Happy Ending for Chilean Mine Rescue, But What Next?

Anyone who watched last Wednesday as the thirty-three trapped Chilean miners were hauled up one by one through a two-thousand-foot borehole must have felt at least some emotion as we witnessed the great joy and relief the miners and their relatives and friends expressed. This was truly the best possible ending to a type of disaster that so often ends with funerals instead of parties. Many kudos go to the Chilean, Canadian, and American engineers and managers who drilled access and transportation boreholes accurately, safely, and in record time to make the rescue possible. But the highest congratulations go to the miners themselves, who, despite rumors of arguments deep underground, managed to survive those first seventeen days on two days’ worth of rations and hope that help was on its way. The truth of their survival is probably better than the fictionalized movie and book versions that no doubt will be forthcoming. But as an Associated Press article published yesterday examines the futures of these miners, this would be a good time to look at the ethics and economics of mine operations in general.

As the AP article points out, by U. S. standards all the miners are very poor, and since the company that owned the collapsed mine has now declared bankruptcy, all its three-hundred-some-odd miners are now out of work. One miner returned to a “wood-and-tin” house where sixteen people live, and the street where he lives was lined with plastic bags filled with air because the residents could not afford balloons. Working in a mine—at least as long as you don’t own it—is no way to get rich, except perhaps by comparison to what you were doing before. If you were a subsistence farmer whose livelihood depended on the vagaries of wind and rain, you might view a mining job as a great way to improve your life. It lets you live in a city or town rather than the country, it gives you a regular job that doesn’t depend on the weather, and as long as your health and strength hold up, you can even earn enough to provide for a family.

With the exception of freelance prospecting, mining is a capital-intensive business, which means the people who put in the money to make the mine work are the ones who reap the profits. The miners themselves are paid wages and perhaps some benefits, and take the risks normally associated with mining. There is apparently no such thing as an absolutely safe mine, unless no one ever goes in it, and the day of totally robotic mining has not yet arrived. So for the foreseeable future, there will be mine owning and operating companies that hire local people to do the dirty, dangerous work underground.

There will also be a tension between spending money on safety equipment, training, and other overhead expenses that improve the miner’s lot, and spending it on means of exploiting the mine itself. This is why governments enact mine safety regulations and enforce them, because human nature is such that if firms are left strictly to themselves, the dangerous cost-cutting mines make more money and drive out the safer ones, other things being equal (which they never are, of course). The ultimate unrestricted free-market situation for mining in South America existed during the early years of Spanish exploration in the 1500s, where natives were basically enslaved to work the mines. Things are much better now, but the temptation to create a kind of de facto slavery with company towns and stores is always present, and has to be guarded against.

In the best possible circumstances, mine operators treat their employees fairly and run their mines under a consistent and justly administered set of rules that make the playing field as even as possible in a given country. Commodity prices, which ultimately determine whether a given mine is profitable, are currently beyond the control of any one country, but whenever a mine’s output is worth mining, all parties involved can work together to achieve a stable balance between safety and efficient production.

Another lesson from the Copiapo mine saga is that engineering can do only so much. The character and behavior of the miners themselves was critical in this rescue. If thirty-three college professors had been trapped underground instead of thirty-three miners, I fear the only thing the drill would have found after seventeen days would be the minutes of a long and increasingly contentious faculty meeting that concluded in mass slaughter. Despite the hopes and speculations of groups such as the transhumanists and others who think man will eventually conquer nature completely, technology can do only so much. The humanity and faith of the miners and their people aboveground made as much or more difference to the outcome as the best technology could offer. Of all the lessons we can learn from Copiapo, I think that may be the most important one.

Sources: I referred to an Oct. 17, 2010 article on the Yahoo News website at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/lt_chile_mine_collapse.

Red Tide of Disaster in Hungary

The town of Kolontar in western Hungary is about halfway between Budapest and the Austrian border. Like many other former Iron Curtain countries, Hungary has its share of old heavy-industry installations, and an alumina processing plant stands next to Kolontar. The facility no doubt provides some welcome employment, but the preferred method of making alumina is a nasty business. You start with bauxite, which is a mixture of pure alumina (aluminum oxide, from which the metal is made) and other minerals. These other minerals do not dissolve when you treat the ground-up bauxite with sodium hydroxide, otherwise known as lye. The alumina stays in solution as it converts to aluminum hydroxide, you filter out the undissolved material, and then heat up the hydroxide to turn it back into pure alumina, now minus the other minerals.

So far, so good. But what do you do with the leftovers, especially when we’re talking about tons of material a day? The byproduct of this process is called “red mud,” and there’s not much use for it. It still has the pH (a measure of acidity or basicity) of lye, and if there were any heavy metals such as arsenic or mercury in the original bauxite, they are still in the red mud. The Hungarian Aluminum Production and Trade Company, which owns the plant, chose to build large open retaining reservoirs and simply ran the mud out to the reservoirs. As long as the reservoirs held together, this at least localized the problem. But last Monday, Oct. 4, one of the retaining walls (perhaps weakened by heavy summer rains) collapsed. According to an MSNBC report, the resulting red tide flooded most of Kolontar and parts of other nearby towns, killed at least seven people, and sent 150 or so to hospitals for treatment of alkali burns and other injuries.

The investigation into the cause of the collapse is just beginning, but the issue I’d like to address is the practice of what you might call deferred environmental protection. Thousands of various industrial processes make byproducts which, like red mud, take up a lot of space but have no economic value. In fact, to the extent that getting rid of them costs money, they have negative economic value. To treat red mud so that it could be used as fill at construction sites or even in garden soil would cost a lot, first to neutralize the alkali content with acid and then to filter or extract the hazardous heavy metals. If the firm that runs the Kolontar facility spent all this money to make red mud at least disposable without danger, their alumina would cost more than the average commodity price, and the firm would likely go out of business—at least out of the alumina business.

I’m no chemical engineer, and I don’t know what the standard practices are for alumina production. But I suspect that in today’s global economy, the other alumina producers are doing pretty much the same thing as the Kolontar factory did. The only reason we haven’t heard about them is that their reservoirs haven’t sprung leaks—yet.

To what extent should we tolerate the warehousing of hazardous materials in localities where they do no immediate harm, as long as proper precautions are taken? At any given time around the world, there are thousands of tons of highly poisonous materials in chemical plants, factories, and city warehouses, and an accidental release of just one of these materials could kill thousands, as it did in the 1984 Bhopal, India toxic-gas disaster. But because our modern industrial society demands good things that require dealing with these nasty chemicals, we put up with the danger of having them around. And it is largely the responsibility of engineers to see that hazardous materials stay under control, even if they have no useful economic purpose.

Sometimes indefinite storage of hazardous waste just has to be built in to a business plan. Because there is not yet a national storage facility for radioactive waste, most U. S. nuclear power plants have to store their spent fuel on site. The cost of doing this projected into the indefinite future is factored into the cost of doing business. Fortunately, the volume of nuclear waste is much smaller than the waste products of a coal-fired power plant, for example, so the storage problem has proved to be manageable so far.

But alumina production is a different affair. In 2009 the stuff was selling for only about $300 a ton, so dealing with a highly competitive world commodity market means that alumina producers simply can’t afford a lot of fancy pollution-remediation facilities that their competitors aren’t using. In countries such as the U. S. where environmental laws are fairly strict, you don’t see a lot of alumina factories, partly because compliance with the laws here would quite possibly price their product out of the market altogether. If you take a strictly nationalistic viewpoint, you could say that if a country such as Hungary chooses to let its industries produce cheap, profitable commodities at the expense of polluting large tracts of land and putting whole villages at risk, then it’s their right. But I doubt that a well-functioning democracy would knowingly allow the kind of dangerous behavior that resulted in last week’s red-mud disaster.

At the very least, inspections and repairs to the reservoirs should have been better. Future generations would still have to deal with the question of how to dispose of the red mud, but at least the problem would have been under control. Once the investigation is complete, we can make a better-informed judgment about what happened in Kolontar and how similar tragedies can be avoided in the future. But the answers may not be easy to come by.

