Ethics of Career Choice: Nuclear Engineering

Since most engineers are not self-employed, the type of work they do is largely determined by the organizations they work for. This means that one of the most ethically significant decisions engineers make is deciding on what job offer to accept. These days, it may seem like finding any engineering job at all is a challenge, but even in the worst of times you are still free to choose where to look for work. Today I'd like to show how you can begin to work through the ethical implications of a whole field of work, namely, nuclear engineering.

Only a small number of nuclear engineers design bombs, but the fact that the first application of nuclear fission was to kill thousands of Japanese in and around the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II has cast its shadow over the field ever since. There are those who are unalterably opposed to any use of nuclear energy, peaceful or otherwise. They argue that besides the danger of nuclear-weapons proliferation, the problem of nuclear waste hasn't been solved and the danger of a Chernobyl-type accident is too great to allow any further growth of nuclear power. (Chernobyl was the name of a city in the present country of Ukraine, then the USSR, near which a nuclear power plant exploded and caught fire in 1986, spewing tons of radioactive material over the countryside and forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people.)

On the other hand, both current U. S. Presidential candidates favor at least some expansion of nuclear generating capacity in the U. S. as a way of decreasing the nation's dependence on foreign oil. Nuclear generation releases essentially no greenhouse gases such as CO2, in contrast to the burning of fossil fuels such as oil or coal. Proponents argue that the waste problem is manageable and point to countries such as France that generate most of their electricity with nuclear-powered facilities.

You may have heard someone say that technology is ethically neutral, it's what human beings do with technology that makes for good or bad consequences. Most of the time, that view is at least an oversimplification, but it turns out to be almost exactly true of a particular kind of nuclear-related technology: the gas centrifuge. Naturally occurring uranium does not have a high enough percentage of the isotope U-235 to be useful either in nuclear reactors (which need slightly enriched uranium) or weapons (which need almost pure U-235). It turns out that the most efficient way to increase the fraction of the lighter U-235 isotope in uranium, compared to the heavier U-238 one, is to turn it into a gas by attaching six fluorine atoms to each uranium atom, and send the gas through an extremely high-speed centrifuge in the form of a hollow aluminum cylinder spinning in a vacuum. You need hundreds of these centrifuges to do the job, but they can be as small as only six feet high, and a centrifuge plant uses only about as much energy as a food-processing plant of the same size. The very same plant can be used either for making slightly enriched uranium for peaceful nuclear reactors, or highly enriched uranium for bombs.

This is one reason why Iran's gas-centrifuge facilities are so controversial: Iran's government says it's for peaceful applications, but the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors know the same facility could be used to make bomb-grade material. It all depends on what the engineers do with it.

We've only scratched the surface of what is clearly a complex and multifaceted issue. One of the world's most infamous parties in nuclear proliferation, a metallurgist named Abdul Qadeer Khan, turned his knowledge of gas centrifuges toward making plans available for black-market buyers such as Iran and Libya. Khan is a bad example of how technical knowledge can be abused, but even that viewpoint might be debated by some of the people in countries that benefited from his expertise.

Perhaps more than most other fields of engineering, nuclear engineering is fraught with ethical questions: What products are made? How safe are the facilities being designed? What are the long-term consequences of use for future generations? Young people who are uncomfortable dealing with these issues may consider other fields instead. But the field needs some good engineers—both in a technical and an ethical sense—if the benefits of the technology are to be realized with a minimum of harm.

Personally, I would like no better outcome concerning America's energy situation than if we built a bunch of safe, uniform, French-style nuclear plants, junked our gas-guzzling nineteenth-century internal-combustion cars, replaced them with electrics charged from the nuclear-powered grid, and got in a position to thumb our collective noses at foreign oil producers. But a lot of things would have to change before that vision is realized, and a lot of nuclear engineers would be involved in the change.

Sources: The September 2008 issue of Physics Today carried an informative article by H.G. Wood, A. Glaser, and R. S. Kemp on the gas centrifuge and its role in nuclear-weapons proliferation, pp. 40-45.

Expert Witnessing Ethically

I have never been an expert witness in a courtroom or legal situation. But I have known engineers who have been. And sooner or later, many engineers and academics who teach engineering may get a call from a legal firm wanting to pay for their services as an expert witness. What are the ethical implications of serving as a paid expert witness? Can you both take money from only one side of a contentious legal battle and still preserve your integrity and objectivity?

Let's look at a few of the issues that might arise. To keep things concrete, so to speak, let's say you are an expert in concrete, and have been called in by the owner of a shopping mall whose sidewalks are cracking up after only two years of use. The owner is suing the contractor who poured the sidewalks. Should you accept the job, and if you do, what are your ethical obligations?

Many professional codes of ethics have a lot to say about this kind of situation. Although electrical engineers don't deal much with concrete, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has a code of ethics that is representative of many engineering codes, so we will take it as an example since I'm most familiar with the code of my own professional organization.

