Obama's Speech to NASA: Clouds in the Sky

Last Thursday, President Obama spoke to present and former astronauts, NASA administrators, and members of the Florida congressional delegation on the future of NASA and U. S. space exploration. Even before taking office, Obama and his staff rubbed some at NASA the wrong way. And with the release of his proposed federal budget to be enacted next fall, NASA supporters discovered to their dismay that there were no funds to continue the development of the Constellation series of manned-flight rockets, which are the only plans presently in place to keep Americans in space with American hardware. So Obama faced a tough audience primed to criticize him.

According to the official NASA transcript, the President received applause at numerous points in his talk. But I imagine it was of a straw-grasping quality that embodied both the engineer's tendency to be polite in the face of properly constituted authority whenever possible, and the deep-dyed habit of trying to make the best of a bad situation. Because, for many reasons, NASA's situation under the Obama administration is pretty bad.


Things could be worse. Obama could have proposed one more extension of the superannuated Shuttle program, simply to be able to say that America was still able to fly its own people in orbit. Thankfully, he didn't do that, even though it would have preserved jobs, which is supposedly one of his high priorities these days. Trying to keep the Shuttle going after its presently scheduled termination this year would be like trying to keep driving a jalopy after two of its four wheels have fallen off. It has been an amazing run carried on too long, and hats off to everyone who made it possible, but we've really got to retire the thing according to plan before it provides yet another tragedy for the engineering-ethics textbooks.

The trouble is, in a well-run organization the Shuttle's replacement would have been designed about eight to ten years ago, the first unit built three to five years ago, and the fully tested replacement would be ready to launch into service right after the Shuttle retired. For various reasons having to do with NASA, accidents, politics, democracy, and other factors, we are not in that happy situation at all. Instead, we have spent some ten billion on the designs for what some people say is a kind of redesign of the Saturn V-era rockets, called Constellation. I agree that Constellation may not be the most innovative design around, but it kept our engineers busy, it's based on proven technology (sometimes conservatism is good in engineering), and it probably would have worked okay. Only now, we'll never know.

What the President proposes instead sounds good at first glance: let the market innovate. Let private companies compete and come up with the most cost-effective way to get there. Instead of NASA saying to firms like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, "Hey, I want to get to the moon, sell me a rocket that will take me there," he wants NASA to say now, "Hey, I want to get to Mars, sell me a ticket to ride." There's just a few problems with this idea.

First off, for the free market to work, you need a market. One customer isn't a market, it's a thing called a "monopsony," kind of the inverse of a monopoly. Instead of one seller and many buyers, you have one buyer and many sellers (you hope). The Wikipedia article defining monopsony uses the single-payer health care system as a leading example of a monopsony. Everybody knows President Obama would have preferred a single-payer health care system to the mess he got, but he settled for the mess he could pass through Congress. This is no place to debate health care, but it is the place to point out that the President seems to think that whatever the role of private enterprise should be, the federal government must end up calling the shots.

Of course, if we waited for private enterprise to get us to the moon or Mars with no government intervention whatever, we would wait a very long time. There is at present no commercial interest in going to the moon or Mars, simply as a paying proposition independent of government intervention. At least Columbus and the great seafaring explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had some prospect of profit in the backs of their minds, although few if any realized on their bets. So government must take the lead in an economy-transcending type of activity such as space exploration, which in the past has served to unite the nation much as wars do, but with much less bloodshed.

There are both tactical and strategic flaws in Obama's plans for NASA. The tactical one of trashing Constellation has raised howls of protest from numerous astronauts all the way up to the Great Silent Engineer himself, Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon. As practical men, they see ten billion dollars' worth of creditable engineering going down the toilet at a critical time when we should be way ahead of where we are. And now Obama is saying, no, let's start from scratch and do it really well.

And that leads into the strategic aspect. It may be (though this is just a guess on my part) that Obama thinks NASA is beyond salvaging; that it is an old, worn-out, patched-over organization that needs to take a back seat to new, fresh leadership from the private sector. He may be right in at least this, that NASA needs a shock, something more than the same old same old, to get the nation's space vision back in order. But it is far from clear that private companies, working not just as contractors for hardware but as overall system planners, builders, and executors, will be willing to take on challenges that have proved daunting even to an organization as experienced and resourceful as NASA. Especially if their only customer, the government, turns around and changes its mind after the next Presidential election, which is entirely possible.

Unelected dictatorships have numerous disadvantages, but one of the few advantages is the ability to maintain long-term consistency in plans and projects. The otherwise deplorable government of the Peoples' Republic of China has the luxury of making long-term space exploration plans without having to check with its Congress or its public. The way things look now, the next words we hear from the moon will be in Chinese, if not Russian. And then see how hard it will be to catch up.

Sources: Obama's speech on April 15, 2010 is reproduced in transcript at the NASA website http://www.nasa.gov/news/media/trans/obama_ksc_trans.html. The letter to the President signed by Neil Armstrong, James Lovell, and Eugene Cernan can be read at http://theweek.com/article/index/201950/Neil_Armstrongs_letter_to_Obama. Another letter from several prominent astronauts and former NASA leaders can be found at http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1387.

Toyota Revisited: Unintended Acceleration of Judgment?

On April 5 the U. S. Secretary of Transportation announced the intention of the federal government to assess a $16 million fine against Toyota, the maximum allowable penalty in such a case. The government alleges that the car maker failed to notify the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration within five days of identifying the defect that causes unintended acceleration, as U. S. law requires. Toyota has two weeks in which to either accept or contest the fine.

About a month ago, I addressed this issue with a blog that criticized Toyota for its foot-dragging and circle-the-wagons mentality concerning the unintended acceleration incidents that have come to light in the past year or so. What I failed to do then is what many news sources are still failing to do now, which is to put this situation in a historical context, as columnist Walter Olson did in a recent issue of National Review.

Olson points out that at least part of the sudden appearance of wildly accelerating Toyotas everywhere is due to mass psychology, on the part of the public in general and the media and lawyers in particular. Once the issue hits the newsstands, drivers and their lawyers are primed to look for it, and so often what you look for you will find. Back in 1993, a similar flap blew up about suspected unintended acceleration in Audis. Despite extensive coverage, investigations, and government inquiries, no cause for the documented cases of Audi acceleration was ever found other than operator error: in other words, people were hitting the gas pedal by mistake.

This kind of thing happens all the time, often with older or less experienced drivers. Olson cites a Los Angeles Times study of twenty years' worth of Toyota unintended acceleration cases, and of those in which the driver's age could be determined, the median age was 60. Since the typical auto accident victim is in his late twenties, there is clearly an age-related factor involved.

None of this is to say that there may not be a genuine problem, or array of problems, that are causing the deaths and near-accidents that we have heard so much about recently in Toyotas. The carmaker itself has identified and gone to a lot of trouble with recalls to fix a carpet-pedal interference issue that evidently accounts for at least some of the acceleration incidents. But so far the firm has steadfastly denied that there is a problem with the electronics, in particular the software that runs the car. Two separate scientific panels have been convened by the U. S. government to look into that issue, and although they will take a while (one is set to run for over a year), we have hopes of getting to the bottom of that particular question.

The challenge of such an investigation is that software glitches, especially if there is a random hardware effect involved such as electromagnetic interference, can be extremely hard to detect or fix. In principle, computer software follows an exact mathematical deterministic path: if you set up the same initial conditions every time, you will get the same result. But when software is embedded in the roaring, buzzing, mechanically dynamic environment under the hood of a car, the goal of "same initial conditions" can be elusive. You can always do lab tests, but to the extent they are more tightly controlled, they are just as much more removed from the reality in which the accidents supposedly occurred. If such a problem is found, it will likely be the at the end of a long and intricate detective effort on the part of the investigators. And Toyota will need to cooperate fully in revealing its proprietary software and hardware, unless it wants to actively hinder the work of the safety investigators. So far, the firm's track record in this area has not been stellar, but under the present conditions of intense political and legal pressure, a vindication by an outside panel would be worth whatever bean-spilling of secrets that Toyota has been so reluctant to do up to now.

An interesting system-wide question that no one so far has brought up would be a comparison of the way automakers vet their control software with the methods used by aircraft manufacturers. Back when "fly-by-wire" software was first being adopted, there was a lot of concern on the part of pilots that when they pushed the stick, they would no longer be directly moving flaps or ailerons or whatever—instead, they would be simply sending instructions to a computer, which would interpret the pilot's action along with everything else going on and issue the orders it thought best to the control surfaces. This idea seemed to rub a lot of pilots the wrong way, and it took a while for fly-by-wire systems to be accepted. There were one or two problems with it along the way, but then as now, the bulk of airplane accidents involve at least some personal responsibility on the part of the pilot.

