Most famous cases involving engineering ethics start with a headline, a crisis, or a tragedy. In such situations, we can take steps to make sure it’s less likely to happen next time only after we figure out what went wrong. But every once in a while, farsighted engineers can actually anticipate a major new problem before it happens and convince people to prevent it without anyone getting hurt. This is obviously the best way to go if we can manage it. The potential problem of hardware hackers is a case in point.
As John Villasenor explains in the current issue of Scientific American, hardware hacking is the planting of a malicious circuit in hardware, typically deep within the incredible complexity of an integrated circuit (microchip). ICs are so complicated nowadays that the design of most of them is comparable to the design of a large building or an oil refinery. Simply because the system is so large and diverse, pieces of the design are farmed out to numerous subcontractors. In such a complex circumstance, a hardware-hacking scenario could come about in the following way.
Suppose some evil person wants all cell phones sold by a given firm to quit working at a certain date in the future. They infiltrate one of the subcontractors that helps to design a critical IC in the new phone models, and slip in a circuit that monitors the time code and suddenly ties up the communication bus in the system once the blow-up date arrives. Since it’s impossible to check for every conceivable situation a phone might experience, the likelihood that this circuit will pass unnoticed into the final design is pretty good. A few weeks before the blow-up date, the criminals in charge of this trickery send a blackmail letter to the company, telling them what will happen and offering them an encrypted key to prevent the disaster—for, say, a billion dollars.
That particular scenario would be enacted by criminals, but political sabotage or terrorism could also inspire such machinations. Villasenor and his fellow researchers claim there are several ways to prevent such attacks.
One, favored by the Pentagon, is a kind of security-clearance check for every organization involved in the chip design. While this may be practical for certain costly military ICs, it doesn’t seem like a plan that will work for commercial designs, where vendors change at the last minute and are spread out all across the globe in a variety of jurisdictions.
A better idea Villasenor mentions is to install inspector or security circuits in every IC to monitor for suspicious behavior that would indicate the presence of a hardware hack. While this will reduce the space and speed available for the IC’s main tasks slightly, the added security appeal of knowing your new IC is protected against hardware hacking might make it worthwhile.
There are two questions in my mind about this whole situation.
First, how real is the threat of hardware hacking? Villasenor says that there have been no significant incidents so far, but of course there might be unknown time bombs out there right now, ticking away. I think one reason this kind of thing hasn’t happened yet is that, unlike viral malware, hardware generally has a paper trail that can be traced back to the place of origin. Being fingered as the guilty party in a hardware-hacking case would mean certain death to a firm, even if they were unaware of what was going on at the time. Nobody would ever want to buy circuits from them again.
Another reason, at least in the case of political terrorism of the Islamofascist variety, is that companies which design ICs are generally not found in places where organizations like the Taliban have significant influence. The extreme contrast between the state of Israel, which has dozens of high-tech firms turning out world-class technology, and the surrounding Arab nations, which have to buy nearly all the technology they have from other countries, is an example of this. So unless terrorists manage to convince individual designers in critical firms to implant hardware hacks, this kind of threat seems unlikely.
The second question is, if manufacturers develop security measures to install that allegedly prevent hardware hacks, will people pay the extra price for them? No matter how small, the security features will adversely impact price and performance, and it then becomes a question of perceived value added. Some customers with heightened concerns about security, for example the military and government, might be more willing to buy such chips than commercial customers such as computer makers. Of course, once a major hardware hack actually caused damage, the feature would sell itself. So you have the perverse situation that the best incentive to buy a hardware-hack-secure IC is to have a major problem occur with hardware hacking.
Unfortunately, that may be what has to happen if hardware-hack prevention is to amount to much more than a few academic papers and articles. Let’s hope the cure arrives well before the disease, at least in this case.
Sources: John Villasenor’s article “The Hacker in Your Hardware” appeared in the August 2010 issue of Scientific American (pp. 82-87).
Monday, July 26, 2010
Monday, July 19, 2010
The Honor of Dirty Fingernails
On a trip we just completed, the van we drove over a thousand miles in six days (a Dodge) suddenly quit outside Wichita Falls, Texas. The minute it happened, I was pretty sure what the problem was. We have replaced the fuel pump three times in six years, and since the last one was replaced about two years ago, I figured it was curtains for this one. I’m pretty sure (though not certain) that the people who designed that fuel pump had college degrees. And I’m also pretty sure that few if any of the people who helped us from that point onward had degrees in engineering, or possibly anything else. But we would have been stuck without their help.
The gentleman driving the tow truck told us he’d been a semi-trailer driver for thirteen years, then switched to towing for the next thirteen. He was the only person at the small gas station he worked for who could drive the tow truck, and so he’d been on call 24 hours a day for the last several years, except for one day off when he got married.
The guy in charge of the repair shop where they towed the van was very proud of the twenty-something young man who actually did the repair, which involved draining out some 30 gallons of gas (we’d just filled it) without setting the place on fire, dropping the tank, getting all the gaskets and clips and screws out and back in the right way, and putting it all back together again so it didn’t leak. The auto technician did nothing that I couldn’t do without some practice, but he did it in about an hour and a half. I would have taken all day and spent most of it on trips to the auto-parts store to get special tools, assuming I didn’t blow up my house first. The manager said he was very proud of that technician after watching him grow from an inexperienced teenager to a seasoned professional over the ten years or so he’d worked there.
Over 60% of Americans 25 and older have not completed even a two-year associate college degree. They are citizens like anyone else, and voters too, but to listen to certain elite groups in this country, you would think that everybody either has to have a college degree or else they represent abject failures of the system if they don’t. Columnist John Derbyshire recently cited several quotations along these lines, such as: “All students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career—no matter who you are or where you come from.” The speaker was President Obama, and for a politician it is a peculiarly unqualified statement. If he had simply stopped at “All students should graduate from high school,” I’d agree with him there—about fifteen percent of Americans over 25 haven’t even gotten that far. But at the risk of raining on my own parade (I teach engineering in college), I think it is unrealistic to expect or insist that everybody, no matter what their inclinations, abilities, or interests are, should graduate from college ore else become a second-class citizen.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that the opportunity to get a college degree should be artificially restricted to a given class, or income level, or sex, or race. Opportunities should be equal for all, but if for good and logical reasons, a given student would like to cease his or her formal schooling after high school and become a great plumber, or auto mechanic, or tow-truck driver, or filmmaker (Steven Spielberg dropped out of college to go into the film business), I would like the economy to provide them with that opportunity, and for society not to look down upon them as some sort of failure simply because of the kind of work they do. Not everybody who drops out of college is another Spielberg, but the point I’m trying to make is that there are many honorable, useful, and even significant jobs out there which do not require a college degree. And that is as it should be.
The natural tendency of our society, unfortunately, is to look up to people who (1) have lots of money, (2) have lots of people working for them, or (3) manipulate symbols instead of real things. Most engineers nowadays are in the third category, but for every engineer with a college degree in most industries, there are two or three folks who build, test, sell, and fix the things that the engineers design. And while increasing numbers of the lower-ranking workers have college degrees, in many cases such degrees are still not necessary, for example in the construction trades.
The engineering-ethics angle here is to respect those whose education is not as advanced as yours, and remember that the thing called “tacit knowledge”—the right way to ease a tank full of gas down out of a car without incinerating yourself or your shop, for example—is real, and sometimes more important for a given task than anything you could learn in college.
Everyone in an honorable occupation—that is, one which isn’t positively evil—makes a useful contribution to society and deserves to be treated as an important, knowledgeable part of the grand system that makes engineering the vital thing it is in modern life. The next time you deal with such a person, don’t belittle their educational attainments. Instead, watch them, find out just how much they can do that you can’t—and learn.
Sources: John Derbyshire’s column, “The Jobs Americans Should Not Have to Do?” appeared at http://article.nationalreview.com/438112/the-jobs-americans-should-not-have-to-do/john-derbyshire. The statistics on the percentage of Americans who are college graduates is from the U. S. Census Bureau website http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2010/tables/10s0226.pdf.
The gentleman driving the tow truck told us he’d been a semi-trailer driver for thirteen years, then switched to towing for the next thirteen. He was the only person at the small gas station he worked for who could drive the tow truck, and so he’d been on call 24 hours a day for the last several years, except for one day off when he got married.
The guy in charge of the repair shop where they towed the van was very proud of the twenty-something young man who actually did the repair, which involved draining out some 30 gallons of gas (we’d just filled it) without setting the place on fire, dropping the tank, getting all the gaskets and clips and screws out and back in the right way, and putting it all back together again so it didn’t leak. The auto technician did nothing that I couldn’t do without some practice, but he did it in about an hour and a half. I would have taken all day and spent most of it on trips to the auto-parts store to get special tools, assuming I didn’t blow up my house first. The manager said he was very proud of that technician after watching him grow from an inexperienced teenager to a seasoned professional over the ten years or so he’d worked there.
Over 60% of Americans 25 and older have not completed even a two-year associate college degree. They are citizens like anyone else, and voters too, but to listen to certain elite groups in this country, you would think that everybody either has to have a college degree or else they represent abject failures of the system if they don’t. Columnist John Derbyshire recently cited several quotations along these lines, such as: “All students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career—no matter who you are or where you come from.” The speaker was President Obama, and for a politician it is a peculiarly unqualified statement. If he had simply stopped at “All students should graduate from high school,” I’d agree with him there—about fifteen percent of Americans over 25 haven’t even gotten that far. But at the risk of raining on my own parade (I teach engineering in college), I think it is unrealistic to expect or insist that everybody, no matter what their inclinations, abilities, or interests are, should graduate from college ore else become a second-class citizen.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that the opportunity to get a college degree should be artificially restricted to a given class, or income level, or sex, or race. Opportunities should be equal for all, but if for good and logical reasons, a given student would like to cease his or her formal schooling after high school and become a great plumber, or auto mechanic, or tow-truck driver, or filmmaker (Steven Spielberg dropped out of college to go into the film business), I would like the economy to provide them with that opportunity, and for society not to look down upon them as some sort of failure simply because of the kind of work they do. Not everybody who drops out of college is another Spielberg, but the point I’m trying to make is that there are many honorable, useful, and even significant jobs out there which do not require a college degree. And that is as it should be.
The natural tendency of our society, unfortunately, is to look up to people who (1) have lots of money, (2) have lots of people working for them, or (3) manipulate symbols instead of real things. Most engineers nowadays are in the third category, but for every engineer with a college degree in most industries, there are two or three folks who build, test, sell, and fix the things that the engineers design. And while increasing numbers of the lower-ranking workers have college degrees, in many cases such degrees are still not necessary, for example in the construction trades.
The engineering-ethics angle here is to respect those whose education is not as advanced as yours, and remember that the thing called “tacit knowledge”—the right way to ease a tank full of gas down out of a car without incinerating yourself or your shop, for example—is real, and sometimes more important for a given task than anything you could learn in college.
Everyone in an honorable occupation—that is, one which isn’t positively evil—makes a useful contribution to society and deserves to be treated as an important, knowledgeable part of the grand system that makes engineering the vital thing it is in modern life. The next time you deal with such a person, don’t belittle their educational attainments. Instead, watch them, find out just how much they can do that you can’t—and learn.
Sources: John Derbyshire’s column, “The Jobs Americans Should Not Have to Do?” appeared at http://article.nationalreview.com/438112/the-jobs-americans-should-not-have-to-do/john-derbyshire. The statistics on the percentage of Americans who are college graduates is from the U. S. Census Bureau website http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2010/tables/10s0226.pdf.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Big Mother Is Watching You On Your Cell Phone
George Orwell made the phrase “Big Brother” famous in his dystopia 1984 when he epitomized the intrusive, spies-everywhere nature of the omnipresent state of the future with the slogan, “Big Brother is watching you.” While pieces of his futuristic novel (published in 1949) have come true over the years—he anticipated television pretty well, for example—even Orwell did not imagine that some day, for a measly five dollars a month, parents could get continuous accurate information on the whereabouts of their children. Hence “Big Mother.”
This is no science-fiction dream. Last month a flyer came in my cell phone bill. Normally I just throw them away, having no use for most of the features of my cell phone anyway, but this one’s headline caught my attention: “See your kids on a satellite map!”
A system that only a few months ago I heard described as “coming soon” by a telecommunications researcher has been rolled out by Sprint, and no doubt many other companies as well. The fact that it has been available for several years shows that researchers and professors can be out of touch about some things too. The technology is fairly simple. You give your children cell phones with a GPS feature, which nowadays is not that complex—if there aren’t single-chip GPS receivers available already, there will be soon. The phone company, upon receipt of your five dollars a month (plus taxes, fees, and surcharges), queries the GPS receiver periodically, takes the coordinates, plots them on a map, and makes it available to the parents.
I suppose this “family locator” (as it is billed) is too new to have inspired much in the way of reactions from the teenage set. Apparently, the feature has been available in some markets since 2006, but in a cursory glance at a web search I turned up only corporate press releases and reviews, generally favorable, by the press. One report makes it clear that the teenager has to consent to the tracking, and even gets a text message letting him or her know that “Big Mother” (my use of the phrase was not original) is watching.
Originally introduced at a cost of $10 monthly, the fact that Sprint is now putting flyers into their bills and advertising it for only $5 a month tells me that the feature may not have created as much demand as the company had hoped. There are at least two big obstacles to its use: the opt-in feature that lets the kid know what’s going on, and the fact that the offspring can always leave their phone at home or at a friend’s house if they want to go somewhere their parents really don’t approve of. And as every network engineer knows, anything that leads people to disassociate themselves from their phones lowers the value of the network, not only to those directly involved, but to everyone else as well. So in that regard, Sprint could be shooting themselves in the foot with this technology, at least among the under-20 set.
Of course, governments have used cell phones for years to track down criminals without their knowledge or consent, and it worked for a while until the bad guys figured out what was going on. But bringing what started out as high-tech Mission-Impossible-style spy technology down to the level of a commercial $5-a-month option for family use is a new twist on the way technical innovations often start out expensively at the government level and percolate down to the consumer, often in a different form.
What some parents would really like, I suspect, is the stealth version of the family locator, but for fear of virtual stalking, Sprint won’t sell it that way. Of course, there may be some enterprising hackers out there who could modify the software somehow, but that gets into what you might call “grayware” and I wouldn’t recommend it.
What effect would this technology have on a teenager who grows up with it? You could view it as just one more accessory to further enable the “helicopter parent” syndrome that supposedly plagues many families today. Moms with nothing better to do can live out their teenage daughter’s lives vicariously by tracking them from house to mall to wherever. “What were you doing on Lover’s Lane from midnight to 2 A. M.?” I wonder, does the family locator have a history function, or do you have to stay up and watch it in real time? Some things are better left unspeculated about.
Well, judging by Sprint’s efforts to promote this thing, it doesn’t appear to be taking America by storm. But if this and similar location-tracking technology become generally accepted, I can see how it could change the work environment for lots of people, from public-safety employees to delivery personnel to anyone who spends time outside the direct physical supervision of their bosses. A company could easily make carrying a tracking-enabled cell phone a condition of employment, much as long-distance trucking companies keep track of their drivers through GPS already. I’m sure this would change the nature of the work environment, but how is another question altogether.
Should personal tracking be regulated? That depends on what people use it for. Clearly it could be abused, which is why commercial versions all notify the trackee of the system’s operation. But even with notification, it seems to me that one more small piece of freedom disappears when a teenager, or anyone else, agrees to be tracked by someone in authority over them. Yes, it’s the business of the authority to supervise, and knowing where someone is can be an important aspect of supervision. But there will be all sorts of subtle changes, and not all of them good, if a person knows, even subconsciously, that some other person knows exactly where they are at all times—or even just has the capability to know. Will it make a difference in the larger scheme of things? As with so many questions I raise in this blog, we will just have to wait and see.
Sources: An article reviewing one of the first offerings of the Sprint family locator was carried by the website of a New York City TV station in 2006 at http://www.ny1.com/?SecID=1000&ArID=58641.
This is no science-fiction dream. Last month a flyer came in my cell phone bill. Normally I just throw them away, having no use for most of the features of my cell phone anyway, but this one’s headline caught my attention: “See your kids on a satellite map!”
A system that only a few months ago I heard described as “coming soon” by a telecommunications researcher has been rolled out by Sprint, and no doubt many other companies as well. The fact that it has been available for several years shows that researchers and professors can be out of touch about some things too. The technology is fairly simple. You give your children cell phones with a GPS feature, which nowadays is not that complex—if there aren’t single-chip GPS receivers available already, there will be soon. The phone company, upon receipt of your five dollars a month (plus taxes, fees, and surcharges), queries the GPS receiver periodically, takes the coordinates, plots them on a map, and makes it available to the parents.