The first item in the IEEE code that speaks to our hypothetical question says that an engineer should "undertake technological tasks for others only if qualified by training and experience, or after full disclosure of pertinent limitations." In other words, if you don't know beans about concrete and how it cures and why it would crack, you shouldn't trade on your educational qualifications in an unrelated field just to impress a jury. Some lay persons are awed by anyone who can write "Ph. D." after their name, thinking that it confers indefinite wisdom. Those of us who work around Ph. D.s every day know that except for the narrow specialization that the Ph. D. represents, people with doctorates in engineering tend to be all over the map when it comes to wisdom or judgment. And anyway, what your client is paying you for is specific technical expertise that you claim to have. If you don't have it, you've lied to your client, and anyway, the defendant's lawyer, if he's any good at all, will take you apart with great glee during cross-examination. And being humiliated in front of a crowd of people would be just deserts for claiming expertise you don't have.

Suppose you are well qualified to pass judgment on the matter at hand. The plaintiff or his attorneys will offer you a fee for your services. There is generally nothing wrong with this, because everyone understands that an expert's time is valuable and in the course of ordinary affairs, people have to pay experts for their professional time. Of course, if you feel strongly about a certain matter and want to provide pro bono services (for free), there is nothing to stop you from doing that. However, most expert witnesses are paid for their time and effort, which may be considerable in a complicated technical matter, and this is nothing you should be ashamed of.

On the other hand, if there are other connections involved that would look fishy to outsiders, and you don't disclose them, you run up against two more ethical principles covered in the IEEE code: to "reject bribery in all its forms" and to "avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest wherever possible, and to disclose them. . . ." Say for instance that you're married to the owner's daughter and stand to inherit the shopping center when the owner passes on. Most people would say that there is at least a chance that this fact will influence your professional judgment, since you stand to gain a lot more than just your fee for your testimony in that situation. At the very least, this fact should be made known to everyone, to the defendant as well as your client, the plaintiff.

Well, what if you agree to testify, set a fee, and then find that, contrary to the owner's hopes, the contractor he sued wasn't at fault? Maybe the owner made false claims to the contractor about the nature of the subsoil, and it shifted and cracked what was otherwise perfectly good concrete. All sorts of weird things like that can happen to make a case turn out to be otherwise than what it looked like in the beginning. What do you do then?

There's something you're obliged to do, and then you take whatever consequences arise from it. You have to tell the owner the results of your study, whether they're good news or bad news for him. Obviously, if your testimony isn't going to help your client, he won't be wanting you to testify. Whether or not you get paid depends on the nature of your contract with the client. The fairest thing might be just to write it off as a learning experience and not send a bill, but if you spent several weeks working on the issue, you can't afford to undertake too many projects like that. But what you should not do under any circumstances is fudge the data or your analysis to make things look better for your client than they actually are. Here's where the real temptation comes, and here is where it has to be resisted, whether it loses you your fee or not.

Besides all these matters, I have my personal opinion I'll throw in at this point. Like chili powder in soup, expert witnessing is probably best if done sparingly. The picture conveyed to juries is generally that of a busy professional who does "real work" most of the time and has undertaken to benefit the legal system with the expertise that he or she has acquired elsewhere. But expert witnessing pays well, and some are tempted to turn it into a profitable enterprise that takes up a lot of their time. This doesn't seem to me like a good idea for someone who wishes to keep a professional edge on their technical expertise. While the temptations to bend the truth can be successfully resisted if you play the witness role only once in a while, being objective for only one side in a dispute is always a strain. Most people can support the strain once in a while, but I wouldn't advise making a career out of it.

To sum up, expert witnessing can be a genuine public service that can "improve the understanding of technology, its appropriate application, and potential consequences" (another item in the IEEE code of ethics). But this kind of work is fraught with more than the usual quota of ethical hazards, and it takes judgment and wisdom to negotiate them without slipping up. And not everybody—not even those with a Ph. D.—can do it successfully.

Sources: The IEEE Code of Ethics can be found at http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/iportals/aboutus/ethics/code.html.

NASA At Fifty: A Modest Proposal

Five decades ago this month, a brand-new agency of the U. S. government called the National Aeronautics and Space Administration went into business. In 1969, only a little more than a decade later, NASA scored the biggest triumph of its short existence by putting men on the moon. While it would not be fair to say it's been downhill ever since, there is general agreement that NASA is now a troubled, conflicted, underfunded, and rudderless organization. As a recent Associated Press retrospective points out, the Space Shuttle is a flying antique that NASA can't afford to keep and can't afford to get rid of. The Shuttle is our only way of getting to the International Space Station, and current plans are that when (or if) the Shuttle retires, we will rely on the Russians until we can come up with a new vehicle on our own. These days, relying on the Russians looks about as smart as relying on the housing market to keep rising.

This is not to deny that NASA has pockets of excellence here and there. But a few pockets don't make a garment, and clearly something needs to be done about NASA. In the spirit of Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal," I offer the following suggestions.

