Electronic Voting: Why or Why Not?

In case you hadn't noticed, we're going to elect a president here in a few months, and that means voting. Eight years ago, the humble machinery used to register ballot counts got dragged into the national spotlight when the Florida presidential election count uncertainties cast doubt on who would be sitting in the Oval Office on Jan. 20, 2001. Reports of hanging chad and other voting-system flaws motivated many local governments (which are the entities that deal with the nitty-gritty of running elections nationwide) to invest in shiny new all-electronic voting systems. But in recent years, there have been questions raised about the reliability and security of these new systems, and reportedly some municipalities are going back to the paper ballot (although still counted by computers).

What are the basic ethical issues in engineering a voting system for use by the general public? And why can't we seem to make up our minds as to which way is best?

First of all, who is involved? Every citizen meeting the legal qualifications to vote has a right to exercise that privilege. So to begin with, you have voters whose right to express their judgment in a democracy is guaranteed by law. Balloting nowadays is also secret (it didn't used to be, incidentally, even in the U. S.), so there has to be some way to ensure privacy in the voting booth.

Next you have the people being elected. They have a right to a reasonably accurate count. Not a perfect count: if we threw out the results of every election that had even one detectable flaw, we'd still be living in a monarchy. But since most elections are not photo-finish ones decided by only a few dozen votes, perfection isn't required, only accuracy that is better than the margin of victory in most cases.

Other interested parties include the election officials, the vendors selling the hardware and software used for voting, and way back in the back rooms of those firms, the engineers who design and develop the voting systems. Though these engineers are invisible to nearly everybody else, they obviously play a key role.

Now that we have identified the main parties to the matter, what can go wrong? Just to make things interesting, let's compare the latest touch-screen voting systems with the totally manual paper ballots that were used, for example, in the 1948 election that put Lyndon B. Johnson in the Senate.

There is a strong, almost intuitive, bias toward paper records in law and politics. Paper and ink are just as technological as computers and software—it's just that paper is an older and more familiar technology. It is integrated in our ways of thinking in ways that digital technology isn't, at least not yet. Plus which, paper systems can be easier to understand, and transparent in a way that software, for instance, is not. Unless a document is written in Urdu, say, or legalese that only a lawyer can decipher, you don't need an expert to read paper, but you do need one to tell what's going on in software.

All that familiarity with paper was of no avail when certain shenanigans went on in certain South Texas voting precincts back in 1948. Johnson biographer Robert Caro has shown how as many as 10,000 ballots in the Democratic primary that effectively determined the election outcome were highly suspect. And in an election that was won by only some 300 votes, that was more than enough to determine the outcome. The point is that, given enough corrupt officials and political pressure in the right places, paper ballots are no sure-fire defense against fraud. But everybody knows that.

With all-electronic voting, not only are people worried that a malevolent hacker working for one party will infest the system software to deliver enough votes to push that party's candidate to victory, but that mistakes or malfunctions will go undetected because without paper records, there is no way for the average non-technical election worker or politician to check the results. The only people who can even come close to doing that are the folks who can look at the software innards of the machines, and even they can't always recover a blow-by-blow description of everything that went on during the voting.

A recent New York Times editorial pointed out three instances in the last few years in which either all-electronic or partly electronic voting systems led to incidents which at least cast doubt on the results. The editorial writers came out with a proposal which is also being seriously studied by engineering researchers: voter-verified paper record systems (VVPRS for short). In these systems, each voter gets to see a piece of paper that reproduces his or her choices, and if the paper doesn't match the voter's desired choices, the voter can start over and do it right. Only when the voter is satisfied does the ballot get recorded, both electronically and on good old cellulose.

Of course, printing out a bunch of paper in addition to doing electronic ballot recording takes away some of the advantages of the digital system, but it's no different than in other areas where computers have found use. I remember the day when Bill Gates said that computers would eventually make the paperless office possible. As I recall, stocks in paper companies plummeted the next day, but the finance types needn't have worried. If anything, we have more paper to deal with than ever, now that it's so easy to print professional-looking documents at the touch of a button. But I digress.

Paper, electronics, white and black stones—fundamentally, voting is a non-material process mediated by physical communication systems, and the physical media used doesn't much matter if the will of the people is adequately expressed through it. Integrity, good will, and common sense makes it work pretty well most of the time, which is all you can expect of human systems. The big scandal about U. S. elections is not the technology, but the fact that so many people pass up the opportunity to vote. Don't let that be true of you this November.

Sources: The New York Times editorial appeared on July 31, 2008 at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/31/opinion/31observer.html. A paper describing a study of a VVPRS electronic voting system by Nirwan Ansari and others at the New Jersey Institute of Technology appeared in IEEE Security and Privacy for May/June 2008, pp. 30-39. And LBJ's South Texas ballot tricks are described in Robert A. Caro's excellent multivolume biography The Years of Lyndon Johnson.

Free Rides on the MBTA: MIT Hackers and the Law

Does the principle of freedom to share technical information about computer system vulnerabilities mean that you can tell folks how to get free rides on Boston's MBTA? A federal judge doesn't think so. And the way all this came about raises some interesting questions in engineering ethics.

A bunch of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spent some time finding security flaws in the subway system: things like doors and turnstile boxes left unlocked and ways to duplicate the magnetic-stripe and RFID cards to get a free ride. That they did so is not surprising: any time you put a lot of super-competitive technologically savvy kids in a pressure-cooker environment like MIT, they're going to seek recreational relief in activities that will showcase their expertise. But then they went further by documenting their exploits in an 87-slide PowerPoint presentation and entered it in the annual Defcon convention in Las Vegas.

Now I'll be frank that I've never attended a Defcon, but I can imagine the atmosphere: lots of under-30 guys trying to impress each other with their computer prowess amid the partying and general high jinks that Las Vegas encourages. A perfect place, you would think, to brag about hacking the MBTA. Well, the Defcon organizers thought so, because they put the MIT students' talk on the schedule and distributed it in the proceedings CD handed to all registrants. Then the MBTA lawyers found out about it and went to court to block the talk. The federal judge's restraining order did this, but the CD copies found their way to the Internet and the talk is now roaming freely in cyberspace.

According to a lawyer for the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, an organization defending the students, they planned to omit certain key information that would have made it easy for anyone hearing the talk to get free rides. Of course, what is key information to some people is a trivial exercise for others, but we'll never know now, because the talk scheduled for Sunday wasn't delivered.

Let's consider the students to be software engineers—they are acting that way, whether or not they have their degrees yet. As software engineers, they discovered numerous flaws and security breaches in the MBTA's system of controlling access to subways. What should they have done?

The MBTA claims that the students never gave the organization a chance to fix the problems. Instead, the students went straight to Defcon with their findings. You must admit the MBTA has a point, but on the other hand, if the students had shown MBTA officials their talk first and then waited until the problems were fixed to present it in public, it would have taken the edge off, to say the least. And large municipal outfits such as the MBTA are not well known for being able to turn on a dime. The students might have all graduated and gotten real jobs before it was completely safe to talk about what they did back in their young, free undergrad days, and by then it would be ancient software history, not current events.

Back thirty years or so when "computer security" only meant making sure the door to the mainframe computer room was locked, a computer firm approached students at my alma mater, Caltech, with a new operating system and asked them explicitly to try and hack it. The company figured that if the Caltech junior whizzes couldn't break the system, nobody else was likely to, either. Perhaps the MBTA should be grateful for the free consulting work the MIT students did, but not for the way they found out about it.

It's hard to think of a way this situation could have been handled that would have left everybody happy. If someone with diplomatic skills had approached the MBTA with an early copy of the talk and asked their help in tuning it so it wouldn't spill all the digital beans, but would still make the important points, MBTA might have refrained from calling out the lawyers. On the other hand, sometimes it takes the sting of surprise publicity and the ensuing embarrassment to prod sluggish bureaucracies into action. You can bet that copies of the talk are being studied by MBTA engineers already, whether or not they pursue the legal actions they've initiated.

Anyway, happiness isn't necessarily the goal of engineering ethics. And sending around instructions on how to get a free subway ride is not in the same league as, for example, propagating directions on how to blow up subway cars. Still, it seems that the students could have taken a little more care to consider how the MBTA was going to view things. And if they didn't do it this time, they'll have the experience to draw on later in life when they remember back in their wild undergrad days how they got the MBTA on their backs for a hack they tried to show at Defcon.

Sources: The San Jose Mercury-News carried an AP article about the incident at http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_10163740?source=rss. The Electronic Frontiers Foundation currently features the case prominently on its website at www.eff.org.

Guarding the Guardians

Trust is a fragile thing. But it's also the mortar that holds organizations together. Two ongoing news items have brought to mind the critical role trust plays in engineering and what can happen when it's betrayed.

Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, envelopes containing a white powder that turned out to be anthrax spores showed up in the offices of several Congressmen and elsewhere, killing a total of five people and shutting down an entire Congressional office building for a time. The FBI investigation of the incidents progressed largely out of public view until a scientist at the U. S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID, for short) named Bruce Ivins committed suicide last week. Although much remains to be revealed about the situation, it appears that a recently developed genetic test has linked the anthrax spores used in the 2001 attacks to anthrax that Ivins was working on. Ironically, Ivins was one of several scientists the FBI called on to assist with the original investigation.

The second item concerned a computer engineer named Terry Childs, who worked for the city of San Francisco in a highly responsible position in which he had exclusive control of certain passwords needed to make changes in the city's computer systems. It looks like Mr. Childs and his colleagues got into some kind of dispute that devolved into Mr. Childs being arrested on four felony counts of computer tampering. When it was discovered that nobody else in San Francisco knew those passwords, Mayor Gavin Newsome accepted an invitation by Childs' attorney to meet Childs in person at the jail, and got the passwords out of him, thus averting a potential computer disaster if changes had needed to be made to the system.

Both of these cases are far from over, and I hold no particular brief for either side of either dispute. But if either Bruce Ivins or Terry Childs turns out to have done what it looks like they might have done, we've got two failures on our hands. And to continue the theme of double trouble, both failures are of two kinds.

First, the personal failures. Suppose Ivins in fact did what it seems the FBI thinks he may have done: taken some of the anthrax spores he was developing exclusively for the purpose of coming up with defenses against them, and using them in real attacks. His motivation for such a heinous act can only be guessed at. One newswriter speculated that if Ivins was trying to gain attention and funding for what he thought was a neglected area of research, he succeeded—but at the price of five lives and the anxiety of millions. That kind of thing gets an F on anyone's moral calculus exam. And although Childs' accusations that the information technology department in San Francisco is corrupt and incompetently run may in fact be true, that doesn't justify his holding the entire system hostage by absconding with passwords, even though there were no service disruptions as a result of his actions. There is, I hope, little or no debate that these individuals did wrong if the accusations against them turn out to be true.

But what about the organizational failures? So many times it happens that engineering tragedies come about, not because any one person did something wicked or devious, but simply because the system allowed little slipups and slight ignorance here and there to cascade into a disaster. If Ivins really was able to take anthrax spores outside his lab and mail them from post offices in New Jersey, there is something wrong with the security system at the USAMRIID. But short of 100% body searches of everyone coming in and out of the labs, I'm not sure how you would improve it.

I don't know what the organization's policy is on allowing scientists to work alone, but if they allow such things, maybe they ought to stop. If there are always at least two people present any time hot stuff like anthrax spores are being worked on, you now have to have a conspiracy in order to take some away for nefarious purposes. Conspiracies aren't impossible, but they're less likely than the actions of one individual with malicious intent acting alone.

And the same goes for the San Francisco IT organization. Computer engineers can be notoriously poor communicators, and it is quite possible that nobody other than Childs knew that he had these powerful passwords under his exclusive control. There just seems to be something about the type of personality drawn to that line of work which delights in exclusive control of things. But once you trade your own personal computer games for a system that is essential for the safety and livelihoods of thousands of people, the penchant for exclusivity has to go out the window. No amount of organizational incompetence, personal distrust of others' motives, or so on can justify a computer engineer's taking matters into his or her own hands that way. This is an elementary lesson that ought to be drilled into the head of every computer-engineering student, but such uniformity in education is just a pipe dream at this point.

You can remember the lesson here with the adage, "two heads are better than one." Usually it's taken to mean that it's easier to solve problems with help, and that's true. But in technical organizations where life-critical matters are being dealt with, it's always dangerous when the system allows solitary individuals to do things that threaten the system's integrity. Rules enforcing the principle of never working alone or of always sharing system-critical passwords go against the personality grain of some types of engineers. But they're needed, and might have prevented the problems that were the focus of the news items we've just discussed.

Sources: An early report on the Ivins case can be found in the Los Angeles Times at http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-anthrax1-2008aug01,0,2864223.story. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the Childs incident at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/22/BAGF11T91U.DTL&tsp=1

Not Really The Only Ethics Rule You'll Ever Need

After responding to my esteemed correspondent Michael Faris last week, I have heard from him again. This time he reminds me that I failed to respond to what he considers his most important argument: that opposing same-sex marriage violates the Golden Rule ("Do to others as you would have them do to you."). Even though I wrote last week that we were done with the issue, I think it's worthwhile to go with one more round, because the question of the Golden Rule's applicability has wider application than the specific matter that brought it up.

Now it is true that I wrote a short piece last year entitled "The Only Ethics Rule You'll Ever Need," meaning the Golden Rule. My point then was that if you're going to limit yourself to one rule of ethics to memorize, the Golden Rule wasn't a bad one to pick. But it's hard to treat all of moral philosophy in a 600-word column, and what I didn't say was that although the Golden Rule (or something like it) is needed in order for anyone to engage in meaningful ethical analysis, it is not sufficient. Let me give a simple example to show how the Golden Rule by itself can land you in a contradiction. And to make it more interesting, it'll be a personal experience.

My late father started smoking when he was a teenager, and kept it up to the day he was diagnosed with lung cancer at the age of 56, in 1983. He died of it a year later. Back in the 1970s, when the news came out that smoking probably caused lung cancer, I went on a little campaign of my own to convince him not to smoke. He liked smoking, he'd tried quitting and couldn't, and he finally told me to mind my own business because I was making a pest of myself. So I piped down.

Now how does the Golden Rule apply in that case? How was I going to do to him as I would have him do to me? I saw him doing something that was bad for him, so I encouraged him to stop. If I were doing something that could hurt me, I'd want him to tell me so (and in fact he did—numerous times—while I was growing up). Philosopher Karl Popper has proposed what some have since called the "Platinum Rule": namely, do unto others as they want to be done by. In other words, don't just do to others what would make you happy, given your tastes, preferences, and standards; take into consideration what the other person's tastes and standards are, and do to them what they would like, not what you would like.

Clearly, this latter version is what Mr. Faris has in mind when he says that keeping same-sex marriages illegal violates the Golden Rule. According to him, we should take the desires of those who want same-sex marriage into consideration, and allow it. But what if I applied the Platinum Rule to the case of my father's smoking? Clearly, he didn't want to hear my nagging about it. So if I did to him as he wanted to be done by, I should never have told him to stop smoking. But if I did to him as I would have wanted to be done by, I should have insisted he stop. It's easy to come up with other examples where the Golden Rule gives contradictory answers, depending on whether you use your own preferences or those of the person you're dealing with.

Leaving aside the specific issues—same-sex marriage, smoking, jaywalking, or what have you—the point here is that neither the Golden Rule nor the Platinum Rule gives unequivocal answers. To the extent that you must use your imagination to put yourself in the other person's place, the rules help you to do this. But if the other person wants something that is bad for them, or just bad in general, applying either rule mechanically can lead to answers that go against other moral principles. What about the guy who walks into a bar looking for a fight? Making him happy means somebody else will get beat up.

That is what I meant when I said the Golden Rule is necessary, but not sufficient. Jesus and many other moral teachers have endorsed the Golden Rule. As a Christian, I am committed not so much to this rule or that rule, but to a Person. In my view of what that Person said and did, I do not believe same-sex marriage is as important an issue as certain others, such as euthanasia and abortion, but I don't think it is without moral implications, either. I do not expect anyone who does not share my religious convictions to give them any weight, which is why I did not bring religion into the argument. I mention religion here only because the Golden Rule took us into the realm of moral philosophy, and I try to base my moral philosophy on Christian principles.

If I knew what Mr. Faris's moral philosophy was, I could say more about his argument with regard to the Golden Rule, but I don't. I thank him for this opportunity to clarify my thoughts on the issue, and sincerely hope that next week we'll get back to engineering ethics.

Sources: The Wikipedia article "Ethics of Reciprocity" cites numerous versions of the Golden Rule from a wide variety of religious traditions, and also contains the quotation from Karl Popper that I used for the Platinum Rule and the example of the guy picking a fight in a bar. My article "The Only Ethics Rule You'll Ever Need" appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.

Marriage and Engineering Revisited

Back on May 31, I argued here that allowing same-sex marriage in the U. S. could conceivably damage our prospects for raising the next generation of engineers. It elicited several responses, including a remarkably thoughtful and articulate set of counterarguments by Michael Faris, an instructor in business and technical writing at Oregon State University. In the time since, I have read David Blankenhorn's The Future of Marriage (I admitted I had only read the reviews of it earlier). In the May 31 blog, I cited that book to support my arguments that children raised in circumstances other than a two-biological-parent family do not do as well, in a variety of measures, as children who grow up under the care of their own mother and father.

