Self-Driving Cars: More Bumps in the Road

In what is probably the most detailed reporting on Google's self-driving cars to appear so far, New Yorker staff writer Burkhard Bilger shows just how far the technology has advanced since the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held its first Grand Challenge race of autonomous vehicles in the Mojave Desert in 2004.  Nobody came even close to finishing that first race, but only a year later the lessons learned from the inaugural debacles paid off when five vehicles completed the 132-mile course.  Today, Google's fleet of self-driving cars regularly plies roads in California, where the legislature recently passed new licensing laws making it legal to ride in such a vehicle without actually driving it.  But as Bilger briefly points out, a lot remains to be done before you can reasonably expect to own (or at least ride in) a self-driving car yourself.  And in my opinion, technology is not the main stumbling block.

A couple of years ago, I wrote in this blog that I perceived at least two problems which stood in the way of self-driving cars:  unexplored technical problems that might arise if lots of them were on the road all at once, and the reluctance of drivers to hand over the wheel to a robot.  I now think that the first issue has probably been overcome (or easily can be if it arises), and the second issue will take care of itself as the technology becomes more available and peer pressure or necessity (would you rather be told you're too old to drive, or buy a car that can drive itself?) convinces reluctant drivers to hand over the keys to Cyborg. 

But Bilger touches on what I now believe is the single most important obstacle that might slow the spread of autonomous vehicles, at least in the U. S.:  the conservatism of U. S. automotive engineers. 

Bilger spoke with representatives of several car companies:  GM, Ford, Nissan, Toyota, Mercedes, and Volvo, among others.  Ford and GM continue to make incremental "driver-assist" options available, but don't seem enthusiastic about self-driving cars at all. Nissan is the only firm that has made a definite commitment to market a self-driving car, with a target date of 2020.  Mercedes is worried about what the currently-required laser dome on the roof will do to styling, and Volvo is concentrating on safety more than autonomy:  their goal is to make fatal crashes in a Volvo essentially impossible.  But whether a robot or a human drives the car is not their primary concern.  Toyota is still recovering from the controversial accusations that their cars were prone to sudden acceleration, and has paid out millions in legal costs as a result.  That firm is probably not eager to market a product that a few accidents could transform into another huge legal liability.

Here is what I think will happen.  In highly congested non-U. S. cities—Tokyo, Amsterdam, Berlin—auto makers will first market self-driving cars to people for whom car ownership is very expensive in terms of parking and driving aggravation.  Bilger makes the somewhat curious claim that once cars can drive themselves, most people will not feel the need to own one.  I for one fail to see the connection, except in circumstances where it is a positive pain to own a car, such as living in Manhattan. 

Google admits it's not planning to go into the car business.  But if it thinks Ford or GM is going to buy turnkey controls sold by Google and install them in their own products, they have not given sufficient consideration to the power of N. I. H.:  Not Invented Here.  Not only will the U. S. auto engineers be reluctant to hand over critical responsibilities for their products to a bunch of California geeks; the Detroit crowd recognizes that the whole idea of car ownership is tied intimately to the fact that you drive the thing, you don't just ride in it.

Most U. S. automakers sell cars by playing on the emotions of potential car owners.  The idea is "you are what you drive."  Drive a Dodge Ram?  You're a rough, tough guy who can climb mountains while carrying a ton of rocks—in your pickup.  And so on.  The psychological distance between the driver's seat and the passenger seat (even if you're still sitting behind the wheel) is vast.  A car that drives itself isn't a car anymore, it's a one-person bus.  And public transportation in this country is about as sexy as a roomful of old men playing dominoes. 

To sell self-driving cars, the U. S. auto companies would have to retool their whole way of thinking about how cars are sold.  Of course, if buying a car becomes a thing that only really rich people can afford to do (like keeping a chauffeur), and most cars become part of some public transportation network, the marketing job for the auto industry becomes much easier.  They will have to sell only to a few large municipal purchasing agents rather than to millions of individual car owners.  But except in a few quasi-European cities on the U. S. coasts, I simply can't picture this happening to any large extent.  People love their cars too much to let go of them, even if they no longer drive them. 

Perhaps we will go through another U. S. automaker shakeout, like the one that happened in the early 1980s as foreign automotive producers out-manufactured U. S. firms and took over huge tracts of market share.  If lots of people like the idea of not having to drive, but still want to own a car, Nissan will find out when they offer a truly self-driving vehicle.  Legislatures in states where the demand is high will take care of the licensing problem, and if U. S. carmakers ignore or downplay the self-driving car trend after foreign makes start selling, it's their funeral, along with the funerals of those people who die as a result of human-driver error—deaths that Google engineers claim can be reduced drastically once we switch to self-driving vehicles.  And that's another factor that may push U. S. auto manufacturers unwillingly into the self-driving-car business:  insurance companies.  If a large enough database of statistics shows that self-driving cars are, say, four times as safe on average as human-driven ones, insurance rates on the self-driving models will plummet, and people will have to pay more for the privilege of driving rather than letting the computer steer. 

Sooner or later, the sight of driverless cars will no longer attract the attention it does today.  But a lot of things will have to change first, and among the most important are attitudes of engineers, legislatures, and drivers themselves.

Sources:  Burkhard Bilger's article "Auto Correct" appeared on pp. 96-109 of the Nov. 25, 2013 issue of The New Yorker.  I addressed the issue of autonomous vehicles in my blog in this space on August 11, 2011.