It's ironic, but automobile drivers as a group probably carry a lot less clout with the automakers than airline pilots do with aircraft companies. I sense that the automakers regard their customers as, if not quite sheep, then certainly uneducated in the technicalities of automotive engineering. The transition from the day when the connection between the accelerator and the carburetor (as it was way back then) was just a pull wire, to the present situation where a computer sits between your foot and the engine—this transition came silently and unheralded, possibly out of fear that people would not be comfortable with it. Such silence may have made the present situation worse as folks discover the fact for the first time, and find that they don't like it—especially those who believe their problems with unintended acceleration are the fault of the automobile, and not due to inappropriate actions of their own.

As Walter Olson pointed out, it took years for the Audi flap to die down, and we can expect the Toyota situation to linger at least that long—longer, if the investigations into software problems are as complex as I expect they will be, and if Toyota is less than fully cooperative in them. The only sure thing is that lawyers will be making money off this situation for a long time to come.

Sources: A report on the $16 million fine appeared in the Washington Post online edition at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/05/AR2010040503200.html. Walter Olson's article in the Mar. 15, 2010 issue of National Review is online at http://article.nationalreview.com/427879/exorcising-toyotas-demons/walter-olson.

Ethics According to Feynman

Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988) was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, bongo player, and all-around character. He achieved lasting public renown when he showed how the Challenger's O-ring material stiffened in a glass of ice water, accounting for the fatal explosion of that space shuttle. Possessed of a boundless curiosity and enthusiasm, he would freely expound on things both within and outside his professional field, only warning people that when he spoke on matters other than physics, his opinion was not to be taken any more seriously than that of the guy down the street. But sometimes I think he put on false modesty, such as when he gave a series of three lectures at the University of Washington in Seattle in April 1963 on science, values, and philosophy. Published later as The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist, these lectures were one of the few times when Feynman set down his considered opinions and ideas on the basis of right and wrong, and how scientists (and by implication, engineers) should take values into account. As one of the most admired and brilliant scientists of the twentieth century, Feynman's thoughts on ethics are worth our attention, however brief.

In the lecture entitled "The Uncertainty of Values," he starts from the sadness we all feel when we consider how humanity falls short of its potential. We have tremendous potential power over nature and the ability to cure, heal, feed, and educate billions, but instead we have depressions, poverty, sickness, terrorism, and wars. Why is this? In asking this question, Feynman follows in the footsteps of Pascal, who said, "The more enlightened we are, the more greatness and vileness we discover in man." According to Feynman, it's because our potentials and capabilities don't come with instructions. As he puts it, "The sciences do not directly teach good and bad." So how can we figure out what is good and what is bad, and even if we do that, how can we manage to do the good and avoid the bad?

Whatever the answer is, Feynman thinks we must always allow for the possibility that we're wrong. Because only in that way can we try different things and learn from our mistakes.

Despite the fact that he was not a believer in any religion, he has some nice things to say about religion, which he divides into three aspects: the metaphysical, the ethical, and the inspirational. As far as he can tell, the metaphysical aspects of religion—what it says about God, about why there is anything at all, and so on—are independent of the ethical aspects. But in practice, you have to have all three, because most people need emotional inspiration to obey the ethics, and the metaphysics gives you logical reasons to obey.

Then he runs into a paradox. It seems to Feynman that the people for whom religion "works" the best manage to have an absolute faith in the metaphysical aspect: they really believe in the God of the Bible, for instance. And while Feynman allows that science can't disprove the existence of God, it can't prove it either, and sometimes science comes up with results that seem to contradict one or another of the metaphysical aspects of religion, or sometimes even the ethical ones. So can you be both a good scientist and a good believer? Feynman thinks it's possible, but it takes a lot of work.

He says Western civilization "stands by two great heritages. One is the scientific spirit of adventure—. . . humility of the intellect. The other great heritage is Christian ethics—the basis of action on love, the brotherhood of all men, the value of the individual, the humility of the spirit. These two heritages are logically, thoroughly consistent." But the problem comes when one heritage attacks the values of the other. (The recent fuss over evolution and intelligent design is an example of this kind of battle.)

In the midst of the Cold War, Feynman saw the USSR as an example of how government control of both science and religion led to problems. He said that government should not "limit the forms of literary or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines." The place of government was to maintain freedom for its citizens to contribute to the adventure of intellectual development.

For one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century to say publicly "I don't know," as Feynman did several times in these lectures, shows a humility of spirit that is exceptional. Feynman was well aware of how famous people could make fools of themselves with careless pronouncements outside their fields of expertise. So he felt free to admit that he saw no farther than the ancients when he faced the problem of why there is evil in a world full of good, capable people, or how you could logically justify doing good while not believing in God. As one of the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb during World War II, Feyman could have wrapped himself in doubts and agonized over the past. Instead, he freely admitted war was terrible, but sometimes necessary in order to defend things we know are right, though we don't know moral principles in the same way we know the theory of relativity.

What I find impressive is his endorsement of Christian ethics as one of the twin pillars of Western civilization, the other being freedom of intellectual and scientific inquiry. In this he agrees with Alfred North Whitehead, a philosopher who saw the roots of the Scientific Revolution in the Christian faith of the Middle Ages that maintained the universe was ordered by a Mind Who followed logical laws that our minds could eventually figure out.

Those who would combat religion as a bane of civilization that should be allowed to wither and die would do well to contemplate the words of Richard Feynman, great scientist and non-believer, who nevertheless acknowledged Christianity as the giver of the best guide to conduct, for scientists and everyone else.

Sources: My thanks to Bill Birnie for bringing my attention to this work of Feynman's, The Meaning of It All (Reading, Mass: Perseus Books, 1998). The quotation from the Pensées of Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is from no. 613 in P. Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993).

Jamming, Blockers, and the Google-China Conflict

The ongoing struggle between Google, which wants its customers and readers in mainland China to have full access to all its services, and the government of the People's Republic of China, which legally requires Google to impose censorship on some aspects of what it provides, is unprecedented in scale and number of people involved, perhaps, but not in its essentials. Something very similar went on for decades on a smaller scale in a different medium: shortwave radio. But important technological differences in the two media make it harder for Google to do what shortwave broadcasters often succeeded in doing: namely, evading the efforts of hostile governments to "protect" their citizens from harmful foreign influences.

Around 1965, I somehow came into the possession of an old tabletop tube radio with a shortwave band. Back then, shortwave broadcasting was one of the few electronic media which naturally and inexpensively (at least for the user) gave one instant access to information from around the globe. Most nations of any size maintained some sort of shortwave broadcasting presence, and in particular the Communist-bloc countries kept up a barrage of English-language propaganda broadcasts aimed at Europe and the U. S. Radio Moscow came in regularly, and once or twice I even heard Radio Peking, as it called itself then. But even more prominent and easy to find at any time of the day or night were some strange buzz-saw noises. No, it wasn't interference from a neighbor's buzz saw. It was jammers: high-power shortwave stations designed explicitly to block reception of "undesirable" broadcasts, usually Voice of America programs. I don't have statistics to back this up, but it's likely that the Soviet Union and China spent more money on jammers than they ever did on propaganda broadcasts directed at foreign countries. It was more important to them to keep their own citizens from hearing unapproved information from the free world than it was to tell the free world about life behind the Iron Curtain.

By the nature of the medium, jamming was a dodgy and unreliable method. Broadcasters could and did change frequencies unexpectedly, forcing the jammer to take expensive steps to follow suit, and the vagaries of shortwave propagation meant that depending on where you were listening from—especially if you were not near a large city—you might hear Voice of America loud and clear and the jamming signal might not even be audible. But it must have been effective enough for jammers to clutter up the airwaves with dozens of buzz-saw sounds at all hours of the day and night, for years. Then the Internet came along.

The Web is both much better and much worse than shortwave broadcasting with regard to allowing free exchange of information across the boundaries of a nation which wants to control its media. It's better, in that more information can be posted on a single Web page than you could read over the air in half an hour or more. And since pictures are worth some large number of words, the Internet is much richer than any shortwave broadcast could ever be in that regard. But unfortunately for free interchange, the Web works through fiber-optic cables and equipment which must physically reside inside the receiving country. And the government which controls access and operation of that equipment has ultimately an absolute say over what the equipment transmits.

So if the government of China got up some fine day (to personalize an impersonal organization) and decided that it could do without all Internet connections to the outside world altogether, it could pull the plug and everything on the Web outside China would promptly disappear, without recourse. Something like that was never possible in the days of jamming, since one-hundred-percent leakproof jamming was economically and technically impossible. So Google, in its frustrated attempts to keep delivering its search engine and email services in China, has not been able to make that much progress within the mainland itself.

This is one reason why on March 23 Google announced a new approach: they were going to quit self-censoring their services and still stay within the letter of the Chinese law by moving their search services provided in the mainland to Google.com.hk in Hong Kong, where different and more liberal laws evidently still prevail. It is too soon to tell how this move will work out, although a website maintained by Google to show the status of various services within mainland China indicates that the government is blocking access to YouTube, many websites, Google's blogger function (on which this blog appears, unfortunately), and began interfering on Mar. 28 (yesterday) with certain mobile services.

