The Ethics of Disposable Earbuds

 

Over the Christmas holidays, we stayed at a nice Texas motel that had an exercise room.  I usually take a daily bike ride for exercise, but as I didn't bring my bicycle with me, I did the next best thing and used a stationary bike.  The bike had a video screen connected to the cable-TV system of the motel, and for the convenience of exercisers, the motel provided free disposable earbuds, so if you wanted to watch Metallica music videos, you wouldn't disturb the lady next to you who was tuned to PBS.

 

The earbuds worked fine, but I had never come across an establishment which provided them free of charge.  It got me to thinking about how a thing which was once a high-tech piece of specialized and uncommon equipment has become a commodity so inexpensive that motels can afford to give them away.

 

The first device that transformed electrical impulses into audible speech was Bell's telephone receiver.  You have probably seen old movies in which characters use the "candlestick" phone, consisting of a vertical stand with a transmitter that the user spoke into, and a "potato-masher" receiver that was held to the ear.  The reason the potato-masher was as long as it was—several inches—wasn't for convenience in handling.  All electromagnetic transducers (the technical term for a device that converts electric waves into sound waves) need a magnetic field, and producing a strong enough magnetic field to make the device work efficiently has always been one of the defining challenges of making receivers, headphones, and earphones.

 

In the 1890s, the best magnetic materials were lousy by today's standards.  It took a U-shaped piece of iron about three or four inches long to make a strong enough magnetic field to work well as a telephone receiver, and so that was why the potato-masher was as long as it was. 

 

By the early 1900s, materials had improved to the extent that the magnet was small enough to fit into a round can, and thus the headphone came to be developed.  By 1930, you could buy a good pair of radio-quality headphones, the kind that fit over your head with a spring strap, for $1.09.  I have an Allied Radio catalog published in Chicago which describes them as "[u]nusually sensitive headphones carefully designed with aluminum shells and genuine moulded caps."  It's not clear why an imitation moulded cap would be a problem, but a certain amount of vivid writing was expected by the catalog reader of the day.

 

In 2024 dollars, those phones would cost $19.43, so how does a motel get by with giving their modern-day equivalent away?  Advances in manufacturing, of course, and the most significant advance has been in the technology of magnetic materials.

 

Around 1990, it became possible to make what are called neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets, which produce the same magnetic field intensity as previous types but with a small fraction of the weight and size.  Magnets made of NdFeB are why we can have excellent sound quality in tiny packages, and also why we can have small battery-powered drones (one of the reasons, anyway—lithium batteries are the other).  And China, which bought the NdFeB technology from General Motors in the 1990s and ran with it, according to the economics website MacroPolo, makes the vast majority of all NdFeB magnetic materials today, although Japan and Germany still have toeholds in the high-end parts of the market.  The U. S. is no longer a significant player in the technology, although we are one of the largest consumers.

 

The reason why the motel didn't provide a single public set of earbuds, the way nineteenth-century railroads used to provide a single public brush and comb chained to the washroom wall, is sanitation.  I haven't seen any actual statistics on diseases known to be transmitted by reusing somebody else's earbuds, but I suppose it could happen.  And there's the yuck factor of just thinking that somebody else's earwax is getting into your ear.  Even if the motel provided more expensive non-ear-penetrating headphones with padding, there would still be skin-to-pad contact around the ear area, and so the easiest out is just to supply cheap disposable earbuds.

 

So what is the harm, if any, in using some inexpensive earbuds once and throwing them away?  

 

For one thing, that decision adds to the stream of waste electronics flooding our landfills daily.  As pollutants go, a pair of earbuds isn't that big a deal, but they are yet another example of the disposable society that is one of the driving themes of modernity.  Magnets aren't exactly biodegradable, but it turns out that one of the more significant growth industries in the U. S. is the enterprise of picking through garbage to find NdFeB magnet material to recycle.  An economic report by MacroPolo tells me that in the next few years, there may be a crunch in the NdFeB magnet supply chain.  China can't make the best ones, Japan and Germany are maxed out, and the demand for magnets to go in everything from electric cars and wind turbines to drones and earbuds is increasing rapidly.  So magnet material may become recycling gold if new sources of supply aren't found soon.

 

The libertarian economists among us would say, "Hey, if earbuds are cheap enough to throw away, don't worry about it.  If it gets to be a problem, the price will go up and we'll do something else, maybe rent them and sterilize them."  And they would have a point.  But just because something is cheap doesn't mean that it's fine to throw it away after one or a few uses.  Turns out that I kept my earbuds after we left the hotel, and now I have my own private set in my shaving kit if I ever come across another motel which isn't as generous with earbuds.  And if the coming NdFeB magnet crunch comes to pass, I may be glad I kept mine.

 

Sources:  I referred to a report "The Impermanence of Permanent Magnets:  A Case Study on Industry, Chinese Production, and Supply Constraints" at https://macropolo.org/analysis/permanent-magnets-case-study-industry-chinese-production-supply/, and an original Allied Radio catalog for 1930 in my collection of antique catalogs. 

Does Diversty Make United Less Safe?

 

Steve Kirby, CEO of United Airlines, drew a lot of flak this past week for two things.  One of them raises serious questions about the tradeoff between so-called diversity hiring practices and safety.  The other concerns one of Kirby's hobbies and can probably be dismissed as irrelevant, although it contributed to the overall attention level he's been receiving lately.

 

Some videos alleged to be showing Kirby—a 56-year-old married father of seven—performing as a drag queen went viral, amassing 2.7 million views in only a few days.  As I have no means of knowing whether these videos are authentic or when they were made, and I can't find any evidence that either confirms or denies their provenance, I fall back on a policy I once read which the manager of an ice-manufacturing plant told his employees in the 1920s:  "As long as you do your work well during the day, I don't care what you do at night."  While the CEO of a major multinational corporation may regret a time years ago when he dressed up in drag, I see no reason to draw any far-reaching conclusions from that fact, if indeed it is a fact. 

