Global Warming and World Views, Part I

Did you know that if you travel on an airliner from, say, London to Frankfurt, you use about ten times the greenhouse-gas-producing fossil fuel that it takes to carry you the same distance by train? Did you care?

That idea is the gist of an ad campaign sponsored by European environmental groups. The ads take the form of statements by an imaginary airline head who makes arrogant, disparaging comments about environmentalists, who he calls "lentil mobs." In Europe's largely pro-green culture, such comments are as inflammatory as running ads in U. S. media that show a fat white Southern sheriff saying disparaging things about blacks. Technique aside, the point the ads make is true: airline travel uses much more fossil fuel per passenger-mile than surface travel, and especially more than rail, which is more efficient than private cars. The way you react to that fact should depend on your view of the world and what it is all about.

Suppose you think this physical world is all there is, death is annihilation, and we are here to propagate our gene pool and along the way pick up whatever transient enjoyment we can. You may therefore view air travel as one of the greatest boons to humanity, since it lets us get from enjoyable place to enjoyable place much faster than surface transportation. Strangely, though, that attitude is uncommon in cultures where a frankly atheistic outlook prevails. In places such as France, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries, where publicly expressed religion is almost invisible, Greenpeace and similar green parties and beliefs are most common. The reasons for this are complex, but I can speculate.

If you believe man is the supreme intelligence in the universe, then he is therefore responsible for the efficient running of the planet. After all, we can't trust the elephants or the insects to do a good job. Or can we? They were here first. Down that line of thought lies the branch of environmentalism which views mankind as an unmitigated plague upon the planet, one which the Earth would be much better off without. In this view, the ideal world might be one in which the human population was reduced to the point where we could all live off the land like the pre-agriculture American Indians. The trouble with that is, estimates of the pre-Columbian population of North America run in the low dozens of millions, and that would be true in proportion to the rest of the world. To achieve that ideal, then, most of the world's people would have to go away. As it happens, the population of native Europeans (including Russians) is undergoing a population implosion that would be right on target to reduce Europe to its pre-civilization population levels, if it weren't for all the immigrants. But that is another story.

Even if you don't think mankind should commit mass suicide for the betterment of the planet, you may still feel some personal responsibility toward the globe which you cannot possibly fulfill. You may feel like a ten-year-old child put in charge of running General Motors: impossibly underqualified for the job. Accordingly, you turn to the experts, who are not quite as unqualified as you to run the planet, and they tell you that yes, the Earth is getting warmer, and yes, our burning fossil fuels has something to do with it, probably. So are you going to form an ironclad rule never to set foot on an airplane again?

Probably not. Instead, you'll fly when you can't avoid it, or maybe whenever you feel you can afford it, and feel guilty about it. And rightly so. Because if everybody quit flying and took the train, we'd burn less fossil fuel than we do now. Then what?

Well, you as an individual might live long enough to see a slight slowdown in the global-warming trend. But maybe not. And suppose it's too late? Suppose we've passed the invisible tipping point of no return, and the atmosphere is headed inexorably toward a catastrophe that will make the worst disaster movies look like child's play: storms, floods, inundated coastal cities and plains, radical rises in temperature. Again, there is nothing you can do but watch. In this case, the thought that years ago, you quit flying in airplanes as a protest against what you saw as environmental irresponsibility might furnish you some small solace, but it did nothing significant in the long run.

I don't know about you, but I find all these alternatives profoundly depressing. Doing nothing is bad, but doing something like abstaining from flying has such a small chance of making any real difference that it's not worth the effort. Of course, there is always the great mysterious process by which public opinion changes. And something like that might happen here, as it did in the sixties in the U. S. when environmentalism grew from being viewed primarily as the peculiar obsession of a few left-wing crackpots to something that President Richard M. Nixon himself embraced when he founded the Environmental Protection Agency. But such things are hardly predictable, and to trust in their occurrence takes a kind of faith akin to those who regularly buy lottery tickets.

Lest I appear to be bringing a counsel of despair, I will take a look at a different world view next week. I'll tell you right now, I won't necessarily come to any different conclusions about what to do. But the reasons will be very, very different.

Sources: The report on the spoofing airline ads is an Oct. 29, 2006 New York Times article by Eric Pfanner at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/30/business/media/30fuel.html. According to the Wikipedia article on the population history of American indigenous peoples, estimates of the North American native population before 1492 range from 12 million to over 100 million, and are probably no more than educated guesses. Whatever the figure is, it is much less than the current population.

Sniffing Through Your Wallet with RFID

We should all be glad that Superman was a nice guy. I mean, with his X-ray vision, his personal jet-powered cape, not to mention his lady-killing looks when he didn't have his glasses on, he would have made a formidable criminal. Well, some nice guys in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have shown us that it doesn't take X-ray vision to read your name and credit-card number off some new types of credit cards that incorporate something called "RFID."

First, full disclosure (I've always wanted to say that): I taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for fifteen years before moving south, though not in Computer Science. And even before that, my supervising professor in graduate school and I patented a system that could have been used for RFID, although nobody but the patent lawyers ever made a nickel off the patent, which has now expired.

What is RFID? It stands for "radio frequency identification," and it includes a variety of techniques to track inventories, monitor conditions remotely, and even read credit cards. The common thread in all these things is an RFID chip that goes onto the object in question: a box of Wheaties, a credit card, or even a person's body. You can think of this technology as on beyond bar codes—those little symbols that the checkout person scans at the grocery store. Using the proper RFID equipment, you can receive information about where the object is, its inventory number, and so on, all without contacting the object. So in a warehouse, for instance, every time a pallet full of computers goes out the door, an RFID transponder can count them and record each computer's serial number, and the guy driving the forklift doesn't even have to slow down. You just have to be within radio range, which can vary from inches to several feet. Which is how the clever guys at UMass Amherst did their trick.

According to the New York Times, Professor Kevin Fu asked a graduate student to take a sealed envelope bearing a new credit card and just tap it against a transponder box they had designed. In a few minutes, Professor Fu's name, the credit card number, and even the expiration date appeared on a screen. All without even opening the envelope.

The Times reporter dutifully made the rounds of credit-card firms such as American Express and J. P. Morgan Chase to describe Prof. Fu's magic trick. Visa's Brian Triplett said it was an "interesting technical exercise," but wasn't concerned that it would lead to widespread credit-card fraud. It should be noted that it wasn't Mr. Triplett's credit card number that showed up on the screen.

As with many other technologies that develop out of the public eye for years or decades before emerging into visibility, RFID has been around a lot longer than you might think. Back in World War II, a primitive form of RFID was used with aircraft to "identify friend or foe" (IFF). The equipment was far too bulky or expensive back then to be considered for consumer products, but advances in electronics have given us RFID chips cheap enough to throw away with the empty box of Wheaties. Some experts believe RFID will largely replace bar codes as the inventory technology of the future. And that's not all.

Attaching an RFID tag to one's person would lead to all sorts of situations, not all of which are pleasant. Strangely enough, one of the more popular paranoid delusions in recent years, but not so recent that RFID was developed to do it yet, was that the FBI or some equally secretive outfit had implanted a chip in the patient's body, and the chip was spying on their whereabouts and even their thoughts. I actually had dealings with such an individual when I was back at UMass, and it wasn't a pretty picture. It's not every day that billions of dollars are spent with the unintended byproduct of bringing some nut case's delusion into the realm of reality, but it happens. RFID is a long way from reading peoples' thoughts yet, but even that notion doesn't sound as goofy as it used to, what with PET scans and other noninvasive brain-monitoring techniques.

For now, RFID will begin to show up only in places like grocery stores, automated tollbooth tags such as New York State's "EZPass," and some credit cards. I don't think we need to worry about Prof. Fu's trick falling into the hands of some evil computer scientist, because it's fairly easy to foil. And fortunately, the laws about credit-card fraud in this country are written so that the consumer is liable only for the first $50 of loss, and the credit-card issuer is left holding the rest of the bag. So if Visa and company start losing substantial amounts of money to people who cobble together a duplicate of Prof. Fu's remote card reader, the firms will take the straightforward steps needed to fix that particular problem.

All the same, we need to think about how RFID could be abused, before some clever thief or saboteur does, and take reasonable precautions. And it's going to be a long while before yours truly consents to having any chips embedded in his person. But then, I was born old-fashioned.

Sources: The New York Times story appeared online on Oct. 23, 2006 at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/business/23card.html. I have recently received a copy of RFID Strategic Implementation and ROI: A Practical Roadmap to Success by Charles Poirer and Duncan Mccollum, which has a good nontechnical discussion of RFID's history and how it works.

Is Any Technology Ethically Neutral? The Sony Reader

A recent New York Times article announced the debut of the Sony Reader, an electronic book that uses tiny plastic spheres to simulate the appearance of an actual page of print. Unlike a laptop display with its energy-hogging backlighting, the Reader uses only existing room light and consumes essentially no power until you turn the page. A reader of the Reader can take satisfaction in the notion that no trees were cut down and hardly any oil or coal burned to produce the miniscule amount of energy needed to operate it.
A more environmentally friendly technology can hardly be imagined, it seems. So should we all pitch our old-fashioned stacks of paper bound together and buy Readers? It depends.

