"The Switch From Hell": GM's Barra and the Ignition-Switch Debacle

Back in April, GM CEO Mary Barra testified to Congress about a massive recall involving GM's Cobalts, many of which carried a defective ignition switch that could be accidentally turned off by a driver's heavy keyring.  This defect has led to numerous fatal crashes and lawsuits.  In a public address to GM employees worldwide on June 5, Barra released a 315-page report detailing the results of an internal investigation into the switch problem, and used some of the harshest language in memory by a CEO of a major corporation about the performance of his or her own employees.  Thanks to the release of this report, we now know more about exactly how such a serious defect was allowed in thousands of cars produced in the mid-2000s, and also why it was so dangerous.

The report gives fascinating insight into how a large, bureaucratic operation such as GM goes about developing such a complicated thing as a modern automobile.  One way is specialization.  Engineer Ray DeGiorgio, for example, joined the firm around 1991 and became an ignition-switch specialist.  When a new design was called for around 2000, he eventually became the Design Release Engineer on the project that would make a new design of switch for product lines that eventually became known as Saturn's Ion and Cobalt. 

           

The switch's early development did not go smoothly.  Electrical problems plagued both the prototypes that were lab tested and units that made it into test vehicles.  As the deadline for releasing the switch to production approached, DeGiorgio came under pressure to make decisions about whether to address a low-torque issue in a design that had already manifested numerous other problems.  Because the thing was finally working, mostly, when the switch's supplier, Delphi, asked if they should try fixing the torque issue, DeGiorgio replied "maintain present course."  He feared that increasing the torque to meet specifications in all cases would cause further electrical problems, and manifested his frustration by signing the email "Ray (tired of the switch from hell) DeGiorgio." 

People tend to be able to deal with only one thing at a time effectively.  While DeGiorgio knew that a low-torque switch could cause problems such as stalling while in motion, having a car stall while running once in a while didn't seem as serious as not being able to start the car at all, which was the result of some of the electrical problems.  It is not clear that DeGiorgio realized what few other engineers at GM realized either:  that when the switch accidentally slipped from Run to Accessory while the car was in motion due to the low-torque problem, this movement would also disable the airbag and the ABS (anti-lock braking) systems.  Therefore, not only would a driver suddenly find that he or she had lost power and most of the steering (power steering dies when the engine dies)—the protection from collisions provided by ABS and airbags also disappeared.  As subsequent accidents proved, the failure of these safety features was a contributing cause to several of the fatalities that have been ascribed to the ignition-switch problem.

DeGiorgio was not acting maliciously.  He was simply trying to do a difficult job in a timely manner.  As far as we know, he didn't falsify any records.  He was even responsible for fixing the switch-torque problem in 2006, but he did it in a way that violated established GM policy:  he made a silent supplier-specification change that did not change the part number or notify the rest of the organization that the new switch was significantly different.  As a result, GM and outside investigators spent several years tracking down the mysterious ignition-switch failures, and trying to figure out why they disappeared in models built after the hidden 2006 change.

The theologian and philosopher St. Augustine was among the first to point out that evil is not so much a positive substantial thing in itself, as it is the absence or privation of something good.  DeGiorgio's actions and inactions in the GM ignition-switch saga are an example of this.  Faced with a laundry list of problems, both electrical and mechanical, he decided in 2002 to let the apparently minor torque issue slide, rather than delay the process further by trying to fix it at the risk of upsetting the delicately balanced design further.  And he simply didn't know, or didn't think about, the fact that in the particular vehicles that used the switch, a "moving stall" (as engineers referred to it) could be very dangerous because it disabled the ABS and airbag systems, both of which might be especially needed in negotiating a safe escape from a sudden and surprising loss of power.  And when he did a good thing—issuing the 2006 change that fixed the switch—he also, out of either fear or reluctance, failed to issue notifications that would point to the existence of the problem in the first place.  Again, it was not so much a positive action on his part that was faulty, but inaction, and inaction possibly motivated by fear.

We have not been told whether DeGiorgio was one of the fifteen people fired as a result of the investigation.  Perhaps he made the corporate version of a plea bargain, agreeing to talk in exchange for his job.  Whatever his personal fate, his actions have entered the ranks of engineering ethics cases, and will probably stay there for years to come.  CEO Barra has done a great service to the discipline of engineering by being as forthright and direct as she has been during the course of this issue.  I cannot recall any male CEO who faced a similar problem without blustering, obfuscating, or generally following the advice of lawyers to admit as little as possible.  Listening to Barra, one might almost think that she has told her lawyers to go where the switch came from, and not bother her while she says what she wants to say. 

CEOs can say anything they want, but making significant changes in an organization of 220,000 people is a hard task.  Nevertheless, in airing so much dirty laundry, Barra has made a good start toward fixing the systemic managerial and organizational problems that allowed the defective ignition switches to go unnoticed for so long.  She has also presented a good example for other CEOs of major corporations to follow in 'fessing up to ethical lapses.

