Health Care as Systems Engineering

This summer promises a great debate over health care in the U. S. It is pretty sure to be great in the sense of historic or significant; what is not so clear is whether the outcome will be great either in the sense of good and positive, or in the ironic sense ("Great! That's just what I needed!"). One perspective that may help us judge the quality of the debate and the outcome is to view health care through the lens of systems engineering. But since health care deals with the most intimate aspects of human life, ethical considerations also show up at all levels, from individual decision-making to nationwide policy.

It is well known that the U. S. pays more per capita for health care than most other industrialized nations, but by many measures we are not that much more healthy than the other countries are. In other words, we're not getting what we're paying for, if we think that spending more health dollars per person will make everybody that much healthier. Viewed as a system with inputs (health care money and resources) and outputs (people treated by the system), our system does not work as efficiently as it could.

Over the last several weeks I have read of certain parts of the country where the health outcomes per Medicare dollar (which is an easy statistic to obtain) are much better than the national average (e. g. Green Bay, Wisconsin, where President Obama recently spoke on the issue), and other areas where they are much worse (e. g. McAllen, Texas, which a recent New Yorker article identified as in the second most expensive county in the country, measured in Medicare-dollar-per-patient terms). One reason for these identifications appears to be the idea that if we can just figure out what the good places are doing right, we can replicate these successes and do away with whatever bad or evil mischief is going on in the expensive places. How likely is that to succeed?

Atul Gawande, the author of the New Yorker piece, thinks the root problem in McAllen lies in the disconnected, revenue-driven nature of the medical culture there. He says many doctors view their practice as a way of making money, and if you want to practice medicine that way there are few barriers to stop you. By contrast, he cites places like the Mayo Clinic, where doctors on salary receive no incentives for ordering extra tests, and participate in meetings designed to improve patient care systematically by coordinating it to eliminate needless and duplicative tests, among other things. He admits, though, that discouraging the former behavior and encouraging the latter will be a long, tricky process.

I think a key element in the solution, if one can be found, lies in a careful study of incentives and disincentives. Although people can't always be relied upon to do the rational thing, most people will make choices they perceive to be in their own best interest. Of course, perception can be distorted through propaganda and so on, but especially where pocketbook matters are concerned, most people make fairly optimal decisions if given the opportunity to do so. One trouble with health care as it exists today is the same problem I have noticed with the college-textbook market: the people who pay for the goods or services (students or patients) are not the people making the decisions (professors or doctors). Although one doctor quoted by Gawande says allowing patients more of an economic stake in medical decision-making is like relying on "the sheep to negotiate with the wolves," it doesn't have to be that one-sided. If people were in economic control of their own health-care expenditures rather than having to rely on their employer (if they have a job in the first place), I think some way could be developed so that the Mayo-Clinic-type coordinated operations and their lower cost per patient could be packaged to be more appealing in an open market, compared to the multiple-stop-shopping of places like McAllen. The comparison is a little unfair, but think of shopping at Wal-Mart versus going to a third-world village market with its street of shoemakers and street of roasted-goat vendors. The streets full of private vendors are colorful and make for great vacation photos, but if all you want is a pair of shoes you'll go to Wal-Mart.

Of course, efficiency can be carried too far, and if we let even the Mayo Clinics coalesce into one giant monopolistic medical provider, the outcome is likely to be bad. But an appropriate level of market openness in which consumers could see economically efficient, good care for what it is, and choose it, would avoid the coercion and potential for debilitating bureaucracy that so many proposals involve.

Healing is a deeply ethical activity. The oldest known professional code of ethics—the Hippocratic Oath—deals with the ethics of medicine, and many religious leaders such as Jesus made healing an important part of their ministry. The problems Gawande and others have identified when healers start to put money over patient care merely demonstrate that the system, whatever form it takes, must have professionals in it whose philosophy or faith makes healing an end in itself, not primarily a means to wealth. Whatever happens to U. S. medical care after this summer's debate, I hope the designers do not lose sight of the fact that, like doctors themselves, they cannot fix the problem the way you would fix a balky lawnmower engine. All they can do is try to create an environment for people of good will to do even better than they are doing now.

Sources: Atul Gawande's article "The Cost Conundrum" appears in the June 1, 2009 issue of The New Yorker.

The Air France Crash: More Questions Than Answers

The crash of Air France flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on the last day of May is bad news for a number of reasons. The deaths of all 228 people on board make it the worst air disaster since 2001. And while advancing technology has enabled investigators to recover a limited amount of flight data through a remote data link that was operating at the time of the crash, the deep waters where the plane went down may prevent the recovery of the "black box" containing voice and detailed data recordings.

What do we know today, eight days after the crash? There were thunderstorms in the area that night, and early speculation centered on the possibility of a lightning strike to the plane. Although lightning hits planes hundreds of times a year, relatively little damage usually occurs and most modern aircraft can be considered essentially (though not totally) lightning-proof. Evidently, there was a satellite or other radio-mediated data link which was continually feeding certain types of flight data to the ground. Examination of this data shows that the flight speeds during the last minute or so of the flight became "incoherent," followed by a loss of cabin pressure and failure of electrical systems. While this information will be helpful in deciphering what went wrong, it apparently lacks the detail that flight data recorders can preserve. One can imagine a day when such radio links will take the place of, or at least duplicate, the capabilities of flight data recorders so that mechanical recovery of the black box will no longer be so urgent. The black box is designed to emit a sonar signal for 30 days after the crash, so the underwater recovery crews gearing up to find it are operating under tremendous time pressure, not to mention the water pressure at depths exceeding 20,000 feet. The box may never be found.

Recent news reports have focused on the fact that the plane's Pitot tube, the device that measures airspeed, had not yet been replaced with a newer model as the plane's manufacturer Airbus recommended. A Pitot tube is a small tube that faces directly into the airstream. The difference in pressure between the air inside the tube (which is blocked off and registers what is called "stagnation pressure") and the ambient or "static" air pressure, is an indication of airspeed, which is the most important kind of speed to know about when you are trying to fly a plane. These days, when most parts of a flight except for landing and takeoff are under automatic control, the airspeed data from the Pitot tube forms part of an elaborate computer-controlled feedback loop that maintains constant speed, altitude, and other flight characteristics.

The old saw about computers regarding "garbage in, garbage out" goes double when a feedback loop is involved. If enough ice forms on a Pitot tube to plug up the entrance, the indicated airspeed goes way below what is actually the case, and either the automatic pilot guns the engines inappropriately or the real pilots may take incorrect action based on faulty airspeed data. This is exactly what happened to an Argentine DC-9 flight in 1999, which resulted in a spectacular crash, killing all aboard.

Although I have no independent information on this, I hope that modern aircraft such as the Air France A330 that crashed have more than one means of measuring speed: either a second Pitot tube (which of course would be just as likely to ice up as the first one), or other means such as radar altimeter and speed measurements or GPS-based airspeed indicators. But whether the autopilot takes all these other inputs into consideration, and whether the real pilots do too, I don't know. Clearly, if the Pitot tube was involved in this crash, the right thing to do in the circumstances wasn't done.

All flight-critical Pitot tubes have heaters to prevent icing, but evidently the one on Flight 447 was deficient or non-optimal in some way, or else Airbus wouldn't have recommended replacing it. Of course replacements can be recommended for all kinds of reasons, some of which have nothing to do with safety. All that will come out in the investigation report, which will take months or more to complete.

Despite this crash, the general trend in air safety has been a positive one. More people fly every year, and so the safety record per passenger mile is even better than the raw statistics on crashes would indicate. But this record can be maintained only through the painstaking work of investigators, engineers, regulators, inspectors, and the pilots and crews who actually do the work. Most of the time the system works well, and the silver lining in every accident is the fact that it carries with it potential answers to problems that need to be addressed to improve safety even further. I just hope they are able to recover the flight data recorders in order to develop a complete picture of what went wrong, and to teach us how similar situations can be avoided in the future.

We will revisit this accident when more information is available, and in the meantime, our sympathy is with the relatives and friends of those who lost loved ones in this tragedy.

Sources: I drew on reports from Fox News at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525117,00.html and an Associated Press report obtained from Yahoo News at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/brazil_plane, as well as the Wikipedia article "Pitot tube."

Does the U. S. Need a Cyber Czar?

On Friday May 29, President Obama is scheduled to announce a plan to name a “cyber czar” whose responsibility will be to oversee computer security both in and outside the federal government. The term “czar” in Russian originally meant an emperor whose reign was maintained by the authority of God. Somehow I doubt that such overtones of meaning are intended by the PR people who put together these news releases and the members of the press who report them. But it is a good place to start asking whether the U. S. really needs such a czar for this increasingly important area of technology, and what the good and bad aspects of such an appointment might be.