One way to find out what NASA is really worth is to have a garage sale. You could have different sales for hardware—things like the Deep Space Network, Shuttle spare parts, the giant Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) in Florida—and the software—outfits like the Goddard Space Flight Center in Virginia, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, and so on. If this garage sale is anything like ones I've had, we'll have to offer some real bargains. On the other hand, I can see some entrepreneurs who might see possibilities in selling rides on high-G centrifuges and swims in zero-G swimming pools. Rocket-engine firings on test stands will always attract crowds on the Fourth of July. And think how many loft-style condos you could make out of the VAB, once the Florida real estate market comes back.

And here's an idea to make the sale go better. Instead of sending a bunch of dull old highly trained engineers up to the Space Station in the next Shuttle flight, we go around the world and offer free rides to the most popular entertainers in the world, regardless of nationality. I have no idea who these people might be, but you can ask any young Chinese or Russian or Indian, and I'm sure they'll have plenty of suggestions. We send them up there with a couple year's supply of food, and then sit back and say, "Surprise, young people of the world! You've got to build the rocket to get them back!" This will do two things: it will probably move a lot more NASA surplus stuff off the shelves, and it will motivate a lot of young people to get interested in space flight real fast.

That ties in with my next idea: the deregulation of space. It is high time that we let the free market determine what we do out there, rather than a bunch of bureaucrats and politicians. Of course, the first step is advertising and publicity. The drama of rescuing those entertainers will make great reality TV. And of course, everybody wants to travel to places where famous people have been, so space tourism will get a tremendous boost. Tourism means motels, restaurants, and all the other things that go with development. Having your latte at an altitude of 200,000 miles will give a whole new meaning to the word "Starbucks."

Naysayers will object that space travel is expensive, dangerous, and ought not to be approached with the reckless exuberance of a prospector looking for gold in a newly discovered territory. I counter that this is exactly the attitude we want. Every new generation looks around for some object to focus its idealism on. There are people out there who want to travel in space more than anything else, and we ought to get clunky old organizations like NASA out of their way and let them. The free market will determine the size of the effort, whether it's one private-enterprise rocket a year or a weekly space-bus trip from starports around the world. The good pieces of NASA that can contribute will find their places in this new order of the ages, and the rest, well, some things are better off simply coming to an end.

Nothing will ever take away the fact that once upon a time, an organization of people and machines known as NASA put men on the moon. But that was close to forty years ago. Five hundred years ago, Queen Isabella funded Columbus's voyages to the New World. But nobody has tried to keep the Spanish court going ever since simply to send more Niñas and Pintas and Santa Marias out to do battle with the wind and the waves. If NASA's time has come to fold its doors, let's at least try to get some of our money back in the process. And let's encourage the world at large to do what it really wants to do with space—by putting its money where its mouth is.

Sources: The AP story on NASA's troubled 50th anniversary can be found at http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2008/09/29/1930411-analysis-is-the-right-stuff-now-lost-in-space. Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal" for the Irish to solve their overpopulation and poverty problems by eating their children was obviously intended to be ironic, as is the case with my proposals above. Swift's original essay can be read at http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/modest.html.

Where Will China's Walk in Space Take Us?

Over the weekend, three Chinese astronauts landed safely in Inner Mongolia after completing a 68-hour flight that included a 20-minute spacewalk. After the burst of patriotism from the Chinese people that the world witnessed during the Beijing Olympics, China now has even more to celebrate. As a successful demonstration that China has mastered the extreme engineering complexities of manned space flight, the exploit's message is unambiguous. But as with any technology, its ethical implications depend on how it is used and why.

It's no surprise that I obtained one of the more comprehensive news reports on the flight from New Delhi Television Limited's website. As China's nearest large neighbor to the south, India is more than a little interested in any signs that China's ability to throw complicated machinery a long distance has improved. The space race between the old U. S. S. R. and the United States was about many things, but at its core was the technology needed to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) halfway around the world. Just as war games provide a way for a country to show off its military might without actually fighting the enemy, the race to the moon provided the U. S. with a peaceful means of showing off the advanced state of our aerospace technology which, with relatively small modifications, was fully capable of blowing the U. S. S. R. to pieces.

Something similar is going on with China's space program, which has surprisingly long roots. As long ago as 1967, Chinese government officials announced their intentions to put a man in space. Unfortunately, a few things like the Great Cultural Revolution, Mao's demise, and the resultant governmental and social turmoil got in the way. It wasn't until 2003 that one Yang Liwei climbed aboard a rocket and became the first Chinese astronaut. But since then, the Chinese space program has made great strides. Considering that the U. S. took eight years to go from its first manned spaceflight in 1961 to the first moon landing in 1969, the Chinese program probably won't keep up quite that pace. But a moon landing is clearly in the works, as well as extensive Earth-orbiting doings such as a Chinese space station.