Although I haven't listened to shortwave broadcasting much lately, it's unusual to hear any jamming anymore, partly because shortwave radio has been overtaken by the Internet and partly because the world's biggest jammer, the USSR, no longer exists. Jamming was always a shady business anyway. To my knowledge, the U. S. never engaged in jamming of broadcasts intended for the general U. S. public (although jamming is a time-honored practice in wartime electronic countermeasures to disable enemy radars and communications). Any government which insists on blocking the free flow of information to its citizens thereby pronounces a kind of self-delivered judgment on itself and betrays a kind of fundamental insecurity—a fear that the light of day will show its citizens their true situation and make them want to change it. Google's shift to Hong Kong may make things better for a while, but the only permanent solution is for the government of 1.3 billion Chinese citizens to change its ways.

Sources: Google's March 23 announcement of its changes in service is posted at http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-approach-to-china-update.html, and the website for monitoring services available in China is at http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en.

U. S. Health Care Bill: Killing the Messenger

Last night I watched a tiny video image on my laptop that showed the floor of the U. S. House of Representatives. Superimposed on the image was a set of numbers tallying the votes for and against the famous (or infamous) health-care bill that has obsessed Washington for the last year or so. When the "yea" vote got to 216, I turned it off, knowing that the die had been cast. Whatever happens after this, the federal government has now taken to itself massive new powers over the one-sixth of the U. S. economy that is health care.

Part of the reason that health care costs so much more than it did decades ago, both proportionally and absolutely, is that owing largely to engineered products and services, doctors can do a lot more about disease more effectively than they used to. And medical technology is one of the shrinking number of areas in which U. S. manufacturing still leads the world. Our peculiar cobbled-together third-party way of paying for health care, which largely insulates the consumer against the real cost of medical technology, may be one reason that the U. S. is a favorable environment for developing such technology. Another may be the fruitful interaction between our research universities and medical companies, both of which benefit from federal and state research support as well as private research funding. Whatever the reasons, the healthy and innovative state of the medical technology industry is a bright spot in the otherwise murky health-care scene.

But that is not the way it is viewed in the philosophy embodied in the new health-care bill that just passed Congress. In this view, medical technology companies are unfairly profiting from the misery of the patients they serve, and should be penalized with a 2.3-percent excise tax on their products. Although the final form of this tax is not clear as of this writing, an earlier press account of it in December estimated it would cost the medical-device industry some $2 billion annually, rising to $3 billion in 2018.

It is not clear whether it was ever an ancient practice to kill the runner who brought bad news to the king. Even old-time despots probably understood the sheer wastefulness of such a move, let alone the difficulties it would cause in recruiting new messengers. But the vengeful, short-sighted, political-grandstanding attitude that leads to taxes such as the one on medical device companies is about as counterproductive as you can get, and shows a basic misunderstanding of the nature of business and private enterprise.

I am personally tone-deaf when it comes to entrepreneurship, but even I understand enough about it to see that medical-device companies, and health-insurance companies too for that matter, typically do the best they can within the regulatory and economic environment they work in. If MRI machines cost X hundred thousand dollars, and the MRI-machine market is doing well with several companies competing for good business, as I understand to be the case, then those who have the money to buy them (namely hospitals and clinics) must think the price is about right compared to the money they can make by using them. The rules and restrictions that people chafe about concerning health insurance arise largely from the way we have historically tied such insurance to employers, who "own" the policies rather than the individuals insured. Such third-party situations always lead to higher prices, and in my view this is the single most significant reason why health-care costs have risen faster than otherwise. If individuals owned their own health-care plans and decided in advance how much they wanted to spend, maybe there wouldn't be so many "Cadillac" plans out there and medical technology might be cheaper. But it would still be innovative, because the market would be free enough to reward innovation and competition.

The health-care bill that the president is so eager to sign moves things in the exact wrong direction: toward more bureucratic control, less freedom to do business in a way that makes economic sense, and more third-party interference between the consumer of health care and the provider. Yes, some more people will have insurance than before, and that is a worthwhile goal and almost the only good thing about the legislation. But there were far less intrusive, and probably more effective, ways of increasing the number of people who could afford health insurance. Only now, we may never know whether they might have worked. Instead, we have embarked on a huge, complex social experiment that will probably take decades to implement, and whose consequences we will all have to live with regardless of the outcome.

Besides the specific policy problems, the year-long debate over health care has further frayed the already worn fabric of our democracy. Congress has passed legislation that was clearly unpopular, and led to party-line divisions that may be very difficult to heal. Plus which, it may have contributed to an unhealthy cynicism about government in general. Last Friday I took the trouble to visit my congressman's office in downtown Austin to hand-deliver a note about the health-care vote. I had never done this before. It was rather depressing to see how the federal building is surrounded by a high black steel fence and guarded by cops who make you pass through a metal detector and run your personal items through an X-ray machine, just like at the airport. I understand the reasons for these precautions, but all the same, it seems like if the government had not expanded to be such a big target, we wouldn't have to go to so much trouble to protect it.

I will try to leave this topic alone in the future, since it is largely a done deal now and following it has not done my personal state of mind any good. But if anything comes up about it in the future that credibly concerns engineering ethics, I reserve the privilege to say something about it.

Sources: A description of last-minute changes to the medical-device tax was carried by the Huffington Post on Mar. 21 at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/21/health-care-bill-insuranc_n_507506.html. The figures on total cost to the industry were from a Wall Street Journal article on Dec. 21, 2009 at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704398304574598130440164954.html.

Epistemology for Dummies, or, Where Do Engineers Come From?

My wife edits the About.com breast cancer website, and every so often she feels obliged to take down scurrilous rumors by running them to their source and shining the light of day on them. The one she's working on right now says that bras cause breast cancer. Turns out that an anthropologist and his wife published a book in 1995 saying just that, but apparently basing it on nothing more than some hazy suspicions about restraining lymph and breast cancer rates in industrial societies (in which women tend to wear bras more). Judging by the fact that this couple now lives on sixty-some acres in Hawaii, a lot of people must have bought the book.

This is an example of the type of thinking that cannot help you build a bridge, or design a computer, or develop a cure for cancer that will work. It begins from a feeling or a desire, even, rather than from scientifically gleaned data. If bras cause breast cancer, then there's something you can do to avoid it: don't wear a bra! Wouldn't it be nice if it were that simple? And evidently, at least some readers of the book seem to think it is.

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy dealing with how we know things. There are many ways of knowing, and I am not here to tell you that the scientific way—which means gathering carefully marshalled data, doing highly controlled experiments, and constructing theories based on reliable premises, all of this being a lot of tedious, difficult work—is the only way we can know things. But for certain questions, such as "do bras cause breast cancer?" the scientific way has proved itself to be better than the path taken by the aforementioned authors. I'm not sure what they did has a name, but let's call it the wish-fulfillment way. I'm also not sure that what they get out of it is knowledge—I'd prefer to call it a story. But it's a story that a lot of people want to hear.

If I were the kind of person who indulged myself in telling similar stories, there's a story I'd like to tell, and one that feels right to me. After doing or teaching engineering for some thirty-odd years, it seems to me that the kind of person who is good at engineering comes from a certain kind of background. This background includes, typically, a solid family structure (if possible, being raised by the person's biological father and mother), a culture in which few material things are taken for granted and actions are valued above words, and an atmosphere in which complex mental achievements are honored and praised. Up to the 1960s, these descriptions applied to most of the U. S., especially outside large coastal cities. But as average incomes rose and the culture changed significantly, this type of background became relatively rare.

Outside the States, however, especially in places where opportunities for higher education were strictly limited and highly competitive, these conditions still prevailed, or at least they did until recently. We are currently interviewing candidates for faculty openings in my engineering school. I haven't done a scientific study of the question, but I estimate that no more than 10% of the applicants were born in the U. S. A. All the rest are immigrants. I have no problem with this, because it's great for the immigrants and shows once again that America is the land of opportunity. But all the same, it's a curious phenomenon, and in my more pessimistic moments I want to explain it with the conclusion of this little story.

What if the blessings of modern technology and engineering lead inevitably after a generation or so to a population of individuals who are incapable of doing engineering? Instead, you get the kind of folks who will buy and believe a fuzzy-headed book about bras causing breast cancer. These kinds of people can still sell things. They can get retail jobs, or factory jobs (if there are any factories left), or they can even become good artists or politicians (especially politicians). But if on some fundamental level, they don't believe in the external, objective, stubborn, don't-care-what-you-think-but-that's-the-way-it-is-anyway reality that engineers have to deal with, they will not even consider engineering as a career, no matter how much money the National Science Foundation or anybody else spends on science, technology, engineering, and math education enhancement. And anyway, they wouldn't be any good at it if they tried.

In this dismal fantasy, the only reason we haven't run out of engineers yet is that we can still find people who are the products of cultures which haven't yet enjoyed the fruits of technology long enough to quit producing young men and women who can be engineers. But given enough time, and the spread of high-tech prosperity into enough places, we may run out.

