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:

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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.

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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.

Rising Expectations and Engineering Ethics

Most engineering is carried out in a context of complex global economic and social interactions that share certain underlying assumptions. One of these assumptions is that progress is something like a metaphysical necessity, without which great sectors of the technical economy would dry up and blow away. Why is this, and is it an assumption that should be questioned?

First we should say what we mean by "progress." Progress implies a goal, or at least a desirable direction, and a way to measure movement in that direction. For a simple example, take the memory capacity of flash drives, the little pen-size USB-connected memory sticks that have become ubiquitous in the last four or five years. I think the first one I bought had a capacity of 512 megabytes and cost somewhere around fifty bucks, but I doubt if you can even buy one so small today. Now, a few years later, you can get 16-GB (gigabyte) drives, a factor of 32 larger, for only $27, and next year I expect the price of those will drop and new ones with even more capacity will come along. In this case, progress is easy to measure. Everybody agrees that having more memory on a single flash drive is better, assuming there are no compensating disadvantages such as slower access time, etc. So other things being equal, people will want to buy a drive with more memory over one with less, and the price structure of the market reflects this.

There's nothing automatic or inevitable about the rising memory capacity of flash drives. It's part of a great "roadmap" that the semiconductor industry has planned for many years, a kind of coordinated progress chart that guides research and development, plant investment, and related matters. As long as the underlying physics allows improvements, chip makers will continue to pile more transistors onto each square millimeter, and the memory capacity or processing capabilities of the chips will rise. And the same thing is true of many other technical fields, from software to medical equipment to transportation.

It was economist Joseph Schumpeter who coined the phrase "creative destruction" to describe the way entrepreneurial capitalism constantly developed new products and services that essentially destroyed the markets for previous ones. If Company B can make a 16-GB flash drive and sell it for $27, but Company A can make only 4-GB units that cost them $40 each to make, Company A is out of luck. It has to change or die, and in most of the productive sectors of the economy, change is the rule.

From the consumer's perspective, creative destruction leads to rising expectations: the idea that next year's product will either deliver better performance for the same price, or a lower price for the same performance. In fields where this can truly happen, such as computer hardware and software, this expectation is a reasonable one. But it can lead to a kind of overgeneralization problem, an expectation that since software gets better every year (or at least more complicated), every other product ought to get better too. While great strides have taken place in the application of technology to medicine, for example, I sometimes wonder if we ask more of medical technology than it can deliver. And if we do, especially in the United States, that may explain why our health-care costs are such a large fraction of our total gross domestic product.

From an individual engineer's perspective, creative destruction leads to a kind of employent instability or instant obsolescence that is hard to avoid. Last June, a company in Austin called Silicon Laboratories announced the development of a TV tuner on a chip. Despite the integration of every other part of a digital TV, until recently the "front end" that dealt with the wideband RF signals to be demodulated took the form of a tuner "can" of hand-assembled coils, capacitors, and other components. These tuners were expensive and bulky, but the problems of designing a TV tuner in a CMOS IC were too daunting until a team of about fifteen engineers met the challenge and succeeded. I recently saw a photo of the team, and judging by their faces, not one of the engineers was much over 40. Nobody had gray hair, but a few were bald. To an old geezer like me (I turned 56 last week), this says that certain engineering activities are practically limited to younger engineers who are conversant with technologies and approaches that are generally too hard to master if you are older. I'm sure there are some conventional "can" TV tuner engineers out there who see the handwriting on the wall, or the Silicon Labs chip in the catalog, and are wondering what they'll do next.

Despite the problems this assumption of progress may cause, I'm not sure there's a viable alternative. The grand (and deadly) experiment of managed economies in the old Soviet Union and China showed that market forces are pretty necessary if you are going to have a thriving, up-to-date economy that doesn't limit freedom in a profound way. The few remaining little pockets of traditional Communism around the world (mainly North Korea and Cuba) show by contrast what a dismal thing it is to "freeze" an economy by legal fiat. On a small scale, communities such as the Amish and Mennonites have shown that an organized and thoughtful limitation of new technology is consistent with what appears to be a fruitful, if circumscribed, way of life, although such communities are sort of parasites on the larger unrestricted economy that surrounds them. That is to say, if some bizarre tragedy occurred and killed everybody in the world outside the few Amish and Mennonite communities in the U. S., they would have a much harder time surviving on their own, although they might stand a better chance than the rest of us.

