As I write this, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average is somewhere south of 8100, down 35% or more from its 2007 high and showing few signs of fatigue in its downward trek. General Motors hourly threatens to go bankrupt, credit markets are doing an imitation of the last Ice Age, and newspapers are running old pictures of soup lines during the Great Depression of the 1930s, I guess to get us used to what's coming. For such a young recession, it's already gotten plenty of publicity. But in all the finger-pointing about whose fault it was that we got into this mess, I have not read anyone who has addressed the question of what might be called economic and financial engineering, and the ethics associated with it.
I remember being surprised the first time I heard that a couple of our better electrical engineering graduates got high-paying jobs with a credit-card company, of all places. But I'm surprised no longer when I hear that present or former engineers often get hired by banks, brokerage firms, and other outfits that deal in highly technical and complex financial machinery. The attention to detail and problem-solving skills that engineers learn can be applied fruitfully to finance and securities trading as well as electronics, and the pay can be better, too. I call it "machinery" although in reality it's mostly software and rules devised by lawyers and technical types such as former engineers and physicists. But the complexity is there, and there is a good argument that such complexity played a significant role in the current recession.
From what little I do understand about the situation, when all sorts of home loans (the good, the bad, and the ugly) were bundled together by means of software-mediated deals, they sold like two-dollar Miley Cyrus concert tickets at a middle school full of teenage girls. To make things more complicated still, financial institutions started selling things called "credit default swaps," which were some sort of unregulated insurance against the eventuality of loans turning bad. My point is not to explain these things in all their gory details (which I couldn't even if I had to), but to show that computers and technical people who can keep track of these things, and figure out the rules by which they operated, played essential roles in this situation.
Before electronic computers became generally available, the most complex math a banker had to deal with was figuring out compound interest, and there were tables for that sort of thing. The complexity of a given financial deal was limited by, among other things, the labor it would take to figure it out. If somebody came up with some kind of security that came with a formula that would take three women punching calculators for three days to figure out, nobody would have bought it.
Not so today. If you took all the computers away from today's traders, the whole system would come to an instant halt, not only because computers are the medium of communication (so-called "electronic trading" is involved in virtually all transactions), but because a lot of trades are initiated by automatic triggers that write buy and sell orders based on electronically reported prices.
This is not to say that speculative booms and busts are possible only when you have engineer types and horribly complicated automated trading involved. The classic textbook example of a boom-and-bust phenomenon was the tulip-bulb mania of the early 1600s. Substitute tulip bulbs for bundled home mortgages, and you can see the same psychology at work: rising prices, a spreading perception that investing in tulip bulbs is a great way to make money fast, a few people made richer but only if they cash out early, and then alternate reality sets in: hey, we're only talking about tulip bulbs here! What's the big deal? And the crash follows, wiping out thousands of tulip-bulb plutocrats.
Engineers or technical people are not to blame for the mass psychology of crashes. But as they are often endowed with perhaps an above-average grasp of logic and what used to be called common sense, I would hope that they could serve as a kind of reality check or brake on things when matters really get out of hand. Of course, engineers working for a firm whose whole existence is based on complex derivatives or credit-default swaps or tulip-bulb futures, are not going to have long stable careers in such firms if they start questioning the fundamental assumptions on which the operation is based. On the other hand, it's looking like they won't have long stable careers anyway, now that many of the outfits are going broke.
I have no illusions that many of my readers are working in the financial industry. But if you ever happen to end up either working in it or dealing with it, remember that when a deal gets so complicated and computerized that even the people who are buying and selling it don't really understand it—then maybe it's too complicated. Complexity in the service of necessity is one thing, but complexity simply to confuse the buyer is wrong. And it looks like there were a lot of confused buyers out there who have lost faith in their vendors, to the detriment of the economy as a whole.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Monday, November 17, 2008
Gateways to Engineering: "Our Mr. Sun" 52 Years On
In my perhaps overly generous definition of engineering ethics, I consider the question of why people become engineers a legitimate topic of enquiry within the field. If for some mysterious reason young people all of a sudden lost interest in becoming engineers, we'd have real problems getting engineering projects done, and all the good things that result from engineering wouldn't happen. Also, even though it's been two years since I did a blog on the movie "The Prestige," I'm still getting comments about it. So these two factors lead me to draw your attention to a curious film called "Our Mr. Sun." But first, some context.
The nineteen-fifties were unique in many ways, some good, some not so good. Having helped to knock flat nearly every other industrialized country's manufacturing capabilities during World War II, the United States enjoyed an unprecedented decade of prosperity as we produced a lot of neat new stuff that the rest of the world wanted. One beneficiary of this abundance was the Bell System, which back then legally monopolized the U. S. telecommunications market. With a small portion of their government-regulated profits, Ma Bell devoted itself to what it perceived as good works, the nature of which some historian of technology ought to explore one of these days. One of these good works was a well-funded series of entertaining and (they hoped) educational films, which became known as the Bell Laboratories Science Series.
It sounds like what we call "infotainment" today, but compared to today's thirty-minute ads for weight-loss nostrums, the Bell films are almost the exact opposite. Today's infotainment is produced as cheaply as the advertisers can get by with it; Bell went out and hired top-notch directors such as Frank Capra, and gave them pretty nearly a free hand and generous funding. The whole point of today's infotainment is to sell you something; the first film in the Science Series, an hour-long production called "Our Mr. Sun," has about three minutes devoted to the Bell System's early research in solar cells, and one gets the feeling that if Mr. Capra had decided to cut it for a good artistic reason, the Bell people would have swallowed their pride and gone along with the cut.
When one asks why a telecommunications monopoly would spend their shareholders' money on such an apparently profitless enterprise, the non-historian is reduced to guesswork (the real answer may be buried in the AT&T Archives in New Jersey, but my historical-research travel budget for this blog is busted). One reason might have been that Bell, and a lot of other people besides, were worried that U. S. citizens didn't know enough about science, and needed to know more. Although the film's format combined animation and live action, it was clearly intended for a wider audience than the kiddies, since it reportedly aired on television at 10 PM, which was not a good time if you wanted a lot of children in your audience. On the other hand, over 600 prints were later distributed to schools and civic organizations, so reaching the younger generation must have been at least a part of their intentions.
One way to get a grip on why they did it is to watch the film, which I did last night. (It is now in the public domain, and a URL for a streaming source is given below.) Technically, the story is in the form of an allegory a la Pilgrim's Progress, with characters such as Mr. Research (played by professor of literature Frank Baxter), Mr. Writer (Eddie Albert), and the voices of Mr. Sun (Marvin Miller) and Father Time (allegedly played by Lionel Barrymore, in his last role). These latter two worthies appear via animated segments, which makes it easier to conduct interviews with beings such as stars and personifications of non-material ideas.
Capra knew his way around lively stories, and the film holds up surprisingly well in both the dramatic and the technical senses. Dramatically, it does not induce that cringing sensation that the hyper-corniness of so many didactic films of the 1950s produce in us today. Capra managed to get across three thousand years' worth of history about how the sun was originally regarded as a god, to today's present view of it as a flaming ball of gas, and pinpoints the turning point with the name of a specific Greek philosopher. Then the viewer is treated to such things as the physics of nuclear fusion as explained by a magician, the problem of future sources of energy as symbolized by an "energy bank" measured in horsepower-hours, and speculation that future energy shortages will be solved in the short run by nuclear energy, of course, but eventually we might run out of uranium and then we'd have to develop better solar cells.
It's easy to throw rocks at such clouded crystal balls (to mix a metaphor), but the science that was state-of-the-art then was explained well. We get to see a clip of Hans Bethe, who originated the explanation for the carbon cycle of nuclear fusion in the sun, and get treated to what scientists knew about how chlorophyll (or rather, Chloro Phyll, a diminutive cook in a plant's metaphorical chemical kitchen) turns sunlight and water and carbon dioxide into sugar. In one of the weirder sequences, a cartoon scientist dressed in a chef's outfit starts with beach sand, purifies it in a blender, adds a "dash of arsenic" (!), cooks it in a boron oven, and voila! out pops a pan of solar cells from the oven, like cookies. (You're tempted to say, "Kids, don't try this at home," but the Bell System, in a separate but related public-education program, made available to public schools a do-it-yourself solar-cell kit, complete with a set of little fire bricks to build your boron-diffusion oven with.)
Your correspondent was too young at the time the film was released in 1956 to see it in its initial release on TV, but seven others came out over the next eight years, and chances are that anybody going to school in the 1960s saw at least one of these films. In an essay on the series, David Templeton notes that many young people who saw the films later became scientists and engineers, and some cite the series as at least one reason why they chose their technical fields. So in that sense, at least, it looks like Ma Bell got her money back.
It's hard to imagine anything like this taking place today, for a number of reasons. Telecomm monopolies have passed from the scene, corporate altruism is not popular with shareholders these days (what is?), and there is no chance in perdition that a modern film director could get by with the framing motif that Capra, a committed Catholic, chose to begin and end "Our Mr. Sun" with. The first words you see are "The Heavens declare the glory of God" (the first line of the Old Testament Psalm 19), and nearly the last words you hear are those of St. Francis of Assisi, who viewed Nature not as our mother, to be enslaved to, nor as our mistress or subject, to be exploited and dominated, but as our sister, to be loved, cared for, and regarded as a fellow creature of one's Creator. Of course, this was back when prayer in schools was not only permitted but often required by law. Whether getting rid of that kind of religious intrusion in public education has contributed to our current parlous state in which the future of engineering in the U. S. is at least somewhat in doubt, I will leave as a puzzle for the reader.
Sources: "Our Mr. Sun" can be viewed at the AVGeeks archive at http://www.archive.org/details/our_mr_sun. David Templeton's essay can be found at http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/09.23.99/bellscience-9938.html.
The nineteen-fifties were unique in many ways, some good, some not so good. Having helped to knock flat nearly every other industrialized country's manufacturing capabilities during World War II, the United States enjoyed an unprecedented decade of prosperity as we produced a lot of neat new stuff that the rest of the world wanted. One beneficiary of this abundance was the Bell System, which back then legally monopolized the U. S. telecommunications market. With a small portion of their government-regulated profits, Ma Bell devoted itself to what it perceived as good works, the nature of which some historian of technology ought to explore one of these days. One of these good works was a well-funded series of entertaining and (they hoped) educational films, which became known as the Bell Laboratories Science Series.
It sounds like what we call "infotainment" today, but compared to today's thirty-minute ads for weight-loss nostrums, the Bell films are almost the exact opposite. Today's infotainment is produced as cheaply as the advertisers can get by with it; Bell went out and hired top-notch directors such as Frank Capra, and gave them pretty nearly a free hand and generous funding. The whole point of today's infotainment is to sell you something; the first film in the Science Series, an hour-long production called "Our Mr. Sun," has about three minutes devoted to the Bell System's early research in solar cells, and one gets the feeling that if Mr. Capra had decided to cut it for a good artistic reason, the Bell people would have swallowed their pride and gone along with the cut.
When one asks why a telecommunications monopoly would spend their shareholders' money on such an apparently profitless enterprise, the non-historian is reduced to guesswork (the real answer may be buried in the AT&T Archives in New Jersey, but my historical-research travel budget for this blog is busted). One reason might have been that Bell, and a lot of other people besides, were worried that U. S. citizens didn't know enough about science, and needed to know more. Although the film's format combined animation and live action, it was clearly intended for a wider audience than the kiddies, since it reportedly aired on television at 10 PM, which was not a good time if you wanted a lot of children in your audience. On the other hand, over 600 prints were later distributed to schools and civic organizations, so reaching the younger generation must have been at least a part of their intentions.
One way to get a grip on why they did it is to watch the film, which I did last night. (It is now in the public domain, and a URL for a streaming source is given below.) Technically, the story is in the form of an allegory a la Pilgrim's Progress, with characters such as Mr. Research (played by professor of literature Frank Baxter), Mr. Writer (Eddie Albert), and the voices of Mr. Sun (Marvin Miller) and Father Time (allegedly played by Lionel Barrymore, in his last role). These latter two worthies appear via animated segments, which makes it easier to conduct interviews with beings such as stars and personifications of non-material ideas.
Capra knew his way around lively stories, and the film holds up surprisingly well in both the dramatic and the technical senses. Dramatically, it does not induce that cringing sensation that the hyper-corniness of so many didactic films of the 1950s produce in us today. Capra managed to get across three thousand years' worth of history about how the sun was originally regarded as a god, to today's present view of it as a flaming ball of gas, and pinpoints the turning point with the name of a specific Greek philosopher. Then the viewer is treated to such things as the physics of nuclear fusion as explained by a magician, the problem of future sources of energy as symbolized by an "energy bank" measured in horsepower-hours, and speculation that future energy shortages will be solved in the short run by nuclear energy, of course, but eventually we might run out of uranium and then we'd have to develop better solar cells.
It's easy to throw rocks at such clouded crystal balls (to mix a metaphor), but the science that was state-of-the-art then was explained well. We get to see a clip of Hans Bethe, who originated the explanation for the carbon cycle of nuclear fusion in the sun, and get treated to what scientists knew about how chlorophyll (or rather, Chloro Phyll, a diminutive cook in a plant's metaphorical chemical kitchen) turns sunlight and water and carbon dioxide into sugar. In one of the weirder sequences, a cartoon scientist dressed in a chef's outfit starts with beach sand, purifies it in a blender, adds a "dash of arsenic" (!), cooks it in a boron oven, and voila! out pops a pan of solar cells from the oven, like cookies. (You're tempted to say, "Kids, don't try this at home," but the Bell System, in a separate but related public-education program, made available to public schools a do-it-yourself solar-cell kit, complete with a set of little fire bricks to build your boron-diffusion oven with.)
Your correspondent was too young at the time the film was released in 1956 to see it in its initial release on TV, but seven others came out over the next eight years, and chances are that anybody going to school in the 1960s saw at least one of these films. In an essay on the series, David Templeton notes that many young people who saw the films later became scientists and engineers, and some cite the series as at least one reason why they chose their technical fields. So in that sense, at least, it looks like Ma Bell got her money back.
It's hard to imagine anything like this taking place today, for a number of reasons. Telecomm monopolies have passed from the scene, corporate altruism is not popular with shareholders these days (what is?), and there is no chance in perdition that a modern film director could get by with the framing motif that Capra, a committed Catholic, chose to begin and end "Our Mr. Sun" with. The first words you see are "The Heavens declare the glory of God" (the first line of the Old Testament Psalm 19), and nearly the last words you hear are those of St. Francis of Assisi, who viewed Nature not as our mother, to be enslaved to, nor as our mistress or subject, to be exploited and dominated, but as our sister, to be loved, cared for, and regarded as a fellow creature of one's Creator. Of course, this was back when prayer in schools was not only permitted but often required by law. Whether getting rid of that kind of religious intrusion in public education has contributed to our current parlous state in which the future of engineering in the U. S. is at least somewhat in doubt, I will leave as a puzzle for the reader.
Sources: "Our Mr. Sun" can be viewed at the AVGeeks archive at http://www.archive.org/details/our_mr_sun. David Templeton's essay can be found at http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/09.23.99/bellscience-9938.html.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Watching Teenage Drivers with Webcams
Over two hundred teenagers in southern Maryland are now driving around with a webcam on the rear-view mirror of their cars. Whenever they turn or brake sharply, the resulting g-force triggers the camera to record a 20-second sequence of what went on inside and outside the car before and after the incident. These dynamic snippets go via the web to a company in San Diego that reviews them, attaches little helpful comments about how such dangerous driving incidents can be avoided, and notifies the teenager's parents that the video is now available for viewing.
Although deaths and injuries in automobile accidents have been declining slowly for years, over 40,000 people died in highway-related accidents in 2007. Anything that makes that number go down without severely compromising some other desirable outcome of automobile use is worth considering. And at first glance, the specter of Mom or Pop looking over the teen driver's shoulder, so to speak, seems like a good idea. A similar study done in 2006 showed that drivers who started out triggering the webcam a lot with their jerky, high-risk driving, eventually learned to reduce their triggering rate (and thus drive more safely) by four-fifths. It's too early to tell whether a similar improvement will result from the Maryland experiment. But one thing is already clear: the teens don't like the idea, even though some grudgingly admit that the system has improved their driving.
Do the teens have a point? Is the webcam an intrusion on their privacy? Obviously it is, but then you have to ask whether the chance of saving someone's life is worth a little less privacy. And it's not like the thing was on all the time. Teens do other things with, and in, cars that I'm sure they wouldn't want their parents to see. But when the company that operates the system says it won't forward anything that's "embarrassing to the teen" in their words, that seems to be enough to satisfy most young drivers. Of course, if the company were ever to betray that trust, the entire system might suffer a black eye that it might never recover from.