There, that's my story that I don't exactly wish were true, but have often suspected of being true. Is it true? If I weren't an engineer, I might go out and write a fuzzy-headed wish-fulfillment-type book claiming that it is, and aimed at getting people all worked up about how bad it is and what we should do about it. But being an engineer, I know that it would take probably millions of dollars' worth of statistical, sociological, and longitudinal-study research even to come close to guessing about the truth of this idea. I have neither the support nor the skills to contemplate such research, so my story will have to just remain what it is—a story. The only way I can imagine finding out it's true without doing a lot of research is to let time pass and see what happens. By that time I will probably not be around to find out. But if it does happen, remember—you read it here first.

Sources: Pretty soon you should be able to read about bras and breast cancer at http://breastcancer.about.com./

Toyota: Not So Fast, Guys

The automotive industry has furnished the field of engineering ethics with more than one "paradigm" case that generations of budding engineers have studied. In the way Toyota tried to deal with the now-infamous problem of unintended acceleration in many of its models, they have given us an example of how not to deal with a safety problem. Technical issues are only one aspect of the way an initially small-scale issue snowballed into a major financial disaster that shut down sales and may have permanently blotted Toyota's reputation. While the whole story has yet to emerge, it looks now as though a circle-the-wagons mentality was at least as much to blame as poor engineering.

We have the Los Angeles Times to thank for most of the initial journalistic spadework that pressured Toyota into reluctant action. Back in August of last year, an off-duty policeman and three of his family suddenly felt their new Lexus jet out of control at speeds of up to 100 mph before it hit another car, flew down an embankment, and caught fire, killing all four occupants. Investigation revealed that if a certain rubber floor mat is installed, a projection in the molding can catch the bottom tip of the rigid accelerator pedal so that the throttle is stuck wide-open. In late September, Toyota issued a floor-mat recall on over four million vehicles.

The August incident turned out to be the tip of an unintended-acceleration iceberg that Toyota has been struggling to minimize for over a decade, as further investigations published by the L. A. Times in October revealed. In October, Toyota sent out a letter to many of its car owners that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration criticized four days later as "inaccurate" and "misleading." Toyota was clearly trying to minimize a problem that now appears to be more serious than simply a floor mat that interferes with accelerator-pedal motion. Some of the incidents dug up by the Times appear to involve the "drive-by-wire" electronic accelerator system which is, of course, operated by computer programs. Toyota admits that there is no software feature that disables the accelerator pedal when the brake pedal is pressed.

In all of the United States, Toyota has exactly one machine that can read a car's onboard data recorder to assist in diagnosing accidents and problems after the fact. This appears to be an attempt on the part of the automaker to control the production of potentially damaging information, since dealers and other interested parties cannot access the data. After a crash the day after Christmas in Texas that killed four people appeared to be due to unintended acceleration, things spun out of even Toyota's control. On January 26, they took the extraordinary step of halting sales of about half their models until the mechanical accelerator fix can be applied. It turns out this is at the request of the federal government, in a move that was probably motivated by words to the effect of, "if you don't do it by yourselves, we'll make you do it." As of this writing, the question of whether Toyota's electronic throttle system is to blame as well as the mechanical pedal problems is still under investigation. But there is plenty of smoke around to justify the conclusion that there's a fire in that department as well.

The phrase "damage control" can mean several things. If you're talking about something as straightforward as fighting a fire, it means putting the fire out as fast as you can to minimize physical damage. But the phrase has taken on a darker meaning in recent years. It has come to mean a strategy that an organization deploys in its public (and government) relations in order to convince outsiders that whatever really happened, things are not that bad after all. Although the story is still unfolding, there is enough evidence already to conclude that Toyota had taken the second meaning all too much to heart. In its misleading minimizing of the seriousness of recalls, in its failure to provide more than one data-reading device for the entire U. S., and in its Johnny-come-lately reactions to serious, long-term problems, it showed a signal lack of judgment and concern for the safety of the driving public. We do not know yet what Toyota knew about the problem, or problems, and when they knew it. But it is already clear that whatever they knew, they didn't want anyone else to know. It took a courageous news outlet (a print one, at that) to keep hammering on the issues and asking embarrassing questions, as well as a government agency that is arguably understaffed and underequipped to deal with the technical complexity of today's automotive industry. I wonder how long it would take a gang of clever Caltech undergrads to crack Toyota's automotive data-recorder code. If somebody hasn't done it already, they ought to as a public service.

The worst thing that can happen to a corporation (short of going out of business altogether) is to lose money, and Toyota has already been taken to the woodshed in that regard. But losing money is one thing, and losing one's life to a preventable technical defect is another order of thing altogether. Some estimates say that perhaps fifty or so people have died as a result of unintended acceleration in Toyota cars. That is a small fraction of the total of annual auto-related deaths in this country. But the engineers who could have prevented these deaths failed to do so. And that's what engineering ethics is about.

Sources: Motortrend Magazine online has a good chronology of the Toyota recall and related issues up to late January at http://www.motortrend.com/features/auto_news/2010/112_1001_toyota_recall_crisis/index.html. I also referred to a recent Los Angeles Times article on Congressional hearings about the matter at http://www.latimes.com/sns-ap-toyota-recall,0,7766384.story. For the record, I drive a Honda.

Wizardry and Word

Here's a little quiz. I'm going to give you a passage from the 1939 novel The Sword In the Stone, about King Arthur's tutelage under the magician Merlyn back before anyone (except maybe Merlyn, who lived backwards in time) knew that the changeling boy Wart was really King Arthur. After you read it, try and think of a situation similar to Merlyn's that you probably find yourself in several times a week.

As the scene opens, Merlyn has just brought Wart back from a magical trip somewhere, and on their return, Merlyn discovers that he lost his hat. Here’s what happens next:

[quote—Google doesn't accept tabs!]

The Wart sat quiet while Merlyn closed his eyes and began to mutter to himself. Presently a curious black cylindrical hat appeared on his head.

Merlyn examined it with a look of disgust, said bitterly, “And they call this service!” and handed it back to the air. He closed his eyes and produced with growing indignation, in rapid succession, this . . . and this . . . and this. [In the original each “this” is followed by sketches of a top hat, a conductor’s cap, a Sherlock-Holmes style deerstalker, and a sailor’s cap.] . . .

“Now,” said Merlyn furiously, apparently to nobody, “do you think you are being funny?”

“Very well then, why do you do it?”

“That’s no excuse. Naturally I meant the one I was wearing.”

“But wearing now, of course, you fool. I don’t want a hat I was wearing in 1890. Have you no sense of time at all?"

Merlyn took off his sailor hat and held it out to the air for inspection.

“This is an anachronism,” he said severely. “That’s what it is, a beastly anachronism.”

Archimedes [Merlyn’s pet owl] seemed to be accustomed to these scenes, for he now said in a reasonable voice, “Why don’t you ask for the hat by name, master? Say, ‘I want my magician’s hat,’ not ‘I want the hat I was wearing.’ Perhaps the poor chap finds it as difficult to live backwards in time as you do.”

“I want my magician’s hat,” Merlyn said sulkily.

Instantly the long pointed cap was standing on his head.

[end quote]

If you are like me, as you read this passage it seemed strangely familiar. Where do you find yourself trying to do some simple, trivial thing, only to have your desires frustrated by an entity that gets it almost right, but not quite, and you have to keep trying again and again until someone wiser than you gives you the right advice? Then it works like a charm (so to speak).

If you say, "Operating any Microsoft product," you are right. Now, don't get me wrong. Microsoft comes in for a lot of criticism simply because its products are so ubiquitous, not because they are necessarily inferior or hard to use. But it is inevitable that in the case of something as complex and feature-filled as Word or Excel, that the average user who wants to do only a few things will sooner or later come up against a problem that is best described as a failure to communicate.

Whoever Merlyn was talking with (and we never find out), they seem to be peculiarly literal-minded—like computers. They're very fast—like computers—at doing something completely wrong, such as handing you a top hat when you want a magician's cap.

The other day, I was writing a list of things and wanted to head each item (a), (b), and open-parenthesis-c-close parenthesis. I spelled it out that way because if I tried just typing it literally the way I did the first two, I didn't get (c), I got the little "c" in a circle that means "copyright." Evidently there's a frustration meter built into the software, though, because the third or fourth time I erased the copyright symbol and typed (c), the machine finally understood what I meant and let me continue.

When things like this happen, I'm glad that I'm alone in the room and there's no one around to wonder who I am about to kill. I have conversations with Word and Excel, most of them printable, but I will not reproduce them here except to say that they have the same general tone as Merlyn's talk with his invisible servant.

How T. H. White got the idea for that scene is beyond me, writing well before computers were more than a gleam in a few inventors' eyes. The real joke is not so much that the invisible magic servant is incompetent, but that Merlyn can't be precise enough in his magical commands. Which is true for us too, by and large. I suppose somewhere in the universe, people teach entire courses on how to use Word and Excel, and there's all those online tutorials I never have time to go through—though I spend as much or more time trying to fix some annoying little problem that I might sail through easily if I'd had a formal course on the subject.