From time to time we have discussed various cyberthreats in this blog, and so far, none of them have turned out to be the Armageddon of viruses or cyberattacks. The trend in recent years, however, is not reassuring. Back when email was a novelty engaged in by a few nerds and their friends, the worst motivation of those who wrote viruses or produced spamware was a kind of intellectual mischievousness: “Gee, can I really get away with this?” But eventually, people figured out there was serious money to be made, either quasi-legitimately via spamware advertising of kooky products, or illegally via shakedowns and blackmail threats (“If you don’t want your whole website to go down next Tuesday, leave $100,000 in unmarked bills in the trash can next to the entrance of the Kremlin tonight.”). And in the last year or two we’ve seen pretty definite evidence that nations are using cyberattacks as part of more conventional warfare, as when Russia evidently coordinated a cyberattack on Georgia’s government websites last August during its attack on contested territory between the two countries.

So the threats are real, no doubt about that. The question is, can we defend ourselves better against them if we have some centralized governmental authority taking some as-yet-undefined actions? That question has to be answered in the context of how things are done currently.

Like the Internet itself, the U. S. system (if you can call it that) of defense against cyberattacks consists of a not very organized, highly distributed network of specialty firms, companies who simply want to use the Internet legitimately without hindrance, and the various governmental entities who use computers, which is (I hope by now) all of them. Judging by various reports, the private firms seem to do a better job of security and upgrading, including defense against attacks, than the government does. But this may simply be an artifact of accessibility. Reporters can file requests under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a wide variety of government records, but there is no such privilege with regard to the internal documents of private firms. So if (to take an example) Bank of America makes a big goof in purchasing vulnerable ATM machines that can be programmed to spurt out piles of twenty-dollar bills to a waiting kid on his tricycle, as long as they catch the problem and fix it before it hits the news wires, no one is the wiser. But let that happen in a government agency, and reporters can get all the documentation on it they want, usually.

That doesn’t mean the government is necessarily less competent in dealing with cyberattacks. One danger I can foresee is that of burdensome regulations in what is historically a very unregulated industry. If Microsoft had to prove to some government bureaucrat that its new software upgrade is bulletproof against cyberattacks before it could be released, we’d all still be running OS/2 on our PCs (except for those of us using Macs). But the advance reports indicate that the new cyber czar won’t have even the authority of a cabinet official, nor Presidential access of the highest level.

So if the new czar can’t do much, why should we bother? One aspect of the situation appears to pertain to public education. I suppose if the President talks about what you as an individual can do to improve computer security, a certain number of people will pay more attention, but it does seem like it might be a needless expenditure of political capital. On the other hand, if we are made aware of the cost of cyberattacks in terms of centrally analyzed statistics publicized by the government, that might motivate some changes.

This problem resembles environmental issues in that it is essentially a global, not strictly a national matter. The Internet knows no boundaries, and in fact many if not most cyberattacks on U. S. institutions come from abroad. That means a solution, or more likely a range of solutions, will have to have international aspects to it: international agreements, international coordination, and so on. And for this the federal government is probably the best choice.

In sum, let’s wait and see how czar-like the new czar acts. There is no need to worry that the designee will take over the universe, even the cyber-universe. And there is a lot of room for improvement both in the public and the private sector. But government can do only so much, and it will be interesting to see whether the person chosen makes a positive difference, or disappears after the next federal initiative grabs all the headlines.

Sources: An Associated Press article describing the results of a Presidential study of cyber security and related issues can be found on the Business Week website at http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D98FEMQO1.htm. My blog “War Comes to the Internet” was posted on Sept. 8, 2008.

Ethics Education: How Can You Tell?

One reason I started this blog was to use it in a short (four-week) engineering ethics segment of a freshman course for engineering and technology majors. When you teach something, you obviously expect the lessons to make some kind of positive change in your students. You hope that they will be able to do or understand something that they couldn’t do, or didn’t understand, before you went to work on them. With technical subjects such as circuit theory or computer programming, it’s fairly easy to tell whether the students learn what you want them to learn. That’s what exams are for. But how can you tell whether ethics instruction has achieved its goal, which is to turn students into ethical engineers?

In an ideal world of infinite educational-evaluation resources, you would do a longitudinal study of two groups of students: one group who took engineering ethics, and a second matched cohort of students who took the same courses as the test group except for the engineering ethics parts. You would then follow every student, doing in-depth interviews and gathering third-party information about the ethical aspects of their work over their entire careers. And at the end of this process (which would take thirty-five years or so), you could write a paper saying we know for sure that X number of students who took Y ethics module thirty-five years ago were Z per cent more ethical than the control group of students who didn’t. Only, of course, Z might turn out to be negative. All it takes is one determined crook in your test sample to throw everything off.

And that ties in to something I learned last week. It’s not only universities that try to improve their students’ ethics with educational modules; companies and governments try it too. In particular, every employee of the state of Illinois has to take a brief online ethics module periodically, up to and including (I presume) the governor. You may have heard the name Rod Blagojevich in the news over the last six months or so. He is the (now ex-) governor of Illinois who was impeached for trying to sell the Senate seat vacated by now-President Obama. This was hardly ethical behavior under any standard, yet Blagojevich was following a tradition honored by numerous Illinois governors, of engaging in indictable behavior. If anyone was trying to evaluate the ethics education of Illinois employees and included the governor in their sample, they are going to have a lot of trouble showing that it helps.

But wait. Should one or two spectacularly bad apples spoil the barrel? That is, you are always going to have what are called “outliers.” If you are familiar with a Gaussian distribution, often called a “bell curve,” you know that it looks like a hill with gently sloping sides. If one of these distributions represents some measure of “ethicalness” (an ugly word, but I can’t think of a better one), then the peak of the hill represents the bulk of students who have what you might call typical or average ethics. Mother Teresa would be in the right-hand tail of the distribution, way off to one end, and the ex-governor would be somewhere in the left-hand tail.

You can make the argument that even though ethics education doesn’t prevent the occasional Blagojevich, if it moves the whole distribution to the right it makes the average person more ethical, which is worth something. But then you get into the utilitarian bind of evaluating the worth of ethics to society in general. Is it better that most people in a profession are a little more ethical even though some are still news-worthily unethical, or would it be better if somehow we could prevent only the worst ethical lapses and leave the rest alone? And all this assumes that there is some fail-safe way to evaluate ethics education other than the impossibly expensive and lengthy longitudinal study I described above, which is by no means clear.

All education involves some degree of faith, which is the certain knowledge of things we don’t see yet. Even if my students pass exams on digital logic or electromagnetics, I can’t say for sure what they’re going to do with those pieces of knowledge and ability. I can only trust that they will remember them and use them somehow in a good way. Experience has shown that the vast majority of our students do just that, although I can’t instantly pull up tons of documentation to prove it.

In the last several years, whenever the National Science Foundation funds programs to augment and encourage engineering ethics education, it insists that the outcomes of these programs be evaluated by some independent means. Their argument is that taxpayer money is being used for these programs, and the agency has to go back to Congress and show that the money did some good. Although the motive is laudable, I have questions about the method. The same person who told me about the online ethics course in Illinois is an expert in evaluating ethics education, which he admits is not a perfect process either. The preferred way is to administer a survey in which students answer questions about hypothetical ethical situations. As I say, it’s better than nothing. But it seems to me that the process of evaluating ethics education mainly to generate some paperwork to send back to Washington is motivated by the same spirit that causes the government of the state of Illinois to insist that all its employees take the online ethics module. In both cases, the ostensible motive seems to differ from the real motive.

Ostensibly, one is doing something that will genuinely improve (or measure) the ethics of the target population. But in reality, both the online ethics module and the ethics evaluation process serve mainly to shift responsibility for any possible bad outcomes. If another Rod Blagojevich shows up, Illinois government administrators can say, “Well, we did all we could—we made him take that ethics module.” And if despite all efforts, the next couple of decades turn up a few engineers who, despite taking NSF-evaluated engineering ethics education, go ahead and do something unethical anyway, the National Science Foundation can turn to Congress and say, “Well, we did all we could—we evaluated those programs with the best available evaluation instruments.”

Am I saying we should chuck all attempts at evaluation, or even ethics education? By no means. But let’s be realistic about what we’re trying to do, and not pretend that it’s capable of more than it can really do, which is simply to give us some reason to hope, but not to be certain, that we are making people more ethical.

Sources: Michael Loui, professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told me about these matters. I would point you to some information about Rod Blagojevich, but I think he’s already had more attention than he deserves. And my definition of faith is taken from the New Testament book of Hebrews, 11:1.

Crash of Flight 3407: The Human Factor

Last February 12, a Continental Airlines regional flight 3407, operated by Colgan Air, crashed short of the Buffalo, New York runway it was headed for, killing all 49 aboard and one person on the ground. At the time I wrote about it shortly afterward, speculation centered on how well the deicing systems were working, since icy conditions had been reported in the area. But after a three-day hearing on the crash held by the National Transportation Safety Board last week, it looks like human error may be the root cause of the crash.