This system is just one example of how technology is making it possible to monitor more and more aspects of our daily lives, in ways that were unthinkable back in the days when George Orwell wrote 1984. One of the creepier images of that novel was the spy cameras everywhere, monitored by secret police whose presence the citizens were reminded of through the slogan "Big Brother is watching you." A sure-fire argument against that kind of thing ever happening in reality used to be that you'd never be able to man every camera everywhere, because eventually you'd end up hiring one half of the populace to watch the other half. But notice that the in-car webcam uses smart technology—namely, accelerometers—to select only those incidents worthy of study, thereby reducing the work of human editors to manageable proportions.
So as time goes on, it will be more and more practical to acquire webcam data on all sorts of activities, and still be able to handle the massive amounts of raw input intelligently. Is this a fundamental threat to privacy, liberty, and all that? Or is it a tempest in a teapot?
The answer hinges on those who are doing the spying, or monitoring, or whatever you want to call it. In the case we're discussing today, a private company is involved with consenting families, and if the company does anything out of line, they are liable to lose business fast. That's one of the best constraints against misbehavior. Governments do not have such a negative incentive, which is why government-sponsored monitoring of behavior can be more problematic. A case in point is the increasingly obtrusive safety inspections for airline passengers. In certain airports, systems are now in place that use millimeter-wave sensors to see through a person's clothes. The people who inspect these images are not co-located at the inspection point, but still, you wonder if and when this kind of thing will be abused.
It seems the best thing to do in these cases is to ask whether the system is doing any good. In the case of the in-car webcams, it looks like they may well improve driver safety, which is good for everybody. In other situations, such as in-flight security, it's harder to evaluate effectiveness except with tests in which people try to sneak by the inspection stations on purpose. And the news regularly carries reports that inspectors often fail these tests. On the other hand, we haven't had any U. S. planes get bombed or turned into flying missiles since Sept. 9, 2001, so something is working, at any rate.
The other factor to consider is the continuing decline in monitoring technology cost. The current webcam system costs $900 plus a $30 monthly fee, but if it proves popular, these costs could go down to where it would be offered as an option when you buy a new car. If insurance companies like it, you could get a discount on your teenager's insurance rate if you agreed to install the device. And once it's in there, it will work for everybody: the teens, Mom, Pop, and Grandpa. So one day we may all be driving around with spycams in our rear-view mirrors, who knows? Let's just hope the people operating the cameras then are as trustworthy as they are today.
Sources: An early report on the in-car webcam can be found at the Washington Post website for Oct. 24, 2008 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/23/AR2008102303821.html. The 2007 automotive fatality statistics can be found at the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration website http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811017.PDF.
Although deaths and injuries in automobile accidents have been declining slowly for years, over 40,000 people died in highway-related accidents in 2007. Anything that makes that number go down without severely compromising some other desirable outcome of automobile use is worth considering. And at first glance, the specter of Mom or Pop looking over the teen driver's shoulder, so to speak, seems like a good idea. A similar study done in 2006 showed that drivers who started out triggering the webcam a lot with their jerky, high-risk driving, eventually learned to reduce their triggering rate (and thus drive more safely) by four-fifths. It's too early to tell whether a similar improvement will result from the Maryland experiment. But one thing is already clear: the teens don't like the idea, even though some grudgingly admit that the system has improved their driving.
Do the teens have a point? Is the webcam an intrusion on their privacy? Obviously it is, but then you have to ask whether the chance of saving someone's life is worth a little less privacy. And it's not like the thing was on all the time. Teens do other things with, and in, cars that I'm sure they wouldn't want their parents to see. But when the company that operates the system says it won't forward anything that's "embarrassing to the teen" in their words, that seems to be enough to satisfy most young drivers. Of course, if the company were ever to betray that trust, the entire system might suffer a black eye that it might never recover from.
This system is just one example of how technology is making it possible to monitor more and more aspects of our daily lives, in ways that were unthinkable back in the days when George Orwell wrote 1984. One of the creepier images of that novel was the spy cameras everywhere, monitored by secret police whose presence the citizens were reminded of through the slogan "Big Brother is watching you." A sure-fire argument against that kind of thing ever happening in reality used to be that you'd never be able to man every camera everywhere, because eventually you'd end up hiring one half of the populace to watch the other half. But notice that the in-car webcam uses smart technology—namely, accelerometers—to select only those incidents worthy of study, thereby reducing the work of human editors to manageable proportions.
So as time goes on, it will be more and more practical to acquire webcam data on all sorts of activities, and still be able to handle the massive amounts of raw input intelligently. Is this a fundamental threat to privacy, liberty, and all that? Or is it a tempest in a teapot?
The answer hinges on those who are doing the spying, or monitoring, or whatever you want to call it. In the case we're discussing today, a private company is involved with consenting families, and if the company does anything out of line, they are liable to lose business fast. That's one of the best constraints against misbehavior. Governments do not have such a negative incentive, which is why government-sponsored monitoring of behavior can be more problematic. A case in point is the increasingly obtrusive safety inspections for airline passengers. In certain airports, systems are now in place that use millimeter-wave sensors to see through a person's clothes. The people who inspect these images are not co-located at the inspection point, but still, you wonder if and when this kind of thing will be abused.
It seems the best thing to do in these cases is to ask whether the system is doing any good. In the case of the in-car webcams, it looks like they may well improve driver safety, which is good for everybody. In other situations, such as in-flight security, it's harder to evaluate effectiveness except with tests in which people try to sneak by the inspection stations on purpose. And the news regularly carries reports that inspectors often fail these tests. On the other hand, we haven't had any U. S. planes get bombed or turned into flying missiles since Sept. 9, 2001, so something is working, at any rate.
The other factor to consider is the continuing decline in monitoring technology cost. The current webcam system costs $900 plus a $30 monthly fee, but if it proves popular, these costs could go down to where it would be offered as an option when you buy a new car. If insurance companies like it, you could get a discount on your teenager's insurance rate if you agreed to install the device. And once it's in there, it will work for everybody: the teens, Mom, Pop, and Grandpa. So one day we may all be driving around with spycams in our rear-view mirrors, who knows? Let's just hope the people operating the cameras then are as trustworthy as they are today.
Sources: An early report on the in-car webcam can be found at the Washington Post website for Oct. 24, 2008 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/23/AR2008102303821.html. The 2007 automotive fatality statistics can be found at the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration website http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811017.PDF.
Monday, November 03, 2008
The Ethics of Externalities
You may have never heard of an externality, but engineers (as well as nearly everybody else) deal with them all the time without realizing it. The term comes from economics, and means an effect of an economic transaction that happens to somebody who was not directly involved in the transaction. That's pretty dry, so let me give a juicy example.
In the early nineteenth century, the chemical called sodium carbonate (washing soda) was obtained by burning a type of seaweed found off the coast of Spain. But when Napoleon ticked off England so much that the British blockaded French ports, that cut off France's supply of soda from Spain. The French government thereupon offered a prize for the best process of making soda without seaweed. A chemist named Le Blanc found that if he heated ordinary table salt with sulfuric acid, he got an intermediate chemical (sodium sulfate) that was easily transformed into washing soda. Le Blanc won the prize, the French were able to wash clothes again, and eventually the Le Blanc process took over as the main commercial way of making soda.
The trouble was that a by-product of the process was hydrochloric acid. At first the manufacturers just let it go up the chimney, but nearby farmers began to complain that it was killing their crops. This effect was an externality to the economy of making, buying and selling soda. Eventually chemical engineers found a way to capture the acid and sell it too, but not all air pollution problems are so easily solved.
One of the major externality issues these days is the problem of carbon dioxide emissions. Every time anyone burns a carbon-bearing fuel (coal, especially, but to some extent gasoline and oil as well), the resulting carbon dioxide goes into the air and plays some role (exactly how much isn't totally clear) in global warming. The prophecies about what consequences global warming will have if we don't do something about it range from the negligible to the apocalyptic. This fuzziness about how much carbon dioxide does what amount of damage is one of the classic problems with externalities. In a straighforward economic transaction between informed parties, the price paid says a lot about the relative value of the commodity. If the price goes up or down, that represents information that buyers, sellers, and even economists can use about the thing being traded. But the person harmed (or occasionally helped) by an externality doesn't spend any money, and therefore the economic equivalent of the externality is much harder to determine in many cases.
What have externalities got to do with engineering ethics? A lot, as it turns out. Many externalities are hidden, often from the traders and sometimes even from the third parties being affected. Returning to environmental externalities, such infamous incidents as the terrible ground pollution in the Love Canal area of Niagara Falls, New York came about because standard practices at the time allowed chemical companies to dump toxic waste into the ground with only minimal precautions, and nobody gave much thought to the possibility that someone in the far future might want to come along and build a school on the former toxic waste dump site.
Once you start looking for externalities, you'll see them everywhere. Anyone who buys a piece of new electronic gear is creating a future externality that arises when the thing is no longer useful: where does it go then? Into a landfill? A landfill next to whose property? Or maybe it goes off to some third-world reprocessing facility—then what? As the saying goes, "you can't just throw things away anymore because there is no 'away' anymore."
Even the cyberworld has externalities. Say some online game clogs up a server so much that other people just trying to get their work done experience slowdowns. That's an externality, and one that's hard to evaluate as well.
Just knowing about an externality doesn't mean that it's easy to deal with. Economists say you can pass laws or tax externalities to right the potential wrongs they represent. But that assumes you can put a value, either economic or moral, on the externality. Obviously, if a third party is injured or inconvenienced by some transaction that he or she has no control over, there is at least the potential for injustice, and in a just world such things wouldn't happen. Then you have to ask whether in the grand scheme of things, this particular injustice due to the externality is worth worrying about or fixing compared to everything else that's going on. This is the problem known as life, and we don't do life guiding here.
All I wanted to do in today's blog was to let you know about a concept that I have found useful in thinking about a wide variety of engineering ethics problems. Perhaps the most important thing about externalities is to recognize them when they occur. Depending on how serious they are, the ethical engineer may or may not want to address the issue, but if you don't see it, you'll never be able to do anything about it.
Sources: Wikipedia's article on "externality" is helpful, although it concentrates mainly on the economics of the concept. The story of Napoleon's washing comes from a modern reproduction copy of Asher & Adams' Pictorial Album of American Industry, 1876, p. 19.
In the early nineteenth century, the chemical called sodium carbonate (washing soda) was obtained by burning a type of seaweed found off the coast of Spain. But when Napoleon ticked off England so much that the British blockaded French ports, that cut off France's supply of soda from Spain. The French government thereupon offered a prize for the best process of making soda without seaweed. A chemist named Le Blanc found that if he heated ordinary table salt with sulfuric acid, he got an intermediate chemical (sodium sulfate) that was easily transformed into washing soda. Le Blanc won the prize, the French were able to wash clothes again, and eventually the Le Blanc process took over as the main commercial way of making soda.
The trouble was that a by-product of the process was hydrochloric acid. At first the manufacturers just let it go up the chimney, but nearby farmers began to complain that it was killing their crops. This effect was an externality to the economy of making, buying and selling soda. Eventually chemical engineers found a way to capture the acid and sell it too, but not all air pollution problems are so easily solved.
One of the major externality issues these days is the problem of carbon dioxide emissions. Every time anyone burns a carbon-bearing fuel (coal, especially, but to some extent gasoline and oil as well), the resulting carbon dioxide goes into the air and plays some role (exactly how much isn't totally clear) in global warming. The prophecies about what consequences global warming will have if we don't do something about it range from the negligible to the apocalyptic. This fuzziness about how much carbon dioxide does what amount of damage is one of the classic problems with externalities. In a straighforward economic transaction between informed parties, the price paid says a lot about the relative value of the commodity. If the price goes up or down, that represents information that buyers, sellers, and even economists can use about the thing being traded. But the person harmed (or occasionally helped) by an externality doesn't spend any money, and therefore the economic equivalent of the externality is much harder to determine in many cases.
What have externalities got to do with engineering ethics? A lot, as it turns out. Many externalities are hidden, often from the traders and sometimes even from the third parties being affected. Returning to environmental externalities, such infamous incidents as the terrible ground pollution in the Love Canal area of Niagara Falls, New York came about because standard practices at the time allowed chemical companies to dump toxic waste into the ground with only minimal precautions, and nobody gave much thought to the possibility that someone in the far future might want to come along and build a school on the former toxic waste dump site.
Once you start looking for externalities, you'll see them everywhere. Anyone who buys a piece of new electronic gear is creating a future externality that arises when the thing is no longer useful: where does it go then? Into a landfill? A landfill next to whose property? Or maybe it goes off to some third-world reprocessing facility—then what? As the saying goes, "you can't just throw things away anymore because there is no 'away' anymore."
Even the cyberworld has externalities. Say some online game clogs up a server so much that other people just trying to get their work done experience slowdowns. That's an externality, and one that's hard to evaluate as well.
Just knowing about an externality doesn't mean that it's easy to deal with. Economists say you can pass laws or tax externalities to right the potential wrongs they represent. But that assumes you can put a value, either economic or moral, on the externality. Obviously, if a third party is injured or inconvenienced by some transaction that he or she has no control over, there is at least the potential for injustice, and in a just world such things wouldn't happen. Then you have to ask whether in the grand scheme of things, this particular injustice due to the externality is worth worrying about or fixing compared to everything else that's going on. This is the problem known as life, and we don't do life guiding here.
All I wanted to do in today's blog was to let you know about a concept that I have found useful in thinking about a wide variety of engineering ethics problems. Perhaps the most important thing about externalities is to recognize them when they occur. Depending on how serious they are, the ethical engineer may or may not want to address the issue, but if you don't see it, you'll never be able to do anything about it.
Sources: Wikipedia's article on "externality" is helpful, although it concentrates mainly on the economics of the concept. The story of Napoleon's washing comes from a modern reproduction copy of Asher & Adams' Pictorial Album of American Industry, 1876, p. 19.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Cheesy Products: The Case of the Solar-Powered Lamp
Less than a year ago, I responded to my wife's request to install a light on the stairway leading down from our back deck into the back yard. Her elderly father, who lives with us, goes down those stairs at night when he lets his dog out for the usual reason that dogs like to go out, and even with a flashlight the stairs can be tricky. She mentioned seeing advertisements for solar-powered light-emitting-diode (LED) lamps, so I found one at a local hardware chain store and screwed it to the stairway near the bottom.
From the start, the thing was somewhat of a disappointment. After dusk fell the first night, I was hoping its light would be enough to see the stairs by. But frankly, it reminded me of Mark Twain's candle supplied by a skinflint innkeeper. Twain complained that the candle was so dim he needed a second candle to see the first one by. If you looked carefully out in the back yard after dark, you'd see a dim bluish light hovering somewhere in the blackness, but it served more like a lighted buoy in a channel than as a source of illumination for the steps. Still, it was better than nothing.
Time went on, winter, spring, summer, and somewhere along the line, the lamp quit working. It was getting as much sunlight as it ever did, so I decided to do a post-mortem on the thing. It's 98% plastic, of course, and the works are all in the top. A white LED shines down on a conical reflector in the base that scatters light back up along a cylindrical diffuser behind a translucent white plastic box. Inside the lid I found connections to the solar cell itself (installed in a square opening on the top), a cadmium sulfide photocell, and wires leading to a circuit board. I haven't bothered to trace out the whole thing, but it looks like they used a CMOS-type integrated circuit (IC) to detect the light level with the photocell and switch the 2.4-volt rechargeable battery pack to the LED when it gets dark.
That is all fine and good, but this thing sat out in the weather. Somehow water got on the top (not a startling eventuality), made its way inside, and created a nice little rust spot on the circuit board next to the IC. CMOS ICs are notoriously sensitive to small leakage currents, and the conductive rust likely shorted out something or other, causing the entire apparatus to fail.
Now in the grand scheme of engineering ethics, this is not a big deal. My father-in-law didn't trip in the dark and break his hip, the monetary losses are small (twenty-five bucks or so, if I recall correctly), and after all, the lamp did give us nearly a year of service, such as it was. And I suppose it may have even come with a one-year warranty with which, if I bothered to fill out the paperwork, get a return authorization, and ship it back, I could get a new one. But what would happen then? In a year or so I'd have to do the same thing all over again.
Cheesy bargain-basement products intentionally made to last just long enough but no longer are nothing new. As industrialization during the 1800s made possible the mass production of stamped-metal products, complaints arose about how the market was flooded with goods that barely lasted long enough to take home. But somehow, there is always a market for a thing that's a little cheaper than the next comparable product, even if it doesn't work as well. These products are generally made by anonymous factories in Asian countries (the lamp in question is made in the Peoples' Republic of China, to use the official name), sold under nice-sounding brand names (this unit carries the brand of Hampton Bay, which makes a decent line of ceiling fans), and carried by the Wal-Marts and Lowe's Hardwares of the world. And yes, it takes that kind of a system to deliver goods at the lowest prices possible.
But see what you get: a product whose impermanence is almost guaranteed. The problem I'm speaking of could have been prevented with a better weather seal, but that would have added manufacturing steps, labor costs, maybe some added R&D costs, and the price would have gone up a dollar or two. And with the ruthless international market to deal with, the designer said to heck with it, let's ship it as is.