Sources: The MSNBC article I referred to is at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39570826/ns/world_news-europe/#slice-2. I also consulted the Wikipedia article on alumina for details of the refining process.

Innovative Help for Haiti

When the worst earthquake in many decades struck Haiti last Jan. 12, it killed over 200,000 people and wrecked hundreds of thousands of buildings. In the months after the quake, Haiti gradually faded from the news, but for Haitians, the quake continues to be a life-changing event that they will never forget. I’d like to look at some rare good news that has come about in relation to the devastating tragedy of that earthquake.

The sheer size of the housing and construction problem in Haiti has created an opportunity for innovative architectural designs that address the specific complex of needs that Haitian reconstruction embodies. These needs include low cost, earthquake resistance, and simplicity of construction. I recently received an email from a Canadian firm called CBD Building Systems. “CBD” stands for “curved by design.” Their basic notion is simple: use short pieces of lumber (they can even start from mill tailings, pieces that are normally thrown away) to make curved sections of a dome-like building shaped like a large igloo. The vertical members are just straight pieces of wood, while the curvature is established by the horizontal members. (See their website referenced in the “Sources” section for pictures.)

Normally I don’t pay attention to companies that just ask me to mention them on my site, and all I have to go on for this one is what their website says. But as the co-founder said in an email, they claim to be applying engineering ethics “beyond the influence of any building codes” and supplying earthquake-resistant structures at a cost they say is below that of some tent-type temporary housing.

If all this is true (and I have no evidence to the contrary), then I say good for CBD Building Systems. They saw a need in a place where the need exceeds the potential profit, and for reasons that are at least partly altruistic, they have made an extra effort to put their product in Haiti and adapt it to the particular circumstances that prevail in that woebegone country. I do not know if they have made a profit from their Haitian venture so far—it seems doubtful. But there is a long tradition, not so much honored today, of engineering firms that take some of their profits and put them into charitable engineering activities that don’t make money, but do somebody good.

I don’t recall the details, but years ago a profitable, privately held firm called General Radio based in Massachusetts sold a small line of aids for blind people, priced well below cost. CBD Building Systems seems to want to make money as well as benefit the people of Haiti, and other parts of the world where their products can be used. I see nothing wrong with that, especially if non-governmental organizations (NGOs) get involved in funding the effort.

Of course, one must be careful to study the details of the situation on the ground. History is full of stories of development projects that benefited everybody except the people they were designed to benefit. In a presentation by members of Engineers Without Borders, an organization that recruits student volunteers to do engineering projects in developing countries, I learned that up to half the effort expended on a typical project is devoted to researching the specific target clients and location, and tailoring educational and training efforts as well as the technical aspects of the project to ensure that a truly lasting benefit accrues to the people on the receiving end. I hope that the same kind of attention is paid by CBD Building Systems and other similar firms which are developing housing adapted to the Haitian situation.

Of course, engineering is always done in an economic context, and we can’t expect a few clever architectural ideas to solve the problem of poverty in Haiti, or anywhere else. If companies can’t make money with their products, they can’t keep making them, and so housing for impoverished devastated places like Haiti may always be just a sideline to most firms. What would really be innovative is if some of these companies set up manufacturing in Haiti itself, and provide much-needed employment for a country that is chronically near the top of the list of poor Western Hemisphere nations. That isn’t engineering, strictly speaking, but it would represent a different kind of extension of the idea that those of us blessed with the ability to do engineering owe something that we should give back to the world.

I thank Peter Black,CBD Building Systems co-founder, for bringing my attention to their work. While they are not the only firm working in the area of relief housing, their efforts are to be commended, and held up as an example of how engineering can be both profitable and beneficial to those in special need.

Sources: The website of CBD Building Systems is www.curvedbydesign.ca, where you can see earthquake tests of their domed structures and samples of their products. An article on the U. S. Coast Guard Forum briefly describes several other types of relief housing being used in Haiti and other regions at http://www.uscgf-kmi.com/cgf-home/269-cgf-2010-volume-2-issue-4-august/3311-rescue-and-relief.html.

P. S. After posting this article, I received the following comment from Peter Black:

We use a dome wood technology to create a linear curved structure 65 ft long and 24 feet wide which houses 12 families and is earthquake and hurricane proof, fire and termite proof with shuttered screen windows, doors, solar powered lights and fans. We considered manufacturing there but the infrastructure is just not there so we designed so 85% of the product's labour will be done by low skilled Haitian workers who work for $6 - $12 per day thus injecting some much needed economic development and Haitian pride. The local workers take the flat-packed wood parts, assemble the frames and erect the structure which is designed to work as a ladder so you erect the shell bottom to top then add the exterior cladding from top to bottom. It takes 3-6 days to install the structure ready to move in. The cost ready to move in is Cdn$15/ sq ft where total living area is 5,376 sq ft or 448 sq ft per apartment. Temporary structures are costing as much as $19/sq ft there.

Is Birth Control a Sustainable Technology?

Last year, the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology (IEEE stands for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) devoted its annual conference to issues of sustainable development. One of the papers was presented by Jeff Robbins, who applied the second law of thermodynamics to the question of technology development. His point was that entropy always increases, and whenever you have a decrease in entropy caused by the production of ordered systems (as in technological development), there has to be a bigger increase in entropy elsewhere.

Robbins assumes that in order to survive, humanity must change its ways with regard to consumption of energy and technological activity. He says “. . . we are living unsustainably, our extravagant consuming feeding off coming generations.” He goes on to cite seven barriers that, as he puts it, stand in the way of “moving in the direction of where we know we have to go.” Leaving aside the question of whether a purely quantitative theory about mass and energy really applies to an issue fraught with social and ethical aspects, I would like to address what Robbins says about one of the “barriers” to sustainable development that he sees as a critical problem to be overcome.

Robbins titles this section of his paper, “Be Fruitful and Multiply.” He begins by saying, “When it comes to having children, few people think globally.” He shows how in religious groups such as the Amish or ultraorthodox Jews, where large families are both socially approved and encouraged, population growth is much higher than the average in their host nations. He then plays the Malthusian game of projecting what would happen if every couple had eight children instead of 2.07 or whatever the approved number is for zero population growth, and shows that one couple could produce 67 million offspring that way in only three centuries. And if that couple and their descendants happened to live in North America instead of the lower per-capita energy-use regions of sub-Saharan Africa, their energy consumption would eventually outstrip the planet’s ability to supply it.

In a way, I hate to pick on Robbins, because his fearmongering statistics belie a much larger global trend that he chooses to ignore. To his credit, some of his other barriers have stronger arguments to back them up, but I will reluctantly stick to his point about population growth.

The big news on the population front for the last couple of decades has not been overpopulation, but the coming population bust, which is already far advanced in countries such as Japan. With a birth rate of only 1.2 per woman, Japan is already experiencing the early consequences of a demographic collapse that may turn the country into either a “ghost nation” or a place that will be taken over by immigrants out of necessity. Either way, the dearth of babies has brought an unsustainable decline to the population which threatens Japan’s very existence as a nation.

The U. S. may be experiencing similar problems, though in a less acute way since this country has an exceptionally high birthrate compared to other developed nations. But it doesn’t take a Ph. D. in economics to figure out that if families are smaller, their need for housing declines, and eventually there are fewer families to buy houses in the next generation. There are many causes of the international housing-market collapse, but declining birth rates are certainly a contributing factor. And I’m saying nothing about the problems with social programs such as Social Security that depend on transferring wealth from the (presumably growing) younger population to retirees.

