A Trip To the Genius Bar

It is a sad fact of life that even the best-engineered system breaks down from time to time.  Hence repairmen (or should I say repair people, these days) are assured of job security, although the types of repairs they make have changed radically over the years.  For a few summers in high school and college, I worked as a repair technician at an audiovisual services shop, fixing tape recorders and dealing mainly with mechanical rather than electrical troubles.  But when my Mac laptop started acting up the other day, I decided to take it to the 2012 version of Mac’s fix-it shop:  the Genius Bar.

That’s an inspired name, by the way, evoking images of a drinking establishment with a bouncer that lets in only MENSA members with IQs above 140.  What it is in fact is a counter at the rear of an Apple retail store in an Austin shopping mall.  I had heard recently that Apple retail stores have the highest sales figures per square foot of store area of any type of mall store, and after visiting one, I believe it.

The display windows showed life-size cutout profiles of two people enjoying some of the latest Mac products.  Just a few minutes after the store opened at 10, it was as crowded as a discount clothing store during tax-free weekend.  And about half the people inside wore identical blue tee-shirts with Mac logos:  the sales staff.  Someone greeted me as soon as I stepped in the door.  I explained that I had gone online and made an appointment for 10:15 at the Genius Bar, and the man referred me to another sales associate, a young woman carrying an iPad (clipboards are so twentieth-century), who looked up my name and said it would be just a few minutes.  I was early, so I didn’t mind waiting.

Customers, or potential customers, were everywhere, trying out the wares displayed on clean, simple white box-like tables or browsing through the accessories for iPads, iPhones, and i don’t know what all else.  I wasn’t in the market for any of those, so I poked around where they had custom-made cases for iPads.  The one I found most amusing was made to look like a codex:  one of those pre-printing-press books with thick hand-painted leather binding.  It gave me the same kind of feeling I had when I first heard a student’s cellphone in my class emit a classic mechanical-bell ringtone.

Pretty soon yet a third salesperson hunted me down.  “Karl?  We’re ready for you, have a seat right here.”  It was just a bare counter with four high stools and barely enough elbow room to separate me from an older woman with a German accent who was explaining what her Macbook Air wasn’t doing right.

My genius (I’ll call him Biff) was a late-twenty-something man who was distinguished from many of the other salespeople by not having any tattoos.  He asked me what the problem was.  I told him my Magic Mouse did all its magic except scrolling, and it wasn’t the mouse because it would scroll fine with my wife’s computer.

He tried some obvious things first.  Logging in as a guest, he discovered that when he did that, the mouse worked.  That was progress, but he explained that all it told him was that some of my custom library and root stuff was corrupted, because when a guest logs in the library is empty.

I will not bore you with what all he tried in the next half hour.  At one point, because no one had mentioned charges or fees, I asked him what this would cost.  “Nothing unless we turn a screw.”  So software fixes were free.  That sounded good.  Every so often he’d spin the computer over to me and ask me to enter my password again.  I must have done that fifteen or twenty times.  It gave me a nice but entirely spurious sense that I was assisting in the repair.

At one point he turned to the fellow genius next to him, an older guy with a short beard, earrings, and many tattoos.  The guy said, “Don’t try this unless you know what you’re doing,” went into some mysterious part of the file system where all the files were labeled with incomprehensible abbreviations like “ertx” and “infpro,” but failed to fix the problem.  My genius reset something on the machine that took a few minutes and excused himself to go in the back and consult with the web, I suppose.

When he came back, I said I supposed they wouldn’t let him work on my machine all day, would they?  Was there a time limit?

“Not a time limit exactly, but a goal.  We can be somewhat flexible, and there’s one more thing I can try.”  Saying thus, he opened some files and started selectively wiping out whole sections.  I got a little nervous and recalled Mark Twain’s saying that “a good horse was a good horse until it had run away once, and a good watch was a good watch until the repairers got a chance at it.”  But this wasn’t the first time the machine (a fairly new one) had been in for repairs, so it wasn’t really relevant to the case.

Finally, Biff turned my Mac back to me and said, “Now, one more password entry, and see what it does now.”  Then he tried stroking the mouse’s back, and this time it scrolled.  And we were in my library, not the guest’s empty one.  I congratulated Biff, thanked him for his time, packed up my Mac, and walked through the crowd surging around the thousands of dollars’ worth of retail merchandise I steadfastly refrained from buying, and went about the rest of my day.

Was it ethical for me to take a half hour of a genius’s time and get a repair that probably would have cost me upwards of a hundred dollars at a non-genius shop?  Well, I look at it this way.  If they really sell five thousand dollars a year of stuff from that place for every square foot in it, they seem to think they can afford to give away free software repairs in the back.  And if some customers take advantage of this service without leaving some of their cash behind for other more costly attractions on display, well, it’s just a cost of doing business that way.  I for one thank Apple for being so generous, and only wish there were more Apple retail stores nationwide.  But that would spell trouble for all the other Mac repair shops, so maybe things are just as well the way they are.

 

Sources:  The statistic on retail sales in Mac stores (their figure of $5,647 per square foot, presumably per year, is seventeen times the U. S. mall store average of $341) is from an MSN Money article published on April 19, 2012 at http://money.msn.com/top-stocks/post.aspx?post=f87ebfd7-fcf1-4bdb-9489-d752d85293b6.  Mark Twain’s comment about horses and watches, which he attributes to his deceased Uncle William, is in his short story, “My Watch.” 

Copyright or Copy Wrong?

Over a hundred years ago, when newspapers existed exclusively on paper and the fastest way news traveled was by tapping telegraph keys and not computer keys, newspaper editors established a practice called the “exchange.”  As I understand it, Newspaper A would send copies of its back issues to Newspapers B, C, and D, and they would exchange copies of theirs with A and with each other.  Items that were of more than local interest but not time-sensitive would be picked up by other papers and printed with the credit given to “(Exchange).”  Such items could include what we would now call “feature” stories, human-interest reports, and even poetry.

Why this bit of historical newspaper arcana?  Because you need to know it to understand the following poem, which I transcribe from memory:

I shot a poem into the air

It was reprinted everywhere

From Bangor to the Rocky Range,

And always credited to (Exchange).

In other words, once the woebegone poet got his poem into one paper, editors at other papers saw it in the exchanges and liked it so much that they printed it too, but somehow or other his name got left off in the process.   If poetry is the clear expression of mixed emotions, this poet had plenty of raw material to go on:  pleasure at the thought that lots of papers reprinted his poem, but regret that nobody but the local readers of the first paper to print it knew who the author was.

