Hazards of Smartphones for Kids

 

A recent Associated Press article describes how public schools are trying to counteract the maleficent influence of smartphones.  Simply banning them from the classroom isn't enough, it seems, because kids will become glued to their devices as soon as they get them back after school.  Reporter Carolyn Thompson says that in an effort to counter the smartphone plague, a school system in Maine coordinated a week of outdoor activities, including camping and cooking outdoors in May.  A Spokane, Washington school ran a program called "Engage IRL" (In Real Life) to give students an alternative to infinite scrolls and chatrooms.  And many other schools are trying to encourage extracurricular activities to displace the domination of smartphones in their students' lives.

 

The schools are right to see a problem.  But just banning smartphones in class and adding extracurricular activities here and there isn't going to solve it, according to Jonathan Haidt.

 

Haidt, a Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business, has written The Anxious Generation, a book that everyone with children younger than college age should read. 

 

The advent of social media has caused a nearly universal sea change in the fundamentals of daily life for every child and teenager who has access to a smartphone.  There is no need to cite statistics on how much time a young person with a smartphone spends on it.  Just a circumspice (look around you) will show that unless some powerful outside force intervenes, kids will use literally every spare minute engaged in keeping up with social-media posts and rumors and all the other stuff that goes on in their personal cyberspace. 

 

Haidt marshals the most impressive set of statistics I've seen in any kind of social-science book in a long time to show that the advent of smartphones has not only been correlated with, but in most cases is the cause of, declines in all sorts of normal healthy stuff that kids used to do without prompting:  spending literal face time with other kids, playing outside, and learning how to be an adult by attaching oneself to an adult role model or two, getting a driver license, and finding a job.  On the active-harm side, incidences of anxiety, depression, visits to emergency rooms for psychological reasons, use of pornography, and suicide rates have all soared. 

 

I have described elsewhere in this space how the social-media companies have spent billions on perfecting algorithms to keep eyeballs glued to their apps, and because the user is the product, the user can't just passively watch things—he or she has to essentially live online and constantly keep updating the avatar that increasingly represents them to the online world.  Besides being a sucky way to live, this mode of existence has now been conclusively shown to be actively harmful to mental health.

 

Haidt has done for smartphones and kids what Rachel Carson did for DDT and eagles in her famous book Silent Spring, which was a foundational document of the environmental movement.  If we can muster even a fraction of the concern and activism that we focused on eagles, and apply it to our children and teenagers, we might be able to get somewhere.

 

The schools cited in the AP article deserve credit for perceiving a problem and trying to do something about it, but Haidt might not endorse their solution of increasing structured activities, although it might do some good.  If I had to summarize what Haidt advises in the closing section of his book, it would be "Less smartphones and more recess."

 

It turns out that play—just letting kids goof around and come up with fun things to do on their own—isn't just the cherry on top of the educational milkshake.  It's a vitally essential activity that forms kids' brains and souls to become capable, functional adults.  Especially when kids form groups or teams, they spend time working out problems together and face difficulties and learn how to overcome them, ideally without much adult intervention.

 

For various reasons I won't go into, the idea of just letting kids be unsupervised kids has fallen into disfavor in some circles.  The epitome of this attitude is exemplified in a photo Haidt shows to make his point that adults are trying to restrict free play unnecessarily.  It was taken at a playground of an elementary school in Berkeley, California.  A sign fully as tall as the chain-link fence it is hung on is titled "Tag Rules" followed by nine rules phrased in a way that would warm any bureaucrat's heart (e. g. "If a player doesn't want to play tag, then other players must respect that.").

 

Such stifling oversupervision is part of the problem, not part of the solution.  Haidt cites studies of experiments in which schools have brought back the old-fashioned unsupervised recess, where the kids are told to basically go outside and play for half an hour.  He has helped to found a movement called Let Grow Play Clubs, which helps schools design playgrounds that have fun stuff to play with, not the standard OSHA-approved boring playground equipment, but things like big blocks and old pieces of machinery and so on that you can do stuff with.  And keeping adults away from the kids is just as important as providing them with stimulating things to play with. 