 

Its chief use by certain media organizations has been to serve as eye candy for the related story, which should be considered seriously:  whether United Airlines' stated diversity-hiring intents are so extreme as to cause their passengers unnecessary safety risks.

 

While I have not been able to locate the original June 2021 interview that is the basis of this charge, the closest I can find to a direct quote from Kirby is from something called "The Patriot Oasis" on X:  "We decided that 50% of the aviation academy students would be women or people of color.  Today, women and people of color make up only 19% of our pilots."     

 

The issue here is whether a prestigious and demanding profession—that of airline pilot in this case—should be allowed to compose and propagate itself according to criteria that are strictly professional-merit-based, or whether one should also consider what for the lack of another phrase I will call identity-based factors.  Questions like this are made clearer by extreme cases, so I will use an example to show what I mean.

 

In 1960, less than 5% of lawyers in the U. S. were female.  Many law firms would hire women only as secretaries and legal assistants, and many law schools either had a policy of not admitting women at all, or making it very difficult for a woman to obtain a law degree.   But things changed, and today, 38% of U. S. lawyers are women. 

 

Similar things can be said about the professions of medicine and engineering.  For a variety of reasons both historical and political, barring women from entering professions simply because they were women became something that was both frowned upon, and eventually made illegal by Federal and state laws.  What once seemed part of the nature of things now seems highly prejudicial and arbitrary.  In retrospect, the custom of banning women from the professions of law, medicine, and engineering seems to have few if any redeeming features, and undoubtedly lost the talents of many otherwise qualified women.

 

Lifting bans is one thing.  But setting numerical goals for percentages of various identity groups is a different thing.  Is it justifiable to arrange selection and admission processes to shift the percentage of various identity groups (women, ethnic and racial minorities, social classes, etc.) in directions that appear to be desirable, not for the intrinsic good of the profession itself, but for an extrinsic good such as distributing the benefits of highly-paid prestigious professions among identity groups who have previously not enjoyed them? 

 

If Steve Kirby's stated goal of his "aviation academy" students being 50% women or people of color is achieved, what are the consequences for the distribution of pilot quality among the graduates?  Qualitatively speaking, if the total number of slots in the academy is fixed, and the selection rules are changed so that the fraction of women and people of color rises from whatever it is under strictly professional-merit-based criteria (presumably less than 50%) to the stated goal, some people who would have otherwise been admitted can't get in.  I have no idea how hard it is to get into United Airlines' aviation academy, or what criteria one must meet in order to be admitted.  Presumably, it includes a track record of flying experience and education, and perhaps some tests of professional ability. 

 

The critical question is, does United Airlines maintain their professional-merit-based standards of admission and graduation and hiring while also managing to admit more women and people of color?  To answer this question in detail would require months or perhaps years of research and access to information which is probably proprietary.  But the answer is critical to our query. 

 

If United raises their fraction of discriminated-against minorities by admitting and hiring them with lower professional criteria than those applied to other applicants, it is clear that quality is being compromised.  But if they achieve their diversity goals only by extensive and intensified recruitment efforts, for example, and maintain the standards they held before the diversity initiative started, then there is nothing to worry about safety-wise.

 

There really is no other way to answer this question that I can see.  And of all the various places I've seen or heard this topic discussed, no one seems to have carried the inquiry to the depths it needs to go in order to answer it with fairness both to United Airlines and to the flying public.

 

Maybe some investigative reporter is busily digging into the records as we speak, but somehow I doubt it.  The drag-queen videos combined with a two-year-old interview quote have done their job of increasing Internet traffic to certain sites that are more interested in traffic than truth or objectivity. 

 

In order to remain professions and merit the respect and prestige they receive from the public at large, professions, including that of airline pilot, must maintain their professional standards, and must also be perceived as maintaining those standards in order to retain the public's trust.  This Internet-based kerfuffle about Steve Kirby has undoubtedly eroded that trust, but has left the real question of pilot quality unexamined.

 

Sources:  I referred to a Fox Business report at https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/pilots-hired-based-merit-not-diversity-safety-top-priority-aviation-expert-says, the quote from Patriot Oasis at https://twitter.com/ThePatriotOasis/status/1747584074175107488, and for statistics on women in law at https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/05/women-lawyers.html, in addition to the Wikipedia article on Steve Kirby, United Airlines CEO.

The Door Plug Blowout on a 737 Max 9: Another Headache for Boeing

 

When Alaska Airlines flight 1282 took off around 5 PM Friday, Jan. 5 from Portland, Oregon, few if any of the 171 passengers suspected that anything unusual was going to happen.  But at 5:11 PM, as the Boeing 737 Max 9 was climbing through 16,000 feet, passengers heard a loud bang followed by a roaring wind noise that made conversation impossible.  Where a normal porthole window had once been, a gaping two-by-four-foot hole had appeared next to a row of seats on the left side of the plane.   One passenger, Kelly Bartlett, didn't realize what had happened until a teenage boy moved into an empty seat next to her.  He was sitting in the row next to the hole, two empty seats away from the window, and the blast sucked the shirt off his back.  If he hadn't been wearing his seatbelt, he might have gone with it.

 

Oxygen masks deployed all over the plane, and the passengers remained calm amid the chaotic noise.  The pilot immediately returned to Portland and landed the plane safely.  No one other than the boy next to the hole was injured. 

 

The Boeing 737 Max 9 can be configured for various numbers of seats, and for more than 200, an emergency exit is required in the location where the hole appeared.  But for smaller capacities, the emergency exit is replaced by a panel, basically a plug the shape of the exit door, that blocks the exit opening.  From inside the plane, the window and trim make this plug almost invisible.  But all that was holding it against the differential pressure of over a ton as the plane rose through 16,000 feet were four bolts, at least if the plug had been installed correctly.  This particular Max 9 was delivered to Alaska Airlines only last October, so the problem may have existed since it was built.

