Aereo Versus the TV Broadcasters: Will David Fell Goliath?

Some of my readers are no doubt familiar with the Biblical story of David, the Hebrew shepherd boy, who knocked out the giant Philistine Goliath with a rock shot from a sling.  A relatively small company named Aereo is trying a similar stunt these days with TV broadcasters by using an antenna no larger than a dime to upset the whole broadcast-TV applecart.  What Aereo is doing has been challenged in court by a coalition of broadcast-TV interests including ABC, NBCUniversal, CBS, Fox, and others.  But because Aereo has designed its technology explicitly to comply with copyright law, so far they have been able to fend off legal challenges, although the issue may ultimately be decided by the U. S. Supreme Court.

As a recent article in The New Yorker points out, more and more viewers are watching video online in various ways, through both stationary and mobile devices.  The networks themselves ventured into this business with a service called Hulu.  But Hulu, with its heavy ad content, has not thrived, and is losing subscribers as other options such as Aereo become available. 

It's always a good idea in situations like this to follow the money.  Over-the-air broadcasters, whose content was originally provided for free in the U. S. to anyone owning a television receiver, make their money by sticking ads into their content and charging advertisers for doing so.  When cable TV came along, the broadcasters sued cable networks successfully, because the courts interpreted what the cable systems were doing with the broadcasters' over-the-air signals as constituting a "public performance."  I suppose the way they judged that was by looking at the way a cable system deals with broadcast signals.  Typically, a master antenna at the cable system head-end picks up big chunks of the broadcast spectrum off the air, including multiple TV channels.  The whole spectrum is shipped down the cable, and selection of the program you want to watch occurs at your set-top box.  The fact that more than one person can access the set of signals that the cable system deals with led the courts to decide it was a public performance, electronically speaking, and therefore subject to copyright laws.  In essence, cable companies were stealing copyrighted content and selling it without paying the originators of the programming for it.  Ever since, the cable networks have had to pay retransmission fees to the over-the-air content providers.  Every so often, the two parties get into a fight and one or the other cuts off a particular service, to the disgruntlement of viewers, until the combatants can agree on a new schedule of fees.  Because most people watch over-the-air TV through cable systems nowadays, these retransmission fees are a big deal to the broadcasters, who are seeing their viewership shrink as other options become available.

Then along came Chet Kanojia, who obtained the backing of media mogul Barry Diller to implement a clever idea to adhere to the letter of the copyright laws while bringing broadcast TV to the online masses without paying retransmission fees.  Everyone agrees that the form an individual TV receiver takes is not at issue.  You can use an old-fashioned tube model (with a digital converter), or a little gizmo that plugs into your computer's USB outlet, or even a system strung all the way from your iPhone to an office building in New York City, as long as everything in it is devoted to picking up a signal you individually want to see.  That's not a public performance; it's only an odd kind of TV receiver, against which there is no law.  So Kanojia designed an entire system to preserve that individuality, all the way from the dime-size antenna picking up the publicly-accessible broadcast signal from the air, through a high-tech transcoder that converts it into a form that can be either recorded on a digital video recorder (DVR) or sent directly over the Internet to the individual viewer, to the servers that provide every Aereo subscriber with their individually selected TV program.  You can see photos online of the antenna arrays, which look like hundreds of peculiar paperclips soldered vertically to columns of printed-circuit boards and set in front of a window facing a TV broadcast tower in the distance.  Kanojia gets by with such a small antenna for each viewer by electronically tuning it to the particular channel in use, and then reassigning the antenna to the next viewer when the first one tunes out.  From a strictly technical point of view, it's a silly thing to do, but laws sometimes make people do silly things.

So for as little as eight dollars a month, in certain areas where Aereo is now available (which are designed to imitate the standard broadcast range of the on-air broadcasts) you can watch or record whatever on-air program you want, through almost any Internet-connected device of your choosing.  That's a lot less than monthly cable charges, and you can use DVR systems with Aereo that skip commercials too.  No wonder the broadcasters sued.

This is only the latest of many situations in which technology has outstripped the ability of laws to keep up with it.  Kanojia says that if it weren't for recent advances in transcoding and data storage, his service would be prohibitively expensive, but costs have dropped to the point that it's technically feasible, and such trends will only continue.  Whether the Supreme Court will shut down Aereo or make it change its ways remains to be seen.  But so far, judges have agreed with Aereo's claim that it is not providing a public performance, but simply hooking up thousands of individual subscribers to their own individual TV systems. 

Of course, broadcasters could mount a rear-guard action to change the copyright laws, and from time to time this type of ploy has succeeded.  But it would have to be federal laws that are changed, and Congress is in such disarray right now that making major copyright-law changes would be a challenge, to say the least. 

So for the time being, it looks like the old-style advertisement-supported broadcast TV folks are going to have to look for other ways to make money as their conventional model gets bypassed by technological advances such as Aereo.  Whether the new style of individual online TV viewing is a good thing in itself is an ethical question for another time.  But it looks like if Aereo succeeds in winning its legal challenges, that online viewing will get easier and cheaper, and the old networks and their advertisers will have to find a new way of doing things.

Sources:  The article "Outside the Box" by Ken Auletta appeared in the Feb. 3, 2014 issue of The New Yorker.  I referred to the following articles on Aereo:  CNET, Feb. 14, 2012 at http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-33199_7-57377530-221/aereo-brings-over-the-air-tv-to-the-cloud/, CNNMoney, May 12, 2012 at http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/21/aereo/, and a particularly good article on the technology involved on the website Gigaom.com, Feb. 6, 2013, at http://gigaom.com/2013/02/06/inside-aereo-new-photos-of-the-tech-thats-changing-how-we-watch-tv/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on Aereo and Barry Diller.

