Ethics of Engineered Toys: Beyblade

Most of my readers, unless they are teenage or younger boys, can be excused for not knowing the meaning of the last word in today’s headline: Beyblade. It is an English transliteration of the Japanese word “Beiburedo” which is itself derived from “beigoima,” meaning a spinning top toy. I myself had no clue about this concept until a month ago, when my ten-year-old nephew I shall call here Nate arrived in our house for the summer with a set of Beyblade tops and a full-blown obsession to match. In almost no time, we got familiar with the semi-destructive buzzing and rattling sounds of two metal-ringed tops engaged in a battle royal inside a plastic “stadium” that resembles nothing as much as a glorified dog’s food bowl. And I have competed with Nate in this game, spinning up the tops with a simple plastic rack-strip-and-pinion device that releases the Beyblade into the stadium for its time of combat, which can last as long as two or three minutes.

Children have played with tops for probably thousands of years, but that was before the advent of mass-production manufacturing, global advertising and license deals, and coordinated multimedia campaigns involving print, video, and the Internet. The Japanese toy company Takara (now Takara-TOMY), developer of the famed “Transformer” toy line, coordinated their development and launch of Beyblades with a “manga” comic strip of the same name around 2002. Engineering-wise, the tops have progressed from the first all-plastic models to heavier and more complex ones incorporating both metal “fusion wheels” and interchangeable tips, labels, and other features too numerous to mention. The result is no ordinary top: in the stadium Nate has, the tops appear to “orbit” around one another, engage in complex maneuvers that look almost intelligent, and collide violently due to the textured and sculpted outer edges of the fusion wheels. The shaped wheels ensure that the force vectors resulting from collisions have a randomized element that makes for surprising and unpredictable results. While you would think there are too many random elements involved to make operator skill much of a factor, I have to admit that Nate manages to beat me most of the time. I still haven’t figured out how he does it.

If you ask him how he wins, he will launch into a five-minute spiel about balance versus attack and defense yellow stars, energy rings, spin tracks, performance tips, and strength gained from previous battles with Phoenixes, Eagles, Lizards, Ursas, and I don’t know what all. (There is a tie-in between the names of the various Beyblade models and astronomical constellations.) He has read several of the institution’s canonical works—that is, the original manga series penned by comic-strip and marketing genius Takao Aoki. I have tried reading one or two of these literary achievements. Once you get used to the fact that they are printed backwards (the back page is the front page and vice versa), they are all the same: highly stylized fragmented scenes of huge-eyed boys leaping about in dubious battle with giant tops, all of which is punctuated by jagged-letter sound effects (“KRAK!!!” “ZZZIM!!!”). No sign of plot, character development, or any of that other mushy stuff of no interest to ten-year-old boys.

The engineering ethics of childrens’ games and toys is confined in my experience to only a few topics. One is the question of violent or sexually explicit video games and their effects on the mental and moral development of children who use them. The other is the hazard factor: matters such as choking dangers of small parts, or the incident a few years ago when imported toys for small children were found to have lead paint on them. Beyblade-iana seems to avoid both of these problems. Although it involves small parts, it is not marketed to an age group that is likely to try swallowing them rather than playing with them. And as for the moral consequences of playing with Beyblades, as far as I know it is a matter of speculation, unless some sociologist has done a study on this specific toy.

There are a lot of things to be said in favor of Beyblades. As one would expect from a nation where most families live in tiny apartments, the space required for two kids to engage in Beyblade combat is only about six square feet. Yet a Beyblade battle allows boys to do several things they enjoy doing: exercise a certain amount of physical skill, compete with other boys, and make violent-sounding noises that in the end do little or no harm (it’s a lot better than a toy drum, believe me).

On the minus side of the ledger, I have some qualms about the mythology or backstories that the makers have conjured up to go along with the physical toys. My main knowledge of this mythology is gained through hours of listening to Nate talk about it, so bear that in mind. Apparently there is a spiritual, or at least non-material, aspect to the way Beyblade tops are presented. In this mythology, the tops have intelligence of a sort and some kind of aura or energy that can be enhanced or drained by both physical and non-physical means. I’m not expecting fine philosophical distinctions to be made by a ten-year-old, but the way he talks about his collection gives me the impression that he makes no distinction between changes or improvements that can rationally be expected to make a difference (e. g. changing to a better performance tip), and matters that violate physical law (e. g. things like the idea that one Beyblade he took to bed with him absorbed energy from him and plays better).

Maybe this is making a mountain out of a Beyblade molehill. But this arbitrary blend of the physical and the magical, if you want to call it that, combined with the winner-take-all bluster that he’s picked up from the manga series, are things that trouble me a little. All the same, it is likely that in a few years he’ll look at these toys from an entirely different perspective. They’ll be moved out to make room for a more age-appropriate interest, and will leave only subconscious traces in his mind, perhaps. In the great scheme of things, Beyblade toys seem to bring a great deal of harmless pleasure to children around the world, and so for that reason alone, we should probably cut them a good deal of slack.

Sources: Wikipedia has good articles on the Beyblade phenomenon (“Beyblade”) and a separate description of the toy itself (“Beyblade (toy)”) which I relied on for this piece.

Power to the Set-Top Box: Who’s Involved?

One of the most challenging aspects of engineering ethics is figuring out who the players are. Sometimes half the ethics battle is won once you have identified all the significant parties who may be affected by a given engineering enterprise or decision. This process is especially important in examining an issue that I had frankly never given any thought to until I read a New York Times article entitled “Atop television sets, a power drain that runs nonstop.” It turns out that the set-top box—the device that interfaces your cable TV signal to your TV—along with any digital video recorder (e. g. TIVO) you may have, together consume more electricity annually than many newer-model refrigerators. Whether this is a problem depends on who you are and your point of view. But first let’s identify the players.

