Prison Terms for Careless Words: The L’Aquila Seismology Verdict

 

Suppose you are a citizen of the medieval Italian town of L’Aquila.  Your city has survived several earthquakes in its history, including ones that led to considerable loss of life in 1461 and 1703.  In late March of 2009, you notice that there have been small tremors lately that perhaps rattle a dish or two, but this is nothing particularly unusual in highly seismic Italy.  However, a lab technician in a town thirty miles away garners some publicity when he announces that a method he’s come up with to predict earthquakes is telling him there’s going to be a big one soon.  You wonder whether it will be worth the trouble to sleep outside, which is something you have done on occasion when the temblors get severe.

Then you tune in to a news report of an announcement by a seven-member expert commission made up of seismologists, engineers, and a government official.  The panel’s conclusion is that the tremors over the past four months pose “no danger.”  In fact, one of the panelists says that “in fact it is a favorable situation, that is to say a continuous discharge of energy.”  This makes you feel better, and you decide to continue sleeping indoors.

Six days later, at 3:30 in the morning on April 6, a 5.8-magnitude earthquake hits L’Aquila.  You survive, but many people are killed, about 300 in all, and hundreds of buildings of both medieval and modern construction either collapse or are severely damaged.  Now the question:  what should be done about that panel of experts?

The Italian legal system has answered that question.  On Oct. 22 of this year, all seven members of the panel were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six years in prison.  This verdict has made headlines around the world for a number of reasons.

Italian prosecutors insist that the scientists and engineers are not being charged with failing to predict the earthquake.  Everyone (or nearly everyone) acknowledges that earthquake prediction is still an inexact science compared to weather forecasting, for instance.  But except for relatively rare fatal storms such as hurricanes and tornadoes, one’s life does not depend on the accuracy of a weather forecast.  The government prosecution contended that the panel’s reassurances that the temblors did not mean an earthquake was imminent, prevented L’Aquila residents from sleeping outside and thus led to a larger number of deaths than if they had kept quiet.

For the convicted scientists and engineers, things may not be quite as bad as they seem.  On average, in Italy about four out of five convictions involving prison terms are never put into effect, due to reversals on appeal or other reasons.  Nevertheless, these convictions are a sobering warning to experts who make public pronouncements about the possibility of earthquakes.

An article on the conviction in The Economist carried the subhead “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”  Earthquake experts asked to predict quakes face a classic dilemma.  If they fail to predict an earthquake that occurs, they can be charged with negligently giving bad advice that led to fatalities, at least in Italy.  But if they go to the other extreme and sound the alarm any time it looks like a quake might happen, they are liable to cause panic, or else to be wrong so often that people will ignore them even when they turn out to be right.  The independent prediction by the lab technician that his radon-based method was saying an earthquake was coming caused panic in a nearby town, and it is possible that the L’Aquila commission felt obliged to calm troubled waters.  It was their bad fortune to take that position less than a week before the fatal quake that did happen.

While the U. S. has perhaps a more robust tradition of free speech, including the freedom to give opinions about public dangers without worrying about manslaughter charges, the unhappy experience of the Italian earthquake scientists and engineers is a cautionary tale for any expert who makes public pronouncements on matters relating to safety.  Despite appearances, people do listen to experts and sometimes even take their advice.  I am not aware of any doctors from the 1950s who were quoted in TV ads as saying smoking was harmless, and then were sued or charged with manslaughter after it was shown that cigarettes cause cancer.  But that may be because a powerful industry fought the idea for decades.  No well-funded interest group had a vested interest in showing that the scientists had science on their side when they dismissed the possibility of an imminent quake.  Other members of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology (NIGV) did some Monday-morning quarterbacking after the quake and calculated that the chances of a big earthquake happening in the 10-km region around the city rose from a normal background of 1 in 200,000 to a much greater, but still small, chance of 1 in 1000 a few hours before it actually occurred.  But one chance in a thousand is still a pretty long shot, and even if the panel had announced this relatively great increase in the likelihood of an earthquake, they might still have found themselves in the dock.

Part of the problem is that most average citizens do not want to deal in probabilities.  They want to know, “Are we going to have an earthquake or aren’t we, and if so, when?”  Unfortunately, the science we have so far can only deal in probabilities, and if experts are asked to give more than raw statistics about a possible future event, they tend to send a message that is either reassuring or alarming, depending on the tone of the situation and any number of other extraneous factors.

Let us hope that the Italian convictions don’t persuade seismologists to eschew forecasting as too personally risky to engage in, because a robust and reliable science of earthquake forecasting would be a valuable thing that could save lives.  But if earthquake scientists feel that they are putting their personal lives and liberty at stake every time they issue an opinion, the science and engineering pertaining to earthquakes could itself suffer long-term damage as an unexpected casualty of the L’Aquila disaster.

Sources:  Besides the two articles in The Economist on the seismologists’ trial (one on Sept. 17, 2011 after the indictment at http://www.economist.com/node/21529006

and the second on Oct. 27, 2012 at http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21565135-italy-sloppy-seismology-can-lead-prison-reason-tremble), I used an article on the Italian legal system at http://www.justlanded.com/english/Italy/Articles/Visas-Permits/Legal-System, and I referred to the Wikipedia articles “Italian Code of Criminal Procedure” and “2009 L’Aquila earthquake.”

Airline Safety: No News Is Good News—Or Is It?

It has been almost four years since the last fatal commercial airline accident in the U. S.:  the crash of Flight 3407 in February 2009, in which pilot and copilot errors combined to send the plane into a house in Clarence Center, N. Y., killing fifty people.  Of course, that could change overnight, but for the moment we can be grateful that the airline safety record looks so good.  However, there’s a fly in this otherwise sweet-smelling ointment:  it turns out that crashes stimulate the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) more than anything else to improve safety measures such as pilot training and work rules.  And the lack of such stimulus has allowed the FAA to drag out some important pilot-training improvements for over a decade.

In the early years of flying, many accidents were due to mechanical failures, and this remained true at least until the 1980s.  Cargo doors, flammable cargo, and of course bombs (before airport security was beefed up) were responsible for many fatalities.  But with the advent of airport security measures and technical improvements in both airframe construction and restrictions on the types of cargo carried, most of the non-human causes of commercial crashes have been adequately dealt with.  What remains, as the story of Flight 3407 tells us, is the human factor.