Under the Cloud

The business world is almost as fad-ridden as the education world, and one of the hot words in the last few years is "cloud" as in "I'll get it from the cloud," or "We put all our data on the cloud."  In this sense, the word means a set of Internet servers where your important data is archived so that it is accessible from anywhere that has an Internet connection.  The concept is increasingly vital to commercial and institutional users worldwide, and makes sense in that context.  But as Scientific American columnist David Pogue warns in the February issue, Apple and Microsoft are taking not-so-subtle steps to force many individual users of their products onto the cloud.  And I doubt that anyone reading this column can avoid using Apple and Microsoft products without a lot of inconvenience. 

The situation, as I understand it, is basically this:  suppose you have data that needs continual updating on your portable gizmo (which can be an iPad, an iPhone, a BlackBerry, one of those Android things, or you name it), and you'd also like the same version of the same data on your laptop.  In the old days, whenever you made changes on your calendar, for example, you would then physically plug your portable device through a USB cable or whatnot into your laptop and tell it to sync.  That way, your laptop calendar would agree with your handheld thingy's calendar and vice versa, and you wouldn't find yourself at Aunt Mimi's when you were supposed to be having your teeth cleaned.  So far, so good.

Then the number of handheld devices proliferated, and so did their operating systems, and so did the ways you can have laptops and towers talk with portable systems (wireless, IR, Bluetooth, etc.), and at least according to the manufacturers and their unofficial representatives, it just got to be too hard to come up with proprietary software to sync absolutely every portable thingamajig with each operating system for all the popular computers.  So they just said forget it:  the real data will sit on the cloud, where we can keep track of it, and then all we have to do is make sure that every piece of hardware (portable or not) can keep in touch with the cloud.  And that solved the problem. . . .

But if you were used to firing up your old laptop and plugging it into your BlackBerry that you've had since 2003, and you are dead-set against keeping your data in a place that you know not where and you know not when it might go down, you are now out in the cold and under the cloud, so to speak.  According to Mr. Pogue, the latest operating systems from both Apple and Microsoft either don't allow you to do hard-wired transfers without involving the cloud, or make it so hard to do that you almost have to get a networking certificate from Microsoft to know how to do it. A discussion thread on an Apple forum on exactly this topic has been going on since last October, and has accumulated 150 pages of comments.  So there are more than a few people upset about this.

Call me Amish, but it doesn't affect me because my form of a BlackBerry is a three-by-five card.  Or rather, many three-by-five cards.  I suppose if you took all the three-by-five cards I've used in the last decade and piled them up, they would make a stack high enough to fall over and form the kind of mess my desk looks like some days.  In fact, that may be why. . . anyway, somehow I have survived thirty years of an occasionally intense professional life with nothing more advanced than a laptop or two and a mobile phone that you still have to use the numeric keypad for to send a text.  It's so annoying to do it that way that I hardly ever send texts, which is all right by me. 

But seriously, this specific issue is an example of a more general trend that organizations are following: a move toward exerting increasing control of any computer that is connected to one of their networks.  For example, I spend some time at the University of Texas at Austin.  If I was using a University-provided laptop (which I'm not, as it turns out), I would now have to make sure that all the data on it was encrypted in accordance with a University-provided type of encryption software so that if it happens to get stolen, the thieves can't run off with University data.  That makes sense from a liability and security point of view—I have blogged on numerous scandals and crimes that happened when someone took home a laptop full of supposedly secure data—but it represents another intrusion, if you will, into a space that was formerly rather private. 

Of course, if the University owns the laptop, they get to say what you can and can't do with it.  Privately owned computers connected to privately rented networks are another matter, but then you still have to deal with Apple or Microsoft, and their pressure to keep your stuff on the cloud will prove irresistible.  The Star Trek Borg, a race of cybernetic beings, liked to say "resistance is futile," but that was only a TV show.   

Personally, I don't see any real harm in letting Microsoft know the details of my next dental appointment.  And yes, those massive servers go down from time to time, but then so does your laptop.  I admit that I would feel a certain kind of existential queasiness in entrusting the only record of my professional schedule to some ethereal system that is everywhere and nowhere, rather than having it in a tangible, solid form on pieces of paper in my appointment calendar in my briefcase.  (Yes, I do that the old-fashioned way too.)  Maybe people living in the 1850s felt the same way about the newfangled electromagnetic telegrams, and didn't really trust them on an instinctive level as much as they would trust a letter written by the hand of a friend they knew.  But they got used to trusting telegrams, and I suppose we will get used to trusting the cloud, as long as our trust is not abused. 

Sources:  The online version of David Pogue's article "The Curse of the Cloud" can be found at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/were-forced-to-use-cloud-services-but-at-what-cost/.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on BlackBerry and Borg (Star Trek). 

Wearing a Mask on the Web

There are lots of reasons to wear a mask, some good and some not so good.  On Halloween, kids have mostly harmless fun by donning masks and dressing up as their favorite cartoon characters, or anything else their imagination (and their parents) can come up with.  But criminals also wear masks to conceal identity for nefarious purposes.  At least in Western countries, I'm not aware of any law against simply wearing a mask, although you have to choose your circumstances carefully.  Outside of Halloween or a costume party, a person walking around in a mask may be suspected of either serious eccentricity or illegal doings.

When you go online these days, your identity is as obvious to websites you visit as it is in person.  Cookies and easily purchased commercial databases make it easy for both individuals and companies to identify you and figure out things about you that you may not even be aware of yourself.  So wouldn't it be convenient if there was some way to wear a mask on the Internet?  It turns out that there is:  a type of freeware called Tor, which was developed with support by, believe it or not, the U. S. Naval Research Laboratory, and still largely supported financially by the U. S. government.  Tor has recently been used for a lot of underhanded doings, most prominently the Silk Road affair.