Unlike the International Space Station currently in orbit that involves astronauts and technology from numerous countries, China has chosen to go it alone almost completely in space. For many years the U. S. did the same, and it is tempting to lay out other parallels between the Chinese and U. S. space efforts. But they are different countries, and the reasons behind the Chinese space program may differ considerably from ours.

In a sense, space is the best of places and the worst of places. Some of the most idealistic and noble ambitions (and people, too) are directed toward the exploration of space, either for purely scientific reasons or for reasons of national prestige. The old Latin phrase ad astra ("to the stars") captures the quasi-religious feeling that many people have when they think about manned space exploration. At the same time, the worst kind of mass destruction that mankind is capable of inflicting in the form of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) would pass through the void of space on their way to vaporizing millions of people back on Earth. It is too early to tell what China will do with its new-found space capabilities. So far, all they've done is to perform the same kind of stunts that the U. S. and the U. S. S. R. did in the harmless but significant space race of the 1960s. That race, you will recall, did result in the dissolution of one of the two parties, although how much the Soviet Union's diversion of resources to its space effort contributed to its demise is a fight for the historians.

China is a different situation altogether. Although they have their own territorial ambitions, China is a much more homogeneous country than the U. S. S. R. ever was. And while I deplore dictatorships and Communist governments, from a technocratic point of view they can provide the long-range stability that tends to go away when you have a newly elected government every two to four years or so. Let's hope that China will put its efforts into showing how it can master the peaceful challenges of space instead of trying to pull some kind of international space blackmail on the rest of the world some day.

Sources: Wikipedia has a good article on the Chinese space program. An article on the recent Chinese spacewalk can be found at http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20080067038.

A Note to Readers Requesting Private Responses

From time to time, a reader may wish to communicate with me in a way that requests a private response: for example, a query for more information, a question requiring a specific answer, etc. Unfortunately, until recently I neglected to post my email address on the profiles page of this blog. (For the record, it is kdstephan@txstate.edu, and can also now be found on the profiles page.) Some readers unable to locate my email address sent queries to the comments section of this blog, assuming that I could obtain their email addresses from the system and respond.

That is not the case. The system does not reveal to me the email addresses of anyone who sends in a comment. So to those readers who sent me queries or requests via the comment section, I apologize for not responding and for not posting my email address. You probably think by now that I'm one of those arrogant bloggers who's too busy to respond to individual inquiries. I assure you that this is not the case; I simply cannot recover your email address when you post in the comments section. Of course, if you give your email address or other identifying information within the post itself, I can respond that way, but some correspondents failed to do that, or are reluctant to post their email address in a public location.

So in the future, please feel free to post comments either anonymously or with identifying information within the post. But if you expect an individual response from me, please either include your email in the post, or email me directly at kdstephan@txstate.edu. Thank you.

What Is Distributism, and Why Should Engineers Care?

Engineering is an unavoidably economic activity, since it always involves applying knowledge to achieve an end within the constraint of limited resources. Engineers have worked under every kind of economic system from radical Communism to the nearly unrestrained free market of places like Singapore. There seems to be a growing consensus that the only kind of economic system with a future is free-market capitalism, which even the leaders of the Peoples' Republic of China have embraced. I will now take moment during this more-than-usually-political season to introduce you to a system that is more than economics and really more than politics, but would profoundly change both if it was adopted seriously. It is a third alternative to capitalism or socialism which almost no one has heard of: distributism.

Historically, distributism was the way most economies operated in most parts of the world for centuries until the rise of the mercantile states in the seventeenth century, when capitalism began to take its modern form. Then socialism arose as an attempt to correct the flaws of capitalism, but sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. Both capitalism and socialism share many concepts in common, including the philosophical assumption that man is Homo economicus: that is, the most important thing about man is his economic activity and behavior. Socialism puts the government in charge of the economy and capitalism bows to the free market, but both systems assume that when you have solved the economic problem, you have solved the most important problems.

Distributism, which had its heyday in England in the 1930s, starts from a different place altogether. It says that the economy was made for man, and not man for the economy.

Here's a little quiz: how many of the following items do you find appealing? Never mind how they would come about, just react positively or negatively to each:

--- Working at home, rather than in an office at the end of a long commute
--- Eating fresh fruits and vegetables you grew yourself or bought from a local farmer
--- Owning your own business
--- Being better off economically for having children rather than the reverse
--- Buying things made and sold by people who live in your neighborhood

None of these things are impossible or cloud-cuckoo-land pipe dreams. Millions of Americans enjoy one or more of them every day. All these things, and more that space doesn't allow me to list, are pieces of a distributist program that would encourage movement toward the wider distribution of ownership of productive property. That is distributism in a nutshell.

Where would engineers fit in a distributist economy? That is a good question, but one I would have to take time off and write a book about to answer adequately. Because large-scale capitalism is so deeply entrenched worldwide, most engineers work for firms that are either large multinationals themselves or depend on them. It is silly to pretend that you could take a multi-billion-dollar semiconductor foundry and turn it into dozens of little mom-and-pop IC plants spread all over the world. But it may seem silly simply because no one has thought along those lines for decades.