Because fatigue seemed to play a big role in the Flight 3407 accident, the FAA began to revise rules on pilot work schedules to prevent the kind of overscheduling that pilot Marvin Renslow and 24-year-old copilot Rebecca Shaw experienced before their fatal accident in 2009.  Shaw had joined the flight after an all-night commute from Seattle, and at the time it was a common thing for pilots to snooze in airport waiting rooms at odd moments rather than checking into a hotel with the accompanying delays.

But only in 2011 were the new work-schedule rules implemented, and then only for planes carrying paying passengers.  Cargo flights are still immune from the new rules, which seems to imply that while we want to protect paying customers, pilots and hardware are expendable.

Regulation is a sparring match between an industry that sees restrictions on how they can use their paid staff in dollars-and-cents terms, and a government agency that is beholden to Congress and the people at large to ensure that airline travel is “safe.”  Of course, “safe” can only be approached, not achieved, and therein lies the difficulty.  The practical outcome is that things slide along, with the FAA taking years to solicit industry input and modify the proposed rules, until an accident prods Congress to come down hard on the agency with a mandate for improved rules that will keep the next horse from getting out of the barn after the present one has escaped.

That is perhaps a cynical view of the process, but it appears to cover the facts.  I have not looked at the proposed new rules, but as I recommended in May 2009 when the National Transportation Safety Board issued its conclusions on the causes of the Flight 3407 crash, we can learn a lot from near-accidents without having to go through the agony of a real one.

A recent news report on the issue of new FAA regulations says that voluntary data-gathering has been emphasized over one-size-fits-all obligatory rules.  And perhaps that is one reason that we’ve had such a long spell without commercial-airline fatalities.  The Air Line Pilots’ Association (ALPA) holds an annual Air Safety Forum, and the September 2012 online issue of the Air Line Pilot Magazine describes topics at the four-day forum such as stall recovery, the new pilot training rules proposed by the FAA, and airport safety issues.  Computerized records of voluntary safety-issue reporting make it easier than ever for pilots to learn from the mistakes of their colleagues.  Under the old cop-and-bad-guy model, airlines were reluctant to publicize pilot errors because of fears that they would get in trouble with the FAA, and consequently, knowledge about errors that could have turned into major disasters stayed in the cockpit.  Under the new atmosphere of collaboration, however, the FAA encourages such sharing of experience, with the result that pilots are more prepared than ever to avoid or deal with dangerous situations that other pilots have encountered.

This is one more example of a general principle: that we often learn more from technical mistakes and errors than we do from uneventful success.  This was something Chesley Sullenberger put into practice on January 15, 2009, when some geese killed all the engines of his Airbus A320 on his descent to New York City.  Sullenberger and his co-pilot successfully ditched the plane in the Hudson River and everyone was safely rescued.  It turned out that Sullenberger had served the NTSB as an accident investigator and was active in safety committees for the ALPA.  A good man constantly improving his safety skills got a big chance to put them into action, and he did.

What Sullenberger did that day, we would hope that the entire industry does all the time:  learn from previous errors, communicate them widely, and use that knowledge to prevent future incidents.  So far, it seems to be working.  It doesn’t make headlines, and it doesn’t stir Congress to action, but the pragmatic engineering criterion “does it work?” seems to be met here.  Let’s hope that the new record of time without a fatal commercial crash keeps getting longer each day.

Sources:  The Associated Press carried Joan Lowy’s article on airline pilot rule making, which was titled “No crashes, so new safety rules stall” in the Austin American-Statesman for Oct. 21, 2012.  I consulted the September 2012 online edition of the Air Line Pilot Magazine at http://www.alpa.org/publications/Air_Line_Pilot_September_2012/Air_Line_Pilot_September_2012.html#06 and the Wikipedia article on Chesley Sullenberger.  My blogs on Flight 3407 appeared on Feb. 16 and May 18, 2009.

Genes and Sneakers

 

Here is a not altogether implausible scenario from a possible not-too-distant future.

You’re a 30-year-old U. S. woman who has recently been diagnosed with breast cancer.  You are too old to be covered by your parents’ health insurance, and you don’t yet work for a firm that has health-care coverage, so you have applied for health insurance under a new Federal insurance-exchange program.  As a condition of receiving coverage, you must supply a mouth swab which provides a DNA sample.  A few weeks later, the results come back:  because you have a hitherto undiscovered genetic defect that puts you at a high risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease at an early age, you are eligible for a mastectomy, but not chemotherapy.  According to a utilitarian calculation by a government bureaucracy, you will die of Alzheimer’s well before your breast cancer would recur without the added prevention provided by chemo.

Now, if the insurer were a private company, the scenario I just described would be illegal, at least according to a recent Associated Press article on the potential pitfalls of inexpensive human genome sequencing.  “Discrimination” by either employers or health insurance companies based on a person’s DNA information is a violation of Federal law.  But just as it’s illegal for you and me to print money, but perfectly legal for the government to print money, there may come a time when the government deems it necessary to analyze your DNA for reasons of “efficiency” or “cost-effectiveness.”

It is truly amazing how rapidly a feat which was once hailed as one of the most difficult achievements in the history of humanity is now something that may cost as little as $1,000 in a few years.  Of course, we are not really comparing apples and oranges here, because it’s one thing to read out all the 1’s and 0’s (to use computer language) of a person’s DNA, and another thing altogether to know what it means.  And technically, the human genome sequencers aren’t really finished even now, more than a decade after a “working draft” was published in 2000.  Figuring out what the human genome is saying is one of the hottest topics in molecular biology, and more is being learned every day.  But enough is known already so that dozens of genetically-related diseases can now be tested for.  And with that ability come a host of ethical issues.

Insurance companies rely on accurate calculation of risks faced by their customers in the average or statistical sense.  That’s how they stay in business, by making educated guesses as to who is likely to die when, who is more likely to need what medical treatment, and so on.  Nobody gets upset when a life-insurance firm wants to charge an 80-year old more than a 20-year old for a $100,000 life-insurance policy.  Decades of actuarial data (and common sense) show that the octogenarian is much more likely to “assume room temperature” (in Kinky Friedman’s phrase) sooner than the college-age kid.  And believe it or not, there was a time when the kind of actuarial or statistical calculation that prudently apportions insurance rates to risk was regarded as advanced scientific knowledge.  For all I know, some people opposed the use of obscure calculations of actuarial science for pricing insurance when these methods first arrived on the scene.  But eventually, people realized that the advantage of having insurance was worth the trouble of paying different prices for it, and we got to where we are today.

