websites http://www.cbtrus.org/factsheet/factsheet.html and http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/lung/statistics/. My original blog on Wave Shield was published on Oct. 25, 2010.

Destroying the Engineering Imagination

2011-11-21T04:39:00.000-08:00

If our supply of future engineers dries up, nobody will be doing any kind of engineering, ethical or otherwise. So I think it is appropriate for me to address issues relating to engineering education from time to time, including those factors in the upbringing of young people that don’t fit into K-12 institutional studies. For example, as a parent, what could you do to encourage your children to be engineers? Or (what might be just as informative as a bad example), what could you do to keep them away from engineering?

Anthony Esolen has taken the latter approach. A professor of English literature at Rhode Island’s Providence College, he has written a book called Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. Of course, he is advocating no such thing, but by firmly planting his tongue in his cheek, he indirectly advises parents about what sorts of things will foster and encourage a child’s imagination. He does this through a heavily ironic tone in which current child-rearing practices, systems of public education, and large swathes of the U. S. economy come in for severe criticism.

The part of the book that speaks most directly to the rearing (or discouragement) of future engineers is his Method 3, “Keep Children Away from Machines and Machinists.” With examples drawn from biographies (Edison, naturalist Louis Agassiz, amateur astronomer Charles Messier), older nonfiction books for children (e. g. the electronic hobbyist book series written by the redoubtable Alfred P. Morgan from the 1930s through the 1960s), and fiction (Swiss Family Robinson, the Wallace and Gromit animated films), Esolen shows the vivid contrast between the untrammeled freedom children in past generations had to watch craftsmen at work, read about fascinating machines and the ingenious self-reliant inventors who made them, and play at craftsmanship and invention themselves; and today’s typical childhood, which by contrast is a vast, dreary landscape of scheduled “activities,” indoctrination masquerading as education, and spare time spent in front of computers and video games, indoors, away from anything real that could conceivably be called truly adventurous.

Esolen is not bound by any desire to appear scientific, or particularly even-handed. Accordingly, he paints his picture in vivid, stark colors, leaving the impression that nothing much good has occurred in child-rearing, education, or the economy since about 1970. Mixed in with the more objective material are autobiographical sections in which Esolen recounts the hardscrabble environment of the Pennsylvania coal town where he grew up. So some of the exaggerated contrast between the dismal present and the golden-tinged past can be attributed to insufficiently compensated nostalgia, in my opinion.

This does not detract from the highly useful advice Esolen gives in his backhanded fashion about fostering what I would term the engineering imagination. The best engineers have well-developed imaginations that they use to create new ideas and products in their heads, well before anything exists even on paper, in a computer, or in reality. What Esolen has done is to show us ways that this kind of imagination takes root and grows in children’s minds, and what kinds of experiences and relationships can encourage it.

Structure and discipline are two important ingredients. The parents who would discourage the growth of an engineering imagination should keep their children away from maps, blueprints, and complicated games and stories. Also, people who do intricate skilled tasks with their hands—artists, hunters and fishermen, furniture makers, weavers—should be avoided. In the name of safety, keep children from tinkering with cars, taking things apart, playing with chemicals or fireworks, and using anything in any manner for which it was not intended. Esolen winds up his chapter with a wonderful list that I cannot resist reproducing in part here: “No soldering kits, no ham radios, no transformers, no catapults. No big drills, no routers, no table saws, no axes. . . . No vacuum tubes, no motherboards, no Bunsen burners, no sledges. . . . No gears, no sprockets, no flywheels, no springs, no spools. No trades, no gear, no tackle, and no trim.”

The last sentence is a reference to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Pied Beauty,” the one that begins, “Glory be to God for dappled things,” and praises the beauty of “áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.” Esolen writes from a deeply Christian viewpoint, although most of what he says can be taken seriously by believer and unbeliever alike. However, Christianity furnishes a philosophical framework that gives purpose and meaning to life, and counters the attitude behind sayings like, “Life sucks, and then you die.”

Imagination is closely related to the Christian virtue of hope. We cannot hope for what we cannot imagine, and if our imaginations are stunted and withered, hope suffers as well. At their best, engineers imagine a better future for people and then work to bring it into reality. Anthony Esolen has shown us how to stifle imagination, and therefore hope. But by taking the opposite of his advice, as he intends, we can foster a better future for ourselves and our children.

Sources: Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, by Anthony Esolen, was published in 2010 by ISI Books, Wilmington, Delaware.

Phobos-Grunt Flops, or, What’s In A Name?

2011-11-13T16:03:00.000-08:00

It is obvious that the Russian Federal Space Agency does not have in its employ one of those multilingual specialists who makes sure that a brand name in one language doesn’t mean something embarrassing in another language. Otherwise the space probe intended to sample a piece of the Martian moon Phobos and return it to Earth would have been called something like Datari or Zeniflex—in other words, “Phobos-Grunt” would sound more like a drug, and less like a psychological problem. Far from being merely psychological, the spacecraft now poses a small but real threat to anyone residing between 51.4 degrees north latitude and 51.4 degrees south latitude—which includes most of the world’s population.

The Russians have not tried to launch a space probe for fifteen years. Phobos-Grunt (the Russian word that is transliterated “grunt” means just “soil”) had a noble goal: to fly to the larger of Mars’s two moons, take a nip out of it, and bring the nip back here so we could figure out why Phobos is the darkest large object in the solar system, among other things. Space probes that don’t use prohibitive amounts of fuel can’t be launched to Mars just any old time. There are fairly narrow launch windows, and the last one came in 2009 amid a near-panic-stricken rush which ended in the Russians concluding they’d better wait till next time.

Next time turned out to be last Wednesday. For a while, all went well as the first stage boosted the seven tons of highly toxic fuel and oxidizer, plus the three tons of spacecraft structure, into a low earth orbit from which it was supposed to take off for Mars. Only, it didn’t. Repeated commands to the rocket engines to fire were followed by attempts to wake up the system, and to receive any telemetry at all from it. Finally, on Saturday (yesterday, as I’m writing this Sunday) the agency admitted that the craft was lost. Its batteries, not designed to last long in Earth orbit, will run down soon, and after that it becomes a hazardous piece of space junk whose orbit will decay inside of a month. NASA is guessing late November will be when the hydrazine and nitrous oxide tanks will (mostly) burn up in the atmosphere before crashing somewhere.

Before you rush out and buy satellite-collision insurance, recall that two-thirds of the Earth’s surface is water. Still, it’s got to come down somewhere, and no one has had to adjudicate a situation in which a spacecraft launched by one nation has caused pain, injury, or the death of residents of another country. In peacetime, that is. Rockets launched as a part of war are a different matter.

It would be easy to criticize the peaceful scientific space exploration efforts of another country, formerly a space-program rival to the U. S. NASA has had its share of space-probe failures, although most of them are at least a decade old. Phobos-Grunt had a number of experiments on board, including an international one to see how well certain kinds of bacteria fared in outer space. It looks like they will get a chance to survive re-entry, but don’t put a lot of money on them making it.

The failure of an unmanned space probe is a different order of business from the failure of a manned flight. What makes this a little disquieting is that for the next several years, the U. S. must rely on Russia—or somebody—to ferry our astronauts to the International Space Station. As a matter of fact, this very night (late Sunday Central Standard Time) a Russian Soyuz is scheduled to take off carrying two cosmonauts and U. S. space veteran Daniel Burbank to the station. An unmanned flight last August using the same type of rocket didn’t work out when the third stage failed to ignite.

Given their complexity, extreme conditions under which they operate, and the onesy-twosy way space hardware is built, orbital spacecraft will probably never be as reliable as a five-year-old American car, for example. But you would think after throwing hardware into space for over half a century, the batting average of one of the major players in the business would be better than it is. Perhaps the Russian agency needs a little more of the famous transparency that has made NASA a favorite with engineering ethics writers. While transparency doesn’t automatically improve performance, it makes things very uncomfortable for bad performers, and that can be a good thing.

Best wishes to the space station commuters, and if you have any good ideas for a hydrazine-proof umbrella, send them my way.

Sources: The news on the Phobos-Grunt failure was carried by the Discovery Channel website at http://news.discovery.com/space/real-russian-roulette-toxic-phobos-grunt-reentry-111111.html, and coverage of the International Space Station flight was carried by CNET at http://news.cnet.com/8301-19514_3-57323809-239/russians-prep-soyuz-for-launch-to-international-space-station/.

Fresh Water from Salt: The Environment of Desalination

2011-11-06T14:36:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of visiting Doha, Qatar, in connection with an engineering ethics workshop at Texas A&M University Qatar. Qatar is a small nation on a peninsula in the Arabian (Persian) Gulf, almost destitute of natural resources except for oil and gas. These they have in abundance, and exchange for the more mundane necessities of life such as food and water. Especially water.

To support a population of 1.7 million, water desalination plants take seawater from the Gulf and deliver freshwater to the cities and towns, including the capital Doha. I have no statistics on Qatar’s per-capita water use, but Saudi Arabia’s is below the world average. From my very limited perspective, I did not see much in the way of water extravagance in Doha. The city was largely devoid of outdoor greenery except for small patches of grass in front of a few hotels. The larger private homes had gorgeous rose bushes climbing their back walls here and there. But by and large, it’s easy to tell that Doha is built in the middle of a desert.

Desalination is not without its environmental problems. There are two main technical processes in commercial use today: flash evaporation and reverse osmosis. The older flash evaporation method runs the salt water into a partial vacuum, which lowers the boiling point below what it is normally (around 100 C or 212 F). By arranging several stages with heat exchangers and varying pressure between stages, the flash evaporation process can be made fairly economical. But it is still energy-intensive and much more costly than any other kind of water treatment for freshwater sources.

About forty years ago, a lower-energy approach called reverse osmosis was commercialized. Crudely speaking, the salt water is sent through an osmosis membrane with pores so small that even sodium and chlorine ions can’t make it through. Regular “forward” osmosis causes water to flow from a region with lower ion concentrations to higher concentrations, with a resulting pressure difference across the barrier. To make the process run backwards, very high pressures are applied—upwards of tons per square inch. But everything happens more or less at room temperature, and high-pressure pumps use less energy per liter of water than the flash-evaporation technology does.

Both methods produce waste in the form of highly concentrated brine that is typically pumped back into the sea. If this is done carelessly, the dense brine (which also has anti-scaling chemicals added) stays on the sea floor and can harm or kill a wide variety of animal and plant life. At added expense, the brine can be diffused slowly through a large network of perforated pipes so that it doesn’t build up excessively in any one place. Or if there is a large flow of ordinary seawater available from the cooling system of a power plant, for example, the brine can be first diluted with the larger volume of seawater and then released. The second alternative makes sense if the desalination plant is operated in a “cogeneration” fashion, that is, by using waste heat or energy from a power plant (either nuclear or conventional fueled).

So far, desalination has not become a mainstream method of water production except in places that have enough cash to afford it, and don’t have other alternatives for freshwater resources. In the U. S., for example, which has the highest per-capita consumption of water in the world, we also have enough freshwater sources (so far) to avoid desalination altogether, except for a few special situations in California, Florida, and Texas.

Lack of clean drinking water is one of the major challenges in the path of improving the quality of life for billions of poor people around the globe. Unfortunately, unless a population is fairly close to the ocean and not too high in elevation, desalination is usually too expensive to be considered in comparison to simply piping freshwater from somewhere else. And it is not a technology that works well on a small scale, although I am aware of a few experimental projects which tried to develop household-size desalination plants. Even if they work, they are not as efficient as the larger units and produce a relatively large waste stream that has to be dealt with somehow.

As population pressures increase the demand for freshwater supplies, desalination should be considered as one of many options, including conservation, more intelligent utility pricing, and cooperation between private and public entities. In the U. S., the era of grand publicly-financed public works such as dams and aqueducts is mostly over. For one thing, most of the good sites for dams have dams on them already, and for another thing, the political climate in which large areas of land could be taken by eminent domain no longer exists in most places. If an environmentally friendly way can be found to power desalination plants (solar comes to mind), perhaps it will be a viable way to deal with future water crises. Here in central Texas, we are enduring the second year of a severe drought, and we’re considering all kinds of oddball ideas. But I hope the drought breaks before we have to ship desalinated water in from Galveston or somewhere.

Sources: I referred to the Wikipedia articles “desalination” and “reverse osmosis,” and a news article by Emmanuelle Landais in the Gulf News on desalination plants in the Arabian region at http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/uae/environment/waste-dump-threatens-arabian-gulf-1.72058

Fighting Dengue Fever with Engineered Mosquitoes: Good News or Otherwise?

2011-10-31T04:51:00.000-07:00

Today’s online New York Times carries a story about a new way to fight dengue fever, a tropical disease that afflicts an estimated 50 to 100 million people annually and kills about 25,000 people a year. The disease is carried by a single species of mosquito, so if you can reduce or eliminate that mosquito, you also reduce the risk of dengue fever. Historically, spraying noxious pesticides was the only way to kill mosquitoes over large regions, but a British firm called Oxitec has developed a clever way to decimate populations of Aedes aegypti, the species that carries the disease. They have used genetic engineering to create a line of mosquitoes that die before reaching adulthood unless they are fed a particular chemical (specifically, tetracycline, an antibiotic). So to spell doom to Aedes aegypti, Oxitec breeds thousands of these mosquitoes in captivity by feeding them tetracycline, then releases them into the wild. In order not to make the mosquito problem temporarily worse, only males (which do not bite humans) are released. These little genetic time-bomb males look just as attractive to the native females, but their progeny don’t get their tetracycline fix in the wild, and die out before they can spread dengue fever. Population simulations show that once a certain percentage of wild females mate with the modified males, the entire mosquito population should collapse in that region.

Dengue fever is a truly miserable disease, as you can tell from its informal name, “breakbone fever.” I have known several people who have had it, and although they didn’t endure the severe hemorrhagic form (which is often fatal), it was one of the worst experiences of their lives because of the nightmarish bone and joint pain. So anything reasonable that will keep people from getting this disease is welcome news in my book.

This blog is about engineering ethics, not media ethics, although I must say that the news article in which this work is reported emphasizes the possible hazards of the new development. For example, in selecting which mosquitoes to releas, it’s hard to tell male mosquitoes from female ones, at least if you aren’t a mosquito yourself, so inevitably a few biting females are always released with the males. And the Times reporter found an academic spokesperson who criticized some field tests as being inadequately reviewed and vetted with public notification, pointing out that the tests have been made in countries such as the Grand Cayman Islands which have relatively weak regulatory structures.

From what I can tell, however, the Oxitec people have followed all applicable protocols, and the first notification of their work to the scientific community was a peer-reviewed publication in Nature Biotechnology. In this they are following accepted scientific procedure rather than rushing out with a news conference in advance of peer review.

For various reasons, the phrase “genetically modified” has become a trigger for fear and opposition in Europe, especially, as well as other regions. There is no single word to describe the situation in which a technology is feared, not because it has ever led to any significant harm to the general public, but for other reasons. One cynical view holds that because genetically modified crops were first developed to a large extent in the U. S., they posed an economic threat to European farmers, who then mounted a scare campaign to induce public fear and obtain legal restrictions against the sale of such products. If this was the case, the farmers largely succeeded, and now the fear of genetically modified anything is one of the background assumptions of millions of people.

One thing that is hard for some engineers to learn is the fact that when millions of people, including potential customers or otherwise affected parties, hold a particular view about something even if the view cannot be logically or reasonably supported, one cannot simply ignore that view and pretend it doesn’t exist. This may be one reason that Oxitec chose to try out their mosquitoes in places where people generally have more important things to worry about than genetically modified insects. Most places where dengue fever is a problem are poor and have inferior healthcare systems, and illness can mean loss of a job (assuming one has a job to start with). So to people in sub-Saharan Africa or Papua New Guinea, a company that lets a few non-biting mosquitoes loose in order to reduce the chances of your getting dengue fever looks like a good deal.