Many technical innovations that have taken place since the 1930s are potentially very friendly to a distributist economy. For instance, before the advent of the Internet it was impossible for a three-person company with limited capital to do worldwide marketing of any kind. There were simply no advertising media that such a small company could afford. Now all it takes is a website and maybe some translation software, and there you are. Already many firms are outsourcing specific engineering functions to private contractors, although in a haphazard way motivated by capitalistic concerns rather than other factors. The profession of engineering itself began largely as a group of quasi-independent professionals with what amounted to consulting practices, rather than as large staffs of wage-earning employees, which is the norm today.

These are idle musings at this point, admittedly, but the point is that bigger is not always better, and more means exist today to make small, owner-operated engineering firms viable than possibly ever before. There will always be a need for large organizations to deal with large projects such as aerospace programs, public works, and so on. But they need not be the rule-–one day they could be the rare exception in a distributist economy, in which most engineers would work either for themselves or in small local firms.

After decades of neglect, distributism is now seeing something of a renaissance, with books and websites showing up with some regularity. One of distributism's most prominent early exponents was the British author G. K. Chesterton, whose writings on distributism (The Outline of Sanity, Utopia of Usurers) are easier to find than some others. Wendell Berry, an author and farmer associated with what is known as the Southern Agrarian movement, takes positions that are often sympathetic with distributist principles. The Amish, who are often thought to eschew all forms of technology, actually take advantage of certain carefully chosen modern technologies, but only after carefully considering how its use will affect their individual and communal life.

You will probably never see a distributist candidate for President or a Distributist Party playing power politics. It is inherently a small-scale, local movement, but for that reason it can be much easier to live a practical distributist life here and now, in some ways, than it is to become an instant successful capitalist, for instance. If you think my treatment of distributism has been wacky and out of place, I promise not to bring it up again at least till after the November elections. But it's not impossible to imagine engineers doing well and doing good in a distributist economy as well as in the one we have now. And maybe, just maybe, things might be better than they are.

Sources: Books such as Distributist Perspectives I and II and Beyond Capitalism and Socialism are available from IHS Press (www.ihspress.com), which also publishes other works of Catholic social thought, where distributism finds many of its origins. On the web there are peppery blogs and information on distributism to be found in The Distributist Review at http://www.distributism.blogspot.com. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine carried an excellent article by Jameson Wetmore on the Amish and their attitude toward technology in its Summer 2007 issue, pp. 10-21.

Will Peers Process Patents Perspicaciously?

Well, once you get on one of those alliteration kicks, it's hard to stop. This is a story about a big problem with the U. S. patent system, which is of concern to any engineer whose work is valuable enough to patent. And, about one small attempt to make it better.

For some years now, there has been general agreement that the patent system has major flaws. Basically, it's too easy to get a bad patent, and too easy to clog the legal system with patent lawsuits that never should have been started in the first place, based on overly-broad patents that never should have been issued. Partly because it's so easy, more patents are being filed every year, but the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) can't keep up—it now takes an average of more than two years to get a patent. And since many technologies such as software engineering come up with a whole new generation of products every few months or so, the patent system starts to look like a glacier stuck up on a mountain while a flood of water rushes by in the valley.

Part of the problem is that there aren't enough good patent examiners. Those are the government folks who pass judgment on whether a patent should be granted or not. The ideal patent examiner has advanced degrees in both law and a technical field, plus the patience and incorruptibility of a good detective. Such people have never been easy to find, and attracting them with a government pay scale is even harder. Faced with the rising flood of patents, patent examiners nowadays err on the side of generosity, allowing all sorts of patents through which in more rigorous days would have been tossed out. But to toss out a patent you need a good reason such as a citation of "prior art," and apparently doing a thorough job in that area is simply not something the patent office can handle very well anymore.

A recent news article highlights an attempt to improve the situation with something called Peer-to-Patent, a collaboration between the USPTO and New York Law School professor Beth Noveck. She has set up a website at which ordinary citizens (you or I included) can review selected patent applications, read and interpret the claims, cite prior art, and in short, pretend you are a patent examiner. If the "community" of volunteer examiners votes to forward your citations to the patent office, one of them may make a Top Ten list that actually gets used in the patent, if it gets issued, or more likely denied if your prior-art citation is a good one.

I viewed the little video on the site that gives an overview of the process. While it puts the best face on the matter, even my passing familiarity with patents (I have managed to obtain a couple over the years) tells me that to do a good job on just one application would require a good bit more work than it takes to do your average income-tax form, if not more. When I read about the Peer-to-Patent idea, my first question was, "Why would anybody bother to donate several hours of their highly marketable expertise to such a thing?" and after looking at the website, my first question remains unanswered.

