Boeing’s 787 Battery Eggs: All in One Lithium Basket

Excuse the tortured metaphor, but the old advice about not putting all your eggs in one basket applies to engineering as well as to other fields.  The implication is that if the basket with all your eggs slips and falls, you’ve lost everything.  Boeing hasn’t lost everything, but the battery troubles besetting its new 787 Dreamliner could not have come at a worse time.

The 787, the latest-model wide-body jetliner from Boeing that seats up to 290 passengers, has been in commercial service since October 2011, less than a year and a half.  It boasts the latest high-tech advances such as a mainly carbon-fiber airframe for reduced weight and fuel consumption, and mostly electrical control systems, rather than the older pneumatic or hydraulic actuators.  Consequently, its electrical power requirements are about triple that of earlier comparable airliners, and so the electrical power system of the 787 was boosted accordingly.  Like a car, the engines (or turbogenerators driven by engines) provide most of the electrical power in flight, but for emergencies and times when the generators aren’t running, the 787 needs batteries, also like a car.  But lead-acid or even nickel-cadmium batteries were seen to be too heavy for the advanced jet, so designers chose to use two 60-some-pound auxiliary power units (battery banks) that employed lithium-cobalt batteries.

Now, lithium batteries have both virtues and vices.  Their main virtue is that they have the best energy-weight ratio of just about any commercial type of battery, meaning you get more stored energy in a 60-pound lithium battery than you would in the same weight of nickel-cadmium or lead-acid batteries.  So far, so good.  But lithium is one of the more reactive metals, and the chemistry of lithium batteries is very touchy with regard to storage temperatures, charging rates, and defects such as little metal needles that sometimes grow through insulating layers and short the things out.  When any of these problems happen to a severe enough degree, the battery can catch fire.  And once a lithium battery is on fire, there’s very little you can do except to wait till it burns itself out, because all the ingredients for the fire are already inside the battery.  Even the FAA recognizes this because it doesn’t require any fire-fighting equipment to put out lithium-battery fires—just adequate ventilation to make sure the hazardous fumes from the fire don’t harm passengers or crew, and don’t spread the fire to other parts of the plane. 

But there is evidence that in the two lithium-battery fires that occurred on 787s in the last couple of months, even these safety systems didn’t work properly.  After these fires in Boston and Japan, the FAA and most other national air-safety agencies grounded the entire fifty-plane fleet of 787s until the battery problem is resolved. 

This problem clearly could have been worse.  The planes could have crashed, but in the incidents so far, the pilots discovered the problem in enough time to land the planes safely.  In the past, lithium-battery fires in a plane’s cargo compartment have caused the loss of the plane, and that is why you are not allowed to carry loose non-rechargeable lithium-ion batteries in checked luggage on air flights.  (Didn’t know that, did you?)  But anybody who owns or leases a multi-million-dollar investment like a 787 knows that every day you can’t fly it is a big hole in your pocket, and also seriously disrupts flight schedules that were made assuming the new 787s would be available. 

It looks like the planes were designed almost in the expectation that the batteries would catch fire some time or other, even though the ventilation systems apparently didn’t work as well as planned.  The fix is likely to be a challenge, because the plane’s entire electrical system is designed around lithium batteries.  Substituting an older type of battery is feasible, but will involve a major redesign, adding weight and probably space and a lot of certification tests to ensure that the fixes aren’t worse than the original problem. 

We may be getting ahead of the game if we assume the lithium batteries are going to come out of the 787s altogether.  The fact that the fires happened so close in time, after over a year of service, says to me that there may have been some kind of well-controlled slipup either in the manufacture of those particular batteries, or the design of those particular planes.  If engineers and investigators can isolate—and ideally, reproduce—the cause of these fires, and it turns out to be fixable, then it may be a simple matter of making sure those particular conditions don’t happen again, and the planes can fly safely again with the lithium batteries they were originally designed for. 

The trouble with these investigations is that once you get a lithium fire going, there isn’t a lot left to pick through to see what started it.  In the “Sources” section at the end of this blog, I’ve put a URL for a little video that I must say about at the outset, “Kids, don’t try this at home.”  It shows a guy taking apart an ordinary consumer lithium battery and setting fire to it.  After you watch that video, you may have second thoughts about buying a lithium anything, though most people don’t go around taking propane torches to their batteries.

We can be thankful that the battery incidents did not result in any fatalities, and I for one hope that the problem turns out to be discoverable, reproducible under controlled conditions, and fixable.  But in any case, Boeing has some lithium-colored egg on its face for the time being, and has about fifty reasons—equal to the number of 787s sold—to get to the bottom of the problem and solve it to everyone’s satisfaction.

Sources:  I referred in the preparation of this piece to an article in the Tacoma, Washington News-Tribune by John Gillie published online on Jan. 27, 2013 at http://www.thenewstribune.com/2013/01/27/2451132/787-battery-fire-correction-may.html.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on Boeing and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.  The lithium-fire-from-battery video can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BliWUHSOalU.

Ethical Lessons from Lance

Trying to learn a lesson in ethics from bicyle-racing star Lance Armstrong’s public confession last week is a little like trying to learn a lesson in cooperation from the U. S. Congress.  Neither Mr. Armstrong nor Congress has recently demonstrated a good understanding of the concepts involved.  But as many engineers know, you sometimes learn more from things that go wrong than from unqualified successes.  Mr. Armstrong has given us a personal perspective of what it is like to violate rules for personal gain, and to maintain for years that you’re not violating them until the evidence to the contrary became overwhelming.  Before you say to yourself, “Well, I would never do such a thing,” recall Solzhenitsyn’s words that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”  And hear what it is like to do things that even Mr. Armstrong himself now can hardly believe he did.