So on balance, it looks like rising expectations and creative destruction are things that we'll have with us for a long time. They are the economic engines that drive many industries, and while we should never take the assumption of progress for granted, we should acknowledge the good it has done.

Sources: I consulted the Wikipedia article on creative destruction. A news release from Silicon Laboratories describing their TV-tuner chip can be found at http://news.silabs.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=4600.

Gold Farming: Not Just a Game

It might have been Isaac Asimov who was once asked in an interview about the future of the job market, and how advances in computing might lead to technological unemployment. (I'd check the quote but my internet modem died yesterday, and all I'll have time to do today is upload this column without any time for online research.) His reply was interesting. He said not only did he believe technological unemployment would not be a problem, but if you looked at the job market ten years from now, many of the jobs people would be doing wouldn't even have names today. They simply didn't exist yet.

I can't think of a better example of this right now than the weird service industry called "gold farming," a byproduct of the rapid expansion of massively multi-player online role-playing games that occurred over the last fifteen years or so. Next month's issue of Scientific American carries a good article describing the rise of this business, which I must admit was news to me, since I am of a generation to whom online role-playing games are as unfamiliar as writing Sanskrit.

It turns out that in many of these games, which millions of people play all around the world now, the designers have seen fit to introduce a medium of exchange, which in World of Warcraft, for instance, is called "gold." Like real money, you can both earn it and spend it. The ways to earn it tend to be pretty boring, much like real life: working in a "mine," cutting "timber," and "killing monsters." (The last one might not be so boring, but still you might get tired of it after a while.) You can spend it on things like medicine to "heal" your "wounds" or "improvements" to your "spaceship." You get the idea: in the shared mental universe of the game, online gold has as real a value as anything else in the game. Only its value transfers to the real world, and players are willing to pay real dollars, yuan, or whatever to get online gold. And as any good economist will tell you, enough demand on the part of enough people will create a market and a supply.

So it turns out that in China, especially, there are rooms full of low-paid service workers "playing" (the quotes now mean it's really working) games with the sole purpose of accumulating gold to sell, usually in online markets separate from the game itself. The game operators and designers try to discourage this sort of thing, but like most online gray markets (e. g. international online gambling), enforcement of a prohibition like that is difficult or impossible.

In absolute terms, this is not a huge market. Although estimates are hard to come by, numbers range from $200 million to $3 billion annually traded in online value. But depending on what happens with virtual worlds, it is an industry that could get a lot bigger in the future.

Ethically speaking, the whole business is under a cloud since the game companies see gold farming as a gross misuse of their service. I suppose it's a little like ticket-scalping, in the sense that gold farming is a purely parasitic activity that would vanish if its host went away. Just as different organizations take different views of ticket-scalpers who resell legitimately purchased tickets despite laws that sometimes make it illegal, you'd think that some game companies would figure out a way to join the farmers instead of fighting them. Why not just make it a part of the game and set up your own online store? The game companies would be at an advantage since they sit at the controls that make the gold in the first place—they wouldn't need to pay roomfuls of people to make gold, it would just come out of the store, like Uncle Sam makes dollar bills. Which of course could lead to online hyperinflation, and a whole nest of other economic nasties.

The reason they don't do this, I suppose, is that they don't want to undercut or short-circuit the whole reason for playing online games in the first place, which is to demonstrate some kind of skill or prowess in front of other real human beings, however disguised. And there is a kind of pretense or implied fraud committed by a person who has purchased a new spaceship or sexy avatar or what have you, with real money instead of earning it in the "proper" way (I promise that's the last pair of quotation marks I will use in this piece.). There is a kind of ethics of gamesmanship or sportsmanship, and in that sense, buying online gold in the real economy is not unrelated to an athlete taking steroids. In both cases, you have people abusing technology to achieve goals in a way that is not admissible under the rules of the game. But some people go ahead and do it anyway.

