U. S. Engineers: Not Without Honor Except In Their Own Country

One of the better-known sayings of Jesus is that a prophet is not without honor except in his own country. Another way of saying the same thing is the adage that an expert is just an ordinary guy who happens to be from out of town. The profession of engineering in the U. S. is not what public-relations firms would call “high-profile.” And when you hear statistics cited that China graduates 600,000 engineers every year compared to less than 100,000 in the U. S., you could be excused for thinking that the profession of engineering in the U. S. is headed the way of the Blockbuster video chain, which recently declared bankruptcy. But an interesting report a few years ago by a Duke University research group on global engineering and entrepreneurship shows these trends in a different light, and gives us at least some ideas about what to do.

Entitled “Where The Engineers Are,” the report says that when people take engineering graduation statistics from India and especially China at face value, they are unwittingly comparing apples and oranges. For one thing, the offshore statistics routinely count two- and three-year degrees the same as four-year bachelors’ degrees, which is not done in U. S. compilations. The numbers from China are not gathered in a uniform way and show some irregularities owing to a tremendous push on behalf of the government there to increase the number of engineering graduates. In India, there is no single agency charged with the responsibility of gathering engineering statistics of this type, so computer-science degrees are often mixed in with the engineering degrees, and there are some programs there which do not have an exact equivalent in the U. S. When the authors (who traveled to China and India as part of their research) asked managers of companies where they can get engineers comparable in background and quality to the “standard” product of U. S. engineering schools, the managers typically named only a few universities in their respective countries, out of the hundreds of institutes that are producing people who are counted as engineering graduates. So the picture that emerged was a two-tiered kind of affair: a few select universities graduating a relatively small number of engineers with the backgrounds typical of U. S. four-year schools, and a much larger and varied group of organizations producing the hundreds of thousands of people cited in the statistics, many of whom would not be classified as engineers in the U. S.

Does that mean there’s nothing to do and we can all go back to our knitting, so to speak? Not necessarily. An important aspect of any well-functioning profession is a sense of honor on behalf of its members: the notion that one belongs to a select group which is admired and looked up to by the general public, and whose reputation and integrity is therefore worth preserving by individual effort. Think of the recruiting ads put out by the U. S. Marine Corps, who are always looking for “a few good men.” While engineers rank fairly high in polls that ask what the most trusted professions are, pharmacists rank even higher. I don’t watch TV that much, but I don’t recall hearing about any TV shows starring a charismatic, handsome pharmacist. But lawyers, doctors, and even politicians and mobsters get that kind of exposure.

The kinds of people a culture honors says a lot about its desires and ambitions. In China, according to the Duke researchers, anyone who succeeds in publishing a research paper in an international journal is treated like a hero. But in the words of Rodney Daingerfield, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that in the U. S., engineers “don’t get no respect.”

This may be one reason why there is such a dearth of native U. S. students who pursue advanced degrees in engineering and the sciences. The result is that a majority of graduate students in these disciplines are from other countries, and while many of them stay here and contribute in positive ways that are out of proportion to their percentage of the population, an increasing number return to their native countries, where they can find highly prestigious management and technical positions.

What can be done, not only to better the situation of the engineering profession in this country, but to contribute to the global situation in a positive way? There are two basic approaches, which cast in economic terms are (1) restricting supply and (2) increasing demand. Some call for restrictive immigration policies that would make it harder for foreign citizens to either get advanced degrees in the U. S. or to stay here once they did. I favor the second approach, which is to make it easier for us to keep good foreign students and to attract more good students of any origin into programs that don’t require such severe financial sacrifices as present graduate programs do now.

One idea I haven’t seen much support for lately is the notion of changing the way we fund research in this country. Most of the research funds go to the researchers themselves, who then hire students on the open market at reduced rates compared to what the students could earn in industrial employment. What if we took a big chunk of money away from those guys (which includes me, by the way) and gave it to the best students instead, regardless of citizenship? You’d have to have some kind of competitive examination or other to find them, but once they got in, you could have favorable visas fast-tracked to the foreign students, and everybody who got in would get virtually a free ride financially to a graduate degree, as far as they wanted to pursue it. You’d need some time limits to prevent people from turning into perpetual graduate students, but that wouldn’t be hard. It would change the nature of the research business considerably, but schools and researchers would be competing for students with these new fellowships, rather than competing directly among each other for funding.

That’s the student end; how about the researcher and engineer end? There are awards for excellence in engineering and science, but they are definitely low-profile and scarcely cause a blip in the public consciousness or the media. I’m not in show business, but it sure seems like you could jazz up these kinds of awards with a little Academy-Award style of publicity. That goes against the grain of most engineers I know, but in a world of hyped media, the person who speaks quietly in a normal tone of voice is simply not heard.

Well, I’ve gone on too long with some half-baked ideas on how to make engineering a more prestigious activity in the U. S. In the long run, though, it will be determined by those who take our place, the next generation, and I just hope that they look upon our profession with more respect than it has received recently.