Technology has not eliminated this kind of thing, but it happens a lot faster now.  In fact, just since last week, it has happened to me twice, although I didn’t have the misfortune to see my work appear without my byline.  Here’s what happened.

Some people at a commercial website, which will remain nameless herein, but which caters to a technical and engineering readership, apparently read ny blog post last week about the submarine theater flipping over.  I’m not too surprised that such folks glance at my blog.  Google statistics tell me there are about fifty or so people who get it regularly, and many more occasional visitors.  Anyway, when they read last week’s post, they thought it was good enough to run in not just one, but two websites they operate.  So all of a sudden I appeared in their pages as an “editorial” writer, complete with photo and bio attached to the blog post.  But there was no mention of the fact that it was actually reprinted from another source.  The impression their readers came away with was that I had written it exclusively for them.

They must have a lot larger readership than this blog does, because I later got an email from Bob Phillips, the producer of the Aquarena Springs documentary from which I took the submarine-theater story.  Now, to be fair, I didn’t tell him that I was blogging about it, though I did write him a fan letter.  He not only thanked me for the letter, but said that he’d gotten 124 hits from the commercial website that had carried my post, and sold three videos as a result.

My presence on someone else’s website was news to me, and I promptly went over to the site and sure enough, there was my “editorial.”  A few days later the head of the publicity department at Texas State University emailed me to say he’d enjoyed the story too, which is how I found out about the second place they’d posted it.

Like the poet, I came away from this episode with mixed feelings.  I was flattered that the outfit thought enough of the story to post it on two of their websites.  But I was a little annoyed at their failing to mention my blog’s URL, and to give the impression I’d written the piece for their website.

This same sort of thing went on before digital technology made it so easy to cut and paste whole articles in less than a minute.  I have a curious old book with the title “Henley’s Twentieth Century Formulas, Processes, and Trade Secrets,” which is an encyclopedia of how to make everything from adhesives to yeast.  It credits almost no sources at all.  Internal evidence indicates it was culled from numerous old encyclopedias, trade journals, and European publications too old or far away to be likely to sue for copyright infringement.  But it took years to put that sort of thing together, and nowadays you can do it practically overnight.

So has digital technology made copyright infringement and its less serious but ethically questionable allied practices easier?  Certainly it’s easier and faster to electronically cut and paste an article today than it was in the old days, when you had to retype it by hand (two or three times in the old Linotype days), set it up, print it, ship it, and read it to do the whole thing over again.  But the ethics of the thing haven’t changed, as far as I’m concerned.

How was what I did with Bob Phillips’s video different from what the nameless website did with my article?  I did not present his video in its full and original form and leave you with the impression that he had made it solely so that I could show it on my website.  Instead, I added my own views, research, and recollections to material from his video and came up with an original work of my own.  And I stated my sources in the “Sources” section of the blog.  Far from being annoyed at what I did, Mr. Phillips was delighted, not least because the additional advertising brought him more business.  But the nameless website passed off my article as though I had written it for them and didn’t mind appearing in their pages to help them make money.

My intention is to maintain this blog as a strenuously non-commercial enterprise, and I plan to keep it that way.  Because I have another job that pays the bills, I wish to keep this blog free from even the hint of a conflict of interest by accepting no sponsorships or advertising of any kind.  You see no ads here, I invite no guest bloggers to advertise their wares, and the only reason Mr. Phillips’s video sales website got mentioned was because its URL is the only way I could refer to it in a way that is publicly accessible.  When the commercial website passed off my blog as their “editorial,” they gave the impression that I was working for them, which is assuredly not the case.  Which is why I was somewhat annoyed as well as pleased.

As for that poet, I hope I do not get into trouble with the literary heirs and assigns of Franklin P. Adams, a popular humor columnist of the 1930s.  He was the guy who wrote the poem.  Considering the subject of this column, it would hardly be fair to Mr. Adams to leave his name out.

Sources:  Although I won’t give their URLs here, you can find the websites where my post was reproduced by typing in last week’s headline to Google.  By now, the piece has even made its way to the Theater Safety Blog on Blogspot.com.  And Franklin P. Adams’ poem “Frequently” appears in An Encyclopedia of Modern American Humor edited by Bennett Cerf (Doubleday, 1954), which in turn reprinted it from his anthology The Melancholy Lute (Viking, 1936).  There now.

An Apology (added Aug. 28):  After I posted the above blog, I received an email from a staff member at www.pddnet.com, the "nameless" site I referred to.  He said I had given him permission to copy my blog over a year ago, and otherwise he wouldn't have posted it without permission, which is what I thought had happened.  I had completely forgotten about this exchange, so I extend my apologies for raking pddnet.com over the coals undeservedly.  They have agreed to list my blog URL in any future posts, and so I consider this commitment sufficient amends for something I told them they could do in the first place.

The Day The Submarine Theater Flipped Over

This is a story that, as far as I know, has never appeared in print before.  It’s not exactly hot news—the incident happened in 1970—but it exemplifies Henry Petroski’s dictum that engineers often learn more from failure than success.

One of the big tourist attractions of Texas in the 1960s was Aquarena Springs, an early water park at the headwaters of the San Marcos River in San Marcos, Texas, where I now live.  The park boasted what it called the world’s only submarine theater, a steel-and-glass box with rows of seating inside that you entered via a stairway in the rear.  Once the audience was seated, the entire system was lowered on cables and you watched the level of the crystal-clear spring water slowly rise along the glass picture windows.  When the window was pretty much entirely underwater, the show began.

First came Ralph the Swimming Pig, encouraged to jump into the water by an Aquamaid holding a baby bottle of milk.  Then the Aquamaids themselves put on an underwater show:  not just artistic underwater ballets and blowing huge bubble rings, but unique achievements such as drinking from soda bottles and dining at an underwater picnic table.  Hundreds of thousands of people attended the park each year, and up till 1970 the submarine functioned flawlessly.

Then on May 15 and 16 of that year, heavy rains struck San Marcos and areas to the northwest in its watershed.  Six to eight inches of rain in a day or less produced six-foot-high walls of water that tumbled down normally dry streambeds into town.  An apartment building on the banks of the San Marcos River just down from Aquarena Springs was flooded up to its second story, and the entire Aquarena complex next to the springs was many feet underwater.  Thirty alligators kept in a pen in the park escaped, but that’s another story, although the fact that the park used glass-bottom boats to give tours of the spring may have given rise to the phrase “up to your glass in alligators.”