A fellow going by the online name of Dread Pirate Roberts (a character who always wears a mask in the cult-classic movie The Princess Bride) designed a clandestine website called Silk Road to deal in illegal drugs and other illicit material.  To protect both his own identity and those of his customers, he required users to communicate with him using Tor, which virtually guarantees anonymity on the Web.  The medium of exchange on Silk Road was bitcoin, a virtual currency that is also (virtually) untraceable and often used for illegal transactions.

Dread Pirate Roberts, whose real name was Ross William Ulbricht, eventually made enough mistakes online, such as using his real email address on occasion, to allow the FBI to catch up with him last October.  He is now awaiting trial on numerous charges, and may wish that he'd never heard of Tor.  So why is the government supporting software used by criminals?

Just as kids at Halloween usually don't mean any harm by wearing masks, there are legitimate reasons to be anonymous on the Web.  Suppose you are a dissident in a country run by a nasty dictatorship.  Using Tor can allow you to communicate over the Internet with fellow dissidents or supporters outside your country.  Law enforcement agencies do not care to have their confidential online activities viewable or traceable by all and sundry, and I'm sure that domestic and international security issues were an important driving force behind the Naval Research Lab's support of Tor.  But because it's cross-platform freeware, just about anybody with a computer and enough knowhow to install a Web browser can don a Tor mask online and instantly become very hard to trace.  It's a little like a digital invisibility cloak, and we all know what happened to the Invisible Man:  nothing good.

That is not to say that anyone using Tor will inevitably develop bad habits of flaming websites anonymously and dealing in child porn or crystal meth, payable in bitcoin.  But the developers who decided to make Tor widely available as freeware were making a decision that they may not have explored the full implications of.  Just to move the situation in imagination to the physical world, suppose Wal-Mart came up with a good, cheap invisibility drug and decided to make it free for everybody, and the Wal-Mart greeters handed it out as you walked in the door.  I'm sure there are legitimate reasons to be invisible, but my guess is that the vast majority of people who decided to take advantage of the offer would do things that are inadvisable at best, and more probably illegal, immoral, and maybe even fattening.  (Don't like the way you look?  Become invisible and who can tell?) I'm not liking where that fantasy is going, so I think I'll stop here.

No one I have read on this subject is saying that defects in Tor led to Ulbricht's arrest, or that we should rethink whether Tor ought to be freely available.  The fact that it's not that well known makes it unlikely that we'll see a rash of online crimes committed by newly invisible Internet users.  But Tor enables the existence of what various news articles on the Silk Road incident have referred to as the Deep Web or the Dark Web, because Tor renders a website invisible to the usual search engines and so on.  For most commercial websites, their problem is increasing their visibility, not the other way around, so they have no incentive to use Tor.  But for sites dealing with unpopular, persecuted, or illegal activities, Tor is still available.

Ulbricht is awaiting trial, so I should refer to him as the "alleged" mastermind of Silk Road, although the evidence pointing to him is pretty convincing.  Whatever the other facts of the case may be, Ulbricht's use of Tor did make it harder for the FBI to catch him, just as masks make it more difficult to identify a guy who knocks over the convenience store down the street.  But there are other ways to catch crooks, and it looks like we will all just have to get used to a world where you can wear a mask on the Internet as well as in real life.

Sources:  I referred to articles on the Silk Road affair published in the online version of Time magazine at http://nation.time.com/2013/10/04/a-simple-guide-to-silk-road-the-online-black-market-raided-by-the-fbi/ and by the website Verge at http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/2/4795502/the-fbi-busted-silk-road-but-not-the-dark-web-behind-it, as well as the Wikipedia articles "Tor (anonymity network)" and "The Princess Bride."  My blog "Bitcoin:  Currency of the Future?" appeared on Oct. 16, 2011.

Don't Drink the Water In Charleston, West Virginia

Charleston is the capital of West Virginia and its largest city, although its population barely exceeds 50,000.  It's a safe bet that nearly all 50,000 residents were in various states of annoyance ranging from ticked to furious as they learned last Friday, January 10, that the water supply for not only their city, but nine surrounding counties as well, was unsuitable for anything except flushing toilets.  How come?  A little-known industrial chemical used for washing coal had leaked into the Elk River just above the main intake pipe for the city's water supply.  Exactly how this happened, and whether it's a cause for serious concern or only a transient inconvenience, are questions that we don't have answers to yet.  But the incident has already revealed problems ranging from inadequate protection from leaking storage tanks to inadequate knowledge about obscure chemicals.

Large tanks of stuff have been rupturing and spreading death and destruction ever since engineers learned how to build large tanks.  Perhaps the most famous disaster involving an industrial storage tank rupture was the Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919.  A two-million-gallon tank filled with molasses for the manufacture of alcohol used in munitions gave way, and sent a 25-foot-high wave of goo at speeds up to 35 miles an hour racing through downtown Boston, killing 21 and injuring 150.  It was such incidents that inspired the practice of surrounding large tanks with containment dikes, which can be seen at most tank farms around the country.  The idea of a containment dike is that if the tank lets go, the contents will at least be slowed down by the dike, if not contained altogether.  I am not familiar enough with the regulations governing tank construction to know whether containment dikes have to be sealed with impervious layers of rubber or tar, a precaution often taken in landfill construction.  But it is obvious that the containment dike at Freedom Industries failed to stop about 5,000 gallons of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (MCHM) from getting into the Elk River and thus into the West Virginia American Water Company's pipes.  Once that happened, the whole water system had to be flushed, which could take days.  In the meantime, you will have trouble finding bottled water in Charleston, because it vanished from the shelves as soon as the water company announced the problem. 