Do You Smell Gas? Thank New London

On Thursday, March 18, 1937, a seventh-grade girl named Sibyl sat in a school bus outside the junior-senior high school building built four years earlier in the unincorporated town of New London, Texas.  In contrast to the rest of the nation, New London and the surrounding area of East Texas were prospering from a local oil boom, and many of the school's students came from families drawn to the area by oil-field jobs.  Sibyl had mistakenly left her class early, but rather than go back inside and look foolish, she had decided just to wait in the bus until school let out for the day in another twenty minutes or so.  Suddenly, at 3:17 PM, she saw the entire front of the building rise several feet into the air and then collapse into a huge pile of dust with a thunderous crash.  She had just narrowly escaped what turned out to be the worst school disaster in the history of the United States.  Over three hundred children and adults died either in the explosion itself or as a result of injuries they sustained in it.  The cause?  Odorless natural gas.

As you may know, natural gas has no characteristic odor of its own.  By law, a malodorant must be added to natural gas for non-industrial users such as homes, businesses, and schools so that a leak will call attention to itself by means of smell.  One of the compounds used, butyl mercaptan, is so stinky that the average human nose detects it at a level of 0.33 parts per billion.  That concentration amounts to one teaspoon of malodorant in a cube of air about 25 meters (80 feet) on a side.  While gas leaks and explosions still occur, the chances of detecting a leak before it causes an explosion are much better when the gas contains a malodorant. 

Flammable gas has been used for domestic light and heat since the early 1800s, but until the discovery of large supplies of natural gas, piped-in gas was a relatively costly type of utility that was confined to cities.  By contrast, the oil wells around New London freely produced so much natural gas that it was (and still often is) considered a waste product, and was flared off near wells in towering flames that burned day and night and could be seen for miles.  The oil companies piped some of it around in what were called bleed-off lines to supply power for their own operations, and because many of New London's residents were already familiar with oilfield equipment and piping, tapping a nearby gas line for free raw natural gas became a common practice.  Although it was technically illegal, someone with the requisite skills could install his own private gas line to an oil lease's bleed-off line, and enjoy free gas instead of paying the local gas utility for it. 

It is a matter of record that a couple of months before the 1937 explosion, W. C. Shaw, superintendent of the New London schools, authorized a janitor to disconnect the schoolhouse from the local gas utility and tap a nearby bleed-off line instead.  Mr. Shaw apparently viewed this as a cost-saving measure, similar to the earlier decision when the school was built to forego the usual steam-boiler-radiator heating system, and instead install an extensive gas piping system and some seventy gas space heaters instead. 

In My Boys and Girls Are in There, a recent book on the tragedy, historian Ron Rozelle notes that many subsequent summaries of the disaster tend to blame Superintendent Shaw for endangering the lives of his charges with the decision to use free untreated bleed-off gas.  The critical question, which Mr. Rozelle doesn't answer in the book, is whether the local gas company was adding malodorant to its product at the time.  Such a practice was widespread by 1937, but by no means universal.  If the utility's gas was odorless as well, then the decision to switch to bleed-off gas made no difference, because the leak that caused the explosion would not have been any easier to detect.  The main reason that the explosion was so severe and extensive was that the poured-concrete school building had a single, poorly ventilated, and uninterrupted crawl space beneath the entire front part of the building, under eight inches of solid concrete floor.  Since natural gas (primarily methane) is lighter than air, this crawl space formed a good container for thousands of cubic feet of gas, which was touched off on that fatal day when a shop teacher switched on an electric sander in the basement. 

While the New London explosion dominated national news for a week or so, it faded quickly as other events diverted the public's attention.  Like war veterans often do, survivors of the explosion usually refused to talk about it afterwards.  However, one survivor, fifth-grader Carolyn Jones, had the courage to make a speech to the Texas House and Senate in Austin only a week after the explosion, urging that safety measures be passed to prevent another disaster like the one at New London.  The result?  Two laws:  one requiring all natural gas for domestic purposes to contain a malodorant, and the other requiring that anyone working on residential natural-gas lines for residential use must be trained and certified for such work by the state of Texas.  The publicity of the New London disaster furnished ammunition for the passage of similar laws in other states, so that eventually, all natural gas sold for household use would carry its own portable detection system, namely, a bad smell.

The New London explosion and its aftermath form a familiar pattern:  first an innovation (the use of natural gas for domestic gas supplies was fairly new in the 1930s); then a tragedy resulting from inadequate safeguards, ignorance, or other factors; then regulations, or a change in good engineering practices, or both, all inspired by the tragedy.  It would be nice if engineers were able to anticipate everything that could go wrong in a novel situation.  But human ingenuity being both fallible and limited, sometimes we have to learn from mistakes, and the more costly the mistake in terms of lives, the faster we learn.  While nothing will ever bring back those three hundred lives lost on that East Texas afternoon seventy-six years ago, it is some comfort to know that their lives were not lost in vain, and that gas users around the globe are safer as a result. 

Sources:  I thank Andrea Nelson and Stephen Paul for bringing my attention to Ron Rozelle's book My Boys and Girls Are in There (College Station:  Texas A&M University Press, 2012), which I relied on for most of the material in today's column.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on the history of manufactured gas, thiols, and tert-butylthiol.

Privacy in Public: Mobile Phones and Personal Spaces

The other evening I was waiting in line in a cafeteria, and the woman ahead of me, who was rather short, was reading her phone.  A few years ago, the phrase "reading her phone" would have ranked as nonsense, but nowadays when most mobile phones seem to do everything a desktop computer used to do, only faster, reading your phone has become a humdrum, routine part of life.  Anyway, she was flipping through what looked like either twitters or Facebook comments, and I, being a compulsive reader of anything in my field of vision, began to read along with her.  The content was nothing remarkable—little notes from friends about what other friends were doing, pictures of small children (grandchildren?), comments about an upcoming wedding—I frankly forgot nearly all of what I saw a few minutes after I saw it.  What stuck with me was a question:  what exactly was I doing in reading that lady's phone over her shoulder?  What would you call it?  And does the fact that you can do something like that have any larger implications?