In his two-part interview with Oprah Winfrey aired last week, Mr. Armstrong contrasted his extraordinary public image with “the truth.”  The “mythic perfect story” of his overcoming advanced testicular cancer to win the Tour de France seven times, while in reality violating the sport’s rules against artificial means of enhancing performance (collectively called “doping”) leads to lesson No. 1:  what look like small or routine compromises with the truth early on in a process may lead to unforeseen consequences that are huge.  Most of the time, most of the things that we average people do have little or no effect outside a small circle of influence.  But sometimes, what looks at first like a small act of wrongdoing can cascade into a major disaster.  For example, the I-35W bridge collapse on Aug. 1, 2007 in Minnesota was traced largely to a small error in the size of gusset plates that held joints together, although overloading by construction machinery also contributed. 

Ms. Winfrey probed into Mr. Armstrong’s feelings at the time he was winning Tour de France prizes over and over again while knowingly violating the sport’s rules against doping.  She asked, “Was it a big deal to you, did it feel wrong?”  His reply:  “No. Scary.”  “It did not even feel wrong?”  “No.  Even scarier.”  “Did you feel bad about it?”  “No.  The scariest.”  When I teach engineering ethics modules, I usually ask students how they can tell the difference between right and wrong actions.  One of the most common responses is that they have a “feeling” or intuition that a thing is wrong, and that feeling is what they depend on.  While this feeling, called conscience, is quite often a good guide to what in retrospect turns out to be the right choice, consciences can be overpowered by other feelings or motivations.  In Mr. Armstrong’s case, he admits to being a competitiveness junkie and a control freak, putting it bluntly.  The desire to win at all costs was richly rewarded by the increasingly prominent sports competitions he entered, and whatever qualms he may have had about doping were swept away in the practical realization that doping was just a part of what it took to win races.  Lesson No. 2 is:  don’t always trust your feelings about an ethical matter. 

As many readers know, while allegations of doping have been made against Mr. Armstrong and others for many years, it took the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s multi-year investigation to produce results that convinced the Union Cycliste Internationale (the world body governing professional cycling) to revoke his Tour de France wins retroactively.  Despite Mr. Armstrong’s legal challenges to the process, the USADA’s nearly exhaustive thousand-page report contained enough testimony from enough people to convince the UCI, and gradually even most of Mr. Armstrong’s supporters, that the doping charges were basically true.  Only after losing all commercial sponsorships and being forced out of the leadership of his charitable Livestrong Foundation did Mr. Armstrong decide to make an extensive public statement about the matter, in the form of his interview with Oprah Winfrey. 

When someone else discovers that you have run aground ethically, what should you do about it?  For a time that even Mr. Armstrong now admits is too long, he continued an almost knee-jerk reaction to charges of doping by either threatening or filing lawsuits, including one against the USADA itself.  But losing the lawsuits, losing the money from sponsorship contracts, and losing his credibility even with former supporters finally convinced Mr. Armstrong to change tactics and to admit that what he was doing for so many years was a big lie, and involved lying and calling truth-tellers liars on a regular basis.  When a person is held up to millions as an ideal to strive for, an example of noble achievement against tremendous obstacles, that person has more than the usual obligation to keep his nose clean. 

Mr. Armstrong’s nose was not clean.  And now everybody knows it.  He himself points to a moment when he learned that the USADA was going to pursue its case against him.  He now wishes that he had simply asked them for three days in which to confess the truth to his family, his sponsors, and his foundation, and then he would have admitted to the rest of the world that the charges were true.  But even Mr. Armstrong can’t get in a time machine and go back and play that scene differently:  “I wish I could do that but I can’t.”

So we end with Lesson No. 3:  Fighting the truth once it is revealed usually hurts more than admitting you were wrong.  I’m reminded of a case in which some researchers analyzed the Citigroup Center tower in Manhattan in 1978, shortly after its completion.  They found that under some types of wind load, the unusual architecture of the building could cause oscillations that might lead to its collapse.  When its architect William LeMessurier recalculated the wind loads himself, he found that the researchers were right, and voluntarily contacted Citicorp to warn them of the problem.  Without any publicity, the owners worked with LeMessurier to correct the difficulties, but the story was not revealed in public for another twenty years.  LeMessurier came in for both criticism and praise, but the story is basically one of an honest engineer correcting his mistakes at the risk of his reputation.

Sources:  I used two sources for the transcriptions of Lance Armstrong’s interviews with Oprah Winfrey: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/cycling/lancearmstrong/9810801/Lance-Armstrongs-interview-with-Oprah-Winfrey-the-transcript.html for Part 1 and http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cycling/21087586 for Part 2.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Lance Armstrong, the Citigroup Center, the Missisippi I-35W bridge collapse, William LeMessurier, and for the Aleksander Solzhenitsyn quote, the site http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/10420.Aleksandr_I_Solzhenitsyn. 

Mines of Tears: Uranium Mining and the Navajos

Suppose you are a member of the Navajo Nation living on a reservation near Shiprock, New Mexico in 1960.  You hear of a great opportunity to earn money and help the United States besides.  Uranium has been discovered in many locations in and around the reservation, and a private company has opened a uranium mine in Shiprock.  The work is hard and dirty, but the pay is better than anything else you can find without leaving your land and your people.  You apply for the job and you’re hired.

Something like this was the story for one hundred and fifty Navajos who worked at the Shiprock uranium mine at various times from the 1950s through 1970, when it closed.  A decade later, a public-health researcher managed to track down records of these 150 miners.  By that time, as little as ten years after some of them finally left their jobs when the mine shut down, 133 of these men had died of lung cancer or various forms of lung fibrosis.  That’s 88 percent mortality—a pretty big chance to take for earning a decent wage for a few years.  And it’s even worse when you realize that most of these men had no idea of the chance they were taking by working in a uranium mine.  The 150 Navajos studied are just a sample of the thousands of native Americans affected by uranium mining and its aftereffects.

