Fighting Dengue Fever with Engineered Mosquitoes: Good News or Otherwise?

Today’s online New York Times carries a story about a new way to fight dengue fever, a tropical disease that afflicts an estimated 50 to 100 million people annually and kills about 25,000 people a year. The disease is carried by a single species of mosquito, so if you can reduce or eliminate that mosquito, you also reduce the risk of dengue fever. Historically, spraying noxious pesticides was the only way to kill mosquitoes over large regions, but a British firm called Oxitec has developed a clever way to decimate populations of Aedes aegypti, the species that carries the disease. They have used genetic engineering to create a line of mosquitoes that die before reaching adulthood unless they are fed a particular chemical (specifically, tetracycline, an antibiotic). So to spell doom to Aedes aegypti, Oxitec breeds thousands of these mosquitoes in captivity by feeding them tetracycline, then releases them into the wild. In order not to make the mosquito problem temporarily worse, only males (which do not bite humans) are released. These little genetic time-bomb males look just as attractive to the native females, but their progeny don’t get their tetracycline fix in the wild, and die out before they can spread dengue fever. Population simulations show that once a certain percentage of wild females mate with the modified males, the entire mosquito population should collapse in that region.

Dengue fever is a truly miserable disease, as you can tell from its informal name, “breakbone fever.” I have known several people who have had it, and although they didn’t endure the severe hemorrhagic form (which is often fatal), it was one of the worst experiences of their lives because of the nightmarish bone and joint pain. So anything reasonable that will keep people from getting this disease is welcome news in my book.

This blog is about engineering ethics, not media ethics, although I must say that the news article in which this work is reported emphasizes the possible hazards of the new development. For example, in selecting which mosquitoes to releas, it’s hard to tell male mosquitoes from female ones, at least if you aren’t a mosquito yourself, so inevitably a few biting females are always released with the males. And the Times reporter found an academic spokesperson who criticized some field tests as being inadequately reviewed and vetted with public notification, pointing out that the tests have been made in countries such as the Grand Cayman Islands which have relatively weak regulatory structures.

From what I can tell, however, the Oxitec people have followed all applicable protocols, and the first notification of their work to the scientific community was a peer-reviewed publication in Nature Biotechnology. In this they are following accepted scientific procedure rather than rushing out with a news conference in advance of peer review.

For various reasons, the phrase “genetically modified” has become a trigger for fear and opposition in Europe, especially, as well as other regions. There is no single word to describe the situation in which a technology is feared, not because it has ever led to any significant harm to the general public, but for other reasons. One cynical view holds that because genetically modified crops were first developed to a large extent in the U. S., they posed an economic threat to European farmers, who then mounted a scare campaign to induce public fear and obtain legal restrictions against the sale of such products. If this was the case, the farmers largely succeeded, and now the fear of genetically modified anything is one of the background assumptions of millions of people.

One thing that is hard for some engineers to learn is the fact that when millions of people, including potential customers or otherwise affected parties, hold a particular view about something even if the view cannot be logically or reasonably supported, one cannot simply ignore that view and pretend it doesn’t exist. This may be one reason that Oxitec chose to try out their mosquitoes in places where people generally have more important things to worry about than genetically modified insects. Most places where dengue fever is a problem are poor and have inferior healthcare systems, and illness can mean loss of a job (assuming one has a job to start with). So to people in sub-Saharan Africa or Papua New Guinea, a company that lets a few non-biting mosquitoes loose in order to reduce the chances of your getting dengue fever looks like a good deal.

No engineering can be carried out without money, and Oxitec is hoping that they can show enough good results for their process to be paid for by governments who see the doomed-mosquito trick to be more cost-effective than treating millions for the effects of dengue fever, or even worse, doing nothing. Obviously they have some challenges ahead of them, but it seems short-sighted to me to throw up roadblocks just because the whole idea of genetically modified critters is under a cloud in some places.

The best argument I can think of for opposing the general release of genetically modified mosquitoes is that there may be some sinister unintended consequence lurking in the background. But that’s why people do field tests: to uncover such problems and deal with them before they cause widespread harm. Here’s hoping that Oxitec does a good job of looking out for such problems, fixes them if they occur, and then goes on to alleviate the miseries of dengue fever for millions of people worldwide.

Sources: The New York Times article by Andrew Pollack on Oxitec’s effort appeared on Oct. 31, 2011 at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/31/science/concerns-raised-about-genetically-engineered-mosquitoes.html. I also referred to the Wikipedia article about dengue fever.

Steve Jobs and the Esthetics of Computers

When Apple co-founder and longtime CEO Steve Jobs passed away earlier this month, the tributes, laments, and commentaries were all out of proportion to the usual “captain-of-industry” obituaries. That’s because Jobs was not just a captain of industry, though he was that. More than anyone else, he was identified with the esthetic associated with everything Apple, including the Macintosh computer.

Pardon me if I get shamelessly nostalgic for a moment. I saw my first Macintosh at the home of a missionary friend of ours in North Carolina in the late 1980s. Because the first Mac came out in 1984, this must have been either a Mac Plus or perhaps an SE. Anyway, the minute I saw how the mouse worked and how you could escape the hated DOS magic words by just clicking on things on the screen, I fell in love with it. In fact, one day not too long after that, my wife found me in flagrante delicto in bed—with a rented Mac. Despite her initial objections to my taking a computer to bed with me, she soon came around, and when she found out you could do really cool graphics on the thing, she started to learn drawing programs on it. This eventually turned into a full-time job for her at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I worked at the time, and she became the staff technical illustrator for their College of Engineering.