I don't need a Ph. D. in moral philosophy (which I don't have anyway) to know that it was wrong to read somebody else's private messages, from whatever source derived.  Nowadays, of course, they may not really be private.  On Facebook and personal blogs and so on, people make public all sorts of matters that earlier generations would have buried deep inside a locked diary.  But the presumption is that the content of a person's own phone is, well, personal and private.  And it was not right for me to read her mail, so to speak.  I watched an old movie the other night which had a plot that turned on the theft of a letter—a theft that was noted by a landlady, who called the cops and brought the whole criminal scheme tumbling down thereby.  Stealing a letter is an overt, easily documented act.  But just looking over somebody's shoulder in a cafeteria line—who can tell what you're seeing? 

The closest word I can think of that means something like what I did is "eavesdropping,"  but that involves hearing, not seeing.  "Eyedropping" won't work—it sounds like what goes on in an opthalmologist's office.  "Spying" would cover it, but I didn't go to the cafeteria with the intention of snooping on somebody else's phone messages.  I just happened to be standing where, without any real effort or intention on my part, I was able to read private material.  The parallel between that and a situation where you are in a restaurant booth and can't help overhearing conversations in the next booth is pretty exact. 

Whatever it should be called, it's something that happens more and more often as people with portable electronic communications devices take over public spaces in subtle but significant ways.  What about those folks who have either an ear-mounted phone, or one of those little earbud-cord microphones that you have to look closely to see?  They're the same ones who conduct one-sided phone conversations in hallways or sidewalks at normal volume, so that at a distance they give every appearance of talking with an invisible companion, which leads one to doubt their sanity until you get close enough to see the electronics they're talking to.  We don't mind people having normal conversations in public when both parties are right there, so why should we mind if one of the participants happens to be at the other end of an electronic link?  I'm not sure, except that sometimes people talk about things over the phone that they wouldn't mention in a public place.  And if they're doing it over a mobile phone, they sometimes tend to forget their surroundings, and passersby end up privy to TMI (too much information).  This is just as discourteous as what I did to the lady in front of me in the cafeteria line, but it's discourtesy of a different type. 

The real problem, I think, is that the boundary between public and private is getting really fuzzy, and you can get into trouble if you mix up the two.  Saying, "I'd like to kill you!" out in a field where only you and your listener can hear you is one thing.  It may be a serious threat, or it may be nothing more than a joke between well-acquainted friends.  But saying the same thing on Facebook or another internet-mediated forum can land you in jail.

Here are two pieces of advice, one for users of technologies that tend to make the private public, and the other for bystanders who end up hearing or seeing something that the user didn't intend for you to hear or see.  For users, try to realize that while you may be focused just on your friends you are chatting with, the medium you are using is full of holes that leak information to casual passersby—people just browsing the sidewalk or the web, and even folks you may be trying to keep a secret from.  So use some discretion in what you look at or say.  If you wouldn't want to hear someone else saying what you're saying, don't say it, or at least wait for a more private circumstance than looking at your phone while waiting in line or talking through your earbud mike at a crowded bus stop.

And for bystanders, I would say that while sometimes you really can't help overhearing or "overseeing" someone's private information, you can help what you do with it.  If you can read somebody else's email over a shoulder, well, quit it.  If you can hear somebody's private conversation, maybe move to a chair where you can't.  And otherwise, try to be nice even to thoughtless or nasty people.  To some folks, old-fashioned courtesies such as beginning a letter with "Dear" look hypocritical:  if you aren't really dear to me, why should I address you that way?  But courtesy is the social lubricant that you don't wake up the next day with a hangover from.  It makes life easier and more pleasant for all of us, and while it has aspects of hypocrisy, I like to think of it as more like clean, well-tailored clothing that covers a less-than-presentable body.  And come to think of it, that's something else that is out of fashion, and maybe for the same reason.  But just as there is good taste in clothing, there is good taste in the use of mobile phones, and here's hoping more people use them more tastefully.

Sources:  After I wrote this blog, I found a website that makes most of my points and more, and with pictures.  It's "How to Practice Cell Phone Etiquette" at http://www.wikihow.com/Practice-Cell-Phone-Etiquette.  Highly recommended.

Democracy By Sampling

If you had stopped by my house last Saturday, you would have seen me seated on the front porch in a folding chair, watching a presentation on a laptop connected to a notebook computer, which was in turn operated by a woman seated in another folding chair.  The woman works for a contractor to the U. S. Department of Commerce.  The contractor, Abt SRBI, performs high-tech surveys for government agencies.  Instead of pencils and clipboards, the woman brought along the aforementioned technology that she used to show me the options I had for each answer, as well as photographs and other information related to the survey questions.  My subject today is not so much the actual content of the survey (which she requested I keep confidential so as not to bias other potential participants), but the entire process of which the survey was a part, which I'm calling "democracy by sampling."

One vital aspect of engineering ethics is to consider all the stakeholders in a given case, including members of the public liable to be affected by a proposed course of action.  I think it's okay for me to say this much about the survey:  it dealt with a proposed program that the Department of Commerce may implement, and would entail substantial costs to be borne by the U. S. taxpayer.  The program would address an environmental issue which it turns out I have discussed in this space in the past, and it would deal with it in a way that struck me as egregiously boneheaded.  And I told them so.

But unless you, gentle reader, are one of the 1500 or so people nationwide selected to participate in this survey, if you wish to register your opinion on this subject with the government, you are out of luck.  This is unfair, but all too symptomatic of a disheartening trend that has picked up the momentum of an avalanche in recent years.