As a practical matter, the only people I can imagine who would want to fool with this and devote the serious amount of work it would take, would be rivals of the inventors who made the original application, who are of course highly motivated to see it fail. If you translate this idea to a more familiar setting, I think you can see its problems better. Suppose you sue your neighbor for building a corner of his garage on your property. And suppose the judge in the civil suit, instead of hearing testimony from duly sworn-in experts such as surveyors and land-title experts, opens a website, posts the records of the case on line, and invites all and sundry to make comments, without even requiring them to give their real names. (The Peer-to-Patent website doesn't require real names, although it is recommended that you not hide behind an alias.) Who is the person most motivated to get online and trash your side of the case? Your neighbor, of course, or maybe his lawyer.

The analogy is not exact, but it does seem to me that by asking for "volunteers" to put in such a large amount of work—effort that the government can't seem to be able to hire on the open market—the site automatically selects only for the people who have the greatest motivation to criticize an application—that is, rivals of the original applicant who would dearly love to see it fail. And maybe that's exactly what Prof. Noveck is trying to do. But if that's the case, it seems more than a little hypocritical to just pretend that the volunteers are random, public-spirited citizens whose only motivation is the honor of having one of their prior-art citations selected for use by the USPTO. I mean, wouldn't that send you into orbit for weeks? Maybe there are some people like that, but I'm not optimistic that they'll be coming out of the woodwork to make the Peer-to-Patent idea succeed.

You have to give the USPTO and the New York Law School credit for trying something. The other day I heard a review of a rather cynical book by a fellow who says that the real motivation for Republicans who gain control of the federal government is to make it run so badly that people will lose faith in it, and not complain when it eventually withers away to the small government of many decades ago. I sincerely hope he's wrong about that, since if he's right we have been watching institutionalized hypocrisy in action for a long time. But weird ideas like this Peer-to-Patent business make me wonder. Maybe I'm wrong and Peer-to-Patent will be the answer to many of the USPTO's problems. But we'll have to wait a while to see.

Sources: The Associated Press article on Peer-to-Patent by Joelle Tessler was carried by many papers, including the Baltimore Sun on Sept. 15 at http://www.baltimoresun.com/technology/bal-patent0915,0,1444023.story. The USPTO's main website is http://www.uspto.gov, and the Peer-to-Patent website is http://www.peertopatent.org.

War Comes to the Internet

When Russian troops attacked the Georgian province of South Ossetia last August 8, tanks and guns weren't the only weapons they were using. Starting in July, websites operated by the Georgian government suffered repeated attacks that intensified when the war on the ground started, and continued for days afterwards. The cyber-attacks took the form of distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) assaults in which hundreds or thousands of "bot" computers make so many synchronized requests to a website that it crashes, and shuts out legitimate users. The bots can be owned by unwitting users who may not even know their computer is being shanghaied for nefarious purposes. This is one of the first times when a cyber-attack was coordinated with a real war. But it's likely that it won't be the last. Of course, the Russian government denies all involvement, but it's easy to hide behind anonymous websites in cases like this.

War has always been one of the main incentives in advances of technology. And conversely, advances in technology—high-tech factories, communications centers, and military installations—become the target of wartime attacks, precisely because they are so valuable. So we shouldn't be surprised that as the Internet becomes an increasingly important part of a nation's infrastructure, war spills over into cyberspace too. More than ever, the engineering and software development that goes into vital Internet services such as banking, military communications, and public-safety coordination now needs to include some consideration of the possibility that terrorists or others with malign intent may mount a DDoS-type attack on them.

Fortunately, judging by the general level of reliability of these services, nothing like what happened to the Web in Georgia has happened here—yet. So far, terrorists have gone in mostly for the big splashy bombings that make gory headlines all over the world. But times and tactics change. As software expertise becomes more widespread in more parts of the world, terrorists or other nations may accumulate the expertise needed for a truly effective assault on the Internet infrastructure. It wouldn't have the drama or bloodiness of a bombing, but it might affect a lot more people, and for that reason alone it might prove more effective than a bomb thrown here or there.

The fact that such an attack hasn't happened yet says one of two things. Either our level of defenses against such attacks are so high that such attacks are not worth the effort, or else the people who would like to cause us problems simply haven't bothered to mount a major attack.

The trouble with knowing how much to spend on preparing for war is that the only way you know for sure that you didn't spend enough, is that you lose. And by then, it's too late. There will always be a measure of uncertainty in trying to answer the question, "Are we safe against a hostile Internet-based military attack?" But lower-level attacks by freelance blackmailers are always happening somewhere or other, and while deplorable, they do furnish a good testing ground for defenses against a larger attack.

As happened with the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks, we may not find out the true extent of our Internet vulnerability until something really serious takes place. Sometimes it takes a major disaster to muster the political and technical will to do what should have been done a long time earlier.

