OSHA Fine for West Explosion: What's the Point?

Last April 17, when the West Fertilizer Company's facility in the Texas town of the same name exploded, killing 15 and laying waste not only to the plant but to a good chunk of the town as well, it had been more than 25 years since a federal Occupational Safety and Health (OSHA) inspector personally appeared at the plant.  But that did not stop OSHA from issuing a $118,300 fine against the company last week, on October 9, for a list of 24 safety violations.  This news came out despite the federal government's shutdown because Sen. Barbara Boxer's office found out about it and notified news media.  The company has fifteen days to either pay the fine or file an administrative appeal with OSHA, and company representatives said they were conferring with lawyers about their next step.

Depending on how you view the idea of punishment, OSHA's fine either looks pretty silly or seems like a sound and reasonable step for such an agency to take.  Let's examine the case for silly first.

Suppose you run a small fertilizer company that has gone through bankruptcy in the last few years and probably has total assets, land and facilities included, of at most a few million dollars, with a one-million-dollar liability insurance policy on the property.  Due to causes that even combined federal and state investigations cannot precisely determine, your plant blows up, killing fifteen of your fellow citizens, causing over a hundred million dollars' worth of damage to your town, and by the way, completely demolishing the physical assets of your business.  Half a year later, along comes OSHA and lays a fine of over $100,000 on you for various historical violations based on testimony of how the fertilizer that exploded was stored and for not having an emergency response plan.  How do you respond?

I am not running the West Fertilizer Company, but at the moment, hiring lawyers to file an administrative appeal will be a lot cheaper than paying the fine up front, which would probably suck up most of any remaining cash and possibly make the company go out of business altogether.  Not that they haven't had time to do anything more than deal with lawyers and lawsuits since April anyway.  Obviously, the better time for OSHA to have levied such a fine would have been before the April explosion, when the changes possibly stimulated by such a large penalty might have had the positive effect of preventing the explosion. At this point, the fine brings to mind a scene in the animated film Wallace & Gromit:  The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.  At one point, the brilliant but silent canine character Gromit, a skilled driver, goes on a wild car chase that winds up with his vehicle stalled out after a minor collision.  Sitting there silently on a dark road, Gromit seems lost in the depths of despair, thinking that things cannot possibly get worse.  And then they do:  the car's airbag deploys in his face.  OSHA's fine is timed as well as Gromit's airbag.

Whether the fine makes any sense depends on one's theory of punishment.  In How to Think About the Great Ideas, philosopher Mortimer Adler points out that there are two main opposing theories of punishment:  retribution and prevention.  As retribution, OSHA's fine would be laughable, were it not for the somber circumstances.  It is hard to imagine a retributive penalty for the West Fertilizer Company, which after all is a business firm, not an individual.  It has already been reduced to smithereens, and unless you contemplate something primitive like blowing up the houses of the owners in retribution for the explosion of their plant, it is hard to conceive of a punishment that would be purely retributive in character. 

OSHA fines appear to be based on the preventive theory of punishment, as are most administrative fines levied on corporations in general.  While it is clear that it is way too late for this fine to prevent what happened in West, it is by no means too late for other operators of fertilizer manufacturing and storage facilities to take note of the fine and the reasons why it was levied.  There are over a dozen similar fertilizer plants just in Texas alone, and it is a good bet that many of these are lacking in the same safety features that would have prevented or mitigated the accident in West.  One hopes that insurance companies will take the initiative to motivate their fertilizer-plant customers to upgrade their facilities and procedures to make it less likely that something like the West explosion will happen.  And there is always the chance that enlightened managers and owners will take it upon themselves to make the needed changes:  following existing federal guidelines about how ammonium nitrate should be stored, putting emergency procedures in place and even practicing fire drills, and taking other sensible precautions that are not rocket science but often get neglected when an organization skids by for years and avoids the very unlikely but disastrous chance that a normally well-behaved chemical like ammonium nitrate will explode. 

While it's true that the horse named the West fertilizer explosion has long since left the barn, there are many other horses of a similar nature who can be kept in place if fertilizer plants and facilities across the country learn from the sad experience of the Texas town that got famous for a reason nobody wanted.  I hope that OSHA's actions, however tardy, serve as a warning to prevent another tragedy like the one we saw last spring.

Sources:  The OSHA fine was described in a news article in the Waco Tribune that appeared in the online edition of Oct. 11 at http://www.wacotrib.com/news/business/west-fertilizer-co-cited-for-safety-violations/article_6d83a0cc-f28f-5763-ba23-f8229c0dfbae.html.  Mortimer Adler's How to Think About the Great Ideas (Chicago:  Carus Publishing, 2000) describes the great idea of Punishment on pp. 274-283.

When Scientists Aren't Scientists

I recently attended a scientific conference in the Northeast U. S. (I will be purposely vague about the exact venue for reasons that will shortly become clear), and on the plane I read an article by the Harvard political scientist Harvey Mansfield that pointed out an ironic fact about science:  in order to do good science, scientists must act at least some of the time like non-scientists.  Right after that, I got to see a good example of what he was talking about.