No engineering can be carried out without money, and Oxitec is hoping that they can show enough good results for their process to be paid for by governments who see the doomed-mosquito trick to be more cost-effective than treating millions for the effects of dengue fever, or even worse, doing nothing. Obviously they have some challenges ahead of them, but it seems short-sighted to me to throw up roadblocks just because the whole idea of genetically modified critters is under a cloud in some places.

The best argument I can think of for opposing the general release of genetically modified mosquitoes is that there may be some sinister unintended consequence lurking in the background. But that’s why people do field tests: to uncover such problems and deal with them before they cause widespread harm. Here’s hoping that Oxitec does a good job of looking out for such problems, fixes them if they occur, and then goes on to alleviate the miseries of dengue fever for millions of people worldwide.

Sources: The New York Times article by Andrew Pollack on Oxitec’s effort appeared on Oct. 31, 2011 at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/31/science/concerns-raised-about-genetically-engineered-mosquitoes.html. I also referred to the Wikipedia article about dengue fever.

Steve Jobs and the Esthetics of Computers

2011-10-22T09:42:00.000-07:00

When Apple co-founder and longtime CEO Steve Jobs passed away earlier this month, the tributes, laments, and commentaries were all out of proportion to the usual “captain-of-industry” obituaries. That’s because Jobs was not just a captain of industry, though he was that. More than anyone else, he was identified with the esthetic associated with everything Apple, including the Macintosh computer.

Pardon me if I get shamelessly nostalgic for a moment. I saw my first Macintosh at the home of a missionary friend of ours in North Carolina in the late 1980s. Because the first Mac came out in 1984, this must have been either a Mac Plus or perhaps an SE. Anyway, the minute I saw how the mouse worked and how you could escape the hated DOS magic words by just clicking on things on the screen, I fell in love with it. In fact, one day not too long after that, my wife found me in flagrante delicto in bed—with a rented Mac. Despite her initial objections to my taking a computer to bed with me, she soon came around, and when she found out you could do really cool graphics on the thing, she started to learn drawing programs on it. This eventually turned into a full-time job for her at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I worked at the time, and she became the staff technical illustrator for their College of Engineering.

Through thick and thin (notably thin in the 1990s during Jobs’ absence), we have stuck with Macs ever since. As Bill Gates and Microsoft came to dominate the non-artistic consumer and business computer world, I eventually had to buy a PC or two to run software that was not available on the Mac platform. But I always sort of mentally hold my nose whenever I have to do that, putting up with the cheesy-looking graphics, relatively speaking, and the just-good-enough compromises that characterize Windows products compared to Apple stuff.

That is pure personal opinion, and while the Mac-versus-PC battles have largely subsided since the turn of the twenty-first century, there is an odd analogy between what brand of computer one uses and the religion one subscribes to. Ideally, a religion shapes one’s entire worldview and positively influences one’s daily life. The mechanical reliability and elegance of Macintosh products and the style of the OS X operating environment do those things for me, on a small scale. And the fanatic perfectionism that Steve Jobs was famous (or infamous) for is no small reason why Macs and other Apple products such as the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad are so easy to incorporate into one’s life.

Jobs was as much an artist as he was an engineer or entrepreneur. His superabundant talents allowed him to metaphorically zoom along at 80 in a sportscar while most people were still on foot, whether the task was designing a motherboard, inventing a new form of entertainment medium, or rescuing a moribund company.

It’s interesting, though not always illuminating, to inquire into a famous person’s faith, or at least evidences of it. By most accounts I’ve read, the faith Jobs was most often associated with was Buddhism. He ate no meat (only fish), and in his early years made a pilgrimage to India to an ashram. Why someone deeply influenced by Buddhism would wind up inventing world-changing people-friendly hardware is not obvious. There are plenty of Buddhists who have not done anything like that, so Buddhism alone isn’t the answer to the “why” of Jobs’ career.

But I think the style of Apple can be traced, at least in part, to elements of Buddhism.

The essence of the old DOS operating system was the command. You typed in a command, and the computer (presumably) obeyed. But you had first to learn all those commands, so in a way the computer was in charge, not you, if you didn’t know any commands. So the first thing a person had to do in order to use an old-style IBM PC was to go to school to learn some arbitrary commands cooked up by programmers, who were the real commanders of the whole business. It was a hierarchy: the programmers, the user, the computer.

Now, hierarchies have their place. I’m a Christian, and in many places the Christian universe is portrayed hierarchically: God at the top, then angels, then mankind, then the lower animals, plants, and inanimate objects (the Great Chain of Being, so called). But it’s not necessarily the best way to organize computing for the average person.

The Apple esthetic is to subsume the programmers, the technical junk, and the magic words into the invisible interior of the machine. What the user sees is simplicity, elegance, and hardware and software that is seamlessly integrated, both with each other and with the natural way humans do things: we point at things we’re interested in, we touch things to get stuff, our visual field focuses in on things of interest, and so on. With Apple machines, you get the feeling that people come first. The hardware and software are only means to the end of accomplishing something truly beneficial to humanity, with the rough edges smoothed off. To the greatest extent possible, the average person’s native abilities are often sufficient for the task. The highest compliment an operating system can get is that it’s “intuitive,” and that is true of most Apple designs.

It’s not a coincidence or fluke that after his difficulties that led to his leaving Apple in 1985, Jobs found success with the movie studio that eventually became Pixar. The vital thing in movies is to appeal to as many people as you can, tapping typical emotions that the vast majority of us have in common. This sense of what the average person wants to do, and what they’ll think is funny or appealing, was at the heart of everything Jobs did, whether it was encouraging innovative animation at Pixar or innovative hardware design at Apple.

How is that more like Buddhism than Christianity? Well, it’s certainly not hierarchical. The Beatles, who were heavily influenced by Buddhism, made famous the phrase “Let it be.” Jobs let human nature be, and adapted his signature products to the way people are, not the way some programmer wants them to be. And the world is richer for all he did. Not necessarily in the sense of more wealthy, though that has happened too. But richer in the way that every truly meritorious work of art makes us all richer. Recquiescat in pace.

Bitcoin: Currency of the Future?

2011-10-16T14:29:00.000-07:00

The first person who came up with the idea of money did more to advance civilization than most inventors whose names we know. Trade, commerce, and financial operations would be inconvenient or impossible without it. Money is one of the most real and commonplace things that people deal with, but for all that, it is fundamentally a non-material entity. And a person (or persons) known as “Mr. Nakamoto” has recently pushed the idea of money that much closer to its true essence, which belongs wholly in the realm of ideas.

In January of 2009, Bitcoin was born. It is a totally digital form of currency. Instead of dollar bills, or numbers in a bank account representing dollar bills or any other sovereign currency, bitcoin exists physically only on computers running a highly sophisticated encryption software program written by Nakamoto himself (we will refer to him thus for convenience, although he may in fact be a team of programmers, or even a secret branch of a government agency, for all I know).

Where do bitcoins come from? A computer-operated lottery that anyone with a fast enough computer can play. Practically speaking, only people who devote considerable computational resources to the task stand a reasonable chance of winning the lottery, which will be played every ten minutes or so for the next twenty years, at which point about 21 million bitcoins will be in circulation. These specialists are called “miners” because of the obvious analogy to gold mining.

What is a bitcoin worth, in terms of a dollar? Right now, about three dollars and eighty cents, depending on market fluctuations. Bitcoins have been much higher—up to twenty-nine dollars last June—but there’s been a bit of a bitcoin bubble, apparently, and so anyone who bought some last summer is probably regretting their decision.

Can you counterfeit bitcoins? Not so far. Mr. Nakamoto is a very good cryptographer, and no one has been able to fool his software into taking bogus bitcoins. The system is based on digital security that verifies bitcoins as genuine articles (I suppose it’s sort of like serial numbers on dollar bills), and so faking bitcoins is not practically possible.

Is the bitcoin legal tender? Here we get into a hazy area. There are U. S. laws against making and selling coins or other currency “intended as current money.” In other words, places such as the Franklin Mint have the excuse that they’re really selling their commemorative coins and other objects of value to coin collectors for esthetic reasons, despite the fact that many “collectors” simply buy them as an investment. But bitcoin goes farther than that. You can buy things with it, keep it in a digital “wallet,” exchange it online for a wide variety of other currencies, and treat in most ways just like money. The only thing that stops Mr. Nakamoto from getting in trouble with the FBI is, well, nobody knows who or where he is. Which is, I’m sure, one reason he took care to erase his digital footprints, despite the efforts of many people, including New Yorker writer Joshua Davis, to identify him.

I first learned about bitcoin from Davis’s article in last week’s New Yorker magazine. The essentially non-material aspect of money has fascinated me for years, and to find that someone has pursued their individual idea to the point that millions of dollars of equivalent cash in bitcoin is now floating around the Internet is intriguing, to say the least.

According to an article Mr. Nakamoto reportedly posted, he invented bitcoin because was hacked (meaning irritated, not digitally outsmarted) at the tendency of governments to inflate their fiat currencies whenever they got into a financial bind. Fiat currency is any type of money not tied by law to an article of intrinsic value. The U. S. dollar has been fiat currency ever since we went off the gold standard in 1933, and most other countries have the same setup.

Technologically, bitcoin wasn’t possible until the Internet developed, and now that it’s here I’m not sure what its fate will be. In perilous economic times, people tend to run away from ethereal-sounding concepts and head toward investment instruments that have historically proven to be sound: U. S. government bonds, gold, diamonds, that sort of thing. Of course, bonds are just the paper documentation for a promise made by a government. And all we have to back bitcoin is Mr. Nakamoto’s promise that he won’t flood the market with bitcoins at some time in the future, if he happens to get hard up for lunch money some day. This shows that any currency that exists in time must of necessity be based on some mass expectation of how its issuer will behave in the future. When bitcoin goes up in comparison to the dollar, I suppose it says that some number of people concerned about both currencies trust Mr. Nakamoto more than they trust Uncle Sam, at least for the moment. Which, if you think about it, is a remarkable thing to do.

I own no bitcoin, nor do I plan to invest in any, although I may check out its price from time to time. As the world’s first supra-national digital currency, it deserves some attention from ethicists who no doubt have opinions about this novel way of dealing with the problem of currency. And it will be interesting if we ever find out who Mr. Nakamoto is, assuming he shows up some day. But unless the world economy gets a whole lot weirder than it is already, I expect bitcoin may just fade away and become a historical memory, like emu farms. Remember emu farms and emu oil? If you don’t, don’t worry about it.

Sources: Joshua Davis’s article “The Crypto-Currency” appeared in the Oct. 10, 2011 issue of The New Yorker. I also referred to an article on pseudo-currency laws in the Wall Street Journal at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704425804576220383673608952.html

and the Wikipedia article on bitcoin.

Neutrinos Faster Than Light? Not So Fast

2011-10-09T18:27:00.000-07:00

Last month, researchers at CERN, the European high-energy-physics lab that houses the world’s most powerful atom smasher, announced that they had detected a subatomic particle in the act of breaking the speed limit posted by Officer Einstein. In other words, their data indicated that the particles—very light, hard-to-detect items called neutrinos—covered a distance of some 400-plus miles and took about sixty-billionths of a second less time than they should have. It’s like the man who said good-by to his wife and drove his sports car to a town 80 miles away. When he got there she called him and asked: “Are you there yet?” When he said yes, she said, “Well, you’ve been speeding again. You left 45 minutes ago.” The neutrinos got from CERN’s accelerator (it’s so big it covers portions of France and Switzerland, I believe) to an underground detector in Gran Sasso, Italy a little too faster than they should have.

If the results are independently confirmed, they will rank as one of the most important experimental discoveries of the century. And if they are not, they will show how the way science is conducted has changed over the last few decades, and not for the better.

I am not a professional physicist, though I know enough about the subject to start squinting when someone comes up with a claim that anything, from a microwave to a piece of peanut brittle, has been measured as traveling faster than the speed of light. One of the two pillars of modern science is relativity, whose fundamental postulate is that no signal (an event capable of carrying information) can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. (The other pillar is quantum mechanics.) So within hours of the announcement, theorists had lined up on both sides of the aisle, one group claiming that the discovery confirmed their pet theories, and the other citing seventeen different reasons why the experimentalists had to be wrong. It was quite a show.

And the show-business aspect is why the whole scene bothers both me and Laurence Krauss, a highly qualified physicist who wrote an op-ed piece in the L. A. Times criticizing the way the discovery was presented.

The normal procedure is for scientists to submit new work to a refereed journal. In many fields, this step is preceded by informal publication on a site such as arxiv.org, where non-refereed papers can be published online under certain conditions. But everybody understands this is tantamount to thinking out loud, and an essential part of the scientific process of investigating the validity of new results is for qualified colleagues to critique the paper during the process of peer review by referees. Sometimes this results in the paper being rejected, but more often, criticism in the right spirit points out weaknesses or omissions that the authors can correct to make the final publication even better. Only when the paper is published (and in the case of unusual results such as CERN’s, duplicated by different laboratories), should the public in general be informed that, hey, we may really have something here.

As is so often done these days, however, the CERN authors called a news conference to discuss the implications of their paper before it had been peer-reviewed. This short-circuits the referee process and puts highly digested and simplified versions of the science out into the general blogosphere, where hun-yocks like me can have a go at it whether we are qualified or not.

As Krauss points out in his opinion piece, the result is a brief flurry of ambiguous reports of the original news, together with pro- and con-comments from other experts which largely cancel each other out. Then the whole thing is forgotten, at least by the non-experts who hear about it between an ad for an energy drink and the latest on how the Texas Rangers are doing. It’s this kind of thing that gives science a bad name. It will take a lot of work to degrade the prestige of science down to the point where the average citizen will take the word of a Congressman over the word of a physicist, but news conferences about results that haven’t been peer-reviewed take us a little bit in that direction.

I have probably mentioned that years ago, I attended a conference in China at which an otherwise well-reputed professor of microwave engineering reported that he had measured microwaves traveling at a speed greater than light. I wrote an article on his work, and included some other examples of instances where experimentalists deluded themselves, not out of a desire to deceive, but out of a combination of inadequate care to keep their own psychology from skewing the process, and a strong wish to discover something remarkable.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to discover something remarkable. I have had that desire off and on myself. But doing new science is very hard work, and when you get a result that would upset most of the applecart of existing physical law, the first thing to do is not rush out and invite in a bunch of science reporters. The thing to do is to ask your colleagues, including your worst enemies, to come over and throw as many rocks as they can at your methods, your calculations, your assumptions, and your instrumentation (metaphorically speaking, of course). The more remarkable the result, the more rocks.

The worst that can happen this way is that you will be humbled to discover where you have made your mistake, and both you and your critic will have learned something. You will learn what you did wrong, and your critic will learn that you are the type of physicist who can benefit with good grace from constructive criticism. And you will avoid looking foolish in public, because the situation will have been kept among professionals rather than plastered all over the Internet.

Instead, the CERN people have stuck their necks out and made headlines (and engendered a lot of jokes, too, but that’s somewhat beside the point). Whether they deserve the headlines remains to be seen. If the result holds up (which I personally think it won’t—their geographic accuracy alone had to be on the order of ten feet in 400 miles), they will deserve not only the favorable publicity they have gotten already, but probably a Nobel Prize. If the result is shown to be in error, you probably won’t see a single headline about it. There will just be a lot of question marks in the public’s mind like, “Didn’t they say something goes faster than light? Wonder what happened to that? Those scientists can’t make up their minds about anything anymore.” And that won’t be good for science.