 

A Portland high-school teacher found the door intact in his back yard, so investigators are looking at it closely to determine the cause of the failure. 

           

In the meantime, the U. S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has grounded all Boeing 737 Max 9 planes, which affects some 171 aircraft.  It has ordered inspections of the bolts and other structures around the door plugs, and United Airlines has already found that some bolts on its door plugs are loose. 

 

Only last week, we described in this space how all passengers on a commercial flight involved in a runway collision in Japan survived with only minor injuries, and we can fortunately say the same about this accident in Portland.  But things could have been much worse.  In similar incidents involving sudden holes in fuselages, passengers or flight attendants have been sucked out bodily.  If the boy sitting next to the hole hadn't been wearing his seatbelt, that probably would have been his fate.  And if the plug had waited to fail at a higher altitude, the pressure differential would have been greater, possibly tearing a seat off its mounts. 

 

Although we can rejoice that nobody was seriously injured, the big question now is why the plug blew out.  The fact that at least one other plane has been found with loose bolts holding the plug says that this may not have been an isolated incident.  That is why the FAA has wisely grounded the Max 9s until a thorough investigation shows exactly what the problem was.

 

We can only speculate at this point, but already some things are fairly clear.  The fact that the plane suffering the accident was so new points to a possible manufacturing problem.  Nuts on airframes must be torqued to a specific tension, because the proper amount of torque represents a compromise between not enough tension on the bolt, which might leave it subject to vibration loosening or fatigue in some cases, and too much tension, which could lead to bolt failure.  Many bolts on aircraft have locking cables, cotter pins, or other means by which the nut on the bolt is prevented from turning.  It's not clear whether the four bolts that hold the door plug in place had such provisions, but even locking devices can fail, or be improperly installed.

 

Another 737 Max series, the Max 8, was the subject of an extensive and expensive investigation involving defective software that intentionally crashed the plane when it received faulty data from attitude sensors.  This problem cost Boeing billions of dollars and lost prestige, and the last thing the company needs right now is another expensive and embarrassing safety problem.

 

In a statement to employees that was also released to the public, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun promised "100% and complete transparency every step of the way" during the investigation.  He can hardly promise less, because Boeing's reputation is on the line with every accident that points to a manufacturing cause. 

 

As airlines which own 737 Max 9s wait impatiently to begin using their millions of dollars of investment again, both the FAA and Boeing have big incentives to figure out why the plug blew out and how to make sure it doesn't happen again.  The recovery of the intact door will be very helpful in the investigation, and I expect we will know something definite within 60 to 90 days. 

 

In the meantime, air flight remains a safe mode of travel for the vast majority of passengers.  The incredible number of things that all have to work flawlessly for a typical flight to be completed goes completely unnoticed by most passengers, but it is the product of the efforts of thousands of engineers, technicians, service people, pilots, crew members, air traffic controllers, and others who do their jobs without public recognition. 

 

We are fortunate that the last two attention-grabbing commercial aircraft accidents have resulted in relatively few casualties.  But grounding the Max 9s was the right thing to do, and everyone looks forward to the time when we can know what happened, why it happened, and how to keep it from happening again.

 

Sources:  I referred to the FAA website at https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/updates-grounding-boeing-737-max-9-aircraft and the following news reports:  https://abcnews.go.com/US/alaska-airlines-emergency-fittings-top-door-plug-fractured/story?id=106218951, https://www.npr.org/2024/01/08/1223517098/door-plug-boeing-737-max-portland-ntsb-faa. and https://abc7ny.com/alaska-airlines-flight-emergency-boeing-door-plug/14298712/.

The Mostly Good News of the JAL Flight 516 Crash

 

Any air transportation fatality is tragic, and our sympathy is extended to the loved ones of the five crew members of the Japan Coast Guard plane who died in a collision with Japan Air Lines (JAL) flight 516 on Tuesday Jan. 2.  But considering that the JAL Airbus 350 had 367 passengers and 12 crew members on board, and every single one of them survived, this accident could have been so much worse.

 

Investigation of the crash will continue for months, but initially it appears that while the JAL flight was cleared to land on runway 34R at Haneda Airport, one of the two international airports in Tokyo, a much smaller Japan Coast Guard De Havilland turboprop was supposed to be waiting to enter the runway.  However, possibly due to a misunderstanding or communications error, the De Havilland was already on the runway as the JAL aircraft was landing.

 

The two aircraft collided, killing five of the six crew members on the Coast Guard plane and sending the Airbus 350 skidding down the runway.  It eventually ground to a stop with the right engine still running. Dramatic video footage of the wreck shows passengers escaping down inflatable ramps in the red glow of the engine's fiery exhaust.

 

The JAL flight crew were unable to use the plane's PA system, so they resorted to megaphones in order to direct the passengers to usable exits amid the smoke that quickly filled the cabin.  The wide-body carbon-fiber-composite A350 was designed for quick evacuation, but until now the evacuation procedure had only been tried out in drills.  Eyewitnesses say none of the passengers appeared to be carrying luggage, which probably helped evacuate the plane quickly.  The plane's captain was the last person to leave the aircraft.  Despite the presence of over 100 fire trucks and the efforts of firefighters, the A350's fire spread throughout the plane and completely destroyed it.  But other than bruises and minor injuries, all the passengers and crews made it out safely.

 

According to a BBC report on the crash, after a 1985 accident in which a JAL aircraft collided with a mountain and killed 520 people the company pledged that they would "never again allow such a tragic accident to occur."  And a look at commercial aircraft fatalities over the years shows a generally declining trend since the 1970s, with a low of 59 deaths worldwide in 2017, for example. 