Sources:  Mary Barra's "global town hall" meeting remarks were reported in USA Today on June 5 at http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/06/05/gm-ceo-mary-barra-speech-switch-recall-report/10012715/.  I referred to the (redacted for privacy of private individuals) "Report to Board of Directors of General Motors Company Regarding Ignition Switch Recalls" dated May 29, 2014, which is currently available from a news item on the main page of the National Highway and Transportation Safety Board website (www.nhtsa.gov).  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on the Ford Pinto.  I blogged on Barra's testimony to Congress in this space on April 7, 2014.

The Medium Makes the Message: Music and Technology

A few years ago, my wife tried to start a home-based graphics and communications freelance consulting business by teaming with another woman I'll call M.  M. was of Japanese origin and had trained for some years as a classical pianist, although at the time she was earning money as a Japanese-English translator.  When my wife set up shop with her graphics software, she turned on a radio to a classical music station, and M. objected.  When my wife asked why, M. said that she was compelled to pay full attention to any music she could hear, and to have any music playing at all while she worked was an intolerable distraction.  The partnership soon dissolved for reasons unrelated to the background-music issue.  But I recall the different ways M. and my wife reacted to music as paradigms of two approaches to music that the future may judge our era by.

Engineering has made possible the incredibly widespread propagation of recorded music to all corners of the earth.  Until the invention of the phonograph in 1877, music disappeared as soon as it was made, and except for minor technologies like music boxes and barrel organs, the only way to hear music was to make it yourself, or to be near somebody who was making it.  Either way, music was integrated into life in an intimate, personal way, because either you or someone in your vicinity was personally engaged in musical performance any time music was heard.  It was under these conditions that ancient Greek philosophers developed their first aesthetic judgments, which were about music.  And under these same conditions, classical composers such as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms produced those monuments of tonality which are standards by which all other Western music is judged. 

At least, that is what philosopher Roger Scruton says about the matter in his book The Aesthetics of Music.  In a music-appreciation class in college, I first became aware of the fact that classical music has intricate structures and complexity fully comparable to other cultural achievements in art and technology.  In his book, Scruton spends 500 pages showing just how complex music is, and what makes great music great.  I suspect he is the same kind of person as my wife's friend M.:  to him music demands attention, and can be analyzed and judged in detail.  I base this conclusion on the fact that at one point he refers to classical music as "the music which asks to be heard, but never overheard."  M. was hearing the classical-music station my wife tuned in to, but my wife was just overhearing it.

Toward the end of his book, Scruton spends a few pages discussing popular music, and how the only measure of quality that anyone tries to apply to it is that of popularity:  what's in the top 40, for example.  It is engineering and technology which has made possible the worldwide dominance of the "democratic culture of America" in music.  He uses the word "democratic" not in its political sense, but in the sense of "the common people," so the music of a democratic culture is the music most people listen to.  And that is not classical music by any means.

Scruton acknowledges a connection that relates music, culture, and religion, and many of the most transcendently beautiful musical compositions were created for religious services.  By contrast, most events called "concerts" today that involve popular music can be viewed as orgies of idol worship.  As Scruton puts it, "It is not a metaphor to describe Kurt Cobain as an idol; on the contrary, he is simply one among many recent manifestations of the Golden Calf . . . . If the music sounds ugly, this is of no significance:  it is not there to be listened to, but to take revenge on the world."  In other words, most popular music is itself instrumental, not in the sense of not having words, but in the sense of being used for some other purpose:  to break up silence, to relax the listener, or to enrage, excite, or stupify.  By contrast, classical music of the type that Scruton spends most of his book on is an end in itself:  it is played because it is not work, but play.  And the point of play is to play, not to achieve some other purpose by means of playing.

Modern engineering and technology does not encourage long-term thinking.  As I get older, I am increasingly impressed by the brevity of product lifespans and the transitory nature of engineering firms and even entire technologies.  Engineers are not used to thinking about how their work may affect future generations, not only materially, but intellectually and even aesthetically.  For good or ill, the democratic-culture type of music is the overwhelmingly vast majority of all music made and heard in the world today.  The conditions under which the great classical composers lived are gone forever.  Will anyone, now or in the future, ever equal or surpass the achievements of the great composers of tonal Western music?  Or will their compositions stand like the Egyptian pyramids, isolated monuments to a way of life and a set of priorities that are completely foreign to our present and future experience?

These are questions neither Scruton nor I can answer.  But by flooding the world with the kinds of music it wants, engineers have forever changed the course of musical history.  With all of the more urgent issues that engineering can address these days—energy scarcity, sanitation, and so on—worrying about what engineering has done to music may seem pointless or trivial.  But the next time you hear music, remember that what you hear is as much a product of the means of hearing it as it is of the musicians who wrote it and played it.  And remember that there are a few people left who can still appreciate, understand, and judge music by standards that most of us know little or nothing about.

Sources:  Roger Scruton's The Aesthetics of Music was published in 1997 by Oxford University Press. 