Sources: The CERN news was reported by many sources, and appeared with commentary on the Scientific American website http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/degrees-of-freedom/2011/10/02/superluminal-neutrinos-would-wimp-out-en-route/

Laurence M. Krauss’ op-ed piece appeared at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-krauss-neutrino-20111004,0,7882894.story

And my article on the supposedly superluminal microwaves was entitled "N-rays, super-dielectrics, and microwaves faster than light: improbable discoveries in electromagnetics," and appeared in IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 13-18, June 1993; a letter by me pertaining to the same subject was published in IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, vol. 36, no. 5, p. 72, Oct. 1994. And I’ve used “hun-yock” before—look it up at http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hunyock.

Cybervetting and You

2011-10-03T03:55:00.000-07:00

Although I hope any engineer can benefit on occasion from this blog, I am especially keen to discuss matters that younger engineers and engineering students can use. One concern I’ve addressed before continues to come up in news reports, and now a scholarly article by William Herbert in the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine. For those of you who use social media such as Facebook and Twitter, it’s something you ignore at your peril: the increasing practice of “cybervetting” by firms looking to hire new staff.

In the old days, meaning pre-Internet, young people did foolish things just as much or more so than they do now. Suppose a group of engineering students in 1980 went out and had a little too much to drink, found some young women in the same condition (back then the vast majority of engineering students were men), and did things that, say, they wouldn’t want their parents to know about. And suppose that one of the engineers brought along a camera and took pictures of the proceedings. Short of blackmail, there’s nothing much that one could do with such pictures, and normally they’d either be forgotten, or turn up some day when the now-soberly-married-with-children husband gets a question from his wife who is cleaning out the attic: “Is this you in this picture? And who’s that girl?”

But fast-forward to today. We engineers have transformed the social world of young people around the world. Cell phones and digital cameras and Internet connections are ubiquitous. The barriers to mass duplication of embarrassing images of all kinds are so low that the only thing standing in the way is often one’s inhibitions, which alcohol or a party atmosphere can lower so much that one does things without thinking of the consequences. Only now, the consequences can damage your career.

In his article, Herbert cites two surveys that show over 70% of job recruiters admit that they do online searches (“cybervetting”) of potential hires, and just as many say they have rejected applications based on information they have found that way. This means that when you apply for a job, you can assume your potential employer is going to do some checking up on whatever publicly accessible information is out there about you. And because the operators of social media have strong financial motivations to make more information easy to get at, it’s likely that if you’ve ever posted anything you might not want someone to see, they’ll be able to see it anyway.

In the current economy there are all kinds of reasons for employers to reject applicants. But this is one you can do something about. It’s unreasonable to recommend that young people avoid social media entirely. It’s just a part of life now, and unless you become a hermit and stay away from all social events, it’s hard not to be included in group pictures, and some of those pictures may end up looking ambiguous later, to say the least. The point is, things that used to be private matters are now no longer under a single person’s control. Some guy you don’t even know might take a picture of some foolishness at a bar and you just might happen to be in the picture, and someone might tell the photographer your name. That’s all it takes for you to be famous (or infamous) in places where you have no idea your image has turned up.

And that assumes you have good judgment, which is not always the case. Many employees have lost their good jobs because of a lack of discretion regarding negative things they say about their employer on semi-private blogs. This is a gray area that requires judgment and discretion. Many companies have internal chatrooms, sort of online water-coolers, where employees virtually gather to discuss all kinds of things, and obviously one’s employer is aware of those comments. What you may not realize is that at least in the U. S., your employer has the presumptive right to look at all your electronic communications that use facilities provided by the employer. So if you send emails having nothing to do with your job, but use your employer’s network or computers to do it, they can legally read those emails as long as they have met certain minimal requirements regarding notification and so on. This is a surprise to a lot of people, but it’s true.

Employers have limits too. Herbert describes a case in which an airline pilot ran a blog which was password-protected explicitly to keep the airline he worked for from seeing it, but a vice-president of the airline persuaded another pilot to let him gain access to the blog. This action violated the terms of the blog access rules, and the pilot sued. In this case, the pilot was taking what I regard as reasonable precautions to restrict access to persons that were sympathetic with his position. But privacy is only a password away from being violated on the web, and all it takes is one person violating such trust to blow the lid off, so to speak.

By now I hope you have a bigger picture of what can happen if one’s youthful romps of an indiscreet kind show up on the computer of a recruiter whose idea of a good time may not match yours. Things are more complicated than they used to be, but that doesn’t mean you can’t both enjoy the benefits of social media and get and hold a good job. Perhaps it sounds a little extreme these days, but it’s worth considering the advice of an older professor I knew who was asked about things to watch out for when writing reports and other technical documents. He said: “One rule I’ve always followed is never to write down anything that I wouldn’t mind showing up on the front page of the New York Times.” As a matter of fact, I don’t believe anything he did or wrote ever did show up anywhere in the New York Times, but it’s not bad advice, all the same.

Sources: William A. Herbert’s article “Workplace Consequences of Electronic Exhibitionism and Voyeurism” appeared in the fall 2011 (vol. 30 no. 3) edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, pp. 25-33.

Engineers: Problem-Solvers or Creative Artists?

2011-09-25T14:45:00.000-07:00

One aspect of engineering that technical courses don’t address very well is the attitude that an engineer should bring to the task at hand. Because so much of an engineering student’s time is spent solving problems, it’s easy to get into the habit of thinking that solving problems is all engineers do. But as the mystery writer Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) said in her book The Mind of the Maker, life isn’t a series of problems to be solved, like the whodunits she was famous for writing. Instead, the better approach is to realize that life in all its complexity and ramifications can’t simply be “solved,” except for certain narrowly defined specific cases. Life should be viewed as the raw material for a work of art, and the more creatively we approach life’s issues and difficulties and work within the limitations we are given, the better off we will be.

The Mind of the Maker is an extended comparison between, believe it or not, the creative process and the Christian religious doctrine of the Trinity. I will leave that aspect of it for another time, and concentrate instead on the criticism she makes near the end of the book about a worrisome trend that, as she wrote in 1941, was already dominating the way people thought about social and economic ills.

The mentality she decries is to view large, complicated issues as though they were numbered items at the end of an engineering textbook chapter: namely, problems that with sufficient technical effort and scientific expertise can be solved in a way that clears them up entirely. If anything, this way of thinking has only become more common in the seven decades or so that have elapsed since she criticized it. The “problem-solution” way of thinking has become ingrained in our thought processes so thoroughly that many politicians, economists, doctors, lawyers, and even theologians largely accept it without question. If all these folks think this way, why not engineers?

She answers this question by listing four ways that the kinds of solvable problems she set up in her detective fiction are different from most problems (including engineering problems) that we face in real life. These are, briefly, (1) there is always a solution to the detective-story problem, (2) when the murder mystery is solved, there’s no doubt or loose ends left over, (3) the detective problem is solved within the same framework of ideas that the writer sets out at the beginning, and (4) every detective story has an end. Engineering students can see the strong family resemblance that mystery-story problems bear to engineering-text problems: the same four features are true of both.

Writers of both detective fiction and engineering textbooks have to pose problems in these terms. Neither students nor readers of detective fiction will put up with problems that can’t be solved, leave a lot of loose ends and unanswered questions, require an unexpected type of knowledge to solve, or which go on literally forever. But Sayers’ point is that the problems we deal with in real life can do any or all of these things.

So what good is it to learn how to solve problems? A lot of good, it turns out. As engineering involves a wider variety of disciplines, the technical knowledge that engineers of various stripes acquire in their undergraduate education proves either insufficient for many tasks, or gets outmoded pretty quickly. What doesn’t get outmoded, and what makes engineers increasingly valuable in the rapidly changing world of technological society, is the ability to solve problems that are more complex, more extended, and less well defined than the textbook (or mystery-novel) variety. That’s why a substantial number of engineering graduates go on to work in fields as diverse as medical research, economics, or law: all professional disciplines need people who can solve problems, but they also need people with a wide enough vision to realize that simple-minded “turn-the-crank” solutions can only take you so far.

Sayers’ example of how a creative artist works within the limitations of a medium has lessons for engineers as well. As a classic example, she considers Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. In writing one of his most profound dramas, Shakespeare did not solve a problem, except in the limited sense of having something to attract a season’s patrons of the Globe Theater. He worked within the grand but fixed framework of human nature to explore perpetual issues of loyalty, courage, decision-making, and other matters of the heart and mind that continue to engage audiences today. Was the world any closer to solving these types of problems after Shakespeare wrote his plays? Not in the sense that just a few more years added to Shakespeare’s life would have made any of them go away. But in accepting human nature as it was and portraying it in a timeless way, Shakespeare helped everyone who can read and appreciate his plays to understand life a little better, I think. And understanding is necessary for wisdom.

Engineers rarely think of their activities as being creative, in the same sense that a Shakespeare or a Steven Spielberg is creative. No one but God is truly creative: even the most creative of artists works with the social, historical, and intellectual material at hand. But if we engineers learn to approach real-life problems, not with the mindset of finding “the” unique, cut-and-dried solution, but with the hope of learning about the limitations within which we work, and the human meanings of what we plan to do, perhaps the world will take a more enlightened view of our profession. And we will leave the world, as we eventually must, having made it a better place.

Sources: Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker was first published in 1941. I used the Harper San Francisco edition of 1987, in which Chapter XI, “Problem Picture” discusses the issues explored in today’s blog.

The Ethics of DVD Rentals: From Blockbuster to RedBox

2011-09-19T04:33:00.000-07:00

At first glance, the ways people rent DVDs seem pretty neutral morally (that is, excluding the content of the DVDs: that’s a topic for another time). But these ways have changed a lot in the past decade or so, and anytime there is change in technology there will be winners, losers, and effects that have ethical aspects to them. This is certainly true in the DVD rental market, which has gone through at least two major transitions since about 2000.

DVDs themselves were the eventual death knell for the previous media-storage technology, the videotape cartridge. DVDs were introduced in the U. S. in 1997, the same year that a small company called Netflix was founded. Initially, DVDs were rented (or sold) through the already-established chains of video rental outlets, Blockbuster being the most prominent among many others.

From the consumer’s point of view, browsing at a video rental store was not unlike browsing at a bookstore, especially if the store was independently owned and carried a wider variety of goods than was strictly warranted by volume or profit. There is something about being physically present among a collection of physical objects that facilitates the spontaneous and serendipitous discovery, making one feel like a child exploring an unknown wood. When we moved to Austin for a year in 1999, our favorite independent video store was Vulcan Video, which was (and still is) just that kind of place where you can find the unexpected.

Then Netflix happened, Blockbuster failed to adapt, and the video-store market collapsed, aided by the Great Recession starting around 2008. As people increasingly turned to renting content either by mail or internet streaming, the overhead associated with running a brick-and-mortar store—space, utilities, and above all, salaries—overwhelmed the declining profits, and Blockbuster went bankrupt.

But an outfit named Redbox (initially funded by the fast-food chain McDonald’s, as it turns out) discovered there was still a niche for people who did not want the hassle and commitment of ordering videos in advance by mail, but who still wanted to go get a DVD on Friday night on the spur of the moment. The solution: vending machines.

The vending machine has a surprisingly long pedigree, the first one being invented around A. D. 30 by none other than Hero of Alexandria, who was one of the ancient Greek world’s leading inventors. His machine dispensed holy water in temples in response to the worshipper’s inserting a coin. The concept mostly went dormant for a couple of millennia until an enterprising English bookseller named Richard Carlisle devised a machine to sell books automatically in the late 1800s. From there the idea caught on, with food for the mouth taking precedence over food for the mind in the U. S.: gum, candy, cigarettes (remember cigarette vending machines?), and the ubiquitous soft-drink dispensers spread over the landscape.

So it only makes sense that somebody would try to rent DVDs with vending machines, aided by the ease of networked debit-card and credit-card systems. I suppose that is the way the company enforces late penalties and charges for unreturned media as well, although I have never personally rented a video through Redbox.

The other day, however, I was waiting for my wife outside a drugstore and watched several people rent videos from one of the units. One couple, a guy and his girlfriend, loudly discussed the merits of various DVDs while he was standing in front of the screen and she stood a few yards away at their car door. The screens, complete with little flexible cloth sunshades, aren’t large enough for more than one person to see at a time. Another pair, evidently a woman and her late-teenage daughter, must have flipped through the machine’s entire inventory before picking something. This particular machine has two screens, fortunately, but I can imagine that such dallying with others waiting in line could be discouraging for the impatient. Clearly the leisurely browsing in air-conditioned comfort that the vanished video store provided is a thing of the past. I forecast a big drop in Redbox sales once cold weather hits, too

The phrase “creative destruction” has been used to describe the way advances in technology render superfluous entire business segments, such as the video store. My sympathy is with the thousands of former Blockbuster employees who have now joined the ranks of the (at least temporarily) unemployed. If they were young (most of them were), they can adapt fairly quickly and find other work. They are among the losers in this process.

As for consumers, well, it’s certainly more convenient for me to just run over the couple of blocks to the drugstore and rent a video, instead of driving across town to the former Blockbuster. But I’m not sure I’d want to stand out in the sun (or the cold) and pick through stuff on a touchscreen while perhaps other patrons are standing behind me, figuratively breathing down my neck. I’ve found myself instead looking through the admittedly limited selection of DVDs and antique VHS tapes at the public library. The experience is closer to the video-store one, and somehow the taste expressed by the library’s selections is closer to mine than the kiss-kiss-bang-bang type of DVD featured by Redbox. (That was true of Blockbuster’s selection, too, and is just a function of market demographics in a college town).

Eventually, perhaps, internet downloading will be so cheap and fast that even the Redboxes will find themselves out-maneuvered. But that’s what’s so interesting about living in a free-market economy: nobody knows for sure what will happen next, even the people who are trying to make it happen.

Sources: A good mini-history of vending machines can be found at http://www.gumballs.com/history.html, which I consulted along with articles on Wikipedia about Hero of Alexandria, Redbox, and DVDs.

Electricity Comes of Age: The Flatlining of U. S. Residential Consumption

2011-09-11T17:23:00.000-07:00

“Flatlining” is a term from medicine meaning that the patient’s heart and/or brain has ceased to function. U. S. electric utilities are very far from ceasing to function (except for the occasional brownout or blackout), but a recent Associated Press article revealed that the growth of electricity use by U. S. residential customers has slowed or even stopped, and is actually declining by some measures. This is good news for some and perhaps not so good news for others. But first we should put the matter in historical perspective.

The first consumers of mass-produced electricity were businesses and industries, for which electric power meant cash saved or earned when compared to previous ways of doing things. Originally, utilities sought to sell electricity to homes as a sideline, mainly as a way to increase the “load factor,” which means essentially the percentage of time their expensive generating stations were running efficiently at close to capacity. Factories and businesses ran during the day, so having someplace to sell electricity in the evenings was a profitable new business for the utilities to explore. So for most of the twentieth century, the electric utilities’ marching orders to residential customers were to sell, sell, sell. And they did. By about 1925, half of all U. S. residences were wired, and the momentum to do more and more with electricity carried over well into the 1960s. Some of my older readers may recall “Reddy Kilowatt,” a cartoon character fashioned from a light bulb, who urged customers to rely on electric power from everything from clothes drying to brushing your teeth in your new home that sported the all-electric medallion next to the doorbell.

Somewhere around 1980, the tide began to turn. The rise of the environmental movement, the energy crises triggered by oil-cartel actions, and anxiety about nuclear power inspired by the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents combined with concerns raised in the 1990s about global warming and carbon footprints. Add to these cultural factors the hard objective facts that the market for new energy-consuming appliances was pretty well saturated and electric rates were rising, and sooner or later NOT consuming more electricity started to look better than the alternative for many people.