One of the main things that attract certain personalities to science and engineering is the supposed objectivity and emotion-free quality of science.  Mr. Spock, the famously non-emotional Vulcan of the Star Trek TV series, supposedly had a temperament ideally suited for science, because emotion was never supposed to influence his judgment.  Many scientific journals insist that papers submitted to them be written in the passive voice (not "We found that. . . " but "It was found that. . . "), thus removing any trace of the author's personality from the paper and making it sound more objective.  But Mansfield pointed out that thumos (a Greek word meaning "spiritedness" or "passion") often takes over when scientists perceive a threat to something they hold dear, even if the threat comes with scientific credentials.  And many scientists who discover something that goes against the current consensus of scientific opinion have to defend their new ideas passionately against equally vigorous and emotional opposition.  In getting emotional, scientists end up acting like ordinary non-scientists, but most good scientists tend to have a certain amount of thumos that motivates them to do the hard work and defending of their ideas that are needed to get a hearing in the competitive world of research.

The night after I arrived at the conference, the sponsoring organization held a banquet which included a buffet dinner, awards, and a three-piece classical music group that could barely be heard above the conversational din in the large hall.  During dessert, the chairman got up at the raised podium and announced the name of the after-dinner speaker:  William Happer, a well-known physicist.  I had heard his name before, and as he began his talk, I remembered where:  as author of an article entitled "The Truth About Greenhouse Gases."

By now, the most famous (but by no means the only) greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide, CO₂.  The conventional wisdom among most scientists, policymakers in many countries, and the general public is that (a) humanity is playing Russian roulette with the world's climate by burning so much fossil fuel, which (b) invariably makes CO₂, which (c) traps heat and raises average global temperatures, which will (d) lead to all kinds of disasters, from dying polar bears to flooded South Sea islands and perhaps even an epidemic of kidney stones.  Therefore, all right-thinking citizens should be aware of their carbon footprints and do everything humanly possible to minimize them, or else go around feeling guilty for not doing so.

Prof. Happer's specialty is the way atoms and molecules absorb and emit radiation, and in the technically sophisticated and convincing talk he gave, he showed that the correlation between rising CO₂ levels and global average temperature is more alleged than real.  He also showed that the role of CO­₂ in the global heat balance has been greatly exaggerated, and that there are serious flaws in the way current models treat the details of how the gas absorbs radiation to affect climate.  He closed with a quotation from playwright Henrik Ibsen: "I am in revolt against the age-old lie that the majority is always right."

The audience reaction was interesting.  They were quiet at first, but when it became clear that Happer was arguing against the main claims of global warming, most people except for a small circle near the speaker resumed talking as though nothing special was going on.  There was scattered applause at the end, and then Happer asked for questions. 

The first two or three were queries about technical details.  Then a tall, rather formidable-looking man rose and mounted the podium.  I can't recall all his words, but I know he began by saying his father was one of the founders of the field of cloud physics.  He charged Happer with at least two faults: cowardice, for not being willing to attend mainstream climate-change meetings to present his arguments; and ill will, for insulting the intelligence of the climate-change community.  In response, Happer pointed at one of the charts in his presentation and said, "The facts are there."  His accuser said something else in a tone of voice that I would characterize as non-scientific, and for a moment there I wondered if the after-dinner entertainment was going to be an amateur prizefight.  Then the chairman hastily grabbed the microphone and asked the musical trio to start playing.  The audience laughed that nervous kind of laugh that means people are relieved that something really awful isn't going to happen after all, and that was the end of that.

Only it wasn't, really.  What if Happer is right, and the vast majority of climate scientists, government leaders, and the public (which is not qualified to judge) has turned a molehill of a problem into a mountain that threatens whole economies and spreads fear and misplaced priorities worldwide?  A lot of people will end up looking pretty foolish, for one thing, which is why Son of Cloud Physicist got up and said what he said.  Of course, one should not make the opposite error of thinking that every crank and holder of a fringe opinion who comes along must be right and the mainstream is always wrong.  But Happer's evidence is not the only reason to suspect that the conventional climate-change picture at least has serious flaws.  Others such as David Rutledge at Caltech have questioned the conventional wisdom as well, but for different reasons. 

Climate change happens so slowly compared to the potential progress of science that I suspect the story will be gradually rewritten as time goes on to prove the dominant powers right whatever actually happens, and it will take a clever historian to tell the real story a century or two hence.  In the meantime, those of us who have more important things to worry about than how many centimeters per year the ocean is rising can take some comfort in the chance that William Happer's voice may be heard, and scientists will act a little more like scientists in the matter of examining the technical evidence for global warming.

Sources:  Prof. Happer's excellent article "The Truth About Greenhouse Gases," written for a non-technical audience, appeared in the June/July 2011 issue of the journal First Things, pp. 33-38.  On Jan. 3, 2010, I blogged on Prof. David Rutledge's contention that we are not going ever going to burn enough fossil fuels to make much of a difference in the climate one way or another. 

Harvey Mansfield's article "Science and Non-Science in Liberal Education" appeared in the Summer 2013 edition of The New Atlantis, pp. 22-37.

The Mythological STEM Crisis

What I'm about to write is considered rank heresy in some circles.  But at least one prominent expert has taken a similar position, and he has backed it up with extensive research.  So here goes.

