NSF and Women in STEM: Removing Barriers or Chartering Jets?

 

Anyone even remotely connected with the academic world knows that the Trump administration has recently been playing Attila the Hun to the Italy of the government-funded research establishment, slashing billions in already-granted money, firing staff, and generally raising Hades.  A recent article by Andrew Follett in National Review highlights the shakeup at what many academics consider to be the crown jewel of such funding, the U. S. National Science Foundation (NSF).  Follett points out that the long-established woke-diversity-equity-inclusion slant at the agency may be repressed for the moment, but making permanent changes will require Congressional action. 

 

Follett may well be right regarding the correct political strategy, but what I would like to focus on is one particular goal which the NSF holds dear to its bureaucratic heart:  expanding participation in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) for women. 

 

It is not quite the case, as Follett says it is, that NSF is abandoning this goal completely.  Rather, according to some updated guidelines on the NSF website, investigators may pursue it, but only "as part of broad engagement activities" that are open to all Americans, regardless of sex, race, or other "protected characteristics."  Even if Congress gets involved, I suspect NSF will keep doing what it wants to do while staying within the letter of the law, because I've seen up close how they do it in the case of a specific grant aimed at increasing the participation of women in engineering.

 

I state categorically that women should not be barred from pursuing degrees or jobs in engineering, either de jure or de facto.  As recently as 1970, women were not admitted to many all-male engineering-intensive schools, and many engineering programs at coed universities refused to take women.  Accordingly, the U. S. Dept. of Labor reports that only 3% of engineers were women that year.  Second-wave feminism, equal-employment laws, and other societal changes knocked down virtually all the legal and cultural barriers that kept women from being engineers by around 1990, and the percentage of engineers in the U. S. who were women rose to around 16%, where it has hovered to this day. 

 

But since 1990, NSF has expended probably a total of billions of dollars trying to raise that percentage above 16%, with the presumed goal being "equity":  that is, a percentage of women in engineering equal to their percentage in the general population.  We can say several things about these efforts.

 

The most obvious thing is, they have failed.  If NSF had poured billions of dollars into a pure-science project—just to take one at random, say, the nature of ball lightning—and gotten precisely zip results by now, one would hope that common sense would prevail and they would turn their attention to other matters.  But that is not how these things work.  This is not to say that all the money was wasted.  In a grant I was familiar with at my own university, special scholarships and academic support networks were set up in a way that mainly attracted women, although when I asked the principal investigator whether a male student could apply, she said technically yes, although they weren't getting any to speak of.  And scholarships are good for students, other things being equal. 

 

But in terms of NSF's original goals of funding science research that otherwise would not get done, paying for scholarships that are legally for everybody but (wink-wink) are really focused on women is a classic example of politics corrupting science.

 

I use the word "corrupting" deliberately, in the sense that betrayal of an agency's stated purpose for political reasons—any political reasons, right, left, or slantwise—is a step down a long road that led to distinctions such as "Aryan science" in Germany before World War II. 

 

As a wise junior-high civics teacher once told me, politics is just the conduct of public affairs, and of course it's not possible to keep any human institution, let alone a governmental one, completely free of political considerations. 

 

But as in so many other ethical situations, the intent is the key.  If Congress manipulates an agency's budget to favor certain regions, there's not much the agency's director can do about it other than jawbone.  But that is vastly different from setting up entire divisions directed not at the discovery of new knowledge, but at the changing of certain demographic statistics such as the percentage of women in engineering. 

 

It is entirely possible, but in the nature of things it cannot be proved, that about as many women as want to go into engineering today presently do so.  As we said, most legal barriers that kept women out of engineering were gone by 1990, and since then the two professions that are even more prestigious than engineering—law and medicine—have become thoroughly feminized.  And the stereotypical engineering image has changed radically from the 1940s, when a clipart drawing of an engineer would depict a rugged guy wearing work boots and toting a transit tripod on one shoulder and a big hammer in his hand.  Nowadays, your typical engineer does exactly what I'm doing now—sits at a computer, something that women and men can do equally well. 