In addition, the deregulation trend finally reached the electric-utility business and fundamentally changed how power companies made money. Until deregulation, state regulatory boards guaranteed the industry a fixed percentage of profit, and the best model was to grow sales so as to increase the absolute profit in dollars. But after deregulation with its accompanying price competition and downward pressure on expenses, encouraging consumers to use less electricity actually started to make sense sometimes, when the alternative was adding expensive generating capacity.

There are many other factors in the current (pardon the pun) flattening of demand, but the portrayal of reducing energy usage as a virtue together with a change in the mix of appliances that use juice probably account for much of the decline in growth. Newer houses and appliances simply use less electricity to do the same thing compared to older models. And one cannot deny that government-supervised incentive programs such as the Energy Star rating system for appliances has played an important role.

A longstanding theme in modern engineering is efficiency, defined broadly as achieving a given result with the minimum use of resources. From the perspective of efficiency, the prospective decline in residential electricity use can only be welcomed, at least to the extent that it represents true gains in efficiency and not simply people using less of everything because they’re out of work, for example. (There is some of that, too.) One can carry this trend to an unhealthy extreme, such as some Europeans have done in designing and living in houses that use no energy for heating or cooling, relying only on incidental heat produced by water heaters and electric appliances. One can do such a thing, but only at the expense of hugely thick insulated walls, a floor plan that approximates an igloo, and exotic measures such as giant air heat exchangers in the basement.

What of the future? If I were an investor, I would look somewhat skeptically at the electric utility business, at least its residential sector, because growth is the fundamental watchword for a capitalist economy. Investing in a no-growth business is not generally perceived as a smart move. If the old regulated system still prevailed, things would be different, and industrial electric usage is still expected to rise for some years. But as the news item pointed out, unless some radical new use for electricity in homes is devised such as the explosive growth of the overnight-charging electric-car market, a declining demand for a commodity is generally a sign that rough financial times lie ahead. State regulation was implemented widely in the 1930s to stabilize a deteriorating private market for electricity, and if something similar happens in the future, deregulation may lose its attractiveness and we may see state regulatory boards stepping in once more.

So will Reddy Kilowatt ride again? I doubt it. No one gives their water utility much thought, largely because it is a well-established industry for which not many new uses are being developed. The same thing may happen to electricity. But the one thing that’s certain about developments in technology is that something no one guessed would happen, is bound to happen sooner or later.

Sources: The Associated Press article on declining growth in residential electricity use in the U. S. appeared in numerous places, and I saw it in the Austin American-Statesman, where it was carried online at http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/shocker-power-demand-from-us-homes-is-falling-1825755.html?cxtype=rss_ece_frontpage.

Is the Internet a Drug?

2011-09-05T04:03:00.000-07:00

The dangers of alcohol abuse are too well-known to be questioned, although most societies have decided that the dangers are not so widespread and inevitable as to require absolute prohibition of alcohol use. We tried that in the U. S. from 1920 to 1933 and it is now generally regarded as a failure. A psychiatrist named Elias Aboujaoude has described how one’s use of the Internet can lead to personality changes both online and offline that are just as serious as those resulting from alcohol abuse. When I heard him interviewed recently, it struck a chord with me because I have recently had a couple of experiences that made me think he is right.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we hosted our ten-year-old nephew for a couple of months this summer. There were many ups and downs in that connection, but the specific effect I noted came after he was allowed (unwisely, on our part) to view hours of YouTube videos produced by teenagers playing certain Nintendo games.

It was interesting to watch the change that came over the boy as he sat on the couch, watching the screen images and wearing headphones because the noise was too much for us to put up with if he played it over the speakers. Hypnotism isn’t too strong a word for it. The worst came when we needed to talk with him for mundane things like getting him to come to supper. The first time I’d speak to him he would almost never respond. So I’d raise my voice slightly, thinking he didn’t hear me through the din of the video game and adolescent narration. When my voice finally registered, it was like the Tasmanian Devil had been disturbed in his lair. “Whaddaya want??!!” is the general tenor of the responses I’d get, none of which were socially acceptable, at least in my book. It would take him several minutes to mentally disengage himself from the machine and get to where he could approximate a reasonable member of society again.

In the child’s defense, he was dealing with some difficulties in his own family, and zoning out on YouTube may have been a kind of coping mechanism. But nothing else he did (with the exception of playing with his Nintendo itself) made him as cranky and rude as watching those YouTube videos.

I also experienced something similar when I went to a retreat center for a couple of days in mid-August. It is in a remote area and set up as a contemplative Catholic retreat, where no talking is allowed. And I had no radio or Internet access. I liked the experience so much that when I came back, I intentionally limited my time on the Internet to strictly work-related matters such as email and looking up specific information. In particular, I dropped my viewing of news sites, which had become a kind of killing-time activity I would do several times a day.

It wasn’t a controlled experiment, because several other things changed at the same time, but I attribute at least part of my noticeable increase in calmness, lack of stress, and feeling more rested to my abstention from what had become a pernicious Internet habit. I may eventually go back to viewing some of those sites on a limited basis, but right now I like the benefits better than whatever enjoyment I got out of them.

Neither I nor my nephew suffered from the more acute maladies that Dr. Aboujaoude sees in his practice of treating sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Although I have not read his book Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality, in the interview I heard he described five types of problems that can result from spending hours online, especially if one’s participation is more active than just reading or viewing. People who participate in the kind of mob-psychology forums that encourage “flaming” and anonymous posts are particularly susceptible to these problems.

The two problems that struck me as especially insightful were grandiosity, a technical term that means having a self-image that is much better than reality, and narcissism. People with these problems tend to think they are smarter, more important, and much more worth listening to than the average person online, and neglect the needs and feelings of others they encounter. It is a kind of delusion that the Internet encourages: a false image that you are the center of your electronic universe and everything is under your control. The real trouble is that these traits acquired online tend to stay with you in the rest of your life as well. Combine those with regression and impulsivity (two more dangers Aboujaounde has identified), and you get the kind of grossly indiscreet behavior that former U. S. Representative Anthony Weiner confessed to engaging in last June. My initial reaction to the news that someone in such a responsible position sent photos of his naughty bits to not just one, but several women, was disbelief. Rep. Weiner has apparently admitted to extensive online activity of other types as well, and the Internet may have had the effects on him that Aboujaounde describes in his patients. Given enough doses of grandiosity and narcissism, a person might delude himself into thinking that certain personal closeups are exactly what Miss X is wanting to see. Add some impulsivity that would lead you to do something that a little reflection would reveal as foolish, and there you are. Or were—Rep. Weiner eventually resigned.

The Internet doesn’t come in little cardboard boxes that we can put warning labels on, as the federal government requires cigarette makers to do. The hazards are much less quantifiable than smoking, but I think the effects are just as real. In the absence of such warnings, I think it is just up to everyone who uses the Internet for any reason to be aware that it can be habit-forming, and many of the habits it forms are not good ones.

Sources: An online (!) audio publication called Mars Hill Audio (www.marshillaudio.org) carried the interview with Dr. Elias Aboujaounde in their March/April 2011 (Vol. 108) edition. His book Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality was published in 2011 by W. W. Norton.

High-Speed Rail Crash in China: Too Fast Too Soon?

2011-08-29T04:19:00.000-07:00

Only four years ago, the first “bullet train” line in mainland China opened to great fanfare. Like tall buildings and modern airports, a high-speed rail line is considered to be a sign that a nation has joined the industrialized world, and Chinese citizens were justly proud of their new high-speed rail lines, which have mushroomed since then. But last July 23, the Chinese high-speed rail industry received a shock that has reverberated to the highest levels of government.

Details are still hard to come by, apparently, and I am working from secondary sources in English. But the basic story appears to be this: On a rail line leading to the coastal city of Wenzhou, a high-speed train was traveling through a thunderstorm. Suddenly, lightning struck. Exactly what it struck is not clear. Some reports say the train itself was hit, disabling it and bringing it to a halt. Other reports say the signaling system was disabled. In any event, lightning crippled either the power or signaling systems or perhaps both, leaving the train stranded on a viaduct some 60 feet above the ground.

Then a second train approached and slammed into the stranded one. Several cars fell to the ground or were derailed, hundreds were injured, and forty people died of their injuries.

The accident was tragic enough, but public reaction intensified when, after a week or so of competitive and often scathing news coverage accusing the government of incompetence and corruption, the government’s censors clamped down on further negative reporting. This sent many citizens to so-called “micro-blogging” sites similar to Twitter, where people can post up to 140 Chinese characters. And they did, criticizing government censorship of investigations into the crash and questions about whether China has rushed into high-speed rail too fast.

Even in the West where media coverage is over-generous, it would take months for an official board to thoroughly investigate a complex accident such as the Wenzhou disaster. So we should not be surprised that a definitive answer to the question of what caused the accident has not yet emerged. China’s premier Wen Jiabao, who has been visibly concerned about the accident starting the day after it occurred, said on Aug. 10 that China was suspending approvals of new high-speed rail projects and taking steps to ensure the safety of existing systems, including lowering maximum speeds temporarily.

All the same, it creates an atmosphere of distrust to issue orders from censorship agencies to quit covering certain topics. Old habits die hard, and the bad old days when electronic media were limited to a single government-run TV station and a few radio channels, plus the party papers, apparently allowed censors to get used to the idea that they could steer public opinion like a farmer steers an ox. But with the proliferation of modern computer-based media, it’s getting harder and harder to steer opinion this way. Even in China, where the government has made strenuous efforts (often abetted by American high-tech companies) to restrain the free flow of information on the Internet, the censorship regime is showing signs of coming unglued. And the rail accident has only put more strain on it.

Still, the government is the only entity which has the resources and access to technical information to investigate the accident in a competent way. I do not know how such investigations are organized in China, but one hopes there is a measure of independence for the technical experts charged with getting the facts straight. In the U. S., the National Transportation Safety Board has a mostly unimpeachable record of independence from political pressure. In all the many accidents I have looked into that were investigated by the NTSB, I do not recall any incidents in which the board’s integrity was ever questioned because of political motives. This doesn’t mean it has never happened or never will. But the fact that most transportation systems in the U. S. are privately owned (AMTRAK being a glaring exception) means there is little political motive to prettify accident reports.

In China, on the other hand, the government has its economic hands in most major undertakings, including high-speed rail. Add that to the heightened sensitivity to criticism that characterizes new kids on the block, and you have plenty of motivation for the Chinese government to whitewash accident reports. Perhaps the lightning strike was a one-in-a-million occurrence that is unlikely to happen again. With six thousand miles of high-speed rail in operation, much of it built in the last four years, the fact that China has not had another major rail accident of this magnitude says something positive about the system. Lightning can do some pretty unpredictable things, and it may turn out that this accident was way down the list of likely problems that the engineers had to consider.

Publicly owned rail systems seem especially prone to engineering ethics controversies. One of the canonical engineering-ethics cases of all time occurred in the 1970s during the testing of a new Bay Area Rapid Transit train system. Some bad technical flaws were covered up and the engineers involved went public, leading to considerable controversy and a classic engineering-ethics story.

Nevertheless, my sympathies are with those who lost loved ones in the Chinese accident. And I hope that the whole controversy surrounding coverage of the accident will lead to greater openness on the part of the government of China, as well as improved safety for millions of Chinese who ride the rails.

Sources: I consulted several news reports on the accident, including coverage by the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14262276), Bloomberg and Business Week (http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-07-28/china-high-speed-rail-crash-likely-caused-by-signal-flaw.html), and Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/10/us-china-train-idUSTRE77946C20110810 and http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/01/us-china-train-censorship-idUSTRE7700ET20110801). A summary of the BART train incident can be found in Stephen H. Unger’s Controlling Technology: Ethics and the Responsible Engineer (1982).

Self-Driving Cars: Here Sooner Than You Think, Courtesy of Google?

2011-08-21T14:18:00.000-07:00

From time to time I have noted the progress being made in autonomous roadway vehicles, otherwise known as self-driving cars. Somebody recently stepped on the gas to speed it up considerably. This time, the progress took place not in a lab, but in a state legislature.

About half a decade ago, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored a series of highly publicized contests to develop driverless vehicles that would complete a prescribed route many miles long, including some rugged stretches representative of the kind of terrain the military might be interested in traversing. After some embarrassing initial failures, several vehicles successfully completed the route by 2005, including one built by a team led by Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun. Thrun has since become a Google Fellow, and heads that company’s efforts to develop a fleet of autonomous vehicles. This fleet has reportedly logged over 100,000 miles of driving in California traffic, which counts for a lot more miles than driving in ordinary traffic, I’m sure.

It is outside the scope of current motor vehicle laws for an unmanned car to drive down the highway, even if it drives better than your mother-in-law does. While it is not clear who would get the ticket if a cop pulled over a driverless vehicle, I’m sure he’d find a way to blame the passenger for not touching the wheel. With advances in artificial intelligence such as Thrun and others, including researchers at Volkswagen, have made in the last few years, it looks like the technology is beginning to outpace the legal system, which is not an uncommon thing these days.

Just a couple of months ago, legislators in the state of Nevada did what Google has been asking them to do for some time. They passed a law directing the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles to develop a driver’s license endorsement for autonomous vehicles. This means that as early as Mar. 1, 2012, you could take some sort of examination and get a Nevada driver’s license authorizing you to sit in a car that drives itself, and not be pulled over for DWI (Driving While Idle).

Why is Google, of all organizations, so interested in autonomous vehicles? A clue is provided by another law they asked Nevada lawmakers to pass, one that so far the legislators have hesitated to approve. This law would allow drivers of autonomous vehicles to send text messages while behind the wheel they aren’t touching. A little item in (believe it or not) Google Answers states that “Americans collectively spend more than 500 million hours in their cars each week with an average commuting time of 80 minutes per day and growing." Google is probably looking at those 500 million hours a week like the miners of the 1850s gold rush (also in Nevada, it turns out) looked at the Comstock Lode. Put all those folks, or even a good fraction of them, in autonomous vehicles (and give them wireless mobile internet connections provided by, for example, Motorola’s mobile phone division, which Google also purchased recently), and voilá: hundreds of millions of hours a week freed up for people to do whatever they like that will fit inside a car, including surfing the Internet and using guess what? Google! These things aren’t hard to figure out if you think about them a while.

Of course, Google’s public reasons for interest in autonomous vehicles are things like safety and convenience, and these factors are also true. But Google exists because of its bottom line, and employing some of the smartest people on the planet, they know exactly what they’re doing, and it isn’t all altruism, though that may be a useful byproduct.

I foresee bumps on the road to the general use of autonomous vehicles, though. One technical problem, I suspect, will happen when the fraction of autonomous vehicles in use gets so large that chances are good that several driverless cars, most likely made by different companies, will be seeing each other all at once. As smart as Prof. Thrum is, it’s possible that interactions between large numbers of driverless cars will lead to some spectacular unforeseen results, not all of which will be healthy for the occupants. The danger is that a really deadly accident in which autonomous vehicles are involved could cast a black pall over the whole technology and slow down or reverse legislative approval for years. Something similar to this happened after the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents with the nuclear industry, and it has only recently partly recovered from those disasters.

A more remote but still real issue concerns those of us who, as a friend of mine once said, will insist on driving his own vehicle until they have to pry the wheel out of his cold dead fingers. Suppose the technology succeeds so well that insurance companies begin to treat it like safety glass: something that no vehicle should be allowed on the road without, and something that everybody should use. What happens to the freedom of the road to drive your own car in your own way? What happens to motorcyclists, for Pete’s sake? An autonomous motorcycle would be like a man going on his honeymoon by proxy: it might get the job done, but it wouldn’t be near as much fun.

Fortunately, we are a long way from worrying about those kinds of problems quite yet. For me, I would be glad to be relieved of the mostly tedious, dull, and occasionally dangerous task of driving a car, at least for routine commuting purposes. And yes, I probably would surf the Internet some with the time it would free up. But I also might read a book, or nap, or pray, or do any number of other things which would not lead to immediate profits for Google. And so I say to Google: go for it!