 

Haidt even has the temerity to say that if a few kids get minor injuries while playing, guess what?  It's okay.  Better to scrape your elbow on a playground then grow up never knowing what getting hurt is like.  That sounds harsh, but it's just an example of the well-supported data he marshals to show that we are currently letting kids do the psychological equivalent of smoking three packs a day, and we not only need to take away their mental cigarettes, but help restore to them the natural stages of childhood and teenagerhood that lead, or used to lead, most people to become functional, reasonably happy adults. 

 

And that still happens, sometimes.  But for millions of kids it's not, and we need to do something about it yesterday.

 

Sources:  The AP article "Schools are competing with cell phones.  Here's how they think they could win" appeared on Aug. 24, 2024 at https://apnews.com/article/school-cell-phone-ban-extracurricular-afterschool-4d89f5b7fd7c8f1d5903f8c04f26da54.  Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation:  How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness was published by Penguin Press in 2024.

Boeing Starliner: Crisis or Routine Glitch?

 

Since 2020, the SpaceX Dragon has been the primary spacecraft in which U. S. astronauts have traveled to and from the International Space Station (ISS).  But for at least a decade, it has always been NASA's plan to get Boeing to develop a second spacecraft for the same purpose, called the Starliner.  After two unmanned flights, the first only partially successful, last June the Starliner carried Barry Wilmore, 61, and Sunita Williams, 58, to the ISS.  But during the flight, five of the 28 thrusters used to orient the spacecraft failed.  Although the Starliner was successfully docked to the ISS, Boeing engineers have been puzzling ever since over why the thrusters failed and whether the Starliner is safe enough to return Wilmore and Williams, who otherwise will have to wait as long as eight months before returning to earth after what was supposed to be an eight-day visit to space.

 

Putting aside all questions of whether having people live in space is useful or beneficial, the fact that we have two independent companies providing transportation to the ISS is a big step forward from the early stages of manned space exploration, which were basically state-sponsored stunts put on for quasi-military reasons, to something resembling commercial operations, in which competition and a certain routine emerge.  Think of the contrast between the hype surrounding Lindbergh's 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic, and the milder publicity accompanying the first commercial flight from New York to Marseilles a dozen years later.  The same firm (Boeing) provided the B-314 flying boat that Pan American Airways used in 1939, and passengers paid $375 for a one-way ticket, which in terms of today's dollars is north of $8200.  Not exactly busfare, but it was one of the first steps in making international air travel routine.

 

As for the Boeing Starliner, thrusters are vital to preserving the orientation of a spacecraft on re-entry, when the vehicle has to face a certain way in order for the heat shield to absorb the punishing friction of air as it slows the craft down.  Entering the atmosphere pointing the wrong way is a guarantee of disaster, so Boeing is wise in delaying the return flight until they can get to the bottom of the thruster failures.

 

So far, Wilmore and Williams have not made any public comments about their unexpected delay.  It's a little more extreme than the delays experienced by thousands of commercial air travelers in the last few weeks when a computer glitch upset the schedule applecarts of dozens of airlines.  Spending an extra day or two in an airport is not much compared to eight months in space, but the two astronauts concerned are seasoned veterans, and presumably their families and whatever other commitments they had back on Earth have been dealt with satisfactorily.  I don't know how I would feel if I watched my ride home take off without me and achieve a successful landing, but I suppose it depends on how much I was enjoying myself in the ISS.  Space flight is not for everybody, and the selection process probably yields personalities who can handle nearly anything unexpected except maybe death.  And in this case, erring on the side of caution at the price of inconveniencing a couple of astronauts is probably the best thing to do.

 

We will know that space flight has finally achieved routine status when occurrences such as the one about the failed thrusters don't make news at all.  After all, we don't hear much about Amereican Airlines flight XYZ that was cancelled because of a problem with their battery backup system, because such things happen every day and the airlines have found ways to deal with them without inconveniencing their customers—well, not much, anyway. 

 

Space flight is still far from a purely commercial endeavor, however, and it's not clear whether it ever will be.  The ISS itself is a creature of international agreements of fiendish complexity, and is perhaps the best example of an institution that self-perpetuates because you can't simply shut it down and send messages up to tell everybody they're fired.  But given the obvious need to swap people in and out of the ISS, it's good that NASA persisted in getting two contractors to develop different vehicles for the same purpose.  And if history is any guide, Boeing will straighten out the thruster problem, if not on this flight, then the next one.  And the astronauts will have the luxury of knowing that their ride back to Earth isn't built by a company with a lock on the business. 