 

I agree with Follett that the NSF, along with other federal agencies, will require extensive Congressional action and supervision in order for it to reorient its intentions and priorities.  Old habits die hard, and old bureaucrats die harder.  But some such sea change may be necessary if we are to avoid a wholesale turn away from government support of science research, which from the 1940s up to at least the 1990s enjoyed the benign support of most citizens.  In a democracy, if most people no longer want a thing done by the government, it shouldn't be done, generally speaking.  And if the science establishment has betrayed its origins and allowed itself to be corrupted by political winds that inevitably go out of fashion, the day of reckoning we are currently seeing the dawn of may go on longer than we think. 

 

I'm glad there are women in engineering.  I miss them when I don't have any in my undergraduate class, which happened last semester.  But I think it's time NSF quit trying to move political needles and go back to funding science.

 

Sources:  Andrew Follett's article "How Republicans Can Actually Defund Woke Science" appeared on the National Review website at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/05/how-republicans-can-actually-defund-woke-science/.  I also referred to the Dept. of Labor site at https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/data/occupations-stem for women-in-engineering statistics, and the NSF website https://www.nsf.gov/updates-on-priorities for their updated priorities. 

Parents and Children: Breaking Down the Technoference Barrier

 

No, I never read the word "technoference" before today, either.  But according to some sociologists, technoference is what happens when a parent pays more attention to a mobile phone than to their children.  And the results are not good.

 

An article by Clare Morell on the news website The Dispatch points out that even if children don't have mobile phones or screens themselves, their lives are significantly affected when their parents do.  A study that compared rates of parental mobile phone use with how well their children do when starting school found that kids whose parents used their phones a lot had deficits in language and interpersonal skills. 

 

Another problem comes when children try to learn new life skills.  It turns out that parental "scaffolding"—basic support and encouragement—is vital for children to control their emotions when dealing with new situations.  If Mommy is off in cyberspace when Junior is trying to color within the lines for the first time, she can't provide the reassurance and guidance which, however trivial-seeming for the parent, can make an earthshattering difference for the child. 

 

I'm pretty sure I remember the first time I rode a bike without training wheels.  And it was when my father held the bike for me to get on, and then gave it enough of a shove that it would stay upright no matter what I did.  Suddenly I could make it go on my own.  This was about three decades before the advent of mobile phones, and while my upbringing was not without problems, mobile-phone technoference wasn't one of them.

 

Full disclosure:  I have never been a parent, so I can't speak about childraising from personal experience.  But there is one childraising principle I have observed in action over many years, which the article terms "over-imitating."  I prefer to state it as follows:  "Whatever Daddy (or Mommy) does is OK."  This is a deep and profound, even subconscious, tendency in children to accept, embrace, and imitate whatever they see their parents doing.  It plays out in everything from such minor habits as habitual finger-tapping to major malfeasances such as adultery.  And I'm sure it applies to mobile-phone use as well.

 

One interesting study found that even babies are affected by a parent using a mobile phone within the child's field of view, even if the baby doesn't need anything in particular at the time.  If you observe the expressions of people while they are looking at their phones, it's a kind of passive, zoned-out look that showed up a lot when a sociologist decided to install a camera on a TV and take pictures of people as they watched television.  The researchers call this a "still face."  It turns out that showing a still face to an infant isn't good, because it gives the infant no positive feedback or assurance that the mother or father is paying attention to the child.  This passive look often inspires the infant to cry or otherwise try to attract attention. If Mommy stays glued to her phone, Junior escalates provocations until he gets some kind of reaction, which by this time will probably be a negative one. 

 

Yet another study showed a correlation between a four-times-greater incidence of depression in teenagers and high rates of mobile phone use among parents.

 

Now, as we should constantly remind ourselves when reading about research like this, correlation isn't necessarily causation.  The crisis in reproducibility of scientific studies means that statistical methods are often misapplied in an illogical way.  That is a topic for another blog.  But even if we disregard all the statistics and simply ask, "Can a parent's mobile-phone use get in the way of their attempts to be a good parent?" I think the answer is obvious.  Of course it can, but what can we do about it?