When I try to engage certain people in a discussion of the ethics of a given technology, an argument I often hear goes like this: "Well, technology by itself is neutral. It's only the ways people use technology that are good or bad." That is one of those nice-sounding phrases that look good at first, but tend to disintegrate under scrutiny. The Sony Reader would seem to be a good candidate to exemplify the idea of the neutrality of technology. No one is making us go out and buy Readers. It's simply another item on the market which may or may not prove popular. It seems to be environmentally benign, and as long as it does what its maker claims for it, what downsides could it possibly have?

That question actually sends us out upon deep philosophical waters. There is a school of thought popular in Europe that goes under the name of the "precautionary principle." Followers of this principle take the stand that any new technology must be examined thoroughly for possible harmful effects before it can be generally distributed. If no actual harm has occurred yet, the examination of a technology for possible harm necessarily involves reasoned speculation about what might occur. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with basing technical decisions upon hypotheticals. After all, the Sony Reader's designers were speculating that people would want to buy their product if they developed it, and so the use of speculation in evaluating its effects, both good and bad, is no less warranted.

For example, one could imagine Readers sweeping the world to become as popular as books, if not more so. (To a great extent, this has already taken place as computers have replaced reference volumes in libraries.) Would the world be a better place if every book was an e-book?

That depends. The people who make conventional books wouldn't think so. Technological unemployment has been around ever since there was technology. Somehow the world's economies have absorbed the paste-up artists, the platemakers, the hot-type linotypers, and all the other superseded occupations that pre-electronic forms of printing required. What has happened to a good fraction of the printing industry's past workers might eventually happen to all of them. But unless you believe in state control and ownership of the means of production, technological unemployment is just one of those things that happen.

How could this possibility be forestalled? In the world's continuing embrace of a free-market global economy, consumers can exert a certain amount of control over what they buy. But consumers can't buy what isn't there, and much of the power to decide what gets sold lies with those who control the large firms whose investments determine the directions of the markets. If next year, most investors decide that paper books are going the way of the slide rule when electronic calculators came along, the rest of us will not be able to do much about it.

Next, consider what the Reader is made of: probably some conventional electronics, a battery, and a display containing thousands if not millions of tiny plastic spheres suspended in some kind of liquid. Some day—probably sooner than later if the useful lifetime of the typical laptop is any guide—the brand-new Readers now waiting on store shelves will accumulate in attics and closets, only to be thrown out when the next model comes along. As we have learned, you can't simply throw things away these days, because there isn't any "away" anymore. More and more environmentally conscious manufacturers are doing what is called life-cycle design, which takes into account the problem of how to dispose of a used piece of equipment with minimal impact to the environment. I have no specific information on the Sony Reader in this regard, but at the least, its disposal will take up some room in a landfill somewhere. And if it contains any hazardous chemicals in its battery or display, these chemicals could cause problems later.

Finally, there is the subtle but real change in the habits of millions who change from one form of information exchange to another. No matter how closely the makers of a new technology try to imitate the experience produced by a previous one, some things are different. And sometimes the new technology imposes a whole set of new habits on the user, not all of them good ones. How many of us have rattled out an angry email and hit the send key only to regret it later? Somehow, the act of writing or typing a paper letter, signing it, folding it, addressing it, and putting it in the mailbox provided a number of additional points of decision where we could give heed to our second thoughts and at least put the letter aside instead of mailing it. What at first looked like nothing more than obstacles to the rapid communication of thought now looks more like a kind of psychological buffer that may have made society a better place.

I have no idea whether the Reader will catch on, or whether it is only a precursor of something better, or whether, like the poor, the paper books we will always have with us. And my little exercise in applying the precautionary principle to such a benign-looking piece of technology as the Reader should not be misunderstood to mean that I feel it is a threat to civilization. But I hope I have made clear that any technology whatsoever that ends up in the hands of people has intrinsic potential for both good and bad consequences, and the way it is designed can influence how those consequences develop over time.

Sources: The New York Times article by David Pogue on Oct. 12, 2006 describing the Sony Reader was located at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/12/technology/12pogue.html.

Doctors, Data, and Doomsday

Nearly every business, government office, and organizations of any size down to the local barber shop have made the transition from paper records to computers—except doctors and hospitals. Go into any doctor's office and you will still see big file cabinets filled with cardboard folders bearing colored tabs. The system of keeping a file for each patient was an innovation when the Mayo Clinic came up with the idea in the early 1900s. As Robert Charrette reports in a recent article in IEEE Spectrum, the Clinic is one of the few medical facilities so far to make a successful transition to all-electronic records. But he warns that while we aren't necessarily facing a medical Doomsday, troubles lie ahead along the way to converting the entire U. S. medical system to computerized recordkeeping

As Charrette points out, the history of large-scale software projects is littered with the bones of huge, expensive failures. One of the most egregious was the FBI's attempt to computerize their elaborate system of case files, which had been kept on paper since the days of J. Edgar Hoover in the 1930s. After spending over $100 million, the FBI gave up on the project altogether. Why is it that society tolerates such disasters in software engineering? If banks lost your money as readily as some software firms do, people would still be keeping their cash in mattresses.

Software engineering differs from almost every other kind of engineering in two fundamental ways. In electrical, mechanical, civil, and chemical engineering, the subject matter of the discipline is something physical: steel dirt, chemicals, or electromagnetic waves. But in software engineering, the "material cause" (as Aristotle would put it), the matter out of which the discipline emerges, is thought. And thoughts are notoriously hard things to pin down. Secondly, most large-scale software projects invariably deal with the largely undocumented and tremendously variable behavior of thousands of people as they do comparatively complex intellectual tasks. This is nowhere more true than in the medical profession, where some of the most highly educated and individualistic professionals deal daily with life-or-death situations. These two factors make software engineering the most unpredictable of engineering disciplines, in that despite the best plans of competent engineers, projects often run off the rails of budgets and schedules to crash in the woods of failure (metaphorically speaking).

To what extent are software engineers morally culpable for the failure of a major software project they are involved in? Failures are a normal part of engineering. And it can be said in behalf of most software project failures that no one dies or is seriously injured, at least directly. A building that collapses usually takes someone with it, but a failed software project's worst consequences for individuals are usually the loss of jobs, not life itself. But the expenditure of millions of dollars toward an end that is ultimately never realized is hardly a social good, either.

Despite such notable failures, no one seems inclined to give up on the idea that computerizing paper medical records, if we can do it, will be better than the situation we have now, where the present limited access to data results in thousands of misdiagnoses and hundreds of deaths every year. Of course, along with the promises of better access for those who need to know medical records comes the threat of abuse by unscrupulous businesses and criminals. Patient advocacy groups have already weighed in to oppose the present versions of health information technology legislation which do not protect the privacy rights of patients enough, in their opinion. This is a problem that can be dealt with, as the largely successful effort to put private banking records on the Internet has shown. But the challenges are greater with medical records, and it would be easy to promulgate a system that would have as many security holes as a Swiss cheese if things aren't done right.

Some people advocate an increased role for the federal government in this area, pointing out that many medical practices are small and simply don't have the resources to adapt on their own. The track record of government involvement in medicine in this country is excellent with regard to research, problematic with regard to large-scale social programs such as Medicare, and largely unknown with regard to standardized software. As with anything else, if enough good people of good will are put to the task, it could be made to work. But in the present political atmosphere in which government is often regarded as the enemy of the free market and the good in general, it is hard to imagine how enough public and professional support for a government-sponsored project could be raised.

The field of software engineering itself is only about a generation old, and its practitioners are increasingly aware of the need to borrow from fields such as sociology, ethics, and psychology to do their jobs better. The old days of a geeky nerd sitting alone in a cubicle churning out code that no one else can understand are passing, if not completely over. Good software engineers study the project's intended users as thoroughly as anthropologists observe primitive tribes, in order to figure out not only what the customers say they want, but in order to discover existing methods and connections that the users may not even know about themselves and their organizations. The ideal paper-to-software transition in the medical profession will still be a lot of work. But if it is staged properly, using good examples such as the Mayo Clinic as paradigms and checking results in each new case before proceeding, it could work as smoothly as the introduction of computers into banking. But in this case, it won't be your money, it will be your life.

Sources: The article "Dying for Data" in IEEE Spectrum's October 2006 issue is available online at http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/oct06/4589. Charrette also wrote about the FBI project failure in "Why Software Fails" at http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/sep05/inthisissue. An example of one organization advocating in favor of better patient privacy rights can be found at http://www.patientprivacyrights.org.

Legislating Morality: The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act

Over the weekend, the U. S. Congress approved and passed to the President a bill to prohibit financial institutions from sending payments to offshore internet gambling websites. President Bush is expected to sign it. The internet gambling industry was taken somewhat by surprise, and stocks in online casinos are tumbling all over the globe. Some view the action as a purely political ploy to help Republicans retain control of Congress after the November elections. Others see it as one more belated attempt for the law to catch up to technology.