Sources: The Duke University report “Where The Engineers Are” can be downloaded at http://www.soc.duke.edu/globalengineering/papers_whereengineers.php and was published in the Spring 2007 issue of Issues in Science and Technology. I obtained the information on a Gallup poll of most trusted professions from a news report from 2009 at http://www.cnsnews.com/node/58362.

Prophet of the Nuclear Apocalypse: Keith Snow on the Japanese Nuclear Disaster

Last week when I commented on the nuclear disaster that followed the tsunami and earthquake in Japan on Mar. 11, my estimate of the eventual outcome was guardedly optimistic. A week and several explosions and fires later, no one has been able to get close enough to the damaged reactors to make a thorough assessment of the situation, and radiation is starting to show up in water and the food chain in Japan, although initially at low levels. And after reading the grim prophetic words of Keith Snow, I have a different viewpoint altogether to consider.

Mr. Snow is an independent investigative journalist whose courageous and iconoclastic efforts to reveal hidden agendas, systemic lies, and outrageous wrongs have won him numerous awards. He was also a student of mine many years ago at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and spent several years as an engineer in the military-industrial complex before experiencing a change of heart. He has turned his considerable technical abilities and understanding to writing accurate, informed reports on things that the usual media outlets seldom cover, at least in the way Mr. Snow covers them.

In the Old Testament of the Bible, every now and then God would send a prophet to his people the Jews. The prophet’s job was not a pleasant one. If the people had been behaving well, they wouldn’t have needed a prophet to draw their attention to their misdeeds. As a usual thing, the prophet was ignored at best, and mocked, scorned, jailed, or killed at worst. Because the prophet’s message threatened the status quo and the vested interests of the powerful, he rarely found a large audience. But the sign of a true prophet was truth: telling it like it was, and sometimes foretelling events that later came to pass.

Keith Snow is a modern-day prophet. He’s aware of this: his blog on the Japanese nuclear disaster at http://www.consciousbeingalliance.com/2011/03/japans-catastrophic-nuclear-power-cover-up/ begins with a quotation from the New Testament about false prophets. He doesn’t quite come out and say he’s the real McCoy, but the implication is clear. As with other reporting he’s done, he sticks to one or two consistent themes.

One theme is the way that corporate interests move heaven and earth to protect themselves, through exerting influence on commercial media by advertising, on politicians through donations and lobbying, and by exploiting powerless populations by neglecting basic safety and health issues that might cost too much. Mr. Snow has a deeply critical view of commercial (i. e. corporation-controlled) media, which nowadays includes almost everything except independent bloggers such as himself. He describes in his current blog how the major media outlets such as the New York Times have skewed their coverage of the nuclear disaster in Japan to favor corporate interests such as those of General Electric, which is responsible for the reactor designs that failed during the earthquake. He shows how corporate-friendly experts have downplayed the danger of radioactive isotope releases from the damaged plants, and cites hard facts straight from scientific tables to show that materials like cesium-137 and strontium-90 are not items that you want showing up in your dinner salad—or anywhere else nearby, not for many, many years. He harshly (and correctly, I believe) rakes the plant designs over the coals for a number of basic flaws that have been at least partially corrected in some later designs—but the Japanese electric utilities wanted to recover their substantial investments in the older technology, at least up to last week when the whole complex was apparently written off in efforts to stop the crisis. Just for the sake of balance, I would urge anyone who read my post last week on the nuclear crisis in Japan to read Mr. Snow’s much more detailed and technically deep analysis of the situation.

Mr. Snow and I have some philosophical differences, but that does not keep me from recognizing the importance of paying attention to voices like his. I will admit that sometimes, after reading one of his more vitriolic analyses of a current commercial technology such as nuclear power, the use of fossil fuels, or the Wild-West-style mining of a technologically important mineral such as coltan, I want to sit him down and ask him, “Okay, these terrible consequences have resulted from the corporation-dominated market operating internationally to produce and satisfy technological needs and wants of millions or billions of people. If you were king for a year, or a decade, how would you do things differently? Would you take the Distributist line and prohibit the existence of any corporation larger than a certain size? And how pray tell would you enforce such a law?” It is a conversation I have never had with him, but I keep looking for hints in his writings of how it would proceed. I don’t see many.

As a teacher in an electrical engineering program, I believe that acquiring technical knowledge for the purposes of commercial development of engineered products and services is a net societal good. Yes, it can cause trouble. Yes, people can be killed, deprived of liberty, impoverished, or otherwise harmed by wrongly made technology. But I still believe the technological enterprise is worth pursuing, although perhaps with a much greater awareness of its long-term effects than has been customary in the past.

This may sound strange, but a culture can’t stop and think too much about what it’s doing, or else it risks the chance of general paralysis. The heart must be involved as well as the head. This is not a criticism of Mr. Snow—his journalism clearly involves his heart as well as his head, probably more than most journalism does. What I am trying to say is, we need to hear words like Mr. Snow’s, not only after a disaster that happens, but before other disasters in order that they may not happen. The proper response is not to cease building engineered things altogether, but to build them more responsibly and wiser. And the working out of what that means can take a lifetime.

