Julius Randall's Life Mattered

 

Since the killing of George Floyd at the hands of police last May, countless companies and organizations have announced their condemnation of racism and their commitment to its abolishment.  Time will tell how effective these commitments are.  Rather than pen a bland general statement, I would rather tell a story.  It's a true story.

 

There was once a young engineering student named Julius Randall at a small college in South Carolina.  The college was so small that it had no bookstore, and so the engineering students had to go to the nearby Woolworth's to buy their supplies.  Julius was black, and although the Woolworth's would sell him graph paper and pencils, it wouldn't let him sit at the lunch counter.

 

This was the 1960s, and one day Martin Luther King Jr. showed up in the area and found out about the Woolworth's policy of no Blacks at the lunch counter.  Rev. King caused a picket line to be organized, and for the next few weeks no student of any color bought any supplies at that Woolworth's.  The worst violence that resulted was that somebody threw an egg at the store.  Soon the owners capitulated, and now Julius and his friends could sit at the lunch counter in Woolworth's after buying their supplies.

 

Julius went on to graduate and got an engineering job in the New Jersey area.  He then moved into higher education, and at Stevens Institute of Technology, for seven or eight years he ran the co-op program that allowed students to work and get an education at the same time.  Then he was hired by the University of Massachusetts Amherst in their new Minority Engineering Program (MEP), which is where I met him. 

 

Around that time, Julius contracted a kidney disease that prevented him from driving, and so one day he asked us where we went to church, and could he have a ride there?  It was the beginning of a personal as well as a professional relationship that gave me a close-up view of one of the most saintly persons, of any color, that I have ever known.

 

Julius knew that an engineering education could be the path from poverty to success as it had been for him, which was why he left industry to devote his life to bringing the blessings of engineering education to minority students.  But his work was not without obstacles.  One obstacle at the time was our dean of engineering, who barely tolerated the MEP and repeatedly refused Julius opportunities for promotion when they arose.  Another obstacle was his chronic illness, which would attack him with nausea and vomiting, whereupon he would simply excuse himself from a meeting and deal with it without complaining.  He eventually had to begin a type of home-based dialysis that involved hooking himself up to a complicated machine every night. 

 

But he didn't let that slow him down from his professional work, or from volunteering to organize and run worthy events at church.  During a service he would get up and smile a thousand-watt smile and say, "Good morning, saints!" and then encourage us to join the painting crew or the tee-shirt sale or whatever worthy cause was on the menu that day. 

 

He had been married before, but was divorced before we met him.  Around 1997, he fell in love with a woman and they decided to get married.  Julius did me the honor of asking me to be one of his groomsmen, and we went down to New Jersey in July of 1998 and saw him and Lynn tie the knot.  They honeymooned in Hawaii, and after another year or so at UMass, he found a job closer to his new bride's family in New Jersey, and we saw him off from UMass at a going-away party.

 

In 1999, I left UMass myself for Texas, but we kept in touch with people who knew Julius, and soon we heard a sad story.  It seemed that his wife took on the notion that Julius no longer needed his dialysis machine, so somehow she persuaded him to quit using it to see what would happen.  Ever the loving husband, he tried it, and the result was that he landed in a hospital in a coma. 

 

I learned this shortly before I was due to make a trip from Texas to the New York City area on business, so I found out where the hospital was and made a special side trip to see him.  He was in an ICU surrounded by beeping machinery, and while he seemed unresponsive, I knew that sometimes the last sense to go is hearing.  So I told him I was here, and that my wife and I were praying for him.  I'm not sure, but I think I saw his lips move a little in response.  A few weeks later we heard that he had died.

 

God only knows how many lives Julius Randall touched for the better during his relatively brief time on this planet.  He was always finding people who needed help and figuring out how to help them with jobs, money, a place to stay, a way of doing things, a plan, a word of encouragement, or just a listening ear. 

 

But he did all this in a way that let you know he was human, and "holier than thou" never applied to him.  Once in a blue moon, I even heard him complain.  One day I was driving him back to his apartment and we had to drive through the UMass campus.  He was in the front seat beside me, and I was obeying the speed limit.  Suddenly I saw the lights of a campus police car behind me, so I pulled over.  I forget what reason the officer gave for wanting to pull me over, but it didn't make a lot of sense at the time.  The officer finally let us go, and as I was driving away Julius said, "Man, I get tired of that sometimes."  It wasn't the first time he'd been pulled over for DWB:  Driving While Black.  But it was the first time I experienced just a tiny sliver of what it was like to live in supposedly enlightened Massachusetts as a Black man, whose life certainly mattered.

We Don't Chat — For Now

 

Today (Sunday, Sept. 20) the U. S. Department of Commerce implemented an unprecedented ban on a major Chinese social media company, WeChat.  Citing security concerns, President Trump issued an executive order on Aug. 6 to cripple WeChat and TikTok, but the TikTok order has been delayed until November.

 

Not so WeChat.  While it will not be illegal for individuals to continue using WeChat in the U. S., it may become difficult or impossible in the days to come. 

 

The Dept. of Commerce order bans the distribution of the WeChat app to new phones and prohibits the transfer of funds through the app.  It also prohibits internet service providers from servicing the app, and so unless your ISP is based outside the U. S., the app may disappear altogether.  Some of the terms of the ban are rather technical, but I think a word from the underworld covers the intent of the order:  they want to kneecap WeChat. 

 

Anyone who knows a person who speaks Chinese has probably heard them at least mention WeChat.  It's operated by the huge Chinese Google-like conglomerate Tencent, and is sort of like Facebook on steroids.  In addition to allowing Facebook-like interactions, it serves as a money transfer medium, a news app, messaging app, and of course, an advertising medium.  According to a report in the Washington Post, the Chinese government censors it heavily, and independent investigators who tested it with 26,000 test words on accounts registered in China, Canada, and the U. S. found nearly 200 words triggered censorship in accounts with Chinese phone numbers.  Over three million people use WeChat in the U. S., and the majority of them are going to have big problems trying to continue with the app after today.

 

Why is the U. S. government landing on WeChat like a piano from a third-floor window?  The official announcement is terse on this:  "The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has demonstrated the means and motives to use these apps to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and the economy of the U.S. Today’s announced prohibitions, when combined, protect users in the U.S. by eliminating access to these applications and significantly reducing their functionality."  Personally, my impression of what WeChat does is to connect Chinese speakers in the U. S. with their friends, relatives, associates, and (possibly) fellow spies back in China.  But because the vast majority of what goes on through WeChat is probably in Chinese, it's hard to see how the rest of the U. S. is directly harmed by the existence of the app.

