Last February 12, a Continental Airlines regional flight 3407, operated by Colgan Air, crashed short of the Buffalo, New York runway it was headed for, killing all 49 aboard and one person on the ground. At the time I wrote about it shortly afterward, speculation centered on how well the deicing systems were working, since icy conditions had been reported in the area. But after a three-day hearing on the crash held by the National Transportation Safety Board last week, it looks like human error may be the root cause of the crash.
Working with voice-recorder transcripts and flight data from the "black boxes" recovered from the crash, NTSB investigators painted a picture of the last minute or so of the flight which did not show pilot Marvin Renslow and his 24-year-old copilot Rebecca Shaw in a good light. During their final approach, when FAA regulations prohibit nonessential communications in the cockpit, the pair are heard chatting about careers and the co-pilot's lack of experience flying in icing conditions. Renslow himself had only three months of experience flying the particular Dash-8 involved in the crash, and had failed several flight simulator tests in the last few years. Besides these factors, fatigue may have further dulled the crew's responses. Shaw had joined the flight after commuting all night from her home in Seattle, where she lived with her parents. Her raising the plane's flaps without a command from the captain compounded the already critical situation the pilot found himself in when the plane lost airspeed and began to stall. Under these conditions an automatic system activates a "stick-shaker" intended to alert the pilot to the danger. The proper response is to move the stick forward to regain airspeed, but records indicate Renslow pulled it back. After stalling, the plane rolled and crashed.
The impressive and improving safety record of U. S. air travel says that on balance, nearly all pilots do the right thing in critical moments nearly all the time. But the fact that the safety record for smaller regional carriers such as Colgan is not as good as for the major carriers flying larger aircraft says there may be something about the difference in working conditions between long-range and regional carriers that bears watching, to say the least. A lot of the news coverage of the NTSB hearing centered on co-pilot Shaw's meager annual salary, which was less than $17,000 (not counting extra flying time). Deregulation of the airline industry plus the recent recession has brought intense competitive pressure to regional operators, who may be cutting corners and hiring inexperienced pilots with less-than-stellar records simply because they're cheaper. The Federal Aviation Administration has regulations about minimum standards for pilot training, performance, work hours, and rest breaks, but these things are human rules, and rules can be bent or broken without automatic penalties coming into play. At least, until something bad happens.
The loss of any life in an engineered system is a tragedy. But if the publicity surrounding the accident and its investigation result in corrective action, we can look forward to further improvements in safety procedures and their enforcement.
At last week's hearing, a NASA expert in cockpit communications acknowledged that more could be done to give pilots even earlier warning of potential stall conditions than the stick-shaker provides. This is a problem in what is called human-factors engineering: how to effectively interface a machine to a person so that the person has the right information at the right time in order to take the right action. By the time the stick-shaker went off, the pilot's options were very limited. If an earlier warning had been provided, the crew might have snapped out of their inattentive mood sooner and realized their difficulties in time to avert the accident. We will never know about this particular case, but if the investigation results in improved cockpit instrumentation that saves other inattentive crews from getting into the same fix, something good will have come from this crash.
The current federal administration seems to be more interested in regulation than deregulation, and there may be areas where such a change is appropriate. One reason that co-pilot Shaw's low pay got so much attention was that it is such a contrast to the typical popular perception of airline pilots: distinguished-looking former military flyers with some dignified gray around their temples (nearly always men), good pay, and years of flying experience. Stereotypes are made to be broken, and my hat is off to any young woman who goes through the arduous process of becoming a commercial pilot, but in the bad old days of high airfares and closely regulated airlines, the companies could afford to hire the very best pilots available, and generally did. The case of Shaw may indicate that inexperienced crews are being pushed too fast into positions of great responsibility without adequate training, or even sleep.
As sad as this accident was, we are starting to see the feedback system of engineering work. I don't mean the stick-shaker; I mean the corrective process that learns from mistakes, errors, and tragedies, and does things to make them less likely in the future. This kind of work takes place out of the spotlight, in quiet offices and labs around the world, but it is the reason that air travel is as safe and reliable as it generally is. And as long as we pay attention to the rare cases when something goes wrong, and have the courage to fix problems—whether mechanical or human—it will keep on getting even safer.
Sources: Two good reports on last week's NTSB hearings may be found at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/sns-ap-us-plane-into-home,0,5946950.story and http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/05/13/national/main5010745.shtml. My article "The Crash of Flight 3407: Better Deicing Needed?" appeared on Feb. 16, 2009.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Monday, May 11, 2009
An Orbital Service Call to Hubble
Today, if all goes well, the Space Shuttle will take off with a cadre of astronauts whose main job will be to act as glorified technicians. There's nothing wrong with doing a technician's job well, and although I have said critical things about the Space Shuttle and NASA in the past, this trip is more justifiable than most. The Hubble space telescope, launched in 1990, has already outlived its nominal lifetime, and with some judicious repairs, scientists hope it will run for at least another five years or so. But as a recent National Public Radio report describes, fixing Hubble is no ordinary service call.
Take the 111 screws, for example. I have enough trouble in an ordinary 1-G lab keeping track of small screws involved in my research projects. If I spend a day or so building something, I'm pretty sure that at least a few minutes will pass with me on my hands and knees on the floor, looking for a critical nut or bolt that jumped off the edge of the workbench. Well, it turns out there's an instrument box on Hubble that needs to be accessed for repairs, but the designers never meant for it to be fooled with anywhere but on the ground. Hence the 111 screws, which would form a toxic cloud of malicious orbiting metal if just released around the telescope. Never fear, though. NASA engineers under the direction of Jill McGuire devised a plate with 111 or so tiny plastic boxes that fit exactly over the screws. A hole in each box is just big enough for the screwdriver to go through, but when the screw comes loose the only drifting it can do is inside the box. A snap-on replacement cover is part of the repair kit, so the astronaut doesn't have to find all those screws and put them back on.
This is engineering of an extreme kind, and I suppose that in testing the extremes of repair operations in the vacuum and weightlessness of space, NASA may come up with something that we ordinary Jills and Jacks could use as well. Back in the days when NASA was searching for reasons to justify itself after the end of the Apollo moon program, you heard a lot about "spinoff technologies"—ideas that were originally developed for the space program and turned out to be useful for earthbound applications as well. I have the unconfirmed impression that Velcro may be in this category, but other than that, I can't think of anything that's made a huge difference to the economy. I'd like to have one of those sleek little vacuum-and-zero-G-adapted hand drills they're using for my own toolbox, but not if I had to pay $180,000 or whatever the equivalent cost would be.
The Hubble, as with most astronomy, is pure science, and science is its own justification, culturally. To do certain kinds of science, you end up developing some weird engineering, such as plates that capture 111 screws in the vacuum of space. Offhand, I can't think of any other circumstance in which you'd need a screw-capturer like that, but maybe tools developed for some other obscure task the astronauts will do up there, will turn out to have beneficial consequences down here. Even if it doesn't, just getting the astronauts up there safely and back is something that takes a lot more resources than developing the hundred or so tools they'll carry with them. But that would get us into the manned-versus-unmanned space flight argument, and hey, I'm on vacation. I'd rather not argue. Let's just hope the repair trip goes well and Hubble gives us another half-decade or so of fine science. By which time, I also hope, we're well on the way to replacing the outmoded Shuttle with something better.
Sources: A written form of the report about NASA tools carried on NPR can be found at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103915475.
Take the 111 screws, for example. I have enough trouble in an ordinary 1-G lab keeping track of small screws involved in my research projects. If I spend a day or so building something, I'm pretty sure that at least a few minutes will pass with me on my hands and knees on the floor, looking for a critical nut or bolt that jumped off the edge of the workbench. Well, it turns out there's an instrument box on Hubble that needs to be accessed for repairs, but the designers never meant for it to be fooled with anywhere but on the ground. Hence the 111 screws, which would form a toxic cloud of malicious orbiting metal if just released around the telescope. Never fear, though. NASA engineers under the direction of Jill McGuire devised a plate with 111 or so tiny plastic boxes that fit exactly over the screws. A hole in each box is just big enough for the screwdriver to go through, but when the screw comes loose the only drifting it can do is inside the box. A snap-on replacement cover is part of the repair kit, so the astronaut doesn't have to find all those screws and put them back on.
This is engineering of an extreme kind, and I suppose that in testing the extremes of repair operations in the vacuum and weightlessness of space, NASA may come up with something that we ordinary Jills and Jacks could use as well. Back in the days when NASA was searching for reasons to justify itself after the end of the Apollo moon program, you heard a lot about "spinoff technologies"—ideas that were originally developed for the space program and turned out to be useful for earthbound applications as well. I have the unconfirmed impression that Velcro may be in this category, but other than that, I can't think of anything that's made a huge difference to the economy. I'd like to have one of those sleek little vacuum-and-zero-G-adapted hand drills they're using for my own toolbox, but not if I had to pay $180,000 or whatever the equivalent cost would be.
The Hubble, as with most astronomy, is pure science, and science is its own justification, culturally. To do certain kinds of science, you end up developing some weird engineering, such as plates that capture 111 screws in the vacuum of space. Offhand, I can't think of any other circumstance in which you'd need a screw-capturer like that, but maybe tools developed for some other obscure task the astronauts will do up there, will turn out to have beneficial consequences down here. Even if it doesn't, just getting the astronauts up there safely and back is something that takes a lot more resources than developing the hundred or so tools they'll carry with them. But that would get us into the manned-versus-unmanned space flight argument, and hey, I'm on vacation. I'd rather not argue. Let's just hope the repair trip goes well and Hubble gives us another half-decade or so of fine science. By which time, I also hope, we're well on the way to replacing the outmoded Shuttle with something better.
Sources: A written form of the report about NASA tools carried on NPR can be found at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103915475.
Monday, May 04, 2009
In Search of the Perfect Email Software
Email is as much a fact of life nowadays for most knowledge workers as opening the morning snail mail used to be. I don't know about you, but just dealing with email has lately gotten to be a time-sink and chore I don't look forward to. Anyone who can improve this situation will certainly do a lot of people a lot of good, and that's a good example of engineering ethics in my book. Part of the problem, no doubt, is my high expectations for what should happen to my email. In what follows I'm probably going to show off my ignorance and prejudices in a good strong light, but it may be worth it if something close to my ideal software ever turns up.
I'm one of those people who takes seriously the thought that months or years later after I get an email message I care about, I should be able to find it any time my computer is on, whether it's connected to the network or not. This means (unless I'm blessed with a total-recall photographic memory, which I'm not) that important emails (that is, ones I decide to keep) need to be sorted somehow and should physically reside somewhere on my laptop for access without a network connection.
Back when email was a novelty and getting three emails a day was a comparative blizzard, these requirements were easy to meet. Sorting email into files on my computer took maybe thirty seconds. But nowadays, if I skip reading my email for only twenty-four hours, when I check it again there's easily fifty or a hundred of the little jewels, only a few of which I am interested in. The rest is everything from notices about worker-training courses I don't need to offers to help princes get their money out of countries I've never been to, and worse.
I used to pride myself on doing what the older generation called "clearing my correspondence," which meant that every day, I checked out every email (at least by its source and subject line), either threw it away or filed it somewhere using the software filing routine, and got the inbox down to either zero or the two or three emails I hadn't decided what to do with yet. Filing consists of negotiating one of those multiple-level popup menus, most layers of which have so many items that I have to use the scroll function, which on no email program I've tried has a scroll bar, so I have to slide to the bottom of the visible list and stand on the mouse till the desired category comes into view, at which point I select it and sometimes have to do the whole thing over again at the next menu level (I have files within files within files, sort of like wheels within wheels). This means that filing a single email sometimes takes twenty or thirty seconds, and oh! the joy when the very next email in the list turns out to belong right where the previous one went—another thirty or forty seconds, because this time I'm mad and slip up and select "Nutcases" instead of "NosferatuTheorists"—well, in that case it wouldn't matter, but you know what I mean. So after a half hour or forty minutes of this kind of thing, I struggle back up the Sisyphean slope to a mostly empty email box, only to turn my back for a few hours and face a door-filling pile flooding in again, metaphorically speaking.
So how would the perfect email software help me? For one thing, I could use it on either of my two main computers. The way it is now, I can have part of what I want—files of old email without Internet access—only on my office computer. For some obscure reason known only to IT professionals, I can send emails with a computer-resident software like Thunderbird (or the old Eudora) only if I'm physically plugged in to my university server. If I'm anywhere else, I have to log into the internet-based software program the University runs (it's like Gmail in that respect), send an email, and copy it to myself in order to have a permanent copy that I'll later download into my Thunderbird resident software, but that adds to my already tedious task of sorting email.
Returning to the elusive purpose of describing the perfect email software, I'd better resort to bullets if I'm going to finish at all. It would:
--- Store all the email I decide to keep in an intuitive, use-frequency-based filing system (one that makes the more frequently used files easier to get at, and saves the four-layer menus for ones I access every three years or so)
--- Be accessible anywhere in the world, for sending as well as receiving, and would leave a permanent sorted record of sent emails on my machine as well as on some server somewhere
--- Would automatically figure out the procedure for getting off an email list and write the necessary messages once I put a sample undesirable email into a "get rid of this junk" file
--- Would use some kind of quasi-intelligent processing to figure out which email sources I'm really interested in and which I'm not, and would rank order these within some kind of time-based presentation, that is, most recent interesting ones first, older interesting ones later, and so on.
--- Would give me access to all emails I decided to keep, going back to the dawn of time (email time, anyway) with or without internet access
There, that'll do for starters. So far, I haven't been able to find the perfect software. None of the server-based systems will do (Gmail, Microsoft Outlook) because you have to be hooked to the Internet to find old emails, and some of them throw away old ones anyway, drat it. But the resident programs that store mail physically on your laptop can't be used to send mail except from the one server. That seems like a simple thing to fix, but maybe fixing it would violate the computer-science equivalent of the law of gravity, or something. And moving categories around so that the most frequently used folders are easy to get at doesn't sound hard. Note that I don't want to do it—I want the software to do it for me. Sure, I could reorganize my own files, but that would add a three-hour task every few months to my already excessive time spent on computer housekeeping, and I thought time saving was what software was all about. Hah.
And don't tell me to get a new email account to cut down on the junk email, either. That way folly lies, because it just trades a few months of quiet now for the heinous duty of checking more than one email account—forever. No, thanks.
Any suggestions?
Sources: If you want to know what "Sisyphean" means, check out the back story on the founder of Corinth at http://www.mythweb.com/encyc/entries/sisyphus.html—he was quite a tricky guy, it turns out, and well deserved the punishment meted to him by the gods. I think some of his descendants must be writing spamware today.
I'm one of those people who takes seriously the thought that months or years later after I get an email message I care about, I should be able to find it any time my computer is on, whether it's connected to the network or not. This means (unless I'm blessed with a total-recall photographic memory, which I'm not) that important emails (that is, ones I decide to keep) need to be sorted somehow and should physically reside somewhere on my laptop for access without a network connection.
Back when email was a novelty and getting three emails a day was a comparative blizzard, these requirements were easy to meet. Sorting email into files on my computer took maybe thirty seconds. But nowadays, if I skip reading my email for only twenty-four hours, when I check it again there's easily fifty or a hundred of the little jewels, only a few of which I am interested in. The rest is everything from notices about worker-training courses I don't need to offers to help princes get their money out of countries I've never been to, and worse.
I used to pride myself on doing what the older generation called "clearing my correspondence," which meant that every day, I checked out every email (at least by its source and subject line), either threw it away or filed it somewhere using the software filing routine, and got the inbox down to either zero or the two or three emails I hadn't decided what to do with yet. Filing consists of negotiating one of those multiple-level popup menus, most layers of which have so many items that I have to use the scroll function, which on no email program I've tried has a scroll bar, so I have to slide to the bottom of the visible list and stand on the mouse till the desired category comes into view, at which point I select it and sometimes have to do the whole thing over again at the next menu level (I have files within files within files, sort of like wheels within wheels). This means that filing a single email sometimes takes twenty or thirty seconds, and oh! the joy when the very next email in the list turns out to belong right where the previous one went—another thirty or forty seconds, because this time I'm mad and slip up and select "Nutcases" instead of "NosferatuTheorists"—well, in that case it wouldn't matter, but you know what I mean. So after a half hour or forty minutes of this kind of thing, I struggle back up the Sisyphean slope to a mostly empty email box, only to turn my back for a few hours and face a door-filling pile flooding in again, metaphorically speaking.