Reading the book has given me a deeper understanding of the complex issues involved, and I would like to explore a few of them briefly here as I respond to some of Mr. Faris's arguments. For those of you who are wondering what this has to do with engineering ethics, the point is that anything which encourages the development of stable, intellectually agile, and dedicated young adults will augur well for the future of engineering education, and without such people, there won't be as many future engineers. Also, there's some interesting ethical reasoning in this issue to be explored on its own.

First, I will concede a couple of points to Mr. Faris.

He claimed that maybe white, male, middle-class students do better in engineering, not because they are "inherently 'superior,'" but because such students receive "unearned privileges" such as living in better school districts than students of poorer single parents, having more relatives and friends who are college graduates, and so on. I will admit that I did not consider these kinds of factors in my original arguments, although they are difficult to disentangle from intrinsic abilities and character.

Second, he said my likening same-sex marriage to flooding the engineering-degree market with bogus degrees from fake institutions was a bad analogy. I admit that the comparison was poorly chosen and rather obscure. But as my reading of Blankenhorn revealed, that analogy turned out to be my intuitive way of groping toward a point that Blankenhorn makes abundantly clear in his book. That point is the "deinstitutionalization" of marriage. What does he mean by that?

Social institutions of any kind—marriage, universities, the legal system, you name it—both grant rights and require responsibilities of those who participate in them. If people claim the rights without following the rules that specify the responsibilities, the institution collapses, and whatever good it was doing disappears along with it. To remove the responsibilities from marriage, or any other institution, is to deinstitutionalize it, which radically reduces its beneficial effects for society.

To oversimplify Blankenhorn's main point, the promotion of same-sex marriage is an attempt to use marriage for a purpose it was not designed to fulfill: the promotion of human dignity for gay people. Blankenhorn is in favor of giving gay people equal recognition as full members of society. But he sees this good thing to be in conflict with another good thing: the right of every child to be cared for by their natural mother and father. He sees the latter good as the primary institutional purpose of marriage, which is why sexual intercourse and the care of children are responsibilities involved in the institution as it has historically stood.

He shows, in more detail than I can outline here, how the legalization of same-sex marriage must change the meaning of marriage for every single person in the country—married, single, with or without children, and for the children themselves. It already has in Canada. Largely because of that nation's implementation of same-sex marriage, the term "natural parent" has been eliminated in Canadian law, and replaced by the term "legal parent." And that isn't just for children of same-sex couples—it's for everybody. In law, there is no longer any such thing as a natural parent in Canada. Parents are now what the law says they are, period. My badly chosen analogy to the debauching of engineering degrees was simply my attempt to show how you can wreck an institution by lowering its standards. Changing marriage from what the U. N. Declaration of Human Rights says it is when it guarantees "the right to marry and to found a family," which is "the natural and fundamental group unit of society. . . entitled to protection by society and the State," to what one judge called "a celebration of a life of commitment to the relationship" lowers the standards of marriage.

Mr. Faris discounted my citation of "objective" social-science research that shows children raised in a two-biological-parent family do better, saying that social science is an "ideology." He implied that if a thing is ideological, then it can't be objective. By "objective," I simply mean that which is the same for me, for you, and for everybody else—that which is public knowledge, as opposed to a subjective feeling or sensation. If Mr. Faris wants to call social science an ideology, that is his privilege. But that does not change the fact that if you look at two different groups of children, one group being raised by their two natural parents and the other some other way, and the natural-parent group drops out of school less, commits suicide less, does drugs less, engages in early sex and has babies in their teenage years less, then those numerical facts are the same facts for everybody, whether you call them ideological or not.

The last point I will address is the one Mr. Faris makes here: "Our current Western model of family didn't arise because it was best for children; it arose because it was best for the continuity of property under a capitalist system." I beg to differ. He says there are societies in which children are raised "communally" or by "large extended families." First, I am unaware of any society, present or past (with two exceptions that Blankenhorn cites) in which the biological mother and father, if available, do not play a lead role in the raising of children, however much the extended family or community or the village raises the child as well. Blankenhorn uses the example of the Trobriand Islanders in the South Pacific as a society in which conventional inheritance of property as we know it in the West is largely unknown (uncles, for example, take on the primary responsibility for providing food), but in which the mother and father play primary roles in the raising of children. This is not to say that property rights are not related to family structure at all. But Mr. Faris is simply wrong when he claims that property rights are the main reason for the near-universal practice of mothers and fathers bearing the main responsibility for raising their children.

I understand from his blog that Mr. Faris will be pursuing a Ph. D. in English rhetoric and composition at Penn State in the fall. I wish him the best in his pursuits, and thank him for his thoughtful and stimulating comments. All the same, it looks like we will have to agree to disagree on this topic, which I will now give a well-deserved rest.

Sources: My original blog on this topic was "California Supreme Court Damages Future of Engineering" on May 31. Mr. Faris's comments can be found below that entry, and his website "A Collage of Citations" is currently at http://oregonstate.edu/~farism/blog/. The quotations from the U. N. Declaration of Human Rights is from p. 182, and the judge's definition of marriage is from p. 147, of David Blankenhorn's The Future of Marriage (Encounter Books, 2007).

Too Good To Be Ethical

You've probably heard the saying, "If it's too good to be true, it probably isn't'." If someone came up to you and offered to let you invest in a project to make free energy, what would you do? Or what if you were looking for an engineering job, and got an offer from a company working on such a project? This isn't as farfetched as it sounds.

Over my years as an engineering professor, I have run across my share of techno-eccentrics: people who promote ideas or theories that obviously violate the known laws of physics. Some of them were relatively harmless—the guy who thought he could replace all of Maxwell's electromagnetic equations with diagrams of springs, for example, or the fellow who said he found a meteorite in Barton Creek in Austin and claimed to have made a battery with it that generates huge amounts of energy. But every so often I come across someone who is clearly using an idea like this to raise lots of money. And then things get complicated.

Recently I heard a presentation by a fellow who claims to have developed a way to generate energy from nothing. He's been working on this for the last twenty years, he says, and now has built a system that takes eighty-five kilowatts of power to run and puts out 800 kilowatts—you do the math. No fuel, no solar input or anything, just run it and it makes energy from nothing.

How does it work, if it works as he claims? Well, there are two things to be considered: what he says it does, and what it actually does. They may not be the same. What he says he does is to heat up gas or air with a microwave oven and a high-voltage transformer until some quantum-mechanical things go on, and presto!—free energy.

Now, quantum-mechanical things are always going on everywhere, and people have been heating gas with microwaves and high-voltage transformers for decades. Nobody other than the gentleman in question has claimed to get out eight times more power than they put in for hours at a time. Although he appeared at a scientific meeting, he clearly delivered more of a sales pitch than a technical presentation. He admitted he wasn't telling everything he knew, claiming that he had to protect his investors, from whom he has already raised millions of dollars.

This situation raises a number of questions which need to be addressed in a logical order. The first question is, does he really get the results that he claims? The scientific way of answering this question is to try to duplicate his experiment. But this is impossible, because he has already told us that he hasn't described all the details necessary. The purpose of describing experiments, all the way back to Robert Boyle of Boyle's Law, is to make things so clear that anyone with the necessary equipment can duplicate them and get essentially the same results. By refusing to do so, the free-energy man is clearly not acting like a scientist, but like a promoter.

The law of macroscopic conservation of matter-energy (allowing for the conversion of matter into energy as in nuclear fusion reactions) is so basic to modern science, that any reputable scientist will resort to almost any other alternative than to question it. But this gentleman runs right up to the issue and says you can get away with violating it under some conditions having to do with quantum mechanics. Judging by some other things he said, he is using the words "quantum mechanics" merely as an incantation to get people to suspend their common-sense disbelief that you can get energy from nothing.

Philosophically speaking, there is a logical possibility that he has evaded the conservation of matter-energy, but if he has, it's the biggest scientific discovery of the last three centuries. In order to be recognized as such, however, the data must be presented in a scientific way for experimental validation, and this has not been done. A discovery that is not generally recognized is not yet a dis-covery, in that it remains covered or concealed to most people except perhaps to the discoverer. And if this fellow really has something, it's clear to me that he doesn't understand the details of the scientific issues involved.

Well, if he's not a scientist, is he acting like an ethical engineer? That takes us to the next question: is he consciously perpetrating a fraud, or does he sincerely believe that he's getting free energy? This question is not so easy to answer. Some crooks plan to be crooks from the start, know they are acting as crooks, and even glory in their crookedness. But many con artists have a psychological makeup that allows them to maintain an emotional belief in the legitimacy of their crooked scheme, even as they are pocketing the profits and delivering little or nothing of value to the victims. When they're caught, they will make excuses like, "Well, if you had just let me operate for another six months, everything would have worked out fine and everybody would have gotten their money back." This faith in the rightness of their evil schemes allows them to sell their ideas with a zeal and sincerity that convinces the gullible—and there are always plenty of those types around, even among trained professionals.