At any rate, while the submarine theater didn’t flood, the abnormally high water level put a severe upward strain on the lift mechanism, which was designed to support its weight by opposing the downward force of gravity.  Once the floodwaters receded and everything dried out enough to resume operations, the park management asked engineers to come and inspect the lift mechanism for damage.  They said everything looked fine, so the next day tourists were admitted and the show was under way again.

The following information is from a documentary interview with a former Aquamaid who was an eyewitness.  When the first batch of tourists climbed into the theater and the lift mechanism started to lower it into the water, it became evident that the strain of the flood had evidently caused some hidden damage.  Beams restraining the theater gave way, and the thing became a free-floating object for the first time in its career.  With the load of tourists on board, its center of gravity was too high, and the whole theater flipped forward ninety degrees, so that the windows in the front now gave the surprised and shaken-up tourists a view of the bottom.  And of course everybody fell out of their seats.

Fortunately, the open hatchway was still above water in the theater’s new configuration.  Ladders and boats were called for, an escape plan was hastily arranged, and all the tourists inside, at least eleven people, were rescued without injury.  According to the eyewitness, the incident never appeared in the news media, no one complained, no lawsuits were filed, and after repairs the submarine theater resumed normal operations.

However, the park management decided this was a good opportunity to build an even larger theater, which they did.  The new structure was intentionally shaped in the form of three straight sections forming a banana-like curve, which would float upright even if cast free from its moorings in another flood.  It was this theater that I had the privilege of observing this fall when, after many delays, Texas State University (which purchased the park in the 1990s after it ceased profitable operation) finally began reconstruction of the Springs as a nature area.  It took one of the largest cranes in the Southwest to lift the thing out of the water, and if anyone is in the market for a used submarine theater, still good for many performances, I’m sure the University would welcome your inquiry.

This story brings to mind several lessons in engineering ethics.  First of all, the people who design a structure aren’t necessarily the best ones to tell whether subtle damage has occurred to it following an unusual circumstance, such as the flood putting upward strain on a system designed to resist downward tension.  Clearly, the engineers who gave the okay to start using the system after the flood missed something, though it might have been pretty hard to detect exactly what the damage was.

Next, we live in a very different culture than the one that prevailed in 1970.  It is hard to imagine such an incident happening without any news reports emerging about it today.  Kids caught in such a situation would be sending live videos with their iPhones to their friends within seconds, although the solid-steel environment of the submarine theater might have made it difficult to get reception.  In any case, the secret would have been out almost as soon as it happened, and the place would have been as full of news photographers and media helicopters as it was in fact during the final lifting of the theater by the giant crane this spring.  Only back then, the Aquarena Springs management would have been faced with damage control, not to the tourists (no one was hurt, fortunately) but to the park’s reputation.

And finally, the better design of the later, larger theater was directly attributable to the memorable near-disaster that the first one was involved in.  Sometimes, despite every effort designers make to anticipate things that could go wrong, they just miss some tricks that Nature manages to come up with.  So there really is no substitute for experience and experimental trials in some fields.

Aquarena Springs, the theme park, is history now, but it’s nice to know that its biggest engineering failure led not to death or destruction, but simply some good stories a few tourists got to tell when they got back home, and an improved design for the final decade or two of the park’s existence.

  

And by the way, they did catch those alligators, but they had to hire a professional alligator-wrestler from Florida to do it.

Sources:  Bob Phillips, son of a long-time manager at Aquarena Springs, has produced a 2011 documentary film, “Aquarena Springs and Ralph the Swimming Pig,” available at www.aquarenaandralph.com.  I used material on the 1970 San Marcos flood from Jonathan Burnett, Flash Floods in Texas (College Station:  Texas A&M University Press, 2008).   My wife and I took our honeymoon at Aquarena Springs in 1978, surviving a successful submarine theater performance.

Questioning “Question Authority”

Engineers work in an authority structure that coordinates their individual efforts with the larger purposes of a corporation, a government, or an entire industry.  Authority is one of those taken-for-granted concepts that we don’t often give much thought to.  There are those who view all authority with suspicion, and for some reason they seem especially widespread in New England, where “Question Authority” bumper stickers are almost as common as license plates; at least they were when I lived there in the 1990s.  The question I’d like to ask today is, can you be a good engineer and question authority too?   That is, is it consistent to be simultaneously an ethical engineer, and to maintain a fundamentally skeptical and judgmental attitude toward all authorities?

For help, I will turn to Victor Lee Austin, whose book Up With Authority is the best explication of the many ramifications of the idea of authority that I have ever seen.  Although Austin is himself a theologian, he draws support from philosophers such as Yves R. Simon and Michael Polanyi, and the point he makes that bears on our question is one that believers and non-believers alike can understand.

Austin says early in his book that authority has a dual aspect.  Normally we think of a person in authority as having power to decide important matters.  This is the facet of authority that first comes to mind when I think about authority with respect to engineering.  In an architectural firm, for example, only certain licensed architects and engineers are authorized to sign off on blueprints (or whatever the electronic equivalent is these days).  But using the word “authorized” in that way brings up a second aspect of authority.

Authorities don’t just get up one day and declare themselves authorities.  They have to be authorized.  In the case of licensed engineers, the state board in charge of licensing engineers authorizes the engineer to sign off on designs.  So authorities must receive their authority from, well, other authorities.  And authorities, as Austin points out, are ultimately other persons.   Even when we cite a licensing board or a book as an authority, we really refer to the person or people behind these intermediate entities.  So you can’t have authority without speaking of authorities, that is, persons who have authority.

That raises the structural question of where authority ultimately comes from.  I mean, if A is authorized by B and B is authorized by C through F, can we ever trace the lines of authority to their final source?  Where does the buck stop, in other words?

Austin, being a theologian, spills these particular beans early in the book.  The ultimate authority, he says, is God.  But God, being a “clean different kind of a thing” from anything or anyone else, is not simply another link in the chain of authority.  The clearest way God exerts authority is through his people, that is, believers, although he has many other ways of doing so.  But if you don’t believe in God, where does that leave you with respect to authority?

If you believe that human beings are the highest form of sentient life, then human beings must also be the ultimate source of authority.  And this hypothesis, if you want to call it that, appears to cover a lot of ground, at least if you don’t look too deeply.  For the nonbeliever as well as the believer, authority forms a complex web of interrelated authorizations and mutual consents.  Take an engineering licensing board as an example.  The people on the board are (or should be) licensed engineers themselves, whose licensing authority comes from a state government, but government itself acknowledges their authority by recognizing them as technically qualified to authorize other engineers.  And most of what Austin says about the various kinds of authority—social, epistemic (having to do with knowledge), and political—is supported by philosophical arguments that nonbelievers can at least understand, if not necessarily agree to.