Most numerous, and as usual the least informed, are the consumers of cable-TV services in the U. S. Nearly all households in urban and suburban areas have cable TV, and that means over 160 million of these boxes are out there. Next in the lineup are the cable-TV providers: the companies that rent the boxes (typically) to the consumers and decide how to operate them. It turns out that two of their priorities, namely fast service to the consumer when the TV is turned on, and convenience in system maintenance and data downloading, dictate that the set-top box and recorder (if present) are usually turned on in fully operational mode 24 hours a day. Since the average box-recorder combination uses about 50 watts, that’s like having a 50-watt light bulb turned on all the time. Doesn’t sound like much, but multiply that by 160 million and you’ve got a lot of power.

Next, there are the box and recorder manufacturers themselves. Many of them market devices in Europe, where there is a higher cost for electricity and consequently a demand for boxes that go into snooze or sleep mode, in which their power consumption decreases anywhere from 50% to 90% or more. True, to wake them up out of sleep takes maybe half a minute, but European viewers appear to be more patient than American viewers. Or else, the first set-top boxes over there ever marketed took 45 seconds to start up and your average Frenchman thinks that’s just a fact of life, like not being able to get good crepes Suzette at a fast-food joint. Some of the sleep-mode boxes are sold to the U. S., but the cable operators here don’t take advantage of that feature, by and large.

Farther down the list of interested parties are the U. S. power utility companies, the Federal government (which has voluntary Energy Star ratings, but so far no mandatory regulations about this matter), various state and local governments, and finally media outlets such as the New York Times, which go around looking for ways that they can encourage the U. S. to be more like Europe, among other things. Some people would include the whole rest of the world because increased power consumption means a larger carbon footprint, which can lead to climate change, etc., but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.

Once you know the players, you ask how the game is being played. Well, cable service is a utility like any other. Only in this matter, it turns out that in addition to paying the cable bill with its black-and-white figure, taking one utility’s service results in an invisible increase in another utility cost, namely your electric bill. In the U. S. a kilowatt-hour costs between 10 and 20 cents, depending on where you live, so the indirect monetary cost to the average consumer of cable and DVR service because of increased power consumption is between $45 and $90 a year. In most people’s budgets, that is not a big deal, but if you knew it could be reduced by more than half if you were just patient enough to wait 45 seconds whenever you turned on the TV, would you choose to save that amount?

For various reasons, that is a choice that most U. S. consumers have never been asked to make. Some people who are hyper-energy-conscious may see this article and start to bombard their cable provider with demands for energy-efficient cable service. This is a fairly new thing in the consumer-marketing field, and there is no general term for it. I guess you could call it politically-correct market appeal. It’s the kind of thing that goes on when you see ads for sneakers that aren’t any better, and may be more expensive than the average mass-marketed sneaker, but come with a certificate guaranteeing that they were made by contented American union workers and not in some sweatshop in a South Pacific island. Some people really would choose to wait 45 seconds to watch TV if they knew their carbon footprint was thereby made smaller. (Of course, it would get a whole lot smaller if they just threw out the TV altogether, but that’s a different story.)

On a personal note, I may have mentioned that my last career in industry before becoming a full-time academic was as an engineer helping to design Scientific-Atlanta’s first set-top box, a job I quit thirty years ago this summer as the project was collapsing around my ears. That firm went on to pick itself up from that six-million-dollar mistake and pioneer the business of “smart” cable boxes. The one we designed—when it worked—had less computer power than a pocket calculator, but turned on right away. But nobody who is used to the super-enhanced services of today’s cable providers would want to switch to such a primitive device—it’d be like swapping all our cars for Model Ts. The power consumed by cable TV boxes is probably not going to be a big factor in the future of western civilization. But it’s worth thinking about, or at least reading about, I hope.

Sources: Elizabeth Rosenthal’s piece on this issue appeared in the June 25, 2011 online edition of the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/us/26cable.html

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From NASA to USSG: Fixing the U. S. Space Programs

As readers of this blog may have realized by now, some problems in engineering ethics lie mainly not in the bad decisions of individuals, but in wrongly conceived or executed institutional organizations and policies. A lot of well-intentioned people working in a poorly structured outfit can nevertheless do real damage. The engineering ethics poster-child example of this is NASA, which holds the dubious distinction of being responsible for one of the leading engineering ethics case studies, the 1986 Challenger disaster. While human lives are invaluable, much harm also results from waste, inefficiency, and mismanagement, and NASA has had its share of that too. But I am not here merely to register another carp about NASA, but to draw your attention to a well-considered and politically astute alternative to the present mish-mosh that is U. S. space policy: the creation of a United States Space Guard (USSG).

Writing in the Winter 2011 issue of The New Atlantis, space consultant James C. Bennett describes an idea that originated with U. S. Air Force Lt. Col. Cynthia A. S. McKinley in 2000. She looked at how a basic structure that might once have been appropriate for a small federal agency, which the National Aeronautics and Space Agency once was in the early 1960s, was inflated all out of proportion during the Great Space Race that got the U. S. to the moon first in 1969. But to use a human-body analogy, what remained after that unique experience bears some resemblance to what might happen if a 110-pound professional jockey decided to become a temporary Sumo wrestler, and bloated up to 600 pounds for one wrestling match. Even if he won, he’d have a lot of trouble getting his old jockeying job back afterwards, and NASA has been the 600-pound Sumo wrestler in the nation’s space efforts ever since.

The domination by NASA of virtually all important aspects of U. S. space activities, whether military, civilian, governmental, commercial, regulatory, or scientific, has distorted and rendered inefficient or neglected a lot of things that might have fared better, and might in the future fare better, if we reorganized our whole approach, which is what the Space Guard proposal does. I don’t have room to describe all the ingenious details that Bennett has added to McKinley’s basic idea, but I will concentrate on the fundamental analogy between a familiar and well-functioning organization, namely the U. S. Coast Guard, and the proposed U. S. Space Guard.