And while attention is focused on software, we shouldn't forget that the Internet relies on physical fiber-optic cables whose routings and switch points are fairly well known. Every now and then some stray bulldozer takes out the main cable between San Marcos and Austin, and for a day or so our local Internet service is disrupted, or used to be. While it would take a lot more coordination than even the 9/11 attacks, you can imagine that a determined group of terrorists could fan out to remote unprotected areas and simultaneously slice the backbone cables that carry the bulk of domestic Internet traffic. It would take several days to fix that, and in the meantime our economy would suffer a serious hit.

Well, let's hope that none of these dismal speculations comes to pass. Like it or not, the Internet is an integral part of our lives now. And anyone who wants to disrupt it has only to try from the safety of their hideouts halfway across the world. But when or if they do, it will fall to the engineers and technicians who have made the Internet what it is to make sure that the thing keeps running.

Sources: An Agence France-Presse story on the Georgian cyber-attacks can be found at http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iRuGsssizXAKVgmPqAXOxqB5uHsQ.

Did Design Flaws Doom the Minneapolis Bridge?

I don't pretend to do breaking news in this blog, although timely events do make it in here on occasion. A little over a year ago, on Aug. 1, 2007, to be exact, a major bridge carrying I-35W over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed, killing 13 motorists and drawing attention to the generally poor state of highway infrastructure nationwide. At the time, there was speculation that neglected maintenance might have been a factor in the collapse. But last January, the National Transportation Safety Board issued an interim report which pointed to a design flaw as the possible culprit. The final accident report is due out in November, but the interim report sheds a lot of light on the issue already.

Here are some details. The bridge was an example of a truss design that was popular in the 1960s. The trusses used in the ill-fated bridge were made of steel beams that formed triangular shapes and converged at joints that were held together by gusset plates. Gusset plates are like the slices of bread on either side of a sandwich whose meat is the ends of the steel beams that you're tying together at the joints. The bridge builders fasten the beams to the gusset plates to make the joints secure. As you might imagine, the weight of the vehicular traffic plus the dead weight of the bridge itself and any wind forces, etc. all factored into the forces that these gusset plates had to deal with.

Figuring out all those forces is the job of civil engineers, and although the calculations are detailed and tedious, there is nothing involved that requires the genius of the proverbial rocket scientist. The NTSB people have laboriously recalculated the loads for all the gusset plates on the bridge, and using standards and assumptions current at the time the bridge was built, they found that most of the gusset plate designs (there are eight actual plates in each location) were done right. That is, the gusset plates were thick enough to have enough "capacity" to meet the "demand" that the bridge loads imposed. The report is written in terms of "demand/capacity ratios." If the calculated capacity of a plate to deal with loads is exactly equal to the demand placed on it, you have a demand/capacity ratio of one. Since all these calculations have some margin of error, it doesn't mean that the instant you go to a demand/capacity ratio of 1.1 the thing will bust. But generally, you want most of the items in your bridge to be capable of meeting more demand than they actually will have in practice—that is, a demand/capacity ratio of less than one is desirable. A 1.1 here and there won't be fatal, necessarily, but 1.5 or higher is not a good idea.

Well, somebody back in the sixties must have put some kind of thought like this into the design, because most of the gusset plates with higher demand were thicker, just like they should have been, and had reasonable demand/capacity ratios. To save money and fabrication time, the plates with less stress on them were made thinner, and most notably the set of eight plates designated "U10," near the middle of the bridge. The NTSB engineers calculated three different kinds of loads that were imposed on the plates: shear, principal tension, and principal compression. The U10 plates were the only ones that had a demand/capacity ratio of 1.5 or greater in all three kinds of loads. And the NTSB's study of the wreckage showed that all eight of those gusset plates had popped during, or more likely at the beginning of, the collapse.

You may recall that there was some heavy construction equipment on the bridge at the time. It begins to look like the I-35W bridge was a marginal design that somehow made it through forty years on the edge of safety, only to have a combination of factors topple it into the river last year.

We will have to wait for the full accident report to be released in November to know more. But in its conservative engineering way, the NTSB has shown that age or maintenance may not have had as much to do with the collapse as we thought at first. This shows how errors in engineering judgment can lie dormant for decades before bearing their bitter fruit, to borrow a phrase from the old "Shadow" radio program (no, I'm not quite that old, but I've heard recordings).

We may never know exactly what the designers were thinking when they designed this detail of the bridge, because evidently the Minnesota Department of Transportation doesn't have any records of the consulting firm's calculations for the gusset plates. It might have been a case of rushing a job, or a simple error of some kind. The engineers who actually performed the initial design may be dead, or retired, or otherwise unlocatable. And finding them or suing their firm is beside the point, in a way. Certainly, legal measures are one way to deal with this sort of thing. But a better use of resources, to my mind at least, is to include this story in civil engineering classes and textbooks as a lesson in how not to do it.