If you have spent any time in engineering education, either as a student or instructor, you have probably heard about the alleged "STEM crisis."  STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and math, and is the umbrella acronym for a range of academic subjects that (a) are obviously essential to the continuation of modern life as we know it and (b) are not mastered by enough students each year to ensure such continuation, at least in the U. S.  That is the story, anyway:  that we are teetering on the edge of a disaster in which our economy will crash and our technology will stagnate for lack of enough young people able to do science, technology, engineering, and math.

In a recent issue of IEEE Spectrum, a publication of the world's largest professional organization for engineers, author Robert Charette took issue with this claim, which he calls a "myth."  Why a myth?

A myth isn't a lie, exactly.  It's a story that may have elements of truth in it, but isn't necessarily wholly and literally true.  Nevertheless, there is usually a group of people who have a strong reason to believe in the myth, and repeat it over and over until belief in the myth spreads among the general population.  

Charette finds that, depending on your definition of what a STEM education or a STEM job is exactly, that many people holding STEM jobs do not have a bachelor's degree in STEM, or necessarily a college degree at all.  On the other hand, if you look at the pool of all graduates of STEM programs, most of them are currently working in fields other than STEM ones.  So it doesn't look like you necessarily need a STEM degree to get a STEM job.  And if you do get a STEM degree, unless you're lucky you are liable to end up in a non-STEM job anyway.

Anecdotes aren't statistics, but they make situations seem more real.  A student of mine graduated from my university a few years ago with a bachelor's degree in manufacturing engineering.  After an unsuccessful spring and summer looking for a technical job, he returned to school, attended another couple of years or so, and obtained his second B. S. degree, this time in electrical engineering.  Even with two STEM B. S. degrees, it took him over a year of looking before he finally found an engineering job last summer. 

If the STEM crisis was as severe as some would have us believe, people like my student would be snapped up before they graduate.  And average starting salaries in engineering would show a steady increase above average wages for as long as the crisis endured.  Neither of these things is the case, however. 

While some engineering students get jobs before they graduate with B. S. degrees, others, like the student I mentioned, have a lot of trouble finding suitable work.  And Charette notes that while average wages of STEM employees have risen faster than those of non-STEM employees over the last 30 years, the increase is not evenly distributed across all fields.  Engineers, it turns out, saw their wages rise slower than those of non-STEM workers. 

Charette suspects, and I agree, that the real reason the myth of a STEM shortage won't go away, is that it is in the best interests of those who employ STEM workers to have an oversupply from which to select the top echelon of graduates, while being able to let them go when business slows without concern that there will be a problem in rehiring when things turn for the better again.  Because the long-term employment model is now long gone, engineers can look forward to a series of short-term jobs with multiple employers anyway, and often the only way to get a raise in such an environment is to quit and join a different firm.  But as an employee, you always take the risk that you'll quit at the wrong time and be out of work for an unknown length of time. 

If the STEM crisis isn't all it's cracked up to be, does this mean that it is perverse and wrong to encourage more students to study STEM subjects?  Not necessarily.  For a variety of cultural and political reasons, K-12 education in the U. S. has fallen on hard times, and one way to help fix it is to encourage a renewed focus on STEM subjects.  There is little actual harm in running pre-engineering programs in high schools, and maybe some good results, although the longitudinal studies to prove whether such programs are really effective are so expensive that they are almost never done.  And other things being equal, providing more resources for students to study STEM subjects in college is a good thing too.  But overall, we might be better off leaving the system to adjust itself, rather than expecting that such programs will permanently put the alleged STEM crisis to rest.

As Charette points out, there is now a sizable educational and governmental establishment that is heavily invested in the STEM myth, and whose existence would be threatened if we all woke up one morning and had a good laugh at their expense by realizing that the STEM crisis is at least partly advertising rather than reality.  And turning such bureaucracies around is a political problem, not just an engineering problem.  But the first step in dealing with such problems is to realize that things aren't necessarily the way they are presented to us.

Politicians and governments can do only so much.  Most of the people I know who are truly content with their role in the engineering profession were not waylaid into it by a government-sponsored program.  Someone close to them, a relative or friend, got them interested in engineering, or perhaps they just discovered on their own that it is fun and (usually) remunerative to make things.  As long as a society allows enough freedom for people to choose their direction in life, and provides enough resources to educate those who can succeed in mastering the technicalities of engineering, there will be enough engineers to go around.  Maybe not as many as companies always want, but enough.  And the next time you read something about the STEM crisis, take what you read with a grain of salt.

Sources:  The article "The STEM Crisis Is a Myth" by Robert N. Charette appeared on Aug. 30, 2013 on the IEEE Spectrum website at http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth. 

Engineers and Technological Unemployment: What Are People For?

 

The ways that people make a living today are very different from what they were a generation ago.  In 1970, Detroit was still a bustling manufacturing metropolis, thousands of women earned a decent living as telephone operators, and many newspapers provided employment to linotype operators who spent their days at the keyboard of a clunky pile of machinery that molded molten type metal into sticks.  Needless to say, you will have problems finding a manufacturing job in Detroit these days, and the other jobs are history too.  Furthermore, engineers played an essential role in these changes, and leading the charge are those engineers who made computers and information technology the chief engine of creative destruction over the last few decades. 