Of course, in principle I could have spent a few more dollars and gotten a better product, but only if one were available. But I did the easy thing, which was to go to the big-box store, find the cheapest thing that did what I wanted (or at least claimed to), and bought it. Judging by the selection available, that's what most people do. I'm a believer in spending a little more if you know you'll get a better product that will last longer, but such options are not always available. In some areas of consumer electronics, the tendency is to drive toward the bottom of the product lineup, cutting costs while maintaining a minimum of functionality. And we as consumers vote with our money to encourage such behavior.
Was it wrong for that designer to neglect the problem that killed the lamp after less than a year? I can't say unequivocally yes, and yet this situation falls into a kind of gray area of ethics that I personally would not want to spend a lot of time in. Cutting corners and trusting to warranties to get you out of legal trouble does not add to one's reputation, but then brand recognition and reputation is such an ephemeral thing nowadays that I'm not sure anyone worries about it much anymore. If I'm in the market for a ceiling fan any time soon (although in contrast to this lamp, ceiling fans seem to run forever), I might consider Hampton Bay, but not for solar-powered lamps.
As for the backyard stairs, I went out and bought a set of three solar-powered lights that use a pole-mounted solar-powered battery. The new lights are much brighter than the old lamp, and you can actually see the stairs better than the lamps. But the other night my wife told me one of the lights had gone out, and a few days later the whole system died. I've just finished exchanging the solar unit for a new one and tracing out a short somewhere that mysteriously disappeared. It works for now, but we'll see how long it lasts.
From the start, the thing was somewhat of a disappointment. After dusk fell the first night, I was hoping its light would be enough to see the stairs by. But frankly, it reminded me of Mark Twain's candle supplied by a skinflint innkeeper. Twain complained that the candle was so dim he needed a second candle to see the first one by. If you looked carefully out in the back yard after dark, you'd see a dim bluish light hovering somewhere in the blackness, but it served more like a lighted buoy in a channel than as a source of illumination for the steps. Still, it was better than nothing.
Time went on, winter, spring, summer, and somewhere along the line, the lamp quit working. It was getting as much sunlight as it ever did, so I decided to do a post-mortem on the thing. It's 98% plastic, of course, and the works are all in the top. A white LED shines down on a conical reflector in the base that scatters light back up along a cylindrical diffuser behind a translucent white plastic box. Inside the lid I found connections to the solar cell itself (installed in a square opening on the top), a cadmium sulfide photocell, and wires leading to a circuit board. I haven't bothered to trace out the whole thing, but it looks like they used a CMOS-type integrated circuit (IC) to detect the light level with the photocell and switch the 2.4-volt rechargeable battery pack to the LED when it gets dark.
That is all fine and good, but this thing sat out in the weather. Somehow water got on the top (not a startling eventuality), made its way inside, and created a nice little rust spot on the circuit board next to the IC. CMOS ICs are notoriously sensitive to small leakage currents, and the conductive rust likely shorted out something or other, causing the entire apparatus to fail.
Now in the grand scheme of engineering ethics, this is not a big deal. My father-in-law didn't trip in the dark and break his hip, the monetary losses are small (twenty-five bucks or so, if I recall correctly), and after all, the lamp did give us nearly a year of service, such as it was. And I suppose it may have even come with a one-year warranty with which, if I bothered to fill out the paperwork, get a return authorization, and ship it back, I could get a new one. But what would happen then? In a year or so I'd have to do the same thing all over again.
Cheesy bargain-basement products intentionally made to last just long enough but no longer are nothing new. As industrialization during the 1800s made possible the mass production of stamped-metal products, complaints arose about how the market was flooded with goods that barely lasted long enough to take home. But somehow, there is always a market for a thing that's a little cheaper than the next comparable product, even if it doesn't work as well. These products are generally made by anonymous factories in Asian countries (the lamp in question is made in the Peoples' Republic of China, to use the official name), sold under nice-sounding brand names (this unit carries the brand of Hampton Bay, which makes a decent line of ceiling fans), and carried by the Wal-Marts and Lowe's Hardwares of the world. And yes, it takes that kind of a system to deliver goods at the lowest prices possible.
But see what you get: a product whose impermanence is almost guaranteed. The problem I'm speaking of could have been prevented with a better weather seal, but that would have added manufacturing steps, labor costs, maybe some added R&D costs, and the price would have gone up a dollar or two. And with the ruthless international market to deal with, the designer said to heck with it, let's ship it as is.
Of course, in principle I could have spent a few more dollars and gotten a better product, but only if one were available. But I did the easy thing, which was to go to the big-box store, find the cheapest thing that did what I wanted (or at least claimed to), and bought it. Judging by the selection available, that's what most people do. I'm a believer in spending a little more if you know you'll get a better product that will last longer, but such options are not always available. In some areas of consumer electronics, the tendency is to drive toward the bottom of the product lineup, cutting costs while maintaining a minimum of functionality. And we as consumers vote with our money to encourage such behavior.
Was it wrong for that designer to neglect the problem that killed the lamp after less than a year? I can't say unequivocally yes, and yet this situation falls into a kind of gray area of ethics that I personally would not want to spend a lot of time in. Cutting corners and trusting to warranties to get you out of legal trouble does not add to one's reputation, but then brand recognition and reputation is such an ephemeral thing nowadays that I'm not sure anyone worries about it much anymore. If I'm in the market for a ceiling fan any time soon (although in contrast to this lamp, ceiling fans seem to run forever), I might consider Hampton Bay, but not for solar-powered lamps.
As for the backyard stairs, I went out and bought a set of three solar-powered lights that use a pole-mounted solar-powered battery. The new lights are much brighter than the old lamp, and you can actually see the stairs better than the lamps. But the other night my wife told me one of the lights had gone out, and a few days later the whole system died. I've just finished exchanging the solar unit for a new one and tracing out a short somewhere that mysteriously disappeared. It works for now, but we'll see how long it lasts.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Ethics of Career Choice: Nuclear Engineering
Since most engineers are not self-employed, the type of work they do is largely determined by the organizations they work for. This means that one of the most ethically significant decisions engineers make is deciding on what job offer to accept. These days, it may seem like finding any engineering job at all is a challenge, but even in the worst of times you are still free to choose where to look for work. Today I'd like to show how you can begin to work through the ethical implications of a whole field of work, namely, nuclear engineering.
Only a small number of nuclear engineers design bombs, but the fact that the first application of nuclear fission was to kill thousands of Japanese in and around the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II has cast its shadow over the field ever since. There are those who are unalterably opposed to any use of nuclear energy, peaceful or otherwise. They argue that besides the danger of nuclear-weapons proliferation, the problem of nuclear waste hasn't been solved and the danger of a Chernobyl-type accident is too great to allow any further growth of nuclear power. (Chernobyl was the name of a city in the present country of Ukraine, then the USSR, near which a nuclear power plant exploded and caught fire in 1986, spewing tons of radioactive material over the countryside and forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people.)
On the other hand, both current U. S. Presidential candidates favor at least some expansion of nuclear generating capacity in the U. S. as a way of decreasing the nation's dependence on foreign oil. Nuclear generation releases essentially no greenhouse gases such as CO2, in contrast to the burning of fossil fuels such as oil or coal. Proponents argue that the waste problem is manageable and point to countries such as France that generate most of their electricity with nuclear-powered facilities.
You may have heard someone say that technology is ethically neutral, it's what human beings do with technology that makes for good or bad consequences. Most of the time, that view is at least an oversimplification, but it turns out to be almost exactly true of a particular kind of nuclear-related technology: the gas centrifuge. Naturally occurring uranium does not have a high enough percentage of the isotope U-235 to be useful either in nuclear reactors (which need slightly enriched uranium) or weapons (which need almost pure U-235). It turns out that the most efficient way to increase the fraction of the lighter U-235 isotope in uranium, compared to the heavier U-238 one, is to turn it into a gas by attaching six fluorine atoms to each uranium atom, and send the gas through an extremely high-speed centrifuge in the form of a hollow aluminum cylinder spinning in a vacuum. You need hundreds of these centrifuges to do the job, but they can be as small as only six feet high, and a centrifuge plant uses only about as much energy as a food-processing plant of the same size. The very same plant can be used either for making slightly enriched uranium for peaceful nuclear reactors, or highly enriched uranium for bombs.
This is one reason why Iran's gas-centrifuge facilities are so controversial: Iran's government says it's for peaceful applications, but the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors know the same facility could be used to make bomb-grade material. It all depends on what the engineers do with it.
We've only scratched the surface of what is clearly a complex and multifaceted issue. One of the world's most infamous parties in nuclear proliferation, a metallurgist named Abdul Qadeer Khan, turned his knowledge of gas centrifuges toward making plans available for black-market buyers such as Iran and Libya. Khan is a bad example of how technical knowledge can be abused, but even that viewpoint might be debated by some of the people in countries that benefited from his expertise.
Perhaps more than most other fields of engineering, nuclear engineering is fraught with ethical questions: What products are made? How safe are the facilities being designed? What are the long-term consequences of use for future generations? Young people who are uncomfortable dealing with these issues may consider other fields instead. But the field needs some good engineers—both in a technical and an ethical sense—if the benefits of the technology are to be realized with a minimum of harm.
Personally, I would like no better outcome concerning America's energy situation than if we built a bunch of safe, uniform, French-style nuclear plants, junked our gas-guzzling nineteenth-century internal-combustion cars, replaced them with electrics charged from the nuclear-powered grid, and got in a position to thumb our collective noses at foreign oil producers. But a lot of things would have to change before that vision is realized, and a lot of nuclear engineers would be involved in the change.
Sources: The September 2008 issue of Physics Today carried an informative article by H.G. Wood, A. Glaser, and R. S. Kemp on the gas centrifuge and its role in nuclear-weapons proliferation, pp. 40-45.
Only a small number of nuclear engineers design bombs, but the fact that the first application of nuclear fission was to kill thousands of Japanese in and around the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II has cast its shadow over the field ever since. There are those who are unalterably opposed to any use of nuclear energy, peaceful or otherwise. They argue that besides the danger of nuclear-weapons proliferation, the problem of nuclear waste hasn't been solved and the danger of a Chernobyl-type accident is too great to allow any further growth of nuclear power. (Chernobyl was the name of a city in the present country of Ukraine, then the USSR, near which a nuclear power plant exploded and caught fire in 1986, spewing tons of radioactive material over the countryside and forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people.)
On the other hand, both current U. S. Presidential candidates favor at least some expansion of nuclear generating capacity in the U. S. as a way of decreasing the nation's dependence on foreign oil. Nuclear generation releases essentially no greenhouse gases such as CO2, in contrast to the burning of fossil fuels such as oil or coal. Proponents argue that the waste problem is manageable and point to countries such as France that generate most of their electricity with nuclear-powered facilities.
You may have heard someone say that technology is ethically neutral, it's what human beings do with technology that makes for good or bad consequences. Most of the time, that view is at least an oversimplification, but it turns out to be almost exactly true of a particular kind of nuclear-related technology: the gas centrifuge. Naturally occurring uranium does not have a high enough percentage of the isotope U-235 to be useful either in nuclear reactors (which need slightly enriched uranium) or weapons (which need almost pure U-235). It turns out that the most efficient way to increase the fraction of the lighter U-235 isotope in uranium, compared to the heavier U-238 one, is to turn it into a gas by attaching six fluorine atoms to each uranium atom, and send the gas through an extremely high-speed centrifuge in the form of a hollow aluminum cylinder spinning in a vacuum. You need hundreds of these centrifuges to do the job, but they can be as small as only six feet high, and a centrifuge plant uses only about as much energy as a food-processing plant of the same size. The very same plant can be used either for making slightly enriched uranium for peaceful nuclear reactors, or highly enriched uranium for bombs.
This is one reason why Iran's gas-centrifuge facilities are so controversial: Iran's government says it's for peaceful applications, but the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors know the same facility could be used to make bomb-grade material. It all depends on what the engineers do with it.
We've only scratched the surface of what is clearly a complex and multifaceted issue. One of the world's most infamous parties in nuclear proliferation, a metallurgist named Abdul Qadeer Khan, turned his knowledge of gas centrifuges toward making plans available for black-market buyers such as Iran and Libya. Khan is a bad example of how technical knowledge can be abused, but even that viewpoint might be debated by some of the people in countries that benefited from his expertise.
Perhaps more than most other fields of engineering, nuclear engineering is fraught with ethical questions: What products are made? How safe are the facilities being designed? What are the long-term consequences of use for future generations? Young people who are uncomfortable dealing with these issues may consider other fields instead. But the field needs some good engineers—both in a technical and an ethical sense—if the benefits of the technology are to be realized with a minimum of harm.
Personally, I would like no better outcome concerning America's energy situation than if we built a bunch of safe, uniform, French-style nuclear plants, junked our gas-guzzling nineteenth-century internal-combustion cars, replaced them with electrics charged from the nuclear-powered grid, and got in a position to thumb our collective noses at foreign oil producers. But a lot of things would have to change before that vision is realized, and a lot of nuclear engineers would be involved in the change.
Sources: The September 2008 issue of Physics Today carried an informative article by H.G. Wood, A. Glaser, and R. S. Kemp on the gas centrifuge and its role in nuclear-weapons proliferation, pp. 40-45.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Expert Witnessing Ethically
I have never been an expert witness in a courtroom or legal situation. But I have known engineers who have been. And sooner or later, many engineers and academics who teach engineering may get a call from a legal firm wanting to pay for their services as an expert witness. What are the ethical implications of serving as a paid expert witness? Can you both take money from only one side of a contentious legal battle and still preserve your integrity and objectivity?
Let's look at a few of the issues that might arise. To keep things concrete, so to speak, let's say you are an expert in concrete, and have been called in by the owner of a shopping mall whose sidewalks are cracking up after only two years of use. The owner is suing the contractor who poured the sidewalks. Should you accept the job, and if you do, what are your ethical obligations?
Many professional codes of ethics have a lot to say about this kind of situation. Although electrical engineers don't deal much with concrete, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has a code of ethics that is representative of many engineering codes, so we will take it as an example since I'm most familiar with the code of my own professional organization.
The first item in the IEEE code that speaks to our hypothetical question says that an engineer should "undertake technological tasks for others only if qualified by training and experience, or after full disclosure of pertinent limitations." In other words, if you don't know beans about concrete and how it cures and why it would crack, you shouldn't trade on your educational qualifications in an unrelated field just to impress a jury. Some lay persons are awed by anyone who can write "Ph. D." after their name, thinking that it confers indefinite wisdom. Those of us who work around Ph. D.s every day know that except for the narrow specialization that the Ph. D. represents, people with doctorates in engineering tend to be all over the map when it comes to wisdom or judgment. And anyway, what your client is paying you for is specific technical expertise that you claim to have. If you don't have it, you've lied to your client, and anyway, the defendant's lawyer, if he's any good at all, will take you apart with great glee during cross-examination. And being humiliated in front of a crowd of people would be just deserts for claiming expertise you don't have.
Suppose you are well qualified to pass judgment on the matter at hand. The plaintiff or his attorneys will offer you a fee for your services. There is generally nothing wrong with this, because everyone understands that an expert's time is valuable and in the course of ordinary affairs, people have to pay experts for their professional time. Of course, if you feel strongly about a certain matter and want to provide pro bono services (for free), there is nothing to stop you from doing that. However, most expert witnesses are paid for their time and effort, which may be considerable in a complicated technical matter, and this is nothing you should be ashamed of.
On the other hand, if there are other connections involved that would look fishy to outsiders, and you don't disclose them, you run up against two more ethical principles covered in the IEEE code: to "reject bribery in all its forms" and to "avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest wherever possible, and to disclose them. . . ." Say for instance that you're married to the owner's daughter and stand to inherit the shopping center when the owner passes on. Most people would say that there is at least a chance that this fact will influence your professional judgment, since you stand to gain a lot more than just your fee for your testimony in that situation. At the very least, this fact should be made known to everyone, to the defendant as well as your client, the plaintiff.
Well, what if you agree to testify, set a fee, and then find that, contrary to the owner's hopes, the contractor he sued wasn't at fault? Maybe the owner made false claims to the contractor about the nature of the subsoil, and it shifted and cracked what was otherwise perfectly good concrete. All sorts of weird things like that can happen to make a case turn out to be otherwise than what it looked like in the beginning. What do you do then?
There's something you're obliged to do, and then you take whatever consequences arise from it. You have to tell the owner the results of your study, whether they're good news or bad news for him. Obviously, if your testimony isn't going to help your client, he won't be wanting you to testify. Whether or not you get paid depends on the nature of your contract with the client. The fairest thing might be just to write it off as a learning experience and not send a bill, but if you spent several weeks working on the issue, you can't afford to undertake too many projects like that. But what you should not do under any circumstances is fudge the data or your analysis to make things look better for your client than they actually are. Here's where the real temptation comes, and here is where it has to be resisted, whether it loses you your fee or not.