Though usually engaged in peaceful work such as search and rescue operations, navigational facilitation for commercial sea traffic, and other fairly routine tasks, the Coast Guard is a cadre of officers in uniform committed to service, at the cost of their lives if necessary. As Bennett points out, the informal motto of the Coast Guard in lifesaving efforts is “You have to go out, you don’t have to come back.” Making personnel of a new U. S. Space Guard similarly sworn to duty, with the recognition of a uniform, military rank and command structure, and so on, would at last acknowledge the fact that space travel and space-related work is hazardous and astronauts, at least, put their lives on the line. We expect that of policemen, firemen, and soldiers, but to expect it of civil servants (technically, that’s what astronauts are) is not fitting, to say the least.

The establishment of a U. S. Space Guard would allow the collection of a number of important but unglamorous space-related tasks under one roof where a common body of experts could coordinate activities which now are spread far and wide. For example, responsibility for communications satellites is presently spread among agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Commerce, and NASA (if any of their launch vehicles are used). The FAA is also presently involved in regulating some “black” (secret) U. S. Air Force military space work, which does not fit the agency well. Transferring these sorts of tasks to the new USSG would make more sense.

Besides remedying such existing confusions and inefficiencies, and freeing up NASA to do what it was founded to do in the 1950s—namely far-out exploratory and scientific research—the USSG could spawn helpful and fruitful new efforts. We could start a Space Academy, along the lines of the other service academies such as Annapolis and West Point. We could maintain a Space Reserve of former USSG service people who could be recalled to active duty should the need arise. And best of all from my point of view, the USSG would be a fresh start organizationally, instead of yet another patch or fix to the dysfunctional organization that is NASA today.

This is not to say that NASA has no good features. Obviously it does. Its unmanned science programs are still among the best in the world, doing wonders with inadequate funding. But so much of what NASA does depends not on national needs and plans, but on whose congressional district and which company does it, that only a well-planned and politically wise transition from the status quo to a new order in which the USSG plays the main role will improve things. At least, this idea is the best one I’ve seen addressing the question of what the U. S. should do about space. I just hope that for once, reason and common sense will prevail over the less salutary aspects of politics, and we’ll do the right thing about it.

Sources: James C. Bennett’s article “Proposing a ‘Coast Guard’ For Space” appears in the Winter 2011 edition of The New Atlantis, pp. 50-68.

Finding a Job in a Technocracy

Last month, graduation ceremonies were held all over the U. S., and now the newly minted ex-students face the challenging task of finding a job. A recent New York Times report details just how challenging it will be in today’s economy. And engineers, even recently graduated ones, need to ponder the effects of their work on the employment picture.

First, the bad news. After the world economy nearly melted down in 2008, a severe recession (some are now calling it the Great Recession) caused widespread job losses and a general slowdown for the better part of two years. It seems that by now the U. S. economy, when measured strictly by production of goods and services, has fully recovered to the level of productivity that prevailed before the 2008 debacle. The only difference is, it’s humming along with 7 million fewer jobs than were in existence in 2008. And what is worse from the viewpoint of job hunters, is that firms are very reluctant to take on new workers, but are spending bucketloads on new equipment, much of which is made overseas. Since 2008, spending on employment has risen only 2 percent, but spending on capital equipment has soared by 26 percent.

Much of this capital equipment consists of highly engineered manufacturing technology such as computers, robotics, and other devices that allow makers of goods (and often providers of services as well) to replace people with machines. This sort of thing has gone on at least since the dawn of history, when some clever person devised an irrigation water wheel pump that one person could operate while replacing four or five people armed with individual buckets. But at certain times, a whole lot of people are thrown out of work at once and replaced by a whole lot of technology, and the newly unemployed people tend to notice.

Another time this happened was the 1930s. Although statistics were kept differently then, by some estimates the U. S. unemployment rate soared as high as 25% and stayed close to that for most of the decade. Some people then saw the advances in manufacturing machinery as an important cause of the disruptions accompanying the Great Depression, and posed various solutions, including the short-lived political movement called Technocracy. Technocrats, as they termed themselves, believed that the economy was too complicated to be left in the hands of non-expert business people, who had clearly let things get out of hand. The solution posed by the technocrats was to abolish money and place the economy in charge of technical experts—engineers, mostly, but with a few doctors and economists mixed in. The engineers would allocate a new unit of exchange that represented energy (joules were proposed) so that everybody would get an equal amount of energy and be free to decide what to do with it.

The technocrats turned out to be better engineers than politicians (in fact, most of the leaders of the Technocracy movement had little engineering experience either), and Technocracy as a political movement vanished from the scene shortly after World War II began, when the Great Depression ended in a flurry of economic activity stimulated by war production. But the idea of putting government in the charge of experts has by no means gone away.

One could even argue that the present White House occupant represents modern-day technocracy carried to an extreme. The Obama administration pushed through a health-care plan that envisions centralized monitoring and control of supply by experts. Its Environmental Protection Agency has extended its reach far beyond former limits and opposed state regulatory agencies in its efforts to apply its own expertise to everyone’s pollution problems. And while organized labor is favored in certain ways, the overall trend of the economy toward increased mechanization, as opposed to higher rates of employment, has continued unabated.

Besides the Technocracy movement, a few voices in the 1930s called for an alternate vision of what could be done about the increasing replacement of human workers by machines. When it takes fewer people to make the same amount of stuff, you can either get rid of some workers and keep the remainder working full time, or you can lower the number of hours per week that everyone works and keep everyone working at reduced hours. The latter possibility was the basis of the notion that in the future, most people would have to work only ten or fifteen hours a week to earn as much as they got from forty or fifty hours of toil every week before mechanization. The promoters of this vision saw a landscape of leisure time opening up in the future, as people enjoyed the fruits of advances in productive automation by working less for the same pay.