And we are by no means done, according to a report by some Oxford researchers that was mentioned in the online magazine Salon.com recently.  Carl B. Frey and Michael A. Osborne studied the U. S. employment picture and used sophisticated (and undoubtedly computerized) data-grinding methods to discover that almost half of current U. S. jobs could eventually vanish as they are taken over by "computerisation."

Some parts of this forecast are easy to believe.  If experiments by Google and others succeed in replacing human car and truck drivers with robot drivers, long-distance truckers, bus drivers, taxi drivers, and anybody else who gets paid to drive something somewhere will have to find something else to do.  Among the ranks of engineers themselves, this sort of thing has been going on for decades too.  If you look at old photographs of the offices of large engineering firms in the 1970s, one of the most typical images is that of a huge open room filled with row after row of drawing boards, each one with its white-shirted male engineer.  The output of a roomful of engineers at drawing boards can be matched today by one modern engineer armed with CAD (computer-aided design) software.  The processes are so different that they are not directly comparable, but obviously, today's engineers have very different skills than the engineers of 1970, many of whom were little more than glorified draftsmen.  But is all this real cause for concern?  Or are we looking at the problem from too narrow an angle?

What so often goes completely unmentioned in discussions of technological unemployment, is the question of anthropology:  what is your model of the human being?  I think the model that most secular economists and researchers use is something like this.  All life is basically economic in character, and the ultimate good in this life is a smoothly functioning economy, wherein everyone capable of contributing to it works to the best of their ability and receives in turn the material benefits of their work.  That is a nice picture as far as it goes, but as a philosophy of life it's somewhat lacking.

For a completely different take on technological unemployment, you should read one of a number of works that were popular in the 1930s.  Even in the teeth of the Great Depression, writers such as C. C. Furnas in The Next Hundred Years went into optimistic technophilic raptures about how the increasing efficiency and productivity brought about by technological advances would let most people earn all the money they needed by working only one or two hours a day, leaving the rest of the time for leisure pursuits such as art appreciation and charitable work.  We have certainly gone beyond Mr. Furnas's wildest dreams of increased productivity.  So what went wrong with his vision?

I'm not entirely sure, but one factor seems to be the social consensus of what kinds of work and lives are to be desired, and what kinds are to be disparaged.  A short list of the occupations that are admired and envied in the U. S. today might start out like this:  movie stars, rock stars, the wealthy (regardless of how they made their money), sports figures, politicians (a few, anyway), . . . and it's going to be a short list because for the most part, we don't have true heroes anymore, just people who are famous for a bit and then fall victim to that favorite journalistic enterprise, The Mighty Brought Low. 

An even more important reason for the problem that most people seem dissatisfied with their occupational lot in life is that respect for ordinary, non-intellectual, perennial jobs that are nonetheless useful to society has largely vanished from the scene.  This disrespect can do tremendous psychological damage to those who hold such jobs, which in any economy is going to be the majority of workers.  Take janitors, for instance. Janitorial work is the classic job today that "don't get no respect," in Rodney Daingerfield's phrase. But it was not always thus.

My first job, outside of being paid by family friends, was sweeping the floor in a sign plant in Fort Worth, Texas.  It took me just about all day to work my way around the band saws, the bending brakes, and the vacuum molding machine.  There was no air conditioning, no breaks except for lunch, and by the time five o'clock rolled around I was ready to go home and flop—no heavy reading for this boy that summer.  But I was grateful for the work and the pay, and did it as well as I could. 

An amazing thing happened my last day on the job.  They gave me a going-away party, complete with a little cake.  I can still see their faces:  the grizzled old shop foreman who showed me the ropes my first day on the job, the skinny bandsaw operator with slicked-back black hair who always talked about how he'd rather be fishing, the red-headed cowboy who I saw one day taking liberties with the secretary (it bothered me until I found out they were married)—they thought enough of my humble sweeping up after them, to honor me and wish me well in the future. 

They did this, not because I had proved to be in the 99th percentile of floor sweepers nationwide, but because I had done a simple job with a reasonable amount of dedication.  They saw even such humble work as worthy of honor, and decided to honor me because I had done it well. 

If that deep respect for those who do any kind of honest work, technological or otherwise, were embedded in the ethos and psyche of this nation, the employment picture would largely take care of itself.  But those in charge of the economy would first have to believe in the honor of work, and then put their money where their hearts are.  And by and large, neither the money nor the hearts are in the right place today.

Sources:  The article "Don't look back—the machines are gaining on you" by Andrew Leonard appeared in Salon.com at http://www.salon.com/2013/09/20/dont_look_back_the_machines_are_gaining_on_you/.  The Oxford study "The future of employment:  how susceptible are jobs to computerisation?" is available for download at http://www.futuretech.ox.ac.uk/sites/futuretech.ox.ac.uk/files/The_Future_of_Employment_OMS_Working_Paper_1.pdf.  The Next Hundred Years by C. C. Furnas was published in 1936 by Williams & Wilkins of New York.  