Working with voice-recorder transcripts and flight data from the "black boxes" recovered from the crash, NTSB investigators painted a picture of the last minute or so of the flight which did not show pilot Marvin Renslow and his 24-year-old copilot Rebecca Shaw in a good light. During their final approach, when FAA regulations prohibit nonessential communications in the cockpit, the pair are heard chatting about careers and the co-pilot's lack of experience flying in icing conditions. Renslow himself had only three months of experience flying the particular Dash-8 involved in the crash, and had failed several flight simulator tests in the last few years. Besides these factors, fatigue may have further dulled the crew's responses. Shaw had joined the flight after commuting all night from her home in Seattle, where she lived with her parents. Her raising the plane's flaps without a command from the captain compounded the already critical situation the pilot found himself in when the plane lost airspeed and began to stall. Under these conditions an automatic system activates a "stick-shaker" intended to alert the pilot to the danger. The proper response is to move the stick forward to regain airspeed, but records indicate Renslow pulled it back. After stalling, the plane rolled and crashed.

The impressive and improving safety record of U. S. air travel says that on balance, nearly all pilots do the right thing in critical moments nearly all the time. But the fact that the safety record for smaller regional carriers such as Colgan is not as good as for the major carriers flying larger aircraft says there may be something about the difference in working conditions between long-range and regional carriers that bears watching, to say the least. A lot of the news coverage of the NTSB hearing centered on co-pilot Shaw's meager annual salary, which was less than $17,000 (not counting extra flying time). Deregulation of the airline industry plus the recent recession has brought intense competitive pressure to regional operators, who may be cutting corners and hiring inexperienced pilots with less-than-stellar records simply because they're cheaper. The Federal Aviation Administration has regulations about minimum standards for pilot training, performance, work hours, and rest breaks, but these things are human rules, and rules can be bent or broken without automatic penalties coming into play. At least, until something bad happens.

The loss of any life in an engineered system is a tragedy. But if the publicity surrounding the accident and its investigation result in corrective action, we can look forward to further improvements in safety procedures and their enforcement.

At last week's hearing, a NASA expert in cockpit communications acknowledged that more could be done to give pilots even earlier warning of potential stall conditions than the stick-shaker provides. This is a problem in what is called human-factors engineering: how to effectively interface a machine to a person so that the person has the right information at the right time in order to take the right action. By the time the stick-shaker went off, the pilot's options were very limited. If an earlier warning had been provided, the crew might have snapped out of their inattentive mood sooner and realized their difficulties in time to avert the accident. We will never know about this particular case, but if the investigation results in improved cockpit instrumentation that saves other inattentive crews from getting into the same fix, something good will have come from this crash.

The current federal administration seems to be more interested in regulation than deregulation, and there may be areas where such a change is appropriate. One reason that co-pilot Shaw's low pay got so much attention was that it is such a contrast to the typical popular perception of airline pilots: distinguished-looking former military flyers with some dignified gray around their temples (nearly always men), good pay, and years of flying experience. Stereotypes are made to be broken, and my hat is off to any young woman who goes through the arduous process of becoming a commercial pilot, but in the bad old days of high airfares and closely regulated airlines, the companies could afford to hire the very best pilots available, and generally did. The case of Shaw may indicate that inexperienced crews are being pushed too fast into positions of great responsibility without adequate training, or even sleep.

As sad as this accident was, we are starting to see the feedback system of engineering work. I don't mean the stick-shaker; I mean the corrective process that learns from mistakes, errors, and tragedies, and does things to make them less likely in the future. This kind of work takes place out of the spotlight, in quiet offices and labs around the world, but it is the reason that air travel is as safe and reliable as it generally is. And as long as we pay attention to the rare cases when something goes wrong, and have the courage to fix problems—whether mechanical or human—it will keep on getting even safer.

Sources: Two good reports on last week's NTSB hearings may be found at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/sns-ap-us-plane-into-home,0,5946950.story and http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/05/13/national/main5010745.shtml. My article "The Crash of Flight 3407: Better Deicing Needed?" appeared on Feb. 16, 2009.

An Orbital Service Call to Hubble

Today, if all goes well, the Space Shuttle will take off with a cadre of astronauts whose main job will be to act as glorified technicians. There's nothing wrong with doing a technician's job well, and although I have said critical things about the Space Shuttle and NASA in the past, this trip is more justifiable than most. The Hubble space telescope, launched in 1990, has already outlived its nominal lifetime, and with some judicious repairs, scientists hope it will run for at least another five years or so. But as a recent National Public Radio report describes, fixing Hubble is no ordinary service call.

Take the 111 screws, for example. I have enough trouble in an ordinary 1-G lab keeping track of small screws involved in my research projects. If I spend a day or so building something, I'm pretty sure that at least a few minutes will pass with me on my hands and knees on the floor, looking for a critical nut or bolt that jumped off the edge of the workbench. Well, it turns out there's an instrument box on Hubble that needs to be accessed for repairs, but the designers never meant for it to be fooled with anywhere but on the ground. Hence the 111 screws, which would form a toxic cloud of malicious orbiting metal if just released around the telescope. Never fear, though. NASA engineers under the direction of Jill McGuire devised a plate with 111 or so tiny plastic boxes that fit exactly over the screws. A hole in each box is just big enough for the screwdriver to go through, but when the screw comes loose the only drifting it can do is inside the box. A snap-on replacement cover is part of the repair kit, so the astronaut doesn't have to find all those screws and put them back on.

This is engineering of an extreme kind, and I suppose that in testing the extremes of repair operations in the vacuum and weightlessness of space, NASA may come up with something that we ordinary Jills and Jacks could use as well. Back in the days when NASA was searching for reasons to justify itself after the end of the Apollo moon program, you heard a lot about "spinoff technologies"—ideas that were originally developed for the space program and turned out to be useful for earthbound applications as well. I have the unconfirmed impression that Velcro may be in this category, but other than that, I can't think of anything that's made a huge difference to the economy. I'd like to have one of those sleek little vacuum-and-zero-G-adapted hand drills they're using for my own toolbox, but not if I had to pay $180,000 or whatever the equivalent cost would be.

The Hubble, as with most astronomy, is pure science, and science is its own justification, culturally. To do certain kinds of science, you end up developing some weird engineering, such as plates that capture 111 screws in the vacuum of space. Offhand, I can't think of any other circumstance in which you'd need a screw-capturer like that, but maybe tools developed for some other obscure task the astronauts will do up there, will turn out to have beneficial consequences down here. Even if it doesn't, just getting the astronauts up there safely and back is something that takes a lot more resources than developing the hundred or so tools they'll carry with them. But that would get us into the manned-versus-unmanned space flight argument, and hey, I'm on vacation. I'd rather not argue. Let's just hope the repair trip goes well and Hubble gives us another half-decade or so of fine science. By which time, I also hope, we're well on the way to replacing the outmoded Shuttle with something better.

Sources: A written form of the report about NASA tools carried on NPR can be found at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103915475.

In Search of the Perfect Email Software

Email is as much a fact of life nowadays for most knowledge workers as opening the morning snail mail used to be. I don't know about you, but just dealing with email has lately gotten to be a time-sink and chore I don't look forward to. Anyone who can improve this situation will certainly do a lot of people a lot of good, and that's a good example of engineering ethics in my book. Part of the problem, no doubt, is my high expectations for what should happen to my email. In what follows I'm probably going to show off my ignorance and prejudices in a good strong light, but it may be worth it if something close to my ideal software ever turns up.

I'm one of those people who takes seriously the thought that months or years later after I get an email message I care about, I should be able to find it any time my computer is on, whether it's connected to the network or not. This means (unless I'm blessed with a total-recall photographic memory, which I'm not) that important emails (that is, ones I decide to keep) need to be sorted somehow and should physically reside somewhere on my laptop for access without a network connection.

Back when email was a novelty and getting three emails a day was a comparative blizzard, these requirements were easy to meet. Sorting email into files on my computer took maybe thirty seconds. But nowadays, if I skip reading my email for only twenty-four hours, when I check it again there's easily fifty or a hundred of the little jewels, only a few of which I am interested in. The rest is everything from notices about worker-training courses I don't need to offers to help princes get their money out of countries I've never been to, and worse.