It is the nature of a prophet’s words that one cannot judge their correctness at the time they are spoken. Some of the things Mr. Snow speaks of in his nuclear disaster blog may not come to pass for years, or decades, or centuries. Only generations in the far future will be able to make a truly informed judgment on the rightness of his words. To those of us in the present, Mr. Snow’s words pose a challenge: do you believe him? And if so, to what degree? And that, dear reader, is a decision that you must make for yourself.

Nuclear Power Meltdown in Japan?

As I write this on Sunday evening (U. S. Central Daylight Time), it is Monday morning in Japan, and nuclear engineers continue to struggle with several damaged nuclear power plants in the northern part of Japan. They were damaged in last Friday’s massive magnitude-8.9 earthquake and tsunami. Our prayers and thoughts are with the people of Japan, who are dealing with the worst catastrophe to hit their islands since World War II. It is likely that thousands have died, and about half a million people have been displaced from their homes. Many months will pass before life in Japan returns to something near normal. The question I would like to ask is: will “normal” life in Japan include nuclear power?

To my knowledge, no nuclear plant in the history of the world has ever been subjected to an 8.9-magnitude earthquake before now. Prior to last week’s temblor, Japan was well known for designing nuclear reactors with extremely high standards for safety in the face of all kinds of malfunctions and problems, including earthquakes. The fact that Japan uses nuclear power at all is somewhat impressive, given the fact that it is the only country where people were killed by nuclear weapons in war (Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Conscious of the technology’s history, Japanese nuclear engineers have probably devised the safest possible systems consistent with making a reasonable profit and making a viable contribution to their country’s power industry. But every design has intentional limits, and informed sources say that the plants were not designed to withstand an earthquake the size of the one that hit last Friday.

Despite the magnitude of the shock, it appears that the containment vessels surrounding the radioactive cores have done their job so far. The main problems have been that at several plants, notably the Fukushima No. 1 unit, both the main and the auxiliary electric power failed. Nuclear reactors work by producing huge amounts of heat that is carried away ultimately to make steam that runs electric generators. In pressurized-water reactors (evidently the type in question), the heat is transported by rapidly flowing pressurized water. Any interruption in this flow traps heat in the radioactive core, sending its temperature soaring to the point that the zirconium-encased uranium fuel rods can crack and release radioactive byproducts. The absolute worst-case scenario is not a nuclear-bomb-type of explosion, but a so-called “meltdown” in which the fuel rods melt through the floor of the containment vessel into the ground. The resulting release of radioactive material is a serious problem.

So far, this has not apparently happened. However, short of that ultimate disaster, some other disturbing things can and did occur. Hot zirconium oxidizes, and when it gets in contact with water, a chemical (not nuclear) reaction releases hydrogen gas, which can build up to a concentration that causes a plain old chemical explosion. This has happened in at least one plant, blowing off some of the outer structure of the plant and releasing some radioactive gas. But the amounts are small and nothing like what happened at Chernobyl, for example.

In 1986, an accident at the graphite-moderated nuclear plant in Chernobyl (in the present country of Ukraine) set fire to the graphite and spread deadly amounts of radiation for many miles. By almost any measure, the Chernobyl plant was badly designed, and nothing like the radioactive fire that happened there could occur at the Japanese plants.

Nevertheless, things are still dicey. Even if the nuclear reaction is shut down by emergency flooding or moderator-rod insertion, you still have a tremendous amount of heat to deal with, and the failure of the cooling-water pumps means that the reactors have already overheated and sustained a certain amount of damage. And of course, most of the instrumentation that engineers would normally use to figure out what is going on inside the plants has also gone flooey. Plus, nobody wants to get near the things with radioactive fuel sloshing around. Possibly it is a job for some radiation-hardened robots. If there are any such things, you can bet they have them in Japan and they’re trying to use them now.

A late report mentions that engineers working with at least one plant have thrown in the towel, and are pumping seawater mixed with boron into one reactor vessel. This is a last-ditch emergency measure that will cool the reactor core fast, but will also corrode it to the point of destruction. It’s likely that the reactor was beyond salvaging anyway, but this action seals its fate. At this point, this is an appropriate action that puts public safety ahead of the power company’s investment.

The future of Japan’s nuclear industry may depend on how well the damaged plants are handled, and also how well the news of any releases of radioactivity is dealt with. If the reactor failures were the only problem, it would be a huge crisis, but the Japanese public currently has other things on its mind besides a little radioactive gas floating around amid the devastation of the earthquake and tsunami.

It’s hard to say, but it looks like the Japanese nuclear engineers will handle this situation with courage and good judgment. The reactors will cool, eventually someone will get inside to assess the damage, and some of the power plants will have to be written off. My guess is that Japan will decide to keep using nuclear power, but may increase even further the already rigorous standards for future plant construction, learning from whatever lessons this tragedy has taught us.