There are many flies in that ointment, as history has shown, but perhaps the biggest reason why this is not happening today is what you can call the fixed and overhead charges associated with hiring people. Back in the early 1930s, there was no Social Security, no Medicare, no tax break for employers who paid for workers’ health insurance, and little advanced training needed for most jobs. So the cost of hiring a worker simply amounted to what he or she was paid. If things were still that simple, it might make sense for a company to retain most of its employees at reduced hours as it buys equipment that allows it to make each unit of product with a lower total man-hour input.

However, we have strayed far from that path today, with a huge number of fixed costs associated with every hire, and those costs are slated to rise if the health-care machinery passed by Congress remains in place. Quite literally the last thing many employers want to do right now is to hire another warm body, much preferring to acquire equipment that needs no training or health insurance, can be depreciated on a tax return, and does just as good a job, if not better, than a human being can. And engineers have largely made this possible. All in all, however, I sometimes wonder if the tools made by engineers have been used wisely by managers, corporation heads, and politicians. When it gets to the point that engineers design tools that are used largely to replace engineers, we at least need to think twice before proceeding.

Sources: The Austin American-Statesman reprinted a New York Times article on labor versus equipment costs by Catherine Rampell on June 12, 2011, page E1.

Should Cancer Be a Profitable Opportunity?

In 2003, my wife was treated (successfully, thank God) for breast cancer. And right now, her sister is preparing to be treated for a serious blood disease by means of a bone-marrow transplant, which is also used to treat many kinds of cancer. So my close relatives and I have personal experience with an industry that accounts by some measures for as much as $60 billion of economic activity, much of it going to advanced high-tech science and engineering work (which is how I’m relating it to this blog).

Picture my emotions, then, when the other day I received in the mail a thing that looked at first glance like an issue of Time Magazine, with the red border on the cover. Only the top line was not “Time” but “Timing” and the headline read “Cancer: The $60 billion industry” It turned out to be an investment flyer boosting all kinds of “opportunities” to put your money into this or that promising cancer treatment. This brings up an issue that goes to the heart of how we as a culture handle illness: to what extent should the profit motive be involved in medical care?

Historically, physicians have been among the best-educated and well-paid members of the community, even back when they could do little but listen and give fatherly advice. Since the Scientific Revolution revolutionized medicine starting about 1700, the field has developed in the direction of highly organized combinations of institutions, corporations, and societies all exchanging information, products and services of value, and delivering health care which by most measures continues to improve in quality year by year—but at a steeply increasing price. Anyone who hasn’t totally ignored the news over the last year or two knows that we in the U. S. pay a higher proportion of our GDP (gross domestic product) for health care, but what we get for our money is generally not that much better than other industrialized countries that pay less.

Any discussion along these lines has already made an implicit assumption: namely, that the problem consists of maximizing health-care delivery efficiency, and we simply aren’t doing it as well as some other countries. But is that really the issue?

What if the problem is not so much macroeconomics and political and social forms of organization, but the motivations and ethical stances of the people involved? Here is what I mean.

Would you rather have a doctor who went into medicine because he wanted to heal people, or because he wanted to afford vacations at Cap Ferrat? Would you rather deal with an organization whose members are dedicated primarily to the healing of patients, or whose owners are anonymous stockholders simply wanting the best return on investment possible? I think the answer in the case of the doctor is pretty clear. In the case of the organization, things begin to get a little fuzzy.

If you look at the history of medical innovations, it is fairly clear that the most favorable environment for them appears to be a place where the profit motive plays a fairly unrestricted role in guiding developments, rather than dictatorial control by some government-funded bureaucracy. This is not to neglect the role of such agencies as the U. S. National Institutes of Health in supporting basic medical research whose future profitability is unclear. But medicine is so complex today that large and expensive organizations are needed to pursue technologically-intense advances (including drugs as well as other forms of treatment). And judging by results, the best environment for such organizations appears to be places where taking risks with large investments in new medical ideas can pay off in commensurate profits, and the marketplace is used to signal the distribution of resources.

But I’m still bothered by the notion that a thing which on a personal level is an unmixed curse and tragedy—namely, cancer—is also the basis of what is being promoted by the flyer I mentioned as a wonderful opportunity to get rich quick. The reason that individual doctors have been well-paid members of society is that they have both invested years of their lives learning their profession, and have also (historically, at least) sworn an oath to use their knowledge in socially beneficial ways. The fact that most doctors no longer take the Hippocratic Oath as part of their medical training is not encouraging, and may have something to do with the rampant abuse of prescription pharmaceuticals that we have today. The medical business used to do pretty well with almost no advertising at all: no ads for doctors, no ads for prescription drugs. As I understand it, the prohibition against ads by doctors was self-imposed by their professional associations. There have always been advertisements for over-the-counter medications, but until recent times they were looked down upon and relegated to the small-type back pages of magazines.

One can argue that the consumer should be king in all this, and in some ways we suffer from a lack of consumer control in the health-care industry. But consumers can decide only if they have a clear financial incentive to do so, and if they have competent professional guidance about matters beyond their understanding. The so-called “twelve-cent problem” is the fact that only 12 cents out of every medical dollar comes out of the U. S. consumer’s pocket. If we had to pay only 12 cents for every dollar of food we consumed, I expect the food industry would become as inefficient and bloated as the health-care industry (not to mention bloating us too). And the presence of huge amounts of TV and other advertising for prescription drugs of questionable utility distorts the environment in which medical decisions are made. I for one would not miss most medical advertising, especially camouflaged brochures asking me to profit from someone else’s misery. But in so many things in politics, the question is how to get from here to there. And for that, I don’t have an easy answer.

Sources: The 12-cent problem is described in many places, among which is a blog by Dr. David Gratzer posted on Jan. 26, 2011 at http://conhomeusa.typepad.com/platform/2011/01/part-4-of-dr-david-gratzers-series-on-the-future-of-the-gop-battle-with-obamacare-the-12-cent-proble.html.