The Dendrites Made Me Do It: Free Will and Morality

Back in the 1970s, TV comedian Flip Wilson liked to play a character named Geraldine, whose Church of What's Happening Now taught her to say, whenever she did something bad, that "the devil made me do it!"  Recent research over the last decade or two has given new strength to the argument that our will is determined not by the devil, but by certain neurons, whose axons and dendrites transmit characteristic nerve impulses that appear to precede our conscious decisions to do a thing by a substantial fraction of a second. 

Both research scientists and the general public tend to conclude from brain science that there is no such thing as free will.  If free will is an illusion, then so is responsibility, and it doesn't matter what we do.  And thinking we don't have free will actually affects the way we act, according to a body of research pointed out by Azim Shariff, a psychologist, and Kathleen Vohs, a business-school professor. 

Writing in the June issue of Scientific American, Shariff and Vohs describe a series of experiments in which researchers first primed subjects to think critically of free will.  This priming took various forms.  Reading an essay explicitly criticizing the concept of free will was one way.  But popular-science articles describing brain research, without explicitly mentioning free will, appeared to be about as effective.  However the researchers brought up the topic, it tended to make their subjects less likely to act nice, and less likely to punish others for not-nice behavior.  In one study, volunteers who read an anti-free will article put almost twice as much hot sauce on tortilla chips they were asked to prepare for another volunteer (secretly in cahoots with the researchers), who had previously made it well known that he didn't like hot sauce.  Other subjects shown anti-free will material then proceeded to cheat on an academic test more than subjects who read about an unrelated matter.  The idea that we are simply complex material objects reacting in an entirely predetermined way to our environment appears to lead people to behave irresponsibly, and to judge others as having less responsibility for their actions as well. 

The essay by Shariff and Vohs is an outstanding example of what I would call scientific fence-sitting.  Nowhere do they say what their personal views are on whether free will exists.  Instead, they cite studies of what happens to people when they are exposed to the idea of determinism, either directly or indirectly, and they find that mostly, the results are not good, except that people tend to ease up on the idea of punishment as revenge.  Shariff and Vohs seem to think that modern societies are gradually abandoning the idea of free will, and that this might lead to trouble, although if things get too bad after we leave the concept behind, we "might have to reinvent it."  But they write as though science is the only way of knowing anything for sure, and because science can't resolve the question of whether free will really exists, there's no point in talking about it directly.  It doesn't seem to occur to them that science is not the only way to know things.

I have a couple of modest proposals in the form of hypothetical questions.  Dr. Shariff is an assistant professor, meaning that in the normal course of events, he will go up for tenure some time in the next few years and be evaluated by his peers in the department.  Dr. Vohs is Land O'Lakes Professor of Excellence in Marketing, which presumably means she owes her living to the success of Land O' Lakes Inc. in selling lots of margarine.  Dr. Shariff, what would you think (not feel, not act, but think) if your personnel committee came up to you after you turned in your application for tenure and they said, "Well, Azim, we were going to grant you tenure, but hey, we were talking and discovered that we're all determinists and it doesn't matter what we do, so to save money, we're going to let you go instead."  And Dr. Vohs, what if the people in charge of the Land O' Lakes Endowment or whatever it is that pays your salary sent you a letter saying, "Dear Dr. Vohs, reading your article in Scientific American convinced us of the truth of determinism, so being freed of the burden of responsibility for our actions, we're taking the endowment that pays your salary and are all going on an extended vacation to the French Riviera." 

I am fairly confident that both injured parties in these situations would think that their supervisors made wrong decisions, and would appeal to rules that apply to their jobs.  These rules spell out responsibilities for both professors and administrators.  You can take the position that, as a practical matter, societies have to pretend that things like free will and the responsibility of moral agents exist, because otherwise we'd degenerate into a state of anarchy and chaos, like Somalia is today. 

But there is a problem here.  I thought science was the search for truth.  Not pretense, not convenient fictions that we live by in order to survive, but truth.  The sense I get from the Scientific American essay (I'm reading between the lines here) is that the authors don't personally believe in free will, but recognize that if we didn't act like it existed, we'd all be in a lot of trouble, both individually and collectively. 

There are two related lessons here for the engineer, and anyone else for that matter, who is looking to behave ethically, both on the job and elsewhere. 

First of all, be careful what you read.  I'm not saying that you shouldn't read articles on brain science, but be sure your reading is at least a balanced diet of a variety of viewpoints, because your reading may influence your actions even if you don't think it does. 

Next, guess what?  Free will exists.  I'm not just pretending that it exists, but it really does.  I'm not enough of a philosopher to trot out all the arguments in favor of it, but I can point to people like Aristotle and Aquinas who were, as well as plenty of modern philosophers.  And while it is technically what theologians call a "mystery," meaning we can understand some of it but never all of it, free will is compatible with the idea that God is in ultimate control of the universe.  Why, there are even some philosophers, called compatibilists, who argue that free will is compatible with atheistic determinism!  So you really can decide to do the right thing in your work, in your personal life, and in deciding what you think of a couple of professors who won't even say whether they believe in free will, even though they spend years researching it.