In fairness to Robbins, he may be aware of these trends, but in order to have something to say he picks on isolated groups where large families are the norm. If sustainable development means development that takes future generations into consideration, what about the very existence of those future generations? Before you can receive the benefits from the wise and sustainable decisions of previous generations, you have to exist. If the countries of the world contracept themselves out of existence and leave a clean, cool, pristine planet to the crickets, that may be very well for the crickets, but we have committed the most fundamental wrong possible against the future generations: we have denied them the privilege of existence. In all the discussions of sustainable development I have seen, the idea that birth control is anything but a beneficent technology with respect to sustainability never comes up. This is probably due to the deeply misanthropic philosophy espoused by the more extreme members of the sustainability contingent. They view people—other people, of course—as the problem, and therefore the idea of making fewer people in the future has to be part of the solution.

Robbins’ scary scenario of vast global overcrowding is almost certainly not going to happen. The United Nations itself (not exactly a hotbed of anti-sustainable-development activism) in its low range of population forecasts (which have historically turned out to be the most accurate) says that if the tendency of wealthier, more educated people to have fewer children continues, global population will peak at around 8 billion in 2040 and then begin a slow overall decline. So much for Malthus. In contrast to global warming, the end of oil, and other dire straits that Robbins cites as something to be feared in the future, the consequences of population collapse are already here and taking their toll on some countries.

As Steven Mosher points out in his Population Research Institute website, you can’t turn population collapse around easily. Once the number of childbearing-age women declines significantly, the demographics reaches almost a point of no return and even if the few women left have much larger families than previously, it’s basically too late to fix things. Of course, neither the Malthusian exponential growth nor the population-collapse exponential decline ever happen exactly in accordance with the math—societies are simply too complicated, and immigration, political changes, and other factors always intervene. But to the extent that the demographics proceed without major interruptions, it is a near certainty that population collapse will occur in a given group with something like the predicted intensity. Much of Western Europe is in the same sinking boat, by the way.

So the next time anybody lists a bunch of technologies that threaten future generations, I want to see birth control in the list. If it’s not included, then we are missing one of the most obvious ignored facts about sustainable development.

Sources: Jeff Robbins’ article “Standing In the Way: Sustainable Future vs. Sloth, Genes, and Entropy” appears in the Fall 2010 issue of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, pp. 14-21. The website of the Population Research Institute is http://www.pop.org/ and has a link to its “Overpopulation Is a Myth” project at http://overpopulationisamyth.com, where the statistics about Japan and the U. N.

Mixing Academia and Military Secrets: The Case of J. Reece Roth

The plasma physicist J. Reece Roth wrote a book on industrial plasma engineering that I have found very useful in my recent research. So when I was asked to recommend a reviewer for a paper on plasma physics, I went on the Internet to find Roth’s email address. To my amazement, the first thing that came up was a story about how Roth had been indicted, tried, and convicted for violating export-law restrictions on technical data he had developed as part of an Air Force research contract. In July of 2009, Roth was sentenced to four years in prison for giving restricted information to Chinese and Iranian nationals and taking a laptop to China with restricted information on it. At this time, the 73-year-old Roth may not actually be in jail yet pending an appeal, but this sad end to a notable career is a cautionary tale for anyone who conducts research in an academic setting with certain types of military funding.

After graduating from MIT in 1959, Roth obtained a Ph. D. from Cornell and joined NASA, where he worked in plasma-fusion technology until 1978. He then joined the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and developed an atmospheric-pressure plasma technology which he published and patented. Around 2000, he co-founded a company called Atmospheric Glow Technologies (AGT) to develop inventions based on his discovery, and for a few years the firm did quite well, licensing several products which were made by other firms.

Along the way, Dr. Roth had made several trips to China in order to present his research work, and was named an honorary professor at two universities there. Like many other researchers in technical fields, he hired Chinese graduate students from time to time and communicated with them regarding the technical details of the research they were doing. So far, none of these activities would be of legal concern. But all that changed when AGT won a Phase I Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) contract with the U. S. Air Force to do research on plasma actuators for drone aircraft.

There is nothing wrong about professors inventing useful things, or patenting their inventions through their institution’s intellectual property office, or founding companies to exploit the patents. This type of activity is becoming almost routine in academic science and technology, and is vigorously encouraged by many universities. Most people (not all) even think there is nothing wrong with professors who do military research. But if they do, they have to follow the rules.

Certain types of military research contracts have export-restriction clauses in them, meaning that any technical data developed as a result of the contract is subject to export-law restrictions. This is only reasonable behavior on the part of the military, which hopes to gain a technical advantage over their international competition. If the usual free and open access to information that is customary in universities were allowed for focused and applied military research results, the Air Force would be spending its money for the benefit of all military forces in the world, which is not the point. So the SBIR contract that Roth’s company obtained with the Air Force explicitly restricted technical results in this way and made them subject to the Arms Control Export Act (ACEA), which requires obtaining a license before disclosing the information to foreign nationals or exporting it to foreign countries.

Unfortunately for Roth, he thought he knew better than the University of Tennessee’s export coordinator Robin Witherspoon. Instead of founding his company at a physically separate location from his university lab and staffing it with company-hired staff, which would have made it easier to obey the export-restriction laws, he continued to use his university lab and his graduate students for both university and AGT research activities, paying for the AGT work through a subcontract with the university. This is a touchy way of doing things ethically under the best of conditions, and when you add export restrictions to the mix, you get a potentially explosive situation.

In May of 2006, when export coordinator Witherspoon discovered that in blatant contradiction to the terms of the SBIR contract, Roth had hired non-U. S. nationals to work on the project, she told him he had to remove them at once and find U. S. students instead. She also told him not to take any restricted information on a trip he was about to make to China.

Roth apparently believed that until he demonstrated a working prototype, his work was still “fundamental research” and not subject to export restriction laws. Acting on this erroneous supposition, he continued to communicate research results to his Chinese and Iranian graduate students and took to China a laptop containing proposals and research reports on the SBIR project. The University of Tennessee, fearing it would be charged with violations if something wasn’t done fast, informed the FBI and the State Department of Roth’s actions. When he returned from China, he found federal officials waiting for him. They confiscated his laptop and began an investigation that culminated in a federal indictment, a trial, and conviction on thirteen counts of violating the Arms Control Export Act.

Along with his many academic honors, Roth now has the dubious distinction of being the first professor convicted under the ACEA laws. His sad story should be a warning to anyone who wants to pursue the combination of activities that Roth did. Setting up a separate lab with U. S.-only workers would have made more work for Roth and perhaps less profit. But it would have kept him out of trouble with the law.

Sources: There is an abundance of news material on Roth’s trial and the associated events. Among the reports I drew on were articles at the following websites:

http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2009/jul/jail-prof-who-gave-china-military-secrets

http://media-newswire.com/release_1094393.html

http://dailybeacon.utk.edu/showarticle.php?articleid=53567

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2008/jun/24/atmospheric-glow-to-sell/

http://www.djacobsonlaw.com/2009/11/sentencing-of-atmospheric-glow.html

http://knoxville.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/2008/kxillegalexports082008.htm

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/08/29/ex_tenn_professor_denies_he_violated_secrets_law/?rss_id=Boston.com+--+Latest+news

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,415982,00.html?sPage=fnc/us/crime

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=tennessee-physicist-sentenced-to-4-2009-07-03

http://www.patentbaristas.com/archives/2009/09/17/professor-gets-4-years-in-prison-for-exporting-technical-information-on-uavs/

http://orda.siuc.edu/rm/36-08.html#export

BP’s Report: No Smoking Gun, But a Lot of Smoke

The long oily summer of the BP oil spill is over, and now the investigation season has begun. BP itself has completed and issued a summary of its own internal investigation, posted for public access on its website. I have had time to read only the executive summary, but even that brief six-page document has technical details I don’t completely understand. However, the basic picture is clear: what happened last April 20 to cause the explosion, fire, deaths, and consequent oil spill that blackened miles of coastline and disrupted entire industries was not a simple one-failure event. Instead, it was a cascade of failures, both mechanical and human, that all went the wrong way to produce the tragedy.