 

Morell has a number of recommendations, some of which are easier to do than others.  She suggests having a "phone box" to put phones in at the end of the day, so parents and children are both freed up to interact without distractions.  How one would define the day's end is up to the individual, but it sounds like a good idea.  I have a phone you can actually turn off, and I set it in my study and leave it there overnight.

 

She suggests putting away your phone whenever you are with your children.  For some people, especially single moms, that is a big ask.  But at least consciously setting aside a no-phone interval each day might be a good idea.  The only time these days I am around parents with a lot of children is when I go to church, and except for the stray ringtone during the sermon, you might otherwise think that my church is a phone-free zone.  That's an unusual situation, though, and I have no idea what these parents do with regard to mobile phones when they are home with their kids.  A good many of them homeschool, however, and you can bet the phone is put away during those times.

 

Morell says she uses something called a Wisephone.  A visit to that firm's website shows that their product has "no social media, no explicit content, no web browser" but can do basic stuff like maps, calling for rides, playing music, dealing with money, and checking the weather.  That's two or three more things than I use my phone for, so I'm ahead of her already in that regard.

 

I'm also in sync with her recommendations to go analog (or at least not use your phone for everything):  get a separate alarm clock (check), use a paper calendar (check), use a real camera instead of your phone camera (check), and use a notepad and pen (check).  I claim no particular virtue for doing these things:  I just never quit doing them when I got a mobile phone.  Others may have more of a problem transitioning.

 

So even if kids don't have mobile phones themselves, their parents' phones can cause problems.  Parenting is a huge responsibility, and my metaphorical hat is off to anyone who attempts it.  Just be aware that your smartphone may get in the way of being the best parent you want to be.

 

Sources:  Clare Morell's article "Parents, Put Down the Phones" is on the (paywall-protected, unfortunately) website The Dispatch, which some may be able to access at https://thedispatch.com/article/parenting-phones-screen-time-kids-development-imitation/.  I also referred to the Wisephone website at https://wisephone.com/. 

Did Renewables Contribute to Spain's Blackout?

That's the question that still has not been definitively answered as of today (May 11), almost two weeks after the April 28 power outage that plunged much of Spain and Portugal into darkness for almost 24 hours.  Why could renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power have contributed to the blackout?  The answer isn't simple, but as more and more countries derive more of their energy from renewables, it's a question that deserves examination.

 

What we do know about the blackout is this.  The Iberian Peninsula is a little like Texas in that its power grid is nearly autonomous, with only small interties to the rest of the European continent.  A little after noon, some "oscillations" appeared in the grid and were "detected and mitigated."  Operating a large power grid is a delicate balancing act in which the fluctuating demand must be met by appropriate generating capacity at all times.  And across the entire grid, all the generating plants must produce power in synchronism at a rate of 50 Hz (in Europe—60 Hz in the U. S.). 

 

A prime indicator of the health of the grid is how close the grid's frequency is to its nominal frequency.  The grid is like a symphony orchestra in which all the instruments are tuned to the same pitch.  The entire system is designed for optimum efficiency at 50 Hz, and as little as only 1 Hz deviation above or below that can lead to serious problems and ultimately damage or destroy millions of dollars' worth of transformers and other gear.  So grid operators have both automatic and manually backed-up systems to keep the grid frequency near its nominal value, and to vary the amount of power being generated as demand varies.

 

For reasons that are not yet clear, at 12:33 PM three generators tripped off the grid.  This meant that the system lost 2.2 GW of capacity instantly.  In response, the grid frequency began to fall from 50 Hz, and when it reached 48 Hz, automatic protection circuitry began to disconnect more generators from the grid, leading to a cascade that shut the entire system down in a matter of seconds. 

 

Once a thing like this happens, it takes hours to communicate among the now-isolated generating plants and organize an effort to re-synchronize and reconnect parts of the grid in a way that will not lead to further problems.  In the meantime, most communications and transportation systems in Spain and Portugal were severely crippled, thousands of people had to be evacuated from electric trains, and seven people died as a result of the blackout.