 

When the current ISS reaches the end of its planned lifespan in 2030 after being up there for about three decades, what comes next for manned space flight?  It's hard to imagine how a space station would be profitable on its own.  We already do the most commercially valuable things in space without having people up there to do them:  satellite communications and remote sensing.  And as robotics advances, the argument that having people in space allows us to do things that no robot could do may become weaker and weaker.  Because of the life-support and safety systems needed to keep people alive in space, any manned flight is going to be orders of magnitude more costly than an unmanned flight to do the same thing, unless the thing happens to be simply putting people in a new place such as Mars. 

 

It may ultimately come down to a question of international politics.  If a new space race develops between China and the U. S., or China and Europe if the U. S. loses its will to keep up, then companies like SpaceX will be able to provide the hardware and software needed.  But if a plague of space indifference spreads worldwide, as it seems to have in the U. S., I'm not sure that even a dozen Elon Musks could afford to put people into space simply for the glory of the thing, or to make enough money to recoup their astronomical investments. 

 

I hope Wilmore and Williams enjoy their extended stay, and that Boeing gets their thrusters working right the next time.  As for whether we'll ever be able to afford pleasure trips to a space station, I reserve my judgment. 

 

Sources:  I referred to an AP article on the Boeing Starliner thruster problems at https://apnews.com/article/nasa-spacex-boeing-starliner-astronauts-922b43fa8d0e1f9622022a52f8c8e2ed.  Information on the first commercial transatlantic flight was from https://www.centennialofflight.net/essay/Commercial_Aviation/atlantic_route/Tran4.htm, and I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on the Boeing Starliner and the SpaceX Dragon.

Sao Paulo Flight Crash Raises Questions about ATR 72s

 

On Friday Aug. 9, a regional airline flight carrying 62 passengers and crew bound from Cascavel to Sao Paulo, Brazil crashed in a suburb of Sao Paulo, killing all on board.  The crash was significant for several reasons, and not only because it was the most deadly plane accident of 2024 so far, but because it involved an ATR 72.  The ATR 72 is a turboprop plane made by a consortium of French and Italian firms and intended for regional airline service.  While it is too early to make any definitive statements about the cause of the crash, we can summarize what is known so far.

 

The flight appeared to be going normally until the plane was about eighty miles (130 km) away from the destination airport.  The pilot then appeared to deviate from his intended course, and eyewitnesses on the ground reported that the plane was in a flat spin when it crashed into a residential neighborhood.  Fortunately, there were no casualties on the ground, but all 62 people on board the plane were killed. 

 

Since around 2000, the total global number of fatalities per year in commercial aircraft has been on a mostly steady decline.  As total air miles traveled has increased, this means that the fatality rate per passenger-mile is declining even faster.  2023 was one of the best years to fly safety-wise, as only 102 fatalities were recorded.  Unfortunately, most of that number consists of the 72 people who were killed in the crash of another ATR 72, this time in Nepal.  That crash was due to human error:  during the landing approach, a pilot "feathered" the propellers by mistake when he used the wrong levers in the cockpit.  This turned the propellers at an angle that reduced the engine thrust to zero, and the plane stalled and crashed short of the runway.

 

The cause of the Sao Paulo crash is still uncertain.  Along with the bodies of all 62 victims, the two flight recorders have been recovered, and Brazilian authorities are promising that initial results of the investigation will be available within 30 days.

 

Over its 36-year history of production, the ATR 72 has been involved in accidents resulting in about 500 fatalities.  According to the Wikipedia page on the aircraft, several of these crashes have been attributed to icing conditions.  Icing is a difficulty that modern aircraft are well equipped to deal with, but pilots must be aware of icing conditions in order to take steps to mitigate its adverse effects.

 

For example, the use of autopilots during icing conditions can lead to trouble, as one American Eagle flight was on autopilot, iced up, and crashed in the U. S. on Oct. 31, 1994 after flying a holding pattern at 8,000 feet, killing all 68 people on board, according to an AP report on the Brazilian crash.  In Sao Paulo last Friday, a local meterological agency said there were severe icing conditions at the time of the accident, so it is at least a possibility that icing could have contributed to this crash as well.