So if authority is a necessary thing that engineering cannot function without, what about questioning authority?  Austin covers this in a discussion of disputed authority.  Human authorities make mistakes, and that means unquestioning obedience to all authority is an overly simplistic way to live.  But he points out that attitude is everything in a situation where you believe an authority above you is in error.

On the one hand, you can allow yourself to rebel against the authority and all its works.  You may let yourself have thoughts like,  “Well, if that’s what he’s going to do, I hope the whole project goes to smash.”  With an attitude like this, you are one with the “Question Authority” bumper stickers and in fundamental revolt against the entire organization.  If this is your attitude, quitting your job would be more honorable than staying and undermining the enterprise from within.

The attitude Austin encourages in situations where authority must be questioned is one that philosopher Michael Polanyi exemplified before he left science to pursue philosophy.  Polanyi made a fundamental but unexpected discovery about an aspect of surface chemistry, but it took him upwards of twenty years of persistent research and accepting the repeated rejection of his papers before he managed to convince the scientific community of the truth of what he had found.  Even as the peer-review process turned against him, he respected the basic authority structure it represented and worked within its constraints to make the truth known.

This attitude toward authority, of respectful disagreement while preserving the basic structure, goes a long way toward summarizing a lot of engineering-ethics thought.  A whole book could be written about engineering ethics and authority, and while I’m not going to write it, it would be a good book to read.

So what’s the answer to our question?  Normal engineering requires one both to be an authority and to be under authority.  Anyone who arrogates authority to himself or herself without respecting superior authorities will not last long in engineering (or most other fields, either).  But now and then, you may find that your authorities, whoever they are, have made an error, ranging from a mistake in a textbook to an order to falsify test records for an engineering project.  It will then be your role to deal respectfully but truthfully with the error in a way that preserves the overall authority structure, but moves the organization toward the freedom for human flourishing that Austin recognizes as the ultimate purpose of all authority. 

Sources: Victor Lee Austin’s book Up With Authority:  Why We Need Authority to Flourish as Human Beings (New York:  T&T Clark International, 2010) was brought to my attention by an interview with the author on the Mars Hill Audio Journal (www.marshillaudio.org).

Curiosity Kills the Skeptics—So Far

As you know by now if you have the slightest interest in the U. S. space program—and maybe even if you don’t—the unmanned Mars exploration craft called Curiosity landed successfully last night, a little after midnight Central Daylight Time.  This represents both a triumph for those who have advocated unmanned automated space exploration as the way to go, and the advent of a new NASA that is willing to relax and do a little showbiz of its own.

The Curiosity program is not without its critics.  Originally planned to cost $1.6 billion, which as major space probes go is not cheap but orders of magnitude less than manned flight, the launch date was delayed by two years because of technical problems and the final cost so far is $2.5 billion.  And as with any novel space venture, there was always a significant chance that the whole thing would turn into useless space junk.

But there’s a lot of grateful engineers at NASA this morning.  The elaborate sequence of rocket deceleration, ablation of a heat shield as the craft entered the thin Martian atmosphere, deployment of a parachute, and ignition of “hover” rockets to suspend the main body of the craft a hundred feet or so above the surface while the Curiosity vehicle itself was lowered on a cable, all worked apparently without flaw.  Cheers greeted the first grainy black-and-white image that the craft sent from the Martian surface.

Payoff will be a while in coming.  For the first month or so, engineers will just be checking out all the systems before issuing orders to drive anywhere.  But there are some very sophisticated instruments on board, including lasers to vaporize rock samples, a kind of low-power microscope, and a Russian neutron-based instrument that can search for hydrogen up to three meters deep in the soil.  The main goal of the whole project is to search for signs of present (or former) life on the planet.

I am not in the habit of making prognostications, but as various space probes have shown that interplanetary space is a more permeable region than we formerly believed, it would not surprise me to learn that Curiosity eventually finds some pretty uncontrovertible evidence of organically-produced stuff up there.  This would raise a lot more questions than it answers, of course, ranging from which came first, life on Mars or life on Earth? to whether life just naturally shows up under the right conditions, or whether it is a special and perhaps unique feature of Earth.  But we will just have to wait a few months to see about that.

This blog has carried more than its share of criticisms of NASA, but criticizing NASA is like saying “Texas is hot”—it’s not just one organization in one building.  Some parts of NASA are indeed dysfunctional, but the division responsible for the Curiosity mission has so far demonstrated their competence in the best possible way:  by succeeding in an ambitious and potentially fruitful scientific mission.

And perhaps because of the younger mix of engineers in this team, the way they have chosen to present the project to the public has a very different feel than what I am used to from NASA.  The old style is represented well in the film Apollo 13, where scenes of the NASA control room were filled with pudgy white-shirted chain-smoking engineers in ties, all male.  Official pronouncements and publicity were couched in stuffy NASA-speak that required interpretation to be understood by ordinary human beings.

But the material coming from the Curiosity team is very different. In a photo of the Curiosity control room just after the landing that accompanied the New York Times announcement, the predominant color was blue—evidently a kind of blue tee-shirt was the uniform of the day.  But there are no ties and no smoking visible, and at least a few women with responsibilities equal to those of the men are shown hugging the men.  It’s quite a contrast to the old days, and also shows up in the official Curiosity website, which seems to be aimed at about thirteen-year-olds.  Curiosity itself is quoted as talking about its mission:  “What’s My Mission?” is one menu item—and it has sent Twitter feeds such as “FYI, I aim to send bigger, color pictures from Mars later this week once I've got my head up & Mastcam active #MSL.”  (The overall project is known by its full name, the Mars Science Laboratory, or MSL for short, while the lander itself is called Curiosity.)  As if that wasn’t unbent enough, NASA reportedly issued a short documentary using simulated scenes of the landing, but emphasizing the risky nature of the process and using Hollywood-style effects for maximum dramatic impact.

Hey, if you’ve got it, flaunt it.  Following a series of failures in the first decade of the 21st century, NASA’s public image got pretty tarnished, but at least for the unmanned missions such as the MSL, it looks like their confidence has returned.  We will always have people around who say things like “For that $2.5 billion we could have fed X million starving people.”  This is always true, but I think the real reason for the MSL is encapsulated nicely in the name of the rover:  Curiosity.  This project represents a fairly unusual resurgence in public life these days of science for its own sake, unbuttressed by wire-drawn arguments that the work will really lead to practical applications such as better toasters, or some such thing.  Modern science since the days of Sir Francis Bacon has always been in tension between pure abstract curiosity on the one hand, and commercially profitable applications on the other hand.  There never was a time when the two poles were not present, but the practical pole has dominated to a greater extent than historically has been the case in the last few decades.  Perhaps Curiosity will inspire through its kid-friendly publicity a new generation of scientists who want to do science, not because it will make them more bucks, but simply because they want to know.