Sources: I relied on news reports from CNN at http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/13/japan.nuclear.reactors/index.html?hpt=T1 and the Los Angeles Times at http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-sci-japan-quake-reactor-qa-20110314,0,3403230.story.

Daniel Bell, the Post-Industrial Society, and Engineering

Daniel Bell was a Harvard sociologist who died at the age of 91 last January. He is perhaps best known for inventing the phrase “post-industrial society” in the 1970s to describe a transition that was only beginning to take place in the United States back then. I’d like to speculate a little on the contributions of engineers to that transition, and whether post-industrial society is an unequivocally good thing.

Perhaps the first modern industrial society came into being in Great Britain in the late 1800s, where the Scientific Revolution and Industrial Revolutions combined with a commerce-friendly government and culture to lead to tremendous growth of mass manufacturing and exchange of mass-produced goods. Transportation and communications technologies were an essential part of this transition, because the mere making of 100,000 widgets is a pretty pointless endeavor if you can’t agree to sell them fast (e. g. the use of telegrams and the telephone by businesses) and ship them to customers nearly as fast (e. g. on railroads and steamships). The U. S. was an even more fertile ground for industrialization than England in some ways, and once World War II temporarily flattened nearly every other country’s industrial base, the U. S. entered what is increasingly looking in retrospect like a unique Golden Age of industrialization.

Industrialized societies are physical-thing-based: the making and using of things is what they are all about. The things can be big (modern buildings, cities) or small (computers, microchips) but they are physical objects that are assembled, bought, sold, shipped, and owned. Bell’s insight was to see that a different kind of society was in the cards: one in which things, although necessary to the functioning of the new kind of society, were not the main event. What web developers like to call “content,”—what Bell described in terms of data, information, and knowledge—was to be the main product of post-industrial society. This transition from industrial to post-industrial was to have huge implications for the makeup of society as a whole, and for the kinds of workers needed as well.

By many criteria, Bell got it right. Perhaps the most obvious measure of the transition is the movement from manufacturing to service employment. The category of services, which counts everything from janitors to judges, has always been a larger component than manufacturing once most people moved off the farm, but in 1970 there were only about two service workers for every manufacturing worker. By 2005, the proportion was five service workers for every manufacturing employee.

Another way that Bell’s idea was confirmed is in the types of business that attract attention and young workers. In 1970, quite possibly the best a high-school graduate could do was to find a factory job that demanded semi-skilled manual labor. The wages and benefits (often guaranteed by a union contract) were enough to start a family on, and job security was good. In 2011, good luck finding such a job. The unemployment rate among native-born U. S. citizens aged 18-29 with only a high-school diploma is about 20% as of last fall. And those who are employed get jobs that barely can make ends meet for a single person. As for raising a family or getting married (increasingly in that order), it is a dubious proposition at best.

What have engineers got to do with all this? Engineering is both an industrial and a post-industrial job category. Engineers were needed to design the cornucopia of material goods that built the industrial economies of the world, and engineers likewise devised the computer networks, software, and auxiliary tools and concepts necessary for the modern film, video game, and financial trading industries—the kinds of activities that make up a post-industrial economy. As I have noted elsewhere, engineers tend to have a narrow focus on the technical task to be done, to the neglect of its wider implications for society as a whole. Not only engineers, but most people discussing modern economies tend to operate with some unspoken assumptions I would like to at least question.

To put it a little too broadly, what is life for? The unspoken answer to this question that usually is assumed by all parties is, “To produce and consume—especially consume.” In a way, the transition from industrial to post-industrial hasn’t questioned that assumption. Instead of buying new, improved toasters and refrigerators and cars, we’re now buying new and improved DVDs, computer games, and versions of Microsoft Excel. Both kinds of economies demand that people earn enough money to consume the products made—and that’s where a problem is showing up.

Every cohort of young people is made up of some who will make brilliant lawyers, doctors, scientists, or engineers—and a whole lot more who won’t. But if we increasingly move toward an economy in which the only people who can earn a decent living need advanced degrees and the brainpower required to obtain those degrees, we will end up with a situation more typical of developing countries: a small, pampered, wealthy elite living in walled compounds to keep out the impoverished, ill-fed and ill-clad masses who live from hand to mouth. This is frankly the way most societies were organized over the centuries, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best way. To have a solid, prosperous middle class, one needs solid middle-class jobs for them—jobs within the reach of most people with average smarts. But that’s not what’s happening.

We are trying to compensate for the problem by making more and more people go to college for longer and longer periods. This is good in some ways, but it runs against biology in several respects, notably the fact that we are set up (by evolution or God, depending on your point of view) to marry and have children around the age of 20 at the latest. The Amish solve this problem by amputating education at the eighth grade. The young people who choose to stay Amish (and there is usually a time when they are given a choice) become farmers or craftsmen, marry and have children at 18 or 20, and live quiet, unremarkable, pre-industrial lives, most of them. But if everybody quit what they’re doing now and tried to be Amish, we’d run out of farmland in about two seconds.