Sources:  The essay "The World Without Free Will" appeared on pp. 76-79 of the June 2014 issue of Scientific American.  I referred to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://plato.stanford.edu on free will, and to Wikipedia for articles on Flip Wilson and dendrites.  Also, I found out that Land O' Lakes (www.landolakesinc.com) makes other things besides margarine—Purina animal feeds, for example. 

Rumor Mills and World War III: "(The Russians Are Coming)^2" Revisited

Pardon the geek typography ("^2" means "squared" or "repeat a second time"), but there wasn't enough room to put the movie's full title—"The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming" in the headline comfortably.  Made in 1966 at the height of the Cold War between the old Soviet Union and the U. S., the film portrays what might have happened if a small Soviet submarine ran aground by accident near the shore of a rustic vacation island off the coast of New England.  I date myself when I confess I saw it when it first came out, and it's one of the few comedies I saw as a child that still seems funny to this 60-year-old.

The humor may be timeless, but the plot is not.  It hinges on the fact that with one exception, the most advanced communications technology on the island is the telephone office whose sole manual switchboard is run by grandmotherly Alice Foss, who knows everybody's name in town and takes eccentric Muriel Everett's report of being attacked by Russians with a large grain of salt—at least until Muriel's phone line goes dead.  But by then, the nine Russian sailors who came ashore to find a boat big enough to tow their sub off the rocks have cut the phone wires to that section of town (it was apparently a party line), so the only way word can travel after that is if a person carries it himself.  In the process of spreading the word, the rumor-mill game starts, and a report of one Russian sailor attacking Muriel distorts into a whole troop of Russian parachutists taking over the island's airport.  Most of the rest of the film follows the five-man police force and a separate vigilante mob led by a self-appointed death-and-glory war veteran, who each think the Russians are somewhere different, and charge around town sowing confusion and more misinformation wherever they go.  The mixups are augmented when the Russians make their way to town, tie up Mrs. Foss, and axe the main phone cables.  A rather sentimental and unlikely incident near the end of the film unites all the town's residents with the Russians, but the whole thing nearly ends up starting World War III anyway when the war vet gets to the only two-way radio in town and calls the U. S. Air Force into action.  Universal holocaust is averted only when the townies escort the sub out to sea with their own boats, which leads the Air Force fighters to call off their attack, and the day is saved. 

Try to update the plot to 2014, and you run into trouble right away.  The first American who spots the Russians is the ten-year-old son of a vacationing writer, who refuses to believe his boy when the kid tells Dad there's nine men in black in the garage with Tommy guns.  If something like that happened today, said son would have posted the guys' photos on whatever it is you post photos on when you're ten years old and have a cellphone these days, and inside of five minutes the FBI might have been on the case.  And the same goes for the creaky old plot device of cutting phone lines, which was laid to rest when the first cellphones (mobile phones, as they are called in world outside the U. S.) came out.  Ironically, rather than helping matters, the only wireless link in the movie—the two-way radio—nearly leads to disaster when it's used to call in the Air Force.

It may seem trivial to note the passing of a slower mode of life in which news sometimes had to be carried by hand, so to speak.  But the same thing has happened to our lives that has happened to that fifty-year-old plot.  Those who want to know what is going on in the lives of significant others these days can keep up with them almost constantly with no time lag via Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, and there is some concern that excessive indulgence in such things can be an addictive hazard for some people. 

Back in the 1850s, when the electromagnetic telegraph first began to send news around the country at nearly the speed of light, critics worried that life was simply getting too fast and there would be adverse consequences.  Well, whatever the consequences were, we seem to have adapted to them just fine, and in some ways the habit of keeping in constant touch with others via electronic media is perhaps a return to a very primitive way of life.  An anthropologist I read years ago (and have since lost the reference to) noted that in tribal societies, where work such as farming and handicrafts are done in groups, people chat all the time about other people, mostly, and this is the normal way life goes.  So after an industrial interlude of 150 years or so in which workers left the farm for factories and offices where you were expected to deal silently with your job unless it required you to talk, maybe we are using social media and electronics to return to what used to be normal.  At least, some people are. 

Yours truly does not have a Facebook page.  I have never posted an Instagram, or tweeted, or used a hashtag, or any of that other stuff, though my wife keeps me posted on notable doings of people we know who do those things.  I refrain from these modes of communication not out of any principled objection, but mainly because the payoff doesn't seem worth the effort, at least to me.  Blame it on my Y-chromosomes and the fact that males in general, and engineers in particular, often deal more easily with things than with people.  If I'm going to put in an hour or two learning new software, as a result I'd rather be able to analyze plasma spectra, say, as opposed to finding out that some guy I knew in high school has opened a new restaurant.

To those who enjoy social media and the ease of instant global communication, I say:  good for you.  Go ahead and enjoy them in reasonable moderation.  Only be careful not to start World War III.

Sources:  I referred to the Internet Movie Database listing of "The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming" at www.imdb.com.