Well, now we have some new advanced scientific knowledge about our DNA that can be obtained for a cost that falls every year, and it promises to tell us all sorts of things about how long we might live and what we might die of.  From the consumer’s point of view, especially if you are a consumer with a genetic malady that could cost some health insurer millions, it makes sense to pass a law forbidding discrimination on the basis of genetic testing.  But to be entirely consistent, it seems to me, they shouldn’t have stopped there.  They should have rescinded all the variations in the price of all kinds of insurance based on things like whether you smoke, how safely you drive, or how old you are.

The reason they didn’t, is because imposing a completely uniform rate on everybody for a class of insurance without taking advantage of any of the data that allows companies to predict risk, is like blindfolding a man and then telling him to go find his car keys.  Maybe he’ll find them eventually by feeling every square inch of the house, but it will take him a lot longer than if you let him look.  And if private insurers can’t use additional information to predict risk, they will have to raise rates on almost everybody, because they have to deal with worst-case situations that they could avoid with more information. But what’s crazy for a private company is done all the time by government, and so what we’ve prohibited from coming in the front door—discrimination based on DNA testing—is very likely to sneak around and come in by the back door when even the government finds that ignoring DNA data is a very costly thing to do.  Hence the sneakers of the title (I had to work it in somewhere).

What’s the answer?  I don’t have one.  Not every ethical dilemma posed by a new technological development has an easy answer, or even a logical hard answer.  We as a society have spent billions of dollars developing the ability to decode our own genes.  We have let that particular genie (pardon the expression) out of the bottle, and like Pandora, many of us will not be able to resist the temptation to pay whatever the market will bear to find out what our genes bode for our future.  But very little of what genetic testing tells you is a certainty.  And even lives cut short or debilitated by genetic disease can be worth living—ask Stephen Hawking, who has a type of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease) and has been wheelchair-bound and almost paralyzed for many decades.  Yet he has won a dozen or more international prizes for his groundbreaking work in theoretical physics, has married twice, and has been portrayed on Broadway.  Hawking should thank God that genetic testing for ALS wasn’t available when his mother was pregnant.  England’s National Health Services might have saved a few bucks if Hawking had been aborted, but the world would have been much poorer as a result.

Sources:  The article “Panel:  Genetics needs ethics rules” by Lauran Neergaard appeared in the Oct. 14, 2012 edition of the Austin American-Statesman, p. A7.  I referred to articles in Wikipedia on Stephen Hawking and the Human Genome Project. 

Are You Mediated?

Every now and then a book comes along that is hard to classify, but pulls a lot of disparate things together and explains them in a remarkable way.  Mediated is such a book.  The answer to the question of the title is yes, almost certainly you’ve been mediated.  Especially if you’re reading this blog.

Thomas De Zengotita is an anthropologist by training who teaches in New York City.  His book describes how the ubiquitous electronic media of the twenty-first century has made fundamental and far-reaching changes in human behavior and thought.  There’s enough material in the book for dozens of blogs, so I’m going to restrict myself to one little piece of it:  how we deal with our manifold options of spending mediated time versus time in old-fashioned reality.

Let’s start back in the thirteenth century, with St. Thomas Aquinas (although the roots go back to Plato and Aristotle).  Aquinas was the most famous of what are called the “scholastic” philosophers, and scholastics were known for making distinctions.  One of the more significant distinctions he drew was the one that separates the process of thought (what Aquinas called the “intellectual power”) from the processes of sensing, which Aquinas termed the “sensual power” (not in the modern connotation of “sensual,” but meaning just “pertaining to the senses”).  Now, sensing—meaning touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight—goes on in what we now call “real time.”  Once you aim your eyes in a given direction, what you see is not under your control, generally speaking.  But what you think about what you see is.  Using your intellectual power, you can think about things present, things past, or things to come, and swap these around at your will.  So as long as humanity has had the ability to think, we have experienced something in addition to “real time”:  what De Zengotita calls “unreal time.”

Unreal time was restricted to the human mind until modern media came along:  first analog means of recording and playing back experience (the phonograph, motion pictures) and ways of experiencing real time in another location (radio, television).  And of course it wasn’t long before recorded experience began to be broadcast so that the media brought you a kind of hybrid of real time and unreal time (e. g. “recorded live”).   Early forms of media such as novels and radio dramas still required some active thought (or imagination, which is a different but related thing) on the part of the listener.  But a few days ago I saw a banner outside the Texas State History Museum advertising a 3-D IMAX presentation of an animated film about flying dinosaurs.  It’s hard to imagine anything that would leave less work to the imagination than being surrounded by giant pterodactyls which appear to be flying directly at your head.

De Zengotita’s writing style reminds me of the late Catholic writer Walker Percy, whose Lost in the Cosmos was a similar unclassifiable work that was part social criticism, part personal essay, but highly readable and thought-provoking because of its original point of view.  In Mediated, De Zengotita strenuously refrains from moralizing or prescribing “solutions to the problem,” a trope which he says has become almost required these days.  But he wants us to think about the consequences of spending a larger and larger part of our time in mediated unreal time:  playing online games, cruising the web that so easily takes us from one non-sequitur to the next almost-unrelated site, and watching representations of all kinds that train us to expect to be flattered by increasingly customized and personalized treatment (count how many times you see the word “my” this or that in ads, and even software labels such as “my computer”).  One day, as he was in conversation with a techie type discussing the potential problems that could arise from spending too much time in mediated unreality, the man turned to him and said, “What’s so great about reality?”

