In a blog post last Friday, Google admitted that since 2006 its Street View photography cars have also been collecting bits of private data from unencrypted private WiFi networks as the cars drive by. According to Google, the collection of private data in this way was unintentional, but it has landed them in hot water with the German data protection authorities whose inquiry prompted the discovery.
As a rule, European states have a greater regard for data protection and privacy issues than many jurisdictions in the Americas. So when a (presumably) American engineer working for Google thought it would be a good idea to collect just the network identification data of wireless networks that the Street View car passed by, apparently no one at Google saw anything objectionable in the idea. The problem was, the software that the engineer wrote also collected what is called "payload data"—that is, content of emails, websites being viewed, and whatever else goes over one's unencrypted wireless network. (Encrypted networks were not sniffed.) I can imagine that it was easier simply to grab and store all the data at once and then sort out the network ID stuff later, than it was to do it "on the fly" while the car was in motion. But this meant that everywhere the Street View cars went—and by now they've traveled probably millions of miles in most cities of the world—their hard drives were accumulating little pieces of private information that were exactly correlated with location and scenery. And presumably, as Google is a well-run engineering outfit, all this data was carefully collected and archived somewhere, even though no one seemed to realize that the private stuff was in there along with the network ID information.
Then along comes the data protection agent of Hamburg, Germany, who asks just exactly what are you collecting with that car? What is all this wireless stuff for? Let me see the hard drive. It's encrypted? Hum, well, tell me what's on it. And Google, in accordance with one of its founding precepts, namely, "Don't be evil," honestly checked and honestly found to its dismay that it had been collecting all this private stuff for the last four years, all over the world.
There is some good news and bad news here. The good news is, to all appearances this was a genuine error, not a sinister plot to collect blackmail data on people all over the world so as to increase Google's bottom line illegally. And when challenged by a duly constituted authority, Google personnel didn't lie, cover up, or illegally dispose of the data. Instead, they did the short-term hard thing, which was for Alan Eustace, the Senior VP of Engineering and Research, to post a blog admitting that an earlier post was in error, that Google did indeed inadvertently acquire and collect private data, and that they were going to do everything they can to amend the situation.
The bad news is, at least for Google, that their honesty has not mollified various European authorities to any great extent. The very collection of such data, even if you do nothing with it (as Google apparently has not) is illegal in Germany, and according to a New York Times report, officials are going to consult the European Commission to decide what penalties will be appropriate. The Street View feature itself has already been under attack there, and one German legislator has introduced a bill that would allow private citizens to request that their property not appear on Street View at all, with a hefty fine for Google for each incidence of non-compliance. This law would seriously compromise the usefulness of Street View, and it might be simpler for Google to just make Germany disappear altogether—so to speak.
This incident highlights the fact that a single engineer working on something that will be used in a large project should take the trouble to consider all the places the software or hardware might be used, not just some of them. Google has a reputation for putting huge resources behind innovative notions, and that's good, but with those resources come the responsibility of being more careful than is necessary if what you're working on involves only you and Joe, the neighbor down the street. I'm sure this lesson will be remembered and pounded into the heads of future engineers whose products are used in places that are more touchy about data security and privacy than, say, Austin, Texas.
It also shows the limitations of the idea of privacy in a globally interconnected age. Already, if you carry a cell phone in the U. S. and many other countries, your cellphone company "knows" where you are at least to within the accuracy of a cell (which can be any size from hundreds of feet wide to several miles), and soon there may be software and hardware on phones that will use GPS and other technologies to narrow that down to within a few yards. In general, we trust our phone companies not to use this information to our detriment, but so far, it is just a matter of trust, not law. And when it suits the law's purposes, as when a criminal is being tracked down, phone companies can be made to yield up that data. Any time you walk outside, satellite photography can almost make out your visage as you smile at the nice sunshiny day, not to mention the thousands of security cameras everywhere, and if you go inside and get on your computer, all kinds of folks can find out all kinds of things about you without your knowledge. In the U. S. we are perhaps more content with less of certain kinds of privacy than other countries are, in keeping with our long history of freedom.
Whether we will live to regret what may be viewed in the future as an excess of openness, or whether Europe will strangle data innovation with cumbersome laws that leave it increasingly without new services, only time will tell.
Sources: The New York Times article on Google's admission appeared in the May 14, 2010 online edition at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/technology/16google.html. Mr. Eustace's blog entry on the subject appears at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html. And full disclosure: The website blogspot.com on which this blog appears is owned by Google.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Offshore Oil Regulation: Who's To Judge?
As Transocean and British Petroleum try to lower yet another big box to stop the underwater gusher that threatens to turn many Gulf beaches into hazardous-waste environments, President Obama is talking about taking a hatchet to the U. S. Minerals Management Service, the agency that both oversees many aspects of mining and well-drilling, and collects (or is supposed to collect) fees from private entities who have permission to mine or drill on government land, or water. Clear? Well, the conflict that the President sees is that the people who stand to benefit (or at least to make their agency look good) from lots of drilling and royalties derived therefrom, are the same folks who are supposed to play policeman and make sure all this is done safely. While splitting the agency into enforcement and collection halves is a nice idea on paper and gives politicians a sense that they're doing something about the problem, it may just paper over a deeper problem: how do you regulate something that is so complicated that only the people who do it really understand it?
Time and again, reporters have shown how the government regulators of many industries, from petroleum to communications to finance, are either former employees of the very firms they are charged with regulating, or (what seems even worse) rely on the companies they regulate to do the actual inspecting, and take their word that things are going well.
On the surface, this kind of thing looks bad. We all feel that a person who has depended for their livelihood on a particular organization or industry will be prejudiced in favor of that entity, even if the former private employee enters government service to regulate the very business they used to work for. So what is the alternative?
The only way to get rid of all possible prejudice of this kind is to select regulators who have no association whatsoever with oil wells, or radio stations, or banks, or whatever the target of the regulator's scrutiny is. But right away we run into a problem: if you've never drilled a well, or run a radio station, or worked in a bank, can you know enough to regulate it?
Sometimes, maybe so. My father was a banker, and every year or two he'd come home complaining about the upcoming visit of the bank examiners. He never told me what their backgrounds were, but I imagine that back then, a degree in general accounting was probably okay. But if a banker was determined to pull a fast one, it seems like it would be better if the fellow trying to catch him in the act had actually stood in his shoes and learned all the little details of procedure and so on that allow clever nefarious schemes to succeed. It's the old "it takes a thief to catch a thief" idea (no aspersions on bankers intended).
The same problem happens to the nth degree when a highly technical field such as offshore oil production is in question. As I learned long ago when I once thought my Ph. D. in electrical engineering qualified me to fix an oscilloscope, nobody knows a system better than the people who work inside it day to day. So handing my scope over to a technician with a two-year degree and five years of experience fixing just those kind of scopes is going to work a lot better than me trying to fiddle with the thing. There is a lot of what chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi called "tacit knowledge" out there: stuff that you can't find in books, but which is essential to the proper functioning of machines, systems, and organizations. And nothing teaches tacit knowledge like experience.
This same issue has arisen when questions are asked about why the U. S. government or the Coast Guard or the Marines or somebody with a uniform hasn't been called in to fix the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, instead of letting the same doofuses who broke it in the first place try to do it? The simple answer is that those "doofuses" happen to be the world experts on this kind of thing, and even experts foul up every now and then. Asking the government to shove the private owners aside in order to step in would be pushing away the best expertise we have, and that would be simply stupid.
In the attempts to fix the Deepwater Horizon spill, we may be witnessing the outworkings of a kind of failure that results not just in shifts in government bureaucracies, but fundamental technical changes that render a whole industry safer and better equipped to do its job in the future. Engineer and historian Henry Petroski has shown how certain failures in nineteenth-century iron bridges closed down whole avenues of design and opened up other ones. Despite what they (we?) teach you in school, you can sometimes learn more from failures than you can from success. Once that well is capped, or plugged, or committed to perdition some way or other, and all the hearings are over and the reports written, we will know a lot more about how this accident happened, and how blowout preventers with double and triple backups can nevertheless fail. But the best people to learn this stuff are the very ones who are going to go out and do it better next time. All the government regulators you can hire straight out of school are not going to know quite as much as the experts they regulate, and so the answer is not in simply more regulation, but smarter regulation, and smarter engineering. Let's hope we get both.
Sources: The New York Times carried an article about President Obama's plans at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/us/12interior.html?hp. Henry Petroski's To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure In Successful Design (Vintage, 1992) is still in print, and a good treatment of just what the title says.
Time and again, reporters have shown how the government regulators of many industries, from petroleum to communications to finance, are either former employees of the very firms they are charged with regulating, or (what seems even worse) rely on the companies they regulate to do the actual inspecting, and take their word that things are going well.
On the surface, this kind of thing looks bad. We all feel that a person who has depended for their livelihood on a particular organization or industry will be prejudiced in favor of that entity, even if the former private employee enters government service to regulate the very business they used to work for. So what is the alternative?
The only way to get rid of all possible prejudice of this kind is to select regulators who have no association whatsoever with oil wells, or radio stations, or banks, or whatever the target of the regulator's scrutiny is. But right away we run into a problem: if you've never drilled a well, or run a radio station, or worked in a bank, can you know enough to regulate it?
Sometimes, maybe so. My father was a banker, and every year or two he'd come home complaining about the upcoming visit of the bank examiners. He never told me what their backgrounds were, but I imagine that back then, a degree in general accounting was probably okay. But if a banker was determined to pull a fast one, it seems like it would be better if the fellow trying to catch him in the act had actually stood in his shoes and learned all the little details of procedure and so on that allow clever nefarious schemes to succeed. It's the old "it takes a thief to catch a thief" idea (no aspersions on bankers intended).
The same problem happens to the nth degree when a highly technical field such as offshore oil production is in question. As I learned long ago when I once thought my Ph. D. in electrical engineering qualified me to fix an oscilloscope, nobody knows a system better than the people who work inside it day to day. So handing my scope over to a technician with a two-year degree and five years of experience fixing just those kind of scopes is going to work a lot better than me trying to fiddle with the thing. There is a lot of what chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi called "tacit knowledge" out there: stuff that you can't find in books, but which is essential to the proper functioning of machines, systems, and organizations. And nothing teaches tacit knowledge like experience.
This same issue has arisen when questions are asked about why the U. S. government or the Coast Guard or the Marines or somebody with a uniform hasn't been called in to fix the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, instead of letting the same doofuses who broke it in the first place try to do it? The simple answer is that those "doofuses" happen to be the world experts on this kind of thing, and even experts foul up every now and then. Asking the government to shove the private owners aside in order to step in would be pushing away the best expertise we have, and that would be simply stupid.
In the attempts to fix the Deepwater Horizon spill, we may be witnessing the outworkings of a kind of failure that results not just in shifts in government bureaucracies, but fundamental technical changes that render a whole industry safer and better equipped to do its job in the future. Engineer and historian Henry Petroski has shown how certain failures in nineteenth-century iron bridges closed down whole avenues of design and opened up other ones. Despite what they (we?) teach you in school, you can sometimes learn more from failures than you can from success. Once that well is capped, or plugged, or committed to perdition some way or other, and all the hearings are over and the reports written, we will know a lot more about how this accident happened, and how blowout preventers with double and triple backups can nevertheless fail. But the best people to learn this stuff are the very ones who are going to go out and do it better next time. All the government regulators you can hire straight out of school are not going to know quite as much as the experts they regulate, and so the answer is not in simply more regulation, but smarter regulation, and smarter engineering. Let's hope we get both.
Sources: The New York Times carried an article about President Obama's plans at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/us/12interior.html?hp. Henry Petroski's To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure In Successful Design (Vintage, 1992) is still in print, and a good treatment of just what the title says.
Monday, May 03, 2010
Deep Problems from the Deepwater Horizon
Two weeks ago tomorrow, on Apr. 20, an explosion and fire on the oil-drilling platform Deepwater Horizon off the Louisiana Coast resulted in the presumed deaths of eleven people and the sinking of the structure two days later. Initially, it was thought that an automated device called a "blowout preventer" (BOP in petroleum-engineer speak) would shut off the high-pressure oil from the well, which is about a mile below the ocean's surface. But soon after the structure sank, oil started showing up on the surface. British Petroleum, the owner of the well, and Transocean Inc., the operator hired by BP, initially estimated that 1,000 barrels a day were leaking out. More recently the number has risen to 5,000 barrels a day, and the slick has come within nine miles of the Louisiana coastline by today (Monday morning May 3). Already the federal government has prohibited all fishing operations for the next ten days in the region, and things look like they will get worse before they get any better.
There are nearly 4,000 offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, most of them concentrated south of Louisiana, and as long as things operate smoothly, they are out of the public consciousness despite the fact that almost a third of our domestic oil production originates there. Partly because there have been no major headline-grabbing spills in recent years, President Obama recently called for increased offshore drilling in selected areas. The Deepwater Horizon disaster has put that on hold, and threatens to turn public opinion against offshore drilling for a long time.
Out of the 4,000 or so offshore oil rigs that operate without major problems, why did the Deepwater Horizon explode and sink? And even more urgently now, why didn't the blowout preventer work? These are technical questions that will require months of investigation to answer, although computerized logs and telemetry from the platform should help considerably. The blowout preventer, a three-story-high assemblage of hydraulic equipment designed to withstand the tremendous pressures five thousand feet underwater, is a sophisticated multi-stage system that sits on top of the ocean floor and surrounds the well pipe assembly. It is essentially a large automatic shutoff valve, using hydraulic pressure to acivate guillotine-like rams or rubber-and-steel rings that impose enough counterpressure to block the several-thousand-pounds-per-square-inch pressure behind the oil emerging from the ocean floor. Normally it is activated by remote control from the platform, but before the platform sank, operators tried to activate it without success. When underwater remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) reached the BOP's control panel and flipped the control switches, nothing happened. According to online discussions, in the event of a major disaster such as the loss of the platform, stored hydraulic energy in devices called accumulators should be sufficient to make the BOP do its job. But this didn't work, for reasons that are not yet clear.
Time is now critical, but unless something on the shrinking list of things British Petroleum engineers haven't tried on the BOP works, the other options to shut off the increasing flow of oil from the well will take at least weeks, if not longer. A risky idea that has apparently never been tried at such depths involves lowering large metal cans or funnels over the leaks (there are apparently at least two in the broken and twisted riser pipe) and trying to "vacuum" up the oil that way. All sorts of complications and challenges attend this approach, from the buoyancy of oil that might literally float the cans away to the differential pressure that could crush pipes and disable suitable submersible pumps, only a few of which exist anywhere in the world. The third way, which is going to be done sooner or later in any event and is pretty likely to work, is to drill a relief well, which could be better understood as a capping well. This involves drilling sideways at some safe distance to hit the exact location of the original well in order to send mud or cement into it and stop the flow. For the relief well to work, pinpoint accuracy is required, somewhat like hitting a rain gutter on the side of a building from half a mile away. While accuracy like this can be achieved, it takes two to three months to do it. And by that time, the oil could have reached Gulf shores all the way from Louisiana to Florida.
By now, British Petroleum is the poster child of the Petroleum Industry Hall of Infamy. The Houston refinery explosion that killed about two dozen people five years ago happened largely due to BP's lax safety standards, and while it is too soon to assess BP's culpability for the initial explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon, which was operated in any event by Transocean, no amount of feel-good institutional advertising is going to overcome the public perception that BP is careless about safety. In the meantime, let's hope that the effort to stop the oil leak is managed safely, efficiently, effectively, and fast.