So how would the perfect email software help me? For one thing, I could use it on either of my two main computers. The way it is now, I can have part of what I want—files of old email without Internet access—only on my office computer. For some obscure reason known only to IT professionals, I can send emails with a computer-resident software like Thunderbird (or the old Eudora) only if I'm physically plugged in to my university server. If I'm anywhere else, I have to log into the internet-based software program the University runs (it's like Gmail in that respect), send an email, and copy it to myself in order to have a permanent copy that I'll later download into my Thunderbird resident software, but that adds to my already tedious task of sorting email.
Returning to the elusive purpose of describing the perfect email software, I'd better resort to bullets if I'm going to finish at all. It would:
--- Store all the email I decide to keep in an intuitive, use-frequency-based filing system (one that makes the more frequently used files easier to get at, and saves the four-layer menus for ones I access every three years or so)
--- Be accessible anywhere in the world, for sending as well as receiving, and would leave a permanent sorted record of sent emails on my machine as well as on some server somewhere
--- Would automatically figure out the procedure for getting off an email list and write the necessary messages once I put a sample undesirable email into a "get rid of this junk" file
--- Would use some kind of quasi-intelligent processing to figure out which email sources I'm really interested in and which I'm not, and would rank order these within some kind of time-based presentation, that is, most recent interesting ones first, older interesting ones later, and so on.
--- Would give me access to all emails I decided to keep, going back to the dawn of time (email time, anyway) with or without internet access
There, that'll do for starters. So far, I haven't been able to find the perfect software. None of the server-based systems will do (Gmail, Microsoft Outlook) because you have to be hooked to the Internet to find old emails, and some of them throw away old ones anyway, drat it. But the resident programs that store mail physically on your laptop can't be used to send mail except from the one server. That seems like a simple thing to fix, but maybe fixing it would violate the computer-science equivalent of the law of gravity, or something. And moving categories around so that the most frequently used folders are easy to get at doesn't sound hard. Note that I don't want to do it—I want the software to do it for me. Sure, I could reorganize my own files, but that would add a three-hour task every few months to my already excessive time spent on computer housekeeping, and I thought time saving was what software was all about. Hah.
And don't tell me to get a new email account to cut down on the junk email, either. That way folly lies, because it just trades a few months of quiet now for the heinous duty of checking more than one email account—forever. No, thanks.
Any suggestions?
Sources: If you want to know what "Sisyphean" means, check out the back story on the founder of Corinth at http://www.mythweb.com/encyc/entries/sisyphus.html—he was quite a tricky guy, it turns out, and well deserved the punishment meted to him by the gods. I think some of his descendants must be writing spamware today.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Poles Vault to Headlines: The Defective Light Pole Problem
Ordinarily, when I select an item for discussion in this blog, I try to choose one that has relevance beyond my local area. After all, I'm writing partly for readers around the world who follow this blog (both of them). So last month, when an athletic-field light pole toppled over at a high school in Hays County where I live, I thought it was odd, but not of sufficiently general interest to write about here. Now I've changed my mind.
As Eric Dexheimer of the Austin American-Statesman described in a front-page story on Sunday Apr. 26, at least eight light poles across the U. S. have collapsed in the last three years. All of these poles were designed by Whitco, a firm in Fort Worth, Texas which is now bankrupt. Fortunately, no one has been killed or injured in these pole failures, but a lot of school districts and towns are out a lot of money for smashed lighting fixtures, damaged gyms, and whatnot, and everyone who ever bought Whitco poles is now anxiously examining them. In many cases they're finding cracks and replacing them before anything worse happens. On Apr. 23, the U. S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced it would investigate the pole failures, and has power to issue a safety recall if one is warranted. Dexheimer's own investigation revealed that the design of the poles was marginal in the extreme, and probably reduced the ability of the poles to withstand high winds. The thickness of metal at the base wasn't sufficient to take the huge stresses that result when wind blows against the large area of lighting fixtures at the top of the pole, and the poles developed cracks. The official investigation will probably confirm these findings.
What implications for engineering ethics does this story have? The parties involved are the engineers who designed the poles, the firm (Whitco) that employed the engineers, the organizations that supplied the materials (a Mexican steel mill) and fabricated the poles to Whitco specifications (another Fort Worth company still in business), the agencies that bought the poles (mostly school districts), and at least that portion of the general public which was within falling radius of the poles when they fell. Clearly, if the engineers knowingly chiseled on the pole specifications to save money, the fault lies with them. The American Society of Civil Engineers has a Code of Ethics which states (Canon 1 (b)) that "Engineers shall approve or seal only those design documents, reviewed or prepared by them, which are determined to be safe for public health and welfare in conformity with accepted engineering standards." The Code has no legal standing, but if the engineers who did the work were required to be licensed professional engineers, they could lose their licenses. However, since they worked for a private firm and not directly for a public agency, it's likely that no such requirement applies.
An added complication to the situation is that the firm selling the poles has gone bankrupt (although the name Whitco was bought by a separate company afterwards). Bankruptcy in the corporate world can be like death in the human world—it can remove the entity concerned from all worldly obligations. Of course, a good enough civil lawyer can find a way to extract blood from a turnip, or at least the turnip's heirs and assigns, but bankruptcy makes things even harder. After all the legal dust settles, it may turn out that the school districts and their insurance companies are without recourse, and have to swallow the expense of new poles on their own.
It remains to be seen what the Consumer Product Safety Commission will do. Their bread-and-butter issues usually run to things like toys with lead paint, not eighty-foot light poles sold to school districts. But the current administration is taking an expansive view of governmental authority, so it's not surprising that light poles will fall (so to speak) under the purview of the Commission from now on.
And that is not necessarily a bad thing. Somebody has to mind the henhouse, and foxes (that is, private companies) aren't too qualified. In some countries, anyone who calls himself or herself an engineer must have a governmentally-sanctioned professional license. But in the U. S., back when a movement toward licensing was gaining steam in the 1930s, private firms, worried about the chance that licensing would drive up the cost of engineering services, rushed to pliable state legislatures (is there any other kind?) and convinced them to write in "industrial exemptions," meaning that if you worked for a private firm as opposed to the government, you didn't have to have a professional engineer's license. And so the matter stands today.
It seems to work all right most of the time, except when it doesn't. And when a clear case of engineering incompetence shows up, as it appears to have done on playing fields all over the U. S., the only recourses are financial. If the engineers responsible are ever identified, and they hold P. E. licenses, they could lose them. But that wouldn't stop them from working as engineers, at least not in the U. S. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, I will leave to you to decide.
Sources: The online version of the Austin American-Statesman article can be found at http://www.statesman.com/search/content/news/stories/local/04/26/0426poles.html.
As Eric Dexheimer of the Austin American-Statesman described in a front-page story on Sunday Apr. 26, at least eight light poles across the U. S. have collapsed in the last three years. All of these poles were designed by Whitco, a firm in Fort Worth, Texas which is now bankrupt. Fortunately, no one has been killed or injured in these pole failures, but a lot of school districts and towns are out a lot of money for smashed lighting fixtures, damaged gyms, and whatnot, and everyone who ever bought Whitco poles is now anxiously examining them. In many cases they're finding cracks and replacing them before anything worse happens. On Apr. 23, the U. S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced it would investigate the pole failures, and has power to issue a safety recall if one is warranted. Dexheimer's own investigation revealed that the design of the poles was marginal in the extreme, and probably reduced the ability of the poles to withstand high winds. The thickness of metal at the base wasn't sufficient to take the huge stresses that result when wind blows against the large area of lighting fixtures at the top of the pole, and the poles developed cracks. The official investigation will probably confirm these findings.
What implications for engineering ethics does this story have? The parties involved are the engineers who designed the poles, the firm (Whitco) that employed the engineers, the organizations that supplied the materials (a Mexican steel mill) and fabricated the poles to Whitco specifications (another Fort Worth company still in business), the agencies that bought the poles (mostly school districts), and at least that portion of the general public which was within falling radius of the poles when they fell. Clearly, if the engineers knowingly chiseled on the pole specifications to save money, the fault lies with them. The American Society of Civil Engineers has a Code of Ethics which states (Canon 1 (b)) that "Engineers shall approve or seal only those design documents, reviewed or prepared by them, which are determined to be safe for public health and welfare in conformity with accepted engineering standards." The Code has no legal standing, but if the engineers who did the work were required to be licensed professional engineers, they could lose their licenses. However, since they worked for a private firm and not directly for a public agency, it's likely that no such requirement applies.
An added complication to the situation is that the firm selling the poles has gone bankrupt (although the name Whitco was bought by a separate company afterwards). Bankruptcy in the corporate world can be like death in the human world—it can remove the entity concerned from all worldly obligations. Of course, a good enough civil lawyer can find a way to extract blood from a turnip, or at least the turnip's heirs and assigns, but bankruptcy makes things even harder. After all the legal dust settles, it may turn out that the school districts and their insurance companies are without recourse, and have to swallow the expense of new poles on their own.
It remains to be seen what the Consumer Product Safety Commission will do. Their bread-and-butter issues usually run to things like toys with lead paint, not eighty-foot light poles sold to school districts. But the current administration is taking an expansive view of governmental authority, so it's not surprising that light poles will fall (so to speak) under the purview of the Commission from now on.
And that is not necessarily a bad thing. Somebody has to mind the henhouse, and foxes (that is, private companies) aren't too qualified. In some countries, anyone who calls himself or herself an engineer must have a governmentally-sanctioned professional license. But in the U. S., back when a movement toward licensing was gaining steam in the 1930s, private firms, worried about the chance that licensing would drive up the cost of engineering services, rushed to pliable state legislatures (is there any other kind?) and convinced them to write in "industrial exemptions," meaning that if you worked for a private firm as opposed to the government, you didn't have to have a professional engineer's license. And so the matter stands today.
It seems to work all right most of the time, except when it doesn't. And when a clear case of engineering incompetence shows up, as it appears to have done on playing fields all over the U. S., the only recourses are financial. If the engineers responsible are ever identified, and they hold P. E. licenses, they could lose them. But that wouldn't stop them from working as engineers, at least not in the U. S. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, I will leave to you to decide.
Sources: The online version of the Austin American-Statesman article can be found at http://www.statesman.com/search/content/news/stories/local/04/26/0426poles.html.
Monday, April 20, 2009
The EPA and Carbon Dioxide: What Next?
Sunday morning I was sitting at the breakfast table reading the paper. A headline caught my eye, and I told my wife that the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency just decided that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that endangers public health and welfare, which is the first step toward regulating it.
"Carbon dioxide?" she asked. "Don't we breathe that out?"
"That's all right," I said, "you'll still be able to breathe in as much as you like."
Bad jokes aside, with this finding the EPA is taking a giant step into an uncharted region of U. S. environmental regulation, a step bristling with enough ethical issues and questions to keep me writing for several columns. But I'll try to limit myself to this one for the time being.
It was President Richard Nixon who founded the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, back when rivers in certain industrial areas routinely caught fire and everyone from Rachel Carson to Carl Sagan was forecasting various kinds of environmental doom. The spate of new regulations that the young agency promulgated raised enough furor among manufacturers to exceed my threshold of attention for political events, which was then very high. I remember wondering what the world was coming to if the federal government could tell you what you could and couldn't send up your own private smokestack. I even knew a few pioneering environmentalists back in my high-school days, in particular a young woman who thought that founding the EPA was the only good thing Richard Nixon ever did.
Gradually, corporate America was dragged, sometimes kicking and screaming, into a world of environmental regulations. Former industrial heroes such as Thomas Midgley (1889-1944), who was awarded and feted during his lifetime for discovering both tetraethyl lead to improve gasoline's octane rating, and chlorofluorocarbons ("Freon") for use in refrigeration systems, became post-mortem villains as first leaded gasoline, and then CFCs, fell under the ban of the EPA and other regulatory agencies worldwide. Now that some of the environmental dust has settled, most reasonable people would agree that some amount of environmental regulation is a good thing. We have seen what its absence does in areas of the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, and have witnessed the comebacks of species such as the bald eagle, whose existence was threatened by the pesticide DDT.
That being said, I should point out that regulation of carbon dioxide, should it ever take place (and it looks like either the EPA or Congress will do just that), is a different breed of cat, for several reasons.
First of all, there is the sheer scale of carbon dioxide emissions. Every time anybody anywhere burns a fossil fuel—coal, oil, or natural gas—they make carbon dioxide. DDT, CFCs, and even tetraethyl lead were special chemicals made for specific purposes, and after varying amounts of trouble, acceptable substitutes were found or other ways of achieving the same purposes were discovered. None of these chemicals was used as the primary energy source for the nation's transportation, electric utility, and manufacturing industries. In 2002, the U. S. derived over four-fifths of its energy from burning carbon-containing compounds, and that fraction hasn't changed much since then. If we stopped burning carbon tomorrow, we'd go back to the energy consumption rates of perhaps 1920, when the well-wired house had maybe four electric outlets in all and a family of five with one car was doing quite well to drive ten miles a day. Substitutes for carbon-based fuels—primarily nuclear energy, with wind, hydroelectric, and other renewables coming up far in the rear—are available, but not any time soon in the scale required.
Another fundamental difference between carbon dioxide regulation and everything else the EPA has done up to now is the nature of the science and other events on which the finding is based. I know I'm up against everybody from Al Gore on down when I say that the connection between global warming and anthropogenic emissions is less than crystal-clear. On the bus ride from scientific observations to the conclusion that humanity is committing collective suicide by continuing to burn carbon-based fuels, there are a number of places to get off. One can question whether the current trends are largely due to human activity versus natural causes. One can even question whether a moderate amount of global warming will in fact be the earth-stopping catastrophe that it is portrayed to be. There is no better way to gain the fascinated attention of a bored elite than by forecasting some giant disaster that requires expansive governmental intervention to fix. Few remember the popularity of Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb, which forecasted a worldwide overpopulation nightmare that would come to its ghastly fruition somewhere about now. Instead, we're finding that industrial advancement in developing countries leads so rapidly to declining birthrates that the problem in many countries is not too many births, but too few. Mr. Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" may find itself in a similar situation some day.
For reasons that are more geopolitical than environmental, I would like to see the U. S. move away from fossil-fuel imports in a reasonable, coordinated fashion that doesn't smuggle in social engineering or class warfare under a guide of environmental protection. Maybe the EPA's carbon-dioxide finding is a step in that direction. I don't know. But for the reasons listed above and many others besides, it bears most careful watching in the coming months.
Sources: The EPA's news release about its finding is at http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/0/0EF7DF675805295D8525759B00566924. The New York Times article I read at the breakfast table is at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/science/earth/18endanger.html. A useful chart developed by Lawrence Livermore Labs from which I obtained information about U. S. energy use can be found in the Wikipedia article "Energy Conservation" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USEnFlow02-quads.gif.
Welcome to Online MBA Guide Readers: A special welcome to readers of the Online MBA Guide who may have found us. I recently learned that this blog was included on a list of 50 best business ethics blogs by the editors of that blog (see the article at http://www.onlinembaguide.net/50-best-business-ethics-blogs). True, we're No. 50, but at least we're on the list!
"Carbon dioxide?" she asked. "Don't we breathe that out?"
"That's all right," I said, "you'll still be able to breathe in as much as you like."
Bad jokes aside, with this finding the EPA is taking a giant step into an uncharted region of U. S. environmental regulation, a step bristling with enough ethical issues and questions to keep me writing for several columns. But I'll try to limit myself to this one for the time being.
It was President Richard Nixon who founded the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, back when rivers in certain industrial areas routinely caught fire and everyone from Rachel Carson to Carl Sagan was forecasting various kinds of environmental doom. The spate of new regulations that the young agency promulgated raised enough furor among manufacturers to exceed my threshold of attention for political events, which was then very high. I remember wondering what the world was coming to if the federal government could tell you what you could and couldn't send up your own private smokestack. I even knew a few pioneering environmentalists back in my high-school days, in particular a young woman who thought that founding the EPA was the only good thing Richard Nixon ever did.