Through thick and thin (notably thin in the 1990s during Jobs’ absence), we have stuck with Macs ever since. As Bill Gates and Microsoft came to dominate the non-artistic consumer and business computer world, I eventually had to buy a PC or two to run software that was not available on the Mac platform. But I always sort of mentally hold my nose whenever I have to do that, putting up with the cheesy-looking graphics, relatively speaking, and the just-good-enough compromises that characterize Windows products compared to Apple stuff.

That is pure personal opinion, and while the Mac-versus-PC battles have largely subsided since the turn of the twenty-first century, there is an odd analogy between what brand of computer one uses and the religion one subscribes to. Ideally, a religion shapes one’s entire worldview and positively influences one’s daily life. The mechanical reliability and elegance of Macintosh products and the style of the OS X operating environment do those things for me, on a small scale. And the fanatic perfectionism that Steve Jobs was famous (or infamous) for is no small reason why Macs and other Apple products such as the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad are so easy to incorporate into one’s life.

Jobs was as much an artist as he was an engineer or entrepreneur. His superabundant talents allowed him to metaphorically zoom along at 80 in a sportscar while most people were still on foot, whether the task was designing a motherboard, inventing a new form of entertainment medium, or rescuing a moribund company.

It’s interesting, though not always illuminating, to inquire into a famous person’s faith, or at least evidences of it. By most accounts I’ve read, the faith Jobs was most often associated with was Buddhism. He ate no meat (only fish), and in his early years made a pilgrimage to India to an ashram. Why someone deeply influenced by Buddhism would wind up inventing world-changing people-friendly hardware is not obvious. There are plenty of Buddhists who have not done anything like that, so Buddhism alone isn’t the answer to the “why” of Jobs’ career.

But I think the style of Apple can be traced, at least in part, to elements of Buddhism.

The essence of the old DOS operating system was the command. You typed in a command, and the computer (presumably) obeyed. But you had first to learn all those commands, so in a way the computer was in charge, not you, if you didn’t know any commands. So the first thing a person had to do in order to use an old-style IBM PC was to go to school to learn some arbitrary commands cooked up by programmers, who were the real commanders of the whole business. It was a hierarchy: the programmers, the user, the computer.

Now, hierarchies have their place. I’m a Christian, and in many places the Christian universe is portrayed hierarchically: God at the top, then angels, then mankind, then the lower animals, plants, and inanimate objects (the Great Chain of Being, so called). But it’s not necessarily the best way to organize computing for the average person.

The Apple esthetic is to subsume the programmers, the technical junk, and the magic words into the invisible interior of the machine. What the user sees is simplicity, elegance, and hardware and software that is seamlessly integrated, both with each other and with the natural way humans do things: we point at things we’re interested in, we touch things to get stuff, our visual field focuses in on things of interest, and so on. With Apple machines, you get the feeling that people come first. The hardware and software are only means to the end of accomplishing something truly beneficial to humanity, with the rough edges smoothed off. To the greatest extent possible, the average person’s native abilities are often sufficient for the task. The highest compliment an operating system can get is that it’s “intuitive,” and that is true of most Apple designs.

It’s not a coincidence or fluke that after his difficulties that led to his leaving Apple in 1985, Jobs found success with the movie studio that eventually became Pixar. The vital thing in movies is to appeal to as many people as you can, tapping typical emotions that the vast majority of us have in common. This sense of what the average person wants to do, and what they’ll think is funny or appealing, was at the heart of everything Jobs did, whether it was encouraging innovative animation at Pixar or innovative hardware design at Apple.

How is that more like Buddhism than Christianity? Well, it’s certainly not hierarchical. The Beatles, who were heavily influenced by Buddhism, made famous the phrase “Let it be.” Jobs let human nature be, and adapted his signature products to the way people are, not the way some programmer wants them to be. And the world is richer for all he did. Not necessarily in the sense of more wealthy, though that has happened too. But richer in the way that every truly meritorious work of art makes us all richer. Recquiescat in pace.

Bitcoin: Currency of the Future?

The first person who came up with the idea of money did more to advance civilization than most inventors whose names we know. Trade, commerce, and financial operations would be inconvenient or impossible without it. Money is one of the most real and commonplace things that people deal with, but for all that, it is fundamentally a non-material entity. And a person (or persons) known as “Mr. Nakamoto” has recently pushed the idea of money that much closer to its true essence, which belongs wholly in the realm of ideas.

In January of 2009, Bitcoin was born. It is a totally digital form of currency. Instead of dollar bills, or numbers in a bank account representing dollar bills or any other sovereign currency, bitcoin exists physically only on computers running a highly sophisticated encryption software program written by Nakamoto himself (we will refer to him thus for convenience, although he may in fact be a team of programmers, or even a secret branch of a government agency, for all I know).

Where do bitcoins come from? A computer-operated lottery that anyone with a fast enough computer can play. Practically speaking, only people who devote considerable computational resources to the task stand a reasonable chance of winning the lottery, which will be played every ten minutes or so for the next twenty years, at which point about 21 million bitcoins will be in circulation. These specialists are called “miners” because of the obvious analogy to gold mining.