The Sudden Death of Windows XP

Okay, it wasn't that sudden:  Microsoft announced as long ago as 2012 that, as of April of 2014, it was going to end all support of its creaky but still serviceable Windows XP operating system, so it's not like it happened without warning.  And strictly speaking, computers running Windows XP didn't die on April 8, 2014:  they just became instantly vulnerable to malware, hackers, and others who had been kept somewhat at bay by security upgrades from Microsoft.  As it turns out, this includes well-intentioned network managers such as the ones at my university, who now sniff out any PCs on their network still running Windows XP and simply snip them off the network.  But the whole episode has occasioned some thoughts on planned obsolescence, and how different computer technology is from other kinds of technology.

As it turns out, I have a dog in this fight:  an old Dell laptop in my research lab that runs a number of applications I use in my research, and its operating system is Windows XP.  The applications all run with expensive hardware I have accumulated over the years as funding intermittently became available.  One such item is a high-speed camera that cost about $15K new when I bought it a decade ago with a combination of grant and department money.  Another is a $10K spectrometer that I happened into after I met my department chair in the hall one day, and he asked me if I knew of a good way I could help him spend ten thousand dollars real fast.  The software for these items will not run on anything other than Windows XP, and the laptop is so old I don't think I can upgrade the operating system to Windows 8 in any case.  I have a little grant right now, but I've obligated most of the money toward other items and there's nothing left for software or hardware upgrades. So what's an impoverished researcher to do?

I wasn't the only person caught with my operating system down on April 8, by the way.  One estimate (www.netmarketshare.com) says that about a quarter of all PCs are still running Windows XP here over a month after the drop-dead date, so I'm sure there are millions of computers out there in the same slowly sinking boat that my laptop is in. 

In a lot of ways, the end of XP support resembles the old Y2K scare that those of us old enough to be computer-savvy in 2000 can recall.  Because programmers dealing with the limited memory in mid-20th-century computers didn't always take into account the possibility that their software might still be running on Jan. 1, 2000, they sometimes wrote dates in a way that would make the software bomb if you tried to keep them running past Dec. 31, 1999.  Fortunately, the turn of the century was highly predictable, and despite certain fringe elements who predicted a digital Armageddon, nearly all software had been successfully upgraded by New Year's Day on 2000, and the big Y2K scare turned out to be a bust.

Similarly, judging from the cricket-filled silence on the Internet concerning any dire consequences of the end of XP support after April 8, I think things have not turned out to be as bad as some people thought.  Still, I can't connect my PC laptop to the internet without getting it squelched by IT support now, and if anything goes wrong with any of the software or hardware it runs, I may find myself up a creek.

Those involved in the computer and software industries rarely think in terms of indefinitely lengthy stretches of time, although I will give Microsoft credit for announcing the end of XP support so far in advance, and sticking to their commitment.  Every design of an engineered product is an act of faith:  the designer rarely knows exactly who will use the design, how they will benefit, or how long the design will be useful.  The business model of software companies is a constant scramble to issue upgrades and new products, and in a competitive global economy, it can't very well be otherwise.  But in the rare cases that a thing shows unexpected fruitful longevity, it seems that there is a kind of nobility or merit attached to that fact that most engineers rarely recognize, having been trained in the philosophy of "old = bad, new = good" from their college days. 

I recall the story of a mechanical animation stand and camera that begin its existence back in the 1920s, and was used to make some of the earliest animated cartoons.  The same stand was still in use in the late 1990s for commercial film production, because the mechanical standards of 35-mm film had not changed in all that time. 

Animation stands are junk now, rendered that way by the advent of computer-generated images (CGI).  And motion-picture production companies that have switched to all-digital production find that it costs them a bundle simply to keep a movie on the shelf, because all the software and memory standards associated with the huge pile of digital information that goes into the movie are constantly changing, and it's a full-time job for several people just to make sure that the movie is still in shape to be played from month to month.  It brings to mind the words of the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's story Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There:  "Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.  If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Those who have the resources to run twice as fast have long since upgraded their old PCs (or not so old PCs) to Windows 7 or 8 or 13 or whatever the latest version is, and will continue to keep up with the times.  And those of us who haven't, will just have to deal with the situation any way we can. 

Sources:  The online journal Computerworld carried a debate as long ago as December 2012 at http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9234316/Experts_question_Microsoft_s_decision_to_retire_XP in which experts differed as to whether Microsoft would really stick to their announced deadline, as they in fact did.  Some good advice to those who can't afford upgrading from Windows XP appeared in PC Pro's online edition at

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/387022/what-to-do-if-you-re-still-on-windows-xp-should-i-upgrade-from-windows-xp.  The statistic about the percentage of PCs running Windows XP is available at http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx.

West One Year Later: Will It Happen Again?

On April 22, the U. S. Chemical Safety Board held a news conference to present its recommendations about how to prevent another disaster such as the one in West, Texas that killed fifteen, injured over 200, and caused millions of dollars of property damage on April 17, 2013.  So far, not a lot has changed in terms of federal or state regulations pertaining to ammonium nitrate, the fertilizer chemical that exploded on that fateful day.  But a fertilizer trade organization has issued a set of recommendations that, if followed, will go some distance toward reducing the chances that another disastrous accident involving the chemical will happen again.