If you are a secular humanist like De Zengotita says he is, maybe raw reality really is just one of an increasing number of options we have now, and it’s hard to answer the techie’s question.  But for people who believe in a God who created both reality in general and us in particular, the real has a prior call on our attention over anything we cobble together ourselves.  I realized an aspect of this over a year ago when, as a part of a retreat I was planning, I voluntarily gave up listening to my car radio.  My listening habits were fairly typical:  NPR, a classical music station, and a low-power AM station broadcasting Relevant Radio, an evangelistic effort of the Roman Catholic Church.  But the freedom to think my own thoughts during commutes came to be more valuable to me than whatever background interruptions the radio brought to me, and I haven’t gone back.  On long commutes to Austin, I sometimes play recordings of interviews with authors by former NPR correspondent Ken Myers, who has established a subscription radio network of sorts called the Mars Hill Audio Journal.  (Mars Hill was how I learned about Mediated, as a matter of fact.)  But the key to my approach to my car audio in particular, and increasingly media in general, is that I try to stay in charge whenever possible.

That means I try to avoid simply killing time by bombing around on the web.  If I get on the web I try to make sure that I know what I’m looking for—a journal article, maybe, or the definition of a word, or a review of a particular movie.  Because if I just take at random one of the thousands of little dangling baits that nearly every website hangs in front of you, I know I will eventually end up seeing something I regret, simply for the time wasted if not for the dubious nature of the content.

Am I still mediated?  Unquestionably.  But at least, after reading De Zengotita’s book, I’m aware of my mediated state and can try to do something about it.  And those of us who work in the media—everywhere from blogs like this to the most advanced techies at Google working on things we may not see for years—should all find out what being mediated is, and make up your mind whether you like it or not.

Sources:  Thomas De Zengotita’s Mediated:  How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It was published by Bloomsbury in 2005.  For more information about the Mars Hill Audio Journal, see http://www.mhaj.com.

Fukushima Revisited: Lessons Learned

On Mar. 11, 2011, a huge earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, killing thousands of people outright and flooding large areas of the northeastern coastline of the country.  But perhaps the most significant legacy of the disaster will arise from what happened at the Fukushima nuclear plant, which was situated in the direct path of the tsunami.

As we mentioned in a blog two days after the disaster, no nuclear plant in history had been subjected to an 8.9-magnitude earthquake before.  But all of the six reactors at the plant may have sustained the shock without serious initial damage.  As the earthquake struck, automatic shutdown procedures were followed and after the earthquake, the operating reactors were still under control.  The problems came with the tsunami, which flooded the lowest level of the plant.

At this point, we turn to the conclusions of two special commissions charged with investigating the accident.  Both issued their conclusions just this last July of 2012.  One commission was the first of its kind in the entire sixty-six-year history of Japan’s constitutional government.  After interviewing hundreds of witnesses and conducting over a thousand hours of interviews, the commissions had harsh words to say about Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), government officials, and the sadly lacking state of emergency preparedness showed by those charged with the safety of nuclear power generally in Japan.

One problem that could have been avoided concerned the location of the emergency generators that kept cooling pumps operating during cooldown.  Turning off a large nuclear reactor is not like just flipping a switch.  They operate by heating large volumes of water, metal, and fuel to many hundreds of degrees, and even if the nuclear reaction is stopped almost instantly by some means such as the insertion of neutron-absorbing control rods, the laws of physics say that all that heat has to go somewhere.  And the usual place it goes is into the cooling fluid that is circulated through the reactor to remove the heat to boilers to generate electricity.

In the case of a shutdown, the heat can be simply dissipated in cooling towers or other rapid means, but first it has to be extracted by the cooling fluid flowing through the reactor.  In an emergency, this fluid has to be pumped even faster than normal, and only mechanical pumps will do the job in the type of reactor used at Fukushima.  With the loss of electric power from outside due to the earthquake and from the plant’s own generators due to the shutdown, the pumps had to be powered by emergency generators that were operating from diesel engines.  The big problem was, all these emergency generators were in the basement—where the floodwaters rose and stopped them cold.

From that point on, the situation just got worse.  With no cooling fluid flowing, the three reactors operating at the time of the earthquake overheated and produced hydrogen from the reaction of water with hot metal inside, and eventually the hydrogen exploded.  This was a chemical, not a nuclear, explosion, but it broke open the plant’s housing enough to release a lot of radioactive trash from the wrecked reactors inside—about a tenth of what was released during the much more serious accident at Chernobyl, Ukraine in 1986.  But enough radioactive material was released at Fukushima to affect the lives of those who lived near the plant for many years.

The fact that the emergency generators were in a vulnerable position where floodwaters could stop them is only one of a number of design flaws that contributed to the magnitude of the disaster.  Higher dikes around the plant site could have conceivably prevented flooding in the first place.  Following a call for increased safety measures at nuclear plants in 2006, TEPCO apparently did little or nothing.  According to the National Diet report, the firm relied on its close connections with Japanese regulators to avoid taking any substantial actions to improve safety.  The reports also faulted government officials for not planning for evacuations of the scale that turned out to be needed.  The Fukushima disaster has also given ammunition for groups agitating for the end of nuclear power altogether, and several countries such as Germany have either slowed or stopped their plans for future nuclear plants.

Admittedly, the earthquake and tsunami that led to the Fukushima disaster were at the outer limits of what any reasonable design would take into account.  But clearly, some fairly simple measures that might have made routine operations a little less convenient would have reduced or eliminated altogether the tragic events that led to the death or injury of numerous plant workers, the release of radiation that contaminated land for miles around the plant, the bad publicity that nuclear power received, and the total loss of billions of dollars’ worth of machinery and equipment.

One hopes that every nuclear engineer, in school and out, will make a special study of Fukushima in order to use the lessons learned from what went wrong there.  With the release of the disaster reports (and, hopefully, their translation into other languages including English), the nuclear industry has been presented with a treasure trove of mostly bad examples of how not to do it.  As engineer and writer Henry Petroski likes to point out, engineers often learn more from failure than from success, and Fukushima has presented us with an abundance of learning opportunities.  In view of concerns over climate change, the availability of fossil fuels, and the promise of conservation technologies such as smart-grid approaches to power distribution, it would be a shame if we back away from a form of energy that could provide non-fossil power for many decades to come.

Sources:  I relied upon the Wikipedia summaries of the commission reports under the headings of “Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster” and “National Diet of Japan Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission.”  

Your Face is Familiar, But Not Enough to Log You On

Biometrics is the science of measurement applied to biological entities such as fruit flies, dogs, or human beings.  Ever since the discovery that fingerprints are a nearly unique lifelong way of identifying people, we have employed biometrics in some form, but usually only in special situations such as criminal investigations or other law-enforcement matters.  But recent advances in the quality and reliability of digital biometric sensors that work entirely without human intervention have made it possible to log on to your computer, not with a password, but with your right thumb, as I saw a colleague do in my office the other day.  He has a new laptop and at the lower left corner of the screen is a little red panel that he swiped his thumb over to turn it on.  Although I didn’t try it, I suspect my thumb would not have done the trick.