 

This is the first total loss of a carbon-fiber-airframe A350, and the Airbus designers should be justifiably proud of the way the plane took the punishment of a crash landing without coming apart.  Carbon does burn, after all, while aluminum doesn't burn as easily, and one might be concerned that a carbon-fiber plane would be more dangerous in terms of flammability.  But the JAL 516 crash proved that under the particular circumstances of this accident, the Airbus managed to protect every human being inside from a fiery death.

 

Turning to the causes of the crash itself, increasing aspects of commercial flying have been computerized and automated.  But the processes of taxiing, takeoff, and landing are mostly still done manually by the pilots and copilots. 

 

Decades ago, railroads devised a system called "interlock" which helps prevent settings of switches that would put a train on a track occupied by another train.  Planes aren't trains, but it seems that with modern GPS systems installed on every commercial plane, some sort of coordinated alarm process could be designed to inform pilots when they are straying onto a runway that they have not yet been authorized to enter. 

 

Of course, such a system could cause more trouble than it's worth.  And cockpits are already overflowing with alarms, flashing indicators, and other distractions that sometimes encumber pilots more than helping them. 

 

But when you look into any multiple-fatality accident, regardless of the engineering field, you will typically find that there were precursors:  less serious non-fatal incidents that nevertheless resembled the big awful one, but for some reason turned out to be either harmless or only slightly harmful.  These near-misses are full of information about how to avoid the big awful accident, if only engineers and safety people will pay attention to them.

 

In the JAL-Coast Guard plane crash, five people died, but that was only a small fraction of the number who could have perished, had it not been for the excellent safety procedures and obedience of the passengers who evacuated Flight 516 so quickly.  So in terms of what could have happened, this crash was more of a warning than a full-fledged tragedy. 

 

If the cause does turn out to be due to pilot error, I think it's time to consider some sort of automated system that at a minimum, warns a pilot when he is about to stray onto a runway for which he hasn't been authorized.  Not being a commercial pilot, I may be speaking out of ignorance and there may be such a system in place already.  But it seems like if there was, we would have heard about it.  Warning systems can only do so much, but if a light or voice had warned the Japan Coast Guard pilot that he didn't belong on the runway yet, his crew members might not have died, and 379 other people might not have had to run for their lives before their plane burned up. 

 

It's good to know that those inflatable ramps are actually good for something, and that the practice evacuations in aircraft manufacturers' test facilities that some people make fun of ("Sure, try doing that with smoke in the cabin and screaming people everywhere") can actually be realized in a real-life emergency.  But what would be even better is if this accident encourages new safety features that would keep the precipitating cause from happening anywhere, ever again.

 

Sources:    I thank my wife for alerting me to the BBC article on this crash at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67870119.  I also referred to statistics at https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-traffic-fatalities/

and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/aviation-fatalities-per-million-passengers, and the Wikipedia article "2024 Haneda airport runway collision." 

California Cracks Down on Warehouse Pollution—Or Does It?

 

As the retail economy transitions from big-box stores to big-box warehouses supporting home delivery, the U. S. has experienced something of a warehouse building boom.  And the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) in Southern California is going to make sure that those warehouses don't pollute the air.

 

How does a warehouse pollute the air?  Good question.  A warehouse itself is just a big room full of stuff.  But getting the stuff in and out of the warehouse requires trucks and forklifts.  Never mind that those trucks are going to be going somewhere else and emitting pollution anyway if that particular warehouse isn't built.  The brilliant minds of the California regulators have determined that warehouse owners and operators are liable for the air pollution caused by any truck that delivers or picks up stuff at the warehouse. 

 

In order to be absolved of these sins, warehouses must either pay a fee that allegedly goes toward the air district's anti-pollution initiatives, or must install electric vehicle chargers or rooftop solar panels.  If the warehouse doesn't comply by the deadline (which varies from now till 2025, depending on the warehouse's size), the SCAQMD can assess fines of $11,700 a day.  And according to an LA Times article, only about half of the warehouses included in current regulations have complied so far.  In order to shame the noncompliant ones, the paper published a 109-line table of the warehouses that haven't complied.  The article noted that the regulators made warehouses in disadvantaged communities a special priority for enforcement. 

 

Nobody in their right mind is in favor of air pollution, other things being equal.  But other things are hardly ever equal, and this attempt on the part of California regulators to reduce pollution that is loosely associated with warehouses shows that the regulatory process has reached the outer limits of feasibility in this case.

 

Let's see if we can analyze the logic of the regulations, such as it is.  Californians need stuff that is typically shipped by truck.  Currently, that stuff is moving less through retail stores and more through warehouses owned by retailers, shippers, and manufacturers, and a lot of truck traffic is going to and from the warehouses. 

 

So far, electric trucks are not much of a thing, although in other regulations California is threatening to ban diesel trucks from the state altogether.  (That would certainly fix the truck-pollution problem, but would deprive most Californians of their stuff.)  The people building warehouses clearly have money to spend on building them, so they can certainly afford to pay either fees the regulators assess—so many dollars per truck coming and going—or they can afford to install lots of charging stations for the electric trucks which will surely materialize ("If you build it, they will come"), or force the warehouses to install solar panels on those nice flat roofs of theirs. 

 

Now suppose you're a poor person living in one of those disadvantaged neighborhoods near which a big new warehouse has been built, and you open your door to diesel fumes emitted by the many trucks that drive past your house on the way to the warehouse.  How is any aspect of these new regulations going to make your life better? 

 

If the warehouse is paying a fee per truck and that goes to the SCAQMD, that isn't going to help you directly unless you get a job at the SCAQMD.

 

If the warehouse installs hordes of electric-truck charging stations, that isn't going to help you until the electric trucks come along, which may be many years from now, if ever.

 

If the warehouse installs solar panels on their roof, there's just as many trucks going by your house as there were before. 