Besides all these matters, I have my personal opinion I'll throw in at this point. Like chili powder in soup, expert witnessing is probably best if done sparingly. The picture conveyed to juries is generally that of a busy professional who does "real work" most of the time and has undertaken to benefit the legal system with the expertise that he or she has acquired elsewhere. But expert witnessing pays well, and some are tempted to turn it into a profitable enterprise that takes up a lot of their time. This doesn't seem to me like a good idea for someone who wishes to keep a professional edge on their technical expertise. While the temptations to bend the truth can be successfully resisted if you play the witness role only once in a while, being objective for only one side in a dispute is always a strain. Most people can support the strain once in a while, but I wouldn't advise making a career out of it.
To sum up, expert witnessing can be a genuine public service that can "improve the understanding of technology, its appropriate application, and potential consequences" (another item in the IEEE code of ethics). But this kind of work is fraught with more than the usual quota of ethical hazards, and it takes judgment and wisdom to negotiate them without slipping up. And not everybody—not even those with a Ph. D.—can do it successfully.
Sources: The IEEE Code of Ethics can be found at http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/iportals/aboutus/ethics/code.html.
Let's look at a few of the issues that might arise. To keep things concrete, so to speak, let's say you are an expert in concrete, and have been called in by the owner of a shopping mall whose sidewalks are cracking up after only two years of use. The owner is suing the contractor who poured the sidewalks. Should you accept the job, and if you do, what are your ethical obligations?
Many professional codes of ethics have a lot to say about this kind of situation. Although electrical engineers don't deal much with concrete, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has a code of ethics that is representative of many engineering codes, so we will take it as an example since I'm most familiar with the code of my own professional organization.
The first item in the IEEE code that speaks to our hypothetical question says that an engineer should "undertake technological tasks for others only if qualified by training and experience, or after full disclosure of pertinent limitations." In other words, if you don't know beans about concrete and how it cures and why it would crack, you shouldn't trade on your educational qualifications in an unrelated field just to impress a jury. Some lay persons are awed by anyone who can write "Ph. D." after their name, thinking that it confers indefinite wisdom. Those of us who work around Ph. D.s every day know that except for the narrow specialization that the Ph. D. represents, people with doctorates in engineering tend to be all over the map when it comes to wisdom or judgment. And anyway, what your client is paying you for is specific technical expertise that you claim to have. If you don't have it, you've lied to your client, and anyway, the defendant's lawyer, if he's any good at all, will take you apart with great glee during cross-examination. And being humiliated in front of a crowd of people would be just deserts for claiming expertise you don't have.
Suppose you are well qualified to pass judgment on the matter at hand. The plaintiff or his attorneys will offer you a fee for your services. There is generally nothing wrong with this, because everyone understands that an expert's time is valuable and in the course of ordinary affairs, people have to pay experts for their professional time. Of course, if you feel strongly about a certain matter and want to provide pro bono services (for free), there is nothing to stop you from doing that. However, most expert witnesses are paid for their time and effort, which may be considerable in a complicated technical matter, and this is nothing you should be ashamed of.
On the other hand, if there are other connections involved that would look fishy to outsiders, and you don't disclose them, you run up against two more ethical principles covered in the IEEE code: to "reject bribery in all its forms" and to "avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest wherever possible, and to disclose them. . . ." Say for instance that you're married to the owner's daughter and stand to inherit the shopping center when the owner passes on. Most people would say that there is at least a chance that this fact will influence your professional judgment, since you stand to gain a lot more than just your fee for your testimony in that situation. At the very least, this fact should be made known to everyone, to the defendant as well as your client, the plaintiff.
Well, what if you agree to testify, set a fee, and then find that, contrary to the owner's hopes, the contractor he sued wasn't at fault? Maybe the owner made false claims to the contractor about the nature of the subsoil, and it shifted and cracked what was otherwise perfectly good concrete. All sorts of weird things like that can happen to make a case turn out to be otherwise than what it looked like in the beginning. What do you do then?
There's something you're obliged to do, and then you take whatever consequences arise from it. You have to tell the owner the results of your study, whether they're good news or bad news for him. Obviously, if your testimony isn't going to help your client, he won't be wanting you to testify. Whether or not you get paid depends on the nature of your contract with the client. The fairest thing might be just to write it off as a learning experience and not send a bill, but if you spent several weeks working on the issue, you can't afford to undertake too many projects like that. But what you should not do under any circumstances is fudge the data or your analysis to make things look better for your client than they actually are. Here's where the real temptation comes, and here is where it has to be resisted, whether it loses you your fee or not.
Besides all these matters, I have my personal opinion I'll throw in at this point. Like chili powder in soup, expert witnessing is probably best if done sparingly. The picture conveyed to juries is generally that of a busy professional who does "real work" most of the time and has undertaken to benefit the legal system with the expertise that he or she has acquired elsewhere. But expert witnessing pays well, and some are tempted to turn it into a profitable enterprise that takes up a lot of their time. This doesn't seem to me like a good idea for someone who wishes to keep a professional edge on their technical expertise. While the temptations to bend the truth can be successfully resisted if you play the witness role only once in a while, being objective for only one side in a dispute is always a strain. Most people can support the strain once in a while, but I wouldn't advise making a career out of it.
To sum up, expert witnessing can be a genuine public service that can "improve the understanding of technology, its appropriate application, and potential consequences" (another item in the IEEE code of ethics). But this kind of work is fraught with more than the usual quota of ethical hazards, and it takes judgment and wisdom to negotiate them without slipping up. And not everybody—not even those with a Ph. D.—can do it successfully.
Sources: The IEEE Code of Ethics can be found at http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/iportals/aboutus/ethics/code.html.
Monday, October 06, 2008
NASA At Fifty: A Modest Proposal
Five decades ago this month, a brand-new agency of the U. S. government called the National Aeronautics and Space Administration went into business. In 1969, only a little more than a decade later, NASA scored the biggest triumph of its short existence by putting men on the moon. While it would not be fair to say it's been downhill ever since, there is general agreement that NASA is now a troubled, conflicted, underfunded, and rudderless organization. As a recent Associated Press retrospective points out, the Space Shuttle is a flying antique that NASA can't afford to keep and can't afford to get rid of. The Shuttle is our only way of getting to the International Space Station, and current plans are that when (or if) the Shuttle retires, we will rely on the Russians until we can come up with a new vehicle on our own. These days, relying on the Russians looks about as smart as relying on the housing market to keep rising.
This is not to deny that NASA has pockets of excellence here and there. But a few pockets don't make a garment, and clearly something needs to be done about NASA. In the spirit of Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal," I offer the following suggestions.
One way to find out what NASA is really worth is to have a garage sale. You could have different sales for hardware—things like the Deep Space Network, Shuttle spare parts, the giant Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) in Florida—and the software—outfits like the Goddard Space Flight Center in Virginia, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, and so on. If this garage sale is anything like ones I've had, we'll have to offer some real bargains. On the other hand, I can see some entrepreneurs who might see possibilities in selling rides on high-G centrifuges and swims in zero-G swimming pools. Rocket-engine firings on test stands will always attract crowds on the Fourth of July. And think how many loft-style condos you could make out of the VAB, once the Florida real estate market comes back.
And here's an idea to make the sale go better. Instead of sending a bunch of dull old highly trained engineers up to the Space Station in the next Shuttle flight, we go around the world and offer free rides to the most popular entertainers in the world, regardless of nationality. I have no idea who these people might be, but you can ask any young Chinese or Russian or Indian, and I'm sure they'll have plenty of suggestions. We send them up there with a couple year's supply of food, and then sit back and say, "Surprise, young people of the world! You've got to build the rocket to get them back!" This will do two things: it will probably move a lot more NASA surplus stuff off the shelves, and it will motivate a lot of young people to get interested in space flight real fast.
That ties in with my next idea: the deregulation of space. It is high time that we let the free market determine what we do out there, rather than a bunch of bureaucrats and politicians. Of course, the first step is advertising and publicity. The drama of rescuing those entertainers will make great reality TV. And of course, everybody wants to travel to places where famous people have been, so space tourism will get a tremendous boost. Tourism means motels, restaurants, and all the other things that go with development. Having your latte at an altitude of 200,000 miles will give a whole new meaning to the word "Starbucks."
Naysayers will object that space travel is expensive, dangerous, and ought not to be approached with the reckless exuberance of a prospector looking for gold in a newly discovered territory. I counter that this is exactly the attitude we want. Every new generation looks around for some object to focus its idealism on. There are people out there who want to travel in space more than anything else, and we ought to get clunky old organizations like NASA out of their way and let them. The free market will determine the size of the effort, whether it's one private-enterprise rocket a year or a weekly space-bus trip from starports around the world. The good pieces of NASA that can contribute will find their places in this new order of the ages, and the rest, well, some things are better off simply coming to an end.
Nothing will ever take away the fact that once upon a time, an organization of people and machines known as NASA put men on the moon. But that was close to forty years ago. Five hundred years ago, Queen Isabella funded Columbus's voyages to the New World. But nobody has tried to keep the Spanish court going ever since simply to send more Niñas and Pintas and Santa Marias out to do battle with the wind and the waves. If NASA's time has come to fold its doors, let's at least try to get some of our money back in the process. And let's encourage the world at large to do what it really wants to do with space—by putting its money where its mouth is.
Sources: The AP story on NASA's troubled 50th anniversary can be found at http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2008/09/29/1930411-analysis-is-the-right-stuff-now-lost-in-space. Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal" for the Irish to solve their overpopulation and poverty problems by eating their children was obviously intended to be ironic, as is the case with my proposals above. Swift's original essay can be read at http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/modest.html.
This is not to deny that NASA has pockets of excellence here and there. But a few pockets don't make a garment, and clearly something needs to be done about NASA. In the spirit of Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal," I offer the following suggestions.
One way to find out what NASA is really worth is to have a garage sale. You could have different sales for hardware—things like the Deep Space Network, Shuttle spare parts, the giant Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) in Florida—and the software—outfits like the Goddard Space Flight Center in Virginia, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, and so on. If this garage sale is anything like ones I've had, we'll have to offer some real bargains. On the other hand, I can see some entrepreneurs who might see possibilities in selling rides on high-G centrifuges and swims in zero-G swimming pools. Rocket-engine firings on test stands will always attract crowds on the Fourth of July. And think how many loft-style condos you could make out of the VAB, once the Florida real estate market comes back.
And here's an idea to make the sale go better. Instead of sending a bunch of dull old highly trained engineers up to the Space Station in the next Shuttle flight, we go around the world and offer free rides to the most popular entertainers in the world, regardless of nationality. I have no idea who these people might be, but you can ask any young Chinese or Russian or Indian, and I'm sure they'll have plenty of suggestions. We send them up there with a couple year's supply of food, and then sit back and say, "Surprise, young people of the world! You've got to build the rocket to get them back!" This will do two things: it will probably move a lot more NASA surplus stuff off the shelves, and it will motivate a lot of young people to get interested in space flight real fast.
That ties in with my next idea: the deregulation of space. It is high time that we let the free market determine what we do out there, rather than a bunch of bureaucrats and politicians. Of course, the first step is advertising and publicity. The drama of rescuing those entertainers will make great reality TV. And of course, everybody wants to travel to places where famous people have been, so space tourism will get a tremendous boost. Tourism means motels, restaurants, and all the other things that go with development. Having your latte at an altitude of 200,000 miles will give a whole new meaning to the word "Starbucks."
Naysayers will object that space travel is expensive, dangerous, and ought not to be approached with the reckless exuberance of a prospector looking for gold in a newly discovered territory. I counter that this is exactly the attitude we want. Every new generation looks around for some object to focus its idealism on. There are people out there who want to travel in space more than anything else, and we ought to get clunky old organizations like NASA out of their way and let them. The free market will determine the size of the effort, whether it's one private-enterprise rocket a year or a weekly space-bus trip from starports around the world. The good pieces of NASA that can contribute will find their places in this new order of the ages, and the rest, well, some things are better off simply coming to an end.
Nothing will ever take away the fact that once upon a time, an organization of people and machines known as NASA put men on the moon. But that was close to forty years ago. Five hundred years ago, Queen Isabella funded Columbus's voyages to the New World. But nobody has tried to keep the Spanish court going ever since simply to send more Niñas and Pintas and Santa Marias out to do battle with the wind and the waves. If NASA's time has come to fold its doors, let's at least try to get some of our money back in the process. And let's encourage the world at large to do what it really wants to do with space—by putting its money where its mouth is.
Sources: The AP story on NASA's troubled 50th anniversary can be found at http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2008/09/29/1930411-analysis-is-the-right-stuff-now-lost-in-space. Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal" for the Irish to solve their overpopulation and poverty problems by eating their children was obviously intended to be ironic, as is the case with my proposals above. Swift's original essay can be read at http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/modest.html.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Where Will China's Walk in Space Take Us?
Over the weekend, three Chinese astronauts landed safely in Inner Mongolia after completing a 68-hour flight that included a 20-minute spacewalk. After the burst of patriotism from the Chinese people that the world witnessed during the Beijing Olympics, China now has even more to celebrate. As a successful demonstration that China has mastered the extreme engineering complexities of manned space flight, the exploit's message is unambiguous. But as with any technology, its ethical implications depend on how it is used and why.
It's no surprise that I obtained one of the more comprehensive news reports on the flight from New Delhi Television Limited's website. As China's nearest large neighbor to the south, India is more than a little interested in any signs that China's ability to throw complicated machinery a long distance has improved. The space race between the old U. S. S. R. and the United States was about many things, but at its core was the technology needed to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) halfway around the world. Just as war games provide a way for a country to show off its military might without actually fighting the enemy, the race to the moon provided the U. S. with a peaceful means of showing off the advanced state of our aerospace technology which, with relatively small modifications, was fully capable of blowing the U. S. S. R. to pieces.
Something similar is going on with China's space program, which has surprisingly long roots. As long ago as 1967, Chinese government officials announced their intentions to put a man in space. Unfortunately, a few things like the Great Cultural Revolution, Mao's demise, and the resultant governmental and social turmoil got in the way. It wasn't until 2003 that one Yang Liwei climbed aboard a rocket and became the first Chinese astronaut. But since then, the Chinese space program has made great strides. Considering that the U. S. took eight years to go from its first manned spaceflight in 1961 to the first moon landing in 1969, the Chinese program probably won't keep up quite that pace. But a moon landing is clearly in the works, as well as extensive Earth-orbiting doings such as a Chinese space station.
Unlike the International Space Station currently in orbit that involves astronauts and technology from numerous countries, China has chosen to go it alone almost completely in space. For many years the U. S. did the same, and it is tempting to lay out other parallels between the Chinese and U. S. space efforts. But they are different countries, and the reasons behind the Chinese space program may differ considerably from ours.
In a sense, space is the best of places and the worst of places. Some of the most idealistic and noble ambitions (and people, too) are directed toward the exploration of space, either for purely scientific reasons or for reasons of national prestige. The old Latin phrase ad astra ("to the stars") captures the quasi-religious feeling that many people have when they think about manned space exploration. At the same time, the worst kind of mass destruction that mankind is capable of inflicting in the form of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) would pass through the void of space on their way to vaporizing millions of people back on Earth. It is too early to tell what China will do with its new-found space capabilities. So far, all they've done is to perform the same kind of stunts that the U. S. and the U. S. S. R. did in the harmless but significant space race of the 1960s. That race, you will recall, did result in the dissolution of one of the two parties, although how much the Soviet Union's diversion of resources to its space effort contributed to its demise is a fight for the historians.
China is a different situation altogether. Although they have their own territorial ambitions, China is a much more homogeneous country than the U. S. S. R. ever was. And while I deplore dictatorships and Communist governments, from a technocratic point of view they can provide the long-range stability that tends to go away when you have a newly elected government every two to four years or so. Let's hope that China will put its efforts into showing how it can master the peaceful challenges of space instead of trying to pull some kind of international space blackmail on the rest of the world some day.
Sources: Wikipedia has a good article on the Chinese space program. An article on the recent Chinese spacewalk can be found at http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20080067038.
It's no surprise that I obtained one of the more comprehensive news reports on the flight from New Delhi Television Limited's website. As China's nearest large neighbor to the south, India is more than a little interested in any signs that China's ability to throw complicated machinery a long distance has improved. The space race between the old U. S. S. R. and the United States was about many things, but at its core was the technology needed to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) halfway around the world. Just as war games provide a way for a country to show off its military might without actually fighting the enemy, the race to the moon provided the U. S. with a peaceful means of showing off the advanced state of our aerospace technology which, with relatively small modifications, was fully capable of blowing the U. S. S. R. to pieces.
Something similar is going on with China's space program, which has surprisingly long roots. As long ago as 1967, Chinese government officials announced their intentions to put a man in space. Unfortunately, a few things like the Great Cultural Revolution, Mao's demise, and the resultant governmental and social turmoil got in the way. It wasn't until 2003 that one Yang Liwei climbed aboard a rocket and became the first Chinese astronaut. But since then, the Chinese space program has made great strides. Considering that the U. S. took eight years to go from its first manned spaceflight in 1961 to the first moon landing in 1969, the Chinese program probably won't keep up quite that pace. But a moon landing is clearly in the works, as well as extensive Earth-orbiting doings such as a Chinese space station.