The San Jose Mercury News carried a roundup article the other day describing some new and upcoming biometric techniques.  Turns out fingerprints are only one of many characteristics that inventive labs and firms are working on.  Face recognition software is getting good enough to pick out a particular face in a high-resolution photo of a crowd.  And somebody in a government lab is working on the notion, familiar to owners of bloodhounds, that body odor is unique enough to identify you.

I will be the first to admit that being pestered for a new, unique, high-quality password that is also different from all the other new, unique, high-quality passwords you’ve had to come up with in the last six weeks to do everything from buying things online to logging into your organization’s pay system, is quite annoying.  So why am I not jumping for joy over the prospect of simply swiping my thumb or even just grinning into the camera to get my computer to do what I want?  Several reasons come to mind.

The first one is pointed out by a researcher quoted in the Mercury News article.  There is a basic assumption of anonymity that people have when they go into a public place.  Yes, sometimes you put on a nametag at a party or in a social setting where you want people to know who you are, but if you’re like me, you feel sort of foolish if you leave the event and look down a couple of hours later and you’re still wearing your nametag at the airport.  There are places where I don’t necessarily want all and sundry to know who I am, not because I’m doing something nefarious, but just because the information could be abused.  It’s a little far-fetched now, but this is the kind of problem that biometrics could lead to if it gets into the wrong hands.  And believe me, if it becomes widely used by consumer-electronics manufacturers, it will get into the wrong hands.

A second problem concerns what I’d call the interoperability problem.  The big pain about passwords is that every little seller of internet toothpicks and offerer of free software wants you to come up with a password for their particular system.  Some people use the same password for everything, and I . . . well, I don’t quite go that far, but let’s just say there are commonalities among the different passwords I use.  If we go whole hog for replacing passwords with biometrics, what kind of biometric identifier will we use?  If there’s some industry-standard device, that means basically everyone will be using the same password for everything (read “fingerprint” or whatever the feature du jour is for “password”), and that means one giant database sitting somewhere with everybody’s password on it might not be that hard to compile.  The dangers that could arise from such a concentration of sensitive information are obvious.  And if we use a diverse number of systems, well, that means a diverse number of plugins or thingamajigs or whatever, will be needed to log in to many sites, and that could be even worse than having to remember all those passwords.

Last but not least, I will remind you that no technology is perfect, and this includes biometric devices as well.  Say you are using face-recognition technology and one day you decide to shave your moustache.  Ooops!—facial hair isn’t all you lost.  You’ll have to retrain X number of security programs to recognize your new, less hirsute visage.  At least when you forget a password, there’s usually some alternate approach that works reasonably well—a security question or two, an email to your known email address, or some such thing that consumes time but otherwise works pretty well.  Biometric security will have to have some kind of backup like that, but who knows what form it would take? We might end up looking at passwords rather like I looked at the little hole in the front bumper of my 1958 Morris Minor (well, technically it was my father’s car, but he let me drive it when I was in high school).  It had an electric starter, but in a pinch such as a moribund battery, you could take the tire jack, stick it through the front bumper, and crank the little pint-size motor to start it by hand.  (I never got up the nerve to try that, but it’s one of my many lost opportunities of my youth.)

Part of what we are seeing is a generational shift in attitudes toward privacy.  Things that annoy me, such as the creepy way items I search for online at one site start magically showing up a few days later in ads at a wholly unrelated site, are things that just seem part of the background of life to younger people who haven’t experienced anything different.  After all, before there were cities, most people lived in little village clans where everybody knew who you were and what you were up to, and we survived that.  But there is a disproportion of power and ability between one individual whose identity is increasingly ascertainable, and the giant international corporations who can ascertain it and act on that knowledge.  Let’s hope we don’t get so used to the degradation of privacy that by the time we start missing it, there’s nothing left.

 

Sources:  The San Jose Mercury News (www.mercurynews.com) carried the article “Does Rise of Biometrics Mean a Future Without Anonymity?” on Sept. 16, 2012.  I would give the article’s URL if I could get it to work, but I can’t.  You can find the article by the paper’s online search function. 

Texting in Emergencies: Communications Gone Right

 

Most Fridays, I drive the 35 miles or so from San Marcos to Austin, Texas, where I have a long-standing association with a laboratory on the Pickle Research Campus of the University of Texas at Austin.  No, we do not research pickles there, though that would not be a bad way to spend time.  It’s named for “Jake” Pickle, the U. S. Representative who steered a lot of federal energy money to UT in the 1980s, and UT returned the favor by naming the research campus after him.

It’s a mildly secure place where you need a parking sticker to get in, but otherwise it has the open feel of a research business park.  As I drove through the place about 10 A. M. on the way to the building I work in, I noticed a large crowd of people outside a dining hall.  Thinking maybe they were waiting for a tour bus, I didn’t wonder about it any longer until I pulled up at my building and saw another group of people milling around outside.  It had been raining lightly, so I knew these folks weren’t just taking the air for their health.

I saw a man I knew and asked him what was going on.  He said that the University had sent out a text message about ten minutes ago telling everybody to leave their building and get as far away as possible from it.  There was some confusion as to whether this applied only on the main campus or to the research campus as well, but when in doubt, most people decided to evacuate the premises.

There was no telling how long this was going to go on and I had some other obligations, so I just turned around and went back home.  Later I learned that the all-clear wasn’t given officially until noon, and that the bomb threat (that’s what it was) had been a hoax.  University officials had received a phone call about 8:35 that morning, and the caller said that bombs were set to go off in campus buildings in about 90 minutes.  The administration received some criticism for not notifying students sooner, but I want to talk about what went right:  the system of using broadcast text messages in emergencies.

I am old enough to remember the infamous “duck-and-cover” drills that were observed in schools in the 1960s, during the height of the Cold War.  Back then, there were two main ways of notifying the public of a crisis such as a potential nuclear war:  radio and TV broadcasts, and sirens.  But if you didn’t happen to be watching TV or listening to the radio, and were out of the hearing range of a siren, the first you might know something was wrong would be your conversion into toast.  Still, these means were reasonably effective when we all thought we had at least thirty minutes’ warning before incineration.