Gradually, corporate America was dragged, sometimes kicking and screaming, into a world of environmental regulations. Former industrial heroes such as Thomas Midgley (1889-1944), who was awarded and feted during his lifetime for discovering both tetraethyl lead to improve gasoline's octane rating, and chlorofluorocarbons ("Freon") for use in refrigeration systems, became post-mortem villains as first leaded gasoline, and then CFCs, fell under the ban of the EPA and other regulatory agencies worldwide. Now that some of the environmental dust has settled, most reasonable people would agree that some amount of environmental regulation is a good thing. We have seen what its absence does in areas of the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, and have witnessed the comebacks of species such as the bald eagle, whose existence was threatened by the pesticide DDT.
That being said, I should point out that regulation of carbon dioxide, should it ever take place (and it looks like either the EPA or Congress will do just that), is a different breed of cat, for several reasons.
First of all, there is the sheer scale of carbon dioxide emissions. Every time anybody anywhere burns a fossil fuel—coal, oil, or natural gas—they make carbon dioxide. DDT, CFCs, and even tetraethyl lead were special chemicals made for specific purposes, and after varying amounts of trouble, acceptable substitutes were found or other ways of achieving the same purposes were discovered. None of these chemicals was used as the primary energy source for the nation's transportation, electric utility, and manufacturing industries. In 2002, the U. S. derived over four-fifths of its energy from burning carbon-containing compounds, and that fraction hasn't changed much since then. If we stopped burning carbon tomorrow, we'd go back to the energy consumption rates of perhaps 1920, when the well-wired house had maybe four electric outlets in all and a family of five with one car was doing quite well to drive ten miles a day. Substitutes for carbon-based fuels—primarily nuclear energy, with wind, hydroelectric, and other renewables coming up far in the rear—are available, but not any time soon in the scale required.
Another fundamental difference between carbon dioxide regulation and everything else the EPA has done up to now is the nature of the science and other events on which the finding is based. I know I'm up against everybody from Al Gore on down when I say that the connection between global warming and anthropogenic emissions is less than crystal-clear. On the bus ride from scientific observations to the conclusion that humanity is committing collective suicide by continuing to burn carbon-based fuels, there are a number of places to get off. One can question whether the current trends are largely due to human activity versus natural causes. One can even question whether a moderate amount of global warming will in fact be the earth-stopping catastrophe that it is portrayed to be. There is no better way to gain the fascinated attention of a bored elite than by forecasting some giant disaster that requires expansive governmental intervention to fix. Few remember the popularity of Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb, which forecasted a worldwide overpopulation nightmare that would come to its ghastly fruition somewhere about now. Instead, we're finding that industrial advancement in developing countries leads so rapidly to declining birthrates that the problem in many countries is not too many births, but too few. Mr. Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" may find itself in a similar situation some day.
For reasons that are more geopolitical than environmental, I would like to see the U. S. move away from fossil-fuel imports in a reasonable, coordinated fashion that doesn't smuggle in social engineering or class warfare under a guide of environmental protection. Maybe the EPA's carbon-dioxide finding is a step in that direction. I don't know. But for the reasons listed above and many others besides, it bears most careful watching in the coming months.
Sources: The EPA's news release about its finding is at http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/0/0EF7DF675805295D8525759B00566924. The New York Times article I read at the breakfast table is at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/science/earth/18endanger.html. A useful chart developed by Lawrence Livermore Labs from which I obtained information about U. S. energy use can be found in the Wikipedia article "Energy Conservation" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USEnFlow02-quads.gif.
Welcome to Online MBA Guide Readers: A special welcome to readers of the Online MBA Guide who may have found us. I recently learned that this blog was included on a list of 50 best business ethics blogs by the editors of that blog (see the article at http://www.onlinembaguide.net/50-best-business-ethics-blogs). True, we're No. 50, but at least we're on the list!
Monday, April 13, 2009
The Ethics of Consumption: Electric Carving Knives
Most engineering ethics concentrates on the production end of things: how engineers can engage ethically in making products or services. When the general consuming public appears in an ethical analysis, it is usually assumed that they know little or nothing about the technical or even ethical issues involved. Like babies in their parents' arms, the public is thought to be largely dependent on the kindness and forethought of wiser engineers to protect them from harm. But consumers are not always passive recipients of what engineers design for them. As consumers, they have both rights and responsibilities. You hear a lot about consumers' rights but not so much about their responsibilities. And one of those responsibilities may be to avoid buying things that are simply silly or wasteful.
All this is brought to mind by Easter dinner, or rather, one little incident during Easter dinner yesterday. In helping my wife prepare the meal, I got out our electric carving knife and sliced the pork roast.
We received the carving knife as a wedding present 31 years ago. The handle is two-toned plastic—white on top, avocado on the bottom (avocado was a very popular color in the late 1970s), with a red safety catch and knife-release buttons. The knife is a two-part affair consisting of hollow-ground serrated knife blades that connect at the tip with a sliding joint and insert in the handle at the other end. Inside the handle is a 120-V motor (you have to plug it in—today's models would no doubt be battery-powered). When you squeeze the trigger, the motor sets the two halves of the knife sliding back and forth in a reciprocal motion that makes cutting through the toughest meat a breeze, as I'm sure the TV ad said.
It is a General Electric product, model 02EK15, manufactured in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Anyone familiar with New England knows that for much of the twentieth century, Bridgeport was a reasonably prosperous center of appliance manufacturing. Much of the mid-century domestic bounty of irons, washing machines, toasters, and electric carving knives poured from the well-paid hands of factory workers in and around Bridgeport. Of course, the invasion of cheaper imports changed all that, and Bridgeport is now in the news, if ever, primarily as a bad example of a pathologically sick city whose employment base collapsed decades ago.
To some people, the very idea of an electric carving knife smacks of decadence and extravagance. After all, if a piece of roast is so tough the only way you can cut it is with an electric-powered tool, it's too tough to serve to company anyway. And in the fate of Bridgeport they see a just end to a debauched consumer culture that went over the top with ridiculous objects like electric carving knives.
But to others, an electric carving knife could serve as a symbol of a lot that was right about America. Who else was making electric carving knives in 1978? Maybe nobody, and if so, we were first in the world with electric carving knives. You're not going to win a war with electric carving knives, but the kind of economy that gave rise to them was so powerful that when President Reagan threatened the Soviet Union with Star Wars, it set off a chain of events that ultimately marked the downfall of Communism there and in Eastern Europe. After 1990, people in East Germany who could afford an electric carving knife could jolly well go ahead and buy one.
I'm not a party of either camp. I just like to use the knife occasionally when there's a lot of carving to do fast. For all I know, there may be industrial models of electric carving knives that save thousands of dollars a year in commercial kitchens. And since General Electric built this one so well (and we use it so seldom), I'm not going to be in the market for a new one any time soon. This one still works just fine.
The economy worldwide is currently in a funk, and we are hearing advice that it is our privilege, maybe even our patriotic duty, to go out there and spend money, even borrowing it if necessary, and get more of those things that make it such a good deal to be a consumer today. I suppose I could go out and find a newer electric carving knife, cordless, maybe even one with a wireless remote control and Internet access built in and a camera chip so people around the world can get a carving-knife-eye view of our Easter pork roast. But you know, I believe in buying things only when I can see a good use for them. If everybody had my purchasing habits, we'd have a depression so deep that it would make this current slump look like happy days are here again. Fortunately for the economy, for every believer in relative simplicity like me, there are several spendthrifts who have to get the latest things just as they come out, so whenever money starts flowing again, there will be people around to spend it on the 2009 version of electric carving knives.
And so I don't think we can get very far, at least in a free-market economy, with a general theory of consumption ethics. It's so individualized, for one thing, that it is hard to say anything ethics-wise that would apply to most consumers. I'll go along sticking to my ethic of relative simplicity, and my 31-year-old electric carving knife, but I'm sure the slack will be taken up by some of you folks who can't wait to see your pot roast on YouTube next Easter.
Sources: It appears that the direct descendant of my carving knife is still out there: Black & Decker, for example, still makes a model EK700K, and it's not even battery-powered yet (see e. g. http://www.bizrate.com/electricknives/oid1017775940.html) Whether the "EK" in the model number indicates that B&D bought the product line from GE somewhere along the line is anybody's guess. And for an interesting view of how domestic consumer products were developed in the controlled economy of East Germany in the 1950s, see Karin Zachmann's "A Socialist Consumption Junction: Debating the Mechanization of Housework in East Germany, 1956-1957" in Technology & Culture, vol. 43, pp. 73-99 (Jan. 2002).
All this is brought to mind by Easter dinner, or rather, one little incident during Easter dinner yesterday. In helping my wife prepare the meal, I got out our electric carving knife and sliced the pork roast.
We received the carving knife as a wedding present 31 years ago. The handle is two-toned plastic—white on top, avocado on the bottom (avocado was a very popular color in the late 1970s), with a red safety catch and knife-release buttons. The knife is a two-part affair consisting of hollow-ground serrated knife blades that connect at the tip with a sliding joint and insert in the handle at the other end. Inside the handle is a 120-V motor (you have to plug it in—today's models would no doubt be battery-powered). When you squeeze the trigger, the motor sets the two halves of the knife sliding back and forth in a reciprocal motion that makes cutting through the toughest meat a breeze, as I'm sure the TV ad said.
It is a General Electric product, model 02EK15, manufactured in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Anyone familiar with New England knows that for much of the twentieth century, Bridgeport was a reasonably prosperous center of appliance manufacturing. Much of the mid-century domestic bounty of irons, washing machines, toasters, and electric carving knives poured from the well-paid hands of factory workers in and around Bridgeport. Of course, the invasion of cheaper imports changed all that, and Bridgeport is now in the news, if ever, primarily as a bad example of a pathologically sick city whose employment base collapsed decades ago.
To some people, the very idea of an electric carving knife smacks of decadence and extravagance. After all, if a piece of roast is so tough the only way you can cut it is with an electric-powered tool, it's too tough to serve to company anyway. And in the fate of Bridgeport they see a just end to a debauched consumer culture that went over the top with ridiculous objects like electric carving knives.
But to others, an electric carving knife could serve as a symbol of a lot that was right about America. Who else was making electric carving knives in 1978? Maybe nobody, and if so, we were first in the world with electric carving knives. You're not going to win a war with electric carving knives, but the kind of economy that gave rise to them was so powerful that when President Reagan threatened the Soviet Union with Star Wars, it set off a chain of events that ultimately marked the downfall of Communism there and in Eastern Europe. After 1990, people in East Germany who could afford an electric carving knife could jolly well go ahead and buy one.
I'm not a party of either camp. I just like to use the knife occasionally when there's a lot of carving to do fast. For all I know, there may be industrial models of electric carving knives that save thousands of dollars a year in commercial kitchens. And since General Electric built this one so well (and we use it so seldom), I'm not going to be in the market for a new one any time soon. This one still works just fine.
The economy worldwide is currently in a funk, and we are hearing advice that it is our privilege, maybe even our patriotic duty, to go out there and spend money, even borrowing it if necessary, and get more of those things that make it such a good deal to be a consumer today. I suppose I could go out and find a newer electric carving knife, cordless, maybe even one with a wireless remote control and Internet access built in and a camera chip so people around the world can get a carving-knife-eye view of our Easter pork roast. But you know, I believe in buying things only when I can see a good use for them. If everybody had my purchasing habits, we'd have a depression so deep that it would make this current slump look like happy days are here again. Fortunately for the economy, for every believer in relative simplicity like me, there are several spendthrifts who have to get the latest things just as they come out, so whenever money starts flowing again, there will be people around to spend it on the 2009 version of electric carving knives.
And so I don't think we can get very far, at least in a free-market economy, with a general theory of consumption ethics. It's so individualized, for one thing, that it is hard to say anything ethics-wise that would apply to most consumers. I'll go along sticking to my ethic of relative simplicity, and my 31-year-old electric carving knife, but I'm sure the slack will be taken up by some of you folks who can't wait to see your pot roast on YouTube next Easter.
Sources: It appears that the direct descendant of my carving knife is still out there: Black & Decker, for example, still makes a model EK700K, and it's not even battery-powered yet (see e. g. http://www.bizrate.com/electricknives/oid1017775940.html) Whether the "EK" in the model number indicates that B&D bought the product line from GE somewhere along the line is anybody's guess. And for an interesting view of how domestic consumer products were developed in the controlled economy of East Germany in the 1950s, see Karin Zachmann's "A Socialist Consumption Junction: Debating the Mechanization of Housework in East Germany, 1956-1957" in Technology & Culture, vol. 43, pp. 73-99 (Jan. 2002).
Monday, April 06, 2009
Google Earth's Street View: Public Boon or Privacy Invasion?
Google Earth is, simply put, an attempt to put the earth online in maps and photographs. Lately they have been adding "street views" taken by camera-equipped cars that roam the streets taking 360-degree photographs for display to anyone who types in the correct address, or latitude and longitude, or any number of other ways to indicate location that Google can figure out. While distributing scenic views of public places is nothing new, the novelty of Google's approach is the sheer scale of what they're doing combined with extreme ease of accessibility.
Some folks in the English town of Broughton thought it all a bit much when the Street View car showed up on their roads recently. As the online Times of London explained, resident Paul Jacobs saw the vehicle from an upstairs window, got mad, ran down to the street, and stopped the car. Residents were already anxious about a number of burglaries in the prosperous area, and this was the last straw for several of them, who formed a human chain and blocked further access to their town. The Street View driver eventually turned around and left, and so Broughton is one of the shrinking number of places that you can't see up close and personal on Google Earth.
I just checked to see if my own little side court in this midsize Texas town had been visited by Google Earth, and indeed it has. I can't tell exactly when, because I don't put a big sign out in the front yard every day with the day's date on it. But from certain vehicles parked in driveways I can tell it's within the last two years, and maybe more recently than that.
Would I have objected like Mr. Jacobs if I'd been here when the truck came by? Being natively technology-friendly, probably not. I might have gone out to talk with the driver, but only to ask for technical details about the camera.
I first heard about the anti-Google-Earth mob on a radio talk show focused on privacy issues. Although Google has a way for individuals (or nations, for that matter) to request that certain images be blurred or removed, this is an "opt-out" process, which builds in a bias toward display that an "opt-in" process would not have (if you had to ask Google specifically to put your street on their system, they wouldn't display nearly as many streets). What are the ethical issues involved here?
The first step in analyzing an ethical problem is to figure out who is involved. In the case of Mr. Jacobs, for instance, the concerned parties are him and his neighbors; Google; and the rest of the world. Already we've got a problem, in that rarely do ethical issues go straight from a small, local population to literally everyone on earth who has a computer with network access. I say rarely, but it's becoming more common these days as computer worms produced by small but influential outlaw groups affect millions or billions of people. Fortunately, what Google Earth is trying to do appears to be more benign, but that may be only because people of ill will haven't figured out how to take advantage of it yet.
Clearly, if what Google Earth presented was live pictures, there would be a much bigger problem. It frankly doesn't bother me much that a photo of my house taken some time in the last two years is online, but if it was live and burglars could just watch until they were sure no one was home, it would be a different matter altogether. Nevertheless, the potential now exists for someone (or something, in the case of automated malware) from any part of the world to use that information for inimical purposes, and there's nothing I can do about it until after it happens.
And that may be the best thing to do in such cases. I do not generally subscribe to the "precautionary principle," which says no new technology should be adopted until it is proven to be safe. It may be the best thing just to wait and see if anyone actually uses Google Earth's street-view feature in the commission of a crime, and then deal with the problems that arise. That's not too fair to the people who will be victims of the crime, but somebody has to go first, I guess. And to stray a little bit into the field of utilitarian ethics (a place I don't like to spend much time in), there is the advantage individuals get from being able to use Google Earth to, for instance, check out motels without going there, as I did a couple of weeks ago. So maybe this kind of good for a great number of people is worth the minor risks taken by, well, almost an equal number of people. That's the problem with utilitarianism, the math quickly gets out of hand.
As the same talk-show host pointed out, the Google Earth system is one more way of packaging ordinary people as a product. Far more likely than burglars, advertisers (or their software) will spend a lot of time studying street views. You can tell a lot about a person from looking at their house: income level, types of cars they drive, whether they need a new lawnmower, and so on. This is a use that isn't clearly objectionable, but isn't exactly what I had in mind, either.
So, as with so many other new technologies, we will wait and see what happens. I don't think Google Earth's photo cars will run into too many privacy-hungry mobs in Texas, but I'd be careful around Massachusetts and Vermont.
Sources: The online Times of London story appeared on Apr. 3 at http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6022902.ece. The radio talk show was hosted by Dr. Katherine Albrecht (http://www.katherinealbrecht.com/), whose work has appeared elsewhere in this blog as the head of a group concerned about RFID usage in supermarkets.