I said I’d raise a question. I didn’t say I knew the answer. Responses to this blog, as always, are more than welcome.

Sources: I relied on the Wikipedia article on Daniel Bell, and used information from the websites http://jobs.stateuniversity.com/pages/16/American-Workplace-SHIFT-SERVICE-ECONOMY.html and http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article23764.html for employment statistics.

Do Cell Phones Make Your Brain Hungry?

People are often afraid of things they don’t understand. The way cell phones work is a mystery to most people, if by “mystery” we mean something that we may understand on a basic level, but something that has indefinite levels of complexity that we do not comprehend. By that definition, most pieces of electronic gear are mysteries even to their designers, because no one person any longer has an exhaustive understanding of all the pieces that go into a cell phone: the microprocessors, the RF circuits, the digital signal processing, the details of the semiconductor fabrication design, etc. Each designer knows his or her little bit, but no one any longer understands the whole thing exhaustively.

And the mysteries of cell phones pale when compared to the mysteries of the brain. Though we have just begun to be able to measure certain things about the brain, such as how much glucose it metabolizes where, this is just like studying an advanced computer based on how much power different parts of it consume, without being able to measure the actual signals inside. In either case, you could make some broad generalizations and correlations, but detailed understanding would be beyond your grasp.

So it’s not surprising that a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) showing a relationship between cell-phone use and brain metabolism got a lot of attention. The interaction between cell phones and the brain has got to be one of the most thoroughly studied matters in the history of medical science and electrical engineering. As cell phone use grew in the 1980s and 1990s, both industry and government labs studied nearly every possible way that the radio-frequency emissions from cell phones could affect the brain. No one denies that the watt-level or less power emitted from a cell phone causes a very slight warming of tissue. So does sitting out in the sun, for that matter. But if you dig down into the worst fears of the average member of the cell-phone-using public, you might find something like this: twenty years down the road, large numbers of people who have used cell phones extensively will all come down with some horrible incurable form of brain cancer and die lingering, mentally incapacitated deaths, all because they wouldn’t put down the durn phone.

The actual finding, by members of the National Institutes on Drug Abuse and Brookhaven National Laboratory, was a lot less serious than that. In the normal course of business, the brain metabolizes glucose from the blood to obtain energy for its operations. This is how the brain eats, so to speak. Positron-emission tomography (PET) combined with a special type of glucose-containing chemical allows brain scientists to measure the energy consumption, as it were, of different parts of the brain in real time. When they put cell phones next to both ears of 47 healthy test subjects for 50 minutes and turned one on (presumably they didn’t tell the subjects which one was on and which one wasn’t), they found that the parts of the brain closest to the phone antenna used 35.7 micromoles of glucose per minute per 100 grams of brain tissue. The other side used 33.3 micromoles. In other words, the side of the brain nearest the phone used about 7% more glucose than the other side. They are quite confident about the statistics of this result, but say that their finding is “of unknown clinical significance.”

My own uninformed guess is that the slight heating effect of the absorbed RF waves affected the brain’s sensitive temperature-regulating mechanism, and possibly increased blood circulation in that area as a result, producing more glucose use as a side effect. Obviously, more research is required, at a minimum another study showing that this effect is repeatable. Until that is done, the scientifically responsible thing to do is to suspend judgment, not get into a panic about using cell phones.

As I have said in other contexts, engineers should not ignore the public perception that cell phone use might damage your brain in some way. It’s something the industry must deal with, and is as real as consumer attitudes about price, color, service features, or anything else to do with a product. A report by Kent German on CNET stated that the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association played up the “unknown clinical significance” aspect of the JAMA report, which is understandable. They could hardly be expected to embrace it with open arms. But as they point out, this is not the first time researchers have investigated the relationship between cell-phone use and brain activity. This study is unusual in that a definite statistical correlation was found, but whether the change in metabolism is harmful is just not known at this time. And the fact that this almost inconsequential finding has received so much publicity has to do with our attitude toward science as the ultimate authority in more and more aspects of life.

Every age has authority figures to which it looks for guidance. In the Middle Ages it was the Church, by and large. Since the nineteenth century, science has largely replaced other authorities as the recognized way of resolving questions of wider and wider significance, whether or not it makes sense to approach a problem in a scientific way, meaning armed with statistical studies and correlation calculations.

It’s hard to bear in mind that not all of life is best approached in that way. I rarely carry a cell phone, and turn it on even less often than I carry it. This is most assuredly not because I’m afraid of the RF radiation it emits. As an amateur-radio operator in my younger days, I got exposed to way more RF than most cell-phone users will take in from cell phones in their lifetimes. Once I even got burned—literally—on my thumb when I was working on an antenna, and a fellow amateur didn’t check my location before he keyed the transmitter. I am happy to report that the small scar healed in a week or so and my thumb has survived intact to this day.