Nevertheless, just because a crook believes sincerely in a fraud doesn't make it any less of a fraud. Just as ignorance of the law is no excuse for violating the law, a sincere belief that a fraud is either technically or legally sound is no excuse for perpetrating it on people. That is why all good engineering is based on the best available scientific principles. If an engineer happens to discover something that seems to violate a well-known physical law, the first thing to question isn't the physical law—it's the engineer's own experiments and calculations. And while these days, few working engineers are in fields where they have opportunities to make fundamental scientific discoveries, it has been known to happen.

The case of Karl Jansky is an example. Purely as a practical matter, he was hired by the Bell Telephone Labs to investigate sources of radio noise in order to improve long-distance shortwave transmission in the 1930s. When he detected a mysterious source of noise that seemed to move around slowly with the seasons, he tracked it for an entire year in order to make sure it was really coming from outer space. Once he was sure of his findings, he published his results. Without really meaning to, Jansky founded the scientific discipline of radioastronomy. This discovery wasn't the kind that he could have personally profited from, but if it had been, I think he would have had the integrity to report it to his employers and to the scientific community anyway.

I expect our free-energy friend will go on for a while raising capital with his flashy machinery until the inevitable crash, which he will blame on anything and everything except himself. Of course, there's the tiny, tiny possibility that he's really on to something. If he is, well, you read about it here first. But if I were you, I wouldn't hold my breath.

E-Haste Makes E-Waste

Last night some young people came by the house taking signatures and contributions for the Texas Campaign for the Environment. We see folks like this several times a year, and this time their issue was e-waste. My wife gave them a small sum and wrote and mailed four letters to legislators about the issue. And I'm blogging about it, so that's my bit for the cause.

What is e-waste? Basically, anything electronic that you throw away—cell phones, computers, TVs, electric toothbrushes, and so on. And as I heard someone say a few years ago, "there isn't any 'away' anymore." We are increasingly aware that trash has to go somewhere, and electronic waste causes peculiar problems in landfills. Most of it is held together with solder, and until a few years ago all solder had lead in it. Cadmium plating was popular for steel chassis, certain plastics have toxic plasticizers that leach out into the soil, and so for a variety of reasons, e-waste is one of the less attractive types of garbage to put on top of your water table. And it's highly non-biodegradable—there's a good chance that the twentieth century will be known to future archaeologists as the Cathode-Ray Tube Era, since the big glass bottles we watched TV on for many years will probably outlast almost all other artifacts from our time, like pottery shards in ancient Sumerian archaeological digs.

Anyway, over two million tons of e-waste went to municipal dumps in the U. S. as long ago as 2005, when the annual rate of increase was running between five and seven percent, so who knows what it is now. And next February, when millions of analog TVs in the U. S. become instantly useless for anything but viewing old VHS videotapes, the flood of e-trash is sure to increase.

Years ago the European Union decided to shift some of the burden of disposing of e-waste from the consumer and the government onto the manufacturers who make the stuff. They have what is called "extended product responsibility" (EPR), which means that you can't simply make and sell electronics and wash your hands of all responsibility once the things are sold. Manufacturers (or their agents) are under an obligation with EPR to take back used and obsolete electronics and dispose of it in an environmentally responsible way. This costs the manufacturers more than otherwise, but it also gives them an incentive to change their products so they are easier to dispose of. "Easier" can mean anything from no-lead solder (which is now required in Europe) to reducing the size and weight of products overall. What it apparently doesn't mean is making products that will last longer, and not just in terms of not breaking down.

In all the discussions of e-waste I've seen, the unmentioned elephant in the room is the fact that the whole consumer-electronics economy is based on faster and faster product life cycles. A personal comparison may be apt here. During my brief foray into industry around 1980, I worked for a company that made mobile radios for ambulances, fire trucks, and so on. We were developing a new product line of radios to replace the previous line, which came out about 1972. So, taking this recollection as a guide, the lifetime for that product, in terms of how long it would remain basically the same piece of equipment for sale with only minor changes, was eight years. Of course, police departments and private consumers are two different breeds of cat, but the point is that sales were generated from new customers, not by making the same customers throw away something they just bought six months ago in order to buy a newer model.

But the newer-better-faster speedup cycle—the "e-haste" of my headline—is the reigning paradigm in consumer electronics today. Product and even component life cycles are now measured in months, not years. Such rapidity used to be physically impossible, but with modern computer-aided design and manufacturing tools, an entirely new product can be designed, developed, tested, and in full production in three to six months. Having acquired this wonderful tool, manufacturers use it to the limit, which is why you can't find parts for anything electronic older than a couple of years. That's an exaggeration, of course, but perilously close to the truth.

I applaud the efforts of those who are trying to get take-back laws passed in the U. S., although they have an uphill battle to fight. The fact is that the vast majority of consumer electronics bought in this country is made in Asia, and we lack the protectionist motives that partly inspired the European Union's move toward take-back laws. Still, we are a big market, and if we decided to move to EPR, U. S.-based retailers such as Wal-Mart would have to deal with it somehow. I can't picture shiploads of obsolete PCs making their way back to China for disposal, but if that happened, I would be very careful to check up on what happened to them once they got back to their country of origin. There are already third-world countries whose leaders have turned to accepting U. S. waste streams for fun and profit, to the harm of the average citizenry, and we don't want to make that kind of problem worse by passing laws that just move the junk offshore. And there is another way yet, and that is to deal with the elephant face-to-face.

There is a discipline in many religious traditions called simplicity. It means basically not buying, doing, or having things that are not necessary. And of course you can spend a lifetime figuring out what "necessary" means. Unless you live like a hermit, you will eventually have to buy some number of electronic gizmos just to get along in today's world. And simplicity has never made for big new markets—the last thing electronics manufacturers want to do is to sell you something you can use for ten years without spending any more money on it. But if enough people ask for things that you don't have to throw away right after you've learned how to use it because the software is obsolete or everybody else has the new model that yours isn't compatible with, maybe the manufacturers will start making things that way.

Sources: An organization called the Electronics Take-Back Coalition (www.computertakeback.com) has collected statistics from the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency and other sources, some of which I used for this column.

Carbon Nanotubes and Cancer: A Hazard Forestalled?

Writing about engineering ethics can be a grim business: plane crashes, fires, explosions, or insidious deaths from apparently innocuous things that people did decades earlier show up with depressing regularity in this column. So I try to look for good news every now and then, and a few weeks ago some showed up in the New York Times, of all places.
The good news is not unmixed with bad news, but hey, I'll take what I can get.

The bad news is that it looks like carbon nanotubes—those tiny rods of carbon atoms arranged on a hexagonal grid like chicken wire—may have the potential to cause cancer under certain special conditions. The good news is, we know about the problem long before any epidemiological evidence has shown up that people have actually been harmed in this way.
This looks like a success story of how research dollars spent on engineering-ethics-related matters have actually paid off with some useful information. But first, let me describe carbon nanotubes and summarize the results of the research.

Starting in the early 1990s, many scientists began to be aware that under certain conditions, carbon forms long, thin tubes that can be less than a billionth of a meter in diameter but thousands of times longer than that. The term "nanotube" was invented to describe these structures, and since then there has been a race of sorts both on the scientific and engineering fronts to exploit their fascinating properties. One peculiarity they show is that they conduct electricity extremely well along the axis of the tube, so well that I understand one prominent commercial application is in carbon motor brushes. Anybody who uses a power-line-powered electric drill has used carbon brushes—sometimes you can see sparks from them toward the back of the drill. The purpose of the brush is to conduct current to the armature (the moving part) of the motor. Brushes made with properly aligned nanotubes are more efficient at this than the regular kind, although their added cost doesn't justify using them in consumer products such as drills. But in heavy industrial applications where the brushes may conduct hundreds of amps, they make enough difference to sell.

Anyway, some researchers in the United Kingdom and the U. S. got some government funding to see whether carbon nanotubes might be dangerous to health. One reason to suspect this might be the case has to do with the shape of the nanotubes: long and thin. It turns out that one of the main reasons asbestos particles can cause an otherwise rare form of lung cancer called mesothelioma appears to be that they, too, are long and thin (that's why asbestos is a mineral fiber that can be woven into sheets). Although the connection between the shape of asbestos fibers and this type of cancer is not entirely clear, there is abundant evidence that associates exposure to asbestos with mesothelioma. So the researchers thought it would be worth looking into to see if carbon nanotubes could cause precancerous lesions in mice.

Well, they do. The experiment wasn't continued to the point that the mice actually developed cancer, but they did get inflammation and certain lesions associated with precancerous conditions.

The first thing that will happen is, the researchers will apply for more funding to look into the question further. That seems reasonable, because it's a long stretch from precancerous lesions in mice to actual cancer in humans. The next thing that ought to happen is that people should use appropriate precautions when dealing with carbon nanotubes. What would "appropriate precautions" amount to?