Unlike the International Space Station currently in orbit that involves astronauts and technology from numerous countries, China has chosen to go it alone almost completely in space. For many years the U. S. did the same, and it is tempting to lay out other parallels between the Chinese and U. S. space efforts. But they are different countries, and the reasons behind the Chinese space program may differ considerably from ours.
In a sense, space is the best of places and the worst of places. Some of the most idealistic and noble ambitions (and people, too) are directed toward the exploration of space, either for purely scientific reasons or for reasons of national prestige. The old Latin phrase ad astra ("to the stars") captures the quasi-religious feeling that many people have when they think about manned space exploration. At the same time, the worst kind of mass destruction that mankind is capable of inflicting in the form of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) would pass through the void of space on their way to vaporizing millions of people back on Earth. It is too early to tell what China will do with its new-found space capabilities. So far, all they've done is to perform the same kind of stunts that the U. S. and the U. S. S. R. did in the harmless but significant space race of the 1960s. That race, you will recall, did result in the dissolution of one of the two parties, although how much the Soviet Union's diversion of resources to its space effort contributed to its demise is a fight for the historians.
China is a different situation altogether. Although they have their own territorial ambitions, China is a much more homogeneous country than the U. S. S. R. ever was. And while I deplore dictatorships and Communist governments, from a technocratic point of view they can provide the long-range stability that tends to go away when you have a newly elected government every two to four years or so. Let's hope that China will put its efforts into showing how it can master the peaceful challenges of space instead of trying to pull some kind of international space blackmail on the rest of the world some day.
Sources: Wikipedia has a good article on the Chinese space program. An article on the recent Chinese spacewalk can be found at http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20080067038.
A Note to Readers Requesting Private Responses
From time to time, a reader may wish to communicate with me in a way that requests a private response: for example, a query for more information, a question requiring a specific answer, etc. Unfortunately, until recently I neglected to post my email address on the profiles page of this blog. (For the record, it is kdstephan@txstate.edu, and can also now be found on the profiles page.) Some readers unable to locate my email address sent queries to the comments section of this blog, assuming that I could obtain their email addresses from the system and respond.
That is not the case. The system does not reveal to me the email addresses of anyone who sends in a comment. So to those readers who sent me queries or requests via the comment section, I apologize for not responding and for not posting my email address. You probably think by now that I'm one of those arrogant bloggers who's too busy to respond to individual inquiries. I assure you that this is not the case; I simply cannot recover your email address when you post in the comments section. Of course, if you give your email address or other identifying information within the post itself, I can respond that way, but some correspondents failed to do that, or are reluctant to post their email address in a public location.
So in the future, please feel free to post comments either anonymously or with identifying information within the post. But if you expect an individual response from me, please either include your email in the post, or email me directly at kdstephan@txstate.edu. Thank you.
That is not the case. The system does not reveal to me the email addresses of anyone who sends in a comment. So to those readers who sent me queries or requests via the comment section, I apologize for not responding and for not posting my email address. You probably think by now that I'm one of those arrogant bloggers who's too busy to respond to individual inquiries. I assure you that this is not the case; I simply cannot recover your email address when you post in the comments section. Of course, if you give your email address or other identifying information within the post itself, I can respond that way, but some correspondents failed to do that, or are reluctant to post their email address in a public location.
So in the future, please feel free to post comments either anonymously or with identifying information within the post. But if you expect an individual response from me, please either include your email in the post, or email me directly at kdstephan@txstate.edu. Thank you.
Monday, September 22, 2008
What Is Distributism, and Why Should Engineers Care?
Engineering is an unavoidably economic activity, since it always involves applying knowledge to achieve an end within the constraint of limited resources. Engineers have worked under every kind of economic system from radical Communism to the nearly unrestrained free market of places like Singapore. There seems to be a growing consensus that the only kind of economic system with a future is free-market capitalism, which even the leaders of the Peoples' Republic of China have embraced. I will now take moment during this more-than-usually-political season to introduce you to a system that is more than economics and really more than politics, but would profoundly change both if it was adopted seriously. It is a third alternative to capitalism or socialism which almost no one has heard of: distributism.
Historically, distributism was the way most economies operated in most parts of the world for centuries until the rise of the mercantile states in the seventeenth century, when capitalism began to take its modern form. Then socialism arose as an attempt to correct the flaws of capitalism, but sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. Both capitalism and socialism share many concepts in common, including the philosophical assumption that man is Homo economicus: that is, the most important thing about man is his economic activity and behavior. Socialism puts the government in charge of the economy and capitalism bows to the free market, but both systems assume that when you have solved the economic problem, you have solved the most important problems.
Distributism, which had its heyday in England in the 1930s, starts from a different place altogether. It says that the economy was made for man, and not man for the economy.
Here's a little quiz: how many of the following items do you find appealing? Never mind how they would come about, just react positively or negatively to each:
--- Working at home, rather than in an office at the end of a long commute
--- Eating fresh fruits and vegetables you grew yourself or bought from a local farmer
--- Owning your own business
--- Being better off economically for having children rather than the reverse
--- Buying things made and sold by people who live in your neighborhood
None of these things are impossible or cloud-cuckoo-land pipe dreams. Millions of Americans enjoy one or more of them every day. All these things, and more that space doesn't allow me to list, are pieces of a distributist program that would encourage movement toward the wider distribution of ownership of productive property. That is distributism in a nutshell.
Where would engineers fit in a distributist economy? That is a good question, but one I would have to take time off and write a book about to answer adequately. Because large-scale capitalism is so deeply entrenched worldwide, most engineers work for firms that are either large multinationals themselves or depend on them. It is silly to pretend that you could take a multi-billion-dollar semiconductor foundry and turn it into dozens of little mom-and-pop IC plants spread all over the world. But it may seem silly simply because no one has thought along those lines for decades.
Many technical innovations that have taken place since the 1930s are potentially very friendly to a distributist economy. For instance, before the advent of the Internet it was impossible for a three-person company with limited capital to do worldwide marketing of any kind. There were simply no advertising media that such a small company could afford. Now all it takes is a website and maybe some translation software, and there you are. Already many firms are outsourcing specific engineering functions to private contractors, although in a haphazard way motivated by capitalistic concerns rather than other factors. The profession of engineering itself began largely as a group of quasi-independent professionals with what amounted to consulting practices, rather than as large staffs of wage-earning employees, which is the norm today.
These are idle musings at this point, admittedly, but the point is that bigger is not always better, and more means exist today to make small, owner-operated engineering firms viable than possibly ever before. There will always be a need for large organizations to deal with large projects such as aerospace programs, public works, and so on. But they need not be the rule-–one day they could be the rare exception in a distributist economy, in which most engineers would work either for themselves or in small local firms.
After decades of neglect, distributism is now seeing something of a renaissance, with books and websites showing up with some regularity. One of distributism's most prominent early exponents was the British author G. K. Chesterton, whose writings on distributism (The Outline of Sanity, Utopia of Usurers) are easier to find than some others. Wendell Berry, an author and farmer associated with what is known as the Southern Agrarian movement, takes positions that are often sympathetic with distributist principles. The Amish, who are often thought to eschew all forms of technology, actually take advantage of certain carefully chosen modern technologies, but only after carefully considering how its use will affect their individual and communal life.
You will probably never see a distributist candidate for President or a Distributist Party playing power politics. It is inherently a small-scale, local movement, but for that reason it can be much easier to live a practical distributist life here and now, in some ways, than it is to become an instant successful capitalist, for instance. If you think my treatment of distributism has been wacky and out of place, I promise not to bring it up again at least till after the November elections. But it's not impossible to imagine engineers doing well and doing good in a distributist economy as well as in the one we have now. And maybe, just maybe, things might be better than they are.
Sources: Books such as Distributist Perspectives I and II and Beyond Capitalism and Socialism are available from IHS Press (www.ihspress.com), which also publishes other works of Catholic social thought, where distributism finds many of its origins. On the web there are peppery blogs and information on distributism to be found in The Distributist Review at http://www.distributism.blogspot.com. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine carried an excellent article by Jameson Wetmore on the Amish and their attitude toward technology in its Summer 2007 issue, pp. 10-21.
Historically, distributism was the way most economies operated in most parts of the world for centuries until the rise of the mercantile states in the seventeenth century, when capitalism began to take its modern form. Then socialism arose as an attempt to correct the flaws of capitalism, but sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. Both capitalism and socialism share many concepts in common, including the philosophical assumption that man is Homo economicus: that is, the most important thing about man is his economic activity and behavior. Socialism puts the government in charge of the economy and capitalism bows to the free market, but both systems assume that when you have solved the economic problem, you have solved the most important problems.
Distributism, which had its heyday in England in the 1930s, starts from a different place altogether. It says that the economy was made for man, and not man for the economy.
Here's a little quiz: how many of the following items do you find appealing? Never mind how they would come about, just react positively or negatively to each:
--- Working at home, rather than in an office at the end of a long commute
--- Eating fresh fruits and vegetables you grew yourself or bought from a local farmer
--- Owning your own business
--- Being better off economically for having children rather than the reverse
--- Buying things made and sold by people who live in your neighborhood
None of these things are impossible or cloud-cuckoo-land pipe dreams. Millions of Americans enjoy one or more of them every day. All these things, and more that space doesn't allow me to list, are pieces of a distributist program that would encourage movement toward the wider distribution of ownership of productive property. That is distributism in a nutshell.
Where would engineers fit in a distributist economy? That is a good question, but one I would have to take time off and write a book about to answer adequately. Because large-scale capitalism is so deeply entrenched worldwide, most engineers work for firms that are either large multinationals themselves or depend on them. It is silly to pretend that you could take a multi-billion-dollar semiconductor foundry and turn it into dozens of little mom-and-pop IC plants spread all over the world. But it may seem silly simply because no one has thought along those lines for decades.
Many technical innovations that have taken place since the 1930s are potentially very friendly to a distributist economy. For instance, before the advent of the Internet it was impossible for a three-person company with limited capital to do worldwide marketing of any kind. There were simply no advertising media that such a small company could afford. Now all it takes is a website and maybe some translation software, and there you are. Already many firms are outsourcing specific engineering functions to private contractors, although in a haphazard way motivated by capitalistic concerns rather than other factors. The profession of engineering itself began largely as a group of quasi-independent professionals with what amounted to consulting practices, rather than as large staffs of wage-earning employees, which is the norm today.
These are idle musings at this point, admittedly, but the point is that bigger is not always better, and more means exist today to make small, owner-operated engineering firms viable than possibly ever before. There will always be a need for large organizations to deal with large projects such as aerospace programs, public works, and so on. But they need not be the rule-–one day they could be the rare exception in a distributist economy, in which most engineers would work either for themselves or in small local firms.
After decades of neglect, distributism is now seeing something of a renaissance, with books and websites showing up with some regularity. One of distributism's most prominent early exponents was the British author G. K. Chesterton, whose writings on distributism (The Outline of Sanity, Utopia of Usurers) are easier to find than some others. Wendell Berry, an author and farmer associated with what is known as the Southern Agrarian movement, takes positions that are often sympathetic with distributist principles. The Amish, who are often thought to eschew all forms of technology, actually take advantage of certain carefully chosen modern technologies, but only after carefully considering how its use will affect their individual and communal life.
You will probably never see a distributist candidate for President or a Distributist Party playing power politics. It is inherently a small-scale, local movement, but for that reason it can be much easier to live a practical distributist life here and now, in some ways, than it is to become an instant successful capitalist, for instance. If you think my treatment of distributism has been wacky and out of place, I promise not to bring it up again at least till after the November elections. But it's not impossible to imagine engineers doing well and doing good in a distributist economy as well as in the one we have now. And maybe, just maybe, things might be better than they are.
Sources: Books such as Distributist Perspectives I and II and Beyond Capitalism and Socialism are available from IHS Press (www.ihspress.com), which also publishes other works of Catholic social thought, where distributism finds many of its origins. On the web there are peppery blogs and information on distributism to be found in The Distributist Review at http://www.distributism.blogspot.com. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine carried an excellent article by Jameson Wetmore on the Amish and their attitude toward technology in its Summer 2007 issue, pp. 10-21.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Will Peers Process Patents Perspicaciously?
Well, once you get on one of those alliteration kicks, it's hard to stop. This is a story about a big problem with the U. S. patent system, which is of concern to any engineer whose work is valuable enough to patent. And, about one small attempt to make it better.
For some years now, there has been general agreement that the patent system has major flaws. Basically, it's too easy to get a bad patent, and too easy to clog the legal system with patent lawsuits that never should have been started in the first place, based on overly-broad patents that never should have been issued. Partly because it's so easy, more patents are being filed every year, but the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) can't keep up—it now takes an average of more than two years to get a patent. And since many technologies such as software engineering come up with a whole new generation of products every few months or so, the patent system starts to look like a glacier stuck up on a mountain while a flood of water rushes by in the valley.
Part of the problem is that there aren't enough good patent examiners. Those are the government folks who pass judgment on whether a patent should be granted or not. The ideal patent examiner has advanced degrees in both law and a technical field, plus the patience and incorruptibility of a good detective. Such people have never been easy to find, and attracting them with a government pay scale is even harder. Faced with the rising flood of patents, patent examiners nowadays err on the side of generosity, allowing all sorts of patents through which in more rigorous days would have been tossed out. But to toss out a patent you need a good reason such as a citation of "prior art," and apparently doing a thorough job in that area is simply not something the patent office can handle very well anymore.
A recent news article highlights an attempt to improve the situation with something called Peer-to-Patent, a collaboration between the USPTO and New York Law School professor Beth Noveck. She has set up a website at which ordinary citizens (you or I included) can review selected patent applications, read and interpret the claims, cite prior art, and in short, pretend you are a patent examiner. If the "community" of volunteer examiners votes to forward your citations to the patent office, one of them may make a Top Ten list that actually gets used in the patent, if it gets issued, or more likely denied if your prior-art citation is a good one.
I viewed the little video on the site that gives an overview of the process. While it puts the best face on the matter, even my passing familiarity with patents (I have managed to obtain a couple over the years) tells me that to do a good job on just one application would require a good bit more work than it takes to do your average income-tax form, if not more. When I read about the Peer-to-Patent idea, my first question was, "Why would anybody bother to donate several hours of their highly marketable expertise to such a thing?" and after looking at the website, my first question remains unanswered.
As a practical matter, the only people I can imagine who would want to fool with this and devote the serious amount of work it would take, would be rivals of the inventors who made the original application, who are of course highly motivated to see it fail. If you translate this idea to a more familiar setting, I think you can see its problems better. Suppose you sue your neighbor for building a corner of his garage on your property. And suppose the judge in the civil suit, instead of hearing testimony from duly sworn-in experts such as surveyors and land-title experts, opens a website, posts the records of the case on line, and invites all and sundry to make comments, without even requiring them to give their real names. (The Peer-to-Patent website doesn't require real names, although it is recommended that you not hide behind an alias.) Who is the person most motivated to get online and trash your side of the case? Your neighbor, of course, or maybe his lawyer.
The analogy is not exact, but it does seem to me that by asking for "volunteers" to put in such a large amount of work—effort that the government can't seem to be able to hire on the open market—the site automatically selects only for the people who have the greatest motivation to criticize an application—that is, rivals of the original applicant who would dearly love to see it fail. And maybe that's exactly what Prof. Noveck is trying to do. But if that's the case, it seems more than a little hypocritical to just pretend that the volunteers are random, public-spirited citizens whose only motivation is the honor of having one of their prior-art citations selected for use by the USPTO. I mean, wouldn't that send you into orbit for weeks? Maybe there are some people like that, but I'm not optimistic that they'll be coming out of the woodwork to make the Peer-to-Patent idea succeed.
You have to give the USPTO and the New York Law School credit for trying something. The other day I heard a review of a rather cynical book by a fellow who says that the real motivation for Republicans who gain control of the federal government is to make it run so badly that people will lose faith in it, and not complain when it eventually withers away to the small government of many decades ago. I sincerely hope he's wrong about that, since if he's right we have been watching institutionalized hypocrisy in action for a long time. But weird ideas like this Peer-to-Patent business make me wonder. Maybe I'm wrong and Peer-to-Patent will be the answer to many of the USPTO's problems. But we'll have to wait a while to see.
Sources: The Associated Press article on Peer-to-Patent by Joelle Tessler was carried by many papers, including the Baltimore Sun on Sept. 15 at http://www.baltimoresun.com/technology/bal-patent0915,0,1444023.story. The USPTO's main website is http://www.uspto.gov, and the Peer-to-Patent website is http://www.peertopatent.org.
For some years now, there has been general agreement that the patent system has major flaws. Basically, it's too easy to get a bad patent, and too easy to clog the legal system with patent lawsuits that never should have been started in the first place, based on overly-broad patents that never should have been issued. Partly because it's so easy, more patents are being filed every year, but the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) can't keep up—it now takes an average of more than two years to get a patent. And since many technologies such as software engineering come up with a whole new generation of products every few months or so, the patent system starts to look like a glacier stuck up on a mountain while a flood of water rushes by in the valley.