 

Unless you have the particular mindset that rejoices when any polluter is made to pay a penalty for their crime, and derive enough satisfaction from knowing that the warehouse operator is doing daily penance for attracting all those trucks that drive by your door, and that warm glow of vengeance or whatever it is outweighs the problem of all those trucks passing your house, you are no better off with these regulations than without them, at least for the foreseeable future. 

 

Yes, perhaps the regulations move us incrementally closer to the fossil-fuel-free utopia envisioned by many in our elite classes, in which the roar of diesel engines is replaced by the almost imperceptible hum of electric motors—except for the occasional boom of exploding transformers overloaded by too much demand on an outmoded power grid. 

 

I put the regulations in terms of sin and penance rather than in more objective or scientific terms, because that is what they amount to:  a secular version of the religious concepts of sin and salvation.  As I have shown, the warehouse anti-pollution regulations are not going to reduce the diesel emissions from trucks going to and from the warehouse, at least not until most of the California truck fleet becomes electric.  But they punish people who have had the economic initiative to build warehouses in order to meet California's insatiable desire for stuff. 

 

It would make more sense to assess fines on the trucks each time they make a delivery.  But the regulators know they have pushed truckers about as far as they can stand, and so instead they go for large warehouse-owning corporations, which are richer and easier to shake down than individual truckers.  I use the term "shakedown" intentionally, because in some ways, these environmental regulations are taking on the look of the Mafia henchman who comes into a dime store and says to the owner, "Nice little place you got here—a shame if anything happened to it."  Because air quality has become such a sacred cow in California, almost anything can be done in its name, including the slapping of ineffective regulations that don't get at the root of the problem, but appease the gods of air quality. 

 

Perhaps these regulations are just rough spots on the road to a diesel-free future, but in the meantime, I'm glad I don't run a warehouse in California.

 

Sources:  The article "Crackdown on warehouse pollution results in more than 100 violation notices" appeared on the LA Times website at https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2023-12-22/warehouse-crackdown-results-in-over-100-pollution-violations. 

Predatory Sparrows in Iran

 

In the United States, fears of widespread hacking causing major national disruptions have so far been mostly unfounded.  There have been isolated foreign-based attacks on infrastructure here and there, but no one has so far been able to disrupt an important nationwide system deliberately for political reasons. 

 

Iran hasn't been so fortunate.  A hacker group calling itself Gonjeshke Darande, which translates as "Predatory Sparrow," claims responsibility for knocking out about 70% of Iran's gas stations in the last few days, according to an Associated Press report.  A related CNBC piece connects the Predatory Sparrows with Israel, although the connection is unconfirmed by the group. 

 

This isn't the first time the Sparrows have mounted cyberattacks in Iran.  The CNBC report recounts a fire in an Iranian steel plant in June of 2022 which the group claimed to have started.  The hackers say that they try to avoid inconveniencing civilians, but having 70% of a country's gas stations shut down is more than an inconvenience.  Iran reportedly disconnected most of its government infrastructure from the Internet after the Stuxnet virus damaged uranium-enrichment centrifuges in the late 2000s, but the hackers have evidently found a way around that obstacle.

 

Iran has been sanctioned for its support of terrorism in other countries, and these sanctions prevent hardware and software updates from being installed that might otherwise help the country defend itself against attacks such as these.  Reportedly, software pirating is widespread, but pirated software typically loses manufacturer support for security updates, with the result that such systems are comparatively easy to invade for nefarious purposes.

 

Iran is widely believed to be the power behind Hamas, the group which mounted the October 7 attacks in southern Israel.  Engineering ethics always has to operate before a background of cultural and historical events.  An action which can be construed as ethical in wartime, at least by some people, would be considered highly unethical in peacetime circumstances. 

 

As large-scale hacks go, the Predatory Sparrows' shutdown of most gas stations, which isn't the first time they've done something like this, is not life-threatening, at least to most people.  In tweets, the group claimed to have warned emergency services in advance, and so they at least appear to be trying to avoid serious harm to civilians.  Their idea seems to be that if the people of Iran get fed up enough with issues like not being able to buy gas for a time, they will rise up and throw off the chains of the present regime.  And that might happen, but the ayatollahs in charge have endured much worse challenges up to now, and unless their grip on power gets a lot shakier, they will probably shrug off this cyberattack as easily as they did the others.

 

Cyberattacks are still new enough to count as a novel addition to the warmonger's bag of tricks.  As with other forms of warfare, its success depends on how well-defended the enemy is.  For whatever reason, the United States seems to be doing a better job at defending itself against hacks than Iran has.  I suspect a large factor in this difference has to do with the wide range of systems employed in the U. S. compared to more top-down-governed places like Iran.

 

I have no way of knowing for sure, but it wouldn't surprise me if nearly all the gas stations in Iran use the same kind of hardware and software.  That uniformity makes a system much easier to hack compared to an infrastructure built out of several different brands and designs of technology.  This is why theories of how a national election was allegedly hacked in many U. S. states hold so little water.  A hacker would have to master and invade dozens or hundreds of different systems and would have to gain access to literally thousands of machines through individual county election offices in order to swing millions of votes. 

 

While the rule can be extrapolated beyond its range of usefulness, it is true that in technological systems, diversity lends a kind of strength.  If one brand of system falls to a hacker, the others may not.  Iran would probably like to have a robust market for software, but sanctions and the general economic climate have militated against that.  So in addition to having to limp along with outdated machinery, they suffer from Predatory Sparrows who take advantage of the vulnerabilities of outdated and pirated software.

 

What can the U. S. learn from this situation?  At least two things.

 

First, money spent on cybersecurity is generally worth it.  Regular updates and security patches are simply good practice, and most responsible organizations follow these guidelines. 