Interview:  After this blog was posted, it was carried on www.MercatorNet.com and led to an interview of yours truly with Drew Mariani, host of a talk radio show on the U. S. radio network Relevant Radio.  Streaming audio of the interview can be found on the Sept. 27, 2013 download page at 
http://www.relevantradio.com/audios/the-drew-mariani-show.  

Cars, Cameras, and Computers: License Plates for the 21st Century

Soon after we moved from Texas to Massachusetts in 1983, I went to the Registry of Motor Vehicles (which we always referred to thereafter as the Registry of Woes, but that's another story) and got Massachusetts license plates.  Ours had some fairly typical arrangement of letters and numbers (e. g. HGQ 796), but as we spent more time there, I began to notice that a few cars had plates with only three digits, or maybe two:  "967" or "76."  It took some asking around to discover what was so special about those plates, but eventually I found out.

Turns out that those two- and three-digit plates were handed down from generation to generation, possibly even bequeathed in wills.  You see, Massachusetts was the first state in the nation to issue license plates, in 1903, and the first plates did have only two or three digits.  Somewhere along the line, the bluebloods who owned the first cars with license plates decided that some visible trace of this distinction should be left to their descendants.  So they evidently spoke with their buddies in the legislature to allow these old plate numbers to be passed to younger relatives.  So eighty years later, any latecomers to Massachusetts (and never mind if you moved there as a three-month-old, that makes you a latecomer) could look around and tell which drivers were descended from families old enough, and presumably rich enough, to have owned one of the first cars in the Commonwealth. 

I don't know if this curious habit continues there today, but if it does, it looks like Massachusetts may have to figure out a way to tell computers about the achievements of remote ancestors as well as people.  There is a good chance that everyone's license plate in the near future will have not only visible characters, readable easily by humans and with some difficulty by machines, but will also bear an invisible barcode that is much easier to read by machine than the visible characters are. 

Most people know that computers can read license-plate numbers by now almost as well as people can.  These devices, known as Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR for short) use a digital camera and a series of algorithms to separate the alphanumeric characters from the background, which task is increasingly challenging these days when custom plates have pictures of everything from blue whales to your favorite grandchild.  Once that's done, the algorithms interpret the characters and send the result to law-enforcement officials or whoever is interested.  These ALPR devices are used in automated tollbooths on toll roads, as well as their more controversial use in camera-equipped traffic signals that generate tickets for people who run red lights. 

But ALPR does not read the plates correctly 100% of the time, and so 3M and other firms have developed a type of infrared-readable ink that can be used to print a certain form of bar code directly over the visible image on the plate.  3M claims that the invisible barcode is much more reliably read by automatic bar-code readers than the visible characters, and at least one state (Virginia) is seriously considering adopting the machine-readable barcodes.  I have heard a rumor (which was the inspiration of this blog, incidentally) that many if not most states already use them, but I have not been able to confirm this rumor.  It may be the sort of thing that some states would prefer not to be known, anyway. 

We Americans are very attached to our cars, partly because the automobile is perhaps the single most significant technology that enables millions to live more independent lives in many senses.  The mobility permitted by the automobile has altered much of the country's built environment and contributes to the sense of freedom symbolized in movies when a solitary car speeds away from the camera down a lonely desert road. 

Anything that compromises the privacy of the very private space represented by the automobile tends to get our attention.  Many new cars now carry in their onboard computers a system that amounts to a "black box" which records data on control settings, acceleration, and other information that is of interest to insurance companies and lawyers in the event of an accident involving the vehicle.  And now that many cars come with GPS and wireless transceivers, not to mention the cellphones people carry, it is no long stretch of the imagination to picture a Big-Brother government knowing exactly which checkpoints you passed when, any time it wants.  The technology is already largely in place.

But in a way, the invisible-ink barcode idea is only applying to automobiles what we have already applied to our persons.  We are long since used to carrying forms of personal identification that are designed to be read by both humans and machines.  The magnetic strips on your credit cards, the RFID chips in your driver license (that's the way Texas refers to it, not as a "driver's license") and possibly a company or university ID card, and the cellphone in your pocket that is kept track of by your phone company are earlier steps in this direction.  There has been a lot of speculation (including an article that I contributed to in a professional magazine) that sooner or later, having some sort of RFID chip permanently implanted in your body will either become popular as a voluntary form of self-imposed cyborgism, or will be required by the state at some point.

Compared to having an RFID chip implanted on your person, letting your state's motor vehicle office put invisible ink on your license plate is not that big a deal.  From a technical point of view, it's just an incremental improvement that will simplify and improve the accuracy of machines that read license plates.  But the very fact that someone thought it interesting enough to spread a rumor about it says that invisible ink on license plates may cross another invisible line on the way to a future that not all of us would like to see happen.

Sources:  In 2012, the Commonwealth of Virginia (that's how some former colonies refer to themselves) commissioned a study of license plates that mentions the invisible-ink-barcode technology, and is downloadable at http://leg2.state.va.us/dls/h&sdocs.nsf/fc86c2b17a1cf388852570f9006f1299/db715763b38b14da85257ad200653d0d/$FILE/RD383.pdf.