Sources: A number of articles appeared in June following the Nevada legislature’s approval of the autonomous-vehicle license law, including one in Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/06/22/nevada-passes-law-authorizing-driverless-cars/), Geek.com (http://www.geek.com/articles/news/nevada-passes-law-giving-self-driving-cars-the-ok-20110623/), and the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/24/autonomous-vehicle-law-nevada_n_884307.html). On May 10, 2011, the New York Times published an in-depth piece on Google’s research and lobbying efforts in this area at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/science/11drive.html?_r=1.

Small Businesses Hacked; Banks Say Not Their Business

2011-08-14T03:50:00.000-07:00

Say you run a dry-cleaning company with three outlets, or a restaurant, or a machine shop with thirteen employees. You have an account with a bank, possibly a smaller bank that isn’t in the major leagues. Like most people these days with bank accounts in the U. S., you deal with your bank electronically as well as in person. You log onto your bank’s website daily and transfer funds, pay bills, do payroll, and most of the other financial operations that a small business requires. And you probably have some accounting software on your business computers that interfaces somehow with the bank’s software.

Everything’s rolling along okay until one fine morning, when you open up your accounting software, update your balances from the bank, and find that instead of the thousands of dollars you had there yesterday, there’s zero dollars and zero cents—or even that your $10K line of credit with the bank that you haven’t touched in months is suddenly maxed out. You get on the phone with the bank. After some heated conversations with the bank’s information technology (IT) people, you discover your accounts have been hacked. And the bank says that because it was your system that was hacked, not theirs, that you are out of luck. They won’t make good your losses.

According to a recent blog post in the online edition of IEEE Spectrum, the amount of physical cash stolen in old-fashioned bank heists (less than $50 million a year in the U. S.) is dwarfed by the amount of money hacked from small-business bank accounts, which is upwards of $1 billion annually. Unlike regulations covering consumer credit-card accounts, which have a $50 maximum loss ceiling that most banks honor, there is no law protecting small businesses against similar kinds of fraud. So unless a small company can prove in court that the bank itself was at fault and not the company’s IT system, that money is just as gone as if a thief broke into the office safe and walked away with it. But in the case of physical cash, there’s usually no question about who the money was stolen from. Digital cash is different.

Money is an interesting philosophical concept. I was in my forties before a historian of technology made me realize that the monetary value of gold is not an intrinsic objective property, like atomic weight. Considered analytically, money is just an elaborate symbolic system humans have devised to keep track of economic value. Whether money is stored in the form of dollar bills, gold bars, or bits on some server somewhere, it is fundamentally an agreement among people that certain physical states of the universe correlate with a certain distribution of wealth among individuals and groups.

That being the case, there is a fundamental distinction between physical theft, which is what happens when someone with a gun holds up a real bank and runs off with real bills; and cybertheft, where by fraud some hackers make certain numbers in one computer system go down and certain other numbers in their own accounts go up. In this regard, hacking small business accounts is in the same category as check forging. In both hacking and forging, a third party or parties are made to believe something false.

What has this got to do with the question of who should shoulder the responsibility for hacking small business accounts? In a more leisurely era, there might be a real chance of simply catching the crooks and making them give back the dough. But the famous fungibility of money (the ease with which it is converted into other things of value) goes double for digital cash, which can be laundered, converted, disguised, and transferred around the world in seven minutes or less, beating Shakespeare’s Puck by a good measure. Hackers are notoriously difficult to catch, and by the time they are caught the money they steal is almost always unrecoverable. So in reality, the question boils down to who is left holding the empty bag: the small-business owner or the bank?

The fact that there is some dispute about this in the various court cases that have been brought to trial, reflects the fuzziness of computer systems with regard to the question of whose pieces are whose. If your business software transfers data back and forth to your bank, who is to say where one system ends and the other one begins? Maybe we should all gang up on the rooms full of programmers who worked out the compatibility standards for both systems. After all, they are ultimately responsible for the way the system ended up, including any vulnerabilities. But nowhere have I seen that anyone considers going after the programmers or engineers who put these systems together. Instead, the banks who hire them are the main targets of lawsuits, because, as all good bank robbers know, that’s where the money is.

I wish I had a gold-plated surefire answer to this ethical issue, but I don’t. The best I can do is urge caution all around, especially where “phishing” attacks are concerned. If what you think is your bank’s website looks the least little bit funny, stop what you’re doing and double-check everything. That way you might be able to avoid a very costly mistake.

Sources: Robert Charette’s blog post entitled “Business Phone or Bank Account Hacked? It's Your Toaster” appeared on Aug. 12 in the online edition of the magazine for electrical and electronic engineering professionals IEEE Spectrum at http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/telecom/security/business-phone-or-bank-account-hacked-its-your-toaster.

Betting on Methanol

2011-08-09T04:13:00.000-07:00

The U. S. dependence on foreign oil imports is a little like what Mark Twain said about the weather: everybody complains about it, but nobody does anything about it. My metaphorical hat is off to entrepreneur and author Robert Zubrin, who, in a small way, is trying to do something about it. Zubrin has offered to wager up to $100,000 (presumably his own money) that he can make his recent-model Chevy Cobalt run on methanol with better fuel economy than it gets with gasoline.

Why methanol? In a previous column in National Review, Zubrin explained some of its advantages compared to gasoline and even ethanol. Methanol (also known as wood alcohol) has the chemical formula CH₃OH. It can be produced at low cost (Zubrin says the going price is currently $1.28 per gallon) from a wide variety of carbon-containing materials: oil, coal, natural gas, and almost any biomass material, even wood (the name comes from an early production method involving the destructive distillation of wood). The chemistry for producing methanol is fairly straightforward, in contrast to ethanol, which is most easily obtained from sugar-containing foodstuffs (e. g. corn) used in a fermenting process. Although most cars cannot burn pure methanol because it attacks certain kinds of rubber seals and has different combustion characteristics than gasoline, many recent models have fuel lines and software that will allow the use of methanol and other flexfuels with only minor modifications. I am sure Zubrin, a smart engineer, has either done this or knows people who have, and so is fairly sure to win his bets.

So what if he does show that his Cobalt can get 24 mpg on methanol? Will he have done anything more than pulled a publicity stunt profitable to himself? His wider goal is to make a point about the inertia of our present transportation fuel system and how it could be radically improved.

Increasingly, newer technology is advancing beyond the shell-like fossilized regulatory and infrastructure environment in which earlier technology developed, and the environment often blocks adoption of the new technology. As Zubrin points out, adapting a car of today to a different kind of fuel is a much simpler matter than it was thirty years ago, when one would have to do extensive mechanical modifications to the carburetor, valve lifters, and other parts, costing many thousands of dollars to complete. But the nation’s fuel infrastructure and regulatory environment developed around such facts. Now that the facts have changed, we are stuck with a distribution and legal system based on the assumption that cars will run on gasoline or diesel fuel forever, amen. If by some miracle, methanol refining plants running on natural gas or coal sprang up all over the country and methanol filling stations were built to service flexfuel cars, the road tax system of every state would be severely challenged, because most states receive revenues based on a fixed charge per gallon of gasoline sold. If gasoline sales plummet, so do road tax revenues.

Of course, the one thing lawmakers are still pretty good at is passing new tax laws, so this problem would be addressed promptly if methanol became a significant part of the transportation-fuel market. The best thing about such a development from Zubrin’s point of view is that unlike petroleum, the U. S. has abundant coal and increasing amounts of natural gas reserves. And methanol can be made from either coal or natural gas.

A believer in the free market, Zubrin does not call for a methanol subsidy, which like the current Federal law mandating ethanol in gasoline would further distort the market and lead to unexpected negative consequences. He simply wants most new cars to be flexfuel-capable in fact as well as in theory, and feels if this happens, the market will do the rest. If your car could burn either gasoline or methanol, and you drove by two filling stations, one with gasoline at $3.55 a gallon and one with methanol at a fuel-economy-equivalent price of $2 a gallon, which would you buy? Such no-brainers are how the market works, and pretty soon gasoline marketers would find they have a price ceiling to contend with.

We have seen calls for major shifts in the nation’s transportation-fuel infrastructure before. Who remembers President George W. Bush’s call for a hydrogen-based economy in twenty years? As attractive as it might have been politically, hydrogen is a relatively poor choice for a transportation fuel. To carry around enough hydrogen to take you more than a few miles, you need extremely high-pressure tanks to contain the compressed gas. The problem is even worse than it is with natural-gas-fueled vehicles, which have made very limited inroads in mostly municipal fleets where a city can build its own supply station. Methanol, although not quite as easy to handle as gasoline, is a lot better in this regard, because its energy density is higher than hydrogen or other fuel gases. Another advantage of methanol compared to gasoline is its biodegradable characteristics. It breaks down into carbon dioxide and water in a few days if released into the environment, unlike gasoline, some of whose toxic components can persist for years in the ground.

I wish Zubrin the best of luck in his wagers. He’s willing to break down his $100,000 bet into as many as ten $10K pieces. If I had that kind of money lying around, I would be tempted to take him up on it. Not because I think he’ll lose, but because it would be fun to participate in a publicity stunt that may turn out to be a prophetic event.

Sources: Zubrin has published two articles recently on methanol as a transportation fuel, both in the online edition of National Review. The July 27 article can be found at http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/272685/tripling-america-s-fuel-production-robert-zubrin?page=1 and the one in which he issues his betting challenge appeared on Aug. 2 at http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/273285/fuel-efficiency-bet-robert-zubrin.

The Transient and the Enduring: Rereading "A Canticle for Leibowitz"

2011-08-01T03:50:00.000-07:00

Films and novels are not the usual fare in this blog, but every so often I come across a fictional work that embodies a truth so important to engineering ethics that I want to bring it up. Such a work is Walter M. Miller Jr.’s prize-winning sci-fi trilogy A Canticle for Leibowitz, which I recently reread after seeing it mentioned by another blogger whose name I’d mention if I could remember it.

The book combines what at first glance seem an unlikely pair of premises: the near-destruction of the world by a nuclear war (the book was published in 1960, at the height of the Cold War), and the 1700-year history of a Roman Catholic monastic order founded shortly after the nuclear war in order to preserve scraps of knowledge that escaped the flames. At the time Miller was writing, two things seemed nearly certain. One was that sooner or later, some madman would start a nuclear holocaust. The other was that the Roman Catholic Church, which was then near the zenith of its post-World-War II flourishing in the U. S., would endure no matter what.

Regarded strictly as technological prophecy, Miller’s work scores pretty well. Toward the end of the book there are dictation-taking computers (which break down), self-driving automobiles, and interstellar space flights. But of far more interest are the essential points of conflict that Miller explores between the oldest continuously functioning institution of Western culture (the Catholic Church) and the scientists, technologists, and government agents with whom the monks of the Order of St. Leibowitz have to deal.

It would be hard to make a movie out of the novel, but it has a few memorable scenes of cinematic quality. In one, a clever monk, after piecing together scraps of technical information, has managed to build a dynamo-powered arc lamp, the first electric lighting the world has seen in several hundred years. It works great as long as the four monks pushing the cartwheel in a circle don’t get tired out. In order to avoid spoiling the story for those who haven’t read it, I won’t give the context of the second scene. But it involves a fight (first verbal, then physical) between the abbot of the monastery and a government-paid doctor who wants to set up a portable euthanasia center and crematorium for victims of radiation poisoning who are beyond help.

Every age asks questions about fundamental issues: What is life for? What should we do with wealth and power? How should we deal with knowledge? In his novel, Miller takes the answers that the Church has had two millennia to refine, and contrasts them with the answers that the secular world typically comes up with. Tribal chieftains commit gruesomely gory murders; civilizations rise, destroy each other with nuclear bombs, and rise again; cultures forget nearly everything that makes modern civilization possible, and then slowly re-acquire the scientific and technological knowledge that previous ages had achieved. In all this, the monks of St. Leibowitz play relatively minor roles on a larger scale. But the continuity of their own records and the fact that theirs is the only historical memory that endures, creates a thread that ties the different ages together and brings up recurring themes.

Where Miller was truly prophetic, I think, was the way that the Church has preserved its stance on the absolute sanctity of life as the shifting legal sands have washed away prohibitions on first abortion, and now euthanasia in some states. When the book came out, the infamous Roe v. Wade decision was thirteen years in the future. But its promulgation brought to reality a forecast that Miller made, which was that the Church would always protest the taking of innocent life—whatever the age of that life, whatever its form (healthy or handicapped), and whatever its usefulness to society. Canticle is a working out in fictional form of various ways that technological man can go wrong, both individually and collectively.

To his credit, Miller poses no easy answers. A colleague I recently loaned the book to said it was “dystopic,” and I suppose that’s one way to look at it. But as engineers know, you can sometimes learn more from mistakes and accidents than from successes. A Canticle for Leibowitz is a long case study in how 1950s-era technology (most of which is still with us today) can go wrong and combine with original sin to do really bad things. There are a lot of things to avoid doing in this novel. And the heroes, such as they are, are men and women of faith. That, too, is a lesson to ponder, I think.

Stuxnet and the Future of Cyberwarfare

2011-07-24T14:34:00.000-07:00

Gunpowder led to guns, electronics led to electronic warfare, and now we can expect cyberspace to breed its own versions of armed conflict. This month, Wired Magazine published an online tale that rivals any James Bond flick in its twists, turns, intrigue, and drama. It’s the story of Stuxnet: the first computer virus explicitly designed to do physical sabotage to a target of international significance. And it probably worked.

There’s no room here to do justice to the whole story, but the essentials are these. In June of 2010, a computer security firm in Belarus got a call to investigate a persistently rebooting computer. The cause turned out to be an unusual virus that exploited what is called a “zero-day” vulnerability: one that the hackers themselves discovered, and neither the software maker nor antivirus firms know about yet. As both the Belarus firm and investigators at Symantec studied the virus, bearing the name “Stuxnet,” they became more intrigued, because it appeared to be a large, sophisticated virus designed to look for a particular kind of software made by Siemens. This software operated PLCs, which are industrial minicomputers that directly interface with electromechanical gear such as pumps, valves—and uranium-enrichment centrifuges.

After about a dozen cyber-sleuths spent the equivalent of several man-weeks on the problem, they determined that Stuxnet counted on infecting USB drives in a facility using the targeted Siemens software. Once it found its target, it would silently wait until a certain date, and then suddenly increase a motor-drive speed far beyond its rated maximum, all while generating fake signals to the control room making it look like everything was OK. The operators at the target uranium-enrichment facility would be clueless until their centrifuges blew up.

Six months earlier, in January of 2010, International Atomic Energy Agency personnel reviewing security-monitoring camera data for an Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz noticed that over a period of only a month or two, the operators had to replace over 1,000 centrifuges, far more than routine maintenance would require. So far, this is the most direct evidence that the Stuxnet virus was at least partially successful. Iran has obvious reasons for not giving out a lot of details, and whoever developed the highly sophisticated Stuxnet virus has even less motivation for coming forward and admitting that they did it. But internal evidence points to either the U. S. or more likely Israel as the probable source of the malware.

This story is bristling with so many ethical issues I don’t know where to start. For one thing, how does a company with worldwide branches in countries at cyberwar with each other treat information that could potentially ruin a planned cyberattack if it was disclosed? Symantec, where much of the deciphering was done, did not stop their employees from publishing basically everything they found out about the virus almost as soon as they figured it out. This is the customary way cybersecurity firms work, and so far it seems to be the best way to stem the ever-flowing tide of malware that the companies exist to fight. One of the principal engineers involved, Liam O Murchu of the firm’s Culver City, California office, said that the one thing which might have made him hesitate about publishing is if they had found evidence for “100 percent attribution who was behind it.” But because no such evidence emerged, the firm went ahead with their announcements.