The chemical, which reportedly smells like licorice (its strong smell was how the leak was originally found), is not known to be hazardous, but on the other hand, no extensive toxicity tests have apparently been made on it either.  Determining toxicity to humans in a way that would satisfy the U. S. Food and Drug Administration is a costly business, and so for chemicals that will probably not end up in food or otherwise in close contact with humans, chemical companies don't bother to investigate it unless there are obvious hazards.  Every chemical sold has to have a Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS), but the information on these sheets comes from various places and is not up to the FDA standard.  Because washing coal is clearly not a consumer-type application, nobody has done a study on whether the licorice-smelling compound in question can harm humans.  Probably the best data we can get will come from future demographic studies in the area served by the Charleston water supply utility.  In the meantime, it is worth considering whether the old Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 should be updated.  Right now, all a chemical company has to do to legally sell a new chemical is to notify the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency of the chemical's composition.  The EPA resorts to computer modeling to guess whether the new compound is hazardous, and either lets it go or regulates it, depending on the result.  No actual safety tests are required.  Certainly there is food for legislative thought here, but Congress seems to have other things on its collective mind recently.

The West Virginia American Water Company did the right thing in promptly notifying its customers not to use the contaminated water.  Similar precautions are called for on a smaller scale quite frequently when supply-line breaks result in contamination with ground water.  In those cases, residents can safely use water for drinking purposes after boiling it, but boiling wouldn't get rid of MCHM, so bottled water is the only alternative for a few days. 

Another lesson to be learned is how a system with no backup water source can be especially vulnerable.  Apparently the water utility had only one set of intake pipes, and no wells or other sources.  At the least, this situation would call for heightened scrutiny of any chemical plants a few miles upriver from the intake pipes, with perhaps added safety precautions above and beyond the usual ones required for plants that could leak into the river just above the intake site.

Monday-morning quarterbacking is easy, and I'm not having to go out and hunt down the last gallon of bottled water on the shelves until the water coming out of my kitchen faucet no longer smells like licorice.  (I predict a steep decline in licorice sales in West Virginia, by the way.)  But given the unfortunate circumstances, the authorities in West Virginia's capital appear to have handled the situation reasonably well, and hopefully there won't be any consequences worse than the inconvenience of using bottled water for a while. 

Sources:  I referred to an article by Deborah Blum at http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/01/chemical-guesswork-in-west-virginia/

and a New York Times article by Trip Gabriel on the accident at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/11/us/west-virginia-chemical-spill.html.  I also used Wikipedia articles on Charleston, West Virginia, and the Boston Molasses Disaster.

Doing Good Versus Making Good: Engineers and Charitable Works

A reader recently called my attention to some of the inventions sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, an organization that funds things like new vaccines and other technologies that can save lives.  I will confess that I wasn't that interested in condoms made with graphene and toilets that turn solid waste into electricity, but one item did catch my eye:  Bill Gates is a founder of something called the Giving Pledge.  And it got me to thinking about the question of how to do good with an engineering career, if such is your intention.

First, the Giving Pledge.  It's not for everybody; you have to be a billionaire to join.  But once you qualify, membership is simple:  you simply pledge to give away half your wealth, either in your lifetime or in your will.  Some members you may have heard of who made their money in techie ways include Craig McCaw (cellphones), Larry Ellison (co-founder of Oracle Computers), Steve Case (America OnLine), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), and Elon Musk (you name it, he's tried it, but most lately Tesla Motors).  The Giving Pledge simply codifies in a somewhat more palatable form what famed nineteenth-century American steel industrialist Andrew Carnegie said he would try to do:  give away all his wealth before he died.  Putting it off till post mortem is more attractive to some, but all of these folks deserve credit for publicly devoting half their wealth to charity, whether they will be here to enjoy the results or not.

That is certainly one way to try to make the world a better place with an engineering career:  first get filthy rich and then give some of your money away.  For those with the talent and good fortune to do such a thing, this is certainly one path.  But another approach is simply to create and grow a profit-making engineering-based enterprise in the first place, as long as you choose the right one. 

Founding a chain of meth labs, for instance, is both technical and highly profitable, but nobody would suggest that it helps the world's net well-being, even if you turn around and make the Giving Pledge with your ill-gotten gains.  No, the engineering enterprise you profit from must be beneficial, at least on balance.  In my experience, certain types of engineering work tend to be more benign than others.  Take communications technologies, for example: cellphones (mobile phones, as they are known through most of the world) are a case in point.  Helping people talk to other people they want to talk with is a good thing the vast majority of the time.  Yes, it can lead to abusive telephone solicitation, but for people who have never before had access to a cellphone, the occasional advertising call they may get is worth the value of being able to get in touch with the rest of the world.  This explains why cell networks spread so fast even in relatively poor countries:  the infrastructure is much cheaper than the old landline phones, and the technology is easy to use and inexpensive to the user.  And simply by growing their business model and trying to make a profit, cellphone companies have brought the blessings of telecommunications to millions who otherwise would remain in isolation.

What if, like myself, you have the entrepreneurial abilities of a snail and couldn't make a lemonade stand turn a profit, but would still like to benefit the world somehow in an engineering capacity?  There are many non-profit organizations that can use engineers as both volunteers and paid employees to do good works of various kinds.  Some of them have religious affiliations, while others are simply dedicated to serving populations that otherwise could not afford technical solutions to problems that for-profit organizations could provide.  Two such organizations I have had some dealings with personally are Engineers Without Borders and JAARS.  Engineers Without Borders, which has many chapters worldwide, engages students and other engineering specialists to do development work in areas such as water supplies and sanitation, solar power to rural areas, and communications in remote regions.  JAARS (an acronym which originally derived from "Jungle Aviation and Radio Service") is a service branch of Wycliffe Bible Translators, and recruits computer geeks, telecomm specialists, aviation pilots, mechanics, and others with technical skills to support teams of Bible translators around the world, who often deal with obscure isolated tribes that need basic technical services as well.

So there are at least three distinct paths to doing good by doing engineering:  become a techie billionaire and give away your wealth, start or contribute to an engineering enterprise or industry that is more benign than malign, and find an engineering organization explicitly dedicated to doing good rather than just making money.  I find that this list leaves out what I do, namely, educating future engineers.  To find out whether this is a good work, you'd have to ask my students.  In general, though, conveying knowledge is a benefit to humanity, and so I find I can sleep most nights and look myself in the mirror in the morning, as long as I don't mind looking at a sleepy old man.