Robocalls and Electronic Warfare on the Landline

Well, it’s finally happened. I have reluctantly joined the ranks of those whom you are never, ever going to be able to talk to on their landlines simply by calling their number and waiting for a live person to answer the phone. Now we always let the answering machine pick up the call. If the caller leaves a message (which usually doesn’t happen), and it’s somebody we want to talk with, we’ll call them back. But otherwise, the caller is out of luck.

Thirty, or even twenty, years ago, I would have regarded this sort of behavior as standoffish at best, if not downright unfriendly. I inherited a strong streak of what you might call German democratic “just-folks” populism from my father. It’s one reason I still mow my own lawn, have a listed phone number, and until recently, answered my own home phone in person. I don’t want to send a message that I’m too busy or important to be bothered by people I don’t know. But that was before some of the people I don’t know started using robocall machines (technical term: auto-dialers) to pester the life out of me by asking for donations to various and sundry charities. What prompted me to change my behavior was the realization that about 90% of the calls reaching our landline were from robot dialers operated by charities of one kind or another. While some of these organizations are worthwhile, I got tired of spending numerous five-minute chunks either trying to get them to hang up, or reluctantly promising to watch in the mail for the envelope with the red phone on it in order to send in my twenty bucks for the relief of red-haired orphans of left-handed libertarians, or whatever it was.

I’m not alone in letting my answering machine screen phone calls. Response rates to telephone polls are declining steadily. According to one study, 36% of calls resulted in completed interviews in 1997, but the figure dropped to 25% by 2003, and is probably somewhere in the low teens today. Many people, especially younger ones, have dropped their landline altogether, or never even had one, relying only on their cell phones. This has created problems for organizations such as telephone-solicitation charities and polling outfits, because the rules are different for cell phones and landlines. Did you know that there is a Federal law against using auto-dialing machines for cell-phone numbers? No such restriction applies to landlines. For this and other reasons, it costs about twice as much to do polls calling cell phone numbers as it does to call landline numbers. And naturally, that results in fewer pesky solicitations on cell phones. Not zero, just fewer, which is one reason I hardly ever turn on my cellphone.

This mass retreat from instant accessibility is one more example of what you might call the electronic-warfare effect. Electronic warfare includes any techniques designed to confuse, disable, or otherwise bamboozle your enemy’s radar, communications, and other electronic systems. It began during World War II with the advent of radar, and ever since then has followed an ever-escalating path of improved jammers and countermeasures, followed by the other side’s devising a way to dodge the jammers and countermeasures, followed by the first side’s countervailing improvements in said jammers and countermeasures, ad infinitum. The same kind of thing happens all the time with cybersecurity, telephone solicitations, and even humdrum things like locks and burglar alarms.

In some fields, the war reaches a stalemate pretty quickly. Unless you have a Fort-Knox scale hoard of gold in your house, you are not likely to spend extravagant amounts of money on super-secure locks and infrared-laser burglar alarm systems. But with a relatively trivial investment in robo-calling machines, the telephone solicitors have managed to pollute a well that used to be clean, fresh water, metaphorically speaking: namely, the experience of dialing a stranger’s number and getting the stranger on the other end of the line, right away, without the intervention of an answering machine. That experience is increasingly rare today, and I am one who has contributed to its increasing rarity.

It’s hard to say where all this is headed. If the artificial-intelligence folks get their act together, we may all have phones that act like clever private secretaries, forwarding calls directly to us from people we want to talk with and squelching other calls even before they set off the ring tone. And yes, there’s probably an iPhone app for that—there is for almost everything else. If the telephone world of 1970 was the electronic version of the peasant village where everybody could talk with everybody else, today’s telephone world is more like those rich parts of town where everybody lives behind a guarded gate and you have to know someone inside in order to get in. My German democratic-populist self says we have lost something in the transition. But maybe it’s just different, not better or worse.

Sources: The Pew Research Center has a helpful website that answers numerous questions about how telephone polls are conducted, at http://people-press.org/methodology/collecting-survey-data/. The paper in which the decline in response rates is described is “Gauging the impact of growing nonresponse on estimates from a national RDD telephone survey,” by Scott Keeter, Courtney Kennedy, Michael Dimock, Jonathan Best, and Peyton Craighill, which appeared in the online edition of Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 70 (2006), pp. 759-779, and at http://poq.oxfordjournals.org/content/70/5/759.full#sec-3.

Global Warming’s Judgment Day

As some readers may have heard, today, May 21, 2011, was supposed to be Judgment Day, at least according to Harold Camping, a religious broadcaster who has predicted dates for the end of the world at least twice now. To give him the benefit of the doubt, May 21 won’t be over technically until it’s midnight at the International Date Line, but that’s only about another nine hours from when I’m writing this Saturday evening, Central Daylight Time. In fairness to Mr. Camping, I agree with him that it was at least logically possible that today would be Judgment Day, believing as I do in the second coming of Christ. But logical possibility is also about as much as I can say about the much larger numbers of global-warming Judgment Day forecasters, many of whom sit in the seats of scientific authority and government power.

In contrast to Mr. Camping’s prediction, which was largely held up to ridicule, the prediction that our continuing to burn fossil fuels will lead to a wide variety of present and future climate disasters ranging from droughts to floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes has been taken very seriously for many years in the highest centers of government and science. The U. S. Environmental Protection Agency is now considering the regulation of carbon dioxide emissions as a pollutant, and could cripple huge swathes of the economy with a single ruling. Against the array of global-warming prophets ranging from Al Gore to President Obama, only a few voices are raised. Those who do object are usually dismissed as cranks, religious fanatics, scientific ignoramuses, or some combination of the preceding. But that is a little harder to do when the person raising the objection holds a named chair in the Department of Physics at Princeton University.