Part of the problem is the deep shadow of anonymity in which Microsoft cloaks its engineers. In this it's like the old Disney studios. No matter what talented people contributed to a Disney film before about 1970, all the credits said was "A Walt Disney Production." This is good for the head man if there is more praise than blame to go around, but I venture to say that Bill Gates is the most roundly cursed name in the phone book, especially around times when new Microsoft products are released. If Microsoft would allow a little public recognition of the people who are responsible for certain products, maybe the anger would be diffused some and we might even come to look up to these people as the sages they ought to be.

But knowing the typical software engineer, meeting the public who uses one's program is not ranked high on one's bucket list. So perhaps it is just as well that Mr. Gates is the public lightning rod for all manner of curses and denunciations whenever a Microsoft product fails to read our minds correctly. But if we knew who was behind the "wizards" of the software, we might act with less anger and more restraint against a fallible piece of software written by fallible human beings.

Sources: T. H. White's The Sword In the Stone is the first of a four-part series of Arthurian novels called The Once and Future King, and by most estimates, is by far the best one.

Dead Wrong?

Since death is one of the things we try to avoid in doing engineering ethics, it only stands to reason that we need to have a good, widely accepted definition of death. This might not be as easy to agree on as you might think.

Michael Shermer is one of the nicest atheists you'll ever meet. He is a cheery, humorous person by nature, endowed with a strong sense of fairness and even generosity in debate, which is more than you can say about some skeptics. I once heard him speak at a conference that included many religious believers, and his attitude toward them was always courteous, but he never allowed them to get away with logical lapses. In his monthly column for Scientific American, Shermer shows the same combination of humor and rigor, so I was interested to read what he had to say about death in the March issue.

He starts off by saying, "Have you ever died and come back to life? Me neither. No one has." He goes on to describe a panel he participated in on Larry King Live in which several folks who claimed that they had died and come back to life told about their experiences. Shermer was more than willing to admit they had experienced a "near-death" state, but he says that death is a process, not an instantaneous event. And although he doesn't say in so many words, he clearly excludes anyone (or any living entity, presumably) from the category of ever having been "dead" if they are now living, no matter what state they were in at an earlier time.

That makes sense in a way, but consider the following situation. There are certain small bacteria whose internal workings are so simple that they can be frozen at liquid nitrogen temperatures or below without suffering permanent harm. A biologist told me once of an experiment he performed. He took one of these bacteria and chilled it so cold that you could show that all chemical and metabolic activity in the bacterium was frozen out—at that point, it was just an inert inanimate object and harbored no more lifelike activity than a salt crystal. Then he gradually warmed it up again to the point that its inner machinery thawed out and it began processing food and excreting waste and so on—in other words, it came back to life.

Now here is the critical question: when the bacterium was in its suspended-animation state, was it alive or dead? The answer depends on your definition of death.

If we use Shermer's definition, strictly speaking, we can't say until we know the subsequent history of the thing. Suppose that the biologist then lifted the frozen bacteria out of the cryostat, still frozen, and ran it through an acid bath or something that disintegrated the critter into its constituent atoms before it thawed out. Even Shermer would have to admit it was dead at that point. But he wouldn't have been able to say earlier, because if the biologist had instead thawed the thing out and got it going again, by Shermer's own definition, it would never have died. Like the guests on Larry King Live, it would have simply had a near-death experience.

This is not just a trivial thought problem. Out in California, there is a company that for a hefty fee will take your body (once you have ceased to function), freeze it in liquid nitrogen, and preserve it until such time as science has advanced enough to get you going again. If Shermer wants to be consistent, he can't say that those people are dead either, since neither he nor anyone else knows for absolutely sure that some day, scientific progress may enable the revival of people on ice like that. It's a good thing Shermer doesn't run a life-insurance company, because if he did there would be a lot of survivors of those frozen entities in California who wouldn't get their death benefits, because the alleged deceased doesn't meet Shermer's definition of death.

To turn theological for a moment, the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of Jesus is a central, if not the central, tenet of the faith. If Jesus really did rise from the dead, then by Shermer's definition, he never died, and if his followers rise some day too, they never died, either. Oddly (or maybe not so oddly), Jesus himself talks this way. In the Gospel of John, just before Jesus tells the dead and smelly Lazarus to come out of his tomb, he tells Lazarus's sister Martha that "He who believes in me shall never die." The Gospel doesn't say what Lazarus claims to have experienced during his four days in the tomb, but he later makes an appearance at the first-century equivalent of Larry King Live—a large banquet—and becomes sufficiently famous that the authorities plot to kill him as well as Jesus. If Shermer had been around then, I'm sure he would have said that Lazarus merely had a near-death experience as well.

Perhaps engineers can be satisfied with a pragmatic definition of death. If someone comes to be in a condition that makes it very unlikely they will be up and around and paying taxes any time soon, then we can consider them to be dead, no matter what philosophers or skeptics like Shermer or Christians say. I'm a Christian myself, and maybe the ancient custom of referring to believers who died in the faith as asleep rather than dead would be worth reviving. But if we revived it, it never really would have died, now, would it?

Sources: Michael Shermer's column "Surviving Death on Larry King Live" appears on p. 32 of the March 2010 issue of Scientific American. For those interested in the cryonics movement, Jill Lepore's report on the Cryonics Institute, one of the leading people-freezing outfits, appears in the Jan. 25, 2010 issue of The New Yorker.

The End of the Space Shuttle-And What Next?

America's space program has always been interesting from an engineering ethics perspective. During the race to the moon in the 1960s, we witnessed the unique spectacle of billions of dollars of technological effort focused on a goal that was, in retrospect, primarily political and cultural, not technical or scientific. The Space Shuttle's two major disasters—Challenger's explosion after launch in 1986 and Columbia's disintegration on reentry in 2003—have provided extensively documented object lessons in how not to manage hazardous technical operations. And now as America faces a new decade and the Space Shuttle's scheduled retirement by the end of this year, the question arises: what next?

The Obama administration has weighed in with its opinion: no trip to the moon, on the government's dime, anyway. According to news reports, the President's proposed budget eliminates funding for the moon-bound Constellation program, on which $9 billion has already been spent. A while back, $9 billion sounded like a lot of money, but as conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer pointed out, that is only a few percent of the 2009 stimulus package that has seemed to do little more than delay some inevitable cutbacks. Constellation could be finished for less than $9 billion more, but instead, the budget calls for a change in course toward commercial space flights.

As longtime readers of this blog may recall, I am no supporter of the Space Shuttle. The only justification for keeping this antiquated technology running is that we had no alternative if America was to keep any presence in manned space flight. So I welcome the wind-down of the program after its remaining four flights this year, and look forward to seeing one of the Shuttles take a well-deserved rest in the halls of the Smithsonian Museum, where it belongs.

At the same time, my underlying assumption was that wiser heads than mine would initiate and complete an alternative to the Shuttle in a timely fashion, "timely" meaning not too long after the Shuttle was retired. Well, it retires in less than a year, and not only do we not have a replacement, now we do not even have plans for a replacement. True, various private firms are competing for both manned and unmanned space operations, but let's think about that for a moment. The restrictions and precautions needed to make manned space flight safe enough to undertake even by a government employee who has trained for ten or fifteen years for a mission one knows to be dangerous, are so expensive that only the government has heretofore been able to afford it. In today's litigious environment, I am trying to imagine how a private company is going to succeed (which means, make a profit at) in a field where entire governments have spent billions and failed to develop manned flight systems that are safe and reliable, let alone economical.

Just to be technical a moment: With unmanned space flights such as satellite launches, once the hardware is in orbit your job is mostly done. If the launch fails, your expenses are no greater than if it succeeds—you just don't have an orbiting satellite to show for it. All the hardware is disposable and it's just a cost of doing business to throw most of it into the ocean.

By contrast, in manned space flight, at least some of the hardware has to come back, with a live person or persons inside. Life-support systems are extraordinarily complex, the G-forces the human body can stand are limited, and a number of other complications mean that manned space flight is orders of magnitude more challenging than unmanned flight. The small number of privately funded flights by wealthy individuals have resulted, not from companies founded for the explicit purpose of taking rich guys into space, but as a byproduct of Russian space expenditures and a desire on the part of Russia to pay for their existing program any way they can.

I will be very surprised if anything significant comes from Obama's call for private enterprise to take up the slack in our manned space program. If private firms don't suddenly develop a reliable, safe, and economical way to get people into space, then as Krauthammer points out, for the first time since 1962, the United States will have no means of putting humans into space.

The space program began largely as a manifestation of national pride, which is not an emotion that our current President seems inclined to indulge. As glad as I am that the Shuttle is finally going the way of the Wright Brothers' planes, I confess to some unease that for the foreseeable future, we will have to rely on Russia and perhaps other nations for taking our astronauts to the International Space Station and anywhere else up there they'd like to go. This is at a time when China is continuing to boast about its new space program, which registered its latest success in 2008 with a spacewalk in orbit. In historical terms, the Chinese appear to be where the U. S. was in space in about 1965. But despite the Chinese government's other disadvantages such as its repressive nature and despotic tendencies, it does have the advantage of continuity. So when Chinese officials talk about planning lunar missions by around 2017, we should at least take them seriously.

