Would Licensed Engineers Make Workplaces Safer?

Joe Carson is a licensed professional engineer (PE) with three decades of experience as a federal employee whose job involved responsibility for nuclear safety.  He is also an activist and whistleblower who has devoted much of his time in recent years to problems with safety and accountability in the engineering profession.  Joe recently sent me a couple of articles that, taken together, raise an interesting question:  if engineers working in U. S. industries had to have PE licenses, could they raise the level of workplace safety?

The first article reports that the U. S. government's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recently levied $1.7 million in fines against Ashley Furniture for numerous safety violations and injuries in its large plant in Arcadia, Wisconsin.  OSHA says about 4,500 people are employed at the facility, making it probably one of the largest furniture factories in the U. S.  But Ashley's Arcadia plant doesn't seem to be a safe place to work.  OSHA says that Ashley's plant workers have suffered over 1,000 injuries in three and a half years, and have placed the firm in its Severe Violator Enforcement Program.  A spokesman for Ashley disputes the allegations and calls the fines "grossly inappropriate and overzealous." 

In some countries, engineers cannot work in their profession at all without obtaining a PE license or equivalent from a government agency.  In turn, the government can hold licensed engineers responsible for ethics-related performance, such as the safety of products manufactured, and even for the safety of employees who work at a plant under the engineer's supervision, broadly defined.  There is an entire specialty called manufacturing engineering which is devoted to the efficient—and safe—design of manufacturing facilities.  If U. S. manufacturing engineers had to have PE licenses in order to work in private industries, and the terms of their licenses spelled out minimum safety standards that facilities they designed had to meet, it stands to reason that with their jobs on the line, manufacturing engineers would pay a lot of attention to workplace safety in facilities they were responsible for.

So why isn't that the case in the U. S.?  Because of a little-known set of laws collectively known as the "industrial exemption."  Back in the 1930s when engineering societies began to lobby state legislatures to enact PE licensing laws, corporate manufacturing and industrial interests got wind of this and inserted industrial exemptions into the laws in many states.  The effect of these exemptions is to exempt firms that are basically big enough to look out for themselves from having to hire only licensed engineers.  Some states without industrial exemptions nevertheless do not enforce the licensing of all engineers.  The history of PE licensing and regulation is complicated, but the results are simple enough to summarize:  unless you practice engineering as a direct service to the general public (as in a consulting firm), or work for a government agency engaged in public works such as roads and bridges, you generally do not have to hold a PE license to work in the engineering field.

In his fair-minded way, Joe also sent me another article, this one on the question of whether state licensing laws have gone too far.  The recent rise of unlicensed taxi-equivalent private services such as Uber has raised the issue of whether we really need to license professions such as hair-braiding and interior decorating.  The arguments in favor of professional licensing made by trade groups usually start from the premise that the public needs protection from untrained amateurs who don't know what they're doing.  Consequently, the state has an interest in licensing X profession, and the licensing process typically requires a minimum amount of training and certification for the licensee.  With such training, the public can now rest assured that a licensed practitioner of X knows what he or she is doing, and certain dire consequences, ranging from mis-braided hair to clashing colors in your living room, can be avoided.

I let myself go a little there at the end of that paragraph, but the basic point is sound in some cases.  Everyone wants licensing for highly trained professionals in life-critical jobs such as surgeons and airline pilots, because the negative consequences of error in these professions are so obvious.  Critics of state licensing laws counter that while licensing can raise the standards of performance in a profession, it can also restrict entry and create a seller's market for the profession's services.  This lets licensed members of the profession make more money, but arguably leads to more expensive services that are not always better, as numerous studies comparing services in states with and without particular licensing laws have shown.

If the industrial exemptions went away and states began aggressively enforcing PE licensing for all engineers, we would certainly see a spike in engineering salaries for licensed engineers.  There would also be a rush to get PE licenses, which usually take years to obtain for undergraduate engineers, who can only get "EIT" (Engineer In Training) status immediately after passing an initial exam, and then must accumulate some years of experience before applying for a full license. 

As to whether products and workplaces would be safer, that would depend on whether safety requirements were built into the licensing laws, as I described above.  Currently, that is not the case, although as a matter of principle, engineers at facilities such as Ashley Furniture ought to consider workplace safety more than they apparently do at present, license or no license.  If no engineer would work for a firm out of fear of losing his or her license, it would apply a novel kind of pressure that would encourage such organizations to clean up their act safety-wise.  But it would also turn licensed engineers into a sort of government agent, a role that many might find uncomfortable, to say the least.

I thank Joe Carson for bringing this issue to my attention, and I hope that engineers responsible for workplace safety, including those at Ashley Furniture, will follow Joe's example of holding safety paramount above profit, promotion, and even one's job, whether or not licensing laws are changed.

Sources:  Joe Carson sent me notice of the New York Times articles "OSHA Cites Ashley Furniture Over Dozens of Safety Violations" at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/03/business/osha-cites-ashley-furniture-for-dozens-of-safety-violations.html

and "Job Licenses in Spotlight as Uber Rises" at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/28/business/economy/ubers-success-casts-doubt-on-many-job-licenses.html.  You can read more about Joe Carson and his work at http://www.carsonversusdoe.com.  For the history of PE licensing, I referred to an article by Neil Norman on the National Society of Professional Engineers website at http://www.nspe.org/sites/default/files/resources/pdfs/blog/industry_exemptions-neil_norman.pdf.  I last blogged about PE licensing on April 13, 2013 at

http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/should-engineers-be-licensed.html.

Passing of an Ethical Engineer

For almost as long as I have been writing this blog, my wife's father Benjamin G. Simons has lived with us.  Ben passed away in our home on Saturday, Feb. 7, at the age of 89.  There is a branch of engineering ethics that uses "moral exemplars"—basically, good examples—as models of how ethical engineers should live.  Ben was one of these.

Ben was a brick.  I use that word in two senses. 