I simply prefer to live my life without the added annoyance of having some telemarketer interrupt my already precarious chain of thought, or my dinner with my wife, or any number of other activities that were formerly sacrosanct from electronic perturbation. This has nothing to do with statistics, and everything to do with my sanity. Other people, including my wife, have decided differently, for good reasons. They carry cell phones and turn them on, and that is fine. If you want to limit your cell phone use for reasons to do with how you live, that makes sense. But don’t get rid of it because you’re afraid of brain cancer. There are a lot more sensible things to be afraid of, at least as far as we know now.

Sources: An abstract of the JAMA report referred to in this blog is freely accessible at http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/305/8/808.short, and Kent German’s Feb. 23, 2011 CNET article on the CTIA reaction (and other thoughts of his) can be found at http://www.cnet.com/8301-17918_1-20035614-85.html?tag=mncol;mlt_related.

Jaron Lanier and his Six Web Commandments

You would think that a person who was doing virtual-reality experiments in the 1980s, someone who wears dreadlocks and plays obscure musical instruments professionally, and someone who just wrote a book criticizing most of what we’re familiar with about the WorldWideWeb would not have much in common. Well, they turn out to be the same person: Jaron Lanier, who is Scholar at Large with Microsoft Corporation, among several other of his hats. And he published a book last year called You Are Not a Gadget that has enough unique perspectives on engineering ethics problems to give me ideas for several blogs. Today I’ll stick to just one: the danger that the web is about to lock us into pernicious frameworks and habits that may do permanent damage to cultures worldwide.

The easiest way to understand what he’s saying is to consider the idea of the inner troll. This is Lanier’s phrase for the way normally decent and polite people sometimes turn into writers of nasty, ill-tempered, and vicious attacks in comments on blogs and other online forums, under cover of anonymity. Anyone who has spent time on popular websites where anonymous comments are allowed has noticed how ugly people tend to be when they take sides on a controversial issue. (The non-controversial ones rarely attract comments.) It doesn’t matter what the subject is, and whether the visitors are beer-drinking football fans or musicologists with perfect pitch and Ph. D’s. Sooner or later, the discussions degenerate into the kind of name-calling and personal attacks that most people still shy away from in face-to-face encounters (I hope). On some occasions involving teenagers, the pressure from hateful online mobs has even driven a few victims to suicide. Why is this?

Although Lanier isn’t sure, he has some ideas. One problem is the fact that anonymity is almost a default setting on many websites, while it takes extra effort to identify yourself in a way that can be traced back to your true name or address. This is one of the “locked-in” features of the web that is pretty hard to reverse without making folks go through a lot of identification hassle that would discourage commenting at all. Lanier explains that the first Internet users were all physicists at a few large labs, most of them knew each other, and most of them had no concern, or even a vague notion, that anyone on the web would ever be less than polite and professional. Well, this was one of those little features of human behavior that got overlooked as one of several competing versions of how the web should work took over. And now we are more or less stuck with it.

Another problem he identifies might be termed the homogenization of personhood. Contrast the old-fashioned handwritten letter from one friend to another with the impression of a person you can get from a typical Facebook page. Back in the day, you could often tell who wrote the letter simply by the handwriting style of the address on the envelope. Your friend’s handwriting became as familiar to you as his face, and everyone’s unique writing style conveyed more sense of personality, even down to repetitive phrases that could be simultaneously annoying and endearing.

By contrast, a lot of material on a Facebook page derives from a few bits that represent yes-or-no answers to a limited set of canned questions: age, sex, “single” or “attached,” and a few others. And the more skillfully a Facebook page is designed to put forward an appealing personality, the more successful it is, generally speaking, at everything but sincerity. As Lanier puts it, “The deep meaning of personhood is being reduced by illusions of bits.” While any communications medium inevitably reduces a holistic experience to a limited range of information, the digital medium of the web is particularly reductive. And because it’s so widespread, its effects may be more pervasive than any previous technology, perhaps including the invention of the printing press.

Lanier thinks that while it’s too late to change some things about the web, it’s not too late for others. He gives a list of practical suggestions that each user of the web can act on. While a few people who follow these rules will not revolutionize the web overnight, I think the philosophy behind these ideas will move us in the right direction. Here they are, from page 21 of You Are Not a Gadget:

1. Don’t post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.

2. If you put effort into Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to help attract people who don’t yet realize that they are interested in the topics you contributed to.

3. Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won’t fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.

4. Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view.

5. Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.

6. If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine.

If everyone followed these rules, I think the web experience for everyone would be much better. No. 1 by itself would rid the world of most spam, for instance. Of course it is idealistic to think this might happen, but that’s what ideals are for. Even if you never reach them, just by trying to you naturally go in the right direction.

At the risk of flattering my readers, I will say that I have rarely if ever encountered any Inner Trolls trying to post comments on this site. I view all the submitted comments, and allow ones in that I think contribute to the conversation, regardless of whether they agree with or oppose my own view. Most of the ones I reject are machine-generated spam or so short and content-free that there’s no point in posting them. The result is something that I think is in the spirit of Lanier’s Six Commandments. While few of my posts are the product of weeks of reflection, I do think about them for more than the hour or so it takes to write them. As I said, there is a lot more in Lanier’s book worth pondering, so you may read about him again here soon.