As long ago as 2002, the Chemical Safety Board recommended that ammonium nitrate be included in OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and EPA (Environmental Protection Administration) regulatory programs, but these agencies have not yet chosen to act on these recommendations.  Ammonium nitrate falls in a gray area between chemicals such as nitroglycerin or TNT that are clearly dangerous, and others such as sand that are harmless.  Under most circumstances, ammonium nitrate can be handled with little or no risk.  But under certain combinations of heat, pressure, and/or shock, the chemical detonates, transforming many tons of solid matter into hot gases that expand explosively, as they did in West. 

In response to the West accident a trade organization called The Fertilizer Institute issued a fourteen-page booklet to its members last February with the title "Safety and Security Guidelines for the Storage and Transportation of Fertilizer Grade Ammonium Nitrate at Fertilizer Retail Facilities."  The title does not promise exciting reading, though the legalese and lengthy definitions of different types of ammonium-nitrate fertilizer are enlivened by color photos of fertilizer manufacturing and handling installations.  The pamphlet summarizes most of the precautions which, if followed, would have gone a long way toward preventing the West disaster. 

These measures fall into two categories: (1) ways to prevent ammonium nitrate from exploding in the first place, and (2) ways to avert death and destruction if a fire breaks out where ammonium nitrate is stored, and the stuff explodes anyway.  The prevention measures are more or less what you'd expect:  things like storing the material in non-combustible bins, rather than wooden ones as were used in the West firm; installing sprinkler systems or other fire-prevention and fire-fighting facilities; and treating places where ammonium nitrate is stored like flammable-material storage areas (no-smoking signs, no sparks or flames nearby, etc.).  Because an exact cause of the fire at West that led to the explosion may never be found, we cannot know for certain if these precautions would have prevented the tragedy.  But obviously, they are good things to do, and if fertilizer retailers around the country follow these prevention guidelines, the chances of another such accident will be reduced.

The second category of recommendations is more problematic.  It involves informing the wider community, including first-responder agencies, that ammonium nitrate is stored in the facility and should be treated with extra caution.  By the nature of the business, many fertilizer retailers are located in semi-rural or thinly populated areas.  These locales are often served by volunteer fire departments, and while volunteer firemen theoretically should be trained as well as full-time paid firefighters, the reality is that their training may be on the sketchy side.   The Chemical Safety Board concluded that the first responders in West did not know of the dangers presented by the large quantity of ammonium nitrate stored at the plant where they responded to what appeared at first to be an ordinary fire, and were much too close for safety.  Consequently, when the plant exploded, most of the people who died were firefighters.  The guidance handbook says "The rule of thumb is if outside emergency responders are necessary, do not fight AN [ammonium nitrate] fires.  For fires that have engaged AN, plans should focus on evacuation of the area."  In other words: don't fight, run. 

While the trade-association brochure's advice is good, it has no legal standing, and firms are free to adopt its recommendations or ignore them.  Simply as a matter of asset protection, I would hope that fertilizer retailers who sell ammonium nitrate are at least considering an upgrade of unsafe storage facilities, and the brochure provides good guidelines as to how to carry this out.  However, the informational side of the recommendations may be harder to implement.  A business owner may feel some reluctance in volunteering the information to local authorities that his facility harbors material that might reduce a wide swath of his neighborhood to rubble.  Nevertheless, there may be courageous and conscientious owners who will do such things. 

Both the Chemical Safety Board and various other authorities have called for tighter compulsory regulation of ammonium nitrate storage and transportation.  This is a political as well as a technical and ethical matter, and politics these days tends to go to polarized extremes.  On the one hand are those who favor centralized uniform federal regulations for all sorts of things, including ammonium nitrate.  On the other hand, a prominent plank in the Tea Party platform is the idea that government regulations have gone too far and are stifling free enterprise and economic growth.  The regulations contemplated with regard to ammonium nitrate vary from rules about how the stuff is stored to rules about notification and training of local first responders.  It seems to me that sensible regulations requiring the exchange of information, perhaps implemented by some sort of web-based registry, would be the least costly way to make sure that at a minimum, any firefighters responding to an ammonium-nitrate fire would know what they are dealing with and would take appropriate precautions. 

One way of dealing with this information problem is by the use of fire codes.  However, the state of Texas has a strong history of anti-regulatory bias.  In fact, counties with low population density in Texas are actually prohibited by state law from enacting fire codes at all.  So around July and December, you see roadside fireworks stands popping up for a few weeks with nary a concern for any safety beyond the immediate self-preservation of the owners in case a customer drops a burning cigarette. 

So far, the only concrete public action toward preventing more ammonium-nitrate fertilizer disasters has been the Fertilizer Institute's brochure.  While they deserve credit for their efforts, only time will tell whether enough has changed to keep another fertilizer plant from blowing up, or to save lives if it does.