I suppose this “family locator” (as it is billed) is too new to have inspired much in the way of reactions from the teenage set. Apparently, the feature has been available in some markets since 2006, but in a cursory glance at a web search I turned up only corporate press releases and reviews, generally favorable, by the press. One report makes it clear that the teenager has to consent to the tracking, and even gets a text message letting him or her know that “Big Mother” (my use of the phrase was not original) is watching.
Originally introduced at a cost of $10 monthly, the fact that Sprint is now putting flyers into their bills and advertising it for only $5 a month tells me that the feature may not have created as much demand as the company had hoped. There are at least two big obstacles to its use: the opt-in feature that lets the kid know what’s going on, and the fact that the offspring can always leave their phone at home or at a friend’s house if they want to go somewhere their parents really don’t approve of. And as every network engineer knows, anything that leads people to disassociate themselves from their phones lowers the value of the network, not only to those directly involved, but to everyone else as well. So in that regard, Sprint could be shooting themselves in the foot with this technology, at least among the under-20 set.
Of course, governments have used cell phones for years to track down criminals without their knowledge or consent, and it worked for a while until the bad guys figured out what was going on. But bringing what started out as high-tech Mission-Impossible-style spy technology down to the level of a commercial $5-a-month option for family use is a new twist on the way technical innovations often start out expensively at the government level and percolate down to the consumer, often in a different form.
What some parents would really like, I suspect, is the stealth version of the family locator, but for fear of virtual stalking, Sprint won’t sell it that way. Of course, there may be some enterprising hackers out there who could modify the software somehow, but that gets into what you might call “grayware” and I wouldn’t recommend it.
What effect would this technology have on a teenager who grows up with it? You could view it as just one more accessory to further enable the “helicopter parent” syndrome that supposedly plagues many families today. Moms with nothing better to do can live out their teenage daughter’s lives vicariously by tracking them from house to mall to wherever. “What were you doing on Lover’s Lane from midnight to 2 A. M.?” I wonder, does the family locator have a history function, or do you have to stay up and watch it in real time? Some things are better left unspeculated about.
Well, judging by Sprint’s efforts to promote this thing, it doesn’t appear to be taking America by storm. But if this and similar location-tracking technology become generally accepted, I can see how it could change the work environment for lots of people, from public-safety employees to delivery personnel to anyone who spends time outside the direct physical supervision of their bosses. A company could easily make carrying a tracking-enabled cell phone a condition of employment, much as long-distance trucking companies keep track of their drivers through GPS already. I’m sure this would change the nature of the work environment, but how is another question altogether.
Should personal tracking be regulated? That depends on what people use it for. Clearly it could be abused, which is why commercial versions all notify the trackee of the system’s operation. But even with notification, it seems to me that one more small piece of freedom disappears when a teenager, or anyone else, agrees to be tracked by someone in authority over them. Yes, it’s the business of the authority to supervise, and knowing where someone is can be an important aspect of supervision. But there will be all sorts of subtle changes, and not all of them good, if a person knows, even subconsciously, that some other person knows exactly where they are at all times—or even just has the capability to know. Will it make a difference in the larger scheme of things? As with so many questions I raise in this blog, we will just have to wait and see.
Sources: An article reviewing one of the first offerings of the Sprint family locator was carried by the website of a New York City TV station in 2006 at http://www.ny1.com/?SecID=1000&ArID=58641.
Monday, July 05, 2010
Deepwater Drilling: More Research Needed?
The ongoing Gulf of Mexico oil spill has led many to question the competence of both industry and government in conducting and regulating deepwater oil drilling. The perspective of Tad Patzek, chairman of the University of Texas Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department, is worth listening to, if for no other reason that he stands at some remove from both corporations and government institutions. On June 8, he gave prepared testimony before Congress in which he shared his thoughts about the root causes of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and what should be done to prevent such tragedies in the future.
Prof. Patzek's main point was that complex systems behave in a qualitatively different way from the simpler systems of which they are a part. He used the analogies of a watch and a frog. Given the right tools, you can take a watch apart and reassemble it, and it will work just as well as it ever did. Try the same thing with a frog, and you don't get a live frog back—you get high-school biology lab. Even such an apparently simple thing as a single-celled organism such as an amoeba is a fantastically complex interconnected system of thousands of micro-machines, chemical plants, disposal systems, data storage in the form of DNA, and so on. And just writing down the chemicals involved doesn't begin to explain the complex behavior of a living organism.
According to Prof. Patzek, the highly complex system of an offshore oil rig in deep water has moved beyond the boundary between simple, easily-understood systems (such as the plumbing in your bathroom sink) and complex systems that come up with surprising behavior that the simpler systems don't show. Unfortunately, the design and management structure of deepwater drilling, along with the technologies used, have not kept pace with the increasing complexity needed to drill in deeper waters, which is where a good deal of U. S. oil production has moved since most onshore reserves have already been exploited. Prof. Patzek says that neither the oil industry nor government funding agencies have spent much money in the last few decades on long-term research into these problems of complexity. Federal support for such research has essentially disappeared, while industry research is narrowly restricted to fields that can show an immediate short-term return: namely, exploration techniques and methods of drilling that improve rates of oil and gas recovery. While these are important and necessary, they do not fill out the big picture of what has to happen if the whole system of deepwater exploration is to function smoothly.
There are well-known analysis techniques that deal with the hazards and failure modes of complex systems. These approaches were developed in part by the space industry, where repairs are generally not possible and astronauts' lives are sometimes at stake. They are paper-and-pencil (or rather nowadays, computer-and-spreadsheet) techniques which force the analyst to imagine what will happen if this or that element in the system fails. While we don't know enough about the Deepwater Horizon failure yet to say (and Prof. Patzek calls for a thorough investigation as part of his testimony), it is possible that if these analysis methods had been applied to the system in question, they might have shown there was a problem, and how to avoid it.
But even if they had, the culture of the industry would have to change so that the results of an office worker's analysis would trump the gut feelings of the guys who are getting their fingernails dirty out on the platform in the Gulf. One of the problems that seems to have contributed to the accident is the distributed nature of command and operations. Rather than one integrated operation owned and run by one entity, large offshore oil-drilling operations are a collaboration between an oil company (BP in this case), a rig operator (TransOcean), and numerous smaller contractors, each of which runs his own little domain. While this mode of operation can work well in non-life-critical systems such as motion-picture production, the Deepwater Horizon accident may be the test case that shows this kind of management structure is inadequate either to prevent such an accident, or to deal with it quickly and efficiently once it occurs.
Not surprisingly for a professor of engineering, Prof. Patzek winds up his testimony by proposing a number of specific research projects, including one to develop a large-scale "skimmer" (system for recovering oil from the ocean surface) by converting a conventional oil tanker. None of these plans will probably be implemented in the near term, but the hope is that Congress will recognize that a vital part of our economy has been left to deteriorate in some ways, and research is needed to fix the problems. Direct Federal involvement is not necessarily the only answer, although some increase in the form of better regulation is probably needed, as Prof. Patzek admits. But a longer-term view of R&D investment on the part of oil companies would help a great deal.
One success story in this regard that might serve as an example of what to do can be drawn from the history of the U. S. semiconductor industry in the 1980s. To oversimplify, Japanese firms were eating their lunch in terms of technical advances, so the major U. S. firms got together, funded a large research effort with shared contributions and shared discoveries, and basically grabbed the football back. This required Federal cooperation in terms of allowing what would otherwise be a violation of anti-trust laws, but it was handled well and it worked out with benefits for both the industry and the general public.
Whether the very different culture of the oil business will lend itself to this kind of inter-company co-operation remains to be seen. One problem is that the U. S. no longer has the lead in terms of oil-company size. Our largest (and according to many sources, best-run) company is ExxonMobil, and it is ranked 17th in the world in terms of oil reserves. But these are still well-off outfits capable of putting some percentage of their profits into a common research foundation that could address some of the safety and accident problems that have been so vividly brought to our attention lately. To my mind, it is the least they can do, and the smartest too.
Sources: The July 4, 2010 Austin American-Statesman carried a portion of Prof. Patzek's prepared testimony, which can be found in full at http://alt.coxnewsweb.com/statesman/pdf/07/070410patzek.pdf.
Prof. Patzek's main point was that complex systems behave in a qualitatively different way from the simpler systems of which they are a part. He used the analogies of a watch and a frog. Given the right tools, you can take a watch apart and reassemble it, and it will work just as well as it ever did. Try the same thing with a frog, and you don't get a live frog back—you get high-school biology lab. Even such an apparently simple thing as a single-celled organism such as an amoeba is a fantastically complex interconnected system of thousands of micro-machines, chemical plants, disposal systems, data storage in the form of DNA, and so on. And just writing down the chemicals involved doesn't begin to explain the complex behavior of a living organism.
According to Prof. Patzek, the highly complex system of an offshore oil rig in deep water has moved beyond the boundary between simple, easily-understood systems (such as the plumbing in your bathroom sink) and complex systems that come up with surprising behavior that the simpler systems don't show. Unfortunately, the design and management structure of deepwater drilling, along with the technologies used, have not kept pace with the increasing complexity needed to drill in deeper waters, which is where a good deal of U. S. oil production has moved since most onshore reserves have already been exploited. Prof. Patzek says that neither the oil industry nor government funding agencies have spent much money in the last few decades on long-term research into these problems of complexity. Federal support for such research has essentially disappeared, while industry research is narrowly restricted to fields that can show an immediate short-term return: namely, exploration techniques and methods of drilling that improve rates of oil and gas recovery. While these are important and necessary, they do not fill out the big picture of what has to happen if the whole system of deepwater exploration is to function smoothly.
There are well-known analysis techniques that deal with the hazards and failure modes of complex systems. These approaches were developed in part by the space industry, where repairs are generally not possible and astronauts' lives are sometimes at stake. They are paper-and-pencil (or rather nowadays, computer-and-spreadsheet) techniques which force the analyst to imagine what will happen if this or that element in the system fails. While we don't know enough about the Deepwater Horizon failure yet to say (and Prof. Patzek calls for a thorough investigation as part of his testimony), it is possible that if these analysis methods had been applied to the system in question, they might have shown there was a problem, and how to avoid it.
But even if they had, the culture of the industry would have to change so that the results of an office worker's analysis would trump the gut feelings of the guys who are getting their fingernails dirty out on the platform in the Gulf. One of the problems that seems to have contributed to the accident is the distributed nature of command and operations. Rather than one integrated operation owned and run by one entity, large offshore oil-drilling operations are a collaboration between an oil company (BP in this case), a rig operator (TransOcean), and numerous smaller contractors, each of which runs his own little domain. While this mode of operation can work well in non-life-critical systems such as motion-picture production, the Deepwater Horizon accident may be the test case that shows this kind of management structure is inadequate either to prevent such an accident, or to deal with it quickly and efficiently once it occurs.
Not surprisingly for a professor of engineering, Prof. Patzek winds up his testimony by proposing a number of specific research projects, including one to develop a large-scale "skimmer" (system for recovering oil from the ocean surface) by converting a conventional oil tanker. None of these plans will probably be implemented in the near term, but the hope is that Congress will recognize that a vital part of our economy has been left to deteriorate in some ways, and research is needed to fix the problems. Direct Federal involvement is not necessarily the only answer, although some increase in the form of better regulation is probably needed, as Prof. Patzek admits. But a longer-term view of R&D investment on the part of oil companies would help a great deal.
One success story in this regard that might serve as an example of what to do can be drawn from the history of the U. S. semiconductor industry in the 1980s. To oversimplify, Japanese firms were eating their lunch in terms of technical advances, so the major U. S. firms got together, funded a large research effort with shared contributions and shared discoveries, and basically grabbed the football back. This required Federal cooperation in terms of allowing what would otherwise be a violation of anti-trust laws, but it was handled well and it worked out with benefits for both the industry and the general public.
Whether the very different culture of the oil business will lend itself to this kind of inter-company co-operation remains to be seen. One problem is that the U. S. no longer has the lead in terms of oil-company size. Our largest (and according to many sources, best-run) company is ExxonMobil, and it is ranked 17th in the world in terms of oil reserves. But these are still well-off outfits capable of putting some percentage of their profits into a common research foundation that could address some of the safety and accident problems that have been so vividly brought to our attention lately. To my mind, it is the least they can do, and the smartest too.
Sources: The July 4, 2010 Austin American-Statesman carried a portion of Prof. Patzek's prepared testimony, which can be found in full at http://alt.coxnewsweb.com/statesman/pdf/07/070410patzek.pdf.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Deepwater Horizon Spill: Two Months and Counting
I have already blogged a couple of times on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, but since it has now gained the dubious honor of being the worst environmental accident in U. S. history, it's time to pay it some more attention.
Apparently most but not all of the leaking oil is now being captured and disposed of by storage or flaring, some 24,000 barrels a day. Since April 20, however, the date of the explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil platform that killed eleven people and started the spill, more oil has gone into the Gulf than was spilled during the previous U. S. record-holding accident, the Exxon Valdez. That was a tanker accident, which had the advantage that once all of it spilled out of the tanker, there wasn't any more left. Obviously that is not the case in the Gulf, where an incredibly productive old-fashioned gusher on the ocean floor has been throwing out swimming pools of oil every day or so.
I mentioned in my first blog that this might be a game-changing incident for the offshore oil industry. In the short term, that proved correct when President Obama placed a six-month moratorium on all Gulf oil drilling. Just last week a judge blocked execution of that order, and we will have to wait and see if it sticks, putting thousands more oil workers out of work, probably sending most of the active rigs elsewhere so the owners can recoup their huge investments, and possibly—just possibly—preventing another accident like the Deepwater Horizon. But my guess is that this has put the fear of, if not God, the federal government, into every other drilling organization, and they are probably running the safest operations they have for many years.
Will offshore oil operations be run any differently from now on than they have been up to now? Right now it is hard to say, but one thing is certain: if the safety record improves in the future, it will be because both technical people and managerial types work together to make an already pretty good technology even better. For a technology wonk like me, just the technical details of how they're doing things right now are fascinating.
Today Adm. Thad Allen, the Coast Guard commander in overall charge of the recovery operation, described how the capping wells are being drilled. For most of the distance, the same directional drilling techniques are used that are common elsewhere in the world. It is an "open-loop" process, in that the drill goes in a particular direction determined by internal navigation systems, not by any feedback from the place where they want to get to.
But now that the hole is within a thousand or two feet of the original well, they have gone to a different method. Every so often they pull the drill string (the column of interconnected pipes attached to the drill bit) and run a sensing instrument down the hole. At the end of the hole, it "listens" for magnetic fields due to the presence of the original problem well's casing, and gives a direction and distance reading to the drillers. Armed with this knowledge, they readjust their steering, drill another couple hundred feet, and then do it all over again. Once they're just a few feet away, they know they can go straight ahead and they'll hit the casing—but this time they will be prepared with plenty of mud to stop the thing up.
Maybe I'm strange, being technically inclined, but learning this little detail about how the capping wells are being drilled makes me feel better about the whole situation. I'm not a Louisiana shrimpboat captain sitting on his hands and wondering whether to go into another line of work, and for those folks I don't think this knowledge would be much solace. But as we pointed out earlier, the same type of people—technical experts—who caused the problem are the ones best qualified to fix it. Whether that's a good thing or not is a matter for managers, regulators, legislators, and the general public to decide. But right now, we have to trust the technical types to make things better, and learning how they're going about it is reassuring to me, even though it's a tedious and expensive process that will take another several weeks to complete.
Many people want to use this accident as a reason for reconsidering our nation's energy policy as a whole. The ethanol industry, for example, is boasting about how you never see pictures of gulls and cranes drenched in spilled ethanol. In principle, I think this would be a good thing. We as a country depend too much on one type of energy source, and our dependence has gotten us in a lot of trouble in the past. But the difficulty is how to get there from here to there: how to move from the way we are now to a situation that would be fair to most people, not result in disproportionate advantages or disadvantages to certain industries or political pressure groups, and not cause huge economic or political disruptions that would make the cure look worse than the disease. Doing this with the democratic process is hard, and doing it in a top-down expert-designed way would be fraught with unintended consequences. Perhaps this disaster will indeed lead to a more unified view of our present situation and more consensus about what we should do. But first we need to get it over with, and not make any hasty, ill-considered decisions in the midst of the crisis.
Sources: Adm. Allen's June 27, 2010 press briefing transcript is posted at http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/doc/2931/714075/.