Some folks in the English town of Broughton thought it all a bit much when the Street View car showed up on their roads recently. As the online Times of London explained, resident Paul Jacobs saw the vehicle from an upstairs window, got mad, ran down to the street, and stopped the car. Residents were already anxious about a number of burglaries in the prosperous area, and this was the last straw for several of them, who formed a human chain and blocked further access to their town. The Street View driver eventually turned around and left, and so Broughton is one of the shrinking number of places that you can't see up close and personal on Google Earth.
I just checked to see if my own little side court in this midsize Texas town had been visited by Google Earth, and indeed it has. I can't tell exactly when, because I don't put a big sign out in the front yard every day with the day's date on it. But from certain vehicles parked in driveways I can tell it's within the last two years, and maybe more recently than that.
Would I have objected like Mr. Jacobs if I'd been here when the truck came by? Being natively technology-friendly, probably not. I might have gone out to talk with the driver, but only to ask for technical details about the camera.
I first heard about the anti-Google-Earth mob on a radio talk show focused on privacy issues. Although Google has a way for individuals (or nations, for that matter) to request that certain images be blurred or removed, this is an "opt-out" process, which builds in a bias toward display that an "opt-in" process would not have (if you had to ask Google specifically to put your street on their system, they wouldn't display nearly as many streets). What are the ethical issues involved here?
The first step in analyzing an ethical problem is to figure out who is involved. In the case of Mr. Jacobs, for instance, the concerned parties are him and his neighbors; Google; and the rest of the world. Already we've got a problem, in that rarely do ethical issues go straight from a small, local population to literally everyone on earth who has a computer with network access. I say rarely, but it's becoming more common these days as computer worms produced by small but influential outlaw groups affect millions or billions of people. Fortunately, what Google Earth is trying to do appears to be more benign, but that may be only because people of ill will haven't figured out how to take advantage of it yet.
Clearly, if what Google Earth presented was live pictures, there would be a much bigger problem. It frankly doesn't bother me much that a photo of my house taken some time in the last two years is online, but if it was live and burglars could just watch until they were sure no one was home, it would be a different matter altogether. Nevertheless, the potential now exists for someone (or something, in the case of automated malware) from any part of the world to use that information for inimical purposes, and there's nothing I can do about it until after it happens.
And that may be the best thing to do in such cases. I do not generally subscribe to the "precautionary principle," which says no new technology should be adopted until it is proven to be safe. It may be the best thing just to wait and see if anyone actually uses Google Earth's street-view feature in the commission of a crime, and then deal with the problems that arise. That's not too fair to the people who will be victims of the crime, but somebody has to go first, I guess. And to stray a little bit into the field of utilitarian ethics (a place I don't like to spend much time in), there is the advantage individuals get from being able to use Google Earth to, for instance, check out motels without going there, as I did a couple of weeks ago. So maybe this kind of good for a great number of people is worth the minor risks taken by, well, almost an equal number of people. That's the problem with utilitarianism, the math quickly gets out of hand.
As the same talk-show host pointed out, the Google Earth system is one more way of packaging ordinary people as a product. Far more likely than burglars, advertisers (or their software) will spend a lot of time studying street views. You can tell a lot about a person from looking at their house: income level, types of cars they drive, whether they need a new lawnmower, and so on. This is a use that isn't clearly objectionable, but isn't exactly what I had in mind, either.
So, as with so many other new technologies, we will wait and see what happens. I don't think Google Earth's photo cars will run into too many privacy-hungry mobs in Texas, but I'd be careful around Massachusetts and Vermont.
Sources: The online Times of London story appeared on Apr. 3 at http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6022902.ece. The radio talk show was hosted by Dr. Katherine Albrecht (http://www.katherinealbrecht.com/), whose work has appeared elsewhere in this blog as the head of a group concerned about RFID usage in supermarkets.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Can Google Save Emailers From Themselves?
Most people, it seems, have sent off emails they later regret sending. In last Friday's edition of Slate magazine, reporter Michael Agger comments on what Google is calling its "Gmail embarrassment reduction pack." Among the new features are a five-second window during which you can hit an "undo send" button. While Agger wishes Google would come up with a more powerful version that would reach out into recipients' email boxes minutes or hours after you send a regrettable email, there are technical server barriers that make such a thing practically impossible.
Saying or doing things you are sorry for later is nothing new, but email has made it treacherously easy to fire off flaming ripostes, jokes from the Poor-Taste Review, and confidential memos to people you either change your mind about sending them to later, or sometimes even to people you never intended to contact, if the automatic email-address-completer function guesses your intentions incorrectly. The other day I watched an old suspense movie about a woman whose husband falsely accused her of murder in a letter he mailed to the local district attorney's office. The plot's engine ran on her efforts to get the letter back from the post office, and we got a little tour of how a small-town 1950s post office handled such requests: badly, it turned out. They refused her requests at every turn. Just when it seemed that all was lost and the letter was about to fall into the hands of the DA, here it came back to the woman in the next day's mail—returned for insufficient postage!
So even when it took many minutes or hours to send a letter, people would get into trouble caused by someone's malicious hand, if not their own. With email, it just happens faster nowadays, and there's no friendly (or unfriendly) postal employees to go talk to and beg for your emails back.
Google is to be commended for something that software engineers do too rarely, which is to take into account the real ways that average people (not other software engineers) actually use and misuse their products.
Sometimes this works well, but other times it backfires. For example, I am using two different version of Microsoft Word at work. The old familiar version makes .doc files, but the new version produces something called ".docx" files that my old version can't make heads or tails of. I understand that one reason each version of Word is bigger than the previous one is that "backward compatibility" is something they've tried to preserve over the years. What this means is that even files made by nearly prehistoric software (meaning, anything older than five years) should be readable by the latest applications. Evidently this got to be impossible with Word 2007, or so difficult Microsoft decided to bite the bullet and pitch it—hence the .docx problem. Which incidentally forces anyone who receives Word attachments to get the new version of Word, but that's another issue.
So at least part of the time, I'm using the new 2007 Word, and it tries to read my mind. For example, any time I type a period it capitalizes the following word. If I'm typing regular sentences, that's appropriate, but if I'm typing lists, or software code, or other things, when I type a lower-case letter after a period, I mean a lower-case letter. So then I have to go back and type the same thing again. There must be a "that's what I meant the first time" detector built into the program, because at least it doesn't keep capitalizing the letter over and over again. I've searched all over the preferences controls for a way to turn this irritating feature off, but I can't find it. Perhaps a merciful reader will write in with the solution. In the meantime, it slows me down and adds an incremental bit to the annoyance level of my job.
It would be an interesting exercise for some anthropologists with time on their hands to try to recreate what software engineers and developers think human beings are like from the way we are expected to use computers. We love generic, inane clip art that tries to look different but always looks like cheap clip art; we make common grammatical errors all the time and require the help of our word processors to fix them; but we always mean to send emails immediately after we write them and never have any regrets (unless we're using Gmail, in which case the regrets always show up within five seconds). We demand tons of new features in every new software package even though we end up using only a few percent of them. We love new things of any kind, even though the added value or usefulness of them is sometimes hard to see. A good number of us respond to web ads placed anywhere in our visual field, regardless of whether the ad pertains to the website we happen to be looking at, especially if the ads have little animated figures of women wiggling their behinds. And enough people to make the scam worthwhile apparently believe there are really usurped former princes in Nigeria looking for someone to help them get their cash out of the country who email strangers at random trusting them with their cash, if they'll only send a few bucks to Nigeria to prime the pump, so to speak.
This is not an edifying picture. To a great extent, general-purpose software and the web are a free-market response to what people are actually like, and to that extent, the picture is accurate. But instead of just extracting money from our wallets, it is good to read that some software developers are at least trying to appeal to the better angels of our nature, in Lincoln's famous phrase. I hope Google's efforts reduce the number of email flaming incidents and to that extent, make the world a better place. But human nature being what it is, I'm sure we'll find ways around it too.
Sources: The article "Can't Believe I Just Sent That" appeared in Slate magazine on Friday, Mar. 27, at http://www.slate.com/id/2214733/.
Saying or doing things you are sorry for later is nothing new, but email has made it treacherously easy to fire off flaming ripostes, jokes from the Poor-Taste Review, and confidential memos to people you either change your mind about sending them to later, or sometimes even to people you never intended to contact, if the automatic email-address-completer function guesses your intentions incorrectly. The other day I watched an old suspense movie about a woman whose husband falsely accused her of murder in a letter he mailed to the local district attorney's office. The plot's engine ran on her efforts to get the letter back from the post office, and we got a little tour of how a small-town 1950s post office handled such requests: badly, it turned out. They refused her requests at every turn. Just when it seemed that all was lost and the letter was about to fall into the hands of the DA, here it came back to the woman in the next day's mail—returned for insufficient postage!
So even when it took many minutes or hours to send a letter, people would get into trouble caused by someone's malicious hand, if not their own. With email, it just happens faster nowadays, and there's no friendly (or unfriendly) postal employees to go talk to and beg for your emails back.
Google is to be commended for something that software engineers do too rarely, which is to take into account the real ways that average people (not other software engineers) actually use and misuse their products.
Sometimes this works well, but other times it backfires. For example, I am using two different version of Microsoft Word at work. The old familiar version makes .doc files, but the new version produces something called ".docx" files that my old version can't make heads or tails of. I understand that one reason each version of Word is bigger than the previous one is that "backward compatibility" is something they've tried to preserve over the years. What this means is that even files made by nearly prehistoric software (meaning, anything older than five years) should be readable by the latest applications. Evidently this got to be impossible with Word 2007, or so difficult Microsoft decided to bite the bullet and pitch it—hence the .docx problem. Which incidentally forces anyone who receives Word attachments to get the new version of Word, but that's another issue.
So at least part of the time, I'm using the new 2007 Word, and it tries to read my mind. For example, any time I type a period it capitalizes the following word. If I'm typing regular sentences, that's appropriate, but if I'm typing lists, or software code, or other things, when I type a lower-case letter after a period, I mean a lower-case letter. So then I have to go back and type the same thing again. There must be a "that's what I meant the first time" detector built into the program, because at least it doesn't keep capitalizing the letter over and over again. I've searched all over the preferences controls for a way to turn this irritating feature off, but I can't find it. Perhaps a merciful reader will write in with the solution. In the meantime, it slows me down and adds an incremental bit to the annoyance level of my job.
It would be an interesting exercise for some anthropologists with time on their hands to try to recreate what software engineers and developers think human beings are like from the way we are expected to use computers. We love generic, inane clip art that tries to look different but always looks like cheap clip art; we make common grammatical errors all the time and require the help of our word processors to fix them; but we always mean to send emails immediately after we write them and never have any regrets (unless we're using Gmail, in which case the regrets always show up within five seconds). We demand tons of new features in every new software package even though we end up using only a few percent of them. We love new things of any kind, even though the added value or usefulness of them is sometimes hard to see. A good number of us respond to web ads placed anywhere in our visual field, regardless of whether the ad pertains to the website we happen to be looking at, especially if the ads have little animated figures of women wiggling their behinds. And enough people to make the scam worthwhile apparently believe there are really usurped former princes in Nigeria looking for someone to help them get their cash out of the country who email strangers at random trusting them with their cash, if they'll only send a few bucks to Nigeria to prime the pump, so to speak.
This is not an edifying picture. To a great extent, general-purpose software and the web are a free-market response to what people are actually like, and to that extent, the picture is accurate. But instead of just extracting money from our wallets, it is good to read that some software developers are at least trying to appeal to the better angels of our nature, in Lincoln's famous phrase. I hope Google's efforts reduce the number of email flaming incidents and to that extent, make the world a better place. But human nature being what it is, I'm sure we'll find ways around it too.
Sources: The article "Can't Believe I Just Sent That" appeared in Slate magazine on Friday, Mar. 27, at http://www.slate.com/id/2214733/.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Conficker Stumps the Experts, So Far
Back in January, I blogged on the Conficker or Downadup worm that had spread to millions of computers worldwide. Conficker is a worm that is intended to form "botnets" of computers owned by unsuspecting users who have no idea that their machine has been taken over for (usually) nefarious purposes. Since then, Conficker has continued to spread and its developer (or developers) have managed to stay a few steps ahead of the growing team of computer-security experts who are trying to foil it.
A recent New York Times article describes how the "Conficker Cabal," a team of leading security specialists from a variety of private and governmental organizations, have tried to frustrate the worm's attempts to control its botnets from a list of Internet domain names that was originally only 250 or so. The Conficker authors foxed the experts by modifying the program so it can now use about 50,000 addresses from which to send its nefarious instructions, making the problem of combating it much harder. Even the U. S. military doesn't seem to know what to do. The situation grows more urgent as April 1 approaches, which is evidently the date at which the bots in the botnet will report for Conficker duty. But what that duty might be is a matter of speculation, ranging from a harmless April Fool prank to a severe attack on Internet sites of major importance, or even the entire Internet.
I'm trying to think of another case in which a high-tech system of international scope has been turned from good to evil purposes. It's not that hard. The Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center used atoms, not bits, but the idea was similar: take a complex technology that involves large amounts of power and divert it to harmful purposes. Conficker lacks the element of surprise that 9/11 carried, but the level of planning and expertise required is comparable. Nuclear energy is another ongoing example. The beneficial use of nuclear energy for peaceful power reactors carries with it the constant hazard of diversion of nuclear fuel and knowhow to rogue regimes who want nuclear weapons.
A question we could ask that ties all these cases together is this: to what extent should engineers who develop a new technology, take into account the evil purposes to which it could be applied? I'm not talking about accidental hazards, but intentional misuse. I can't help but think that the original developers of the Internet were not thinking too heavily along these lines when they came up with the protocols that they did. Obviously, the Internet is generally one of the greatest success stories of the twenty-first century, and such problems that we have run into on it so far have not led to fatalities on a wide scale. But as we depend on it more and more and as attacks grow more sophisticated, that may change.
I have mentioned previously the need for engineers to use moral imagination, but mostly in the context of imagining how a given technology employed for its intended purpose can affect various groups of people. This is not always an easy thing to do, and it takes determined effort and a kind of thinking outside the usual engineering box to do it. But it often pays off in terms of new insights about potential problems that can be avoided, sometimes with simple low-cost fixes such as notifications or minor changes.
What I haven't considered in such musings is the need for a kind of twisted or evil imagination. It looks like not only should you think of how a technology will affect people if it is used as intended, but also if some evil person comes along and tries to do really nasty things with it. For some reason, this line of thinking has gone farther in computer technology than in most other forms of technology, partly because attempts to defeat security measures have been a part of computer programming almost since the beginning. There are several reasons for this.
Much more than other kinds of technology, computer technology is homogeneous: there's the human programmer or user, and the machine with its software. And the prize is simple: control. While control is only one aspect of the problem with hijacking other kinds of technology, control is the major part of the battle with computer hacking. Once you have control, computers will do your bidding with entire indifference to your moral values. And computer technology is the supreme example of fungibility: a general-purpose computer can literally do almost anything, limited only by resources. So once you have control, there's no particular problem in making the botnet or whatever do your evil will.
All the same, when programmers and computer scientists create new technologies, they build into them realms of possible and impossible actions. Because of the way the system is structured, there are certain things that it is physically impossible to do with the Internet. It's too late now, but wouldn't it be nice if one of those impossible things was to create a botnet and do evil things with it? Hindsight is generally sharper than foresight, but there are always new technologies coming along, and so there is still a chance to get it right, or more nearly right, in the future.
Of course, if you're clever and wicked enough, you can take almost any technology and do something bad with it. This doesn't mean that designers should simply drop any project that could conceivably be used for malicious acts. Engineering is all about compromises and tradeoffs. All I'm suggesting is that when you can think of an obvious nefarious use for a new technology, it would be a good idea to take some small steps toward building in preventive measures that would make it harder to use in a bad way.
In the meantime, let's hope that nothing worse happens on April 1 than a few bad practical jokes here and there.
Sources: I last blogged about the Conficker worm on Jan, 16, 2009. The New York Times article "Computer Experts Unite to Hunt Worm" can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/technology/19worm.html.
