The Waterfront—and Engineering—Ain’t What It Used To Be

A few days ago, I watched “On the Waterfront,” the famous 1954 movie starring Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, and Eva Marie Saint. Brando plays a morally conflicted longshoreman named Terry who eventually takes a stand against the corrupt union that has murdered fellow longshoreman Joey, the brother of Edie (played by Saint). Karl Malden is the Catholic priest who gets involved in Edie’s freelance investigation of Joey’s death, and ultimately persuades Terry to confess his involvement in Joey’s death and testify against the union bosses, who thereupon beat him within an inch of his life.

This Oscar-winning movie’s context is the New York City dockyards of the 1950s, and was shot mostly on location. And here’s where engineering comes in.

As I watched the movie, I began to notice the backgrounds in outdoor scenes: gritty alleyways, buildings that were already half a century old in 1950, ships constantly plying the waters of the harbor, and factories, factories, factories. Not little one-story light-industry jobs, either: big towering brick-and-steel piles with steam coming out of pipes and tanks, places that were bustling hives of physical work for hundreds or thousands of people, as the dockyards themselves were. And the longshoremen union’s members were mostly first- or second-generation Irish immigrants, men who had spent all their lives busting their backs as they hauled heavy barrels, bags, and boxes around in the days before containerized shipping rendered most of their jobs obsolete.

The fact that the American economy depended vitally on the large quantities of stuff that flowed in and out of our ports made it possible for longshoremens’ unions to gain an illegal stranglehold on the commerce flowing through the docks, profiting from all kinds of corrupt practices ranging from preferential treatment of workers and shippers in exchange for kickbacks to organized-crime-style theft of shipped goods. The best thing many of the longshoremen could do with their lives, beyond simple survival, was to scrimp and save in order to send their children to college, where the next generation might learn enough to get professional jobs in air-conditioned offices doing something like accounting or engineering.

Today, most of the longshoremens’ jobs are gone. The New York City factories are gone. We still move a lot of stuff through ports, but containerized shipping is to the docks in “On the Waterfront” as an elevator is to a horse and buggy. Most of the jobs that Americans are willing to take these days are inside office-type positions. Such a job may not be engineering, but it probably involves computers, and its connection with physical stuff is likely to be remote, if it exists at all. And engineering increasingly keeps its practitioners in front of a computer too, rather than on the shop floor, or factory, or even a test bench.

To the extent that most of our citizens no longer have to work in dangerous, physically demanding jobs that wear your body out and dull your mind, the changes that have taken place from 1954 to 2010 are good ones. I wrote a few weeks back (July 19) about the arrogance that can creep into our attitudes toward people who still work with their hands as much as with their minds (I’m not counting typing as working with your hands). All workers who are not positively engaged in evil activities are worthy of honor, right down to the strawberry harvesters and janitors, many of whom dream of better jobs for their children just as the dockworkers in “On the Waterfront” did. Almost a quarter of the students at Texas State University where I teach are of Hispanic origin, and many are the first in their families to attend college. This is by and large a good thing.

But something else has also changed in the last half-century or so that I have trouble putting into words. A large and growing fraction of the U. S. economy consists of activity that either simply moves wealth around for a fee, or delivers purely symbolic content—software, generously defined. By this I mean things like movies, video games, and basically anything you pay for that comes in the form of bits rather than stuff. Engineers are heavily involved in the production and design ends of these parts of the economy. The products, and therefore the jobs, tend to be evanescent, the original meaning of which is “to vanish like vapor.” That doesn’t mean you can’t get another job doing something similar, after a while, perhaps. But the nature of this area of the economy encourages extreme competition, constant demands for novelty (often without a true improvement in quality), and a consequent shortsighted outlook on life.

Don’t get me wrong. I would rather live in today’s economy and state of technological advancement than in 1954 (although technically, I lived in both—I was born the year before the movie came out). And it’s hard to organize a corrupt union around the shipment of bits on the Internet, although crooks have found many ways to operate in that environment too. But perhaps what I’m looking for nowadays, and don’t see much of, is a simplicity and stability that life had back then—even if it was often simply and indefinitely bad.

Engineers starting their careers today have to accept the idea that their first job will probably not last longer than a couple or three years, and their company itself might not even make it that long without a buyout or significant shakeup. And your next job may require you to learn an entirely new discipline, on your own dime, before you can even think about applying for it. And moving, which involves uprooting whatever face-to-face relationships the modern workplace allows, is a fact of life now, making traditional community life, which requires staying in one place for at least the amount of time it takes to establish meaningful friendships, a distant esoteric memory for more and more people.

On this Labor Day, let us be glad that labor, and many unions, ain’t what they used to be, at least as portrayed in “On the Waterfront.” But let’s also honor all honest labor, and see if we can think of ways it can be more lastingly meaningful and part of a life of integrity and honor.

The Chilean Mine Accident: Bad News and Good News

On August 5 of this year, the upper galleries of the San Jose gold and copper mine near the town of Copiapo in northern Chile collapsed. Thirty-three miners were more than 2,000 feet underground when the collapse occurred, and for more than two weeks no definite signs of life were detected. But on Aug. 22, a week ago Sunday, a drill pulled back out of a borehole drilled in an attempt to reach a rescue chamber near the bottom of the mine had a note attached to it, saying that all 33 miners were alive and reasonably well, considering. They had retreated to the chamber after the collapse and managed to make the three-day supply of food and water last 17 days. Intense efforts are continuing to drill a borehole wide enough to get the miners out to the surface, but estimates are that it will take several months. In the meantime, authorities are sending supplies of food and water and psychological aids such as telephone lines down the boreholes so the miners can talk with their families.

This has got to be one of the most dramatic mine accidents in recent memory, and one that potentially has a happy ending. If the miners don’t succumb to disease (their skin is already being affected by the hot, damp conditions) and manage to clear the thousands of tons of rubble the man-sized borehole will cause (there’s no other way to clear it), and don’t flip out and do something terrible like committing mass suicide, they could all survive to sign book contracts and do national speaking tours. That’s a long chain of “ifs,” but they obviously have enough self-discipline to have made it this far. None of the news reports I’ve seen mention religious faith, but my guess is that is playing a significant positive role too.

The bad news was that the mine collapsed in the first place. A helpful diagram on the Wikipedia page “Chile mining accident” shows why even one collapse in a gallery in this particular mine could trap the miners. I don’t know about you, but my mental image of mines is based on the old 1960s-encyclopedia pictures of coal mining as it was done in England and the eastern U. S. back then. Several vertical shafts with elevators were connected by horizontal galleries, like the floors in a high-rise office building. In this format, if one gallery collapsed you at least had a chance to turn around and run to one of the three or four vertical shafts.

The Chilean mine, by contrast, is a gold and copper mine run by a small private firm with a less-than-stellar safety record. It is in the form of a tall spiral, like an old-fashioned bedspring. The single gallery loops in and out of the valuable veins of ore, and meanwhile slopes gently downward at an incline that can be managed by either motorized vehicles or just miners walking. No vertical shafts (except for ventilation), no expensive elevators—and no way out if the single spiral gallery collapses anywhere along its length. And that is exactly what happened on Aug. 5, apparently in a couple of places. So part of the bad news (other than the collapse itself) is that this form of mine is very vulnerable to gallery collapse—there’s really no other way out, unless you count ventilation shafts (and apparently the only one large enough to get the miners out collapsed on Aug. 7).

Allowing for this possibility, the mine owners installed a safety chamber at the bottom of the spiral with enough food and water to last three days. I suppose the thought was that any collapse would be minor enough to be cleared in that length of time. Apparently, the cave-ins were so severe that much of the old spiral gallery is destroyed, hence the drilling attempts direct from the surface. Fortunately, the ventilation shaft leading from the safety chamber to the surface was undamaged, so suffocation was never a serious threat. Starvation and dehydration were, though. It will be fascinating to hear how the miners fared and how they organized themselves to survive what has to be one of the most harrowing situations imaginable—being trapped almost half a mile underground, not knowing when or if you would be rescued, and trying to survive on almost no provisions. The fact that they’ve done so is the good news, so far.

Chile’s President Sebastian Pinera (there are diacritical markings in his name that I can’t get this blog type to do) has properly made this disaster the focus of his attention, and personally issues important news about it. A large state-owned mine is in charge of the rescue efforts, including the human-size borehole. So it looks like the government of Chile responded promptly and is doing everything humanly possible to rescue the miners.

This event comes at a time when we are commemorating the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a disaster in which our U. S. government did less than cover itself with glory, shall we say. The two disasters are very different: the mine is a single, specific technical challenge whose victims are already disciplined and familiar with their situation; while Katrina involved millions of average citizens, a huge geographic area, and a tangle of interlocking and conflicting political lines of authority that made an already bad situation worse. But still, we could learn some lessons from the Chilean situation.

For one thing, people who live in flood-prone areas ought to have some basic training and physical resources to be able to deal with floods if they come. An evacuation plan that was actually practiced and taught to the public, and some requirement for people to have emergency provisions wouldn’t be that difficult, and would have gone far to mitigate the terrible disaster that Katrina became.