Apparently most but not all of the leaking oil is now being captured and disposed of by storage or flaring, some 24,000 barrels a day. Since April 20, however, the date of the explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil platform that killed eleven people and started the spill, more oil has gone into the Gulf than was spilled during the previous U. S. record-holding accident, the Exxon Valdez. That was a tanker accident, which had the advantage that once all of it spilled out of the tanker, there wasn't any more left. Obviously that is not the case in the Gulf, where an incredibly productive old-fashioned gusher on the ocean floor has been throwing out swimming pools of oil every day or so.
I mentioned in my first blog that this might be a game-changing incident for the offshore oil industry. In the short term, that proved correct when President Obama placed a six-month moratorium on all Gulf oil drilling. Just last week a judge blocked execution of that order, and we will have to wait and see if it sticks, putting thousands more oil workers out of work, probably sending most of the active rigs elsewhere so the owners can recoup their huge investments, and possibly—just possibly—preventing another accident like the Deepwater Horizon. But my guess is that this has put the fear of, if not God, the federal government, into every other drilling organization, and they are probably running the safest operations they have for many years.
Will offshore oil operations be run any differently from now on than they have been up to now? Right now it is hard to say, but one thing is certain: if the safety record improves in the future, it will be because both technical people and managerial types work together to make an already pretty good technology even better. For a technology wonk like me, just the technical details of how they're doing things right now are fascinating.
Today Adm. Thad Allen, the Coast Guard commander in overall charge of the recovery operation, described how the capping wells are being drilled. For most of the distance, the same directional drilling techniques are used that are common elsewhere in the world. It is an "open-loop" process, in that the drill goes in a particular direction determined by internal navigation systems, not by any feedback from the place where they want to get to.
But now that the hole is within a thousand or two feet of the original well, they have gone to a different method. Every so often they pull the drill string (the column of interconnected pipes attached to the drill bit) and run a sensing instrument down the hole. At the end of the hole, it "listens" for magnetic fields due to the presence of the original problem well's casing, and gives a direction and distance reading to the drillers. Armed with this knowledge, they readjust their steering, drill another couple hundred feet, and then do it all over again. Once they're just a few feet away, they know they can go straight ahead and they'll hit the casing—but this time they will be prepared with plenty of mud to stop the thing up.
Maybe I'm strange, being technically inclined, but learning this little detail about how the capping wells are being drilled makes me feel better about the whole situation. I'm not a Louisiana shrimpboat captain sitting on his hands and wondering whether to go into another line of work, and for those folks I don't think this knowledge would be much solace. But as we pointed out earlier, the same type of people—technical experts—who caused the problem are the ones best qualified to fix it. Whether that's a good thing or not is a matter for managers, regulators, legislators, and the general public to decide. But right now, we have to trust the technical types to make things better, and learning how they're going about it is reassuring to me, even though it's a tedious and expensive process that will take another several weeks to complete.
Many people want to use this accident as a reason for reconsidering our nation's energy policy as a whole. The ethanol industry, for example, is boasting about how you never see pictures of gulls and cranes drenched in spilled ethanol. In principle, I think this would be a good thing. We as a country depend too much on one type of energy source, and our dependence has gotten us in a lot of trouble in the past. But the difficulty is how to get there from here to there: how to move from the way we are now to a situation that would be fair to most people, not result in disproportionate advantages or disadvantages to certain industries or political pressure groups, and not cause huge economic or political disruptions that would make the cure look worse than the disease. Doing this with the democratic process is hard, and doing it in a top-down expert-designed way would be fraught with unintended consequences. Perhaps this disaster will indeed lead to a more unified view of our present situation and more consensus about what we should do. But first we need to get it over with, and not make any hasty, ill-considered decisions in the midst of the crisis.
Sources: Adm. Allen's June 27, 2010 press briefing transcript is posted at http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/doc/2931/714075/.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Engineering Ethics In the Movies: The Bridge On the River Kwai
In 1957, World War II was nearly as recent to people living then as the Sept. 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks are to us today. So when a film was released that year about British and American servicemen working in a Japanese prison camp to build a bridge for important railway supply line through Burma (now Myanmar), the story had an emotional punch simply because it was about a recent war that many viewers fought in personally. But even now, half a century later, "The Bridge On the River Kwai" throws a strong light on a perennial problem in engineering ethics: getting the larger picture of what you as an engineer are doing.
I won't worry about giving you a spoiler alert here, because even if you know how it turns out, it's the kind of story that's good enough to watch anyway. The tale pivots on the personality of Colonel Nicholson (played by Alec Guinness), a British officer captured by the Japanese in Burma, along with a couple hundred of his officers and men. The first part of the movie is a test of wills between Saito, the prison-camp commandant, and Nicholson. Saito insists that the officers must do manual labor along with the men; Nicholson and his officers refuse, citing the Geneva Convention prohibiting it. In revenge, Saito claps the officers in a tiny cell and puts Nicholson in a "hot box": an iron shed exposed to the tropical sun for days. Saito, under pressure to build a railway bridge across a nearby river by a deadline only a couple of months away, eventually sees that he's getting nowhere, and uses a Japanese holiday as an excuse to give in to Nicholson's demands. In return, Nicholson seizes on the bridge project as a way to instill order and discipline in his men, and returns to effective command.
The rest of the movie is a penetrating psychological study of how a person (in particular, an engineer, though the point is relevant to anyone engaged on a challenging project) can become captivated by a technical challenge to the exclusion of its wider purpose and effects. Until Nicholson assumes responsibility for the bridge, the Japanese have been fluffing the job. They selected the wrong site where the river bottom is too soft and the uncooperative prisoners have encumbered the work at every opportunity. Nicholson initially justifies tackling the project with a sincere desire to do the best he can as a way to show the Japanese the superiority of British discipline and know-how. And he succeeds. His engineering-trained officers have built bridges like this before, and despite setbacks Nicholson and his men complete the structure the day before a train of dignitaries is scheduled to cross it for the first time. Ironically, Nicholson eventually asks his officers to do manual labor in his rush to finish the bridge—breaking the very same principle he insisted on keeping in his battle with Saito earlier.
In a parallel story, an American sailor who escaped from the camp earlier has joined a British commando team who have made their way through the jungle to place explosives under the river surface in order to blow up the same bridge. After many struggles, they manage to do this on the night before the first train is supposed to arrive, and station a man downstream with a plunger-type detonator to blow it up as the train crosses the bridge.
All is well for this plan until Nature intervenes: overnight, the river level falls, revealing the detonator cable here and there rising from the receding water. Tension among the commandos runs high as that morning, Nicholson strolls out to view "his" bridge, even stopping to admire a commemorative plaque he placed on the bridge that says British troops built the bridge on such-and-such a date. When he spots a suspicious-looking cable sticking up above the water, he calls Saito and they climb down to trace the path of the cable along the bank. Just as they reach the detonator, one of the commandos opens fire and mortally wounds Nicholson. At the very last moment, he realizes with horror that for the last two months he has been aiding the enemy. Gasping, "What have I done?" he falls on the detonator, and the bridge blows just as the train is crossing it.
Now, there are engineers opposed to war of any form, and even they have a spokesman in the movie. One of Nicholson's officers is given the last word of the film: after witnessing the tragic end of the project, he says simply, "Madness," and to that extent you can view the entire movie as a kind of anti-war epic. But given the assumption of most of the characters that the war was a necessary evil, clearly Nicholson allowed his pride in technical accomplishment to overcome his judgment about how a given project (the bridge) fit into the larger scheme of things.
Many engineers eventually become managers, but that doesn't mean they can leave engineering ethics behind. The men under Nicholson's command were basically tools that he could bend to his will. It took the British commando team to remind Nicholson that Japan was the enemy, and the Geneva-convention rules applied to everyone, not just the Japanese. Like many problems in engineering ethics, the film presents a complex situation, though it was simplified for dramatic intensity. While reality is not usually as dramatic as the film portrayed it, the story highlights the kinds of questions that engineers still face today: What am I really doing? What is its real purpose? Am I doing this just because I enjoy the technical challenge, or because it genuinely contributes to the good of society? These are all questions that every engineer should ponder from time to time. And if you have a chance to check out "The Bridge On the River Kwai," do it. It's a great film.
Sources: Besides the DVD of the film, the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) has a good detailed plot synopsis which I referred to.
I won't worry about giving you a spoiler alert here, because even if you know how it turns out, it's the kind of story that's good enough to watch anyway. The tale pivots on the personality of Colonel Nicholson (played by Alec Guinness), a British officer captured by the Japanese in Burma, along with a couple hundred of his officers and men. The first part of the movie is a test of wills between Saito, the prison-camp commandant, and Nicholson. Saito insists that the officers must do manual labor along with the men; Nicholson and his officers refuse, citing the Geneva Convention prohibiting it. In revenge, Saito claps the officers in a tiny cell and puts Nicholson in a "hot box": an iron shed exposed to the tropical sun for days. Saito, under pressure to build a railway bridge across a nearby river by a deadline only a couple of months away, eventually sees that he's getting nowhere, and uses a Japanese holiday as an excuse to give in to Nicholson's demands. In return, Nicholson seizes on the bridge project as a way to instill order and discipline in his men, and returns to effective command.
The rest of the movie is a penetrating psychological study of how a person (in particular, an engineer, though the point is relevant to anyone engaged on a challenging project) can become captivated by a technical challenge to the exclusion of its wider purpose and effects. Until Nicholson assumes responsibility for the bridge, the Japanese have been fluffing the job. They selected the wrong site where the river bottom is too soft and the uncooperative prisoners have encumbered the work at every opportunity. Nicholson initially justifies tackling the project with a sincere desire to do the best he can as a way to show the Japanese the superiority of British discipline and know-how. And he succeeds. His engineering-trained officers have built bridges like this before, and despite setbacks Nicholson and his men complete the structure the day before a train of dignitaries is scheduled to cross it for the first time. Ironically, Nicholson eventually asks his officers to do manual labor in his rush to finish the bridge—breaking the very same principle he insisted on keeping in his battle with Saito earlier.
In a parallel story, an American sailor who escaped from the camp earlier has joined a British commando team who have made their way through the jungle to place explosives under the river surface in order to blow up the same bridge. After many struggles, they manage to do this on the night before the first train is supposed to arrive, and station a man downstream with a plunger-type detonator to blow it up as the train crosses the bridge.
All is well for this plan until Nature intervenes: overnight, the river level falls, revealing the detonator cable here and there rising from the receding water. Tension among the commandos runs high as that morning, Nicholson strolls out to view "his" bridge, even stopping to admire a commemorative plaque he placed on the bridge that says British troops built the bridge on such-and-such a date. When he spots a suspicious-looking cable sticking up above the water, he calls Saito and they climb down to trace the path of the cable along the bank. Just as they reach the detonator, one of the commandos opens fire and mortally wounds Nicholson. At the very last moment, he realizes with horror that for the last two months he has been aiding the enemy. Gasping, "What have I done?" he falls on the detonator, and the bridge blows just as the train is crossing it.
Now, there are engineers opposed to war of any form, and even they have a spokesman in the movie. One of Nicholson's officers is given the last word of the film: after witnessing the tragic end of the project, he says simply, "Madness," and to that extent you can view the entire movie as a kind of anti-war epic. But given the assumption of most of the characters that the war was a necessary evil, clearly Nicholson allowed his pride in technical accomplishment to overcome his judgment about how a given project (the bridge) fit into the larger scheme of things.
Many engineers eventually become managers, but that doesn't mean they can leave engineering ethics behind. The men under Nicholson's command were basically tools that he could bend to his will. It took the British commando team to remind Nicholson that Japan was the enemy, and the Geneva-convention rules applied to everyone, not just the Japanese. Like many problems in engineering ethics, the film presents a complex situation, though it was simplified for dramatic intensity. While reality is not usually as dramatic as the film portrayed it, the story highlights the kinds of questions that engineers still face today: What am I really doing? What is its real purpose? Am I doing this just because I enjoy the technical challenge, or because it genuinely contributes to the good of society? These are all questions that every engineer should ponder from time to time. And if you have a chance to check out "The Bridge On the River Kwai," do it. It's a great film.
Sources: Besides the DVD of the film, the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) has a good detailed plot synopsis which I referred to.
Monday, June 14, 2010
K-12 Engineering Education: Will it Help?
Poetry, it is said, is the clear expression of mixed emotions. I will forgo inflicting upon my readers an example of my poetic gifts, such as they are, but mixed emotions are definitely what I felt when I read a recent New York Times story about a school district in New Jersey that is teaching engineering to children in kindergarten. Or trying to, anyway.
At Clara E. Colemen Elementary in Glen Rock, New Jersey, all students from fifth graders right down to kindegarten are exposed to at least ten hours a year of something that can be optimistically described as engineering education. For the kindergarteners, who can't yet spell engineering (or anything else), this takes the form of imagining how they could make the three little pigs' house less vulnerable to high-velocity winds blown by the huffing puffing wolf. As a spokesman for the American Society of Engineering Education pointed out, this is not learning engineering so much as it is learning about engineering, but still, it's a move in the right direction. Assuming, that is, that you think the teaching of engineering belongs in elementary school at all.
And here's where the mixed emotions come in. Speaking for myself, I would have been thrilled if I had been given an opportunity to study anything related to engineering when I was that age. But as things were run in a medium-quality Texas school district in the 1960s, I had to make do with things like bringing samples of my self-assigned battery-powered electrical projects to show-and-tell, and reading the articles on oil refining in the encyclopedia during recess. The view then was that first we teach them how to read, write, and do elementary math, along with things like world history, art, and U. S. citizenship. There will be plenty of time for them to find out about professions like engineering, law, or medicine when they can at least have a basic understanding of how and why such things are done.
I personally disagreed with such an approach. Much later in life, I was told that one day I came home from my first day in fourth grade looking particularly disgusted. When my mother asked me what the problem was, I said, "When am I going to be able to take physics?" The reply was discouraging, to say the least.
So from a purely personal perspective, I am jealous of all those kids out there (and the Glen Rock school is by no means unique) who are getting to build paper-hedgehog levitators, hyperventilating-wolf safeguard mechanisms, and other things that pass under the label of engineering, broadly defined.
But here's where the mixed emotions come in. I was an unusual child, in the sense of being a statistical outlier. There are simply not that many fourth-graders hankering for a dose of Newton's Laws, or at least there weren't in my day. One can question the wisdom of taking a perceived national need for more engineers (which at some level or other is always a chronic problem, especially if you talk to industrial representatives at any time except during the depths of a recession) and thereby justifying the presentation of a particular singled-out profession to young children, most of whom will not become engineers. From the descriptions, it sounds like mathematics is not a prominent feature of most of these programs, at least at the lower levels. That may well be appropriate, since a lot of what engineers do is enabled by math, but not fundamentally based on it. People were building sheds and houses without benefit of anything beyond basic arithmetic for millennia, after all. But by the same token, it is a stretch to describe what they were doing as engineering.
How would it look if we had a shortage of lawyers, for example (I know that is hard to imagine, but bear with me), and set aside a week or two a year in every grade to make kids dress up in fancy suits and carry briefcases and hold mock trials? It begins to sound like debating teams, and in fact that is a good place for budding lawyers to start. But I'm not aware of any debating teams that have to interrupt their sessions for nap time, and that's because the intellectual equipment needed to conduct a meaningful debate, as opposed to a playground brawl, is simply not present in most kids before the age of twelve or so.
Is the same true of engineering? Yes and no. If you are talking about the instinct to build things, well, you can find that in toddlers who like to pile blocks together and then knock them down. And for decades, toymakers have profited from selling construction kits like Erector sets, Tinkertoys, and so on, without benefit of any subsidies from the National Science Foundation or the Department of Education. It is an empirical fact that boys tend to like those kinds of toys more than girls do, and I suspect one motive behind the engineering-for-everybody movement is to get more girls interested in the subject. And to the extent it works, I say fine, but at the same time I don't expect that ten years from now we'll see the percentage of women in engineering zoom up to the perpetually-hoped-for goal of 52%, or whatever statistical parity with respect to the general population would be.
And here is a caution: if these little engineering samples in elementary school are presented badly, or poorly equipped teachers have to do it under compulsion, the whole thing might backfire. Not everything kids do in school is to their liking. The few weirdos like me will like it, but they will probably go on to be engineers or scientists anyway. But for the great majority of children to whom most of what they do in school is at best a chore or a burden, they may learn to associate the word "engineering" with tedium, frustration, and failure, which would not be what we want at all.
Sources: The New York Times article "Studying Engineering Before They Can Spell It," appeared on June 13, 2010 at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/education/14engineering.html?. It cites curriculum material developed by the Boston Museum of Science, which has been a national leader in this area.