The 3M firm has a news item on a "license-plate shootout" field test of various ID technologies, including their own, at one of the longest URLs I've ever seen:

http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/NA_Motor_Vehicle_Services_Systems/Motor_Vehicle_Industry_Solutions/3m-motor-vehicle-services-systems-resources/newsletter-signup-3m-motor-vehicle-services-systems/newsletter-archive-3m-motor-vehicle-services-systems/?PC_7_U00M8B1A00PAD0A0C2MU390ED1000000_assetId=1361625382051.  And I also referred to the Wikipedia article on "vehicle registration plates."  The magazine article I contributed to appeared in Proceedings of the IEEE, "Social implications of technology:  the past, the present, and the future," vol. 100, pp. 1752-1781, May 2012.

Wisdom Literature for 21st-century Engineers

The other day I received a copy of a book written by a retired engineering professor and academic administrator named Lyle Feisel.  Prof. Feisel has found plenty of good works to do in his retirement, one of which was to write a column for The Bent, the magazine of the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society.  He has collected these columns in a book with the title Lyle's Laws:  Reflections on Ethics, Engineering, and Everything Else. University administrators as a group are not noted for their literary brilliance or scintillating wit, and I will admit I opened the book with some trepidation.  But even after I had read (and enjoyed) it, it took me a while to figure out what category of literature it was. 

It's not an ethics textbook, by any means.  There are no homework problems, and each of its forty or so chapters is only a few pages long, dealing with a separate topic introduced by the "law" in question:  a single word or phrase followed by a brief aphorism.  Even though the chapters are independent, a particular view of the world emerges from the whole as you read.  That doesn't mean it's a work of philosophy, either—Prof. Feisel uses no fancy philosophical vocabulary, and makes no pretense of adhering to any particular philosophical or religious system. 

Finally it struck me what the book was:  it's a work of wisdom literature for 21st-century engineers. 

Wisdom literature is what scholars call the literary genre represented by the books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible.  These books are collections of short, informal words of advice, without much in the way of overall organization or pattern, but rich with anecdotes, stories with a moral, and observations on human nature.  So is Lyle's Laws. 

Wisdom is not a word that gets a lot of use these days.  I once heard it defined as the ability to apply knowledge effectively, and that covers not only what engineers should do but what anyone with specialized knowledge has an obligation to do.  Many, if not most, of Lyle's Laws are not original.  For instance, No. 25, "Possibility:  If it can happen, it will happen" derives from that principle known to all working engineers, Murphy's Law ("If anything can go wrong, it will.").  But Feisel's form of the law allows for unexpected good things to happen as well, though you shouldn't count on them happening as a part of your design!  I heard a version of another law—"Discoverability:  Don't record anything you don't want the whole world to see"—from an older engineering professor in the 1990s, who told me he always warned his students not to write down anything that you wouldn't mind seeing reprinted on the front page of the New York Times.  But that's what wisdom consists of:  basic truths about human nature and human relations that are often learned by experience and passed on from generation to generation.  As C. S. Lewis pointed out in The Abolition of Man, it's as hard to devise a truly original moral principle as it is to come up with a new primary color besides red, blue, and green. 

But if there is moral medicine in Lyle's Laws, it is covered with a pleasant and engaging outer coating of war stories (some of them literally that:  the author is a Navy veteran), professional and personal tales that introduce many of the chapters, and a tone that is never preachy or didactic.  Sometimes you read a book and wish you could meet the author afterwards, and this is that kind of a book. 

This is true despite the fact that I found myself mentally squirming after reading a few of the chapters, notably the one entitled "Comfort:  Beware the cozy comfort zone."  Somewhere in the book I came across the question, "What do you know how to do now that you didn't know how to do a year ago?"  That prompted me to think about how much of what I do is simply more of the same, and how much is something I don't know how to do, but want to learn, even at the cost of some mental anguish and frustration.  This is an especially good question for tenured professors, who sometimes appear to the outside world to be entitled to coast for the rest of their lives.  Fortunately, I was able to come up with a few things I've learned in the past year, anyway, and I hope to add to the list as time goes on. 

Who should read this book?  I think there's a difference between who should read it and who will read it.  I would like every undergraduate engineering student in the English-speaking world to read the book (and so would Prof. Feisel, obviously).  If they did, and if they took the advice in the book to heart, they could avoid a lot of the errors, screwups, and cases of bad judgment that sometimes make the lives of young engineers as interesting as they are.  But that is a dream impossible of realization, short of some rich guy taking the notion to send free copies to all engineering schools.  I suspect that many of the people who will read the book are those of us in the late summer and fall of our careers, who can relate to the historical situations that Prof. Feisel alludes to and resonate with the truths he elucidates from his stories and experiences.  But the book would also serve as a good recommended read for engineering ethics courses, and I hope it will be used that way.

In my technical lectures, I occasionally mention a historical anecdote in connection with my technical topic of the day, and I have learned that a little of such material goes a long way.  Most young people, at least most young engineering students, are not that interested in history.  The spirit of our age is inherently forward-looking and views history as something to be overcome and surpassed, not something to learn from.  And for the most part, that is a good thing.  Too much regard for the past keeps you from moving into the future as fast as the next guy, as I have learned from my own experience.  But the human side of engineering is a function of human nature, which doesn't change.  And Lyle's Laws is one of the most easily read, and yet rewarding, works on human nature and engineering that I have come across in years.