But today the most common type of physical threat that educational institutions have to deal with is both smaller scale and more personal:  either a “shooter” on campus, for example, or a hidden bomb.  Neither of these comes with a guaranteed thirty-minute grace period.  So how nice it is to have a system in which identical messages containing a reasonable amount of information can be simultaneously sent to students via a medium that they nearly all use dozens of times a day.

During the media coverage of the evacuation, it emerged that UT has signed up some 60,000 people to receive emergency text messages.  I, alas, am not one of them, because I’m one of those old fogies who rarely carries a cellphone, never mind text messages.  But I had no trouble finding out what was going on from those who got the message.

A few years ago I wrote an article about the engineering ethics of communications technologies.  The specific example I used was the way fire and police communications broke down during the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina.  The point I made was that modern communications technologies create an expectation that they will be there in an emergency, and when they collapse due to unusual circumstances it is a kind of moral failing.  I didn’t have any examples of systems working well in that article, but that was before the UT bomb scare last Friday.

While one could question the timing of the alert, the fact that nearly everybody got out of hundreds of buildings on campus with no injuries is a remarkable achievement in itself.  Such evacuations can easily go bad, as when someone yells “Fire” in a crowded theater and a stampede ensues.  Mood is everything.  Theater patrons scared out of their seats by a fire alarm are in a much different mood than students told to drop whatever dull thing they’re doing and go outside to chat.  There is also a tacit admission on the part of the administration that whatever you do, students will read their text messages during class, and in this particular case, it was a good thing.

If some techno-genie had come out of the sky in 1965 and offered to provide a way to send instant emergency messages to everybody in a school, or a city, people would have leaped at the chance, I think, even if it had cost something.  But the demand-driven spread of cellphones has provided a virtually free way of doing that.  It’s a shame that city governments have not also clued into this way of spreading emergency information in a larger way, although there may be municipalities that have.  It would be great for tornado warnings, for instance, but you can already get those texted to you by commercial weather channels.

It’s nice to discuss a technical incident with ethical implications that went right for a change.  Technology will also be involved in catching the guy who pulled the hoax, and I would not want to be in his shoes when they find him.  As UT’s President Powers said at a news conference, every such incident gives them more material to learn from so they can do better next time.  I hope they do, but I think they did pretty well this time too.

Sources:  An article describing the events of last Friday, Sept. 14 concerning the bomb threat on the UT campus can be found on the Austin American-Statesman webpage at

http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/bomb-threats-prompt-evacuations-at-3-campuses-2457978.html.  My article on the ethics of emergency communications technology, "We've Got to Talk:  Emergency Communications and Engineering Ethics," was published in IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, vol. 26, no. 3 pp. 42-48, Fall 2007.

Can Engineers Fix the Political System?

From now until early November, U. S. citizens will be bombarded by more political ads than most people care to hear.  While I won’t take sides today, I sense a general opinion that the U. S. Congress in particular, and perhaps the whole range of U. S. political systems in general, is severely impaired if not quite broken down.  And during an election year, it’s more noticeable than ever.

Support for this sense comes from a book by economist Arnold Kling, who thinks the U. S. has outgrown a political system that may have worked fine when the country was much smaller, but has now become antiquated and needs serious overhauling.  His basic point is that while the knowledge needed to govern the country is increasingly diffused by means of the Internet and other advanced technologies, the present political system tends to concentrate power in the hands of a few hundred elites:  the President and his executive-branch heads, members of Congress, quasi-independent bureaucrats such as the Federal Reserve Board, and leaders of large private corporations.  This leads at best to a kind of paralysis in which the elites do things that basically feather their own nests, while the great mass of people have little voice or influence on what the elites choose to do to them (I could have written “for them” instead of “to them” but sometimes it’s hard to tell which preposition is more appropriate).

Rather than just complain, Kling proposes some solutions, and says some very nice things about engineers in the process.  He cites the way that the Internet’s technical rules are arrived at as a good example of “just-in-time government.”  Although the process is somewhat different now, for many years the Internet was governed by a series of ad-hoc Internet Engineering Task Forces (IETFs).  A typical task force would be called together by an engineer who thought there was a problem that needed fixing.  Other engineers interested in the problem would volunteer their time to form a working group which would have meetings (either virtual or face-to-face) to discuss alternatives and agree on a plan of action.  Eventually the solution would be agreed upon and circulated in the form of a final draft.  If nobody objected strenuously within a certain time, the draft became Internet “law.”  Though Kling doesn’t mention it, many technical standards such as the ones about how wireless devices interact (you may have heard of IEEE 802.11, which is one such standard for local area networks) are arrived at by essentially the same kind of task-force mechanisms.

Kling points out that in contrast to well-paid civil servants, volunteers do not have an incentive to keep their problem alive so as to justify their working on it indefinitely.  They have their own jobs they’d like to get back to, and fixing the problem expeditiously is more appealing than prolonging it.  On the other hand, if you are the government-paid Assistant Sub-Executive Secretary of the Department of Circumlocution or something, you may be tempted to say that “further study is needed” no matter what problem comes up.

Kling uses IETFs as an example of ways that societies can govern themselves without the need for a superstructure of permanently empowered individuals whose terms in office last for many years.  He has other ideas as well that would make government run more like a competitive business and allow individuals to choose which regulatory and tax regime they would like to live under, without the disagreeable necessity of moving from one place to another physically.

Kling makes a good point about the excessive concentration of power with the following example.  If you divide the total budget of $4.3 billion for Montgomery County, Maryland by the number of County Council members, the spending per legislator is an astonishing $500 million.  There are few CEOs of private companies who can boast of controlling so much cash.  By contrast, Switzerland is divided into 26 “cantons” with between about 50 to 100 legislators in each canton.  The highest per-legislator spending level in Switzerland—a nation, not a county—is $76 million.  And Switzerland spends more per person on its relatively small population than the U. S. does.  When the U. S. was smaller, the spending per legislator was closer to what Switzerland’s is today, and it was probably easier for an average citizen to get the attention of a legislator, simply because there weren’t as many citizens then as there are today.  We would need upwards of a thousand congressmen in Congress today in order to move substantially closer to Switzerland’s situation.