A Note About Broken Links: Whenever I give a source URL link, I make sure that it is working at the time I write the blog. Over time, some of these links have become broken because the source website has taken down the article or for other reasons. I do not have the resources to go back and repair old links, so if you are interested in a source URL, my suggestion is to click on it as soon as you see it show up. If you are interested in a link but find it is broken and can't locate the material any other way, you can email me at kdstephan@txstate.edu. I sometimes keep local file copies of the source material referred to, and if I have done so I will be happy to provide you with a copy if the original URL is broken.
A recent New York Times article describes how the "Conficker Cabal," a team of leading security specialists from a variety of private and governmental organizations, have tried to frustrate the worm's attempts to control its botnets from a list of Internet domain names that was originally only 250 or so. The Conficker authors foxed the experts by modifying the program so it can now use about 50,000 addresses from which to send its nefarious instructions, making the problem of combating it much harder. Even the U. S. military doesn't seem to know what to do. The situation grows more urgent as April 1 approaches, which is evidently the date at which the bots in the botnet will report for Conficker duty. But what that duty might be is a matter of speculation, ranging from a harmless April Fool prank to a severe attack on Internet sites of major importance, or even the entire Internet.
I'm trying to think of another case in which a high-tech system of international scope has been turned from good to evil purposes. It's not that hard. The Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center used atoms, not bits, but the idea was similar: take a complex technology that involves large amounts of power and divert it to harmful purposes. Conficker lacks the element of surprise that 9/11 carried, but the level of planning and expertise required is comparable. Nuclear energy is another ongoing example. The beneficial use of nuclear energy for peaceful power reactors carries with it the constant hazard of diversion of nuclear fuel and knowhow to rogue regimes who want nuclear weapons.
A question we could ask that ties all these cases together is this: to what extent should engineers who develop a new technology, take into account the evil purposes to which it could be applied? I'm not talking about accidental hazards, but intentional misuse. I can't help but think that the original developers of the Internet were not thinking too heavily along these lines when they came up with the protocols that they did. Obviously, the Internet is generally one of the greatest success stories of the twenty-first century, and such problems that we have run into on it so far have not led to fatalities on a wide scale. But as we depend on it more and more and as attacks grow more sophisticated, that may change.
I have mentioned previously the need for engineers to use moral imagination, but mostly in the context of imagining how a given technology employed for its intended purpose can affect various groups of people. This is not always an easy thing to do, and it takes determined effort and a kind of thinking outside the usual engineering box to do it. But it often pays off in terms of new insights about potential problems that can be avoided, sometimes with simple low-cost fixes such as notifications or minor changes.
What I haven't considered in such musings is the need for a kind of twisted or evil imagination. It looks like not only should you think of how a technology will affect people if it is used as intended, but also if some evil person comes along and tries to do really nasty things with it. For some reason, this line of thinking has gone farther in computer technology than in most other forms of technology, partly because attempts to defeat security measures have been a part of computer programming almost since the beginning. There are several reasons for this.
Much more than other kinds of technology, computer technology is homogeneous: there's the human programmer or user, and the machine with its software. And the prize is simple: control. While control is only one aspect of the problem with hijacking other kinds of technology, control is the major part of the battle with computer hacking. Once you have control, computers will do your bidding with entire indifference to your moral values. And computer technology is the supreme example of fungibility: a general-purpose computer can literally do almost anything, limited only by resources. So once you have control, there's no particular problem in making the botnet or whatever do your evil will.
All the same, when programmers and computer scientists create new technologies, they build into them realms of possible and impossible actions. Because of the way the system is structured, there are certain things that it is physically impossible to do with the Internet. It's too late now, but wouldn't it be nice if one of those impossible things was to create a botnet and do evil things with it? Hindsight is generally sharper than foresight, but there are always new technologies coming along, and so there is still a chance to get it right, or more nearly right, in the future.
Of course, if you're clever and wicked enough, you can take almost any technology and do something bad with it. This doesn't mean that designers should simply drop any project that could conceivably be used for malicious acts. Engineering is all about compromises and tradeoffs. All I'm suggesting is that when you can think of an obvious nefarious use for a new technology, it would be a good idea to take some small steps toward building in preventive measures that would make it harder to use in a bad way.
In the meantime, let's hope that nothing worse happens on April 1 than a few bad practical jokes here and there.
Sources: I last blogged about the Conficker worm on Jan, 16, 2009. The New York Times article "Computer Experts Unite to Hunt Worm" can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/technology/19worm.html.
A Note About Broken Links: Whenever I give a source URL link, I make sure that it is working at the time I write the blog. Over time, some of these links have become broken because the source website has taken down the article or for other reasons. I do not have the resources to go back and repair old links, so if you are interested in a source URL, my suggestion is to click on it as soon as you see it show up. If you are interested in a link but find it is broken and can't locate the material any other way, you can email me at kdstephan@txstate.edu. I sometimes keep local file copies of the source material referred to, and if I have done so I will be happy to provide you with a copy if the original URL is broken.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Nuclear Power: Technical Assets and Political Liabilities
With the coming of the new U. S. presidential administration, we as a country have a rare chance to debate and decide on a new course in energy policy: specifically, where we will get our electricity during the remainder of the twenty-first century. For a number of reasons ranging from geopolitical issues to fear of global warming, many people want to get away from burning fossil fuels. Technically, one of the most promising and accessible ways to do that is to build more nuclear plants. But politically, doing that will be an uphill battle.
France seems to be one of the models that the new administration is using as an example of how to run things. It turns out that France generates over three-fourths of its electricity from nuclear power, and they have beaten us out of the gate in the race to start building new plants. The French have never had a major nuclear accident on the order of Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, and they are the only country in the world that successfully reprocesses nuclear fuel on a commercial basis (think recycling for nuclear waste). Reprocessing and a variety of yet-to-be-commercialized techniques such as fast breeder reactors promise to reduce or eliminate the need for storing large amounts of nuclear waste. While it is true that such promises have yet to be delivered and so far, nuclear waste is stored on site at many plants, good engineering and planning is capable of dealing safely with that problem too. Unfortunately, the budget proposed by the Obama Administration eliminates funding for continuing the development of the best project the U. S. has sponsored for dealing coherently with nuclear waste, namely the Yucca Mountain program.
So why don't we follow France's example and go nuclear in a big way? I can think of at least two reasons, both of them mainly political rather than technical: fear of nuclear anything and competition from renewable energy.
A small, vocal minority in the U. S. has dedicated their lives, it seems, to the proposition that all nuclear technology must be banished from the face of the earth forever. I agree with them that if we could wave a magic wand somehow and make it impossible to build nuclear weapons forever, the world would probably be a better place. (Human cussedness being what it is, I'm not sure, but on balance I think it would be.) But to this minority, nuclear power and nuclear waste are just as evil and just as deserving to be eradicated. A larger number of people are influenced by these minority views and hold a deep, almost instinctive revulsion for nuclear technology, especially if a new nuclear plant is proposed in their neighborhood (where "neighborhood" often means anywhere within one's state or region). Technical people can talk themselves blue in the face about how non-rational this fear is, but in a democracy, the fears of millions of voters can and should make a difference. Nuclear power has had a mainly bad press in the U. S. and many other parts of the world for decades, and that fact cannot be ignored in any efforts to go nuclear with our power systems.
The flip side of that coin is the popularity that green anything enjoys these days (I'm writing this on St. Patrick's Day, incidentally, but the Irish green isn't the kind I'm talking about). You can tell by the almost desperate way companies claim they're going green with products and services that if you can label yourself green, you get a publicity boost almost regardless of whether you can back up the claim. Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power benefit immensely from this green buzz. And that is good to the extent that we can use them as an auxiliary energy source. But the problem with most renewable sources that remain to be exploited (that eliminates hydropower, for example, in most places) is that they depend on the fickleness of their natural drivers. Wind blows sometimes and doesn't sometimes. The sun never comes out at night and has problems coming out on cloudy days. And since it's not practical to store electric energy in large quantities (although this issue could be addressed if we wanted to), wind and solar sources are best used for what is called "peak load," which is the times when everybody has turned on their air conditioners on a hot summer day, and the utility companies are desperately scrambling to squeeze every last kilowatt out of their generators. At times like those, it's great to have arrays of solar panels you can call on, and for every solar-powered kilowatt you get during a peak-load period, that's one less kilowatt you have to generate with coal or oil.
But to go completely renewable is impractical. Solar arrays take up huge amounts of real estate and are very expensive. Some estimates I've read say that to supply even the majority of U. S. electric power with solar, you'd have to cover most of New Mexico with solar panels, and that deals only with the daytime. Wind energy is equally problematic as a source of what is called "base-load" power that you can rely on 24 hours a day, which is most of what electric utilities need to keep going. And that doesn't even address the problem of how to get the energy from where it would be generated (mainly in low-population rural areas) to where it would be used (mainly cities).
Most of these technical issues never come up in political discussions of the future of energy policy. If we go with the inclinations of the average voter, we'd get all our power from wind and solar and none from nuclear or fossil fuels. That's fine if you happen to be an off-the-grid type living by yourself in the wilds of Montana, but we simply can't run our cities and industries and homes that way, unless we tear them all down and redesign them to use about 25% or less of the power they now use.
In Europe there is a small building boom in nearly zero-power-consumption homes. It turns out that by using vast quantities of insulation, air-based heat exchangers that take up a large part of the basement (assuming you have a basement), and by approaching the shape of a sphere, you can build a (small) residence of a few hundred square feet that uses almost no energy for heating or cooling. Somehow I don't think we're all going to enjoy living in tiny insulated igloos in the future. But if we simply go with how the majority feels about energy and we ignore the technical realities, we might end up that way.
Sources: A good article on France's reprocessing facilities was carried by IEEE Spectrum in their February 2007 online edition at http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb07/4891. The statistic about France's nuclear power as a percentage of all power was obtained from an International Herald Tribune article at http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/17/europe/17francenuke.php.
France seems to be one of the models that the new administration is using as an example of how to run things. It turns out that France generates over three-fourths of its electricity from nuclear power, and they have beaten us out of the gate in the race to start building new plants. The French have never had a major nuclear accident on the order of Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, and they are the only country in the world that successfully reprocesses nuclear fuel on a commercial basis (think recycling for nuclear waste). Reprocessing and a variety of yet-to-be-commercialized techniques such as fast breeder reactors promise to reduce or eliminate the need for storing large amounts of nuclear waste. While it is true that such promises have yet to be delivered and so far, nuclear waste is stored on site at many plants, good engineering and planning is capable of dealing safely with that problem too. Unfortunately, the budget proposed by the Obama Administration eliminates funding for continuing the development of the best project the U. S. has sponsored for dealing coherently with nuclear waste, namely the Yucca Mountain program.
So why don't we follow France's example and go nuclear in a big way? I can think of at least two reasons, both of them mainly political rather than technical: fear of nuclear anything and competition from renewable energy.
A small, vocal minority in the U. S. has dedicated their lives, it seems, to the proposition that all nuclear technology must be banished from the face of the earth forever. I agree with them that if we could wave a magic wand somehow and make it impossible to build nuclear weapons forever, the world would probably be a better place. (Human cussedness being what it is, I'm not sure, but on balance I think it would be.) But to this minority, nuclear power and nuclear waste are just as evil and just as deserving to be eradicated. A larger number of people are influenced by these minority views and hold a deep, almost instinctive revulsion for nuclear technology, especially if a new nuclear plant is proposed in their neighborhood (where "neighborhood" often means anywhere within one's state or region). Technical people can talk themselves blue in the face about how non-rational this fear is, but in a democracy, the fears of millions of voters can and should make a difference. Nuclear power has had a mainly bad press in the U. S. and many other parts of the world for decades, and that fact cannot be ignored in any efforts to go nuclear with our power systems.
The flip side of that coin is the popularity that green anything enjoys these days (I'm writing this on St. Patrick's Day, incidentally, but the Irish green isn't the kind I'm talking about). You can tell by the almost desperate way companies claim they're going green with products and services that if you can label yourself green, you get a publicity boost almost regardless of whether you can back up the claim. Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power benefit immensely from this green buzz. And that is good to the extent that we can use them as an auxiliary energy source. But the problem with most renewable sources that remain to be exploited (that eliminates hydropower, for example, in most places) is that they depend on the fickleness of their natural drivers. Wind blows sometimes and doesn't sometimes. The sun never comes out at night and has problems coming out on cloudy days. And since it's not practical to store electric energy in large quantities (although this issue could be addressed if we wanted to), wind and solar sources are best used for what is called "peak load," which is the times when everybody has turned on their air conditioners on a hot summer day, and the utility companies are desperately scrambling to squeeze every last kilowatt out of their generators. At times like those, it's great to have arrays of solar panels you can call on, and for every solar-powered kilowatt you get during a peak-load period, that's one less kilowatt you have to generate with coal or oil.
But to go completely renewable is impractical. Solar arrays take up huge amounts of real estate and are very expensive. Some estimates I've read say that to supply even the majority of U. S. electric power with solar, you'd have to cover most of New Mexico with solar panels, and that deals only with the daytime. Wind energy is equally problematic as a source of what is called "base-load" power that you can rely on 24 hours a day, which is most of what electric utilities need to keep going. And that doesn't even address the problem of how to get the energy from where it would be generated (mainly in low-population rural areas) to where it would be used (mainly cities).
Most of these technical issues never come up in political discussions of the future of energy policy. If we go with the inclinations of the average voter, we'd get all our power from wind and solar and none from nuclear or fossil fuels. That's fine if you happen to be an off-the-grid type living by yourself in the wilds of Montana, but we simply can't run our cities and industries and homes that way, unless we tear them all down and redesign them to use about 25% or less of the power they now use.
In Europe there is a small building boom in nearly zero-power-consumption homes. It turns out that by using vast quantities of insulation, air-based heat exchangers that take up a large part of the basement (assuming you have a basement), and by approaching the shape of a sphere, you can build a (small) residence of a few hundred square feet that uses almost no energy for heating or cooling. Somehow I don't think we're all going to enjoy living in tiny insulated igloos in the future. But if we simply go with how the majority feels about energy and we ignore the technical realities, we might end up that way.
Sources: A good article on France's reprocessing facilities was carried by IEEE Spectrum in their February 2007 online edition at http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb07/4891. The statistic about France's nuclear power as a percentage of all power was obtained from an International Herald Tribune article at http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/17/europe/17francenuke.php.
Monday, March 09, 2009
Stem Cells and "The Prestige"
If you haven't seen the remarkable 2006 film The Prestige, quit reading this blog and go rent it, because there's a "spoiler" in the next paragraph.
If you have, you will remember among the final scenes the sight of one hundred tanks of water, each containing the drowned body of a "duplicate" of the magician Angier. Each body was created and destroyed in a matter of minutes during the performance of a magic trick. The fictional form of cinema drives home, as no dry argument can do, the horror of how a man driven by worldly ambition for fame and fortune could bring himself to produce and then kill dozens of human beings.
That scene comes to mind as I am writing this blog early on the morning of March 9. Later today, if all goes according to plan, President Obama will announce the rescinding of President Bush's order restricting federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research. According to the New York Times, the President is doing this as part of his pledge to "separate science and politics."
How will increased federal support, by tax money designated by the duly elected Congress of the United States, for research that destroys human beings who under normal circumstances would develop into babies, children, and adults more or less like the rest of us, be a step in the direction of "separating science and politics"? If anyone deserves credit for separating science and politics, it is former President Bush, who, after careful consideration early in his first term, decided to allow limited federal support of embryonic stem-cell research using only existing stem-cell lines, so that no more embryos would be destroyed for the purposes of this research.
That was a long time ago. Since then, science has progressed to the point that cells from the adult body can be made to do nearly everything that embryonic stem cells do, and without the destruction of embryos. According to Yuval Levin, director of the Bioethics and American Democracy program at Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, the number of labs using these non-embryonic "induced pluripotent stem cells" had increased to about 800 by the fall of 2008.
But in the meantime, politicians shanghaied the science for their own purposes. We were showered with TV ads and shows portraying victims of neurological damage such as Michael J. Fox and the late quadriplegic Christopher Reeve as being made to suffer primarily because of Bush's partial ban on embryonic stem-cell funding. Voters in the state of California were persuaded to approve Proposition 71 in 2004, which allowed a $3-billion bond issue designated for human stem-cell research. Despite these efforts and privately funded research in this country and abroad, not a single therapy based on human embryonic stem cells has even reached the stage of clinical trials in operation, according to Levin.