Sources:  Lyle's Laws:  Reflections on Ethics, Engineering, and Everything Else, by Lyle D. Feisel, was published in 2013 by Brooklyn River Press, New York.

What We Don't Know About Chemical Accidents

The fertilizer-plant explosion last April 17 in West, Texas that killed 15 and demolished a good part of the town was only the most recent of a number of accidents involving hazardous chemicals that have happened in Texas over the years.  Home to a large number of refining and petrochemical plants and other high-tech industries, Texas has had more of its share of explosions, fires, releases of toxic and polluting chemicals, and other chemical-related accidents.  But when a team of Dallas Morning News reporters tried to answer what they thought was a simple, straightforward question about the frequency of chemical accidents, they found a mare's nest of conflicting and incomplete statistics.  Is this a basic problem that leads to a higher rate of accidents than we would otherwise have?  Or is it just an inherent difficulty that comes about because of the nature of chemical accidents?

The News reporters were unable to find a single database of national scope that answered the question they were asking.  I think what they wanted to find was something like what the U. S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) maintains on statistics such as cases of measles or rabies, or the National Transportation Safety Board's database on fatal accidents involving air transport.  But what they found instead was a hodgepodge of things:  raw unfiltered lists of emergency calls to the U. S. Coast Guard, lists of incidents investigated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and data collected by the Chemical Safety Board, which relies primarily on media reports—in other words, the reporters themselves!  They found glaring inconsistencies among the numbers cited by the various sources of information, and although they were able to identify 24 potentially serious chemical accidents in Texas between 2008 and 2011, they were almost sure that the true number was higher.

The first question in compiling statistics on something is to define exactly what you are compiling statistics on.  The problem of defining a chemical accident is not a trivial one.  Clearly, if I'm working in my garage and accidentally knock over a can of used oil that spills into the ground, that is not something that should be treated with the same seriousness as the West explosion.  But by some definitions, both are chemical accidents.  So first, a line needs to be drawn defining how serious an accident should be before it is logged into a database.  But how do you draw that line?  Should you log only accidents that resulted in casualties (deaths or injury to persons), or a minimum amount of property damage, or all accidents that involve certain types of particularly hazardous chemicals?  There are millions of kinds of chemicals, and the hazard to humans of many of them are simply unknown. 

Even if we agree that casualty-only accidents are what we want, the problems of privacy and legal liability come into play. As noted by the Dallas Morning News reporters, private firms are reluctant to share details of their inner workings that might leave them open to lawsuits or might prove repellent to potential investors.  As the aftermath of the West explosion has shown, the legal environment of chemical accidents is complex, poorly defined, and is the result of a tangle of criminal, regulatory, and civil codes that do not produce the kind of clear-cut situations that are easy to record in databases.

Not mentioned by the investigative reporters is a powerful external force on chemical industries which makes most firms maintain and enforce strict internal safety rules and records of accidents.  This force is applied by insurance companies.  My brother-in-law is the chief safety officer for a large firm that operates refineries in several states.  One of his main jobs is to travel to the home offices of the company's main insurers annually, and present detailed reports of his firm's safety records and the measures they are taking to make sure lessons are learned from near-misses in order to prevent bigger accidents in the future.  While these matters are handled out of the public eye, the desire to keep insured is one reason that the chemical industry as a whole has a safety record that is much better than it could be, considering the millions of pounds of hazardous material that passes through its facilities every year.  And in conversations with my brother-in-law, I have learned that firms quickly learn about accidents at other firms, and take steps to make sure those types of incidents don't happen to them too.  In other words, a good bit of what a comprehensive nationwide database of chemical accident reports would do, is already taking place: namely, information-sharing among the plant operators themselves.

Of course, there are always exceptions, which often tend to be among the smaller independent operators that can't afford full-time safety officers and large staffs.  The West fertilizer plant was one such operation, but it is not clear that having an accurate national database of fertilizer-plant explosions would have made much difference in the way that particular accident transpired. 

More and better publicly accessible information about chemical accidents is a desirable thing, and I hope that the West explosion will lead to a better system of gathering and presenting such data nationwide.  But if this goal is achieved at the cost of burdensome, onerous, and unjustly harsh regulations of industries which already do a fairly good job of self-policing due to the economic interests of their insurers, the price tag may be more than we should pay.

Sources: The Dallas Morning News report appeared on that paper's website on Aug. 24-25 at http://www.dallasnews.com/news/west-explosion/headlines/20130824-after-west-disaster-news-study-finds-u.s.-chemical-safety-data-wrong-about-90-percent.ece.

Of Pecans, Profits, and Piety

Broadly speaking, the system of international trade we live under is a kind of technology.  It’s certain that without modern engineered means of transportation and communications, international markets would be much less significant than they are today.  And while the particular story I’m going to relate pertains to the oldest technology in human history, namely farming, the lesson behind it applies to many fields of engineering.

The pecan tree is the state tree of Texas.  (In case you’ve never heard a Texan say it, it’s pronounced “puh-cawn”).  Pecan trees can grow to a height of 100 feet (30 meters) or more, live up to 1000 years, and for most of those years can produce an abundant annual crop of tasty, highly edible nuts.  When my late grandfather moved to Fort Worth, Texas in 1930, he planted a pecan tree in his back yard.  The last time I visited his house (currently occupied by other relatives), that tree was still going strong, providing shade for most of the back yard and a good bit of the house too.  Pecan trees are native to Texas and grace thousands of acres of river banks and bottom lands, besides furnishing an important food crop to pecan growers who grow hundreds of different varieties.  Pecans are sold both for direct consumption, either in the shell or hulled, and also as ingredients for processed food that benefit from the addition of chopped or blended pecans.  But until about a decade ago, the pecan market was almost entirely domestic, with a good number being sold mainly in Texas.

Then someone in China caught on to the fact that the huge market there for snack nuts, sold often in vending machines in locations such as gas stations and convenience stores, might benefit from imported pecans.  Up until then, most of the snack nuts sold were Chinese walnuts, but the cheaper pecan tastes just as good (in my opinion, anyway), and some clever Chinese importers introduced the new nut to Chinese consumers around 2001.

They liked it—liked it so much that since 2007, shipments of pecans to China from the U. S. (which includes exports from relatively new pecan-growing states such as Georgia and New Mexico as well as Texas) averaged almost 60 million pounds annually.  But there is a fly in this profitable ointment, which is the fact that the Chinese market wants a particular kind of “improved” pecan, not the rich variety of our native pecans.

According to an article in Texas Monthly by James McWilliams, the hybrid improved pecans have a uniform size, uniformly thin shells, and uniform quality.  These improved varieties will work in the Chinese vending machines, which can’t handle the variation in shapes and sizes of native varieties.  Texas pecan growers have known about the Chinese market for years, but so far they have exhibited a marked reluctance to chop down their existing groves, many of which are native varieties, to plant the improved type that produces machine-vendable pecans.   In so doing, they are losing year by year a potential market that could allow Texas to surpass the newer pecan-growing states and once more lead the nation in pecan exports.

That takes care of pecans and profits; now for the piety.  I have been reading a book called Food & Faith, a work of theological musings about the connections between eating and Christianity.  The author, Norman Wirzba, relies on the works of agrarians such as Wendell Berry as well as more explicitly theological writers.  But I was struck by the following passage from the book as expressing exactly what is going on between the Chinese pecan market and Texas pecan growers:  “Food that may have begun in the ground [or on a tree] must lose all traces of soil, sunlight, and fragile plant and animal life so that it can be redesigned, engineered [!], improved, packaged, stored, and delivered in whatever ways the food producer sees fit.”  Wirzba’s book, among many other things, is an impassioned plea to stop thinking about food and eating merely in material and economic terms. 

Viewed one way, it only makes sense for Texas pecan farmers to replant their groves with machine-friendly pecan trees, for the more efficient production of pecans that will contribute to the efficient international trade that efficiently fills vending machines with pecans that Chinese consumers can eat to fuel the machines called their bodies. 

But viewed another way, there is incalculable value in tending native pecan trees which are so deeply connected at multiple levels to a part of the world that Texans, at least, view as God’s country.  Not that His title to the rest of the world is defective in any serious way.  But as a recent arrival here from California said to me the other day, “Texans seem to have a loyalty to their state that I haven’t noticed anywhere else.”  And native pecan trees are part of what makes Texas the place it is.  I find reassuring the fact that just down the road from where I live, in Seguin, you can visit Pape’s Pecan Nutcracker Museum, and view both stationary and portable World’s Largest Pecans.  One is a concrete model on a pedestal on the town square, and the other, welded out of steel, is mounted on a trailer for convenient towing in parades.  And I would like to think that at least part of the reason that Texas pecan growers haven’t done the economically sensible and efficient thing of whacking down all their old-fashioned native trees to plant new ones for the Chinese market, is that, well, there’s more important things than money. 

It takes ten years for a new pecan sapling to mature enough to start producing.  That induces a natural tendency in pecan farmers to take the long view.  Ten years from now, the Chinese may have dropped pecans for Brazil nuts, for all I know.  But the rich biological and cultural heritage represented by the native pecan trees of Texas will live on, I hope, for many generations to come.

Sources:  I learned about the Chinese pecan market from James McWilliams’ article “Shell Game” in the Sept. 2013 edition of Texas Monthly.  It is an excerpt from his book The Pecan:  A History of America’s Native Nut to be published in October 2013.  I also referred to an online article about the pecan market posted by Nature’s Finest Foods Ltd. (a brokerage firm) at http://www.nffonline.com/industry-news/2013/06/19/pecan-exports-china-falter and an item by the Whitney Consulting Group posted on Google Docs (account required) at https://docs.google.com/file/d/1l9XwHsObwgS8O9OERlQwUqaF_IEoBXSVhQLpcnLvwnLpB_fwr-kY1pSeeVdl/edit.  Norman Wirzba’s Food & Faith:  A Theology of Eating was published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press.