Sources:  The New York Times report on the landing of Curiosity appeared at  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/06/science/space/curiosity-rover-lands-safely-on-mars.html.  I also used material from the NASA website’s fact sheet at http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/news/pdfs/MSL_Fact_Sheet.pdf. 

Research Integrity and Politics: The Regnerus Affair

Because many engineers do scientific research and publish in peer-reviewed journals, the matter of research integrity should be a concern of all engineers.  An acquaintance of mine, University of Texas sociology professor Mark Regnerus, has recently found himself in the center of a tornadic controversy over a paper he published last month in the Journal of Social Science Research.

I am not an unbiased observer of this situation.  I met Prof. Regnerus several years ago at a dinner, and he impressed me as a pleasant, sincere Christian (he is a Catholic convert) whose presence in the field of sociology was a welcome one, because sociologists in general tend to be leery of personal commitments to organized religion.  Regnerus is interested in the way sexuality influences and is influenced by social behavior, as evidenced by his earlier Oxford University Press book Forbidden Fruit, an investigation of teenage sexual behavior and attitudes.  But with his latest paper, Regnerus stepped on a political third rail.

The paper describes an extensive research project into the question of whether gay parenting affects the lives of children in measurable ways.  The conventional sociological wisdom, represented by a fairly small number of research papers, says that there is essentially no negative effect of being raised by two mommies or two daddies, as opposed to the conventional mother and father.  This body of work is cited by every judicial decision in favor of things such as adoption by gay parents and the extension of marriage to gay couples.

Regnerus’s study, which he himself admits is not perfect, found otherwise.  There were significant negative consequences of being raised by parents who were gay, according to the study.  I am not going to address the controversial question of defining “gay” or how extensive the negative consequences were or how accurate and scientific the study was. 

Not being a sociologist, I am not qualified to pass judgment on these matters.  What I am qualified to judge is the way the peer-review process has been attacked and corrupted after Regnerus’s paper was published.

The idea behind peer review is that scientific publications should be judged by those most qualified to do so:  namely, other scientists in the same field.  That is exactly how Regnerus’s paper was judged.  As is common practice in some fields, Regnerus was allowed to suggest the names of some reviewers, and as is also common, he had worked with some (not all) in the distant past.  In specialized fields, this kind of thing is often unavoidable and does not mean that the reviews will necessarily be biased in the author’s favor.  (Sometimes it works the other way!)  In any case, the reviewers recommended publication and the paper was published.

Then the deluge began.  A journalist and self-described “minorities anti-defamation professional” whose pseudonym is Scott Rose wrote a letter to the University of Texas administration alleging that Regnerus’s paper falsified data.  This is the most serious professional charge that anyone can level against a scientist, comparable to a malpractice charge against a doctor.  The first wrongdoing (as I pointed out in a letter published in the Austin American-Statesman) was for UT Austin to act on such complaints from a person who was not in a competent professional position to make such assessments.  Scott Rose is not a sociologist.  Rose has since published the full “evidence” he plans to present to UT Austin, and it consists of two kinds of arguments.  One kind comprises disputes over methods and definitions that Regnerus used.  If Rose had been selected as a reviewer of Regnerus’s paper, these arguments might have played a role at that point.  But Rose, not being a qualified sociologist, has no professional standing to make them, and they must be assessed on their merits by other professional sociologists.  The other kind of argument consists of various ad hominem attacks on Regnerus’s funding sources, which include organizations such as the Witherspoon Institute that favor conservative causes.  While taking funding from organizations with a political agenda is certainly a possible source of bias, in the field of sociology it is hard to avoid.  Even the federal government has a political agenda, and one’s source of funding cannot be construed as prima facie evidence of research falsification.

Rose also cites the other outrage against the peer-review process:  a special audit report written by a member of the Journal of Social Science Research’s editorial board on the question of whether the peer-review process that led to publication was flawed.  The member, Darren Sherkat, found essentially nothing wrong with the peer-review process.  Instead, he took the opportunity in the audit to review the paper himself, and used terms (“bulls---“) that in my opinion have no place even in a conversation about another colleague’s work, let alone a report on the integrity of the review process.

I have not even mentioned the press coverage with derogatory headlines, the letter signed by over a hundred sociologists objecting to Regnerus’s conclusions, and the politically motivated letter-mobbing of the journal’s editor, James Wright, which pressured him to request the review audit.  Releasing a draft audit to the media, as Wright did, was clearly a craven attempt to deflect hostile politically motivated attacks from himself.  It showed no respect or regard for Regnerus, and probably did not even achieve its intended purpose.

In an opinion piece published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, sociologist Christian Smith takes Regnerus’s side and expresses better than I can, the point that the scientific integrity of the field of sociology is at stake here.  I will ask a question.  In the 1930s, many prominent scientists and engineers in Germany lost their reputations, their jobs, and some eventually their lives because of a non-scientific reason:  they happened to be Jews, or outspoken Christians, or simply opposed to some political aim of the government.  Everyone now agrees that this was a grievous violation of human rights, an early warning sign of the greater wrongs the German government would do in World War II.  While that situation differs from the one Regnerus finds himself in by degree, does it differ in kind from what Jewish scientists suffered in Germany in the 1930s?  Regnerus has reached scientific conclusions that oppose the prevailing political winds.  Though his punishment has come from activists rather than official government sources, it is no less politically motivated and no less unjust.  Smith thinks the integrity of the social-science research process is threatened by the “public smearing and vigilante media attacks” mounted against Regnerus.  If such attacks are successful, we have taken a long step away from scientific integrity and a long step toward the encouragement of a political atmosphere that is totalitarian in its effects.

Sources:  Among the many articles published on this controversy in the last few weeks, I have used the following.  The Austin American-Statesman published a description of UT’s inquiry on July 11 at http://www.statesman.com/news/local/ut-investigates-professors-study-on-children-with-gay-2415276.html.  The Chronicle of Higher Education has published “The Regnerus Affair at UT Austin” by Peter Wood on July 15 at

http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/the-regnerus-affair-at-ut-austin/33509 and “An Academic Auto-da-Fé” by Christian Smith on July 23 at

http://chronicle.com/article/An-Academic-Auto-da-F-/133107/.