 

At the time of the grid failure, over half of the grid's power was being produced by solar, wind, or hydroelectric plants.   Assuming most of this was wind or solar, the grid was therefore missing something that power grids used to have an abundance of:  "spinning reserve."  And spinning reserve is an important way that grids can stabilize themselves.

 

Simply put, spinning reserve is the energy stored in the mechanical momentum of the turbines and generators used to produce power at nuclear, fossil-fueled, and hydropower plants.  A generator-turbine shaft, armature, and blades weighing many tons cannot be stopped on a dime, and the fact that it's spinning, typically at thousands of revolutions per minute, means that there's a lot of energy stored in it. 

 

When a sudden increase or decrease in load occurs on such a generator, the spinning reserve means that its speed (which directly determines its frequency) does not change instantly.  If the load increases (as it would if generators elsewhere suddenly tripped off the line), the spinning reserve automatically keeps the frequency from dropping instantly.  This factor can be used in designing stability into the grid, and historically spinning reserve has been an asset in making grids stable.

 

When renewable sources began to be connected to power grids, the approach taken by designers was that the renewables would always be a small fraction of the total power generated.  So when they designed the devices to interface solar or wind power to the grid (called "inverters") they simply designed them to follow whatever frequency the grid was producing at the time.  Electronics has no mechanical momentum, so renewable sources can adjust their frequency instantaneously.  As long as they represent a small fraction of the total power generated, like a few monkeys riding on the back of an elephant, the fact that renewables do not contribute spinning reserve was not important.  The monkeys go where the elephant goes, and they're just along for the ride.

 

But reports say that at the time of the blackout, the fraction of power being made by renewables was on the order of 58%.  So the monkeys outweighed the elephant in this case.  Engineers have studied and modeled these situations, and presumably know what they're doing, but there is an undercurrent of suspicion that under some circumstances, having too large a fraction of renewables on a power grid that is isolated, like the Iberian Peninsula's is, can lead to trouble.  The question is, was last month's blackout an example of the kind of trouble renewables can cause?  We will have to wait on the results of the investigation to find out.

 

There is a way to make renewable power sources act like they have spinning reserve, but it's not cheap.  That energy has to come from somewhere, and either the renewable source has to hold its maximum capacity in reserve (which is wasteful), or you have to add capacity in the form of batteries.  But with suitable inverter design, a wind or solar source with batteries can be made to act like it has a certain amount of spinning reserve.

 

If we find that the blackout was in fact worsened by inverter-based renewables, something like the battery-spinning-reserve idea may need to be implemented as a safety precaution.  There are other good reasons to put battery storage on grids with a lot of renewable energy.  A windless night produces no wind or solar power, and it's handy in such cases to have energy stored up somewhere that you can use in such situations. 

 

Batteries are improving steadily and may come in very handy to avert the next blackout.  If it turns out that renewables contributed to the problem, we have a solution, but it's not going to be cheap.

 

Sources:  I referred to an article in Wired at https://www.wired.com/story/what-caused-the-european-power-outage-spain-blackout/, an article on batteries supplying spinning reserve at https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/energy-storage/battery/spinning-reserve-displacement-using-batteries-for-a-more-efficient-and-cleaner-way-to-back-up-power/, and the Wikipedia article "2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout."

She Did Not Turn Left

 

Those are the last words of a New York Times story on the helicopter-airline crash that killed 67 people last Jan. 29 in Washington, DC.  While there is no official word yet from the National Transportation Safety Board on the cause of the crash, the in-depth Times report has material from interviews with numerous experts, and pieces together the final minutes leading up to the crash.  As with so many avertable tragedies, this one combined multiple factors, each one of which might have not been fatal by itself.  But the combination proved deadly, and as is often the case in modern aviation accidents, human error played a large role.

 

The basics of what happened are well known.  American Airlines Flight 5342 from Wichita, Kansas to Washington's National Airport was on its final approach to land when an Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter flying a training mission collided with it short of the runway.  All 64 people on the commercial flight died in the crash, as did the helicopter pilot, Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach; the instructor, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Loyd Eaves, and the third member of the crew, Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O'Hara. 