At Clara E. Colemen Elementary in Glen Rock, New Jersey, all students from fifth graders right down to kindegarten are exposed to at least ten hours a year of something that can be optimistically described as engineering education. For the kindergarteners, who can't yet spell engineering (or anything else), this takes the form of imagining how they could make the three little pigs' house less vulnerable to high-velocity winds blown by the huffing puffing wolf. As a spokesman for the American Society of Engineering Education pointed out, this is not learning engineering so much as it is learning about engineering, but still, it's a move in the right direction. Assuming, that is, that you think the teaching of engineering belongs in elementary school at all.
And here's where the mixed emotions come in. Speaking for myself, I would have been thrilled if I had been given an opportunity to study anything related to engineering when I was that age. But as things were run in a medium-quality Texas school district in the 1960s, I had to make do with things like bringing samples of my self-assigned battery-powered electrical projects to show-and-tell, and reading the articles on oil refining in the encyclopedia during recess. The view then was that first we teach them how to read, write, and do elementary math, along with things like world history, art, and U. S. citizenship. There will be plenty of time for them to find out about professions like engineering, law, or medicine when they can at least have a basic understanding of how and why such things are done.
I personally disagreed with such an approach. Much later in life, I was told that one day I came home from my first day in fourth grade looking particularly disgusted. When my mother asked me what the problem was, I said, "When am I going to be able to take physics?" The reply was discouraging, to say the least.
So from a purely personal perspective, I am jealous of all those kids out there (and the Glen Rock school is by no means unique) who are getting to build paper-hedgehog levitators, hyperventilating-wolf safeguard mechanisms, and other things that pass under the label of engineering, broadly defined.
But here's where the mixed emotions come in. I was an unusual child, in the sense of being a statistical outlier. There are simply not that many fourth-graders hankering for a dose of Newton's Laws, or at least there weren't in my day. One can question the wisdom of taking a perceived national need for more engineers (which at some level or other is always a chronic problem, especially if you talk to industrial representatives at any time except during the depths of a recession) and thereby justifying the presentation of a particular singled-out profession to young children, most of whom will not become engineers. From the descriptions, it sounds like mathematics is not a prominent feature of most of these programs, at least at the lower levels. That may well be appropriate, since a lot of what engineers do is enabled by math, but not fundamentally based on it. People were building sheds and houses without benefit of anything beyond basic arithmetic for millennia, after all. But by the same token, it is a stretch to describe what they were doing as engineering.
How would it look if we had a shortage of lawyers, for example (I know that is hard to imagine, but bear with me), and set aside a week or two a year in every grade to make kids dress up in fancy suits and carry briefcases and hold mock trials? It begins to sound like debating teams, and in fact that is a good place for budding lawyers to start. But I'm not aware of any debating teams that have to interrupt their sessions for nap time, and that's because the intellectual equipment needed to conduct a meaningful debate, as opposed to a playground brawl, is simply not present in most kids before the age of twelve or so.
Is the same true of engineering? Yes and no. If you are talking about the instinct to build things, well, you can find that in toddlers who like to pile blocks together and then knock them down. And for decades, toymakers have profited from selling construction kits like Erector sets, Tinkertoys, and so on, without benefit of any subsidies from the National Science Foundation or the Department of Education. It is an empirical fact that boys tend to like those kinds of toys more than girls do, and I suspect one motive behind the engineering-for-everybody movement is to get more girls interested in the subject. And to the extent it works, I say fine, but at the same time I don't expect that ten years from now we'll see the percentage of women in engineering zoom up to the perpetually-hoped-for goal of 52%, or whatever statistical parity with respect to the general population would be.
And here is a caution: if these little engineering samples in elementary school are presented badly, or poorly equipped teachers have to do it under compulsion, the whole thing might backfire. Not everything kids do in school is to their liking. The few weirdos like me will like it, but they will probably go on to be engineers or scientists anyway. But for the great majority of children to whom most of what they do in school is at best a chore or a burden, they may learn to associate the word "engineering" with tedium, frustration, and failure, which would not be what we want at all.
Sources: The New York Times article "Studying Engineering Before They Can Spell It," appeared on June 13, 2010 at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/education/14engineering.html?. It cites curriculum material developed by the Boston Museum of Science, which has been a national leader in this area.
Monday, June 07, 2010
The Nuremberg Trial: Lessons for Engineers, and Everyone Else
In today's overheated political rhetoric, the word "Nazi" tends to turn up whenever someone wants to compare an act or person to ultimate evil. Though the term is in danger of becoming meaningless through overuse, the reality of Nazi Germany represented the unimaginable in wrongdoing at the time the fullness of its horrors became generally known after World War II. The extraordinary judicial proceeding by which the world learned in abundant detail of the Holocaust and related crimes against humanity was called the Nuremberg Trial, after the German city in which it was held. Lasting almost a year (from November 1945 to September 1946), this trial brought to justice some twenty-one former leaders of the Third Reich, ranging from Luftwaffe chief and Hitler right-hand man Hermann Goering to armaments and war production head Albert Speer. Judges and prosecutors of the Allied Powers (England, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union) took thousands of pages of testimony, called hundreds of witnesses, examined tons of documents, and issued verdicts that condemned most, but not all, of the defendents to be hanged. The lesson I learned from recently reading a one-volume history of the proceedings is that, although the Nazi regime was a unique chapter in history, the motivations and causes for many of their heinous acts are still with us. And advances in technology mean that the same things the Nazis did crudely and inefficiently then can be done elegantly and efficiently today.
Evil does not always follow logic, but the actions of Hitler's government often followed logically from a few (wrong) premises. One detestable premise was that Jews were human vermin whose extermination was necessary before Germany could be racially purified for its alleged glorious future. Therefore, the efficient killing of Jews and other undesirable elements was a legitimate engineering goal. So German engineers experimented first with mobile execution units that used carbon monoxide in the engine's exhaust to kill a truckload of people in ten to fifteen minutes. When this method proved too slow and erratic, the famous gas chambers were designed and built so that hundreds of people packed into a space not much larger than a living room could be killed without fail inside half an hour.
Jews were not the only undesirables destined for gas chambers. Anyone whose existence imposed an economic burden on the State was a candidate for at least a concentration camp, and ultimately execution. One of the early signs of these horrors noticed by Catholic clergy during World War II was that many parishoners who had elderly or disabled relatives in rest homes and hospitals began getting messages from the government saying in effect: "Dear Blank, This is to inform you that So-and-So was recently moved to a new hospital, whereupon he contracted pneumonia and died." And the bodies were always cremated "for sanitary reasons." While the regime did not allow investigation of these reports at the time, it turned out that a plan was being implemented to move "unproductives" out of their existing care facilities to the gas chambers. In this way thousands of mentally and physically disabled citizens of the Third Reich ceased to be a burden to their fellow citizens, and in the Nazi mind contributed thereby to the wellbeing of the State.
Another charge well supported by the evidence was that "doctors" performed experiments on prisoners, not only without their consent, but with flagrant disregard for elementary standards of decency, medical ethics, or safety. People were boiled or frozen in water tanks, injected with scarlet-fever germs, had air injected into their veins, and were sterilized by hidden X-ray machines without their consent. All these things were permissible once the "doctors" made the mental transition to objectify their subjects: the prisoners were no longer human beings like their torturers, but only raw material for scientific investigation.
What are the lessons for today? I can think of three without even trying hard.
One, is that the modern state of Israel was formed largely as a way for the community of nations to apologize to the Jews for what happened to them in World War II. In Albert Speer's phrase, "No apologies are possible," but the creation of a free and independent Israel after two thousand years of exile for the Jews marked one of the bright spots in an otherwise tarnished century. There are now nations and organizations whose stated official policy is the eradication, not only of the Jewish state, but of Jews too. We have seen this before. And we have seen what it leads to. And if we haven't learned from the most horrendous chapter in the history of the twentieth century to oppose not only antisemitism wherever it is found, but organizations and states which foster it, then we are shirking our responsibility to God's special people, the Jews. The recent actions of the present U. S. administration towards Israel are not encouraging in this regard, to say the least.
Two, is that doing away with human lives that are a burden, or inconvenient, or economically unproductive, was heinous when the Nazis did it, and is just as heinous today. Abortion has been unfortunately legal in the U. S. since 1973, and euthanasia is now legal in some U. S. states. Both of these things treat human beings as inconveniences to be disposed of if they do not meet certain criteria. That is exactly what the Nazis did, and if it was wrong then, it is wrong now.
Three, the use of human embryos for research purposes is just as objectifying an action as that of a Nazi "doctor" who treated a young Jewish woman like a guinea pig to be experimented upon at his pleasure. A human embryo is just as human as you are or I am. We were both embryos at first, and until recently, the younger a person was, the more he or she was entitled to respect, compassion, and protection. The reversal by the present administration of former President George W. Bush's policy against the use of federal funds for human embryo research is a step in the direction of objectifying human beings. And the example of Nazi Germany showed us where that leads.
Sources: The book I read was The Nuremberg Trial by Joe J. Heydecker and Johannes Leeb, tr. R. A. Downie (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975). Defendant Albert Speer's closing statement before he was sentenced to twenty years of imprisonment showed a prescient insight into how technology enabled many of the Nazi horrors and threatened to allow even worse in the future (pp. 369-370): "In five or ten years' time the technique of war will have made it possible to fire rockets from continent to continent with uncanny precision. An atomic rocket, operated perhaps by only ten men, may be able to destroy a million people in the center of New York within seconds. . . . [T]his Trial must be a contribution toward preventing wars in the future and in laying down the fundamental laws of human existence. What does my fate matter, after all that has happened?"
Evil does not always follow logic, but the actions of Hitler's government often followed logically from a few (wrong) premises. One detestable premise was that Jews were human vermin whose extermination was necessary before Germany could be racially purified for its alleged glorious future. Therefore, the efficient killing of Jews and other undesirable elements was a legitimate engineering goal. So German engineers experimented first with mobile execution units that used carbon monoxide in the engine's exhaust to kill a truckload of people in ten to fifteen minutes. When this method proved too slow and erratic, the famous gas chambers were designed and built so that hundreds of people packed into a space not much larger than a living room could be killed without fail inside half an hour.
Jews were not the only undesirables destined for gas chambers. Anyone whose existence imposed an economic burden on the State was a candidate for at least a concentration camp, and ultimately execution. One of the early signs of these horrors noticed by Catholic clergy during World War II was that many parishoners who had elderly or disabled relatives in rest homes and hospitals began getting messages from the government saying in effect: "Dear Blank, This is to inform you that So-and-So was recently moved to a new hospital, whereupon he contracted pneumonia and died." And the bodies were always cremated "for sanitary reasons." While the regime did not allow investigation of these reports at the time, it turned out that a plan was being implemented to move "unproductives" out of their existing care facilities to the gas chambers. In this way thousands of mentally and physically disabled citizens of the Third Reich ceased to be a burden to their fellow citizens, and in the Nazi mind contributed thereby to the wellbeing of the State.
Another charge well supported by the evidence was that "doctors" performed experiments on prisoners, not only without their consent, but with flagrant disregard for elementary standards of decency, medical ethics, or safety. People were boiled or frozen in water tanks, injected with scarlet-fever germs, had air injected into their veins, and were sterilized by hidden X-ray machines without their consent. All these things were permissible once the "doctors" made the mental transition to objectify their subjects: the prisoners were no longer human beings like their torturers, but only raw material for scientific investigation.
What are the lessons for today? I can think of three without even trying hard.
One, is that the modern state of Israel was formed largely as a way for the community of nations to apologize to the Jews for what happened to them in World War II. In Albert Speer's phrase, "No apologies are possible," but the creation of a free and independent Israel after two thousand years of exile for the Jews marked one of the bright spots in an otherwise tarnished century. There are now nations and organizations whose stated official policy is the eradication, not only of the Jewish state, but of Jews too. We have seen this before. And we have seen what it leads to. And if we haven't learned from the most horrendous chapter in the history of the twentieth century to oppose not only antisemitism wherever it is found, but organizations and states which foster it, then we are shirking our responsibility to God's special people, the Jews. The recent actions of the present U. S. administration towards Israel are not encouraging in this regard, to say the least.
Two, is that doing away with human lives that are a burden, or inconvenient, or economically unproductive, was heinous when the Nazis did it, and is just as heinous today. Abortion has been unfortunately legal in the U. S. since 1973, and euthanasia is now legal in some U. S. states. Both of these things treat human beings as inconveniences to be disposed of if they do not meet certain criteria. That is exactly what the Nazis did, and if it was wrong then, it is wrong now.
Three, the use of human embryos for research purposes is just as objectifying an action as that of a Nazi "doctor" who treated a young Jewish woman like a guinea pig to be experimented upon at his pleasure. A human embryo is just as human as you are or I am. We were both embryos at first, and until recently, the younger a person was, the more he or she was entitled to respect, compassion, and protection. The reversal by the present administration of former President George W. Bush's policy against the use of federal funds for human embryo research is a step in the direction of objectifying human beings. And the example of Nazi Germany showed us where that leads.
Sources: The book I read was The Nuremberg Trial by Joe J. Heydecker and Johannes Leeb, tr. R. A. Downie (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975). Defendant Albert Speer's closing statement before he was sentenced to twenty years of imprisonment showed a prescient insight into how technology enabled many of the Nazi horrors and threatened to allow even worse in the future (pp. 369-370): "In five or ten years' time the technique of war will have made it possible to fire rockets from continent to continent with uncanny precision. An atomic rocket, operated perhaps by only ten men, may be able to destroy a million people in the center of New York within seconds. . . . [T]his Trial must be a contribution toward preventing wars in the future and in laying down the fundamental laws of human existence. What does my fate matter, after all that has happened?"
Monday, May 31, 2010
Privacy and Social Media: Flap Over Facebook
In a protest over how the social media website Facebook treats privacy issues, 24,500 users have reportedly made plans to commit "digital suicide" on June 1. They have announced that they will take all their content off Facebook in a show of solidarity. This is only the latest incident in a controversy over how Facebook deals with the complicated issue of privacy. There are layers of irony and paradox here that could stand some exploration.
One of the main problems cited in the controversy is that it is very complicated to either figure out or alter one's privacy settings in Facebook. In an attempt to allay this concern, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's 26-year-old CEO, has instituted changes which will reduce the number of different settings and pages you have to visit in order to adjust your privacy status. Whether this will solve all the perceived problems remains to be seen.
And of course, being seen is one of the main reasons people get on Facebook in the first place. I speak as a near-total outsider to the whole social media phenomenon. I do not tweet or twitter, I do not have a Facebook presence, and the closest I have come to any of this stuff is when I watch my wife put old family photos on LifeSnapz, a family-photo-sharing site based in Chicago. Just out of curiosity, I did a little experiment this morning in trying to party-crash my wife's Lifesnapz material, registering simply to see if there was an easy way for me to look at the stuff she's posted without her invitation. There wasn't, but then, I'm not a determined hacker, either.
Facebook, apparently, is a whole different proposition. There's all kinds of publicly accessible stuff on Facebook, and that is part of the problem. Zuckerberg and his staff face conflicting priorities. On the one hand, he would like people on his site to share as much of their private information as possible, both because it gets other people to be more active and do the same, and because it helps Facebook's advertisers and other third parties get what they want as well, namely, information on potential customers. On the other hand, there are clearly limits to what some users want to share, and at times Facebook has gone beyond those limits.
I'm sure this schizophrenic conflict is experienced by many individual users too. There's the whole issue of "sexting," for example, which is not so much a problem on Facebook (although I'm sure it has come up) as it is among teenagers with camera-equipped cell phones. Back when telephones were telephones and cameras were cameras, your average fifteen-year-old girl would have had to take considerable conscious thought and planning to put a camera in her purse, take it to some private location, partially disrobe, take a picture of herself (or have a friend do it, more likely), get the film developed (without having the guy at the drugstore counter blow the whistle on her), and physically hand the salacious product to her boyfriend. Maintaining one's intention under such a series of obstacles in 1995 would have daunted all but the hardiest future porn stars.
But now that most teenagers have cellphones, and most cellphones have cameras, and there are no snoopy drugstore-counter clerks or other humans in the pathway between one phone and another, the technology has made this sort of misbehavior so much easier that a lot of kids do it. The only thing stopping them is a fear of adverse consequences if they go too far, and many teenagers don't take the forethought to consider such consequences until they have happened. The same kind of ease-of-use issues are at the root of privacy concerns on Facebook too.