Sources: I used information from the following websites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gulf_Coast_Platforms.jpg has a map of oil platforms in the Gulf, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7114487.ece is an article in The Times of London about attempts to shut off the oil flow, and attached to the photo of the ROV shutoff attempt at http://www.flickr.com/photos/uscgd8/4551846015/ is a long thread of discussion among engineers about the problems surrounding the disaster and how to shut off the well flow. Also, CNN has a good graphic of the three major approaches to shutting it off at http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/01/explainer.stopping.oil.leak/index.html.
There are nearly 4,000 offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, most of them concentrated south of Louisiana, and as long as things operate smoothly, they are out of the public consciousness despite the fact that almost a third of our domestic oil production originates there. Partly because there have been no major headline-grabbing spills in recent years, President Obama recently called for increased offshore drilling in selected areas. The Deepwater Horizon disaster has put that on hold, and threatens to turn public opinion against offshore drilling for a long time.
Out of the 4,000 or so offshore oil rigs that operate without major problems, why did the Deepwater Horizon explode and sink? And even more urgently now, why didn't the blowout preventer work? These are technical questions that will require months of investigation to answer, although computerized logs and telemetry from the platform should help considerably. The blowout preventer, a three-story-high assemblage of hydraulic equipment designed to withstand the tremendous pressures five thousand feet underwater, is a sophisticated multi-stage system that sits on top of the ocean floor and surrounds the well pipe assembly. It is essentially a large automatic shutoff valve, using hydraulic pressure to acivate guillotine-like rams or rubber-and-steel rings that impose enough counterpressure to block the several-thousand-pounds-per-square-inch pressure behind the oil emerging from the ocean floor. Normally it is activated by remote control from the platform, but before the platform sank, operators tried to activate it without success. When underwater remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) reached the BOP's control panel and flipped the control switches, nothing happened. According to online discussions, in the event of a major disaster such as the loss of the platform, stored hydraulic energy in devices called accumulators should be sufficient to make the BOP do its job. But this didn't work, for reasons that are not yet clear.
Time is now critical, but unless something on the shrinking list of things British Petroleum engineers haven't tried on the BOP works, the other options to shut off the increasing flow of oil from the well will take at least weeks, if not longer. A risky idea that has apparently never been tried at such depths involves lowering large metal cans or funnels over the leaks (there are apparently at least two in the broken and twisted riser pipe) and trying to "vacuum" up the oil that way. All sorts of complications and challenges attend this approach, from the buoyancy of oil that might literally float the cans away to the differential pressure that could crush pipes and disable suitable submersible pumps, only a few of which exist anywhere in the world. The third way, which is going to be done sooner or later in any event and is pretty likely to work, is to drill a relief well, which could be better understood as a capping well. This involves drilling sideways at some safe distance to hit the exact location of the original well in order to send mud or cement into it and stop the flow. For the relief well to work, pinpoint accuracy is required, somewhat like hitting a rain gutter on the side of a building from half a mile away. While accuracy like this can be achieved, it takes two to three months to do it. And by that time, the oil could have reached Gulf shores all the way from Louisiana to Florida.
By now, British Petroleum is the poster child of the Petroleum Industry Hall of Infamy. The Houston refinery explosion that killed about two dozen people five years ago happened largely due to BP's lax safety standards, and while it is too soon to assess BP's culpability for the initial explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon, which was operated in any event by Transocean, no amount of feel-good institutional advertising is going to overcome the public perception that BP is careless about safety. In the meantime, let's hope that the effort to stop the oil leak is managed safely, efficiently, effectively, and fast.
Sources: I used information from the following websites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gulf_Coast_Platforms.jpg has a map of oil platforms in the Gulf, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7114487.ece is an article in The Times of London about attempts to shut off the oil flow, and attached to the photo of the ROV shutoff attempt at http://www.flickr.com/photos/uscgd8/4551846015/ is a long thread of discussion among engineers about the problems surrounding the disaster and how to shut off the well flow. Also, CNN has a good graphic of the three major approaches to shutting it off at http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/01/explainer.stopping.oil.leak/index.html.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Do Radio Waves Cause Cancer?
This was a question a student asked last week during the electromagnetics class that I'm teaching for the first time this semester. Not wanting to turn the rest of the class period into an engineering ethics seminar, I said some brief words to this effect: "There have been many studies of that question, and although you will find people who disagree, the general conclusion is that there is no repeatable connection between radio waves and cancer." But I wish I had known about the article that journalist George Johnson published online in Slate last week. Not only did he look into the question, he tried to give himself an electromagnetic headache by camping in a nest of microwave towers in New Mexico one night. As it turned out, it didn't work.
Johnson was inspired to try this by a Los Alamos scientist who describes himself as "electrosensitive." The scientists claims that exposure to too much radio-frequency radiation gives him a variety of symptoms such as headaches and insomnia, though cancer was not on his list of complaints. So Johnson made the trek up Sandia Crest to the "Steel Forest" where dozens of radio, TV, and microwave transmitters broadcast to a large area of New Mexico. In the event, he slept well and suffered no headaches or other adverse symptoms.
Johnson explains that some of the complaints of so-called electrosensitives may be explained by a phenomenon known to historians as a hysterical epidemic. It turns out that some people with genuine but ill-defined physical complaints are prone to latch on to a current cultural phenomenon and become convinced that it is the source of their problems. This is not to say that the maladies are not subjectively real—if someone tells you they have a headache, there is no way to prove they are wrong. But the cause is another question altogether.
And most people are familiar with the psychiatric problems that lead some people to believe things that are clearly at odds with reality. For example, years ago when I taught microwave engineering in Massachusetts, one of my colleagues received a phone call from a woman who was convinced that the government had implanted a secret radio chip in her body. She wanted to know if we had any equipment that we could use to examine her in order to find the thing. Nobody volunteered, needless to say. Before the advent of miniature electronics, when radios were novel pieces of furniture in 1920s living rooms, some psychiatric sufferers would complain to their doctors that spies were "working wireless" on them. And I suspect that if you go back far enough in history, you might find a case of a person who thought people were telegraphing messages inside his head.
While it is almost impossible in some individual cases to establish the cause of a given subjective complaint, it is quite possible to do systematic large-scale studies of epidemiology and biological effects of electromagnetic radiation. Unlike shorter-wavelength radiation ranging from ultraviolet rays through X-rays, radio waves and microwaves cannot knock electrons loose from atoms in your body, under normal conditions. If the waves are not strong enough to cause localized heating (and no piece of equipment properly used and meeting FCC regulations produces such strong waves), then there is no obvious mechanism by which radio or microwave radiation could cause cancer, headaches, insomnia, or any of the other range of ailments that people sometimes suspect them of causing. Literally hundreds of research studies have been done over the years on this subject, and as Johnson reports, the World Health Organization recently concluded from a review of the world's scientific literature that there is no reason to be concerned about biohazards from the type of low-level radio or microwave radiation that people receive just by living in the modern world among cell phones, computer wireless links, and digital TV broadcasts.
But as engineering ethics has taught me, to know a technical fact is one thing, and to deal with lots of ordinary people who have concerns or even beliefs to the contrary is a completely different thing. The attitude shown by knowledgeable engineers toward lay persons with genuine concerns is crucial. An arrogant, blowoff type of response to a legitimate question can arouse suspicions—which may be entirely unfounded—that the engineer in question is trying to hide something. Every microwave engineer who deals with the general public should be sensitive to anxiety, concern, and even hostility from people who think cell phones or computers or digital TV broadcasts have caused them harm. This is especially true when dealing with situations such as cancer clusters, a statistical phenomenon which can lead to explosive reactions, protests, and lawsuits.
Suppose for example that a cell-phone tower is built in a new neighborhood. There is a non-zero chance that among the population of young children in that neighborhood, a higher than average number of them will come down with some horrible fatal disease such as brain cancer. If a few parents of such victims meet each other, it can happen that they start to suspect something geographic is to blame for their rare and tragic experiences. The need to find an answer to the agonized question, "Why my daughter?" or "Why my son?" in the face of death is a universal one. And sometimes people seize on things they don't understand as a kind of scapegoat or target for action.
These people can have the best of intentions, such as wanting to prevent future tragedies like the ones they have endured. But if they get an unfeeling response from a know-it-all engineer who keeps saying, "You just don't understand, you don't have the technical background that I have," and so on, they are not likely to be persuaded by anything he says, no matter how technically correct it is. Engineers need hearts as well as heads, and this aspect of engineering training is usually neglected.
So perhaps I will let my students know about the Slate article this week, and if they ever happen to run into similar questions, I hope their response is technically correct, of course. But even more, I hope they take the questioner's feelings and situation into consideration as well.
Sources: George Johnson's article "On Top of Microwave Mountain" appeared in the Apr. 21, 2010 online edition of Slate Magazine at http://www.slate.com/id/2251432/.
Johnson was inspired to try this by a Los Alamos scientist who describes himself as "electrosensitive." The scientists claims that exposure to too much radio-frequency radiation gives him a variety of symptoms such as headaches and insomnia, though cancer was not on his list of complaints. So Johnson made the trek up Sandia Crest to the "Steel Forest" where dozens of radio, TV, and microwave transmitters broadcast to a large area of New Mexico. In the event, he slept well and suffered no headaches or other adverse symptoms.
Johnson explains that some of the complaints of so-called electrosensitives may be explained by a phenomenon known to historians as a hysterical epidemic. It turns out that some people with genuine but ill-defined physical complaints are prone to latch on to a current cultural phenomenon and become convinced that it is the source of their problems. This is not to say that the maladies are not subjectively real—if someone tells you they have a headache, there is no way to prove they are wrong. But the cause is another question altogether.
And most people are familiar with the psychiatric problems that lead some people to believe things that are clearly at odds with reality. For example, years ago when I taught microwave engineering in Massachusetts, one of my colleagues received a phone call from a woman who was convinced that the government had implanted a secret radio chip in her body. She wanted to know if we had any equipment that we could use to examine her in order to find the thing. Nobody volunteered, needless to say. Before the advent of miniature electronics, when radios were novel pieces of furniture in 1920s living rooms, some psychiatric sufferers would complain to their doctors that spies were "working wireless" on them. And I suspect that if you go back far enough in history, you might find a case of a person who thought people were telegraphing messages inside his head.
While it is almost impossible in some individual cases to establish the cause of a given subjective complaint, it is quite possible to do systematic large-scale studies of epidemiology and biological effects of electromagnetic radiation. Unlike shorter-wavelength radiation ranging from ultraviolet rays through X-rays, radio waves and microwaves cannot knock electrons loose from atoms in your body, under normal conditions. If the waves are not strong enough to cause localized heating (and no piece of equipment properly used and meeting FCC regulations produces such strong waves), then there is no obvious mechanism by which radio or microwave radiation could cause cancer, headaches, insomnia, or any of the other range of ailments that people sometimes suspect them of causing. Literally hundreds of research studies have been done over the years on this subject, and as Johnson reports, the World Health Organization recently concluded from a review of the world's scientific literature that there is no reason to be concerned about biohazards from the type of low-level radio or microwave radiation that people receive just by living in the modern world among cell phones, computer wireless links, and digital TV broadcasts.
But as engineering ethics has taught me, to know a technical fact is one thing, and to deal with lots of ordinary people who have concerns or even beliefs to the contrary is a completely different thing. The attitude shown by knowledgeable engineers toward lay persons with genuine concerns is crucial. An arrogant, blowoff type of response to a legitimate question can arouse suspicions—which may be entirely unfounded—that the engineer in question is trying to hide something. Every microwave engineer who deals with the general public should be sensitive to anxiety, concern, and even hostility from people who think cell phones or computers or digital TV broadcasts have caused them harm. This is especially true when dealing with situations such as cancer clusters, a statistical phenomenon which can lead to explosive reactions, protests, and lawsuits.
Suppose for example that a cell-phone tower is built in a new neighborhood. There is a non-zero chance that among the population of young children in that neighborhood, a higher than average number of them will come down with some horrible fatal disease such as brain cancer. If a few parents of such victims meet each other, it can happen that they start to suspect something geographic is to blame for their rare and tragic experiences. The need to find an answer to the agonized question, "Why my daughter?" or "Why my son?" in the face of death is a universal one. And sometimes people seize on things they don't understand as a kind of scapegoat or target for action.
These people can have the best of intentions, such as wanting to prevent future tragedies like the ones they have endured. But if they get an unfeeling response from a know-it-all engineer who keeps saying, "You just don't understand, you don't have the technical background that I have," and so on, they are not likely to be persuaded by anything he says, no matter how technically correct it is. Engineers need hearts as well as heads, and this aspect of engineering training is usually neglected.
So perhaps I will let my students know about the Slate article this week, and if they ever happen to run into similar questions, I hope their response is technically correct, of course. But even more, I hope they take the questioner's feelings and situation into consideration as well.
Sources: George Johnson's article "On Top of Microwave Mountain" appeared in the Apr. 21, 2010 online edition of Slate Magazine at http://www.slate.com/id/2251432/.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Obama's Speech to NASA: Clouds in the Sky
Last Thursday, President Obama spoke to present and former astronauts, NASA administrators, and members of the Florida congressional delegation on the future of NASA and U. S. space exploration. Even before taking office, Obama and his staff rubbed some at NASA the wrong way. And with the release of his proposed federal budget to be enacted next fall, NASA supporters discovered to their dismay that there were no funds to continue the development of the Constellation series of manned-flight rockets, which are the only plans presently in place to keep Americans in space with American hardware. So Obama faced a tough audience primed to criticize him.
According to the official NASA transcript, the President received applause at numerous points in his talk. But I imagine it was of a straw-grasping quality that embodied both the engineer's tendency to be polite in the face of properly constituted authority whenever possible, and the deep-dyed habit of trying to make the best of a bad situation. Because, for many reasons, NASA's situation under the Obama administration is pretty bad.
Things could be worse. Obama could have proposed one more extension of the superannuated Shuttle program, simply to be able to say that America was still able to fly its own people in orbit. Thankfully, he didn't do that, even though it would have preserved jobs, which is supposedly one of his high priorities these days. Trying to keep the Shuttle going after its presently scheduled termination this year would be like trying to keep driving a jalopy after two of its four wheels have fallen off. It has been an amazing run carried on too long, and hats off to everyone who made it possible, but we've really got to retire the thing according to plan before it provides yet another tragedy for the engineering-ethics textbooks.
The trouble is, in a well-run organization the Shuttle's replacement would have been designed about eight to ten years ago, the first unit built three to five years ago, and the fully tested replacement would be ready to launch into service right after the Shuttle retired. For various reasons having to do with NASA, accidents, politics, democracy, and other factors, we are not in that happy situation at all. Instead, we have spent some ten billion on the designs for what some people say is a kind of redesign of the Saturn V-era rockets, called Constellation. I agree that Constellation may not be the most innovative design around, but it kept our engineers busy, it's based on proven technology (sometimes conservatism is good in engineering), and it probably would have worked okay. Only now, we'll never know.
What the President proposes instead sounds good at first glance: let the market innovate. Let private companies compete and come up with the most cost-effective way to get there. Instead of NASA saying to firms like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, "Hey, I want to get to the moon, sell me a rocket that will take me there," he wants NASA to say now, "Hey, I want to get to Mars, sell me a ticket to ride." There's just a few problems with this idea.
First off, for the free market to work, you need a market. One customer isn't a market, it's a thing called a "monopsony," kind of the inverse of a monopoly. Instead of one seller and many buyers, you have one buyer and many sellers (you hope). The Wikipedia article defining monopsony uses the single-payer health care system as a leading example of a monopsony. Everybody knows President Obama would have preferred a single-payer health care system to the mess he got, but he settled for the mess he could pass through Congress. This is no place to debate health care, but it is the place to point out that the President seems to think that whatever the role of private enterprise should be, the federal government must end up calling the shots.