The name of a popular bestseller some years ago was "Please Don't Eat the Daisies." The author, a mother of several young children, was preparing a dinner party and told her kids not to track mud into the living room, not to touch the china on the table, and so on. But she forgot to tell them not to eat the daisies in the centerpiece, and so they did. People will come up with ways of doing things that regulators, legislatures, and competitors simply cannot think of in advance. But the effects of these novel ideas are not always welcome.

Once enough people got onto the Internet, gambling websites were probably inevitable. The same privacy, anonymity, and ability to operate anywhere in the world with T1 lines that makes the Internet so attractive for pornographers also attracts internet gaming firms. As I noted in my Aug. 1 column, various governments over the centuries have taken attitudes toward gambling ranging from pure laissez-faire to near-total prohibition. But until recently, a government that wanted to regulate gambling could identify the bookies, their hangouts, and their customers without too much trouble. The advent of the Internet changed all that.

Because of the dispersed nature of communication over computer networks, it is impractical to identify individuals who place bets online without serious curtailment of individual liberties. In principle, Federal agents could stage raids on college dorm rooms and other places where they suspect Internet gambling is occurring, but this kind of action would be tantamount to creating a police state.

If you examine the machinery of internet gambling by U. S. customers who use offshore companies, most of it is dispersed widely. Customers gamble online, paying mostly by credit card to foreign internet casinos. The thousands of individual customers are spread all over the place. There are fewer foreign sites with servers and operators, but they are inaccessible to U. S. enforcement officials. The one link in the chain that is both accessible and fairly concentrated is the group of U. S. financial institutions which forward their customers' money to the internet casinos. This is precisely the group targeted by the law that Congress just passed.

If you are a credit-card company, what your customers do with their money is normally none of your business. Outright fraud is a concern, since by law a customer's liability in most cases of credit-card fraud is limited to $50, with banks picking up the rest of the tab. Thus motivated, banks have developed sophisticated ways of ferreting out fraudulent companies who abuse their credit-card systems. But most internet gamblers tacitly agree to the rules of the game, which over the long term mean that most gamblers lose big to the casinos, just as in real life. Nevertheless, in the eyes of the law they have not been defrauded. Rather, they chose to take an action which is technically illegal, so they can't have any recourse except to deduct gambling losses on their tax returns to the extent allowed by law (a loophole I have never understood).

The present law simply prohibits banks from reimbursing online casinos, which puts the banks in a bind. If they don't obey the law and keep on sending funds to the casinos, they will be liable to legal penalties. But if they do obey and refuse to pay online casinos, how will this affect the other parties involved?

Well, pretty soon you will see lists of unacceptable credit cards on the online gambling sites: cards issued by companies who have begun to obey the law. Depending on how dedicated a gambler is, he may shift to another card, or he may just drop that site for another one that is less picky about credit cards. What he probably won't do is quit gambling, especially if he has a habit established.

If the U. S. banking industry as a whole stands firm, foreign-owned credit firms will rush in to fill the vacuum. If this occurs, we will simply have succeeded in moving a major part of the system offshore. After all, the only pieces that have to stay here are the customers.

While I have no special insight into the mentality of those who passed this law, I suspect that they view gambling as an intrinsic evil which should be curtailed or eliminated where possible. I happen to be in sympathy with that view, but I also happen to be in sympathy with the outlook that says when you decide to do a thing, find a good way of doing it.

What is gambling, after all? In my very limited experience, accumulated chiefly in convenience store lines behind people who just wanted one more scratch ticket and yeah, lemme have five of them Texas Holdems, gambling is a way people have of facing the apparent randomness of life headon, and trying to win. It has everything to do with emotion, desire, and the consumer mentality, and very little to do with logic, higher education (except for the ill-gotten gambling dollars that pay for some of it), or the nobler aspects of life. If we went about creating a society of self-controlled, self-directed citizens who knew who they were, were largely content with their lot in life, and could count on their circumstances maintaining some stability over the next few years, I suspect we'd have a lot fewer gamblers to start with. The ones who were left could send all their money to Bermuda for all I care.

So while I agree with the goal of the anti-gambling legislation just passed, as an engineer I can see several big problems that stand in the way of its achieving it. Maybe I'm wrong and this will put a big damper on the whole business. I hope so. But some problems are deeper than a solution by legislation can address.

Sources: A summary of the recent legislation is at http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/columnists/story.html?id=101747ec-8d41-42f5-9209-1236e3ced739&p=1

Maglev Train Wreck: The Human Factor

For the past several years, a train that literally floats on air and travels at speeds up to 280 miles per hour has been operating regularly on a 19-mile test track in northwestern Germany. The Transrapid 07 "maglev" train's test runs are open to the public, and the waiting list for a ride often exceeds six months. On Friday, September 22 of this year, some thirty visitors and employees of the train's manufacturers, ThyssenKrupp and Siemens, filed aboard for a high-speed trip along an elevated guideway that wends through forests and pastures. Earlier that day, maintenance personnel had traveled the same route in a smaller service vehicle which normally was moved out of the way to clear the track for the Transrapid. But somehow, that morning the service car was still on the main line when the Transrapid plowed into it at a speed of 125 miles per hour. Twenty-three passengers and crew died and ten more were injured in the most serious accident to befall maglev technology since its inception.

The idea of using a magnetic field to support a vehicle without contacting the ground is not that new. Patents on the basic idea were filed as early as the 1930s, but the notion had to await advances in electrical power and control systems before a practical maglev train could be designed. The first full-scale experimental units were fielded in the 1960s, but so far the only commercial maglev train, a German Transrapid, shuttles between downtown Shanghai and the city's airport.

The technical appeal of magnetic levitation is easy to understand. At train speeds over a hundred miles an hour, stresses on conventional train wheels and tracks become extreme, leading to increased operation and maintenance costs. In operation, the Transrapid makes no physical contact with the track. Instead, powerful magnets hover less than an inch below steel strips on either side of the track, and automatic control systems measure the distance thousands of times every second to keep it within close limits. Heavy copper coils of wire along the track produce moving magnetic fields that propel the train up to 280 mph, eliminating any need to transfer large amounts of electrical energy to the train.

How does it stop? In normal operation, the same moving magnetic fields that accelerate the train also slow it down. The excess mechanical energy that braking makes available can even be captured and sent back into the power grid, making maglev trains one of the most energy-efficient transportation modes around. In emergencies, a mechanical system takes over. The train is fail-safe in the sense that if all power fails on the train and the track, the cars simply settle down on a skid pad on the track and the whole thing just slides to a stop without leaving the rails. All the cars remained on the track even after the recent accident.

So what went wrong? A complete answer must await future investigations, but initial reports indicate that the train operators simply did not know that the service vehicle was still on the track. At speed, any train—maglev, electric, diesel, or steam—takes a long distance to stop, a distance that increases greatly for high-speed trains. Stopping after the driver sees an obstruction is usually not an option. So the whole orientation of train safety since the nineteenth century has been to keep obstructions off the track. And this is largely a matter of good communications between the train operators and those in a position to know what is on the track ahead, out of sight.

A friend of mine belongs to the Austin Steam Train Association, a largely volunteer-staffed organization which operates excursion trains in and around Austin, Texas. Even though what they do is for fun and not for pay, they follow all applicable rules, regulations, and licensing requirements for safe train operation. After years of study, my friend finally got his engineer's "ticket" recently. Even though he is a professor of engineering, he had to undergo a course of study and a rigorous examination about the fine points of train operating procedures, including rules about authorization for train movements that seem almost Byzantine in their complexity. But decades of experience have proven these rules to be necessary, and he takes pride in following them to the letter.

Anyone can make mistakes, and this is not to say that those who operated the Transrapid on that fatal day did not have enough rules and regulations. All the regulations in the world will not prevent an accident if the rules aren't followed, and the fact that the Transrapid operated with a good safety record up till now says that by and large, the operators knew how to run it safely. Perhaps the experimental nature of the maglev train allowed a certain complacency to creep in. Track sensors that detect obstructions and interlock with train controls would have prevented this accident. And perhaps the commercial installation in Shanghai features such safety interlocks. It would be a shame if this mishap, which had nothing to do with the maglev features of the train and everything to do with human error, ends up tainting the future of maglev technology. All the same, it is a reminder that no matter how advanced technology becomes, the people working with it have essential roles to play in making it safe to use.

Sources: A New York Times article describing the Transrapid accident is at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/23/world/europe/23cnd-germany.html?_r=1&oref=slogin. Some interesting historical background on maglev technology in Germany can be found at http://maglev.de/index.php?en_vision. The Austin Steam Train Association's website is www.austinsteamtrain.org.

Email: Boon or Bane?

If you are reading this blog, you must be on the Internet, unless you are standing outside my office door where I post a hard copy of the first page every week. Either way, you very likely have one or more email accounts. If you're like me, your feelings about email are not uniformly positive. Sure, it's convenient, cheap, and a great way to stay in touch with people on the other side of the world, if you happen to know anybody over there. But email's downsides are well known too, from the time it takes you to wade through spam up to career-destroying incidents that could have been prevented by thinking just a little longer before clicking the "send" button.