If a website is too hard to use, people won't use it, but what "too hard to use" means depends on why people are using it in the first place. When "use" grows to include fine-tuning your privacy settings, what was formerly seen as adequate becomes inadequate: hence the protests and Zuckerberg's efforts to make setting one's privacy controls easier.
The effect of all this technological soul-baring is all in the direction of letting other people know more about you than formerly. Back when total obscurity was the default setting of 99.999% of the world's population and it took massive amounts of resources simply to send a letter from one end of Europe to another, privacy was essentially built into the hardware of existence, and so there was no special need to safeguard it. But now that there are strong economic forces favoring the universally-accessible blatting of one's most intimate secrets to all and sundry, we are faced with the novel problem of deciding what, if anything, was good about the old situation, and what parts of it do we want to preserve?
There are quiet human virtues which are so low-profile that they attract little attention, and in a publicity-conscious age tend to fall out of consciousness altogether. But without them, the social fabric wears thin and we find ourselves missing these virtues without really knowing what went wrong. Sexual purity is one such virtue; discretion—the ability to share information only when it is the right thing to do—is another. Those who are flagrantly lacking such virtues get most of the immediate attention, and if you believe the old saying that there's no such thing as bad publicity, it looks like no harm is done. But when it comes time for such people to desire a special relationship, or true intimacy, and they find that there is nothing special or private saved up that they can share with that special person—that's when these kinds of virtues are missed.
I hope Facebook fixes their privacy-control problems, but I doubt that they will ever post a warning on their site about the virtue of discretion, at least in so many words. They may say things like, "If you don't want people to know certain things, don't post them," but that doesn't get to the core problem. The core problem may be that we have a whole generation which has a very limited idea of what true privacy is. And as they get older, they may wish they had learned.
Sources: The item describing the digital suicides was carried by a media outlet in India at http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/facebook-faces-digital-suicides-today/396539/. Mr. Zuckerberg's announcement was covered by CNET on May 26, 2010 at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20006054-36.html.
One of the main problems cited in the controversy is that it is very complicated to either figure out or alter one's privacy settings in Facebook. In an attempt to allay this concern, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's 26-year-old CEO, has instituted changes which will reduce the number of different settings and pages you have to visit in order to adjust your privacy status. Whether this will solve all the perceived problems remains to be seen.
And of course, being seen is one of the main reasons people get on Facebook in the first place. I speak as a near-total outsider to the whole social media phenomenon. I do not tweet or twitter, I do not have a Facebook presence, and the closest I have come to any of this stuff is when I watch my wife put old family photos on LifeSnapz, a family-photo-sharing site based in Chicago. Just out of curiosity, I did a little experiment this morning in trying to party-crash my wife's Lifesnapz material, registering simply to see if there was an easy way for me to look at the stuff she's posted without her invitation. There wasn't, but then, I'm not a determined hacker, either.
Facebook, apparently, is a whole different proposition. There's all kinds of publicly accessible stuff on Facebook, and that is part of the problem. Zuckerberg and his staff face conflicting priorities. On the one hand, he would like people on his site to share as much of their private information as possible, both because it gets other people to be more active and do the same, and because it helps Facebook's advertisers and other third parties get what they want as well, namely, information on potential customers. On the other hand, there are clearly limits to what some users want to share, and at times Facebook has gone beyond those limits.
I'm sure this schizophrenic conflict is experienced by many individual users too. There's the whole issue of "sexting," for example, which is not so much a problem on Facebook (although I'm sure it has come up) as it is among teenagers with camera-equipped cell phones. Back when telephones were telephones and cameras were cameras, your average fifteen-year-old girl would have had to take considerable conscious thought and planning to put a camera in her purse, take it to some private location, partially disrobe, take a picture of herself (or have a friend do it, more likely), get the film developed (without having the guy at the drugstore counter blow the whistle on her), and physically hand the salacious product to her boyfriend. Maintaining one's intention under such a series of obstacles in 1995 would have daunted all but the hardiest future porn stars.
But now that most teenagers have cellphones, and most cellphones have cameras, and there are no snoopy drugstore-counter clerks or other humans in the pathway between one phone and another, the technology has made this sort of misbehavior so much easier that a lot of kids do it. The only thing stopping them is a fear of adverse consequences if they go too far, and many teenagers don't take the forethought to consider such consequences until they have happened. The same kind of ease-of-use issues are at the root of privacy concerns on Facebook too.
If a website is too hard to use, people won't use it, but what "too hard to use" means depends on why people are using it in the first place. When "use" grows to include fine-tuning your privacy settings, what was formerly seen as adequate becomes inadequate: hence the protests and Zuckerberg's efforts to make setting one's privacy controls easier.
The effect of all this technological soul-baring is all in the direction of letting other people know more about you than formerly. Back when total obscurity was the default setting of 99.999% of the world's population and it took massive amounts of resources simply to send a letter from one end of Europe to another, privacy was essentially built into the hardware of existence, and so there was no special need to safeguard it. But now that there are strong economic forces favoring the universally-accessible blatting of one's most intimate secrets to all and sundry, we are faced with the novel problem of deciding what, if anything, was good about the old situation, and what parts of it do we want to preserve?
There are quiet human virtues which are so low-profile that they attract little attention, and in a publicity-conscious age tend to fall out of consciousness altogether. But without them, the social fabric wears thin and we find ourselves missing these virtues without really knowing what went wrong. Sexual purity is one such virtue; discretion—the ability to share information only when it is the right thing to do—is another. Those who are flagrantly lacking such virtues get most of the immediate attention, and if you believe the old saying that there's no such thing as bad publicity, it looks like no harm is done. But when it comes time for such people to desire a special relationship, or true intimacy, and they find that there is nothing special or private saved up that they can share with that special person—that's when these kinds of virtues are missed.
I hope Facebook fixes their privacy-control problems, but I doubt that they will ever post a warning on their site about the virtue of discretion, at least in so many words. They may say things like, "If you don't want people to know certain things, don't post them," but that doesn't get to the core problem. The core problem may be that we have a whole generation which has a very limited idea of what true privacy is. And as they get older, they may wish they had learned.
Sources: The item describing the digital suicides was carried by a media outlet in India at http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/facebook-faces-digital-suicides-today/396539/. Mr. Zuckerberg's announcement was covered by CNET on May 26, 2010 at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20006054-36.html.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Military and Civilian Engineering: The X-37B and the Space Shuttle
The profession of engineering has deep roots in military culture and military organizations. Both in France and the U. S., the first engineering schools in the late 1700s and early 1800s were military academies, and the first people trained in what we would now call the profession of engineering were military servicemen educated in the technicalities of forts, armaments, and related matters. When such training proved to be useful in fields other than war, the first practitioners of non-military engineering were called "civil engineers" to distinguish them from the only other kind at the time. Although the military employs only a minority of engineers today, the story of the X-37B says a lot about the different ways a military and a civilian organization go about achieving similar goals.
The X-37B is a recently launched unmanned space vehicle that the U. S. Air Force has developed, apparently to maintain its ability to launch spy satellites now that the last scheduled Shuttle flight is taking place as I write this. Like the Shuttle, it is a reusable craft with vestigial wings whose design was based on the Shuttle when NASA asked Boeing to develop an earlier version, the X-37, back in 1999. During the last decade, according to Wikipedia, the NASA design served as the basis for the Air Force's X-37B, which was announced in 2006 and then cloaked mostly in secrecy. Unlike NASA, whose proceedings are open and publicized almost to a fault, the Air Force gives out only such information as suits its purposes. So for example, we have only an early artist's conception of what the X-37B really looks like. But when the launch of the first X-37B took place last month (April 22, to be exact), amateur satellite observers and others figured out pretty fast what was happening.
The Air Force has always had a claim on a certain number of Shuttle flights to deliver its most advanced spy satellites into orbit. Even now we do not have full data on the nature of these satellites, but there is enough indirect evidence to show that they produce images superior to anything you can find on Google Earth, for example, and can be reconfigured and steered to watch trouble spots in most parts of the world as needed. During the Cold War, these satellites played an essential role in arms-reduction verification and many other aspects of that conflict, and after the Soviet Union came apart the programs continued for obvious reasons, since having eyes in the sky better than anyone else's will always provide a strategic advantage in both war and peace.
As long as the Shuttle was in operation, it could be relied upon to deliver new spy satellites, but the hiatuses caused by the two major accidents (Challenger in 1986 and especially Columbia in 2003) plus the planned ending of the Shuttle program inspired the Air Force to find an alternative. The nice thing about a military organization is that it is largely unencumbered by democracy. Democracy, I am convinced, is the best way to conduct public affairs. But once a specific technical objective has been decided upon, a well-run military organization has a much better chance of delivering the goods on time and under budget than other types of organizations. So now at fairly low cost (in the hundreds of millions rather than many billion, apparently) and in about a decade (including the seven-year NASA development, or even less time if you consider only the Air Force version), we have a space vehicle that does one of the most important functions of the Shuttle. And by its very nature, nobody on board can ever get killed because nobody is on board to start with.
Of course, the X-37B has a limited range of tasks it can do. Compared to the Shuttle, it is a butter knife to the Shuttle's Swiss army knife—it can do only one thing, but it should do it pretty well. Advances in remotely piloted vehicles and robotics have allowed the Air Force to do without people on board, and while this may lead to situations that a person in space would come in handy for, you can still do a lot with robots nowadays, only perhaps slower. But during an X-37B flight, there is no time pressure to get a task done before the oxygen and food runs out and the humans have to be carted back safely to Earth. Things can just take as long as they take. So in some ways, operations with the X-37B should be more deliberate and therefore better planned and executed.
Does this mean I favor a military type of organization for all engineering works? To a large degree, that is what we already have. The large commercial firms that do engineering have mimicked military organization in more ways than you might think. An engineer at a large company may not have to salute his boss or do kitchen-police duty for getting to work late, but everyone in a company knows there is a strict chain of command that one violates at his or her peril.
Of course, there are problems with the military style of doing things as well. When input from a large number and variety of constituencies should be considered, as in a public work that affects lots of people, the military style does not function that well. This problem has played out in such situations as the deteriorated state of dikes and flood protection systems that was the nominal, but not total, responsibility of the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans before Katrina struck. To be fair, the Corps had its hands tied with regard to much of that infrastructure, and things might have gone better if it had taken over complete control of all aspects of the system. But that was a political impossibility.
Nevertheless, when you have a specific, clear-cut job to be done, it looks like handing it over to the military arm can work pretty well. That assumes, of course, that the military either possesses or has access to the necessary technical expertise. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill that is still going on in the Gulf of Mexico has inspired calls to shove British Petroleum out of the way and put the military in charge. As I mentioned a few blog posts ago, the problem with this idea is that BP and their contractor Transocean have all the smarts in this case. But if the problems that BP and Transocean are having are organizational rather than technical, they might benefit from having the Marines run things for a while.
Sources: The Wikipedia article "Boeing X-37" supplied most of my data on the NASA X-37 and the Air Force X-37B.
The X-37B is a recently launched unmanned space vehicle that the U. S. Air Force has developed, apparently to maintain its ability to launch spy satellites now that the last scheduled Shuttle flight is taking place as I write this. Like the Shuttle, it is a reusable craft with vestigial wings whose design was based on the Shuttle when NASA asked Boeing to develop an earlier version, the X-37, back in 1999. During the last decade, according to Wikipedia, the NASA design served as the basis for the Air Force's X-37B, which was announced in 2006 and then cloaked mostly in secrecy. Unlike NASA, whose proceedings are open and publicized almost to a fault, the Air Force gives out only such information as suits its purposes. So for example, we have only an early artist's conception of what the X-37B really looks like. But when the launch of the first X-37B took place last month (April 22, to be exact), amateur satellite observers and others figured out pretty fast what was happening.
The Air Force has always had a claim on a certain number of Shuttle flights to deliver its most advanced spy satellites into orbit. Even now we do not have full data on the nature of these satellites, but there is enough indirect evidence to show that they produce images superior to anything you can find on Google Earth, for example, and can be reconfigured and steered to watch trouble spots in most parts of the world as needed. During the Cold War, these satellites played an essential role in arms-reduction verification and many other aspects of that conflict, and after the Soviet Union came apart the programs continued for obvious reasons, since having eyes in the sky better than anyone else's will always provide a strategic advantage in both war and peace.
As long as the Shuttle was in operation, it could be relied upon to deliver new spy satellites, but the hiatuses caused by the two major accidents (Challenger in 1986 and especially Columbia in 2003) plus the planned ending of the Shuttle program inspired the Air Force to find an alternative. The nice thing about a military organization is that it is largely unencumbered by democracy. Democracy, I am convinced, is the best way to conduct public affairs. But once a specific technical objective has been decided upon, a well-run military organization has a much better chance of delivering the goods on time and under budget than other types of organizations. So now at fairly low cost (in the hundreds of millions rather than many billion, apparently) and in about a decade (including the seven-year NASA development, or even less time if you consider only the Air Force version), we have a space vehicle that does one of the most important functions of the Shuttle. And by its very nature, nobody on board can ever get killed because nobody is on board to start with.
Of course, the X-37B has a limited range of tasks it can do. Compared to the Shuttle, it is a butter knife to the Shuttle's Swiss army knife—it can do only one thing, but it should do it pretty well. Advances in remotely piloted vehicles and robotics have allowed the Air Force to do without people on board, and while this may lead to situations that a person in space would come in handy for, you can still do a lot with robots nowadays, only perhaps slower. But during an X-37B flight, there is no time pressure to get a task done before the oxygen and food runs out and the humans have to be carted back safely to Earth. Things can just take as long as they take. So in some ways, operations with the X-37B should be more deliberate and therefore better planned and executed.
Does this mean I favor a military type of organization for all engineering works? To a large degree, that is what we already have. The large commercial firms that do engineering have mimicked military organization in more ways than you might think. An engineer at a large company may not have to salute his boss or do kitchen-police duty for getting to work late, but everyone in a company knows there is a strict chain of command that one violates at his or her peril.
Of course, there are problems with the military style of doing things as well. When input from a large number and variety of constituencies should be considered, as in a public work that affects lots of people, the military style does not function that well. This problem has played out in such situations as the deteriorated state of dikes and flood protection systems that was the nominal, but not total, responsibility of the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans before Katrina struck. To be fair, the Corps had its hands tied with regard to much of that infrastructure, and things might have gone better if it had taken over complete control of all aspects of the system. But that was a political impossibility.
Nevertheless, when you have a specific, clear-cut job to be done, it looks like handing it over to the military arm can work pretty well. That assumes, of course, that the military either possesses or has access to the necessary technical expertise. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill that is still going on in the Gulf of Mexico has inspired calls to shove British Petroleum out of the way and put the military in charge. As I mentioned a few blog posts ago, the problem with this idea is that BP and their contractor Transocean have all the smarts in this case. But if the problems that BP and Transocean are having are organizational rather than technical, they might benefit from having the Marines run things for a while.
Sources: The Wikipedia article "Boeing X-37" supplied most of my data on the NASA X-37 and the Air Force X-37B.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Google Admits Sniffing Private Info
In a blog post last Friday, Google admitted that since 2006 its Street View photography cars have also been collecting bits of private data from unencrypted private WiFi networks as the cars drive by. According to Google, the collection of private data in this way was unintentional, but it has landed them in hot water with the German data protection authorities whose inquiry prompted the discovery.
As a rule, European states have a greater regard for data protection and privacy issues than many jurisdictions in the Americas. So when a (presumably) American engineer working for Google thought it would be a good idea to collect just the network identification data of wireless networks that the Street View car passed by, apparently no one at Google saw anything objectionable in the idea. The problem was, the software that the engineer wrote also collected what is called "payload data"—that is, content of emails, websites being viewed, and whatever else goes over one's unencrypted wireless network. (Encrypted networks were not sniffed.) I can imagine that it was easier simply to grab and store all the data at once and then sort out the network ID stuff later, than it was to do it "on the fly" while the car was in motion. But this meant that everywhere the Street View cars went—and by now they've traveled probably millions of miles in most cities of the world—their hard drives were accumulating little pieces of private information that were exactly correlated with location and scenery. And presumably, as Google is a well-run engineering outfit, all this data was carefully collected and archived somewhere, even though no one seemed to realize that the private stuff was in there along with the network ID information.
Then along comes the data protection agent of Hamburg, Germany, who asks just exactly what are you collecting with that car? What is all this wireless stuff for? Let me see the hard drive. It's encrypted? Hum, well, tell me what's on it. And Google, in accordance with one of its founding precepts, namely, "Don't be evil," honestly checked and honestly found to its dismay that it had been collecting all this private stuff for the last four years, all over the world.