The claim that to allow unrestricted federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research is to separate science from politics is the exact opposite of the truth. Decades ago when the government was smaller, federal funds were treated with a certain amount of deference and respect. Having been forcibly extracted from the entire populace, federal money was held in special regard and used only for causes such as national defense and scientific projects that showed clear and unequivocal promise of furthering the public good.
Not only has science recently shown that embryonic stem cells are probably not the way to go in stem-cell research, the old idea that we would need lots of them to insert into patients for treatment is also becoming passé. More recent studies indicate that molecular biology directed at particular genetic switches will be more effective than the crude injection of stem cells, which tend to form malignancies and other problems that are often worse than the disease they were originally intended to cure.
This is the science that needs to be separated from politics to a greater extent that it is already. Any time you have public funding of science, science tends to become politicized. But it is at least possible for the influence of politics on science to be minimized by a hierarchy of authority. The best people to decide on a tactical level which science should be funded are the scientists themselves, which is why agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health conduct peer reviews of proposals. It is by no means a perfect system, but it is vastly superior to earmarks or other political approaches that channel funds directly to certain projects or institutions regardless of their scientific merit or qualifications. However, scientists cannot always be trusted to do things in keeping with the moral inclinations of the public, and that is why Bush decided the way he did about limiting funding for embryonic stem-cell research, as a part of his strategic outlook on the broad politics of science research. Not everything that can be done should be done, and scientists should not have the last word in all cases over how public money should be spent.
But political causes, once set in motion, tend to take on a life of their own independent of rational thought or scientific progress. There are millions of people out there convinced by politicians that the only thing standing between us and Heaven on earth is Bush's restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research.
It looks like President Obama is going to do what he said he would. A lot of people (embryos are people, they're just a lot younger than you and me) will die as a result, and a lot of other people will be disappointed that all the claims of miracle cures don't pan out. And science will get more deeply embroiled in politics than it ever was before.
Sources: The New York Times story on Obama's plans to rescind the Bush rules can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/07/us/politics/07stem.html. Yuval Levin's report "Biotech: What to Expect" is carried in the March 2009 issue of the journal First Things, pp. 17-20.
If you have, you will remember among the final scenes the sight of one hundred tanks of water, each containing the drowned body of a "duplicate" of the magician Angier. Each body was created and destroyed in a matter of minutes during the performance of a magic trick. The fictional form of cinema drives home, as no dry argument can do, the horror of how a man driven by worldly ambition for fame and fortune could bring himself to produce and then kill dozens of human beings.
That scene comes to mind as I am writing this blog early on the morning of March 9. Later today, if all goes according to plan, President Obama will announce the rescinding of President Bush's order restricting federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research. According to the New York Times, the President is doing this as part of his pledge to "separate science and politics."
How will increased federal support, by tax money designated by the duly elected Congress of the United States, for research that destroys human beings who under normal circumstances would develop into babies, children, and adults more or less like the rest of us, be a step in the direction of "separating science and politics"? If anyone deserves credit for separating science and politics, it is former President Bush, who, after careful consideration early in his first term, decided to allow limited federal support of embryonic stem-cell research using only existing stem-cell lines, so that no more embryos would be destroyed for the purposes of this research.
That was a long time ago. Since then, science has progressed to the point that cells from the adult body can be made to do nearly everything that embryonic stem cells do, and without the destruction of embryos. According to Yuval Levin, director of the Bioethics and American Democracy program at Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, the number of labs using these non-embryonic "induced pluripotent stem cells" had increased to about 800 by the fall of 2008.
But in the meantime, politicians shanghaied the science for their own purposes. We were showered with TV ads and shows portraying victims of neurological damage such as Michael J. Fox and the late quadriplegic Christopher Reeve as being made to suffer primarily because of Bush's partial ban on embryonic stem-cell funding. Voters in the state of California were persuaded to approve Proposition 71 in 2004, which allowed a $3-billion bond issue designated for human stem-cell research. Despite these efforts and privately funded research in this country and abroad, not a single therapy based on human embryonic stem cells has even reached the stage of clinical trials in operation, according to Levin.
The claim that to allow unrestricted federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research is to separate science from politics is the exact opposite of the truth. Decades ago when the government was smaller, federal funds were treated with a certain amount of deference and respect. Having been forcibly extracted from the entire populace, federal money was held in special regard and used only for causes such as national defense and scientific projects that showed clear and unequivocal promise of furthering the public good.
Not only has science recently shown that embryonic stem cells are probably not the way to go in stem-cell research, the old idea that we would need lots of them to insert into patients for treatment is also becoming passé. More recent studies indicate that molecular biology directed at particular genetic switches will be more effective than the crude injection of stem cells, which tend to form malignancies and other problems that are often worse than the disease they were originally intended to cure.
This is the science that needs to be separated from politics to a greater extent that it is already. Any time you have public funding of science, science tends to become politicized. But it is at least possible for the influence of politics on science to be minimized by a hierarchy of authority. The best people to decide on a tactical level which science should be funded are the scientists themselves, which is why agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health conduct peer reviews of proposals. It is by no means a perfect system, but it is vastly superior to earmarks or other political approaches that channel funds directly to certain projects or institutions regardless of their scientific merit or qualifications. However, scientists cannot always be trusted to do things in keeping with the moral inclinations of the public, and that is why Bush decided the way he did about limiting funding for embryonic stem-cell research, as a part of his strategic outlook on the broad politics of science research. Not everything that can be done should be done, and scientists should not have the last word in all cases over how public money should be spent.
But political causes, once set in motion, tend to take on a life of their own independent of rational thought or scientific progress. There are millions of people out there convinced by politicians that the only thing standing between us and Heaven on earth is Bush's restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research.
It looks like President Obama is going to do what he said he would. A lot of people (embryos are people, they're just a lot younger than you and me) will die as a result, and a lot of other people will be disappointed that all the claims of miracle cures don't pan out. And science will get more deeply embroiled in politics than it ever was before.
Sources: The New York Times story on Obama's plans to rescind the Bush rules can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/07/us/politics/07stem.html. Yuval Levin's report "Biotech: What to Expect" is carried in the March 2009 issue of the journal First Things, pp. 17-20.
Monday, March 02, 2009
Software Engineers as Legislators: Is Code Law?
The other day someone (perhaps a publisher's representative, or a colleague who thought I'd be interested in it) put in my mailbox a copy of David G. Post's new book In Search of Jefferson's Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace. Whoever did it was right to think I'd be interested. But rather than review the whole book (which tries to tie together cyberspace, Thomas Jefferson, a stuffed moose he went to great trouble and expense to have shipped to him from the U. S. to France, and a great variety of other matters), I would like to cogitate on just one idea from it: the notion that in cyberspace, "code is law."
The word "law" has at least two distinct common meanings. If I say, "You can't drive over 40 MPH on this street, it's against the law," the word means the set of rules enacted by a duly authorized governmental body. In a democracy the laws are presumably made by representatives of the people. In a dictatorship they're made by the dictator. But in either case they are human constructions. And when I say "can't" I'm not being strictly accurate. It's not physically impossible to drive faster than 40 MPH on that street, but if you do, you are liable to get caught and pay a fine.
The other important meaning of "law" is what we mean when we talk about the law of gravity, for instance: a natural principle that governs how the universe works. Try as you might, you simply can't defeat the law of gravity. It's part of the structure of the physical world. Obviously, we can do something about human laws—debate them, even change them if necessary—but all we can do about physical laws is try to understand them better so we can work within their constraints.
Which of these two meanings applies better to the idea that in cyberspace, "code is law"? That's actually a quotation in the book from Lawrence Lessig, a law professor who has written extensively on intellectual property in cyberspace. What he means is perhaps best illustrated by an example.
It turns out that embedded in the underlying "HTTP protocols" on which all web browsers run is a requirement for what is called a "referrer field." This is how Google gets paid for sending people to its advertisers' websites. The referrer field tells the advertiser that the visitor came from a Google site, and Google can collect their fee by using this information. The only way Google can do this, though, is by means of the "law" that allows for the referrer field.
If, way back in the beginning of hypertext and browsers in the 1990s, the engineers who wrote the HTTP protocols had neglected to allow for the referrer field, Post points out that Internet commerce would be very different. More specifically, millions of common transactions we are used to doing today would be impossible. What kind of law would make them impossible?
If you say that it's a physical law, like gravity, I will point out that the code enabling or disabling the referrer field was written by ordinary (more or less, anyway) human beings calling themselves software engineers.
But if you say it's just like a law on the books of a state or country, I will point out that unlike such man-made rules, it's not, strictly speaking, illegal to break "code laws"—but it just won't work. If you pretend there's a referrer field that isn't there, something very much like physical law intervenes to stop you, since you are denying a part of reality.
So the constraints and allowances imposed by the software structure of cyberspace borrow characteristics from both physical law and legislative law. This fact is underappreciated by at least two groups of people.
The first group is the software engineers themselves. I don't know why the early HTTP code warriors put that referral field in there, but making the founders of Google fabulously rich was probably not foremost in their minds. It probably served some minor technical function that paled into insignificance once the commercial possibilities of its use came to the fore. No one can foretell the future with perfect accuracy, but it would be nice if software engineers working in fields that are likely to influence the behavior and freedom, even, of millions of people, would at least realize that they are playing the part of legislators, usually without realizing it. Maybe a few of them do realize the broader implications of what they're doing, but it is a rare engineer who has even an average legislator's appreciation for the needs and wants of the public. That is one reason why so much software has annoying habits that make you want to go hunt up the guy who wrote it and give him a piece of your mind before you lose it on account of the software.
The second group, which includes practically everybody nowadays, is the public at large who uses, deals with, or is (sometimes) victimized by, software. You need to know that it is possible, at least in principle, for things to change, even in software. Unfortunately, when you look at the governance systems erected by those in charge of the Internet and allied software standards, they are typically as complicated as the software is. I have noticed that whenever engineers are left to themselves to design an organization, whether it's a five-person committee or something as large as the 300,000-member Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, they will typically devise a legislative monstrosity with interlocking boards, districts, criss-crossing lines of authority, and other features that leave the outside observer with a general sense of not knowing quite who is in charge. It's hard even for technical people to get anything useful out of such organizations, and as for the general public—well, "forget it" is a tad discouraging, but the systems are usually not designed for ease of access by non-experts.
But as with any problem, people of good will can at least try to make things better. For you software engineers out there, try to think outside your little code box and consider the wider implications of your work, especially if you're fooling with stuff that millions of people will use. And as for the rest of us, if you ever get a chance to have some input on software design, take it and run. You stand a good chance of making cyberspace a better place.
Sources: In Search of Jefferson's Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace by David G. Post was published in February 2009 by Oxford University Press.
The word "law" has at least two distinct common meanings. If I say, "You can't drive over 40 MPH on this street, it's against the law," the word means the set of rules enacted by a duly authorized governmental body. In a democracy the laws are presumably made by representatives of the people. In a dictatorship they're made by the dictator. But in either case they are human constructions. And when I say "can't" I'm not being strictly accurate. It's not physically impossible to drive faster than 40 MPH on that street, but if you do, you are liable to get caught and pay a fine.
The other important meaning of "law" is what we mean when we talk about the law of gravity, for instance: a natural principle that governs how the universe works. Try as you might, you simply can't defeat the law of gravity. It's part of the structure of the physical world. Obviously, we can do something about human laws—debate them, even change them if necessary—but all we can do about physical laws is try to understand them better so we can work within their constraints.
Which of these two meanings applies better to the idea that in cyberspace, "code is law"? That's actually a quotation in the book from Lawrence Lessig, a law professor who has written extensively on intellectual property in cyberspace. What he means is perhaps best illustrated by an example.
It turns out that embedded in the underlying "HTTP protocols" on which all web browsers run is a requirement for what is called a "referrer field." This is how Google gets paid for sending people to its advertisers' websites. The referrer field tells the advertiser that the visitor came from a Google site, and Google can collect their fee by using this information. The only way Google can do this, though, is by means of the "law" that allows for the referrer field.
If, way back in the beginning of hypertext and browsers in the 1990s, the engineers who wrote the HTTP protocols had neglected to allow for the referrer field, Post points out that Internet commerce would be very different. More specifically, millions of common transactions we are used to doing today would be impossible. What kind of law would make them impossible?
If you say that it's a physical law, like gravity, I will point out that the code enabling or disabling the referrer field was written by ordinary (more or less, anyway) human beings calling themselves software engineers.
But if you say it's just like a law on the books of a state or country, I will point out that unlike such man-made rules, it's not, strictly speaking, illegal to break "code laws"—but it just won't work. If you pretend there's a referrer field that isn't there, something very much like physical law intervenes to stop you, since you are denying a part of reality.
So the constraints and allowances imposed by the software structure of cyberspace borrow characteristics from both physical law and legislative law. This fact is underappreciated by at least two groups of people.
The first group is the software engineers themselves. I don't know why the early HTTP code warriors put that referral field in there, but making the founders of Google fabulously rich was probably not foremost in their minds. It probably served some minor technical function that paled into insignificance once the commercial possibilities of its use came to the fore. No one can foretell the future with perfect accuracy, but it would be nice if software engineers working in fields that are likely to influence the behavior and freedom, even, of millions of people, would at least realize that they are playing the part of legislators, usually without realizing it. Maybe a few of them do realize the broader implications of what they're doing, but it is a rare engineer who has even an average legislator's appreciation for the needs and wants of the public. That is one reason why so much software has annoying habits that make you want to go hunt up the guy who wrote it and give him a piece of your mind before you lose it on account of the software.
The second group, which includes practically everybody nowadays, is the public at large who uses, deals with, or is (sometimes) victimized by, software. You need to know that it is possible, at least in principle, for things to change, even in software. Unfortunately, when you look at the governance systems erected by those in charge of the Internet and allied software standards, they are typically as complicated as the software is. I have noticed that whenever engineers are left to themselves to design an organization, whether it's a five-person committee or something as large as the 300,000-member Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, they will typically devise a legislative monstrosity with interlocking boards, districts, criss-crossing lines of authority, and other features that leave the outside observer with a general sense of not knowing quite who is in charge. It's hard even for technical people to get anything useful out of such organizations, and as for the general public—well, "forget it" is a tad discouraging, but the systems are usually not designed for ease of access by non-experts.
But as with any problem, people of good will can at least try to make things better. For you software engineers out there, try to think outside your little code box and consider the wider implications of your work, especially if you're fooling with stuff that millions of people will use. And as for the rest of us, if you ever get a chance to have some input on software design, take it and run. You stand a good chance of making cyberspace a better place.
Sources: In Search of Jefferson's Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace by David G. Post was published in February 2009 by Oxford University Press.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Computerizing Medical Records: What Could Go Wrong?
The other day I was in my dentist's office getting my teeth cleaned (wait, it gets better). Like most other health professionals, my dentist keeps patient records on paper in file folders bearing multicolored tabs, all crammed into shelves behind the receptionist's desk for easy access. As I discussed the bill with the office's insurance person, I glanced behind her and saw the name of a friend scrawled along a protruding edge of one folder.
Now, technically, that was a breach of confidential medical information, I suppose. I hadn't known that my friend and I shared a dentist in common, and I don't think anything nefarious will come of it. But this little episode shows that while some people concerned about computer security are worried now that the Obama Administration has gotten $19 billion out of Congress to spend on computerizing medical records, the old-fashioned paper records are not entirely secure either.
If you had asked someone in 1960 to guess whether doctors or lawyers would be faster to adopt computerized record-keeping, most people might have bet on the doctors. After all, doctors use advanced technology every day, while in 1960 it was still possible to operate a profitable law practice with manual typewriters and carbon paper. But history has proved this guess wrong. Most lawyers now shoot emails and .pdf files and electronic signatures around without a second thought, but doctors and hospitals still keep medical records more or less the same way they were kept in 1890: on millions of little scraps of paper in cardboard file folders. Yes, they can fax copies around, and sometimes do when requested, but the heart of the system is still paper, not electronic.
This state of affairs has its drawbacks. While no form of record-keeping is error-free, you would think that a profession with a reputation for bad handwriting would do something about keeping handwritten records of life-critical information before now. I am not aware of any formal estimate for how many people in the U. S. die every year due to medical errors caused by poor penmanship, but it's probably in the dozens, at least. So if it is done well, the transferring of medical records to computer form promises to reduce mistakes in a field where the phrase "fatal error" means more than just the fact that your computer crashed.