In a recent article in First Things magazine, Princeton physicist William Happer points out that even after the rise in carbon dioxide levels in the world’s atmosphere over the last century or so, the figure is still low by historical standards. To be specific, right before the Industrial Revolution got under way, ice cores and other data show that the carbon-dioxide content of the atmosphere was about 270 parts per million. It now stands at 390 parts per million. But about 80 million years ago, the level was 1000 parts per million, and guess what? The plants loved it (they need a certain amount in the air to survive at all), and life was just as abundant on earth then as it is now, if not more so.

Happer’s point is that calling carbon dioxide a pollutant is like calling rain a hazardous substance because when you get too much, it causes a flood. Yes, floods are bad, but we don’t pass laws against rain as a result. And passing laws against carbon dioxide isn’t much more logical.

According to Happer, the science of “climate change” (which is now the preferred term in some circles) has been co-opted by political and economic interests who have fallen victim to a species of mass hysteria. The climate crusade is our age’s great bandwagon, a secular cause that delivers dictates which are as close to moral absolutes as secular authorities get. The logic goes something like this, with my parenthetical comments about each step: Scientists say burning fossil fuels raises the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (true), which in turn will cause the average temperature to rise (maybe) and lead to all kinds of problems ranging from rises in the world’s ocean level to massive and sudden climatic shifts that will cause famines, floods, and other disruptive effects (not clear at all). Therefore, we have a moral imperative to burn as little fossil fuel as possible, and this moral imperative takes precedence over just about any other cause you care to name, because if climate change makes the world uninhabitable, then nothing else matters. The world views of most authorities in this matter do not include the conventional religious category called “sin,” but based on this logic, burning fossil fuels, or even renewable fuels such as corn-based ethanol which contribute to the carbon dioxide burden, is the closest thing they have to a sin.

What Happer does is to call into question the earliest link in this logical chain: will rising carbon dioxide levels really cause problems of the magnitude that Al Gore and people like him believe? There are two answers to that question. One is, maybe not. Global average temperatures have changed a lot more in the past, and a lot faster, than anything we have seen in recent history, and life and humanity survived. The second answer is, even if some of the dire predictions come to pass, human life is incredibly adaptable. People find ways around all sorts of problems, and while any major climate change produces both good and harm, it will probably happen slowly enough to allow us to adapt to the changing circumstances. This is the way life evolved in the first place, and the only thing that would prevent us from adapting in the future is despotism of the kind that presently runs Cuba, for example, which has been frozen in many ways in the year 1959. Some people hold up this socialist state as a shining example of “sustainable development,” but it has achieved this dubious distinction by rigid controls on the physical, mental, and spiritual lives of its citizens. And something like Cuba’s dictatorship would be necessary if we were to fulfill the fondest wishes of those who want our carbon footprints to vanish.

I’m finishing this blog on Sunday morning, May 22, which dawned pretty much like any other day. If yesterday was Judgment Day, I guess I must have missed out. At least Mr. Camping had the courage to be specific enough so that his claim could be falsified, as indeed it has been. The predictions of the global-warming camp are so fungible that tying them down is like trying to nail jelly to the wall. Happer says that after the disclosure of emails by climate scientists who were trying to restrain publications of the opposition, more people are starting to realize that all is not as we have been told for many years. Let’s hope that reality and truth will come to the fore instead of group thinking, panic, and a misguided attempt to achieve secular salvation through atonement by the sacrifice of our carbon-based economy.

Sources: William Happer’s article “The Truth About Greenhouse Gases” appears on pp. 33-38 of the June/July 2011 issue of First Things magazine. I also referred to a graph of carbon-dioxide content in the atmosphere over time that appears in the Wikipedia article “Carbon dioxide in earth’s atmosphere.”

To Compete or Not To Compete: Engineers and the Non-Compete Clause

In today’s engineering job market, changing jobs every few years is almost a given because the days of lifetime employment with one firm are virtually extinct, at least in the U. S. If you become a qualified specialist in a certain field, it is more than likely that when you change jobs, you’ll most easily find a new job in the same field, perhaps even working for a competitor to your previous firm, or a new startup founded by members of your previous firm. And if that happens, you had better make sure that you read all those papers your previous employer made you sign when you started work there, because the chances are that one of them contained what is called a “non-compete clause.”

A non-compete clause, also known to employment lawyers as a “covenant not to compete” or CNC, is an agreement on the part of the employee not to compete with the employer after termination of employment. Usually a limited time and even a limited geographic area are specified, so a typical clause might read, “In the event of Mr. Blank leaving the Company, he agrees not to engage in a similar engineering pursuit for any firms in competition with the Company within the state of X for a period of two years following termination of employment with the Company.” Being a matter of civil law, these clauses are governed by state codes, not Federal law. I was not too surprised to learn that, except in the case of equity owners of a firm, California absolutely prohibits any form of non-compete clause in employment agreements. But most other states allow it as long as the terms are reasonable and the purpose is to preserve the firm’s legitimate business interests.

Even in states that allow such agreements, there are definite limits to the clause’s scope. A company can’t bar you for life from doing a specific kind of engineering, nor can they be too general about the kind of work you are agreeing not to compete in. So there is inevitably a matter of judgment involved, and like many other civil-law matters, as long as nobody decides to sue you, you can (from a legal standpoint, at least) do whatever you want. In this aspect, non-compete agreements resemble nondisclosure agreements, which bar an employee from taking or using business-critical information once they leave a firm.

Despite all these restrictions, the fact is that many startup companies are formed around engineers who used to work for larger firms where they were unable to obtain management support for a new technology, or who left for other reasons. The company that many historians regard as the cornerstone of Silicon Valley, Fairchild Semiconductor, was formed when a group of engineers hired by William Shockley for his Shockley Transistor Corporation got tired of Shockley’s incompetent management and left to form a startup. Since none of them were part owners of Shockley's firm, at least to my knowledge, and California prohibits non-compete clauses, they were unhindered by such obstructions and were able to found the Silicon Valley we know today.