Well, I've rambled on for eight hundred words without solving the problem of gold farming. Like many other ethical problems, what you think about it depends on your point of view. From the viewpoint of a former real farmer in China, sitting inside and typing all day for what looks to him like good, reliable pay is a step up in the world, never mind that it's against the rules of some company in some country he's never visited. And a truly effective way to do away with gold farming would put all these folks out of work, at least until the next technological job we don't have a name for yet came along. Maybe I'm just the wrong person to consider this subject. The end of yet another year next week reminds me that our time in this real world is finite, and I prefer to spend it dealing with real people in person most of the time, rather than getting dressed up as some screwy avatar and going around doing things I'd never do in real life, or even consider doing. But that's just me.

Sources: The January 2010 issue of Scientific American carries the article "Real Money from Virtual Worlds" by Richard Heeks, pp. 68-73.

The EPA's New CO2 Teeth

The U. S. Environmental Protection Agency has just got itself a new pair of choppers. It did this last week (Dec. 7, to be exact) by finding that greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as carbon dioxide, in the EPA's own words, "threaten the public health and welfare of the American people." Their reasoning is that if we keep emitting GHGs at the current rate, we will contribute to the apocalyptic disaster of global warming that many nations of the world are currently talking about in Copenhagen. And admittedly, if Manhattan turned into a scuba-divers-only tour and the entire Midwest became a North American version of the Sahara, you could argue that the public health and welfare of the American people was threatened, to say the least. But there is more to the story than that.

Why does just finding this officially give the EPA sweeping new powers? Because in 2007, the U. S. Supreme Court found that GHGs fit within the Clean Air Act's definition of air pollutants. In calling these findings "long overdue," EPA head Lisa Jackson managed to get in an indirect swipe at the Bush Administration, which quite reasonably refused to rush out a bunch of new regulations following the Supreme Court ruling. What does this latest EPA action mean for industries and consumers who depend on engineered products such as gasoline and automobiles?

Potentially, a lot. Earlier in the fall, the EPA announced a new set of fuel-economy standards it was hoping to implement, once it figured out if GHGs were really a threat. Now that it has done that, there's nothing other than Congress to stand in the way of the EPA implementing those standards. Briefly, they ramp up the light-duty vehicle average fleet fuel economy from about 30 MPG to over 35 MPG by 2014. Something bad will happen to any automaker whose fleet doesn't meet these standards. There are other ways of meeting these standards besides raising fuel economy, but they are things like increasing the number of all-electric vehicles in the fleet, which is even harder than making cars that guzzle less gas.

In times of low to moderate fuel prices, the American consumer has historically shown little interest in fuel-efficient cars. But if the EPA has its way, Mr. Consumer will buy fuel-efficient vehicles or go without. I drive a Honda Civic that gets just about 35 MPG, and I like it. But some people have large families or other valid, non-environmentally-hostile reasons for needing a bigger vehicle that gets fewer miles per gallon. To me, it is a restriction of freedom to tell these people that they simply can't get what they need, or if they do, there better not be very many of them because the automakers can't make that many gas-guzzlers without making an equal number of toy cars that get 50 MPG or something. The whole thing becomes a headache, and starts reminding me of old stories out of the former Soviet Union.

Forgive me if I've told this one before, but it's supposedly true. After the Revolution of 1917, a bureaucrat was put in charge of nail production. His job was to figure out how to set the goal for nail factories. So he decided to make them produce X number of nails per year, and sent out telegrams to all the factories with the order.

Only a couple of months later, he got back telegrams reporting compliance with his order—somehow the factories had fulfilled their entire year's quota in only a few weeks. This pleased him greatly. Then he started hearing rumors on the street that all was not well at hardware stores. Going to a nearby store, he found that the only nails you could get were tacks and finishing nails—in other words, the smallest nails the factories could make and still call them nails.