What is a bitcoin worth, in terms of a dollar? Right now, about three dollars and eighty cents, depending on market fluctuations. Bitcoins have been much higher—up to twenty-nine dollars last June—but there’s been a bit of a bitcoin bubble, apparently, and so anyone who bought some last summer is probably regretting their decision.

Can you counterfeit bitcoins? Not so far. Mr. Nakamoto is a very good cryptographer, and no one has been able to fool his software into taking bogus bitcoins. The system is based on digital security that verifies bitcoins as genuine articles (I suppose it’s sort of like serial numbers on dollar bills), and so faking bitcoins is not practically possible.

Is the bitcoin legal tender? Here we get into a hazy area. There are U. S. laws against making and selling coins or other currency “intended as current money.” In other words, places such as the Franklin Mint have the excuse that they’re really selling their commemorative coins and other objects of value to coin collectors for esthetic reasons, despite the fact that many “collectors” simply buy them as an investment. But bitcoin goes farther than that. You can buy things with it, keep it in a digital “wallet,” exchange it online for a wide variety of other currencies, and treat in most ways just like money. The only thing that stops Mr. Nakamoto from getting in trouble with the FBI is, well, nobody knows who or where he is. Which is, I’m sure, one reason he took care to erase his digital footprints, despite the efforts of many people, including New Yorker writer Joshua Davis, to identify him.

I first learned about bitcoin from Davis’s article in last week’s New Yorker magazine. The essentially non-material aspect of money has fascinated me for years, and to find that someone has pursued their individual idea to the point that millions of dollars of equivalent cash in bitcoin is now floating around the Internet is intriguing, to say the least.

According to an article Mr. Nakamoto reportedly posted, he invented bitcoin because was hacked (meaning irritated, not digitally outsmarted) at the tendency of governments to inflate their fiat currencies whenever they got into a financial bind. Fiat currency is any type of money not tied by law to an article of intrinsic value. The U. S. dollar has been fiat currency ever since we went off the gold standard in 1933, and most other countries have the same setup.

Technologically, bitcoin wasn’t possible until the Internet developed, and now that it’s here I’m not sure what its fate will be. In perilous economic times, people tend to run away from ethereal-sounding concepts and head toward investment instruments that have historically proven to be sound: U. S. government bonds, gold, diamonds, that sort of thing. Of course, bonds are just the paper documentation for a promise made by a government. And all we have to back bitcoin is Mr. Nakamoto’s promise that he won’t flood the market with bitcoins at some time in the future, if he happens to get hard up for lunch money some day. This shows that any currency that exists in time must of necessity be based on some mass expectation of how its issuer will behave in the future. When bitcoin goes up in comparison to the dollar, I suppose it says that some number of people concerned about both currencies trust Mr. Nakamoto more than they trust Uncle Sam, at least for the moment. Which, if you think about it, is a remarkable thing to do.

I own no bitcoin, nor do I plan to invest in any, although I may check out its price from time to time. As the world’s first supra-national digital currency, it deserves some attention from ethicists who no doubt have opinions about this novel way of dealing with the problem of currency. And it will be interesting if we ever find out who Mr. Nakamoto is, assuming he shows up some day. But unless the world economy gets a whole lot weirder than it is already, I expect bitcoin may just fade away and become a historical memory, like emu farms. Remember emu farms and emu oil? If you don’t, don’t worry about it.

Sources: Joshua Davis’s article “The Crypto-Currency” appeared in the Oct. 10, 2011 issue of The New Yorker. I also referred to an article on pseudo-currency laws in the Wall Street Journal at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704425804576220383673608952.html

and the Wikipedia article on bitcoin.

Neutrinos Faster Than Light? Not So Fast

Last month, researchers at CERN, the European high-energy-physics lab that houses the world’s most powerful atom smasher, announced that they had detected a subatomic particle in the act of breaking the speed limit posted by Officer Einstein. In other words, their data indicated that the particles—very light, hard-to-detect items called neutrinos—covered a distance of some 400-plus miles and took about sixty-billionths of a second less time than they should have. It’s like the man who said good-by to his wife and drove his sports car to a town 80 miles away. When he got there she called him and asked: “Are you there yet?” When he said yes, she said, “Well, you’ve been speeding again. You left 45 minutes ago.” The neutrinos got from CERN’s accelerator (it’s so big it covers portions of France and Switzerland, I believe) to an underground detector in Gran Sasso, Italy a little too faster than they should have.

If the results are independently confirmed, they will rank as one of the most important experimental discoveries of the century. And if they are not, they will show how the way science is conducted has changed over the last few decades, and not for the better.

I am not a professional physicist, though I know enough about the subject to start squinting when someone comes up with a claim that anything, from a microwave to a piece of peanut brittle, has been measured as traveling faster than the speed of light. One of the two pillars of modern science is relativity, whose fundamental postulate is that no signal (an event capable of carrying information) can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. (The other pillar is quantum mechanics.) So within hours of the announcement, theorists had lined up on both sides of the aisle, one group claiming that the discovery confirmed their pet theories, and the other citing seventeen different reasons why the experimentalists had to be wrong. It was quite a show.