 

Turboprop planes use jet-engine-like turbines, not for their jet-propulsion qualities, but to generate torque to turn conventional propellers.  But like any air-breathing turbine, the engines of a turboprop can be compromised or incapacitated if ice builds up on the intake ports.  Ice on control surfaces can prevent the maneuverability needed for proper flight, and ice gathering onto flight instrument sensors can lead to false readings and inappropriate responses from autopilot mechanisms.

 

Modern aircraft have ways of combating all these problems, but not automatically.  De-icing systems use power and can compromise performance in other ways, so they are generally controlled by cockpit switches that the pilot must use.  Preoccupation with other duties or inattention to weather conditions might render these devices useless if the pilots do not notice there is an icing problem until it is too late.

 

And icing can occur in any kind of surface weather.  The fact that a summer thunderstorm on a blazingly-hot day can produce hail is a vivid reminder that the typical height at which the air is at freezing temperature is about 10,000 feet (3,000 meters), which commercial regional flights fly through quite often.  While pilots try to avoid clouds that are likely to produce icing conditions, this is not always possible, which is why anti-icing devices are installed.  But they only work if they are turned on.

 

It is an open question whether the ATR 72 needs attention with regard to its icing problems, but if history is any guide, a combination of icing conditions and poor crew training procedures can lead to a dangerous situation.  As long as robots aren't flying planes yet, we will need highly trained professionals operating them from the cockpit, and those professionals need to pay attention to a lot of possible problems. 

 

I recently found a used copy of Van Sickle's Modern Airmanship, 6th Edition.  It is a kind of encyclopedia of flying, with all the answers to questions a student pilot could ask and many that an experienced professional needs to be reminded of from time to time.  While I always knew that flying was hard, reading this book has brought home to me just how hard it can be, and how many details have to go exactly right for a smooth commercial flight to come off from takeoff to landing. 

 

All the technical training in the world will not keep a careless pilot from making mistakes.  And while pilots are human too, they hold the responsibility for dozens of human lives literally in their hands, just like a surgeon does.  It takes character to live up to that responsibility, and cultivating such character is a big part of pilot training and recertification.  It's possible that the Sao Paulo crash was due entirely to mechanical problems and the crew was blameless.  We will have to await the results of the investigation to find out.  But whatever happened, it's too late for the 62 who died.  It's not too late, however, for the rest of us to learn from whatever mistakes were made, and avoid them next time.

 

Sources:  I referred to the Associated Press articles on the crash at https://apnews.com/article/brazil-plane-crash-sao-paulo-394427322513643f4eaf517e4ac4c85e

and https://apnews.com/article/brazil-airplane-crash-deadly-voepass-sao-paulo-5c5a3371b5e899b745c1cb6e46950230.  I also consulted statistics on plane crashes at https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1490283 and the Wikipedia sites "List of accidents and incidents involving commercial aircraft," "ATR 72," and "Yeti Airlines Flight 691."  

Benevolent Spinoffs in Technology: Smartphones and the Deaf Population

 

At the town recreation center where my wife and I take exercise from time to time, one day we passed a man who was using American Sign Language (ASL).  That in itself is not too unusual in Central Texas, as there is a long-established Texas School for the Deaf in Austin, and as a result we have a higher-than-average concentration of deaf and hearing-impaired people in the area. 

 

What was unusual is that he was by himself, directing his gestures and facial expressions to his smartphone, propped on a chair next to him.  It never occurred to me until that moment that the video-call feature is a huge step forward for deaf individuals who use ASL.  As long as the person at the other end also knows ASL, there's no need for any intervening interpreters or translation functions:  just look and talk, and this guy was enthusiastically doing just that.

 

This was the vision of some Cornell researchers back in 2009, when older and slower 2-G phone systems were barely able to handle still images, let alone the 10-frame-per-second or so data rates needed to convey ASL efficiently.  Sheila Hemami, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, led a four-year effort to squeeze video of both hand gestures and facial expressions over the limited bandwidth then available.  By 2009, they were testing 25 prototype units with deaf individuals in the Seattle area, and hoped that their pioneering efforts would take hold and spread.  Of course, when wider bandwidths and videoconferencing came along, the problem almost solved itself.