There is some good news and bad news here. The good news is, to all appearances this was a genuine error, not a sinister plot to collect blackmail data on people all over the world so as to increase Google's bottom line illegally. And when challenged by a duly constituted authority, Google personnel didn't lie, cover up, or illegally dispose of the data. Instead, they did the short-term hard thing, which was for Alan Eustace, the Senior VP of Engineering and Research, to post a blog admitting that an earlier post was in error, that Google did indeed inadvertently acquire and collect private data, and that they were going to do everything they can to amend the situation.
The bad news is, at least for Google, that their honesty has not mollified various European authorities to any great extent. The very collection of such data, even if you do nothing with it (as Google apparently has not) is illegal in Germany, and according to a New York Times report, officials are going to consult the European Commission to decide what penalties will be appropriate. The Street View feature itself has already been under attack there, and one German legislator has introduced a bill that would allow private citizens to request that their property not appear on Street View at all, with a hefty fine for Google for each incidence of non-compliance. This law would seriously compromise the usefulness of Street View, and it might be simpler for Google to just make Germany disappear altogether—so to speak.
This incident highlights the fact that a single engineer working on something that will be used in a large project should take the trouble to consider all the places the software or hardware might be used, not just some of them. Google has a reputation for putting huge resources behind innovative notions, and that's good, but with those resources come the responsibility of being more careful than is necessary if what you're working on involves only you and Joe, the neighbor down the street. I'm sure this lesson will be remembered and pounded into the heads of future engineers whose products are used in places that are more touchy about data security and privacy than, say, Austin, Texas.
It also shows the limitations of the idea of privacy in a globally interconnected age. Already, if you carry a cell phone in the U. S. and many other countries, your cellphone company "knows" where you are at least to within the accuracy of a cell (which can be any size from hundreds of feet wide to several miles), and soon there may be software and hardware on phones that will use GPS and other technologies to narrow that down to within a few yards. In general, we trust our phone companies not to use this information to our detriment, but so far, it is just a matter of trust, not law. And when it suits the law's purposes, as when a criminal is being tracked down, phone companies can be made to yield up that data. Any time you walk outside, satellite photography can almost make out your visage as you smile at the nice sunshiny day, not to mention the thousands of security cameras everywhere, and if you go inside and get on your computer, all kinds of folks can find out all kinds of things about you without your knowledge. In the U. S. we are perhaps more content with less of certain kinds of privacy than other countries are, in keeping with our long history of freedom.
Whether we will live to regret what may be viewed in the future as an excess of openness, or whether Europe will strangle data innovation with cumbersome laws that leave it increasingly without new services, only time will tell.
Sources: The New York Times article on Google's admission appeared in the May 14, 2010 online edition at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/technology/16google.html. Mr. Eustace's blog entry on the subject appears at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html. And full disclosure: The website blogspot.com on which this blog appears is owned by Google.
As a rule, European states have a greater regard for data protection and privacy issues than many jurisdictions in the Americas. So when a (presumably) American engineer working for Google thought it would be a good idea to collect just the network identification data of wireless networks that the Street View car passed by, apparently no one at Google saw anything objectionable in the idea. The problem was, the software that the engineer wrote also collected what is called "payload data"—that is, content of emails, websites being viewed, and whatever else goes over one's unencrypted wireless network. (Encrypted networks were not sniffed.) I can imagine that it was easier simply to grab and store all the data at once and then sort out the network ID stuff later, than it was to do it "on the fly" while the car was in motion. But this meant that everywhere the Street View cars went—and by now they've traveled probably millions of miles in most cities of the world—their hard drives were accumulating little pieces of private information that were exactly correlated with location and scenery. And presumably, as Google is a well-run engineering outfit, all this data was carefully collected and archived somewhere, even though no one seemed to realize that the private stuff was in there along with the network ID information.
Then along comes the data protection agent of Hamburg, Germany, who asks just exactly what are you collecting with that car? What is all this wireless stuff for? Let me see the hard drive. It's encrypted? Hum, well, tell me what's on it. And Google, in accordance with one of its founding precepts, namely, "Don't be evil," honestly checked and honestly found to its dismay that it had been collecting all this private stuff for the last four years, all over the world.
There is some good news and bad news here. The good news is, to all appearances this was a genuine error, not a sinister plot to collect blackmail data on people all over the world so as to increase Google's bottom line illegally. And when challenged by a duly constituted authority, Google personnel didn't lie, cover up, or illegally dispose of the data. Instead, they did the short-term hard thing, which was for Alan Eustace, the Senior VP of Engineering and Research, to post a blog admitting that an earlier post was in error, that Google did indeed inadvertently acquire and collect private data, and that they were going to do everything they can to amend the situation.
The bad news is, at least for Google, that their honesty has not mollified various European authorities to any great extent. The very collection of such data, even if you do nothing with it (as Google apparently has not) is illegal in Germany, and according to a New York Times report, officials are going to consult the European Commission to decide what penalties will be appropriate. The Street View feature itself has already been under attack there, and one German legislator has introduced a bill that would allow private citizens to request that their property not appear on Street View at all, with a hefty fine for Google for each incidence of non-compliance. This law would seriously compromise the usefulness of Street View, and it might be simpler for Google to just make Germany disappear altogether—so to speak.
This incident highlights the fact that a single engineer working on something that will be used in a large project should take the trouble to consider all the places the software or hardware might be used, not just some of them. Google has a reputation for putting huge resources behind innovative notions, and that's good, but with those resources come the responsibility of being more careful than is necessary if what you're working on involves only you and Joe, the neighbor down the street. I'm sure this lesson will be remembered and pounded into the heads of future engineers whose products are used in places that are more touchy about data security and privacy than, say, Austin, Texas.
It also shows the limitations of the idea of privacy in a globally interconnected age. Already, if you carry a cell phone in the U. S. and many other countries, your cellphone company "knows" where you are at least to within the accuracy of a cell (which can be any size from hundreds of feet wide to several miles), and soon there may be software and hardware on phones that will use GPS and other technologies to narrow that down to within a few yards. In general, we trust our phone companies not to use this information to our detriment, but so far, it is just a matter of trust, not law. And when it suits the law's purposes, as when a criminal is being tracked down, phone companies can be made to yield up that data. Any time you walk outside, satellite photography can almost make out your visage as you smile at the nice sunshiny day, not to mention the thousands of security cameras everywhere, and if you go inside and get on your computer, all kinds of folks can find out all kinds of things about you without your knowledge. In the U. S. we are perhaps more content with less of certain kinds of privacy than other countries are, in keeping with our long history of freedom.
Whether we will live to regret what may be viewed in the future as an excess of openness, or whether Europe will strangle data innovation with cumbersome laws that leave it increasingly without new services, only time will tell.
Sources: The New York Times article on Google's admission appeared in the May 14, 2010 online edition at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/technology/16google.html. Mr. Eustace's blog entry on the subject appears at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html. And full disclosure: The website blogspot.com on which this blog appears is owned by Google.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Offshore Oil Regulation: Who's To Judge?
As Transocean and British Petroleum try to lower yet another big box to stop the underwater gusher that threatens to turn many Gulf beaches into hazardous-waste environments, President Obama is talking about taking a hatchet to the U. S. Minerals Management Service, the agency that both oversees many aspects of mining and well-drilling, and collects (or is supposed to collect) fees from private entities who have permission to mine or drill on government land, or water. Clear? Well, the conflict that the President sees is that the people who stand to benefit (or at least to make their agency look good) from lots of drilling and royalties derived therefrom, are the same folks who are supposed to play policeman and make sure all this is done safely. While splitting the agency into enforcement and collection halves is a nice idea on paper and gives politicians a sense that they're doing something about the problem, it may just paper over a deeper problem: how do you regulate something that is so complicated that only the people who do it really understand it?
Time and again, reporters have shown how the government regulators of many industries, from petroleum to communications to finance, are either former employees of the very firms they are charged with regulating, or (what seems even worse) rely on the companies they regulate to do the actual inspecting, and take their word that things are going well.
On the surface, this kind of thing looks bad. We all feel that a person who has depended for their livelihood on a particular organization or industry will be prejudiced in favor of that entity, even if the former private employee enters government service to regulate the very business they used to work for. So what is the alternative?
The only way to get rid of all possible prejudice of this kind is to select regulators who have no association whatsoever with oil wells, or radio stations, or banks, or whatever the target of the regulator's scrutiny is. But right away we run into a problem: if you've never drilled a well, or run a radio station, or worked in a bank, can you know enough to regulate it?
Sometimes, maybe so. My father was a banker, and every year or two he'd come home complaining about the upcoming visit of the bank examiners. He never told me what their backgrounds were, but I imagine that back then, a degree in general accounting was probably okay. But if a banker was determined to pull a fast one, it seems like it would be better if the fellow trying to catch him in the act had actually stood in his shoes and learned all the little details of procedure and so on that allow clever nefarious schemes to succeed. It's the old "it takes a thief to catch a thief" idea (no aspersions on bankers intended).
The same problem happens to the nth degree when a highly technical field such as offshore oil production is in question. As I learned long ago when I once thought my Ph. D. in electrical engineering qualified me to fix an oscilloscope, nobody knows a system better than the people who work inside it day to day. So handing my scope over to a technician with a two-year degree and five years of experience fixing just those kind of scopes is going to work a lot better than me trying to fiddle with the thing. There is a lot of what chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi called "tacit knowledge" out there: stuff that you can't find in books, but which is essential to the proper functioning of machines, systems, and organizations. And nothing teaches tacit knowledge like experience.
This same issue has arisen when questions are asked about why the U. S. government or the Coast Guard or the Marines or somebody with a uniform hasn't been called in to fix the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, instead of letting the same doofuses who broke it in the first place try to do it? The simple answer is that those "doofuses" happen to be the world experts on this kind of thing, and even experts foul up every now and then. Asking the government to shove the private owners aside in order to step in would be pushing away the best expertise we have, and that would be simply stupid.
In the attempts to fix the Deepwater Horizon spill, we may be witnessing the outworkings of a kind of failure that results not just in shifts in government bureaucracies, but fundamental technical changes that render a whole industry safer and better equipped to do its job in the future. Engineer and historian Henry Petroski has shown how certain failures in nineteenth-century iron bridges closed down whole avenues of design and opened up other ones. Despite what they (we?) teach you in school, you can sometimes learn more from failures than you can from success. Once that well is capped, or plugged, or committed to perdition some way or other, and all the hearings are over and the reports written, we will know a lot more about how this accident happened, and how blowout preventers with double and triple backups can nevertheless fail. But the best people to learn this stuff are the very ones who are going to go out and do it better next time. All the government regulators you can hire straight out of school are not going to know quite as much as the experts they regulate, and so the answer is not in simply more regulation, but smarter regulation, and smarter engineering. Let's hope we get both.
Sources: The New York Times carried an article about President Obama's plans at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/us/12interior.html?hp. Henry Petroski's To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure In Successful Design (Vintage, 1992) is still in print, and a good treatment of just what the title says.
Time and again, reporters have shown how the government regulators of many industries, from petroleum to communications to finance, are either former employees of the very firms they are charged with regulating, or (what seems even worse) rely on the companies they regulate to do the actual inspecting, and take their word that things are going well.
On the surface, this kind of thing looks bad. We all feel that a person who has depended for their livelihood on a particular organization or industry will be prejudiced in favor of that entity, even if the former private employee enters government service to regulate the very business they used to work for. So what is the alternative?
The only way to get rid of all possible prejudice of this kind is to select regulators who have no association whatsoever with oil wells, or radio stations, or banks, or whatever the target of the regulator's scrutiny is. But right away we run into a problem: if you've never drilled a well, or run a radio station, or worked in a bank, can you know enough to regulate it?
Sometimes, maybe so. My father was a banker, and every year or two he'd come home complaining about the upcoming visit of the bank examiners. He never told me what their backgrounds were, but I imagine that back then, a degree in general accounting was probably okay. But if a banker was determined to pull a fast one, it seems like it would be better if the fellow trying to catch him in the act had actually stood in his shoes and learned all the little details of procedure and so on that allow clever nefarious schemes to succeed. It's the old "it takes a thief to catch a thief" idea (no aspersions on bankers intended).
The same problem happens to the nth degree when a highly technical field such as offshore oil production is in question. As I learned long ago when I once thought my Ph. D. in electrical engineering qualified me to fix an oscilloscope, nobody knows a system better than the people who work inside it day to day. So handing my scope over to a technician with a two-year degree and five years of experience fixing just those kind of scopes is going to work a lot better than me trying to fiddle with the thing. There is a lot of what chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi called "tacit knowledge" out there: stuff that you can't find in books, but which is essential to the proper functioning of machines, systems, and organizations. And nothing teaches tacit knowledge like experience.
This same issue has arisen when questions are asked about why the U. S. government or the Coast Guard or the Marines or somebody with a uniform hasn't been called in to fix the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, instead of letting the same doofuses who broke it in the first place try to do it? The simple answer is that those "doofuses" happen to be the world experts on this kind of thing, and even experts foul up every now and then. Asking the government to shove the private owners aside in order to step in would be pushing away the best expertise we have, and that would be simply stupid.
In the attempts to fix the Deepwater Horizon spill, we may be witnessing the outworkings of a kind of failure that results not just in shifts in government bureaucracies, but fundamental technical changes that render a whole industry safer and better equipped to do its job in the future. Engineer and historian Henry Petroski has shown how certain failures in nineteenth-century iron bridges closed down whole avenues of design and opened up other ones. Despite what they (we?) teach you in school, you can sometimes learn more from failures than you can from success. Once that well is capped, or plugged, or committed to perdition some way or other, and all the hearings are over and the reports written, we will know a lot more about how this accident happened, and how blowout preventers with double and triple backups can nevertheless fail. But the best people to learn this stuff are the very ones who are going to go out and do it better next time. All the government regulators you can hire straight out of school are not going to know quite as much as the experts they regulate, and so the answer is not in simply more regulation, but smarter regulation, and smarter engineering. Let's hope we get both.
Sources: The New York Times carried an article about President Obama's plans at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/us/12interior.html?hp. Henry Petroski's To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure In Successful Design (Vintage, 1992) is still in print, and a good treatment of just what the title says.
Monday, May 03, 2010
Deep Problems from the Deepwater Horizon
Two weeks ago tomorrow, on Apr. 20, an explosion and fire on the oil-drilling platform Deepwater Horizon off the Louisiana Coast resulted in the presumed deaths of eleven people and the sinking of the structure two days later. Initially, it was thought that an automated device called a "blowout preventer" (BOP in petroleum-engineer speak) would shut off the high-pressure oil from the well, which is about a mile below the ocean's surface. But soon after the structure sank, oil started showing up on the surface. British Petroleum, the owner of the well, and Transocean Inc., the operator hired by BP, initially estimated that 1,000 barrels a day were leaking out. More recently the number has risen to 5,000 barrels a day, and the slick has come within nine miles of the Louisiana coastline by today (Monday morning May 3). Already the federal government has prohibited all fishing operations for the next ten days in the region, and things look like they will get worse before they get any better.
There are nearly 4,000 offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, most of them concentrated south of Louisiana, and as long as things operate smoothly, they are out of the public consciousness despite the fact that almost a third of our domestic oil production originates there. Partly because there have been no major headline-grabbing spills in recent years, President Obama recently called for increased offshore drilling in selected areas. The Deepwater Horizon disaster has put that on hold, and threatens to turn public opinion against offshore drilling for a long time.
Out of the 4,000 or so offshore oil rigs that operate without major problems, why did the Deepwater Horizon explode and sink? And even more urgently now, why didn't the blowout preventer work? These are technical questions that will require months of investigation to answer, although computerized logs and telemetry from the platform should help considerably. The blowout preventer, a three-story-high assemblage of hydraulic equipment designed to withstand the tremendous pressures five thousand feet underwater, is a sophisticated multi-stage system that sits on top of the ocean floor and surrounds the well pipe assembly. It is essentially a large automatic shutoff valve, using hydraulic pressure to acivate guillotine-like rams or rubber-and-steel rings that impose enough counterpressure to block the several-thousand-pounds-per-square-inch pressure behind the oil emerging from the ocean floor. Normally it is activated by remote control from the platform, but before the platform sank, operators tried to activate it without success. When underwater remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) reached the BOP's control panel and flipped the control switches, nothing happened. According to online discussions, in the event of a major disaster such as the loss of the platform, stored hydraulic energy in devices called accumulators should be sufficient to make the BOP do its job. But this didn't work, for reasons that are not yet clear.