In the event, the investigators figured out Stuxnet after it had apparently done most of its damage. This is hardly reassuring to those of us who don’t worry about cyberattacks on PLC-controlled infrastructure such as power grids, water delivery systems, gas mains, and so on. The resources needed to develop Stuxnet, although substantial, are estimated at less than a million dollars. What it took besides money was cleverness, some auxiliary secret information probably known only to a government security operation, and lots of guts. None of these commodities are in scarce supply in various places around the world, so the fact that Stuxnet got as far as it did is a cautionary tale for everyone who has an interest or stake in these matters, which these days means nearly everyone.

Another issue that this raises is the question of where cyberattacks fit on the moral spectrum of war. In a way, a cyberattack designed to do nothing more than disable a plant is the best kind of weapon: no one gets killed, there’s no collateral damage to speak of, and you surgically strike at exactly what you want to take out. If you compare the consequences of a Stuxnet-style attack to something more crude, such as dropping a bomb on the whole facility, the cyberattack looks a lot better when judged by criteria of the just-war theory: it is specifically targeted, it leaves no unnecessary civilian deaths, and it can be proportionate to the situation provoking it.

But by the same token, Stuxnet is now common knowledge among those whose interests it is to guard their own targets of military importance and attack those of the enemy’s. This lesson will be learned, and it’s a very good chance that we’ll see something like Stuxnet happen again. Only the next time it may not be an Iranian nuclear facility. It could be a U. S. power plant, or a German steel mill, or any number of other places. We have taken a long first step down the cyber-warfare road with Stuxnet, and there is no telling where it will lead.

Sources: The excellent article by Kim Zetter entitled “How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet, The Most Menacing Malware in History,” appeared on July 11, 2011 in Wired’s online edition at http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/how-digital-detectives-deciphered-stuxnet/all/1. The article also mentions a widely reported but apparently unverified 1981 incident in which the U. S. Central Intelligence Agency reportedly destroyed a natural-gas pumping station in the old Soviet Union with malware.

Nintendo and the Small Boy: One Uncle’s View

2011-07-18T03:21:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned earlier, my ten-year-old nephew is staying with us this summer, and his visit has opened my eyes to a variety of things that would normally remain completely below my radar. Among these is the pervasive phenomenon of video games, specifically the portable Nintendo Game-Boy variety. Because it has become somewhat a bone of contention in our domicile, I won’t pretend to give an even-handed analysis of the ethics of video games here. Instead, you will get an uncle’s thoughts on what one particular video game does to a boy and his relationships to others.

Starting from the legendary Donkey Kong of the early 1980s, Nintendo has pioneered the video-game business and played a major role in its growth from a niche market to the multi-billion-dollar industry it is today, rivaling the motion-picture industry in terms of total revenue. Appealing primarily (but not exclusively) to preteen, adolescent, and young males, it furnishes millions around the world with countless hours of something or other that players seem to want a lot of, and will pay good money to get. “Entertainment” is probably the best word for it, but that doesn’t cover everything.

What exactly does a user do when he plays the Nintendo Super Mario Brothers game that my nephew has? Understand that I haven’t played it myself, except to fail miserably at a two-console option that he tried with me for a few minutes before it became clear that I did about as well as an elephant would fare in the Kentucky Derby. Well, there’s these two little characters intended to represent Italian plumbers, and they scurry around a planarized landscape and do a variety of improbable things to an even more improbable array of other creatures: a large spike-backed turtle, some things that look like animated mushrooms, and other vaguely human-looking beings intended to represent females. There are weird cheesy-sounding sound effects, some meaningless babble-chatter when the characters emit speech balloons, and a score-accounting system that makes the IRS tax forms look like a trivial exercise in addition. I am clearly not Nintendo’s target audience.

But my nephew is. So much so that when we ask him to stop playing it for a legitimate reason, such as going out to dinner or taking a bath, this often provokes a furious flurry of activity accompanied by the desperate plea, “I’ve got to get to a saving place!!” Evidently with this particular game, you can’t just close the lid and pick up later where you left off—it deterioriates somehow, or you lose health points, or Bowser burns your house down, or something else bad happens. You have to play till you get to a designated “saving place” and then you can save the state of the game and go on with the rest of your life, trivial as it may seem in comparison to Nintendo-world.

I will not even mention the amount of time that I, as an adult, have spent waiting for a computer to start up, or shut down, or finish saving, or complete some operation indicated by a blue bar creeping ever so slowly across the screen. My work requires this sort of thing, and it is apparently just the unavoidable price of benefiting from computers, just like taxes are the price of living in a secure country. But for ten-year-old kids to have the same kind of problem already—my gosh, isn’t there some age below which they should be exempt from the tyranny of the digital? With a board game (he likes Monopoly, it turns out), we can simply stop and put the pieces down. Not Nintendo, with this game, anyway. For however long it takes between he hears our cease-and-desist order, and the appearance of the next saving place, the entire family is held hostage to the dictates of some not-especially-well-meaning programmer in Japan or Austin or somewhere, who has decided where and how many saving places a particular game will have. We have taken to monitoring how much time he spends on the thing, and this obliges me to follow him around with a little notecard I record his time usage on. (Yes, I know I could do that better with a BlackBerry, but then I’d have to wait for the BlackBerry to start up. . . .) Once he hits the maximum daily limit, that’s it—no more Nintendo. After some initial protests about this policy, he’s calmed down, and has willingly if not cheerfully abided by our restrictions.

I won’t hunt up a bunch of statistics on how video games make kids more violent, or improve their fine motor skills, or make them eat their broccoli, or any of that stuff. I’m simply interested in how it affects the way they relate to other people. While his talk is full of Nintendo references (he even called himself by the name of a game character this evening), it’s possible that small boys have gone way overboard for brief times over all kinds of things in previous generations. Mark Twain’s descriptions of how Tom and Huck played cowboys and Indians in his fictional version of the 1840s involve more physical movement and imagination than is required to play Nintendo, but the total absorption, the competition, and the on-and-off-again way that boys go after first one enthusiasm, then a different one, does not seem to have changed in all that time. Already the Beyblades (see my blog two weeks ago) are lying neglected under the bed, and one can hope for a similar fate to befall the Nintendo device after a while. I can only guess what will come next, but whatever it is, I can reassure myself with the reminder that this too shall pass—as all of boyhood does too quickly.

Sources: I consulted Wikipedia articles on “Modern cinema” and “Video game” for the comparative sales figures of the two industries.

Manned U. S. Space Flights and E Pluribus Unum

2011-07-11T04:08:00.000-07:00

As I write this, the last flight of the last operational Space Shuttle is in progress, and there is only about a week to go before Atlantis lands and retires to a museum. It is a good time to take a retrospective look at the way the United States has gone about doing manned space flight over the last generation.

In aid of this retrospective, I viewed a reissued DVD of the old Disneyland TV show aired by the Walt Disney organization back in 1956. This particular episode was dedicated to the future of man in space, and featured interviews with space-flight popularizer Willy Ley and rocket designer Wernher von Braun. In less than an hour, anyone who was watching ABC that March evening (only one of three networks back then, remember) learned about Newton’s law of action and reaction, what type of fuel space rockets could burn, how staging works, and the amusing problems of eating in a weightless environment.

By today’s standards, the artwork was crude, the animation primitive, and the slow pace would be snore-inducing, especially to young people. But the remarkable thing about this show was that the producers, with the obvious help of von Braun and other rocket scientists and engineers, managed to predict most of the high points of the U. S. space program for the next forty years. The viewer saw giant versions of von Braun’s V-2 rocket engines boost a multi-passenger spacecraft into orbit after a night-launch countdown; maneuvers to dock with an orbiting earth-sensing solar-powered satellite; and a manually-steered landing of a Shuttle-like vehicle carrying the astronauts safely back to earth. A later show in the series went into more detail about how man would eventually fly to the moon and back. Von Braun confidently stated that if we devoted enough resources to the project, we could put humans into orbit and return them safely to earth within a decade.

Of course, history proved him right, but since von Braun was a pivotal figure in the entire space program, it was a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Still, without the advance preparation of visionary productions such as those Disney TV programs and allied magazine and newspaper articles, it is unlikely that the general public would have stood for the tremendous expense of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs that landed men on the moon by 1969. Not only did the public stand for it, but throughout the 1960s the U. S. space program was generally one of the most popular government activities going: an island of unity in a decade that was characterized by increasing dissent and social unrest.

Over half a century later, I cannot imagine any combination of media effort costing less than billions of dollars that would present a similar idea to the public as effectively as von Braun and his colleagues presented their visions in the 1950s. Back then, technological limitations limited the media options, and anyone who managed to get on national TV at all was guaranteed at least a third or so of the viewing public. In today’s atomized media world, gaining some access is easy—my ten-year-old nephew has a website than anyone in the world can view with the right URL. But addressing a large audience in a single large country such as the U. S., now divided by so many factors—political, social, economic, religious, and otherwise—is a feat that even the largest corporations can’t accomplish without spending billions. And even then there’s no guarantee it will work.

The fragmentation of media has made a number of things harder, not just getting a consensus about the space program. This fragmentation, itself a product of engineering advances, has radically affected how politicians run for office, necessitating their devotion of huge amounts of time and effort merely to raise enough money to be re-elected, along with the potential for corruption that goes along with that. Space enthusiasts have now become just another one of thousands of special-interest groups with their own websites, politicians, organizations, and like-minded supporters who can isolate themselves by selecting the media they pay attention to and ignoring everyone else. It is an unintended consequence of advances in electronic media that national unity about anything, let alone the space program, has become much more expensive, more difficult, and—paradoxically—more necessary.

It is necessary because the vastly more complex world we live in requires a political and cultural environment in which certain basic things get done right, or else the whole mess unravels. A dystopic vision of what the U. S. might become if national unity continues to decline can be gleaned from countries like the Philippines, where the advantages of high technology are limited to a small fraction of elite families, while the vast majority of the populace lives in underemployed and undereducated poverty. We are far better off than the Philippines in many ways, but there are disturbing trends such as continued high unemployment, the shrinking of the middle class, and the breakdown of the family that are moving us in that direction.

Adages become adages because they embody durable wisdom. E pluribus unum (“from many, one”) and “United we stand, divided we fall,” are as true now as they were centuries ago. I am glad that the United States were united enough to achieve the historic breakthroughs in manned space flight of the 1960s through the 1990s. But I can’t help wondering whether we are watching the torch of manned space flight pass from this country to others, perhaps never to return again.

Ethics of Engineered Toys: Beyblade

2011-07-04T04:17:00.000-07:00

Most of my readers, unless they are teenage or younger boys, can be excused for not knowing the meaning of the last word in today’s headline: Beyblade. It is an English transliteration of the Japanese word “Beiburedo” which is itself derived from “beigoima,” meaning a spinning top toy. I myself had no clue about this concept until a month ago, when my ten-year-old nephew I shall call here Nate arrived in our house for the summer with a set of Beyblade tops and a full-blown obsession to match. In almost no time, we got familiar with the semi-destructive buzzing and rattling sounds of two metal-ringed tops engaged in a battle royal inside a plastic “stadium” that resembles nothing as much as a glorified dog’s food bowl. And I have competed with Nate in this game, spinning up the tops with a simple plastic rack-strip-and-pinion device that releases the Beyblade into the stadium for its time of combat, which can last as long as two or three minutes.

Children have played with tops for probably thousands of years, but that was before the advent of mass-production manufacturing, global advertising and license deals, and coordinated multimedia campaigns involving print, video, and the Internet. The Japanese toy company Takara (now Takara-TOMY), developer of the famed “Transformer” toy line, coordinated their development and launch of Beyblades with a “manga” comic strip of the same name around 2002. Engineering-wise, the tops have progressed from the first all-plastic models to heavier and more complex ones incorporating both metal “fusion wheels” and interchangeable tips, labels, and other features too numerous to mention. The result is no ordinary top: in the stadium Nate has, the tops appear to “orbit” around one another, engage in complex maneuvers that look almost intelligent, and collide violently due to the textured and sculpted outer edges of the fusion wheels. The shaped wheels ensure that the force vectors resulting from collisions have a randomized element that makes for surprising and unpredictable results. While you would think there are too many random elements involved to make operator skill much of a factor, I have to admit that Nate manages to beat me most of the time. I still haven’t figured out how he does it.

If you ask him how he wins, he will launch into a five-minute spiel about balance versus attack and defense yellow stars, energy rings, spin tracks, performance tips, and strength gained from previous battles with Phoenixes, Eagles, Lizards, Ursas, and I don’t know what all. (There is a tie-in between the names of the various Beyblade models and astronomical constellations.) He has read several of the institution’s canonical works—that is, the original manga series penned by comic-strip and marketing genius Takao Aoki. I have tried reading one or two of these literary achievements. Once you get used to the fact that they are printed backwards (the back page is the front page and vice versa), they are all the same: highly stylized fragmented scenes of huge-eyed boys leaping about in dubious battle with giant tops, all of which is punctuated by jagged-letter sound effects (“KRAK!!!” “ZZZIM!!!”). No sign of plot, character development, or any of that other mushy stuff of no interest to ten-year-old boys.

The engineering ethics of childrens’ games and toys is confined in my experience to only a few topics. One is the question of violent or sexually explicit video games and their effects on the mental and moral development of children who use them. The other is the hazard factor: matters such as choking dangers of small parts, or the incident a few years ago when imported toys for small children were found to have lead paint on them. Beyblade-iana seems to avoid both of these problems. Although it involves small parts, it is not marketed to an age group that is likely to try swallowing them rather than playing with them. And as for the moral consequences of playing with Beyblades, as far as I know it is a matter of speculation, unless some sociologist has done a study on this specific toy.

There are a lot of things to be said in favor of Beyblades. As one would expect from a nation where most families live in tiny apartments, the space required for two kids to engage in Beyblade combat is only about six square feet. Yet a Beyblade battle allows boys to do several things they enjoy doing: exercise a certain amount of physical skill, compete with other boys, and make violent-sounding noises that in the end do little or no harm (it’s a lot better than a toy drum, believe me).

On the minus side of the ledger, I have some qualms about the mythology or backstories that the makers have conjured up to go along with the physical toys. My main knowledge of this mythology is gained through hours of listening to Nate talk about it, so bear that in mind. Apparently there is a spiritual, or at least non-material, aspect to the way Beyblade tops are presented. In this mythology, the tops have intelligence of a sort and some kind of aura or energy that can be enhanced or drained by both physical and non-physical means. I’m not expecting fine philosophical distinctions to be made by a ten-year-old, but the way he talks about his collection gives me the impression that he makes no distinction between changes or improvements that can rationally be expected to make a difference (e. g. changing to a better performance tip), and matters that violate physical law (e. g. things like the idea that one Beyblade he took to bed with him absorbed energy from him and plays better).

Maybe this is making a mountain out of a Beyblade molehill. But this arbitrary blend of the physical and the magical, if you want to call it that, combined with the winner-take-all bluster that he’s picked up from the manga series, are things that trouble me a little. All the same, it is likely that in a few years he’ll look at these toys from an entirely different perspective. They’ll be moved out to make room for a more age-appropriate interest, and will leave only subconscious traces in his mind, perhaps. In the great scheme of things, Beyblade toys seem to bring a great deal of harmless pleasure to children around the world, and so for that reason alone, we should probably cut them a good deal of slack.

Sources: Wikipedia has good articles on the Beyblade phenomenon (“Beyblade”) and a separate description of the toy itself (“Beyblade (toy)”) which I relied on for this piece.

Power to the Set-Top Box: Who’s Involved?