 

What this looks like to me is more along the lines of a diplomatic tit-for-tat on a large scale.  Every so often the U. S. will catch some spies from another country and expel them.  It's entirely expected that in the days to follow, the foreign country will go to the U. S. embassy there and tell an equal number of U. S. diplomats or diplomatic staff to pack their bags and head back to the U. S. 

 

Ever since Facebook, Twitter, and company gained prominence, these U. S.-based apps have been heavily censored or flat-out banned in China, which is one reason why there was such a big vacuum for WeChat to fill.  In going a long way toward banning WeChat here, the U. S. government is simply saying, "You want to ban our apps?  Okay, we'll ban yours and see how you like that." 

 

Such moves have their place in a carefully planned strategic pressure-building exercise that includes sanctions of other kinds.  But this administration's actions toward China do not exactly give the impression of careful deliberation.  Nevertheless, being startling and unpredictable can itself be an effective strategy, and it's possible that WeChat and even the Chinese Communist Party itself was caught off guard.

 

The broader picture of U. S.-China relations, while not explicitly a matter of engineering ethics, deserves mention at this point.  While allowing economic freedom to a great extent, the Chinese government continues to repress political freedom and systematically persecutes certain groups such as the Falun Gong religious organization and the ethnic group termed Uighurs.  These are deplorable actions that deserve censure, and if the WeChat ban is a sort of punishment for these things, it is well deserved. 

 

On the other hand, one has to ask how effective it will be.  Something else not called WeChat but doing everything WeChat does is probably in development at this instant, and the Department of Commerce order hinted that they might take care of that too, if WeChat shows up under another name.  What this action has started is a social-media-ban war that will be marked by a ban followed by an evasive move, then followed by another ban, and so on.  The WeChat users, most of whom probably do nothing more sinister than checking on Aunt Hong in Wuhan every now and then, are caught in the middle, and will have to struggle along as best they can with old-fashioned phone calls or whatever ingenious programmers and companies can come up with to evade the ban. 

 

And there is always the possibility that, as the clock runs down to Election Day, this anti-China move will turn out to be just a political plum offered to supporters of the President, rather than a calculated diplomatic move in a well-crafted chess game.  I don't know how many Chinese-American citizens voted for President Trump in 2016, but this action probably has not endeared him to them. 

 

Historically, one reason the WorldWideWeb has appealed philosophically to certain tendencies of mind is that it does not recognize borders.  For people whose ideal world would be a borderless global block party under a single benevolent government, that has been one of the strengths of the Internet-mediated thing that lets people chat with others halfway around the world as though they were in the same room.  But the Department of Commerce move is an attempt to impose borders on what began as a borderless cyberworld.  Whether this is a good thing, a bad thing, or simply a political stunt that will soon be forgotten is something we can't tell yet.  All we can be sure of is that U. S. users of WeChat are going to have a hard time continuing to use it, and we'll just have to wait to see what the wider effects are, if any.

 

Sources:  The official U. S. Department of Commerce statement regarding its orders on WeChat and TikTok can be found at https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2020/09/commerce-department-prohibits-wechat-and-tiktok-transactions-protect.  I also referred to a Washington Post article at https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/18/wechat-ban-faq/.

Hyundai Engine Fire Recalls: Lessons to Learn

 

With the COVID-19 situation, a lot of other things have dropped under the radar.  But in one way or another, life is still going on, people are buying and driving cars, and not all of those cars are behaving the way they should.  In particular, the South Korean automaker Hyundai has had a serious issue with their cars catching fire.

 

According to one Associated Press report, since 2015 Hyundai and its associated brand Kia have recalled over two million vehicles because of issues with engine failures and fires.  In April of 2019, the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said it had received over 3,000 complaints of engine fires and 103 injuries as a result.  That investigation revealed poorly machined crankcase bearings that caused metal shavings to clog oil passages, overheating the bearings and causing the engines to seize. 

 

The more recent recalls relate to an anti-lock brake computer board that can corrode and short out, causing a fire even if the car is turned off.  In a recall released last week, Hyundai warned owners of about 180,000 of its Tucson SUVs to park them outside, and if the anti-lock brake warning light comes on, to disconnect the battery and call Hyundai for a loaner car. 

 

There's good news and bad news here.

 

The good news is that Hyundai is not stonewalling or denying that there are any problems, as other auto companies have done from time to time when consumer complaints forced them to deal with a safety issue, such as rapid unintended acceleration in Toyotas.  While I would not be happy to be on the receiving end of one of Hyundai's recalls, at least I would know that the company is concerned and wants to do the right thing if a problem shows up.

 

On the other hand, one wonders about the quality control and engineering that is letting these things happen in the first place.  The overheated-bearing problem sounds like a manufacturing issue.  Automakers have been machining crankcase bearings since there were automobiles at all, and so the problem is most likely a defect in the way the manufacturing process was set up or executed.  Automobiles are probably the most complex type of consumer product to make, and so it's easy for a subtle issue such as metal chips that don't cause problems right away to escape notice. 

 

The anti-lock computer board problem is harder to understand.  One of the basic rules of electric power system design is to include protective circuitry—read "fuses"—in all power wiring, so that if any part of the system draws enough current to start a fire, a fuse somewhere will blow and interrupt the process before a fire gets a chance to start.

 

Of course, you can carry this only so far.  You have to have wires going from the battery to the fuses, and how do you protect those wires?  More fuses?  Typically, heavy-current pathways such as the one going from the battery to the starter are not fused.  But the starter operates only 0.0003% of the time the car is in use, roughly, so no fuse is needed in that circuit.  And maybe whoever designed the anti-lock brake system figured that hey, this system is rarely going to operate either, so it doesn't really need a fuse. 

 

Trouble is, corrosion doesn't punch a time clock, and it's rather surprising that cars only a year or two old have experienced enough corrosion on a supposedly well-protected board to short out and cause fires.  Besides the electrical issue, Hyundai needs to take into account that millions of cars in this country get exposed to salt spray from icy roads for months at a time.  Unless every seal is perfect, your electronics in any area that the salt can get to will be toast, perhaps literally if it catches fire.