One sense is now archaic, but means something close to today's "cool dude."  When a character in Mark Twain called someone a brick, it meant that they were a good, reliable, and even generous character, what in Yiddish is called a "mensch."  Ben was born in 1925 in Kenefic, a town occupying one square mile in south central Oklahoma, to a couple who decided in the early 1930s to seek better opportunities when they moved to Fort Worth, Texas.  Ben's mother trained him well:  he was unfailingly courteous to women, always said "thank you" for favors received, and almost always used his native Irish stubbornness for good purposes.  Following his graduation from high school in 1943, he joined the Navy as soon as he turned eighteen and served in the Seabees (the Navy's Construction Battalion) in the South Pacific theater until the end of World War II.  He made some efforts in the direction of higher education, both with independent study in the form of International Correspondence School literature and formal academic training.  In going through some of his old papers we found while cleaning out the family home in Fort Worth, I found a calculus exam he had failed.  In the late 1940s, a college degree was not yet a necessity for someone who wanted to become a surveyor or civil engineering professional, and he found work in those fields in South Texas and various other locations, turning his wartime construction experience to good purpose.

Sometime in the mid-1950s, he joined what was then called the Texas Highway Department in Fort Worth and determined to live the American dream:  he built a new house, bought a new car (a 1955 Olds, which now resides in the garage here), and after ten years of marriage, a girl was born in 1956.  (That girl eventually became my wife.)  From that time until his retirement in 1979, he worked at the Highway Department's Fort Worth offices and occasionally on field sites as a construction supervisor.

The grand civil-engineering project of that era was the Interstate Highway System promoted by President Eisenhower, who had seen the military usefulness of Germany's advanced autobahns during World War II and understood the unifying effect of a good transportation infrastructure for the U. S.  Ben's career spanned the construction of Loop 820, the main ring road around Fort Worth that interconnects the east-west IH-20 and IH-30 routes with the north-south IH-35W, which goes all the way from Laredo, Texas to Duluth, Minnesota.  He was one of those guys you see in old photos of large drafting rooms where white-shirted men wearing ties spent their days under fluorescent lights churning out penciled drawings on mylar that became blueprints for America.  His title on retirement was Engineering Technician V, but most people back then would have called him a highway engineer.

And here we come to the second meaning of "brick," namely, a rectangular block of fired clay used in construction.  There is nothing that remarkable about an individual brick, and nothing that useful, either.  But as long as each brick meets its specifications for hardness and strength, you can use thousands of them to build truly amazing structures, anything from houses up to churches, roads, and aqueducts, as the ancient Romans knew.  Ben was a metaphorical brick in the great, and possibly historically unique, burgeoning of engineering that the United States experienced in the 1950s through the 1970s.  In 1950, there were no interstate highways, only two-lane roads connecting most cities, and television was just beginning to put small fuzzy gray images in the homes of a few million city dwellers.  Digital computers consisted of rooms full of giant boxes of hot vacuum tubes, and even their developers thought the world market for computers would be saturated by the time a dozen or two were completed.  By 1960, the interstate highway system was on the drawing boards of most states, 87% of U. S. households had at least one TV, and computer engineers were eagerly ordering a new device from Texas Instruments called the "integrated circuit." 

For the next two decades, Ben stayed married to his wife (a monumental achievement only those closest to him could appreciate), raised two daughters, paid off his car loan and his mortgage, and stayed gainfully employed as a member of the Texas Highway Department's staff.  At one point, in order to communicate better with a hearing-impaired colleague, he went to the trouble to learn American Sign Language, and we have a photo that shows him receiving a service award for this work.  To the best of my knowledge, Ben never accepted a bribe, and none of the roads or bridges he helped design and build ever showed serious flaws. 

To some, this might seem to be an unremarkable, even dull, life.  But just as each brick's hardness and solidity contributes its small part to the integrity of the entire structure, Ben's small role in the story of American engineering in the mid-twentieth century was just as important as every other brick's role.  Without millions of such bricks, many of them veterans who had seen just enough of foreign lands to be glad to be back home in America, this country could not have become what it became:  the birthplace and home of many of the most outstanding engineering and scientific achievements of world history.

There is honor in fulfilling one's obligations to one's profession, one's society, and one's family, and Ben fulfilled his obligations.  That such achievements are commonplace makes them no less honorable for that.  Ben's life is history now.  But his legacy of simply doing his job well and remaining faithful to his vision of right and wrong is one that deserves attention and emulation.  Ben never founded a Fortune 500 company, or won the Nobel Prize, or even got promoted beyond the title of Engineering Technician V.  But he did his job competently and well, and we engineers who follow in the footsteps of his generation should do no less.

Sources:  I found the statistic on TVs in U. S. households at http://www.tvb.org/media/file/TV_Basics.pdf.

Who Wazed the Sheriff?—Traffic Apps and Law Enforcement

Google's traffic app called Waze allows users to tell each other about traffic-related issues such as construction zones, tie-ups, and speed traps.  It uses a phone's GPS system to locate an icon on a map of the area that everyone using Waze can see.  Google bought Waze from its Israeli developers for a billion dollars in 2013, and it is now one of the most popular free apps on Apple's rankings.  But the National Sheriffs' Association (NSA) is not happy about it.

In a widely publicized statement, the NSA's Deputy Executive Director John Thompson said "we are . . . concerned this app will have a negative effect on saving lives and with public safety activities."  The app's little police icons can show locations of speed traps and other law-enforcement operations.  The sheriffs cite recent ambush attacks on law enforcement, such as the killing of New York City patrolmen Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu last December, as examples of hostile actions that could be aided by Waze.

An Associated Press report of the reactions to the NSA statement includes a response by a Google spokesperson, who pointed out that most users tend to drive more carefully when they believe law enforcement is nearby.  Free-speech advocates oppose any restrictions on locating law-enforcement operations via Waze as long as the operations are clearly visible on public property. 