Sources: An article describing the news conference at which the NTSB issued its preliminary report can be found at http://www.designnews.com/article/1790-Design_Flaw_Identified_in_Minnesota_Bridge_Collapse.php. The NTSB's interim report no. 383930 can be downloaded at the NTSB docket website http://www.ntsb.gov/dockets/Highway/HWY07MH024/default.htm. My thanks to Michael Sherry for drawing my attention to this report.

RFID and Privacy: A Spy In Your Pants?

A few days ago, I found out that my university ID card has an RFID chip in it. A new floor of our building has labs equipped with RFID locks on the doors: little black boxes that light up red or green when you pass the right card next to them. I figured I'd have to go get some special new key fob or other to use the locks, but I was told, "Just hold your ID card near it." I did, and open sesame! I didn't even have to take the card out of my wallet. Some guys, like technicians with an armload of equipment, will just do the "butt-pass"—twist around so their back pocket gets close enough, and they're in.

This discovery aroused mixed emotions. I'm glad I don't have to go get any special new card, but on the other hand, why didn't anybody tell me that chip was in there? And what else could it be used for?

Turns out that these are not idle questions. In a special issue on privacy, this month's Scientific American carries an article by Katherine Albrecht, who heads an organization called Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN, for short). We are entering an era in which RFID chips—little inexpensive transponders that spit out data-bearing radio waves to a properly equipped interrogation unit—are spreading like fleas on a dog. Think of RFIDs as a kind of wireless barcode on steroids. Barcodes have to be out in the open to be scanned, and the data they convey is limited to the few numbers of the bar code. But you can attach an RFID chip to an entire pallet of goods in a warehouse, and as a forklift carries the pallet past an interrogator in the doorway, the inventory control system learns that everything on the pallet has gone out the door—no manual scanning.

The financial and logistical advantages of this sort of thing are obvious to shippers, warehousemen, and supermarkets, in fact retailers of almost anything. So RFID chips are popping up in a lot of places.

So where's the beef? One of the places they're showing up is in identification documents such as passports, private and institutional ID cards (such as my university card), and even driver's licenses. Several states, including Washington, Arizona, Michigan, and Vermont, are making such "enhanced" driver's license cards available. Is there any potential drawback to this? It turns out that the type of technology most states are adopting is the same basic kind that is used in warehouses. So anybody with the right equipment can read the data off the chip—according to Albrecht, there is no encryption involved, unlike a different RFID standard prevalent in Europe which includes encryption.

Well, engineers like to think of worst-case scenarios, so here goes my attempt. Say I have an enhanced driver's license with an RFID chip in it. Driver's license numbers are no big secret anymore—you're asked for them any time you write a check, typically. So here I am, wandering around the hardware store, and without speaking to a soul, without picking up a single item, an RFID sensor can figure out who I am, what aisle I'm in, call up my complete purchase record at that store (and maybe other kinds of stores too, for all I know), and figure out exactly what kind of stuff they ought to try to sell to me. I don't know about you, but I'm not sure I like this idea.

Now the way you react may say something about how old you are. Younger people, to whom YouTube, MySpace, and Flickr are just another part of life, tend to have different notions about privacy than older people do. You might feel pleased or special if a salesperson comes up and offers you stuff that is specially tailored to your past purchases. My main encounter with this kind of thing so far is on Amazon.com, which is constantly making wild guesses as to what kind of books I'd like to read, based on the books I've bought in the past. Most of the time its offers are either laughable or annoying, but every once in a while they hit on something good. All in all, though, I would not miss this feature a bit.

We are talking about what some would term an invasion of privacy. Privacy is a right without much of a historical pedigree, it turns out. The Wikipedia article on it says that the first serious consideration of a legal right to privacy was published in the U. S. only in 1890. Before then, it was so hard to duplicate and spread information that the question of personal privacy rarely arose. But now with the tap of a keystroke, you can spread intensely private information to millions of people worldwide. And with an unencrypted RFID chip on your person that has data such as your social security number, driver's license number, or (as an RFID card that China is reportedly trying to implement has), your religion, ethnicity, employment record, and how many kids you have, why, you've turned into one of those pathological bean-spillers that late-night bus-riders fear to encounter—the kind of person who will dump their most intimate secrets onto the first stranger who won't get up and run away. I don't know about you, but I don't want to be that kind of person, either by word of mouth or electronically.

What is the alternative? Effective regulation is one, either direct regulation of the kind and amount of data that can be put on RFID cards, requiring the data to be encrypted somehow, or even simpler things such as labels telling consumers that products have RFID tags on them. Trouble is, the public awareness of this technology is so low that labels would probably just arouse confusion or fear. A little fear can be a good thing. But knowledge is even better. Consider whether you should inform yourself more about RFID technology, and make up your own mind about what kind of information you want to be giving away without ever knowing about it.

Sources: Katherine Albrecht's article "RFID Tag—You're It" appears in the September 2008 issue of Scientific American. CASPIAN operates websites www.spychips.com and www.nocards.org. Also see my blog "I Spend, Therefore I'm Spied Upon?" for Jan. 11, 2007.

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.