 

When I blogged on this crash shortly after it happened, we knew that the helicopter was flying higher than FAA regulations allowed.  At the location of the crash, it was supposed to be lower than 200 feet, but the crash occurred at an altitude of about 300 feet.  Also, the helicopter was equipped with an improved navigational aid called ADS-B, which updates air traffic controllers every second on the aircraft's location, but the device was not turned on at the time.

 

The Times article adds important information about the interaction among the air traffic controller, Capt. Lobach, and Warrant Officer Eaves.  The main purpose of the flight was to practice evacuating important members of the Federal government in time of emergency.  As a part of that practice, it was customary not to operate easily-detected navigational equipment such as the ADS-B.  The helicopter had a standard radar transponder on board which was operational, but it provides updated location information only about every five to twelve seconds, according to the report. 

 

Such a time gap between updates could have been critical.  For one thing, the runway that Flight 5342 landed on that night was seldom used, and it's possible that Capt. Lobach had never been in a situation where she had to avoid a plane landing on that runway.  For another thing, it seems that critical information the controller tried to tell the helicopter crew may have been "stepped on" when the crew pressed their push-to-talk button to transmit words to the controller. 

 

A third factor is that a few minutes before the crash, after being alerted that there was a commercial flight nearby, the helicopter pilots requested "visual separation" from the controller.  This meant basically, "We want to be responsible for avoiding a crash by looking around us and getting out of the way of anything we see in our path." 

 

This relieves the controller from essentially micro-managing the flight's actions, but puts a heavy burden on the pilot to know exactly what is going on and what to do to avoid a collision.  At night, with night-vision goggles on, it is quite possible that Capt. Lobach and Warrant Officer Eaves had difficulty seeing the approaching Flight 5342, or at least gaining enough information about its path to avoid the collision.

 

At about 40 seconds before the crash, when the two aircraft were about a mile apart, the controller asked the helicopter pilots if they had the CRJ passenger jet in sight.  He received no response, and then transmitted an order to them to pass behind the jet.  Analysis of the recordings indicates that the helicopter crew might have been transmitting at the time and didn't hear this order.  The last exchange between Warrant Officer Eaves and the controller came a few seconds later, and affirmed that the helicopter crew had "the aircraft" in sight and wanted to be okayed for visual separation, which was again approved. 

 

Then, the instructor Eaves told the pilot Lobach to turn left, which would have brought the helicopter farther away from the jet's flight path and might have averted the accident.  But she kept flying straight, and the collision happened a few seconds later.

 

No one knows what was going on in the minds of Capt. Lobach and Warrant Officer Eaves in those last few seconds.  But some aspects of this tragedy remind me of the crash of Korean Air flight 801 in Guam in 1997.  Analysis of the voice recorders in that crash revealed that the  captain of the flight evidently became confused about the plane's location.  But when the junior-ranked copilot tried to correct him, his suggestions were ignored.

 

In a training flight, the protocol should be that the student, even if she is a five-star general, for the moment is under the authority of the instructor, even if he is just a warrant officer.  It's possible that cultural factors prevented Warrant Officer Eaves from being as forceful as he should have been in telling Capt. Lobach to turn left.  And we do not know how deferential Capt. Lobach was feeling at the time, and whether she was alert and cognizant of her surroundings, frozen with fear, or somewhere in between. 

 

But it is already clear that communications broke down in significant ways in the last few critical seconds before the crash.  The technology exists to enable pilots to both hear and talk to the controller at the same time.  I say that, not knowing the details of what would have to change about the old-fashioned AM VHF cockpit radio system still in use, but I suspect there would be some grumbling on the part of those affected and then they would go along with the change. 

 

Beyond technology, there is the vital issue of prompt and relevant communication among those who can do something to avoid a crash.  That didn't happen in this case, and I hope the lessons learned here are applied in every situation where they could help avoid the next accident.

 

Sources:  The New York Times carried the story entitled "Missteps, Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practice Led to a Fatal Crash" by Kate Kelly and Mark Walker appeared in the Apr. 27, 2025 edition.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on the 2025 Potomac River mid-air collision and Korean Air Flight 801.