 

Second, in technological diversity there is strength.  Highly centralized national mandates dictating the details of any kind of cyber-infrastructure are liable to produce security vulnerabilities.  The software industry is still one of the most lightly-regulated ones in our economy, and the resulting variety and dynamism is a security advantage as well as providing customers with the latest and greatest, other things being equal.  Any attempt by government to do heavy-handed regulation is likely to lead to a uniformity that would not be in the best interests of customers, and it might make life easier for predatory sparrows and their like.

 

It's too bad that Iranians are having to wait in long lines at the 30% of gas stations that still operate (a fraction apparently chosen deliberately by the hackers), but when your government fights a proxy war, you can expect the enemy to get back at it by both fair means and foul.  With cyberattacks, the line between fair and foul is especially fuzzy, and Iranians should be glad that the hackers are as relatively polite as they are.  Still, it's a pain, and we can long for a day when neither Iran nor Hamas nor Israel has to resort to hacking, because peace has at long last come to earth. 

 

And that's what Christmas is all about.  But that's a story for another time.

 

Sources:  The AP report "A suspected cyberattack paralyzes the majority of gas stations across Iran" appeared prior to Dec. 18, 2023 on the AP website at https://apnews.com/article/iran-gas-stations-cyberattack-a9ae33c352812e40ca3d255a2533fea9.  I also referred to a CNBC report at https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/18/pro-israel-hackers-claim-cyberattack-disrupting-irans-gas-stations.html.

Are We Ready for Mandatory Alcohol Detectors in Cars?

 

Drunk driving has been a problem ever since automobiles were invented.  The alertness needed to control a motor vehicle is incompatible with drinking more than a certain amount, and as a consequence of ignoring this fact, 13,400 people in the U. S. died in alcohol-related crashes, according to a recent AP news report.  That may be about to change, because in response to a law passed by Congress in 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced on Dec. 12 that it is going to require all new passenger vehicles to have a device that will prevent drunk driving.

 

The NHTSA rule will not go into effect for a year or two, at least, because the agency's notice of proposed rule making first allows manufacturers to provide information about the state of the technology so as to have an orderly rollout and reasonable requirements once the rule is finalized.  But unless Congress changes its mind, sooner or later all new cars will have this feature—or bug, depending on your point of view.

 

So-called "ignition lockout" devices are not new.  A cursory search of the Internet turns up dozens of papers and project descriptions to implement versions of this technology.  It appears that some jurisdictions already require certain people convicted of drunk driving to install a lockout device on their car before they are permitted to drive again.  Some of these gizmos are pretty inconvenient—imagine having to blow into a tube every time you start your car.  But it's better than not being able to drive at all.

 

The AP article says that the new required device won't have a tube for drivers to blow into, and the average driver may not even be aware of its presence.  The optimum technology hasn't been decided on yet, but leading candidates include a sensor that would check the driver's breath from a distance (maybe mounted in the steering wheel?), or an optical spectrometer that would derive blood alcohol content from reflectance measurements on a finger. 

 

From a technical point of view, one can ask what the acceptable rate of false positives and false negatives are going to be.  For sober drivers and those who haven't consumed their legal limit, false positives will mean that your car won't start until the device decides that you're really sober.  Users of alcohol-based mouthwashes and breath-freshener sprays will have to avoid using them just before getting in the car in the morning.  This in itself is not a major problem, but other factors could cause false positives as well.  For the finger-spectrometer device, what if you happen to wear gloves?  Too bad, you'll have to take them off to drive. 

 

And then there's the question of setting a threshold.  As the instrument itself can be backed up by sophisticated statistical software, it may take other factors into account:  the weight of the driver (easily obtained from a strain gauge in the seat), the driver's motions as monitored by pedal and steering wheel activity, and history of alcohol use as detected by the system in the past.  But no system is going to be perfect.  We can expect some unanticipated problems when the systems are first deployed widely among drivers who don't drink, because there's nothing like the real world to come up with situations that even the most imaginative engineer can't predict.

 

Even worse will be the false negatives:  cases in which the driver is really drunk but the system doesn't detect it.  Habitual drunk drivers will have a strong motivation to defeat the system, and designers will have to take measures to ensure this doesn't happen.  "See that little hole in the steering wheel?  Plug it up with chewing gum and you can drive no matter how many you've had." Tricks like that will have to be prevented somehow.

 

Reducing the thousands of deaths annually due to drunk driving is worth something, certainly.  And adding one more required system to automobiles is not going to be noticed along with the many hardware and software enhancements—assisted driving chief among them—which are already being implemented voluntarily by carmakers. 

 

But an alcohol-detection system is different in kind from other systems, in that it monitors the driver's condition independent of how well he or she drives.  You can make the case that automatic braking systems step in and remove control from the driver when the system decides it's necessary, but that is determined by immediate road circumstances to avoid an imminent crash.  An alcohol-detection system uses a chemical sensor to conclude that the "meat system" called the driver is unsuitable for use, and simply shuts down the car until the driver sobers up. 

 

This may be the first step toward driver evaluation that is already implemented in some ways elsewhere.  "Dead man" lockout systems in certain types of industrial equipment require that a person always be touching the controls or holding a pedal down, and if the operator ceases to do so, the equipment automatically stops.  One can imagine alertness tests using subtle cues such as eye motion in response to instrument-panel changes, and if the car decides you're too sleepy to drive, it tells you to pull over or else.  Or else—what?  Stopping in the middle of traffic wouldn't be a good idea, but unless the car is semi-autonomous already, it's hard to think of what to do with a sleepy driver other than to tell him or her to get off the road, and hope that the driver obeys. 

 

Like it or not, all new cars will eventually have the alcohol-detection feature, which is already being required next year in some European Union countries.  And we will have to deal with the consequences, whatever they may be.  Reducing the number of drunk-driving crashes is a highly worthwhile goal, and if it means a few non-drinkers will be inconvenienced by false positives now and then, it's probably worth it. 