While there are exceptions, I think most engineering careers do more good than harm.  The exceptions are what we usually think about when engineering ethics comes to mind:  the explosions, accidents, and other disasters that can happen when people try to do something good with technology, and slip up.  But such problems should not blind us to the fact that even if you don't become a billionaire and make the Giving Pledge, or join a nonprofit engineering organization, your work in engineering can make the world a better place.  But don't just assume it does:  pay enough attention to find out whether it does, and if it doesn't, maybe you should do something about it.

Sources:  The website http://www.mphonline.org/gates-foundation/ has information on inventions sponsored by the Gates Foundation and on the Giving Pledge.  The Giving Pledge website is http://givingpledge.org/, and has a list of all public pledgers.  The USA umbrella organization of Engineers Without Borders is at http://www.ewb-usa.org, and the JAARS website is https://www.jaars.org.

Is Fracking Shaking Up Azle?

Although Texas has had its share of both natural and man-made disasters, earthquakes are not something most Texans worry about much.  The geology of much of Texas is more or less flat limestone layers left over from the time when a giant sea covered much of the state.  We are pretty far away from the edges of tectonic plates, unlike places such as the west coast of the U. S., where earthquakes are a constant threat.  So when the small North Texas town of Azle had an earthquake a year or two ago, it was an unusual event.  It was a small one, but more and more followed.  In the month-long period ending today (Dec. 29), Azle has had ten earthquakes large enough to be noted by the website earthquaketrack.com, whose data comes from the United States Geological Survey.  The smallest was magnitude 2.8 and the largest was 3.6, which is enough to rattle windows and cause minor structural damage. 

This would be simply a matter of scientific curiosity were it not for the possibility that these earthquakes, as well as similar ones in other parts of Texas and the U. S., are related to oil- and gas-drilling activity.  Specifically, the process called "fracking" involves sending lots of water treated with chemicals down a potential oil or gas well, then pulling it out again and disposing of it in underground injection wells that are deep enough so the injected fluids don't mix with groundwater.  At least, that is the intention.

Drillers have done fracking for many years, and according to a website operated by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, Texas has over 52,000 Class II injection wells, which are typically the type used by fracking operations.  But only in the last five to ten years has fracking become a widespread practice near populated areas of North Texas, where the Barnett Shale formation has become the focus of intense exploration and drilling.  In the interests of full disclosure, my father-in-law received some money for mineral rights related to drilling near his former home in Fort Worth, which he no longer owns.  And my sister lives in Cleburne, some 30 miles south of Fort Worth, which has experienced a few earthquakes of its own in recent months.  Cleburne is near a lot of fracking activity and injection wells too.

Suppose there is a connection between shoving lots of water underground and triggering earthquakes:  what then?  Is this a matter of engineering ethics concern?  I would certainly think so.

The parties most directly involved are (1) the oil and gas drillers, (2) the people living in areas subject to these strange earthquakes, (3) the organizations paying for and benefiting from the drilling, (4) local, state, and federal regulatory authorities, and (5) the general public, which is not directly affected by the earthquakes, but benefits in some way from increased domestic supplies of fossil fuels, and is possibly harmed by the general increased risk of earthquakes in the future.  But identifying the concerned parties is only the first step.

From a legal point of view, the situation is extremely fuzzy.  Although there have not historically been a lot of Texas earthquakes, there were enough for U. T. Austin geology professor Cliff Frolich and his colleague Scott Davis to write a book about them in 2002.  I have read that book, and the impression I got was that Texas is not under any existential threat from a "big one" like California is due for.  Rather, there are lots of little faults here and there, and every so often one of them gets tense enough to snap, like a third-grade teacher the day before Christmas vacation.  Frolich wrote a report back in 2009 on a cluster of earthquakes near Cleburne, where he confirmed that numerous injection wells had been operating.  After installing a special array of seismographs, he detected even more earthquakes than the standard USGS network did, and in the abstract of the report he stated, "A plausible hypothesis to explain these observations is that injection only triggers earthquakes if injected fluids reach and relieve friction on a suitably oriented, nearby fault that is experiencing regional tectonic stress."  What he's saying in ordinary English is something like this:  Earthquake clusters are like doors that have both a lock and a key.  The lock is the local conditions of stress and orientation that make the fault ready to let go, and the key is the water coming in from the injection wells.  When the key fits in the lock, the door opens and in comes an earthquake.

Seismic data on earthquakes is easy to come by; besides the USGS data, there are other online databases and the information is relatively easy to find and read.  The question of where injection wells are and how much fluid is injected is a harder one to answer, although the Texas Railroad Commission (named that for historical reasons), which is the state regulatory agency for oil and gas drilling, has a database on injection wells that will yield such information to diligent inquiry.  I diligently inquired for about five minutes this morning and turned up a bunch of wells across Eagle Mountain Lake from Azle, but nothing right in the town.  But maybe Azle sits on the lock, and the key flowed under the lake from the other side, so to speak.

I'm no geologist, or lawyer either.  If Azaleans (or whatever you call citizens of Azle) get tired of being shaken awake at 2 A. M. and organize a class-action lawsuit, their lawyers would have a rocky road to travel (so to speak) in order to prove to the satisfaction of a civil-trial jury that such-and-such injection wells directly caused so-and-so earthquake.  The only similar legal issue I can think of would be a lawsuit concerning structural damage caused by dynamiting for quarries and similar purposes.  In those types of cases, all the plaintiff has to show is that at Time A before the blast, the damage wasn't there, and right afterward at Time B it was, and usually it's easy to show that because the physics of shock propagation is pretty well known and hard to argue against in court. 