And for another thing, government isn’t always the problem. There is a distressing tendency in some circles of U. S. politics today to view all government, at whatever level, and all government employees, as automatically corrupt, wasteful, and even malicious. While not denying that all three characteristics are to be found somewhere in government, I would point out the danger of lowered expectations. If good, selfless public servants constantly hear nothing but unwarranted criticism, they may figure “Well, everybody thinks I’m a no-good crook, so I might as well go ahead and be one.” If we’re not careful, we will get the government such an attitude deserves. And nobody will be better off in that case.

Sources: Besides the Wikipedia article mentioned, I used material from the following news items on Yahoo (from Associated Press) and ABC News, respectively: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100829/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_chile_mine_collapse and http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=11455968.

The Harmful Effects of Text

A couple of weeks ago, we took a ride on a tour boat at San Antonio’s River Walk. Over the decades, the city has taken what started out as a glorified drainage ditch and transformed it into a tourist attraction, complete with shops, restaurants, hotels, historic sites, and nice sidewalks on each side of the not-very-deep “river,” which is actually as tamed and controlled as anything you’ll see at Six Flags. At one point on the tour, the guide pointed out a place where the sidewalk on one side of the river took a sudden jog to the left, so that if you kept going straight you’d walk into the river. He said he was watching the other day as a well-dressed businesswoman came down the sidewalk, busily engaged in texting on her cellphone. The next thing he knew, she’d walked straight into the river, which was fortunately only about four feet deep at that point. She kept her cool enough to hold her phone way above her head to keep it dry as passersby helped her out. I wonder what the person on the other end thought was going on.

Any portable technology that engages our visual attention is potentially capable of causing such problems. I’m sure that once it became possible to print books that were small enough to carry in one hand and read while walking, the occasional absent-minded scholar in 16th-century Bologna was seen to walk over the edge of a quay into the Po River while reading Dante. But texting engages one’s attention more than reading does. I say this not from personal experience but from observation, since my personal view of texting is rather dim. The one-two-three stroke business on the numeric keypad reeks of compromise, and so do the miniature typewriter keyboards with keys that are easily usable only by children who are too young to write. But obviously, young people have taken to texting, and even some people my age, though it does seem to appeal to women in their 50s more than men.

Like any other communications technology, texting brings people more in contact with each other, and most ethical systems view that as basically a good thing. So if you put texting under the microscope of engineering ethics, it’s fair to say that it is innocent until specific charges prove it guilty in one way or another. Of course, there are times and places where texting is plain wrong, such as when you’re driving a car, bus, or train. And accidents have been traced to just such texting, as the National Traffic Safety Board found in the September 2008 crash of a commuter train in Chatsworth, California that killed 25 people when the driver’s attention was distracted by texting. But in such cases of flagrant misconduct, texting can be at worst charged with being an accessory to the crime. With good training and good sense, we can avoid most such accidents.

Part of these problems with texting accidents is simply inexperience. People try all sorts of things with new technologies, things that the developers can never dream of, and in the nature of things, some of the new uses just don’t work out. That lady who walked straight into the river is going to be a lot more careful about where she is the next time she starts texting. Maybe we’ll have laws about instant dismissal of any train or bus operators caught texting on the job. We are still only a few years down the learning curve on texting, so a lot of these issues will lessen in frequency and severity with time.

Then there is the slippery-slope argument that texting is one more step down a path that leads to a nation or world of isolated wired androids, half human and half technology, each enmeshed in one’s own little cocoon of gizmos, and regarding plain old-fashioned person-to-person meetings as ancient relics of an energy-wasteful dark age. The slightly creepy thing about texting is that you can do it without anybody near you (in real space) noticing. On a recent trip, I was about to remind my wife to call my sister when she told me she’d been texting her for the last twenty minutes, and everything was all arranged.

There are good aspects to texting compared to actual talking on the cellphone. In a world where everybody texted rather than talked, there’d be no one-sided private or intimate conversations carried on in the setting of a public bus or train. And deaf people must have rejoiced when the first text-capable cellphones came out. So compared to the original use of cellphones, texting has its positive aspects from a noise-abatement point of view.

Still, I can’t help but feel that the actual operation of texting could be improved. Maybe they’ll develop eye-position-reading technology to where you just have to look at the letters on an on-screen display in sequence to make them appear in the text. This kind of technology is still in human-factors labs now, but a lot of stuff out there in the consumer market now started in research labs a few years ago. That way you wouldn’t use your fingers for anything except holding the phone. Or, we could promote a technique that has been proved in head-to-head contests to yield the fastest one-handed electronic communications possible: Morse code, which uses only one key (it's all in the timing of the dots and dashes). I heard about a TV show in which the producers rounded up a couple of teenagers who claimed they could text really fast, and then found a couple of old-time radio amateurs (probably about my age) who were CW whizzes. “CW” stands for “continuous wave” which is ham lingo for Morse code. The two teams were handed the same text to send, and the Morse guys beat out the texting teenagers by sending and receiving about twice as fast. I am told that there are a few apps out there which let you send and receive Morse instead of text, and to me, it makes sense. Morse is just another language, like French, and if we just taught it to everybody along with cursive writing (if anyone still learns that), we could get rid of all this one-two-three business and Lilliputian keyboards and, hey, why stop there? How about a one-key computer? You read it here first.

Sources: The San Antonio River Walk’s official website is http://www.thesanantonioriverwalk.com/. Check it out the next time you’re in San Antonio. I’d give the tour guide’s name if I could remember it.

Toyota's Acceleration Problem: No Smoking Gun Yet

According to a preliminary report by U. S. regulators looking into the accusations that some Toyotas have an electronic flaw that makes them accelerate unexpectedly, no sign of such a problem was found in any of the 58 cars involved in incidents that the regulators investigated so far. The report reinforces claims by Toyota that there are no electronic flaws to be found, and that drivers who say their cars took off by themselves probably hit the accelerator by mistake.

I blogged on this issue back on March 6 and April 12 of this year, first to criticize Toyota for mishandling public relations surrounding the incident, and then to back off on my own opinion that they were to blame. Toyota has since paid a $16 million fine for not notifying the government fast enough about the problem, whatever its cause was. And they have supplied the Feds with ten of the data readers that were so scarce at the beginning of the investigation—only one operable unit was in the entire United States to begin with. So at least when it comes to public and government relations, Toyota seems to be learning some lessons there.

The question remains open whether some other technical problem could have been causing the accidents that are the focus of many lawsuits. Advocates for these suits, as you might expect, claim that the government investigation looked in the wrong places. The investigation is not over by any means. Experts at NASA and the National Academy of Sciences are still looking into the possibility that electromagnetic interference, for example, could have caused the problem. That is a subject I know a little bit about and have some experience with.

One day I was doing an experiment in my lab that involved a high-voltage discharge that made a pretty powerful electromagnetic impulse. All of a sudden, right after I fired the discharge the laptop I was using for taking data locked up. I discovered that the impulse was traveling down some wires to the laptop and giving it temporary paralysis. I improved the shielding on my setup and eventually got things to work again.

Unless there are unusual circumstances, electromagnetic interference with computers usually acts like a blunt instrument, causing low-level communications errors that most systems will react to by just freezing up. I suppose the automotive equivalent of freezing up would be for the whole car to quit running, not for the accelerator to stick on maximum. From my relatively uninformed viewpoint, I would say that electromagnetic interference is unlikely to do the particular thing that the plaintiffs claim it did.

I am no psychologist, but I expect that the surprise and fear engendered by a sudden acceleration of a car you’re driving might cause you to freeze up yourself, rendering you both incapable of figuring out what you’re doing with the pedals, and of realizing that in fact you have jammed your foot on the accelerator and not the brake. So I don’t accuse all the plaintiffs in these suits of bad faith. I expect that most of them sincerely believe they did nothing wrong and the car just took off by itself. But without having the floorboard equipped with a camera and recording system to show what really happened (will that be an option on next year’s Toyotas?), or unless the onboard “black box” was subsequently activated by a high-velocity accident, there is really no way to tell what happened in the majority of the alleged cases. So those cases will be matters for judges and juries to sort out, not scientific investigators.

As I pointed out in my second post last spring, history shows a record of periodic flurries of sudden-acceleration lawsuits that crop up from time to time, sort of like seven-year locusts. There is a constant supply of accidents in which drivers (generally older ones) hit accelerators by mistake, and all that is needed to generate a spate of lawsuits against a given auto maker is one or two well-publicized cases in which the plaintiffs accuse the manufacturer of a safety defect that caused the sudden-acceleration crash. The plaintiffs are obviously not unbiased observers in these cases, since if they prove to a jury that it was the carmaker’s incompetence, and not the driver’s stupidity or carelessness, that was at fault, they stand to make big bucks, as do their (generally) contingency-fee lawyers. (Though this is not the place to debate the ethics of contingency-fee lawyering, I have negative opinions about it.) With the exception of the floor-mat problem, which was a real flaw and thoroughly, though tardily, recalled and fixed by Toyota, it is beginning to look like this was just the latest of a long series of unintended-acceleration flaps that have popped up on and off for many years.