Well, he knew how to fix that. He went back to his office in the Kremlin and sent out another telegram revoking the first order, and setting the new quota in terms of pounds of nails. You can imagine what happened next. Pretty soon he went to the hardware store and found the only kind of nail you could buy were giant spikes weight a couple of kilograms each.

I never found out how the bureaucrat solved his nail problem, but the point is clear. When the free-market mechanism of prices and supply in response to prices is replaced by any kind of government-imposed regulation, things tend to get out of whack, and the wants and even needs of consumers tend to go by the wayside. The right to drive a big gas-hungry car is not enshrined as such in the Constitution, but the right of property is. And if the EPA starts biting the industry which helps make Texas the largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the nation—the oil-refining industry—it may effectively render this multi-billion-dollar investment worthless, and drive refining offshore to countries whose regulations are less hostile to industry, but whose governments may be more hostile to us—Venezuela, for instance. How would you like our gasoline supply to depend on whether Hugo Chavez got up on the right side of his bed this morning? That seems to be a "threat to the public health and welfare of the American public" that takes precedence over some longer-term, uncertain, and politically charged issue which in any case could turn out to be a waste of our effort if the other countries of the world don't regulate GHGs as strenuously as we do. And China and India have so far shown very little inclination to get serious about it.

Before we wreck our economy in order to help fix something that others may break anyway (if it breaks at all), I hope the Congress will take a second look at what the EPA is doing and have a spell of calm reasonableness, which will allow them to restrain that agency from doing serious and perhaps irrevocable harm to the U. S. economy. But their recent performance does not encourage me in this hope.

Sources: The EPA's own news release on its finding is at http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/0/08D11A451131BCA585257685005BF252. A Wall Street Journal article describing some industries' reaction to the finding is at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126020179812780059.html. The Dec. 21, 2009 issue of National Review (p. 40) carries an excellent article "Priceless is Worthless" by Kevin D. Williamson on how necessary prices are to the proper functioning of any important sector of the economy. And I blogged on the EPA's proposed finding last Apr. 20, 2009 when they announced it for public comments, 380,000 of which did not dissuade the agency from going ahead anyway.

Power to the Television: California's Challenge

California likes to think of itself as leading the nation in various progressive measures such as environmental consciousness. Last Nov. 18, the California legislature passed a law that will require all televisions sold in the state to comply with increasingly restrictive regulations on power consumption. By 2013, new TVs sold in that state will have to use only about half the power they do now, on average.

Why single out TVs for power-consumption laws? For one thing, the big flat-screen devices that have chased the old cathode-ray tube models out to the garbage dump (which is another environmental issue we won't go into right now) tend to use a lot more power than all but the largest older-style TVs. Of course, those with long enough memories can recall the really old days of early vacuum-tube color televisions. The first guy in our neighborhood to buy a color TV bought his about 1964. He had it installed in a wall in his living room, and the thirty or so tubes generated so much heat it had to have its own cooling fan. Transistors improved this situation drastically, but when large-screen flat-panel liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) and especially plasma displays were introduced, the power required went back up to what it was in the pre-transistor days. For example, a 65-inch plasma unit (the Panasonic TC-P65S1), even though it is "Energy-Star qualified" (a voluntary industry rating), takes as much as 700 watts from the wall socket, although its average power consumption is a more modest 360 watts. Still, that's like running six 60-watt bulbs all the time, or a dozen energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs.

Should California do this? Or is it an unfair intrusion of government into private enterprise's business?

Manufacturers are unhappy about it for two reasons. One, if they do nothing and keep making some energy-hungry models, they won't be able to sell them in California, which by some estimates is a tenth of the 35-million-unit annual TV market in the U. S. Two, if they bite the bullet and redesign their TVs to use less power, they spend engineering capital on a feature that isn't all that attractive to the consumer—capital they could otherwise use for developing new features or improving the product in other ways.

But efficiency is such a reigning watchword in engineering that I expect the power consumption average would have come down on its own sooner or later, if not quite as fast as it would have if California hadn't shoved its oar in. Already many models meet the new standards, which shows that the lawmakers are not flying in the face of physical reality, which some regulations do. Which reminds me of a cautionary tale.