Time is now critical, but unless something on the shrinking list of things British Petroleum engineers haven't tried on the BOP works, the other options to shut off the increasing flow of oil from the well will take at least weeks, if not longer. A risky idea that has apparently never been tried at such depths involves lowering large metal cans or funnels over the leaks (there are apparently at least two in the broken and twisted riser pipe) and trying to "vacuum" up the oil that way. All sorts of complications and challenges attend this approach, from the buoyancy of oil that might literally float the cans away to the differential pressure that could crush pipes and disable suitable submersible pumps, only a few of which exist anywhere in the world. The third way, which is going to be done sooner or later in any event and is pretty likely to work, is to drill a relief well, which could be better understood as a capping well. This involves drilling sideways at some safe distance to hit the exact location of the original well in order to send mud or cement into it and stop the flow. For the relief well to work, pinpoint accuracy is required, somewhat like hitting a rain gutter on the side of a building from half a mile away. While accuracy like this can be achieved, it takes two to three months to do it. And by that time, the oil could have reached Gulf shores all the way from Louisiana to Florida.
By now, British Petroleum is the poster child of the Petroleum Industry Hall of Infamy. The Houston refinery explosion that killed about two dozen people five years ago happened largely due to BP's lax safety standards, and while it is too soon to assess BP's culpability for the initial explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon, which was operated in any event by Transocean, no amount of feel-good institutional advertising is going to overcome the public perception that BP is careless about safety. In the meantime, let's hope that the effort to stop the oil leak is managed safely, efficiently, effectively, and fast.
Sources: I used information from the following websites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gulf_Coast_Platforms.jpg has a map of oil platforms in the Gulf, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7114487.ece is an article in The Times of London about attempts to shut off the oil flow, and attached to the photo of the ROV shutoff attempt at http://www.flickr.com/photos/uscgd8/4551846015/ is a long thread of discussion among engineers about the problems surrounding the disaster and how to shut off the well flow. Also, CNN has a good graphic of the three major approaches to shutting it off at http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/01/explainer.stopping.oil.leak/index.html.
There are nearly 4,000 offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, most of them concentrated south of Louisiana, and as long as things operate smoothly, they are out of the public consciousness despite the fact that almost a third of our domestic oil production originates there. Partly because there have been no major headline-grabbing spills in recent years, President Obama recently called for increased offshore drilling in selected areas. The Deepwater Horizon disaster has put that on hold, and threatens to turn public opinion against offshore drilling for a long time.
Out of the 4,000 or so offshore oil rigs that operate without major problems, why did the Deepwater Horizon explode and sink? And even more urgently now, why didn't the blowout preventer work? These are technical questions that will require months of investigation to answer, although computerized logs and telemetry from the platform should help considerably. The blowout preventer, a three-story-high assemblage of hydraulic equipment designed to withstand the tremendous pressures five thousand feet underwater, is a sophisticated multi-stage system that sits on top of the ocean floor and surrounds the well pipe assembly. It is essentially a large automatic shutoff valve, using hydraulic pressure to acivate guillotine-like rams or rubber-and-steel rings that impose enough counterpressure to block the several-thousand-pounds-per-square-inch pressure behind the oil emerging from the ocean floor. Normally it is activated by remote control from the platform, but before the platform sank, operators tried to activate it without success. When underwater remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) reached the BOP's control panel and flipped the control switches, nothing happened. According to online discussions, in the event of a major disaster such as the loss of the platform, stored hydraulic energy in devices called accumulators should be sufficient to make the BOP do its job. But this didn't work, for reasons that are not yet clear.
Time is now critical, but unless something on the shrinking list of things British Petroleum engineers haven't tried on the BOP works, the other options to shut off the increasing flow of oil from the well will take at least weeks, if not longer. A risky idea that has apparently never been tried at such depths involves lowering large metal cans or funnels over the leaks (there are apparently at least two in the broken and twisted riser pipe) and trying to "vacuum" up the oil that way. All sorts of complications and challenges attend this approach, from the buoyancy of oil that might literally float the cans away to the differential pressure that could crush pipes and disable suitable submersible pumps, only a few of which exist anywhere in the world. The third way, which is going to be done sooner or later in any event and is pretty likely to work, is to drill a relief well, which could be better understood as a capping well. This involves drilling sideways at some safe distance to hit the exact location of the original well in order to send mud or cement into it and stop the flow. For the relief well to work, pinpoint accuracy is required, somewhat like hitting a rain gutter on the side of a building from half a mile away. While accuracy like this can be achieved, it takes two to three months to do it. And by that time, the oil could have reached Gulf shores all the way from Louisiana to Florida.
By now, British Petroleum is the poster child of the Petroleum Industry Hall of Infamy. The Houston refinery explosion that killed about two dozen people five years ago happened largely due to BP's lax safety standards, and while it is too soon to assess BP's culpability for the initial explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon, which was operated in any event by Transocean, no amount of feel-good institutional advertising is going to overcome the public perception that BP is careless about safety. In the meantime, let's hope that the effort to stop the oil leak is managed safely, efficiently, effectively, and fast.
Sources: I used information from the following websites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gulf_Coast_Platforms.jpg has a map of oil platforms in the Gulf, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7114487.ece is an article in The Times of London about attempts to shut off the oil flow, and attached to the photo of the ROV shutoff attempt at http://www.flickr.com/photos/uscgd8/4551846015/ is a long thread of discussion among engineers about the problems surrounding the disaster and how to shut off the well flow. Also, CNN has a good graphic of the three major approaches to shutting it off at http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/01/explainer.stopping.oil.leak/index.html.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Do Radio Waves Cause Cancer?
This was a question a student asked last week during the electromagnetics class that I'm teaching for the first time this semester. Not wanting to turn the rest of the class period into an engineering ethics seminar, I said some brief words to this effect: "There have been many studies of that question, and although you will find people who disagree, the general conclusion is that there is no repeatable connection between radio waves and cancer." But I wish I had known about the article that journalist George Johnson published online in Slate last week. Not only did he look into the question, he tried to give himself an electromagnetic headache by camping in a nest of microwave towers in New Mexico one night. As it turned out, it didn't work.
Johnson was inspired to try this by a Los Alamos scientist who describes himself as "electrosensitive." The scientists claims that exposure to too much radio-frequency radiation gives him a variety of symptoms such as headaches and insomnia, though cancer was not on his list of complaints. So Johnson made the trek up Sandia Crest to the "Steel Forest" where dozens of radio, TV, and microwave transmitters broadcast to a large area of New Mexico. In the event, he slept well and suffered no headaches or other adverse symptoms.
Johnson explains that some of the complaints of so-called electrosensitives may be explained by a phenomenon known to historians as a hysterical epidemic. It turns out that some people with genuine but ill-defined physical complaints are prone to latch on to a current cultural phenomenon and become convinced that it is the source of their problems. This is not to say that the maladies are not subjectively real—if someone tells you they have a headache, there is no way to prove they are wrong. But the cause is another question altogether.
And most people are familiar with the psychiatric problems that lead some people to believe things that are clearly at odds with reality. For example, years ago when I taught microwave engineering in Massachusetts, one of my colleagues received a phone call from a woman who was convinced that the government had implanted a secret radio chip in her body. She wanted to know if we had any equipment that we could use to examine her in order to find the thing. Nobody volunteered, needless to say. Before the advent of miniature electronics, when radios were novel pieces of furniture in 1920s living rooms, some psychiatric sufferers would complain to their doctors that spies were "working wireless" on them. And I suspect that if you go back far enough in history, you might find a case of a person who thought people were telegraphing messages inside his head.
While it is almost impossible in some individual cases to establish the cause of a given subjective complaint, it is quite possible to do systematic large-scale studies of epidemiology and biological effects of electromagnetic radiation. Unlike shorter-wavelength radiation ranging from ultraviolet rays through X-rays, radio waves and microwaves cannot knock electrons loose from atoms in your body, under normal conditions. If the waves are not strong enough to cause localized heating (and no piece of equipment properly used and meeting FCC regulations produces such strong waves), then there is no obvious mechanism by which radio or microwave radiation could cause cancer, headaches, insomnia, or any of the other range of ailments that people sometimes suspect them of causing. Literally hundreds of research studies have been done over the years on this subject, and as Johnson reports, the World Health Organization recently concluded from a review of the world's scientific literature that there is no reason to be concerned about biohazards from the type of low-level radio or microwave radiation that people receive just by living in the modern world among cell phones, computer wireless links, and digital TV broadcasts.
But as engineering ethics has taught me, to know a technical fact is one thing, and to deal with lots of ordinary people who have concerns or even beliefs to the contrary is a completely different thing. The attitude shown by knowledgeable engineers toward lay persons with genuine concerns is crucial. An arrogant, blowoff type of response to a legitimate question can arouse suspicions—which may be entirely unfounded—that the engineer in question is trying to hide something. Every microwave engineer who deals with the general public should be sensitive to anxiety, concern, and even hostility from people who think cell phones or computers or digital TV broadcasts have caused them harm. This is especially true when dealing with situations such as cancer clusters, a statistical phenomenon which can lead to explosive reactions, protests, and lawsuits.
Suppose for example that a cell-phone tower is built in a new neighborhood. There is a non-zero chance that among the population of young children in that neighborhood, a higher than average number of them will come down with some horrible fatal disease such as brain cancer. If a few parents of such victims meet each other, it can happen that they start to suspect something geographic is to blame for their rare and tragic experiences. The need to find an answer to the agonized question, "Why my daughter?" or "Why my son?" in the face of death is a universal one. And sometimes people seize on things they don't understand as a kind of scapegoat or target for action.
These people can have the best of intentions, such as wanting to prevent future tragedies like the ones they have endured. But if they get an unfeeling response from a know-it-all engineer who keeps saying, "You just don't understand, you don't have the technical background that I have," and so on, they are not likely to be persuaded by anything he says, no matter how technically correct it is. Engineers need hearts as well as heads, and this aspect of engineering training is usually neglected.
So perhaps I will let my students know about the Slate article this week, and if they ever happen to run into similar questions, I hope their response is technically correct, of course. But even more, I hope they take the questioner's feelings and situation into consideration as well.
Sources: George Johnson's article "On Top of Microwave Mountain" appeared in the Apr. 21, 2010 online edition of Slate Magazine at http://www.slate.com/id/2251432/.
Johnson was inspired to try this by a Los Alamos scientist who describes himself as "electrosensitive." The scientists claims that exposure to too much radio-frequency radiation gives him a variety of symptoms such as headaches and insomnia, though cancer was not on his list of complaints. So Johnson made the trek up Sandia Crest to the "Steel Forest" where dozens of radio, TV, and microwave transmitters broadcast to a large area of New Mexico. In the event, he slept well and suffered no headaches or other adverse symptoms.
Johnson explains that some of the complaints of so-called electrosensitives may be explained by a phenomenon known to historians as a hysterical epidemic. It turns out that some people with genuine but ill-defined physical complaints are prone to latch on to a current cultural phenomenon and become convinced that it is the source of their problems. This is not to say that the maladies are not subjectively real—if someone tells you they have a headache, there is no way to prove they are wrong. But the cause is another question altogether.
And most people are familiar with the psychiatric problems that lead some people to believe things that are clearly at odds with reality. For example, years ago when I taught microwave engineering in Massachusetts, one of my colleagues received a phone call from a woman who was convinced that the government had implanted a secret radio chip in her body. She wanted to know if we had any equipment that we could use to examine her in order to find the thing. Nobody volunteered, needless to say. Before the advent of miniature electronics, when radios were novel pieces of furniture in 1920s living rooms, some psychiatric sufferers would complain to their doctors that spies were "working wireless" on them. And I suspect that if you go back far enough in history, you might find a case of a person who thought people were telegraphing messages inside his head.
While it is almost impossible in some individual cases to establish the cause of a given subjective complaint, it is quite possible to do systematic large-scale studies of epidemiology and biological effects of electromagnetic radiation. Unlike shorter-wavelength radiation ranging from ultraviolet rays through X-rays, radio waves and microwaves cannot knock electrons loose from atoms in your body, under normal conditions. If the waves are not strong enough to cause localized heating (and no piece of equipment properly used and meeting FCC regulations produces such strong waves), then there is no obvious mechanism by which radio or microwave radiation could cause cancer, headaches, insomnia, or any of the other range of ailments that people sometimes suspect them of causing. Literally hundreds of research studies have been done over the years on this subject, and as Johnson reports, the World Health Organization recently concluded from a review of the world's scientific literature that there is no reason to be concerned about biohazards from the type of low-level radio or microwave radiation that people receive just by living in the modern world among cell phones, computer wireless links, and digital TV broadcasts.
But as engineering ethics has taught me, to know a technical fact is one thing, and to deal with lots of ordinary people who have concerns or even beliefs to the contrary is a completely different thing. The attitude shown by knowledgeable engineers toward lay persons with genuine concerns is crucial. An arrogant, blowoff type of response to a legitimate question can arouse suspicions—which may be entirely unfounded—that the engineer in question is trying to hide something. Every microwave engineer who deals with the general public should be sensitive to anxiety, concern, and even hostility from people who think cell phones or computers or digital TV broadcasts have caused them harm. This is especially true when dealing with situations such as cancer clusters, a statistical phenomenon which can lead to explosive reactions, protests, and lawsuits.
Suppose for example that a cell-phone tower is built in a new neighborhood. There is a non-zero chance that among the population of young children in that neighborhood, a higher than average number of them will come down with some horrible fatal disease such as brain cancer. If a few parents of such victims meet each other, it can happen that they start to suspect something geographic is to blame for their rare and tragic experiences. The need to find an answer to the agonized question, "Why my daughter?" or "Why my son?" in the face of death is a universal one. And sometimes people seize on things they don't understand as a kind of scapegoat or target for action.
These people can have the best of intentions, such as wanting to prevent future tragedies like the ones they have endured. But if they get an unfeeling response from a know-it-all engineer who keeps saying, "You just don't understand, you don't have the technical background that I have," and so on, they are not likely to be persuaded by anything he says, no matter how technically correct it is. Engineers need hearts as well as heads, and this aspect of engineering training is usually neglected.
So perhaps I will let my students know about the Slate article this week, and if they ever happen to run into similar questions, I hope their response is technically correct, of course. But even more, I hope they take the questioner's feelings and situation into consideration as well.
Sources: George Johnson's article "On Top of Microwave Mountain" appeared in the Apr. 21, 2010 online edition of Slate Magazine at http://www.slate.com/id/2251432/.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Obama's Speech to NASA: Clouds in the Sky
Last Thursday, President Obama spoke to present and former astronauts, NASA administrators, and members of the Florida congressional delegation on the future of NASA and U. S. space exploration. Even before taking office, Obama and his staff rubbed some at NASA the wrong way. And with the release of his proposed federal budget to be enacted next fall, NASA supporters discovered to their dismay that there were no funds to continue the development of the Constellation series of manned-flight rockets, which are the only plans presently in place to keep Americans in space with American hardware. So Obama faced a tough audience primed to criticize him.
According to the official NASA transcript, the President received applause at numerous points in his talk. But I imagine it was of a straw-grasping quality that embodied both the engineer's tendency to be polite in the face of properly constituted authority whenever possible, and the deep-dyed habit of trying to make the best of a bad situation. Because, for many reasons, NASA's situation under the Obama administration is pretty bad.
Things could be worse. Obama could have proposed one more extension of the superannuated Shuttle program, simply to be able to say that America was still able to fly its own people in orbit. Thankfully, he didn't do that, even though it would have preserved jobs, which is supposedly one of his high priorities these days. Trying to keep the Shuttle going after its presently scheduled termination this year would be like trying to keep driving a jalopy after two of its four wheels have fallen off. It has been an amazing run carried on too long, and hats off to everyone who made it possible, but we've really got to retire the thing according to plan before it provides yet another tragedy for the engineering-ethics textbooks.
The trouble is, in a well-run organization the Shuttle's replacement would have been designed about eight to ten years ago, the first unit built three to five years ago, and the fully tested replacement would be ready to launch into service right after the Shuttle retired. For various reasons having to do with NASA, accidents, politics, democracy, and other factors, we are not in that happy situation at all. Instead, we have spent some ten billion on the designs for what some people say is a kind of redesign of the Saturn V-era rockets, called Constellation. I agree that Constellation may not be the most innovative design around, but it kept our engineers busy, it's based on proven technology (sometimes conservatism is good in engineering), and it probably would have worked okay. Only now, we'll never know.