The only way this kind of thing can be put to rest altogether is for the car manufacturers to perfect one-hundred-percent autopiloted cars. I for one look forward to the day of the electronic chauffeur. I can take driving or leave it, and the idea of treating my private car like a train ride—reading, making phone calls, and doing whatever else is convenient to do in an automobile when you are not distracted by the tedious task of driving the thing—is quite appealing to me. And if the car is fixed so the driver can’t accelerate, brake, steer or do anything other than tell the thing where to go, then you automatically eliminate driver error. Of course, anything that goes wrong after that is indubitably the automaker’s fault, which may be one reason this vision will be long in coming. I for one look forward to it. But then, I’m not a lawyer.

Sources: Nick Bunkley’s article on the National Highway Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary report to Congress is at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/11/business/11auto.html.

P. S. I have started another blog entitled “Electronic Memories” at which I will post from time to time memoirs of a youth and adolescence spent among solder, batteries, and oscilloscopes. For those who may be interested in such things, it can be found at http://kaydee-electronicmemories.blogspot.com/.

Will The Net Stay Neutral If Google Doesn't Want It To?

In a perceptive article in Slate last week, Tim Wu noted with some alarm the news reports that Google was working with Verizon to arrange for paid preferential treatment of Google's content on Verizon's networks. Although Google officially denied the reports, some insiders say otherwise, according to Wu. And considering the size and influence of both Google and Verizon, something like this could affect most of us who use the Net, which nowadays means most of us, period.

Net neutrality is democracy applied to packets. In keeping with the original vision of many of the Internet's founders, a truly neutral net treats every server and every user the same, to the extent possible technically. Obviously, some websites can get overwhelmed by traffic and some Internet connections are slower than others, but these are issues at the ends of the communications link, not matters determined by the way the Internet is set up and operated.

As long as there is enough bandwidth to go around, net neutrality is a fairly easy thing to maintain. But in limited-bandwidth situations such as newer wireless technologies, companies that get in early with fresh business models adapted to the new technologies can sometimes play the neutrality of the web to their advantage. (Think Apple with its tightly-controlled but growing crop of iPhone apps.) This may be why Google may be talking to Verizon about ways it could pay the network to give its sites a boost in terms of speed, access, or other advantages. But this would violate the time-honored principle of net neutrality, which Google itself has promoted in the past, according to Wu. He hopes the Federal Communications Commission will gird up its legal loins, so to speak, and start issuing rules that will protect net neutrality from intrusions of what Wu terms "internet payola."

From an ethical point of view, what concerns me about this matter may not be so much whether the net stays neutral or not, as much as whether we'd know about it if net neutrality is abandoned. The term "payola" arose back in the 1950s when record companies secretly paid pop radio stations to play certain tunes more often. The dishonest part was that these payments were not disclosed to the listeners—people who heard the tunes more often just thought the stations were honestly responding to public demand. Payola is a form of corruption in which supposedly unbiased gatekeepers are being secretly paid to promote certain products over others. It's in the same moral category as the bribing of judges: payments for favors goes against the stated principles of the institution. So the secrecy aspect is an essential feature of the problem.

Suppose Google goes out and spends X billion dollars buying favorable treatment from Verizon and other networks, and then publicly brags that you're going to get better access because Google has paid for it. That might look like bullying by the big boy on the block, and other websites without such deep pockets might protest that it's unfair, but at least everyone would know what's going on. We would no longer have an institution called "net neutrality," true, but we would at least know the new rules of the game. This would be different than if Google paid for these favors and didn't tell anybody, keeping net neutrality in appearance but not in reality. And that would be a problem.

It's a little creepy to think about the Internet's hundredth birthday (which I certainly won't see). Its half-century mark will come around 2033, which is only 23 years from now. Will the present basic form and function of the Internet still be around then, or will we look on it as something akin to the giant railway networks that once crisscrossed the U. S., only to be superseded by highways and airports? Suppose nearly everything moves to wireless by then: that might mean Apple's iPhone way of doing business prevails, and what kind of network experience you have would critically depend on what kind of hardware you own, which isn't the case now. That kind of thing gives Google the creeps.

Something that will not change, however, is the basic principle that any obstructions to any port of a communications network harm the system in a way that affects everyone else, and the bigger the system, the more harm is done. This is because the value of a network to any one user depends on how many other nodes can be reached. So a multi-tiered "Internet" with fast lanes and slow lanes would be that much less valuable, because reducing access to any part of the network lowers its value to everyone.

For this reason alone, we are not likely to see significant future fragmentation of the current form of the Internet, ethics or no ethics. This principle has triumphed time and again in the history of telecommunications, going all the way back to the telegraph, which originally served mainly wealthy clients who used it for business transactions. And for various reasons, both economic and regulatory, the telegraph companies never really got it. The idea of truly universal service didn't come along until the newer telephone network was consolidated in the early 1900s, by which time the Bell System had figured out this more-the-merrier principle. The principle of telephones for everyone sounded democratic and patriotic, and it was, but it was also plain good business sense.

So while we can worry if we like that Google is going to pay for the end of net neutrality, I suspect experience with such a system would soon show that it militates against the more-the-merrier principle, which would be violated by making a few nodes better, because it really just amounts to making all the other nodes worse. As long as Google, or anybody else, tells us what they're up to, I see no fundamental ethical problem with it. But I don't think it would end up working as well as they might hope.

Sources: Tim Wu's article, "Evil? The alleged Google-Verizon deal that's endangering net neutrality," appeared in the Aug. 6 online edition of Slate at http://www.slate.com/id/2262952/pagenum/1.

Do Borders Matter in Engineering?

Stephen Unger, one of the deans and founders of the field of engineering ethics, is concerned about the fates of engineering and high-tech employment in the U. S. He recently pointed out to me an article by Andy Grove, founder of Intel, in which Grove pointed out the current crisis in manufacturing employment in the U. S. It turns out that for every U. S. resident employed by many high-tech companies such as Apple, Dell, and so on, there are about ten Chinese employees who either work for the same firm or make the products that the company sells. This trend started back in the 1980s when what was then called “consumer electronics” manufacturing (mostly TVs and radios) went into a steep decline in the U. S. while Japan and then China took up the slack. To critics who say this doesn’t matter as long as the high-value-added jobs such as R&D and finance stay in the U. S., Grove says basically, “bunk.” He calls for a frankly protectionist tax on all imported high-tech goods, with the money coming from the tax going to people who are willing to scale up small startups into full-scale U. S. manufacturing efforts.

I will not comment on the political feasibility of such a solution, except to say that it would be quite disruptive if enacted. But sometimes a short, sudden disruption is better medicine than allowing a disease to go on and on until the patient can no longer recover.

The question I really want to address is: do borders matter in engineering?

On the one hand, modern science-based engineering is a truly universal profession. Go to an engineering conference of a hundred or more attendees, and you are very likely to meet people from all over the globe in just a few minutes. The technical language of engineering is the same everywhere: Ohm’s law, Maxwell’s equations, and all the rest. Even in the commercial world, unless strong political forces dictate otherwise, engineering teams are made up of people from many countries, ethnicities, and faiths, who can work together harmoniously without allowing their diverse backgrounds to interfere with getting the job done.

Would the world really be a better place if all engineers considered themselves as simply citizens of the world, taking no pride and holding no affection for their native lands? You can imagine some advantages to this. It would be hard to find any engineers to work on military projects, for instance, since all wars would then become civil wars and no upstanding world citizen would support such a thing.

The answer to the question reveals one’s core beliefs about the purpose of life and society. If there really is such a thing as true good (and therefore true evil), the ordering of life by a polis—a city-state, as Aristotle referred to it—is necessary to preserve good and combat evil. When I first began to study the classic texts of ethics seriously, I was somewhat dismayed to find that the ancient writers spent much of their time talking about politics, broadly defined as the right ordering of public life. And since the alternatives to citizenship in a particular country—namely, total anarchy or one-world government—are either unthinkable or impossible, every engineer has to decide how to relate to the government under which he or she lives.

There is no such thing as world citizenship, no matter how much people might like it if there was. The way the world is set up, people are born into a particular place at a particular time, and thereafter have to deal with the circumstances that life hands them, including the government of the country where they were born.

Most people have little or no choice as to where they live, and under what government they live. Most immigration around the world is internal, from countrysides to cities, which is why so many of the world’s largest cities are growing at an insupportable rate. Once in a city, sometimes people can accumulate enough capital to emigrate to a country that will take them in. In most parts of the world, emigration is not only possible but widely practiced, and for all its flaws, the United States seems to be one of the places that people all over the world would prefer to live in.

I think they’re right. Our polis is founded on principles that I find to be very compatible with my own system of ethics and religion, and I believe it is worth preserving and enriching. Part of the work of preservation and enrichment involves making sure that the people who live here can earn a decent living. And since so much of our economy depends on technology, perhaps some measures along the lines of what Andy Grove calls for would be at least worth considering. I am not an economist and can’t say whether Grove is right about his proposal. But I will say that I think his heart is in the right place, and borders should matter to an engineer—not in a jingoistic, my-country-right-or-wrong sense, but in a realistic sense that recognizes the great worth of good countries and the need to preserve them against forces that work for their decline.