Mining is dangerous, uranium can be dangerous, and uranium mining can be one of the most risky occupations of all in terms of long-term health hazards unless extraordinary precautions are taken to protect the miners from radon and its products.  Radon, a heavy, odorless, highly radioactive gas, is produced by the decay of U-238, the major constituent of uranium.  Breathing radon and its decay products is one of the best ways to get lung cancer, which is why basements with even very slight detectible levels of radon are a health hazard.  Extensive ventilation of uranium mines and continuous monitoring of radon levels can reduce the risks of uranium mining to reasonable levels, but in many of the mines in and near Navajo land in the American West during the “uranium-boom” period of 1948 to 1970, these safety precautions were neglected in a rush to exploit domestic sources of uranium for both peaceful nuclear reactors and nuclear armaments.  And worse, the miners—many of them Navajos who spoke little or no English—were not informed that they were working in conditions that would very likely shorten their lifetimes.  The Navajo language did not even have a word for “radiation.” 

Even after most of the mines closed following a global decline in uranium prices, the hazards continued.  In 1978, the same year that the Three Mile Island nuclear plant suffered a contained meltdown, a containment dam broke that was holding back 93 million gallons of radioactive and poisonous tailing solution.  This hot muck ran into the Puerco River and contaminated miles of the river and acres of aquifer recharge zones.  Judging by the total amount of radioactivity released, this was arguably the worst accident involving radioactive materials in U. S. history, far exceeding the radiation that Three Mile Island put into the biosphere.  But no official disaster declaration was made, few news outlets mentioned the Puerco River disaster, and only in the last few years has some effort been expended on investigating the full extent of the damage and cleaning up the contaminated areas. 

This story is not one of unmitigated gloom.  Because many of the mines and Navajo miners were in Utah, in 1989 congressmen of that state sponsored a Federal bill to provide monetary compensation for uranium-mine workers whose health was affected by their employment in mines and related processing industries.  This measure was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush in 1990, and by 2009 over 20,000 workers had received a total of over $1.4 billion in reparations.

But no amount of money will bring back the lives of those who died early deaths because they only wanted to earn a decent living doing something they thought was helping the nation that had treated them so shamefully in the past.  This situation echoes the dismal conditions imposed by early Spanish explorers on the native Americans who were forced to work in gold mines under circumstances that amounted to slavery.  A person of a different color who speaks a different language than you do is easy to regard as a different species, unworthy of the consideration and justice that you give to your own kind.  Some of the earliest protests against Spanish exploitation of the natives were lodged by Catholic missionaries who saw the maltreatment of mine workers as a blasphemy against the God whom they served. 

Perhaps not coincidentally, I first learned of the Navajo experience with uranium mining from a brochure I happened across which was published by the Maryknoll Missioners, a group of lay persons, religious sisters, and priests who devote their lives to serving the underprivileged of the world.  One of the sisters was featured in an article about her activities in trying to establish the extent of radioactive pollution from uranium mining in areas where Navajos live today. 

No doubt, there were engineers involved in the design and operation of the U. S. uranium mines, and it would be easy to blame them in retrospect for the harms done.  In their defense, it must be said that the hazards of uranium mining were poorly understood as late as the 1950s, because until the advent of nuclear weapons and reactors, uranium was only one of a number of specialty metals, and experience with mining it was limited to a few European mines and scattered studies of uranium miners.  The first substantial U. S. Public Health Study of the subject was done with a sample of Navajo uranium miners, and by the time the results confirmed that such mining without proper ventilation was very dangerous, most of the damage had been done, because the lung cancer and other problems that radon causes take twenty years or more to develop.  Nevertheless, enough information was available as early as the 1950s to indicate that the mining of uranium was especially hazardous, and little or nothing was done technically to account for this fact.  At a minimum, the financial reparations paid to the Navajos and their families are a partial acknowledgment that they were deeply wronged, and teach us that long-term health effects are worth considering in any kind of employment.

Sources:  Besides the Maryknoll brochure from which I first learned of this issue, I referred to a Science Education Resource Center website maintained by Carleton College at http://serc.carleton.edu/research_education/nativelands/navajo/humanhealth.html and the Wikipedia article “Uranium mining and the Navajo people.”

Texas’ Light Bulb Law: Not the Brightest Bulb On the Tree

Each January brings with it a slew of laws scheduled to take effect on the first of the year, and 2013 is no exception.  As of Jan. 1, for example, it is now illegal to make or sell new 100-watt and 75-watt light bulbs that do not meet the efficiency standards of the federal Energy Independence and Security Act (nicknamed ERISA).  The plain old tungsten-filament argon-filled bulbs that Edison would have recognized don’t make the cut, so if you like them you’d better scout around and scarf up any old ones in stock, because when they’re gone, you won’t be able to find any more—except maybe in Texas.

Why Texas?  Because a year ago, in defiance of the federal ERISA law, the Texas Legislature passed a kind of anti-ERISA bill that specifically allows Texans to make and sell the old-fashioned inefficient kind of bulbs.  According to one of the bill’s sponsors, however, so far no one has rushed to Texas to set up a light bulb factory—possibly because the only U. S. market would be Texas, avoiding the interstate commerce that would be illegal under ERISA.  Of course, if somebody does eventually start making them here, we might find bordering states setting up checkpoints at El Paso and Texarkana, where tough-looking customs inspectors tell you to roll down your window and ask, “Excuse me, ma’am, but did you buy any live animals, plants, or 100- or 75-watt light bulbs not meeting the ERISA standards while you were in Texas?”

The ERISA standard for light bulbs is an example of how legislating technology can be a hazardous occupation.  The law’s name implies that one of its goals was to lower U. S. energy usage.  There are many ways to do this, but it’s harder to think of a more visible one than to banish a device known to every consumer who has ever changed a light bulb.  Law is fundamentally about justice, and laws should be passed to remedy an existing injustice.  Using slightly more electricity for lighting by using an established technology strikes me as one of the more remote kinds of injustice, so I personally regard this part of ERISA as misbegotten and counterproductive.  The public antagonism and loss of respect for legislative wisdom it has aroused have been a price that seems awfully high compared to the benefits in energy savings it may achieve.