I used to pride myself on doing what the older generation called "clearing my correspondence," which meant that every day, I checked out every email (at least by its source and subject line), either threw it away or filed it somewhere using the software filing routine, and got the inbox down to either zero or the two or three emails I hadn't decided what to do with yet. Filing consists of negotiating one of those multiple-level popup menus, most layers of which have so many items that I have to use the scroll function, which on no email program I've tried has a scroll bar, so I have to slide to the bottom of the visible list and stand on the mouse till the desired category comes into view, at which point I select it and sometimes have to do the whole thing over again at the next menu level (I have files within files within files, sort of like wheels within wheels). This means that filing a single email sometimes takes twenty or thirty seconds, and oh! the joy when the very next email in the list turns out to belong right where the previous one went—another thirty or forty seconds, because this time I'm mad and slip up and select "Nutcases" instead of "NosferatuTheorists"—well, in that case it wouldn't matter, but you know what I mean. So after a half hour or forty minutes of this kind of thing, I struggle back up the Sisyphean slope to a mostly empty email box, only to turn my back for a few hours and face a door-filling pile flooding in again, metaphorically speaking.

So how would the perfect email software help me? For one thing, I could use it on either of my two main computers. The way it is now, I can have part of what I want—files of old email without Internet access—only on my office computer. For some obscure reason known only to IT professionals, I can send emails with a computer-resident software like Thunderbird (or the old Eudora) only if I'm physically plugged in to my university server. If I'm anywhere else, I have to log into the internet-based software program the University runs (it's like Gmail in that respect), send an email, and copy it to myself in order to have a permanent copy that I'll later download into my Thunderbird resident software, but that adds to my already tedious task of sorting email.

Returning to the elusive purpose of describing the perfect email software, I'd better resort to bullets if I'm going to finish at all. It would:

--- Store all the email I decide to keep in an intuitive, use-frequency-based filing system (one that makes the more frequently used files easier to get at, and saves the four-layer menus for ones I access every three years or so)
--- Be accessible anywhere in the world, for sending as well as receiving, and would leave a permanent sorted record of sent emails on my machine as well as on some server somewhere
--- Would automatically figure out the procedure for getting off an email list and write the necessary messages once I put a sample undesirable email into a "get rid of this junk" file
--- Would use some kind of quasi-intelligent processing to figure out which email sources I'm really interested in and which I'm not, and would rank order these within some kind of time-based presentation, that is, most recent interesting ones first, older interesting ones later, and so on.
--- Would give me access to all emails I decided to keep, going back to the dawn of time (email time, anyway) with or without internet access

There, that'll do for starters. So far, I haven't been able to find the perfect software. None of the server-based systems will do (Gmail, Microsoft Outlook) because you have to be hooked to the Internet to find old emails, and some of them throw away old ones anyway, drat it. But the resident programs that store mail physically on your laptop can't be used to send mail except from the one server. That seems like a simple thing to fix, but maybe fixing it would violate the computer-science equivalent of the law of gravity, or something. And moving categories around so that the most frequently used folders are easy to get at doesn't sound hard. Note that I don't want to do it—I want the software to do it for me. Sure, I could reorganize my own files, but that would add a three-hour task every few months to my already excessive time spent on computer housekeeping, and I thought time saving was what software was all about. Hah.

And don't tell me to get a new email account to cut down on the junk email, either. That way folly lies, because it just trades a few months of quiet now for the heinous duty of checking more than one email account—forever. No, thanks.

Any suggestions?

Sources: If you want to know what "Sisyphean" means, check out the back story on the founder of Corinth at http://www.mythweb.com/encyc/entries/sisyphus.html—he was quite a tricky guy, it turns out, and well deserved the punishment meted to him by the gods. I think some of his descendants must be writing spamware today.

Poles Vault to Headlines: The Defective Light Pole Problem

Ordinarily, when I select an item for discussion in this blog, I try to choose one that has relevance beyond my local area. After all, I'm writing partly for readers around the world who follow this blog (both of them). So last month, when an athletic-field light pole toppled over at a high school in Hays County where I live, I thought it was odd, but not of sufficiently general interest to write about here. Now I've changed my mind.

As Eric Dexheimer of the Austin American-Statesman described in a front-page story on Sunday Apr. 26, at least eight light poles across the U. S. have collapsed in the last three years. All of these poles were designed by Whitco, a firm in Fort Worth, Texas which is now bankrupt. Fortunately, no one has been killed or injured in these pole failures, but a lot of school districts and towns are out a lot of money for smashed lighting fixtures, damaged gyms, and whatnot, and everyone who ever bought Whitco poles is now anxiously examining them. In many cases they're finding cracks and replacing them before anything worse happens. On Apr. 23, the U. S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced it would investigate the pole failures, and has power to issue a safety recall if one is warranted. Dexheimer's own investigation revealed that the design of the poles was marginal in the extreme, and probably reduced the ability of the poles to withstand high winds. The thickness of metal at the base wasn't sufficient to take the huge stresses that result when wind blows against the large area of lighting fixtures at the top of the pole, and the poles developed cracks. The official investigation will probably confirm these findings.

What implications for engineering ethics does this story have? The parties involved are the engineers who designed the poles, the firm (Whitco) that employed the engineers, the organizations that supplied the materials (a Mexican steel mill) and fabricated the poles to Whitco specifications (another Fort Worth company still in business), the agencies that bought the poles (mostly school districts), and at least that portion of the general public which was within falling radius of the poles when they fell. Clearly, if the engineers knowingly chiseled on the pole specifications to save money, the fault lies with them. The American Society of Civil Engineers has a Code of Ethics which states (Canon 1 (b)) that "Engineers shall approve or seal only those design documents, reviewed or prepared by them, which are determined to be safe for public health and welfare in conformity with accepted engineering standards." The Code has no legal standing, but if the engineers who did the work were required to be licensed professional engineers, they could lose their licenses. However, since they worked for a private firm and not directly for a public agency, it's likely that no such requirement applies.

An added complication to the situation is that the firm selling the poles has gone bankrupt (although the name Whitco was bought by a separate company afterwards). Bankruptcy in the corporate world can be like death in the human world—it can remove the entity concerned from all worldly obligations. Of course, a good enough civil lawyer can find a way to extract blood from a turnip, or at least the turnip's heirs and assigns, but bankruptcy makes things even harder. After all the legal dust settles, it may turn out that the school districts and their insurance companies are without recourse, and have to swallow the expense of new poles on their own.

It remains to be seen what the Consumer Product Safety Commission will do. Their bread-and-butter issues usually run to things like toys with lead paint, not eighty-foot light poles sold to school districts. But the current administration is taking an expansive view of governmental authority, so it's not surprising that light poles will fall (so to speak) under the purview of the Commission from now on.

And that is not necessarily a bad thing. Somebody has to mind the henhouse, and foxes (that is, private companies) aren't too qualified. In some countries, anyone who calls himself or herself an engineer must have a governmentally-sanctioned professional license. But in the U. S., back when a movement toward licensing was gaining steam in the 1930s, private firms, worried about the chance that licensing would drive up the cost of engineering services, rushed to pliable state legislatures (is there any other kind?) and convinced them to write in "industrial exemptions," meaning that if you worked for a private firm as opposed to the government, you didn't have to have a professional engineer's license. And so the matter stands today.

It seems to work all right most of the time, except when it doesn't. And when a clear case of engineering incompetence shows up, as it appears to have done on playing fields all over the U. S., the only recourses are financial. If the engineers responsible are ever identified, and they hold P. E. licenses, they could lose them. But that wouldn't stop them from working as engineers, at least not in the U. S. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, I will leave to you to decide.

Sources: The online version of the Austin American-Statesman article can be found at http://www.statesman.com/search/content/news/stories/local/04/26/0426poles.html.

The EPA and Carbon Dioxide: What Next?

Sunday morning I was sitting at the breakfast table reading the paper. A headline caught my eye, and I told my wife that the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency just decided that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that endangers public health and welfare, which is the first step toward regulating it.

"Carbon dioxide?" she asked. "Don't we breathe that out?"

"That's all right," I said, "you'll still be able to breathe in as much as you like."

Bad jokes aside, with this finding the EPA is taking a giant step into an uncharted region of U. S. environmental regulation, a step bristling with enough ethical issues and questions to keep me writing for several columns. But I'll try to limit myself to this one for the time being.

It was President Richard Nixon who founded the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, back when rivers in certain industrial areas routinely caught fire and everyone from Rachel Carson to Carl Sagan was forecasting various kinds of environmental doom. The spate of new regulations that the young agency promulgated raised enough furor among manufacturers to exceed my threshold of attention for political events, which was then very high. I remember wondering what the world was coming to if the federal government could tell you what you could and couldn't send up your own private smokestack. I even knew a few pioneering environmentalists back in my high-school days, in particular a young woman who thought that founding the EPA was the only good thing Richard Nixon ever did.

Gradually, corporate America was dragged, sometimes kicking and screaming, into a world of environmental regulations. Former industrial heroes such as Thomas Midgley (1889-1944), who was awarded and feted during his lifetime for discovering both tetraethyl lead to improve gasoline's octane rating, and chlorofluorocarbons ("Freon") for use in refrigeration systems, became post-mortem villains as first leaded gasoline, and then CFCs, fell under the ban of the EPA and other regulatory agencies worldwide. Now that some of the environmental dust has settled, most reasonable people would agree that some amount of environmental regulation is a good thing. We have seen what its absence does in areas of the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, and have witnessed the comebacks of species such as the bald eagle, whose existence was threatened by the pesticide DDT.