Sources: The article pointed out to me by Stephen Unger, whom I thank for the information, is at the Bloomberg News website http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-01/how-to-make-an-american-job-before-it-s-too-late-andy-grove.html.

Hackers in Hardware: Will It Happen and Can We Stop It?

Most famous cases involving engineering ethics start with a headline, a crisis, or a tragedy. In such situations, we can take steps to make sure it’s less likely to happen next time only after we figure out what went wrong. But every once in a while, farsighted engineers can actually anticipate a major new problem before it happens and convince people to prevent it without anyone getting hurt. This is obviously the best way to go if we can manage it. The potential problem of hardware hackers is a case in point.

As John Villasenor explains in the current issue of Scientific American, hardware hacking is the planting of a malicious circuit in hardware, typically deep within the incredible complexity of an integrated circuit (microchip). ICs are so complicated nowadays that the design of most of them is comparable to the design of a large building or an oil refinery. Simply because the system is so large and diverse, pieces of the design are farmed out to numerous subcontractors. In such a complex circumstance, a hardware-hacking scenario could come about in the following way.

Suppose some evil person wants all cell phones sold by a given firm to quit working at a certain date in the future. They infiltrate one of the subcontractors that helps to design a critical IC in the new phone models, and slip in a circuit that monitors the time code and suddenly ties up the communication bus in the system once the blow-up date arrives. Since it’s impossible to check for every conceivable situation a phone might experience, the likelihood that this circuit will pass unnoticed into the final design is pretty good. A few weeks before the blow-up date, the criminals in charge of this trickery send a blackmail letter to the company, telling them what will happen and offering them an encrypted key to prevent the disaster—for, say, a billion dollars.

That particular scenario would be enacted by criminals, but political sabotage or terrorism could also inspire such machinations. Villasenor and his fellow researchers claim there are several ways to prevent such attacks.

One, favored by the Pentagon, is a kind of security-clearance check for every organization involved in the chip design. While this may be practical for certain costly military ICs, it doesn’t seem like a plan that will work for commercial designs, where vendors change at the last minute and are spread out all across the globe in a variety of jurisdictions.

A better idea Villasenor mentions is to install inspector or security circuits in every IC to monitor for suspicious behavior that would indicate the presence of a hardware hack. While this will reduce the space and speed available for the IC’s main tasks slightly, the added security appeal of knowing your new IC is protected against hardware hacking might make it worthwhile.

There are two questions in my mind about this whole situation.

First, how real is the threat of hardware hacking? Villasenor says that there have been no significant incidents so far, but of course there might be unknown time bombs out there right now, ticking away. I think one reason this kind of thing hasn’t happened yet is that, unlike viral malware, hardware generally has a paper trail that can be traced back to the place of origin. Being fingered as the guilty party in a hardware-hacking case would mean certain death to a firm, even if they were unaware of what was going on at the time. Nobody would ever want to buy circuits from them again.

Another reason, at least in the case of political terrorism of the Islamofascist variety, is that companies which design ICs are generally not found in places where organizations like the Taliban have significant influence. The extreme contrast between the state of Israel, which has dozens of high-tech firms turning out world-class technology, and the surrounding Arab nations, which have to buy nearly all the technology they have from other countries, is an example of this. So unless terrorists manage to convince individual designers in critical firms to implant hardware hacks, this kind of threat seems unlikely.

The second question is, if manufacturers develop security measures to install that allegedly prevent hardware hacks, will people pay the extra price for them? No matter how small, the security features will adversely impact price and performance, and it then becomes a question of perceived value added. Some customers with heightened concerns about security, for example the military and government, might be more willing to buy such chips than commercial customers such as computer makers. Of course, once a major hardware hack actually caused damage, the feature would sell itself. So you have the perverse situation that the best incentive to buy a hardware-hack-secure IC is to have a major problem occur with hardware hacking.

Unfortunately, that may be what has to happen if hardware-hack prevention is to amount to much more than a few academic papers and articles. Let’s hope the cure arrives well before the disease, at least in this case.

Sources: John Villasenor’s article “The Hacker in Your Hardware” appeared in the August 2010 issue of Scientific American (pp. 82-87).

The Honor of Dirty Fingernails

On a trip we just completed, the van we drove over a thousand miles in six days (a Dodge) suddenly quit outside Wichita Falls, Texas. The minute it happened, I was pretty sure what the problem was. We have replaced the fuel pump three times in six years, and since the last one was replaced about two years ago, I figured it was curtains for this one. I’m pretty sure (though not certain) that the people who designed that fuel pump had college degrees. And I’m also pretty sure that few if any of the people who helped us from that point onward had degrees in engineering, or possibly anything else. But we would have been stuck without their help.

The gentleman driving the tow truck told us he’d been a semi-trailer driver for thirteen years, then switched to towing for the next thirteen. He was the only person at the small gas station he worked for who could drive the tow truck, and so he’d been on call 24 hours a day for the last several years, except for one day off when he got married.

The guy in charge of the repair shop where they towed the van was very proud of the twenty-something young man who actually did the repair, which involved draining out some 30 gallons of gas (we’d just filled it) without setting the place on fire, dropping the tank, getting all the gaskets and clips and screws out and back in the right way, and putting it all back together again so it didn’t leak. The auto technician did nothing that I couldn’t do without some practice, but he did it in about an hour and a half. I would have taken all day and spent most of it on trips to the auto-parts store to get special tools, assuming I didn’t blow up my house first. The manager said he was very proud of that technician after watching him grow from an inexperienced teenager to a seasoned professional over the ten years or so he’d worked there.

Over 60% of Americans 25 and older have not completed even a two-year associate college degree. They are citizens like anyone else, and voters too, but to listen to certain elite groups in this country, you would think that everybody either has to have a college degree or else they represent abject failures of the system if they don’t. Columnist John Derbyshire recently cited several quotations along these lines, such as: “All students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career—no matter who you are or where you come from.” The speaker was President Obama, and for a politician it is a peculiarly unqualified statement. If he had simply stopped at “All students should graduate from high school,” I’d agree with him there—about fifteen percent of Americans over 25 haven’t even gotten that far. But at the risk of raining on my own parade (I teach engineering in college), I think it is unrealistic to expect or insist that everybody, no matter what their inclinations, abilities, or interests are, should graduate from college ore else become a second-class citizen.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that the opportunity to get a college degree should be artificially restricted to a given class, or income level, or sex, or race. Opportunities should be equal for all, but if for good and logical reasons, a given student would like to cease his or her formal schooling after high school and become a great plumber, or auto mechanic, or tow-truck driver, or filmmaker (Steven Spielberg dropped out of college to go into the film business), I would like the economy to provide them with that opportunity, and for society not to look down upon them as some sort of failure simply because of the kind of work they do. Not everybody who drops out of college is another Spielberg, but the point I’m trying to make is that there are many honorable, useful, and even significant jobs out there which do not require a college degree. And that is as it should be.

The natural tendency of our society, unfortunately, is to look up to people who (1) have lots of money, (2) have lots of people working for them, or (3) manipulate symbols instead of real things. Most engineers nowadays are in the third category, but for every engineer with a college degree in most industries, there are two or three folks who build, test, sell, and fix the things that the engineers design. And while increasing numbers of the lower-ranking workers have college degrees, in many cases such degrees are still not necessary, for example in the construction trades.

The engineering-ethics angle here is to respect those whose education is not as advanced as yours, and remember that the thing called “tacit knowledge”—the right way to ease a tank full of gas down out of a car without incinerating yourself or your shop, for example—is real, and sometimes more important for a given task than anything you could learn in college.

Everyone in an honorable occupation—that is, one which isn’t positively evil—makes a useful contribution to society and deserves to be treated as an important, knowledgeable part of the grand system that makes engineering the vital thing it is in modern life. The next time you deal with such a person, don’t belittle their educational attainments. Instead, watch them, find out just how much they can do that you can’t—and learn.

Sources: John Derbyshire’s column, “The Jobs Americans Should Not Have to Do?” appeared at http://article.nationalreview.com/438112/the-jobs-americans-should-not-have-to-do/john-derbyshire. The statistics on the percentage of Americans who are college graduates is from the U. S. Census Bureau website http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2010/tables/10s0226.pdf.

Big Mother Is Watching You On Your Cell Phone

George Orwell made the phrase “Big Brother” famous in his dystopia 1984 when he epitomized the intrusive, spies-everywhere nature of the omnipresent state of the future with the slogan, “Big Brother is watching you.” While pieces of his futuristic novel (published in 1949) have come true over the years—he anticipated television pretty well, for example—even Orwell did not imagine that some day, for a measly five dollars a month, parents could get continuous accurate information on the whereabouts of their children. Hence “Big Mother.”

This is no science-fiction dream. Last month a flyer came in my cell phone bill. Normally I just throw them away, having no use for most of the features of my cell phone anyway, but this one’s headline caught my attention: “See your kids on a satellite map!”