Over Thanksgiving, I was talking with my brother-in-law, who works for one of the largest privately-held refining companies in the U. S. He told me the story of some new diesel-fuel regulations that require refiners to blend in 10% biodiesel with all the diesel they sell. This is fine, he said, except that biodiesel tends to wax up at a very high temperature compared to ordinary diesel fuel. At a meeting with the new Obama-administration regulators, his engineers mixed up a batch of diesel according to the new regulations and put it in a cooler to simulate typical January weather in Minnesota. When they pulled it out of the cooler at the meeting and passed it around, it was a cloudy, jelly-like mess, which would run a diesel engine about as well as a tankful of Jell-O. They asked the regulators what they should do about it. "You'll be having to replace a lot of fuel filters," they said. In other words, it's not our problem, it's yours. His company eventually found a workaround that involved asking retailers to do some mixing on their own, but if they forget, their customers end up with jelly in their tanks and the whole situation is not a happy one at all.

Compared to that, the California regulations are mild and well within reason. As LCD technology improves, the plasma screen may go the way of the vacuum tube in any event. It is an inherently less efficient technology, and the only reason it's out there at all, that I can see, is because it was easier to make large plasma displays a few years ago than it was to make LCD displays of equal resolution. And as LED light sources become more efficient, that efficiency bonus will be available to the flat-panel makers, and things will tend to improve in the efficiency department almost naturally. There is a huge incentive to make efficient displays for battery-powered devices anyway, and a lot of that technology can be adopted by the plug-in-device manufacturers without a lot of trouble.

My own feeling of what the best thing is to do about TV power consumption, is to turn the durn thing off, but that's just me.

Sources: A good summary of the California regulation and its effects can be found in the Washington Post online edition for Nov. 27 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/26/AR2009112602164.html.

Engineers, Scientists, Climate Change, and Politics

A little over a week ago, according to the New York Times, someone posted a large number of emails and other internal correspondence that the University of East Anglia said was stolen from their computer systems. What makes this important news is that the material shows the inner workings of the university's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), a leading research center that advises the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC, in turn, has largely taken the lead in convincing the rest of the world that global warming is the issue of our times upon which the fate of the world turns. Or at least that's the way their outlook seems to me.

I have not examined the emails in detail, and so will not try to make a judgement on what some sources allege is a cavalier and even conspiratorial attitude the emails reveal, on the part of the CRU's leading climate scientists, to stifle papers written by researchers who oppose the idea that global warming is as serious or severe as the CRU claims. Rather, I'd like to ask the question: what are the roles of engineers and engineering organizations in a situation so fraught with politics and uncertainty as the controversy surrounding global warming?

First, there is the nature of the issue itself. We had next to no idea about what prehistoric climates were like until the last three or four decades, when techniques of ice-core measurements at the South Pole and similar methods began to enable us to reconstruct. with impressive detail, the temperatures and carbon dioxide content of ancient atmospheres. The story these data tell is a complex one, and gives us no direct information about what will happen next. The earth has been considerably warmer in the past than it is now, and certainly much colder. There is more carbon dioxide in the air now because of anthropogenic causes than there ever was before. But the more you try to pin down climatologists as to exactly what is going to happen when, and the farther into the future you go in your request for forecasts, the fuzzier and less certain the answers get. This is just the nature of trying to forecast a strictly chaotic system, which is what the global climate is. Chaotic systems always operate within certain broad boundaries, but they can produce short excursions beyond those boundaries and predicting exactly when these extremes occur is next to impossible. Only in this case, "short" may mean a century.

So the scientific problem itself is fraught with uncertainty, since it is in the class of problems that cannot be exhaustively explored either in the laboratory or with a computer. Unfortunately, since it involves the whole world, the playing out of the problem in real time will involve us all to some degree, so it combines intractibility with universality. A worse situation for the application of engineering design and prediction techniques could hardly be devised.

But if (and that is a big "if") global warming really is the crisis of our times, engineers are at least partly responsible for getting us into the difficulty. What is their responsibility in getting us out again?