But there are clearly ethical questions involved when an engineer considers quitting one company to go to work for a rival firm doing basically the same type of work. Who is affected by this action? The parties to it are the firm the engineer is leaving (call it Company A), the new firm he or she is joining (Company B), the engineer, and the wider customer base and public served by the business both firms are engaged in.

From the viewpoint of Company A, it is a bad thing that the engineer is leaving and will now provide staff resources to B instead of A. That is why Company A insisted on having a non-compete clause in the engineer’s employment contract in the first place. Company B’s interests are more or less directly opposed to those of Company A, at least in the narrow sense. To the extent the engineer in question has rare or unique skills, Company B’s gain is Company A’s loss. Once the engineer leaves A for B, he or she casts in their lot with Company B, assuming there was enough incentive in terms of salary, job opportunities, equity, etc. to make it a good move.

What about the line of business as a whole? Generally speaking, customers and the public benefit from more competition rather than less. Taking things to a fictional extreme, you could imagine an industry dominated by one giant company which maintains extremely restrictive non-compete agreements with all its engineers. This outfit could charge whatever it wanted because nobody could ever hire away its engineers to start up a rival firm.

So it looks like Company A against the world, and that is one reason why, like patents and other forms of intellectual property, there are time and often geographic restrictions on non-compete clauses. The public interest is best served by restricting them, or, as in the case of California, prohibiting them nearly altogether.

My advice to engineers just starting their careers is to actually sit down and read all that boilerplate fine print in your employment contract. Since you signed it already, you are formally bound by its terms, and when the time comes for you to look for another job, you should be aware of possible restrictions on your freedom of movement. Whether or not a non-compete clause should influence your choice of future employment is an ethical as well as a legal question, but one you should make in an informed way.

Sources: I found some useful background on the non-compete clause in the Wikipedia article “Non-compete clause.”

Obama Names A Fractious Panel to Study Fracking

My grandfather sold oil-field equipment for a living, and my mother was born in Big Spring in the midst of the West Texas oil boom of 1929. My wife’s grandfather spent some time as a roustabout in the oil fields. So to that extent, our roots extend deep into the Texas oil and gas tradition, and lately my wife’s father has benefited, however indirectly, from the drilling going on in North Texas to tap the vast natural-gas reserve in the Barnett Shale, a hydrocarbon-rich rock deposit underlying Fort Worth and surrounding areas. He still owns a home in Fort Worth, and a few years ago we were somewhat surprised to see a drilling rig spring up in a vacant lot only a few miles from his house. Later we were not so surprised when he got offers to lease the mineral rights under his ordinary 50s-era tract home, which he did. All this is to make it clear that when it comes to any controversy over the drilling technique called “fracking,” I am hardly an unbiased party.

The problem with the Barnett Shale, as with many other gas and oil deposits around the world that remain after the easy ones to extract have been depleted, is that the good stuff is trapped inside rock that is not porous enough to let it flow out. Over the years, production firms have devised a number of techniques that have brought the cost of extraction down to within reach of today’s higher natural-gas prices so that they can make money drilling in formations such as the Barnett Shale, even at the price of paying hundreds of homeowners for rights in a metropolitan area. One such technique is directional drilling, which replaces the old-time forest of tens or hundreds of independent drilling rigs with one sophisticated rig which drills a number of holes, first vertically down to the depth of the deposit, then horizontally through it to increase the area of contact with the hydrocarbon-bearing formation. But the controversial technique comes next: the high-pressure injection of a solution of chemicals and particles in water that cracks open spaces in the rock, and props them open so that the gas or oil can flow more freely.

There is nothing particularly new about the fracking process, which has been used for years but not so often in populated areas until recently. But when you shove a lot of chemical-bearing water down a hole, it’s all got to go somewhere. Obviously, the producers try to extract as much of it as possible and clean it up before disposing of it when the wells start to produce, but in the nature of things you will never recover all of what you put in. And although the gas-bearing strata are typically far below the water table where most water wells end, sometimes there are leaks and unexpected ways for the fracking fluid to show up in nearby wells, or even on the surface of the ground. The production firms have been less than forthcoming about what exactly is in their mixtures of fracking fluid, since they feel it might give an edge to their competitors to reveal the exact formula. But even this reluctance is starting to be overcome by government inquiries and other pressures from citizens’ groups concerned about the long-term health issues that might arise from having this stuff in the ground in one’s neighborhood.

So far, so objective. Now it is time for my editorializing. According to a recent New York Times report, President Obama has named a special seven-member panel to look into the safety and environmental issues surrounding hydraulic fracturing. The President’s Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, is quoted as saying, “America’s vast natural gas resources can generate many new jobs and provide significant environmental benefits, but we need to ensure we harness these resources safely.”

Let’s look at the members of the panel from a political point of view. It is headed by John Deutch, an MIT chemistry professor and director of a gas-pipeline operating company. It might be safe to count him in the ranks of promoters of increased gas exploration. Another person on the panel who one might believe is in favor of actually getting more natural gas to the public is Stephen Holditch, who chairs the department of petroleum engineering at Texas A&M. After him, hang onto your hats.

The other five members are: (1) the president of the Environmental Defense Fund; (2) a former aide to Al Gore past member of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection; (3) an ex-Secretary of Environmental Affairs for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; (4) energy consultant Daniel Yergin, who wrote a book called “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power”; and (5) Mark Zoback, who is a professor of geophysics at Stanford University.

Well, this is one of those times when I started out wanting to bust out of the barn with guns blazing, so to speak, but now I’m having second thoughts. Zoback, for example, seems to be a model of the scientist-engineer with a conscience. Besides writing a textbook on reservoir geomechanics which is probably one that the production companies use in training their own engineers, he teaches a course on “Sustainability and Collapse,” whatever that might mean. Still, I see the potential for deadlock in this panel. It looks like only three members are solidly from the oil-production community, and the remaining four are more critical. That’s why there are seven members and not six, so the fourth can break a tie the way the President wants it broken. And just putting an Aggie petroleum engineer in the same room with a former aide to Al Gore seems tantamount to throwing a match into a gas tank just to see what will happen.