Part of the problem is that there aren't enough good patent examiners. Those are the government folks who pass judgment on whether a patent should be granted or not. The ideal patent examiner has advanced degrees in both law and a technical field, plus the patience and incorruptibility of a good detective. Such people have never been easy to find, and attracting them with a government pay scale is even harder. Faced with the rising flood of patents, patent examiners nowadays err on the side of generosity, allowing all sorts of patents through which in more rigorous days would have been tossed out. But to toss out a patent you need a good reason such as a citation of "prior art," and apparently doing a thorough job in that area is simply not something the patent office can handle very well anymore.
A recent news article highlights an attempt to improve the situation with something called Peer-to-Patent, a collaboration between the USPTO and New York Law School professor Beth Noveck. She has set up a website at which ordinary citizens (you or I included) can review selected patent applications, read and interpret the claims, cite prior art, and in short, pretend you are a patent examiner. If the "community" of volunteer examiners votes to forward your citations to the patent office, one of them may make a Top Ten list that actually gets used in the patent, if it gets issued, or more likely denied if your prior-art citation is a good one.
I viewed the little video on the site that gives an overview of the process. While it puts the best face on the matter, even my passing familiarity with patents (I have managed to obtain a couple over the years) tells me that to do a good job on just one application would require a good bit more work than it takes to do your average income-tax form, if not more. When I read about the Peer-to-Patent idea, my first question was, "Why would anybody bother to donate several hours of their highly marketable expertise to such a thing?" and after looking at the website, my first question remains unanswered.
As a practical matter, the only people I can imagine who would want to fool with this and devote the serious amount of work it would take, would be rivals of the inventors who made the original application, who are of course highly motivated to see it fail. If you translate this idea to a more familiar setting, I think you can see its problems better. Suppose you sue your neighbor for building a corner of his garage on your property. And suppose the judge in the civil suit, instead of hearing testimony from duly sworn-in experts such as surveyors and land-title experts, opens a website, posts the records of the case on line, and invites all and sundry to make comments, without even requiring them to give their real names. (The Peer-to-Patent website doesn't require real names, although it is recommended that you not hide behind an alias.) Who is the person most motivated to get online and trash your side of the case? Your neighbor, of course, or maybe his lawyer.
The analogy is not exact, but it does seem to me that by asking for "volunteers" to put in such a large amount of work—effort that the government can't seem to be able to hire on the open market—the site automatically selects only for the people who have the greatest motivation to criticize an application—that is, rivals of the original applicant who would dearly love to see it fail. And maybe that's exactly what Prof. Noveck is trying to do. But if that's the case, it seems more than a little hypocritical to just pretend that the volunteers are random, public-spirited citizens whose only motivation is the honor of having one of their prior-art citations selected for use by the USPTO. I mean, wouldn't that send you into orbit for weeks? Maybe there are some people like that, but I'm not optimistic that they'll be coming out of the woodwork to make the Peer-to-Patent idea succeed.
You have to give the USPTO and the New York Law School credit for trying something. The other day I heard a review of a rather cynical book by a fellow who says that the real motivation for Republicans who gain control of the federal government is to make it run so badly that people will lose faith in it, and not complain when it eventually withers away to the small government of many decades ago. I sincerely hope he's wrong about that, since if he's right we have been watching institutionalized hypocrisy in action for a long time. But weird ideas like this Peer-to-Patent business make me wonder. Maybe I'm wrong and Peer-to-Patent will be the answer to many of the USPTO's problems. But we'll have to wait a while to see.
Sources: The Associated Press article on Peer-to-Patent by Joelle Tessler was carried by many papers, including the Baltimore Sun on Sept. 15 at http://www.baltimoresun.com/technology/bal-patent0915,0,1444023.story. The USPTO's main website is http://www.uspto.gov, and the Peer-to-Patent website is http://www.peertopatent.org.
Monday, September 08, 2008
War Comes to the Internet
When Russian troops attacked the Georgian province of South Ossetia last August 8, tanks and guns weren't the only weapons they were using. Starting in July, websites operated by the Georgian government suffered repeated attacks that intensified when the war on the ground started, and continued for days afterwards. The cyber-attacks took the form of distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) assaults in which hundreds or thousands of "bot" computers make so many synchronized requests to a website that it crashes, and shuts out legitimate users. The bots can be owned by unwitting users who may not even know their computer is being shanghaied for nefarious purposes. This is one of the first times when a cyber-attack was coordinated with a real war. But it's likely that it won't be the last. Of course, the Russian government denies all involvement, but it's easy to hide behind anonymous websites in cases like this.
War has always been one of the main incentives in advances of technology. And conversely, advances in technology—high-tech factories, communications centers, and military installations—become the target of wartime attacks, precisely because they are so valuable. So we shouldn't be surprised that as the Internet becomes an increasingly important part of a nation's infrastructure, war spills over into cyberspace too. More than ever, the engineering and software development that goes into vital Internet services such as banking, military communications, and public-safety coordination now needs to include some consideration of the possibility that terrorists or others with malign intent may mount a DDoS-type attack on them.
Fortunately, judging by the general level of reliability of these services, nothing like what happened to the Web in Georgia has happened here—yet. So far, terrorists have gone in mostly for the big splashy bombings that make gory headlines all over the world. But times and tactics change. As software expertise becomes more widespread in more parts of the world, terrorists or other nations may accumulate the expertise needed for a truly effective assault on the Internet infrastructure. It wouldn't have the drama or bloodiness of a bombing, but it might affect a lot more people, and for that reason alone it might prove more effective than a bomb thrown here or there.
The fact that such an attack hasn't happened yet says one of two things. Either our level of defenses against such attacks are so high that such attacks are not worth the effort, or else the people who would like to cause us problems simply haven't bothered to mount a major attack.
The trouble with knowing how much to spend on preparing for war is that the only way you know for sure that you didn't spend enough, is that you lose. And by then, it's too late. There will always be a measure of uncertainty in trying to answer the question, "Are we safe against a hostile Internet-based military attack?" But lower-level attacks by freelance blackmailers are always happening somewhere or other, and while deplorable, they do furnish a good testing ground for defenses against a larger attack.
As happened with the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks, we may not find out the true extent of our Internet vulnerability until something really serious takes place. Sometimes it takes a major disaster to muster the political and technical will to do what should have been done a long time earlier.
And while attention is focused on software, we shouldn't forget that the Internet relies on physical fiber-optic cables whose routings and switch points are fairly well known. Every now and then some stray bulldozer takes out the main cable between San Marcos and Austin, and for a day or so our local Internet service is disrupted, or used to be. While it would take a lot more coordination than even the 9/11 attacks, you can imagine that a determined group of terrorists could fan out to remote unprotected areas and simultaneously slice the backbone cables that carry the bulk of domestic Internet traffic. It would take several days to fix that, and in the meantime our economy would suffer a serious hit.
Well, let's hope that none of these dismal speculations comes to pass. Like it or not, the Internet is an integral part of our lives now. And anyone who wants to disrupt it has only to try from the safety of their hideouts halfway across the world. But when or if they do, it will fall to the engineers and technicians who have made the Internet what it is to make sure that the thing keeps running.
Sources: An Agence France-Presse story on the Georgian cyber-attacks can be found at http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iRuGsssizXAKVgmPqAXOxqB5uHsQ.
War has always been one of the main incentives in advances of technology. And conversely, advances in technology—high-tech factories, communications centers, and military installations—become the target of wartime attacks, precisely because they are so valuable. So we shouldn't be surprised that as the Internet becomes an increasingly important part of a nation's infrastructure, war spills over into cyberspace too. More than ever, the engineering and software development that goes into vital Internet services such as banking, military communications, and public-safety coordination now needs to include some consideration of the possibility that terrorists or others with malign intent may mount a DDoS-type attack on them.
Fortunately, judging by the general level of reliability of these services, nothing like what happened to the Web in Georgia has happened here—yet. So far, terrorists have gone in mostly for the big splashy bombings that make gory headlines all over the world. But times and tactics change. As software expertise becomes more widespread in more parts of the world, terrorists or other nations may accumulate the expertise needed for a truly effective assault on the Internet infrastructure. It wouldn't have the drama or bloodiness of a bombing, but it might affect a lot more people, and for that reason alone it might prove more effective than a bomb thrown here or there.
The fact that such an attack hasn't happened yet says one of two things. Either our level of defenses against such attacks are so high that such attacks are not worth the effort, or else the people who would like to cause us problems simply haven't bothered to mount a major attack.
The trouble with knowing how much to spend on preparing for war is that the only way you know for sure that you didn't spend enough, is that you lose. And by then, it's too late. There will always be a measure of uncertainty in trying to answer the question, "Are we safe against a hostile Internet-based military attack?" But lower-level attacks by freelance blackmailers are always happening somewhere or other, and while deplorable, they do furnish a good testing ground for defenses against a larger attack.
As happened with the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks, we may not find out the true extent of our Internet vulnerability until something really serious takes place. Sometimes it takes a major disaster to muster the political and technical will to do what should have been done a long time earlier.
And while attention is focused on software, we shouldn't forget that the Internet relies on physical fiber-optic cables whose routings and switch points are fairly well known. Every now and then some stray bulldozer takes out the main cable between San Marcos and Austin, and for a day or so our local Internet service is disrupted, or used to be. While it would take a lot more coordination than even the 9/11 attacks, you can imagine that a determined group of terrorists could fan out to remote unprotected areas and simultaneously slice the backbone cables that carry the bulk of domestic Internet traffic. It would take several days to fix that, and in the meantime our economy would suffer a serious hit.
Well, let's hope that none of these dismal speculations comes to pass. Like it or not, the Internet is an integral part of our lives now. And anyone who wants to disrupt it has only to try from the safety of their hideouts halfway across the world. But when or if they do, it will fall to the engineers and technicians who have made the Internet what it is to make sure that the thing keeps running.
Sources: An Agence France-Presse story on the Georgian cyber-attacks can be found at http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iRuGsssizXAKVgmPqAXOxqB5uHsQ.
Monday, September 01, 2008
Did Design Flaws Doom the Minneapolis Bridge?
I don't pretend to do breaking news in this blog, although timely events do make it in here on occasion. A little over a year ago, on Aug. 1, 2007, to be exact, a major bridge carrying I-35W over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed, killing 13 motorists and drawing attention to the generally poor state of highway infrastructure nationwide. At the time, there was speculation that neglected maintenance might have been a factor in the collapse. But last January, the National Transportation Safety Board issued an interim report which pointed to a design flaw as the possible culprit. The final accident report is due out in November, but the interim report sheds a lot of light on the issue already.
Here are some details. The bridge was an example of a truss design that was popular in the 1960s. The trusses used in the ill-fated bridge were made of steel beams that formed triangular shapes and converged at joints that were held together by gusset plates. Gusset plates are like the slices of bread on either side of a sandwich whose meat is the ends of the steel beams that you're tying together at the joints. The bridge builders fasten the beams to the gusset plates to make the joints secure. As you might imagine, the weight of the vehicular traffic plus the dead weight of the bridge itself and any wind forces, etc. all factored into the forces that these gusset plates had to deal with.
Figuring out all those forces is the job of civil engineers, and although the calculations are detailed and tedious, there is nothing involved that requires the genius of the proverbial rocket scientist. The NTSB people have laboriously recalculated the loads for all the gusset plates on the bridge, and using standards and assumptions current at the time the bridge was built, they found that most of the gusset plate designs (there are eight actual plates in each location) were done right. That is, the gusset plates were thick enough to have enough "capacity" to meet the "demand" that the bridge loads imposed. The report is written in terms of "demand/capacity ratios." If the calculated capacity of a plate to deal with loads is exactly equal to the demand placed on it, you have a demand/capacity ratio of one. Since all these calculations have some margin of error, it doesn't mean that the instant you go to a demand/capacity ratio of 1.1 the thing will bust. But generally, you want most of the items in your bridge to be capable of meeting more demand than they actually will have in practice—that is, a demand/capacity ratio of less than one is desirable. A 1.1 here and there won't be fatal, necessarily, but 1.5 or higher is not a good idea.
Well, somebody back in the sixties must have put some kind of thought like this into the design, because most of the gusset plates with higher demand were thicker, just like they should have been, and had reasonable demand/capacity ratios. To save money and fabrication time, the plates with less stress on them were made thinner, and most notably the set of eight plates designated "U10," near the middle of the bridge. The NTSB engineers calculated three different kinds of loads that were imposed on the plates: shear, principal tension, and principal compression. The U10 plates were the only ones that had a demand/capacity ratio of 1.5 or greater in all three kinds of loads. And the NTSB's study of the wreckage showed that all eight of those gusset plates had popped during, or more likely at the beginning of, the collapse.
You may recall that there was some heavy construction equipment on the bridge at the time. It begins to look like the I-35W bridge was a marginal design that somehow made it through forty years on the edge of safety, only to have a combination of factors topple it into the river last year.
We will have to wait for the full accident report to be released in November to know more. But in its conservative engineering way, the NTSB has shown that age or maintenance may not have had as much to do with the collapse as we thought at first. This shows how errors in engineering judgment can lie dormant for decades before bearing their bitter fruit, to borrow a phrase from the old "Shadow" radio program (no, I'm not quite that old, but I've heard recordings).
We may never know exactly what the designers were thinking when they designed this detail of the bridge, because evidently the Minnesota Department of Transportation doesn't have any records of the consulting firm's calculations for the gusset plates. It might have been a case of rushing a job, or a simple error of some kind. The engineers who actually performed the initial design may be dead, or retired, or otherwise unlocatable. And finding them or suing their firm is beside the point, in a way. Certainly, legal measures are one way to deal with this sort of thing. But a better use of resources, to my mind at least, is to include this story in civil engineering classes and textbooks as a lesson in how not to do it.
Sources: An article describing the news conference at which the NTSB issued its preliminary report can be found at http://www.designnews.com/article/1790-Design_Flaw_Identified_in_Minnesota_Bridge_Collapse.php. The NTSB's interim report no. 383930 can be downloaded at the NTSB docket website http://www.ntsb.gov/dockets/Highway/HWY07MH024/default.htm. My thanks to Michael Sherry for drawing my attention to this report.
Here are some details. The bridge was an example of a truss design that was popular in the 1960s. The trusses used in the ill-fated bridge were made of steel beams that formed triangular shapes and converged at joints that were held together by gusset plates. Gusset plates are like the slices of bread on either side of a sandwich whose meat is the ends of the steel beams that you're tying together at the joints. The bridge builders fasten the beams to the gusset plates to make the joints secure. As you might imagine, the weight of the vehicular traffic plus the dead weight of the bridge itself and any wind forces, etc. all factored into the forces that these gusset plates had to deal with.
Figuring out all those forces is the job of civil engineers, and although the calculations are detailed and tedious, there is nothing involved that requires the genius of the proverbial rocket scientist. The NTSB people have laboriously recalculated the loads for all the gusset plates on the bridge, and using standards and assumptions current at the time the bridge was built, they found that most of the gusset plate designs (there are eight actual plates in each location) were done right. That is, the gusset plates were thick enough to have enough "capacity" to meet the "demand" that the bridge loads imposed. The report is written in terms of "demand/capacity ratios." If the calculated capacity of a plate to deal with loads is exactly equal to the demand placed on it, you have a demand/capacity ratio of one. Since all these calculations have some margin of error, it doesn't mean that the instant you go to a demand/capacity ratio of 1.1 the thing will bust. But generally, you want most of the items in your bridge to be capable of meeting more demand than they actually will have in practice—that is, a demand/capacity ratio of less than one is desirable. A 1.1 here and there won't be fatal, necessarily, but 1.5 or higher is not a good idea.
Well, somebody back in the sixties must have put some kind of thought like this into the design, because most of the gusset plates with higher demand were thicker, just like they should have been, and had reasonable demand/capacity ratios. To save money and fabrication time, the plates with less stress on them were made thinner, and most notably the set of eight plates designated "U10," near the middle of the bridge. The NTSB engineers calculated three different kinds of loads that were imposed on the plates: shear, principal tension, and principal compression. The U10 plates were the only ones that had a demand/capacity ratio of 1.5 or greater in all three kinds of loads. And the NTSB's study of the wreckage showed that all eight of those gusset plates had popped during, or more likely at the beginning of, the collapse.
You may recall that there was some heavy construction equipment on the bridge at the time. It begins to look like the I-35W bridge was a marginal design that somehow made it through forty years on the edge of safety, only to have a combination of factors topple it into the river last year.
We will have to wait for the full accident report to be released in November to know more. But in its conservative engineering way, the NTSB has shown that age or maintenance may not have had as much to do with the collapse as we thought at first. This shows how errors in engineering judgment can lie dormant for decades before bearing their bitter fruit, to borrow a phrase from the old "Shadow" radio program (no, I'm not quite that old, but I've heard recordings).