Traffic-law enforcers face a problem that is in some ways paradoxical.  Sometimes they want to be highly visible simply because of the deterrent effect on most law-abiding citizens.  After all, the overarching goal of law enforcement is to encourage obedience to the law.  This goal would be achieved with respect to speed laws if everyone obeyed the speed limits.  And most drivers (but not all) who become aware of a potential speed trap will slow down.  So letting folks know that Smokey is hiding over that next ridge on the interstate will probably lead to fewer speeders, which is what we want, isn't it?  That doesn't take into account the other aspect of the paradox, which is that sometimes traffic cops want to hide, too.

I think it may be significant that the National Sheriffs' Association, but no other major law-enforcement organization, has come out in opposition to Waze.  In small towns in rural areas, and in larger Western counties where the main law enforcement is by sheriffs and not town or city policemen, a considerable fraction of the sheriff's office revenue may come from speeding tickets.  If a deputy has found a nice concealed location where drivers who are just passing through frequently get ticketed for speeding, the last thing he or she wants is for this prize fishing hole to show up on Waze.  Local circumstances such as these can create perverse incentives which encourage law enforcers to rely on a certain number of speeders to show up, just to keep them in business. 

The problem of publicizing law-enforcement operations and locations should not simply be brushed off.  You can imagine a months-long sting operation by police that would climax in a stealthy approach to a crime organization's secret hideout.  But if some clueless driver comes along and posts a lot of cop icons on Waze, and one of the crooks happens to be looking at his phone at the time, the whole operation could come unglued, with dire consequences up to and including bloodshed.

Back in the slow-media days when newspapers were the main forum of public information about law enforcement, reporters would sometimes get wind of secret police operations in advance.  It was a part of the journalistic code of ethics not to spill such beans when it would cause major problems to the police, even though it would make a scoop that would sell papers.  Editors have sat on such hot news many times until after the police have had time to spring their traps.  While such measures could have been viewed as press self-censorship, most observers would agree that it was done in the public's best interest in most cases.  The public's right to know is not absolute, and must be tempered by other considerations such as the safety of law-enforcement officials when publicity would put their lives at risk.

But this is 2015, not 1935, and the age of citizen-journalists.  Instead of fedora-wearing photographers armed with big Graflex cameras, we have baseball-capped passersby armed with iPhones linked to Facebook and Waze.  We can no longer count on the reasoned restraint of professional journalists who can view the larger picture and weigh the consequences of their actions in the long run.  If a Waze user sees a cop and posts the sighting on Waze, the user has no idea whether the cop is there for a routine speed trap or for more specialized and delicate reasons. 

So far, there have been no major incidents to my knowledge in which Waze data on law enforcement personnel locations has led to a major miscarriage of justice or harm to an officer.  But in the present atmosphere of tension between police and many citizens, I can understand why the National Sheriffs Association is touchy about the popularity of Waze, and why they have asked Google to do something about it.

Unfortunately for the NSA, chances are not good for that to happen.  While Google could conceivably run interference between the raw data coming from observers and the displays of police icons, it would be a resource-intensive and probably manual process, which would slow down the edited displays and diminish what is one of the main attractions of Waze in the first place:  its timeliness.  Public-access apps that let the public post information directly depend on that same public not to lie or manipulate their inputs in a nefarious way.  Fortunately for law enforcement, and everybody else, most people at most times are simply trying to get along and help others when it's not too much trouble.  Waze helps them do that, and it looks like the speeding-deterrent effects of posting speed-trap locations will outweigh the possible negative consequences, at least in Google's view.  And in this case, unless some more powerful force intervenes, it's Google's view that counts.

Sources:  The Associated Press article by Eileen Sullivan describing reactions to the National Sheriffs' Association press release was carried by numerous outlets such as the Chicago Tribune at http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-bc-us--police-tracking-app-20150128-story.html.  The NSA statement itself can be found at http://www.sheriffs.org/content/waze-concerns-sheriffs.  I also referred to Wikipedia's article on Waze. 

High Time for Satellite Tracking of All International Flights

This coming March 8 will mark one year since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared from radar en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing somewhere over the Indian Ocean.  The wreckage has never been found, although communications experts used some almost accidental satellite-transponder data to estimate the last known location of the plane.  At the time, I recall thinking that if I was an airline and owned a number of high-value mobile assets known as airliners, I would want some way of knowing where each one was every minute or so, anywhere in the world.   After all, the technology for tracking the much cheaper assets called semi-trailer trucks has been around for years.  The little white domes on truck cabs report minute-by-minute locations to a data center where operators can pay a monthly fee to any one of a number of firms to keep tabs on shipments, and truck drivers too, for that matter.  But there is no international requirement for airlines to do the same.

Last week, the U. S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) waded in with a recommendation for all passenger airliners to be equipped with improved location technology.  The board admitted it was motivated partly by Flight 370's disappearance, and called both for improvements in in-flight tracking and in "black-box" technology. 

The in-flight tracking part seems to be pretty straightforward technologically.  It would operate more or less the same way as the truck-tracking system.  Every minute or so, a GPS receiver on the plane would send its location to a satellite in view, and the satellite would relay that information to a data center, where it would be logged and made available in the event of an incident of interest.  The only slightly tricky part would be identifying which satellite to use.  But there are already geostationary satellites in orbit such as Inmarsat which provide virtually world-wide coverage, and the missing bits of Earth near the poles could be made up for by linking to numerous low-earth-orbit satellites in polar orbits. 

The technology is not nearly so much a hurdle as the cost and the peculiar structure of international aviation regulations.  The NTSB's recommendations went to the U. S. Federal Aviation Administration, and if the FAA adopts them they will be obligatory for all U. S. airlines—but nobody else.  Because the U. S. operates only a fraction of international flights over large bodies of water where the technology would be most useful, the idea will not succeed without international cooperation, and that means the International Civil Aviation Organization, or ICAO.