And that brings up the main problem with all these nice ideas: as with many wide-ranging proposals to remake the political system, the problem is how to get there from here.  It’s unlikely that anyone in Washington is going to look kindly on the idea that we should have ten or a hundred many times as legislators as we do now.  And the alternative, to move power from Washington back to the individual states, is also one that has a rough time getting heard, although there are slight signs that the U. S. Supreme Court is thinking it might be time to move that way.

In the near term, the best we average citizens can do is to vote for people who might possibly be inclined to look beyond their own interests and do what is right for the city, state, or nation, regardless of whether it means a decrease in his or her own power.  Such people are increasingly rare, but if you find one, I encourage you to vote for them, while you still have the opportunity.

Sources: Arnold Kling’s Unchecked and Unbalanced:  How the Discrepancy Between Knowledge and Power Caused the Financial Crisis and Threatens Democracy  was published by Bowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD) in 2010.

Note to Podcast Enthusiasts:  I was recently interviewed by Jeffrey Shelton and Chris Gammell of “Engineering Commons,” a podcast they put together weekly.  The resulting podcast was posted Sept. 6 and if you want to hear your scribe opinionate on a wide range of ethics-related matters, you can download it at theengineeringcommons.com.

A Trip To the Genius Bar

It is a sad fact of life that even the best-engineered system breaks down from time to time.  Hence repairmen (or should I say repair people, these days) are assured of job security, although the types of repairs they make have changed radically over the years.  For a few summers in high school and college, I worked as a repair technician at an audiovisual services shop, fixing tape recorders and dealing mainly with mechanical rather than electrical troubles.  But when my Mac laptop started acting up the other day, I decided to take it to the 2012 version of Mac’s fix-it shop:  the Genius Bar.

That’s an inspired name, by the way, evoking images of a drinking establishment with a bouncer that lets in only MENSA members with IQs above 140.  What it is in fact is a counter at the rear of an Apple retail store in an Austin shopping mall.  I had heard recently that Apple retail stores have the highest sales figures per square foot of store area of any type of mall store, and after visiting one, I believe it.

The display windows showed life-size cutout profiles of two people enjoying some of the latest Mac products.  Just a few minutes after the store opened at 10, it was as crowded as a discount clothing store during tax-free weekend.  And about half the people inside wore identical blue tee-shirts with Mac logos:  the sales staff.  Someone greeted me as soon as I stepped in the door.  I explained that I had gone online and made an appointment for 10:15 at the Genius Bar, and the man referred me to another sales associate, a young woman carrying an iPad (clipboards are so twentieth-century), who looked up my name and said it would be just a few minutes.  I was early, so I didn’t mind waiting.

Customers, or potential customers, were everywhere, trying out the wares displayed on clean, simple white box-like tables or browsing through the accessories for iPads, iPhones, and i don’t know what all else.  I wasn’t in the market for any of those, so I poked around where they had custom-made cases for iPads.  The one I found most amusing was made to look like a codex:  one of those pre-printing-press books with thick hand-painted leather binding.  It gave me the same kind of feeling I had when I first heard a student’s cellphone in my class emit a classic mechanical-bell ringtone.

Pretty soon yet a third salesperson hunted me down.  “Karl?  We’re ready for you, have a seat right here.”  It was just a bare counter with four high stools and barely enough elbow room to separate me from an older woman with a German accent who was explaining what her Macbook Air wasn’t doing right.

My genius (I’ll call him Biff) was a late-twenty-something man who was distinguished from many of the other salespeople by not having any tattoos.  He asked me what the problem was.  I told him my Magic Mouse did all its magic except scrolling, and it wasn’t the mouse because it would scroll fine with my wife’s computer.

He tried some obvious things first.  Logging in as a guest, he discovered that when he did that, the mouse worked.  That was progress, but he explained that all it told him was that some of my custom library and root stuff was corrupted, because when a guest logs in the library is empty.

I will not bore you with what all he tried in the next half hour.  At one point, because no one had mentioned charges or fees, I asked him what this would cost.  “Nothing unless we turn a screw.”  So software fixes were free.  That sounded good.  Every so often he’d spin the computer over to me and ask me to enter my password again.  I must have done that fifteen or twenty times.  It gave me a nice but entirely spurious sense that I was assisting in the repair.

At one point he turned to the fellow genius next to him, an older guy with a short beard, earrings, and many tattoos.  The guy said, “Don’t try this unless you know what you’re doing,” went into some mysterious part of the file system where all the files were labeled with incomprehensible abbreviations like “ertx” and “infpro,” but failed to fix the problem.  My genius reset something on the machine that took a few minutes and excused himself to go in the back and consult with the web, I suppose.

When he came back, I said I supposed they wouldn’t let him work on my machine all day, would they?  Was there a time limit?

“Not a time limit exactly, but a goal.  We can be somewhat flexible, and there’s one more thing I can try.”  Saying thus, he opened some files and started selectively wiping out whole sections.  I got a little nervous and recalled Mark Twain’s saying that “a good horse was a good horse until it had run away once, and a good watch was a good watch until the repairers got a chance at it.”  But this wasn’t the first time the machine (a fairly new one) had been in for repairs, so it wasn’t really relevant to the case.

Finally, Biff turned my Mac back to me and said, “Now, one more password entry, and see what it does now.”  Then he tried stroking the mouse’s back, and this time it scrolled.  And we were in my library, not the guest’s empty one.  I congratulated Biff, thanked him for his time, packed up my Mac, and walked through the crowd surging around the thousands of dollars’ worth of retail merchandise I steadfastly refrained from buying, and went about the rest of my day.

Was it ethical for me to take a half hour of a genius’s time and get a repair that probably would have cost me upwards of a hundred dollars at a non-genius shop?  Well, I look at it this way.  If they really sell five thousand dollars a year of stuff from that place for every square foot in it, they seem to think they can afford to give away free software repairs in the back.  And if some customers take advantage of this service without leaving some of their cash behind for other more costly attractions on display, well, it’s just a cost of doing business that way.  I for one thank Apple for being so generous, and only wish there were more Apple retail stores nationwide.  But that would spell trouble for all the other Mac repair shops, so maybe things are just as well the way they are.