2011-06-27T04:32:00.000-07:00

One of the most challenging aspects of engineering ethics is figuring out who the players are. Sometimes half the ethics battle is won once you have identified all the significant parties who may be affected by a given engineering enterprise or decision. This process is especially important in examining an issue that I had frankly never given any thought to until I read a New York Times article entitled “Atop television sets, a power drain that runs nonstop.” It turns out that the set-top box—the device that interfaces your cable TV signal to your TV—along with any digital video recorder (e. g. TIVO) you may have, together consume more electricity annually than many newer-model refrigerators. Whether this is a problem depends on who you are and your point of view. But first let’s identify the players.

Most numerous, and as usual the least informed, are the consumers of cable-TV services in the U. S. Nearly all households in urban and suburban areas have cable TV, and that means over 160 million of these boxes are out there. Next in the lineup are the cable-TV providers: the companies that rent the boxes (typically) to the consumers and decide how to operate them. It turns out that two of their priorities, namely fast service to the consumer when the TV is turned on, and convenience in system maintenance and data downloading, dictate that the set-top box and recorder (if present) are usually turned on in fully operational mode 24 hours a day. Since the average box-recorder combination uses about 50 watts, that’s like having a 50-watt light bulb turned on all the time. Doesn’t sound like much, but multiply that by 160 million and you’ve got a lot of power.

Next, there are the box and recorder manufacturers themselves. Many of them market devices in Europe, where there is a higher cost for electricity and consequently a demand for boxes that go into snooze or sleep mode, in which their power consumption decreases anywhere from 50% to 90% or more. True, to wake them up out of sleep takes maybe half a minute, but European viewers appear to be more patient than American viewers. Or else, the first set-top boxes over there ever marketed took 45 seconds to start up and your average Frenchman thinks that’s just a fact of life, like not being able to get good crepes Suzette at a fast-food joint. Some of the sleep-mode boxes are sold to the U. S., but the cable operators here don’t take advantage of that feature, by and large.

Farther down the list of interested parties are the U. S. power utility companies, the Federal government (which has voluntary Energy Star ratings, but so far no mandatory regulations about this matter), various state and local governments, and finally media outlets such as the New York Times, which go around looking for ways that they can encourage the U. S. to be more like Europe, among other things. Some people would include the whole rest of the world because increased power consumption means a larger carbon footprint, which can lead to climate change, etc., but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.

Once you know the players, you ask how the game is being played. Well, cable service is a utility like any other. Only in this matter, it turns out that in addition to paying the cable bill with its black-and-white figure, taking one utility’s service results in an invisible increase in another utility cost, namely your electric bill. In the U. S. a kilowatt-hour costs between 10 and 20 cents, depending on where you live, so the indirect monetary cost to the average consumer of cable and DVR service because of increased power consumption is between $45 and $90 a year. In most people’s budgets, that is not a big deal, but if you knew it could be reduced by more than half if you were just patient enough to wait 45 seconds whenever you turned on the TV, would you choose to save that amount?

For various reasons, that is a choice that most U. S. consumers have never been asked to make. Some people who are hyper-energy-conscious may see this article and start to bombard their cable provider with demands for energy-efficient cable service. This is a fairly new thing in the consumer-marketing field, and there is no general term for it. I guess you could call it politically-correct market appeal. It’s the kind of thing that goes on when you see ads for sneakers that aren’t any better, and may be more expensive than the average mass-marketed sneaker, but come with a certificate guaranteeing that they were made by contented American union workers and not in some sweatshop in a South Pacific island. Some people really would choose to wait 45 seconds to watch TV if they knew their carbon footprint was thereby made smaller. (Of course, it would get a whole lot smaller if they just threw out the TV altogether, but that’s a different story.)

On a personal note, I may have mentioned that my last career in industry before becoming a full-time academic was as an engineer helping to design Scientific-Atlanta’s first set-top box, a job I quit thirty years ago this summer as the project was collapsing around my ears. That firm went on to pick itself up from that six-million-dollar mistake and pioneer the business of “smart” cable boxes. The one we designed—when it worked—had less computer power than a pocket calculator, but turned on right away. But nobody who is used to the super-enhanced services of today’s cable providers would want to switch to such a primitive device—it’d be like swapping all our cars for Model Ts. The power consumed by cable TV boxes is probably not going to be a big factor in the future of western civilization. But it’s worth thinking about, or at least reading about, I hope.

Sources: Elizabeth Rosenthal’s piece on this issue appeared in the June 25, 2011 online edition of the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/us/26cable.html

From NASA to USSG: Fixing the U. S. Space Programs

2011-06-20T03:29:00.000-07:00

As readers of this blog may have realized by now, some problems in engineering ethics lie mainly not in the bad decisions of individuals, but in wrongly conceived or executed institutional organizations and policies. A lot of well-intentioned people working in a poorly structured outfit can nevertheless do real damage. The engineering ethics poster-child example of this is NASA, which holds the dubious distinction of being responsible for one of the leading engineering ethics case studies, the 1986 Challenger disaster. While human lives are invaluable, much harm also results from waste, inefficiency, and mismanagement, and NASA has had its share of that too. But I am not here merely to register another carp about NASA, but to draw your attention to a well-considered and politically astute alternative to the present mish-mosh that is U. S. space policy: the creation of a United States Space Guard (USSG).

Writing in the Winter 2011 issue of The New Atlantis, space consultant James C. Bennett describes an idea that originated with U. S. Air Force Lt. Col. Cynthia A. S. McKinley in 2000. She looked at how a basic structure that might once have been appropriate for a small federal agency, which the National Aeronautics and Space Agency once was in the early 1960s, was inflated all out of proportion during the Great Space Race that got the U. S. to the moon first in 1969. But to use a human-body analogy, what remained after that unique experience bears some resemblance to what might happen if a 110-pound professional jockey decided to become a temporary Sumo wrestler, and bloated up to 600 pounds for one wrestling match. Even if he won, he’d have a lot of trouble getting his old jockeying job back afterwards, and NASA has been the 600-pound Sumo wrestler in the nation’s space efforts ever since.

The domination by NASA of virtually all important aspects of U. S. space activities, whether military, civilian, governmental, commercial, regulatory, or scientific, has distorted and rendered inefficient or neglected a lot of things that might have fared better, and might in the future fare better, if we reorganized our whole approach, which is what the Space Guard proposal does. I don’t have room to describe all the ingenious details that Bennett has added to McKinley’s basic idea, but I will concentrate on the fundamental analogy between a familiar and well-functioning organization, namely the U. S. Coast Guard, and the proposed U. S. Space Guard.

Though usually engaged in peaceful work such as search and rescue operations, navigational facilitation for commercial sea traffic, and other fairly routine tasks, the Coast Guard is a cadre of officers in uniform committed to service, at the cost of their lives if necessary. As Bennett points out, the informal motto of the Coast Guard in lifesaving efforts is “You have to go out, you don’t have to come back.” Making personnel of a new U. S. Space Guard similarly sworn to duty, with the recognition of a uniform, military rank and command structure, and so on, would at last acknowledge the fact that space travel and space-related work is hazardous and astronauts, at least, put their lives on the line. We expect that of policemen, firemen, and soldiers, but to expect it of civil servants (technically, that’s what astronauts are) is not fitting, to say the least.

The establishment of a U. S. Space Guard would allow the collection of a number of important but unglamorous space-related tasks under one roof where a common body of experts could coordinate activities which now are spread far and wide. For example, responsibility for communications satellites is presently spread among agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Commerce, and NASA (if any of their launch vehicles are used). The FAA is also presently involved in regulating some “black” (secret) U. S. Air Force military space work, which does not fit the agency well. Transferring these sorts of tasks to the new USSG would make more sense.

Besides remedying such existing confusions and inefficiencies, and freeing up NASA to do what it was founded to do in the 1950s—namely far-out exploratory and scientific research—the USSG could spawn helpful and fruitful new efforts. We could start a Space Academy, along the lines of the other service academies such as Annapolis and West Point. We could maintain a Space Reserve of former USSG service people who could be recalled to active duty should the need arise. And best of all from my point of view, the USSG would be a fresh start organizationally, instead of yet another patch or fix to the dysfunctional organization that is NASA today.

This is not to say that NASA has no good features. Obviously it does. Its unmanned science programs are still among the best in the world, doing wonders with inadequate funding. But so much of what NASA does depends not on national needs and plans, but on whose congressional district and which company does it, that only a well-planned and politically wise transition from the status quo to a new order in which the USSG plays the main role will improve things. At least, this idea is the best one I’ve seen addressing the question of what the U. S. should do about space. I just hope that for once, reason and common sense will prevail over the less salutary aspects of politics, and we’ll do the right thing about it.

Sources: James C. Bennett’s article “Proposing a ‘Coast Guard’ For Space” appears in the Winter 2011 edition of The New Atlantis, pp. 50-68.

Finding a Job in a Technocracy

2011-06-13T03:58:00.000-07:00

Last month, graduation ceremonies were held all over the U. S., and now the newly minted ex-students face the challenging task of finding a job. A recent New York Times report details just how challenging it will be in today’s economy. And engineers, even recently graduated ones, need to ponder the effects of their work on the employment picture.

First, the bad news. After the world economy nearly melted down in 2008, a severe recession (some are now calling it the Great Recession) caused widespread job losses and a general slowdown for the better part of two years. It seems that by now the U. S. economy, when measured strictly by production of goods and services, has fully recovered to the level of productivity that prevailed before the 2008 debacle. The only difference is, it’s humming along with 7 million fewer jobs than were in existence in 2008. And what is worse from the viewpoint of job hunters, is that firms are very reluctant to take on new workers, but are spending bucketloads on new equipment, much of which is made overseas. Since 2008, spending on employment has risen only 2 percent, but spending on capital equipment has soared by 26 percent.

Much of this capital equipment consists of highly engineered manufacturing technology such as computers, robotics, and other devices that allow makers of goods (and often providers of services as well) to replace people with machines. This sort of thing has gone on at least since the dawn of history, when some clever person devised an irrigation water wheel pump that one person could operate while replacing four or five people armed with individual buckets. But at certain times, a whole lot of people are thrown out of work at once and replaced by a whole lot of technology, and the newly unemployed people tend to notice.

Another time this happened was the 1930s. Although statistics were kept differently then, by some estimates the U. S. unemployment rate soared as high as 25% and stayed close to that for most of the decade. Some people then saw the advances in manufacturing machinery as an important cause of the disruptions accompanying the Great Depression, and posed various solutions, including the short-lived political movement called Technocracy. Technocrats, as they termed themselves, believed that the economy was too complicated to be left in the hands of non-expert business people, who had clearly let things get out of hand. The solution posed by the technocrats was to abolish money and place the economy in charge of technical experts—engineers, mostly, but with a few doctors and economists mixed in. The engineers would allocate a new unit of exchange that represented energy (joules were proposed) so that everybody would get an equal amount of energy and be free to decide what to do with it.

The technocrats turned out to be better engineers than politicians (in fact, most of the leaders of the Technocracy movement had little engineering experience either), and Technocracy as a political movement vanished from the scene shortly after World War II began, when the Great Depression ended in a flurry of economic activity stimulated by war production. But the idea of putting government in the charge of experts has by no means gone away.

One could even argue that the present White House occupant represents modern-day technocracy carried to an extreme. The Obama administration pushed through a health-care plan that envisions centralized monitoring and control of supply by experts. Its Environmental Protection Agency has extended its reach far beyond former limits and opposed state regulatory agencies in its efforts to apply its own expertise to everyone’s pollution problems. And while organized labor is favored in certain ways, the overall trend of the economy toward increased mechanization, as opposed to higher rates of employment, has continued unabated.

Besides the Technocracy movement, a few voices in the 1930s called for an alternate vision of what could be done about the increasing replacement of human workers by machines. When it takes fewer people to make the same amount of stuff, you can either get rid of some workers and keep the remainder working full time, or you can lower the number of hours per week that everyone works and keep everyone working at reduced hours. The latter possibility was the basis of the notion that in the future, most people would have to work only ten or fifteen hours a week to earn as much as they got from forty or fifty hours of toil every week before mechanization. The promoters of this vision saw a landscape of leisure time opening up in the future, as people enjoyed the fruits of advances in productive automation by working less for the same pay.

There are many flies in that ointment, as history has shown, but perhaps the biggest reason why this is not happening today is what you can call the fixed and overhead charges associated with hiring people. Back in the early 1930s, there was no Social Security, no Medicare, no tax break for employers who paid for workers’ health insurance, and little advanced training needed for most jobs. So the cost of hiring a worker simply amounted to what he or she was paid. If things were still that simple, it might make sense for a company to retain most of its employees at reduced hours as it buys equipment that allows it to make each unit of product with a lower total man-hour input.

However, we have strayed far from that path today, with a huge number of fixed costs associated with every hire, and those costs are slated to rise if the health-care machinery passed by Congress remains in place. Quite literally the last thing many employers want to do right now is to hire another warm body, much preferring to acquire equipment that needs no training or health insurance, can be depreciated on a tax return, and does just as good a job, if not better, than a human being can. And engineers have largely made this possible. All in all, however, I sometimes wonder if the tools made by engineers have been used wisely by managers, corporation heads, and politicians. When it gets to the point that engineers design tools that are used largely to replace engineers, we at least need to think twice before proceeding.

Sources: The Austin American-Statesman reprinted a New York Times article on labor versus equipment costs by Catherine Rampell on June 12, 2011, page E1.

Should Cancer Be a Profitable Opportunity?

2011-06-06T04:44:00.000-07:00

In 2003, my wife was treated (successfully, thank God) for breast cancer. And right now, her sister is preparing to be treated for a serious blood disease by means of a bone-marrow transplant, which is also used to treat many kinds of cancer. So my close relatives and I have personal experience with an industry that accounts by some measures for as much as $60 billion of economic activity, much of it going to advanced high-tech science and engineering work (which is how I’m relating it to this blog).

Picture my emotions, then, when the other day I received in the mail a thing that looked at first glance like an issue of Time Magazine, with the red border on the cover. Only the top line was not “Time” but “Timing” and the headline read “Cancer: The $60 billion industry” It turned out to be an investment flyer boosting all kinds of “opportunities” to put your money into this or that promising cancer treatment. This brings up an issue that goes to the heart of how we as a culture handle illness: to what extent should the profit motive be involved in medical care?

Historically, physicians have been among the best-educated and well-paid members of the community, even back when they could do little but listen and give fatherly advice. Since the Scientific Revolution revolutionized medicine starting about 1700, the field has developed in the direction of highly organized combinations of institutions, corporations, and societies all exchanging information, products and services of value, and delivering health care which by most measures continues to improve in quality year by year—but at a steeply increasing price. Anyone who hasn’t totally ignored the news over the last year or two knows that we in the U. S. pay a higher proportion of our GDP (gross domestic product) for health care, but what we get for our money is generally not that much better than other industrialized countries that pay less.

Any discussion along these lines has already made an implicit assumption: namely, that the problem consists of maximizing health-care delivery efficiency, and we simply aren’t doing it as well as some other countries. But is that really the issue?

What if the problem is not so much macroeconomics and political and social forms of organization, but the motivations and ethical stances of the people involved? Here is what I mean.

Would you rather have a doctor who went into medicine because he wanted to heal people, or because he wanted to afford vacations at Cap Ferrat? Would you rather deal with an organization whose members are dedicated primarily to the healing of patients, or whose owners are anonymous stockholders simply wanting the best return on investment possible? I think the answer in the case of the doctor is pretty clear. In the case of the organization, things begin to get a little fuzzy.