What the President proposes instead sounds good at first glance: let the market innovate. Let private companies compete and come up with the most cost-effective way to get there. Instead of NASA saying to firms like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, "Hey, I want to get to the moon, sell me a rocket that will take me there," he wants NASA to say now, "Hey, I want to get to Mars, sell me a ticket to ride." There's just a few problems with this idea.
First off, for the free market to work, you need a market. One customer isn't a market, it's a thing called a "monopsony," kind of the inverse of a monopoly. Instead of one seller and many buyers, you have one buyer and many sellers (you hope). The Wikipedia article defining monopsony uses the single-payer health care system as a leading example of a monopsony. Everybody knows President Obama would have preferred a single-payer health care system to the mess he got, but he settled for the mess he could pass through Congress. This is no place to debate health care, but it is the place to point out that the President seems to think that whatever the role of private enterprise should be, the federal government must end up calling the shots.
Of course, if we waited for private enterprise to get us to the moon or Mars with no government intervention whatever, we would wait a very long time. There is at present no commercial interest in going to the moon or Mars, simply as a paying proposition independent of government intervention. At least Columbus and the great seafaring explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had some prospect of profit in the backs of their minds, although few if any realized on their bets. So government must take the lead in an economy-transcending type of activity such as space exploration, which in the past has served to unite the nation much as wars do, but with much less bloodshed.
There are both tactical and strategic flaws in Obama's plans for NASA. The tactical one of trashing Constellation has raised howls of protest from numerous astronauts all the way up to the Great Silent Engineer himself, Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon. As practical men, they see ten billion dollars' worth of creditable engineering going down the toilet at a critical time when we should be way ahead of where we are. And now Obama is saying, no, let's start from scratch and do it really well.
And that leads into the strategic aspect. It may be (though this is just a guess on my part) that Obama thinks NASA is beyond salvaging; that it is an old, worn-out, patched-over organization that needs to take a back seat to new, fresh leadership from the private sector. He may be right in at least this, that NASA needs a shock, something more than the same old same old, to get the nation's space vision back in order. But it is far from clear that private companies, working not just as contractors for hardware but as overall system planners, builders, and executors, will be willing to take on challenges that have proved daunting even to an organization as experienced and resourceful as NASA. Especially if their only customer, the government, turns around and changes its mind after the next Presidential election, which is entirely possible.
Unelected dictatorships have numerous disadvantages, but one of the few advantages is the ability to maintain long-term consistency in plans and projects. The otherwise deplorable government of the Peoples' Republic of China has the luxury of making long-term space exploration plans without having to check with its Congress or its public. The way things look now, the next words we hear from the moon will be in Chinese, if not Russian. And then see how hard it will be to catch up.
Sources: Obama's speech on April 15, 2010 is reproduced in transcript at the NASA website http://www.nasa.gov/news/media/trans/obama_ksc_trans.html. The letter to the President signed by Neil Armstrong, James Lovell, and Eugene Cernan can be read at http://theweek.com/article/index/201950/Neil_Armstrongs_letter_to_Obama. Another letter from several prominent astronauts and former NASA leaders can be found at http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1387.
According to the official NASA transcript, the President received applause at numerous points in his talk. But I imagine it was of a straw-grasping quality that embodied both the engineer's tendency to be polite in the face of properly constituted authority whenever possible, and the deep-dyed habit of trying to make the best of a bad situation. Because, for many reasons, NASA's situation under the Obama administration is pretty bad.
Things could be worse. Obama could have proposed one more extension of the superannuated Shuttle program, simply to be able to say that America was still able to fly its own people in orbit. Thankfully, he didn't do that, even though it would have preserved jobs, which is supposedly one of his high priorities these days. Trying to keep the Shuttle going after its presently scheduled termination this year would be like trying to keep driving a jalopy after two of its four wheels have fallen off. It has been an amazing run carried on too long, and hats off to everyone who made it possible, but we've really got to retire the thing according to plan before it provides yet another tragedy for the engineering-ethics textbooks.
The trouble is, in a well-run organization the Shuttle's replacement would have been designed about eight to ten years ago, the first unit built three to five years ago, and the fully tested replacement would be ready to launch into service right after the Shuttle retired. For various reasons having to do with NASA, accidents, politics, democracy, and other factors, we are not in that happy situation at all. Instead, we have spent some ten billion on the designs for what some people say is a kind of redesign of the Saturn V-era rockets, called Constellation. I agree that Constellation may not be the most innovative design around, but it kept our engineers busy, it's based on proven technology (sometimes conservatism is good in engineering), and it probably would have worked okay. Only now, we'll never know.
What the President proposes instead sounds good at first glance: let the market innovate. Let private companies compete and come up with the most cost-effective way to get there. Instead of NASA saying to firms like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, "Hey, I want to get to the moon, sell me a rocket that will take me there," he wants NASA to say now, "Hey, I want to get to Mars, sell me a ticket to ride." There's just a few problems with this idea.
First off, for the free market to work, you need a market. One customer isn't a market, it's a thing called a "monopsony," kind of the inverse of a monopoly. Instead of one seller and many buyers, you have one buyer and many sellers (you hope). The Wikipedia article defining monopsony uses the single-payer health care system as a leading example of a monopsony. Everybody knows President Obama would have preferred a single-payer health care system to the mess he got, but he settled for the mess he could pass through Congress. This is no place to debate health care, but it is the place to point out that the President seems to think that whatever the role of private enterprise should be, the federal government must end up calling the shots.
Of course, if we waited for private enterprise to get us to the moon or Mars with no government intervention whatever, we would wait a very long time. There is at present no commercial interest in going to the moon or Mars, simply as a paying proposition independent of government intervention. At least Columbus and the great seafaring explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had some prospect of profit in the backs of their minds, although few if any realized on their bets. So government must take the lead in an economy-transcending type of activity such as space exploration, which in the past has served to unite the nation much as wars do, but with much less bloodshed.
There are both tactical and strategic flaws in Obama's plans for NASA. The tactical one of trashing Constellation has raised howls of protest from numerous astronauts all the way up to the Great Silent Engineer himself, Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon. As practical men, they see ten billion dollars' worth of creditable engineering going down the toilet at a critical time when we should be way ahead of where we are. And now Obama is saying, no, let's start from scratch and do it really well.
And that leads into the strategic aspect. It may be (though this is just a guess on my part) that Obama thinks NASA is beyond salvaging; that it is an old, worn-out, patched-over organization that needs to take a back seat to new, fresh leadership from the private sector. He may be right in at least this, that NASA needs a shock, something more than the same old same old, to get the nation's space vision back in order. But it is far from clear that private companies, working not just as contractors for hardware but as overall system planners, builders, and executors, will be willing to take on challenges that have proved daunting even to an organization as experienced and resourceful as NASA. Especially if their only customer, the government, turns around and changes its mind after the next Presidential election, which is entirely possible.
Unelected dictatorships have numerous disadvantages, but one of the few advantages is the ability to maintain long-term consistency in plans and projects. The otherwise deplorable government of the Peoples' Republic of China has the luxury of making long-term space exploration plans without having to check with its Congress or its public. The way things look now, the next words we hear from the moon will be in Chinese, if not Russian. And then see how hard it will be to catch up.
Sources: Obama's speech on April 15, 2010 is reproduced in transcript at the NASA website http://www.nasa.gov/news/media/trans/obama_ksc_trans.html. The letter to the President signed by Neil Armstrong, James Lovell, and Eugene Cernan can be read at http://theweek.com/article/index/201950/Neil_Armstrongs_letter_to_Obama. Another letter from several prominent astronauts and former NASA leaders can be found at http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1387.
Monday, April 12, 2010
Toyota Revisited: Unintended Acceleration of Judgment?
On April 5 the U. S. Secretary of Transportation announced the intention of the federal government to assess a $16 million fine against Toyota, the maximum allowable penalty in such a case. The government alleges that the car maker failed to notify the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration within five days of identifying the defect that causes unintended acceleration, as U. S. law requires. Toyota has two weeks in which to either accept or contest the fine.
About a month ago, I addressed this issue with a blog that criticized Toyota for its foot-dragging and circle-the-wagons mentality concerning the unintended acceleration incidents that have come to light in the past year or so. What I failed to do then is what many news sources are still failing to do now, which is to put this situation in a historical context, as columnist Walter Olson did in a recent issue of National Review.
Olson points out that at least part of the sudden appearance of wildly accelerating Toyotas everywhere is due to mass psychology, on the part of the public in general and the media and lawyers in particular. Once the issue hits the newsstands, drivers and their lawyers are primed to look for it, and so often what you look for you will find. Back in 1993, a similar flap blew up about suspected unintended acceleration in Audis. Despite extensive coverage, investigations, and government inquiries, no cause for the documented cases of Audi acceleration was ever found other than operator error: in other words, people were hitting the gas pedal by mistake.
This kind of thing happens all the time, often with older or less experienced drivers. Olson cites a Los Angeles Times study of twenty years' worth of Toyota unintended acceleration cases, and of those in which the driver's age could be determined, the median age was 60. Since the typical auto accident victim is in his late twenties, there is clearly an age-related factor involved.
None of this is to say that there may not be a genuine problem, or array of problems, that are causing the deaths and near-accidents that we have heard so much about recently in Toyotas. The carmaker itself has identified and gone to a lot of trouble with recalls to fix a carpet-pedal interference issue that evidently accounts for at least some of the acceleration incidents. But so far the firm has steadfastly denied that there is a problem with the electronics, in particular the software that runs the car. Two separate scientific panels have been convened by the U. S. government to look into that issue, and although they will take a while (one is set to run for over a year), we have hopes of getting to the bottom of that particular question.
The challenge of such an investigation is that software glitches, especially if there is a random hardware effect involved such as electromagnetic interference, can be extremely hard to detect or fix. In principle, computer software follows an exact mathematical deterministic path: if you set up the same initial conditions every time, you will get the same result. But when software is embedded in the roaring, buzzing, mechanically dynamic environment under the hood of a car, the goal of "same initial conditions" can be elusive. You can always do lab tests, but to the extent they are more tightly controlled, they are just as much more removed from the reality in which the accidents supposedly occurred. If such a problem is found, it will likely be the at the end of a long and intricate detective effort on the part of the investigators. And Toyota will need to cooperate fully in revealing its proprietary software and hardware, unless it wants to actively hinder the work of the safety investigators. So far, the firm's track record in this area has not been stellar, but under the present conditions of intense political and legal pressure, a vindication by an outside panel would be worth whatever bean-spilling of secrets that Toyota has been so reluctant to do up to now.
An interesting system-wide question that no one so far has brought up would be a comparison of the way automakers vet their control software with the methods used by aircraft manufacturers. Back when "fly-by-wire" software was first being adopted, there was a lot of concern on the part of pilots that when they pushed the stick, they would no longer be directly moving flaps or ailerons or whatever—instead, they would be simply sending instructions to a computer, which would interpret the pilot's action along with everything else going on and issue the orders it thought best to the control surfaces. This idea seemed to rub a lot of pilots the wrong way, and it took a while for fly-by-wire systems to be accepted. There were one or two problems with it along the way, but then as now, the bulk of airplane accidents involve at least some personal responsibility on the part of the pilot.
It's ironic, but automobile drivers as a group probably carry a lot less clout with the automakers than airline pilots do with aircraft companies. I sense that the automakers regard their customers as, if not quite sheep, then certainly uneducated in the technicalities of automotive engineering. The transition from the day when the connection between the accelerator and the carburetor (as it was way back then) was just a pull wire, to the present situation where a computer sits between your foot and the engine—this transition came silently and unheralded, possibly out of fear that people would not be comfortable with it. Such silence may have made the present situation worse as folks discover the fact for the first time, and find that they don't like it—especially those who believe their problems with unintended acceleration are the fault of the automobile, and not due to inappropriate actions of their own.
As Walter Olson pointed out, it took years for the Audi flap to die down, and we can expect the Toyota situation to linger at least that long—longer, if the investigations into software problems are as complex as I expect they will be, and if Toyota is less than fully cooperative in them. The only sure thing is that lawyers will be making money off this situation for a long time to come.
Sources: A report on the $16 million fine appeared in the Washington Post online edition at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/05/AR2010040503200.html. Walter Olson's article in the Mar. 15, 2010 issue of National Review is online at http://article.nationalreview.com/427879/exorcising-toyotas-demons/walter-olson.
About a month ago, I addressed this issue with a blog that criticized Toyota for its foot-dragging and circle-the-wagons mentality concerning the unintended acceleration incidents that have come to light in the past year or so. What I failed to do then is what many news sources are still failing to do now, which is to put this situation in a historical context, as columnist Walter Olson did in a recent issue of National Review.
Olson points out that at least part of the sudden appearance of wildly accelerating Toyotas everywhere is due to mass psychology, on the part of the public in general and the media and lawyers in particular. Once the issue hits the newsstands, drivers and their lawyers are primed to look for it, and so often what you look for you will find. Back in 1993, a similar flap blew up about suspected unintended acceleration in Audis. Despite extensive coverage, investigations, and government inquiries, no cause for the documented cases of Audi acceleration was ever found other than operator error: in other words, people were hitting the gas pedal by mistake.
This kind of thing happens all the time, often with older or less experienced drivers. Olson cites a Los Angeles Times study of twenty years' worth of Toyota unintended acceleration cases, and of those in which the driver's age could be determined, the median age was 60. Since the typical auto accident victim is in his late twenties, there is clearly an age-related factor involved.
None of this is to say that there may not be a genuine problem, or array of problems, that are causing the deaths and near-accidents that we have heard so much about recently in Toyotas. The carmaker itself has identified and gone to a lot of trouble with recalls to fix a carpet-pedal interference issue that evidently accounts for at least some of the acceleration incidents. But so far the firm has steadfastly denied that there is a problem with the electronics, in particular the software that runs the car. Two separate scientific panels have been convened by the U. S. government to look into that issue, and although they will take a while (one is set to run for over a year), we have hopes of getting to the bottom of that particular question.
The challenge of such an investigation is that software glitches, especially if there is a random hardware effect involved such as electromagnetic interference, can be extremely hard to detect or fix. In principle, computer software follows an exact mathematical deterministic path: if you set up the same initial conditions every time, you will get the same result. But when software is embedded in the roaring, buzzing, mechanically dynamic environment under the hood of a car, the goal of "same initial conditions" can be elusive. You can always do lab tests, but to the extent they are more tightly controlled, they are just as much more removed from the reality in which the accidents supposedly occurred. If such a problem is found, it will likely be the at the end of a long and intricate detective effort on the part of the investigators. And Toyota will need to cooperate fully in revealing its proprietary software and hardware, unless it wants to actively hinder the work of the safety investigators. So far, the firm's track record in this area has not been stellar, but under the present conditions of intense political and legal pressure, a vindication by an outside panel would be worth whatever bean-spilling of secrets that Toyota has been so reluctant to do up to now.
An interesting system-wide question that no one so far has brought up would be a comparison of the way automakers vet their control software with the methods used by aircraft manufacturers. Back when "fly-by-wire" software was first being adopted, there was a lot of concern on the part of pilots that when they pushed the stick, they would no longer be directly moving flaps or ailerons or whatever—instead, they would be simply sending instructions to a computer, which would interpret the pilot's action along with everything else going on and issue the orders it thought best to the control surfaces. This idea seemed to rub a lot of pilots the wrong way, and it took a while for fly-by-wire systems to be accepted. There were one or two problems with it along the way, but then as now, the bulk of airplane accidents involve at least some personal responsibility on the part of the pilot.
It's ironic, but automobile drivers as a group probably carry a lot less clout with the automakers than airline pilots do with aircraft companies. I sense that the automakers regard their customers as, if not quite sheep, then certainly uneducated in the technicalities of automotive engineering. The transition from the day when the connection between the accelerator and the carburetor (as it was way back then) was just a pull wire, to the present situation where a computer sits between your foot and the engine—this transition came silently and unheralded, possibly out of fear that people would not be comfortable with it. Such silence may have made the present situation worse as folks discover the fact for the first time, and find that they don't like it—especially those who believe their problems with unintended acceleration are the fault of the automobile, and not due to inappropriate actions of their own.
As Walter Olson pointed out, it took years for the Audi flap to die down, and we can expect the Toyota situation to linger at least that long—longer, if the investigations into software problems are as complex as I expect they will be, and if Toyota is less than fully cooperative in them. The only sure thing is that lawyers will be making money off this situation for a long time to come.
Sources: A report on the $16 million fine appeared in the Washington Post online edition at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/05/AR2010040503200.html. Walter Olson's article in the Mar. 15, 2010 issue of National Review is online at http://article.nationalreview.com/427879/exorcising-toyotas-demons/walter-olson.
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