Like most other communications media, at first glance email doesn't seem to have much to do with engineering ethics. A saying around my house is, "More communication is better than less communication," and why wouldn't that apply to email? The first large-scale users of email were physicists who found it a convenient way to keep in touch via their advanced networked computers. Many of the standard features of email were developed in an environment where the users were intelligent, well-behaved, technically adept, and often had a libertarian streak that opposed excessive government regulation. The protocols and systemic features that email uses were developed in this environment. Consequently, email's marginal cost is basically zero, anyone with an email account can send mail to anyone else, and it is almost impossible to regulate without extensive government-funded intervention, as in China.

These features stayed in place as the volume of email grew far beyond what most of its early developers anticipated. Now it is a part of modern culture, as much as the telephone was half a century ago. The near-zero marginal cost of email has allowed spammers of all kinds to spring up, and a kind of electronic warfare now exists between spammers who spray the Internet with billions of bits of advertising in the hopes that a few people respond, and the system operators who keep improving spam filters in a constant battle to limit the junk percentage in the average user's in-box. One wonders how much resources are being wasted on both sides. If there was a tiny fixed cost to sending an email message built into the system, even a Federal tax, and that cost was impossible to avoid, most spammers would go out of business. The rest would have to behave more like direct-mail companies, carefully targeting their messages to only those persons who are more likely to respond, given the limited financial resources of the spammer. The horse has been out of the barn much too long to consider implementing something like that now, unless in a few years it becomes necessary to do a worldwide system upgrade reaching down to the very basics of the email protocols. And that is not likely for the foreseeable future.

Spam aside, even the volume of email from people and organizations I recognize is often overwhelming. I find that the two largest generators of emails I realize are legitimate, but which I'd rather not receive, come from the two universities I am associated with, one as an employee and one as an adjunct professor. To control this problem, there would have to be some kind of financial or other penalty associated with excessive use of the all-employee email list. Most organizations have some sort of policy along those lines, but its enforcement is sporadic and sometimes you wonder if anyone cares at all how many emails are sent out to everyone.

Finally, there is the time each individual spends dealing with email. I must personally spend an hour or more each day dealing with it: reading it, sorting it, purging it, filing it, writing responses, and so on. In the years before email, what did I do with that hour or so a day? I don't remember reading postal mail for that length of time daily. And I wasn't on the phone. I must have been able to do other useful things, such as work, reading important books, or talking with friends and relatives. Whatever it was, it doesn't happen now, or if it does, it's in the rest of the day that has been squeezed by email.

Email isn't the first communications medium that has been viewed with ambivalence. Plato, writing around 380 B. C., called into question the wisdom of the invention of writing itself. In a story he attributed to a legendary king, he noted that before the invention of writing, people had to commit important things to memory: songs, poems, even legal agreements. But now that the technology of writing was available, the skills of remembering would atrophy. He was not at all sure that writing was an unmixed blessing.

Neither am I sure that email is an unmixed blessing. But I hope that in the future, its rough edges get smoothed out and it approaches the ideal of a seamless meeting of minds that all communication should strive for. It hasn't happened yet.

Sources: The Socratic dialogue in which Plato recounts the encounter between the Egyptian divinity and inventor of writing Theuth and King Thamos is available at http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/2.1/features/brent/platowri.htm (Phaedrus 67-71).

Death in Africa for Cell Phones in the U. S.

According to some estimates, four to ten million people have died in the war that has raged in the Democratic Republic of Congo since 1996. Africa's third-largest country was known as Zaire until 1997, and began its sad history of relations with the West as the Congo Free State in 1870, when King Leopold of Belgium made it his personal property. The despicable exploitation and cruelty that Leopold wrought upon millions of Africans in his efforts to extract natural resources such as rubber and diamonds reduced the population by half in thirty years, and has ever since stood as a paradigm of human rights abuse. Today, the Congo holds another material that the rest of the world covets: colombo-tantalite ore, commonly known as "coltan." And although there is no single individual like King Leopold who can be held responsible, the Congo is once again suffering horribly as the rest of the world steals its treasures.

Coltan is the world's main source of tantalum, an essential element in the manufacture of miniature electrolytic capacitors, also called "pinhead" capacitors because of their size. Without these capacitors, portable electronic equipment such as cell phones, PDAs, and iPods would either be much larger or simply wouldn't work at all. When only expensive military gear used tantalum capacitors, the demand for coltan was small. But now that consumer electronics manufacturers use millions of them, coltan is a hot commodity in the world mineral market.

The U. S. has no significant natural deposits of coltan. Other than Australia, the largest reserves are in the Congo. Makers of consumer electronics buy tantalum capacitors whose ingredients very likely come from a country where illegal mining, smuggling, and full-scale warfare over coltan-rich regions is endemic. The detailed history of the Congo and coltan is complex and tangled, involving multinational companies in the U. S. and Europe, migrations of refugees from Rwanda, interference by the government of Uganda, and general bad behavior on all sides. (For more information, see the article by Keith Harmon Snow and David Bernouski at http://zmagsite.zmag.org/JulAug2006/snowpr0706.html.) But the simple fact is that much of the coltan that makes its way into the world's supply chains of electronic components was mined either illegally or under political or moral conditions that most people would be horrified at if they knew.

So what is an electronics engineer to do? Avoid any designs that use tantalum capacitors? That's hardly practical, and for one thing, you can't tell just by looking whether the tantalum in a particular device came from Australia, the Congo, or somewhere else. But if engineers simply shrug their shoulders and say, "The supply chain isn't my problem—if a part's price is right and meets the specs, I've done my duty," then the professionals who are in the best position to know about the situation and make decisions based on it are turning their backs on the problem.

In Europe, certain activist groups have publicized the connection between portable electronics and the murderous events in the Congo, chanting "no blood on my cell phone" and calling for an embargo on tantalum from illegal mining. But embargoes and boycotts are not as effective as professionals who organize to recognize a problem and take action against it. At the very least, those who specify and use components whose ingredients may have been extracted at the cost of human suffering should be aware of the sordid background behind some innocent-looking electronics parts. And if their consciences moves them to do something about it, so much the better.

Engineers and technology specialists should learn from the food industry, where product differentiation has been raised to a high art. Most consumers can't tell organic broccoli from the other kind simply by tasting it. The U. S. Department of Agriculture has developed a "certified organic" system which tells the consumer that organic produce was grown without pesticides and so on. What the consumer pays extra for is not necessarily a better taste, but the knowledge that his vegetables were grown in a certain way. Some makers of clothing feature the fact that their products were not made under sweatshop conditions that prevail in certain parts of the world. Again, the intrinsic quality of the goods is not in question. What is being sold is a feeling or sense that the purchase is somehow making the world a better place.

Why can't this principle be applied to consumer electronics? First, an auditing system of supply chains would have to be implemented so that one could trace supplies of raw materials all the way back to the mine. Given the corrupt nature of some governments and institutions, this would be hard. But if certain firms managed it somehow and made enough of a big deal with publicity and advertisements, the fickle hand of the consumer might begin to favor the firms taking such trouble over those who were not making sure that their products did not use materials that contributed to human exploitation. It sounds silly and idealistic, maybe. In 1820, the idea of banning slavery in the U. S. sounded silly, idealistic, and dangerous. But those who believed in it persisted, and now, slavery is virtually unheard of, at least in the West.

Here is a challenge that goes beyond engineering, but needs engineers and other technologists to implement. The only thing that is lacking is the will on the part of those involved to do something.

Sources: Besides the Snow and Bernouski article noted above, Snow has many other articles on exploitation of African nations by multinational corporations at his website http://www.allthingspass.com. The boycott efforts are described briefly in a BBC article at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1468772.stm.

Does Engineering Ethics Change With Time? The Case of the 1955 Oldsmobile

Owing to circumstances too complex to summarize here, the other weekend I found myself working on the electrical system of a 1955 Oldsmobile Super 88 sedan. The original owner needed help in getting it running again after it had sat unused in a garage for three years. All it needed was a new battery, a set of ignition cables and distributor parts, and a little gasoline poured down the carburetor to give the gas pump a chance to suck new fuel from the gas tank. After a few tries, it started up fine and made all of us very happy, just as it did in 1955 when it became the owner's first new car.

While working around the vehicle, I was struck by the tremendous differences in design and engineering between what was considered a good, safe, responsible-family-man's car in 1955, and what would pass muster by today's standards. The biggest difference is the list of what is missing from the '55 compared to what you would find in virtually any new car today. That list includes: air bags, computers, shoulder belts, high-impact bumpers, a catalytic converter, numerous other anti-pollution technologies, anti-skid brakes, steel-belted radial tubeless tires, and unibody construction with added side-collision protection. On the other hand, what the '55 has in abundance that has been greatly reduced in most modern cars is expressed in one word: steel. The main longitudinal members of the chassis under the car look like they're strong enough to support a skyscraper. The bumpers are thick chrome-plated armorplate that must weigh close to a hundred pounds each. Carry this theme through the whole car, and you have a behemoth that needs a 300-cubic-inch V-8 just to get moving. And of course, the gas mileage (premium only, now that leaded gas is no longer generally available) can't be much better than 20 mpg.