The ideal of democratic government is that it is, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, "of the people, by the people, for the people."  The preposition in question here is "by."  Ultimately, the authority of government is to vest in the people governed.  The means by which this power is exercised in our type of government is through the legislative branch, meaning Congress.  Originally, the only role of the executive branch was to see that the laws were "faithfully executed." 

But beginning in the Progressive era of the early 1900s, a different view of government arose, which can be summarized as government by experts.  The basic idea is that modern life is too complex to leave governance solely to the slow, messy process of legislating laws.  Instead, new powers should devolve upon educated specialists in such fields as finance, technology and its regulation, commerce, and human relations, and we should allow these experts to make such rules as they think best—rules that have the full force of law.  So far, any agency of this type still holds before its face a mask of democracy, in that the agencies exercising such power have to be established by Congress.  But there are so many of them now that Congress can no longer exercise anything like proper oversight anymore.  The result is that executive agencies like the Department of Commerce and its divisions are left to their own devices and desires.

I will grant this to the Department:  in commissioning the survey I participated in, they are genuinely seeking the input of the public, or at least a sample thereof.  They didn't have to do that—as far as I know, they could just haul off and implement the new program they're considering without asking anybody, and we would all just have to live with it.  So they are at least making a gesture toward the idea of democracy.  But it is an ineffectual gesture, in my opinion.

As a part of the survey, I had an opportunity to "vote" for or against the program, and to give reasons for doing so.  But this "vote" is to real voting as hypocrisy is to holiness.  What if we "voted" to elect the President this way?  It would save tons of money and trouble.  Instead of the Electoral College and all that campaign fundraising and advertising and so on, we'd just hand the whole thing over to Abt SRBI, whose experts would come up with a carefully selected sample of 1500 or so voters, and the rest of us would just wait to find out the results, as determined by the experts.  So much more efficient—so much more scientific.

And so much more opposed to the basic notion of rule by law, and not by men.  One of the big reasons that the thirteen British colonies broke away from England was that they were being taxed by those whom they did not elect.  Based on the information I received during the survey, the proposed program would have done exactly that—nothing was mentioned about any enabling legislation.  This sort of thing happens all the time.  The Environmental Protection Agency's decision to categorize carbon dioxide as a pollutant is a shining example of how unelected bureaucrats can unilaterally proclaim costly regulations, and those injured are forced to undertake expensive legal battles as their only recourse. 

The Department of Commerce deserves one small cheer for consulting me about their idea.  But the whole executive branch gets a loud razz for continuing its drive toward government by bureaucracy that has compromised freedom and due process in this country so severely, that some days I wonder if we can ever get them back again.

Drones, Air Safety, and the FAA

On May 10, 2012, in the South Korean city of Incheon, an engineer from the Austrian company Schiebel was demonstrating to South Korean military personnel his firm's S-100 camcopter, a 150-kilogram remotely piloted drone aircraft that could assist South Korean patrol operations at the country's border with North Korea.  In the midst of the camcopter's flight, it suddenly veered out of control and crashed into the control van where the engineer was sitting, setting the van on fire.  Two Koreans were injured and the Austrian engineer was killed.  Speculation immediately arose that the loss of control stemmed from intentional jamming of GPS (Global Positioning System) frequencies by North Korea, which has caused numerous navigational problems in the area in the past. 

Drones, a term that includes helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and anything else that flies without a human on board, have played a major role in warfare for at least a decade.  But prices are falling and capabilities are rising to the extent that commercial and private interests are now wanting to use drones for a wide variety of applications, ranging from surveillance in domestic law enforcement to cargo transport.  Federal Express has even expressed an interest in using pilotless aircraft instead of manned cargo planes, for example.  But in an article in the November issue of Scientific American, two "drone-spoofers" from the University of Texas at Austin raise serious questions about the safety and legal aspects of using drones these ways.

Around the same time that the S-100 crashed in South Korea, UT researchers Kyle Wesson and Todd Humphreys took command of an $80,000 drone at the White Sands Missile Range as part of a demonstration to show how easy it is to distract such aircraft by sending out false GPS signals.  Because GPS signals are so feeble in most locations, it takes relatively little radio-frequency power to overwhelm the real signals from satellites with cleverly devised fake ones.  Once you have taken over the GPS receiver of a drone that relies on GPS for navigation (as many semi-autonomous drones do), you can lead it like a dog on a leash.  Wesson and Humphreys carried their spoof just far enough to show that they did indeed control the craft, and then a backup manual operator took control and landed it safely. 

This demonstration shows that while drones have gained greatly in technical sophistication and capabilities, including the ability to fly completely without manual control from a human operator, the regulatory environment has not kept pace.  The Federal Aviation Administration is charged with the responsibility of making U. S. airspace safe, first of all, then hospitable to air travel for both humans and cargo.  The outstandingly good safety record of air travel in this country is partly due to the FAA's conservatism with regard to changes in the basic way it does things.  

On a flight I took recently from New Jersey to Texas, the captain put the cockpit's air-traffic control channel on one of the audio channels at every seat, and I spent most of the flight eavesdropping as he checked in with a total of six or eight way-stations of the air along our route.  It was reassuring in a way, but at the same time I was impressed by the fact that such conversations would be completely familiar to a pilot who last flew in 1959.  The FAA follows the principle of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," and they change their basic procedures about air-traffic control very slowly, if at all.  A major change from radar-based control to satellite-based control involving GPS is in the works, but the present system will remain in place for nearly a decade into the future.