On the other hand, the Texas anti-ERISA law is more along the lines of entertainment, which is something you can count on with the Texas legislature.  We have a very part-time legislative body here in Texas, one that meets only once every two years for a few months.  But what it lacks in duration it makes up for in spectacle.  The late long-time observer of Texas politics, Molly Ivins, liked to recall the 63rd legislative session back in 1973, which started out to reform some campaign laws and other things that genuinely needed reforming.  She reports that the effort petered out about halfway through the session, on Apache Belles Day. 

The Apache Belles are the cheerleading team from Tyler Junior College, and Ivins gives this idea of what the show was like:  “The Belles, all encased in tight gold lamé pants with matching vests and wearing white cowboy boots and hats, strutted up the center aisle of the House with their tails twitching in close-order drill . . . .”  Then the emcee instructed the august assembly of legislators (back then virtually all male) to “look up at the House gallery, where, sure enough, six extra Belles were standing.  At a signal. . . the six turned and pertly perched their gold-laméed derrieres over the brass rail of the gallery.  Upon each posterior was a letter, and they spelled out R*E*F*O*R*M.”  I don’t know if the Lege still has an Apache Belles day, but if they don’t, I’m sure they replaced it with something just as interesting.

The irony of the federal ERISA law is that since its passage, private invention and development has done something that stands a much greater chance of bringing energy independence to the U. S. than throwing away slightly less efficient light bulbs, and without any new meddling whatsoever by the federal government.  Hydraulic “fracking” and horizontal drilling have led to a gas and oil boom in this country which some observers believe will allow the U. S. to produce more oil than Saudi Arabia in a few years, and possibly achieve true energy independence in a few more years after that.  Of course, oil producers get various tax breaks that have been in place for decades, and in that regard they indirectly benefit from federal largesse, but it didn’t take a new federal law to get the inventors drilling.  New governmental restrictions on drilling could slow down or stop fracking, though.

The point is that there is probably an appropriate pace and type of legislation pertaining to technical fields such as energy production and consumption, but figuring out what is appropriate in a rapidly changing field is hard for legislatures to do—even mature, responsible ones, which seem lately to be in short supply.  By far the most influential force in the energy field is economics:  the price of various energy commodities and technologies.  Short of draconian things like rationing, the most that regulators can do is to hobble or accelerate certain industries or technologies with the hope that the desired result is not overwhelmed by unanticipated effects that can make the situation a net loss.

ERISA has another shoe in its hand that will drop next year:  40- and 60-watt bulbs will fall under the regulations, so even the dim little bulb in your old refrigerator will become contraband.  Fortunately, the prices of compact fluorescent lamps and even all-LED bulbs is dropping, and so switching to the new kinds may not be as much of a jolt as you might think.  But if anybody has a bunch of old light-bulb-making machinery in their garage that you’d love to find a use for, come on down to Texas.  I’ll introduce you to a state legislator, and there’s no telling what will happen after that.

Sources:  The Austin American-Statesman carried a front-page article by David Barer on the Jan. 3, 2013 edition entitled “Texas lightbulb law fails to spark makers.”  Molly Ivins describes the Apache Belles visit on p. 12 of her book Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? (Random House, 1991).

Toyota Settles Class-Action Gas-Pedal Suit

On August 28, 2009, an off-duty California highway patrolman named Mark Saylor was driving his Lexus (made by Toyota) near Santee, California with three members of his family.  Suddenly the car accelerated to speeds of up to 100 MPH, and one of the occupants called 911 to report that they were in trouble and the car “had no brakes.”  Seconds later, the Lexus collided with another vehicle, rolled down an embankment, and caught fire, killing everyone inside.  This was the first highly publicized incident in what came to be known as Toyota’s gas-pedal problem.

On Mar. 6, 2010, I blogged on what had transpired since that and other similar sudden-acceleration incidents had come to light with regard to a variety of Toyota models.  By then, Toyota had already been cited by the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for a letter it sent out to owners about the problem which the NHTSA said was “misleading.”  Toyota later paid a fine to the NHTSA for not notifying the agency promptly enough when reports of unintended acceleration began to reach the automaker. 

There were at least two main suspected causes of these incidents.  One, which Toyota admitted and issued massive recall notices to fix, involved a misfit between the gas pedal and certain floor mats that could catch in the pedal mechanism, making it difficult or impossible to slow down.  The second suspected cause was that glitches in the control software that interfaces between the gas pedal and the engine were appearing randomly or in response to unpredictable RF interference, for example.  Toyota has insisted all along that there is no problem with the software.

But now, after a large class-action lawsuit was filed against the company in California, Toyota has offered a $1-billion settlement which has yet to be approved by the judge in the case.  However, it looks like the worst may be over for the car company.

The details of how the settlement breaks down are interesting, to say the least.  Apparently to widen the class of harmed individuals, lawyers in the suit are suing on behalf of anyone who sold or traded Toyotas between September of 2009 and the end of 2010, presumably because the resale value of all Toyotas was depressed by the ongoing bad news.  Under the proposed settlement, that particular class is getting $250 million as compensation.  Toyota has developed a “brake-override” system that will evidently guarantee your ability to stop the car even if you put a brick on the accelerator (which is not recommended in any case).  Some Toyotas can’t accommodate this new system as a retrofit, so owners of those vehicles get up to $125 apiece instead; the rest get the brake-override system installed free of charge.  About $400 million is going for extended warranties on several components that came under suspicion during the investigation:  tail-light switches, onboard computers, and so on.  And the lawyers, without whom this whole settlement would not have been possible, get $227 million. Such is justice in today’s world.