And the show-business aspect is why the whole scene bothers both me and Laurence Krauss, a highly qualified physicist who wrote an op-ed piece in the L. A. Times criticizing the way the discovery was presented.

The normal procedure is for scientists to submit new work to a refereed journal. In many fields, this step is preceded by informal publication on a site such as arxiv.org, where non-refereed papers can be published online under certain conditions. But everybody understands this is tantamount to thinking out loud, and an essential part of the scientific process of investigating the validity of new results is for qualified colleagues to critique the paper during the process of peer review by referees. Sometimes this results in the paper being rejected, but more often, criticism in the right spirit points out weaknesses or omissions that the authors can correct to make the final publication even better. Only when the paper is published (and in the case of unusual results such as CERN’s, duplicated by different laboratories), should the public in general be informed that, hey, we may really have something here.

As is so often done these days, however, the CERN authors called a news conference to discuss the implications of their paper before it had been peer-reviewed. This short-circuits the referee process and puts highly digested and simplified versions of the science out into the general blogosphere, where hun-yocks like me can have a go at it whether we are qualified or not.

As Krauss points out in his opinion piece, the result is a brief flurry of ambiguous reports of the original news, together with pro- and con-comments from other experts which largely cancel each other out. Then the whole thing is forgotten, at least by the non-experts who hear about it between an ad for an energy drink and the latest on how the Texas Rangers are doing. It’s this kind of thing that gives science a bad name. It will take a lot of work to degrade the prestige of science down to the point where the average citizen will take the word of a Congressman over the word of a physicist, but news conferences about results that haven’t been peer-reviewed take us a little bit in that direction.

I have probably mentioned that years ago, I attended a conference in China at which an otherwise well-reputed professor of microwave engineering reported that he had measured microwaves traveling at a speed greater than light. I wrote an article on his work, and included some other examples of instances where experimentalists deluded themselves, not out of a desire to deceive, but out of a combination of inadequate care to keep their own psychology from skewing the process, and a strong wish to discover something remarkable.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to discover something remarkable. I have had that desire off and on myself. But doing new science is very hard work, and when you get a result that would upset most of the applecart of existing physical law, the first thing to do is not rush out and invite in a bunch of science reporters. The thing to do is to ask your colleagues, including your worst enemies, to come over and throw as many rocks as they can at your methods, your calculations, your assumptions, and your instrumentation (metaphorically speaking, of course). The more remarkable the result, the more rocks.

The worst that can happen this way is that you will be humbled to discover where you have made your mistake, and both you and your critic will have learned something. You will learn what you did wrong, and your critic will learn that you are the type of physicist who can benefit with good grace from constructive criticism. And you will avoid looking foolish in public, because the situation will have been kept among professionals rather than plastered all over the Internet.

Instead, the CERN people have stuck their necks out and made headlines (and engendered a lot of jokes, too, but that’s somewhat beside the point). Whether they deserve the headlines remains to be seen. If the result holds up (which I personally think it won’t—their geographic accuracy alone had to be on the order of ten feet in 400 miles), they will deserve not only the favorable publicity they have gotten already, but probably a Nobel Prize. If the result is shown to be in error, you probably won’t see a single headline about it. There will just be a lot of question marks in the public’s mind like, “Didn’t they say something goes faster than light? Wonder what happened to that? Those scientists can’t make up their minds about anything anymore.” And that won’t be good for science.

Sources: The CERN news was reported by many sources, and appeared with commentary on the Scientific American website http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/degrees-of-freedom/2011/10/02/superluminal-neutrinos-would-wimp-out-en-route/

Laurence M. Krauss’ op-ed piece appeared at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-krauss-neutrino-20111004,0,7882894.story

And my article on the supposedly superluminal microwaves was entitled "N-rays, super-dielectrics, and microwaves faster than light: improbable discoveries in electromagnetics," and appeared in IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 13-18, June 1993; a letter by me pertaining to the same subject was published in IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, vol. 36, no. 5, p. 72, Oct. 1994. And I’ve used “hun-yock” before—look it up at http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hunyock.

Cybervetting and You

Although I hope any engineer can benefit on occasion from this blog, I am especially keen to discuss matters that younger engineers and engineering students can use. One concern I’ve addressed before continues to come up in news reports, and now a scholarly article by William Herbert in the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine. For those of you who use social media such as Facebook and Twitter, it’s something you ignore at your peril: the increasing practice of “cybervetting” by firms looking to hire new staff.

In the old days, meaning pre-Internet, young people did foolish things just as much or more so than they do now. Suppose a group of engineering students in 1980 went out and had a little too much to drink, found some young women in the same condition (back then the vast majority of engineering students were men), and did things that, say, they wouldn’t want their parents to know about. And suppose that one of the engineers brought along a camera and took pictures of the proceedings. Short of blackmail, there’s nothing much that one could do with such pictures, and normally they’d either be forgotten, or turn up some day when the now-soberly-married-with-children husband gets a question from his wife who is cleaning out the attic: “Is this you in this picture? And who’s that girl?”

But fast-forward to today. We engineers have transformed the social world of young people around the world. Cell phones and digital cameras and Internet connections are ubiquitous. The barriers to mass duplication of embarrassing images of all kinds are so low that the only thing standing in the way is often one’s inhibitions, which alcohol or a party atmosphere can lower so much that one does things without thinking of the consequences. Only now, the consequences can damage your career.