Because you couldn't legally market a new car designed like this 1955 specimen today, does that mean that the engineers who designed it then were bad engineers? That they were doing something wrong in foisting such a dangerous vehicle upon the public? Of course not. No one is blamed for not using safety technology that doesn't yet exist. Today's air bags, for instance, depend on a micro-electromechanical IC to detect the rapid deceleration of a collision. Anti-skid brakes need computer technology for similar reasons, and such advances were simply not available in 1955. Seat belts, on the other hand, are hardly advanced technology. According to a document on the Ford Motor Company's website, 1955 was the year Ford became the first U. S. automaker to offer seat belts as an option. But it took decades for car companies to offer seat belts and later air bags as standard equipment. And until states began to pass laws mandating the use of seat belts around 1980, only about one out of ten drivers used them.

There are two morals to this little history lesson. The first one is pretty obvious: standards of what is considered safe and legal design change with time. Laws change as a matter of course, and engineers need to be aware of any changes in laws that affect their firm's products or services. But always staying just barely legal is not usually the best position for either a company or an individual. The best engineering looks ahead of the present legal environment to combine what new technology offers with desirable features that make products safer as well as better. And if you widen the concept of safety to include broader public goods such as less environmental pollution or less fossil fuel consumed for a given output, the range of potential engineering development grows even wider.

The second moral is related to the first: even if laws and technology change, changes in behavior don't always follow. It took a combination of public-awareness campaigns and legal sanctions to get most (not all!) drivers to buckle up. Many today would view the emission of leaded-gas fumes from a 20-mpg 1955 vehicle as at least as dangerous as the absence of seat belts. Many cars sold today get no better mileage than this, and the main reason is not technology, but buyer preference.

There is a debate going on today about how we in the U. S. can reduce our dependence on foreign oil imports. Some favor increasing mandatory federal fleet mileage standards, but auto manufacturers have shown how they can "game" that system in the past. Others take the view that as gasoline becomes more expensive, Americans will just naturally start buying more fuel-efficient cars. A third answer is to radically increase the taxes on gasoline to more accurately reflect the "externalities" of driving gas-hog vehicles: the cost of importing oil, the cost military measures to stabilize the Middle East, the hidden costs caused by air pollution, and the highway-construction costs associated with more cars on the roads, period.

While the means vary, the goal is the same: to change the way drivers behave toward driving and cars. And changes in behavior usually come slowly, if at all. But given the right combination of suitable new technology, economic incentives, and what for lack of a better word can be called the cultural factor, people can change the way they behave pretty fast. With most drivers having cell phones, it's trivially easy to call 911 when you see a road accident, and help can arrive much faster than when someone had to find a pay phone and call the local authorities. If the desire to help others wasn't there, all the cell phones in the world wouldn't do any good. But before it was so easy, the Good Samaritan who would undertake either to drive for help or to stop and render aid was not that common.

That sort of thing was probably not in the minds of cell-phone designers, but it is an unexpected benefit. Engineers can intentionally look for such benefits and design them into new projects, but only if they take a wider view of the ways their work will be used and consider the human factors as well as the purely technical ones.

We still haven't taken the '55 Olds out on the road. The brakes need a little work yet. But when we do, it will only be for special occasions, perhaps car shows, where we can show younger generations what dangers their parents faced in the bad old days of primitive technology. And will today's 20-somethings in their Honda Civics look adventurous and risk-taking, or profligate and careless about the environment, to their grandchildren? Only time will tell.

Sources: The Ford press release describing their introduction of safety belts in 1955 is at http://media.ford.com/newsroom/release_display.cfm?release=23485. The statistics on belt use are from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_it_or_ticket.

When Is A Gallon Not a Gallon? When You're Buying Gas

On a hot August day in Texas, you notice your big pickup is nearly running on fumes, so you drive into a gas station where the price is $2.69 a gallon. You fill up the tank with 35 gallons of gas. Simple math tells you that's going to cost you $94.15. You're not happy about it, but at least you know across the country people are paying something close to the same for gas, so you go inside and get ready to pay. You tell the clerk behind the counter what pump it was, and she says, "Okay, $94.15 plus the $1.14 surcharge, that's $95.29."

"Hey, what's this surcharge business?"

"That's the heat surcharge. Any time the gas is hotter than sixty degrees, we get to charge extra for the same amount of gas."

You think something unprintable, but you've been brought up to be polite to ladies, so all you say is, "Well, I'll pay it, but this is the last time I'm buying gas here."

"Doesn't matter. They all do it."

Sound crazy? Well, it isn't. It happens every day, all across the country. Only the surcharge is a hidden one, and perfectly legal, so the sales clerks don't talk about it. As an article in the Aug. 27 Kansas City Star describes, if you buy gas in the U. S. that is hotter than sixty degrees F—and as a recent U. S. government study shows, that is most of us in the warmer parts of the country—you don't get what you think you're paying for. Here's how it works.

Each molecule of gasoline provides a certain amount of energy to your car's engine. What you're really buying when you pay for gas is energy, and so you'd think that the fairest way to charge for gas is so much money for so many molecules. Well, counting molecules is not too easy, so long ago it was decided that gasoline would be sold by the gallon, since measuring volume is simple and accurate.

The only trouble with that is that gasoline expands when it gets warmer. That means the same number of molecules take up more room at higher temperatures. If you have thirty-five gallons of gas at a temperature of sixty degrees F and warm it up to eighty degrees F, it's still a liquid. But it expands to occupy a volume of 35.42 gallons. Same number of molecules, same amount of energy—but a larger volume. And if you come along and buy 35 gallons of warm gas when it's eighty degrees, you pay the same money, but you get less gas (fewer molecules, less energy) than if it was at sixty degrees.

Petroleum engineers knew all about this decades ago, so they agreed on a standard temperature of 60 F for measuring volumes. And in the bulk transactions among refiners, pipeline operators, and wholesalers, you can bet that they take this expansion into account. In Canada, where the gas that's sold is on average colder than 60 F, an enterprising inventor went around to gasoline retailers and pointed out that when they sold cold gas, they were giving their customers more than they legally had to. So now nearly every gas pump in Canada compensates for temperature and delivers slightly less gas than it used to, for the same price on the pump screen. And the retailers happily paid the inventor for his idea, since they now make more money on each gallon of cold gas.

Nobody that the Star reporter talked to would admit it, but the reason temperature-compensated gasoline sales haven't spread to the U. S. is probably because the retailers would lose money instead of making money.

Engineering ethics is about experts who use their specialized knowledge for the good of their employers and society in general. Here is a clear case where an obscure technical effect is taking billions of dollars a year away from consumers. Engineers know about it, but the law permits it. As long as a gas pump delivers one gallon with a certain accuracy, it gets the stamp of approval from the local weights and measures authority and there is nothing illegal going on. But all that is legal is not moral, and the example of Canada shows that the technical fix for the problem is available at a cost that would not drive gas stations out of business.

Is this the worst problem you'll run into today? If it is, you're having a pretty good day. But it's real, and as gas prices go even higher, any changes in a direction that would improve matters would be welcome. Sooner or later, some clever advertising executive may think of a way to turn temperature-compensated gas sales into a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, logic does not play a large role in advertising, and the campaign to get this idea across would have to be very well planned. Another alternative is to change the laws regulating retail gas sales to require all gas to be sold with temperature compensation. The effect of this would be to make prices slightly lower in the summer and higher in winter, which might do something to offset the annual rise caused by summer driving. The prospects of either happening are not good. But until retailers start selling gas with the price compensated for temperature, at least now you know what you're paying for—which is not what it seems to be.

Sources: The original Kansas City Star article is at http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/15370193.htm. A method of figuring out what temperature does to the volume of gasoline is available from the Ohio Department of Transportation at www.dot.state.oh.us/construction/oca/Specs/SSandPN2002/10600402for2002.pdf.

Lithium Laments

Right now, Michael Dell is probably wishing he'd never heard of lithium. After Dell Inc. recalled over four million laptop batteries on Aug. 14 in the largest consumer-electronics recall ever, the New York Times sent out a photographer to Lake Mead to get a picture of one Thomas Forqueran looking at the gutted and smoky interior of his pickup truck. He had stored a Dell laptop in the glove box next to some ammo, and when the laptop battery caught fire, the ammo went too. Fortunately, Mr. Forqueran was not in the truck at the time.

The culprit in this case was a faulty lithium battery manufactured by Sony. Why is it that lithium batteries are so dangerous? Why did the National Transportation Safety Administration prohibit cargoes containing lithium batteries on passenger planes back in 2004, and why was a shipment of lithium batteries in a UPS plane suspected as the cause of a fire last February that destroyed the plane? Basically, for the same reasons that lithium is used in batteries at all.

Batteries store energy in the form of chemical compounds. The more energy you can store in a give size and weight of battery, the longer the battery can power a device such as an iPod or a laptop. Electrochemical reactions with lithium provide more voltage than almost any other single reaction, and lithium is the lightest known metal. For these and other reasons, battery makers have been using lithium in their latest and greatest products.