Well, nothing like an outright ban, for example. We have learned how to deal with all kinds of hazardous substances over time, and carbon nanotubes don't seem to be nearly as hazardous as some other kinds of stuff you have around the house—drain cleaner or bleach, for example. If you can keep people from breathing or swallowing carbon nanotubes, the things should be perfectly safe to use otherwise. This may present a problem if someone wants to weave them into clothing, for example, but most of the interesting applications have nothing to do with textiles.

On the other hand, having been forewarned by at least one forward-looking study, we shouldn't totally ignore the potential health hazards that carbon nanotubes might present in the future. All too often, the typical way that health hazards of newly introduced substances have been discovered is that people simply start selling products with the new stuff in them, and months or years later, some weird rare malady starts showing up in a few people (or sometimes not so few). And it takes a lot of epidemiologists doing a lot of Sherlock Holmesing to find the cause. By the time they do, whole industries dependent on the substance in question may have large vested interests in the status quo, and so you get a big political tussle as well as delays in appropriate regulations, if they are enacted at all.

This happened with asbestos and, above all, tobacco, and I hope it doesn't happen with carbon nanotubes. Fortunately, it looks like you can't smoke them, so we probably have less to worry about than with cigarettes. Nevertheless, I hope this study doesn't just disappear and fail to stimulate more research into the possible health hazards of carbon nanotubes. This time, maybe, we can get it right.

Sources: The New York Times article on the possible health risks of carbon nanotubes appeared on May 21, 2008, and can be viewed at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/science/21nano.html. The research was published in Nature Nanotechnology, and an abstract is available without charge at http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nnano.2008.111.html.

Does The Internet Flatten Your Mind?

If you are reading this, you must spend at least some time on the Internet, and possibly many hours a day. If you're older than 30 or so, you can remember a time before the Internet when "reading" and "holding a piece of paper in your hands" were generally synonymous. And if you're younger than that, believe me, there was such a time and people actually managed to live under such conditions.

The question for today is: does using the Internet make us less able to do certain important mental feats that we may miss after they're gone? More specifically, does it take from us the ability to give sustained attention to a long, complex piece of reading that requires deep thought?

I am moved to this inquiry by a couple of things. In a recent column, Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. says "amen" to an article in the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" In the Atlantic article, author Nicholas Carr argues that people who use the Internet routinely tend to zip from info-nugget to ad to email to YouTube to . . . well, you get the idea, all without thinking thoughts any deeper than a puddle on a sidewalk. Both he and Pitts find that since adapting to the Internet, they find it much harder to sit still with a book that makes a complex, sustained argument over many chapters. They end up getting restless or sleepy. And they wonder if the instant-gratification style of thinking that Google and the rest of the Internet services encourage, militates against the deep, contemplative, often temporarily aimless and associative, but sometimes very productive type of thinking that reading at length encourages.

There is some quantitative evidence that this suspicion is true. Carr cites a study that found most Internet users do not read more than a few paragraphs of any resource they find, even if it is many pages long. In the technology and society journal The New Atlantis, Christine Rosen cites numerous studies that show the kind of work style known as multitasking actually decreases efficiency rather than otherwise. And the Internet makes multitasking so easy—just open three or four windows on your email, a favorite blog, a video news feed, and go to it.

I must admit that the Internet has profoundly changed the way I do what I used to call library research. My professional research is eclectic in that I often find myself working in fields that I do not have much educational background in. Suppose (as recently happened) that I want to find out about an arcane subject such as astronomical spectrophotometry. (For those who just have to know, it means measuring the light output of stars at various wavelengths.) In the pre-Internet days, this would have meant a trip to the library (preferably the multi-million-volume University of Texas library system), perhaps talking with a reference librarian, hauling six or eight books to a study carrel, writing down references to papers, going back to the shelves and looking up the papers in big heavy volumes of bound journals, and so on. It would have taken a whole day if done properly, and I might have ended up with two or three photocopied papers, some notes, and a whole lot more questions than answers.

Contrast that to what I managed to do yesterday. I Googled the topic, found a few papers online, got more confused than anything else, and ended up going to the library anyway (the local Texas State library, not Austin). I found two books that addressed the subject, but from an insider's point of view. Fortunately, one of them listed some references for introductory works—most of them were books, but one was an online source. Turns out that a professor at Oklahoma University has written an introductory text that he posts online for free. It turned out to be exactly what I needed.

That's a fairly typical story for any of my ventures into new fields. The online stuff helps some (especially Wikipedia, which seems to have very good articles about the basics of technical topics). But at some point I usually end up going to books, sometimes old books. It's unusual that I can find everything I need to know online, especially if I want an overall picture of a field as an introduction.

Now Google and company are working hard to change that by putting all the world's books online. And yes, they may succeed. But once that happens, somehow I don't think people will write new books the same way they used to write old books. Why put a 300-page book on line if nobody reads past the first three or four pages anyway?

It takes a certain kind of personality to write a good book. A psychological test called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator alleges to measure a dichotomy between two distinct lifestyles which are termed "judging" versus "perceiving." One author summarized the difference between the two poles of the dichotomy this way. People who rate high on the "judging" end of the scale are "job-oriented jumpers" who like to size up a task, do it, get it out of their way, wipe their hands, and go on to the next thing. Perceiving types, on the other hand, tend to be "pendulous postponers" who can always think of one more touch to add to their creation, or one more aspect of looking at a subject.

Many college professors turn out to be pendulous postponers, delving endlessly into the infinite ramifications of a specialized topic. And since they will stick with a subject longer than anyone else does, they often find things that nobody else has found. The supreme example of this type that I can think of is the cultural historian Jacques Barzun, who turned 100 last November. A few years ago he wrote From Dawn To Decadence, a history of Western culture over the last five centuries, in which he summed up a long lifetime of learning that made connections and associations of ideas that even historical duffers like me could understand.

My mind doesn't work that way. I am a "judging" type, which is one reason I write a blog on a different topic each week, rather than using the same time to write a book or two a year (much as I'd like to write a book!). But the world needs both kinds of thinkers. It's pretty clear that the Internet encourages the superficial, the list-of-numbers kind of judging thinking, over the long-term study, contemplation, pondering, and sustained attention needed for the perceiving kind of thinking. It would be tragic if the Internet wipes out any future hope of having more of the Jacques Barzun type of personality arise in the intellectual world of the future. As long as we don't get doctrinaire about banning books in favor of the Internet or something, I don't think we have much to worry about. But the same end may be achieved by other means, and possibly even by accident rather than design.

Sources: The Atlantic Monthly article appears at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google. Christine Rosen's article "The Myth of Multitasking" appears in the Spring 2008 issue of The New Atlantis.

The Micro- and Macro-Ethics of Plug-in Hybrids

The online version of Wired Magazine carried an article recently that took a dim view of the Bush Administration's commitment of $30 million toward plug-in hybrid vehicle research, saying it was grossly inadequate in view of our present oil-price exigencies. A plug-in hybrid car is like a conventional hybrid (e. g. the Toyota Prius) in that it has both batteries to run the electric motor coupled to the wheels, and an internal combustion engine to supplement power from the batteries when necessary. But in addition, a plug-in hybrid can be plugged in to your house current overnight to draw power from the electric grid. If the batteries are large enough, some people claim that plug-in hybrids can travel up to 100 miles per gallon of gasoline consumed, although this doesn't count what it does to your electric bill.

Sounds great, doesn't it? Let's look at the decision to go with a plug-in hybrid from two points of view. First, there's what ethicists call the micro-ethical view: what should you as an individual do about the situation? Then, there is the macro-ethical view: what should large institutions—corporations, professional societies, governments, nations—do about it? As we will see, the answers aren't necessarily the same.

What an individual should do depends on what kind of individual you are. If you're just an average consumer, the choice is simply, "Should I buy a plug-in hybrid or not?" Of course, this assumes that they are out there to buy. And they aren't—not just yet, anyway, although the much-hyped Chevrolet Volt is supposed to make it to showroom floors by 2010. This shows the limitations of microethical reasoning: options are limited to what one person can realistically do.

If you are an engineer, and you think a plug-in hybrid is a good idea, you might try getting a job related to power electronics or automotive R&D. Or you could even start your own company to address one of the many technical problems that lie in the way of plug-in hybrid development. The most promising type of battery, the lithium-ion cell, still has lots of problems with safety and lifetime, although these may be ironed out with time. So one's career choice is fraught with ethical implications that many young people don't even consider to start with, let alone after one has taken the job.

When we turn to the macroethical side of the question, a whole array of sub-questions arise. If a company goes into a market not because it's profitable but because it is the morally right thing to do, that company either has to subsidize its activity by drawing funds from other more profitable lines, or face the prospect of going broke, after which the company will no longer exist to do anything at all, moral or otherwise. There are specialty firms right now that will convert conventional cars to plug-in hybrids, but my impression is they are not growing fast and simply don't have the resources to compete with the major automakers. The automotive industry is a strange mixture of century-old traditions (the way car dealership economics works, for instance) and cutting-edge technology. Any organization that wants to succeed in it has to work within the complex environment of existing companies, regulations, and market forces.