The ICAO is a United Nations body in charge of international standards for, well, civil aviation, as you might expect.  As such, its rulings have no force of law in individual countries unless the countries' own aviation regulations require that its carriers follow ICAO rules as well, which most do.  It was a 2008 ICAO ruling, for example, that required all air traffic controllers and flight crew members involved in international flights to be proficient in English.  I'm rather surprised that it took until 2008, but after all, everything takes a while at the UN.

The question is whether and when the ICAO might follow the NTSB's lead if the NTSB prevails with the FAA to make international-flight GPS tracking mandatory.  Enough alphabet soup for you?  The whole process—from tragic accident to technical recommendations to changes in laws and regulations—is typical of how safety technology develops in coordination with regulations requiring its use.  And the regulatory part is particularly tricky when it involves spending money.  The requirement that pilots speak English can be met by changing hiring practices, but GPS tracking will involve both up-front and ongoing expenses for new hardware—which itself needs to be standardized somehow—and rental fees to the commercial firms that operate the satellite transponders used to convey the location data.  Fortunately, we are not talking about large bandwidths here—the equivalent of a single cellphone text message every minute or so would be sufficient.  But coordinating all this will take some doing, and coordination of any kind at the level of the ICAO is a challenging and slow-moving process at best.  If they took till only seven years ago to agree on a common language for radio communications from international flights, the ICAO isn't going to churn out new GPS-location rules overnight, you can be sure. 

The other part of the NTSB recommendations concerns the nature of the onboard flight data recorders.  Now that video cameras and recording equipment are so inexpensive, the NTSB says we should have cockpit video as well as audio recorders, and that controls for the entire system should be inaccessible from the cockpit.  (There is some suspicion that the radar-transponder system of Flight 370, which works only within range of ground-based tracking radars, was intentionally disabled by the pilot.)  Also, the NTSB floated the idea (so to speak) that the flight recorders should be housed in buoyant housings and ejected upon impact so that they can remain on the surface, where their radio signals could be more easily received than the limited-range and limited-time sonar emissions that the units currently send out underwater. 

All these are good ideas, and if the FAA adopts them they will make an already safe U. S. air-travel system even safer, or at least increase the likelihood of finding any flights that go down in deep water.  And the information from such accidents is always valuable in preventing the next one, whether it was caused by mechanical failure, human error, or evil intent.

Nevertheless, I am not going to be holding my breath until the ICAO follows suit.  You would think that the international carriers themselves would have adopted something similar to the truck-tracking systems years ago, but there may be a mentality in place that makes such a system seem unnecessary because of the vanishingly small number of incidents in which it would turn out to be useful.  But once GPS tracking for international flights is in place, I bet folks find other uses for it, for things like fuel-economy efforts and even weather tracking.  But first, the ICAO has to get in gear, so stay tuned.

Sources:  The article "NTSB:  Planes Should Have Technologies So They Can Be Found" by Joan Lowy of the Associate Press was carried by numerous outlets, including ABC News on Jan. 22 at http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/ntsb-planes-technologies-found-28409934.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Inmarsat, and the ICAO.

Addendum Feb. 1:  Edwin Doetzal wrote me on Jan. 31 as follows:

"Your analysis of MH370 contained a couple issues:
Airliners do often have SATCOM tracking 'like trucks'.  On MH370, this system was turned off along with the radio transponder.
ADS-B is the new satellite based air traffic control system that will replace the radio based air traffic control system and is already being implemented through efforts by NAVCanada and ICAO.
What is currently in discussion are new systems such as AFIRS that would stream amounts of data automatically or by trigger in an emergency as well as explosive jettisoned FDR/CVR units.  Knowing where an aircraft was is of course not enough without the detailed DAQ information that might explain why the emergency happened and what action was taken by the flight crew.  A truck's limited DAQ can be retrieved from the ditch.  Please be assured that an airliner is a much more sophisticated system than a truck.
It was somewhat troubling to see such an article on an 'engineering ethics' blog.  With respect, it would seem that you are speaking outside your professional scope.  A retraction would appear appropriate.
Regards,

Edwin Doetzel

Lay Person"

It was careless of me to imply that airliners had no such tracking systems, and I apologize
for leaving that impression.  In the space I had, I meant to concentrate not so much on the technology as on the international coordination that would be needed to implement it uniformly so that flights such as MH370 would not slip through the cracks.  My thanks to Mr. Doetzel for the correction.  

The Passing of Google Glass

Most people who are even slightly technology-aware have heard of Google Glass, the wearable head-mounted display device that Google introduced almost two years ago amid a blizzard of publicity.  Priced at $1500, Google Glass was never intended to be a mass-market product.  As of tomorrow, Google Glasses will become collector's items, because the company announced last week that the product will no longer be available.  According to Will Oremus at Slate.com, the press release announcing the news tried to put a positive spin on the situation with phrases like "moving even more from concept to reality."  So the idea of a wearable camera/monitor isn't dead—just the particular embodiment of it in Google Glass.

I could have told them this was coming, because about a month ago, I finally got to try out a pair.  A student of mine had borrowed some from a friend of his in Austin, and was walking around campus letting all and sundry try them on.  I wear ordinary glasses, so the fit was somewhat of a problem.  But I managed to see the little display, and then the battery ran down, so my experience was very limited.  Nevertheless, it was enough for the Stephan Kiss of Technological Death to take place. 

More times than I can count, I have tried out a new technology just before it's about to disappear.  We bought a VHS player right after DVDs came out.  We got a DVD player about the time BluRay came out.  I bought a cellphone with a color screen about the time the iPhone came out.  Well, you get the idea.  In any market, there are early adopters, then the great mass of people who buy a thing after the early adopters have worked the bugs out, and then late adopters like me who come along after everybody else has dropped a product for the next hot item. 