But for many of the same reasons that make lithium attractive for batteries, it is a nasty element to handle. If you throw pure lithium into water, it will spontaneously catch fire and give off noxious fumes. This makes it hard to battle fires involving lithium, needless to say. Even throwing sand or using CO2 fire extinguishers doesn't work—burying the fire in table salt or lime are about the only things that work. The lithium compounds used in rechargeable batteries are also hazardous, and can catch fire even if slightly contaminated by moisture. Once a lithium battery overheats and starts to burn, it tends to feed on itself as the cell ruptures and the lithium gets into contact with more material it can react with. What apparently happened with the Sony batteries is that a flaw in the manufacturing process left small metal particles in the wrong place. Mechanical stress on the battery once it was installed may have moved these particles around to short out the battery, creating enough heat for it to catch fire.

There are several lessons here. First, as we demand more and more from our portable electronics, we are also asking for more and more energy to be packed into batteries. On the horizon are fuel-cell batteries that run off propane or gasoline. Theoretically, one of these could run your laptop for days between fillups, but then there's the price of gasoline to worry about, not to mention the potential for leaks or spills. So there will be more battery hazards to watch out for if manufacturers don't enforce rigorous quality controls at every step of the way.

Next, it is unclear how long Sony had the manufacturing problem before fires started to occur. As engineer and author Henry Petroski likes to say, engineers often learn a lot more from failure than success. This emphasizes the importance of analyzing failures of products in the field until the engineers know exactly what caused the problem, and exactly how to fix it. But none of that can occur without good communication among vendors, suppliers, repair facilities, salesmen, and others.

This writer recalls an incident he heard about many years ago, when he was working for a large communications company which shall remain nameless. The company made the amplifiers for cable TV systems, metal boxes that hang on telephone poles and keep the cable TV signal strong enough to travel several miles between the "head-end" and the homes that take cable TV service. It seems that after several hundred of these amplifiers were shipped, they all started to fail in the same way. The circuit chip that was the heart of the amplifier was mounted to a metal heat sink, and when the engineers back at the plant opened up the failed amplifiers, they found that somehow the chips had separated from the heat sink, which caused them to burn up.

The engineers had been using this type of chip for some time in other products, and so they went back through the repair records to see if there had been any similar problems earlier. Sure enough, the problem began to show up several years before, but then it seemed to disappear—no more records of that kind of repair. The engineers called up the technician who had signed the failure reports and asked him what had happened at the point when the failures stopped occurring.

"Oh, we kept getting busted amps like that," he replied. "There was just so many of 'em, I got tired of filling out the same old failure report."

One hopes the quality-control system at Sony operates better than that. But any organization is only as good as the people in it, and if only one critical person fails to follow the procedure that others are expecting, the whole system can fail.

We can be glad that there have not been any reported fatalities resulting from flaming Dell laptops. Dell as a company will probably survive this incident. But a safety recall like this can ruin a small or new company's reputation permanently and put it out of business, even if no one is hurt. The daily routines of reliability engineering, quality control, and other related technical and managerial jobs can seem boring or even pointless at times. But like police patrols, they protect the safety and welfare of the public, and negligence in these areas can lead to disaster.

Sources: The New York Times article on the Dell laptop battery recall is at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/15/technology/15battery.html. The NTSB notice prohibiting passenger planes from carrying cargoes of lithium batteries is discussed at http://www.dot.gov/affairs/faa001.htm. The UPS plane fire is reported in TG Daily at http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/07/13/ntsb_laptopbattery_upsfire/.

The Price of Airline Security

On August 11, we received the unwelcome news that terrorists were planning yet another attack, this one involving US-bound flights from Britain that were targeted for demolition with liquid explosives. Fortunately, authorities rounded up many of the alleged plotters before they could do any damage, but the effects of their plans were felt immediately by thousands of would-be airline passengers whose flights were cancelled or missed because of tightened security checks. The problem of airline security is an interesting one from an engineering ethics point of view, because it brings to the surface matters of safety and expense that otherwise get little attention.

Air travel has not always been a relatively safe way to get from A to B. The primitive state of aviation technology in the 1920s meant that the few commercial passengers who flew back then were undertaking substantial risks. But improvements over the decades have made aviation one of the safest modes of transportation around, if only hazards from accidental crashes due to pilot error and hardware failures are considered. While every design effort has been expended to make planes intrinsically safe, modern commercial (as opposed to military) aircraft were not designed with terrorism in mind. The idea that someone inside the plane would brandish arms or set off a bomb was simply not in the imagination of design engineers until recently.

Now, of course, it is. After the World Trade Center attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the only visible change to the structure of commercial aircraft was the presumably bullet-proof steel door that now protects the flight deck from assault from within the cabin. This was an obvious step, and cost the airlines something, but clearly isn't going to solve all of their terrorism problems. Once a person with a reasonably powerful bomb gets on board a commercial airliner, the game is over if the bomb is exploded. There is no practical way to make planes impervious to explosives detonated from within. Flying is a very weight-sensitive business, so the heavy armor required to withstand bomb-force blasts literally won't fly. And so the only way to keep planes from being blown up by terrorists with bombs on board is to keep the bombs off the planes in the first place.

But that isn't free either. Since early terrorist bombs were stowed in luggage, inspection of checked baggage by X-ray was one of the first security measures to be implemented. After the attempted shoe-bombing of an airliner, passengers got used to taking off their shoes for X-ray inspection as well. Now that the latest plot involved liquid explosives, most liquids are now banned from carryon luggage. One almost hates to speculate about these matters in a semi-public forum, but there is always the possibility of a suicide bomber who swallows a time bomb. Not even the most dedicated terrorists have gone to this extent yet, possibly because bomb technology cannot yet put a powerful enough charge into a volume small enough to swallow. But if such an infernal deed is ever done, we can reconcile ourselves to whole-body low-dosage X-rays of all passengers, which would be the ultimate invasion of privacy.

Loss of privacy, delays, inconvenience, and the high cost of inspection machinery are only some of the prices we pay for being able to fly. A company called Ahura is test-marketing a book-size device that can do a chemical analysis of any liquid that you can see, even through glass or plastic bottles. It uses a laser to stimulate vibrations in the molecules of the liquid, which in turn give off light that the device analyzes and interprets in terms of chemical composition. The process, called Raman spectroscopy, has until recently been confined to chemistry research labs. But high demand for security inspections and advances in compact computer and sensor technology have allowed companies like Ahura to develop these devices. Still, they are not cheap. According to an account in Time Magazine, the Ahura unit retails for about $30,000. It will be a while before every airport is equipped with such a device, and in the meantime, even bottled water has become a rarity in the air.

Engineers like to view a problem in enough detail to have a good idea of how design choices will affect the performance of the system in question. In the case of airline security, the system is the whole complex of air travel. The design choices include how much we will pay for increasingly sophisticated security technology on the ground, how much we charge for air travel, how much of the cost of security is borne by the government versus private sources, and (not least important) what kind of research and development we do to prepare for future security problems. This last item is currently being covered, if at all, by small private firms such as Ahura in conjunction with government-sponsored research related to terrorism. It is a well-known fact among researchers that adding the word "terrorism" to a research proposal with almost any conceivable justification increases its likelihood of funding, other things being equal. Whether or not this results in better ideas for anti-terrorism technology is so far an open question.

While the U. S. government has taken steps to coordinate anti-terrorism efforts with the creation of such entities as the Department of Homeland Security, it is not clear that such efforts are coordinated enough or directed well enough to do a good job at not only reacting to, but anticipating, new terrorist threats to airline safety. Most successful crash programs, from the Manhattan Project to the Apollo program, have been coordinated by a single, central authority with a single-minded purpose and enough resources to get the job done. Commercial airline safety differs from those programs in many ways, of course. Millions of ordinary citizens, hundreds of private companies large and small, and international relations all make it a complex picture. But whatever else it is, it is an engineering problem. And a more coordinated and focused effort to make airlines as safe from terrorists as they are now from accidental crashes would be worth whatever we paid for it. Even if I can't carry my soft drink onto the plane for a while.

Sources: The Time Magazine article "A New Way to Detect Liquid Explosives" on Ahura is at http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1225412,00.html.

A Bribe By Many Other Names

When is a bribe a bribe? When is it a token of appreciation? And when is it a campaign contribution? Finally, why should engineers worry about these questions?

All engineering involves money, and wherever lots of money flows, you can find people who will try to get some in nefarious ways. The news that provokes these thoughts concerns one Brent R. Wilkes, a U. S. defense contractor whose enterprises have included a company that converts paper documents into digital form, and another that offers a noise-suppressing technology for military radio communications. In the nature of things, Mr. Wilkes has undoubtedly hired and paid engineers who work for these companies.

The reason Mr. Wilkes is in the news is that in order to procure defense contracts, he paid over two million dollars in cash and gifts to U. S. Rep. Randy Cunningham of California, who confessed to the bribes in a plea bargain with Federal prosecutors. Rep. Cunningham was sentenced to prison. Mr. Wilkes, for his part, feels that he himself did nothing illegal and was simply playing the game by the rules he learned. Unless a contractor pays for preferential treatment in the form of “earmarks,” according to Mr. Wilkes, he doesn’t stand a chance. The New York Times reports that over 12,000 such earmarks were inserted in this year’s Federal spending bills, amounting to a total of some $64 billion, and the number of earmarks is rising every year. Of course, not every earmark is the result of a bribe, but some clearly were.