Sources: You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier was published in 2010 by Afred A. Knopf.

Modular Nuclear Plants: About Time?

Last week, the Obama administration proposed to spend a half billion dollars over the next five years to design modular nuclear power plants that would be cheaper and easier to build than the plants we have now. The idea is a good one—the question is, will it happen?

First, why is it a good idea? What about nuclear waste? What about the dangers of terrorist attacks on the plants? What about nuclear’s unparalleled horrific legacy as the direct descendant of nuclear weapons, and the danger that nuclear fuel will end up in the wrong hands, hands that turn it into a bomb?

These are all good questions. As a practical engineer, my first thought is to look around and see if anyone’s done it right, and ask how they did it. I need look no farther than France, where the centralized government agency in charge of nuclear matters had this uniform-design modular idea, or something a lot like it, around 1965. The result? To the best of my knowledge, no one has stolen French nuclear fuel to make a weapon, no one has mounted a successful terrorist attack on a French nuclear plant, France is a leader in technology that actually recycles some nuclear waste, and most French citizens have a favorable or at least neutral view of nuclear power. Today, France generates about 70% of its electricity with an array of nuclear plants that come in only three sizes: small, medium, and large. In fact, their plants make so much electricity that France is the largest net exporter of electric power in the world. And modular, standardized construction practices are a large part of why the French nuclear effort has been such a success.

In the U. S., however, the picture is more cloudy. In 2010, only 17% of our electric power was produced by nuclear energy, and all of that was from plants at least 15 years old. No nuclear plant has been completed in the U. S. since 1996. There are several reasons for this.

Up through the 1970s, nuclear power in the U. S. was a growth industry that had a bright future. Then a couple of accidents—the Three Mile Island core meltdown in Pennsylvania in 1979, and the disastrous fire in the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the former USSR in 1986—cast a pall over what was already becoming an increasingly controversial way of generating power. The nuclear-plant construction industry was also partly to blame in not coming up with a reliable, predictable way of building standardized plants that worked. Their task was hampered by a moving target of increasing government licensing and construction requirements, which made the last batch of nuclear plants to be built exceedingly uneconomical. Vast cost overruns and some utility bankruptcies led to a complete shutdown of construction of new nuclear plants by the mid-90s. Although there are now signs that the nuclear freeze is beginning to thaw, the deregulation of the electric-power industry in the last decade or so means that investors look even harder at the economics of nuclear power than they used to. And they should. Good engineering is always about economics at some level, and companies who hope to succeed in this business have to figure out how to make nuclear plants effective, safe, and profitable.

Politically, a hard core of opposition to nuclear power in any way, shape, or form developed and took over the conversation by the 1980s. This vociferous minority tends to attract much media attention, and has strongly colored the public perception of nuclear energy. The industry’s proponents are not nearly as concentrated, focused, or energetic, so the minority tends to get most of the attention. Engineers in favor of nuclear power have not always considered the fact that ignoring a public perception based on wrong information, will not make that public perception go away.

For example, suppose a person opposes the construction of a new nuclear plant ten miles away from his house because of fear that the radiation emitted from it in normal operation will shorten his lifetime. I’m not saying that’s the only reason people oppose nuclear power, but it is one reason some people cite. You can sit down with such a person and show them reams of statistics to the effect that if they smoke, or drive a car, or do any number of other things that people do routinely, their chances of dying from one of these other ordinary activities is vastly greater than the miniscule risk of getting cancer from the slight additional background of radiation from a nuclear plant—if indeed there is any added risk at all. But the perception is there, and too many engineers simply sweep aside such beliefs by saying they are irrational. But an irrational belief that someone holds will still affect their behavior, and their attitudes, and the way they vote.

There is one relatively new argument in favor of nuclear power: the fact that it is the most reliable and well-developed way to generate electricity without adding to the world’s carbon footprint. Whether or not you believe global warming is the worst crisis of our time, we can all agree that reducing our reliance on fossil fuels (whether domestic coal or imported oil) is a good thing, other matters being equal. And nuclear power does that in spades. I suspect this is one of the main motivations behind the Obama administration’s embrace of limited nuclear energy, which to their credit they have been fairly consistent about.

A Federally sponsored design exercise is one thing. But until Federal, state, and local governments modify the currently cumbrous and Byzantine nuclear licensing and approval process, I suspect the present deregulated electric-power industry is going to be reluctant to put a lot of money into nuclear power, despite its environmental advantages. In France, sustained and intelligent government direction led to a global success story in nuclear energy. Let us hope that something similar might happen here, although the paths we take will look very different from what happened in France.

Sources: The New York Times online edition carried a report on the Obama administration’s proposal for modular nuclear plant design on Feb. 13, 2011 at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/science/earth/13nuke.html. I also consulted the Wikipedia article “Nuclear power in France” and obtained the statistic on the percentage of U. S. electricity generated by nuclear power from the U. S. Department of Energy website http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/epm_sum.html.