 

Even back then, deaf people could send text messages, and in fact that is the only way they could use the telecommunications network for many decades.  Because most people have normal hearing, the big priority for deaf people is to communicate with a hearing person who has no knowledge of ASL.  With the advent of the telephone, the only way a deaf person could use it  at first was to sign to a hearing person, and ask the hearing person to make the phone call.  This works, but requires a resident hearing person to help you.

 

The next step came when a deaf physicist and amateur radio operator, a deaf orthodontist, and the grandson of the founder of Saks Fifth Avenue used some surplus teletype machines to demonstrate typewritten communications over ordinary phone lines.  This was in 1964, and in the succeeding decades, so-called TTY communication became a kind of standard for deaf people.  Service agencies sprang up who would read the TTY messages over the phone to hearing people so a deaf person could use their TTY to communicate with anyone who had a phone.  This was a great step forward, but still required the deaf person to invest heavily in a specialized set of equipment and hire a service agency to do something that hearing people could achieve with only a telephone.  Nevertheless, it became quite popular in the deaf community for all sorts of uses.  In a discussion thread on Reddit, a former TTY agent, as they were called, expressed amazement at how many deaf persons were calling sex chat rooms when he worked for the agency.  That would certainly pose an ethical dilemma for the agent, but common-carrier law back then would prevent the agency from turning down such business, I suppose.

 

When text messaging became feasible directly on one's mobile phone, deaf people seized on it eagerly, even back when one had to use a 10-key pad and multiple taps to encode messages.  Things got a lot easier with the advent of touchscreen phones and the bandwidth improvements that came along with 3-G and 4-G systems.  For communicating with hearing persons, there are now Video Relay Service (VRS) companies which employ ASL interpreters to relay messages from an ASL user to someone who doesn't understand ASL.  And with the advent of AI systems that are fluent in video images and sound as well as text, it is only a matter of time before someone develops an AI app that will at least supplement the work of a human ASL interpreter, and possibly become good enough to be used without human assistance at all. 

 

The use of videoconferencing for ASL was not the target application when smartphone developers set out to make video over phones possible.  But deaf people were the unintended beneficiaries nevertheless, and unintended uses turn out to be some of the more interesting byways in the history of technology.  Ronald Kline, a historian of technology at Cornell, has written extensively about how farmers adapted Model-T automobiles to do everything from plowing to grinding corn.  While Henry Ford wasn't planning on this, he was probably pleased if it meant more Fords were sold. 

 

This is one reason why engineering can never be an entirely theoretical arm-chair exercise.  Engineers have to get their prototype products out in the field where people they don't know will use them in ways that their designers can't imagine.  Sometimes these ways will cause harm, and that is why prototype testing with safety in mind is so important.  But almost as often, people will find beneficial uses that the developers never thought of, and what begins as a minor side use can become the main use after a while. 

 

The most prominent example of unintended uses I can think of came about with the development of the Internet itself.  While certain far-seeing individuals anticipated access to huge amounts of data by consumers (Vannevar Bush's 1945 "Memex" paper comes to mind), it seems that almost nobody prior to 1980 or so anticipated the huge increase in commercial applications of highly interconnected computer networks.  From early email, which was mainly a peculiar way of evading the long-distance telephone network used by a few physicists to exchange technical data at a distance, the Internet has now become a well-nigh-essential utility for billions of consumers, and sustains the economies of the world.  While it has its significant drawbacks (the maleficent influences of social media and Internet-based hacking come to mind), overall the Internet and its spawn have proved to be beneficial to humanity in myriad ways that its early developers and users never anticipated.

 

So I'm glad that members of the deaf community can now make phone calls to their deaf friends with as much ease and facility as their hearing counterparts can—and all without bothering anybody at the next table in the restaurant.

 

Sources:  The 2009 Cornell research is described at https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2009/12/researchers-create-cell-phones-sign-language.  I also referred to the websites https://nagish.com/post/how-to-use-telephone-if-deaf, about the history of TTY at https://www.smecc.org/tty___tdd_history_and_resources.htm, and discussions about the various technologies at the Reddit site https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualConversation/comments/ci1pbr/i_just_saw_a_deaf_person_having_a_phone/.