In his article, Herbert cites two surveys that show over 70% of job recruiters admit that they do online searches (“cybervetting”) of potential hires, and just as many say they have rejected applications based on information they have found that way. This means that when you apply for a job, you can assume your potential employer is going to do some checking up on whatever publicly accessible information is out there about you. And because the operators of social media have strong financial motivations to make more information easy to get at, it’s likely that if you’ve ever posted anything you might not want someone to see, they’ll be able to see it anyway.

In the current economy there are all kinds of reasons for employers to reject applicants. But this is one you can do something about. It’s unreasonable to recommend that young people avoid social media entirely. It’s just a part of life now, and unless you become a hermit and stay away from all social events, it’s hard not to be included in group pictures, and some of those pictures may end up looking ambiguous later, to say the least. The point is, things that used to be private matters are now no longer under a single person’s control. Some guy you don’t even know might take a picture of some foolishness at a bar and you just might happen to be in the picture, and someone might tell the photographer your name. That’s all it takes for you to be famous (or infamous) in places where you have no idea your image has turned up.

And that assumes you have good judgment, which is not always the case. Many employees have lost their good jobs because of a lack of discretion regarding negative things they say about their employer on semi-private blogs. This is a gray area that requires judgment and discretion. Many companies have internal chatrooms, sort of online water-coolers, where employees virtually gather to discuss all kinds of things, and obviously one’s employer is aware of those comments. What you may not realize is that at least in the U. S., your employer has the presumptive right to look at all your electronic communications that use facilities provided by the employer. So if you send emails having nothing to do with your job, but use your employer’s network or computers to do it, they can legally read those emails as long as they have met certain minimal requirements regarding notification and so on. This is a surprise to a lot of people, but it’s true.

Employers have limits too. Herbert describes a case in which an airline pilot ran a blog which was password-protected explicitly to keep the airline he worked for from seeing it, but a vice-president of the airline persuaded another pilot to let him gain access to the blog. This action violated the terms of the blog access rules, and the pilot sued. In this case, the pilot was taking what I regard as reasonable precautions to restrict access to persons that were sympathetic with his position. But privacy is only a password away from being violated on the web, and all it takes is one person violating such trust to blow the lid off, so to speak.

By now I hope you have a bigger picture of what can happen if one’s youthful romps of an indiscreet kind show up on the computer of a recruiter whose idea of a good time may not match yours. Things are more complicated than they used to be, but that doesn’t mean you can’t both enjoy the benefits of social media and get and hold a good job. Perhaps it sounds a little extreme these days, but it’s worth considering the advice of an older professor I knew who was asked about things to watch out for when writing reports and other technical documents. He said: “One rule I’ve always followed is never to write down anything that I wouldn’t mind showing up on the front page of the New York Times.” As a matter of fact, I don’t believe anything he did or wrote ever did show up anywhere in the New York Times, but it’s not bad advice, all the same.

Sources: William A. Herbert’s article “Workplace Consequences of Electronic Exhibitionism and Voyeurism” appeared in the fall 2011 (vol. 30 no. 3) edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, pp. 25-33.

Engineers: Problem-Solvers or Creative Artists?

One aspect of engineering that technical courses don’t address very well is the attitude that an engineer should bring to the task at hand. Because so much of an engineering student’s time is spent solving problems, it’s easy to get into the habit of thinking that solving problems is all engineers do. But as the mystery writer Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) said in her book The Mind of the Maker, life isn’t a series of problems to be solved, like the whodunits she was famous for writing. Instead, the better approach is to realize that life in all its complexity and ramifications can’t simply be “solved,” except for certain narrowly defined specific cases. Life should be viewed as the raw material for a work of art, and the more creatively we approach life’s issues and difficulties and work within the limitations we are given, the better off we will be.

The Mind of the Maker is an extended comparison between, believe it or not, the creative process and the Christian religious doctrine of the Trinity. I will leave that aspect of it for another time, and concentrate instead on the criticism she makes near the end of the book about a worrisome trend that, as she wrote in 1941, was already dominating the way people thought about social and economic ills.

The mentality she decries is to view large, complicated issues as though they were numbered items at the end of an engineering textbook chapter: namely, problems that with sufficient technical effort and scientific expertise can be solved in a way that clears them up entirely. If anything, this way of thinking has only become more common in the seven decades or so that have elapsed since she criticized it. The “problem-solution” way of thinking has become ingrained in our thought processes so thoroughly that many politicians, economists, doctors, lawyers, and even theologians largely accept it without question. If all these folks think this way, why not engineers?

She answers this question by listing four ways that the kinds of solvable problems she set up in her detective fiction are different from most problems (including engineering problems) that we face in real life. These are, briefly, (1) there is always a solution to the detective-story problem, (2) when the murder mystery is solved, there’s no doubt or loose ends left over, (3) the detective problem is solved within the same framework of ideas that the writer sets out at the beginning, and (4) every detective story has an end. Engineering students can see the strong family resemblance that mystery-story problems bear to engineering-text problems: the same four features are true of both.

Writers of both detective fiction and engineering textbooks have to pose problems in these terms. Neither students nor readers of detective fiction will put up with problems that can’t be solved, leave a lot of loose ends and unanswered questions, require an unexpected type of knowledge to solve, or which go on literally forever. But Sayers’ point is that the problems we deal with in real life can do any or all of these things.