That being said, I should point out that regulation of carbon dioxide, should it ever take place (and it looks like either the EPA or Congress will do just that), is a different breed of cat, for several reasons.

First of all, there is the sheer scale of carbon dioxide emissions. Every time anybody anywhere burns a fossil fuel—coal, oil, or natural gas—they make carbon dioxide. DDT, CFCs, and even tetraethyl lead were special chemicals made for specific purposes, and after varying amounts of trouble, acceptable substitutes were found or other ways of achieving the same purposes were discovered. None of these chemicals was used as the primary energy source for the nation's transportation, electric utility, and manufacturing industries. In 2002, the U. S. derived over four-fifths of its energy from burning carbon-containing compounds, and that fraction hasn't changed much since then. If we stopped burning carbon tomorrow, we'd go back to the energy consumption rates of perhaps 1920, when the well-wired house had maybe four electric outlets in all and a family of five with one car was doing quite well to drive ten miles a day. Substitutes for carbon-based fuels—primarily nuclear energy, with wind, hydroelectric, and other renewables coming up far in the rear—are available, but not any time soon in the scale required.

Another fundamental difference between carbon dioxide regulation and everything else the EPA has done up to now is the nature of the science and other events on which the finding is based. I know I'm up against everybody from Al Gore on down when I say that the connection between global warming and anthropogenic emissions is less than crystal-clear. On the bus ride from scientific observations to the conclusion that humanity is committing collective suicide by continuing to burn carbon-based fuels, there are a number of places to get off. One can question whether the current trends are largely due to human activity versus natural causes. One can even question whether a moderate amount of global warming will in fact be the earth-stopping catastrophe that it is portrayed to be. There is no better way to gain the fascinated attention of a bored elite than by forecasting some giant disaster that requires expansive governmental intervention to fix. Few remember the popularity of Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb, which forecasted a worldwide overpopulation nightmare that would come to its ghastly fruition somewhere about now. Instead, we're finding that industrial advancement in developing countries leads so rapidly to declining birthrates that the problem in many countries is not too many births, but too few. Mr. Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" may find itself in a similar situation some day.

For reasons that are more geopolitical than environmental, I would like to see the U. S. move away from fossil-fuel imports in a reasonable, coordinated fashion that doesn't smuggle in social engineering or class warfare under a guide of environmental protection. Maybe the EPA's carbon-dioxide finding is a step in that direction. I don't know. But for the reasons listed above and many others besides, it bears most careful watching in the coming months.

Sources: The EPA's news release about its finding is at http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/0/0EF7DF675805295D8525759B00566924. The New York Times article I read at the breakfast table is at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/science/earth/18endanger.html. A useful chart developed by Lawrence Livermore Labs from which I obtained information about U. S. energy use can be found in the Wikipedia article "Energy Conservation" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USEnFlow02-quads.gif.

Welcome to Online MBA Guide Readers: A special welcome to readers of the Online MBA Guide who may have found us. I recently learned that this blog was included on a list of 50 best business ethics blogs by the editors of that blog (see the article at http://www.onlinembaguide.net/50-best-business-ethics-blogs). True, we're No. 50, but at least we're on the list!

The Ethics of Consumption: Electric Carving Knives

Most engineering ethics concentrates on the production end of things: how engineers can engage ethically in making products or services. When the general consuming public appears in an ethical analysis, it is usually assumed that they know little or nothing about the technical or even ethical issues involved. Like babies in their parents' arms, the public is thought to be largely dependent on the kindness and forethought of wiser engineers to protect them from harm. But consumers are not always passive recipients of what engineers design for them. As consumers, they have both rights and responsibilities. You hear a lot about consumers' rights but not so much about their responsibilities. And one of those responsibilities may be to avoid buying things that are simply silly or wasteful.

All this is brought to mind by Easter dinner, or rather, one little incident during Easter dinner yesterday. In helping my wife prepare the meal, I got out our electric carving knife and sliced the pork roast.

We received the carving knife as a wedding present 31 years ago. The handle is two-toned plastic—white on top, avocado on the bottom (avocado was a very popular color in the late 1970s), with a red safety catch and knife-release buttons. The knife is a two-part affair consisting of hollow-ground serrated knife blades that connect at the tip with a sliding joint and insert in the handle at the other end. Inside the handle is a 120-V motor (you have to plug it in—today's models would no doubt be battery-powered). When you squeeze the trigger, the motor sets the two halves of the knife sliding back and forth in a reciprocal motion that makes cutting through the toughest meat a breeze, as I'm sure the TV ad said.

It is a General Electric product, model 02EK15, manufactured in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Anyone familiar with New England knows that for much of the twentieth century, Bridgeport was a reasonably prosperous center of appliance manufacturing. Much of the mid-century domestic bounty of irons, washing machines, toasters, and electric carving knives poured from the well-paid hands of factory workers in and around Bridgeport. Of course, the invasion of cheaper imports changed all that, and Bridgeport is now in the news, if ever, primarily as a bad example of a pathologically sick city whose employment base collapsed decades ago.

To some people, the very idea of an electric carving knife smacks of decadence and extravagance. After all, if a piece of roast is so tough the only way you can cut it is with an electric-powered tool, it's too tough to serve to company anyway. And in the fate of Bridgeport they see a just end to a debauched consumer culture that went over the top with ridiculous objects like electric carving knives.

But to others, an electric carving knife could serve as a symbol of a lot that was right about America. Who else was making electric carving knives in 1978? Maybe nobody, and if so, we were first in the world with electric carving knives. You're not going to win a war with electric carving knives, but the kind of economy that gave rise to them was so powerful that when President Reagan threatened the Soviet Union with Star Wars, it set off a chain of events that ultimately marked the downfall of Communism there and in Eastern Europe. After 1990, people in East Germany who could afford an electric carving knife could jolly well go ahead and buy one.

I'm not a party of either camp. I just like to use the knife occasionally when there's a lot of carving to do fast. For all I know, there may be industrial models of electric carving knives that save thousands of dollars a year in commercial kitchens. And since General Electric built this one so well (and we use it so seldom), I'm not going to be in the market for a new one any time soon. This one still works just fine.

The economy worldwide is currently in a funk, and we are hearing advice that it is our privilege, maybe even our patriotic duty, to go out there and spend money, even borrowing it if necessary, and get more of those things that make it such a good deal to be a consumer today. I suppose I could go out and find a newer electric carving knife, cordless, maybe even one with a wireless remote control and Internet access built in and a camera chip so people around the world can get a carving-knife-eye view of our Easter pork roast. But you know, I believe in buying things only when I can see a good use for them. If everybody had my purchasing habits, we'd have a depression so deep that it would make this current slump look like happy days are here again. Fortunately for the economy, for every believer in relative simplicity like me, there are several spendthrifts who have to get the latest things just as they come out, so whenever money starts flowing again, there will be people around to spend it on the 2009 version of electric carving knives.

And so I don't think we can get very far, at least in a free-market economy, with a general theory of consumption ethics. It's so individualized, for one thing, that it is hard to say anything ethics-wise that would apply to most consumers. I'll go along sticking to my ethic of relative simplicity, and my 31-year-old electric carving knife, but I'm sure the slack will be taken up by some of you folks who can't wait to see your pot roast on YouTube next Easter.

Sources: It appears that the direct descendant of my carving knife is still out there: Black & Decker, for example, still makes a model EK700K, and it's not even battery-powered yet (see e. g. http://www.bizrate.com/electricknives/oid1017775940.html) Whether the "EK" in the model number indicates that B&D bought the product line from GE somewhere along the line is anybody's guess. And for an interesting view of how domestic consumer products were developed in the controlled economy of East Germany in the 1950s, see Karin Zachmann's "A Socialist Consumption Junction: Debating the Mechanization of Housework in East Germany, 1956-1957" in Technology & Culture, vol. 43, pp. 73-99 (Jan. 2002).

Google Earth's Street View: Public Boon or Privacy Invasion?

Google Earth is, simply put, an attempt to put the earth online in maps and photographs. Lately they have been adding "street views" taken by camera-equipped cars that roam the streets taking 360-degree photographs for display to anyone who types in the correct address, or latitude and longitude, or any number of other ways to indicate location that Google can figure out. While distributing scenic views of public places is nothing new, the novelty of Google's approach is the sheer scale of what they're doing combined with extreme ease of accessibility.

Some folks in the English town of Broughton thought it all a bit much when the Street View car showed up on their roads recently. As the online Times of London explained, resident Paul Jacobs saw the vehicle from an upstairs window, got mad, ran down to the street, and stopped the car. Residents were already anxious about a number of burglaries in the prosperous area, and this was the last straw for several of them, who formed a human chain and blocked further access to their town. The Street View driver eventually turned around and left, and so Broughton is one of the shrinking number of places that you can't see up close and personal on Google Earth.