The Defibrillator That Fails May Be the One You Need

Everybody who has watched medical shows on TV has sooner or later witnessed a simulated attempt to start a heart going again with a defibrillator.  The doctor in charge tells everybody else to get out of the way—he places electrodes on the patient’s chest—then bang!—the body arches upward and, depending on what the dramatic needs of the moment are, either starts breathing again or gets covered up for the last time.  Used properly in real life, automated external defibrillators (AEDs, for short) can be lifesavers.

For a variety of reasons including circulatory problems and electrical shock, a person’s heart can go into an ineffective kind of twitching known as ventricular fibrillation, and blood basically ceases to flow.  This is called sudden cardiac arrest.  Invariably the person becomes unconscious and has no manually detectible pulse.  It used to be the case that unless properly equipped emergency workers arrived with an AED within four to six minutes of sudden cardiac arrest, it meant curtains.  Then it occurred to AED manufacturers to make their devices simple enough so even a sixth-grader could use one, as has been demonstrated in practice tests.  For the last fifteen years or so, easy-to-use AEDs have been showing up in public places such as airports, bus terminals, universities, and malls, and people have been rescued by quick-witted bystanders who grabbed an AED and used it in the right circumstances.  But as reported in IEEE Spectrum last spring, a disturbing number of AEDs out there fail to do their job, or would fail if called upon to work.

About 300,000 people in the U. S. alone die from sudden cardiac arrest each year.  Some  of these folks would not benefit from application of an AED, but many of them—possibly as many as 40,000 a year—could be saved by a properly applied working AED.  In Seattle, Washington, city authorities undertook to develop a registry of the location of every publicly accessible AED in town, and then promoted a “citizen defibrillation program” with advertisements, public information publications, and training.  The result is that as many as 45 percent of witnessed cardiac arrest cases (situations where the person is not alone) survive.  Contrast this to the U. S. average of 4 percent, or the even more dismal figure of 0.5 percent for Detroit.  The last thing anybody trying to use an AED expects is a little message on the machine’s display saying something like “BATTERY LOW” or “SELF-TEST ERROR 17.”  But it happens.

AEDs are medical devices, aren’t they?  And so they must go through the same rigorous Food and Drug Administration qualification and inspection tests as other medical devices, mustn’t they?  Well, not quite, it turns out.  AEDs are in a kind of legal gray area that allows manufacturers simply to say that their product is “substantially equivalent” to other AEDs, and then they can bypass the usual medical-equipment tests and qualifications.  So it’s up to the manufacturers to ensure that the batteries will stay charged and the unit will be operational even after years of total neglect, and perhaps environmentally harsh conditions of high and low temperatures and humidity in outdoor locations.

This would be a hard trial for any piece of electronics, but for a unit that someone’s life may eventually depend on, it’s doubly difficult.  And the Spectrum  report shows that an FDA investigation found over 90 percent of AED failures were not investigated sufficiently to identify the cause.  Most of these failures showed up during routine tests, but 750 of the reports of failure between 2005 and 2009 followed a death in which the AED was involved.  And at least one manufacturer maintained a “fix-on-fail” policy.  That is, when the same design problem began to show up in a number of calls for repair of AEDs, you would think the firm would act like most auto manufacturers do and issue a recall to all owners of that model device.  No—this outfit simply waited for the next failure to occur instead of notifying the owners of all potentially defective AEDs.

So what’s the answer?  Changing the law to make AEDs qualify through the same rigorous process as other medical devices is one alternative.  But the manufacturers claim, with some justification, that this will send prices (already in the $2000 per unit range) through the roof.  Ideally, an AED would be as cheap and reliable as a fire extinguisher so that people (for example, heart patients) could afford one at home.  But this isn’t going to happen if prices are north of two kilobucks a pop.

My libertarian streak makes me reluctant to say this, but the way we got fire extinguishers in every public building was by means of fire codes:  laws that compel building owners to have so many fire extinguishers for a given square footage of space.  And it’s the owners’ responsibility to make sure those extinguishers are operational too.  Maybe the only way to make sure AEDs work and are widely accessible is to pass similar codes requiring AEDs, at least in places where the demographics indicate it would be helpful.  Because people younger than 20 rarely go into ventricular fibrillation, for example, K-12 schools might not need more than one in a large building.  But rest homes, for example, could use more.

This issue strikes close to home for me, because as a 58-year-old male I’m in the prime demographic of those who might need an AED some day.  Both my grandfathers died of circulatory problems, and while I try to eat right and exercise, there’s only so much you can do.  Let’s hope the next time anyone you know needs a defibrillator, that one will be handy—and it will work, too.

Sources:  The article “A Shocking Truth” by Mark Harris appeared in the March 2012 issue of IEEE Spectrum, the general-interest publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, on pp. 30-34 and 57-59.  I also consulted the Wikipedia article on defibrillators.

Hacking for Solidarity: Broadcast Engineers and the Polish Resistance in the 1980s

In 2008 it was my privilege to visit a Polish friend of mine at his home in Warsaw.  We had become first acquainted back in the 1980s when it was his privilege, as a university professor of electrical engineering, to leave what was then a Communist country for a one-year sabbatical accompanied by his wife and two sons at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I was also teaching.  Some people would have defected and just stayed in the U. S., but Andrezj (pronounced “Andrey”) loved his native Poland enough to return and work for a brighter future, which as it turned out came to pass in 1989, just before the fall of the old Soviet Union.  His sons are both thriving young professionals in Poland now, and he does not regret his decision to return. 

I was reminded of my friendship with Andrezj and his family when I read in a recent historical journal about a little-known aspect of the Solidarity movement in Poland.  Officially a trade union, Solidarity formed around Lech Walesa, a shipyard electrician who led the movement and became modern Poland’s first freely elected President in 1990.  During the 1980s, the Communist government of Poland imposed martial law and rigidly suppressed and controlled speech.  All media outlets, including radio and TV, were under government supervision.  As the Solidarity movement grew, however, a group of radio and television engineers joined with other technical types (mainly university professors) to do (what we would term today) hacking of the official radio and TV networks.  Pretty soon after that, TV-watching Poles began to see images of things like the words of the national anthem superimposed on the video feed of dull official programs.  Now and then, the audio of the TV channel would give way to music of the national anthem, a joke, or some popular song that had nothing to do with the official program.   At other times, Poles listening to their radios began to receive signals from “pirate” radio stations broadcasting information that the government did not want them to hear.