At the time of the accident, the well drilling itself had been completed, and BP together with the actual operator of the rig, Transocean, were under pressure to cap off the well temporarily until a production structure could be put in place. Every modern oil well consists of a hole drilled in the rock, into which a long pipe called the casing is inserted. To keep the highly pressurized oil and gas where it belongs, most of the space (the “annulus” or ring-shaped area) between the outside of the casing and the raw hole is filled with a special cement, so the only place the “hydrocarbons” (BP’s term for oil and gas) can go is into the casing at a controlled location near the bottom of the well. At the very bottom of the casing between it and the bottom of the hole itself is something called a “shoe track.” I’m not sure what it is, but it looks in their drawing like a long can with holes at the bottom. The intention was to seal off this shoe track with the same cement that was being used to fill the space between the casing and the drill-hole wall.

Well, something went wrong: too much nitrogen in the cement, or something. But when the rig operators went to check the integrity of the cement seal by removing the heavy drill mud and replacing it with seawater to check for leaks, the pressure in the well rose beyond allowable limits.

The first place the accident could have been prevented had arrived. If the operators had put back the drill mud and figured out what was wrong instead of proceeding as if things were normal, they would have at least had a chance to avoid problems. But being in a hurry, they accepted the data as showing the cement seal was okay, even though it wasn’t, and eventually left lighter seawater in the well. This allowed high-pressure natural gas to enter the well.

Once the operators realized they had a problem, they sent signals down the well to operate the infamous blowout preventer (BOP), and connected the top of the well to a mud-gas separator on the rig itself. (As most readers probably know by now, the blowout preventer is a big piece of machinery on the ocean floor with two or three redundant systems designed to shut off the well in just such an eventuality as having high-pressure gas flow through it out of control.) Neither of these actions had the intended effect. For a couple of reasons (a bad solenoid valve and a low battery) the BOP failed to operate, and the gas flow coming from the well soon overwhelmed the mud-gas separator’s ability to deal with it. There was a separate overboard diverter line they could have used which might have kept the gas away from places it could ignite a little longer, but it wasn’t used.

Eyewitnesses who were in nearby vessels noted a high-pitched noise of escaping gas just before the explosion. By the time the gas got to areas that were not “electrically classified” (meaning certified as free of ignition sources), it was just a matter of time before an engine sucked in enough natural gas to set it afire. And the tragedy had begun.

The executive summary was written in dry, technical language in which people appear only in the passive voice (e. g. “The first well actions were to close. . .”). But as the immediate party responsible for day-to-day rig operations, Transocean is at fault for a number of things: poor training and management, careless maintenance of critical equipment such as blowout preventers, and allowing schedule pressures to take precedence over safety. But in the eyes of most laws, it is the owner of a rig, not just the operator, whose ultimate responsibility it is to see that the thing doesn’t befoul a good bit of the Gulf of Mexico, as the Deepwater Horizon failure did.

To their credit, BP did establish a fund to pay legitimate claims of damage resulting from the spill, and has paid out a lot of money already. But obviously, it would have been better to operate the rig like the 99+% of other deep-water rigs that successfully drill for and produce oil without major spills or fatal accidents. Besides fouling miles of shoreline, the carelessness exemplified by this tragedy of errors has blackened the reputation of the entire offshore drilling industry, and provoked a harsh government response in the form of the controversial moratorium on drilling operations. Some of the most vocal opponents of this ban were people along the coast that stand to be most affected by any accidents. But the reason for that is simple: offshore oil drilling is a big part of the gulf states’ economy. History may show that this decision was yet another bad judgment call in a cascade of bad judgment calls that began on April 20 on the rig.

At any rate, we will be finding out even more as the Presidential commission and other investigative bodies complete their findings. But already, the technical outlines of the accident are pretty clear. And pretty depressing.

Sources: I referred only to BP’s executive summary of their internal report, available at http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/incident_response/STAGING/local_assets/downloads_pdfs/Deepwater_Horizon_Accident_Investigation_Report_Executive_summary.pdf

The Waterfront—and Engineering—Ain’t What It Used To Be

A few days ago, I watched “On the Waterfront,” the famous 1954 movie starring Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, and Eva Marie Saint. Brando plays a morally conflicted longshoreman named Terry who eventually takes a stand against the corrupt union that has murdered fellow longshoreman Joey, the brother of Edie (played by Saint). Karl Malden is the Catholic priest who gets involved in Edie’s freelance investigation of Joey’s death, and ultimately persuades Terry to confess his involvement in Joey’s death and testify against the union bosses, who thereupon beat him within an inch of his life.

This Oscar-winning movie’s context is the New York City dockyards of the 1950s, and was shot mostly on location. And here’s where engineering comes in.

As I watched the movie, I began to notice the backgrounds in outdoor scenes: gritty alleyways, buildings that were already half a century old in 1950, ships constantly plying the waters of the harbor, and factories, factories, factories. Not little one-story light-industry jobs, either: big towering brick-and-steel piles with steam coming out of pipes and tanks, places that were bustling hives of physical work for hundreds or thousands of people, as the dockyards themselves were. And the longshoremen union’s members were mostly first- or second-generation Irish immigrants, men who had spent all their lives busting their backs as they hauled heavy barrels, bags, and boxes around in the days before containerized shipping rendered most of their jobs obsolete.

The fact that the American economy depended vitally on the large quantities of stuff that flowed in and out of our ports made it possible for longshoremens’ unions to gain an illegal stranglehold on the commerce flowing through the docks, profiting from all kinds of corrupt practices ranging from preferential treatment of workers and shippers in exchange for kickbacks to organized-crime-style theft of shipped goods. The best thing many of the longshoremen could do with their lives, beyond simple survival, was to scrimp and save in order to send their children to college, where the next generation might learn enough to get professional jobs in air-conditioned offices doing something like accounting or engineering.

Today, most of the longshoremens’ jobs are gone. The New York City factories are gone. We still move a lot of stuff through ports, but containerized shipping is to the docks in “On the Waterfront” as an elevator is to a horse and buggy. Most of the jobs that Americans are willing to take these days are inside office-type positions. Such a job may not be engineering, but it probably involves computers, and its connection with physical stuff is likely to be remote, if it exists at all. And engineering increasingly keeps its practitioners in front of a computer too, rather than on the shop floor, or factory, or even a test bench.

To the extent that most of our citizens no longer have to work in dangerous, physically demanding jobs that wear your body out and dull your mind, the changes that have taken place from 1954 to 2010 are good ones. I wrote a few weeks back (July 19) about the arrogance that can creep into our attitudes toward people who still work with their hands as much as with their minds (I’m not counting typing as working with your hands). All workers who are not positively engaged in evil activities are worthy of honor, right down to the strawberry harvesters and janitors, many of whom dream of better jobs for their children just as the dockworkers in “On the Waterfront” did. Almost a quarter of the students at Texas State University where I teach are of Hispanic origin, and many are the first in their families to attend college. This is by and large a good thing.

But something else has also changed in the last half-century or so that I have trouble putting into words. A large and growing fraction of the U. S. economy consists of activity that either simply moves wealth around for a fee, or delivers purely symbolic content—software, generously defined. By this I mean things like movies, video games, and basically anything you pay for that comes in the form of bits rather than stuff. Engineers are heavily involved in the production and design ends of these parts of the economy. The products, and therefore the jobs, tend to be evanescent, the original meaning of which is “to vanish like vapor.” That doesn’t mean you can’t get another job doing something similar, after a while, perhaps. But the nature of this area of the economy encourages extreme competition, constant demands for novelty (often without a true improvement in quality), and a consequent shortsighted outlook on life.

Don’t get me wrong. I would rather live in today’s economy and state of technological advancement than in 1954 (although technically, I lived in both—I was born the year before the movie came out). And it’s hard to organize a corrupt union around the shipment of bits on the Internet, although crooks have found many ways to operate in that environment too. But perhaps what I’m looking for nowadays, and don’t see much of, is a simplicity and stability that life had back then—even if it was often simply and indefinitely bad.