Why wasn't Google Glass more successful?  From a late-adopter point of view, I can tell you one reason:  it didn't promise to do anything for me that was worth $1500 of my money.  From the start, I got the sense that a lot of the people buying them were doing it for the same reason that they bought Rolex watches.  A Rolex doesn't keep time any better than a Timex.  But a Rolex tells other people you are the kind of person who can afford a Rolex.  So Google Glass became a fashion brand for the folks who just couldn't wait to show up at the office wearing another expensive personal item.  I'm a little surprised that nobody came up with an imitation knockoff Google Glass that looked the same as the real thing but wasn't functional, priced at $99.99.  Only it would have been embarrassing for people to come up to you and ask to try them out, and you'd have to tell them sorry, the battery just ran down.

Probably the most useful feature of Google Glass was also the most controversial:  the little camera that could record your environment without anyone knowing for sure whether you're recording or not.  Spy cameras have been around for some time, but if they're designed and placed right, nobody knows about them except for the operator.  You see a Google Glass on someone and right away, you knew they could be recording you.  It was a little bit like walking around with a 35-mm camera in front of your face all the time.  No wonder some people got annoyed.  Nevertheless, Oremus reports that the most serious business customers of the technology used the camera feature to capture things like pictures of sides of beef for FDA inspectors, and whether Dr. Whozis left any forceps inside his last gall-bladder-surgery patient.  So it's likely that face-mounted cameras in some form will show up in places where the product or service is pricey enough to justify the expense of whatever comes after Google Glass.

No one can currently beat Google at what they do best, but designing hardware for personal use is very different from the massive Internet-based data crunching that got Google where it is today.  Technology geeks in particular tend to be blind to some issues that the general public care about deeply.  When Henry Ford first marketed his Model T, he later recalled that he said in 1909, "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black."  And for many years, Ford beat his competition on price and performance with all-black cars.  But as automobiles became more of a commodity, other makers found that they could attract customers away from Ford by offering a variety of paint colors, and Ford eventually had to follow suit. 

Engineer and author Henry Petroski likes to say that failure is often more instructive than success.  By failure, he usually means things like collapsing bridges, but the failure of a new technology to meet its sales target is still a failure, though of a different and less hazardous kind than the failure of a bridge or a building.  In a free market, market failures are inevitable, and it's not like everybody at Google is now out on the street because they can't sell any more glasses.  In general, wearable technology seems to be the wave of the future in some form, and it's just a question of what form it will take. 

I think Google took on a major challenge by messing around with a person's face.  The face, and particularly the eyes, are where we look first when we meet another person.  We have had a few hundred years to get used to the idea of people wearing ordinary glasses.  They started out as expensive specialty items too.  A graphic on the Fashionisto website says that in the U. S. of the 1700s, a pair of eyeglasses could set you back about $200, which is like about $6,000 today.  So regardless of who comes up with the next version of Google Glass technology, they face an uphill battle in getting us used to the idea of having some active technology in the line of sight between soul and soul. 

Sources:  The article "Google Glass Is Finally Dead.  Ish." by Will Oremus appeared on Slate's website at http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/01/15/google_glass_dead_or_alive_nest_s_tony_fadell_takes_over.html .  The Fashionisto spectacle graphic can be found at http://www.thefashionisto.com/history-eyeglasses-timeline/.  I referred to the Wikipedia articles on Google Glass, and the Henry Ford quote can be found at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_Ford. 

Incompetent Engineers: Marilynne Robinson and the Global Economy

Marilynne Robinson is a historically-minded writer of fiction and essays.  In one essay entitled "Family" she decries the damage wrought by the fact that the "marketplace gods," as she calls them, are now in ultimate charge of the global economy.  The result, she says, is a return of Social Darwinism—the nineteenth-century idea that prosperity and success are rewards for the intelligent, the industrious, and the able, and poverty and failure are equally just rewards for the stupid, the lazy, and the incompetent.  The Social Darwinism of the 1800s led straight to eugenics, which acquired a bad reputation after the Nazi regime embraced it during World War II.  But in the ruthless international competition that currently prevails, she sees a return to the bad old days when a small, fantastically wealthy elite ruled over millions of industrial workers enslaved in unremitting toil.

So far, so conventional.  But toward the end of the essay, she takes an unexpected turn:

"Maybe the great drag on us all is not the welfare mother but the incompetent engineer . . . . When our great auto industry nearly collapsed, an elite of designers and marketing experts were surely to blame.  But the thousands thrown out of work by their errors were seen as the real problem." 

Robinson is good at questioning unspoken assumptions that most of us are so used to, we don't even realize they are there.  The assumption she challenges in this essay is that global competition is inevitable, and every industrialized nation must organize its institutions, including its educational system, governmental policies, and even its cultures and family structures, to succeed in the constant worldwide race to produce the most goods and services at the lowest prices.  And rather than simply deploring the way things are, she suggests that the problem may lie in a place we haven't looked—within the very elites we usually assume are the answer to the problem.

Robinson is right that the U. S. auto industry went through a steep decline in the 1980s.  The main reason for that decline was surging competition by Japanese automakers, who adapted many techniques developed in the U. S. for lean manufacturing and outran their former teachers.  To the extent that U. S. automotive engineers and managers got lazy and let things slide, she is absolutely right.  It took another decade for U. S. automakers to learn the hard lessons that Japanese competition taught them, but by 2000 the global shares of auto sales by U. S. and Japanese makers were about even.  Now that many Japanese firms have U. S. factories, the problem is not so clean-cut, but that specific incident has been taken care of. 

Both Japan and the U. S. now have China to worry about instead.  The effect of the globalized economy on the U. S. is an erosion of time available for family and family life.  Instead of one person in a family earning a living wage that suffices for a spouse and children, Robinson cites the many workers today who "patch together a living out of two or three part-time jobs, or work overtime as an employer's hedge against new hiring." 

What if Robinson's "incompetent engineers" had been competent, and had beaten the Japanese at their own game sooner?  Because the largest single expense in manufacturing tends to be labor, if the U. S. makers had quickly adopted the productivity-raising automation technologies that were such a large factor in making Japan more competitive, probably the U. S. workers who eventually lost manufacturing jobs later would have simply lost them sooner.  Clearly, what Robinson is calling for is not just competence in a narrow technical sense, but a larger vision of what purposes engineers serve, and what forms of life are encouraged or discouraged by engineering activities.