There seem to be two distinct schools of thought on how to answer that question. The first school, favored by the IPCC and its political allies, says basically that modern industrial society has been a bad boy and needs to go sit in a corner for a timeout. The timeout consists of throwing over most of the fossil-fuel infrastructure and drastically restricting energy use (by governmental fiat, since free-market economics won't do the job) until we can retool our lives to live with a much smaller "carbon footprint." Doing all this would fit into the ambit of engineering, which is the application of science and technology to the wants and needs of man. But the wants and needs in this first course of action would be artificially imposed, for the most part, by a small elite who have convinced themselves that they are averting global disaster by exerting a form of political control over the vast unwashed multitudes, which will otherwise plunge themselves like lemmings into the rising seas caused by unchecked global warming.

The second school of thought, which is not discussed much in the circles frequented by the IPCC and its friends, takes the attitude that, well, if global warming's going to happen and we've got all this carbon dioxide in the air already, let's see what we can do to deal with the consequences. There are proposals to spray sulfur-dioxide particles in the air to produce global cooling that would counteract the global warming we are trying to avoid. And there are the thousand-and-one adaptations to whatever circumstances global warming will produce, from rising sea levels to changed weather patterns, which in the nature of things people would come up with one by one. If South Pacific islands slowly disappear and coastlines change, people aren't passive sheep. They won't just sit at the dinner table while the waters rise over their heads. They will move to higher ground, and complain, and the poorest will suffer the most in many cases, which is too bad. But global warming might not be the unqualified ill wind it is advertised by the IPCC to be. It might actually blow some good somewhere. This second school of thought takes a positive view of humanity's ingenuity and adaptability, which can turn what looks initially like a bad situation to advantage.

In case you haven't figured it out, I belong to the second school of thought. If indeed the leading climatologists at the University of East Anglia have, consciously or unconsciously, formed a kind of peer-review mafia to protect their own prominent political positions and resources at the cost of sacrificing scientific truth to personal advantage, well, that is too bad as well. But it wouldn't be the first time such a thing happened. Even if global warming is as bad as they say and they were simply doing wrong in a good cause, there are sound economic reasons to believe that the resources we should spend on global warming should not be so large as to seriously disrupt the world's economies, which are not in stellar shape right now anyway. Even if engineering got us into this fix, whatever it is, my view is that engineering, based on truth, as good engineering always must be, can get us out of it again.

Sources: A good summary article on the CRU email release appeared in the New York Times on Nov. 27, 2009 at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/28/science/earth/28hack.html. In my blog of Feb. 18, 2008 ("Should We Discount Global Warming?") I discussed some of the economic arguments relating to global warming.

Ethics: Evolved or Given?

Every now and then we take a look at ethics in general: what ethics is, how to think about it, and, although you don't have to figure this one out to do engineering ethics, where ethics comes from. Where you say ethics comes from depends on your philosophical presuppositions. People who think the physical universe is all there is will generally say something different about the origins of ethics than those who believe there is something beyond nature, that is, supernaturalists such as myself. But the surprising thing is, even researchers who take no account of supernatural explanations end up with a conclusion about the nature of ethics worldwide, that is surprisingly close to what believers in the supernatural claim.

Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has developed what he calls Moral Foundations Theory. It is based on data gathered from over 100,000 surveys of people all around the world, so you would have a hard time accusing Haidt of ethnocentrism. What he and his colleagues have found, is that our sense of right and wrong can be traced to one or more foundational principles or ideas that essentially all cultures he studied share in common. These principles are: (1) "Harm/care"—the ability to understand pain and other results of harm in others, and to empathize and care for them; (2) "Fairness/reciprocity"—the kind of thing that makes even three-year-olds scream, "That's not fair!!" in every language; (3) "Ingroup/loyalty"—the ability to identify with and sacrifice for a group one belongs to; (4) "Authority/respect"—the sense that legitimate authority and traditions should be obeyed; and (5) "Purity/sanctity"—the notion of sacred spaces and the purity of the human body. On his website (which contains basically all I know about his theory), Haidt traces each of these traits to an evolutionary root. The trait of purity/sanctity, for instance, which Catholic author Flannery O'Connor called "the most mysterious of the virtues," derives from the evolutionary psychology of "disgust and contamination."