So what good is it to learn how to solve problems? A lot of good, it turns out. As engineering involves a wider variety of disciplines, the technical knowledge that engineers of various stripes acquire in their undergraduate education proves either insufficient for many tasks, or gets outmoded pretty quickly. What doesn’t get outmoded, and what makes engineers increasingly valuable in the rapidly changing world of technological society, is the ability to solve problems that are more complex, more extended, and less well defined than the textbook (or mystery-novel) variety. That’s why a substantial number of engineering graduates go on to work in fields as diverse as medical research, economics, or law: all professional disciplines need people who can solve problems, but they also need people with a wide enough vision to realize that simple-minded “turn-the-crank” solutions can only take you so far.

Sayers’ example of how a creative artist works within the limitations of a medium has lessons for engineers as well. As a classic example, she considers Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. In writing one of his most profound dramas, Shakespeare did not solve a problem, except in the limited sense of having something to attract a season’s patrons of the Globe Theater. He worked within the grand but fixed framework of human nature to explore perpetual issues of loyalty, courage, decision-making, and other matters of the heart and mind that continue to engage audiences today. Was the world any closer to solving these types of problems after Shakespeare wrote his plays? Not in the sense that just a few more years added to Shakespeare’s life would have made any of them go away. But in accepting human nature as it was and portraying it in a timeless way, Shakespeare helped everyone who can read and appreciate his plays to understand life a little better, I think. And understanding is necessary for wisdom.

Engineers rarely think of their activities as being creative, in the same sense that a Shakespeare or a Steven Spielberg is creative. No one but God is truly creative: even the most creative of artists works with the social, historical, and intellectual material at hand. But if we engineers learn to approach real-life problems, not with the mindset of finding “the” unique, cut-and-dried solution, but with the hope of learning about the limitations within which we work, and the human meanings of what we plan to do, perhaps the world will take a more enlightened view of our profession. And we will leave the world, as we eventually must, having made it a better place.

Sources: Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker was first published in 1941. I used the Harper San Francisco edition of 1987, in which Chapter XI, “Problem Picture” discusses the issues explored in today’s blog.

The Ethics of DVD Rentals: From Blockbuster to RedBox

At first glance, the ways people rent DVDs seem pretty neutral morally (that is, excluding the content of the DVDs: that’s a topic for another time). But these ways have changed a lot in the past decade or so, and anytime there is change in technology there will be winners, losers, and effects that have ethical aspects to them. This is certainly true in the DVD rental market, which has gone through at least two major transitions since about 2000.

DVDs themselves were the eventual death knell for the previous media-storage technology, the videotape cartridge. DVDs were introduced in the U. S. in 1997, the same year that a small company called Netflix was founded. Initially, DVDs were rented (or sold) through the already-established chains of video rental outlets, Blockbuster being the most prominent among many others.

From the consumer’s point of view, browsing at a video rental store was not unlike browsing at a bookstore, especially if the store was independently owned and carried a wider variety of goods than was strictly warranted by volume or profit. There is something about being physically present among a collection of physical objects that facilitates the spontaneous and serendipitous discovery, making one feel like a child exploring an unknown wood. When we moved to Austin for a year in 1999, our favorite independent video store was Vulcan Video, which was (and still is) just that kind of place where you can find the unexpected.

Then Netflix happened, Blockbuster failed to adapt, and the video-store market collapsed, aided by the Great Recession starting around 2008. As people increasingly turned to renting content either by mail or internet streaming, the overhead associated with running a brick-and-mortar store—space, utilities, and above all, salaries—overwhelmed the declining profits, and Blockbuster went bankrupt.

But an outfit named Redbox (initially funded by the fast-food chain McDonald’s, as it turns out) discovered there was still a niche for people who did not want the hassle and commitment of ordering videos in advance by mail, but who still wanted to go get a DVD on Friday night on the spur of the moment. The solution: vending machines.

The vending machine has a surprisingly long pedigree, the first one being invented around A. D. 30 by none other than Hero of Alexandria, who was one of the ancient Greek world’s leading inventors. His machine dispensed holy water in temples in response to the worshipper’s inserting a coin. The concept mostly went dormant for a couple of millennia until an enterprising English bookseller named Richard Carlisle devised a machine to sell books automatically in the late 1800s. From there the idea caught on, with food for the mouth taking precedence over food for the mind in the U. S.: gum, candy, cigarettes (remember cigarette vending machines?), and the ubiquitous soft-drink dispensers spread over the landscape.

So it only makes sense that somebody would try to rent DVDs with vending machines, aided by the ease of networked debit-card and credit-card systems. I suppose that is the way the company enforces late penalties and charges for unreturned media as well, although I have never personally rented a video through Redbox.