What would have to change for society to become less dominated by the ruthlessness of international competition and more hospitable to things Robinson says she misses:  "humor, pleasure, and charm; courage, dignity, and graciousness; loyalty, respect, and good faith"? 

Engineers tend to think in terms of systems, and when asked a question about a large system, the engineering answer tends to be framed in the same terms of system-wide changes.  Some would look toward legal and regulatory solutions:  protective tariffs, restrictions on immigration, widespread unionization, and other changes historically associated with left-wing politics.  But people are not machines, and the kind of scientific approach that models cows as spheres for the purpose of analysis, and models entire populations as a bunch of numbers in a database somewhere, is the kind of thinking that has gotten us into this situation in the first place.

Besides the direct influence of elites through the powers they hold, elites also teach by example.  Civic, industry, and government leaders of earlier eras attempted to maintain public appearances that were consistent with good character and citizenship—things like charm, courage, dignity, graciousness, loyalty, and good faith.  They sometimes failed to show these traits of character in private, or occasionally in public, but the journalists of the day recognized the need to preserve the illusion of rectitude in many cases and refrained from plastering every famous citizen's misdeeds all over the countryside.  Scandals were reported, but they were rare enough to be scandalous.  By contrast, scandalous behavior in everything from sexual morality to profiteering appears to be the norm for many public figures today, at least judging by media coverage.

I don't know clearly how to express what I'm asking for.  Perhaps the essence of it is a reform of character starting with the individual, and a recognition that all the regulatory changes in the world will not reform an individual who has no example of good character and rectitude to look up to and to consider imitating.  If we want an economy in which family breadwinners are paid a living wage for a work schedule that leaves enough time to families to be families, and not just strangers sharing the same living quarters, we all have to value that way of life—have to value it more than just that additional dollar we use to buy that additional consumer item.  All of us, high and low, rich and poor, engineers and janitors, will have to undergo a radical change.  And then we will have to re-learn the democratic process of moving our society toward the vision laid out by people who see it better than most of us do—people like Marilynne Robinson. 

Sources:  Marilynne Robinson's book of essays and speeches The Death of Adam was published in 2005 by Picador.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on the automotive industry.

Will 2015 Be The Year Commercial Drones Take Off?

If you had been in Boulder City, Nevada last December 19, you would have found Governor Brian Sandoval, a U. S. senator, U. S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials, and representatives of a company that manufactures the Magpie, an unmanned aircraft, all gathered to watch the first official test flight at one of six new test facilities the FAA has established to explore how "unmanned aircraft systems" (UASs for short) can safely use the same airspace that is now occupied by manned aircraft.  A video of the test flight shows a man holding what looks like a large model plane.  At a signal, he heaves it into the air.  It flies about twenty feet and nose-dives into the gravel, bending its nose propeller and eliciting a groan from the crowd.

It wasn't exactly an auspicious start to a program that the FAA has undertaken to fast-track new regulations that will accommodate the increasing pressure on the agency to allow legal commercial use of UASs, commonly called drones, far beyond what present regulations permit.  But at least nobody was hurt, except maybe in the pride department.  As I noted in this space over a year ago, experimental drones can be deadly—a large one went amok in South Korea in 2013 and killed an engineer. 

What we are seeing in commercial drone development is a pattern that has played out repeatedly in one form or another whenever a potentially profitable technology outpaces the ability of a regulatory agency to adapt to it.  True to its generally good reputation among government agencies, the FAA is trying to catch up to the rapid advances in commercial drone technology.  But if history is any guide, we are in for some stirring times first.

Something similar happened when advances in radio technology during World War I led to the explosion of radio broadcasting stations in the early 1920s.  The creaky regulatory mechanism of the time stated that the Department of Commerce, which was charged with the task of regulating the new medium, could not deny licenses to any qualified applicant.  As a result, the airwaves got so crowded that in some locations radios were practically unusable.  Congress eventually acted, first by establishing the Federal Radio Commission in 1927, and then following it with the Federal Communications Commission in 1934, under whose ministrations we still operate today. 

Fortunately, the FAA is already up and running, so the situation is not as wild-westish as it could be.  The main issue facing the agency is not lack of regulatory authority—it has plenty of that—but the question of how to allow drones into the air in a way that both allows innovative commercial uses and preserves the exemplary safety record of U. S. air flights that has been achieved in recent years.  The experimental test sites the FAA has set up (besides Nevada, there are locations in Alaska, New York, North Dakota, Texas, and Virginia) can play a critical role in both uncovering unknown potential problems and in finding practical solutions to them.

Just as radio benefited from wartime technology advances, commercial drones benefit from the longer history and huge development effort that has gone into military drones.  In addition, advances in high-density batteries, software, and navigational aids such as GPS systems make it technically possible for drones to travel long distances autonomously.  However, the FAA is still uncomfortable with that.

The way things stand now, there are three classifications of drone regulations.  The only one that doesn't require the operator to obtain special permission is the hobby and recreational class, which has applied to operators of model aircraft for decades.  If you are a researcher, drone developer, or someone who has other good reasons to do not-for-pay work with drones, you can apply for a "civil UAS" permit.  Law enforcement agencies and other public organizations can obtain Certificates of Waiver or Authorization to conduct operations relating to their work.  But before the likes of Jeff Bezos can start delivering Amazon orders via drone, the rules—and maybe the technology too—will have to change. 

I'm going to go out on a limb here, but the start of a new year is a good time for making predictions, and if the following pans out, you heard it here first.  Let it be understood at the outset that I think the following would be a bad idea.  But that doesn't mean that somebody won't try it.  In 1982, a guy with more bravado than sense named Larry Walters tied a few dozen helium balloons to a lawn chair and floated over Long Beach until his balloons got tangled in a power line and he made it safely back to the ground.  I don't know what the payload capability of current small quadcopter-like drones is, but at some point, somebody will have the idea of ganging a bunch of them together to lift the weight of a small person.  This would be more of a stunt than a practical way of transporting people, but if the machines get cheap and powerful enough, it will happen. 