The details of each foundational principle (or should I say foundational/principle?) are not as important as the fact that according to Haidt, they are shared universally among all cultures he has studied. This gives the lie to people who say that ethics is always relative to the specific culture, and what is right in one culture could just as easily, and logically, be wrong in another one. Details differ, of course. What passes for modest apparel in Tahiti would not pass muster in Times Square (not now, anyway), but the remarkable thing is that there really are universally shared moral mechanisms or tendencies at all. One would think that evolution would have come up with a splendid and contradictory variety of ethical notions, just as we see a tremendous variety of colors and shapes among birds or reptiles in different parts of the world.

For supernaturalists, this is no surprise. There is an old, somewhat battered, but nonetheless still vigorous concept called "natural law" which says, in a nutshell, the laws of morality are written on the heart of every person, and the Author is God. According to natural law, there are certain innate principles of morality that people know by nature, even if they later convince themselves otherwise for various, often self-serving, reasons. Just as Haidt has found, natural law says these basic principles are universal, though details can vary according to customs and cultures of different peoples. For example, the Christian tradition says a man can have only one wife at a time. Islam and some other religions allow four or more wives at once. But there is no culture anywhere (Margaret Mead notwithstanding) which says you may simply have any woman you like anytime. This is not to say that some people don't act that way; but if they do, they are going against the morality of their culture.

What difference does this make to engineering ethics? In one sense, very little, and in another sense, everything.

In the sense that engineering ethics deals with practical applications of generally accepted ethical principles to specific problems, the field is not that concerned with where the ethics come from—whether evolution or God. This is why engineering societies composed of people from many religions, or no religion, can nevertheless agree on certain basic codes of ethics to follow worldwide. Although bribery is a widespread practice, nearly everybody agrees that to live in a world without bribery would be better than to live with it. People who take and receive bribes make the excuse that they simply couldn't get things done otherwise. While that may be true in a particular case, it doesn't change the fact that a country or system without bribery is a better thing morally than one where you have to bribe people to get even legitimate things done.

On the other hand, if you ask yourself "Why be moral at all?" the origins of moral principles make all the difference in the world. Engineers often pride themselves on their ability to reason logically. If we are really just products of a blind evolutionary process that came from nowhere and leads nowhere—I don't know about you, but if I believed that, I would have trouble just getting out of bed in the morning, let alone devoting years of study to a profession that will produce only a transient gleam in the eternal void. A common alternative, according to mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, is to distract oneself from the awful reality of death, and engineering is as good a distraction as any, for a while, anyway. But in this view, it's only a distraction.

Next time we'll examine some specific technical matter with an ethical angle to it, and life will go on. But every now and then, it's good to ask why right and wrong is there at all, and where it comes from.

Sources: I discovered the Moral Foundations Theory website from reading a piece by skeptic Michael Shermer in the December 2009 issue of Scientific American. The website is at www.moralfoundations.org.

Air Accidents In Perspective

A good fraction of classic engineering-ethics cases are concerned with accidents involving air transport of some kind, with commercial airline traffic taking the lead in terms of fatalities involving members of the public (as opposed to astronauts, for example). For example, in the early 1970s, problems with a DC-10 cargo door latch led to one near-fatal accident, halfhearted attempts to remedy the problem, and then a serious crash in France on Mar. 3, 1974, that killed 346 people. This case is held up to generations of engineers as an example of how not to fix a mechanical flaw in a life-critical system.

Although we have dealt with individual air accidents in this blog from time to time, before last Saturday I had never come across a book that takes a thoughtful, coherent look at the whole history of air accidents and the intriguing problems associated with investigating them. A small bookstore had opened a few months ago in what passes for downtown San Marcos, and I had a few minutes to poke around in it. (Small independent bookstores are going the way of the newspaper before the onslaught of the Internet, but that is a discussion for another time.) My attention was attracted by a striking photo of the French Concorde in flames as it left the ground, and after perusing David Owen's clear, unsensational prose inside, I concluded to buy Air Accident Investigation.