The problem is even more complex when you ask what the U. S. government might best be doing in this area. Obviously, the Wired reporter (as well as several private and public sources he quoted) thought that $30 million was so small an amount as to be an empty gesture. He quoted a source at the Brookings Institution who said that to make a major impact on the auto market, plug-in hybrids would need about $18 billion of government subsidies and funds over the next ten years. That is a lot, but compared to many other things the government does, it's not all that much.

Over against that notion is the sense, supported by many conservative schools of economics, that we will have plug-in hybrids when fuel costs and other economic factors make it profitable to sell them, and any government intervention to hasten that day is liable to be counterproductive. Macroethics in engineering gets tangled up in economics and public policy pretty quickly, as you can see.

My own opinion of the matter is that there are technical solutions out there, but those who have the nominal power to implement them (both in private corporations and in government) lack the courage to go ahead and do something. The "something" might be in a variety of directions, either liberal or conservative. But my sense is that lately, no one has been willing to step up and put their hands on the wheel and steer. And just as with an individual who drifts through life reacting to things without making or implementing specific plans, institutional drift is sooner or later bound to lead to disaster.

As far as buying a plug-in hybrid goes, I plan to hang on to my own two cars for a while yet. One of them has 183,000 miles on it and the other, which already gets about 37 miles a gallon, is about to turn over 100,000 miles. The car I had before that made it to 200,000 before the wheels began to fall off (literally). So I figure by the time I'm in the market for another car, one of my choices is likely to be a plug-in hybrid. But whether I'll be able to afford it is another question.

Sources: The Wired article on plug-in hybrids appeared on June 13, 2008 at http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/06/feds-scrape-tog.html.

New York's Crane Collapses: Who Inspects the Inspectors?

New York City is undergoing something of a building boom, and building in large cities means tower cranes—those improbably spindly structures that symbolize major construction these days. Last May 30, a crane in use at 91st Street in Manhattan collapsed, killing the operator and another construction worker, seriously injuring a third, and damaging several buildings as it fell to the street below. What made it even worse is that this collapse was the second in less than three months. On March 15, another crane collapsed in midtown Manhattan, killing seven. And in both cases, it appears that the inspection process designed to prevent just such accidents was flawed, to say the least.

What do crane inspectors do? What pressures do they experience in their jobs? And what changes can be made in the system to improve it?

On paper, at least, New York City appears to have a rigorous and exacting system of required inspections for the erection and use of tower cranes. Every contractor has to have a permit to operate a crane, the operators themselves must be licensed by passing tests or showing an equivalent amount of specialized experience, and the cranes themselves must be inspected periodically by crane inspectors, who are city employees. And most of the time, the cranes operate without major accidents or injuries. But it looks like all is not as it should be with the inspection process.

In the March accident, a crane inspector was arrested under the suspicion that he falsified a statement saying he inspected the crane on March 4 that later collapsed. And just last Friday, the acting chief inspector of cranes, James Delayo, was arrested on charges that he took bribes to supply a construction firm with answers to the crane operator's test, as well as to report inspections on cranes that he never in fact inspected. But even if all the inspectors involved had done their jobs, it appears that the May collapse might not have been prevented. A New York Times reporter found that the collapsed crane's turntable was a rebuilt unit that had earlier been struck by lightning and welded back together. It is entirely possible that a hidden defect in the weld contributed to the accident, although further investigations will have to be conducted to confirm that theory. If so, a routine visual inspection might not have revealed any problem.

Inspectors, quality control engineers, traffic policemen—the job of all these people is to make sure that what is supposed to happen actually happens, and what isn't supposed to happen, doesn't. And if they see problems, or potential problems, they have the authority to act. Any time a person holds authority over others, there is the temptation to abuse that authority. And it is no news that from time to time, inspectors take bribes instead of doing the harder thing—actually making the inspection or penalizing a crane operator for careless actions.

A chronic problem with government-operated departments of inspection—whether the things inspected are cranes, X-ray machines in dentists' offices, or sides of beef—is a shortage of inspectors. The benefits of inspection are largely invisible, while the negative consequences of inadequate inspection are blatted all over the news media. The political tendency is therefore to fund inspection agencies just enough to prevent too-frequent accidents, but not so much that the inspected industries and businesses get sore from being plagued with swarms of supernumerary inspectors. The technical abilities required of an inspector can be equal to or greater than his or her counterpart in private enterprise, but government pay is always less than in the private sector, adding to the temptation to bribery.

Some states have decided to outsource certain kinds of inspection to private third-party firms. This leaves the free market to decide the pay rates and numbers of inspectors, but has its own problems as well. How do you insure that a private inspection firm, which is basically a kind of consulting operation, is doing its job? Hire government inspectors to inspect the inspectors? Whether an inspector works for a public or private firm, the issue always comes down to professional integrity: does the inspector know enough technically to do a good inspection? And if so, do they have the moral fiber to resist the temptations to bribery, shortcuts, and other forms of professional corruption?

In today's short-term bottom-line world, the kind of long-term relationships and institutional reputations needed for inspection systems to work well can be hard to establish. But it is too easy to forget that lives are at stake. New York City appears to be trying a short-term fix by prosecuting some crane inspectors who were alleged to be on the take. While that is certainly something that needs to be done, one wonders whether corruption in the process may be endemic, and the arrests happened only in response to headlines. Is privatization a better approach? Maybe, but as in so many other aspects of engineering, you have to work with the materials, culture, and political environment you have, and privatization in certain political circles is a dirty word. Here's hoping that however it gets done, the system of crane inspections in New York improves to the point that seeing those giant towers swinging across the skyline will be only a source of pride, and not of fear.

Sources: I used reports from the New York Times on the crane accidents and bribery arrests available at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/07/nyregion/07crane.html and http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/nyregion/08building.html. A technical description of the March 15 collapse is available at http://www.gostructural.com/article.asp?id=2788.

California Supreme Court Damages Future of Engineering

I'm going to go out on a limb here. But I'm sure that the limb's pretty solid.

On May 15, the California Supreme Court struck down a ban on same-sex marriages that the state has had in place for some time. I'm not going to talk about the issue of judicial activism, or the question of whether California's citizens will assert their rights to reverse this action by approving a referendum amending their state constitution next fall. Instead, I am going to argue that allowing same-sex marriage will endanger the future of the engineering profession in this country.

Seems like a stretch, doesn't it? Here is my line of reasoning.

First, let me show that allowing same-sex marriages damages the institution of marriage. Some people simply do not see how conventional marriages between a man and a woman are in any way affected if we also let men marry men or women marry women. For these readers, let me make an analogy.

We have a nice solid base of well-functioning, highly capable engineering colleges in the U. S. Most of them are accredited through a rigorous process of inspections, visits, and continuous improvement. Suppose we passed a law that said all employers must recognize engineering degrees from any institution calling itself a college of engineering, whether it was accredited or not. It would be illegal to refuse to hire an engineer simply on the basis of what college he or she got a degree from. (=all of society must recognize marriage certificates of all kinds, whether for same-sex marriages or not.) We would leave the whole accreditation machinery in place, and universities capable of giving a good accredited education would still be able to do so. (=men and women who want to marry the opposite sex can still do so.)

What do you think would happen to the institution of engineering higher education in this country? Outfits handing out engineering degrees would spring up like newsstands on every corner, and students would flock to them. The average competency level of degree-holding engineers in this country would go into a precipitate decline, and the whole process of engineering education might undergo permanent damage that would take years or decades to repair, if ever. And note: in this hypothetical scenario, we did nothing whatever to the good schools. They were still free to stay accredited and do their good, competent job. We simply forced everyone to recognize the fly-by-night institutions as competent, but they were in fact incompetent.

The adjective "incompetent" often carries negative connotations, but it need not do so. It simply means that the noun modified is incapable of doing something or other. I have no shame in admitting the fact that, being a male, I am incompetent to bear a child. Women are incompetent to beget children without a male being involved somewhere along the line. And two men together, or two women together, are incompetent when it comes to fulfilling the practical duties and responsibilities of marriage, namely: being a biological and social unit that consists of a man as father, a woman as mother, and children who each have the same mother and father.

There are many scientific studies—thousands, in fact—performed by sociologists with all kinds of backgrounds and personal beliefs, which examine the question, "Do children who grow up in a family consisting of one mother and one father who are married and stay married, do better than children raised in any other kind of environment?" To qualify "better" you can look at social adjustment, criminal records, levels of school achievement, early or frequent sex and drug use, rates of depression and suicide, and so on. And the resounding, repeatable, monotonously consistent answer is, "Yes." This is not to say that kids raised by a single mother or two gay men are doomed to failure and a miserable existence. The human spirit can triumph over adversity of whatever kind. But when children are examined in statistically significant numbers, there is no question that the social institution we call conventional intact marriage beats any other way of raising children hands-down. That is not an ideological statement. It is a social-science statement backed up by years of the best kind of research that social science can offer these days. If you don't believe me on that, see David Blankenhorn's The Future of Marriage.