If you look at the history of medical innovations, it is fairly clear that the most favorable environment for them appears to be a place where the profit motive plays a fairly unrestricted role in guiding developments, rather than dictatorial control by some government-funded bureaucracy. This is not to neglect the role of such agencies as the U. S. National Institutes of Health in supporting basic medical research whose future profitability is unclear. But medicine is so complex today that large and expensive organizations are needed to pursue technologically-intense advances (including drugs as well as other forms of treatment). And judging by results, the best environment for such organizations appears to be places where taking risks with large investments in new medical ideas can pay off in commensurate profits, and the marketplace is used to signal the distribution of resources.

But I’m still bothered by the notion that a thing which on a personal level is an unmixed curse and tragedy—namely, cancer—is also the basis of what is being promoted by the flyer I mentioned as a wonderful opportunity to get rich quick. The reason that individual doctors have been well-paid members of society is that they have both invested years of their lives learning their profession, and have also (historically, at least) sworn an oath to use their knowledge in socially beneficial ways. The fact that most doctors no longer take the Hippocratic Oath as part of their medical training is not encouraging, and may have something to do with the rampant abuse of prescription pharmaceuticals that we have today. The medical business used to do pretty well with almost no advertising at all: no ads for doctors, no ads for prescription drugs. As I understand it, the prohibition against ads by doctors was self-imposed by their professional associations. There have always been advertisements for over-the-counter medications, but until recent times they were looked down upon and relegated to the small-type back pages of magazines.

One can argue that the consumer should be king in all this, and in some ways we suffer from a lack of consumer control in the health-care industry. But consumers can decide only if they have a clear financial incentive to do so, and if they have competent professional guidance about matters beyond their understanding. The so-called “twelve-cent problem” is the fact that only 12 cents out of every medical dollar comes out of the U. S. consumer’s pocket. If we had to pay only 12 cents for every dollar of food we consumed, I expect the food industry would become as inefficient and bloated as the health-care industry (not to mention bloating us too). And the presence of huge amounts of TV and other advertising for prescription drugs of questionable utility distorts the environment in which medical decisions are made. I for one would not miss most medical advertising, especially camouflaged brochures asking me to profit from someone else’s misery. But in so many things in politics, the question is how to get from here to there. And for that, I don’t have an easy answer.

Sources: The 12-cent problem is described in many places, among which is a blog by Dr. David Gratzer posted on Jan. 26, 2011 at http://conhomeusa.typepad.com/platform/2011/01/part-4-of-dr-david-gratzers-series-on-the-future-of-the-gop-battle-with-obamacare-the-12-cent-proble.html.

Robocalls and Electronic Warfare on the Landline

2011-05-29T17:17:00.000-07:00

Well, it’s finally happened. I have reluctantly joined the ranks of those whom you are never, ever going to be able to talk to on their landlines simply by calling their number and waiting for a live person to answer the phone. Now we always let the answering machine pick up the call. If the caller leaves a message (which usually doesn’t happen), and it’s somebody we want to talk with, we’ll call them back. But otherwise, the caller is out of luck.

Thirty, or even twenty, years ago, I would have regarded this sort of behavior as standoffish at best, if not downright unfriendly. I inherited a strong streak of what you might call German democratic “just-folks” populism from my father. It’s one reason I still mow my own lawn, have a listed phone number, and until recently, answered my own home phone in person. I don’t want to send a message that I’m too busy or important to be bothered by people I don’t know. But that was before some of the people I don’t know started using robocall machines (technical term: auto-dialers) to pester the life out of me by asking for donations to various and sundry charities. What prompted me to change my behavior was the realization that about 90% of the calls reaching our landline were from robot dialers operated by charities of one kind or another. While some of these organizations are worthwhile, I got tired of spending numerous five-minute chunks either trying to get them to hang up, or reluctantly promising to watch in the mail for the envelope with the red phone on it in order to send in my twenty bucks for the relief of red-haired orphans of left-handed libertarians, or whatever it was.

I’m not alone in letting my answering machine screen phone calls. Response rates to telephone polls are declining steadily. According to one study, 36% of calls resulted in completed interviews in 1997, but the figure dropped to 25% by 2003, and is probably somewhere in the low teens today. Many people, especially younger ones, have dropped their landline altogether, or never even had one, relying only on their cell phones. This has created problems for organizations such as telephone-solicitation charities and polling outfits, because the rules are different for cell phones and landlines. Did you know that there is a Federal law against using auto-dialing machines for cell-phone numbers? No such restriction applies to landlines. For this and other reasons, it costs about twice as much to do polls calling cell phone numbers as it does to call landline numbers. And naturally, that results in fewer pesky solicitations on cell phones. Not zero, just fewer, which is one reason I hardly ever turn on my cellphone.

This mass retreat from instant accessibility is one more example of what you might call the electronic-warfare effect. Electronic warfare includes any techniques designed to confuse, disable, or otherwise bamboozle your enemy’s radar, communications, and other electronic systems. It began during World War II with the advent of radar, and ever since then has followed an ever-escalating path of improved jammers and countermeasures, followed by the other side’s devising a way to dodge the jammers and countermeasures, followed by the first side’s countervailing improvements in said jammers and countermeasures, ad infinitum. The same kind of thing happens all the time with cybersecurity, telephone solicitations, and even humdrum things like locks and burglar alarms.

In some fields, the war reaches a stalemate pretty quickly. Unless you have a Fort-Knox scale hoard of gold in your house, you are not likely to spend extravagant amounts of money on super-secure locks and infrared-laser burglar alarm systems. But with a relatively trivial investment in robo-calling machines, the telephone solicitors have managed to pollute a well that used to be clean, fresh water, metaphorically speaking: namely, the experience of dialing a stranger’s number and getting the stranger on the other end of the line, right away, without the intervention of an answering machine. That experience is increasingly rare today, and I am one who has contributed to its increasing rarity.

It’s hard to say where all this is headed. If the artificial-intelligence folks get their act together, we may all have phones that act like clever private secretaries, forwarding calls directly to us from people we want to talk with and squelching other calls even before they set off the ring tone. And yes, there’s probably an iPhone app for that—there is for almost everything else. If the telephone world of 1970 was the electronic version of the peasant village where everybody could talk with everybody else, today’s telephone world is more like those rich parts of town where everybody lives behind a guarded gate and you have to know someone inside in order to get in. My German democratic-populist self says we have lost something in the transition. But maybe it’s just different, not better or worse.

Sources: The Pew Research Center has a helpful website that answers numerous questions about how telephone polls are conducted, at http://people-press.org/methodology/collecting-survey-data/. The paper in which the decline in response rates is described is “Gauging the impact of growing nonresponse on estimates from a national RDD telephone survey,” by Scott Keeter, Courtney Kennedy, Michael Dimock, Jonathan Best, and Peyton Craighill, which appeared in the online edition of Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 70 (2006), pp. 759-779, and at http://poq.oxfordjournals.org/content/70/5/759.full#sec-3.

Global Warming’s Judgment Day

2011-05-22T05:03:00.000-07:00

As some readers may have heard, today, May 21, 2011, was supposed to be Judgment Day, at least according to Harold Camping, a religious broadcaster who has predicted dates for the end of the world at least twice now. To give him the benefit of the doubt, May 21 won’t be over technically until it’s midnight at the International Date Line, but that’s only about another nine hours from when I’m writing this Saturday evening, Central Daylight Time. In fairness to Mr. Camping, I agree with him that it was at least logically possible that today would be Judgment Day, believing as I do in the second coming of Christ. But logical possibility is also about as much as I can say about the much larger numbers of global-warming Judgment Day forecasters, many of whom sit in the seats of scientific authority and government power.

In contrast to Mr. Camping’s prediction, which was largely held up to ridicule, the prediction that our continuing to burn fossil fuels will lead to a wide variety of present and future climate disasters ranging from droughts to floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes has been taken very seriously for many years in the highest centers of government and science. The U. S. Environmental Protection Agency is now considering the regulation of carbon dioxide emissions as a pollutant, and could cripple huge swathes of the economy with a single ruling. Against the array of global-warming prophets ranging from Al Gore to President Obama, only a few voices are raised. Those who do object are usually dismissed as cranks, religious fanatics, scientific ignoramuses, or some combination of the preceding. But that is a little harder to do when the person raising the objection holds a named chair in the Department of Physics at Princeton University.

In a recent article in First Things magazine, Princeton physicist William Happer points out that even after the rise in carbon dioxide levels in the world’s atmosphere over the last century or so, the figure is still low by historical standards. To be specific, right before the Industrial Revolution got under way, ice cores and other data show that the carbon-dioxide content of the atmosphere was about 270 parts per million. It now stands at 390 parts per million. But about 80 million years ago, the level was 1000 parts per million, and guess what? The plants loved it (they need a certain amount in the air to survive at all), and life was just as abundant on earth then as it is now, if not more so.

Happer’s point is that calling carbon dioxide a pollutant is like calling rain a hazardous substance because when you get too much, it causes a flood. Yes, floods are bad, but we don’t pass laws against rain as a result. And passing laws against carbon dioxide isn’t much more logical.

According to Happer, the science of “climate change” (which is now the preferred term in some circles) has been co-opted by political and economic interests who have fallen victim to a species of mass hysteria. The climate crusade is our age’s great bandwagon, a secular cause that delivers dictates which are as close to moral absolutes as secular authorities get. The logic goes something like this, with my parenthetical comments about each step: Scientists say burning fossil fuels raises the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (true), which in turn will cause the average temperature to rise (maybe) and lead to all kinds of problems ranging from rises in the world’s ocean level to massive and sudden climatic shifts that will cause famines, floods, and other disruptive effects (not clear at all). Therefore, we have a moral imperative to burn as little fossil fuel as possible, and this moral imperative takes precedence over just about any other cause you care to name, because if climate change makes the world uninhabitable, then nothing else matters. The world views of most authorities in this matter do not include the conventional religious category called “sin,” but based on this logic, burning fossil fuels, or even renewable fuels such as corn-based ethanol which contribute to the carbon dioxide burden, is the closest thing they have to a sin.

What Happer does is to call into question the earliest link in this logical chain: will rising carbon dioxide levels really cause problems of the magnitude that Al Gore and people like him believe? There are two answers to that question. One is, maybe not. Global average temperatures have changed a lot more in the past, and a lot faster, than anything we have seen in recent history, and life and humanity survived. The second answer is, even if some of the dire predictions come to pass, human life is incredibly adaptable. People find ways around all sorts of problems, and while any major climate change produces both good and harm, it will probably happen slowly enough to allow us to adapt to the changing circumstances. This is the way life evolved in the first place, and the only thing that would prevent us from adapting in the future is despotism of the kind that presently runs Cuba, for example, which has been frozen in many ways in the year 1959. Some people hold up this socialist state as a shining example of “sustainable development,” but it has achieved this dubious distinction by rigid controls on the physical, mental, and spiritual lives of its citizens. And something like Cuba’s dictatorship would be necessary if we were to fulfill the fondest wishes of those who want our carbon footprints to vanish.

I’m finishing this blog on Sunday morning, May 22, which dawned pretty much like any other day. If yesterday was Judgment Day, I guess I must have missed out. At least Mr. Camping had the courage to be specific enough so that his claim could be falsified, as indeed it has been. The predictions of the global-warming camp are so fungible that tying them down is like trying to nail jelly to the wall. Happer says that after the disclosure of emails by climate scientists who were trying to restrain publications of the opposition, more people are starting to realize that all is not as we have been told for many years. Let’s hope that reality and truth will come to the fore instead of group thinking, panic, and a misguided attempt to achieve secular salvation through atonement by the sacrifice of our carbon-based economy.

Sources: William Happer’s article “The Truth About Greenhouse Gases” appears on pp. 33-38 of the June/July 2011 issue of First Things magazine. I also referred to a graph of carbon-dioxide content in the atmosphere over time that appears in the Wikipedia article “Carbon dioxide in earth’s atmosphere.”

To Compete or Not To Compete: Engineers and the Non-Compete Clause

2011-05-16T03:29:00.000-07:00

In today’s engineering job market, changing jobs every few years is almost a given because the days of lifetime employment with one firm are virtually extinct, at least in the U. S. If you become a qualified specialist in a certain field, it is more than likely that when you change jobs, you’ll most easily find a new job in the same field, perhaps even working for a competitor to your previous firm, or a new startup founded by members of your previous firm. And if that happens, you had better make sure that you read all those papers your previous employer made you sign when you started work there, because the chances are that one of them contained what is called a “non-compete clause.”

A non-compete clause, also known to employment lawyers as a “covenant not to compete” or CNC, is an agreement on the part of the employee not to compete with the employer after termination of employment. Usually a limited time and even a limited geographic area are specified, so a typical clause might read, “In the event of Mr. Blank leaving the Company, he agrees not to engage in a similar engineering pursuit for any firms in competition with the Company within the state of X for a period of two years following termination of employment with the Company.” Being a matter of civil law, these clauses are governed by state codes, not Federal law. I was not too surprised to learn that, except in the case of equity owners of a firm, California absolutely prohibits any form of non-compete clause in employment agreements. But most other states allow it as long as the terms are reasonable and the purpose is to preserve the firm’s legitimate business interests.

Even in states that allow such agreements, there are definite limits to the clause’s scope. A company can’t bar you for life from doing a specific kind of engineering, nor can they be too general about the kind of work you are agreeing not to compete in. So there is inevitably a matter of judgment involved, and like many other civil-law matters, as long as nobody decides to sue you, you can (from a legal standpoint, at least) do whatever you want. In this aspect, non-compete agreements resemble nondisclosure agreements, which bar an employee from taking or using business-critical information once they leave a firm.

Despite all these restrictions, the fact is that many startup companies are formed around engineers who used to work for larger firms where they were unable to obtain management support for a new technology, or who left for other reasons. The company that many historians regard as the cornerstone of Silicon Valley, Fairchild Semiconductor, was formed when a group of engineers hired by William Shockley for his Shockley Transistor Corporation got tired of Shockley’s incompetent management and left to form a startup. Since none of them were part owners of Shockley's firm, at least to my knowledge, and California prohibits non-compete clauses, they were unhindered by such obstructions and were able to found the Silicon Valley we know today.

But there are clearly ethical questions involved when an engineer considers quitting one company to go to work for a rival firm doing basically the same type of work. Who is affected by this action? The parties to it are the firm the engineer is leaving (call it Company A), the new firm he or she is joining (Company B), the engineer, and the wider customer base and public served by the business both firms are engaged in.

From the viewpoint of Company A, it is a bad thing that the engineer is leaving and will now provide staff resources to B instead of A. That is why Company A insisted on having a non-compete clause in the engineer’s employment contract in the first place. Company B’s interests are more or less directly opposed to those of Company A, at least in the narrow sense. To the extent the engineer in question has rare or unique skills, Company B’s gain is Company A’s loss. Once the engineer leaves A for B, he or she casts in their lot with Company B, assuming there was enough incentive in terms of salary, job opportunities, equity, etc. to make it a good move.

What about the line of business as a whole? Generally speaking, customers and the public benefit from more competition rather than less. Taking things to a fictional extreme, you could imagine an industry dominated by one giant company which maintains extremely restrictive non-compete agreements with all its engineers. This outfit could charge whatever it wanted because nobody could ever hire away its engineers to start up a rival firm.

So it looks like Company A against the world, and that is one reason why, like patents and other forms of intellectual property, there are time and often geographic restrictions on non-compete clauses. The public interest is best served by restricting them, or, as in the case of California, prohibiting them nearly altogether.

My advice to engineers just starting their careers is to actually sit down and read all that boilerplate fine print in your employment contract. Since you signed it already, you are formally bound by its terms, and when the time comes for you to look for another job, you should be aware of possible restrictions on your freedom of movement. Whether or not a non-compete clause should influence your choice of future employment is an ethical as well as a legal question, but one you should make in an informed way.

Sources: I found some useful background on the non-compete clause in the Wikipedia article “Non-compete clause.”