That is far from the case for these earthquake clusters.  In defense of their practices, fracking drillers state correctly that they have been doing fracking for many years in Texas and elsewhere, and nobody much noticed any earthquake clusters back then.  My own guess is that they just happened to be fooling around with keys where there weren't any locks.  But now that the fracking activity is so visible near populated areas such as the Dallas-Fort Worth area, people have begun to notice the clusters and start putting two and two together. 

So far, no one has been seriously injured or killed in a recent Texas earthquake cluster in areas where injection-wells are suspected as the cause.  As long as the damage remains minor, the general good will enjoyed by the oil and gas industry in Texas will probably continue, especially if they keep spreading around those royalty payments of a thousand dollars or so to anyone in the neighborhood of an active well.  But if we get a seriously bad earthquake that results in injuries or deaths near a place where injection wells are operating, watch for the legal and regulatory picture to change fast.  For my sister's sake, as well as the fracking industry, I hope that never happens.

Sources:  The book Texas Earthquakes by Cliff Frolich and Scott Davis was published in 2002 by the University of Texas Press.  An abstract of Prof. Frolich's report on the Cleburne earthquake cluster is accessible at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/07/30/1207728109.abstract.  The EPA website with statistics on Class II injection wells can be found at

http://water.epa.gov/type/groundwater/uic/wells.cfm. I referred to articles in a Russian news website on the Azle earthquakes, published at

http://rt.com/usa/texas-fracking-earthquakes-azle-445/

and data on the Azle earthquakes from the earthquake website

http://earthquaketrack.com/us-tx-azle/recent.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Azle.

From 1963 to 2013: Two Robberies and How The Thieves Got Away

Last week brought news of two robberies that happened five decades apart:  the Great Train Robbery of 1963 and the Great Target Data Breach of 2013.  A comparison of the two tells us something about how the business of thievery has changed over the years, and how likely it is that criminals who execute large-scale thefts like these today will be punished for their misdeeds.

But first, the tale of Ronald Biggs.  On his 34th birthday, August 8, 1963, he assisted a dozen or so partners in crime in an elaborate scheme to divert a British mail train carrying some $7 million in banknotes (equivalent to about $50 million today).  Back then, the Bank of England had the bad habit of shipping large amounts of physical currency from one bank to another, and the thieves caught wind of a shipment and successfully heisted it all.  Biggs' fingerprints were found and he was captured quickly and sentenced to a long jail term.  But less than two years later, he staged a daring escape and made his way first to Australia, then to Brazil, living a life of debauched indolence and occasionally taunting the British authorities by consenting to interviews with visiting newspeople.  However, as he became aged and sick, home looked better than ever, and he returned to England in 2001, expecting a pardon.  What he got instead was a jail sentence, which he served until 2009 when he was released on account of poor health.  He died Dec. 18, a hero to rebels everywhere but a convicted criminal nonetheless.

Only three days earlier, the giant U. S. retailer Target announced that from Nov. 27 to Dec. 15, an elaborately planned hack of their point-of-sale terminals acccomplished the theft of as many as 40 million credit and debit card numbers, names, and one of the two types of card security codes (the one embedded in the magnetic stripe, not the one printed on back of the card).  The potential value of this data on the black market is comparable to the $50 million or so that Biggs and his cohorts nabbed.  This particular piece of information came uncomfortably close to home when I discovered that my wife had used our debit card at Target for Christmas shopping recently.  Fortunately, she used it after Target said they had stopped the breach, but some 40 million people weren't so fortunate.

Catching Ronald Biggs was a matter of examining physical evidence such as fingerprints.  The digital fingerprints left by the Target thieves are much harder to trace.  Late word is that security experts have localized the source of the hack to Southeast Asia, but they may well encounter a brick (or bamboo) wall in their investigation at that point.  The global village metaphor is overused, but from a digital point of view, we really do live practically in each others' laps, with millisecond access to any of millions of computers around the world possible from my lowly laptop here on my desk in Texas.  But the uniformity of jurisdiction that allowed English detectives to move freely and quickly to investigate the Great Train Robbery does not exist across international boundaries, and it's hard to imagine how this situation would change.

There is some precedent in the way that international technical standards are worked out by so-called "working groups" that gather voluntarily to decide on a given technical problem.  But such groups have an automatic unity of purpose that the law-enforcement agencies of different countries do not share.  In some parts of the world, the criminal element is almost indistinguishable from the legitimate government.  Somalia comes to mind, and North Korea, where counterfeiting is regarded as a legitimate act of war.  The only way you could catch cyber-criminals who are harbored by such governments is to go to war with the government, and that measure is a little extreme even for the most dedicated law-and-order types. 

Fortunately for the millions of Target shoppers who were caught with their numbers down, so to speak, the big losers in such thefts are not the individual credit-card holders (whose liability is usually limited to $50) but the retailer whose system was breached, and the credit-card companies and banks themselves.  There will be lawsuits, surely, but the chances of recovering either the data or the money stolen by means of the data are small, if the history of similar breaches is any guide. 

In many European countries, a more complex type of credit card is used, one which has a microchip embedded in it that generates a different security code every time it is used.  It's much harder to hack the microchip type of card than it is to hack the old-fashioned magnetic-stripe variety that dominates the U. S. market.  But because the microchip card will require massive retooling at retailer point-of-sale systems and in the systems of credit-card issuers, the industry has resisted it so far.  According to the president of the Connecticut Bankers Association, MasterCard and Visa have promised to roll out the microchip cards by 2015, but this assumes that retailers won't block it by protesting it will cost them too much.  However, if the banks tell the retailers that they will be liable for fraudulent charges unless they switch to the new system, that may persuade reluctant retailers to get with the program.