Toyota does not admit to any wrongdoing in the settlement, although it is pretty clear that they have decided things are amiss enough to spend a billion dollars fixing them.  To put this amount in perspective, Toyota’s total revenues for the year ending March of 2012 was $226 billion.  So a billion dollars is not a huge chunk of their revenues, though it will certainly cut into their profits, which run a few billion dollars a year when they make money at all.  Nevertheless, the financial world generally looks kindly upon Toyota at this news, because it clears up a good deal of the uncertainty surrounding the cloud of lawsuits arising from the acceleration problem.

The unintended-acceleration problem is a good example of how non-technical factors begin to enter into a problem once it has entered the public mind.  It is possible (though not likely) that a similar crisis could strike any engineering-intensive business with a large customer base of non-technical consumers.  Rumors do spread, even if they are not founded in fact.  One instinctive response that many engineers might take toward such a situation—the spread of unfounded rumors about a technical problem—would be simply to state the technical reasons and results of tests that show the rumor to be false. 

If everyone listening were engineers, this action alone might clear up the issue.  But most people, thank God, are not engineers.  And hearing a bunch of incomprehensible techno-speak will not allay their fears about an unlikely but graphically grisly possibility of something as awful as dying in a car crash caused by a runaway accelerator you are helpless to control.  After a good bit of fumbling early on, Toyota’s public relations and legal departments got their acts together and came up with a settlement that seems to go the extra mile to alleviate not only the technical problems Toyota itself discovered—the gas-pedal-floormat interference—but a range of other issues which may or may not be based in reality:  extended warranties for parts that some people think may be defective, and a new technical fix that will prevent accidents from unintended acceleration even if the driver does something stupid like stomping on the gas and the brake at the same time.

And drivers do stupid things sometimes, no doubt about it.  An investigation sponsored by the U. S. government found that most of the cases of unintended acceleration were due to driver error.  This could mean anything from a loose bottle of shampoo rolling under the gas pedal at the wrong time to a person freezing stiff-legged in terror as the car roars out of control.  But if the new brake-override system really does its job, Toyotas will have an edge over most other cars that don’t have it.  And a brake-override system may become standard on all new cars in the future, which would be a generally good thing, I suppose.

But it’s too bad that the process took so long, cost so much money, and involved so many lawyers.  However, that’s the way things get done in today’s systems of justice, where problems are always viewed with one eye on the bottom line.  Let’s hope that automotive engineers of the future, both at Toyota and elsewhere, will pay more attention to customer complaints and be more proactive when similar safety problems arise.

Sources:  I referred to an article “Toyota in $1.1 Billion Gas-Pedal Settlement” in the Dec. 27, 2012 online edition of the Wall Street Journal at

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324669104578203440990704994.html

.

Caught with the Web: Academic Cheating and the Internet

For the most part, universities have resigned from the business of teaching morals, but with one important exception:  cheating on homework and exams.  While cheating is apparently a fairly widespread practice—recent surveys of college students indicate that between 65 and 80 percent of students admit to cheating at least once—that doesn’t make it right.  As counterfeiting is to the economy, cheating is to grades, which professors sometimes refer to as the “coin of the realm” in academia.  I won’t waste a lot of time here explaining why cheating is wrong.  It combines lying, sometimes stealing (if you turn in someone else’s work), and indulging in flaunting-the-rules behavior that can form a lifelong habit of cheating in other areas besides academics. 

While there have probably been cheaters ever since there have been students, the Internet has provided more ammunition both on the side of the cheaters and on the side of those who try to catch them.  The other day I stumbled onto a website which I will not encourage visits to here by giving their URL.  But believe me, it does exist.  It is a commercial site at which you can submit an essay question or homework problem, and for a fee, you get a finished essay or solution.  Their homepage has some smarmy lingo saying that everybody who’s been a student has thought at some time or another of getting “help” with homework, and we’re just making it easier for you.

They have a “legal” section which is the most hypocritical boilerplate of its kind I have ever seen.  In one part of the text it warned that anything provided to the user was simply “for reference” and should be referenced like any other reference work—as though a student would copy the essay in question and then write, “Oh, by the way, I got this entire essay from a pay-per-assignment website.”  But in another section, the company absolved itself of any responsibility for adverse consequences should you turn the stuff in as your own work, which was clearly the whole purpose of the site. 

If a student availed himself of this type of service, it would be hard to detect if the product is really original.  (In the same legal boilerplate, the cheating site guaranteed that its product would be 90% free of plagiarism, which tells me they allow an internal plagiarism rate of 10%.)  But the Internet, while tempting students to plagiarize sources by copying and pasting wholesale without attribution, also makes it easier to discover such cheating.  I have run across two such cases of plagiarism that I was able to figure out, one with the help of the Internet. 

In one case, two students in a class of mine were turning in letter-for-letter identical homework solutions, which could not have been just coincidental.  The grading assistant pointed it out to me, and I invited each student into my office individually and showed them the evidence.  Each student said they had never copied from the other one, and this was technically true.  But a few hours later, one of them came by my office and admitted he had found a website, posted by the textbook publisher, of solutions to all the homework problems, and both he and the other student were just copying that site, rather than doing the homework by themselves. 

I suppose I was partly responsible for that incident, because I was unaware that the publisher had done such a thing.  If I’d known that a complete solution set to all the homeworks was out there on the web, I would have thought twice about using that textbook.  But the second case of cheating was both more surprising and more blatant.

Because I have published a few papers on the subject of ball lightning, I have started to receive requests from journals to review similar papers in the peer-review process that most reputable academic journals use.  In reviewing one such paper, I came across a passage that seemed both better-written than the average level of the rest of the paper, and rather hard to understand.  I looked up the Wikipedia article on the subject of the passage, and to my surprise, I found that the author of the paper had copied a whole paragraph almost word-for-word out of the Wikipedia article, and had not cited Wikipedia as a source.