The content of the messages sent by what came to be called “Radio Solidarity” was not as significant as the mere fact that somebody, somewhere, was messing with the government’s system, and could get away with it.  These activities were not without risk.  While routine protests such as marches were usually punished merely by fines, the Polish government pursued the Radio Solidarity hackers more vigorously and put many into prison.  But as the movement grew, more volunteers arose to replace those who were arrested among technicians and scientists who were technically proficient enough to tap into the broadcasting network, or build and hide radio transmitters in houses of sympathetic citizens.  At one point, an underground flyer called for people to wear radio resistors pinned to their lapels in memory of two brutal police actions against Polish workers in 1970 and 1981.  Evidently, large numbers of Poles did so, and once the authorities caught on to this form of “resistance,” you could go to jail for it.

Opinions differ as to how effective Radio Solidarity was in aiding the movement toward democracy.  One industrial worker happened to be high on a crane one evening in Gdansk as a Radio Solidarity broadcaster asked his listeners to turn out their lights for a minute if they were listening.  According to the witness, he saw half the city go dark.  A precise assessment at this point is impossible, but the emotional encouragement that such activities brought to people who might otherwise have thought they were struggling alone against the system could have been invaluable.

The story of Radio Solidarity brings to mind the more recent social-media-powered actions of those in the Middle East who have attempted to free themselves from oppressive regimes.  Unlike the largely successful Solidarity movement in Poland, which not only brought about regime change in that country but may have contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union itself, the record of recent opposition to governments in Middle Eastern regions is more mixed so far.  Perhaps it is fair to say that technical means of communication in a political movement is necessary these days, but not sufficient by itself to insure a smooth transition from oppression to freedom.  If citizens do not have a clear, united vision of what a democracy should be like and what goals they should strive for, all the communications facilities in the world are not going to make much difference.  Revolutions are always a last resort, and while some can turn out peacefully, the result is always unpredictable.

Ironically, the limited nature of network systems in the 1980s may actually have helped Radio Solidarity reach more people than hackers today can easily manage to do.  If the Polish national TV network back then resembled those of most other totalitarian countries, there was basically one channel and one program.  That meant if you hacked into the network feed, you had the entire country as an audience automatically.  Today, of course, with the multitudes of various communications media—TV, radio, the Internet, mobile apps, social media, texting, and so on and so forth—it is much harder to reach an audience that is not already primed to hunt for a particular website or participate in a particular meeting, and so it can be harder now to reach large numbers of people.  But this problem can be overcome, especially in times when young media-savvy people are eager to help out.

We can be grateful to the Radio Solidarity engineers and professors who did their part in overthrowing the oppressive Polish regime and catalyzing the downfall of the Soviet Union.  And we can hope their example can be learned by those today who are dealing with similar problems in their own countries.  It seems, though, that freedom of communication is not a magic bullet that keeps away the real bullets a hostile government can use against its citizens.  Syria is a current bad example of this.  Despite repeated internal and international calls for the Syrian government to relinquish its stranglehold, its rulers persist in shooting thousands of protesters.  I don’t know whether anyone in Syria reads this blog, but I would consider it an honor to be in trouble with the government of Syria, and hope that those fighting for true freedom in that country can use all the means at their disposal, including electronic ones, to find a good way out.

Sources:  The article “Dissident Visions through Technological Use:  Radio and Television Solidarity in Poland, 1982-1989” by Carmen Krol appeared in the Autumn 2011 issue of “Antenna,” a newsletter published by the Mercurians, a special-interest group of the Society for the History of Technology.

Higgs 1, Neutrinos 0

The world of high-energy physics breathed a collective sigh of relief last Wednesday when a team of researchers at CERN, the European physics lab, announced results from their Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that make it “99 percent certain” there is indeed a thing called the Higgs boson.  Further work is needed before the discovery makes it to the point that there’s only a one-in-a-million chance that it’s not true, which is allegedly the standard that physicists now maintain before a new particle is generally accepted.  But judging by the signs of exultation and emotion, such as the tears of Peter Higgs (the theorist who first predicted the particle in the 1960s), such acceptance is only a matter of time.

The mood at CERN contrasts with the emotions that a much less publicized announcement last February probably inspired.  Late last fall, some CERN researchers working with an Italian physics lab known (appropriately) as OPERA announced that they had clocked a subatomic particle called a neutrino (Italian for “little neutron”) as going just a hair faster than light.  I blogged on this last October 9 and remarked that if it turned out to be false, you wouldn’t see any headlines about it.  Well, I was wrong, but the headlines were a lot smaller than the ones about the discovery of the Higgs boson.

Turns out that the OPERA people had overlooked a bad connection in their fiber-cable system that messed up their timing by just enough to make it look like the neutrinos were going faster than light, which they probably weren’t.  It’s all rather fuzzy with overlapping error bars, but the problem was significant enough to account for their faster-than-light result, which they have now admitted may have been in error.  Several other similar experiments have not turned up any results indicating that neutrinos can exceed the universe’s speed limit either.

In these days of limited public resources (when were they ever unlimited?), what justification is there to spend many billions of dollars on things such as the Large Hadron Collider or the OPERA experiment?  Judging by the fact that the torch of leadership in high-energy physics has clearly now passed from the U. S. to Europe, the American public seems to have answered, “None.”  Some readers may remember the proposed Superconducting Supercollider planned for Texas, which was cancelled in mid-project in 1993 and never revived.  If it had been completed, it would have easily surpassed the LHC in energy capability, and so we might have been hearing about the Higgs boson discovery from Waxahachie rather than Geneva.

The fact is, no single nation can claim that its citizens were responsible for the discovery.  Thousands of Ph. D. physicists worked on the plans and experiments that made it possible, including hundreds from the U. S.  High-energy physics today is a thoroughly international enterprise, and to do anything significant experimentally means to become a member of a huge team that resembles a multinational corporation more than a small university-style laboratory.  This takes nothing away from the honors due to those who found the Higgs, but it does raise a question of responsibility.

CERN as an organization lent its name both to the Higgs-boson discovery and the announcement that neutrinos possibly traveled faster than light.  Some would say that, hey, this is the way science works, and further checking indeed revealed that the faster-than-light discovery was in error.  While I have no realistic doubt that the Higgs-boson discovery is legitimate, checking it may take anywhere from years to forever if you want to do it with another accelerator, because the LHC is the only show in town, that is, the world.  Of course there are many different experiments that can be done with the LHC to demonstrate the Higgs, so it’s not like we had only one instrument reading, for example.  But the point here is that CERN is becoming something of a monopoly in the high-energy-physics business.  And monopolies may try not to act like they’re monopolies, but it’s not always easy.