All the same, there are political groups which have been campaigning for increased protection of the privacy of patient records now that computerizing records looks like it actually may happen. A former RN named Deborah Peel runs an organization called Patient Privacy Rights, which tries to influence legislation to increase the formerly meager protections that U. S. citizens have against unauthorized use of their medical records. They have recently announced that the part of the stimulus bill paying for medical-record computerizing also has reasonably good protections in place for patient privacy. I admit to somewhat mixed feelings on this score, since efforts like this were responsible for the infamous information and consent forms every new patient has to fill out nowadays. To that extent, the reforms have increased everyone's paperwork burden, and whether patient privacy really got better is somewhat of an open question. But if the move to computers really succeeds, maybe the forms will become electronic too.
The $19-billion question right now is: exactly how is that money going to be used to convert the head-high file cabinets in every doctor's office and hospital in the country, into some computer files that presumably can be shared effortlessly from office to office? In trying to think of analogies to this, the only thing that comes to mind is the giant databases that aircraft manufacturers like Boeing maintain on new airplane designs. Everyone in the organization with the need to know about or alter these databases can access them instantaneously, and everyone ends up working from the same database. This system has increased productivity tremendously in the industry and reduced errors and misunderstandings a great deal.
But there are many differences between that situation and the case of medical records. Boeing is one private company, although a large one; the U. S. medical establishment is (so far, anyway) largely private, incredibly fragmented, and has no overall coordinating managerial structure of any kind. For the shared advantages of a common record-keeping system to be realized, somebody is going to have to impose some rules, which will include software and possibly hardware specifications. You know that all sorts of computer and software companies are currently salivating over that $19 billion, hoping that their particular product becomes the de-facto (or perhaps even de-jure) norm and they will end up with a good part of it in their pockets.
But given the rather anti-business tone of this administration, I can imagine another extreme, namely a Federal Medical-Records Computerization Agency, with thousands of newly hired young agents fresh out of college (where else are college graduates going to find jobs these days?), going from dentists to hospitals to chiropractors, knocking on doors and saying, "Hi, I'm from the government and I'm here to help you . . . computerize your medical records." Finish the joke any way you like, but that picture has its own drawbacks, not the least of which is the tremendous overhead in terms of federal employees and time it would take to decide on the system, train the agents to do their job, and then go and do it. If the Federal Aviation Administration's experiences with software are any guide (they have had tons of problems, including one or two expensive and complete failures), we have a right to be dubious that an all-government attempt to take on a huge software-intensive job like that will succeed, even with nineteen billion dollars behind it.
The sensible thing (and there are sensible people in government, though they don't often capture headlines) is an approach engaging both public and private entities, creating a minimum of new bureaucracies, trying things on a small scale first to work out the bugs, and adapting good systems that have been proven to work already. I hear that the Veterans' Administration, for example, has a pretty good computerized record approach that could be scaled up. Let's hope that sensible heads prevail, and we end up with computerized medical records that do the job with fewer errors and better privacy than the current paper records.
Sources: A report on some details of the portion of the stimulus package dealing with computerized medical records can be found at http://www.kansascity.com/444/story/1033620.html. Deborah Peel's Patient Privacy Rights organization has its website at http://www.patientprivacyrights.org.
Now, technically, that was a breach of confidential medical information, I suppose. I hadn't known that my friend and I shared a dentist in common, and I don't think anything nefarious will come of it. But this little episode shows that while some people concerned about computer security are worried now that the Obama Administration has gotten $19 billion out of Congress to spend on computerizing medical records, the old-fashioned paper records are not entirely secure either.
If you had asked someone in 1960 to guess whether doctors or lawyers would be faster to adopt computerized record-keeping, most people might have bet on the doctors. After all, doctors use advanced technology every day, while in 1960 it was still possible to operate a profitable law practice with manual typewriters and carbon paper. But history has proved this guess wrong. Most lawyers now shoot emails and .pdf files and electronic signatures around without a second thought, but doctors and hospitals still keep medical records more or less the same way they were kept in 1890: on millions of little scraps of paper in cardboard file folders. Yes, they can fax copies around, and sometimes do when requested, but the heart of the system is still paper, not electronic.
This state of affairs has its drawbacks. While no form of record-keeping is error-free, you would think that a profession with a reputation for bad handwriting would do something about keeping handwritten records of life-critical information before now. I am not aware of any formal estimate for how many people in the U. S. die every year due to medical errors caused by poor penmanship, but it's probably in the dozens, at least. So if it is done well, the transferring of medical records to computer form promises to reduce mistakes in a field where the phrase "fatal error" means more than just the fact that your computer crashed.
All the same, there are political groups which have been campaigning for increased protection of the privacy of patient records now that computerizing records looks like it actually may happen. A former RN named Deborah Peel runs an organization called Patient Privacy Rights, which tries to influence legislation to increase the formerly meager protections that U. S. citizens have against unauthorized use of their medical records. They have recently announced that the part of the stimulus bill paying for medical-record computerizing also has reasonably good protections in place for patient privacy. I admit to somewhat mixed feelings on this score, since efforts like this were responsible for the infamous information and consent forms every new patient has to fill out nowadays. To that extent, the reforms have increased everyone's paperwork burden, and whether patient privacy really got better is somewhat of an open question. But if the move to computers really succeeds, maybe the forms will become electronic too.
The $19-billion question right now is: exactly how is that money going to be used to convert the head-high file cabinets in every doctor's office and hospital in the country, into some computer files that presumably can be shared effortlessly from office to office? In trying to think of analogies to this, the only thing that comes to mind is the giant databases that aircraft manufacturers like Boeing maintain on new airplane designs. Everyone in the organization with the need to know about or alter these databases can access them instantaneously, and everyone ends up working from the same database. This system has increased productivity tremendously in the industry and reduced errors and misunderstandings a great deal.
But there are many differences between that situation and the case of medical records. Boeing is one private company, although a large one; the U. S. medical establishment is (so far, anyway) largely private, incredibly fragmented, and has no overall coordinating managerial structure of any kind. For the shared advantages of a common record-keeping system to be realized, somebody is going to have to impose some rules, which will include software and possibly hardware specifications. You know that all sorts of computer and software companies are currently salivating over that $19 billion, hoping that their particular product becomes the de-facto (or perhaps even de-jure) norm and they will end up with a good part of it in their pockets.
But given the rather anti-business tone of this administration, I can imagine another extreme, namely a Federal Medical-Records Computerization Agency, with thousands of newly hired young agents fresh out of college (where else are college graduates going to find jobs these days?), going from dentists to hospitals to chiropractors, knocking on doors and saying, "Hi, I'm from the government and I'm here to help you . . . computerize your medical records." Finish the joke any way you like, but that picture has its own drawbacks, not the least of which is the tremendous overhead in terms of federal employees and time it would take to decide on the system, train the agents to do their job, and then go and do it. If the Federal Aviation Administration's experiences with software are any guide (they have had tons of problems, including one or two expensive and complete failures), we have a right to be dubious that an all-government attempt to take on a huge software-intensive job like that will succeed, even with nineteen billion dollars behind it.
The sensible thing (and there are sensible people in government, though they don't often capture headlines) is an approach engaging both public and private entities, creating a minimum of new bureaucracies, trying things on a small scale first to work out the bugs, and adapting good systems that have been proven to work already. I hear that the Veterans' Administration, for example, has a pretty good computerized record approach that could be scaled up. Let's hope that sensible heads prevail, and we end up with computerized medical records that do the job with fewer errors and better privacy than the current paper records.
Sources: A report on some details of the portion of the stimulus package dealing with computerized medical records can be found at http://www.kansascity.com/444/story/1033620.html. Deborah Peel's Patient Privacy Rights organization has its website at http://www.patientprivacyrights.org.
Monday, February 16, 2009
The Crash of Flight 3407: Better Deicing Needed?
The passengers on Continental Airlines Flight 3407 from Newark, N. J. to Buffalo last Thursday night probably felt pretty confident about air travel, especially after hearing about Chesley Sullenberger's successful splash landing of his U. S. Air flight in the Hudson River less than a month ago after birds apparently clogged both engines. But a few minutes before the planned landing in Buffalo, the crew radioed that they were encountering noticeable icing on the wings. As soon as they attempted to lower the flaps for landing, the Bombardier Q400 commuter turboprop began to pitch and roll violently. The extended landing gear was retracted just before the plane crashed flat on top of a house in Clarence, New York, killing all 48 passengers and crew as well as one person on the ground.
Ice has been a problem for aircraft ever since the first airplane flew high and long enough to accumulate freezing rain on the wings. It tends to build up on the leading edges of airfoils. Besides its additional weight, ice can distort the airflow around the wing in unhelpful ways and even interfere with the mechanical movement of control surfaces such as ailerons and flaps.
There are three main approaches to deicing of aircraft. First, many airports are equipped to spray deicing solutions (basically a kind of antifreeze) on a plane's wings before takeoff. This can prevent ice buildup soon after takeoff, but it eventually wears off. In addition, larger aircraft use heated deicing strips that warm critical surfaces so that ice is less likely to form. Finally, smaller aircraft such as the two-engine Q400 usually use pneumatic deicing boots. If you imagine partially blowing up a balloon, spraying freezing water on it until it has a coating of ice, and then blowing it up more until it cracks out of its ice shell, you have pictured the essentials of a deicing boot.
At a news conference after the crash, federal investigators said that icing was a possible cause. The performance of pneumatic deicing boots has been of enough interest to inspire the Federal Aviation Administration to commission a lengthy investigation into how well they work. In 2006, the investigators published a 160-page report, which I have not had time to read since I found it this morning. However, the executive summary points out that in an actual flight test of an instrumented aircraft using the boots, enough so-called "intercycle ice" built up to produce a loss in lift of 25% or more. This loss became worse when the aircraft was close to a stall angle of attack.
The translation from aerodynamic engineering speak into layman's language goes something like this. Lift, the force that keeps an airplane in the air, can be reduced as much as one-fourth by ice that builds up between the times that pneumatic deicers operate (they work on an automatic cycle once they're turned on). If the airplane is trying to climb rapidly (as may well have happened, since a decision to retract landing gear is consistent with deciding to miss an approach and gain altitude), every airplane eventually reaches a "stall angle." When an airplane stalls, it nearly stops in the air and literally falls out of the sky. Recovering from a stall is hard, even in clear air in the daytime with a normally functioning aircraft when you have plenty of altitude left. The pilots of Flight 3407 were flying what was probably a plane with heavily iced control surfaces, in the dark, in freezing rain, with only about 2,000 feet between them and the ground. And it wasn't enough.
Speaking as a non-mechanical engineer, I have to confess that the picture of little rubber boots inflating and de-inflating to knock ice off a wing has its weirder aspects. Ice is not very strong mechanically, but it can be pretty sticky. And rubber exposed to the kind of life led by the leading edge of an aircraft wing is bound to get roughened and porous sooner or later, which will make ice stick to it that much better. I don't know any details such as how much the boots really inflate to blow off the ice. But the whole situation seems like it's a kind of empirical solution to a problem that is very hard to analyze theoretically, or even to model in the laboratory, as the FAA report itself admits. While the last accident where ice was implicated in the crash of this type of aircraft occurred fifteen years ago, even one life lost that could be prevented is too many.
We will have to wait for the final report of the crash investigation before we can draw any substantiated conclusions about what this accident says with regard to pneumatic deicing gear. As with many crashes, there may be a human factor involved. According to the Wikipedia website article "deicing," pilots used to believe that pneumatic deicers did not work well unless you allowed a certain minimum ice buildup to occur. Later studies reportedly revealed that this idea was false. We don't know what the late pilots of Flight 3407 believed, but we do have a record in the flight recording of what they did. Examination of that record plus engineering studies may show in more detail what went wrong and how accidents like this can be prevented in the future.
Sources: I used the MSNBC report from Associated Press currently available at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29173163/, and the Wikipedia article "deicing." The FAA report "Investigation of Performance of Deicing Boots, Surface Ice Detectors, and Scaling of Intercycle Ice" is available for free download at http://www.tc.faa.gov/its/worldpac/techrpt/ar06-48.pdf.
Ice has been a problem for aircraft ever since the first airplane flew high and long enough to accumulate freezing rain on the wings. It tends to build up on the leading edges of airfoils. Besides its additional weight, ice can distort the airflow around the wing in unhelpful ways and even interfere with the mechanical movement of control surfaces such as ailerons and flaps.
There are three main approaches to deicing of aircraft. First, many airports are equipped to spray deicing solutions (basically a kind of antifreeze) on a plane's wings before takeoff. This can prevent ice buildup soon after takeoff, but it eventually wears off. In addition, larger aircraft use heated deicing strips that warm critical surfaces so that ice is less likely to form. Finally, smaller aircraft such as the two-engine Q400 usually use pneumatic deicing boots. If you imagine partially blowing up a balloon, spraying freezing water on it until it has a coating of ice, and then blowing it up more until it cracks out of its ice shell, you have pictured the essentials of a deicing boot.
At a news conference after the crash, federal investigators said that icing was a possible cause. The performance of pneumatic deicing boots has been of enough interest to inspire the Federal Aviation Administration to commission a lengthy investigation into how well they work. In 2006, the investigators published a 160-page report, which I have not had time to read since I found it this morning. However, the executive summary points out that in an actual flight test of an instrumented aircraft using the boots, enough so-called "intercycle ice" built up to produce a loss in lift of 25% or more. This loss became worse when the aircraft was close to a stall angle of attack.
The translation from aerodynamic engineering speak into layman's language goes something like this. Lift, the force that keeps an airplane in the air, can be reduced as much as one-fourth by ice that builds up between the times that pneumatic deicers operate (they work on an automatic cycle once they're turned on). If the airplane is trying to climb rapidly (as may well have happened, since a decision to retract landing gear is consistent with deciding to miss an approach and gain altitude), every airplane eventually reaches a "stall angle." When an airplane stalls, it nearly stops in the air and literally falls out of the sky. Recovering from a stall is hard, even in clear air in the daytime with a normally functioning aircraft when you have plenty of altitude left. The pilots of Flight 3407 were flying what was probably a plane with heavily iced control surfaces, in the dark, in freezing rain, with only about 2,000 feet between them and the ground. And it wasn't enough.
Speaking as a non-mechanical engineer, I have to confess that the picture of little rubber boots inflating and de-inflating to knock ice off a wing has its weirder aspects. Ice is not very strong mechanically, but it can be pretty sticky. And rubber exposed to the kind of life led by the leading edge of an aircraft wing is bound to get roughened and porous sooner or later, which will make ice stick to it that much better. I don't know any details such as how much the boots really inflate to blow off the ice. But the whole situation seems like it's a kind of empirical solution to a problem that is very hard to analyze theoretically, or even to model in the laboratory, as the FAA report itself admits. While the last accident where ice was implicated in the crash of this type of aircraft occurred fifteen years ago, even one life lost that could be prevented is too many.
We will have to wait for the final report of the crash investigation before we can draw any substantiated conclusions about what this accident says with regard to pneumatic deicing gear. As with many crashes, there may be a human factor involved. According to the Wikipedia website article "deicing," pilots used to believe that pneumatic deicers did not work well unless you allowed a certain minimum ice buildup to occur. Later studies reportedly revealed that this idea was false. We don't know what the late pilots of Flight 3407 believed, but we do have a record in the flight recording of what they did. Examination of that record plus engineering studies may show in more detail what went wrong and how accidents like this can be prevented in the future.
Sources: I used the MSNBC report from Associated Press currently available at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29173163/, and the Wikipedia article "deicing." The FAA report "Investigation of Performance of Deicing Boots, Surface Ice Detectors, and Scaling of Intercycle Ice" is available for free download at http://www.tc.faa.gov/its/worldpac/techrpt/ar06-48.pdf.
Monday, February 09, 2009
Analog TV in the U. S.: Not Quite Dead Yet
Politics gets into everything nowadays, even my lecture notes for an electromagnetics course I hope to teach next fall. In the process of trying to give a more vivid picture of what the electromagnetic spectrum is like, I included a list of radio and television frequencies and what they were used for. One of them is "Old TV channel 56—now reassigned to other uses." When I wrote that, I was counting on having the switch to digital TV in the U. S. to happen on schedule, which until the politicians got into the act again was a week from tomorrow. But now, if President Obama signs legislation passed by Congress, which he has promised to do, the switch is delayed at least until June, and there is a good chance that even then, Congress and the President will take a look at the situation and say, "Well, there's still all these poor people who still haven't got digital converters, so let's wait another little while."