Wesson and Humphreys worry that in the shift to the new system, drones will be left to fall between two stools.  If the new rules for air traffic control make no provision for drones, the whole field could be crippled by the absent-mindedness or hostility of legislators and regulators.  Already, several states have adopted anti-drone-surveillance laws arising from privacy concerns.  These laws would not directly impact the transportation aspects of drone use, but could severely handicap legitimate surveillance with drones.  If the FAA requires that licensed unmanned aircraft always be within visual sight of the operator, that would make drones unusable for most of the promising applications their developers hope to find.  But on the other hand, if it is really as easy as it seems for someone to take control of a GPS-equipped drone, there has to be some way to prevent that from happening if the public safety is to be protected from large, heavy machines falling out of the sky.

The FAA traces its history back to the Air Commerce Act of 1926, which charged the U. S. Department of Commerce with taking actions to ensure the safety of the then-novel field of air travel.  While Congress's delegation of authority to quasi-autonomous agencies has been abused in recent years, the FAA has by and large been a poster child for how a federal agency should behave, keeping safety uppermost in mind while restraining itself from issuing industry-crippling regulations.  It has accomplished this feat by embodying the best features of conservatism and by basing decisions on sound technical arguments as well as on politics.  It remains to be seen whether the FAA can manage to incorporate drones in its next major upgrade of the way it keeps people and things safe in the skies.

We are entering an era in which artificial intelligence and remote control systems are bidding fair to replace human transportation operators in many fields:  railroads, automobiles, and now aircraft.  It will be interesting to see whether those in charge of the FAA's safety regulations can adapt them to accommodate beneficial uses of remotely-controlled and autonomous vehicles without putting the public at undue risk of accidents.  How the FAA handles drones will be a test case for a number of other similar problems that will arise in the near future.

Sources:  The November 2013 issue of Scientific American carried the article "Hacking Drones" by UT Austin researchers Kyle Wesson and Todd Humphreys on pp. 54-59.  I referred to an article on the fatal South Korean drone accident at http://www.suasnews.com/2012/05/15515/ and a brief summary of the history of air traffic control in USA Today at

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-10-10-atc-history_N.htm, as well as the Wikipedia article on the Federal Aviation Administration. 

The Obamacare Website Rollout: Not What the Doctor Ordered

Software failures can have all sorts of bad consequences, ranging from minor annoyances up to and including death.  On that scale, the very public problems that people currently run into when they try to use the Affordable Care Act's website to buy federally-mandated insurance are somewhere in the middle.  (Since President Obama is on record as having no objection to the term "Obamacare" for the Act, I will use it too from this point on.)  To my knowledge, no one has yet died as a direct consequence of not being able to use the site.  But on the other hand, it's hard to think of another software-related issue that has garnered so much negative publicity in as short a time.  While there is plenty of blame to go around, the question I'm interested in today has to do with the ethics of software engineering, and what lessons this debacle can teach us along those lines.

Software engineering is a relative latecomer to the engineering fold.  There were only a few dozen programmable computers in the world as late as 1950, and the first U. S. undergraduate programs in software engineering were not accredited until 2003.  But few types of engineering involve the average non-technical customer more directly than the design of high-volume websites, which requires strategic and organizational planning as an essential aspect of the overall process. 

According to published reports, the rollout of the www.healthcare.gov website was something of a rush job.  For political reasons, the Oct. 1 deadline could not be postponed, and many changes were being made right up to the last minute.  Finally, there was little time for beta testing with a small group of friendly and informative users who could find problems in time for them to be fixed before the main rollout. 

I am glad I was not one of the people who worked on this website, but I can sympathize with them.  My last major engineering job before deciding to go back to school for my Ph. D. was with a firm that wanted to make cable boxes, the little thing that sits on (or now, under) your TV and selects channels.  The company had never made a large-volume consumer product before.  Up to that time, most of their customers were military and scientific users who paid plenty for a few hand-crafted instruments.  Despite the best efforts of our engineering team, the new box never worked right.  At one point I had a conversation with an older engineer who said, "I'm looking at your group and what I see is a bunch of trapped engineers."  I later learned that the company ended up recalling all the boxes from the field at a cost of six million dollars.  By that time, I was in grad school and dealing with problems of a different sort.   

Sometimes, engineers are placed in an impossible situation where even Superman couldn't deliver the goods as requested, and minimizing damage is about all you can do, at least to start with.  The Obamacare website was a large and complex project that everyone knew would both receive tons of traffic from all sorts of people, most of them technically unsophisticated, and would also draw intense media attention, much of it potentially hostile.  If it had been up to the software engineers, the project might have been "frozen" (no more major changes allowed) up to a year in advance of Oct. 1, and early versions would have gone through beta testing with larger and more varied groups of test subjects with plenty of time to work out the glitches before launch. 

Obviously, that didn't happen.  At the risk of sounding biased, I will state here that the way this project was carried out seems to reflect a mindset which is evident in other actions of the Obama administration.  The President and a circle of powerful like-minded people in the administration have a set of ideas which they all agree on as The Way Things Should Be.  Philosophically, they are idealists in the sense that they start with ideas, and then try to make reality conform to their ideas.  Evidently, the political people in charge of implementing Obamacare were coming up with more ideas for the website right up to the time that it was turned on, and disregarded the hard engineering realities of designing a website that must handle many millions of users who are faced with a fine if they don't sign up for insurance through the site by the end of the year. 

The problem with philosophical idealism is that it sometimes collides with reality, and in such collisions, reality always wins.  In such encounters, idealists may or may not learn the error of their ways.  Of necessity, they end up doing what reality requires them to do, but often in a way that is inefficient, expensive, and more trouble than otherwise.  A new deadline of November 30 has just been announced as the day by which www.healthcare.gov will be working.  Jeffrey Zients, the Chief Performance Officer of the United States, is now in charge of fixing it, and has declared publicly that "Healthcare.gov is fixable."  Any system that is not physically impossible is fixable given enough time and resources, but only time will tell whether Zients and his underlings can get the repairs done on time.