 

Corrosion of a computer board was the reason I had to let go of my 2006 Honda Civic last summer.  An intermittent missing problem made me take it to the shop, where the tech called me aside and took me outside for some privacy.  I felt a little bit like a patient waiting to hear from his doctor about a cancer diagnosis.  He told me that the wires coming out of the main computer box were corroded green.  "We call it the green death.  There's nothing you can do but replace the whole thing, and that would cost more than the car's worth." I consoled myself with the fact that the vehicle ran fine for fourteen years, although in Texas we don't put salt on the roads, just sand on the few days a year there might be ice on the streets.

 

If corrosion is causing shorts in circuit boards of Hyundais that are only a year or two old, this does not bode well for the long-term viability of the vehicles.  Good automaking has advanced to the point where car owners expect to drive their vehicles for 200,000 or even 300,000 miles before they encounter a fatal problem like my Honda's green death, or other issue that sends the car to the scrapyard.  The auto industry as a whole is to be congratulated for resisting the temptation toward planned obsolescence that other industries such as consumer electronics have bought into wholesale. 

 

But it's not easy to make a machine as complicated as a car run without problems for hundreds of thousands of miles, and Hyundai, a relative newcomer to the automotive industry, may still have some lessons to learn.  Thankfully, few people have been injured or killed by the problems that have led to recent recalls, and let's hope that the firm can address such issues proactively in the future before they cause further problems to consumers.

 

Sources:  I referred to articles on the Canadian Broadcasting Company's website at https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/hyundai-vehicle-recall-1.5720554, the Car and Driver website at https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a27053460/nhtsa-investigation-hyundai-kia-fires/, and Fortune's website at https://fortune.com/2020/02/07/hyundai-recall-2020-engine-fires/, besides the Wikipedia article "Hyundai Motor Company."

Not Recommended: Flying a Jetpack near LAX

 

But that's just what somebody did last Sunday afternoon, in the sky over Cudahy, California, a one-square-mile town about eighteen miles (29 km) east of the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX).  Two pilots spotted the person at an altitude of about 3000 feet (914 meters).  Flight controllers were inclined to doubt the credibility of the American Airlines pilot who saw the flyer first, but then it was confirmed by a Southwest pilot a few minutes later.  One plane came within an estimated 300 yards (90 meters) of the still-unidentified jetpack pilot, who the FBI is still looking for.  I don't know how many FAA regulations one violates by flying a jetpack into the LAX runway approach, but all it takes is one to get you in serious hot water.

 

This incident could have turned out much worse, as a man and a jetpack getting sucked into an intake cowling or hitting a wing could seriously cripple a jetliner, not to mention putting a premature end to the jetpack pilot's career.  And this is why justice, in the form of the FBI, is seeking him out. 

 

About a week before the LAX incident, a couple of residents in the LA area spotted something that looked like a flying person in the sky and even got some brief cellphone videos, although the jetpack-flyer was too far away to see details.  So assuming it was a man (and I don't think most women will be offended if I assume testosterone was at least partly responsible for this situation), it looks like the guy took some test flights before doing the really foolish thing of hanging out in controlled airspace long enough for a couple of airline pilots to get a good look at him.

 

Let's speculate a little and imagine profiling this person.  While control systems have improved since the very early days of jetpacks in the 1960s, to the point that you can find one or two companies that sell jetpacks commercially nowadays, it's still not something that the average citizen can just strap on his back and fly.  So our suspect has to have had some kind of flight training, though it might not have been anything too out of the ordinary—he might be a general-aviation pilot, for example, or a helicopter pilot.  Or he could just be somebody who's really good at a flight-simulator video game.

 

Next, there's the resources you need to get a jetpack and fuel it up. The information I could find on jetpacks indicates that the fuel used was probably high-purity hydrogen peroxide, around 85% to 90% pure.

 

German scientists came to the same conclusion about fuel when they designed the first rocket-propelled interceptor plane during World War II, the Messerschmitt Bf 109.  It used high-purity hydrogen peroxide too, which has got to be one of the nastiest substances to handle that there is.  It wants to let go of its oxygen really bad, to the point that if it comes in contact with any organic substance—dirt, cloth, hair, skin—it catches fire.  Reportedly, more people died during the testing and training phase of the Me-109 deployment than were killed in combat, and I'm sure the hydrogen peroxide was a big factor in that.

 

So our California jetpack enthusiast, tiring of his enforced idleness during COVID-19 days, orders a $200,000 jetpack and either manages to lie his way into a delivery of high-purity hydrogen peroxide, or gets the fuel some other way.  Now there are lots of aerospace companies in the LA area, so it wouldn't be surprising if the fuel or the jetpack or both were obtained via good-old-boy connections.  But the pilot would have to be a good old boy himself, and so engaged in some sort of high-tech network that investigators shouldn't have too much trouble identifying, assuming his friends are willing to talk.

 

Barring that, I'm sure UPS or whoever delivered these things kept records, because offhand I wouldn't have the first idea how to ship such dangerous stuff without all sorts of special permits and so on, which would make it easy to trace.

 

The most mysterious part of this incident remains the motivation.  If it was just personal curiosity, going somewhere way out in the desert by oneself would seem to be the best place to practice jetpack flying, not directly over one of the most densely-populated municipalities in the United States.  Leaving all questions of personal safety aside, having a misguided jetpack fly in through your kitchen window would not be an easy thing to handle in case something went wrong, and so the choice of location seems singularly poor.

 

It doesn't seem like Cudahy itself, which is mostly lower-income apartments, is exactly a likely hotbed of cutting-edge aerospace technology expertise, although in California, you never know.  One thing we can be sure of is that the pilot didn't travel very far from where he took off, because the flight times of even the longest-flight jetpacks are measured in minutes.  Here it will be helpful to figure out where else he was sighted in his practice flights, which by necessity would be close to home.  On your first flight in your brand-new jetpack, I don't think you're going to fly out of your back yard and intentionally land at the door of the neighborhood QuikSak to pick up some beer. 

 

But if the pilot could choose where to fly, why the LAX landing pattern, unless he was wanting to make some kind of statement?  Anybody smart enough to fly a jetpack would be smart enough to know what restricted airspace is, and so it was a deliberate attempt to cause consternation, at the least. 