Congressional Republicans make the sound point that the Environmental Protection Agency already has full authority to regulate fracking, and does. The big change that has happened recently in the business is not the technology, but the fact that the technology is now operating in areas where large numbers of urbanites see it and wonder what it may be doing to their water supply. Combined with last summer’s Deepwater Horizon accident, these political factors have motivated the Obama administration to try and have it both ways: to appear to be promoting domestic natural-gas exploration and production while in fact encouraging an inquiry and rulemaking effort that can only slow it down, if it does anything at all. What are the chances that the blue-ribbon panel will look at the situation and say, “By gum, you know, there’s actually too many regulations about environmental aspects of fracking. Let’s get rid of some of them so we can get more gas faster!”? Not large, you say? You’d be right.

Perhaps the best we can hope for from this panel is a well-footnoted but divided report, with a minority favoring less regulation, the majority favoring more, and the energy companies just trying to do their job responsibly in response. To the extent the panel’s actions hinder gas and oil production without making a real difference in the environment, it will have been a waste of time. To the extent they prevent a future Deepwater-Horizon type of accident in, say Edgecliff Village south of Fort Worth, well, then, maybe it was all worthwhile.

Sources: The New York Times report on the formation of the hydraulic-fracturing panel appeared on May 6, 2011 in the online edition at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/07/science/earth/07frack.html?_r=1&hpw

End of the Line for the Shuttle

As of this evening (Sunday May 1), the last flight of the Space Shuttle Endeavor has been postponed till at least May 8, a week from today. To fly, Endeavor needs hydraulic power. To make hydraulic power in space, Endeavor has three auxiliary power units (APUs) on the craft that run on hydrazine, a nasty compound that can freeze if it gets too cold, as it is apt to in space. So each APU has a heater to keep the hydrazine warm. Something went wrong with one of the power circuits to a heater, and they’re going to have to replace a switchbox. So neither President Obama nor the estimated three-quarter-million people who gathered in Florida to watch the launch had the satisfaction of seeing Endeavor take off for the last time. This turn of events was regrettable, perhaps, but in these last flights NASA seems to be erring on the side of caution, which is just as well.

In past blog posts, I have made it clear that I think the Space Shuttle program ran about a decade too long. After the 2003 Columbia disaster, it was time to rethink the nation’s entire approach to space and space exploration. Instead, patches were applied to patches, and the program has limped along for eight more years, fortunately without further loss of life, unless you count James Vanover, a 53-year-old contract engineer who fell to his death at the launch pad last March 14. I’m sure Mrs. Vanover counts him, even if others don’t.

Even the simplest orbit-capable rocket is a horrendously complex engineered system. And making one that is both safe enough and powerful enough to carry people­–and all their necessary comforts of home such as food, air, water, and room enough to move around in–is vastly harder than simply putting some non-breathing, non-eating, and expendable hardware up there. So for decades, the vast majority of scientists who really want to do science in space have favored cutting back or eliminating manned space flight in preference to putting much more efficient dollars into unmanned launches of robot probes such as the highly successful Mars rover.

Of course, science and engineering are hopelessly confused in the public mind. Just this morning at church, one of the worship team leaders said something about “this doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this out.” “Rocket scientist” is one of those phrases that has taken on a life of its own, although you could argue that the last true rocket scientist was Newton, in the sense that he wrote down the fundamental equations that turned rocketry from a mysterious art into an engineering chore. Ever since then, we’ve had lots of rocket engineers, but strictly speaking, no rocket scientists.

It’s fruitless to point out these pedantic trivialities to millions who will go on saying “rocket scientist” and thinking the United States will take another big step toward the Hall of Shame if we can no longer put a man into space. But manned space flight has always been about something more than science, or even engineering, though it has taken billions of dollars’ worth of both to achieve it and keep it going. In the 1960s the space race was a sublimated way to fight the Cold War. In the 1980s, the Shuttle program turned into a political football that provided convenient ways for congressmen to send federal dollars to their states and districts. Any science that gets done with it is sort of a byproduct, a kind of window-dressing to make it more presentable to the public. This is not to criticize the scientists who manage to get good science done even with all the constraints posed by the Shuttle. But if we had the last thirty years to do all over again, with the same funding but no people in space, we probably could have built five or six Hubble telescopes or their more advanced equivalents for the same money it cost to keep the Shuttle cripping along all this time.

From an engineering point of view, the politics has clouded the situation again. Constellation, the leading candidate to replace the Shuttle, is now basically canceled, and there is no clear consensus on what we ought to do next. One option favored by President Obama (and this is one of the few proposals he has made which seems sensible to me) is to turn NASA into a contract-supervision outfit, and let private enterprise conduct the work of space exploration, including making money at it if that can be done. Clearly, the U. S. government will be the main, if not the only, customer for the near future, even if most of NASA’s work is privatized. And that brings us back to the main question: what good is manned space flight?

It’s not science. And it’s engineering, strictly speaking, only if it makes money. So what if we as a nation explore space for the same reason mountaineers climb mountains: because it’s there? That is an esthetic, or if you prefer, even a religious reason. And there are large numbers of people involved with space and related matters (such as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) whose secret or not-so-secret hope is that we will either find somebody else out there, or we’ll eventually move out there ourselves in a big way, not a few at a time in a glorified flying tuna can.

Thinking that it is man’s destiny either to live on other planets, or to find beings who live on other planets, is so far an act of faith. While this is a free country and everyone has a right to their own beliefs, we also have what is called disestablishment of religion. That means one religious group can’t get the government to tax everybody to pay for their own worship services. To the extent that manned spaceflight is an act of worship in the religion of space destiny, I for one would like to see my tax dollars go somewhere else.

Sources: The latest Space Shuttle launch schedules, news releases, and other helpful information can be found at the NASA website www.nasa.gov.