A system that only a few months ago I heard described as “coming soon” by a telecommunications researcher has been rolled out by Sprint, and no doubt many other companies as well. The fact that it has been available for several years shows that researchers and professors can be out of touch about some things too. The technology is fairly simple. You give your children cell phones with a GPS feature, which nowadays is not that complex—if there aren’t single-chip GPS receivers available already, there will be soon. The phone company, upon receipt of your five dollars a month (plus taxes, fees, and surcharges), queries the GPS receiver periodically, takes the coordinates, plots them on a map, and makes it available to the parents.

I suppose this “family locator” (as it is billed) is too new to have inspired much in the way of reactions from the teenage set. Apparently, the feature has been available in some markets since 2006, but in a cursory glance at a web search I turned up only corporate press releases and reviews, generally favorable, by the press. One report makes it clear that the teenager has to consent to the tracking, and even gets a text message letting him or her know that “Big Mother” (my use of the phrase was not original) is watching.

Originally introduced at a cost of $10 monthly, the fact that Sprint is now putting flyers into their bills and advertising it for only $5 a month tells me that the feature may not have created as much demand as the company had hoped. There are at least two big obstacles to its use: the opt-in feature that lets the kid know what’s going on, and the fact that the offspring can always leave their phone at home or at a friend’s house if they want to go somewhere their parents really don’t approve of. And as every network engineer knows, anything that leads people to disassociate themselves from their phones lowers the value of the network, not only to those directly involved, but to everyone else as well. So in that regard, Sprint could be shooting themselves in the foot with this technology, at least among the under-20 set.

Of course, governments have used cell phones for years to track down criminals without their knowledge or consent, and it worked for a while until the bad guys figured out what was going on. But bringing what started out as high-tech Mission-Impossible-style spy technology down to the level of a commercial $5-a-month option for family use is a new twist on the way technical innovations often start out expensively at the government level and percolate down to the consumer, often in a different form.

What some parents would really like, I suspect, is the stealth version of the family locator, but for fear of virtual stalking, Sprint won’t sell it that way. Of course, there may be some enterprising hackers out there who could modify the software somehow, but that gets into what you might call “grayware” and I wouldn’t recommend it.

What effect would this technology have on a teenager who grows up with it? You could view it as just one more accessory to further enable the “helicopter parent” syndrome that supposedly plagues many families today. Moms with nothing better to do can live out their teenage daughter’s lives vicariously by tracking them from house to mall to wherever. “What were you doing on Lover’s Lane from midnight to 2 A. M.?” I wonder, does the family locator have a history function, or do you have to stay up and watch it in real time? Some things are better left unspeculated about.

Well, judging by Sprint’s efforts to promote this thing, it doesn’t appear to be taking America by storm. But if this and similar location-tracking technology become generally accepted, I can see how it could change the work environment for lots of people, from public-safety employees to delivery personnel to anyone who spends time outside the direct physical supervision of their bosses. A company could easily make carrying a tracking-enabled cell phone a condition of employment, much as long-distance trucking companies keep track of their drivers through GPS already. I’m sure this would change the nature of the work environment, but how is another question altogether.

Should personal tracking be regulated? That depends on what people use it for. Clearly it could be abused, which is why commercial versions all notify the trackee of the system’s operation. But even with notification, it seems to me that one more small piece of freedom disappears when a teenager, or anyone else, agrees to be tracked by someone in authority over them. Yes, it’s the business of the authority to supervise, and knowing where someone is can be an important aspect of supervision. But there will be all sorts of subtle changes, and not all of them good, if a person knows, even subconsciously, that some other person knows exactly where they are at all times—or even just has the capability to know. Will it make a difference in the larger scheme of things? As with so many questions I raise in this blog, we will just have to wait and see.

Sources: An article reviewing one of the first offerings of the Sprint family locator was carried by the website of a New York City TV station in 2006 at http://www.ny1.com/?SecID=1000&ArID=58641.

Deepwater Drilling: More Research Needed?

The ongoing Gulf of Mexico oil spill has led many to question the competence of both industry and government in conducting and regulating deepwater oil drilling. The perspective of Tad Patzek, chairman of the University of Texas Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department, is worth listening to, if for no other reason that he stands at some remove from both corporations and government institutions. On June 8, he gave prepared testimony before Congress in which he shared his thoughts about the root causes of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and what should be done to prevent such tragedies in the future.

Prof. Patzek's main point was that complex systems behave in a qualitatively different way from the simpler systems of which they are a part. He used the analogies of a watch and a frog. Given the right tools, you can take a watch apart and reassemble it, and it will work just as well as it ever did. Try the same thing with a frog, and you don't get a live frog back—you get high-school biology lab. Even such an apparently simple thing as a single-celled organism such as an amoeba is a fantastically complex interconnected system of thousands of micro-machines, chemical plants, disposal systems, data storage in the form of DNA, and so on. And just writing down the chemicals involved doesn't begin to explain the complex behavior of a living organism.

According to Prof. Patzek, the highly complex system of an offshore oil rig in deep water has moved beyond the boundary between simple, easily-understood systems (such as the plumbing in your bathroom sink) and complex systems that come up with surprising behavior that the simpler systems don't show. Unfortunately, the design and management structure of deepwater drilling, along with the technologies used, have not kept pace with the increasing complexity needed to drill in deeper waters, which is where a good deal of U. S. oil production has moved since most onshore reserves have already been exploited. Prof. Patzek says that neither the oil industry nor government funding agencies have spent much money in the last few decades on long-term research into these problems of complexity. Federal support for such research has essentially disappeared, while industry research is narrowly restricted to fields that can show an immediate short-term return: namely, exploration techniques and methods of drilling that improve rates of oil and gas recovery. While these are important and necessary, they do not fill out the big picture of what has to happen if the whole system of deepwater exploration is to function smoothly.

There are well-known analysis techniques that deal with the hazards and failure modes of complex systems. These approaches were developed in part by the space industry, where repairs are generally not possible and astronauts' lives are sometimes at stake. They are paper-and-pencil (or rather nowadays, computer-and-spreadsheet) techniques which force the analyst to imagine what will happen if this or that element in the system fails. While we don't know enough about the Deepwater Horizon failure yet to say (and Prof. Patzek calls for a thorough investigation as part of his testimony), it is possible that if these analysis methods had been applied to the system in question, they might have shown there was a problem, and how to avoid it.

But even if they had, the culture of the industry would have to change so that the results of an office worker's analysis would trump the gut feelings of the guys who are getting their fingernails dirty out on the platform in the Gulf. One of the problems that seems to have contributed to the accident is the distributed nature of command and operations. Rather than one integrated operation owned and run by one entity, large offshore oil-drilling operations are a collaboration between an oil company (BP in this case), a rig operator (TransOcean), and numerous smaller contractors, each of which runs his own little domain. While this mode of operation can work well in non-life-critical systems such as motion-picture production, the Deepwater Horizon accident may be the test case that shows this kind of management structure is inadequate either to prevent such an accident, or to deal with it quickly and efficiently once it occurs.

Not surprisingly for a professor of engineering, Prof. Patzek winds up his testimony by proposing a number of specific research projects, including one to develop a large-scale "skimmer" (system for recovering oil from the ocean surface) by converting a conventional oil tanker. None of these plans will probably be implemented in the near term, but the hope is that Congress will recognize that a vital part of our economy has been left to deteriorate in some ways, and research is needed to fix the problems. Direct Federal involvement is not necessarily the only answer, although some increase in the form of better regulation is probably needed, as Prof. Patzek admits. But a longer-term view of R&D investment on the part of oil companies would help a great deal.

One success story in this regard that might serve as an example of what to do can be drawn from the history of the U. S. semiconductor industry in the 1980s. To oversimplify, Japanese firms were eating their lunch in terms of technical advances, so the major U. S. firms got together, funded a large research effort with shared contributions and shared discoveries, and basically grabbed the football back. This required Federal cooperation in terms of allowing what would otherwise be a violation of anti-trust laws, but it was handled well and it worked out with benefits for both the industry and the general public.

Whether the very different culture of the oil business will lend itself to this kind of inter-company co-operation remains to be seen. One problem is that the U. S. no longer has the lead in terms of oil-company size. Our largest (and according to many sources, best-run) company is ExxonMobil, and it is ranked 17th in the world in terms of oil reserves. But these are still well-off outfits capable of putting some percentage of their profits into a common research foundation that could address some of the safety and accident problems that have been so vividly brought to our attention lately. To my mind, it is the least they can do, and the smartest too.

Sources: The July 4, 2010 Austin American-Statesman carried a portion of Prof. Patzek's prepared testimony, which can be found in full at http://alt.coxnewsweb.com/statesman/pdf/07/070410patzek.pdf.

Deepwater Horizon Spill: Two Months and Counting

I have already blogged a couple of times on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, but since it has now gained the dubious honor of being the worst environmental accident in U. S. history, it's time to pay it some more attention.

Apparently most but not all of the leaking oil is now being captured and disposed of by storage or flaring, some 24,000 barrels a day. Since April 20, however, the date of the explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil platform that killed eleven people and started the spill, more oil has gone into the Gulf than was spilled during the previous U. S. record-holding accident, the Exxon Valdez. That was a tanker accident, which had the advantage that once all of it spilled out of the tanker, there wasn't any more left. Obviously that is not the case in the Gulf, where an incredibly productive old-fashioned gusher on the ocean floor has been throwing out swimming pools of oil every day or so.