But the rocky startup has added more fuel to the fire of ill feeling that the U. S. public in general harbors toward the federal government.  In a poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released last week, only 19% of those polled said that they trust the government in Washington to do what is right just about always or most of the time.  Before about 1970, most people did have such trust, but the trend since the early 1960s has been downward, falling below 50% around 1973 (the peak of the Vietnam War) and has risen above 50% since then only once:  right after 9/11/2001 and the first war in Afghanistan.  The fact that most people in the U. S. no longer think that their government can be trusted in this way goes beyond partisan politics to signal deep structural problems in the way power is allocated and used.  This is much more than a problem in engineering ethics, but engineers have to deal with it like everyone else.  And those working on www.healthcare.gov bear a particular responsibility to exhibit leadership in the days to come.

Sources:  An article published online on Oct. 25, 2013 by Robert Pear and Sharon LeFraniere at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/26/us/politics/general-contractor-named-to-fix-health-web-site.html describes Jeffrey Zients's statements about the proposed repair of www.healthcare.gov by Nov. 30.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Jeffrey Zients.  Information on the history of accredited software engineering programs was taken from Chapter XIII, "Software Engineering Accreditation in the United States," by J. McDonald, M. J. Sebern, and J. R. Vallino, in Software Engineering: Effective Teaching and Learning Approaches and Practices, H. Ellis, S. Demurjian and J. F. Naveda, (eds.), Information Science Reference, 2008.  The statistic on public confidence in the U. S. government was published online by the Pew organization at http://www.people-press.org/2013/10/18/trust-in-government-nears-record-low-but-most-federal-agencies-are-viewed-favorably/.

The Theology of Global Warming

Last Saturday, October 19, was the date of the Second Annual Global Frackdown.  In case you didn't hear, the Global Frackdown is an international day of activism on which people who believe that global warming is an oncoming train that's about to knock us silly, gather in groups and protest the oil industry's practice of fracking.  Fracking is a technology that has produced renewed yields from old oil and gas fields and promises to make the United States largely energy-independent in a few years.  But there is no question that fracking leads to the burning of more fossil fuel than otherwise, which is the reason for the Frackdown.  According to the movement's website, there were Frackdown events scheduled even in Texas, where fracking is a native industry and practiced widely.  Opponents of global warming seem to believe in their cause with an almost religious fervor, and for some it may be exactly that:  a substitute religion, complete with a theology, an ethics, and an eschatology that foretells doom for the planet unless we get with the gospel of global warming.

The Frackdown is sponsored by an outfit called 350.org, whose guiding light is one Bill McKibben, a journalist and author of such books as Fight Global Warming Now, Enough, The End of Nature, and Eaarth.  The last title requires a little explanation.  McKibben's basic theme throughout is that humanity has transformed the globe into an artifact (thus The End of Nature).  The rather unfortunate neologism "Eaarth" is McKibben's term for Earth.2, the new thing that isn't really a natural environment anymore, but isn't completely under our control either.  Despite the world's new status as a manufactured product, the laws of physics have not been repealed, and McKibben claims there will be absolutely inevitable bad consequences that will follow if we keep acting as though we were just a slight perturbation in the thing we have historically called Nature.  (Picture a 200-pound St. Bernard who still thinks he is a cute little cuddly puppy and tries to sit in your lap.)  Chief among these perturbations is our burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas, which began with the Industrial Revolution and continues to be the single most important energy source worldwide.  McKibben appears to believe as earnestly in the pronouncements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as he believes in the Bible (he is a practicing Methodist).  The focus of his most recent efforts has been to sponsor grass-roots movements to give the fossil-fuel industry a bad reputation by means of divestiture movements, Global Frackdowns, and other activist measures sponsored through 350.org.  Why 350?  That is the alleged tipping point of parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, beyond which innumerable disasters loom.  The current number (as of May 2013) is around 400 ppm, by the way.

I picked up McKibben's Eaarth expecting a uniform challenge to my blood pressure, and for the first two chapters I found what I expected:  a laundry list of terrible things that will happen, and are already happening, because of global warming, which is said to be largely if not exclusively due to anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the air.  Storms, droughts, loss of seacoast regions, die-offs of all kinds, you name it.  So far so bad. 

But then I got to Chapter 3, "Backing Off" and I checked the cover to see if the book was really written by only one author.  McKibben turns out to be what I would call a crypto-distributist.  Distributism, as almost nobody knows, was a short-lived political movement popular in England in the 1930s, whose most well-known exponent was the writer G. K. Chesterton.  Its slogan could have been "smaller, more local, more decentralized," and the old principles of distributism are in perfect harmony with McKibben's plans for us to survive the oncoming global-warming disaster.  For example, here's a problem:  climate change may cause entire monocultures of ag-industry genetically modified foods to disappear.  Solution:  have thousands of independent farmers supply hundreds of different varieties to farmers' markets in cities around the globe, and some of them at least will make it.  Problem:  giant fossil-fueled power grids with a few huge plants are wrecking the environment, and giant nuclear plants to replace them would cost too much.  Solution:  spread solar and other renewable energy sources everywhere so that people can be largely energy-independent down to the city block and house level. 

The biggest change McKibben calls for is not technological but cultural.  He thinks we will have to end our love affair with the super-independent lifestyle so encouraged by American culture and commerce, and live more like we used to, in interdependent communities where not only did you know your neighbors, you depended on them for essential things in your life such as services, goods, and jobs.  Only in this way will we survive the bugbear of climate disasters that await us.