 

Sources:  The AP article "US agency takes first step toward requiring new vehicles to prevent drunk or impaired driving" was published at https://apnews.com/article/alcohol-breath-test-devices-required-new-vehicles-2a2e2862691ecea396df3ab66d4440c6.  I also referred to a website of the Chinese firm Winsen (which makes alcohol-vapor detectors) at https://www.winsen-sensor.com/knowledge/alcohol-detection-engine-lockin-to-prevent-drunk-driving.html. 

Water Beads: A Small But Significant Ethics Issue

 

Water beads, which are spheres of a highly absorbent polymer compound that absorbs water to produce glassy-clear globules that are nearly all water, turn out to be the focus of an ethical issue as complex as many that involve more influential technologies.  I managed to survive until an advanced age in complete ignorance of the existence of water beads.  But now that I've found out about them, they turn out to be more controversial than you'd think.

 

It all began last Friday at a Christmas dinner and concert at a church some friends of ours attend.  The table decorations were clear plastic candle stands with a thin stem supporting a clear cup that had what looked like water in it.  Floating on the water was a disc-shaped candle, but what caught my interest was what I saw between the candle and the bottom of the cup.

 

Somehow, there were five or six small Christmas ornaments suspended at various heights in the cup, which was at least two or three inches (2.5-4 cm) high.  Some ornaments were at the bottom, some were suspended in the middle, and some were near the top.  This got my physics-oriented mind going:  what kept the ornaments from either all falling to the bottom or floating to the top?  Was it clear gelatin?  A touch of my fork to the top of the cup proved that no, there was plain water at the top.  (You see how I spend my time at parties.)  I leaned over to my friend at the next table, who is also technically inclined, and asked him how it worked.  He had no idea, but knew the lady who did the table decorations and said he'd ask her after the event was over.

 

When we caught up with her, she said, "You want to know my candle-holder secret?  Orbeez."

 

We didn't know what Orbeez were.

 

"Water beads.  See, here's a cup that got spilled."  On the table were dozens of what looked like clear marbles, maybe 5 mm (1/4 inch or so) in diameter.  Being almost all water, they are almost invisible when suspended in water.  If I looked through an intact cup with its ornaments, I could see sort of ripples in the clear fluid, like heat waves above a hot road in the summer, but nothing more than that.  The water beads in the water stay intact and support the Christmas decorations at various heights.  Mystery solved, but what the heck were Orbeez?

 

It's a trade name for water spheres made with a special polymer originally developed to make highly absorbent sanitary napkins in the 1970s.  When compressed dry into either spheres or various other shapes, the material expands when placed in water, but retains its relative shape.  Wikipedia's article on expandable water toys describes both the attraction they have for children and also the hazards they pose.

 

Especially if the objects are brightly colored or have interesting shapes resembling candy, it's easy to imagine a baby or young child eating them.  And this has happened—a lot.  The problem is that unless the object is already saturated with water, it will continue to absorb water and expand inside the digestive tract.  The U. S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has a grim webpage with an X-ray showing a child's colon filled with water beads that caused an intestinal blockage, which leads to severe illness or even death if untreated. 

 

According to an article on the ClickOrlando.com website, 4,500 emergency-room visits in the U. S. were attributed to water beads from 2017 to 2022.  This is why last month, U. S. Representative Frank Pallone introduced legislation that would ban the sale of such beads altogether.

 

As with other engineering-ethics issues, the first step is to identify the parties involved.  The manufacture of the beads takes place offshore, mostly in China.  Retailers buy them either directly or from repackagers, and sell them to the public.  Both children and their parents buy the beads, and adults such as our table decorator as well as children use them.  Some types of beads have a maximum size of only a few millimeters, and are advertised as harmless except to very young children, whose small-bore internal plumbing could still be plugged by such objects.  Others can get as large as two inches (about 50 mm), and pose a clear hazard if ingested. 

 

What we have now is close to a libertarian approach to the problem.  Water beads as such are unregulated, but the CPSC has issued consumer recalls on specific brands of water beads that appear to be very likely to be misused.  For example, Target sold a product called "Chuckle and Roar Ultimate Water Bead Activity Kit."  The CPSC issued a recall notice for this product on Sept. 14 of this year.  It's not stated why this particular product was singled out, unless it was associated with an unusually high number of ER visits. 

 

Rep. Pallone's bill would take the government-knows-best approach and simply ban all such products, at least according to the brief report on it.  It's unclear whether responsible adult users such as florists and decorators would be allowed to buy them, perhaps after showing proof they are over 18, like ammunition is treated.  If enforcement is not any more rigorous than the regulations around buying ammunition, which I did online by simply checking a box saying that I was over 18, the new law might not be very effective.

 

Somehow, people with small children keep them alive in houses full of things that might hurt them:  drain cleaner, cleaning fluids, medicines, and so on.  While allowing a very young child who doesn't know the difference between food and plastic to play with water beads seems unwise, it's up to society at large to decide whether hundreds of ER trips every year for kids who eat water beads is worth the pleasure they derive from using them properly. 

 

To be frank, most of society is unaware that there is even an issue.  If Rep. Pallone's bill advances toward passage, you can count on the water-bead sellers to protest, and unless there is an organized group such as Parents Against Water Beads, the voices of the manufacturers and retailers may prevail.  In that case, we'll all just have to be more careful and try not to make this world any more hazardous than it is already for small children.  Even if water beads really are cool looking.

 

Sources:  The article describing Rep. Pallone's bill is at https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2023/11/13/bill-coming-to-congress-would-ban-orbeez-other-water-beads-over-child-injuries/.  The CPSC statement on the water-bead product recall is at 

https://www.cpsc.gov/About-CPSC/Chairman/Alexander-Hoehn-Saric/Statement/Chair-Hoehn-Saric-Statement-on-the-Dangers-that-Water-Beads-Pose-to-Young-Children.