I confess to feelings of great ambivalence about the whole thing: digital versus analog TV, how the switchover has been handled here, and for that matter, TV in general. In these feelings, I continue a long-standing if obscure tradition of TV engineers who at best viewed TV in a dim light (metaphorically speaking) or disapproved of it altogether. The engineer who could be considered as the father of electronic television, Vladimir K. Zworykin, is quoted in the Wikipedia article about him as saying, "I hate what they've done to my child . . . I would never let my own children watch it." This feeling was shared by at least one other electronics engineer of note, Harold A. Wheeler, whose inventions were fundamental to both radio and television. For many years, my wife and I did not own a television set, and when we eventually got one, all we did with it was watch old movies on VCR tapes and DVDs. Finally, a couple of years ago when my father-in-law moved in with us, he received a large-screen TV as a gift and we hooked it up to cable TV. But I still suspect that in some ways the world might be better off without TV.
That being said, I earned my living for a couple of years around 1980 devising ways to keep people who hadn't paid for cable TV from watching it. This involved work at Scientific-Atlanta in what was called "scrambling." In the process, I had to get thoroughly familiar with the analog TV system, and purely for that reason I will be sorry to see the departure of an old acquaintance of long standing. Like any old friend, its flaws became as obvious to me as its virtues. In contrast to the European systems of analog color TV, the U. S. system (termed "NTSC" for the National Television Standards Committee that devised it in the early 1950s) did not reproduce the hue of colors very well unless the entire transmission system was carefully and repeatedly calibrated to maintain something called "constant group delay." For this reason, engineers joked that NTSC actually stood for "Never Twice the Same Color." Nevertheless, it served us reasonably well for over half a century, and I am somewhat sorry to see it go. If in fact it goes at all.
As to the ethics of the thing, I don't believe any wrongdoing can be laid at the feet of the engineers who cooked up digital TV and did the intensely political work of getting major companies and industry groups to agree on the new standards. By most engineering criteria, digital TV is a great advance over analog TV. It does more: it allows several sub-channels within one main channel, allows for a variety of display formats, and delivers an essentially studio-quality image everywhere within range of the transmitter, without the old analog problems of "snow" and "ghosts." (Of course, it does tend to fall off a cliff into complete disaster when you get out of range, but that is how all digital media tend to work: either very well or not at all.) And once it is implemented, we can get by with less spectrum bandwidth devoted to TV, which is how the federal government raised nearly $20 billion by auctioning off the surplus spectrum that will be freed up when all the stations go digital. This will lead, one hopes, to a variety of new digital wireless services, which is why some companies such as Qualcomm who were about to roll out such services complained loudly at the delay.
In comparison with how the digital rollout has been handled in England, the FCC and the TV industry stumbled rather badly here. In England, where everybody who watches TV pays a yearly license fee to the government to support the BBC and so on, the conversion happened in geographic stages and abundant help and equipment was made available. In the U. S., by contrast, there's been a lot of one-way communication in the form of advertising, an underfunded coupon program that assumes a lot of abilities on the part of the consumer (how to get the coupon, what to buy with it, how to hook up the box), and by some estimates, a failure to reach millions of people who still watch TV over the air with old analog sets. These folks tend to have lower incomes and are older and often socially isolated—people for whom TV is arguably one of their main companions. And I agree it would be a shame to simply cut them off without any help or assistance about what to do when that occurs. But no matter what we do, there will be some people who will be caught unawares no matter how much spade work is done in preparing the public for the change. And the rest of the country should not be held hostage to a few people who will have their screens go blank when digital comes along.
So maybe one delay is understandable. But such things can get habit-forming, like resolutions to quit smoking. Mark Twain said it was easy to quit smoking; he'd done it dozens of times. Let's hope we use the next four months to help more of the people who need help with the digital transition, and then go ahead and get it over with.
Sources: A news article describing the latest news on legislation to delay the switchover can be found at the Reuters website http://www.reuters.com/article/industryNews/idUSTRE5136YP20090205.
I confess to feelings of great ambivalence about the whole thing: digital versus analog TV, how the switchover has been handled here, and for that matter, TV in general. In these feelings, I continue a long-standing if obscure tradition of TV engineers who at best viewed TV in a dim light (metaphorically speaking) or disapproved of it altogether. The engineer who could be considered as the father of electronic television, Vladimir K. Zworykin, is quoted in the Wikipedia article about him as saying, "I hate what they've done to my child . . . I would never let my own children watch it." This feeling was shared by at least one other electronics engineer of note, Harold A. Wheeler, whose inventions were fundamental to both radio and television. For many years, my wife and I did not own a television set, and when we eventually got one, all we did with it was watch old movies on VCR tapes and DVDs. Finally, a couple of years ago when my father-in-law moved in with us, he received a large-screen TV as a gift and we hooked it up to cable TV. But I still suspect that in some ways the world might be better off without TV.
That being said, I earned my living for a couple of years around 1980 devising ways to keep people who hadn't paid for cable TV from watching it. This involved work at Scientific-Atlanta in what was called "scrambling." In the process, I had to get thoroughly familiar with the analog TV system, and purely for that reason I will be sorry to see the departure of an old acquaintance of long standing. Like any old friend, its flaws became as obvious to me as its virtues. In contrast to the European systems of analog color TV, the U. S. system (termed "NTSC" for the National Television Standards Committee that devised it in the early 1950s) did not reproduce the hue of colors very well unless the entire transmission system was carefully and repeatedly calibrated to maintain something called "constant group delay." For this reason, engineers joked that NTSC actually stood for "Never Twice the Same Color." Nevertheless, it served us reasonably well for over half a century, and I am somewhat sorry to see it go. If in fact it goes at all.
As to the ethics of the thing, I don't believe any wrongdoing can be laid at the feet of the engineers who cooked up digital TV and did the intensely political work of getting major companies and industry groups to agree on the new standards. By most engineering criteria, digital TV is a great advance over analog TV. It does more: it allows several sub-channels within one main channel, allows for a variety of display formats, and delivers an essentially studio-quality image everywhere within range of the transmitter, without the old analog problems of "snow" and "ghosts." (Of course, it does tend to fall off a cliff into complete disaster when you get out of range, but that is how all digital media tend to work: either very well or not at all.) And once it is implemented, we can get by with less spectrum bandwidth devoted to TV, which is how the federal government raised nearly $20 billion by auctioning off the surplus spectrum that will be freed up when all the stations go digital. This will lead, one hopes, to a variety of new digital wireless services, which is why some companies such as Qualcomm who were about to roll out such services complained loudly at the delay.
In comparison with how the digital rollout has been handled in England, the FCC and the TV industry stumbled rather badly here. In England, where everybody who watches TV pays a yearly license fee to the government to support the BBC and so on, the conversion happened in geographic stages and abundant help and equipment was made available. In the U. S., by contrast, there's been a lot of one-way communication in the form of advertising, an underfunded coupon program that assumes a lot of abilities on the part of the consumer (how to get the coupon, what to buy with it, how to hook up the box), and by some estimates, a failure to reach millions of people who still watch TV over the air with old analog sets. These folks tend to have lower incomes and are older and often socially isolated—people for whom TV is arguably one of their main companions. And I agree it would be a shame to simply cut them off without any help or assistance about what to do when that occurs. But no matter what we do, there will be some people who will be caught unawares no matter how much spade work is done in preparing the public for the change. And the rest of the country should not be held hostage to a few people who will have their screens go blank when digital comes along.
So maybe one delay is understandable. But such things can get habit-forming, like resolutions to quit smoking. Mark Twain said it was easy to quit smoking; he'd done it dozens of times. Let's hope we use the next four months to help more of the people who need help with the digital transition, and then go ahead and get it over with.
Sources: A news article describing the latest news on legislation to delay the switchover can be found at the Reuters website http://www.reuters.com/article/industryNews/idUSTRE5136YP20090205.
Monday, February 02, 2009
Engineering Ethics and "Software Engineering"
Every now and then I like to write about something that is at least potentially controversial. The question of whether software engineering is really engineering ought to do it. I'd like to be more specific: should people who call themselves software engineers be bound by the same professional ethical principles that other engineers claim to follow?
As types of engineering go, software engineering is a relative newcomer. Philosopher Michael Davis, who has written extensively on engineering ethics, traces the first use of the term to a 1967 NATO meeting on software design. Since then, computers and the software they all have to run on have become a huge part of everyday life, and an even greater part of engineering. There are seventeen accredited undergraduate programs at U. S. universities and colleges in software engineering, and by that and other measures you might think software engineers have as much right to call themselves engineers as any other member of the profession. But Davis isn't so sure.
That may be one reason that Davis, along with twenty-four other experts, contributed to the creation of a distinct ethical code for software engineers. It is promulgated by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in cooperation with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The IEEE Code of Ethics, which has been around for at least thirty years, is only 256 words long. By contrast, the full version of the ACM/IEEE Software Engineering Code of Ethics is over 2400 words long (although a shorter version is also available). More important than such superficialities as the length of the codes of ethics is the question of why software engineers need a separate set of ethical principles in the first place.
One reason may be that the education and training to do software engineering is markedly different than the typical training that other kinds of engineers receive. If you look at the undergraduate curriculum of most engineering programs, you see a solid one- to two-year foundation in the sciences: physics, mathematics, and (usually) chemistry. But it is generally accepted that people who can do good programming don't need to know any physics or chemistry, and even the utility of the kind of mathematics most engineering programs emphasize (that is, calculus, differential equations, and so on) is questionable. The type of science called computer science obviously relies on mathematics, but people without any significant background in computer science do software engineering all the time.
Are the ethical issues faced by software engineers markedly different compared to those faced by other engineers? The people who came up with the ACM/IEEE software engineering code seemed to think so, or else they would have simply referred inquirers to another code of ethics such as the IEEE's. A cursory reading of the ACM/IEEE code's long form reveals only a few items that could not explicitly apply to other kinds of engineers as well. For example, item 5.03 of the ACM/IEEE code states that those managing or leading software engineers should "[e]nsure that software engineers know the employer's policies and procedures for protecting passwords, files and information that is confidential to the employer or confidential to others." This is good advice to any type of manager, not just managers of software engineers. My sense is that, rather than leave some ethical stones unturned, the writers of the ACM/IEEE software engineering code tried to think of nearly every issue that software engineers might face, whether or not it pertains peculiarly to software engineering.
As a member of an older engineering discipline (electronic engineering), I confess to a twinge of professional jealousy as software engineering gains prominence. The truth of the matter is that as time goes on, the old divisions between disciplines become harder and harder to find in a typical workplace. It has always been true that many engineers also do management at various times, and often become full-time managers later in their careers. But nowadays it is hard to find any kind of engineer who doesn't at least use software, and every engineering student takes at least a smattering of computer-code writing along the way to graduation.
Still, there is the old notion that engineering is fundamentally about physical stuff, not the ephemeral and fundamentally non-material thing called software. Be that as it may, it is a hard fact that software is (a) produced by people with special knowledge for (b) use by non-specialists who (c) can be seriously inconvenienced (or worse) by software that doesn't perform as expected. Those three items have been true of all engineered products since we began to talk about engineers in the nineteenth century, and they are also true of the non-material product called software. So from a pragmatic standpoint, those who write software for sale or use by others bear the exact same type of responsibility as engineers who design bridges or rockets. For that matter, no bridge or rocket is designed today without at least the use of software, so by implication, software engineers are involved in most other kinds of engineering too.
Software engineering is still a young field, and news items about grand software-project disasters still come up from time to time. But the same was true of the earliest iron and steel bridges: they collapsed with alarming frequency. However, their designers didn't give up on the idea. Instead, they studied what went wrong, learned from their mistakes, got more organized as a profession, and went on to improve the next generation of bridges. I hope that the ACM/IEEE code of software engineering ethics does the same for its young discipline. But all the same, I'll take 256 words over 2400 words any day.
Sources: More thoughts on whether software engineering is really engineering can be found in chapter 3, "Are 'Software Engineers' Engineers?" of Michael Davis's book Thinking Like an Engineer: Studies in the Ethics of a Profession (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998). The ACM/IEEE Software Engineering Code of Ethics is currently at http://www.acm.org/about/se-code. The IEEE Code of Ethics is at http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/iportals/aboutus/ethics/code.html.
As types of engineering go, software engineering is a relative newcomer. Philosopher Michael Davis, who has written extensively on engineering ethics, traces the first use of the term to a 1967 NATO meeting on software design. Since then, computers and the software they all have to run on have become a huge part of everyday life, and an even greater part of engineering. There are seventeen accredited undergraduate programs at U. S. universities and colleges in software engineering, and by that and other measures you might think software engineers have as much right to call themselves engineers as any other member of the profession. But Davis isn't so sure.
That may be one reason that Davis, along with twenty-four other experts, contributed to the creation of a distinct ethical code for software engineers. It is promulgated by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in cooperation with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The IEEE Code of Ethics, which has been around for at least thirty years, is only 256 words long. By contrast, the full version of the ACM/IEEE Software Engineering Code of Ethics is over 2400 words long (although a shorter version is also available). More important than such superficialities as the length of the codes of ethics is the question of why software engineers need a separate set of ethical principles in the first place.
One reason may be that the education and training to do software engineering is markedly different than the typical training that other kinds of engineers receive. If you look at the undergraduate curriculum of most engineering programs, you see a solid one- to two-year foundation in the sciences: physics, mathematics, and (usually) chemistry. But it is generally accepted that people who can do good programming don't need to know any physics or chemistry, and even the utility of the kind of mathematics most engineering programs emphasize (that is, calculus, differential equations, and so on) is questionable. The type of science called computer science obviously relies on mathematics, but people without any significant background in computer science do software engineering all the time.
Are the ethical issues faced by software engineers markedly different compared to those faced by other engineers? The people who came up with the ACM/IEEE software engineering code seemed to think so, or else they would have simply referred inquirers to another code of ethics such as the IEEE's. A cursory reading of the ACM/IEEE code's long form reveals only a few items that could not explicitly apply to other kinds of engineers as well. For example, item 5.03 of the ACM/IEEE code states that those managing or leading software engineers should "[e]nsure that software engineers know the employer's policies and procedures for protecting passwords, files and information that is confidential to the employer or confidential to others." This is good advice to any type of manager, not just managers of software engineers. My sense is that, rather than leave some ethical stones unturned, the writers of the ACM/IEEE software engineering code tried to think of nearly every issue that software engineers might face, whether or not it pertains peculiarly to software engineering.
As a member of an older engineering discipline (electronic engineering), I confess to a twinge of professional jealousy as software engineering gains prominence. The truth of the matter is that as time goes on, the old divisions between disciplines become harder and harder to find in a typical workplace. It has always been true that many engineers also do management at various times, and often become full-time managers later in their careers. But nowadays it is hard to find any kind of engineer who doesn't at least use software, and every engineering student takes at least a smattering of computer-code writing along the way to graduation.
Still, there is the old notion that engineering is fundamentally about physical stuff, not the ephemeral and fundamentally non-material thing called software. Be that as it may, it is a hard fact that software is (a) produced by people with special knowledge for (b) use by non-specialists who (c) can be seriously inconvenienced (or worse) by software that doesn't perform as expected. Those three items have been true of all engineered products since we began to talk about engineers in the nineteenth century, and they are also true of the non-material product called software. So from a pragmatic standpoint, those who write software for sale or use by others bear the exact same type of responsibility as engineers who design bridges or rockets. For that matter, no bridge or rocket is designed today without at least the use of software, so by implication, software engineers are involved in most other kinds of engineering too.
Software engineering is still a young field, and news items about grand software-project disasters still come up from time to time. But the same was true of the earliest iron and steel bridges: they collapsed with alarming frequency. However, their designers didn't give up on the idea. Instead, they studied what went wrong, learned from their mistakes, got more organized as a profession, and went on to improve the next generation of bridges. I hope that the ACM/IEEE code of software engineering ethics does the same for its young discipline. But all the same, I'll take 256 words over 2400 words any day.
Sources: More thoughts on whether software engineering is really engineering can be found in chapter 3, "Are 'Software Engineers' Engineers?" of Michael Davis's book Thinking Like an Engineer: Studies in the Ethics of a Profession (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998). The ACM/IEEE Software Engineering Code of Ethics is currently at http://www.acm.org/about/se-code. The IEEE Code of Ethics is at http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/iportals/aboutus/ethics/code.html.
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