I just checked to see if my own little side court in this midsize Texas town had been visited by Google Earth, and indeed it has. I can't tell exactly when, because I don't put a big sign out in the front yard every day with the day's date on it. But from certain vehicles parked in driveways I can tell it's within the last two years, and maybe more recently than that.

Would I have objected like Mr. Jacobs if I'd been here when the truck came by? Being natively technology-friendly, probably not. I might have gone out to talk with the driver, but only to ask for technical details about the camera.

I first heard about the anti-Google-Earth mob on a radio talk show focused on privacy issues. Although Google has a way for individuals (or nations, for that matter) to request that certain images be blurred or removed, this is an "opt-out" process, which builds in a bias toward display that an "opt-in" process would not have (if you had to ask Google specifically to put your street on their system, they wouldn't display nearly as many streets). What are the ethical issues involved here?

The first step in analyzing an ethical problem is to figure out who is involved. In the case of Mr. Jacobs, for instance, the concerned parties are him and his neighbors; Google; and the rest of the world. Already we've got a problem, in that rarely do ethical issues go straight from a small, local population to literally everyone on earth who has a computer with network access. I say rarely, but it's becoming more common these days as computer worms produced by small but influential outlaw groups affect millions or billions of people. Fortunately, what Google Earth is trying to do appears to be more benign, but that may be only because people of ill will haven't figured out how to take advantage of it yet.

Clearly, if what Google Earth presented was live pictures, there would be a much bigger problem. It frankly doesn't bother me much that a photo of my house taken some time in the last two years is online, but if it was live and burglars could just watch until they were sure no one was home, it would be a different matter altogether. Nevertheless, the potential now exists for someone (or something, in the case of automated malware) from any part of the world to use that information for inimical purposes, and there's nothing I can do about it until after it happens.

And that may be the best thing to do in such cases. I do not generally subscribe to the "precautionary principle," which says no new technology should be adopted until it is proven to be safe. It may be the best thing just to wait and see if anyone actually uses Google Earth's street-view feature in the commission of a crime, and then deal with the problems that arise. That's not too fair to the people who will be victims of the crime, but somebody has to go first, I guess. And to stray a little bit into the field of utilitarian ethics (a place I don't like to spend much time in), there is the advantage individuals get from being able to use Google Earth to, for instance, check out motels without going there, as I did a couple of weeks ago. So maybe this kind of good for a great number of people is worth the minor risks taken by, well, almost an equal number of people. That's the problem with utilitarianism, the math quickly gets out of hand.

As the same talk-show host pointed out, the Google Earth system is one more way of packaging ordinary people as a product. Far more likely than burglars, advertisers (or their software) will spend a lot of time studying street views. You can tell a lot about a person from looking at their house: income level, types of cars they drive, whether they need a new lawnmower, and so on. This is a use that isn't clearly objectionable, but isn't exactly what I had in mind, either.

So, as with so many other new technologies, we will wait and see what happens. I don't think Google Earth's photo cars will run into too many privacy-hungry mobs in Texas, but I'd be careful around Massachusetts and Vermont.

Sources: The online Times of London story appeared on Apr. 3 at http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6022902.ece. The radio talk show was hosted by Dr. Katherine Albrecht (http://www.katherinealbrecht.com/), whose work has appeared elsewhere in this blog as the head of a group concerned about RFID usage in supermarkets.

Can Google Save Emailers From Themselves?

Most people, it seems, have sent off emails they later regret sending. In last Friday's edition of Slate magazine, reporter Michael Agger comments on what Google is calling its "Gmail embarrassment reduction pack." Among the new features are a five-second window during which you can hit an "undo send" button. While Agger wishes Google would come up with a more powerful version that would reach out into recipients' email boxes minutes or hours after you send a regrettable email, there are technical server barriers that make such a thing practically impossible.

Saying or doing things you are sorry for later is nothing new, but email has made it treacherously easy to fire off flaming ripostes, jokes from the Poor-Taste Review, and confidential memos to people you either change your mind about sending them to later, or sometimes even to people you never intended to contact, if the automatic email-address-completer function guesses your intentions incorrectly. The other day I watched an old suspense movie about a woman whose husband falsely accused her of murder in a letter he mailed to the local district attorney's office. The plot's engine ran on her efforts to get the letter back from the post office, and we got a little tour of how a small-town 1950s post office handled such requests: badly, it turned out. They refused her requests at every turn. Just when it seemed that all was lost and the letter was about to fall into the hands of the DA, here it came back to the woman in the next day's mail—returned for insufficient postage!

So even when it took many minutes or hours to send a letter, people would get into trouble caused by someone's malicious hand, if not their own. With email, it just happens faster nowadays, and there's no friendly (or unfriendly) postal employees to go talk to and beg for your emails back.

Google is to be commended for something that software engineers do too rarely, which is to take into account the real ways that average people (not other software engineers) actually use and misuse their products.

Sometimes this works well, but other times it backfires. For example, I am using two different version of Microsoft Word at work. The old familiar version makes .doc files, but the new version produces something called ".docx" files that my old version can't make heads or tails of. I understand that one reason each version of Word is bigger than the previous one is that "backward compatibility" is something they've tried to preserve over the years. What this means is that even files made by nearly prehistoric software (meaning, anything older than five years) should be readable by the latest applications. Evidently this got to be impossible with Word 2007, or so difficult Microsoft decided to bite the bullet and pitch it—hence the .docx problem. Which incidentally forces anyone who receives Word attachments to get the new version of Word, but that's another issue.

So at least part of the time, I'm using the new 2007 Word, and it tries to read my mind. For example, any time I type a period it capitalizes the following word. If I'm typing regular sentences, that's appropriate, but if I'm typing lists, or software code, or other things, when I type a lower-case letter after a period, I mean a lower-case letter. So then I have to go back and type the same thing again. There must be a "that's what I meant the first time" detector built into the program, because at least it doesn't keep capitalizing the letter over and over again. I've searched all over the preferences controls for a way to turn this irritating feature off, but I can't find it. Perhaps a merciful reader will write in with the solution. In the meantime, it slows me down and adds an incremental bit to the annoyance level of my job.

It would be an interesting exercise for some anthropologists with time on their hands to try to recreate what software engineers and developers think human beings are like from the way we are expected to use computers. We love generic, inane clip art that tries to look different but always looks like cheap clip art; we make common grammatical errors all the time and require the help of our word processors to fix them; but we always mean to send emails immediately after we write them and never have any regrets (unless we're using Gmail, in which case the regrets always show up within five seconds). We demand tons of new features in every new software package even though we end up using only a few percent of them. We love new things of any kind, even though the added value or usefulness of them is sometimes hard to see. A good number of us respond to web ads placed anywhere in our visual field, regardless of whether the ad pertains to the website we happen to be looking at, especially if the ads have little animated figures of women wiggling their behinds. And enough people to make the scam worthwhile apparently believe there are really usurped former princes in Nigeria looking for someone to help them get their cash out of the country who email strangers at random trusting them with their cash, if they'll only send a few bucks to Nigeria to prime the pump, so to speak.

This is not an edifying picture. To a great extent, general-purpose software and the web are a free-market response to what people are actually like, and to that extent, the picture is accurate. But instead of just extracting money from our wallets, it is good to read that some software developers are at least trying to appeal to the better angels of our nature, in Lincoln's famous phrase. I hope Google's efforts reduce the number of email flaming incidents and to that extent, make the world a better place. But human nature being what it is, I'm sure we'll find ways around it too.

Sources: The article "Can't Believe I Just Sent That" appeared in Slate magazine on Friday, Mar. 27, at http://www.slate.com/id/2214733/.

Conficker Stumps the Experts, So Far

Back in January, I blogged on the Conficker or Downadup worm that had spread to millions of computers worldwide. Conficker is a worm that is intended to form "botnets" of computers owned by unsuspecting users who have no idea that their machine has been taken over for (usually) nefarious purposes. Since then, Conficker has continued to spread and its developer (or developers) have managed to stay a few steps ahead of the growing team of computer-security experts who are trying to foil it.

A recent New York Times article describes how the "Conficker Cabal," a team of leading security specialists from a variety of private and governmental organizations, have tried to frustrate the worm's attempts to control its botnets from a list of Internet domain names that was originally only 250 or so. The Conficker authors foxed the experts by modifying the program so it can now use about 50,000 addresses from which to send its nefarious instructions, making the problem of combating it much harder. Even the U. S. military doesn't seem to know what to do. The situation grows more urgent as April 1 approaches, which is evidently the date at which the bots in the botnet will report for Conficker duty. But what that duty might be is a matter of speculation, ranging from a harmless April Fool prank to a severe attack on Internet sites of major importance, or even the entire Internet.