Of course, if we waited for private enterprise to get us to the moon or Mars with no government intervention whatever, we would wait a very long time. There is at present no commercial interest in going to the moon or Mars, simply as a paying proposition independent of government intervention. At least Columbus and the great seafaring explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had some prospect of profit in the backs of their minds, although few if any realized on their bets. So government must take the lead in an economy-transcending type of activity such as space exploration, which in the past has served to unite the nation much as wars do, but with much less bloodshed.
There are both tactical and strategic flaws in Obama's plans for NASA. The tactical one of trashing Constellation has raised howls of protest from numerous astronauts all the way up to the Great Silent Engineer himself, Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon. As practical men, they see ten billion dollars' worth of creditable engineering going down the toilet at a critical time when we should be way ahead of where we are. And now Obama is saying, no, let's start from scratch and do it really well.
And that leads into the strategic aspect. It may be (though this is just a guess on my part) that Obama thinks NASA is beyond salvaging; that it is an old, worn-out, patched-over organization that needs to take a back seat to new, fresh leadership from the private sector. He may be right in at least this, that NASA needs a shock, something more than the same old same old, to get the nation's space vision back in order. But it is far from clear that private companies, working not just as contractors for hardware but as overall system planners, builders, and executors, will be willing to take on challenges that have proved daunting even to an organization as experienced and resourceful as NASA. Especially if their only customer, the government, turns around and changes its mind after the next Presidential election, which is entirely possible.
Unelected dictatorships have numerous disadvantages, but one of the few advantages is the ability to maintain long-term consistency in plans and projects. The otherwise deplorable government of the Peoples' Republic of China has the luxury of making long-term space exploration plans without having to check with its Congress or its public. The way things look now, the next words we hear from the moon will be in Chinese, if not Russian. And then see how hard it will be to catch up.
Sources: Obama's speech on April 15, 2010 is reproduced in transcript at the NASA website http://www.nasa.gov/news/media/trans/obama_ksc_trans.html. The letter to the President signed by Neil Armstrong, James Lovell, and Eugene Cernan can be read at http://theweek.com/article/index/201950/Neil_Armstrongs_letter_to_Obama. Another letter from several prominent astronauts and former NASA leaders can be found at http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1387.
According to the official NASA transcript, the President received applause at numerous points in his talk. But I imagine it was of a straw-grasping quality that embodied both the engineer's tendency to be polite in the face of properly constituted authority whenever possible, and the deep-dyed habit of trying to make the best of a bad situation. Because, for many reasons, NASA's situation under the Obama administration is pretty bad.
Things could be worse. Obama could have proposed one more extension of the superannuated Shuttle program, simply to be able to say that America was still able to fly its own people in orbit. Thankfully, he didn't do that, even though it would have preserved jobs, which is supposedly one of his high priorities these days. Trying to keep the Shuttle going after its presently scheduled termination this year would be like trying to keep driving a jalopy after two of its four wheels have fallen off. It has been an amazing run carried on too long, and hats off to everyone who made it possible, but we've really got to retire the thing according to plan before it provides yet another tragedy for the engineering-ethics textbooks.
The trouble is, in a well-run organization the Shuttle's replacement would have been designed about eight to ten years ago, the first unit built three to five years ago, and the fully tested replacement would be ready to launch into service right after the Shuttle retired. For various reasons having to do with NASA, accidents, politics, democracy, and other factors, we are not in that happy situation at all. Instead, we have spent some ten billion on the designs for what some people say is a kind of redesign of the Saturn V-era rockets, called Constellation. I agree that Constellation may not be the most innovative design around, but it kept our engineers busy, it's based on proven technology (sometimes conservatism is good in engineering), and it probably would have worked okay. Only now, we'll never know.
What the President proposes instead sounds good at first glance: let the market innovate. Let private companies compete and come up with the most cost-effective way to get there. Instead of NASA saying to firms like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, "Hey, I want to get to the moon, sell me a rocket that will take me there," he wants NASA to say now, "Hey, I want to get to Mars, sell me a ticket to ride." There's just a few problems with this idea.
First off, for the free market to work, you need a market. One customer isn't a market, it's a thing called a "monopsony," kind of the inverse of a monopoly. Instead of one seller and many buyers, you have one buyer and many sellers (you hope). The Wikipedia article defining monopsony uses the single-payer health care system as a leading example of a monopsony. Everybody knows President Obama would have preferred a single-payer health care system to the mess he got, but he settled for the mess he could pass through Congress. This is no place to debate health care, but it is the place to point out that the President seems to think that whatever the role of private enterprise should be, the federal government must end up calling the shots.
Of course, if we waited for private enterprise to get us to the moon or Mars with no government intervention whatever, we would wait a very long time. There is at present no commercial interest in going to the moon or Mars, simply as a paying proposition independent of government intervention. At least Columbus and the great seafaring explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had some prospect of profit in the backs of their minds, although few if any realized on their bets. So government must take the lead in an economy-transcending type of activity such as space exploration, which in the past has served to unite the nation much as wars do, but with much less bloodshed.
There are both tactical and strategic flaws in Obama's plans for NASA. The tactical one of trashing Constellation has raised howls of protest from numerous astronauts all the way up to the Great Silent Engineer himself, Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon. As practical men, they see ten billion dollars' worth of creditable engineering going down the toilet at a critical time when we should be way ahead of where we are. And now Obama is saying, no, let's start from scratch and do it really well.
And that leads into the strategic aspect. It may be (though this is just a guess on my part) that Obama thinks NASA is beyond salvaging; that it is an old, worn-out, patched-over organization that needs to take a back seat to new, fresh leadership from the private sector. He may be right in at least this, that NASA needs a shock, something more than the same old same old, to get the nation's space vision back in order. But it is far from clear that private companies, working not just as contractors for hardware but as overall system planners, builders, and executors, will be willing to take on challenges that have proved daunting even to an organization as experienced and resourceful as NASA. Especially if their only customer, the government, turns around and changes its mind after the next Presidential election, which is entirely possible.
Unelected dictatorships have numerous disadvantages, but one of the few advantages is the ability to maintain long-term consistency in plans and projects. The otherwise deplorable government of the Peoples' Republic of China has the luxury of making long-term space exploration plans without having to check with its Congress or its public. The way things look now, the next words we hear from the moon will be in Chinese, if not Russian. And then see how hard it will be to catch up.
Sources: Obama's speech on April 15, 2010 is reproduced in transcript at the NASA website http://www.nasa.gov/news/media/trans/obama_ksc_trans.html. The letter to the President signed by Neil Armstrong, James Lovell, and Eugene Cernan can be read at http://theweek.com/article/index/201950/Neil_Armstrongs_letter_to_Obama. Another letter from several prominent astronauts and former NASA leaders can be found at http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1387.
Monday, April 12, 2010
Toyota Revisited: Unintended Acceleration of Judgment?
On April 5 the U. S. Secretary of Transportation announced the intention of the federal government to assess a $16 million fine against Toyota, the maximum allowable penalty in such a case. The government alleges that the car maker failed to notify the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration within five days of identifying the defect that causes unintended acceleration, as U. S. law requires. Toyota has two weeks in which to either accept or contest the fine.
About a month ago, I addressed this issue with a blog that criticized Toyota for its foot-dragging and circle-the-wagons mentality concerning the unintended acceleration incidents that have come to light in the past year or so. What I failed to do then is what many news sources are still failing to do now, which is to put this situation in a historical context, as columnist Walter Olson did in a recent issue of National Review.
Olson points out that at least part of the sudden appearance of wildly accelerating Toyotas everywhere is due to mass psychology, on the part of the public in general and the media and lawyers in particular. Once the issue hits the newsstands, drivers and their lawyers are primed to look for it, and so often what you look for you will find. Back in 1993, a similar flap blew up about suspected unintended acceleration in Audis. Despite extensive coverage, investigations, and government inquiries, no cause for the documented cases of Audi acceleration was ever found other than operator error: in other words, people were hitting the gas pedal by mistake.
This kind of thing happens all the time, often with older or less experienced drivers. Olson cites a Los Angeles Times study of twenty years' worth of Toyota unintended acceleration cases, and of those in which the driver's age could be determined, the median age was 60. Since the typical auto accident victim is in his late twenties, there is clearly an age-related factor involved.
None of this is to say that there may not be a genuine problem, or array of problems, that are causing the deaths and near-accidents that we have heard so much about recently in Toyotas. The carmaker itself has identified and gone to a lot of trouble with recalls to fix a carpet-pedal interference issue that evidently accounts for at least some of the acceleration incidents. But so far the firm has steadfastly denied that there is a problem with the electronics, in particular the software that runs the car. Two separate scientific panels have been convened by the U. S. government to look into that issue, and although they will take a while (one is set to run for over a year), we have hopes of getting to the bottom of that particular question.
The challenge of such an investigation is that software glitches, especially if there is a random hardware effect involved such as electromagnetic interference, can be extremely hard to detect or fix. In principle, computer software follows an exact mathematical deterministic path: if you set up the same initial conditions every time, you will get the same result. But when software is embedded in the roaring, buzzing, mechanically dynamic environment under the hood of a car, the goal of "same initial conditions" can be elusive. You can always do lab tests, but to the extent they are more tightly controlled, they are just as much more removed from the reality in which the accidents supposedly occurred. If such a problem is found, it will likely be the at the end of a long and intricate detective effort on the part of the investigators. And Toyota will need to cooperate fully in revealing its proprietary software and hardware, unless it wants to actively hinder the work of the safety investigators. So far, the firm's track record in this area has not been stellar, but under the present conditions of intense political and legal pressure, a vindication by an outside panel would be worth whatever bean-spilling of secrets that Toyota has been so reluctant to do up to now.
An interesting system-wide question that no one so far has brought up would be a comparison of the way automakers vet their control software with the methods used by aircraft manufacturers. Back when "fly-by-wire" software was first being adopted, there was a lot of concern on the part of pilots that when they pushed the stick, they would no longer be directly moving flaps or ailerons or whatever—instead, they would be simply sending instructions to a computer, which would interpret the pilot's action along with everything else going on and issue the orders it thought best to the control surfaces. This idea seemed to rub a lot of pilots the wrong way, and it took a while for fly-by-wire systems to be accepted. There were one or two problems with it along the way, but then as now, the bulk of airplane accidents involve at least some personal responsibility on the part of the pilot.
It's ironic, but automobile drivers as a group probably carry a lot less clout with the automakers than airline pilots do with aircraft companies. I sense that the automakers regard their customers as, if not quite sheep, then certainly uneducated in the technicalities of automotive engineering. The transition from the day when the connection between the accelerator and the carburetor (as it was way back then) was just a pull wire, to the present situation where a computer sits between your foot and the engine—this transition came silently and unheralded, possibly out of fear that people would not be comfortable with it. Such silence may have made the present situation worse as folks discover the fact for the first time, and find that they don't like it—especially those who believe their problems with unintended acceleration are the fault of the automobile, and not due to inappropriate actions of their own.
As Walter Olson pointed out, it took years for the Audi flap to die down, and we can expect the Toyota situation to linger at least that long—longer, if the investigations into software problems are as complex as I expect they will be, and if Toyota is less than fully cooperative in them. The only sure thing is that lawyers will be making money off this situation for a long time to come.
Sources: A report on the $16 million fine appeared in the Washington Post online edition at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/05/AR2010040503200.html. Walter Olson's article in the Mar. 15, 2010 issue of National Review is online at http://article.nationalreview.com/427879/exorcising-toyotas-demons/walter-olson.
About a month ago, I addressed this issue with a blog that criticized Toyota for its foot-dragging and circle-the-wagons mentality concerning the unintended acceleration incidents that have come to light in the past year or so. What I failed to do then is what many news sources are still failing to do now, which is to put this situation in a historical context, as columnist Walter Olson did in a recent issue of National Review.
Olson points out that at least part of the sudden appearance of wildly accelerating Toyotas everywhere is due to mass psychology, on the part of the public in general and the media and lawyers in particular. Once the issue hits the newsstands, drivers and their lawyers are primed to look for it, and so often what you look for you will find. Back in 1993, a similar flap blew up about suspected unintended acceleration in Audis. Despite extensive coverage, investigations, and government inquiries, no cause for the documented cases of Audi acceleration was ever found other than operator error: in other words, people were hitting the gas pedal by mistake.
This kind of thing happens all the time, often with older or less experienced drivers. Olson cites a Los Angeles Times study of twenty years' worth of Toyota unintended acceleration cases, and of those in which the driver's age could be determined, the median age was 60. Since the typical auto accident victim is in his late twenties, there is clearly an age-related factor involved.
None of this is to say that there may not be a genuine problem, or array of problems, that are causing the deaths and near-accidents that we have heard so much about recently in Toyotas. The carmaker itself has identified and gone to a lot of trouble with recalls to fix a carpet-pedal interference issue that evidently accounts for at least some of the acceleration incidents. But so far the firm has steadfastly denied that there is a problem with the electronics, in particular the software that runs the car. Two separate scientific panels have been convened by the U. S. government to look into that issue, and although they will take a while (one is set to run for over a year), we have hopes of getting to the bottom of that particular question.
The challenge of such an investigation is that software glitches, especially if there is a random hardware effect involved such as electromagnetic interference, can be extremely hard to detect or fix. In principle, computer software follows an exact mathematical deterministic path: if you set up the same initial conditions every time, you will get the same result. But when software is embedded in the roaring, buzzing, mechanically dynamic environment under the hood of a car, the goal of "same initial conditions" can be elusive. You can always do lab tests, but to the extent they are more tightly controlled, they are just as much more removed from the reality in which the accidents supposedly occurred. If such a problem is found, it will likely be the at the end of a long and intricate detective effort on the part of the investigators. And Toyota will need to cooperate fully in revealing its proprietary software and hardware, unless it wants to actively hinder the work of the safety investigators. So far, the firm's track record in this area has not been stellar, but under the present conditions of intense political and legal pressure, a vindication by an outside panel would be worth whatever bean-spilling of secrets that Toyota has been so reluctant to do up to now.
An interesting system-wide question that no one so far has brought up would be a comparison of the way automakers vet their control software with the methods used by aircraft manufacturers. Back when "fly-by-wire" software was first being adopted, there was a lot of concern on the part of pilots that when they pushed the stick, they would no longer be directly moving flaps or ailerons or whatever—instead, they would be simply sending instructions to a computer, which would interpret the pilot's action along with everything else going on and issue the orders it thought best to the control surfaces. This idea seemed to rub a lot of pilots the wrong way, and it took a while for fly-by-wire systems to be accepted. There were one or two problems with it along the way, but then as now, the bulk of airplane accidents involve at least some personal responsibility on the part of the pilot.
It's ironic, but automobile drivers as a group probably carry a lot less clout with the automakers than airline pilots do with aircraft companies. I sense that the automakers regard their customers as, if not quite sheep, then certainly uneducated in the technicalities of automotive engineering. The transition from the day when the connection between the accelerator and the carburetor (as it was way back then) was just a pull wire, to the present situation where a computer sits between your foot and the engine—this transition came silently and unheralded, possibly out of fear that people would not be comfortable with it. Such silence may have made the present situation worse as folks discover the fact for the first time, and find that they don't like it—especially those who believe their problems with unintended acceleration are the fault of the automobile, and not due to inappropriate actions of their own.
As Walter Olson pointed out, it took years for the Audi flap to die down, and we can expect the Toyota situation to linger at least that long—longer, if the investigations into software problems are as complex as I expect they will be, and if Toyota is less than fully cooperative in them. The only sure thing is that lawyers will be making money off this situation for a long time to come.
Sources: A report on the $16 million fine appeared in the Washington Post online edition at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/05/AR2010040503200.html. Walter Olson's article in the Mar. 15, 2010 issue of National Review is online at http://article.nationalreview.com/427879/exorcising-toyotas-demons/walter-olson.