Eaarth is really two books: one written by a frenzied climate-change activist, and another written by a pleasant, earnest Methodist Sunday-school teacher who wants us all to get along together and be good little distributists, but without using that word.  I see no indication that McKibben has even heard of distributism, but most of his solutions lie squarely in that tradition.  And to the extent that they do, I by and large agree with them, although my pragmatic side doubts that McKibben and his fellow activists will be able to make much headway against the powerful entrenched political and economic interests who would like things to stay the way they are now.

To the extent that McKibben gets us to have more to do with our neighbors and less to do with huge multinational corporations, I hope he succeeds.  But he seems to have reached the same desirable conclusions as the English distributists through what seems to me to be a long and unnecessary detour through the notion of global warming and its promised doomsdays, which has almost taken the place of a religion for many people.  If you believe that buying an electric car will make environmental Armageddon 0.0001% less likely, then your faith has convenient ways for you to take actions that are unquestionably righteous, and to condemn those bad actors such as fossil-fuel companies that are unquestionably evil.  But life is seldom that simple, and I hope McKibben writes another book that sets forth more substantial and eternal reasons for people to be more neighborly—and leaves out all that stuff about global warming.

Sources:  Bill McKibben's Eaarth was published in 2010 by Henry Holt & Co.  The website 350.org has links about the Global Frackdown and many other related activities.  For more information on Distributism, see my blog of Sept. 22, 2008, "What Is Distributism, and Why Should Engineers Care?"

OSHA Fine for West Explosion: What's the Point?

Last April 17, when the West Fertilizer Company's facility in the Texas town of the same name exploded, killing 15 and laying waste not only to the plant but to a good chunk of the town as well, it had been more than 25 years since a federal Occupational Safety and Health (OSHA) inspector personally appeared at the plant.  But that did not stop OSHA from issuing a $118,300 fine against the company last week, on October 9, for a list of 24 safety violations.  This news came out despite the federal government's shutdown because Sen. Barbara Boxer's office found out about it and notified news media.  The company has fifteen days to either pay the fine or file an administrative appeal with OSHA, and company representatives said they were conferring with lawyers about their next step.

Depending on how you view the idea of punishment, OSHA's fine either looks pretty silly or seems like a sound and reasonable step for such an agency to take.  Let's examine the case for silly first.

Suppose you run a small fertilizer company that has gone through bankruptcy in the last few years and probably has total assets, land and facilities included, of at most a few million dollars, with a one-million-dollar liability insurance policy on the property.  Due to causes that even combined federal and state investigations cannot precisely determine, your plant blows up, killing fifteen of your fellow citizens, causing over a hundred million dollars' worth of damage to your town, and by the way, completely demolishing the physical assets of your business.  Half a year later, along comes OSHA and lays a fine of over $100,000 on you for various historical violations based on testimony of how the fertilizer that exploded was stored and for not having an emergency response plan.  How do you respond?

I am not running the West Fertilizer Company, but at the moment, hiring lawyers to file an administrative appeal will be a lot cheaper than paying the fine up front, which would probably suck up most of any remaining cash and possibly make the company go out of business altogether.  Not that they haven't had time to do anything more than deal with lawyers and lawsuits since April anyway.  Obviously, the better time for OSHA to have levied such a fine would have been before the April explosion, when the changes possibly stimulated by such a large penalty might have had the positive effect of preventing the explosion. At this point, the fine brings to mind a scene in the animated film Wallace & Gromit:  The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.  At one point, the brilliant but silent canine character Gromit, a skilled driver, goes on a wild car chase that winds up with his vehicle stalled out after a minor collision.  Sitting there silently on a dark road, Gromit seems lost in the depths of despair, thinking that things cannot possibly get worse.  And then they do:  the car's airbag deploys in his face.  OSHA's fine is timed as well as Gromit's airbag.

Whether the fine makes any sense depends on one's theory of punishment.  In How to Think About the Great Ideas, philosopher Mortimer Adler points out that there are two main opposing theories of punishment:  retribution and prevention.  As retribution, OSHA's fine would be laughable, were it not for the somber circumstances.  It is hard to imagine a retributive penalty for the West Fertilizer Company, which after all is a business firm, not an individual.  It has already been reduced to smithereens, and unless you contemplate something primitive like blowing up the houses of the owners in retribution for the explosion of their plant, it is hard to conceive of a punishment that would be purely retributive in character. 

OSHA fines appear to be based on the preventive theory of punishment, as are most administrative fines levied on corporations in general.  While it is clear that it is way too late for this fine to prevent what happened in West, it is by no means too late for other operators of fertilizer manufacturing and storage facilities to take note of the fine and the reasons why it was levied.  There are over a dozen similar fertilizer plants just in Texas alone, and it is a good bet that many of these are lacking in the same safety features that would have prevented or mitigated the accident in West.  One hopes that insurance companies will take the initiative to motivate their fertilizer-plant customers to upgrade their facilities and procedures to make it less likely that something like the West explosion will happen.  And there is always the chance that enlightened managers and owners will take it upon themselves to make the needed changes:  following existing federal guidelines about how ammonium nitrate should be stored, putting emergency procedures in place and even practicing fire drills, and taking other sensible precautions that are not rocket science but often get neglected when an organization skids by for years and avoids the very unlikely but disastrous chance that a normally well-behaved chemical like ammonium nitrate will explode. 

While it's true that the horse named the West fertilizer explosion has long since left the barn, there are many other horses of a similar nature who can be kept in place if fertilizer plants and facilities across the country learn from the sad experience of the Texas town that got famous for a reason nobody wanted.  I hope that OSHA's actions, however tardy, serve as a warning to prevent another tragedy like the one we saw last spring.