 

Well, sometimes people do stupid things just for the heck of it, and that may be the case here.  With all the clues we've enumerated, it does seem like it will just be a matter of time before the FBI identifies the pilot and comes calling, if he can be found.  On the other hand, he may have wised up once the publicity appeared about his little stunt, and taken a long vacation in the Bahamas.  Anybody who can afford a $200,000 jetpack can probably afford a vacation in the Bahamas too. 

 

Sources:  NBC News reported the location of the incident as determined by the FBI at https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/fbi-narrows-down-sighting-location-of-man-flying-in-jet-pack-near-lax/2423858/.  I referred to a Manchester Guardian report on the history of jetpacks at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/15/jetpacks-jet-propulsion-flying-to-work, and the Wikipedia article "Messerschmitt Bf 109."

Flying Cars At Last?

 Last week, a Japanese consortium funded by Toyota, Panasonic, and game developer Bandai Namco showed to reporters a video of a one-man flying car as it rose to a height of about six feet (2 meters) and circled an area about the size of a tennis court before landing—successfully, I might add.  No technical details were released, but the leader of the SkyDrive organization, Tomohiro Fukuzawa, says plans are in place for advancing the prototype to a commercial product as soon as 2023.  

Not much bigger than a motorcycle, the SkyDrive vehicle has eight rotors mounted on four struts, two struts on each side of the chassis.  There are what look like air intake or exhaust cowlings at the front and back, which makes me wonder if the batteries need to be air-cooled during the approximately ten minutes of maximum flight time.  The flight didn't break any air-speed records, as you can see on this video.  The main concern seemed to be keeping the thing level and under control, and after rising to flight altitude, the pilot (or maybe software—it wasn't clear who was doing the guiding) moved in what can only be described as a stately fashion in a large rectangle over the paved test area underneath a mesh that covered the top of the fenced-in space at a height of about 7 meters (22 feet or so).  Clearly, the inventors don't want this thing to get loose. 

 

Safety-wise, the vehicle has a long way to go.  Anybody approaching it while it's winding up to take off risks risks becoming blender fodder in the propeller blades.  And installing enough cowlings, screens, and other protective safeguards to keep the unwary from getting hurt would probably make the thing too heavy and unmaneuverable to use. 

 

But helicopter blades are dangerous, and we've learned how to deal safely with them, most of the time.  Except in emergencies, however, helicopters don't land just any old place, but on secure helipads where unauthorized people can't be wandering around.  And in fact one of the earliest commercial uses of a vehicle like the SkyDrive unit would probably be for emergency access where there isn't enough space to land a helicopter.  And of course, military uses for such a vehicle abound, but it's going to have to move a bit faster to avoid being a sitting (or flying) duck for enemy fire.

 

The SkyDrive machine is classed as an eVTOL, for electric-powered vertical takeoff and landing.  Something like it has featured in many future-city scenarios, and I've waited this long in the column to mention the Jetsons, that animated U. S. Hanna-Barbera sitcom that ran for a single season (1962-63).  It was set in some vague distant future in which the family car was replaced by a personal flying machine.

 

Culturally, the Jetsons show was one of the last bits of foam on the wave of technical optimism that surged through the 1950s but dissipated by the 1970s.  It's fun to imagine flying to work above the myriads of earthbound plebeians who still have to commute on the ground, which is why the very few who can afford to commute by helicopter sometimes do so.  But if everybody took to the air, you can imagine the problems that would arise. 

 

For one thing, running out of gas in a car is inconvenient, maybe, but most of the time you can make it to the side of the road before anything dire happens.  If you're at five thousand feet, it's a different matter.  Of course, any serious attempt to institute personal eVTOLs as commuter transport would probably automate the entire process, from when you step into the thing until you step out, as I don't expect the FAA is willing to license X million commuters as pilots any time soon.  And as the AI people are so fond of showing us traffic-signal-free two-dimensional intersections that smoothly allow computer-steered vehicles to flow unobstructed without stopping, I'm sure they wouldn't have a problem adding one more dimension, so that Manhattan at rush hour would look like nothing so much as an exceptionally busy beehive.

 

As with every electrified flying craft, the battery is the critical component.  And if the present SkyDrive vehicle's performance is battery-limited, as it may well be, the whole idea is going to have to wait on battery improvements, which can take a long time to come. 

 

Of course, some unexpected new compact energy source might come along, in the spirit of "Back to the Future"'s water-powered fusion reactor, and then we could all have our own SkyDrive in short order.  Roadways would still be needed for heavy-load transport—I don't think it will ever be practical to build an electric-powered flying cement truck.  But the addition of a third dimension to transportation on a sort of micro level, rather than the macro level that conventional commercial air transport represents, could lead to a great many changes, most of which could be good if we managed them well. 

 

It's a simple mathematical fact that you can get more stuff through a pipe that is several thousand feet on a side rather than a couple of hundred feet by 13 feet 6 inches (60 meters by 4.1 meters), which is the standard height limit for interstate freeways.  So if  computerized navigation and collision-control software was properly designed, the air above a freeway could easily handle the largest freeway traffic load and it wouldn't even look that crowded.  Weather would be a factor, of course, but maybe things will be so efficient in the future that when it rains, people can just take off a day or so and work from home.  We've learned that lesson from COVID-19 already, and for many types of jobs the change has not been that difficult.

 

For a number of reasons, I'm not going to hold my breath until I can buy a commercial version of the SkyDrive gizmo, as the battery and safety problems may take years or even decades to overcome.  But it does look fun, and even if they never make it to mass production, I foresee great opportunities in the sports area:  races and stunt flying for mass audiences might prove to be entertaining and even profitable.  Time will tell.

 

Sources:  The Associated Press article by Yuri Kageyama on the SkyDrive test appeared on the AP website on Aug. 28, 2020 at https://apnews.com/951c5f396b4277967e3e94f24c71ef68 and was carried by numerous outlets.  A YouTube video of a test flight can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhzmR07WeKU.

From Toilet Paper to Laptops: The School Computer Shortage

 A recent Associated Press report says that school districts in at least 15 states are having a lot of trouble getting enough laptops for their students to start classes this fall, which are partly or completely online in many communities.  Once hailed as the revolutionary solution to education's problems, the personal computer has now become more or less as necessary as the backpack for many elementary through high school students.  But many districts are finding that their well-intentioned efforts to loan laptops to students are being frustrated by manufacturer shortages from suppliers such as Dell, Lenovo, and HP. 