Engineers starting their careers today have to accept the idea that their first job will probably not last longer than a couple or three years, and their company itself might not even make it that long without a buyout or significant shakeup. And your next job may require you to learn an entirely new discipline, on your own dime, before you can even think about applying for it. And moving, which involves uprooting whatever face-to-face relationships the modern workplace allows, is a fact of life now, making traditional community life, which requires staying in one place for at least the amount of time it takes to establish meaningful friendships, a distant esoteric memory for more and more people.

On this Labor Day, let us be glad that labor, and many unions, ain’t what they used to be, at least as portrayed in “On the Waterfront.” But let’s also honor all honest labor, and see if we can think of ways it can be more lastingly meaningful and part of a life of integrity and honor.

The Chilean Mine Accident: Bad News and Good News

On August 5 of this year, the upper galleries of the San Jose gold and copper mine near the town of Copiapo in northern Chile collapsed. Thirty-three miners were more than 2,000 feet underground when the collapse occurred, and for more than two weeks no definite signs of life were detected. But on Aug. 22, a week ago Sunday, a drill pulled back out of a borehole drilled in an attempt to reach a rescue chamber near the bottom of the mine had a note attached to it, saying that all 33 miners were alive and reasonably well, considering. They had retreated to the chamber after the collapse and managed to make the three-day supply of food and water last 17 days. Intense efforts are continuing to drill a borehole wide enough to get the miners out to the surface, but estimates are that it will take several months. In the meantime, authorities are sending supplies of food and water and psychological aids such as telephone lines down the boreholes so the miners can talk with their families.

This has got to be one of the most dramatic mine accidents in recent memory, and one that potentially has a happy ending. If the miners don’t succumb to disease (their skin is already being affected by the hot, damp conditions) and manage to clear the thousands of tons of rubble the man-sized borehole will cause (there’s no other way to clear it), and don’t flip out and do something terrible like committing mass suicide, they could all survive to sign book contracts and do national speaking tours. That’s a long chain of “ifs,” but they obviously have enough self-discipline to have made it this far. None of the news reports I’ve seen mention religious faith, but my guess is that is playing a significant positive role too.

The bad news was that the mine collapsed in the first place. A helpful diagram on the Wikipedia page “Chile mining accident” shows why even one collapse in a gallery in this particular mine could trap the miners. I don’t know about you, but my mental image of mines is based on the old 1960s-encyclopedia pictures of coal mining as it was done in England and the eastern U. S. back then. Several vertical shafts with elevators were connected by horizontal galleries, like the floors in a high-rise office building. In this format, if one gallery collapsed you at least had a chance to turn around and run to one of the three or four vertical shafts.

The Chilean mine, by contrast, is a gold and copper mine run by a small private firm with a less-than-stellar safety record. It is in the form of a tall spiral, like an old-fashioned bedspring. The single gallery loops in and out of the valuable veins of ore, and meanwhile slopes gently downward at an incline that can be managed by either motorized vehicles or just miners walking. No vertical shafts (except for ventilation), no expensive elevators—and no way out if the single spiral gallery collapses anywhere along its length. And that is exactly what happened on Aug. 5, apparently in a couple of places. So part of the bad news (other than the collapse itself) is that this form of mine is very vulnerable to gallery collapse—there’s really no other way out, unless you count ventilation shafts (and apparently the only one large enough to get the miners out collapsed on Aug. 7).

Allowing for this possibility, the mine owners installed a safety chamber at the bottom of the spiral with enough food and water to last three days. I suppose the thought was that any collapse would be minor enough to be cleared in that length of time. Apparently, the cave-ins were so severe that much of the old spiral gallery is destroyed, hence the drilling attempts direct from the surface. Fortunately, the ventilation shaft leading from the safety chamber to the surface was undamaged, so suffocation was never a serious threat. Starvation and dehydration were, though. It will be fascinating to hear how the miners fared and how they organized themselves to survive what has to be one of the most harrowing situations imaginable—being trapped almost half a mile underground, not knowing when or if you would be rescued, and trying to survive on almost no provisions. The fact that they’ve done so is the good news, so far.

Chile’s President Sebastian Pinera (there are diacritical markings in his name that I can’t get this blog type to do) has properly made this disaster the focus of his attention, and personally issues important news about it. A large state-owned mine is in charge of the rescue efforts, including the human-size borehole. So it looks like the government of Chile responded promptly and is doing everything humanly possible to rescue the miners.

This event comes at a time when we are commemorating the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a disaster in which our U. S. government did less than cover itself with glory, shall we say. The two disasters are very different: the mine is a single, specific technical challenge whose victims are already disciplined and familiar with their situation; while Katrina involved millions of average citizens, a huge geographic area, and a tangle of interlocking and conflicting political lines of authority that made an already bad situation worse. But still, we could learn some lessons from the Chilean situation.

For one thing, people who live in flood-prone areas ought to have some basic training and physical resources to be able to deal with floods if they come. An evacuation plan that was actually practiced and taught to the public, and some requirement for people to have emergency provisions wouldn’t be that difficult, and would have gone far to mitigate the terrible disaster that Katrina became.

And for another thing, government isn’t always the problem. There is a distressing tendency in some circles of U. S. politics today to view all government, at whatever level, and all government employees, as automatically corrupt, wasteful, and even malicious. While not denying that all three characteristics are to be found somewhere in government, I would point out the danger of lowered expectations. If good, selfless public servants constantly hear nothing but unwarranted criticism, they may figure “Well, everybody thinks I’m a no-good crook, so I might as well go ahead and be one.” If we’re not careful, we will get the government such an attitude deserves. And nobody will be better off in that case.

Sources: Besides the Wikipedia article mentioned, I used material from the following news items on Yahoo (from Associated Press) and ABC News, respectively: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100829/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_chile_mine_collapse and http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=11455968.

The Harmful Effects of Text

A couple of weeks ago, we took a ride on a tour boat at San Antonio’s River Walk. Over the decades, the city has taken what started out as a glorified drainage ditch and transformed it into a tourist attraction, complete with shops, restaurants, hotels, historic sites, and nice sidewalks on each side of the not-very-deep “river,” which is actually as tamed and controlled as anything you’ll see at Six Flags. At one point on the tour, the guide pointed out a place where the sidewalk on one side of the river took a sudden jog to the left, so that if you kept going straight you’d walk into the river. He said he was watching the other day as a well-dressed businesswoman came down the sidewalk, busily engaged in texting on her cellphone. The next thing he knew, she’d walked straight into the river, which was fortunately only about four feet deep at that point. She kept her cool enough to hold her phone way above her head to keep it dry as passersby helped her out. I wonder what the person on the other end thought was going on.

Any portable technology that engages our visual attention is potentially capable of causing such problems. I’m sure that once it became possible to print books that were small enough to carry in one hand and read while walking, the occasional absent-minded scholar in 16th-century Bologna was seen to walk over the edge of a quay into the Po River while reading Dante. But texting engages one’s attention more than reading does. I say this not from personal experience but from observation, since my personal view of texting is rather dim. The one-two-three stroke business on the numeric keypad reeks of compromise, and so do the miniature typewriter keyboards with keys that are easily usable only by children who are too young to write. But obviously, young people have taken to texting, and even some people my age, though it does seem to appeal to women in their 50s more than men.

Like any other communications technology, texting brings people more in contact with each other, and most ethical systems view that as basically a good thing. So if you put texting under the microscope of engineering ethics, it’s fair to say that it is innocent until specific charges prove it guilty in one way or another. Of course, there are times and places where texting is plain wrong, such as when you’re driving a car, bus, or train. And accidents have been traced to just such texting, as the National Traffic Safety Board found in the September 2008 crash of a commuter train in Chatsworth, California that killed 25 people when the driver’s attention was distracted by texting. But in such cases of flagrant misconduct, texting can be at worst charged with being an accessory to the crime. With good training and good sense, we can avoid most such accidents.