It would be a shame if the U. S. abandons manned spaceflight altogether, although a hiatus for the purpose of planning a safer and more economical means than the Space Shuttle would be justified if we eventually got back on the horse and continued to ride. But right now, that doesn't look like it's going to happen.

Sources: A Reuters dispatch on the Obama budget for space can be found at http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6101XF20100201. Charles Krauthammer's column on this decision is at the National Review Online website http://article.nationalreview.com/424809/closing-the-new-frontier/charles-krauthammer.

Lessons from Flight 3407: Pay Attention

Last Tuesday, Feb. 2, the U. S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released a synopsis of its final report on the crash of Flight 3407 outside Buffalo, New York a year ago (Feb. 12, 2009, to be exact). All aboard the Colgan Air commuter flight from Newark to Buffalo were killed, as well as one person on the ground, raising the total number of fatalities to fifty. In my initial blog on this crash, I reported that there might have been a problem with the deicing machinery on the plane. But an NTSB hearing last May revealed that evidence had emerged of significant pilot error. At the time, there was much consternation in the press about the fact that the co-pilot, 24-year-old Rebecca Shaw, was earning only about $17,000 annually and was living with her parents to save expenses. The NTSB found that both Shaw and pilot Marvin Renslow acted unprofessionally during the flight, tolerating distractions from "personal portable electronic devices," chatting about irrelevant matters during the final approach, and reacting incorrectly to emergency warnings. There were three separate occasions at which Renslow could have corrected the deteriorating situation above Buffalo that night, but the NTSB found that his reactions were characterized by "startle and confusion," to quote from the official synopsis. He had a spotty training record, and this probably contributed to the fact that when the "stick shaker" (a device designed to warn pilots of an impending stall) was activated, he did not automatically push the stick forward as his training should have prompted him to, but instead pulled back, compounding the situation and ultimately causing him to lose control of the aircraft.

Anyone who has studied safety and engineering-related accidents knows that beneath every headline-grabbing tragedy, there are usually a lot more minor incidents, near misses, and recoverable errors that for one reason or another did not go all the way to sudden death for lots of people. The airline industry as a whole has been under financial pressure for many years, and so you have the situation where young, inexperienced, poorly paid pilots are making up an increasing fraction of the airline-pilot staff. For every Flight 3407, there are probably a dozen or more similar incidents that were caught at the last minute.

In its collective wisdom, the NTSB implicitly recognized this more systemic problem in its list of twenty-five recommendations to the Federal Aviation Administration. (One can question the bureaucratic wisdom of having one agency investigate accidents and recommending corrective action to another, but that is a discussion for another time.) The NTSB calls for better training, more careful scrutiny of pilots whose test scores show problems (or who flunk tests altogether), and more of what they call "sterile cockpit discipline."

The ability to direct one's attention is one of the supreme gifts of humanity, but if a person lacks the training or inclination to do so, all the skills in the world are useless. Both Renslow and Shaw were fatigued before they embarked on Flight 3407 (Renslow had slept in the airline's pilot lounge in violation of regulations), but fatigue was no excuse for inattention. Everyone who drives a car knows how important it is to avoid being distracted by cell-phone conversations, GPS readouts, or any of the other amusements and information sources we tend to surround ourselves with. This goes double with the much more complex task of flying a plane, for which sterile cockpit discipline, meaning doing your job and nothing else that will distract you, is a necessary prerequisite. Unfortunately, Shaw and Renslow did not learn that lesson well enough and paid for it with their lives.

The British comic John Cleese, one of the original Monty Pythons, once satirized overly chatty airline pilots in a hilarious sketch. Clearly bored out of his mind by the monotony of his flying job, he amused himself by getting on the intercom and making announcements such as, "Hello, this is the Captain speaking. There is absolutely no cause for concern," then remarking to his copilot, "There, that'll get them thinking." The sketch degenerates to the point where the passengers all jump out of the plane, at which point Cleese looks out the window and comments reflectively, "You know, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some trouble about this."

Analyzing humor is not a funny business, but neither is investigating air crashes. The sketch gained much of its energy from the fact that in the public mind, airline pilots are largely a stereotype of the responsible professional. The picture of a pilot intentionally twitting the passengers and goofing off is funny (in a TV sketch, anyway) because it is so incongruous with the profession's standard public image.

But professionalism has to be achieved one pilot at a time. The NTSB, in its investigation of Flight 3407, has spotted what it fears to be a dangerous trend of unprofessionalism in the cockpit. While its recommendations do not carry the force of law, I hope that the FAA, whose dictates are law, will take them seriously. Professionalism, smooth flights, and expert handling of dangerous situations are what the flying public expects from pilots. Even if we all have to pay a little more, it's worth it to know that the people into whose hands we place our lives every time we step on an airplane are worthy of that trust.

Sources: The synopsis of the NTSB final report on the crash of Flight 3407 can be found at http://www.ntsb.gov/Publictn/2010/AAR1001.htm. Cleese's "Airline Pilots Sketch" is currently online at http://www.serve.com/bonzai/monty/classics/TheAirlinePilotsSketch. My previous blogs on this incident can be found in the entries for Feb. 12 and May 18, 2009.

An Economic Prophecy for Engineers—And Everyone Else

"When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him."—Deuteronomy 18:22

"The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender."—Proverbs 22:7

Without modern economies, engineering would be a shadow of its present self, if it existed at all. Huge capital investments in plant, equipment, and R&D needed for advanced engineering require equally huge, smoothly functioning economies. And anything that fundamentally threatens such economies is worth the attention of engineers and everyone else.

The two Old Testament excerpts above have been much on my mind the last week or so. The selection from Deuteronomy says prophets whose predictions don't come true can be safely ignored. One might expect also the converse to be true: that is, prophets whose predictions are verified deserve at least a little attention, although anyone can make a lucky guess from time to time. The context in which I have been thinking about borrowers being servants of lenders is the fact that for at least the last decade, the U. S. government's debt has been underwritten largely by foreign investment, from China to the sovereign wealth funds of numerous other countries. My worries on that score were allayed by the fact that China, for example, though it holds billions of dollars of Treasury bonds and other debt, has no motivation to do anything bad to us, since we are their largest market in many areas, and destroying one's main market is not a smart thing to do.

But then I read Aftershock by David and Robert Wiedemer (brothers) and Cindy Spitzer.

This writing team published America's Bubble Economy in 2006, which allegedly forecast the broad outlines of the 2008 financial crisis and real-estate crash pretty accurately. (I haven't read it, so I say "allegedly," but I have no reason to doubt this is basically true.) In Aftershock, the authors say that there are actually six bubbles, not just the real-estate bubble, and only four of them have popped or are in the process of popping: real estate, the U. S. stock market, private debt, and discretionary spending. All these areas fed on each other during the expansion phase of the last several decades. Similarly, the collapse of real-estate markets has cut off sources for private debt, discouraged discretionary spending, and put downward pressure on the stock market, leading to a complex vicious circle that is yet to finish its dirty work.

The other two bubbles yet to pop are the dollar bubble and the U. S. government debt bubble. And when these two go, life in many ways will never be the same, according to the Wiedemers and Spitzer.

Why? Because the supposedly safe haven of U. S. Treasury bonds, the place where smart money all around the world goes when things get bad, will turn into a rat hole. How? When non-U. S. purchasers of Treasury bonds quit buying them as enthusiastically as they have in the past, this will force the Federal Reserve to print dollars to keep the government running. This has already started to happen, and when it gathers steam there will be nothing to prevent a huge burst of hyperinflation—on the order of 100% a year. Places like Israel and Argentina have undergone such disasters, but not since the Revolutionary War has the U. S. experienced such a thing.

Of course, in a democracy the politicians can't let hyperinflation go on for long, or else their careers are toast. But the only alternative will be severe cutbacks in government spending, which will finish the inaugural phase of a multi-year worldwide depression from which the U. S. will emerge much chastened, but wiser.

When will all this start to snowball? In one to three years, according to Aftershock, which was completed in the summer of 2009.

What should the individual do if these folks are right? Their advice is to get out of debt to the extent possible, then get out of the stock market into cash or short-term equivalents (money market funds, U. S. Treasury funds), and when the inflation gets going, pitch all that and buy gold.

I am no financial expert, and I will state right here that my only venture into metals trading happened in 1980, when I managed to buy $500 worth of silver coins at $19 an ounce, the exact time when (unbeknownst to me) the Texas Hunt brothers were cornering the silver market and forcing it to a high which—thirty years later—it has yet to achieve again. A worse investment choice could hardly be imagined. So it will take a lot of confirmation and events going the way the Wiedemers say they will, before I will even consider fooling with metals trading again. But I am certainly going to keep my eye on things for the next few years, and if events start to match up according to the Aftershock scenario, I will take their dire forecasts more seriously.