Now for the connection to engineering. It is my subjective impression, which I wish some social scientist would check out with the machinery of their trade, that the better grade of engineering students come from just the kind of stable family background that same-sex marriage will militate against. The National Science Foundation, among other institutions in this country, is concerned that very few students of either sex (and especially few women) choose engineering as an undergraduate degree, and even fewer decide to go on to graduate school. This is why it is increasingly rare to find engineering professors who were born in the U. S., because whatever mysterious factor it is that makes people want engineering graduate degrees is in short supply in this country, but seems to be plentiful abroad.

I will not claim that unstable marriages, divorced and remarried couples, single parents, and same-sex parenting is responsible for the entire decline in interest in engineering among young people in the U. S. But I believe a part of it is. And if we damage the institution of marriage further by insisting that same-sex unions get the same recognition as conventional marriages, I forecast a worsening dearth of U. S. students able to muster the discipline and deferred gratification necessary to pursue careers in engineering. I suspect we will wait a long time before the National Science Foundation comes out in opposition to same-sex marriage. Nevertheless, if I'm right, it might do more good for them to work in that direction than to spend their money on some of the programs they have supported in the past to encourage students to become engineers.

There. I made the connection. Like it, hate it, argue with it as you will. But that is my opinion, and as far as the marriage part goes, I'm on solid ground, not hanging from a tree by a limb.

Sources: Although I have not read the book, David Blankenhorn's The Future of Marriage comes highly recommended as a careful, scientifically reasoned argument written by a person who favors equal rights for homosexuals, but is convinced by scientific evidence that same-sex marriage would be too high a price to pay.

Remembering Brian O'Connell

Last Thursday, May 22 brought the sad news of the passing of Brian O'Connell the previous day. Anyone who knew Brian, or met him even once, was not likely to forget him. For those of you who did not have the privilege of meeting him, I would like first to offer you my sympathy. Then I will try to describe one of the most colorful personalities ever to grace the field of engineering ethics.

This business tends to attract people with mixed backgrounds who are both conversant with the intricacies of some technical field and also interested in the human side of things. Brian was no exception. He once told me he was one of the youngest people ever to run a planetarium show at Hartford's Gengras Planetarium, when as a young teenager he was asked to fill in for the regular operator whom Brian had become friends with. But his interest in the depths of the human soul expressed itself soon thereafter when he attended seminary for a while. Deciding he wasn't quite cut out to be a priest, he switched to computer science, and then back to humanities as he took a law degree and practiced law for several years. Eventually he joined Central Connecticut State University and served with distinction in both their computer science and philosophy departments.

I met Brian shortly after he discovered the Society on Social Implications of Technology (SSIT), a society within the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He was the guy with long blond hair, horn-rim glasses, and a suave and engaging manner, and he saw something humorous in just about everything. Among the more staid, business-suit-clad engineers that often showed up at SSIT meetings, Brian looked like a hippie who had wandered into a Rotary Club meeting by accident. He was the kind of person who could walk into a room and change the whole tone of conversation in five minutes from boredom to excitement, and he often did.

Naturally, not everybody always agreed with Brian's ideas. But he had the ability to see the other person's point of view instinctively, sometimes better than the other person himself. I'm sure that's what made him a good lawyer, and it is also what made him an excellent advocate of engineering ethics in a wide variety of fields, starting with computer ethics and ranging over other areas it would take a detailed study of Brian's writings to determine. As I have said elsewhere, seeing the other person's point of view is an essential first step in good engineering ethics, and Brian could do that better than just about anyone I know. In everything Brian did, there was a foundational joy in living and a desire to see other people blessed by the same joy, not harmed. And technology, since it was such a big part of life nowadays, was something Brian wanted to bless people with, not the other way around.

I think that desire is what drove him to work so energetically on behalf of the SSIT (which he served in many capacities, including President), on behalf of his law clients when he practiced law, and on behalf of his students at CCSU, many of whom he invited to his own basement lab in his house in West Hartford. When I last saw him in July of 2007, he showed me where he pursued robotics projects with his students and we talked about what he could do with robotics and remote control radio links, which he had obtained an amateur radio license to use.
Brian's actions in his chosen professions (and I count at least three: law, computer science, and engineering ethics) all sprang from a view of life that was deeply rooted in his religious and philosophical outlook. We never spoke about it much, but he was familiar with the classics and liked to quote thoughtful people of faith, from St. Augustine to G. K. Chesterton. Like Chesterton, Brian believed life was a thing to be enjoyed with all one's might. Chesterton enjoyed a glass of wine and a cigar, and Brian was partial to tobacco as well (his lung cancer was diagnosed in the spring of 2007). His legacy continues in the lives of the hundreds or thousands of students, colleagues, and fellow professionals who, I hope, will know more about engineering ethics and act on that knowledge because of something Brian did, said, or wrote. His life crossed the paths of the rest of us like a skyrocket shooting up through the trees. Perhaps Edna St. Vincent Millay had someone like Brian in mind when she wrote

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light!

Requiscat in pace, Brian.

China's Earthquake: What If We Had Known?

On Monday, May 12, the Sichuan region of China was devastated by one of the worst earthquakes in recent memory. At this writing, the death toll stands at over 50,000, and more bad news about the disaster arrives daily. One of the strangest news stories that has come out of region concerns rumors spread on the Internet that scientists working for the Chinese government knew the earthquake was going to happen, and suppressed the information out of fear that making their prediction public would cause panic ahead of the Olympic games.

A news source almost certainly affiliated with the Chinese government (China Radio International) issued a release Wednesday which quoted Zhang Guomin, a research fellow at China's Institute for Earthquake Science, as saying that earthquake forecasts should be based on scientific analysis and not tailored to political requirements. According to him, earthquake forecasts are not possible with our present state of knowledge. However, another researcher, Zhang Xiaodong of the China Earthquake Networks Center, seems to wish that predictions were possible, because he told the reporters, "I feel deeply regretful and sorrowful at the failure to predict the earthquake."

What if we could predict earthquakes with the same accuracy as, say, we can predict tornadoes today? At least one leading authority believes that such predictions may be possible. A NASA researcher named Friedemann Freund has published a series of papers over the years that connect measurable changes in the earth's electromagnetic fields to strong earthquakes that happen shortly after the changes. (My blogs of Feb. 20, 2007 and Apr. 13, 2006 describe more technical details.)

Without taking sides on whether this is in fact possible, let's do a little thought experiment. Suppose after X years of research and development, we assemble the expertise, equipment, and networks needed to predict major deadly earthquakes. Now no prediction system is going to be perfect, so let's say its accuracy can be quantified this way: when the system predicts an earthquake of at least a given magnitude in a given geographic area during a given time window (probably at least a week, and maybe much longer), the prediction is borne out 80% of the time. And let's say false positives and false negatives are equally likely. That is, for the 20% of predictions that come out wrong, 10% are major earthquakes that happen when none was predicted, and 10% are non-events that don't happen when an earthquake was predicted.

Given this imaginary system, what do we do with it? Do we treat the forecasts like hurricane forecasts and order mass evacuations? That's certainly one approach. Originally, Hurricane Katrina was predicted to hit the Houston area, and a graduate student I knew was pretty perturbed when he wasn't able to arrange for transportation out of the city. As it turned out, he was one of the lucky ones—nothing too bad happened to Houston, but everybody who tried to flee had to endure the grandaddy of all traffic jams on the already-clogged Houston freeways.

Hurricanes generally end up somewhere, so hurricane forecasters are given the benefit of the doubt when they miss on exact predictions of the storm's path. But what if earthquake experts made a prediction that turned out to be a complete bust—that is, everybody evacuates for the full term of the warning and exactly nothing happens? That might sully the reputation of the field indefinitely, and nobody would take them seriously forever after.

To bring the matter closer to home, what if this hypothetical system predicted The Big One for the San Francisco Bay area? If we shut down everything that goes on in Silicon Valley for a week, that would constitute a major economic disaster of its own. You don't just walk up to a huge semiconductor plant and turn off the switch, unless you want to turn it into scrap. Of course, a major earthquake might do that for you, but then you get into the question of how to deal with an evacuation order that would cost billions of dollars to a private company. Lives are more valuable than property, but property isn't negligible. And that's just one example of many problems that we would face in dealing with accurate earthquake forecasts.

The approach California has taken in the absence of reliable earthquake predictions is to mandate earthquake-resistant construction. But that costs more than ordinary construction, and requires a well-functioning regulatory system and a cooperative construction industry, neither of which are always found in other countries. Mass evacuations are simpler, and might be the best path to pursue for countries that can't afford to replace their entire infrastructure with earthquake-resistant structures.