Monday, April 05, 2010
Ethics According to Feynman
Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988) was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, bongo player, and all-around character. He achieved lasting public renown when he showed how the Challenger's O-ring material stiffened in a glass of ice water, accounting for the fatal explosion of that space shuttle. Possessed of a boundless curiosity and enthusiasm, he would freely expound on things both within and outside his professional field, only warning people that when he spoke on matters other than physics, his opinion was not to be taken any more seriously than that of the guy down the street. But sometimes I think he put on false modesty, such as when he gave a series of three lectures at the University of Washington in Seattle in April 1963 on science, values, and philosophy. Published later as The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist, these lectures were one of the few times when Feynman set down his considered opinions and ideas on the basis of right and wrong, and how scientists (and by implication, engineers) should take values into account. As one of the most admired and brilliant scientists of the twentieth century, Feynman's thoughts on ethics are worth our attention, however brief.
In the lecture entitled "The Uncertainty of Values," he starts from the sadness we all feel when we consider how humanity falls short of its potential. We have tremendous potential power over nature and the ability to cure, heal, feed, and educate billions, but instead we have depressions, poverty, sickness, terrorism, and wars. Why is this? In asking this question, Feynman follows in the footsteps of Pascal, who said, "The more enlightened we are, the more greatness and vileness we discover in man." According to Feynman, it's because our potentials and capabilities don't come with instructions. As he puts it, "The sciences do not directly teach good and bad." So how can we figure out what is good and what is bad, and even if we do that, how can we manage to do the good and avoid the bad?
Whatever the answer is, Feynman thinks we must always allow for the possibility that we're wrong. Because only in that way can we try different things and learn from our mistakes.
Despite the fact that he was not a believer in any religion, he has some nice things to say about religion, which he divides into three aspects: the metaphysical, the ethical, and the inspirational. As far as he can tell, the metaphysical aspects of religion—what it says about God, about why there is anything at all, and so on—are independent of the ethical aspects. But in practice, you have to have all three, because most people need emotional inspiration to obey the ethics, and the metaphysics gives you logical reasons to obey.
Then he runs into a paradox. It seems to Feynman that the people for whom religion "works" the best manage to have an absolute faith in the metaphysical aspect: they really believe in the God of the Bible, for instance. And while Feynman allows that science can't disprove the existence of God, it can't prove it either, and sometimes science comes up with results that seem to contradict one or another of the metaphysical aspects of religion, or sometimes even the ethical ones. So can you be both a good scientist and a good believer? Feynman thinks it's possible, but it takes a lot of work.
He says Western civilization "stands by two great heritages. One is the scientific spirit of adventure—. . . humility of the intellect. The other great heritage is Christian ethics—the basis of action on love, the brotherhood of all men, the value of the individual, the humility of the spirit. These two heritages are logically, thoroughly consistent." But the problem comes when one heritage attacks the values of the other. (The recent fuss over evolution and intelligent design is an example of this kind of battle.)
In the midst of the Cold War, Feynman saw the USSR as an example of how government control of both science and religion led to problems. He said that government should not "limit the forms of literary or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines." The place of government was to maintain freedom for its citizens to contribute to the adventure of intellectual development.
For one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century to say publicly "I don't know," as Feynman did several times in these lectures, shows a humility of spirit that is exceptional. Feynman was well aware of how famous people could make fools of themselves with careless pronouncements outside their fields of expertise. So he felt free to admit that he saw no farther than the ancients when he faced the problem of why there is evil in a world full of good, capable people, or how you could logically justify doing good while not believing in God. As one of the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb during World War II, Feyman could have wrapped himself in doubts and agonized over the past. Instead, he freely admitted war was terrible, but sometimes necessary in order to defend things we know are right, though we don't know moral principles in the same way we know the theory of relativity.
What I find impressive is his endorsement of Christian ethics as one of the twin pillars of Western civilization, the other being freedom of intellectual and scientific inquiry. In this he agrees with Alfred North Whitehead, a philosopher who saw the roots of the Scientific Revolution in the Christian faith of the Middle Ages that maintained the universe was ordered by a Mind Who followed logical laws that our minds could eventually figure out.
Those who would combat religion as a bane of civilization that should be allowed to wither and die would do well to contemplate the words of Richard Feynman, great scientist and non-believer, who nevertheless acknowledged Christianity as the giver of the best guide to conduct, for scientists and everyone else.
Sources: My thanks to Bill Birnie for bringing my attention to this work of Feynman's, The Meaning of It All (Reading, Mass: Perseus Books, 1998). The quotation from the Pensées of Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is from no. 613 in P. Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993).
In the lecture entitled "The Uncertainty of Values," he starts from the sadness we all feel when we consider how humanity falls short of its potential. We have tremendous potential power over nature and the ability to cure, heal, feed, and educate billions, but instead we have depressions, poverty, sickness, terrorism, and wars. Why is this? In asking this question, Feynman follows in the footsteps of Pascal, who said, "The more enlightened we are, the more greatness and vileness we discover in man." According to Feynman, it's because our potentials and capabilities don't come with instructions. As he puts it, "The sciences do not directly teach good and bad." So how can we figure out what is good and what is bad, and even if we do that, how can we manage to do the good and avoid the bad?
Whatever the answer is, Feynman thinks we must always allow for the possibility that we're wrong. Because only in that way can we try different things and learn from our mistakes.
Despite the fact that he was not a believer in any religion, he has some nice things to say about religion, which he divides into three aspects: the metaphysical, the ethical, and the inspirational. As far as he can tell, the metaphysical aspects of religion—what it says about God, about why there is anything at all, and so on—are independent of the ethical aspects. But in practice, you have to have all three, because most people need emotional inspiration to obey the ethics, and the metaphysics gives you logical reasons to obey.
Then he runs into a paradox. It seems to Feynman that the people for whom religion "works" the best manage to have an absolute faith in the metaphysical aspect: they really believe in the God of the Bible, for instance. And while Feynman allows that science can't disprove the existence of God, it can't prove it either, and sometimes science comes up with results that seem to contradict one or another of the metaphysical aspects of religion, or sometimes even the ethical ones. So can you be both a good scientist and a good believer? Feynman thinks it's possible, but it takes a lot of work.
He says Western civilization "stands by two great heritages. One is the scientific spirit of adventure—. . . humility of the intellect. The other great heritage is Christian ethics—the basis of action on love, the brotherhood of all men, the value of the individual, the humility of the spirit. These two heritages are logically, thoroughly consistent." But the problem comes when one heritage attacks the values of the other. (The recent fuss over evolution and intelligent design is an example of this kind of battle.)
In the midst of the Cold War, Feynman saw the USSR as an example of how government control of both science and religion led to problems. He said that government should not "limit the forms of literary or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines." The place of government was to maintain freedom for its citizens to contribute to the adventure of intellectual development.
For one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century to say publicly "I don't know," as Feynman did several times in these lectures, shows a humility of spirit that is exceptional. Feynman was well aware of how famous people could make fools of themselves with careless pronouncements outside their fields of expertise. So he felt free to admit that he saw no farther than the ancients when he faced the problem of why there is evil in a world full of good, capable people, or how you could logically justify doing good while not believing in God. As one of the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb during World War II, Feyman could have wrapped himself in doubts and agonized over the past. Instead, he freely admitted war was terrible, but sometimes necessary in order to defend things we know are right, though we don't know moral principles in the same way we know the theory of relativity.
What I find impressive is his endorsement of Christian ethics as one of the twin pillars of Western civilization, the other being freedom of intellectual and scientific inquiry. In this he agrees with Alfred North Whitehead, a philosopher who saw the roots of the Scientific Revolution in the Christian faith of the Middle Ages that maintained the universe was ordered by a Mind Who followed logical laws that our minds could eventually figure out.
Those who would combat religion as a bane of civilization that should be allowed to wither and die would do well to contemplate the words of Richard Feynman, great scientist and non-believer, who nevertheless acknowledged Christianity as the giver of the best guide to conduct, for scientists and everyone else.
Sources: My thanks to Bill Birnie for bringing my attention to this work of Feynman's, The Meaning of It All (Reading, Mass: Perseus Books, 1998). The quotation from the Pensées of Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is from no. 613 in P. Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993).
Monday, March 29, 2010
Jamming, Blockers, and the Google-China Conflict
The ongoing struggle between Google, which wants its customers and readers in mainland China to have full access to all its services, and the government of the People's Republic of China, which legally requires Google to impose censorship on some aspects of what it provides, is unprecedented in scale and number of people involved, perhaps, but not in its essentials. Something very similar went on for decades on a smaller scale in a different medium: shortwave radio. But important technological differences in the two media make it harder for Google to do what shortwave broadcasters often succeeded in doing: namely, evading the efforts of hostile governments to "protect" their citizens from harmful foreign influences.
Around 1965, I somehow came into the possession of an old tabletop tube radio with a shortwave band. Back then, shortwave broadcasting was one of the few electronic media which naturally and inexpensively (at least for the user) gave one instant access to information from around the globe. Most nations of any size maintained some sort of shortwave broadcasting presence, and in particular the Communist-bloc countries kept up a barrage of English-language propaganda broadcasts aimed at Europe and the U. S. Radio Moscow came in regularly, and once or twice I even heard Radio Peking, as it called itself then. But even more prominent and easy to find at any time of the day or night were some strange buzz-saw noises. No, it wasn't interference from a neighbor's buzz saw. It was jammers: high-power shortwave stations designed explicitly to block reception of "undesirable" broadcasts, usually Voice of America programs. I don't have statistics to back this up, but it's likely that the Soviet Union and China spent more money on jammers than they ever did on propaganda broadcasts directed at foreign countries. It was more important to them to keep their own citizens from hearing unapproved information from the free world than it was to tell the free world about life behind the Iron Curtain.
By the nature of the medium, jamming was a dodgy and unreliable method. Broadcasters could and did change frequencies unexpectedly, forcing the jammer to take expensive steps to follow suit, and the vagaries of shortwave propagation meant that depending on where you were listening from—especially if you were not near a large city—you might hear Voice of America loud and clear and the jamming signal might not even be audible. But it must have been effective enough for jammers to clutter up the airwaves with dozens of buzz-saw sounds at all hours of the day and night, for years. Then the Internet came along.
The Web is both much better and much worse than shortwave broadcasting with regard to allowing free exchange of information across the boundaries of a nation which wants to control its media. It's better, in that more information can be posted on a single Web page than you could read over the air in half an hour or more. And since pictures are worth some large number of words, the Internet is much richer than any shortwave broadcast could ever be in that regard. But unfortunately for free interchange, the Web works through fiber-optic cables and equipment which must physically reside inside the receiving country. And the government which controls access and operation of that equipment has ultimately an absolute say over what the equipment transmits.
So if the government of China got up some fine day (to personalize an impersonal organization) and decided that it could do without all Internet connections to the outside world altogether, it could pull the plug and everything on the Web outside China would promptly disappear, without recourse. Something like that was never possible in the days of jamming, since one-hundred-percent leakproof jamming was economically and technically impossible. So Google, in its frustrated attempts to keep delivering its search engine and email services in China, has not been able to make that much progress within the mainland itself.
This is one reason why on March 23 Google announced a new approach: they were going to quit self-censoring their services and still stay within the letter of the Chinese law by moving their search services provided in the mainland to Google.com.hk in Hong Kong, where different and more liberal laws evidently still prevail. It is too soon to tell how this move will work out, although a website maintained by Google to show the status of various services within mainland China indicates that the government is blocking access to YouTube, many websites, Google's blogger function (on which this blog appears, unfortunately), and began interfering on Mar. 28 (yesterday) with certain mobile services.
Although I haven't listened to shortwave broadcasting much lately, it's unusual to hear any jamming anymore, partly because shortwave radio has been overtaken by the Internet and partly because the world's biggest jammer, the USSR, no longer exists. Jamming was always a shady business anyway. To my knowledge, the U. S. never engaged in jamming of broadcasts intended for the general U. S. public (although jamming is a time-honored practice in wartime electronic countermeasures to disable enemy radars and communications). Any government which insists on blocking the free flow of information to its citizens thereby pronounces a kind of self-delivered judgment on itself and betrays a kind of fundamental insecurity—a fear that the light of day will show its citizens their true situation and make them want to change it. Google's shift to Hong Kong may make things better for a while, but the only permanent solution is for the government of 1.3 billion Chinese citizens to change its ways.
Sources: Google's March 23 announcement of its changes in service is posted at http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-approach-to-china-update.html, and the website for monitoring services available in China is at http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en.
Around 1965, I somehow came into the possession of an old tabletop tube radio with a shortwave band. Back then, shortwave broadcasting was one of the few electronic media which naturally and inexpensively (at least for the user) gave one instant access to information from around the globe. Most nations of any size maintained some sort of shortwave broadcasting presence, and in particular the Communist-bloc countries kept up a barrage of English-language propaganda broadcasts aimed at Europe and the U. S. Radio Moscow came in regularly, and once or twice I even heard Radio Peking, as it called itself then. But even more prominent and easy to find at any time of the day or night were some strange buzz-saw noises. No, it wasn't interference from a neighbor's buzz saw. It was jammers: high-power shortwave stations designed explicitly to block reception of "undesirable" broadcasts, usually Voice of America programs. I don't have statistics to back this up, but it's likely that the Soviet Union and China spent more money on jammers than they ever did on propaganda broadcasts directed at foreign countries. It was more important to them to keep their own citizens from hearing unapproved information from the free world than it was to tell the free world about life behind the Iron Curtain.
By the nature of the medium, jamming was a dodgy and unreliable method. Broadcasters could and did change frequencies unexpectedly, forcing the jammer to take expensive steps to follow suit, and the vagaries of shortwave propagation meant that depending on where you were listening from—especially if you were not near a large city—you might hear Voice of America loud and clear and the jamming signal might not even be audible. But it must have been effective enough for jammers to clutter up the airwaves with dozens of buzz-saw sounds at all hours of the day and night, for years. Then the Internet came along.
The Web is both much better and much worse than shortwave broadcasting with regard to allowing free exchange of information across the boundaries of a nation which wants to control its media. It's better, in that more information can be posted on a single Web page than you could read over the air in half an hour or more. And since pictures are worth some large number of words, the Internet is much richer than any shortwave broadcast could ever be in that regard. But unfortunately for free interchange, the Web works through fiber-optic cables and equipment which must physically reside inside the receiving country. And the government which controls access and operation of that equipment has ultimately an absolute say over what the equipment transmits.
So if the government of China got up some fine day (to personalize an impersonal organization) and decided that it could do without all Internet connections to the outside world altogether, it could pull the plug and everything on the Web outside China would promptly disappear, without recourse. Something like that was never possible in the days of jamming, since one-hundred-percent leakproof jamming was economically and technically impossible. So Google, in its frustrated attempts to keep delivering its search engine and email services in China, has not been able to make that much progress within the mainland itself.
This is one reason why on March 23 Google announced a new approach: they were going to quit self-censoring their services and still stay within the letter of the Chinese law by moving their search services provided in the mainland to Google.com.hk in Hong Kong, where different and more liberal laws evidently still prevail. It is too soon to tell how this move will work out, although a website maintained by Google to show the status of various services within mainland China indicates that the government is blocking access to YouTube, many websites, Google's blogger function (on which this blog appears, unfortunately), and began interfering on Mar. 28 (yesterday) with certain mobile services.
Although I haven't listened to shortwave broadcasting much lately, it's unusual to hear any jamming anymore, partly because shortwave radio has been overtaken by the Internet and partly because the world's biggest jammer, the USSR, no longer exists. Jamming was always a shady business anyway. To my knowledge, the U. S. never engaged in jamming of broadcasts intended for the general U. S. public (although jamming is a time-honored practice in wartime electronic countermeasures to disable enemy radars and communications). Any government which insists on blocking the free flow of information to its citizens thereby pronounces a kind of self-delivered judgment on itself and betrays a kind of fundamental insecurity—a fear that the light of day will show its citizens their true situation and make them want to change it. Google's shift to Hong Kong may make things better for a while, but the only permanent solution is for the government of 1.3 billion Chinese citizens to change its ways.