For the sake of the U. S. economy and everyone who relies on it, and for the sake of young engineers just starting their careers, I hope that Aftershock is wrong, and things go back to normal or better soon. Getting a job these days is hard enough, and hyperinflation and the government going broke is not going to help matters. But as the authors themselves point out, money isn't everything, and those who survived the Great Depression of the 1930s went on to become the Greatest Generation who fought World War II. Still, I feel that once I read the book, I should let people know about it and allow them to draw their own conclusions. I am more than halfway convinced Aftershock is right. But the only way to be sure is to wait and see.

Sources: Aftershock is published by John Wiley & Sons (2010). I learned about the book from a review in National Review Online at http://article.nationalreview.com/420850/the-next-meltdown/stephen-spruiell.

Building Codes, Earthquakes, and Haiti

Two weeks ago tomorrow, the worst earthquake in two centuries hit Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The official death toll has exceeded 100,000 and it is likely that millions are homeless and will have to leave the city temporarily or permanently. The survivors have my sympathy and prayers, along with hopes that this terrible tragedy will have a few positive outcomes. One of the best possible outcomes would be a change in the way the city and country are rebuilt.

Laws concerned with how buildings are constructed can be traced back to the Code of Hammurabi promulgated around 1800 B. C. Its provisions were simple: if a building collapsed on its owner and killed him, the builder lost his head. This was a powerful, if negative, incentive, but it lacked something in the area of specificity. In the U. S., Baltimore was the first city to adopt a prescriptive code that not only laid out penalties for poor construction, but described what good construction was. This was around 1904. Since then, advances in structural engineering and materials science have given us the tools to predict how almost any structure will behave under a wide variety of anticipated natural disasters, from hurricanes and floods to earthquakes. But the problem in Haiti was that this knowledge, even in the rare instances when people possessed it, was rarely applied.

Amid the rubble of Port-au-Prince, the tallest building in Haiti—the Digicel building, completed about a year ago—still stands with only minor cosmetic damage. Why? It was constructed according to American building codes to withstand a magnitude-7 earthquake—and it did. A plainer argument for enforcement of building codes could not be imagined.

If Haiti has any building codes, I was unable to ascertain exactly what they amount to or where they apply. A project that was ongoing in 2007 under the auspices of the Organization of American States (OAS) put up a website that stated Haiti has no national building code, and was focused on developing one. According to news reports, any building codes that exist are merely on paper, and people use cinder blocks that are basically home-made, reportedly weighing only about 12% of what the same size block would weigh if it was made under U. S. standards. Reinforcing bar is used sparingly, if at all, and when people need more room they just go down to the homemade cinder-block store and pile another story or two onto their house. Radical libertarians might do well to study Haiti as an example of what happens when government absents itself completely from the supervision of private and even public construction. Things can go well for a while, but when an earthquake hits, the devastation is nearly total.

And while engineers, to the extent they were involved at all in Haitian construction practices, deserve blame for not building better buildings, an individual engineer can do only so much in a regulatory, economic, political, and cultural environment that militates so strongly against good construction. Digicel was able to build according to American codes because it had the money and expertise to do so. The average Haitian in a country with the lowest per-capita income in the Western Hemisphere cannot afford to pay that much, unless he wants to live in an earthquake-proof building the size of a phone booth.

What will have to change if the next earthquake is not to produce equal devastation?

Clearly, the people will need to demand that the government get serious about building codes. Unfortunately, there is little precedent in recent history for the Haitian government getting serious about anything besides corruption and self-serving behavior on the part of its politicians. But perhaps the shock engendered by this tragedy will make people understand that corruption has a price, and the price is one that Haitians can no longer afford. Something like that happened after the notorious 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist disaster, in which 146 garment workers died when a New York City sweatshop caught fire. That tragedy inspired the creation of the American Society of Safety Engineers and led to important legislation regarding worker safety.

But clearly those aspects of Haitian culture which take a laissez-faire attitude toward future-directed regulation of any kind, including building codes, must change if Haitians are to live in safer buildings in the future. How this can happen is a problem for politicians, diplomats, the hundreds of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have poured many millions of dollars into Haiti over the last few decades, and most of all the citizens, who alone can demand better of their government than they have received heretofore. We have the knowledge of how to build safer buildings, though it is perhaps not distributed very widely in Haiti. What was lacking, and what I hope will arise in the future, is the will to reach a compromise between the total lack of building codes that went on before the earthquake, and an American-style set of codes that would put new construction totally out of reach for all but the richest Haitians. This requires ingenuity, political smarts, and good will on all sides, but it can happen. I only pray that it will.

Sources: I used Wikipedia’s article on building codes and news items on Haiti found at http://www.infrastructurist.com/2010/01/20/earthquakes-dont-kill-peoplebad-buildings-do-more-on-haitis-building-codes/ and http://www.mcclatchydc.com/world/story/82915.html.

Should Google Leave China?

The government of the People's Republic of China has only nominal regard for freedom of speech. It considers censorship part of its job, and so for years now, any internet service provider or search-engine operator in the PRC has had to agree to restrictions on what kinds of things can be searched for and what kinds of private information the government can get its hands on. U.-S.-based companies such as Yahoo and Google have been criticized for giving in to these conditions in the past, and with some justification. If freedom of speech is worth preserving in the U. S., why should it be sacrificed as a cost of doing business in China? But it looks like at least Google is having second thoughts about the whole idea.

According to a New York Times article last week, Google has announced that it will "stop cooperating with Chinese Internet censorship," and is thinking about whether to shut down its activity in the country altogether. A look at Google's history with China is of help in understanding how things came to this pass.

Google began Chinese-based operations in 2006 under the condition that it would cooperate with government-imposed restrictions on what its search engines could provide users. As you can imagine, the whole process of doing searches in Chinese is a very different thing than it is in English or other languages. Nevertheless, Google's Chinese operation reportedly made good progress, but up to now lags considerably behind the search-engine leader in that country, an outfit called Baidu that has close ties to the government. Google's famous ethics motto—"Don't be evil"—obviously leaves something to be desired in the definition department (what's evil?), but Chinese censorship enforced by Google was always a blot on their otherwise fairly clean corporate reputation.

Censorship is not the only reason Google is thinking of leaving. China has been the apparent source of numerous cyberattacks and attempts to hack into private systems. Just a week before Google's announcement, another batch of attacks targeted Silicon Valley companies and Chinese human-rights activists. This starts to look like the worst kind of government-encouraged corporate spying, with a little suppression of free speech thrown in.

Google is right to consider washing its hands of China, but so far the firm has taken only limited action: saying it will try to establish a new arrangement with the government in order to provide uncensored search results. But these negotiations are unlikely to go anywhere, so Google may have to follow up its threats with action. Leaving China for good would shut it out of the huge and growing Chinese market for the foreseeable future, and would undoubtedly hurt the company's bottom line. But Google has a pretty large bottom line these days, not having had a big exposure in mortgage-backed securities or other investments that have tanked in the last couple of years. Whatever its flaws, Google has demonstrated some of the pre-eminent virtues of free-market capitalism in how two college students with a good idea were able to create a multi-billion-dollar organization that has changed the way billions of people live, and mostly for the better. But this achievement rested on some key philosophical principles.

The fundamental philosophy of Google—that sharing information is better than not sharing it—is in direct conflict with the fundamental fear-based pragmatism of the Chinese government. Whether or not Google quits China altogether, these two philosophies will always be in conflict. Up to now, Google's management may have thought that working from within China could lead to at least marginal improvements in freedom of speech, and the history of their three to five years there is marked by disputes and struggles to maintain or expand such freedoms. But the government holds the Internet plug in its hands, and a large corporation like Google can't play at Internet guerrilla warfare. They have to operate in the open, in full view of the government. So leaving may be the best thing to do.

The Internet is a good example of how technology usually has built-in biases that give the lie to the old saying that "technology is neutral, only the way people use it has ethical implications." The Internet's very technological structure is democratic, not hierarchical. Every Internet address is in principle as accessible as every other address. While individual sites can pile up hierarchies to the moon and cause users to drill down dozens of layers to get to where they want to be, the Internet itself is a remarkably "flat" place. This was evidently the intention of the early designers of the Internet, who formed a pretty homogeneous community (physicists, computer scientists, and the like) and who little imagined that their cute idea of inter-computer communication would one day be used by Islamic jihadists to recruit airline bombers. Or, would be used by hospitals to allow telemedicine to save lives.

Google is currently struggling with an ethical choice—not a simple one by any means, but significant ethical choices are sometimes not simple. By leaving China, they would send a message to the government leaders that actions have consequences. Whether that message will get through remains to be seen. But I hope they send it nonetheless.

Sources: The New York Times article on Google's announcement of Jan. 12 is at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/world/asia/14beijing.html.

NOTE TO READERS, especially those who took the time to email me after my query last week: I heard from five of you. Three were people I'd never heard from before, one was a fellow who emailed me a few months ago, and one is a friend I've known since 1980. Given that direct mail usually has less than a 10% success rate, I'm going to assume that means I have at least fifty or so readers. That's a nice comfortable number, and so I will look forward to bringing this blog to you with improved quality and hopes that every so often it will make a positive difference in your life.