 

Not every district buys or leases a laptop for every student.  But even before the COVID-19 pandemic pushed much instruction online, there was concern that the so-called "digital divide" was creating a two-tier environment in which students whose families could afford a laptop were gaining a seemingly unfair advantage over students who had none.  Many schools have computer labs, but homework is homework, and it's clearly an advantage to have your own laptop to do homework after school hours.

 

Following the emergency transition to online learning in the spring, hundreds of districts across the country placed orders for tablets and low-end laptops such as Chromebooks.  But in July, the U. S. Commerce Department sanctioned eleven Chinese manufacturers for violations such as the use of force labor, and some of these companies make either whole laptops or vital components for Lenovo and other laptop firms. 

 

Last spring, HP told California's Morongo Unified School District that their order of 5,000 laptops would arrive in time for school to start on Aug. 26.  Then came the Department of Commerce order, and the delivery date slipped into September, then October.  According to the article, California school districts in general are waiting for a total of at least 300,000 backordered laptops. 

 

Like most supply problems, this one will get straightened out eventually.  But a combination of crises and governmental actions have conspired to create a shortage of something that was until recently regarded as something of a luxury:  a laptop for one's child. 

 

I teach engineering students at a state university, and when we suddenly transitioned last March to online instruction, I was pretty confident that all my students had access to a decent computer and Internet connection.  With one or two exceptions, that assumption was justified.  Nevertheless, I have taken the precaution of sending out an email survey asking about their ability to connect to Zoom, to scan papers, and other things that I'd like them to be able to do this fall for the online portions of my courses.

 

Of course, in doing so I assume that the students can receive emails.  This may not be universally true, and in fact here it is the day before classes begin, and I still have not heard back from some of the students I sent the survey to.  I'm attributing that to last-minute-itis rather than an inability to receive emails, but time will tell.

 

The school laptop shortage brings up a general question, which is whether government entities such as school districts are under an obligation to provide expensive technology such as laptops to all their students.   This is both a question of justice and a question of charity.

 

The question of justice goes to the heart of the idea of public schools, which is that a well-run republic requires an educated electorate who share a common minimum of learning:  the ability to read, a basic knowledge of the country's history and governmental organization, and such other skills that contribute to the making of a good citizen.  Education costs something, and so a large share of local and state taxes go to public schools.  If computer use becomes a necessary part of learning, as COVID-19 has encouraged us to think, then it is almost a breach of justice to fail to supply a necessary learning tool to every student who needs one.

 

There are various practical obstacles in the way to this noble goal, however, of which the current laptop shortage is only one.  What if a family is well enough off to buy their children their own laptops?  Should we reserve the "free" laptops only to those families who can't afford their own?  Or for purposes of software uniformity, etc., should we make everybody buy or use the same type of machine?  These mundane issues have to be worked out with what the theologians call "prudential judgment," which means mainly common sense and wisdom.  Neither of those things is in abundant supply right now, but we still have enough to muddle through each week as it comes along, it seems.

 

The question of charity, in the sense of merciful and loving behavior toward others, is not much thought of these days.  The very word "charity" is looked down on in some circles as demeaning to the one who receives it.  I recall several high-profile efforts a few years back on the part of various foundations to provide a laptop for every child in certain underprivileged regions.  What at first looked like extravagant generosity has eventually become routine, and now the almost-unheard-of gift looks more like a commonplace necessity.

 

There must have been a moment in this country when the first public school system bought the first book to be used free of charge by a student, and it was probably controversial at the time.  This attitude that the school is doing you an unmerited favor by letting you use its books has lingered in some forms down to recent years.  I'm old enough to remember feeling vaguely threatened by fines and imprisonment every fall when our teachers handed out the well-thumbed textbooks issued by the Fort Worth Independent School District, with the warning that they were state property and defacing state property was a crime.  I dread to think what happens to the California third-grader who drops his Lenovo on the sidewalk, but maybe it's not as bad as it could be.

 

Here's hoping that the supply chains get unkinked and that every student who needs to use one finds a laptop somewhere.  My first place to suggest looking is the closet.  I think I saw somewhere that the average U. S. household has about 2.3 old computers sitting around in garages and attics, many of which still work.  So dust those off and give them away to your neighbors with small children, and strike a blow for both justice and charity. 

 

Sources:   The AP article "US faces back-to-school laptop shortage" by Jocelyn Gecker and Michael Liedtke appeared on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer website on Aug. 22, 2020 at https://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/AP-EXCLUSIVE-US-faces-back-to-school-laptop-15507350.php.  I also referred to an article at the website govtech.com at https://www.govtech.com/education/As-Schools-Give-Students-Computers-Prices-Stand-Out.html.  I have no reference for the 2.3 computers statistic, but go look in your own house and I bet you'll be able to confirm something along those lines. 

Externalities On the Roof: Solar Panels and Recycling

 A recent article by Maddie Stone at www.slate.com warns that in the next decade or three, the world will face a novel but entirely predictable problem:  what to do with millions of square feet of worn-out solar panels.  This problem is especially ironic because solar energy has been sold as one of the most appealing "sustainable" technologies.  But when you widen your vision to see the larger picture, you run up against a familiar problem that economists call an externality.

While less than 2% of U. S. electricity is generated by solar panels that convert sunlight directly into electric power, it tends to be one of the more visible types of renewable energy, covering the roofs of businesses and residences and whole acres of ground in sunny parts of the country.  It takes a lot of area to generate appreciable power from even the most efficient solar panels, so a lot of silicon, glass, aluminum, and copper is tied up in every installation.  And no solar panel lasts forever.  Leaks, deteriorating materials, and other age-related problems mean that the design life of the typical solar panel is about 25 years or less.  The big question is, what happens after that?

 

Stone says that conventional electronics recycling can't handle solar panels, which pose unique problems. For one thing, a huge amount of stuff is involved—one estimate says there will be about 80 million metric tons of worn-out solar panels to be disposed of by 2050.  From a recycling point of view, the only easily recoverable materials in used solar panels are the metals, mainly copper and aluminum.  The rest is mostly glass, and not pure enough glass to be diverted to many ordinary glass-recycling streams.  The net result is that, in the U. S., anyway, a typical panel offers about $3 worth of recyclable metal.  But it costs $10 to $12 to recover it.  In other words, recycling solar panels is a money-losing proposition.  Consequently, most defunct solar panels today end up in landfills, where harmful materials such as lead and even gallium arsenide could conceivably leach into the soil. 