I mentioned in my first blog that this might be a game-changing incident for the offshore oil industry. In the short term, that proved correct when President Obama placed a six-month moratorium on all Gulf oil drilling. Just last week a judge blocked execution of that order, and we will have to wait and see if it sticks, putting thousands more oil workers out of work, probably sending most of the active rigs elsewhere so the owners can recoup their huge investments, and possibly—just possibly—preventing another accident like the Deepwater Horizon. But my guess is that this has put the fear of, if not God, the federal government, into every other drilling organization, and they are probably running the safest operations they have for many years.

Will offshore oil operations be run any differently from now on than they have been up to now? Right now it is hard to say, but one thing is certain: if the safety record improves in the future, it will be because both technical people and managerial types work together to make an already pretty good technology even better. For a technology wonk like me, just the technical details of how they're doing things right now are fascinating.

Today Adm. Thad Allen, the Coast Guard commander in overall charge of the recovery operation, described how the capping wells are being drilled. For most of the distance, the same directional drilling techniques are used that are common elsewhere in the world. It is an "open-loop" process, in that the drill goes in a particular direction determined by internal navigation systems, not by any feedback from the place where they want to get to.

But now that the hole is within a thousand or two feet of the original well, they have gone to a different method. Every so often they pull the drill string (the column of interconnected pipes attached to the drill bit) and run a sensing instrument down the hole. At the end of the hole, it "listens" for magnetic fields due to the presence of the original problem well's casing, and gives a direction and distance reading to the drillers. Armed with this knowledge, they readjust their steering, drill another couple hundred feet, and then do it all over again. Once they're just a few feet away, they know they can go straight ahead and they'll hit the casing—but this time they will be prepared with plenty of mud to stop the thing up.

Maybe I'm strange, being technically inclined, but learning this little detail about how the capping wells are being drilled makes me feel better about the whole situation. I'm not a Louisiana shrimpboat captain sitting on his hands and wondering whether to go into another line of work, and for those folks I don't think this knowledge would be much solace. But as we pointed out earlier, the same type of people—technical experts—who caused the problem are the ones best qualified to fix it. Whether that's a good thing or not is a matter for managers, regulators, legislators, and the general public to decide. But right now, we have to trust the technical types to make things better, and learning how they're going about it is reassuring to me, even though it's a tedious and expensive process that will take another several weeks to complete.

Many people want to use this accident as a reason for reconsidering our nation's energy policy as a whole. The ethanol industry, for example, is boasting about how you never see pictures of gulls and cranes drenched in spilled ethanol. In principle, I think this would be a good thing. We as a country depend too much on one type of energy source, and our dependence has gotten us in a lot of trouble in the past. But the difficulty is how to get there from here to there: how to move from the way we are now to a situation that would be fair to most people, not result in disproportionate advantages or disadvantages to certain industries or political pressure groups, and not cause huge economic or political disruptions that would make the cure look worse than the disease. Doing this with the democratic process is hard, and doing it in a top-down expert-designed way would be fraught with unintended consequences. Perhaps this disaster will indeed lead to a more unified view of our present situation and more consensus about what we should do. But first we need to get it over with, and not make any hasty, ill-considered decisions in the midst of the crisis.

Sources: Adm. Allen's June 27, 2010 press briefing transcript is posted at http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/doc/2931/714075/.

Engineering Ethics In the Movies: The Bridge On the River Kwai

In 1957, World War II was nearly as recent to people living then as the Sept. 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks are to us today. So when a film was released that year about British and American servicemen working in a Japanese prison camp to build a bridge for important railway supply line through Burma (now Myanmar), the story had an emotional punch simply because it was about a recent war that many viewers fought in personally. But even now, half a century later, "The Bridge On the River Kwai" throws a strong light on a perennial problem in engineering ethics: getting the larger picture of what you as an engineer are doing.

I won't worry about giving you a spoiler alert here, because even if you know how it turns out, it's the kind of story that's good enough to watch anyway. The tale pivots on the personality of Colonel Nicholson (played by Alec Guinness), a British officer captured by the Japanese in Burma, along with a couple hundred of his officers and men. The first part of the movie is a test of wills between Saito, the prison-camp commandant, and Nicholson. Saito insists that the officers must do manual labor along with the men; Nicholson and his officers refuse, citing the Geneva Convention prohibiting it. In revenge, Saito claps the officers in a tiny cell and puts Nicholson in a "hot box": an iron shed exposed to the tropical sun for days. Saito, under pressure to build a railway bridge across a nearby river by a deadline only a couple of months away, eventually sees that he's getting nowhere, and uses a Japanese holiday as an excuse to give in to Nicholson's demands. In return, Nicholson seizes on the bridge project as a way to instill order and discipline in his men, and returns to effective command.

The rest of the movie is a penetrating psychological study of how a person (in particular, an engineer, though the point is relevant to anyone engaged on a challenging project) can become captivated by a technical challenge to the exclusion of its wider purpose and effects. Until Nicholson assumes responsibility for the bridge, the Japanese have been fluffing the job. They selected the wrong site where the river bottom is too soft and the uncooperative prisoners have encumbered the work at every opportunity. Nicholson initially justifies tackling the project with a sincere desire to do the best he can as a way to show the Japanese the superiority of British discipline and know-how. And he succeeds. His engineering-trained officers have built bridges like this before, and despite setbacks Nicholson and his men complete the structure the day before a train of dignitaries is scheduled to cross it for the first time. Ironically, Nicholson eventually asks his officers to do manual labor in his rush to finish the bridge—breaking the very same principle he insisted on keeping in his battle with Saito earlier.

In a parallel story, an American sailor who escaped from the camp earlier has joined a British commando team who have made their way through the jungle to place explosives under the river surface in order to blow up the same bridge. After many struggles, they manage to do this on the night before the first train is supposed to arrive, and station a man downstream with a plunger-type detonator to blow it up as the train crosses the bridge.

All is well for this plan until Nature intervenes: overnight, the river level falls, revealing the detonator cable here and there rising from the receding water. Tension among the commandos runs high as that morning, Nicholson strolls out to view "his" bridge, even stopping to admire a commemorative plaque he placed on the bridge that says British troops built the bridge on such-and-such a date. When he spots a suspicious-looking cable sticking up above the water, he calls Saito and they climb down to trace the path of the cable along the bank. Just as they reach the detonator, one of the commandos opens fire and mortally wounds Nicholson. At the very last moment, he realizes with horror that for the last two months he has been aiding the enemy. Gasping, "What have I done?" he falls on the detonator, and the bridge blows just as the train is crossing it.

Now, there are engineers opposed to war of any form, and even they have a spokesman in the movie. One of Nicholson's officers is given the last word of the film: after witnessing the tragic end of the project, he says simply, "Madness," and to that extent you can view the entire movie as a kind of anti-war epic. But given the assumption of most of the characters that the war was a necessary evil, clearly Nicholson allowed his pride in technical accomplishment to overcome his judgment about how a given project (the bridge) fit into the larger scheme of things.

Many engineers eventually become managers, but that doesn't mean they can leave engineering ethics behind. The men under Nicholson's command were basically tools that he could bend to his will. It took the British commando team to remind Nicholson that Japan was the enemy, and the Geneva-convention rules applied to everyone, not just the Japanese. Like many problems in engineering ethics, the film presents a complex situation, though it was simplified for dramatic intensity. While reality is not usually as dramatic as the film portrayed it, the story highlights the kinds of questions that engineers still face today: What am I really doing? What is its real purpose? Am I doing this just because I enjoy the technical challenge, or because it genuinely contributes to the good of society? These are all questions that every engineer should ponder from time to time. And if you have a chance to check out "The Bridge On the River Kwai," do it. It's a great film.

Sources: Besides the DVD of the film, the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) has a good detailed plot synopsis which I referred to.

K-12 Engineering Education: Will it Help?

Poetry, it is said, is the clear expression of mixed emotions. I will forgo inflicting upon my readers an example of my poetic gifts, such as they are, but mixed emotions are definitely what I felt when I read a recent New York Times story about a school district in New Jersey that is teaching engineering to children in kindergarten. Or trying to, anyway.

At Clara E. Colemen Elementary in Glen Rock, New Jersey, all students from fifth graders right down to kindegarten are exposed to at least ten hours a year of something that can be optimistically described as engineering education. For the kindergarteners, who can't yet spell engineering (or anything else), this takes the form of imagining how they could make the three little pigs' house less vulnerable to high-velocity winds blown by the huffing puffing wolf. As a spokesman for the American Society of Engineering Education pointed out, this is not learning engineering so much as it is learning about engineering, but still, it's a move in the right direction. Assuming, that is, that you think the teaching of engineering belongs in elementary school at all.