As long as there is money and other valuables, there will be people who want to steal.  And the Target data breach is just the latest in a long series of cops-and-robbers escapades that goes all the way back to cavemen filching another tribe's giant-mastodon meat, no doubt.  But let's hope that the credit companies, banks, and retailers get their act together sufficiently to give us a well-tried microchip technology soon, one that at least makes it harder for thieves to break in and steal your credit-card number. 

Sources:  I referred to articles on Ronald Biggs in the Washington Post at

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/ronnie-biggs-notorious-participant-in-great-train-robbery-dies-at-84/2013/12/18/3f142a38-c5da-11df-94e1-c5afa35a9e59_story.html and the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/19/world/europe/ronnie-biggs-great-train-robber-dies-at-84.html.  I used information on the Target data breach from NBC News at

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/massive-target-credit-card-breach-new-step-security-war-hackers-2D11778083, from Forbes at http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/12/20/targets-biggest-pr-mistake-with-credit-card-security-breach/, and from an AP report carried by the Boston Globe at

http://www.boston.com/2013/12/20/fury-and-frustration-over-target-data-breach/LAEw7wmAeKBl0MJk0lBRDL/story.html as well as a Fox News report at

http://www.myfoxtwincities.com/story/24274470/target-victims-not-financially-responsible-for-credit-fraud.  The Connecticut banker was quoted by the Connecticut Post at http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/New-credit-card-features-may-prevent-breaches-5083388.php, and I referred to the Wikipedia article on card security codes. 

To Vape or Not to Vape?

A year or two ago, the administration at Texas State University, where I teach, passed a regulation that abolished smoking everywhere on campus, inside and out.  I have mixed feelings about this.  Personally, I have never smoked.  Both my parents were moderate to heavy smokers, and my father died of lung cancer at the age of 57.  So I am familiar with the harm smoking can do.  On the other hand,  some see widespread bans on personal habits that have at least some redeeming features as abuse of governmental authority.  Overall, I was mildly pleased by the ban, and so when I walked by a student lounge area in our building the other day and saw what I thought was a puff of cigarette smoke, I was surprised.

But on closer inspection, the student turned out to be "vaping":  smoking (or whatever the appropriate verb is here) an electronic cigarette.  Was that violating the smoking ban or not?  So far, the university hasn't ruled on whether vaping counts as smoking.  Since electronic cigarettes are unquestionably an engineered product, their production, sale, and use fall within the purview of engineering ethics. 

A visit to the website HowStuffWorks.com informed me that a Chinese pharmacist invented e-cigarettes a decade ago.  They depend on small lithium batteries for their energy source, and rechargeable lithium batteries themselves haven't been around for much longer than that.  The power goes through a voltage regulator to a small heating element, where a solution of nicotine in propylene glycol is vaporized and inhaled by the user.  The stuff becomes a finely dispersed mist upon exhaling and looks different than true cigarette smoke, probably because the particles are larger and evaporate rather than dispersing.  The current form of the device was originally marketed as an aid to help people quit smoking, but as with many such aids for addiction, the cure may not be much of an improvement over the disease.

Who is affected by vaping?  Well, there are the manufacturers of the product and its auxiliary apparatus and supplies:  chargers, the nicotine solution, the e-cigarettes themselves.  There are users, many but not all of whom are former smokers of real cigarettes.  There are the makers of conventional tobacco products, who may either feel threatened by the new development or may co-opt it once the market gets large enough, and start selling similar products themselves.  There are various organizational entities ranging from private companies up to things like the European Union, which are now tasked with deciding what if anything to do about vaping.  And last, but hopefully not least, there is the general non-smoking public for whom second-hand-smoke bans were enacted.  But partly because e-cigarettes are so new, nobody has a lot of solid data on their health hazards and whether second-hand nicotine-tinged propylene glycol is something to worry about. 

Hong Kong and Singapore, among other countries, have imposed flat-out bans on e-cigarettes, but most nations either have no laws about them or impose only mild regulation.  Their status in the U. S. has been the subject of numerous court cases, and attempts to get them classified as drug delivery devices have been unsuccessful.  The latest court ruling, which is more definite than logical, says they can be regulated only as tobacco products, which is a little like classifying tires as agricultural products because rubber comes from trees.  But the effect is that governments can't do anything to e-cigarettes that they can't do to regular cigarettes.  Consequently, some state governments have banned sales to minors, but that is about the extent of U. S. regulation so far.

It seems to me that e-cigarettes are all about the nicotine, which has been proved time and again to be addictive.  But so has alcohol, and we all know what a flop Prohibition was.  I confess that I don't relish the idea of attending a party at which I discover several of my friends or students sucking on phony cigarettes, but then again, I don't go to a lot of parties anyway.  In the last couple of decades, the latent puritanical streak in American culture has fastened onto cigarettes, with the result that most people who smoke, as well as most non-smokers, regard the cigarette habit as a disreputable vice.  And this attitude itself will probably keep e-cigarettes from becoming as common as cellphones, for example.

The medical and health evidence on vaping is still largely lacking, so the precautionary principle says to leave it alone until it's been proven to be safe, whatever "safe" means in this context.  The main ingredients of the vapor—nicotine and propylene glycol—are well-understood compounds.  Nicotine use in any form is psychologically addictive, but doesn't itself cause cancer.  Propylene glycol, if pure, is approved for use in foods.  So it's unlikely that their combination in e-cigarettes poses a sinister unknown risk, although one can't be sure without the appropriate long-term studies.

The thing I dislike the most about e-cigarettes is that they present one more opportunity for people, especially young people, to become dependent on a costly habit that otherwise doesn't make the world a better place.  I say that in full knowledge that some of the historical figures I most admire, including G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis, were smokers, not of e-cigarettes but of the original old smelly tobacco products themselves.  E-cigarettes are an addition to a spectrum of products that are potentially habit-forming, products that lie on a spectrum whose mildest end includes coffee and tea, and whose opposite malignant end winds up with heroin and crystal meth.  Some people can choose to stay in one place on the harmless end of that spectrum, while others find that they are drawn through the milder products to take dangerous and illegal risks at the other end.  This is not to say that everyone who tries e-cigarettes will end up hooked on them, or will start smoking real ones.  But some will.  And is the pleasure, or whatever satisfaction that people get from them, worth the risk to those who may find that they are being controlled by their habit, rather than the other way around?  We don't know, but it is a risk both governments and individuals should consider seriously. 