 

Now for the economics.  An externality is something that happens in a transaction which affects a third party not involved in the transaction.  In the case of worn-out solar panels, the parties immediately involved are the solar-panel makers and the solar-panel users.  The makers make money selling the panels, the users make (or save) money getting electricity, and both parties get that warm glow that comes to some people from promoting sustainable energy sources. 

 

But when it comes time to replace the panels, and the old ones get thrown away into a landfill, everybody from now on who might be affected by whatever's in that landfill has a negative externality thrown on them.  And if you want to look at it this way, there are also missed-opportunity costs associated with throwing away something that, with clever enough recycling technology, might become the starting point for a useful product. 

 

Stone points out that in Europe, rigorous life-cycle laws require manufacturers of any electronics to take full responsibility for the recycling of their products.  This is somewhat idealistic in that it requires manufacturers to stay in business at least until the end of a 25-year life cycle, but I suppose the lawyers have figured that one out too, and it may be one reason that people don't start a lot of new high-tech companies in Europe these days.  However, such a law fixes the externality problem right away, because the manufacturers have to build the cost of recycling into the cost of the new product. 

 

In the U. S., however, we have no such laws that apply to solar panels, except for the State of Washington, so it's up to the solar-panel owners to do the right thing with their used solar panels.  A lot of the used panels are apparently finding their way overseas to less fussy consumers, but that just throws the externality burden onto those countries. 

 

Stone cites a few research projects that have attempted more sophisticated recycling to extract usable low-purity silicon from the panels.  Anybody who knows much about the semiconductor industry knows that it's a long and arduous road from beach sand to the ultra-high-purity silicon that is used in computer chips, involving energy-intensive and complex chemical purifying steps.  It's a shame to throw all that effort into a landfill, and so if someone could salvage the already-purified silicon from the huge number of outdated solar panels we'll be dealing with in the coming decades, we would be ahead of the game silicon-wise.

 

But current supply chains simply are not set up to deal with a lot of medium-purity silicon, and so governments or other entities may need to set up incentive programs to encourage innovative ideas such as these.  The one consistent mistake that many ecological doom-criers often make is to neglect the power of human ingenuity.

 

A good example (good in the sense that it makes the point, not that it has no downsides whatever) is the case of hydraulic-fracturing oil production (fracking).  For decades, forecasters have been saying that we were about to reach "peak oil," meaning that at some point, we will have found all the easy places to get oil from, and after that production will go into an inevitable decline and we'd all better get used to obtaining our energy from someplace else, like solar panels.  I'm sure some people forecast that peak oil was going to happen in the early 2000s.

 

Then along came George P. Mitchell, the son of a Greek immigrant who, after thirty years in the oil and gas production business, developed a set of methods in the 1990s that manage to extract fossil fuels from places that were either regarded as played out, or were not considered productive enough to develop.  Thus ensued the fracking boom that enabled the U. S. to regain its place as the world's leading oil-producing country, where it has been since 2014. 

 

Maybe there's another George Mitchell type out there who will say to himself or herself, "there's gold in them thar used solar panels!" and fix this problem without excessive government intervention or subsidies.  Or maybe not, but let's not discount the possibility.

 

Sources:  Maddie Stone's article "Sun Kissed" appeared on Aug. 14, 2020 on Slate's website at https://slate.com/technology/2020/08/solar-panels-toxic-waste-recycling.html.  I referred to the U. S. Energy Information Administration for statistics on the percentage of U. S. energy coming from solar panels, and the Wikipedia article on George P. Mitchell as well. 

Sad Lessons from Beirut Ammonium Nitrate Explosion

 

On Tuesday, August 4, a warehouse in the crowded downtown port area of Beirut, Lebanon caught fire.  Lebanon has been going through hard times lately:  COVID-19, hyperinflation, and general government dysfunction.  Ordinarily,  a warehouse fire would not be cause for concern.  But this fire was different, because 2,750 tons of explosive ammonium nitrate was stored in the warehouse as a result of a combination of business misjudgment, bureaucratic incompetence, and negligence.

 

There are YouTube videos that show what happened next.  In one mobile-phone clip shot from a few miles away, an orange-colored smoke cloud towers above the downtown area.  Suddenly a black ball with cracks of yellow balloons outward at unbelievable speed, followed by a larger whitish spray of water that covers many city blocks.  And then the shockwave hits and the phone is apparenly knocked out of the witness's hand.

 

By the latest counting available at this writing (Sunday), at least 157 people were killed, over 5,000 were injured, and up to 300,000 people have been rendered homeless by the blast, which leveled almost all the buildings in the immediate vicinity and broke windows for a radius of many kilometers. 

 

How did that much ammonium nitrate end up in the middle of the capital city of Lebanon?  By a series of mishaps and oversights that, taken individually, were fairly minor.  But the end effect was disastrous.

 

A BBC article has straightened out the tangled tale.  In September of 2013, the Moldovan-flagged cargo ship MV Rhosus set sail from Batumi, a city on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, to deliver ammonium nitrate to an explosives factory in Mozambique.  After traveling through the Bosporous Strait and docking in Greece for about a month, the ship headed across the Mediterranean for the Suez Canal, which would take it to the eastern coast of Africa.

           

But somewhere in the Mediterranean, something went wrong.  One source said that the ship had "technical problems," but the Russian captain, a Mr. Prokoshev, said that the ship's owner had a cash shortfall, so in order to get enough money to pay for the Suez Canal passage fee, he ordered the captain to pick up a load of heavy machinery in Beirut.  In any event, the MV Rhosus ended up docking unexpectedly in Beirut in November of 2013.  According to the captain, the machinery was too heavy to load, and the owner didn't have enough money to pay the Beirut port fees and a fine.  This is why the Lebanese port authorities impounded the ship and its cargo.

 

To make matters worse, when presented with this situation, the owners of the ship and its cargo abandoned it to creditors and the port authorities, leaving them with 2,750 tons of dangerous ammonium nitrate and a crew that began running low on food and supplies.

 

Beirut has an official called the Judge of Urgent Matters, and when the crew petitioned this entity for permission to leave the ship and go back to their various homes, the judge eventually relented.  In early 2014, port authorities transferred the bagged ammonium nitrate from the abandoned ship to a warehouse near a grain elevator in the port to await "auctioning and/or proper disposal." 