Sources: Google's March 23 announcement of its changes in service is posted at http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-approach-to-china-update.html, and the website for monitoring services available in China is at http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en.
Monday, March 22, 2010
U. S. Health Care Bill: Killing the Messenger
Last night I watched a tiny video image on my laptop that showed the floor of the U. S. House of Representatives. Superimposed on the image was a set of numbers tallying the votes for and against the famous (or infamous) health-care bill that has obsessed Washington for the last year or so. When the "yea" vote got to 216, I turned it off, knowing that the die had been cast. Whatever happens after this, the federal government has now taken to itself massive new powers over the one-sixth of the U. S. economy that is health care.
Part of the reason that health care costs so much more than it did decades ago, both proportionally and absolutely, is that owing largely to engineered products and services, doctors can do a lot more about disease more effectively than they used to. And medical technology is one of the shrinking number of areas in which U. S. manufacturing still leads the world. Our peculiar cobbled-together third-party way of paying for health care, which largely insulates the consumer against the real cost of medical technology, may be one reason that the U. S. is a favorable environment for developing such technology. Another may be the fruitful interaction between our research universities and medical companies, both of which benefit from federal and state research support as well as private research funding. Whatever the reasons, the healthy and innovative state of the medical technology industry is a bright spot in the otherwise murky health-care scene.
But that is not the way it is viewed in the philosophy embodied in the new health-care bill that just passed Congress. In this view, medical technology companies are unfairly profiting from the misery of the patients they serve, and should be penalized with a 2.3-percent excise tax on their products. Although the final form of this tax is not clear as of this writing, an earlier press account of it in December estimated it would cost the medical-device industry some $2 billion annually, rising to $3 billion in 2018.
It is not clear whether it was ever an ancient practice to kill the runner who brought bad news to the king. Even old-time despots probably understood the sheer wastefulness of such a move, let alone the difficulties it would cause in recruiting new messengers. But the vengeful, short-sighted, political-grandstanding attitude that leads to taxes such as the one on medical device companies is about as counterproductive as you can get, and shows a basic misunderstanding of the nature of business and private enterprise.
I am personally tone-deaf when it comes to entrepreneurship, but even I understand enough about it to see that medical-device companies, and health-insurance companies too for that matter, typically do the best they can within the regulatory and economic environment they work in. If MRI machines cost X hundred thousand dollars, and the MRI-machine market is doing well with several companies competing for good business, as I understand to be the case, then those who have the money to buy them (namely hospitals and clinics) must think the price is about right compared to the money they can make by using them. The rules and restrictions that people chafe about concerning health insurance arise largely from the way we have historically tied such insurance to employers, who "own" the policies rather than the individuals insured. Such third-party situations always lead to higher prices, and in my view this is the single most significant reason why health-care costs have risen faster than otherwise. If individuals owned their own health-care plans and decided in advance how much they wanted to spend, maybe there wouldn't be so many "Cadillac" plans out there and medical technology might be cheaper. But it would still be innovative, because the market would be free enough to reward innovation and competition.
The health-care bill that the president is so eager to sign moves things in the exact wrong direction: toward more bureucratic control, less freedom to do business in a way that makes economic sense, and more third-party interference between the consumer of health care and the provider. Yes, some more people will have insurance than before, and that is a worthwhile goal and almost the only good thing about the legislation. But there were far less intrusive, and probably more effective, ways of increasing the number of people who could afford health insurance. Only now, we may never know whether they might have worked. Instead, we have embarked on a huge, complex social experiment that will probably take decades to implement, and whose consequences we will all have to live with regardless of the outcome.
Besides the specific policy problems, the year-long debate over health care has further frayed the already worn fabric of our democracy. Congress has passed legislation that was clearly unpopular, and led to party-line divisions that may be very difficult to heal. Plus which, it may have contributed to an unhealthy cynicism about government in general. Last Friday I took the trouble to visit my congressman's office in downtown Austin to hand-deliver a note about the health-care vote. I had never done this before. It was rather depressing to see how the federal building is surrounded by a high black steel fence and guarded by cops who make you pass through a metal detector and run your personal items through an X-ray machine, just like at the airport. I understand the reasons for these precautions, but all the same, it seems like if the government had not expanded to be such a big target, we wouldn't have to go to so much trouble to protect it.
I will try to leave this topic alone in the future, since it is largely a done deal now and following it has not done my personal state of mind any good. But if anything comes up about it in the future that credibly concerns engineering ethics, I reserve the privilege to say something about it.
Sources: A description of last-minute changes to the medical-device tax was carried by the Huffington Post on Mar. 21 at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/21/health-care-bill-insuranc_n_507506.html. The figures on total cost to the industry were from a Wall Street Journal article on Dec. 21, 2009 at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704398304574598130440164954.html.
Part of the reason that health care costs so much more than it did decades ago, both proportionally and absolutely, is that owing largely to engineered products and services, doctors can do a lot more about disease more effectively than they used to. And medical technology is one of the shrinking number of areas in which U. S. manufacturing still leads the world. Our peculiar cobbled-together third-party way of paying for health care, which largely insulates the consumer against the real cost of medical technology, may be one reason that the U. S. is a favorable environment for developing such technology. Another may be the fruitful interaction between our research universities and medical companies, both of which benefit from federal and state research support as well as private research funding. Whatever the reasons, the healthy and innovative state of the medical technology industry is a bright spot in the otherwise murky health-care scene.
But that is not the way it is viewed in the philosophy embodied in the new health-care bill that just passed Congress. In this view, medical technology companies are unfairly profiting from the misery of the patients they serve, and should be penalized with a 2.3-percent excise tax on their products. Although the final form of this tax is not clear as of this writing, an earlier press account of it in December estimated it would cost the medical-device industry some $2 billion annually, rising to $3 billion in 2018.
It is not clear whether it was ever an ancient practice to kill the runner who brought bad news to the king. Even old-time despots probably understood the sheer wastefulness of such a move, let alone the difficulties it would cause in recruiting new messengers. But the vengeful, short-sighted, political-grandstanding attitude that leads to taxes such as the one on medical device companies is about as counterproductive as you can get, and shows a basic misunderstanding of the nature of business and private enterprise.
I am personally tone-deaf when it comes to entrepreneurship, but even I understand enough about it to see that medical-device companies, and health-insurance companies too for that matter, typically do the best they can within the regulatory and economic environment they work in. If MRI machines cost X hundred thousand dollars, and the MRI-machine market is doing well with several companies competing for good business, as I understand to be the case, then those who have the money to buy them (namely hospitals and clinics) must think the price is about right compared to the money they can make by using them. The rules and restrictions that people chafe about concerning health insurance arise largely from the way we have historically tied such insurance to employers, who "own" the policies rather than the individuals insured. Such third-party situations always lead to higher prices, and in my view this is the single most significant reason why health-care costs have risen faster than otherwise. If individuals owned their own health-care plans and decided in advance how much they wanted to spend, maybe there wouldn't be so many "Cadillac" plans out there and medical technology might be cheaper. But it would still be innovative, because the market would be free enough to reward innovation and competition.
The health-care bill that the president is so eager to sign moves things in the exact wrong direction: toward more bureucratic control, less freedom to do business in a way that makes economic sense, and more third-party interference between the consumer of health care and the provider. Yes, some more people will have insurance than before, and that is a worthwhile goal and almost the only good thing about the legislation. But there were far less intrusive, and probably more effective, ways of increasing the number of people who could afford health insurance. Only now, we may never know whether they might have worked. Instead, we have embarked on a huge, complex social experiment that will probably take decades to implement, and whose consequences we will all have to live with regardless of the outcome.
Besides the specific policy problems, the year-long debate over health care has further frayed the already worn fabric of our democracy. Congress has passed legislation that was clearly unpopular, and led to party-line divisions that may be very difficult to heal. Plus which, it may have contributed to an unhealthy cynicism about government in general. Last Friday I took the trouble to visit my congressman's office in downtown Austin to hand-deliver a note about the health-care vote. I had never done this before. It was rather depressing to see how the federal building is surrounded by a high black steel fence and guarded by cops who make you pass through a metal detector and run your personal items through an X-ray machine, just like at the airport. I understand the reasons for these precautions, but all the same, it seems like if the government had not expanded to be such a big target, we wouldn't have to go to so much trouble to protect it.
I will try to leave this topic alone in the future, since it is largely a done deal now and following it has not done my personal state of mind any good. But if anything comes up about it in the future that credibly concerns engineering ethics, I reserve the privilege to say something about it.
Sources: A description of last-minute changes to the medical-device tax was carried by the Huffington Post on Mar. 21 at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/21/health-care-bill-insuranc_n_507506.html. The figures on total cost to the industry were from a Wall Street Journal article on Dec. 21, 2009 at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704398304574598130440164954.html.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Epistemology for Dummies, or, Where Do Engineers Come From?
My wife edits the About.com breast cancer website, and every so often she feels obliged to take down scurrilous rumors by running them to their source and shining the light of day on them. The one she's working on right now says that bras cause breast cancer. Turns out that an anthropologist and his wife published a book in 1995 saying just that, but apparently basing it on nothing more than some hazy suspicions about restraining lymph and breast cancer rates in industrial societies (in which women tend to wear bras more). Judging by the fact that this couple now lives on sixty-some acres in Hawaii, a lot of people must have bought the book.
This is an example of the type of thinking that cannot help you build a bridge, or design a computer, or develop a cure for cancer that will work. It begins from a feeling or a desire, even, rather than from scientifically gleaned data. If bras cause breast cancer, then there's something you can do to avoid it: don't wear a bra! Wouldn't it be nice if it were that simple? And evidently, at least some readers of the book seem to think it is.
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy dealing with how we know things. There are many ways of knowing, and I am not here to tell you that the scientific way—which means gathering carefully marshalled data, doing highly controlled experiments, and constructing theories based on reliable premises, all of this being a lot of tedious, difficult work—is the only way we can know things. But for certain questions, such as "do bras cause breast cancer?" the scientific way has proved itself to be better than the path taken by the aforementioned authors. I'm not sure what they did has a name, but let's call it the wish-fulfillment way. I'm also not sure that what they get out of it is knowledge—I'd prefer to call it a story. But it's a story that a lot of people want to hear.
If I were the kind of person who indulged myself in telling similar stories, there's a story I'd like to tell, and one that feels right to me. After doing or teaching engineering for some thirty-odd years, it seems to me that the kind of person who is good at engineering comes from a certain kind of background. This background includes, typically, a solid family structure (if possible, being raised by the person's biological father and mother), a culture in which few material things are taken for granted and actions are valued above words, and an atmosphere in which complex mental achievements are honored and praised. Up to the 1960s, these descriptions applied to most of the U. S., especially outside large coastal cities. But as average incomes rose and the culture changed significantly, this type of background became relatively rare.
Outside the States, however, especially in places where opportunities for higher education were strictly limited and highly competitive, these conditions still prevailed, or at least they did until recently. We are currently interviewing candidates for faculty openings in my engineering school. I haven't done a scientific study of the question, but I estimate that no more than 10% of the applicants were born in the U. S. A. All the rest are immigrants. I have no problem with this, because it's great for the immigrants and shows once again that America is the land of opportunity. But all the same, it's a curious phenomenon, and in my more pessimistic moments I want to explain it with the conclusion of this little story.
What if the blessings of modern technology and engineering lead inevitably after a generation or so to a population of individuals who are incapable of doing engineering? Instead, you get the kind of folks who will buy and believe a fuzzy-headed book about bras causing breast cancer. These kinds of people can still sell things. They can get retail jobs, or factory jobs (if there are any factories left), or they can even become good artists or politicians (especially politicians). But if on some fundamental level, they don't believe in the external, objective, stubborn, don't-care-what-you-think-but-that's-the-way-it-is-anyway reality that engineers have to deal with, they will not even consider engineering as a career, no matter how much money the National Science Foundation or anybody else spends on science, technology, engineering, and math education enhancement. And anyway, they wouldn't be any good at it if they tried.
In this dismal fantasy, the only reason we haven't run out of engineers yet is that we can still find people who are the products of cultures which haven't yet enjoyed the fruits of technology long enough to quit producing young men and women who can be engineers. But given enough time, and the spread of high-tech prosperity into enough places, we may run out.
There, that's my story that I don't exactly wish were true, but have often suspected of being true. Is it true? If I weren't an engineer, I might go out and write a fuzzy-headed wish-fulfillment-type book claiming that it is, and aimed at getting people all worked up about how bad it is and what we should do about it. But being an engineer, I know that it would take probably millions of dollars' worth of statistical, sociological, and longitudinal-study research even to come close to guessing about the truth of this idea. I have neither the support nor the skills to contemplate such research, so my story will have to just remain what it is—a story. The only way I can imagine finding out it's true without doing a lot of research is to let time pass and see what happens. By that time I will probably not be around to find out. But if it does happen, remember—you read it here first.
Sources: Pretty soon you should be able to read about bras and breast cancer at http://breastcancer.about.com./
This is an example of the type of thinking that cannot help you build a bridge, or design a computer, or develop a cure for cancer that will work. It begins from a feeling or a desire, even, rather than from scientifically gleaned data. If bras cause breast cancer, then there's something you can do to avoid it: don't wear a bra! Wouldn't it be nice if it were that simple? And evidently, at least some readers of the book seem to think it is.
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy dealing with how we know things. There are many ways of knowing, and I am not here to tell you that the scientific way—which means gathering carefully marshalled data, doing highly controlled experiments, and constructing theories based on reliable premises, all of this being a lot of tedious, difficult work—is the only way we can know things. But for certain questions, such as "do bras cause breast cancer?" the scientific way has proved itself to be better than the path taken by the aforementioned authors. I'm not sure what they did has a name, but let's call it the wish-fulfillment way. I'm also not sure that what they get out of it is knowledge—I'd prefer to call it a story. But it's a story that a lot of people want to hear.
If I were the kind of person who indulged myself in telling similar stories, there's a story I'd like to tell, and one that feels right to me. After doing or teaching engineering for some thirty-odd years, it seems to me that the kind of person who is good at engineering comes from a certain kind of background. This background includes, typically, a solid family structure (if possible, being raised by the person's biological father and mother), a culture in which few material things are taken for granted and actions are valued above words, and an atmosphere in which complex mental achievements are honored and praised. Up to the 1960s, these descriptions applied to most of the U. S., especially outside large coastal cities. But as average incomes rose and the culture changed significantly, this type of background became relatively rare.
Outside the States, however, especially in places where opportunities for higher education were strictly limited and highly competitive, these conditions still prevailed, or at least they did until recently. We are currently interviewing candidates for faculty openings in my engineering school. I haven't done a scientific study of the question, but I estimate that no more than 10% of the applicants were born in the U. S. A. All the rest are immigrants. I have no problem with this, because it's great for the immigrants and shows once again that America is the land of opportunity. But all the same, it's a curious phenomenon, and in my more pessimistic moments I want to explain it with the conclusion of this little story.
What if the blessings of modern technology and engineering lead inevitably after a generation or so to a population of individuals who are incapable of doing engineering? Instead, you get the kind of folks who will buy and believe a fuzzy-headed book about bras causing breast cancer. These kinds of people can still sell things. They can get retail jobs, or factory jobs (if there are any factories left), or they can even become good artists or politicians (especially politicians). But if on some fundamental level, they don't believe in the external, objective, stubborn, don't-care-what-you-think-but-that's-the-way-it-is-anyway reality that engineers have to deal with, they will not even consider engineering as a career, no matter how much money the National Science Foundation or anybody else spends on science, technology, engineering, and math education enhancement. And anyway, they wouldn't be any good at it if they tried.