Suppose you were an engineer working at one of Mr. Wilkes’ companies. Should this affair bother you? The writer of this blog has received in-kind support (not money) from a research center in Massachusetts that was set up via a funding mechanism that could be considered an earmark, so the question is a personal one. The answer depends on your ideas about how government should work, and what representative democracy really is.

Western democracies trace their roots to ancient Greece, where the Athenian democracy gave rise to the most influential culture the West has ever known. Plato could be called the first (and probably the best) political scientist. In The Republic, he put forward his views on the different types of government and the strengths and weaknesses of each. While it is impossible to know what Plato would think of the government of the United States today, if he were looking at how things are really done, as opposed to how we say they are done, he might well classify it as an oligarchy.

Plato defines an oligarchy as “a government resting on a valuation of property, in which the rich have power and the poor man is deprived of it.” Although ownership qualifications for voters and poll taxes have been abolished in this country, we now have a system that still requires candidates for state and Federal office to raise millions of dollars, becoming temporarily rich if only for the duration of the campaign. Why? Because without cash, no one can pay for campaign ads. And since it is easier to raise money from rich people than from poor ones, guess who gets special attention at the very least, and occasionally, illegal favors such as Rep. Cunningham granted in the case of the bribes from Mr. Wilkes.

We should distinguish between legal campaign contributions made to a candidate on the one hand, and illegal bribes paid for specific legislative favors on the other hand. Unfortunately, members of Congress don’t always distinguish between the two. The point is, whether legally or illegally, money has come to have a peculiarly loud voice in U. S. government today, overpowering the voices of people who suffer injustice but don’t have money to do anything about it.

Well, what of it? Is that so bad? Plato thinks it is: “. . . in proportion as riches and rich men are honoured in the State, virtue and the virtuous are dishonoured.” He says that just being rich doesn’t make you wise in the ways of government. All it shows is that you know how to get rich, or at least to keep the riches you inherited. The rich rulers’ “fondness for money makes them unwilling to pay taxes.” And “oligarchies have both the extremes of great wealth and great poverty.” You don’t have to look very far to see both of those effects in action today.

Now, Plato doesn’t say that an oligarchy won’t work. It will, after a fashion, but if you live in an oligarchy, you should get used to certain drawbacks. Less taxes for the rich and extremes of wealth and poverty are two. The rich having virtually all the effective power is another. The worst, he says, is that being poor makes you a kind of non-person, without influence or the hope of justice.

The founders of this country did build in some property qualifications for voters in Federal elections at first. But the wave of Jacksonian democracy that swept through the country in the early nineteenth century did away with most of them, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s abolished poll taxes. At the time, people thought these were good things. They brought the country closer to the ideal enunciated by Lincoln: government of, by, and for the people, not just for some particular favored group with well-funded influence in Washington. Of course, well-funded groups with influence in Washington have been with us always. But the balance between radically egalitarian democracy and highly discriminatory oligarchy has swung back and forth over the years.

Right now, it is swinging pretty heavily toward oligarchy. If you see this as a good thing, or at least an inevitable feature of the way things are done nowadays, then maybe you would not feel a qualm at reading about the adventures of your company’s founder in the realm of bribery. After all, it seems to be only an extreme form of making campaign contributions, and who can draw the line? But if you think bribery and corruption are corrosive to the body politic and need to be fought at every turn, then you won’t be so happy at the news. Maybe you’ll quit and go into politics yourself. The least you can do is vote, and not just for the candidate who runs the most campaign ads, either.

Sources: The New York Times article on Wilkes is at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/washington/06wilkes.html. Plato’s The Republic can be found at http://www.literaturepage.com/read/therepublic, and his comments on oligarchy are from Chapter 8. I thank Jeff Bogumil, former president of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology, for drawing my attention to this matter.

Online Gambling in the U. S.: Don't Bet On It

If you log on to BetOnSports.com today, and your Internet address identifies you as living in the U. S., all you will see besides their colorful logo is the following message:

IN LIGHT OF COURT PAPERS FILED IN THE UNITED STATES, THE COMPANY HAS TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED THIS FACILITY PENDING ITS ABILITY TO ASSESS ITS FULL POSITION. DURING THIS PERIOD NO FINANCIAL OR WAGERING TRANSACTIONS CAN BE EXECUTED. FURTHER INFORMATION WILL BE POSTED ONCE THE COMPANY IS IN A POSITION TO DO SO.

The BETonSPORTS.com
customer support team

The reason for this is simple: A U. S. District Court in St. Louis has issued a restraining order against BetOnSports PLC, forbidding them to take any bets from U. S. residents. The reason for the court order is a civil case filed by the U. S. Department of Justice to stop the company's U. S. operations. On July 16, the CEO of BetOnSports, David Carruthers, a British citizen, was on his way from London to the company's online operations in Costa Rica by way of the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. Federal authorities arrested him at the airport. How you view all these goings-on depends on your view of gambling, the Internet, and what is right and wrong about both.

Engineering ethics often deals with the unexpected consequences of a new technology. Most of the time, the surprise comes not for purely technical or scientific reasons alone, but from the ways people find to use or misuse the new development. The designers of the Arpanet, an early predecessor of the Internet, were thinking in terms of Cold War national defense in 1969 when they put together a computer network that they hoped would withstand partial destruction in a nuclear war. I would be surprised to find that the thought of placing bets over their new medium of communication ever entered their minds. But as millions of ordinary people gained access to the Internet, that thought did occur to gamblers, bookies, and "gaming industry" professionals, who set up gambling websites, mostly outside the continental U. S. to avoid state and Federal laws against unauthorized games of chance. But now the Department of Justice seems to believe it can make a good case against one of the highest-volume online betting operations.

As a strong opponent of gambling in any organized form, I hope that Mr. Carruthers' recent experiences make other online gambling outfits think twice about continuing their U. S. operations. In my view, gambling approaches the perfect temptation, as defined by the demon Screwtape in C. S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. The perfect temptation is to entice someone into a trap and give them nothing in return. And most of the time, that's exactly what gamblers get, on individual bets and in the long run. I think it is a shame that most U. S. states have corrupted themselves to the extent of conducting lotteries. Never mind that the profits so gained are used for good purposes, including education. Studies have shown that people with lower incomes spend a much larger portion of their income on lotteries and gambling than upper-income groups. So organized gambling robs from the poor and gives to the rich, the rich being either state governments or the wealthy owners and operators of casinos and online gambling companies.

Does my personal opinion about gambling make me think that we therefore ought to roll up the Internet and put it away, simply because it can be used for nefarious purposes? Not necessarily. A lot of bad things on the Internet are there simply because people have always been doing them, and people are now using the Internet a lot.

Gambling is a very old social problem. It became a popular recreation in China as much as 3500 years ago. The sage Confucius opposed the practice and several Chinese emperors tried to prohibit it, with mixed success. The fact that gambling has become an issue on the Internet is no more surprising than the fact that people occasionally tell lies in emails as well as in person.

What the Internet has done with gambling that is new is to internationalize it, making it much trickier for any single jurisdiction to enforce its laws or prosecute violators. When you had to fly to Las Vegas or Monaco to gamble in a big way, the volume was necessarily small, but now numerous gambling sites are just a click of the mouse away. Just as the development of radio broadcasting in the 1920s led to a whole new set of laws to regulate international broadcasting, which were (and are) both obeyed and violated to various degrees, the global nature of the Internet has challenged the sovereignty of nations in an unprecedented way.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, some countries such as China have chosen to spend a lot of effort to control their part of the Internet in various ways. I don't know what China's policy is toward Internet gambling, but the great firewall of China can probably block those sites as effectively as it blocks sites with the word "freedom." Such a restrictive system is unthinkable in this country, where the Internet acquired much of its egalitarian and democratic nature. But the Department of Justice seems to believe that other approaches such as restraining orders and arresting CEOs in airports can have the same effect.

What if you think there's nothing wrong with gambling, even after reading what I have to say about it? Well, if you are an engineer, I suppose you could join the technical support staff of BetOnSports.com without having your conscience bother you. But it seems to me that engineers have a special calling to make life better in some way, and not just one's own life, as in getting a high-paying job. After all, if your only criterion about a career is pay, you should go right out and start running drugs: the hourly rate can't be beat and no higher education is required. If you disagree with that idea, that means you have some moral feelings and intuitions about your career. The thing to do is not to ignore them, but ask yourself what they are, and why you have them. If you figure all this out and still think it's fine to work for an online gaming outfit, then go ahead. But just be careful about where your flights land.

Sources: A report on Carruthers' predicament was carried in the Aug. 1, 2006 online edition of the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/technology/01gamble.html. More information is at the Internet News Bureau site http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3622341. An interesting history of gambling in China by Desmond Lam is at http://www.urbino.net/articles.cfm?specificArticle=A%20Brief%20Chinese%20History%20of%20Gambling. The Maryland study of gambling is cited in a philosophical argument against state lotteries by Verna V. Gehring is at
http://www.publicpolicy.umd.edu/IPPP/Winter-Spring00/The_American_State_Lottery.htm.