And here's where the mixed emotions come in. Speaking for myself, I would have been thrilled if I had been given an opportunity to study anything related to engineering when I was that age. But as things were run in a medium-quality Texas school district in the 1960s, I had to make do with things like bringing samples of my self-assigned battery-powered electrical projects to show-and-tell, and reading the articles on oil refining in the encyclopedia during recess. The view then was that first we teach them how to read, write, and do elementary math, along with things like world history, art, and U. S. citizenship. There will be plenty of time for them to find out about professions like engineering, law, or medicine when they can at least have a basic understanding of how and why such things are done.

I personally disagreed with such an approach. Much later in life, I was told that one day I came home from my first day in fourth grade looking particularly disgusted. When my mother asked me what the problem was, I said, "When am I going to be able to take physics?" The reply was discouraging, to say the least.

So from a purely personal perspective, I am jealous of all those kids out there (and the Glen Rock school is by no means unique) who are getting to build paper-hedgehog levitators, hyperventilating-wolf safeguard mechanisms, and other things that pass under the label of engineering, broadly defined.

But here's where the mixed emotions come in. I was an unusual child, in the sense of being a statistical outlier. There are simply not that many fourth-graders hankering for a dose of Newton's Laws, or at least there weren't in my day. One can question the wisdom of taking a perceived national need for more engineers (which at some level or other is always a chronic problem, especially if you talk to industrial representatives at any time except during the depths of a recession) and thereby justifying the presentation of a particular singled-out profession to young children, most of whom will not become engineers. From the descriptions, it sounds like mathematics is not a prominent feature of most of these programs, at least at the lower levels. That may well be appropriate, since a lot of what engineers do is enabled by math, but not fundamentally based on it. People were building sheds and houses without benefit of anything beyond basic arithmetic for millennia, after all. But by the same token, it is a stretch to describe what they were doing as engineering.

How would it look if we had a shortage of lawyers, for example (I know that is hard to imagine, but bear with me), and set aside a week or two a year in every grade to make kids dress up in fancy suits and carry briefcases and hold mock trials? It begins to sound like debating teams, and in fact that is a good place for budding lawyers to start. But I'm not aware of any debating teams that have to interrupt their sessions for nap time, and that's because the intellectual equipment needed to conduct a meaningful debate, as opposed to a playground brawl, is simply not present in most kids before the age of twelve or so.

Is the same true of engineering? Yes and no. If you are talking about the instinct to build things, well, you can find that in toddlers who like to pile blocks together and then knock them down. And for decades, toymakers have profited from selling construction kits like Erector sets, Tinkertoys, and so on, without benefit of any subsidies from the National Science Foundation or the Department of Education. It is an empirical fact that boys tend to like those kinds of toys more than girls do, and I suspect one motive behind the engineering-for-everybody movement is to get more girls interested in the subject. And to the extent it works, I say fine, but at the same time I don't expect that ten years from now we'll see the percentage of women in engineering zoom up to the perpetually-hoped-for goal of 52%, or whatever statistical parity with respect to the general population would be.

And here is a caution: if these little engineering samples in elementary school are presented badly, or poorly equipped teachers have to do it under compulsion, the whole thing might backfire. Not everything kids do in school is to their liking. The few weirdos like me will like it, but they will probably go on to be engineers or scientists anyway. But for the great majority of children to whom most of what they do in school is at best a chore or a burden, they may learn to associate the word "engineering" with tedium, frustration, and failure, which would not be what we want at all.

Sources: The New York Times article "Studying Engineering Before They Can Spell It," appeared on June 13, 2010 at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/education/14engineering.html?. It cites curriculum material developed by the Boston Museum of Science, which has been a national leader in this area.

The Nuremberg Trial: Lessons for Engineers, and Everyone Else

In today's overheated political rhetoric, the word "Nazi" tends to turn up whenever someone wants to compare an act or person to ultimate evil. Though the term is in danger of becoming meaningless through overuse, the reality of Nazi Germany represented the unimaginable in wrongdoing at the time the fullness of its horrors became generally known after World War II. The extraordinary judicial proceeding by which the world learned in abundant detail of the Holocaust and related crimes against humanity was called the Nuremberg Trial, after the German city in which it was held. Lasting almost a year (from November 1945 to September 1946), this trial brought to justice some twenty-one former leaders of the Third Reich, ranging from Luftwaffe chief and Hitler right-hand man Hermann Goering to armaments and war production head Albert Speer. Judges and prosecutors of the Allied Powers (England, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union) took thousands of pages of testimony, called hundreds of witnesses, examined tons of documents, and issued verdicts that condemned most, but not all, of the defendents to be hanged. The lesson I learned from recently reading a one-volume history of the proceedings is that, although the Nazi regime was a unique chapter in history, the motivations and causes for many of their heinous acts are still with us. And advances in technology mean that the same things the Nazis did crudely and inefficiently then can be done elegantly and efficiently today.

Evil does not always follow logic, but the actions of Hitler's government often followed logically from a few (wrong) premises. One detestable premise was that Jews were human vermin whose extermination was necessary before Germany could be racially purified for its alleged glorious future. Therefore, the efficient killing of Jews and other undesirable elements was a legitimate engineering goal. So German engineers experimented first with mobile execution units that used carbon monoxide in the engine's exhaust to kill a truckload of people in ten to fifteen minutes. When this method proved too slow and erratic, the famous gas chambers were designed and built so that hundreds of people packed into a space not much larger than a living room could be killed without fail inside half an hour.

Jews were not the only undesirables destined for gas chambers. Anyone whose existence imposed an economic burden on the State was a candidate for at least a concentration camp, and ultimately execution. One of the early signs of these horrors noticed by Catholic clergy during World War II was that many parishoners who had elderly or disabled relatives in rest homes and hospitals began getting messages from the government saying in effect: "Dear Blank, This is to inform you that So-and-So was recently moved to a new hospital, whereupon he contracted pneumonia and died." And the bodies were always cremated "for sanitary reasons." While the regime did not allow investigation of these reports at the time, it turned out that a plan was being implemented to move "unproductives" out of their existing care facilities to the gas chambers. In this way thousands of mentally and physically disabled citizens of the Third Reich ceased to be a burden to their fellow citizens, and in the Nazi mind contributed thereby to the wellbeing of the State.

Another charge well supported by the evidence was that "doctors" performed experiments on prisoners, not only without their consent, but with flagrant disregard for elementary standards of decency, medical ethics, or safety. People were boiled or frozen in water tanks, injected with scarlet-fever germs, had air injected into their veins, and were sterilized by hidden X-ray machines without their consent. All these things were permissible once the "doctors" made the mental transition to objectify their subjects: the prisoners were no longer human beings like their torturers, but only raw material for scientific investigation.

What are the lessons for today? I can think of three without even trying hard.

One, is that the modern state of Israel was formed largely as a way for the community of nations to apologize to the Jews for what happened to them in World War II. In Albert Speer's phrase, "No apologies are possible," but the creation of a free and independent Israel after two thousand years of exile for the Jews marked one of the bright spots in an otherwise tarnished century. There are now nations and organizations whose stated official policy is the eradication, not only of the Jewish state, but of Jews too. We have seen this before. And we have seen what it leads to. And if we haven't learned from the most horrendous chapter in the history of the twentieth century to oppose not only antisemitism wherever it is found, but organizations and states which foster it, then we are shirking our responsibility to God's special people, the Jews. The recent actions of the present U. S. administration towards Israel are not encouraging in this regard, to say the least.

Two, is that doing away with human lives that are a burden, or inconvenient, or economically unproductive, was heinous when the Nazis did it, and is just as heinous today. Abortion has been unfortunately legal in the U. S. since 1973, and euthanasia is now legal in some U. S. states. Both of these things treat human beings as inconveniences to be disposed of if they do not meet certain criteria. That is exactly what the Nazis did, and if it was wrong then, it is wrong now.

Three, the use of human embryos for research purposes is just as objectifying an action as that of a Nazi "doctor" who treated a young Jewish woman like a guinea pig to be experimented upon at his pleasure. A human embryo is just as human as you are or I am. We were both embryos at first, and until recently, the younger a person was, the more he or she was entitled to respect, compassion, and protection. The reversal by the present administration of former President George W. Bush's policy against the use of federal funds for human embryo research is a step in the direction of objectifying human beings. And the example of Nazi Germany showed us where that leads.

Sources: The book I read was The Nuremberg Trial by Joe J. Heydecker and Johannes Leeb, tr. R. A. Downie (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975). Defendant Albert Speer's closing statement before he was sentenced to twenty years of imprisonment showed a prescient insight into how technology enabled many of the Nazi horrors and threatened to allow even worse in the future (pp. 369-370): "In five or ten years' time the technique of war will have made it possible to fire rockets from continent to continent with uncanny precision. An atomic rocket, operated perhaps by only ten men, may be able to destroy a million people in the center of New York within seconds. . . . [T]his Trial must be a contribution toward preventing wars in the future and in laying down the fundamental laws of human existence. What does my fate matter, after all that has happened?"

Privacy and Social Media: Flap Over Facebook

In a protest over how the social media website Facebook treats privacy issues, 24,500 users have reportedly made plans to commit "digital suicide" on June 1. They have announced that they will take all their content off Facebook in a show of solidarity. This is only the latest incident in a controversy over how Facebook deals with the complicated issue of privacy. There are layers of irony and paradox here that could stand some exploration.