In this dismal fantasy, the only reason we haven't run out of engineers yet is that we can still find people who are the products of cultures which haven't yet enjoyed the fruits of technology long enough to quit producing young men and women who can be engineers. But given enough time, and the spread of high-tech prosperity into enough places, we may run out.
There, that's my story that I don't exactly wish were true, but have often suspected of being true. Is it true? If I weren't an engineer, I might go out and write a fuzzy-headed wish-fulfillment-type book claiming that it is, and aimed at getting people all worked up about how bad it is and what we should do about it. But being an engineer, I know that it would take probably millions of dollars' worth of statistical, sociological, and longitudinal-study research even to come close to guessing about the truth of this idea. I have neither the support nor the skills to contemplate such research, so my story will have to just remain what it is—a story. The only way I can imagine finding out it's true without doing a lot of research is to let time pass and see what happens. By that time I will probably not be around to find out. But if it does happen, remember—you read it here first.
Sources: Pretty soon you should be able to read about bras and breast cancer at http://breastcancer.about.com./
Saturday, March 06, 2010
Toyota: Not So Fast, Guys
The automotive industry has furnished the field of engineering ethics with more than one "paradigm" case that generations of budding engineers have studied. In the way Toyota tried to deal with the now-infamous problem of unintended acceleration in many of its models, they have given us an example of how not to deal with a safety problem. Technical issues are only one aspect of the way an initially small-scale issue snowballed into a major financial disaster that shut down sales and may have permanently blotted Toyota's reputation. While the whole story has yet to emerge, it looks now as though a circle-the-wagons mentality was at least as much to blame as poor engineering.
We have the Los Angeles Times to thank for most of the initial journalistic spadework that pressured Toyota into reluctant action. Back in August of last year, an off-duty policeman and three of his family suddenly felt their new Lexus jet out of control at speeds of up to 100 mph before it hit another car, flew down an embankment, and caught fire, killing all four occupants. Investigation revealed that if a certain rubber floor mat is installed, a projection in the molding can catch the bottom tip of the rigid accelerator pedal so that the throttle is stuck wide-open. In late September, Toyota issued a floor-mat recall on over four million vehicles.
The August incident turned out to be the tip of an unintended-acceleration iceberg that Toyota has been struggling to minimize for over a decade, as further investigations published by the L. A. Times in October revealed. In October, Toyota sent out a letter to many of its car owners that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration criticized four days later as "inaccurate" and "misleading." Toyota was clearly trying to minimize a problem that now appears to be more serious than simply a floor mat that interferes with accelerator-pedal motion. Some of the incidents dug up by the Times appear to involve the "drive-by-wire" electronic accelerator system which is, of course, operated by computer programs. Toyota admits that there is no software feature that disables the accelerator pedal when the brake pedal is pressed.
In all of the United States, Toyota has exactly one machine that can read a car's onboard data recorder to assist in diagnosing accidents and problems after the fact. This appears to be an attempt on the part of the automaker to control the production of potentially damaging information, since dealers and other interested parties cannot access the data. After a crash the day after Christmas in Texas that killed four people appeared to be due to unintended acceleration, things spun out of even Toyota's control. On January 26, they took the extraordinary step of halting sales of about half their models until the mechanical accelerator fix can be applied. It turns out this is at the request of the federal government, in a move that was probably motivated by words to the effect of, "if you don't do it by yourselves, we'll make you do it." As of this writing, the question of whether Toyota's electronic throttle system is to blame as well as the mechanical pedal problems is still under investigation. But there is plenty of smoke around to justify the conclusion that there's a fire in that department as well.
The phrase "damage control" can mean several things. If you're talking about something as straightforward as fighting a fire, it means putting the fire out as fast as you can to minimize physical damage. But the phrase has taken on a darker meaning in recent years. It has come to mean a strategy that an organization deploys in its public (and government) relations in order to convince outsiders that whatever really happened, things are not that bad after all. Although the story is still unfolding, there is enough evidence already to conclude that Toyota had taken the second meaning all too much to heart. In its misleading minimizing of the seriousness of recalls, in its failure to provide more than one data-reading device for the entire U. S., and in its Johnny-come-lately reactions to serious, long-term problems, it showed a signal lack of judgment and concern for the safety of the driving public. We do not know yet what Toyota knew about the problem, or problems, and when they knew it. But it is already clear that whatever they knew, they didn't want anyone else to know. It took a courageous news outlet (a print one, at that) to keep hammering on the issues and asking embarrassing questions, as well as a government agency that is arguably understaffed and underequipped to deal with the technical complexity of today's automotive industry. I wonder how long it would take a gang of clever Caltech undergrads to crack Toyota's automotive data-recorder code. If somebody hasn't done it already, they ought to as a public service.
The worst thing that can happen to a corporation (short of going out of business altogether) is to lose money, and Toyota has already been taken to the woodshed in that regard. But losing money is one thing, and losing one's life to a preventable technical defect is another order of thing altogether. Some estimates say that perhaps fifty or so people have died as a result of unintended acceleration in Toyota cars. That is a small fraction of the total of annual auto-related deaths in this country. But the engineers who could have prevented these deaths failed to do so. And that's what engineering ethics is about.
Sources: Motortrend Magazine online has a good chronology of the Toyota recall and related issues up to late January at http://www.motortrend.com/features/auto_news/2010/112_1001_toyota_recall_crisis/index.html. I also referred to a recent Los Angeles Times article on Congressional hearings about the matter at http://www.latimes.com/sns-ap-toyota-recall,0,7766384.story. For the record, I drive a Honda.
We have the Los Angeles Times to thank for most of the initial journalistic spadework that pressured Toyota into reluctant action. Back in August of last year, an off-duty policeman and three of his family suddenly felt their new Lexus jet out of control at speeds of up to 100 mph before it hit another car, flew down an embankment, and caught fire, killing all four occupants. Investigation revealed that if a certain rubber floor mat is installed, a projection in the molding can catch the bottom tip of the rigid accelerator pedal so that the throttle is stuck wide-open. In late September, Toyota issued a floor-mat recall on over four million vehicles.
The August incident turned out to be the tip of an unintended-acceleration iceberg that Toyota has been struggling to minimize for over a decade, as further investigations published by the L. A. Times in October revealed. In October, Toyota sent out a letter to many of its car owners that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration criticized four days later as "inaccurate" and "misleading." Toyota was clearly trying to minimize a problem that now appears to be more serious than simply a floor mat that interferes with accelerator-pedal motion. Some of the incidents dug up by the Times appear to involve the "drive-by-wire" electronic accelerator system which is, of course, operated by computer programs. Toyota admits that there is no software feature that disables the accelerator pedal when the brake pedal is pressed.
In all of the United States, Toyota has exactly one machine that can read a car's onboard data recorder to assist in diagnosing accidents and problems after the fact. This appears to be an attempt on the part of the automaker to control the production of potentially damaging information, since dealers and other interested parties cannot access the data. After a crash the day after Christmas in Texas that killed four people appeared to be due to unintended acceleration, things spun out of even Toyota's control. On January 26, they took the extraordinary step of halting sales of about half their models until the mechanical accelerator fix can be applied. It turns out this is at the request of the federal government, in a move that was probably motivated by words to the effect of, "if you don't do it by yourselves, we'll make you do it." As of this writing, the question of whether Toyota's electronic throttle system is to blame as well as the mechanical pedal problems is still under investigation. But there is plenty of smoke around to justify the conclusion that there's a fire in that department as well.
The phrase "damage control" can mean several things. If you're talking about something as straightforward as fighting a fire, it means putting the fire out as fast as you can to minimize physical damage. But the phrase has taken on a darker meaning in recent years. It has come to mean a strategy that an organization deploys in its public (and government) relations in order to convince outsiders that whatever really happened, things are not that bad after all. Although the story is still unfolding, there is enough evidence already to conclude that Toyota had taken the second meaning all too much to heart. In its misleading minimizing of the seriousness of recalls, in its failure to provide more than one data-reading device for the entire U. S., and in its Johnny-come-lately reactions to serious, long-term problems, it showed a signal lack of judgment and concern for the safety of the driving public. We do not know yet what Toyota knew about the problem, or problems, and when they knew it. But it is already clear that whatever they knew, they didn't want anyone else to know. It took a courageous news outlet (a print one, at that) to keep hammering on the issues and asking embarrassing questions, as well as a government agency that is arguably understaffed and underequipped to deal with the technical complexity of today's automotive industry. I wonder how long it would take a gang of clever Caltech undergrads to crack Toyota's automotive data-recorder code. If somebody hasn't done it already, they ought to as a public service.
The worst thing that can happen to a corporation (short of going out of business altogether) is to lose money, and Toyota has already been taken to the woodshed in that regard. But losing money is one thing, and losing one's life to a preventable technical defect is another order of thing altogether. Some estimates say that perhaps fifty or so people have died as a result of unintended acceleration in Toyota cars. That is a small fraction of the total of annual auto-related deaths in this country. But the engineers who could have prevented these deaths failed to do so. And that's what engineering ethics is about.
Sources: Motortrend Magazine online has a good chronology of the Toyota recall and related issues up to late January at http://www.motortrend.com/features/auto_news/2010/112_1001_toyota_recall_crisis/index.html. I also referred to a recent Los Angeles Times article on Congressional hearings about the matter at http://www.latimes.com/sns-ap-toyota-recall,0,7766384.story. For the record, I drive a Honda.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Wizardry and Word
Here's a little quiz. I'm going to give you a passage from the 1939 novel The Sword In the Stone, about King Arthur's tutelage under the magician Merlyn back before anyone (except maybe Merlyn, who lived backwards in time) knew that the changeling boy Wart was really King Arthur. After you read it, try and think of a situation similar to Merlyn's that you probably find yourself in several times a week.
As the scene opens, Merlyn has just brought Wart back from a magical trip somewhere, and on their return, Merlyn discovers that he lost his hat. Here’s what happens next:
[quote—Google doesn't accept tabs!]
The Wart sat quiet while Merlyn closed his eyes and began to mutter to himself. Presently a curious black cylindrical hat appeared on his head.
Merlyn examined it with a look of disgust, said bitterly, “And they call this service!” and handed it back to the air. He closed his eyes and produced with growing indignation, in rapid succession, this . . . and this . . . and this. [In the original each “this” is followed by sketches of a top hat, a conductor’s cap, a Sherlock-Holmes style deerstalker, and a sailor’s cap.] . . .
“Now,” said Merlyn furiously, apparently to nobody, “do you think you are being funny?”
“Very well then, why do you do it?”
“That’s no excuse. Naturally I meant the one I was wearing.”
“But wearing now, of course, you fool. I don’t want a hat I was wearing in 1890. Have you no sense of time at all?"
Merlyn took off his sailor hat and held it out to the air for inspection.
“This is an anachronism,” he said severely. “That’s what it is, a beastly anachronism.”
Archimedes [Merlyn’s pet owl] seemed to be accustomed to these scenes, for he now said in a reasonable voice, “Why don’t you ask for the hat by name, master? Say, ‘I want my magician’s hat,’ not ‘I want the hat I was wearing.’ Perhaps the poor chap finds it as difficult to live backwards in time as you do.”
“I want my magician’s hat,” Merlyn said sulkily.
Instantly the long pointed cap was standing on his head.
[end quote]
If you are like me, as you read this passage it seemed strangely familiar. Where do you find yourself trying to do some simple, trivial thing, only to have your desires frustrated by an entity that gets it almost right, but not quite, and you have to keep trying again and again until someone wiser than you gives you the right advice? Then it works like a charm (so to speak).
If you say, "Operating any Microsoft product," you are right. Now, don't get me wrong. Microsoft comes in for a lot of criticism simply because its products are so ubiquitous, not because they are necessarily inferior or hard to use. But it is inevitable that in the case of something as complex and feature-filled as Word or Excel, that the average user who wants to do only a few things will sooner or later come up against a problem that is best described as a failure to communicate.
Whoever Merlyn was talking with (and we never find out), they seem to be peculiarly literal-minded—like computers. They're very fast—like computers—at doing something completely wrong, such as handing you a top hat when you want a magician's cap.
The other day, I was writing a list of things and wanted to head each item (a), (b), and open-parenthesis-c-close parenthesis. I spelled it out that way because if I tried just typing it literally the way I did the first two, I didn't get (c), I got the little "c" in a circle that means "copyright." Evidently there's a frustration meter built into the software, though, because the third or fourth time I erased the copyright symbol and typed (c), the machine finally understood what I meant and let me continue.
When things like this happen, I'm glad that I'm alone in the room and there's no one around to wonder who I am about to kill. I have conversations with Word and Excel, most of them printable, but I will not reproduce them here except to say that they have the same general tone as Merlyn's talk with his invisible servant.
How T. H. White got the idea for that scene is beyond me, writing well before computers were more than a gleam in a few inventors' eyes. The real joke is not so much that the invisible magic servant is incompetent, but that Merlyn can't be precise enough in his magical commands. Which is true for us too, by and large. I suppose somewhere in the universe, people teach entire courses on how to use Word and Excel, and there's all those online tutorials I never have time to go through—though I spend as much or more time trying to fix some annoying little problem that I might sail through easily if I'd had a formal course on the subject.
Part of the problem is the deep shadow of anonymity in which Microsoft cloaks its engineers. In this it's like the old Disney studios. No matter what talented people contributed to a Disney film before about 1970, all the credits said was "A Walt Disney Production." This is good for the head man if there is more praise than blame to go around, but I venture to say that Bill Gates is the most roundly cursed name in the phone book, especially around times when new Microsoft products are released. If Microsoft would allow a little public recognition of the people who are responsible for certain products, maybe the anger would be diffused some and we might even come to look up to these people as the sages they ought to be.
But knowing the typical software engineer, meeting the public who uses one's program is not ranked high on one's bucket list. So perhaps it is just as well that Mr. Gates is the public lightning rod for all manner of curses and denunciations whenever a Microsoft product fails to read our minds correctly. But if we knew who was behind the "wizards" of the software, we might act with less anger and more restraint against a fallible piece of software written by fallible human beings.
Sources: T. H. White's The Sword In the Stone is the first of a four-part series of Arthurian novels called The Once and Future King, and by most estimates, is by far the best one.Monday, February 22, 2010
Dead Wrong?
Since death is one of the things we try to avoid in doing engineering ethics, it only stands to reason that we need to have a good, widely accepted definition of death. This might not be as easy to agree on as you might think.
Michael Shermer is one of the nicest atheists you'll ever meet. He is a cheery, humorous person by nature, endowed with a strong sense of fairness and even generosity in debate, which is more than you can say about some skeptics. I once heard him speak at a conference that included many religious believers, and his attitude toward them was always courteous, but he never allowed them to get away with logical lapses. In his monthly column for Scientific American, Shermer shows the same combination of humor and rigor, so I was interested to read what he had to say about death in the March issue.
He starts off by saying, "Have you ever died and come back to life? Me neither. No one has." He goes on to describe a panel he participated in on Larry King Live in which several folks who claimed that they had died and come back to life told about their experiences. Shermer was more than willing to admit they had experienced a "near-death" state, but he says that death is a process, not an instantaneous event. And although he doesn't say in so many words, he clearly excludes anyone (or any living entity, presumably) from the category of ever having been "dead" if they are now living, no matter what state they were in at an earlier time.
That makes sense in a way, but consider the following situation. There are certain small bacteria whose internal workings are so simple that they can be frozen at liquid nitrogen temperatures or below without suffering permanent harm. A biologist told me once of an experiment he performed. He took one of these bacteria and chilled it so cold that you could show that all chemical and metabolic activity in the bacterium was frozen out—at that point, it was just an inert inanimate object and harbored no more lifelike activity than a salt crystal. Then he gradually warmed it up again to the point that its inner machinery thawed out and it began processing food and excreting waste and so on—in other words, it came back to life.