I'm trying to think of another case in which a high-tech system of international scope has been turned from good to evil purposes. It's not that hard. The Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center used atoms, not bits, but the idea was similar: take a complex technology that involves large amounts of power and divert it to harmful purposes. Conficker lacks the element of surprise that 9/11 carried, but the level of planning and expertise required is comparable. Nuclear energy is another ongoing example. The beneficial use of nuclear energy for peaceful power reactors carries with it the constant hazard of diversion of nuclear fuel and knowhow to rogue regimes who want nuclear weapons.

A question we could ask that ties all these cases together is this: to what extent should engineers who develop a new technology, take into account the evil purposes to which it could be applied? I'm not talking about accidental hazards, but intentional misuse. I can't help but think that the original developers of the Internet were not thinking too heavily along these lines when they came up with the protocols that they did. Obviously, the Internet is generally one of the greatest success stories of the twenty-first century, and such problems that we have run into on it so far have not led to fatalities on a wide scale. But as we depend on it more and more and as attacks grow more sophisticated, that may change.

I have mentioned previously the need for engineers to use moral imagination, but mostly in the context of imagining how a given technology employed for its intended purpose can affect various groups of people. This is not always an easy thing to do, and it takes determined effort and a kind of thinking outside the usual engineering box to do it. But it often pays off in terms of new insights about potential problems that can be avoided, sometimes with simple low-cost fixes such as notifications or minor changes.

What I haven't considered in such musings is the need for a kind of twisted or evil imagination. It looks like not only should you think of how a technology will affect people if it is used as intended, but also if some evil person comes along and tries to do really nasty things with it. For some reason, this line of thinking has gone farther in computer technology than in most other forms of technology, partly because attempts to defeat security measures have been a part of computer programming almost since the beginning. There are several reasons for this.

Much more than other kinds of technology, computer technology is homogeneous: there's the human programmer or user, and the machine with its software. And the prize is simple: control. While control is only one aspect of the problem with hijacking other kinds of technology, control is the major part of the battle with computer hacking. Once you have control, computers will do your bidding with entire indifference to your moral values. And computer technology is the supreme example of fungibility: a general-purpose computer can literally do almost anything, limited only by resources. So once you have control, there's no particular problem in making the botnet or whatever do your evil will.

All the same, when programmers and computer scientists create new technologies, they build into them realms of possible and impossible actions. Because of the way the system is structured, there are certain things that it is physically impossible to do with the Internet. It's too late now, but wouldn't it be nice if one of those impossible things was to create a botnet and do evil things with it? Hindsight is generally sharper than foresight, but there are always new technologies coming along, and so there is still a chance to get it right, or more nearly right, in the future.

Of course, if you're clever and wicked enough, you can take almost any technology and do something bad with it. This doesn't mean that designers should simply drop any project that could conceivably be used for malicious acts. Engineering is all about compromises and tradeoffs. All I'm suggesting is that when you can think of an obvious nefarious use for a new technology, it would be a good idea to take some small steps toward building in preventive measures that would make it harder to use in a bad way.

In the meantime, let's hope that nothing worse happens on April 1 than a few bad practical jokes here and there.

Sources: I last blogged about the Conficker worm on Jan, 16, 2009. The New York Times article "Computer Experts Unite to Hunt Worm" can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/technology/19worm.html.

A Note About Broken Links: Whenever I give a source URL link, I make sure that it is working at the time I write the blog. Over time, some of these links have become broken because the source website has taken down the article or for other reasons. I do not have the resources to go back and repair old links, so if you are interested in a source URL, my suggestion is to click on it as soon as you see it show up. If you are interested in a link but find it is broken and can't locate the material any other way, you can email me at kdstephan@txstate.edu. I sometimes keep local file copies of the source material referred to, and if I have done so I will be happy to provide you with a copy if the original URL is broken.

Nuclear Power: Technical Assets and Political Liabilities

With the coming of the new U. S. presidential administration, we as a country have a rare chance to debate and decide on a new course in energy policy: specifically, where we will get our electricity during the remainder of the twenty-first century. For a number of reasons ranging from geopolitical issues to fear of global warming, many people want to get away from burning fossil fuels. Technically, one of the most promising and accessible ways to do that is to build more nuclear plants. But politically, doing that will be an uphill battle.

France seems to be one of the models that the new administration is using as an example of how to run things. It turns out that France generates over three-fourths of its electricity from nuclear power, and they have beaten us out of the gate in the race to start building new plants. The French have never had a major nuclear accident on the order of Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, and they are the only country in the world that successfully reprocesses nuclear fuel on a commercial basis (think recycling for nuclear waste). Reprocessing and a variety of yet-to-be-commercialized techniques such as fast breeder reactors promise to reduce or eliminate the need for storing large amounts of nuclear waste. While it is true that such promises have yet to be delivered and so far, nuclear waste is stored on site at many plants, good engineering and planning is capable of dealing safely with that problem too. Unfortunately, the budget proposed by the Obama Administration eliminates funding for continuing the development of the best project the U. S. has sponsored for dealing coherently with nuclear waste, namely the Yucca Mountain program.

So why don't we follow France's example and go nuclear in a big way? I can think of at least two reasons, both of them mainly political rather than technical: fear of nuclear anything and competition from renewable energy.

A small, vocal minority in the U. S. has dedicated their lives, it seems, to the proposition that all nuclear technology must be banished from the face of the earth forever. I agree with them that if we could wave a magic wand somehow and make it impossible to build nuclear weapons forever, the world would probably be a better place. (Human cussedness being what it is, I'm not sure, but on balance I think it would be.) But to this minority, nuclear power and nuclear waste are just as evil and just as deserving to be eradicated. A larger number of people are influenced by these minority views and hold a deep, almost instinctive revulsion for nuclear technology, especially if a new nuclear plant is proposed in their neighborhood (where "neighborhood" often means anywhere within one's state or region). Technical people can talk themselves blue in the face about how non-rational this fear is, but in a democracy, the fears of millions of voters can and should make a difference. Nuclear power has had a mainly bad press in the U. S. and many other parts of the world for decades, and that fact cannot be ignored in any efforts to go nuclear with our power systems.

The flip side of that coin is the popularity that green anything enjoys these days (I'm writing this on St. Patrick's Day, incidentally, but the Irish green isn't the kind I'm talking about). You can tell by the almost desperate way companies claim they're going green with products and services that if you can label yourself green, you get a publicity boost almost regardless of whether you can back up the claim. Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power benefit immensely from this green buzz. And that is good to the extent that we can use them as an auxiliary energy source. But the problem with most renewable sources that remain to be exploited (that eliminates hydropower, for example, in most places) is that they depend on the fickleness of their natural drivers. Wind blows sometimes and doesn't sometimes. The sun never comes out at night and has problems coming out on cloudy days. And since it's not practical to store electric energy in large quantities (although this issue could be addressed if we wanted to), wind and solar sources are best used for what is called "peak load," which is the times when everybody has turned on their air conditioners on a hot summer day, and the utility companies are desperately scrambling to squeeze every last kilowatt out of their generators. At times like those, it's great to have arrays of solar panels you can call on, and for every solar-powered kilowatt you get during a peak-load period, that's one less kilowatt you have to generate with coal or oil.

But to go completely renewable is impractical. Solar arrays take up huge amounts of real estate and are very expensive. Some estimates I've read say that to supply even the majority of U. S. electric power with solar, you'd have to cover most of New Mexico with solar panels, and that deals only with the daytime. Wind energy is equally problematic as a source of what is called "base-load" power that you can rely on 24 hours a day, which is most of what electric utilities need to keep going. And that doesn't even address the problem of how to get the energy from where it would be generated (mainly in low-population rural areas) to where it would be used (mainly cities).

Most of these technical issues never come up in political discussions of the future of energy policy. If we go with the inclinations of the average voter, we'd get all our power from wind and solar and none from nuclear or fossil fuels. That's fine if you happen to be an off-the-grid type living by yourself in the wilds of Montana, but we simply can't run our cities and industries and homes that way, unless we tear them all down and redesign them to use about 25% or less of the power they now use.

In Europe there is a small building boom in nearly zero-power-consumption homes. It turns out that by using vast quantities of insulation, air-based heat exchangers that take up a large part of the basement (assuming you have a basement), and by approaching the shape of a sphere, you can build a (small) residence of a few hundred square feet that uses almost no energy for heating or cooling. Somehow I don't think we're all going to enjoy living in tiny insulated igloos in the future. But if we simply go with how the majority feels about energy and we ignore the technical realities, we might end up that way.

Sources: A good article on France's reprocessing facilities was carried by IEEE Spectrum in their February 2007 online edition at http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb07/4891. The statistic about France's nuclear power as a percentage of all power was obtained from an International Herald Tribune article at http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/17/europe/17francenuke.php.