Of course, the FAA would disapprove of such a thing, and rightly so.  But if we do start seeing small packages being delivered by drones, it will happen only if the FAA and industrial interests figure out how to have all that air traffic moving safely and keeping out of the way of buildings, power lines, and giraffes, for that matter.  And if that infrastructure problem is solved, and battery technology advances to the point that you could safely build a helicopter-like backpack that was totally under software control, maybe we could see the day when people could literally fly to work.  Unless it rains, of course.

Sources:  The FAA's overall UAS website is https://www.faa.gov/uas/, and their site stating the rules for hobby and recreational model-airplane flying is http://www.faa.gov/uas/publications/model_aircraft_operators/.  I referred to a report on the Nevada test flight of Magpie carried by Gizmodo at http://gizmodo.com/first-drone-launches-at-faa-test-site-in-nevada-crashe-1673586255.  The six FAA UAS test locations are given at http://gizmodo.com/federal-drone-testing-is-coming-to-these-6-scenic-locat-1491708151.  Business Insider was the source of the commercial drone market estimate at http://www.businessinsider.com/the-market-for-commercial-drones-2014-2.  My blog "Drones, Air Safety, and the FAA" appeared on Nov. 4, 2013.

Red-Light Cameras: Proceed With Caution

The Latin phrase "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" means "Who will guard the guards themselves?" It may have originated with the Roman poet Juvenal, who flourished around the first century A. D., but the problem it highlights is much older than that.  Those who are charged with enforcing a law always experience a temptation to abuse the power that enforcement confers.  The case in point here is the use—and abuse—of so-called red-light cameras that photograph alleged runners of red lights and produce traffic citations that are mailed to the registered owner of the vehicle in question.

By the 1990s, the technology making these devices practical was sufficiently advanced that cities began installing them.  According to an article in a recent issue of National Review, over 500 cities in about half the states in the U. S. now use them.  Although the professed reason for adopting red-light cameras is to reduce the number of red-light runners, studies have shown that the evidence for lowering accident rates at intersections with red-light cameras is mixed.  Traffic engineers have noted a perverse counter-incentive at intersections where drivers know a red-light camera is installed.  Some drivers get so jumpy at seeing a yellow light at a camera-equipped intersection that they jam on their brakes prematurely and get rear-ended by a less paranoid driver behind them. 

What is not in dispute is that the red-light cameras are real moneymakers, both for the municipalities that install them and for the companies that often install and operate them for the government free of charge, taking a portion of the fine proceeds as payment.  The city of Newark, New Jersey gets $4 million per year in revenue from red-light cameras, while Chicago averages about $50 million a year.  Chicago's city government does not have a reputation for being squeaky-clean, so it is not surprising that earlier this month a man named Martin O'Malley was convicted of giving a $2 million bribe to a city transportation official.  The money came from Redflex Traffic Systems, which up to last year operated the city's red-light cameras. 

Redflex also offers a related service to school-bus systems:  a stop-arm violation camera.  In most states, it is illegal to pass a stopped school bus while its red flashing lights are on and the stop-arm is extended, but many people do it anyway.  Redflex will install video cameras and wireless downloading and evaluation systems free of charge on every school bus in exchange for a percentage of the fines assessed for violations.  This type of system has also proved popular and has been installed on school buses across the country, including right here in San Marcos, Texas. 

The red-light and stop-arm cameras can be viewed simply as technological aids to conventional means of law enforcement.  But they differ from other security-camera systems such as those that catch convenience-store robbers in one significant respect:  the absence of a police officer at the scene.  If a live patrolman pulls you over for speeding, there is a human-to-human interaction, and technically you can haul the officer into court and subject him to cross-examination at trial.  The fact that most people don't bother doesn't change the principle.  But when there is nothing but photographic evidence for a violation, there is nobody to subpoena, and correcting mistaken identifications and other errors can become a more complex matter. 

Besides the potential for error, there is the temptation to shorten the duration of yellow lights to increase revenue.  City governments in Florida and Illinois have been caught quietly lowering the duration of yellow signals below the federal guideline of three seconds at red-light-camera-equipped intersections, and in Florida things got so bad that the state legislature passed a law prohibiting the practice. 

Beyond the immediate temptation to abuse the system in government's favor at the expense of private citizens, there is the larger question of whether it is a good thing to use technology in a way that incentivizes governments to enforce laws, not mainly because enforcement benefits society as a whole, but because it generates revenue for the government. 

We have just experienced the Christmas season.  According to the Gospels, Joseph and Mary, the mother of Jesus, had to travel from their home in Nazareth to Bethlehem, where Jesus was born, to fill out some government tax form.  In ancient Rome and its colonies, taxes were collected by private contractors called publicans.  The deal was that publicans would bid for the right to collect a specified amount of taxes in a given region.  If you won the bid, it was up to you to collect at least the amount of taxes you were assigned, and anything you collected over your expenses and what Rome needed was yours to keep.  The potential for abuse in such a system is obvious, which may be why Jesus in later life used the hated figure of a publican in a parable as an example of someone who would have plenty of sins to ask forgiveness for. 

Firms such as Redflex are not exactly in the position of the publicans of ancient Rome, but the system under which they operate is edging toward a publican-like tendency of open-ended revenue collection that profits both the firm and the government it works for, at the expense of the public at large.  The abuses of the publican system came to an end with the Roman republic itself.  I am not recommending such a radical fix here.  But we can take the advice and examples of Juvenal and Jesus to give a hard look at technological systems that create perverse revenue incentives that reward abuse on the part of governments and firms that provide the technology.