The paper had other problems too, but when I pointed out this blatant plagiarism to the journal editors, they summarily rejected the paper.  And they should have, too.  I have come to anticipate a certain amount of that kind of thing from undergraduates who have not learned what plagiarism is, and may have gotten away with it repeatedly at the high-school level.  But I was shocked to find that a scientist would be so careless, although plagiarism and even fabrication of data is not unknown in journal papers.

What is the solution for cheating at the undergraduate level?  While I suspect we will never reduce the level of cheating to zero, the same article (from an American Psychological Association online journal cited below) where I found the statistics on cheating, also cites a study that says creating a peer-level atmosphere that discourages academic dishonesty is helpful.  

I can personally attest to the effectiveness of this approach.  I attended a small private undergraduate school which had a stringent, and largely effective, honor code.  Most of my exams were take-home exams that allowed a specified time for completion, and I stayed within the time limits and to the best of my knowledge, never cheated.  This is not to say “oh, what a good boy am I,” but to point out that if a student knows that cheating is rare and frowned upon both by other students and faculty, it is less likely that whatever pressures are present will push people over the edge into cheating.  And psychologist David Rettinger, interviewed in the APA article, says that “the key is to create this community feeling of disgust at the cheating behavior.”  Sometimes this comes from student-led groups such as Academic Integrity Matters! at the University of California at San Diego, which sponsored a petition drive asking faculty members to be more explicit about what cheating is and what the penalties are. 

As with many other things, the Internet is both a blessing and a curse when it comes to academic cheating.  I think I will be a little more clear to my students in the future about what I consider cheating and plagiarism, and hope that they will take my words to heart.

Sources:  The American Psychological Association online publication “Monitor on Psychology” is the source of the statistics and quotation used in this article.  The article “Beat the Cheat” by Amy Novotney appeared in its June 2011 edition at http://www.apa.org/monitor/2011/06/cheat.aspx. 

Two Views of Porn, and What South Korea Does About It

Pornography is a big business, something that millions of people around the world indulge in, and while viewing it can get you into trouble if you hold a prominent corporate or political office or if you get involved in the child variety, it’s a private affair and not a big deal most of the time.

Pornography is exploitation that twists and defaces a type of relationship that is the earthly model of how Christ relates to his Church, and it can spiritually damage and enslave anyone who gets involved in it, crippling one's ability to relate to the opposite sex in the way God intended.

Which view do you agree with?  Probably most readers will incline toward the first view, which says that in most cases, viewing porn is a private decision that should be left up to the individual, and the legal system should get involved only in situations for which there is near-universal agreement that innocents are being harmed, such as the production or viewing of child pornography.  But the second view (which happens to be mine, more or less) is rooted in a Christian model of humanity which sees human sexuality as a gift from God, which men and women have a responsibility to use according to divine instructions.  In the second view, pornography exploits those who are involved in producing it as well as those consuming it, and debauches (a nice old-fashioned word) the users, accustoming their sexual responses to images which cannot be approached by the reality of any actual woman.  As such, pornography—especially the online variety, which is by far the most common nowadays—is worth opposing, restricting, and fighting with the legal system, even at the cost of one’s own well-being.

Over the past year or two, my views on the relationship between God’s law and human laws have changed.  When religious conservatives who are in the numerical minority in a democratic country manage to gain access to levers of power, they sometimes indulge a fantasy which goes something like this: “Pass a law against a popular but immoral thing, and people will quit doing it.”  This happened in 1919 when the amendment to the U. S. Constitution prohibiting the manufacture or sale of alcoholic beverages, which came to be known as Prohibition, was ratified by enough states to become law.  Prohibition was a long-term goal of the Anti-Saloon League, an organization supported by many Protestant churches but with its power base mainly in rural areas.  What did not happen was that alcohol abuse vanished overnight.  Instead, the consumption of alcohol went underground, leading to smuggling, bootlegger gang warfare, and a lowering of the respect for law, all of which finally led to the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.  The bottom line of this lesson is that law works better as a mirror of a society’s mores than it does as a bridle that tries to jerk the society in a direction it generally does not wish to go.  That is, laws against a so-called “private” sin such as pornography should be enacted only when a substantial number of citizens in a country think it should be illegal.  So, while I am personally unhappy that online pornography is as popular and successful as it is, my view is that passing lots of laws against it, at least in the U. S., would probably be a waste of time.  But not in South Korea.

According to a recent Associated Press article, a good many South Koreans not only dislike online pornography, they are trying to do something about it.  Making anything illegal on the Internet is a challenge because of the intrinsically global nature of the medium.  But that hasn’t stopped South Korean law enforcement officials from arresting about 6400 people in only six months for producing, selling, or posting pornography online. 

Almost a third of South Koreans are Christians (counting both Protestants and Catholics), which makes it the most Christian nation in East Asia by far.  And Christianity in South Korea tends to be taken seriously by its adherents, who now send more missionaries overseas than many Western countries do, including those which evangelized their nation in the first place.  Many of these Christians make up a cadre of about 800 volunteer Internet “Nuri Cops” who regularly spend time patrolling the Internet for South Korean porn, turning in the results of their searches to police for further investigation and prosecution.

About now, you may be wondering what kind of person would devote their spare time to viewing pornography with the sole purpose of wiping it out.  To some, it may sound suspiciously like a member of the Anti-Saloon League who insists on tasting all the wine and beer before pouring the rest into the gutter.  I would imagine it takes a particular type of person to do this work without being harmed by it, and perhaps no one is totally immune.  But you could compare this type of work to the religious orders during the Black Plague of the 14th century in Europe who devoted themselves to the care of the ill, although many of their number ending up catching the disease and dying of it themselves.

For some readers, this comparison will seem completely wacky.  What possible parallel can there be between caring for the innocent victims of a physical disease like the bubonic plague, and snooping around on the Internet for websites that seem to provide harmless (or at least, not very harmful) entertainment for people in the privacy of their homes? 