Is MySpace a Safer Place?

Back on June 20, I wrote about the Texas Attorney General's efforts to track down cyber predators who abuse popular social-networking websites such as MySpace. At last report, he had rounded up eighty alleged criminals who tried to meet cute under-age girls or boys for nefarious purposes, only to find themselves at the wrong end of a sting operation. The very next day, on June 21, MySpace.com announced a series of new restrictions to help fix the problem. I am certain that this blog played no role in MySpace's decision, but it is equally certain that publicity about the potential for abuse as well as the potential for lawsuits did have an effect.

According to an Associated Press report, the changes make it impossible for anyone registered as being over 18 to view the full profiles of members under 16, unless the older user knows the younger one's email address or full name. (MySpace has long had a lower age limit of 14.) While this is undoubtedly an improvement, the report also pointed out that MySpace simply takes a user's word about age. There is still nothing like the credit-card verification mechanism recommended by the Texas Attorney General to verify the user's age by independent means. So if I decided to masquerade as a 14-year-old boy in order to view the full profiles of 14-year-old girls, I could still do so.

The controversy over MySpace is just one battle in the larger war about privacy and technology. These days, "technology" usually means computers, networks, and the whole communications infrastructure of iPods, websites, and other hardware and software that makes us the most connected society in history. In examining a problem, engineers sometimes like to cook up a worst-case scenario in which everything that could conceivably go wrong does go wrong. If the system they are designing nevertheless withstands such a perfect storm of Murphy's Law ("whatever can go wrong will go wrong"), then the engineers can generally breathe a sigh of relief that the system will make it through more likely incidents in which only some things go wrong. Of course, this assumes that the system is simple enough, and the engineers are imaginative enough, to come up with a truly worst-case situation. But even if these conditions don't always apply, the technique is still a useful one.

What is a worst-case scenario in terms of privacy and technology? The answer may depend on what your own worst fears are.

Say you feel strongly that your financial matters are nobody else's business, and that you value your good credit rating. Your worst cyber-privacy nightmare might then be to have your identity stolen by a gang of hot-check-writing, heroin-using, credit-card-busting criminals who pay for a million-dollar orgy of consumer spending with your financial resources and then flee the country, leaving your credit rating in tatters that will take years to repair.

Say that you like to speak your mind about politics or anything else. Then your worst fears might be that a kind of super-Patriot Act would allow the government to spy on everything you email, blog, say, or see online. Imagine what Joseph Stalin would have done with a Communist version of the Internet. In the old days of manual telephone taps and flesh-and-blood spies, the ability of a government to spy on its citizens was limited by the fact that you could hire only so many spies, and there were never enough to keep tabs on all the citizens all the time. But new automated spyware has lifted that restriction and brought the blessings of increased productivity to the espionage business. My blog on "Engineering Censorship in China" shows how a totalitarian government can use technology to monitor or censor the online activities of over a billion people, with the help of companies like Microsoft.

Say that you have a rare genetic disorder that has a good, but not certain, chance of striking you as a young adult. It won't be fatal, but will require many thousands of dollars' worth of specialized health care over the rest of your lifetime. Do you want your prospective employers or health insurance companies to know this fact about you? Even if they say they will not let it influence their decisions about you, do you believe them? There are laws currently under consideration by the U. S. Congress that will mandate the electronic storage of medical data, which is now largely maintained in the form of paper files. This change does not guarantee that any Joe or Jane off the street will be able to access your medical records, but it is not clear that it will safeguard them perfectly, either.

In each of these cases, something that was at first intended to be a good, convenient, or more efficient way of doing things gets twisted around and used to harm. Systems designed to make it easier to buy things also make it easier to steal things. Those who built features into the Internet to encourage the small-d democratic exchange of ideas now find that some governments use it to repress ideas. Attempts to make medical records more accurate and accessible can also hurt someone with a costly medical problem if insurers or employers use their medical records against them. And a great idea about how to bring people closer together with technology-assisted social networking occasionally helps cyber predators carry out their evil intentions.

While there are many laws of physics that engineers must obey at their peril, there is also one principle of human behavior that is equally important. It goes by various names. In the Christian tradition, it is called "original sin," which means that everyone on Earth has an inherent tendency to do the wrong thing, even if they know the right thing. G. K. Chesterton called this doctrine "the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved." The proof, of course, is empirical. There has never been a technology that has actually been used, which has not ended up causing at least some harm as well as good. And it is foolish to design anything without taking this tried-and-true human factor into account.

Sources: The Associated Press report on MySpace's new restrictions is at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13447786/. One view of the issue of medical privacy rights (the patient-advocate view) can be found at http://www.patientprivacyrights.org. The Chesterton quote is from Orthodoxy (New York: Doubleday, 1990, orig. published 1908), p. 15.

The Big Dig in Big Trouble

Boston's Big Dig project to put much of I-90 underground spanned parts of two centuries and cost more than any other single highway project in the United States. On July 11, when the project was mostly finished and people in Massachusetts thought they could begin to put the disruption and cost overruns behind them, a three-ton ceiling tile came loose in a connector tunnel and killed a newlywed woman. Further investigation has revealed that over a thousand fasteners used to hold up similar tiles are probably defective. What can we learn from all this?

The first lesson is an old one: nothing draws attention like death and destruction. According to a report by Sean Murphy and Raja Mishra in the July 18 Boston Globe, lab tests of the epoxy glue used to hold the fasteners in place were originally scheduled during construction. But officials of Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff, the engineering firm in charge of the Big Dig, felt so confident in the epoxy that they canceled the tests. Now it looks like the tests would have been a good idea, because they might have revealed the kind of problems that ultimately led to the fatal ceiling collapse. But there was no immediate harm that resulted from skipping the tests, so the incident went by unnoticed.

The next lesson is one we hear starting in kindergarten: be sure to follow instructions. Engineering is a constant battle between expensive over-caution on the one hand, and reckless negligence on the other hand. Where lives are at stake, as in the construction of bridges and tunnels, laws require licensed engineers to sign off on plans and specifications. But all the licensed engineers in the world won't do any good if the contractors and builders don't carry out the engineers' instructions to the letter.

Speculation by experts centers on the possibility that the epoxy used to hold the concrete ceiling tiles up was either not prepared and applied correctly, or used with oily steel. Steel as it comes from the factory has a thin coating of oil on it, and unless this oil is cleaned off prior to use, adhesives such as epoxy cannot form a good bond. Even if the steel was clean, the widely varying temperatures at a Boston construction site may have interfered with the chemical changes that epoxy goes through in order to harden. Inadequately hardened plastic adhesives can "creep" under stress, moving a tiny fraction of an inch every month, until the entire joint fails. Whatever was done wrong, it appears to have been done wrong consistently, because Governor Mitt Romney has announced that over 1300 fasteners are suspect and will have to be removed or replaced.

Further investigations will eventually reveal what went wrong, and possibly who was responsible. Structural engineering is based mostly on physical science, and things don't generally fall down for no reason at all. But finding the physical cause gets us only part way toward preventing similar accidents in the future. Until the human organizations that let such things happen are repaired and kept in order, the same thing can happen again. In a way, it has.

The Boston tunnel collapse is strangely similar in some ways to a much more serious tragedy that happened twenty-five years ago this month. On July 11, 1981, several hundred people gathered on a suspended concrete walkway to watch a dance party in the newly opened Hyatt Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri. The walkway was held up by steel rods which should have been strong enough to support the weight of the crowd. If they had been installed according to the original engineering plan, everything would have been fine. But on the site, a contractor decided to make a subtle change in the way the rods were made and assembled. This change greatly weakened the structure and caused it to collapse that evening, killing 114 people and injuring 200. Again, we had heavy concrete slabs, dangerous to life, suspended by thin steel rods. Again, if the plans had been carried out to the letter, the disaster would not have occurred. This is not to say that nobody should ever suspend heavy concrete slabs with thin steel rods again, or that engineers never make mistakes. They do. But the point is that responsibility inheres not only in those who make plans, but in those who carry them out and those charged with making sure that the work agrees with the plans.

Everyone involved in a building project, from those who pay for it, to the architects and engineers, to the contractors, to inspectors, down to the lowliest laborer cleaning up afterwards, has to walk that same line between excessive over-caution and reckless carelessness. Since the vast majority of engineering projects work without major failures or loss of life, we can assume that most of these folks do their job well enough most of the time. But an accident like the Big Dig tunnel collapse reminds us of what has to happen at every step of the way, and what can go wrong if somebody doesn't pay enough attention to details that don't seem to matter at the time.

Sources: The Boston Globe articles cited are at http://www.boston.com/news/globe/city_region/breaking_news/2006/07/romney_number_o.html (Gov. Romney's announcement) and http://www.boston.com/news/traffic/bigdig/articles/2006/07/18/workers_doubted_ceiling_method/ (the neglected lab tests). A string of technical discussions on the general subject of epoxy ceiling fasteners and how they can fail is at the Engineering Tips website http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=159632&page=1. The Wikipedia article about the Kansas City Hyatt Regency walkway collapse is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse.