Will Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications Ever Get On the Road?

With all the recent attention on self-driving cars occasioned by the first fatality involving such vehicles, the advent of "talking cars"—cars that communicate wirelessly via vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications—has taken a back seat, so to speak.  But V2V ultimately promises to be a vital link in the chain of technologies that will make driverless vehicles possible, as well as making ordinary human-driven cars safer. 

The basic idea is this.  Each V2V-equipped vehicle has a transmitter and receiver that operate in a 5.9-GHz (microwave) wireless band.  By one proposed standard, each car transmits its location, speed, direction, and other relevant data ten times a second to any other car in a thousand-yard (~910-meter) radius.  Other cars equipped with V2V can use this data to keep pace as a following vehicle, or to avoid a collision with a car that is still out of visual sight—around a corner, for instance—but on a collision course.  Some government experts estimate that if every vehicle on the road was equipped with V2V, the number of accidents not related to impaired drivers (alcohol, etc.) could be reduced by as much as 80%.  So what's the holdup? A couple of things.

First it turns out that, according to a recent Associated Press report, the main federal agency boosting V2V and prescribing an industry standard for it is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which is now locked in a battle with another agency, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).  The bone in this dogfight is the microwave band that V2V needs to use.  The FCC, leaned on by powerful wireless-comm companies, wants to reallocate that part of the spectrum for wireless internet users.  But a recent technical paper examined the tradeoffs involved in reducing the bandwidth used by V2V, and showed that even the currently contemplated 75 MHz of spectrum might not be wide enough to allow virtually error-free transmission, which is what is needed in this safety-critical application.

Aside from the radio-spectrum issue, there is a question of security.  The NHTSA has had enough imagination to build in a complex security protocol for V2V.  You can easily think of ways to use V2V nefariously.  For example, crooks in an escape car being chased by cops could use a false V2V signal to tell the cop car that it's about to have a head-on collision, and the cops would slam on the brakes—if they trusted what the car told them.  This assumes that the V2V information is used only as warnings to the driver, but sooner or later automakers are going to take the driver out of the loop and allow the V2V information to be used directly by the car's control mechanisms—brakes, steering, accelerator, etc. 

So in order to prevent such shenanigans, the NHTSA has devised a complicated security system that involves digital certificates, public-key infrastructure encryption, and a lot of other things that apparently have never been combined in such an elaborate way before.  It's nice that they have thought to make each car anonymous and to ensure that potential hackers will have lots of trouble hijacking the system, but even the NHTSA itself admits they haven't worked all the bugs out of this security process yet.

The closest analogy I can think of between the proposed V2V system and anything we have now is the air-traffic control system that uses active transponders on each aircraft.  The need for security in air-traffic control is a lot less, because there are a lot fewer planes than there are cars, the Federal Aviation Administration is looking over the airlines' shoulder all the time, and there was already an extensive radar-based air-traffic control system in place before the transponders were added.  With V2V, there is no centralized control, only a lot of cars talking with each other, so the technical challenge is harder.

Even if the automakers started selling V2V-equipped cars tomorrow, it would be twenty years, by some estimates, before nearly all cars on the road would be so equipped.  And until then you couldn't count on doing things with V2V such as traveling in closely-spaced packs or caravans on freeways, because even one non-V2V car in the pack would throw everything off. 

Still, if auto insurers find that V2V-equipped vehicles really do get involved in accidents at a significantly lower rate, they're likely to offer insurance discounts for such cars.  And while consumer behavior is not entirely predictable, buying a car that automatically lowers your insurance rate would be a strong incentive for car buyers to upgrade to V2V sooner rather than later.  However, the insurance companies aren't going to do that until they have a few years of data to base their price tables on.  And that won't happen till there's a significant deployment of V2V-equipped cars.  So we have a chicken-and-egg problem. 

Close to thirty years ago now, right after digital ICs capable of generating voice-quality audio came out, the car makers experimented with another kind of talking car.  If you sat down and didn't fasten your seat belt, this woman's voice came out of nowhere and nagged you to fasten it.  That kind of talking car quickly disappeared.  The V2V idea shows promise of making cars a lot safer without a lot of complexity added, except for the system issues involved with spectrum allocation and security.  I hope that the two fighting executive-branch agencies can work out a reasonable compromise so that people can both stream video as much as they want (or are willing to pay for), and drive in safer cars.  But so far, we're not there yet.

Sources:  The Associated Press article "Auto tech industries clash over future of talking cars" was carried in the print edition of the Austin American-Statesman of Aug. 27, 2016, and appeared in other venues such as the Aug. 25 online edition of the Los Angeles Times at http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-talking-cars-20160825-snap-story.html.  I also referred to a technical paper by Lei Shi and Ki Wong Sung, "Spectrum Requirement for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication for Traffic Safety," available at https://www.metis2020.com/wp-content/uploads/publications/VTCSpring_2014_Shi_etal_SpectrumRequirementForV2VCommunication.pdf, and articles on V2V security at https://www.contrastsecurity.com/security-influencers/v2v-communications

and http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/significant-security-challenge-new-vehicle-communication-standard.

Is Bioscience Spinning Its Wheels?

Each year, the U. S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) alone spends over $30 billion on medical research.  The people who decide which scientists get this money are, unsurprisingly, scientists.  Daniel Sarewitz, a professor of science and society at Arizona State University, thinks that we are no longer getting the bangs we should get for all these bucks.  In an article in the spring/summer 2016 issue of The New Atlantis, he explains why.

First off, he admits that spending lots of money on scientific research and development has historically been a great idea.  If you compare how most people in the U. S. lived in 1900 with the way things are done in 2000, most of the good differences—modern medicine, jet aircraft, cars, air conditioning, the Internet, wireless devices, computers, down to electric toothbrushes—are due to technological innovations that grew out of research directed at certain goals.  And Sarewitz has no problem with that.  The federal government was not a big player in research prior to World War II, but the lessons we learned then about how heavy investments in military technologies such as radar and nuclear weapons could pay off led to the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF). 

The NSF was the brainchild of MIT engineer Vannevar Bush, who directed most government-funded research during the war.  Sarewitz says that in order to get his idea enacted, Bush told "a beautiful lie," and summarizes the lie this way:  "Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown."  Sarewitz spends the rest of his article showing just what was wrong about this "lie," and how it has led to inefficient and often simply incorrect research that taxpayers (and corporations too, for that matter) are paying billions for today.

In support of his thesis, he cites studies showing the increasing rate of retractions from peer-reviewed research journal in recent years.  Another source indicates that between 75 and 90 percent of all basic and preclinical biomedical studies are not reproducible. 

These are indicators of a general trend or pattern that goes something like this.  A newly minted Ph. D. in one of the softer sciences (economics, sociology, psychology, biology) gets an academic job and has to produce new and original results that are published in peer-reviewed journals or get fired in five or six years.  (That part I'm very familiar with.)  So he writes tons of proposals to NIH or wherever he can get funding, gets ten to fifteen percent of his proposals funded, and sets to work being novel.  Novel about what?  Well, that almost doesn't matter.  As long as you can show you did something that nobody's done before, and it has some remote tenuous connection with reality, you can find a journal and willing referees to publish it.  There's more Internet-based journals popping up every year, and it's almost to the point that you can get anything published if you send it to enough journals.  Multiply this picture by the thousands of Ph. D.'s we produce every year, and bear in mind that their proposals and papers are being reviewed by people who went through the very same system, and you can see how the situation described by Sarewitz can happen. 

So what should we be doing with all that money?  Sarewitz says it should be spent on highly directed research targeted at specific time-limited goals.  He cites several examples of the way it ought to be done, including a program in the 1990s directed by the U. S. Department of Defense (DOD) to develop a new treatment for breast cancer.  It led to the development of the drug herceptin, one of the most important treatment innovations in years.  The point here is that useful innovations based on science typically happen not when some isolated scientist pursues his or her private dream, but when a team of smart people use both existing and new science and engineering to pursue a specific socially profitable goal. 

Sarewitz congratulates the DOD for its no-nonsense approach to getting such things done, and for including in its project planning people without academic qualifications, but with a strong interest in the goal.  One of the sparkplugs that got the herceptin project going was an activist named Fran Visco, herself a breast cancer survivor, who founded the National Breast Cancer Coalition to do something about better treatments.  She was a lawyer, not a biologist, but the DOD welcomed her as a participant and her vision was essential in getting things done. 

In pointing out that much research today, especially in the biomedical area, doesn't seem to accomplish much more than paying for a lot of expensive professors, postdocs, grad students, and equipment, I think Sarewitz is on the money, so to speak.  However, I disagree with him that Vannevar Bush told "a beautiful lie" to get the NSF going. 

If you genuinely believe that what you say at the time is true, it isn't a lie, morally speaking.  You may be guilty of self-deception or not informing yourself sufficiently, but not of lying.  Bush was a creature of his time, and most of the people he had hired to develop things like radar and nuclear bombs had in fact spent most of their careers indulging the "free play of their free intellects," because that was the main way basic science was pursued before huge amounts of federal dollars showed up after World War II.  Most scientists before 1941 operated more or less in the style of Albert Einstein, who single-handedly revolutionized physics in his spare time that his job at the Swiss patent office provided him.  Back then, the exception was a scientist who did good science while working for industry, such as Irving Langmuir, the first industrial scientist to win a Nobel Prize.  So although the phrase "beautiful lie" is an attention-getting rhetorical device, I think Sarewitz is a little anachronistic in his accusation that Bush was lying at the time.

On the other hand, Sarewitz is probably right in pointing out that the foxes-guarding-the-henhouse pattern of handing money over to scientists who give it to other scientists may not be the right way to do things anymore, at least with the majority of federal research funds.  There's a reason that government funding for science is declining as a percent of GNP, and the public may be right in thinking that their federal research dollars are not being spent as wisely as they could be.  If the powers that are or will be listen to Sarewitz's advice, maybe things will be reorganized so that even fewer dollars can accomplish more, both in the way of pure basic science and in practical applications that improve the lives of millions.

Sources:  Daniel Sarewitz's article "Saving Science" appeared in the Spring/Summer issue of The New Atlantis, and online at http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/saving-science.  For the statistic on NIH spending, I referred to the NIH website at https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/budget.  Full disclosure:  my wife had breast cancer over a decade ago, and is now cancer-free

The Spirit of Engineering: Ulysses Cephas

Some years ago, probably in the late 1940s—the news clipping has no date on it—an 18-year-old woman attending what was then called  Southwest Texas State Teachers' College in San Marcos was seriously injured in an automobile accident, suffering a broken pelvis.  She was taken to a hospital, but became despondent, and her attending doctor decided she should spend her long recovery at home in Hico, 150 miles away.  But the jarring of a long road trip might cause further injuries.  Some sort of rigid custom-made frame to hold her bones in place was needed, but where could such a thing be found?

The photo accompanying the article shows the solution:  a sort of cage made of three or four steel straps attached to a stretcher.  The article gives the names of the young woman and the doctor, but identifies the craftsman who designed and fabricated the frame only as "the village blacksmith."  Thus encased, she was able to be transported safely to Hico, thanks to the village blacksmith.  Probably everyone who read the article in the San Marcos local paper knew who the village blacksmith was.  He lived in a house he built himself, worked in a shop he owned, and had the skills to construct a custom medical device that today would cost many thousands of dollars to make.  Why, then, was the newspaper so reticent about giving his name?  We can only speculate at this point, but I can think of one good reason.  Ulysses Cephas was black.

Mr. Cephas was born in San Marcos in 1884 to Joe and Elizabeth Cephas, both former slaves.  Joe was a blacksmith, and Ulysses followed in his father's footsteps.  Around 1909, Ulysses had acquired enough skills to obtain a certificate in Artistic Horseshoeing, and that was the extent of his formal education.  He married and built a small, sturdy house in the black section of San Marcos.  San Marcos, along with the rest of Texas back then, was a segregated society.  Blacks could live only in the black section of town.  Blacks could sit only in the black section of movie theaters, if the theater happened to have such a section.  It was a common sight to see hotels, restrooms, and even water fountains labeled with signs such as "For Whites Only" or the less direct but just as effective "We Reserve The Right To Refuse Service To Anyone." 

Mr. Cephas, if he did not embrace these restrictions, at any rate lived within them.  He, along with the rest of the black community, endured the rise of the white-supremacist Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.  After some Klan doings that were so bad they drew the attention of the local law authorities, the police asked Mr. Cephas if he could identify certain horseshoe prints left at the scene.  Mr. Cephas was able to connect the prints with one of his own customers, which led to an arrest of the culprit.  Even the Klan came to "Boots" Cephas for horseshoes.

By 1933, Mr. Cephas had saved enough to buy the blacksmith shop he worked in, while supporting his five children.  As if that wasn't enough, he became active in the First Missionary Baptist Church and helped found the San Marcos Independent Band.  But he kept busy working in his shop, as pages from his account book from 1944 attest.  They include things like repairing wagon wheels, drilling holes in iron plates, welding a battery box for the local phone company, and renovating pieces of farm equipment for local farmers.  By that time, his shop was what we would term today a general metal fabrication facility, and his reputation for being able to deal with almost any problem was what led the young woman's doctor to him when the special frame was needed.

There is a photo of Mr. Cephas at work:  a sturdy, overalls-clad man caught in the midst of swinging a heavy hammer—an engineer's hammer, is the technical term.  Along with the photo, another news article quotes him as saying that when he passes from the scene, there won't be anyone to replace him.  Young people these days aren't interested in the hot, heavy work of blacksmithing, he says.  This was well before air conditioning was installed in most small-town businesses, let alone residences or blacksmith shops. 

Mr. Cephas died in 1952, with $10,000 in the bank, rental property in hand, and owing only a keg of nails.  His house stood vacant for years until the City of San Marcos, prompted by those interested in black history, used federal funds to renovate it and turn it into a multi-use space for things like art classes, which is how I found out about the house and Mr. Cephas's story—my wife was attending an art class that I visited last Friday.  Artifacts from his life and work are on display there, and the house itself is a testimony to the skill he brought to his work—the original door and doorknob from the 1920s are still in use. 

Ethical exemplars are people whose professional conduct goes beyond the call of duty to the point where they can be held up as examples of how to do it right.  Mr. Cephas's skin color and birth date barred him from any realistic hopes of gaining an engineering education.  Most of the few colleges open to blacks back then had no engineering schools, and even if they had, the need for tuition money was an obstacle that few black students could overcome.  So he took his certificate in artistic horseshoeing and taught himself everything else he needed to know to serve the community of his birth, even when it turned on him viciously as the KKK did.  His unique skills allowed him to be prosperous in a modest way, and he gave back in terms of service to his church and to the citizens at large who enjoyed the music he and his friends played at special events.  In his life of integrity and service, he showed how a professional—one with specialized knowledge—can use this knowledge responsibly to make the world a better place.  That is what engineering should be all about, and though he lacked the usual academic credentials, I salute Ulysses Cephas as one who embodied in his life and work the true spirit of engineering. 

Sources:  There is a historical marker in front of Mr. Cephas' former home, and a photograph thereof can be seen at http://smmercury.com/tag/ulysses-cephas/.  I also used information from news articles at http://www.statesman.com/news/news/local/san-marcos-seeks-to-rent-cephas-house-for-commun-1/nRfFM/ and http://www.austinchronicle.com/arts/2003-06-20/164554/.  Some of the information in the above post is from my memory of artifacts, and may be slightly inaccurate in a few details.

Hacked At The Polls

Last month we learned that computer systems used by both the U. S. Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) were hacked into, possibly by Russia.  The initial news reports were confirmed by the FBI, which is investigating the breaches.  While no actual damage appears to have been done—yet—it is not clear what the hackers might have learned, and what they might do with the information.  At a minimum, it is a chilling reminder that foreign powers can now remotely meddle with systems vital to our democratic process:  a political party's internal analytical tools, not to mention electronic voting machines themselves.

A recent article on the Politico website enlarges on the latter possibility:  that hackers, either foreign or domestic, could diddle with electronic voting machines and the associated systems enough to throw an election.  Some computer scientists at Princeton have made a career out of showing how various brands of electronic voting machines can be hacked using simple methods that are accessible to clever teenagers.  Usually, the hacks require physical access to the machines for a time, but if polling-place workers are not quite vigilant enough, one can imagine this happening.  And then anything can happen, from blatant count manipulation to subtle effects that would be hard to catch in an audit.  The most vulnerable machines appear to be the touchscreen types that produce no paper audit trail.  Many states and counties have recognized this vulnerability and have switched to optically-scanned paper ballots which automatically produce a paper trail, but even these systems can be hacked into at the count-totalling level where laptops and computer networks are used to add up the results.  But there are still a lot of old vulnerable touchscreen systems in use.

The Politico article decries the inconsistent patchwork nature of our voting technology in the U. S., but fails to note that this can also be regarded as a strength.  For offshore hackers to arrange a major hijack of a national election and be fairly sure it would work, they would have to target up-for-grabs states (several of them), get detailed information on the wide variety of systems being used, and devise sub-hacks for each one.  While this kind of operation could be carried out, it's hard to see how, unless the foreign power had spies on the ground in the various states to provide information that would not be available any other way.  Nevertheless, huge elections can come down to a few critical votes in a few critical states, or even one, as the "hanging-chad" adventures of the Florida vote count of 2000 proved, leaving the whole nation in suspense for weeks and making the U. S. Supreme Court an unwilling participant in the election as well. 

While I normally eschew discussions of politics in this blog, I will limit my comments on the current Presidential contest to a phrase I heard from someone whose position prevented him from venting a more frank opinion about the candidates:  "It's a pity." 

Pitiful or not, national electons are a vital part of the way the U. S. government is made beholden to the people, and it is in the interest of every citizen to see that the process is as fair and transparent as possible.  If a foreign country manages to put its thumb on the scales, so to speak, it would betray the election's whole purpose and be tantamount to invasion by a foreign power.  For the same reason, contributions to domestic political campaigns by foreign entities are generally prohibited by law.

Voting in elections is an odd mix of the highly traditional and the cutting-edge high-tech.  Most applications of engineering have fairly clearcut goals:  build a bridge here to carry so much traffic and cost this much and take that long to build, for instance.  But in voting, it's not always clear what problems engineers are being called upon to solve. 

Some readers may know that Thomas Edison's first patent was for an electric vote recorder that received votes made by pushing buttons, and printed out a paper tally of the results.  He patented it in 1869 and a colleague tried to get the U. S. Congress to adopt it.  But getting through a roll-call vote faster by machine was not something that the committee evaluating the machine wanted to do.  As the committee chairman reportedly said, "If there is any invention on earth that we don't want down here, that is it."  It wasn't until the 1880s that any kind of voting machine was used in the U. S. in a general election, and legislatures were among the last entities to adopt them for their own voting process.  So even the great inventive genius himself misjudged what highly political organizations really want in the way of automated voting.

Increasingly today, politics is about power.  Power has always been a factor, but as other cultural forces—tradition, religion, courtesy, even fairness—wane in influence, the vacuum tends to be filled by the raw lust for power.  So it is understandable that regimes and individuals who see power as the mainspring and goal of politics will stop at nothing to attain their aims.  Just as our military has to exercise constant vigilance to keep armed threats at bay, we now have to defend the integrity of our elections from foreign interference, which is a new thing to a lot of local officials whose worst concern used to be finding enough volunteers to man the polls. 

One of the best ideas for safeguarding election integrity was proposed by a Princeton cybersecurity expert quoted in the Politico article.  If each lowly precinct simply posts its results in real time, on paper (and I would add, on the Internet too), allowing independent vote-checking agencies to compile vote totals, this step essentially eliminates any chance of an outside entity hacking into the vote-totaling systems, because the multiple independent tallies would agree and call into question the "official" total.  To some extent, news agencies already do this, but the exact data paths by which they obtain their vote totals is not obvious to the viewer, and making it so would both raise their credibility and help ensure the integrity of the whole system.

Casting a meaningful ballot is one of the most important privileges of living in a democratic society.  It is up to engineers and programmers to make sure that the voting systems this fall will allow every qualified citizen to do that.  But it is up to the citizens to use that power wisely.

Sources:  I thank my wife for drawing my attention to the Politico article, "How to Hack an Election in 7 Minutes" by Ben Wofford, published online on Aug. 5, 2016 at http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/2016-elections-russia-hack-how-to-hack-an-election-in-seven-minutes-214144.  I also referred to a July 30 NBC News article about the hacking of the Democratic Party systems at http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/clinton-campaign-computer-system-was-hacked-report-n620051.  Details of Edison's first patented invention, the vote recorder that nobody wanted, can be found at http://www.techtimes.com/articles/132791/20160211/thomas-edisons-first-patented-invention-could-have-drastically-changed-u-s-history.htm.

Readers Respond: tDCS ($) Versus TMS ($$$$)

Last week I devoted this space to discussing transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS), a much milder form of brain-zapping than electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), but nevertheless in the same category.  Because there are not a lot of studies on tDCS, we do not have extensive statistical evidence that it does much good for conditions such as depression, but I asked readers who might have had experience with tDCS to respond, and two did:  one amateur tDCS user and one doctor who trains and supervises patients to use tDCS.  For reasons of medical confidentiality, their real names will not appear here, but for the purposes of this article I will call them Mr. P. and Dr. D.

Mr. P., a sufferer from depression, has been using a tDCS setup he built himself for about six months to help him during a transition from one drug regime to another.  As to whether it works, he says, "I did experience a slight lightening of mood and a little more energy, and perhaps a more regular sleep pattern."  But he admits that this is not a scientific controlled experiment, as he was also taking his medication at the time and could not therefore separate the effects of tDCS from what the drug was doing for him.

Dr. D. has assisted "patients using tDCS protocols intermittently with supervision to treat pathological conditions," including depression.  He says it seems to be helpful in cases of depression that have proved to be resistant to other treatments.  He "can't disagree when someone with this condition attempts tDCS.  Considering the compromised quality of life, the potential improvement is worth the risk.  Medical supervision would increase the success rate and make the procedure even safer."

Why isn't tDCS used more widely or studied more extensively?  Dr. D. believes that "tDCS is not utilized primarily because of profitability. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) produces effects and results similar to tDCS. The cost of a 30-treatment protocol for depression costs $15,000 and re-treatments would need to be done at least yearly. And insurance is beginning to cover TMS."  On the other hand, Dr. D. charges only $3,000 for a tDCS stimulator, training, and three years of supervision—a lifetime cost for tDCS, in other words, as opposed to the $15,000 each time a protocol of TMS is administered.

TMS uses a much more complicated piece of machinery than tDCS, a pulse generator that produces powerful magnetic fields which induce currents in the brain without the need for direct contact to the skin.  From an engineering point of view, assuming the end result of small currents in the brain are more or less the same, the difference between tDCS and TMS is the difference between the old wired telephones ("POTS" or "plain old telephone service"), and wireless cellphones.  Cellphones are a lot more complicated, but they have genuine advantages over wired phones.  Whereas it may be that the only advantage TMS has over tDCS is that the machinery costs a lot more and the medical profession, speaking generally, can profit more from a treatment that involves an expensive machine or patented drug, than it can from a gizmo you can build with $30 of parts or a medication you can buy for ten bucks at a drug store without a prescription. 

Fortunately, there are doctors such as Dr. D. around who help patients use less expensive and possibly more effective treatments, but you have to hunt for them.  And as I noted in last week's article, the medical profession, at least that portion of it represented by the Annals of Neurology, has extended something of an olive branch to those who are using tDCS, rather than doing something obstructive such as calling for legislation to stop non-professionals from fooling with it.

Perhaps we can gain a little perspective on this matter if we ask a more basic question:  what if the criteria by which we judge medical care are missing something important?  Here's what I mean.

When we see two kinds of treatment being used for a class of medical conditions, and one costs mucho buckos and the other one is comparatively cheap, and they seem to do about the same amount of good, it's almost a no-brainer to ask, "Why don't we drop the expensive treatment and go to the cheaper one?"  The answer comes back from the medical-scientific establishment:  "Because we have studies that show the expensive treatment is effective, and we don't have anything like that for the cheap treatment."  What is not stated in this interchange are the underlying assumptions shared by doctors, patients, researchers, and medical organizations. 

One of these unstated assumptions is that for every perceived problem, there is a solution that can be discovered, researched, quantified, tested, and implemented efficiently and promptly.  The unconscious image is that of a person in a supermarket, making a consumer's decision as to which technology to use.  The philosopher George Parkin Grant, who made an appearance in this blog not too long ago, recognized that this technological outlook or perspective has become an almost automatic mode of thinking.  In fact, it's hard not to think this way.  He puts it succinctly:  "Technology is the ontology of the age."  And "ontology" is the study of being:  what things really, fundamentally are. 

What he's saying is that we tend to approach the world as though it were a big parts warehouse, or electronics showroom.  Everything is there to be used, and everything is analyzed in terms of its parts and how they can be assembled to do something we want.  Here's a person with depression.  We treat him like a machine in need of repair.  What will fix him?  Certain chemicals?  Expensive TMS treatments?  Or inexpensive tDCS treatments?  We don't stop to ask why he's depressed in the first place. 

It's hard to imagine thinking in some other way, but in the space remaining I'll try.  What if we look at a society in which more than one out of every ten adolescents in the U. S. suffer at least one episode of major depression per year?  The technological fix is to look around for repair parts.  But what if we looked into why being a teenager in this society is so gosh-awful depressing for so many?  And the older they get, the more depressed they become, often.  Try getting funding for that. 

I'm glad Mr. P. is happy with his tDCS, and Dr. D. is helping others like him to get treatment at less cost than alternative treaments.  But as for why so many people are depressed, well, that is, as they say in the technical journals, "outside the scope of this article."

Sources:  I thank Mr. P. and Dr. D. for permission to quote from their emails.  I was clued to the words of George Parkin Grant by a comment made by philosopher Antonio López on Vol. 130 of Ken Myers' excellent Mars Hill Audio Journal, a by-subscription podcast about which more can be found at https://marshillaudio.org.  The Grant quotation itself is from his article "Thinking About Technology," Technology and Justice (Notre Dame Press, 1987), pp. 11-34, and can be downloaded at http://www.communio-icr.com/files/grant28-3.pdf.  The statistic about the incidence of depression among adolescents is from the National Institute of Mental Health at http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/prevalence/major-depression-among-adolescents.shtml.