Owen, a former engineer turned journalist, has the disciplined rhetorical skills that one finds more often than not in good British writers. While not pretending to write an exhaustive history, he does start with the early days of commercial aviation, with an even-handed treatment of both U. S. and European practice. I was intrigued by a photo of what has to have been one of the largest biplanes ever built, a Handley Page H. P. 42 flown by Imperial Airways in trans-Channel service in the early 1930s. It was about four stories high and had four engines clustered around the fuselage. Owen's point in including it was that although there were plenty of accidents back then, early commerical aviation was operated so conservatively that in ten years of use, the H. P. 42 never lost a passenger to a fatal accident.

All this changed after World War II, when jet aviation and economic growth transformed the flying public from a few privileged individuals into hordes of airborne bus passengers. Higher speeds and long over-water flights raised the cost of in-flight mechanical failure to the point that surviving a commercial airline crash was a dubious proposition at best.

Most of Owen's examples date from the period of about 1953 to 1990, and are organized by the type of accident: mechanical failure, weather-related, pilot error, and finally terrorism. One theme that emerged out of the dozens of individual tales of smooth takeoffs followed by unexpected tragedies is the role of metal fatigue in airline safety, or lack thereof. It was metal fatigue, poorly understood at the time, that caused the terrible series of accidents to the first British jetliner, the de Havilland Comet, in the early 1950s. And right up to the 1990s, fatigue continues to exact a toll on airliners, their designers, and maintenance personnel who fail to exercise the utmost diligence in checking for and combating this all-too-common problem. I came away with the strong impression that a modern airliner is a kind of chessboard showing the long history of how human ingenuity can checkmate aluminum's tendency to crack under repeated stress caused by the thousands of takeoffs, flights, and landings in a plane's useful service lifetime. Owen points out that although there is no fixed "retirement age" for airframes, the problem of so-called geriatric aircraft will only increase as the industry's fleet ages.

Another factor that is familiar to those who have read a number of engineering-ethics cases is the way that serious accidents have of coalescing from a number of relatively independent small mistakes, each of which if taken in isolation doesn't seem that serious. The investigation of a runway accident between two 747s on the island of Tenerife in the Canaries in 1977 revealed a chain of problems beginning with a terrorist bomb that shut down a better-equipped airport nearby, and ended with fortuitous radio interference during the last control-tower message that could have conceivably avoided the accident. As a result, one 747 trying to take off collided with another on the ground, killing over 500 people in all. This emphasizes the importance of keeping track of the "near-miss" kind of error which could have resulted in fatalities, but didn't simply because other factors were not also wrongly aligned at the time. Good engineering practice is to establish a system for reporting such incidents and making sure that even mildly dangerous problems do not arise in the future.

The book is illustrated with helpful original diagrams that clarify the often complex situations involved in many accidents. Owen's engineering background gives him a confident familiarity with the technical aspects of aviation, but he always makes sure that the essential details are clear enough for the reasonably intelligent reader to follow. Add to this the inherent suspense of reading about unexpected death and destruction, and how investigators painstakingly piece together evidence (sometimes quite literally) after a crash, and you have a book that is both a valuable addition to the engineering ethics literature, and a fascinating read as well. Which is, frankly, an unusual combination, although it need not be.

Owen's book is still in print (in fact, it's in its third edition), so I would highly recommend it for anyone interested in the technology of aviation or the drama of accident investigations. Notably, the rate of serious accidents has fallen off in the last decade or two, largely because jet aviation is now a mature technology. Many of the major ways aircraft and air transportation systems can fail are pretty well known by now and avoidable. We can only hope that, in spite of terrorism and war, air travel safety keeps improving to the point that major air disasters will recede into the distant past.

Sources: David Owen's Air Accident Investigation (3rd edition, 2006) is published by Haynes Publishing, Somerset, England (ISBN 9978 1 85260 614 5).