  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on "Expandable Water Toy." 

Consumer Reports Says Electric Cars Have More Problems

 

In a comprehensive survey covering vehicle model years 2021 through 2023, the publication Consumer Reports found that electric cars, SUVs, and pickups had among the worst reliability ratings compared to either all-internal-combustion-powered vehicles or IC-powered hybrids (not plug-in hybrids, which were also problem-prone). 

 

Results varied by brand.  Tesla, the largest seller of all-electric vehicles, rose in the reliability rankings from 19th out of 30 automakers in last year's survey to 14th out of 30 in the latest study.  This reflects an overall tendency that is probably the main cause of reliability problems with electric vehicles (EVs):  inexperience.

 

The first time you do anything, you're not likely to do it perfectly.  Young people sometimes don't understand this basic principle of life, and it leads to unfortunate consequences.  My mother once sent me to take tennis lessons when I was about ten.  When I discovered I couldn't serve like a pro right off the bat (or the racket), I promptly lost all interest and closed myself off to a lifetime of tennis enjoyment. 

 

The same thing that is true of individuals learning how to do new things is true of automakers learning how to make EVs.  An Associated Press article on the Consumer Reports survey quotes Jake Fisher, their senior director of auto testing, as saying the situation is mainly "growing pains."  No matter how detailed and accurate computer models and laboratory prototypes are, a manufacturer can't simulate the myriad of unlikely situations that will arise when a product is made in units of thousands and sent out to the great unwashed public, who will do a lot of crazy durn things that the maker could never think of. 

 

This sort of thing has been going on with internal-combustion (IC) cars since before 1900, and the automakers are supremely experienced with what can go wrong with that technology.  It may be surprising to learn, but the reliability requirements of military-grade technology are nowhere nearly as rigorous and demanding as the requirements for hardware used in the automotive industry.  Jet aircraft are inspected and serviced every few hundred hours.  But Grandma just drives her car until it breaks, and expects that to happen very rarely. 

 

Combine that consumer expectation with a radically new powertrain, control system, and body, which is what EVs represent, and you're going to have problems, even entirely new types of problems.  The issue of autonomous vehicles is formally independent of EVs, but as some of the most advanced autonomous-vehicle systems are found in EVs such as Teslas, the two often go together.  And autonomous driving is only one of the multitude of new features that EVs make either possible at all, or a lot easier to implement.

 

An EV is more of a hardware shell for a software platform than anything else, and reliability standards for software are a different kind of cat compared to automotive reliability expectations.  Software is at fault in many issues involving EVs, although it can increasingly cause problems with IC cars as well.    

 

The hope expressed by many EV makers is that consumers will recognize the higher problem rate as something temporary, and won't allow it to tarnish the overall reputation of the technology.  This depends on the age and psychology of the customer to a great and imponderable degree. 

 

Just last night, for instance, I was talking with a friend who bought his first Tesla about five months ago.  If he's had any problems with it, he didn't mention them.  I asked about charging times, and he said it was no problem.  He can charge his Tesla at his house overnight, and he knows where there are supercharging stations that will do it in only 30 minutes.

 

His attitude reminds me of a scene in the Woody Allen movie "Annie Hall."  In a split-screen scene, Alvy Singer's therapist asks him, "How often do you sleep together?"  Singer replies forlornly, "Hardly ever.  Maybe three times a week."  In the other half of the screen, his partner Annie Hall gets asked the same question by her therapist, and Annie says with annoyance, "Constantly.  I'd say three times a week."

 

My friend, a power engineer and Tesla enthusiast, sees charging an EV in thirty minutes as wonderful, hardly any time at all.  Someone like me, who is a dyed-in-the-wool IC traditionalist, can't help compare that half hour to the five minutes I usually spend at the gas pump, and the Tesla suffers by comparison.

 

The true-blue EV proponents will undoubtedly overlook or tolerate minor issues with their vehicles and rightly regard them as temporary stumbling blocks that will grow less frequent as the makers learn from their mistakes and improve reliability overall.  The big question is, are there enough such proponents to support the overwhelming market share growth that the automakers hope for, and that the federal government is standing by to enforce with a big stick if it doesn't happen?

 

The same AP article notes that the initially explosive growth of EV sales has slowed by about half in the last year.  It's a genuine open question as to where EV sales will stabilize, if they ever do, with regard to IC sales.  The problem that the automakers face is that as things currently stand, they must comply with the so-called CAFE standards for overall fleet fuel economy, or else pay heavy fees for non-compliance.  And the Biden administration has proposed steep increases in the fleet-mileage numbers that will require a large fraction of all cars on the roadways to be EVs in the coming years. 

 

One can question the propriety of government interference in the auto marketplace.  If left alone, the market will let all the EV enthusiasts satisfy their wants without driving up the overall price of cars or causing artificial scarcities of IC vehicles.  Both of these downsides are likely if the government forces Adam Smith's famed invisible hand to deal only the kinds of cars the government wants, without regard to consumer preferences or needs. 

 

Electric cars will become more reliable, but it's by no means clear if consumers will want enough of them to warrant the current pressures to overthrow the century-long reign of IC cars. 

 

Sources:  The AP article "Consumer Reports:  Electric vehicles less reliable, on average, than conventional cars and trucks" appeared on Nov. 29, 2023 at https://apnews.com/article/electric-vehicles-consumer-reports-gasoline-vehicles-charging-eed9c3b8d86c1f7708b7c6e2d4dbf55e.  I also referred to IMDB for the "Annie Hall" quote at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075686/characters/nm0000095, and for CAFE standards at https://www.npr.org/2023/07/28/1190799503/new-fuel-economy-standards-cars-trucks.