Clearly, even if we had reliable earthquake prediction, we would face a lot of issues in deciding how to act on the knowledge it would provide. But it seems to me that knowledge is always better than ignorance, especially when it comes to earthquakes. And considering the terrible loss of life and property that major earthquakes usually cause, I wish that we spent more intellectual capital on serious efforts to predict earthquakes, and tried to evaluate the predictions in a statistically meaningful way.

Sources: The China Radio International article I quoted appeared at http://english.cri.cn/2946/2008/05/15/48@357631.htm.

Ethics of the Smart Car

The relationship between drivers and their cars has always been a complex one, fraught with emotional and moral overtones. Maybe that was why some television writers with more enthusiasm than judgment came up with the concept of "My Mother the Car." I'm old enough to remember watching that show, which aired on U. S. television back in 1965. The basic idea was that this guy buys an antique car, only to discover that somehow his deceased mother's spirit has taken up residence in it. The radio dial flashed whenever she spoke to him, I guess so TV viewers could tell that it really was the car and not some hallucinogen-inspired inner voice. The show lasted only one season and is remembered, if at all, for being one of the worst TV series of all time. But if Prof. Clifford Nass of Stanford University has his way, we all may be talking with our cars in the future—and the cars may talk back in tones to match our emotions.

A recent Wired article profiled Prof. Nass's research on the future of the human-automobile interface, and how smart cars may be used. Smart in what sense? Well, with current GPS (global positioning system) technology and computer power, coupled with broadband wireless networks that will be ubiquitous soon, you can imagine driving down the street and saying to your car, "Hey, I'd like a pizza. Any good places within a couple of blocks?" Advertisers and automakers would like your car to reply, "Well, there's Gino's in the next block and Papa's one block over—they're having a lunch special today. What shall it be?"

Of course, the same smarts that lets your car give you dining advice will also empower it to remember how you drive. Auto insurance companies currently give discounts to good drivers and raise rates on poor ones, but the quality of your driving is determined mainly by very coarse measures: the number of accidents and traffic violations. Suppose every week your insurer could download and process (by software, of course) hundreds of details about how you drive: how fast you pulled out after a light changed, whether you were speeding and by how much, and whether you ran red lights without getting caught. Most of the technology's there, it's just a matter of developing it.

Some people would think this amounts to turning one's private car into a spy. The matter gets even more complex if we move to cars which partially or totally take over many of the functions of driving. (See my column "The Human Side of Automated Driving" Dec. 10, 2007). Clearly, if you take your hands completely away from the controls and let the car do everything, your responsibility for accidents that ensue is limited, if not absent entirely. But many plans for computer-assisted driving don't go that far. Nass imagines a heavy-footed driver negotiating with his car for permission to step on the gas after a stop light changes. "Aw, c'mon, just this once?" "No, you're wasting gas, and at five dollars a gallon!" Nass says that changing the car's tone of voice to match the driver's mood may help the situation, but I'm not so sure.

Right after it was economically feasible to put computer-generated voices in cars, some time in the early 1990s, a few manufacturers experimented with it. The idea proved to be almost universally unpopular, as the mechanical female tone reminded everybody of their worst nagging nightmares of school librarians and mothers (there it is again), and the feature disappeared in a model year or so.

Where is engineering ethics in all this? The first responsibility of engineers who are working on these things is to make sure they don't make driving more dangerous. Of course, that doesn't mean things can't ever go wrong occasionally, but tests will have to show a general improvement in safety before new features can be adopted. As for insurance companies and driving information, there is a public-policy aspect which has not been debated yet. It's the same kind of question that arises when health insurers want to use a person's genetic information to restrict health coverage, except in that case you can't help what genes you were born with, but you presumably have some control over how you drive. But should a taxi driver in New York pay higher rates than the legendary little old lady from Pasadena who only drives to church on Sundays? These are questions that involve technology as well as issues of fairness, economics, and what insurers like to call "moral hazard"—that is, the idea that you should not be exempt from all the consequences of your own voluntary bad behavior.

For my part, I'll be content to drive my old, dumb cars (dumb in two senses) until the wheels fall off. And maybe by then I can buy a car named James and commute by saying, "Home, James," and just enjoy the scenery while the car worries about the congestion on IH-35.

A Note To Readers

For the next two to four weeks I will be pursuing some research in a rather remote location where Internet access is not as reliable as it could be. So I apologize in advance for any delays in my weekly postings, which I will try to keep current as much as possible. For more information about the subject of my research, see www.nightorbs.net.

Sources: The Wired article appeared on May 9, 2008 at http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/05/a-data-mining-c.html. And Wikipedia has an article that will tell you more than you will ever need to know about the show "My Mother the Car."

I Got the Botts About Bots

My father, God rest his soul, had enough South Texas German in him to be subject to occasional fits of Teutonic depression. He had enough self-awareness to know what was going on when these moods hit him. When we asked him what was bothering him, he'd generally say, "Aw, I've got the botts." (I never saw him write the word down, but for some reason I think it's spelled with two t's.) He passed on many years before the Internet was more than a gleam in a few researchers' eyes, but if he were alive now, he might well have the botts about bots.

A bot is a piece of malevolent software (malware) that infects your computer with the purpose of controlling it to do things that the bot tells it to do. These things are generally not nice. In the case of one of the worst bots, Storm Worm, some observers say that over a million computers took orders from some people who apparently went on the black market to offer denial-of-service attacks to the highest bidder. If a criminal takes up the offer, the victim's website is likely to be inundated with many millions of emails or other automated requests for service, whereupon the target website immediately gets overwhelmed and becomes inaccessible to legitimate users. Creators of botnets have progressed in the last few years from random vandalism to coordinated criminal activity, which is why computer security firms and software providers from Microsoft on down have lately spent so much time and effort combating the problem.

Until recently, people such as myself who use Macintosh computers could ignore bots, since up to 2004 or so no one had bothered to write a bot for Macs. Since only a relatively small percentage of all computers online at a given time are Macs, a malware writer who wants access to the largest number of computers in the shortest time is probably not going to bother writing two different bot programs, one for Macs and one for PCs. (Most legitimate software companies don't either, but that's another story.) But this supposed invulnerability has evidently come to an end. The other day I received a message from the IT division of a university where I do research. It informed me that a Mac on a network node in the lab I was working in was being remotely controlled by a bot. I was alarmed until I called the people and checked the Ethernet ID address, or whatever it's called—an identifying number unique to my computer. The number didn't match mine, so my computer must not have been the one that was zombified. Still, it means there could be a problem in the future.

It turns out that bots tend to use something called IRC, which stands for Internet Relay Chat. This is the old original protocol that enabled the first internet-based chats, before companies started selling proprietary versions. I am not a computer scientist and I don't know why this particular protocol is so useful to botnet masterminds, but it is.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could rewind to the day when the first wide-eyed innocent programmer came up with the neat idea of the IRC in the first place? "Hey, kids, let's make it so we can chat over the Internet in real time." Sounds great. But apparently, there is something fundamentally flawed about that IRC protocol that makes it able to take over people's computers.

I'm sure that was the last thing in the programmer's mind, to put in a built-in flaw that would later be exploited by criminal elements to the harm of thousands of victims, and to the possible legal compromise of millions of people who unknowingly participate in these crimes simply because their computers are hosting bots and follow the orders of their evil digital masters. But hey—with opportunity comes responsibility.

There is an idea in the engineering ethics world called the precautionary principle. Wikipedia defines it this way: "If there is a risk that an action could cause harm, and there is a lack of scientific consensus on the matter, the burden of proof is on those who would support taking the action." You hear more about it in European ethics discussions than in the U. S. Taking it seriously would severely hamper development of new technologies of all kinds. I wonder, though, if the people who developed the early Internet protocols had taken a more cynical view of human nature, and tried to think of all the evil things ill-willed programmers could do with the neat tools they were putting out there, if we might not have some of the problems we struggle with today.

If, for example, the developers of the IRC had taken a prototype version to some creative young bucks who spent their days trying to devise malevolent uses for new software, they might have discovered the extreme usefulness of IRC in botnets. And who knows?—they might have fixed it in a way that stayed permanently embedded in the Internet as it grew faster than almost anyone expected.

It's obviously too late to close the barn door on that particular horse. Now that Macs can harbor bots, I'll just have to be careful and try to make sure I follow good computer hygiene, for whatever good that will do. But people are writing new software all the time, and some of it is destined to be as influential and ubiquitous as the infamous IRC protocol is now. Surely we have learned a lesson about the depths of depravity to which some programmers will stoop. I just hope that people who write software these days take some thought as to how what they develop could be misused in the future, and even twist their minds around to be creative about it—and then fix it so it can't be used that way.

Sources: Slate has a good introduction to the subject of bots at http://www.slate.com/id/2190275/. A recent overview of the subject from a technical perspective can be found at http://8e6labs.com/2007/11/02/overview-of-the-threats-posed-by-bots/.