Sources:  The news conference in Dallas on Apr. 22, 2014 held by the Chemical Safety Board was summarized by a UPI report at http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2014/04/22/US-investigators-Better-regulation-could-have-prevented-deadly-fertilizer-explosion/4731398190424/.  The Chemical Safety Board's own statements at the conference can be downloaded at http://www.csb.gov/assets/1/16/Statement_-_News_Conference_(Final).pdf.  The Fertilizer Institute recommendations can be found at http://www.tfi.org/ammonium_nitrate_guidelines.  And I blogged on the West explosion previously on Apr. 22 and May 20, 2013.

Digital Clones: Coming To a Hologram Near You

When you see the face of a familiar actor on screen, you probably assume that somewhere, some time, the actual human being presented to you via technology was really in a studio in front of a camera, speaking the lines you hear.  It is only when we remember that motion pictures are designed to produce illusions that we realize the words we hear may be another actor's voice-over, the background may be green-screened in, and even the actor's face could have been digitally retouched, or even created from scratch with sophisticated software.  Thinking about these things distracts from the enjoyment of the movie, so usually we don't.  But if you saw a person looking, moving, and sounding exactly like Humphrey Bogart acting in a movie made in 2015, say, it would be hard to ignore the little detail that Bogart died in 1957.  

The 1994 film "Forrest Gump" digitally placed the live actor Tom Hanks in archival footage of famous deceased persons such as John F. Kennedy, but what I'm talking about is the reverse:  hauling John F. Kennedy out of the grave to make him play a role in, say, a new Judd Apatow comedy.  And here's where we get into some ethical qualms.

In a recent New Yorker article, the digital exploits of University of Southern California computer scientist Paul Debevec are described, from his early work reverse-aging Brad Pitt in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (2008) to his current attempts to preserve holographic versions of Holocaust survivors for use in a permanent museum display.  If the latter project is successful, visitors will be able to pose questions and a three-dimensional representation of the person, accurate down to such details as shadows that fall naturally according to the room lighting prevailing at the time, will answer the questions via artificial-intelligence technology.  In effect, Debevec will have resurrected the dead, although to a strictly circumscribed sort of life.

           

For the last few decades, progress in digitally-enabled technologies that initially depend on huge amounts of computer processing have followed a consistent path.  First, a new technique is developed at great expense, often paid for by the military or government agencies, and demonstrated in a limited way.  Next comes commercialization, with large institutions and corporations being first in line to use it.  And finally, advances in hardware and software lower the cost enough to make it affordable to a reasonably large number of average citizens.  Debevec fully intends for his super-accurate simulation and illumination technology to follow this well-worn path, so we ought to give at least a little consideration to its ethical implications.

The fact that Debevec is labeled a scientist obscures the reality of what he is doing when he takes Angelina Jolie's picture from hundreds of different angles to make a digital clone of her to perform a film stunt too dangerous for stunt doubles to do:  he is being an artist.  And the ethical rules for artists doing art are different from the rules for scientists doing science.  From what little I know about the way art is regarded in Western cultures today, there aren't any ethical rules that are generally observed, unless you count legal strictures such as bans on child pornography and copyright laws.  I suspect if Judd Apatow tried to make a digital clone of John F. Kennedy to do the kind of disreputable things that actors in his films typically do, he might hear from the Kennedy estate via a process server.  But the legal treatment of public figures differs from the way the rights of a private citizen are treated.  Courts have held that as long as the image of a public figure is not being used for commercial exploitation, it is okay to portray it in a work of art.  After death, a person's estate can still control the use of the person's image for commercial purposes, and this would undoubtedly include a Debevec-style holographic image.  So when Debevec was asked if he had considered resurrecting Marilyn Monroe, for instance, he said that Monroe's estate was unwilling, and so he dropped the idea.

On the other hand, when ConAgra, the firm that makes Orville Redenbacher popcorn, approached Debevec to simulate the recently deceased popcorn king for a TV commercial, Debevec readily agreed.  So, two years after Redenbacher died in 2005, viewers saw a digital version of Redenbacher, still promoting his popcorn.  But when critics started referring to "Orville Deadenbacher, the popcorn zombie" the ad disappeared.  This was not a violation of ethics so much as it was a violation of good taste, and I'm not talking about popcorn.

Highly realistic holographic images of people, alive or dead, are simply the latest advance in a sequence that began 40,000 years ago, when someone blew paint through a stencil onto the wall of the Cave of El Castillo in northern Spain to form the earliest known cave paintings.  Sculpture, portraits in oils, photography, motion pictures, and CGI (computer-generated images) followed, and it is only our inordinate addiction to novelty that makes us think there is something fundamentally different in Debevec's hyper-realistic representations of the human form.  Art is one of the most notable activities that separates humans—the only rational animal—from other animals, and the fact that Debevec's form of art involves rationality of a scientific and technological kind does not make it any less an art form.  And art can be put to both the holiest and the most debauched of uses. 

As our power to create increasingly realistic-looking digital human forms grows and the technology to do this spreads, we can only hope that artists will rediscover that truth, beauty, and goodness are their true subjects.  Most of the art world refuses to acknowledge this fact, which is the real basis for the ethics of art.  But no amount of technological advance will change that situation.  That change cannot take place in server rooms, or in the theories of computer scientists.  That change can take place only in the heart.