 

No actual crime had been committed, but by a series of messups, the Port of Beirut became the unwilling owner of a warehouse full of ammonium nitrate.

 

Lower-level officials seemed to know the tremendous hazard that this stuff presented, and the BBC discovered messages from customs officials pleading with the Judge of Urgent Matters to do something about the confiscated explosives.  It appears they tried to get action at least six times in the next three years.  One can question the appropriateness of the judge's title by the fact that the stuff sat there all the way from 2014 until last Tuesday.  Reportedly, the Public Works MInister Michel Najjar was talking about the stuff with the port manager as recently as late July, but again, nothing was done.

 

Up until the 1970s, Lebanon was one of the more competently run countries in the Middle East.  But things have deteriorated since then, and the explosion last week was the end product of a bureaucratic failure of historic proportions.

 

As the ship's captain commented to an interviewer, the best thing that could have happened is if the port had paid the ship's owner to take the ship and its cargo away as soon as they could.  It would have cost maybe $200,000, but the port authorities would have been spared having to deal with the hot potato of that much ammonium nitrate.

 

That didn't happen.  What the situation needed was a person with both the authority and the courage to get rid of the ammonium nitrate, which could have been sold or even donated as fertilizer, which is its other common use besides that of an explosive.  But that would have gone against what may be an all-too-common tendency in some government organizations, which is to deal with the apparently urgent over the truly important but not apparently urgent matters at hand.

 

One important function of governments is to act as a kind of social immune system, defending the body politic from potential and actual threats that are constantly attacking it.  Beirut's political immune system has been weakened by strife, the war in Syria, economic dislocations, and other factors to the point that a very basic "immune response" of getting what amounted to a time bomb out of the city center failed.  We hope that the citizens of Beirut and Lebanon will now stand a better chance of getting what they've been asking for for years:  more competence in government.  But governments everywhere, even the U. S., can learn from this tragedy that incompetence can have a heavy price.

 

Sources:  The BBC report on how the ammonium nitrate got to Beiruit is at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-53683082.  I also referred to a report by the Indian Express at https://indianexpress.com/article/world/lebanon-beirut-explosion-death-toll-france-germany-port-6542835/ and Wikipedia articles on Beirut and Lebanon.

Accused Twitter Hackers Arrested

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about a Twitter hack that made numerous celebrities appear to be offering $2,000 to anyone foolish enough to send them $1,000 in Bitcoin first.  I quoted a lawyer who said that authorities were pretty good about tracing Bitcoin transactions, despite that currency's reputation for enabling anonymous transactions, and that chances were good for an early solution to the case.

Turns out he was apparently right.  On Friday, July 31, the state attorney's office in Tampa, Florida arrested Graham Ivan Clark, a 17-year-old, and will prosecute him as an adult, as Florida laws allow in such cases.  Authorities in California, where Twitter is based, announced that two others, Mason Sheppard of England and Nima Fazeli of Orlando, Florida, are being charged in the case as well.  Fazeli is 22 and Sheppard is 19.

There are now a few more details about how the hack was done.  Somehow the alleged criminals obtained phone numbers for several Twitter employees.  In a technique called "spear phishing," they then tricked someone into calling what probably sounded like a legitimate helpdesk, where the caller persuaded the employee to give them credentials that allowed them into Twitter's critical control systems via targeted spear-phishing attacks on other employees.

One can imagine this playing out rapidly in a movie:  the scene switches back and forth between a teenager's cluttered bedroom in Tampa to the cool, sophisticated environment of a Silicon Valley megacorporation where the kid hoodwinks staffer after staffer, and at last he types something on his laptop and yells, "We're in!"  But Mr. Clark may not have gotten his ideas from a movie.  Just being a teenager may have been enough.

Brain researchers have found that the teenage brain is an odd mixture of sophistication and poorly-controlled impulses.  In a Time article by Alexandra Sifferlin, we read that the brains of teenagers are about as big as they're going to get, but not nearly as interconnected as those of people in their late 20s and older.  In particular, the prefrontal cortex, where planning and forethought occur, is not yet well connected to the limbic system, which deals with emotions and goes through a growth spurt beginning by age 12.  So all the pieces of the adult brain are there, but they aren't connected as well as they will be in an adult. 

Add to this fact that certain kinds of mental activity turn out to be easy for clever teenagers and even children, while other kinds of mentally challenging work isn't.  For example, the world has known of many child prodigies in math (Blaise Pascal was writing proofs on the wall with a piece of coal by age 11) and music (Mozart).  But there haven't been any child-prodigy novelists or statesmen.  I'm not saying Clark is another Pascal, not by a long shot.  But programming and its illegal subset of criminal hacking are activities that smart young people can easily master on their own without undergoing a long apprenticeship.

So couple that native ability with the poor impulse control of a teen brain, and you get situations like the one Graham Clark is in.  Yes, he did a clever thing that got him a lot of publicity and some money.  But now he's facing criminal charges (a laundry list of 30 felonies) that could put him in jail for much of his natural lifespan.

In this case, anyway, crime didn't pay.  But how about Twitter, and how apparently easy it was for the three hacketeers to spoof and spear-phish their way into one of the most prominent Silicon Valley social media companies?

This kind of thing is an IT security specialist's nightmare.  Despite all the encryption, coding precautions, and other software and hardware security you can throw around, any organization of any size relies on interactions among people who trust each other.  And unless all the people work in one room and know each other's names and behaviors (an increasingly rare situation in these COVID-19 times), there is always a chance that a properly-informed hacker could impersonate someone in the organization to steal credentials or other critical data. 

It's hard to think of a way to prevent this kind of thing absolutely, but I bet Twitter is reviewing its IT security rules right now to prevent another such attack.  This is a lesson that engineers, and really anybody involved in dealing with confidential information, can benefit from.  For some of us, it might not be anything more important than a credit-card number, though having your credit card hacked is no picnic (it's happened to me several times). 

For organizations such as Twitter that have extremely valuable credentials to protect, it's hard to say what policies would prevent hacks like the one masterminded by Clark.  Whatever they might be, they would have to partake of a kind of rigidity that goes against the Silicon Valley grain.