The other day, however, I was waiting for my wife outside a drugstore and watched several people rent videos from one of the units. One couple, a guy and his girlfriend, loudly discussed the merits of various DVDs while he was standing in front of the screen and she stood a few yards away at their car door. The screens, complete with little flexible cloth sunshades, aren’t large enough for more than one person to see at a time. Another pair, evidently a woman and her late-teenage daughter, must have flipped through the machine’s entire inventory before picking something. This particular machine has two screens, fortunately, but I can imagine that such dallying with others waiting in line could be discouraging for the impatient. Clearly the leisurely browsing in air-conditioned comfort that the vanished video store provided is a thing of the past. I forecast a big drop in Redbox sales once cold weather hits, too

The phrase “creative destruction” has been used to describe the way advances in technology render superfluous entire business segments, such as the video store. My sympathy is with the thousands of former Blockbuster employees who have now joined the ranks of the (at least temporarily) unemployed. If they were young (most of them were), they can adapt fairly quickly and find other work. They are among the losers in this process.

As for consumers, well, it’s certainly more convenient for me to just run over the couple of blocks to the drugstore and rent a video, instead of driving across town to the former Blockbuster. But I’m not sure I’d want to stand out in the sun (or the cold) and pick through stuff on a touchscreen while perhaps other patrons are standing behind me, figuratively breathing down my neck. I’ve found myself instead looking through the admittedly limited selection of DVDs and antique VHS tapes at the public library. The experience is closer to the video-store one, and somehow the taste expressed by the library’s selections is closer to mine than the kiss-kiss-bang-bang type of DVD featured by Redbox. (That was true of Blockbuster’s selection, too, and is just a function of market demographics in a college town).

Eventually, perhaps, internet downloading will be so cheap and fast that even the Redboxes will find themselves out-maneuvered. But that’s what’s so interesting about living in a free-market economy: nobody knows for sure what will happen next, even the people who are trying to make it happen.

Sources: A good mini-history of vending machines can be found at http://www.gumballs.com/history.html, which I consulted along with articles on Wikipedia about Hero of Alexandria, Redbox, and DVDs.

Electricity Comes of Age: The Flatlining of U. S. Residential Consumption

“Flatlining” is a term from medicine meaning that the patient’s heart and/or brain has ceased to function. U. S. electric utilities are very far from ceasing to function (except for the occasional brownout or blackout), but a recent Associated Press article revealed that the growth of electricity use by U. S. residential customers has slowed or even stopped, and is actually declining by some measures. This is good news for some and perhaps not so good news for others. But first we should put the matter in historical perspective.

The first consumers of mass-produced electricity were businesses and industries, for which electric power meant cash saved or earned when compared to previous ways of doing things. Originally, utilities sought to sell electricity to homes as a sideline, mainly as a way to increase the “load factor,” which means essentially the percentage of time their expensive generating stations were running efficiently at close to capacity. Factories and businesses ran during the day, so having someplace to sell electricity in the evenings was a profitable new business for the utilities to explore. So for most of the twentieth century, the electric utilities’ marching orders to residential customers were to sell, sell, sell. And they did. By about 1925, half of all U. S. residences were wired, and the momentum to do more and more with electricity carried over well into the 1960s. Some of my older readers may recall “Reddy Kilowatt,” a cartoon character fashioned from a light bulb, who urged customers to rely on electric power from everything from clothes drying to brushing your teeth in your new home that sported the all-electric medallion next to the doorbell.

Somewhere around 1980, the tide began to turn. The rise of the environmental movement, the energy crises triggered by oil-cartel actions, and anxiety about nuclear power inspired by the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents combined with concerns raised in the 1990s about global warming and carbon footprints. Add to these cultural factors the hard objective facts that the market for new energy-consuming appliances was pretty well saturated and electric rates were rising, and sooner or later NOT consuming more electricity started to look better than the alternative for many people.

In addition, the deregulation trend finally reached the electric-utility business and fundamentally changed how power companies made money. Until deregulation, state regulatory boards guaranteed the industry a fixed percentage of profit, and the best model was to grow sales so as to increase the absolute profit in dollars. But after deregulation with its accompanying price competition and downward pressure on expenses, encouraging consumers to use less electricity actually started to make sense sometimes, when the alternative was adding expensive generating capacity.

There are many other factors in the current (pardon the pun) flattening of demand, but the portrayal of reducing energy usage as a virtue together with a change in the mix of appliances that use juice probably account for much of the decline in growth. Newer houses and appliances simply use less electricity to do the same thing compared to older models. And one cannot deny that government-supervised incentive programs such as the Energy Star rating system for appliances has played an important role.

A longstanding theme in modern engineering is efficiency, defined broadly as achieving a given result with the minimum use of resources. From the perspective of efficiency, the prospective decline in residential electricity use can only be welcomed, at least to the extent that it represents true gains in efficiency and not simply people using less of everything because they’re out of work, for example. (There is some of that, too.) One can carry this trend to an unhealthy extreme, such as some Europeans have done in designing and living in houses that use no energy for heating or cooling, relying only on incidental heat produced by water heaters and electric appliances. One can do such a thing, but only at the expense of hugely thick insulated walls, a floor plan that approximates an igloo, and exotic measures such as giant air heat exchangers in the basement.

What of the future? If I were an investor, I would look somewhat skeptically at the electric utility business, at least its residential sector, because growth is the fundamental watchword for a capitalist economy. Investing in a no-growth business is not generally perceived as a smart move. If the old regulated system still prevailed, things would be different, and industrial electric usage is still expected to rise for some years. But as the news item pointed out, unless some radical new use for electricity in homes is devised such as the explosive growth of the overnight-charging electric-car market, a declining demand for a commodity is generally a sign that rough financial times lie ahead. State regulation was implemented widely in the 1930s to stabilize a deteriorating private market for electricity, and if something similar happens in the future, deregulation may lose its attractiveness and we may see state regulatory boards stepping in once more.