Part of these problems with texting accidents is simply inexperience. People try all sorts of things with new technologies, things that the developers can never dream of, and in the nature of things, some of the new uses just don’t work out. That lady who walked straight into the river is going to be a lot more careful about where she is the next time she starts texting. Maybe we’ll have laws about instant dismissal of any train or bus operators caught texting on the job. We are still only a few years down the learning curve on texting, so a lot of these issues will lessen in frequency and severity with time.

Then there is the slippery-slope argument that texting is one more step down a path that leads to a nation or world of isolated wired androids, half human and half technology, each enmeshed in one’s own little cocoon of gizmos, and regarding plain old-fashioned person-to-person meetings as ancient relics of an energy-wasteful dark age. The slightly creepy thing about texting is that you can do it without anybody near you (in real space) noticing. On a recent trip, I was about to remind my wife to call my sister when she told me she’d been texting her for the last twenty minutes, and everything was all arranged.

There are good aspects to texting compared to actual talking on the cellphone. In a world where everybody texted rather than talked, there’d be no one-sided private or intimate conversations carried on in the setting of a public bus or train. And deaf people must have rejoiced when the first text-capable cellphones came out. So compared to the original use of cellphones, texting has its positive aspects from a noise-abatement point of view.

Still, I can’t help but feel that the actual operation of texting could be improved. Maybe they’ll develop eye-position-reading technology to where you just have to look at the letters on an on-screen display in sequence to make them appear in the text. This kind of technology is still in human-factors labs now, but a lot of stuff out there in the consumer market now started in research labs a few years ago. That way you wouldn’t use your fingers for anything except holding the phone. Or, we could promote a technique that has been proved in head-to-head contests to yield the fastest one-handed electronic communications possible: Morse code, which uses only one key (it's all in the timing of the dots and dashes). I heard about a TV show in which the producers rounded up a couple of teenagers who claimed they could text really fast, and then found a couple of old-time radio amateurs (probably about my age) who were CW whizzes. “CW” stands for “continuous wave” which is ham lingo for Morse code. The two teams were handed the same text to send, and the Morse guys beat out the texting teenagers by sending and receiving about twice as fast. I am told that there are a few apps out there which let you send and receive Morse instead of text, and to me, it makes sense. Morse is just another language, like French, and if we just taught it to everybody along with cursive writing (if anyone still learns that), we could get rid of all this one-two-three business and Lilliputian keyboards and, hey, why stop there? How about a one-key computer? You read it here first.

Sources: The San Antonio River Walk’s official website is http://www.thesanantonioriverwalk.com/. Check it out the next time you’re in San Antonio. I’d give the tour guide’s name if I could remember it.

Toyota's Acceleration Problem: No Smoking Gun Yet

According to a preliminary report by U. S. regulators looking into the accusations that some Toyotas have an electronic flaw that makes them accelerate unexpectedly, no sign of such a problem was found in any of the 58 cars involved in incidents that the regulators investigated so far. The report reinforces claims by Toyota that there are no electronic flaws to be found, and that drivers who say their cars took off by themselves probably hit the accelerator by mistake.

I blogged on this issue back on March 6 and April 12 of this year, first to criticize Toyota for mishandling public relations surrounding the incident, and then to back off on my own opinion that they were to blame. Toyota has since paid a $16 million fine for not notifying the government fast enough about the problem, whatever its cause was. And they have supplied the Feds with ten of the data readers that were so scarce at the beginning of the investigation—only one operable unit was in the entire United States to begin with. So at least when it comes to public and government relations, Toyota seems to be learning some lessons there.

The question remains open whether some other technical problem could have been causing the accidents that are the focus of many lawsuits. Advocates for these suits, as you might expect, claim that the government investigation looked in the wrong places. The investigation is not over by any means. Experts at NASA and the National Academy of Sciences are still looking into the possibility that electromagnetic interference, for example, could have caused the problem. That is a subject I know a little bit about and have some experience with.

One day I was doing an experiment in my lab that involved a high-voltage discharge that made a pretty powerful electromagnetic impulse. All of a sudden, right after I fired the discharge the laptop I was using for taking data locked up. I discovered that the impulse was traveling down some wires to the laptop and giving it temporary paralysis. I improved the shielding on my setup and eventually got things to work again.

Unless there are unusual circumstances, electromagnetic interference with computers usually acts like a blunt instrument, causing low-level communications errors that most systems will react to by just freezing up. I suppose the automotive equivalent of freezing up would be for the whole car to quit running, not for the accelerator to stick on maximum. From my relatively uninformed viewpoint, I would say that electromagnetic interference is unlikely to do the particular thing that the plaintiffs claim it did.

I am no psychologist, but I expect that the surprise and fear engendered by a sudden acceleration of a car you’re driving might cause you to freeze up yourself, rendering you both incapable of figuring out what you’re doing with the pedals, and of realizing that in fact you have jammed your foot on the accelerator and not the brake. So I don’t accuse all the plaintiffs in these suits of bad faith. I expect that most of them sincerely believe they did nothing wrong and the car just took off by itself. But without having the floorboard equipped with a camera and recording system to show what really happened (will that be an option on next year’s Toyotas?), or unless the onboard “black box” was subsequently activated by a high-velocity accident, there is really no way to tell what happened in the majority of the alleged cases. So those cases will be matters for judges and juries to sort out, not scientific investigators.

As I pointed out in my second post last spring, history shows a record of periodic flurries of sudden-acceleration lawsuits that crop up from time to time, sort of like seven-year locusts. There is a constant supply of accidents in which drivers (generally older ones) hit accelerators by mistake, and all that is needed to generate a spate of lawsuits against a given auto maker is one or two well-publicized cases in which the plaintiffs accuse the manufacturer of a safety defect that caused the sudden-acceleration crash. The plaintiffs are obviously not unbiased observers in these cases, since if they prove to a jury that it was the carmaker’s incompetence, and not the driver’s stupidity or carelessness, that was at fault, they stand to make big bucks, as do their (generally) contingency-fee lawyers. (Though this is not the place to debate the ethics of contingency-fee lawyering, I have negative opinions about it.) With the exception of the floor-mat problem, which was a real flaw and thoroughly, though tardily, recalled and fixed by Toyota, it is beginning to look like this was just the latest of a long series of unintended-acceleration flaps that have popped up on and off for many years.

The only way this kind of thing can be put to rest altogether is for the car manufacturers to perfect one-hundred-percent autopiloted cars. I for one look forward to the day of the electronic chauffeur. I can take driving or leave it, and the idea of treating my private car like a train ride—reading, making phone calls, and doing whatever else is convenient to do in an automobile when you are not distracted by the tedious task of driving the thing—is quite appealing to me. And if the car is fixed so the driver can’t accelerate, brake, steer or do anything other than tell the thing where to go, then you automatically eliminate driver error. Of course, anything that goes wrong after that is indubitably the automaker’s fault, which may be one reason this vision will be long in coming. I for one look forward to it. But then, I’m not a lawyer.

Sources: Nick Bunkley’s article on the National Highway Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary report to Congress is at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/11/business/11auto.html.

P. S. I have started another blog entitled “Electronic Memories” at which I will post from time to time memoirs of a youth and adolescence spent among solder, batteries, and oscilloscopes. For those who may be interested in such things, it can be found at http://kaydee-electronicmemories.blogspot.com/.

Will The Net Stay Neutral If Google Doesn't Want It To?

In a perceptive article in Slate last week, Tim Wu noted with some alarm the news reports that Google was working with Verizon to arrange for paid preferential treatment of Google's content on Verizon's networks. Although Google officially denied the reports, some insiders say otherwise, according to Wu. And considering the size and influence of both Google and Verizon, something like this could affect most of us who use the Net, which nowadays means most of us, period.

Net neutrality is democracy applied to packets. In keeping with the original vision of many of the Internet's founders, a truly neutral net treats every server and every user the same, to the extent possible technically. Obviously, some websites can get overwhelmed by traffic and some Internet connections are slower than others, but these are issues at the ends of the communications link, not matters determined by the way the Internet is set up and operated.