Sources:  John J. Miller's article "The Red-Light District" appeared in the Dec. 31, 2014 print edition of National Review, pp. 24-26.  I also referred to an article on stop-arm cameras posted by a Fox News TV station in Washington, DC at

http://www.myfoxdc.com/story/23344373/2013/09/04/redflex-takes-aim-at-violators-of-school-bus-stop-arms, and to the Wikipedia articles on Juvenal and "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

The Sony Hack And Sony's Response: Caution or Cowardice?

On November 22 of this year, employees at Sony Pictures Entertainment were greeted by images of skulls on their computer screens, and experienced other problems that severely compromised the company's IT systems.  A message accompanying the hack warned that "secrets" would soon be disclosed to the world.  The firm was in the last stages of preparing for release on Christmas Day a film called "The Interview," which includes an unflattering portrayal of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.  Back in June, after the film's planned release was announced, North Korea called it an "act of terrorism" and threatened consequences if the film was released as planned. 

A group calling itself "Guardians of Peace" claimed responsibility for the hacks, and expanded their efforts by revealing reams of private emails and video files of both released and unreleased films, all stolen from Sony through sophisticated hack attacks.  When the Guardians issued threats to movie theaters that dared to show "The Interview," major theater chains began telling Sony that they would not run the film.  Faced with this situation, last week Sony announced that they were cancelling the release altogether. Sony executives received a message from the Guardians on Dec. 18 congratulating them on their "very wise" decision to cancel the release.  The FBI has confirmed that the attack originated from North Korea, which has denied that it has anything to do with it.

The situation is this:  Sony made a movie poking fun at Kim Jong Un, and Kim Jong Un retaliated with probably the most serious cyberattack on a non-governmental entity in history.  And he got more or less what he wanted—Sony cancelled the film's release.

I have not yet seen any estimates of the monetary damage Sony has sustained in this attack, but it clearly amounts to many millions of dollars, both in potential revenue lost from the film's cancellation and in the illegal downloading of other intellectual property of Sony's made possible by the massive cybertheft operation.  I have also not seen anyone comment on the Japan-Korea angle of this attack.  From 1910 to 1945, what was then the united country of Korea was essentially a Japanese colony, and forced conscription and other abuses soured the relationship between the two countries.  Sony is a Japanese firm, and so there may be a settling of decades-old grudges mixed into this situation, in which the U. S. assets of Sony are simply a means to an end.

Whatever North Korea's motivation was, the fact remains that they succeeded not only in a transnational cyberattack of unprecedented size, but also in blackmailing Sony to cancel the release of a major film.  Was this a prudent and "very wise" measure on Sony's part, or an act of cowardice?   

I say it's neither.  What this situation says to me is that the United States government has failed in this instance to carry out its constitutional obligation to "provide for the common defense."

If North Korea had managed to shoot a missile across the Pacific and blow up Sony headquarters in Culver City, everyone would recognize that as a clear act of war in which a state's boundary was violated and assets destroyed by the concerted action of a foreign country. But cyberattacks are so new, and their heritage so different from conventional acts of war, that we have trouble recognizing them for what they are. 

As far as Sony is concerned, the firm has sustained serious damage at the hand of a foreign power.  One of the essential functions of modern states is to provide security for its residents against attacks by foreign powers.  The U. S. government clearly dropped the ball in the case of the Sony hack.  In the absence of any assured forthcoming protection against similar attacks in the future, I understand why Sony pulled the picture, and why theater chains refused to show the film.  Fears of physical attacks on individual theaters were probably exaggerated, but now that most movies are digitally projected and shipped around as bits rather than celluloid, theaters are potentially as vulnerable as Sony to cyberattacks as well.

Now that the gangster regime of North Korea has shown it can attack U. S. assets with impunity, it is time to admit that the U. S. military, or something like it, needs to have a cyber-corps to defend U. S. citizens and corporations against cyberattack.  At present the situation is rather like the following.

Suppose the U. S. military did a good job of protecting the country against attacks by land and sea up to, say, 1910.  But then, private firms began flying airplanes, and, wonder of wonders, someone figured out how to drop bombs from an airplane.  Suppose the U. S. government had said in response to this innovation, "Look, we'll fight foreign attackers if they cross our borders on land or by sea, but as for attacks from airplanes, you're on your own.  Everybody has to have their own private AD (air defense) department, and if you're attacked by air successfully, well, we may be able to tell you where the planes came from, but you just weren't paying enough attention to your air defense and we're sorry.  And the President will badmouth you in a news conference if you cave to the attacker's demands."

Fortunately, this fictional history of private air defense didn't happen.  The Wright Brothers flew their first flights on U. S. soil, and America arguably led the world in air defense and attack, which was a major reason why we won World War II and defeated the international thug and blackmailer Hitler.

But something like the above wacko private-AD scenario is going on right now with regard to cyberattacks on U. S. firms by foreign countries.  The U. S. government is into a lot of things that it probably has no business being involved in, but if there is one thing almost everyone except the deepest-dyed libertarians can agree on, it's the fact that defending the nation against attacks by foreign powers is one of the federal government's main responsibilities. 

We have just seen a demonstration that at least one foreign power can attack and blackmail a major U. S. firm with impunity.  Perhaps Sony was low-hanging fruit in terms of cyber security.  At least one report mentioned the possibility that the attackers had some inside information, but spies have been around ever since warfare has been around, and there are ways of dealing with them too.  The fact remains that North Korea has revealed a serious vulnerability in our national defense, one that needs to be addressed with a serious rethinking of what cybersecurity of a nation really means, and what we are willing to give up in order to have it. 

Unless we want to get used to the idea that cyber-blackmail by foreign powers is going to become a way of life in America, we need to wake up to the reality that cyber assets are just as valuable as brick-and-mortar assets.  And a government that protects one and not the other is simply not doing its job.

Sources:  I relied on two recent reports of the Sony hack and its consequences, one from CNN on Dec. 19 at http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/19/media/insde-sony-hack-interview/index.html and another from the BBC at http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-30512032.  The Wikipedia article "History of Japan-Korea relations" has some information on the complex backstory of Japan's dealings with Korea and Koreans.