So will Reddy Kilowatt ride again? I doubt it. No one gives their water utility much thought, largely because it is a well-established industry for which not many new uses are being developed. The same thing may happen to electricity. But the one thing that’s certain about developments in technology is that something no one guessed would happen, is bound to happen sooner or later.

Sources: The Associated Press article on declining growth in residential electricity use in the U. S. appeared in numerous places, and I saw it in the Austin American-Statesman, where it was carried online at http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/shocker-power-demand-from-us-homes-is-falling-1825755.html?cxtype=rss_ece_frontpage.

Is the Internet a Drug?

The dangers of alcohol abuse are too well-known to be questioned, although most societies have decided that the dangers are not so widespread and inevitable as to require absolute prohibition of alcohol use. We tried that in the U. S. from 1920 to 1933 and it is now generally regarded as a failure. A psychiatrist named Elias Aboujaoude has described how one’s use of the Internet can lead to personality changes both online and offline that are just as serious as those resulting from alcohol abuse. When I heard him interviewed recently, it struck a chord with me because I have recently had a couple of experiences that made me think he is right.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we hosted our ten-year-old nephew for a couple of months this summer. There were many ups and downs in that connection, but the specific effect I noted came after he was allowed (unwisely, on our part) to view hours of YouTube videos produced by teenagers playing certain Nintendo games.

It was interesting to watch the change that came over the boy as he sat on the couch, watching the screen images and wearing headphones because the noise was too much for us to put up with if he played it over the speakers. Hypnotism isn’t too strong a word for it. The worst came when we needed to talk with him for mundane things like getting him to come to supper. The first time I’d speak to him he would almost never respond. So I’d raise my voice slightly, thinking he didn’t hear me through the din of the video game and adolescent narration. When my voice finally registered, it was like the Tasmanian Devil had been disturbed in his lair. “Whaddaya want??!!” is the general tenor of the responses I’d get, none of which were socially acceptable, at least in my book. It would take him several minutes to mentally disengage himself from the machine and get to where he could approximate a reasonable member of society again.

In the child’s defense, he was dealing with some difficulties in his own family, and zoning out on YouTube may have been a kind of coping mechanism. But nothing else he did (with the exception of playing with his Nintendo itself) made him as cranky and rude as watching those YouTube videos.

I also experienced something similar when I went to a retreat center for a couple of days in mid-August. It is in a remote area and set up as a contemplative Catholic retreat, where no talking is allowed. And I had no radio or Internet access. I liked the experience so much that when I came back, I intentionally limited my time on the Internet to strictly work-related matters such as email and looking up specific information. In particular, I dropped my viewing of news sites, which had become a kind of killing-time activity I would do several times a day.

It wasn’t a controlled experiment, because several other things changed at the same time, but I attribute at least part of my noticeable increase in calmness, lack of stress, and feeling more rested to my abstention from what had become a pernicious Internet habit. I may eventually go back to viewing some of those sites on a limited basis, but right now I like the benefits better than whatever enjoyment I got out of them.

Neither I nor my nephew suffered from the more acute maladies that Dr. Aboujaoude sees in his practice of treating sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Although I have not read his book Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality, in the interview I heard he described five types of problems that can result from spending hours online, especially if one’s participation is more active than just reading or viewing. People who participate in the kind of mob-psychology forums that encourage “flaming” and anonymous posts are particularly susceptible to these problems.

The two problems that struck me as especially insightful were grandiosity, a technical term that means having a self-image that is much better than reality, and narcissism. People with these problems tend to think they are smarter, more important, and much more worth listening to than the average person online, and neglect the needs and feelings of others they encounter. It is a kind of delusion that the Internet encourages: a false image that you are the center of your electronic universe and everything is under your control. The real trouble is that these traits acquired online tend to stay with you in the rest of your life as well. Combine those with regression and impulsivity (two more dangers Aboujaounde has identified), and you get the kind of grossly indiscreet behavior that former U. S. Representative Anthony Weiner confessed to engaging in last June. My initial reaction to the news that someone in such a responsible position sent photos of his naughty bits to not just one, but several women, was disbelief. Rep. Weiner has apparently admitted to extensive online activity of other types as well, and the Internet may have had the effects on him that Aboujaounde describes in his patients. Given enough doses of grandiosity and narcissism, a person might delude himself into thinking that certain personal closeups are exactly what Miss X is wanting to see. Add some impulsivity that would lead you to do something that a little reflection would reveal as foolish, and there you are. Or were—Rep. Weiner eventually resigned.

The Internet doesn’t come in little cardboard boxes that we can put warning labels on, as the federal government requires cigarette makers to do. The hazards are much less quantifiable than smoking, but I think the effects are just as real. In the absence of such warnings, I think it is just up to everyone who uses the Internet for any reason to be aware that it can be habit-forming, and many of the habits it forms are not good ones.

Sources: An online (!) audio publication called Mars Hill Audio (www.marshillaudio.org) carried the interview with Dr. Elias Aboujaounde in their March/April 2011 (Vol. 108) edition. His book Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality was published in 2011 by W. W. Norton.