Now here is the critical question: when the bacterium was in its suspended-animation state, was it alive or dead? The answer depends on your definition of death.
If we use Shermer's definition, strictly speaking, we can't say until we know the subsequent history of the thing. Suppose that the biologist then lifted the frozen bacteria out of the cryostat, still frozen, and ran it through an acid bath or something that disintegrated the critter into its constituent atoms before it thawed out. Even Shermer would have to admit it was dead at that point. But he wouldn't have been able to say earlier, because if the biologist had instead thawed the thing out and got it going again, by Shermer's own definition, it would never have died. Like the guests on Larry King Live, it would have simply had a near-death experience.
This is not just a trivial thought problem. Out in California, there is a company that for a hefty fee will take your body (once you have ceased to function), freeze it in liquid nitrogen, and preserve it until such time as science has advanced enough to get you going again. If Shermer wants to be consistent, he can't say that those people are dead either, since neither he nor anyone else knows for absolutely sure that some day, scientific progress may enable the revival of people on ice like that. It's a good thing Shermer doesn't run a life-insurance company, because if he did there would be a lot of survivors of those frozen entities in California who wouldn't get their death benefits, because the alleged deceased doesn't meet Shermer's definition of death.
To turn theological for a moment, the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of Jesus is a central, if not the central, tenet of the faith. If Jesus really did rise from the dead, then by Shermer's definition, he never died, and if his followers rise some day too, they never died, either. Oddly (or maybe not so oddly), Jesus himself talks this way. In the Gospel of John, just before Jesus tells the dead and smelly Lazarus to come out of his tomb, he tells Lazarus's sister Martha that "He who believes in me shall never die." The Gospel doesn't say what Lazarus claims to have experienced during his four days in the tomb, but he later makes an appearance at the first-century equivalent of Larry King Live—a large banquet—and becomes sufficiently famous that the authorities plot to kill him as well as Jesus. If Shermer had been around then, I'm sure he would have said that Lazarus merely had a near-death experience as well.
Perhaps engineers can be satisfied with a pragmatic definition of death. If someone comes to be in a condition that makes it very unlikely they will be up and around and paying taxes any time soon, then we can consider them to be dead, no matter what philosophers or skeptics like Shermer or Christians say. I'm a Christian myself, and maybe the ancient custom of referring to believers who died in the faith as asleep rather than dead would be worth reviving. But if we revived it, it never really would have died, now, would it?
Sources: Michael Shermer's column "Surviving Death on Larry King Live" appears on p. 32 of the March 2010 issue of Scientific American. For those interested in the cryonics movement, Jill Lepore's report on the Cryonics Institute, one of the leading people-freezing outfits, appears in the Jan. 25, 2010 issue of The New Yorker.
Michael Shermer is one of the nicest atheists you'll ever meet. He is a cheery, humorous person by nature, endowed with a strong sense of fairness and even generosity in debate, which is more than you can say about some skeptics. I once heard him speak at a conference that included many religious believers, and his attitude toward them was always courteous, but he never allowed them to get away with logical lapses. In his monthly column for Scientific American, Shermer shows the same combination of humor and rigor, so I was interested to read what he had to say about death in the March issue.
He starts off by saying, "Have you ever died and come back to life? Me neither. No one has." He goes on to describe a panel he participated in on Larry King Live in which several folks who claimed that they had died and come back to life told about their experiences. Shermer was more than willing to admit they had experienced a "near-death" state, but he says that death is a process, not an instantaneous event. And although he doesn't say in so many words, he clearly excludes anyone (or any living entity, presumably) from the category of ever having been "dead" if they are now living, no matter what state they were in at an earlier time.
That makes sense in a way, but consider the following situation. There are certain small bacteria whose internal workings are so simple that they can be frozen at liquid nitrogen temperatures or below without suffering permanent harm. A biologist told me once of an experiment he performed. He took one of these bacteria and chilled it so cold that you could show that all chemical and metabolic activity in the bacterium was frozen out—at that point, it was just an inert inanimate object and harbored no more lifelike activity than a salt crystal. Then he gradually warmed it up again to the point that its inner machinery thawed out and it began processing food and excreting waste and so on—in other words, it came back to life.
Now here is the critical question: when the bacterium was in its suspended-animation state, was it alive or dead? The answer depends on your definition of death.
If we use Shermer's definition, strictly speaking, we can't say until we know the subsequent history of the thing. Suppose that the biologist then lifted the frozen bacteria out of the cryostat, still frozen, and ran it through an acid bath or something that disintegrated the critter into its constituent atoms before it thawed out. Even Shermer would have to admit it was dead at that point. But he wouldn't have been able to say earlier, because if the biologist had instead thawed the thing out and got it going again, by Shermer's own definition, it would never have died. Like the guests on Larry King Live, it would have simply had a near-death experience.
This is not just a trivial thought problem. Out in California, there is a company that for a hefty fee will take your body (once you have ceased to function), freeze it in liquid nitrogen, and preserve it until such time as science has advanced enough to get you going again. If Shermer wants to be consistent, he can't say that those people are dead either, since neither he nor anyone else knows for absolutely sure that some day, scientific progress may enable the revival of people on ice like that. It's a good thing Shermer doesn't run a life-insurance company, because if he did there would be a lot of survivors of those frozen entities in California who wouldn't get their death benefits, because the alleged deceased doesn't meet Shermer's definition of death.
To turn theological for a moment, the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of Jesus is a central, if not the central, tenet of the faith. If Jesus really did rise from the dead, then by Shermer's definition, he never died, and if his followers rise some day too, they never died, either. Oddly (or maybe not so oddly), Jesus himself talks this way. In the Gospel of John, just before Jesus tells the dead and smelly Lazarus to come out of his tomb, he tells Lazarus's sister Martha that "He who believes in me shall never die." The Gospel doesn't say what Lazarus claims to have experienced during his four days in the tomb, but he later makes an appearance at the first-century equivalent of Larry King Live—a large banquet—and becomes sufficiently famous that the authorities plot to kill him as well as Jesus. If Shermer had been around then, I'm sure he would have said that Lazarus merely had a near-death experience as well.
Perhaps engineers can be satisfied with a pragmatic definition of death. If someone comes to be in a condition that makes it very unlikely they will be up and around and paying taxes any time soon, then we can consider them to be dead, no matter what philosophers or skeptics like Shermer or Christians say. I'm a Christian myself, and maybe the ancient custom of referring to believers who died in the faith as asleep rather than dead would be worth reviving. But if we revived it, it never really would have died, now, would it?
Sources: Michael Shermer's column "Surviving Death on Larry King Live" appears on p. 32 of the March 2010 issue of Scientific American. For those interested in the cryonics movement, Jill Lepore's report on the Cryonics Institute, one of the leading people-freezing outfits, appears in the Jan. 25, 2010 issue of The New Yorker.
Monday, February 15, 2010
The End of the Space Shuttle-And What Next?
America's space program has always been interesting from an engineering ethics perspective. During the race to the moon in the 1960s, we witnessed the unique spectacle of billions of dollars of technological effort focused on a goal that was, in retrospect, primarily political and cultural, not technical or scientific. The Space Shuttle's two major disasters—Challenger's explosion after launch in 1986 and Columbia's disintegration on reentry in 2003—have provided extensively documented object lessons in how not to manage hazardous technical operations. And now as America faces a new decade and the Space Shuttle's scheduled retirement by the end of this year, the question arises: what next?
The Obama administration has weighed in with its opinion: no trip to the moon, on the government's dime, anyway. According to news reports, the President's proposed budget eliminates funding for the moon-bound Constellation program, on which $9 billion has already been spent. A while back, $9 billion sounded like a lot of money, but as conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer pointed out, that is only a few percent of the 2009 stimulus package that has seemed to do little more than delay some inevitable cutbacks. Constellation could be finished for less than $9 billion more, but instead, the budget calls for a change in course toward commercial space flights.
As longtime readers of this blog may recall, I am no supporter of the Space Shuttle. The only justification for keeping this antiquated technology running is that we had no alternative if America was to keep any presence in manned space flight. So I welcome the wind-down of the program after its remaining four flights this year, and look forward to seeing one of the Shuttles take a well-deserved rest in the halls of the Smithsonian Museum, where it belongs.
At the same time, my underlying assumption was that wiser heads than mine would initiate and complete an alternative to the Shuttle in a timely fashion, "timely" meaning not too long after the Shuttle was retired. Well, it retires in less than a year, and not only do we not have a replacement, now we do not even have plans for a replacement. True, various private firms are competing for both manned and unmanned space operations, but let's think about that for a moment. The restrictions and precautions needed to make manned space flight safe enough to undertake even by a government employee who has trained for ten or fifteen years for a mission one knows to be dangerous, are so expensive that only the government has heretofore been able to afford it. In today's litigious environment, I am trying to imagine how a private company is going to succeed (which means, make a profit at) in a field where entire governments have spent billions and failed to develop manned flight systems that are safe and reliable, let alone economical.
Just to be technical a moment: With unmanned space flights such as satellite launches, once the hardware is in orbit your job is mostly done. If the launch fails, your expenses are no greater than if it succeeds—you just don't have an orbiting satellite to show for it. All the hardware is disposable and it's just a cost of doing business to throw most of it into the ocean.
By contrast, in manned space flight, at least some of the hardware has to come back, with a live person or persons inside. Life-support systems are extraordinarily complex, the G-forces the human body can stand are limited, and a number of other complications mean that manned space flight is orders of magnitude more challenging than unmanned flight. The small number of privately funded flights by wealthy individuals have resulted, not from companies founded for the explicit purpose of taking rich guys into space, but as a byproduct of Russian space expenditures and a desire on the part of Russia to pay for their existing program any way they can.
I will be very surprised if anything significant comes from Obama's call for private enterprise to take up the slack in our manned space program. If private firms don't suddenly develop a reliable, safe, and economical way to get people into space, then as Krauthammer points out, for the first time since 1962, the United States will have no means of putting humans into space.
The space program began largely as a manifestation of national pride, which is not an emotion that our current President seems inclined to indulge. As glad as I am that the Shuttle is finally going the way of the Wright Brothers' planes, I confess to some unease that for the foreseeable future, we will have to rely on Russia and perhaps other nations for taking our astronauts to the International Space Station and anywhere else up there they'd like to go. This is at a time when China is continuing to boast about its new space program, which registered its latest success in 2008 with a spacewalk in orbit. In historical terms, the Chinese appear to be where the U. S. was in space in about 1965. But despite the Chinese government's other disadvantages such as its repressive nature and despotic tendencies, it does have the advantage of continuity. So when Chinese officials talk about planning lunar missions by around 2017, we should at least take them seriously.
It would be a shame if the U. S. abandons manned spaceflight altogether, although a hiatus for the purpose of planning a safer and more economical means than the Space Shuttle would be justified if we eventually got back on the horse and continued to ride. But right now, that doesn't look like it's going to happen.
Sources: A Reuters dispatch on the Obama budget for space can be found at http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6101XF20100201. Charles Krauthammer's column on this decision is at the National Review Online website http://article.nationalreview.com/424809/closing-the-new-frontier/charles-krauthammer.
The Obama administration has weighed in with its opinion: no trip to the moon, on the government's dime, anyway. According to news reports, the President's proposed budget eliminates funding for the moon-bound Constellation program, on which $9 billion has already been spent. A while back, $9 billion sounded like a lot of money, but as conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer pointed out, that is only a few percent of the 2009 stimulus package that has seemed to do little more than delay some inevitable cutbacks. Constellation could be finished for less than $9 billion more, but instead, the budget calls for a change in course toward commercial space flights.
As longtime readers of this blog may recall, I am no supporter of the Space Shuttle. The only justification for keeping this antiquated technology running is that we had no alternative if America was to keep any presence in manned space flight. So I welcome the wind-down of the program after its remaining four flights this year, and look forward to seeing one of the Shuttles take a well-deserved rest in the halls of the Smithsonian Museum, where it belongs.
At the same time, my underlying assumption was that wiser heads than mine would initiate and complete an alternative to the Shuttle in a timely fashion, "timely" meaning not too long after the Shuttle was retired. Well, it retires in less than a year, and not only do we not have a replacement, now we do not even have plans for a replacement. True, various private firms are competing for both manned and unmanned space operations, but let's think about that for a moment. The restrictions and precautions needed to make manned space flight safe enough to undertake even by a government employee who has trained for ten or fifteen years for a mission one knows to be dangerous, are so expensive that only the government has heretofore been able to afford it. In today's litigious environment, I am trying to imagine how a private company is going to succeed (which means, make a profit at) in a field where entire governments have spent billions and failed to develop manned flight systems that are safe and reliable, let alone economical.
Just to be technical a moment: With unmanned space flights such as satellite launches, once the hardware is in orbit your job is mostly done. If the launch fails, your expenses are no greater than if it succeeds—you just don't have an orbiting satellite to show for it. All the hardware is disposable and it's just a cost of doing business to throw most of it into the ocean.
By contrast, in manned space flight, at least some of the hardware has to come back, with a live person or persons inside. Life-support systems are extraordinarily complex, the G-forces the human body can stand are limited, and a number of other complications mean that manned space flight is orders of magnitude more challenging than unmanned flight. The small number of privately funded flights by wealthy individuals have resulted, not from companies founded for the explicit purpose of taking rich guys into space, but as a byproduct of Russian space expenditures and a desire on the part of Russia to pay for their existing program any way they can.
I will be very surprised if anything significant comes from Obama's call for private enterprise to take up the slack in our manned space program. If private firms don't suddenly develop a reliable, safe, and economical way to get people into space, then as Krauthammer points out, for the first time since 1962, the United States will have no means of putting humans into space.
The space program began largely as a manifestation of national pride, which is not an emotion that our current President seems inclined to indulge. As glad as I am that the Shuttle is finally going the way of the Wright Brothers' planes, I confess to some unease that for the foreseeable future, we will have to rely on Russia and perhaps other nations for taking our astronauts to the International Space Station and anywhere else up there they'd like to go. This is at a time when China is continuing to boast about its new space program, which registered its latest success in 2008 with a spacewalk in orbit. In historical terms, the Chinese appear to be where the U. S. was in space in about 1965. But despite the Chinese government's other disadvantages such as its repressive nature and despotic tendencies, it does have the advantage of continuity. So when Chinese officials talk about planning lunar missions by around 2017, we should at least take them seriously.
It would be a shame if the U. S. abandons manned spaceflight altogether, although a hiatus for the purpose of planning a safer and more economical means than the Space Shuttle would be justified if we eventually got back on the horse and continued to ride. But right now, that doesn't look like it's going to happen.
Sources: A Reuters dispatch on the Obama budget for space can be found at http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6101XF20100201. Charles Krauthammer's column on this decision is at the National Review Online website http://article.nationalreview.com/424809/closing-the-new-frontier/charles-krauthammer.
Monday, February 08, 2010
Lessons from Flight 3407: Pay Attention
Last Tuesday, Feb. 2, the U. S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released a synopsis of its final report on the crash of Flight 3407 outside Buffalo, New York a year ago (Feb. 12, 2009, to be exact). All aboard the Colgan Air commuter flight from Newark to Buffalo were killed, as well as one person on the ground, raising the total number of fatalities to fifty. In my initial blog on this crash, I reported that there might have been a problem with the deicing machinery on the plane. But an NTSB hearing last May revealed that evidence had emerged of significant pilot error. At the time, there was much consternation in the press about the fact that the co-pilot, 24-year-old Rebecca Shaw, was earning only about $17,000 annually and was living with her parents to save expenses. The NTSB found that both Shaw and pilot Marvin Renslow acted unprofessionally during the flight, tolerating distractions from "personal portable electronic devices," chatting about irrelevant matters during the final approach, and reacting incorrectly to emergency warnings. There were three separate occasions at which Renslow could have corrected the deteriorating situation above Buffalo that night, but the NTSB found that his reactions were characterized by "startle and confusion," to quote from the official synopsis. He had a spotty training record, and this probably contributed to the fact that when the "stick shaker" (a device designed to warn pilots of an impending stall) was activated, he did not automatically push the stick forward as his training should have prompted him to, but instead pulled back, compounding the situation and ultimately causing him to lose control of the aircraft.