It boils down to whether one believes in the soul as well as the body.  If there is the death of the body, there can also be such a thing as the death of the soul.  Enslavement to sin—any sort of sin—is a road that leads the soul to death, and one way to help souls escape death is to make it harder to find opportunities to sin.  That is just what the Nuri Cops are trying to do. 

While I would like to see something like that take place in the U. S., we would first have to have a cultural shift of seismic proportions:  one that would involve a resurgence of authentic belief in Christianity at the highest as well as the lowest levels of society, in the cities, editorial offices, studios, and corporate headquarters as well as the farms and private homes of America.  In the meantime, all I can do is congratulate the South Koreans for acting on their beliefs, and hope that maybe they will return the favor that Western missionaries did for them by evangelizing us some day.

Sources:  The Austin American-Statesman carried the article “South Korea’s cyberporn vigilantes” on pp. F3 and F5 of its print edition of Dec. 16, 2012.  I referred to the Wikipedia articles on “Religion in South Korea” and “Prohibition.” 

National Research Council Gives NASA a C-

The U. S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has just been judged by a blue-ribbon panel appointed by the National Research Council (NRC) at the instigation of Congress.  That branch of government wanted an independent assessment of NASA’s strategic direction and goals in light of continuing fiscal constraints and national priorities.  The resulting 80-page report is the best summary I have seen of NASA’s past successes, present ills, and possibilities for improving itself in the future. 

Besides the agency’s spectacular successes, ranging from the 1969 lunar landing on down, NASA has also been the organization behind some of the most famous tragedies in the engineering ethics literature.  The losses of the space shuttles Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 were both preventable disasters that revealed serious problems with NASA’s management and safety structures.  More strategically, NASA has been perceived by many as a set of solutions looking for problems, and the NRC report confirms this picture.

It’s a cliché to say that if you don’t know where you’re going, it will be hard to tell when you get there or how long it will take.  But that is the picture that emerges from the investigation and analysis performed by members of the NRC panel, who visited ten different sites in the widespread NASA organization and took most of a year to compile their results. 

The good news is that there are patches of well-organized high-achieving activity within the organization.  The unmanned space exploration effort, characterized by projects such as the Curiosity Mars rover, has had notable successes and largely stays within budget and on schedule.  It is significant that NASA carries out a periodic ten-year “decadal survey” of the science communities interested in these projects, and a strategic plan for them is thereby updated with extensive international input. 

But with regard to manned spaceflight, the picture is, if not dismal, at least discouraging.  For one thing, the target keeps moving around.  I happened to be in Washington, D. C. the day President George Herbert Walker Bush called for a manned flight to Mars, way back in 1989.  But President Obama has instead brought up the idea of a trip to an asteroid, without saying which one.  The NRC reports the lack of widespread enthusiasm within NASA for the asteroid journey, and in the meantime, if the U. S. wants to put a man in space for any reason right now, we have to go buy tickets from the Russians. 

In some ways, NASA is the victim of its own past successes.  During the Apollo buildup in the 1960s, expensive new facilities were built purposely in many different states to solidify Congressional support for the space effort.  NASA is now saddled with billions of dollars’ worth of real estate occupied by aging specialized test facilities which in many cases have lots of deferred maintenance needed.  Turning these facilities into commercial operations is a nice idea, and in a few places this has worked, but frankly there are not too many commercial users in need of a test stand for a Saturn-V rocket engine, for example.  About a third of NASA’s employees are government civil servants, not contractors, and there are special complications in shifting civil-servant staffing to meet changing needs.

The NRC report doesn’t simply list NASA’s ills; it contains a list of recommendations as well.  Many of the difficulties NASA has encountered result from trying too many ambitious things with insufficient funds.  The NRC realistically admits that the chances of increasing NASA’s total budget are small, so they don’t see an overall increase in funding as a realistic solution. 

They list three other options as more realistic possibilities.  One is strictly downsizing:  sell off underutilized facilities and lay off or retire surplus staff.  This option might work, but as someone who has lived through an organizational downsizing at a university, it creates a poisonous work environment and there is a possibility the treatment might succeed only in killing the patient.  A second option, which is compatible with downsizing, is to reduce the size of NASA’s program portfolio:  in other words, try doing fewer things well more than many things not so well.  To me, this makes the most sense, and is consistent with my blog of June 20, 2011, which examined a proposal for reorganizing NASA around the model of the U. S. Coast Guard. 

The most interesting option proposed by the NRC is to greatly increase national and international cooperative efforts with other U. S. government agencies, private industry, and foreign entities.  Currently, NASA is already moving in that direction with regard to future manned flight hardware, saying that it will assume more of a supervisory role to contractors, who will have greater freedom in developing spacecraft to go to wherever NASA finally decides to go.  But as other nations continue to develop space capabilities that in some ways outstrip those of the U. S., cooperation rather than competition would seem pretty sensible in many cases.

NASA was born in the midst of the Cold War between the U. S. and the USSR, and without that war that wasn’t a war, it never would have received the massive support for the race to the moon, which it did with almost no help from anybody outside the U. S.  Unfortunately, that “not-invented-here” attitude seems to have lingered on in the institution long after it has outlived its usefulness, at least with regard to major manned-flight programs.  But the result has been the end of the Shuttle program without a viable alternative to take its place.

The NRC report ends with an optimistic call to the executive branch and Congress to do something that will focus NASA on a meaningful strategic plan.  (The current NASA planning document is a fuzzy kind of thing that amounts to mom-and-apple-pie for space.)  Given the ongoing near-chaos in Washington, I am not hopeful that the NRC will get what it calls for, and what the rest of the nation deserves from an agency which still has great talent and capabilities.  But if we don’t get action from Washington that puts NASA back on track, at least we have heard clearly from the NRC about exactly what the problems are. 

Sources:  The NRC report (a draft version at this writing) can be downloaded in its entirety from http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=18248.