For example:  I once heard of a restaurant whose management held so highly the safety and well-being of their customers, that if any of the people who laid out the silverware on the table was caught touching a fork anywhere above the handle so as to get their fingers on something that would later go into a customer's mouth, that person was fired on the spot.  Excessive?  Probably.  But it bespoke a kind of integrity and seriousness that may be in short supply these days.  Nevertheless, such an attitude might go far, if turned into data-protection protocols, toward preventing the kind of thing that happened to Twitter.

Twitter recovered, after some embarrassing publicity.  The alleged culprits were caught, and now people can follow the Kardashians or whoever without fear of getting spurious tweets from them.  So maybe the price of an occasional hack is worth the laid-back atmosphere that allowed a seventeen-year-old to make a fool out of a famous social-media company.  To prevent hacks like this in the future, organizations like Twitter may have to implement rules that are inconvenient or even harsh.  But with great privileges come great responsibilities, and that may be a lesson a lot of us have yet to learn.   

Sources:   The Associated Press article by Kelvin Chan on the arrest of Clark and company was carried by several news outlets, including https://www.boston.com/news/crime/2020/07/31/florida-teen-charged-in-massive-twitter-hack-bitcoin-theft.  I also referred to an an article at https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2020-07-31/twitter-says-hackers-used-phone-to-fool-staff-gain-access.  The detail about Pascal's proof in coal dust is from Wikipedia's "List of child prodigies" and the Time article on teenage brains can be found at https://time.com/4929170/inside-teen-teenage-brain/.

Will Online Learning End College As We Know It?

This topic comes close to home, as I am a college professor preparing to teach most of my classes online during the coming fall semester, as thousands of other college classes will be taught during the COVID-19 pandemic.  While I am not privy to my university's decisions about what tuition to charge, I tend to agree with a reporter at Forbes  named Stephen McBride that if students are asked to pay the usual tuition and fees for a vastly reduced online experience, many will feel shortchanged.  And with good reason.

As Denise Trauth, president of Texas State University, has emphasized in her messages to faculty and staff, the in-person part of education is an essential aspect of what it means to go to college.  And that is why she has tried to arrange to offer as many in-person classes as possible this fall, consistent with social distancing and limiting classroom occupancy to 50% of normal.  But such measures are temporary at best, and what McBride is saying is that the transition to online classes is going to expose conventional providers of higher education to extreme competition from startups that will deliver the same degree in the same way for much lower costs.  And that will cause the overpriced higher-education bubble to pop at last.

McBride points out that over the last few decades, the cost of a college education has vastly outstripped inflation.  One factor that he doesn't address directly is the widespread availability of federal-backed student loans.  When the student-loan money spigot was turned on, colleges figured out a way to vacuum it up, and the result is increased costs.  The goal of making college available for more people was met, but at the price of tuition inflation. 

And middle-of-the-road state universities such as Texas State rely increasingly heavily on tuition and fees as the states steadily reduce the fraction of university income that comes from taxes.  Data from 2017 show that only 28% of Texas State's income was from state sources, while a little more than half (52%) came from tuition and fees. 

If anything comes along to upset the applecart of delicately balanced enrollment and expenditures, universities are ill-equipped to do significant budget cutting.  There are not many companies around that have a large fraction of their core employees (read:  tenured professors) with what amount to lifetime-guaranteed jobs until they feel like retiring.  So to make a significant budget cut at a large university, administrators have found that the most effective means is to create an atmosphere of impending doom with threats of closing entire departments.  I know this from experience at my previous institution, which shall remain nameless here but was in Massachusetts, and wasn't Harvard or MIT.  In such a poisonous environment, many of the good expensive people leave for better places, and the ones left are glad to keep their jobs and will take whatever cuts you give them.

Texas universities have already made budget cuts as requested recently by the state government, which is going through its own fiscal woes as tax revenue declines.  All these details are to say that despite precautions taken to deal with the threat of declining enrollment, the ability of state schools to deal with significant sudden drops is strictly limited, as funding formulas include enrollment and would decline precipitously if fewer students attend.

The kind of education McBride envisions would be all-online and much, much cheaper than a conventional college experience.  His back-of-the-envelope estimate (which conveniently ignores things like labs and accreditation requirements) is that you could deliver college for as little as $3000 a year per student.  I think that is low, but not very low.  If all you want to do is teach people online and you want to be a University of Walmart, I'm sure the thing can be done.  Tenure, research, football, buildings, traditions, commencements, and mascots would go out the window.  But people would still get educated, though mainly by computer, as it would still cost too much to hire qualified humans to interact in any meaningful way with the vast numbers of students each system would have to support to deliver costs that low.

In our rude introduction to Zoom and all the other technologies that allowed us to keep universities running past March of last spring, we instructors learned that online teaching is possible, and sometimes even effective.  By most reports, the students didn't like it compared to being in class.  But they recognized the crisis nature of the situation and cooperated as well as they could. 

If online competition similar to what McBride is talking about materializes in a significant way, he may be right that college will never come back, at least in the form we had up till last spring.  But throwing out the baby with the bathwater is not good for the baby, and I hope that young people trying to decide on their educational future will consider more than cost.

I think it's terrible that so many college students wind up with so much student-loan debt, even though that system has given me the job I have.  As a result of the student-loan windfall, colleges have built up a lot of administrative superstructure that is of questionable use, shall we say.  And maybe some competition from online-only outfits will produce some salutary trimming of what is truly not necessary.  But I think there is genuine value in the experience of living in a community dedicated at least nominally to learning, keg parties notwithstanding.  And it's only fair that people should pay something extra for that experience, but how much extra is an open question.

Every new technology brings with it the question, "Now that we can do it, should we do it?"  COVID-19 has given rise to the possibility of converting college massively to online-only at a much lower price.  I do not know how the public at large will respond if given that opportunity.  I suspect that McBride is right in that higher education is going to see more rapid changes in the next few years than we experienced perhaps in the last few decades.  But I hope at the end of it all, we end up with something that's better for students, better for universities, and better for the country as a whole.

Sources:   I thank my wife for bringing my attention to Stephen McBride's article "Why College Is Never Coming Back" at https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephenmcbride1/2020/07/21/why-college-is-never-coming-back/.  I obtained my statistics on Texas State University's 2017 budget from a pie chart at https://ktswblog.net/2017/04/20/breakdown-how-texas-state-university-uses-students-money/.