One of the main problems cited in the controversy is that it is very complicated to either figure out or alter one's privacy settings in Facebook. In an attempt to allay this concern, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's 26-year-old CEO, has instituted changes which will reduce the number of different settings and pages you have to visit in order to adjust your privacy status. Whether this will solve all the perceived problems remains to be seen.

And of course, being seen is one of the main reasons people get on Facebook in the first place. I speak as a near-total outsider to the whole social media phenomenon. I do not tweet or twitter, I do not have a Facebook presence, and the closest I have come to any of this stuff is when I watch my wife put old family photos on LifeSnapz, a family-photo-sharing site based in Chicago. Just out of curiosity, I did a little experiment this morning in trying to party-crash my wife's Lifesnapz material, registering simply to see if there was an easy way for me to look at the stuff she's posted without her invitation. There wasn't, but then, I'm not a determined hacker, either.

Facebook, apparently, is a whole different proposition. There's all kinds of publicly accessible stuff on Facebook, and that is part of the problem. Zuckerberg and his staff face conflicting priorities. On the one hand, he would like people on his site to share as much of their private information as possible, both because it gets other people to be more active and do the same, and because it helps Facebook's advertisers and other third parties get what they want as well, namely, information on potential customers. On the other hand, there are clearly limits to what some users want to share, and at times Facebook has gone beyond those limits.

I'm sure this schizophrenic conflict is experienced by many individual users too. There's the whole issue of "sexting," for example, which is not so much a problem on Facebook (although I'm sure it has come up) as it is among teenagers with camera-equipped cell phones. Back when telephones were telephones and cameras were cameras, your average fifteen-year-old girl would have had to take considerable conscious thought and planning to put a camera in her purse, take it to some private location, partially disrobe, take a picture of herself (or have a friend do it, more likely), get the film developed (without having the guy at the drugstore counter blow the whistle on her), and physically hand the salacious product to her boyfriend. Maintaining one's intention under such a series of obstacles in 1995 would have daunted all but the hardiest future porn stars.

But now that most teenagers have cellphones, and most cellphones have cameras, and there are no snoopy drugstore-counter clerks or other humans in the pathway between one phone and another, the technology has made this sort of misbehavior so much easier that a lot of kids do it. The only thing stopping them is a fear of adverse consequences if they go too far, and many teenagers don't take the forethought to consider such consequences until they have happened. The same kind of ease-of-use issues are at the root of privacy concerns on Facebook too.

If a website is too hard to use, people won't use it, but what "too hard to use" means depends on why people are using it in the first place. When "use" grows to include fine-tuning your privacy settings, what was formerly seen as adequate becomes inadequate: hence the protests and Zuckerberg's efforts to make setting one's privacy controls easier.

The effect of all this technological soul-baring is all in the direction of letting other people know more about you than formerly. Back when total obscurity was the default setting of 99.999% of the world's population and it took massive amounts of resources simply to send a letter from one end of Europe to another, privacy was essentially built into the hardware of existence, and so there was no special need to safeguard it. But now that there are strong economic forces favoring the universally-accessible blatting of one's most intimate secrets to all and sundry, we are faced with the novel problem of deciding what, if anything, was good about the old situation, and what parts of it do we want to preserve?

There are quiet human virtues which are so low-profile that they attract little attention, and in a publicity-conscious age tend to fall out of consciousness altogether. But without them, the social fabric wears thin and we find ourselves missing these virtues without really knowing what went wrong. Sexual purity is one such virtue; discretion—the ability to share information only when it is the right thing to do—is another. Those who are flagrantly lacking such virtues get most of the immediate attention, and if you believe the old saying that there's no such thing as bad publicity, it looks like no harm is done. But when it comes time for such people to desire a special relationship, or true intimacy, and they find that there is nothing special or private saved up that they can share with that special person—that's when these kinds of virtues are missed.

I hope Facebook fixes their privacy-control problems, but I doubt that they will ever post a warning on their site about the virtue of discretion, at least in so many words. They may say things like, "If you don't want people to know certain things, don't post them," but that doesn't get to the core problem. The core problem may be that we have a whole generation which has a very limited idea of what true privacy is. And as they get older, they may wish they had learned.

Sources: The item describing the digital suicides was carried by a media outlet in India at http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/facebook-faces-digital-suicides-today/396539/. Mr. Zuckerberg's announcement was covered by CNET on May 26, 2010 at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20006054-36.html.

Military and Civilian Engineering: The X-37B and the Space Shuttle

The profession of engineering has deep roots in military culture and military organizations. Both in France and the U. S., the first engineering schools in the late 1700s and early 1800s were military academies, and the first people trained in what we would now call the profession of engineering were military servicemen educated in the technicalities of forts, armaments, and related matters. When such training proved to be useful in fields other than war, the first practitioners of non-military engineering were called "civil engineers" to distinguish them from the only other kind at the time. Although the military employs only a minority of engineers today, the story of the X-37B says a lot about the different ways a military and a civilian organization go about achieving similar goals.

The X-37B is a recently launched unmanned space vehicle that the U. S. Air Force has developed, apparently to maintain its ability to launch spy satellites now that the last scheduled Shuttle flight is taking place as I write this. Like the Shuttle, it is a reusable craft with vestigial wings whose design was based on the Shuttle when NASA asked Boeing to develop an earlier version, the X-37, back in 1999. During the last decade, according to Wikipedia, the NASA design served as the basis for the Air Force's X-37B, which was announced in 2006 and then cloaked mostly in secrecy. Unlike NASA, whose proceedings are open and publicized almost to a fault, the Air Force gives out only such information as suits its purposes. So for example, we have only an early artist's conception of what the X-37B really looks like. But when the launch of the first X-37B took place last month (April 22, to be exact), amateur satellite observers and others figured out pretty fast what was happening.

The Air Force has always had a claim on a certain number of Shuttle flights to deliver its most advanced spy satellites into orbit. Even now we do not have full data on the nature of these satellites, but there is enough indirect evidence to show that they produce images superior to anything you can find on Google Earth, for example, and can be reconfigured and steered to watch trouble spots in most parts of the world as needed. During the Cold War, these satellites played an essential role in arms-reduction verification and many other aspects of that conflict, and after the Soviet Union came apart the programs continued for obvious reasons, since having eyes in the sky better than anyone else's will always provide a strategic advantage in both war and peace.

As long as the Shuttle was in operation, it could be relied upon to deliver new spy satellites, but the hiatuses caused by the two major accidents (Challenger in 1986 and especially Columbia in 2003) plus the planned ending of the Shuttle program inspired the Air Force to find an alternative. The nice thing about a military organization is that it is largely unencumbered by democracy. Democracy, I am convinced, is the best way to conduct public affairs. But once a specific technical objective has been decided upon, a well-run military organization has a much better chance of delivering the goods on time and under budget than other types of organizations. So now at fairly low cost (in the hundreds of millions rather than many billion, apparently) and in about a decade (including the seven-year NASA development, or even less time if you consider only the Air Force version), we have a space vehicle that does one of the most important functions of the Shuttle. And by its very nature, nobody on board can ever get killed because nobody is on board to start with.

Of course, the X-37B has a limited range of tasks it can do. Compared to the Shuttle, it is a butter knife to the Shuttle's Swiss army knife—it can do only one thing, but it should do it pretty well. Advances in remotely piloted vehicles and robotics have allowed the Air Force to do without people on board, and while this may lead to situations that a person in space would come in handy for, you can still do a lot with robots nowadays, only perhaps slower. But during an X-37B flight, there is no time pressure to get a task done before the oxygen and food runs out and the humans have to be carted back safely to Earth. Things can just take as long as they take. So in some ways, operations with the X-37B should be more deliberate and therefore better planned and executed.

Does this mean I favor a military type of organization for all engineering works? To a large degree, that is what we already have. The large commercial firms that do engineering have mimicked military organization in more ways than you might think. An engineer at a large company may not have to salute his boss or do kitchen-police duty for getting to work late, but everyone in a company knows there is a strict chain of command that one violates at his or her peril.

Of course, there are problems with the military style of doing things as well. When input from a large number and variety of constituencies should be considered, as in a public work that affects lots of people, the military style does not function that well. This problem has played out in such situations as the deteriorated state of dikes and flood protection systems that was the nominal, but not total, responsibility of the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans before Katrina struck. To be fair, the Corps had its hands tied with regard to much of that infrastructure, and things might have gone better if it had taken over complete control of all aspects of the system. But that was a political impossibility.

Nevertheless, when you have a specific, clear-cut job to be done, it looks like handing it over to the military arm can work pretty well. That assumes, of course, that the military either possesses or has access to the necessary technical expertise. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill that is still going on in the Gulf of Mexico has inspired calls to shove British Petroleum out of the way and put the military in charge. As I mentioned a few blog posts ago, the problem with this idea is that BP and their contractor Transocean have all the smarts in this case. But if the problems that BP and Transocean are having are organizational rather than technical, they might benefit from having the Marines run things for a while.

Sources: The Wikipedia article "Boeing X-37" supplied most of my data on the NASA X-37 and the Air Force X-37B.