Will Wind Power Fall Off the Fiscal Cliff?

If you have driven a considerable distance in West Texas (and it’s hard not to drive a considerable distance when things are as far apart as they are out there), you have seen the slightly Martian-looking sight of a forest of identical white towers, each with a triplet of whirling blades, covering a good part of the whole visible horizon.  Wind energy from huge wind farms has been one of the big success stories in renewable energy by some measures, and Texas leads the nation in the amount of installed capacity per state (over 10,000 megawatts ).  And according to a recent article in the Austin American-Statesman, about 70 firms in Texas supply products or services to the wind-generation industry.  But all this may hit a serious roadblock January 1 if the federal tax credit that has encouraged commercial wind-powered generation for two decades comes to an end, along with a lot of other tax cuts and incentives.  This is one effect of the so-called “fiscal cliff” that will automatically take effect if the U. S. Congress and the President don’t do something to stop it.  The prospective end of the wind tax credit has important implications for what some philosophers call engineering “macro-ethics”:  the engineering ethics of public policy and related matters.

The tax credit is substantial:  anyone selling wind energy commercially can qualify for a 2.2 cents-per-kilowatt-hour tax credit from the government for a period of ten years.  This has led some wind-power producers to give away energy for free on occasion, just to get the tax credit.  And note that a credit is better than a deduction:  a deduction means you pay less tax than you would have otherwise, but a credit means you get a check straight from the Treasury, even if you owed no taxes to begin with.  No wonder parts of West Texas look like the Jolly White Giant has scattered around three-petalled dandelion seeds.

The rationale behind the tax credit, enacted in the last days of the administration of the elder George Bush in 1992, was that a strictly free-market approach to wind energy might never get off the ground, because the vagaries of fossil-fuel prices would discourage private investors from putting their money into it.  Nobody would want to build a lot of wind generators when fuel prices were high, only to see their investment turn to nothing when fuel prices fell and wind became uncompetitive.  So the tax credit gave investors a guaranteed return for ten years, which is a reasonable payback time for a major investment such as a wind farm.

Viewed just from the standpoint of installed capacity, the tax credit has been a major success.  On one (presumably windy) day in October of this year, wind accounted for over a fourth of all the electric energy produced in the ERCOT network (the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which is the name of Texas’ largely independent transmission network).  The growth of wind-related manufacturing and service firms has been a bright spot in the nationwide economy, and Texas is not the only state to benefit from the growth of wind farms.

That’s the good news.  The bad news is that already, the prospect that the tax credit might end has hurt bookings of new business at wind-related firms and caused concern that new construction of wind farms might come to a screeching halt.  And sure enough, another energy-related technology—“fracking,” which makes abundant new sources of natural gas available—has caused the price of natural gas to plummet.  This means that from a subsidy-free economic viewpoint, anyone wanting to build new generation capacity would be crazy to build wind generators when a natural-gas-fired plant would be cheaper and much more reliable (no wind, no power).  In fact, the free market for energy in Texas and many other states is providing little if any incentive for anyone to build new power plants, despite the ongoing need and the fact that brownouts on hot summer days have become uncomfortably common.

The parties involved in this matter are roughly as follows.  There are people who build and install and own and run wind-generation facilities; there are consumers of electricity (basically everybody) who have various preferences about both price and the nature of how electricity is made; there are government entities, mainly the federal government and the state governments; and there are investors whose money can come into the game as long as they see they’ll get a good return on their investment. 

If the tax credits go away, most investors will walk away from future wind farms, at least under the present circumstances of low natural-gas prices.  We will be stuck with what wind farms we’ve got, though if running the farms becomes unprofitable their owners will let them stand idle at best, and will tear them down if things get too bad.  As long as fossil fuel prices stay low, electricity consumers won’t have to pay a lot more, but they may well run into increasingly serious brownouts and blackouts if more generation capacity isn’t built, or if serious conservation efforts are not made.  And conservation isn’t free:  the largest users of electricity have to justify it on a dollars-and-cents basis, not just because it feels good. 

Back in the early days of networked power in the 1920s, the free market reigned because no legislators had given much thought to the need to regulate electric utilities yet.  After notable abuses such as monopolistic practices by single-owner utilities (among whom was numbered my great-uncle L. L. Stephenson, who was an ice-plant and electric-power mogul in San Antonio until he died in 1929), first individual cities, and finally the State of Texas, decided that electricity was too necessary a thing to be left entirely to the whims of private firms with no regulation.  So in the next couple of decades, the industry came under the supervision of state public utility commissions, and a kind of deal was reached.  The state commissions had the authority to set electric rates, but agreed (“colluded with” would be too strong a term) to allow the utility companies a fixed and reasonable rate of profit.  The best thing about being regulated from the viewpoint of the utilities was the fact that their fiscal environment was largely predictable.  This meant planning and investment, which for electric utilities extends decades into the future, could be made with some reassurance that the plans would work out and investments would not be wrecked by unexpected changes in allowable rates and so on.

A number of things conspired to overthrow this regulatory regime. Both the oil crisis of the 1970s, which introduced unpredictability into the fuel-cost equation, and a spirit of deregulation that extended from the airline industry to the telecommunications business led to the experiment of a free market in electric energy, which has been the case in Texas for many years now.  The prospective end of the tax credit for wind generation would be yet another step towards a totally free market in this regard.  While I think it is a good thing to generate some power from wind, we may soon be seeing the harm that comes from relying too much on legislation that produces artificial incentives for certain kinds of technologies.  But there is also a harm done when anyone, including a government, breaks a promise such as the promise of ten years of tax credits.  Let’s hope governments at all levels move toward providing a somewhat more predictable environment in which to do business, including the business of making electricity from wind. 

Sources:  The article “End of Wind?” appeared in the Dec. 2, 2012 print edition of the Austin American-Statesman, p. A1 and A10.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article “Wind power in the United States” for statistics on Texas wind generation.