Anyone who has studied safety and engineering-related accidents knows that beneath every headline-grabbing tragedy, there are usually a lot more minor incidents, near misses, and recoverable errors that for one reason or another did not go all the way to sudden death for lots of people. The airline industry as a whole has been under financial pressure for many years, and so you have the situation where young, inexperienced, poorly paid pilots are making up an increasing fraction of the airline-pilot staff. For every Flight 3407, there are probably a dozen or more similar incidents that were caught at the last minute.
In its collective wisdom, the NTSB implicitly recognized this more systemic problem in its list of twenty-five recommendations to the Federal Aviation Administration. (One can question the bureaucratic wisdom of having one agency investigate accidents and recommending corrective action to another, but that is a discussion for another time.) The NTSB calls for better training, more careful scrutiny of pilots whose test scores show problems (or who flunk tests altogether), and more of what they call "sterile cockpit discipline."
The ability to direct one's attention is one of the supreme gifts of humanity, but if a person lacks the training or inclination to do so, all the skills in the world are useless. Both Renslow and Shaw were fatigued before they embarked on Flight 3407 (Renslow had slept in the airline's pilot lounge in violation of regulations), but fatigue was no excuse for inattention. Everyone who drives a car knows how important it is to avoid being distracted by cell-phone conversations, GPS readouts, or any of the other amusements and information sources we tend to surround ourselves with. This goes double with the much more complex task of flying a plane, for which sterile cockpit discipline, meaning doing your job and nothing else that will distract you, is a necessary prerequisite. Unfortunately, Shaw and Renslow did not learn that lesson well enough and paid for it with their lives.
The British comic John Cleese, one of the original Monty Pythons, once satirized overly chatty airline pilots in a hilarious sketch. Clearly bored out of his mind by the monotony of his flying job, he amused himself by getting on the intercom and making announcements such as, "Hello, this is the Captain speaking. There is absolutely no cause for concern," then remarking to his copilot, "There, that'll get them thinking." The sketch degenerates to the point where the passengers all jump out of the plane, at which point Cleese looks out the window and comments reflectively, "You know, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some trouble about this."
Analyzing humor is not a funny business, but neither is investigating air crashes. The sketch gained much of its energy from the fact that in the public mind, airline pilots are largely a stereotype of the responsible professional. The picture of a pilot intentionally twitting the passengers and goofing off is funny (in a TV sketch, anyway) because it is so incongruous with the profession's standard public image.
But professionalism has to be achieved one pilot at a time. The NTSB, in its investigation of Flight 3407, has spotted what it fears to be a dangerous trend of unprofessionalism in the cockpit. While its recommendations do not carry the force of law, I hope that the FAA, whose dictates are law, will take them seriously. Professionalism, smooth flights, and expert handling of dangerous situations are what the flying public expects from pilots. Even if we all have to pay a little more, it's worth it to know that the people into whose hands we place our lives every time we step on an airplane are worthy of that trust.
Sources: The synopsis of the NTSB final report on the crash of Flight 3407 can be found at http://www.ntsb.gov/Publictn/2010/AAR1001.htm. Cleese's "Airline Pilots Sketch" is currently online at http://www.serve.com/bonzai/monty/classics/TheAirlinePilotsSketch. My previous blogs on this incident can be found in the entries for Feb. 12 and May 18, 2009.
Anyone who has studied safety and engineering-related accidents knows that beneath every headline-grabbing tragedy, there are usually a lot more minor incidents, near misses, and recoverable errors that for one reason or another did not go all the way to sudden death for lots of people. The airline industry as a whole has been under financial pressure for many years, and so you have the situation where young, inexperienced, poorly paid pilots are making up an increasing fraction of the airline-pilot staff. For every Flight 3407, there are probably a dozen or more similar incidents that were caught at the last minute.
In its collective wisdom, the NTSB implicitly recognized this more systemic problem in its list of twenty-five recommendations to the Federal Aviation Administration. (One can question the bureaucratic wisdom of having one agency investigate accidents and recommending corrective action to another, but that is a discussion for another time.) The NTSB calls for better training, more careful scrutiny of pilots whose test scores show problems (or who flunk tests altogether), and more of what they call "sterile cockpit discipline."
The ability to direct one's attention is one of the supreme gifts of humanity, but if a person lacks the training or inclination to do so, all the skills in the world are useless. Both Renslow and Shaw were fatigued before they embarked on Flight 3407 (Renslow had slept in the airline's pilot lounge in violation of regulations), but fatigue was no excuse for inattention. Everyone who drives a car knows how important it is to avoid being distracted by cell-phone conversations, GPS readouts, or any of the other amusements and information sources we tend to surround ourselves with. This goes double with the much more complex task of flying a plane, for which sterile cockpit discipline, meaning doing your job and nothing else that will distract you, is a necessary prerequisite. Unfortunately, Shaw and Renslow did not learn that lesson well enough and paid for it with their lives.
The British comic John Cleese, one of the original Monty Pythons, once satirized overly chatty airline pilots in a hilarious sketch. Clearly bored out of his mind by the monotony of his flying job, he amused himself by getting on the intercom and making announcements such as, "Hello, this is the Captain speaking. There is absolutely no cause for concern," then remarking to his copilot, "There, that'll get them thinking." The sketch degenerates to the point where the passengers all jump out of the plane, at which point Cleese looks out the window and comments reflectively, "You know, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some trouble about this."
Analyzing humor is not a funny business, but neither is investigating air crashes. The sketch gained much of its energy from the fact that in the public mind, airline pilots are largely a stereotype of the responsible professional. The picture of a pilot intentionally twitting the passengers and goofing off is funny (in a TV sketch, anyway) because it is so incongruous with the profession's standard public image.
But professionalism has to be achieved one pilot at a time. The NTSB, in its investigation of Flight 3407, has spotted what it fears to be a dangerous trend of unprofessionalism in the cockpit. While its recommendations do not carry the force of law, I hope that the FAA, whose dictates are law, will take them seriously. Professionalism, smooth flights, and expert handling of dangerous situations are what the flying public expects from pilots. Even if we all have to pay a little more, it's worth it to know that the people into whose hands we place our lives every time we step on an airplane are worthy of that trust.
Sources: The synopsis of the NTSB final report on the crash of Flight 3407 can be found at http://www.ntsb.gov/Publictn/2010/AAR1001.htm. Cleese's "Airline Pilots Sketch" is currently online at http://www.serve.com/bonzai/monty/classics/TheAirlinePilotsSketch. My previous blogs on this incident can be found in the entries for Feb. 12 and May 18, 2009.
Monday, February 01, 2010
An Economic Prophecy for Engineers—And Everyone Else
"When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him."—Deuteronomy 18:22
"The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender."—Proverbs 22:7
Without modern economies, engineering would be a shadow of its present self, if it existed at all. Huge capital investments in plant, equipment, and R&D needed for advanced engineering require equally huge, smoothly functioning economies. And anything that fundamentally threatens such economies is worth the attention of engineers and everyone else.
The two Old Testament excerpts above have been much on my mind the last week or so. The selection from Deuteronomy says prophets whose predictions don't come true can be safely ignored. One might expect also the converse to be true: that is, prophets whose predictions are verified deserve at least a little attention, although anyone can make a lucky guess from time to time. The context in which I have been thinking about borrowers being servants of lenders is the fact that for at least the last decade, the U. S. government's debt has been underwritten largely by foreign investment, from China to the sovereign wealth funds of numerous other countries. My worries on that score were allayed by the fact that China, for example, though it holds billions of dollars of Treasury bonds and other debt, has no motivation to do anything bad to us, since we are their largest market in many areas, and destroying one's main market is not a smart thing to do.
But then I read Aftershock by David and Robert Wiedemer (brothers) and Cindy Spitzer.
This writing team published America's Bubble Economy in 2006, which allegedly forecast the broad outlines of the 2008 financial crisis and real-estate crash pretty accurately. (I haven't read it, so I say "allegedly," but I have no reason to doubt this is basically true.) In Aftershock, the authors say that there are actually six bubbles, not just the real-estate bubble, and only four of them have popped or are in the process of popping: real estate, the U. S. stock market, private debt, and discretionary spending. All these areas fed on each other during the expansion phase of the last several decades. Similarly, the collapse of real-estate markets has cut off sources for private debt, discouraged discretionary spending, and put downward pressure on the stock market, leading to a complex vicious circle that is yet to finish its dirty work.
The other two bubbles yet to pop are the dollar bubble and the U. S. government debt bubble. And when these two go, life in many ways will never be the same, according to the Wiedemers and Spitzer.
Why? Because the supposedly safe haven of U. S. Treasury bonds, the place where smart money all around the world goes when things get bad, will turn into a rat hole. How? When non-U. S. purchasers of Treasury bonds quit buying them as enthusiastically as they have in the past, this will force the Federal Reserve to print dollars to keep the government running. This has already started to happen, and when it gathers steam there will be nothing to prevent a huge burst of hyperinflation—on the order of 100% a year. Places like Israel and Argentina have undergone such disasters, but not since the Revolutionary War has the U. S. experienced such a thing.
Of course, in a democracy the politicians can't let hyperinflation go on for long, or else their careers are toast. But the only alternative will be severe cutbacks in government spending, which will finish the inaugural phase of a multi-year worldwide depression from which the U. S. will emerge much chastened, but wiser.
When will all this start to snowball? In one to three years, according to Aftershock, which was completed in the summer of 2009.
What should the individual do if these folks are right? Their advice is to get out of debt to the extent possible, then get out of the stock market into cash or short-term equivalents (money market funds, U. S. Treasury funds), and when the inflation gets going, pitch all that and buy gold.
I am no financial expert, and I will state right here that my only venture into metals trading happened in 1980, when I managed to buy $500 worth of silver coins at $19 an ounce, the exact time when (unbeknownst to me) the Texas Hunt brothers were cornering the silver market and forcing it to a high which—thirty years later—it has yet to achieve again. A worse investment choice could hardly be imagined. So it will take a lot of confirmation and events going the way the Wiedemers say they will, before I will even consider fooling with metals trading again. But I am certainly going to keep my eye on things for the next few years, and if events start to match up according to the Aftershock scenario, I will take their dire forecasts more seriously.
For the sake of the U. S. economy and everyone who relies on it, and for the sake of young engineers just starting their careers, I hope that Aftershock is wrong, and things go back to normal or better soon. Getting a job these days is hard enough, and hyperinflation and the government going broke is not going to help matters. But as the authors themselves point out, money isn't everything, and those who survived the Great Depression of the 1930s went on to become the Greatest Generation who fought World War II. Still, I feel that once I read the book, I should let people know about it and allow them to draw their own conclusions. I am more than halfway convinced Aftershock is right. But the only way to be sure is to wait and see.
Sources: Aftershock is published by John Wiley & Sons (2010). I learned about the book from a review in National Review Online at http://article.nationalreview.com/420850/the-next-meltdown/stephen-spruiell.
"The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender."—Proverbs 22:7
Without modern economies, engineering would be a shadow of its present self, if it existed at all. Huge capital investments in plant, equipment, and R&D needed for advanced engineering require equally huge, smoothly functioning economies. And anything that fundamentally threatens such economies is worth the attention of engineers and everyone else.
The two Old Testament excerpts above have been much on my mind the last week or so. The selection from Deuteronomy says prophets whose predictions don't come true can be safely ignored. One might expect also the converse to be true: that is, prophets whose predictions are verified deserve at least a little attention, although anyone can make a lucky guess from time to time. The context in which I have been thinking about borrowers being servants of lenders is the fact that for at least the last decade, the U. S. government's debt has been underwritten largely by foreign investment, from China to the sovereign wealth funds of numerous other countries. My worries on that score were allayed by the fact that China, for example, though it holds billions of dollars of Treasury bonds and other debt, has no motivation to do anything bad to us, since we are their largest market in many areas, and destroying one's main market is not a smart thing to do.
But then I read Aftershock by David and Robert Wiedemer (brothers) and Cindy Spitzer.
This writing team published America's Bubble Economy in 2006, which allegedly forecast the broad outlines of the 2008 financial crisis and real-estate crash pretty accurately. (I haven't read it, so I say "allegedly," but I have no reason to doubt this is basically true.) In Aftershock, the authors say that there are actually six bubbles, not just the real-estate bubble, and only four of them have popped or are in the process of popping: real estate, the U. S. stock market, private debt, and discretionary spending. All these areas fed on each other during the expansion phase of the last several decades. Similarly, the collapse of real-estate markets has cut off sources for private debt, discouraged discretionary spending, and put downward pressure on the stock market, leading to a complex vicious circle that is yet to finish its dirty work.
The other two bubbles yet to pop are the dollar bubble and the U. S. government debt bubble. And when these two go, life in many ways will never be the same, according to the Wiedemers and Spitzer.
Why? Because the supposedly safe haven of U. S. Treasury bonds, the place where smart money all around the world goes when things get bad, will turn into a rat hole. How? When non-U. S. purchasers of Treasury bonds quit buying them as enthusiastically as they have in the past, this will force the Federal Reserve to print dollars to keep the government running. This has already started to happen, and when it gathers steam there will be nothing to prevent a huge burst of hyperinflation—on the order of 100% a year. Places like Israel and Argentina have undergone such disasters, but not since the Revolutionary War has the U. S. experienced such a thing.
Of course, in a democracy the politicians can't let hyperinflation go on for long, or else their careers are toast. But the only alternative will be severe cutbacks in government spending, which will finish the inaugural phase of a multi-year worldwide depression from which the U. S. will emerge much chastened, but wiser.
When will all this start to snowball? In one to three years, according to Aftershock, which was completed in the summer of 2009.
What should the individual do if these folks are right? Their advice is to get out of debt to the extent possible, then get out of the stock market into cash or short-term equivalents (money market funds, U. S. Treasury funds), and when the inflation gets going, pitch all that and buy gold.
I am no financial expert, and I will state right here that my only venture into metals trading happened in 1980, when I managed to buy $500 worth of silver coins at $19 an ounce, the exact time when (unbeknownst to me) the Texas Hunt brothers were cornering the silver market and forcing it to a high which—thirty years later—it has yet to achieve again. A worse investment choice could hardly be imagined. So it will take a lot of confirmation and events going the way the Wiedemers say they will, before I will even consider fooling with metals trading again. But I am certainly going to keep my eye on things for the next few years, and if events start to match up according to the Aftershock scenario, I will take their dire forecasts more seriously.
For the sake of the U. S. economy and everyone who relies on it, and for the sake of young engineers just starting their careers, I hope that Aftershock is wrong, and things go back to normal or better soon. Getting a job these days is hard enough, and hyperinflation and the government going broke is not going to help matters. But as the authors themselves point out, money isn't everything, and those who survived the Great Depression of the 1930s went on to become the Greatest Generation who fought World War II. Still, I feel that once I read the book, I should let people know about it and allow them to draw their own conclusions. I am more than halfway convinced Aftershock is right. But the only way to be sure is to wait and see.
Sources: Aftershock is published by John Wiley & Sons (2010). I learned about the book from a review in National Review Online at http://article.nationalreview.com/420850/the-next-meltdown/stephen-spruiell.
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