When scientists such as those at CERN are asked to justify their arcane projects, they generally reply that physics, like many other scientific pursuits, is ultimately a cultural activity, and has to be its own justification.  Some people paint beautiful paintings, others discover beautiful particles.  From the viewpoint of engineering, I have to agree, because it has been a long time since a discovery in the realm of high-energy physics has led to any major practical applications.  Probably the last time this happened was in the 1930s, when Lise Meitner and her colleagues discovered nuclear fission.  That led to the development of atomic weapons and nuclear energy, both of which had consequences that are still with us today.  Beyond that, however, I can’t think offhand of any consumer or industrial products that intrinsically rely on muons or neutrinos or quarks or any of the other members of the subatomic zoo discovered since then.

This doesn’t mean that practical applications will never come along.  But they appear to have slowed down, certainly, and so I have to agree that experimental high-energy physics is just like observational astronomy:  done for the beauty of the thing, and not for any practical uses of the knowledge that may result.

Still, a billion dollars is a lot of money, and I hope that CERN and organizations like it remember that they exist only by permission of a tolerant public.  Incidents like the mistaken announcement of faster-than-light neutrinos do nothing to enhance their reputation, and so I hope that further checking takes place the next time a surprising result like that shows up, and also that the physics worker bees pursue their goal of confirming the Higgs boson with one-in-a-million certainty.  That’s only several thousand dollars per chance, if you want to think of it that way.

Sources:  The announcement that errors were found in the faster-than-light OPERA experiment was carried by the online version of the journal Nature at http://www.nature.com/news/neutrinos-not-faster-than-light-1.10249.  Numerous news outlets reported on the Higgs-boson discovery, and I used the report from National Geographic magazine at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/07/120704-god-particle-higgs-boson-new-cern-science/. 

Now We Know: Stuxnet R US

Almost a year ago in this space, I wrote about a sophisticated new computer virus called Stuxnet which had apparently done considerable physical damage to almost a thousand uranium-enrichment centrifuges in Iran in 2010.  At the time, it wasn’t clear who designed Stuxnet, although guesses were that either Israel or the U. S. was responsible.

Well, on June 1 of this year, the New York Times published excerpts from an upcoming book that confirms those suspicions, and goes into a lot more details.  It turns out that Stuxnet was only one of several cyberattacks that originated with a project called “Olympic Games” that began during the presidency of George W. Bush, who encouraged his successor Obama to continue it.  Obama took Bush’s advice and persisted with the program even after the Stuxnet virus escaped “into the wild,” which is how the computer-security community learned about it a year ago.

There are two related ethical concerns that these latest revelations highlight.  One has to do with U. S. participation in cyberwarfare generally.  And the other has to do with the fact that someone in the current administration spilled so many beans about what we were doing.

Cyberattacks are following a well-trodden path down which earlier forms of militarily useful technology passed decades or even centuries ago:  telegraphy, radio, aviation, and nuclear weapons, to name a few.  The trend is from discovery to initial, usually rather amateurish, experimentation, and then to serious funding and adoption by all sides in a conflict.  With regard to cyberwarfare, we are now beyond the amateurish-experimentation phase and well into serious adoption by at least one side:  the U. S. and Israel, which turns out to have collaborated closely with the U. S. in the Stuxnet project for both technical and diplomatic reasons.  If history is any guide, we can now anticipate a cyberwarfare counterattack by one or more of our enemies sooner or later.

This is made especially likely because cyberattacks turn out to be pretty cost-efficient.  Software experts examining the Stuxnet virus at the time it was first found estimated that it was fairly cheap to develop, under a million dollars.  The latest revelations in the Times show that this may have been an underestimate, because the CIA went to the trouble of building a working model of part of Iran’s nuclear facility using the identical machines that were the target of the attack, in order to be sure it would work.  Still, it was cheap compared to a full-scale airstrike with cruise missiles, for example.

Cheapness cuts both ways.  The U. S. isn’t the only country with sharp computer whizzes willing to develop evil viruses to mess up critical infrastructure.  Stuxnet was highly specialized to do a specific kind of damage to only one facility, but virus-writers worldwide have highjacked its innards to do other malicious things since then.  It is not beyond the realm of possibility to imagine someone taking the basic Stuxnet format and designing a virus to, say, whack out an industrial controller commonly used to regulate the speed of steam turbines in power plants.  I’m not knowledgeable about the degree of sophistication of power-plant software or the tightness of their security measures, but I’m sure it varies from place to place, and while some on-the-ground collaboration was needed for the attack on Iran, that might not be necessary for some forms of virus attack.  The point here is that with its vast array of computer-dependent infrastructure, the U. S. is very vulnerable to just the kind of cyberattack we mounted against Iran.

Which brings up the second ethical concern:  did we have to go so public with all the details of what our responsibility was in Stuxnet?  Critical information about decryption technology used in World War II was kept in the dark for decades.  I would expect the kind of details we read in the Times to come to light some day, but less than two years after the attack?  Perhaps this is a deliberate ploy to warn counterattackers that yes, we can do this and you’d better watch out.  But because cyberattacks rely on lapsed vigilance and poor security measures (the Stuxnet actually got into the target network through a carelessly used flash drive someone carried into the secure facility), it seems like telling our enemies all the details of our attacks and responsibility for them, will just make them all the more cautious and less likely to fall for such things in the future.  In other words, if you’re going to fight a war with secret stuff, blowing the secret doesn’t seem like a good idea.

At the risk of sounding excessively political, one could speculate that the publicity about Stuxnet was another attempt to show the present administration in a “tough-guy” mode, consistent with recent revelations about how the President himself personally authorizes every drone attack on targets that have included a U. S. citizen in at least one instance.  These drone attacks have drawn criticism from the President’s own party, notably former President Jimmy Carter.  Like cyberattacks, drone strikes are, in the short term, a “no-risk” mode of warfare that carries no domestic downside in terms of U. S. casualties incurred during the attacks.  But an older code of conduct in the battlefield would view the kind of button-pushing fight we are presently engaged in as morally suspect, if not downright cowardly.

It was close to inevitable that cyberwarfare would take its place along more conventional means of fighting a military conflict.  But now that we have told the world we’re doing it, we should not cry foul if some fine day our own computer systems fall victim to a low-budget, focused attack that could do even more damage than ours did to the Iranian uranium facility.

 

Sources:  The New York Times report on the Olympic Games efforts appeared online on June 1, 2012 at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html.  President Carter’s criticism of drone strikes as being violations of human rights appeared in the same publication on June 24, 2012 at

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/25/opinion/americas-shameful-human-rights-record.html.  My blog “Stuxnet and the Future of Cyberwarfare” was posted July 24, 2011.