Bombs versus Bareness: The Choice for Airline Safety?

After Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to explode his underwear on a Christmas-day flight from Holland to the U. S. last year, a lot of people got a lot more interested in airport security, and understandably so. In particular, more attention has been focused on the so-called "full-body scanners" now in use at a few U. S. airports. The Transportation Security Administration has ordered 150 more and has money for 300 of these devices. According to a report in the Washington Post, if the Dutch airport where Abdulmutallab boarded his plane had been using such a scanner, they would very likely have caught him. But there are privacy concerns about these devices.

By now you have probably seen sample images from the machines on TV: they look like what you might get if you took one of those little wooden life-modeling dolls that artists use to get the basics of the human figure down, and put it on a copier-machine screen and scanned it. The level of detail is low; objects smaller than about half an inch in diameter are at the edge of the system's resolution. And the faces and certain other personal areas have been obscured by software so you see just a uniform gray blur. Nevertheless, the machines can't do their intended job unless they present the basic body outline minus clothing, and depending on who you are and what shape you're in, even that amount of detail may be too much for some people.

We are told that the folks looking at these pictures will not be able to see the real humans whose images they're checking—the inspectors will be in another part of the building. I suppose that helps—if anybody snickers, at least you won't be able to see them do it.

The right to privacy is a fairly modern one in some ways, being the basis of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion in the U. S. But as in so many situations where technology outpaces the legal system, the right not to have people look at your naked body by means of technology is not well defined. There are peeping-tom laws: if some creep in your apartment complex installs a hidden video camera in your shower and gets caught, there are ways to prosecute him. But this is a different situation, since it is the police who are doing the snooping, and for a good purpose: to keep bombs off planes.

As I may have related elsewhere, I was involved in an experimental program way back in the early 1990s to develop just such a contraband-detection system using millimeter waves, a type of microwave that is naturally emitted by the human body. Somewhere I have millimeter-wave pictures of myself with and without some Play-Doh taped underneath a windbreaker. There were two problems with the technology at the time. One was, a full-body scan (actually only the upper half, now I think about it) took 45 minutes. And the level of detail was sufficiently good that the company I was working for wasn't able to market the thing successfully, partly out of privacy concerns. As I recall, the images weren't any more detailed than what we've seen in the papers lately, but attitudes about what constitutes too much detail have changed a good bit since then. And we've had things like the Sept. 11, 2001 World Trade Center bombings happen.

I don't see much in the way of organized opposition to these devices, however the privacy issue is handled. The alternative that people are being given at airports is to submit to a pat-down, which is a privacy intrusion of a different kind. If the new technology was foolproof, it might be more justifiable, but neither the full-body scan nor a patdown will detect the ultimate in suicide bombing techniques: a person with a bomb inside their body that can be set off by a cell phone. If they start checking for those things, I think I'll just take the train.

A REQUEST TO READERS:

For the first year or two after I began writing this blog in 2008, a number of readers sent in comments, which is a fairly simple thing to do. If you already have an identity on this website, you can post comments right away and they show up immediately without my intervention. If you post as "anonymous" I get an email from the system allowing me to exercise my judgment as to whether to post the comment or not. There are only two kinds of comments I won't post: ones which in my judgment are scandalous or libelous (I get very few of those), or spam. Unfortunately, in the last few months about 90% of the comments I've been getting are spam: either innocuous-sounding general things like "Oh gee I really like your blog" followed by a URL that is clearly advertising, or else a comment entirely in Chinese. Although I wish I could read Chinese, I can't, and these go in the bit trash along with the spam. In the meantime, the "real" comments have dwindled to almost zero.

So here is my request: if you read this blog at all, either occasionally or regularly, would you please email me directly (not comment) at kdstephan@txstate.edu, subject line "Your Blog" and let me know what you think about it? All comments, good or bad, will be welcome, because I'm operating right now in what engineers call an "open-loop" situation with no feedback, and that's generally not a good state for a system to be in. I promise to read all your responses and summarize them in a blog soon. Thank you, and have a happy 2010.

Sources: The Washington Post carried an article on full-body scanners and their planned deployment at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/03/AR2010010301826.html?sub=AR. There is information about how the technology works at http://www.pantagraph.com/news/article_3781a802-f625-11de-9a8c-001cc4c002e0.html. And the article in which I showed off the capability of a 1993-era millimeter-wave contraband detection system is “Contraband detection through clothing by means of millimeter-wave imaging,” by G. R. Huguenin, C.-T. Hsieh, J. E. Kapitsky, E. L. Moore, K. D. Stephan, and A. S. Vickery, SPIE Proc. 1942 Underground and Obscured Object Imaging and Detection, Orlando, FL, pp. 117-128, 15-16 April 1993.

A Rational View of Global Warming

Not that the scientists and politicians from Al Gore to the attendees of last month's Copenhagen summit are completely without rationality, but one must admit that except for the scientist-to-scientist exchanges (and not all of them, if some recently disclosed emails are considered), ratiocination—meaning the process of reasoning from objective, verifiable facts to logical conclusions—is in scarce supply in discussions of global warming. The problem is that so much of the controversy depends on what is going to happen, as opposed to what has happened already, and no matter how good one's computer model or crystal ball, debates that hinge critically on future events tend to go on forever—or at least until the future under debate turns into the past. And by then it's sometimes too late.

How refreshing it was, then, when I found on my acquaintance Prof. David Rutledge's website a detailed presentation of his that takes an original, yet historically based approach to the question. The title is not one to grab headlines: "Hubbert's Peak, the Coal Question, and Climate Change." But Rutledge, a highly honored mathematician and engineering professor, Fellow of the IEEE, former Caltech division chair, and all-around straight shooter, would rather title a talk accurately than sexily.

The Hubbert's Peak of the title is not to be found in a mountain range, but in the statistics of U. S. oil production. In 1956, King Hubbert, an engineer with Shell Oil, wrote a paper predicting that oil production in the States was rising but would peak in about fifteen or twenty years, thereupon entering a gradual decline for the rest of the century. The entire curve, from the early Spindletop discoveries to the present day and beyond, would resemble the famous Gaussian or bell-shaped curve of elementary statistics, though for different reasons. The point is that within a given large region of exploration, discovery and production activities tend to follow a pattern that starts small, peaks sooner or later (at a time that can often be estimated from historical data), and then tapers off.

Rutledge has compiled statistics from other countries and other fields, notably regional and global coal production, which tend to bear out the general principles behind Hubbert's Peak. I have neither the space nor the expertise to do justice to this 60-slide presentation, which is obviously the tip of a larger iceberg of work which Rutledge says will eventually turn into a book. But I have managed to glean a couple of take-homes from the intimidatingly extensive and sophisticated analyses that Rutledge and his collaborators have performed.

One is, that government estimates of fossil fuel reserves, no matter by what government and no matter when, tend to be optimistic by factors of two or three. Comparing such historical estimates to the facts on the ground (or we should say, dug out of the ground, in the case of coal) shows that this principle, which Rutledge distinguishes with the name of "Deffeyes' Law of Bureaucratic Resource Estimates," prevails across national boundaries and across decades. In other words, government bureucrats almost invariably give in to political pressures to overestimate reserves.

This has important implications for the second take-away, which has to do with what will actually happen with regard to global warming as the remainder of the world's fossil fuel reserves get burned up. Trouble is, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the august body whose pronouncements are treated as gospel by many, uses government estimates of future production in its calculations. In one of the few slides where Rutledge lets a little emotion show through, the title is "Where Does the IPCC Get Its Coal Numbers?" He shows how the IPCC cherry-picks the worst-sounding bureaucratic estimates in order to get their input numbers for their climate analyses. On the following slide, "Carbon Dioxide Emissions" he shows his piece de resistance: a chart of the many and various IPCC estimates of cumulative CO2 emissions versus time out to 2100, compared to his own statistics on the question. The IPCC curves spray out high into the graphical sky, like tracers from a crazed machine-gunner trying to shoot down an invisible fighter plane, while Rutledge's curve slowly and gracefully slides in underneath them all like a gently rolling hill.

The bottom bottom line, on his summary slide, is that according to his figures, based not on speculative climate-change models but simply on historical production figures, rationally interpreted, is that we are not going to end up burning nearly as much carbon as the IPCC says, and that the human-caused portion of both future temperature change and ocean-level increases will be so small as to be comparable to the natural noise level.

Is Rutledge right? Again, the only absolutely sure way to tell is to wait and see, although if the issue is what happens by 2100, the waiting will have to be done on the part of my very youngest readers, or perhaps their children. But if you are looking for a calm, highly rational, technically challenging, but rock-solid study about the climate-change controversy, you could do no better than to look at what Prof. Rutledge has come up with.

Sources: The presentation referred to can be downloaded free at Prof. Rutledge's website http://rutledge.caltech.edu/, where PowerPoint slides, an Excel file, and video of his Watson Lecture on this subject are all available.