Stem Cells and "The Prestige"

If you haven't seen the remarkable 2006 film The Prestige, quit reading this blog and go rent it, because there's a "spoiler" in the next paragraph.

If you have, you will remember among the final scenes the sight of one hundred tanks of water, each containing the drowned body of a "duplicate" of the magician Angier. Each body was created and destroyed in a matter of minutes during the performance of a magic trick. The fictional form of cinema drives home, as no dry argument can do, the horror of how a man driven by worldly ambition for fame and fortune could bring himself to produce and then kill dozens of human beings.

That scene comes to mind as I am writing this blog early on the morning of March 9. Later today, if all goes according to plan, President Obama will announce the rescinding of President Bush's order restricting federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research. According to the New York Times, the President is doing this as part of his pledge to "separate science and politics."

How will increased federal support, by tax money designated by the duly elected Congress of the United States, for research that destroys human beings who under normal circumstances would develop into babies, children, and adults more or less like the rest of us, be a step in the direction of "separating science and politics"? If anyone deserves credit for separating science and politics, it is former President Bush, who, after careful consideration early in his first term, decided to allow limited federal support of embryonic stem-cell research using only existing stem-cell lines, so that no more embryos would be destroyed for the purposes of this research.

That was a long time ago. Since then, science has progressed to the point that cells from the adult body can be made to do nearly everything that embryonic stem cells do, and without the destruction of embryos. According to Yuval Levin, director of the Bioethics and American Democracy program at Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, the number of labs using these non-embryonic "induced pluripotent stem cells" had increased to about 800 by the fall of 2008.

But in the meantime, politicians shanghaied the science for their own purposes. We were showered with TV ads and shows portraying victims of neurological damage such as Michael J. Fox and the late quadriplegic Christopher Reeve as being made to suffer primarily because of Bush's partial ban on embryonic stem-cell funding. Voters in the state of California were persuaded to approve Proposition 71 in 2004, which allowed a $3-billion bond issue designated for human stem-cell research. Despite these efforts and privately funded research in this country and abroad, not a single therapy based on human embryonic stem cells has even reached the stage of clinical trials in operation, according to Levin.

The claim that to allow unrestricted federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research is to separate science from politics is the exact opposite of the truth. Decades ago when the government was smaller, federal funds were treated with a certain amount of deference and respect. Having been forcibly extracted from the entire populace, federal money was held in special regard and used only for causes such as national defense and scientific projects that showed clear and unequivocal promise of furthering the public good.

Not only has science recently shown that embryonic stem cells are probably not the way to go in stem-cell research, the old idea that we would need lots of them to insert into patients for treatment is also becoming passé. More recent studies indicate that molecular biology directed at particular genetic switches will be more effective than the crude injection of stem cells, which tend to form malignancies and other problems that are often worse than the disease they were originally intended to cure.

This is the science that needs to be separated from politics to a greater extent that it is already. Any time you have public funding of science, science tends to become politicized. But it is at least possible for the influence of politics on science to be minimized by a hierarchy of authority. The best people to decide on a tactical level which science should be funded are the scientists themselves, which is why agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health conduct peer reviews of proposals. It is by no means a perfect system, but it is vastly superior to earmarks or other political approaches that channel funds directly to certain projects or institutions regardless of their scientific merit or qualifications. However, scientists cannot always be trusted to do things in keeping with the moral inclinations of the public, and that is why Bush decided the way he did about limiting funding for embryonic stem-cell research, as a part of his strategic outlook on the broad politics of science research. Not everything that can be done should be done, and scientists should not have the last word in all cases over how public money should be spent.

But political causes, once set in motion, tend to take on a life of their own independent of rational thought or scientific progress. There are millions of people out there convinced by politicians that the only thing standing between us and Heaven on earth is Bush's restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research.

It looks like President Obama is going to do what he said he would. A lot of people (embryos are people, they're just a lot younger than you and me) will die as a result, and a lot of other people will be disappointed that all the claims of miracle cures don't pan out. And science will get more deeply embroiled in politics than it ever was before.

Sources: The New York Times story on Obama's plans to rescind the Bush rules can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/07/us/politics/07stem.html. Yuval Levin's report "Biotech: What to Expect" is carried in the March 2009 issue of the journal First Things, pp. 17-20.

Software Engineers as Legislators: Is Code Law?

The other day someone (perhaps a publisher's representative, or a colleague who thought I'd be interested in it) put in my mailbox a copy of David G. Post's new book In Search of Jefferson's Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace. Whoever did it was right to think I'd be interested. But rather than review the whole book (which tries to tie together cyberspace, Thomas Jefferson, a stuffed moose he went to great trouble and expense to have shipped to him from the U. S. to France, and a great variety of other matters), I would like to cogitate on just one idea from it: the notion that in cyberspace, "code is law."

The word "law" has at least two distinct common meanings. If I say, "You can't drive over 40 MPH on this street, it's against the law," the word means the set of rules enacted by a duly authorized governmental body. In a democracy the laws are presumably made by representatives of the people. In a dictatorship they're made by the dictator. But in either case they are human constructions. And when I say "can't" I'm not being strictly accurate. It's not physically impossible to drive faster than 40 MPH on that street, but if you do, you are liable to get caught and pay a fine.

The other important meaning of "law" is what we mean when we talk about the law of gravity, for instance: a natural principle that governs how the universe works. Try as you might, you simply can't defeat the law of gravity. It's part of the structure of the physical world. Obviously, we can do something about human laws—debate them, even change them if necessary—but all we can do about physical laws is try to understand them better so we can work within their constraints.

Which of these two meanings applies better to the idea that in cyberspace, "code is law"? That's actually a quotation in the book from Lawrence Lessig, a law professor who has written extensively on intellectual property in cyberspace. What he means is perhaps best illustrated by an example.

It turns out that embedded in the underlying "HTTP protocols" on which all web browsers run is a requirement for what is called a "referrer field." This is how Google gets paid for sending people to its advertisers' websites. The referrer field tells the advertiser that the visitor came from a Google site, and Google can collect their fee by using this information. The only way Google can do this, though, is by means of the "law" that allows for the referrer field.

If, way back in the beginning of hypertext and browsers in the 1990s, the engineers who wrote the HTTP protocols had neglected to allow for the referrer field, Post points out that Internet commerce would be very different. More specifically, millions of common transactions we are used to doing today would be impossible. What kind of law would make them impossible?

If you say that it's a physical law, like gravity, I will point out that the code enabling or disabling the referrer field was written by ordinary (more or less, anyway) human beings calling themselves software engineers.

But if you say it's just like a law on the books of a state or country, I will point out that unlike such man-made rules, it's not, strictly speaking, illegal to break "code laws"—but it just won't work. If you pretend there's a referrer field that isn't there, something very much like physical law intervenes to stop you, since you are denying a part of reality.

So the constraints and allowances imposed by the software structure of cyberspace borrow characteristics from both physical law and legislative law. This fact is underappreciated by at least two groups of people.

The first group is the software engineers themselves. I don't know why the early HTTP code warriors put that referral field in there, but making the founders of Google fabulously rich was probably not foremost in their minds. It probably served some minor technical function that paled into insignificance once the commercial possibilities of its use came to the fore. No one can foretell the future with perfect accuracy, but it would be nice if software engineers working in fields that are likely to influence the behavior and freedom, even, of millions of people, would at least realize that they are playing the part of legislators, usually without realizing it. Maybe a few of them do realize the broader implications of what they're doing, but it is a rare engineer who has even an average legislator's appreciation for the needs and wants of the public. That is one reason why so much software has annoying habits that make you want to go hunt up the guy who wrote it and give him a piece of your mind before you lose it on account of the software.

The second group, which includes practically everybody nowadays, is the public at large who uses, deals with, or is (sometimes) victimized by, software. You need to know that it is possible, at least in principle, for things to change, even in software. Unfortunately, when you look at the governance systems erected by those in charge of the Internet and allied software standards, they are typically as complicated as the software is. I have noticed that whenever engineers are left to themselves to design an organization, whether it's a five-person committee or something as large as the 300,000-member Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, they will typically devise a legislative monstrosity with interlocking boards, districts, criss-crossing lines of authority, and other features that leave the outside observer with a general sense of not knowing quite who is in charge. It's hard even for technical people to get anything useful out of such organizations, and as for the general public—well, "forget it" is a tad discouraging, but the systems are usually not designed for ease of access by non-experts.

But as with any problem, people of good will can at least try to make things better. For you software engineers out there, try to think outside your little code box and consider the wider implications of your work, especially if you're fooling with stuff that millions of people will use. And as for the rest of us, if you ever get a chance to have some input on software design, take it and run. You stand a good chance of making cyberspace a better place.

Sources: In Search of Jefferson's Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace by David G. Post was published in February 2009 by Oxford University Press.