We may never know exactly what the designers were thinking when they designed this detail of the bridge, because evidently the Minnesota Department of Transportation doesn't have any records of the consulting firm's calculations for the gusset plates. It might have been a case of rushing a job, or a simple error of some kind. The engineers who actually performed the initial design may be dead, or retired, or otherwise unlocatable. And finding them or suing their firm is beside the point, in a way. Certainly, legal measures are one way to deal with this sort of thing. But a better use of resources, to my mind at least, is to include this story in civil engineering classes and textbooks as a lesson in how not to do it.
Sources: An article describing the news conference at which the NTSB issued its preliminary report can be found at http://www.designnews.com/article/1790-Design_Flaw_Identified_in_Minnesota_Bridge_Collapse.php. The NTSB's interim report no. 383930 can be downloaded at the NTSB docket website http://www.ntsb.gov/dockets/Highway/HWY07MH024/default.htm. My thanks to Michael Sherry for drawing my attention to this report.
Monday, August 25, 2008
RFID and Privacy: A Spy In Your Pants?
A few days ago, I found out that my university ID card has an RFID chip in it. A new floor of our building has labs equipped with RFID locks on the doors: little black boxes that light up red or green when you pass the right card next to them. I figured I'd have to go get some special new key fob or other to use the locks, but I was told, "Just hold your ID card near it." I did, and open sesame! I didn't even have to take the card out of my wallet. Some guys, like technicians with an armload of equipment, will just do the "butt-pass"—twist around so their back pocket gets close enough, and they're in.
This discovery aroused mixed emotions. I'm glad I don't have to go get any special new card, but on the other hand, why didn't anybody tell me that chip was in there? And what else could it be used for?
Turns out that these are not idle questions. In a special issue on privacy, this month's Scientific American carries an article by Katherine Albrecht, who heads an organization called Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN, for short). We are entering an era in which RFID chips—little inexpensive transponders that spit out data-bearing radio waves to a properly equipped interrogation unit—are spreading like fleas on a dog. Think of RFIDs as a kind of wireless barcode on steroids. Barcodes have to be out in the open to be scanned, and the data they convey is limited to the few numbers of the bar code. But you can attach an RFID chip to an entire pallet of goods in a warehouse, and as a forklift carries the pallet past an interrogator in the doorway, the inventory control system learns that everything on the pallet has gone out the door—no manual scanning.
The financial and logistical advantages of this sort of thing are obvious to shippers, warehousemen, and supermarkets, in fact retailers of almost anything. So RFID chips are popping up in a lot of places.
So where's the beef? One of the places they're showing up is in identification documents such as passports, private and institutional ID cards (such as my university card), and even driver's licenses. Several states, including Washington, Arizona, Michigan, and Vermont, are making such "enhanced" driver's license cards available. Is there any potential drawback to this? It turns out that the type of technology most states are adopting is the same basic kind that is used in warehouses. So anybody with the right equipment can read the data off the chip—according to Albrecht, there is no encryption involved, unlike a different RFID standard prevalent in Europe which includes encryption.
Well, engineers like to think of worst-case scenarios, so here goes my attempt. Say I have an enhanced driver's license with an RFID chip in it. Driver's license numbers are no big secret anymore—you're asked for them any time you write a check, typically. So here I am, wandering around the hardware store, and without speaking to a soul, without picking up a single item, an RFID sensor can figure out who I am, what aisle I'm in, call up my complete purchase record at that store (and maybe other kinds of stores too, for all I know), and figure out exactly what kind of stuff they ought to try to sell to me. I don't know about you, but I'm not sure I like this idea.
Now the way you react may say something about how old you are. Younger people, to whom YouTube, MySpace, and Flickr are just another part of life, tend to have different notions about privacy than older people do. You might feel pleased or special if a salesperson comes up and offers you stuff that is specially tailored to your past purchases. My main encounter with this kind of thing so far is on Amazon.com, which is constantly making wild guesses as to what kind of books I'd like to read, based on the books I've bought in the past. Most of the time its offers are either laughable or annoying, but every once in a while they hit on something good. All in all, though, I would not miss this feature a bit.
We are talking about what some would term an invasion of privacy. Privacy is a right without much of a historical pedigree, it turns out. The Wikipedia article on it says that the first serious consideration of a legal right to privacy was published in the U. S. only in 1890. Before then, it was so hard to duplicate and spread information that the question of personal privacy rarely arose. But now with the tap of a keystroke, you can spread intensely private information to millions of people worldwide. And with an unencrypted RFID chip on your person that has data such as your social security number, driver's license number, or (as an RFID card that China is reportedly trying to implement has), your religion, ethnicity, employment record, and how many kids you have, why, you've turned into one of those pathological bean-spillers that late-night bus-riders fear to encounter—the kind of person who will dump their most intimate secrets onto the first stranger who won't get up and run away. I don't know about you, but I don't want to be that kind of person, either by word of mouth or electronically.
What is the alternative? Effective regulation is one, either direct regulation of the kind and amount of data that can be put on RFID cards, requiring the data to be encrypted somehow, or even simpler things such as labels telling consumers that products have RFID tags on them. Trouble is, the public awareness of this technology is so low that labels would probably just arouse confusion or fear. A little fear can be a good thing. But knowledge is even better. Consider whether you should inform yourself more about RFID technology, and make up your own mind about what kind of information you want to be giving away without ever knowing about it.
Sources: Katherine Albrecht's article "RFID Tag—You're It" appears in the September 2008 issue of Scientific American. CASPIAN operates websites www.spychips.com and www.nocards.org. Also see my blog "I Spend, Therefore I'm Spied Upon?" for Jan. 11, 2007.
This discovery aroused mixed emotions. I'm glad I don't have to go get any special new card, but on the other hand, why didn't anybody tell me that chip was in there? And what else could it be used for?
Turns out that these are not idle questions. In a special issue on privacy, this month's Scientific American carries an article by Katherine Albrecht, who heads an organization called Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN, for short). We are entering an era in which RFID chips—little inexpensive transponders that spit out data-bearing radio waves to a properly equipped interrogation unit—are spreading like fleas on a dog. Think of RFIDs as a kind of wireless barcode on steroids. Barcodes have to be out in the open to be scanned, and the data they convey is limited to the few numbers of the bar code. But you can attach an RFID chip to an entire pallet of goods in a warehouse, and as a forklift carries the pallet past an interrogator in the doorway, the inventory control system learns that everything on the pallet has gone out the door—no manual scanning.
The financial and logistical advantages of this sort of thing are obvious to shippers, warehousemen, and supermarkets, in fact retailers of almost anything. So RFID chips are popping up in a lot of places.
So where's the beef? One of the places they're showing up is in identification documents such as passports, private and institutional ID cards (such as my university card), and even driver's licenses. Several states, including Washington, Arizona, Michigan, and Vermont, are making such "enhanced" driver's license cards available. Is there any potential drawback to this? It turns out that the type of technology most states are adopting is the same basic kind that is used in warehouses. So anybody with the right equipment can read the data off the chip—according to Albrecht, there is no encryption involved, unlike a different RFID standard prevalent in Europe which includes encryption.
Well, engineers like to think of worst-case scenarios, so here goes my attempt. Say I have an enhanced driver's license with an RFID chip in it. Driver's license numbers are no big secret anymore—you're asked for them any time you write a check, typically. So here I am, wandering around the hardware store, and without speaking to a soul, without picking up a single item, an RFID sensor can figure out who I am, what aisle I'm in, call up my complete purchase record at that store (and maybe other kinds of stores too, for all I know), and figure out exactly what kind of stuff they ought to try to sell to me. I don't know about you, but I'm not sure I like this idea.
Now the way you react may say something about how old you are. Younger people, to whom YouTube, MySpace, and Flickr are just another part of life, tend to have different notions about privacy than older people do. You might feel pleased or special if a salesperson comes up and offers you stuff that is specially tailored to your past purchases. My main encounter with this kind of thing so far is on Amazon.com, which is constantly making wild guesses as to what kind of books I'd like to read, based on the books I've bought in the past. Most of the time its offers are either laughable or annoying, but every once in a while they hit on something good. All in all, though, I would not miss this feature a bit.
We are talking about what some would term an invasion of privacy. Privacy is a right without much of a historical pedigree, it turns out. The Wikipedia article on it says that the first serious consideration of a legal right to privacy was published in the U. S. only in 1890. Before then, it was so hard to duplicate and spread information that the question of personal privacy rarely arose. But now with the tap of a keystroke, you can spread intensely private information to millions of people worldwide. And with an unencrypted RFID chip on your person that has data such as your social security number, driver's license number, or (as an RFID card that China is reportedly trying to implement has), your religion, ethnicity, employment record, and how many kids you have, why, you've turned into one of those pathological bean-spillers that late-night bus-riders fear to encounter—the kind of person who will dump their most intimate secrets onto the first stranger who won't get up and run away. I don't know about you, but I don't want to be that kind of person, either by word of mouth or electronically.
What is the alternative? Effective regulation is one, either direct regulation of the kind and amount of data that can be put on RFID cards, requiring the data to be encrypted somehow, or even simpler things such as labels telling consumers that products have RFID tags on them. Trouble is, the public awareness of this technology is so low that labels would probably just arouse confusion or fear. A little fear can be a good thing. But knowledge is even better. Consider whether you should inform yourself more about RFID technology, and make up your own mind about what kind of information you want to be giving away without ever knowing about it.
Sources: Katherine Albrecht's article "RFID Tag—You're It" appears in the September 2008 issue of Scientific American. CASPIAN operates websites www.spychips.com and www.nocards.org. Also see my blog "I Spend, Therefore I'm Spied Upon?" for Jan. 11, 2007.
Monday, August 18, 2008
Electronic Voting: Why or Why Not?
In case you hadn't noticed, we're going to elect a president here in a few months, and that means voting. Eight years ago, the humble machinery used to register ballot counts got dragged into the national spotlight when the Florida presidential election count uncertainties cast doubt on who would be sitting in the Oval Office on Jan. 20, 2001. Reports of hanging chad and other voting-system flaws motivated many local governments (which are the entities that deal with the nitty-gritty of running elections nationwide) to invest in shiny new all-electronic voting systems. But in recent years, there have been questions raised about the reliability and security of these new systems, and reportedly some municipalities are going back to the paper ballot (although still counted by computers).
What are the basic ethical issues in engineering a voting system for use by the general public? And why can't we seem to make up our minds as to which way is best?
First of all, who is involved? Every citizen meeting the legal qualifications to vote has a right to exercise that privilege. So to begin with, you have voters whose right to express their judgment in a democracy is guaranteed by law. Balloting nowadays is also secret (it didn't used to be, incidentally, even in the U. S.), so there has to be some way to ensure privacy in the voting booth.
Next you have the people being elected. They have a right to a reasonably accurate count. Not a perfect count: if we threw out the results of every election that had even one detectable flaw, we'd still be living in a monarchy. But since most elections are not photo-finish ones decided by only a few dozen votes, perfection isn't required, only accuracy that is better than the margin of victory in most cases.
Other interested parties include the election officials, the vendors selling the hardware and software used for voting, and way back in the back rooms of those firms, the engineers who design and develop the voting systems. Though these engineers are invisible to nearly everybody else, they obviously play a key role.
Now that we have identified the main parties to the matter, what can go wrong? Just to make things interesting, let's compare the latest touch-screen voting systems with the totally manual paper ballots that were used, for example, in the 1948 election that put Lyndon B. Johnson in the Senate.
There is a strong, almost intuitive, bias toward paper records in law and politics. Paper and ink are just as technological as computers and software—it's just that paper is an older and more familiar technology. It is integrated in our ways of thinking in ways that digital technology isn't, at least not yet. Plus which, paper systems can be easier to understand, and transparent in a way that software, for instance, is not. Unless a document is written in Urdu, say, or legalese that only a lawyer can decipher, you don't need an expert to read paper, but you do need one to tell what's going on in software.
All that familiarity with paper was of no avail when certain shenanigans went on in certain South Texas voting precincts back in 1948. Johnson biographer Robert Caro has shown how as many as 10,000 ballots in the Democratic primary that effectively determined the election outcome were highly suspect. And in an election that was won by only some 300 votes, that was more than enough to determine the outcome. The point is that, given enough corrupt officials and political pressure in the right places, paper ballots are no sure-fire defense against fraud. But everybody knows that.
With all-electronic voting, not only are people worried that a malevolent hacker working for one party will infest the system software to deliver enough votes to push that party's candidate to victory, but that mistakes or malfunctions will go undetected because without paper records, there is no way for the average non-technical election worker or politician to check the results. The only people who can even come close to doing that are the folks who can look at the software innards of the machines, and even they can't always recover a blow-by-blow description of everything that went on during the voting.
A recent New York Times editorial pointed out three instances in the last few years in which either all-electronic or partly electronic voting systems led to incidents which at least cast doubt on the results. The editorial writers came out with a proposal which is also being seriously studied by engineering researchers: voter-verified paper record systems (VVPRS for short). In these systems, each voter gets to see a piece of paper that reproduces his or her choices, and if the paper doesn't match the voter's desired choices, the voter can start over and do it right. Only when the voter is satisfied does the ballot get recorded, both electronically and on good old cellulose.
Of course, printing out a bunch of paper in addition to doing electronic ballot recording takes away some of the advantages of the digital system, but it's no different than in other areas where computers have found use. I remember the day when Bill Gates said that computers would eventually make the paperless office possible. As I recall, stocks in paper companies plummeted the next day, but the finance types needn't have worried. If anything, we have more paper to deal with than ever, now that it's so easy to print professional-looking documents at the touch of a button. But I digress.
Paper, electronics, white and black stones—fundamentally, voting is a non-material process mediated by physical communication systems, and the physical media used doesn't much matter if the will of the people is adequately expressed through it. Integrity, good will, and common sense makes it work pretty well most of the time, which is all you can expect of human systems. The big scandal about U. S. elections is not the technology, but the fact that so many people pass up the opportunity to vote. Don't let that be true of you this November.
Sources: The New York Times editorial appeared on July 31, 2008 at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/31/opinion/31observer.html. A paper describing a study of a VVPRS electronic voting system by Nirwan Ansari and others at the New Jersey Institute of Technology appeared in IEEE Security and Privacy for May/June 2008, pp. 30-39. And LBJ's South Texas ballot tricks are described in Robert A. Caro's excellent multivolume biography The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
What are the basic ethical issues in engineering a voting system for use by the general public? And why can't we seem to make up our minds as to which way is best?
First of all, who is involved? Every citizen meeting the legal qualifications to vote has a right to exercise that privilege. So to begin with, you have voters whose right to express their judgment in a democracy is guaranteed by law. Balloting nowadays is also secret (it didn't used to be, incidentally, even in the U. S.), so there has to be some way to ensure privacy in the voting booth.
Next you have the people being elected. They have a right to a reasonably accurate count. Not a perfect count: if we threw out the results of every election that had even one detectable flaw, we'd still be living in a monarchy. But since most elections are not photo-finish ones decided by only a few dozen votes, perfection isn't required, only accuracy that is better than the margin of victory in most cases.
Other interested parties include the election officials, the vendors selling the hardware and software used for voting, and way back in the back rooms of those firms, the engineers who design and develop the voting systems. Though these engineers are invisible to nearly everybody else, they obviously play a key role.
Now that we have identified the main parties to the matter, what can go wrong? Just to make things interesting, let's compare the latest touch-screen voting systems with the totally manual paper ballots that were used, for example, in the 1948 election that put Lyndon B. Johnson in the Senate.
There is a strong, almost intuitive, bias toward paper records in law and politics. Paper and ink are just as technological as computers and software—it's just that paper is an older and more familiar technology. It is integrated in our ways of thinking in ways that digital technology isn't, at least not yet. Plus which, paper systems can be easier to understand, and transparent in a way that software, for instance, is not. Unless a document is written in Urdu, say, or legalese that only a lawyer can decipher, you don't need an expert to read paper, but you do need one to tell what's going on in software.
All that familiarity with paper was of no avail when certain shenanigans went on in certain South Texas voting precincts back in 1948. Johnson biographer Robert Caro has shown how as many as 10,000 ballots in the Democratic primary that effectively determined the election outcome were highly suspect. And in an election that was won by only some 300 votes, that was more than enough to determine the outcome. The point is that, given enough corrupt officials and political pressure in the right places, paper ballots are no sure-fire defense against fraud. But everybody knows that.
With all-electronic voting, not only are people worried that a malevolent hacker working for one party will infest the system software to deliver enough votes to push that party's candidate to victory, but that mistakes or malfunctions will go undetected because without paper records, there is no way for the average non-technical election worker or politician to check the results. The only people who can even come close to doing that are the folks who can look at the software innards of the machines, and even they can't always recover a blow-by-blow description of everything that went on during the voting.