Sources:  HowStuffWorks.com has a good description of e-cigarettes I referred to at http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/everyday-innovations/electronic-cigarette1.htm, and I also referred to Wikipedia's articles on electronic cigarettes, nicotine, and propylene glycol. 

Positive Train Control and Commuter Lines: A Train Wreck of Another Kind

Early Sunday morning, Dec. 1, dozens of people living in Westchester County and points north of New York City along the Hudson were riding in a southbound Metro North commuter train driven by veteran engineer William Rockefeller Jr.  The scenic rail line follows the east bank of the Hudson and makes a sharp curve just north of the Spuyten Duyvil station.  According to information leaked by a union official later, Rockefeller "basically nodded" at the controls in his booth at the front of the train, which was electrically linked to the locomotive that was pushing the train from behind.  Whatever Rockefeller's state of mind was, the speed recorder recovered from the train verified that it hit the curve at 82 MPH (131 km/hr), well above the 70-MPH (112 km/hr) speed limit for the straight stretch of line north of the curve, and way too fast for the 30-MPH (48 km/hr) zone in the curve.  The result?  The locomotive and all seven cars derailed, four persons were killed, and over 60 were injured.  As bad as this literal train wreck was, it highlights a different kind of train wreck that is taking place at commuter lines across the U. S.:  one involving a federally-mandated system called Positive Train Control (PTC).

There is little doubt that if the Metro North train operated by Mr. Rockefeller had been equipped with PTC, the accident would never have happened.  As passed into law by Congress in 2010 and required in all trains by the end of 2015, PTS is a system that takes information on a train's location and automatically enforces speed limits in accordance with track regulations, operating conditions, and other factors.  (Think of it like a car equipped with a cruise control that would automatically slow you down to 20 MPH (32 km/hr) in a school zone even if you stomped on the gas.)  So even if Mr. Rockefeller had fallen asleep with his foot on the "dead-man" control (which automatically stops the train if a driver lets go of it), the train would have slowed down safely before it reached the 30-MPH zone.

So why didn't Metro North install PTC already?  Many freight lines have completed their installations, and even the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, a union which does not happen to count Mr. Rockefeller as one of its members, has issued a call for PTS to be installed as soon as possible in all commuter trains. 

There are a couple of reasons, which can be summarized as suitability and cost.  PTC was developed and intended mainly for long-distance freight lines to prevent derailments and other accidents involving hazardous cargo.  Freight-train engineers are often on 24-hour call, and so sleep-deprivation-induced inattention is a real danger, which is one reason freight lines have adopted it so fast.

Commuter lines, with their regular schedules, frequent starts and stops, and much more dense traffic and line networks, are a different sort of problem.  While PTC often relies on GPS for some of its functions, GPS doesn't work underground, which is where many commuter lines spend a good bit of time.  It turns out that the unfunded mandate to install PTC on all U. S. commuter lines might cost as much as $2 billion, which is a lot of change for cash-strapped municipalities.  Even before the crash, many commuter lines had given notice that they were going to miss the deadline, and there was talk of legislating an extension for such lines.  But clearly, PTC was too late to help the four victims of Sunday's crash. 

Not all engineering ethics issues are clear-cut, and rail safety is one of them.  One of the first ethical cases to draw the attention of the IEEE, the largest professional organization of electrical engineers in the world, involved a commuter rail line.  In 1972, as BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit System of San Francisco, tested its new state-of-the-art automatically controlled train cars, a non-injury accident occurred which led whistleblowers to go public with their doubts about the design.  There are similar concerns that PTC technology is not ready for commuter lines, and if fully installed would either slow down the trains so much that schedules would have to be changed, or might take automatic actions that could cause accidents instead of preventing them. 

Metro North trains already have several safety systems installed such as the "dead-man" switch, but reportedly a second type of "alerter" system, which required the engineer to respond to a beep by tapping a control every 25 seconds, was available only in the locomotive itself at the rear of the train, not in the front cab where Rockefeller was.  Investigations of many kinds of accidents often reveal that safety equipment was installed that could have prevented the mishap, but it was either not operating at the time, was disabled, or not available under the particular circumstances that prevailed. 

As the controls and software capable of replacing some, if not all, of the functions of a human driver become more available, either economic forces or the force of law will push both private and public entities to adopt them.  We are seeing this already with Google's self-driving cars, and while PTC does something close to the same thing, it has been out of the public eye until now.  But the same type of tradeoff exists for both PTC and self-driving cars.  The promise of much lower accident rates is offset by the expense and administrative headaches of implementing the systems. 

The immediate cause of Sunday's accident is pretty clear by now.  Mr. Rockefeller did the honest thing by admitting he was sleepy.  When even locomotive-engineer unions call for the installation of potentially job-threatening systems such as PTC, it's a sign that the technology's time has come.  As long as it can be adapted safely and economically to the demands of commuter lines, we can look forward to the chance that the four people who died on Dec. 1, 2013 might be the last lives lost in a U. S. train accident for many years.

Sources:  I referred to reports on the accident carried in the New York Daily News on  Dec. 5 at http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bronx/metro-north-engineer-sleep-disorder-article-1.1538717, a statement issued on Dec. 5 by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen at http://www.blet.org/pr/news/newsflash.asp?id=5507, a CNN report on the crash published on Dec. 4 at http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/04/us/new-york-train-crash/, and the Wikipedia article on Positive Train Control.