Sources:  The article "Pixel Perfect: the scientist behind the digital cloning of actors" appeared in The New Yorker's Apr. 28, 2014 issue on pp. 32-38. I referred to http://www.onlineartrights.org/issues/depictions-real-people/depictions-real-people, and the Wikipedia articles on Orville Redenbacher and cave painting.

Internet Porn and Children: The Body And the Soul

David Cameron, the United Kingdom's Prime Minister, not only thinks porn is bad for children—he's done something about it.  After calling in a speech last year for a change in online access to adult sites in the UK from "opt-out" to "opt-in", most internet providers were persuaded by Cameron's government to make porn-blocking filters the default option for their customers.  After the change, if an account holder wants to view such sites he or she must actively set the account option to do so.  In promoting this initiative, Cameron's goal was, as he put it, "protecting innocence, protecting childhood itself."   But what I want to ask is, exactly what is the harm that this initiative protects against?

Your opinion of how pornography can harm children will depend on what you think children are. 

If you believe children are simply economic units that consume for their early years, and then become units of productivity for their adult years, then you will naturally look to scientific surveys of objective measures of harm such as increases in teen pregnancies, evidence of social pathologies such as sex crimes, and so on.  This is the view that New York Times business writer David Segal took when he wrote a riff on Cameron's action called "Does Porn Hurt Children?"  After interviewing experts who did meta-studies of more than 200 social-science papers examining the question, he concluded that if there is any harm, it's hard to identify.  There were slight statistical increases in some measures, but nothing that could be called a smoking gun.  The only time he mentioned ethics in the article was when he decried the fact that the ideal scientific study of the effects of porn on children could not be done for ethical reasons.  It would be unethical, he said, to find a sample of children who had never seen porn, and then give them a strong dose of it over a period of months and measure its effects as compared with a control group whose innocence was preserved.

But what if you believe children are immortal souls whose eternal destiny may be affected by things they see?  And what if you believe the words of Jesus, who, after calling a child to him, and telling his disciples that they must become as little children to enter his kingdom, said ". . . whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea"?  In other words, it's better to die a quick and certain death than to run a porn website that children can view. 

We seem to have a difference of opinion here.  On the one hand is a materialist view that looks to scientific studies as the ultimate authority on whether porn harms children in objective, measureable ways.  On the other hand is a view that there is something special about children, an attitude or state of mind that we generally call "innocence", and that doing anything to damage that innocence is a worse thing than death by drowning.

Sociologists and psychologists don't have much to say about innocence, and even less to say about the soul.  William James, brother of the novelist Henry James and one of the founders of modern scientific psychology, famously dispensed with the soul, saying that if there was such a thing, it was incapable of being detected or measured scientifically.  For a picture of innocence, one could turn instead to the Christian eighteenth-century poet William Blake, whose Songs of Innocence contrast with his Songs of Experience.  Blake is a puzzle for modern readers, because he combines what for his time was a shocking frankness about sexuality (many of his hand-illustrated poems depict nude figures) and a total lack of what might be called pornographic intent, that is hard to comprehend today. 

As one of the leading spokesmen of the Romantic movement, Blake opposed the Industrial Revolution and the new scientific, rational mode of thought that was sweeping the intellectual world around 1800.  After two centuries of its dominance, we have a lot of trouble trying to think in any other way.  But even Segal encountered hints that there is another way of viewing children besides the scientific one.  Many scientists he talked with prefaced their remarks with comments like, "Don't portray me as endorsing pornography" or "I don't want my kids watching this stuff."  And he described an interesting event in which a group of teenagers were divided into two panels.  One panel was to argue in favor of the idea that pornography affected them, and the other was to argue that it didn't.  The pro-impact panel waxed eloquent about how pornography negatively affected their views of what sex should be like, and tempted them to go out and try some of the pornographic acts they'd seen.  By contrast, the no-impact group ran out of things to say after two minutes. 

It has been argued that the widespread availability of internet porn has damaged or destroyed what should be one of the strongest bonds between a married couple:  the channeling of a man's sexual desire into fulfillment exclusively by his wife, and vice-versa.  True, this is an ideal, not always realized for long, if at all, in some marriages.  But the fact that an ideal is not always realized does not make it any less of an ideal.  And the competition women feel between their own appearance and the fictional airbrushed images online may explain why so many young women obsess about their looks and are generally unhappy with them, no matter how attractive they are.

           

So I applaud Cameron's move toward restricting internet porn access in the UK, and wish we could do something similar here, though our federal system and fragmented regulatory structure makes such a move much more difficult in the U. S.  But for sure, nothing much will happen about protecting children from internet porn if the only authorities we listen to are scientific ones. 

Sources:  David Segal's article "Does Porn Hurt Children?" appeared on Mar. 29, 2014 at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/29/sunday-review/does-porn-hurt-children.html.  David Cameron's speech before Britain's National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children calling for the change to opt-in for internet porn is at

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-internet-and-pornography-prime-minister-calls-for-action.  The quotation from Jesus is from the English Standard Version of the Bible, Matthew 18:6.