 

Sources:  The statistic on retail sales in Mac stores (their figure of $5,647 per square foot, presumably per year, is seventeen times the U. S. mall store average of $341) is from an MSN Money article published on April 19, 2012 at http://money.msn.com/top-stocks/post.aspx?post=f87ebfd7-fcf1-4bdb-9489-d752d85293b6.  Mark Twain’s comment about horses and watches, which he attributes to his deceased Uncle William, is in his short story, “My Watch.” 

Copyright or Copy Wrong?

Over a hundred years ago, when newspapers existed exclusively on paper and the fastest way news traveled was by tapping telegraph keys and not computer keys, newspaper editors established a practice called the “exchange.”  As I understand it, Newspaper A would send copies of its back issues to Newspapers B, C, and D, and they would exchange copies of theirs with A and with each other.  Items that were of more than local interest but not time-sensitive would be picked up by other papers and printed with the credit given to “(Exchange).”  Such items could include what we would now call “feature” stories, human-interest reports, and even poetry.

Why this bit of historical newspaper arcana?  Because you need to know it to understand the following poem, which I transcribe from memory:

I shot a poem into the air

It was reprinted everywhere

From Bangor to the Rocky Range,

And always credited to (Exchange).

In other words, once the woebegone poet got his poem into one paper, editors at other papers saw it in the exchanges and liked it so much that they printed it too, but somehow or other his name got left off in the process.   If poetry is the clear expression of mixed emotions, this poet had plenty of raw material to go on:  pleasure at the thought that lots of papers reprinted his poem, but regret that nobody but the local readers of the first paper to print it knew who the author was.

Technology has not eliminated this kind of thing, but it happens a lot faster now.  In fact, just since last week, it has happened to me twice, although I didn’t have the misfortune to see my work appear without my byline.  Here’s what happened.

Some people at a commercial website, which will remain nameless herein, but which caters to a technical and engineering readership, apparently read ny blog post last week about the submarine theater flipping over.  I’m not too surprised that such folks glance at my blog.  Google statistics tell me there are about fifty or so people who get it regularly, and many more occasional visitors.  Anyway, when they read last week’s post, they thought it was good enough to run in not just one, but two websites they operate.  So all of a sudden I appeared in their pages as an “editorial” writer, complete with photo and bio attached to the blog post.  But there was no mention of the fact that it was actually reprinted from another source.  The impression their readers came away with was that I had written it exclusively for them.

They must have a lot larger readership than this blog does, because I later got an email from Bob Phillips, the producer of the Aquarena Springs documentary from which I took the submarine-theater story.  Now, to be fair, I didn’t tell him that I was blogging about it, though I did write him a fan letter.  He not only thanked me for the letter, but said that he’d gotten 124 hits from the commercial website that had carried my post, and sold three videos as a result.

My presence on someone else’s website was news to me, and I promptly went over to the site and sure enough, there was my “editorial.”  A few days later the head of the publicity department at Texas State University emailed me to say he’d enjoyed the story too, which is how I found out about the second place they’d posted it.

Like the poet, I came away from this episode with mixed feelings.  I was flattered that the outfit thought enough of the story to post it on two of their websites.  But I was a little annoyed at their failing to mention my blog’s URL, and to give the impression I’d written the piece for their website.

This same sort of thing went on before digital technology made it so easy to cut and paste whole articles in less than a minute.  I have a curious old book with the title “Henley’s Twentieth Century Formulas, Processes, and Trade Secrets,” which is an encyclopedia of how to make everything from adhesives to yeast.  It credits almost no sources at all.  Internal evidence indicates it was culled from numerous old encyclopedias, trade journals, and European publications too old or far away to be likely to sue for copyright infringement.  But it took years to put that sort of thing together, and nowadays you can do it practically overnight.

So has digital technology made copyright infringement and its less serious but ethically questionable allied practices easier?  Certainly it’s easier and faster to electronically cut and paste an article today than it was in the old days, when you had to retype it by hand (two or three times in the old Linotype days), set it up, print it, ship it, and read it to do the whole thing over again.  But the ethics of the thing haven’t changed, as far as I’m concerned.

How was what I did with Bob Phillips’s video different from what the nameless website did with my article?  I did not present his video in its full and original form and leave you with the impression that he had made it solely so that I could show it on my website.  Instead, I added my own views, research, and recollections to material from his video and came up with an original work of my own.  And I stated my sources in the “Sources” section of the blog.  Far from being annoyed at what I did, Mr. Phillips was delighted, not least because the additional advertising brought him more business.  But the nameless website passed off my article as though I had written it for them and didn’t mind appearing in their pages to help them make money.

My intention is to maintain this blog as a strenuously non-commercial enterprise, and I plan to keep it that way.  Because I have another job that pays the bills, I wish to keep this blog free from even the hint of a conflict of interest by accepting no sponsorships or advertising of any kind.  You see no ads here, I invite no guest bloggers to advertise their wares, and the only reason Mr. Phillips’s video sales website got mentioned was because its URL is the only way I could refer to it in a way that is publicly accessible.  When the commercial website passed off my blog as their “editorial,” they gave the impression that I was working for them, which is assuredly not the case.  Which is why I was somewhat annoyed as well as pleased.

As for that poet, I hope I do not get into trouble with the literary heirs and assigns of Franklin P. Adams, a popular humor columnist of the 1930s.  He was the guy who wrote the poem.  Considering the subject of this column, it would hardly be fair to Mr. Adams to leave his name out.

Sources:  Although I won’t give their URLs here, you can find the websites where my post was reproduced by typing in last week’s headline to Google.  By now, the piece has even made its way to the Theater Safety Blog on Blogspot.com.  And Franklin P. Adams’ poem “Frequently” appears in An Encyclopedia of Modern American Humor edited by Bennett Cerf (Doubleday, 1954), which in turn reprinted it from his anthology The Melancholy Lute (Viking, 1936).  There now.

An Apology (added Aug. 28):  After I posted the above blog, I received an email from a staff member at www.pddnet.com, the "nameless" site I referred to.  He said I had given him permission to copy my blog over a year ago, and otherwise he wouldn't have posted it without permission, which is what I thought had happened.  I had completely forgotten about this exchange, so I extend my apologies for raking pddnet.com over the coals undeservedly.  They have agreed to list my blog URL in any future posts, and so I consider this commitment sufficient amends for something I told them they could do in the first place.