A recent New York Times editorial pointed out three instances in the last few years in which either all-electronic or partly electronic voting systems led to incidents which at least cast doubt on the results. The editorial writers came out with a proposal which is also being seriously studied by engineering researchers: voter-verified paper record systems (VVPRS for short). In these systems, each voter gets to see a piece of paper that reproduces his or her choices, and if the paper doesn't match the voter's desired choices, the voter can start over and do it right. Only when the voter is satisfied does the ballot get recorded, both electronically and on good old cellulose.
Of course, printing out a bunch of paper in addition to doing electronic ballot recording takes away some of the advantages of the digital system, but it's no different than in other areas where computers have found use. I remember the day when Bill Gates said that computers would eventually make the paperless office possible. As I recall, stocks in paper companies plummeted the next day, but the finance types needn't have worried. If anything, we have more paper to deal with than ever, now that it's so easy to print professional-looking documents at the touch of a button. But I digress.
Paper, electronics, white and black stones—fundamentally, voting is a non-material process mediated by physical communication systems, and the physical media used doesn't much matter if the will of the people is adequately expressed through it. Integrity, good will, and common sense makes it work pretty well most of the time, which is all you can expect of human systems. The big scandal about U. S. elections is not the technology, but the fact that so many people pass up the opportunity to vote. Don't let that be true of you this November.
Sources: The New York Times editorial appeared on July 31, 2008 at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/31/opinion/31observer.html. A paper describing a study of a VVPRS electronic voting system by Nirwan Ansari and others at the New Jersey Institute of Technology appeared in IEEE Security and Privacy for May/June 2008, pp. 30-39. And LBJ's South Texas ballot tricks are described in Robert A. Caro's excellent multivolume biography The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Free Rides on the MBTA: MIT Hackers and the Law
Does the principle of freedom to share technical information about computer system vulnerabilities mean that you can tell folks how to get free rides on Boston's MBTA? A federal judge doesn't think so. And the way all this came about raises some interesting questions in engineering ethics.
A bunch of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spent some time finding security flaws in the subway system: things like doors and turnstile boxes left unlocked and ways to duplicate the magnetic-stripe and RFID cards to get a free ride. That they did so is not surprising: any time you put a lot of super-competitive technologically savvy kids in a pressure-cooker environment like MIT, they're going to seek recreational relief in activities that will showcase their expertise. But then they went further by documenting their exploits in an 87-slide PowerPoint presentation and entered it in the annual Defcon convention in Las Vegas.
Now I'll be frank that I've never attended a Defcon, but I can imagine the atmosphere: lots of under-30 guys trying to impress each other with their computer prowess amid the partying and general high jinks that Las Vegas encourages. A perfect place, you would think, to brag about hacking the MBTA. Well, the Defcon organizers thought so, because they put the MIT students' talk on the schedule and distributed it in the proceedings CD handed to all registrants. Then the MBTA lawyers found out about it and went to court to block the talk. The federal judge's restraining order did this, but the CD copies found their way to the Internet and the talk is now roaming freely in cyberspace.
According to a lawyer for the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, an organization defending the students, they planned to omit certain key information that would have made it easy for anyone hearing the talk to get free rides. Of course, what is key information to some people is a trivial exercise for others, but we'll never know now, because the talk scheduled for Sunday wasn't delivered.
Let's consider the students to be software engineers—they are acting that way, whether or not they have their degrees yet. As software engineers, they discovered numerous flaws and security breaches in the MBTA's system of controlling access to subways. What should they have done?
The MBTA claims that the students never gave the organization a chance to fix the problems. Instead, the students went straight to Defcon with their findings. You must admit the MBTA has a point, but on the other hand, if the students had shown MBTA officials their talk first and then waited until the problems were fixed to present it in public, it would have taken the edge off, to say the least. And large municipal outfits such as the MBTA are not well known for being able to turn on a dime. The students might have all graduated and gotten real jobs before it was completely safe to talk about what they did back in their young, free undergrad days, and by then it would be ancient software history, not current events.
Back thirty years or so when "computer security" only meant making sure the door to the mainframe computer room was locked, a computer firm approached students at my alma mater, Caltech, with a new operating system and asked them explicitly to try and hack it. The company figured that if the Caltech junior whizzes couldn't break the system, nobody else was likely to, either. Perhaps the MBTA should be grateful for the free consulting work the MIT students did, but not for the way they found out about it.
It's hard to think of a way this situation could have been handled that would have left everybody happy. If someone with diplomatic skills had approached the MBTA with an early copy of the talk and asked their help in tuning it so it wouldn't spill all the digital beans, but would still make the important points, MBTA might have refrained from calling out the lawyers. On the other hand, sometimes it takes the sting of surprise publicity and the ensuing embarrassment to prod sluggish bureaucracies into action. You can bet that copies of the talk are being studied by MBTA engineers already, whether or not they pursue the legal actions they've initiated.
Anyway, happiness isn't necessarily the goal of engineering ethics. And sending around instructions on how to get a free subway ride is not in the same league as, for example, propagating directions on how to blow up subway cars. Still, it seems that the students could have taken a little more care to consider how the MBTA was going to view things. And if they didn't do it this time, they'll have the experience to draw on later in life when they remember back in their wild undergrad days how they got the MBTA on their backs for a hack they tried to show at Defcon.
Sources: The San Jose Mercury-News carried an AP article about the incident at http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_10163740?source=rss. The Electronic Frontiers Foundation currently features the case prominently on its website at www.eff.org.
A bunch of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spent some time finding security flaws in the subway system: things like doors and turnstile boxes left unlocked and ways to duplicate the magnetic-stripe and RFID cards to get a free ride. That they did so is not surprising: any time you put a lot of super-competitive technologically savvy kids in a pressure-cooker environment like MIT, they're going to seek recreational relief in activities that will showcase their expertise. But then they went further by documenting their exploits in an 87-slide PowerPoint presentation and entered it in the annual Defcon convention in Las Vegas.
Now I'll be frank that I've never attended a Defcon, but I can imagine the atmosphere: lots of under-30 guys trying to impress each other with their computer prowess amid the partying and general high jinks that Las Vegas encourages. A perfect place, you would think, to brag about hacking the MBTA. Well, the Defcon organizers thought so, because they put the MIT students' talk on the schedule and distributed it in the proceedings CD handed to all registrants. Then the MBTA lawyers found out about it and went to court to block the talk. The federal judge's restraining order did this, but the CD copies found their way to the Internet and the talk is now roaming freely in cyberspace.
According to a lawyer for the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, an organization defending the students, they planned to omit certain key information that would have made it easy for anyone hearing the talk to get free rides. Of course, what is key information to some people is a trivial exercise for others, but we'll never know now, because the talk scheduled for Sunday wasn't delivered.
Let's consider the students to be software engineers—they are acting that way, whether or not they have their degrees yet. As software engineers, they discovered numerous flaws and security breaches in the MBTA's system of controlling access to subways. What should they have done?
The MBTA claims that the students never gave the organization a chance to fix the problems. Instead, the students went straight to Defcon with their findings. You must admit the MBTA has a point, but on the other hand, if the students had shown MBTA officials their talk first and then waited until the problems were fixed to present it in public, it would have taken the edge off, to say the least. And large municipal outfits such as the MBTA are not well known for being able to turn on a dime. The students might have all graduated and gotten real jobs before it was completely safe to talk about what they did back in their young, free undergrad days, and by then it would be ancient software history, not current events.
Back thirty years or so when "computer security" only meant making sure the door to the mainframe computer room was locked, a computer firm approached students at my alma mater, Caltech, with a new operating system and asked them explicitly to try and hack it. The company figured that if the Caltech junior whizzes couldn't break the system, nobody else was likely to, either. Perhaps the MBTA should be grateful for the free consulting work the MIT students did, but not for the way they found out about it.
It's hard to think of a way this situation could have been handled that would have left everybody happy. If someone with diplomatic skills had approached the MBTA with an early copy of the talk and asked their help in tuning it so it wouldn't spill all the digital beans, but would still make the important points, MBTA might have refrained from calling out the lawyers. On the other hand, sometimes it takes the sting of surprise publicity and the ensuing embarrassment to prod sluggish bureaucracies into action. You can bet that copies of the talk are being studied by MBTA engineers already, whether or not they pursue the legal actions they've initiated.
Anyway, happiness isn't necessarily the goal of engineering ethics. And sending around instructions on how to get a free subway ride is not in the same league as, for example, propagating directions on how to blow up subway cars. Still, it seems that the students could have taken a little more care to consider how the MBTA was going to view things. And if they didn't do it this time, they'll have the experience to draw on later in life when they remember back in their wild undergrad days how they got the MBTA on their backs for a hack they tried to show at Defcon.
Sources: The San Jose Mercury-News carried an AP article about the incident at http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_10163740?source=rss. The Electronic Frontiers Foundation currently features the case prominently on its website at www.eff.org.
Monday, August 04, 2008
Guarding the Guardians
Trust is a fragile thing. But it's also the mortar that holds organizations together. Two ongoing news items have brought to mind the critical role trust plays in engineering and what can happen when it's betrayed.
Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, envelopes containing a white powder that turned out to be anthrax spores showed up in the offices of several Congressmen and elsewhere, killing a total of five people and shutting down an entire Congressional office building for a time. The FBI investigation of the incidents progressed largely out of public view until a scientist at the U. S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID, for short) named Bruce Ivins committed suicide last week. Although much remains to be revealed about the situation, it appears that a recently developed genetic test has linked the anthrax spores used in the 2001 attacks to anthrax that Ivins was working on. Ironically, Ivins was one of several scientists the FBI called on to assist with the original investigation.
The second item concerned a computer engineer named Terry Childs, who worked for the city of San Francisco in a highly responsible position in which he had exclusive control of certain passwords needed to make changes in the city's computer systems. It looks like Mr. Childs and his colleagues got into some kind of dispute that devolved into Mr. Childs being arrested on four felony counts of computer tampering. When it was discovered that nobody else in San Francisco knew those passwords, Mayor Gavin Newsome accepted an invitation by Childs' attorney to meet Childs in person at the jail, and got the passwords out of him, thus averting a potential computer disaster if changes had needed to be made to the system.
Both of these cases are far from over, and I hold no particular brief for either side of either dispute. But if either Bruce Ivins or Terry Childs turns out to have done what it looks like they might have done, we've got two failures on our hands. And to continue the theme of double trouble, both failures are of two kinds.
First, the personal failures. Suppose Ivins in fact did what it seems the FBI thinks he may have done: taken some of the anthrax spores he was developing exclusively for the purpose of coming up with defenses against them, and using them in real attacks. His motivation for such a heinous act can only be guessed at. One newswriter speculated that if Ivins was trying to gain attention and funding for what he thought was a neglected area of research, he succeeded—but at the price of five lives and the anxiety of millions. That kind of thing gets an F on anyone's moral calculus exam. And although Childs' accusations that the information technology department in San Francisco is corrupt and incompetently run may in fact be true, that doesn't justify his holding the entire system hostage by absconding with passwords, even though there were no service disruptions as a result of his actions. There is, I hope, little or no debate that these individuals did wrong if the accusations against them turn out to be true.
But what about the organizational failures? So many times it happens that engineering tragedies come about, not because any one person did something wicked or devious, but simply because the system allowed little slipups and slight ignorance here and there to cascade into a disaster. If Ivins really was able to take anthrax spores outside his lab and mail them from post offices in New Jersey, there is something wrong with the security system at the USAMRIID. But short of 100% body searches of everyone coming in and out of the labs, I'm not sure how you would improve it.
I don't know what the organization's policy is on allowing scientists to work alone, but if they allow such things, maybe they ought to stop. If there are always at least two people present any time hot stuff like anthrax spores are being worked on, you now have to have a conspiracy in order to take some away for nefarious purposes. Conspiracies aren't impossible, but they're less likely than the actions of one individual with malicious intent acting alone.
And the same goes for the San Francisco IT organization. Computer engineers can be notoriously poor communicators, and it is quite possible that nobody other than Childs knew that he had these powerful passwords under his exclusive control. There just seems to be something about the type of personality drawn to that line of work which delights in exclusive control of things. But once you trade your own personal computer games for a system that is essential for the safety and livelihoods of thousands of people, the penchant for exclusivity has to go out the window. No amount of organizational incompetence, personal distrust of others' motives, or so on can justify a computer engineer's taking matters into his or her own hands that way. This is an elementary lesson that ought to be drilled into the head of every computer-engineering student, but such uniformity in education is just a pipe dream at this point.
You can remember the lesson here with the adage, "two heads are better than one." Usually it's taken to mean that it's easier to solve problems with help, and that's true. But in technical organizations where life-critical matters are being dealt with, it's always dangerous when the system allows solitary individuals to do things that threaten the system's integrity. Rules enforcing the principle of never working alone or of always sharing system-critical passwords go against the personality grain of some types of engineers. But they're needed, and might have prevented the problems that were the focus of the news items we've just discussed.
Sources: An early report on the Ivins case can be found in the Los Angeles Times at http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-anthrax1-2008aug01,0,2864223.story. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the Childs incident at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/22/BAGF11T91U.DTL&tsp=1
Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, envelopes containing a white powder that turned out to be anthrax spores showed up in the offices of several Congressmen and elsewhere, killing a total of five people and shutting down an entire Congressional office building for a time. The FBI investigation of the incidents progressed largely out of public view until a scientist at the U. S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID, for short) named Bruce Ivins committed suicide last week. Although much remains to be revealed about the situation, it appears that a recently developed genetic test has linked the anthrax spores used in the 2001 attacks to anthrax that Ivins was working on. Ironically, Ivins was one of several scientists the FBI called on to assist with the original investigation.
The second item concerned a computer engineer named Terry Childs, who worked for the city of San Francisco in a highly responsible position in which he had exclusive control of certain passwords needed to make changes in the city's computer systems. It looks like Mr. Childs and his colleagues got into some kind of dispute that devolved into Mr. Childs being arrested on four felony counts of computer tampering. When it was discovered that nobody else in San Francisco knew those passwords, Mayor Gavin Newsome accepted an invitation by Childs' attorney to meet Childs in person at the jail, and got the passwords out of him, thus averting a potential computer disaster if changes had needed to be made to the system.
Both of these cases are far from over, and I hold no particular brief for either side of either dispute. But if either Bruce Ivins or Terry Childs turns out to have done what it looks like they might have done, we've got two failures on our hands. And to continue the theme of double trouble, both failures are of two kinds.
First, the personal failures. Suppose Ivins in fact did what it seems the FBI thinks he may have done: taken some of the anthrax spores he was developing exclusively for the purpose of coming up with defenses against them, and using them in real attacks. His motivation for such a heinous act can only be guessed at. One newswriter speculated that if Ivins was trying to gain attention and funding for what he thought was a neglected area of research, he succeeded—but at the price of five lives and the anxiety of millions. That kind of thing gets an F on anyone's moral calculus exam. And although Childs' accusations that the information technology department in San Francisco is corrupt and incompetently run may in fact be true, that doesn't justify his holding the entire system hostage by absconding with passwords, even though there were no service disruptions as a result of his actions. There is, I hope, little or no debate that these individuals did wrong if the accusations against them turn out to be true.
But what about the organizational failures? So many times it happens that engineering tragedies come about, not because any one person did something wicked or devious, but simply because the system allowed little slipups and slight ignorance here and there to cascade into a disaster. If Ivins really was able to take anthrax spores outside his lab and mail them from post offices in New Jersey, there is something wrong with the security system at the USAMRIID. But short of 100% body searches of everyone coming in and out of the labs, I'm not sure how you would improve it.
I don't know what the organization's policy is on allowing scientists to work alone, but if they allow such things, maybe they ought to stop. If there are always at least two people present any time hot stuff like anthrax spores are being worked on, you now have to have a conspiracy in order to take some away for nefarious purposes. Conspiracies aren't impossible, but they're less likely than the actions of one individual with malicious intent acting alone.
And the same goes for the San Francisco IT organization. Computer engineers can be notoriously poor communicators, and it is quite possible that nobody other than Childs knew that he had these powerful passwords under his exclusive control. There just seems to be something about the type of personality drawn to that line of work which delights in exclusive control of things. But once you trade your own personal computer games for a system that is essential for the safety and livelihoods of thousands of people, the penchant for exclusivity has to go out the window. No amount of organizational incompetence, personal distrust of others' motives, or so on can justify a computer engineer's taking matters into his or her own hands that way. This is an elementary lesson that ought to be drilled into the head of every computer-engineering student, but such uniformity in education is just a pipe dream at this point.
You can remember the lesson here with the adage, "two heads are better than one." Usually it's taken to mean that it's easier to solve problems with help, and that's true. But in technical organizations where life-critical matters are being dealt with, it's always dangerous when the system allows solitary individuals to do things that threaten the system's integrity. Rules enforcing the principle of never working alone or of always sharing system-critical passwords go against the personality grain of some types of engineers. But they're needed, and might have prevented the problems that were the focus of the news items we've just discussed.
Sources: An early report on the Ivins case can be found in the Los Angeles Times at http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-anthrax1-2008aug01,0,2864223.story. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the Childs incident at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/22/BAGF11T91U.DTL&tsp=1
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