As long as there is enough bandwidth to go around, net neutrality is a fairly easy thing to maintain. But in limited-bandwidth situations such as newer wireless technologies, companies that get in early with fresh business models adapted to the new technologies can sometimes play the neutrality of the web to their advantage. (Think Apple with its tightly-controlled but growing crop of iPhone apps.) This may be why Google may be talking to Verizon about ways it could pay the network to give its sites a boost in terms of speed, access, or other advantages. But this would violate the time-honored principle of net neutrality, which Google itself has promoted in the past, according to Wu. He hopes the Federal Communications Commission will gird up its legal loins, so to speak, and start issuing rules that will protect net neutrality from intrusions of what Wu terms "internet payola."

From an ethical point of view, what concerns me about this matter may not be so much whether the net stays neutral or not, as much as whether we'd know about it if net neutrality is abandoned. The term "payola" arose back in the 1950s when record companies secretly paid pop radio stations to play certain tunes more often. The dishonest part was that these payments were not disclosed to the listeners—people who heard the tunes more often just thought the stations were honestly responding to public demand. Payola is a form of corruption in which supposedly unbiased gatekeepers are being secretly paid to promote certain products over others. It's in the same moral category as the bribing of judges: payments for favors goes against the stated principles of the institution. So the secrecy aspect is an essential feature of the problem.

Suppose Google goes out and spends X billion dollars buying favorable treatment from Verizon and other networks, and then publicly brags that you're going to get better access because Google has paid for it. That might look like bullying by the big boy on the block, and other websites without such deep pockets might protest that it's unfair, but at least everyone would know what's going on. We would no longer have an institution called "net neutrality," true, but we would at least know the new rules of the game. This would be different than if Google paid for these favors and didn't tell anybody, keeping net neutrality in appearance but not in reality. And that would be a problem.

It's a little creepy to think about the Internet's hundredth birthday (which I certainly won't see). Its half-century mark will come around 2033, which is only 23 years from now. Will the present basic form and function of the Internet still be around then, or will we look on it as something akin to the giant railway networks that once crisscrossed the U. S., only to be superseded by highways and airports? Suppose nearly everything moves to wireless by then: that might mean Apple's iPhone way of doing business prevails, and what kind of network experience you have would critically depend on what kind of hardware you own, which isn't the case now. That kind of thing gives Google the creeps.

Something that will not change, however, is the basic principle that any obstructions to any port of a communications network harm the system in a way that affects everyone else, and the bigger the system, the more harm is done. This is because the value of a network to any one user depends on how many other nodes can be reached. So a multi-tiered "Internet" with fast lanes and slow lanes would be that much less valuable, because reducing access to any part of the network lowers its value to everyone.

For this reason alone, we are not likely to see significant future fragmentation of the current form of the Internet, ethics or no ethics. This principle has triumphed time and again in the history of telecommunications, going all the way back to the telegraph, which originally served mainly wealthy clients who used it for business transactions. And for various reasons, both economic and regulatory, the telegraph companies never really got it. The idea of truly universal service didn't come along until the newer telephone network was consolidated in the early 1900s, by which time the Bell System had figured out this more-the-merrier principle. The principle of telephones for everyone sounded democratic and patriotic, and it was, but it was also plain good business sense.

So while we can worry if we like that Google is going to pay for the end of net neutrality, I suspect experience with such a system would soon show that it militates against the more-the-merrier principle, which would be violated by making a few nodes better, because it really just amounts to making all the other nodes worse. As long as Google, or anybody else, tells us what they're up to, I see no fundamental ethical problem with it. But I don't think it would end up working as well as they might hope.

Sources: Tim Wu's article, "Evil? The alleged Google-Verizon deal that's endangering net neutrality," appeared in the Aug. 6 online edition of Slate at http://www.slate.com/id/2262952/pagenum/1.

Do Borders Matter in Engineering?

Stephen Unger, one of the deans and founders of the field of engineering ethics, is concerned about the fates of engineering and high-tech employment in the U. S. He recently pointed out to me an article by Andy Grove, founder of Intel, in which Grove pointed out the current crisis in manufacturing employment in the U. S. It turns out that for every U. S. resident employed by many high-tech companies such as Apple, Dell, and so on, there are about ten Chinese employees who either work for the same firm or make the products that the company sells. This trend started back in the 1980s when what was then called “consumer electronics” manufacturing (mostly TVs and radios) went into a steep decline in the U. S. while Japan and then China took up the slack. To critics who say this doesn’t matter as long as the high-value-added jobs such as R&D and finance stay in the U. S., Grove says basically, “bunk.” He calls for a frankly protectionist tax on all imported high-tech goods, with the money coming from the tax going to people who are willing to scale up small startups into full-scale U. S. manufacturing efforts.

I will not comment on the political feasibility of such a solution, except to say that it would be quite disruptive if enacted. But sometimes a short, sudden disruption is better medicine than allowing a disease to go on and on until the patient can no longer recover.

The question I really want to address is: do borders matter in engineering?

On the one hand, modern science-based engineering is a truly universal profession. Go to an engineering conference of a hundred or more attendees, and you are very likely to meet people from all over the globe in just a few minutes. The technical language of engineering is the same everywhere: Ohm’s law, Maxwell’s equations, and all the rest. Even in the commercial world, unless strong political forces dictate otherwise, engineering teams are made up of people from many countries, ethnicities, and faiths, who can work together harmoniously without allowing their diverse backgrounds to interfere with getting the job done.

Would the world really be a better place if all engineers considered themselves as simply citizens of the world, taking no pride and holding no affection for their native lands? You can imagine some advantages to this. It would be hard to find any engineers to work on military projects, for instance, since all wars would then become civil wars and no upstanding world citizen would support such a thing.

The answer to the question reveals one’s core beliefs about the purpose of life and society. If there really is such a thing as true good (and therefore true evil), the ordering of life by a polis—a city-state, as Aristotle referred to it—is necessary to preserve good and combat evil. When I first began to study the classic texts of ethics seriously, I was somewhat dismayed to find that the ancient writers spent much of their time talking about politics, broadly defined as the right ordering of public life. And since the alternatives to citizenship in a particular country—namely, total anarchy or one-world government—are either unthinkable or impossible, every engineer has to decide how to relate to the government under which he or she lives.

There is no such thing as world citizenship, no matter how much people might like it if there was. The way the world is set up, people are born into a particular place at a particular time, and thereafter have to deal with the circumstances that life hands them, including the government of the country where they were born.

Most people have little or no choice as to where they live, and under what government they live. Most immigration around the world is internal, from countrysides to cities, which is why so many of the world’s largest cities are growing at an insupportable rate. Once in a city, sometimes people can accumulate enough capital to emigrate to a country that will take them in. In most parts of the world, emigration is not only possible but widely practiced, and for all its flaws, the United States seems to be one of the places that people all over the world would prefer to live in.

I think they’re right. Our polis is founded on principles that I find to be very compatible with my own system of ethics and religion, and I believe it is worth preserving and enriching. Part of the work of preservation and enrichment involves making sure that the people who live here can earn a decent living. And since so much of our economy depends on technology, perhaps some measures along the lines of what Andy Grove calls for would be at least worth considering. I am not an economist and can’t say whether Grove is right about his proposal. But I will say that I think his heart is in the right place, and borders should matter to an engineer—not in a jingoistic, my-country-right-or-wrong sense, but in a realistic sense that recognizes the great worth of good countries and the need to preserve them against forces that work for their decline.

Sources: The article pointed out to me by Stephen Unger, whom I thank for the information, is at the Bloomberg News website http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-01/how-to-make-an-american-job-before-it-s-too-late-andy-grove.html.

Hackers in Hardware: Will It Happen and Can We Stop It?