Sources:  The OSHA fine was described in a news article in the Waco Tribune that appeared in the online edition of Oct. 11 at http://www.wacotrib.com/news/business/west-fertilizer-co-cited-for-safety-violations/article_6d83a0cc-f28f-5763-ba23-f8229c0dfbae.html.  Mortimer Adler's How to Think About the Great Ideas (Chicago:  Carus Publishing, 2000) describes the great idea of Punishment on pp. 274-283.

When Scientists Aren't Scientists

I recently attended a scientific conference in the Northeast U. S. (I will be purposely vague about the exact venue for reasons that will shortly become clear), and on the plane I read an article by the Harvard political scientist Harvey Mansfield that pointed out an ironic fact about science:  in order to do good science, scientists must act at least some of the time like non-scientists.  Right after that, I got to see a good example of what he was talking about.

One of the main things that attract certain personalities to science and engineering is the supposed objectivity and emotion-free quality of science.  Mr. Spock, the famously non-emotional Vulcan of the Star Trek TV series, supposedly had a temperament ideally suited for science, because emotion was never supposed to influence his judgment.  Many scientific journals insist that papers submitted to them be written in the passive voice (not "We found that. . . " but "It was found that. . . "), thus removing any trace of the author's personality from the paper and making it sound more objective.  But Mansfield pointed out that thumos (a Greek word meaning "spiritedness" or "passion") often takes over when scientists perceive a threat to something they hold dear, even if the threat comes with scientific credentials.  And many scientists who discover something that goes against the current consensus of scientific opinion have to defend their new ideas passionately against equally vigorous and emotional opposition.  In getting emotional, scientists end up acting like ordinary non-scientists, but most good scientists tend to have a certain amount of thumos that motivates them to do the hard work and defending of their ideas that are needed to get a hearing in the competitive world of research.

The night after I arrived at the conference, the sponsoring organization held a banquet which included a buffet dinner, awards, and a three-piece classical music group that could barely be heard above the conversational din in the large hall.  During dessert, the chairman got up at the raised podium and announced the name of the after-dinner speaker:  William Happer, a well-known physicist.  I had heard his name before, and as he began his talk, I remembered where:  as author of an article entitled "The Truth About Greenhouse Gases."

By now, the most famous (but by no means the only) greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide, CO₂.  The conventional wisdom among most scientists, policymakers in many countries, and the general public is that (a) humanity is playing Russian roulette with the world's climate by burning so much fossil fuel, which (b) invariably makes CO₂, which (c) traps heat and raises average global temperatures, which will (d) lead to all kinds of disasters, from dying polar bears to flooded South Sea islands and perhaps even an epidemic of kidney stones.  Therefore, all right-thinking citizens should be aware of their carbon footprints and do everything humanly possible to minimize them, or else go around feeling guilty for not doing so.

Prof. Happer's specialty is the way atoms and molecules absorb and emit radiation, and in the technically sophisticated and convincing talk he gave, he showed that the correlation between rising CO₂ levels and global average temperature is more alleged than real.  He also showed that the role of CO­₂ in the global heat balance has been greatly exaggerated, and that there are serious flaws in the way current models treat the details of how the gas absorbs radiation to affect climate.  He closed with a quotation from playwright Henrik Ibsen: "I am in revolt against the age-old lie that the majority is always right."

The audience reaction was interesting.  They were quiet at first, but when it became clear that Happer was arguing against the main claims of global warming, most people except for a small circle near the speaker resumed talking as though nothing special was going on.  There was scattered applause at the end, and then Happer asked for questions. 

The first two or three were queries about technical details.  Then a tall, rather formidable-looking man rose and mounted the podium.  I can't recall all his words, but I know he began by saying his father was one of the founders of the field of cloud physics.  He charged Happer with at least two faults: cowardice, for not being willing to attend mainstream climate-change meetings to present his arguments; and ill will, for insulting the intelligence of the climate-change community.  In response, Happer pointed at one of the charts in his presentation and said, "The facts are there."  His accuser said something else in a tone of voice that I would characterize as non-scientific, and for a moment there I wondered if the after-dinner entertainment was going to be an amateur prizefight.  Then the chairman hastily grabbed the microphone and asked the musical trio to start playing.  The audience laughed that nervous kind of laugh that means people are relieved that something really awful isn't going to happen after all, and that was the end of that.

Only it wasn't, really.  What if Happer is right, and the vast majority of climate scientists, government leaders, and the public (which is not qualified to judge) has turned a molehill of a problem into a mountain that threatens whole economies and spreads fear and misplaced priorities worldwide?  A lot of people will end up looking pretty foolish, for one thing, which is why Son of Cloud Physicist got up and said what he said.  Of course, one should not make the opposite error of thinking that every crank and holder of a fringe opinion who comes along must be right and the mainstream is always wrong.  But Happer's evidence is not the only reason to suspect that the conventional climate-change picture at least has serious flaws.  Others such as David Rutledge at Caltech have questioned the conventional wisdom as well, but for different reasons. 

Climate change happens so slowly compared to the potential progress of science that I suspect the story will be gradually rewritten as time goes on to prove the dominant powers right whatever actually happens, and it will take a clever historian to tell the real story a century or two hence.  In the meantime, those of us who have more important things to worry about than how many centimeters per year the ocean is rising can take some comfort in the chance that William Happer's voice may be heard, and scientists will act a little more like scientists in the matter of examining the technical evidence for global warming.

Sources:  Prof. Happer's excellent article "The Truth About Greenhouse Gases," written for a non-technical audience, appeared in the June/July 2011 issue of the journal First Things, pp. 33-38.  On Jan. 3, 2010, I blogged on Prof. David Rutledge's contention that we are not going ever going to burn enough fossil fuels to make much of a difference in the climate one way or another. 

Harvey Mansfield's article "Science and Non-Science in Liberal Education" appeared in the Summer 2013 edition of The New Atlantis, pp. 22-37.