Most famous cases involving engineering ethics start with a headline, a crisis, or a tragedy. In such situations, we can take steps to make sure it’s less likely to happen next time only after we figure out what went wrong. But every once in a while, farsighted engineers can actually anticipate a major new problem before it happens and convince people to prevent it without anyone getting hurt. This is obviously the best way to go if we can manage it. The potential problem of hardware hackers is a case in point.

As John Villasenor explains in the current issue of Scientific American, hardware hacking is the planting of a malicious circuit in hardware, typically deep within the incredible complexity of an integrated circuit (microchip). ICs are so complicated nowadays that the design of most of them is comparable to the design of a large building or an oil refinery. Simply because the system is so large and diverse, pieces of the design are farmed out to numerous subcontractors. In such a complex circumstance, a hardware-hacking scenario could come about in the following way.

Suppose some evil person wants all cell phones sold by a given firm to quit working at a certain date in the future. They infiltrate one of the subcontractors that helps to design a critical IC in the new phone models, and slip in a circuit that monitors the time code and suddenly ties up the communication bus in the system once the blow-up date arrives. Since it’s impossible to check for every conceivable situation a phone might experience, the likelihood that this circuit will pass unnoticed into the final design is pretty good. A few weeks before the blow-up date, the criminals in charge of this trickery send a blackmail letter to the company, telling them what will happen and offering them an encrypted key to prevent the disaster—for, say, a billion dollars.

That particular scenario would be enacted by criminals, but political sabotage or terrorism could also inspire such machinations. Villasenor and his fellow researchers claim there are several ways to prevent such attacks.

One, favored by the Pentagon, is a kind of security-clearance check for every organization involved in the chip design. While this may be practical for certain costly military ICs, it doesn’t seem like a plan that will work for commercial designs, where vendors change at the last minute and are spread out all across the globe in a variety of jurisdictions.

A better idea Villasenor mentions is to install inspector or security circuits in every IC to monitor for suspicious behavior that would indicate the presence of a hardware hack. While this will reduce the space and speed available for the IC’s main tasks slightly, the added security appeal of knowing your new IC is protected against hardware hacking might make it worthwhile.

There are two questions in my mind about this whole situation.

First, how real is the threat of hardware hacking? Villasenor says that there have been no significant incidents so far, but of course there might be unknown time bombs out there right now, ticking away. I think one reason this kind of thing hasn’t happened yet is that, unlike viral malware, hardware generally has a paper trail that can be traced back to the place of origin. Being fingered as the guilty party in a hardware-hacking case would mean certain death to a firm, even if they were unaware of what was going on at the time. Nobody would ever want to buy circuits from them again.

Another reason, at least in the case of political terrorism of the Islamofascist variety, is that companies which design ICs are generally not found in places where organizations like the Taliban have significant influence. The extreme contrast between the state of Israel, which has dozens of high-tech firms turning out world-class technology, and the surrounding Arab nations, which have to buy nearly all the technology they have from other countries, is an example of this. So unless terrorists manage to convince individual designers in critical firms to implant hardware hacks, this kind of threat seems unlikely.

The second question is, if manufacturers develop security measures to install that allegedly prevent hardware hacks, will people pay the extra price for them? No matter how small, the security features will adversely impact price and performance, and it then becomes a question of perceived value added. Some customers with heightened concerns about security, for example the military and government, might be more willing to buy such chips than commercial customers such as computer makers. Of course, once a major hardware hack actually caused damage, the feature would sell itself. So you have the perverse situation that the best incentive to buy a hardware-hack-secure IC is to have a major problem occur with hardware hacking.

Unfortunately, that may be what has to happen if hardware-hack prevention is to amount to much more than a few academic papers and articles. Let’s hope the cure arrives well before the disease, at least in this case.

Sources: John Villasenor’s article “The Hacker in Your Hardware” appeared in the August 2010 issue of Scientific American (pp. 82-87).

The Honor of Dirty Fingernails

On a trip we just completed, the van we drove over a thousand miles in six days (a Dodge) suddenly quit outside Wichita Falls, Texas. The minute it happened, I was pretty sure what the problem was. We have replaced the fuel pump three times in six years, and since the last one was replaced about two years ago, I figured it was curtains for this one. I’m pretty sure (though not certain) that the people who designed that fuel pump had college degrees. And I’m also pretty sure that few if any of the people who helped us from that point onward had degrees in engineering, or possibly anything else. But we would have been stuck without their help.

The gentleman driving the tow truck told us he’d been a semi-trailer driver for thirteen years, then switched to towing for the next thirteen. He was the only person at the small gas station he worked for who could drive the tow truck, and so he’d been on call 24 hours a day for the last several years, except for one day off when he got married.

The guy in charge of the repair shop where they towed the van was very proud of the twenty-something young man who actually did the repair, which involved draining out some 30 gallons of gas (we’d just filled it) without setting the place on fire, dropping the tank, getting all the gaskets and clips and screws out and back in the right way, and putting it all back together again so it didn’t leak. The auto technician did nothing that I couldn’t do without some practice, but he did it in about an hour and a half. I would have taken all day and spent most of it on trips to the auto-parts store to get special tools, assuming I didn’t blow up my house first. The manager said he was very proud of that technician after watching him grow from an inexperienced teenager to a seasoned professional over the ten years or so he’d worked there.

Over 60% of Americans 25 and older have not completed even a two-year associate college degree. They are citizens like anyone else, and voters too, but to listen to certain elite groups in this country, you would think that everybody either has to have a college degree or else they represent abject failures of the system if they don’t. Columnist John Derbyshire recently cited several quotations along these lines, such as: “All students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career—no matter who you are or where you come from.” The speaker was President Obama, and for a politician it is a peculiarly unqualified statement. If he had simply stopped at “All students should graduate from high school,” I’d agree with him there—about fifteen percent of Americans over 25 haven’t even gotten that far. But at the risk of raining on my own parade (I teach engineering in college), I think it is unrealistic to expect or insist that everybody, no matter what their inclinations, abilities, or interests are, should graduate from college ore else become a second-class citizen.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that the opportunity to get a college degree should be artificially restricted to a given class, or income level, or sex, or race. Opportunities should be equal for all, but if for good and logical reasons, a given student would like to cease his or her formal schooling after high school and become a great plumber, or auto mechanic, or tow-truck driver, or filmmaker (Steven Spielberg dropped out of college to go into the film business), I would like the economy to provide them with that opportunity, and for society not to look down upon them as some sort of failure simply because of the kind of work they do. Not everybody who drops out of college is another Spielberg, but the point I’m trying to make is that there are many honorable, useful, and even significant jobs out there which do not require a college degree. And that is as it should be.

The natural tendency of our society, unfortunately, is to look up to people who (1) have lots of money, (2) have lots of people working for them, or (3) manipulate symbols instead of real things. Most engineers nowadays are in the third category, but for every engineer with a college degree in most industries, there are two or three folks who build, test, sell, and fix the things that the engineers design. And while increasing numbers of the lower-ranking workers have college degrees, in many cases such degrees are still not necessary, for example in the construction trades.

The engineering-ethics angle here is to respect those whose education is not as advanced as yours, and remember that the thing called “tacit knowledge”—the right way to ease a tank full of gas down out of a car without incinerating yourself or your shop, for example—is real, and sometimes more important for a given task than anything you could learn in college.

Everyone in an honorable occupation—that is, one which isn’t positively evil—makes a useful contribution to society and deserves to be treated as an important, knowledgeable part of the grand system that makes engineering the vital thing it is in modern life. The next time you deal with such a person, don’t belittle their educational attainments. Instead, watch them, find out just how much they can do that you can’t—and learn.

Sources: John Derbyshire’s column, “The Jobs Americans Should Not Have to Do?” appeared at http://article.nationalreview.com/438112/the-jobs-americans-should-not-have-to-do/john-derbyshire. The statistics on the percentage of Americans who are college graduates is from the U. S. Census Bureau website http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2010/tables/10s0226.pdf.