Freezing Texans In the Dark: Engineering Rolling Blackouts

Last Wednesday, thousands of Texans experienced something that, to the best of my knowledge, is unprecedented in the history of the state. A combination of extremely low temperatures, weather-caused generating plant failures, and poor planning led to the need to cut off electric power for several hours or more in widespread regions of Central and North Texas. My house was in one of the affected regions, and so about 5:20 AM that morning I found myself hunting in the dark for flashlights and wondering if someone had driven into a power utility pole nearby. We experienced more blackouts intermittently the rest of the morning, and my university cancelled afternoon classes out of concerns that people would get trapped in elevators. Later that day I learned the reason: a short-term shortage of generating capacity forced the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to order its member utilities to shed loads systematically in a series of rolling blackouts to prevent the whole system from going down in an uncontrolled way. There is both good news and bad news in the reports of why this happened and how decisions were made.

The good news is that the old “hold on till you can’t anymore” attitude that led in the 1960s to regional or national power blackouts is a thing of the past. With modern instrumentation and modeling software, operators can tell when their power grid is getting close to the brink and organize deliberate actions such as rolling blackouts to prevent a total system collapse. That is what operators in California had to do a few years ago during extremely hot weather and an energy crisis, and that is what ERCOT did last week. Relatively short local blackouts of a few “circuits” (distribution areas) at a time are much preferable to a disorganized collapse that affects everybody, including critical loads such as hospitals, rest homes, and semiconductor plants, for whom a power failure means endangering lives or the immediate loss of millions of dollars of product and equipment.

But the bad news is that we had rolling blackouts at all. Texas is unique among the 48 contiguous states in that its power grid is largely independent of surrounding regions. When other grids have trouble, this helps us get through unscathed, but by the same token, the state has to generate the vast majority of the power it uses within its own borders. Consequently there are some 500 or so generating plants in Texas, about 50 of which were off line last Wednesday for one reason or another. Reports are still coming in about why so many plants were down, but the most significant factor was the weather: it was 18 degrees F here in San Marcos, halfway between San Antonio and Austin, and proportionally colder as you went north. Evidently power-plant operators, whose machinery is mostly outdoors and exposed to the wind and icy temperatures, did not uniformly plan in advance for such low temperatures. Pipes froze or burst, machinery failed to start, and even many of the natural-gas-fired emergency plants designed for short-term supplemental use in just such a crisis couldn’t be started. The reason? Atmos Energy, the main natural-gas supplier, was having its own problems keeping gas pressure up to residential customers, so it exercised its contractual right to reduce pressure to large-scale industrial users, including—you guessed it—power plants. So we shot ourselves in the foot on that one.

ERCOT and its member utilities have since come in for a lot of criticism about the way the blackouts were distributed. It turns out that the firms had lists of “protected” loads which were not to be interrupted under rolling-blackout conditions: places like the aforementioned hospitals, nursing homes, and semiconductor plants. There were so many of these protected loads in so many circuits that the burden of the blackouts fell on a relatively few residential and commercial districts, with reports of some sections losing power for as long as eight hours.

What lessons can be learned from this experience? Surely a lot of power-plant owners are reviewing their cold-weather contingency plans, and the next time such an unusual cold snap hits I hope more plants will stay on line. Everybody now knows about the lists of protected loads, and after such public exposure perhaps a dialog about the wisdom of such lists can lead to improvements or changes if necessary. And clearly, just because something is in a contract doesn’t mean that it’s a wise thing to do. Cutting gas pressure to power plants in an emergency when you need more power plants, not less, is just the kind of bureaucratic messup that needs coordination at a higher level, perhaps with state government involvement if necessary.

But beyond these tactical issues lies a more strategic question: does this experience tell us something about changes in the level of commitment and planning in the electric-utility industry after several years of deregulation? Compared to thirty years ago, the industry is much more diversified, independent of government, and competitive, although these changes are only a matter of degree. The concern I have always had about extensive utility deregulation is that in the struggle for profits, the customer’s needs would be left behind. Under normal conditions this concern has largely proved groundless, and at least in many parts of Texas customers now have a choice about who they buy their electricity from. (That is not the case for people who live in cities that own the electric utility, such as San Marcos.) But the relationship between one customer and a particular electric provider proved illusory when ERCOT exercised what amounted to dictatorial control over the entire system to preserve its integrity.

On the whole, this control was exercised wisely. One wonders whether the problem would have occurred under the old regulated system of guaranteed profits, when generating, transmitting, and distributing equipment was typically under one ownership and profits were generous enough to allow overkill in maintenance and cold-weather protection, as well as a little surplus for extravagances like research, for instance. We will never know. I confess a little hurt pride at the thought that rolling blackouts, which I associate (rightly or wrongly) mainly with developing countries, actually affected my home state of Texas. I hope this is not a trend, and that the lessons learned from this unique experience help us avoid another one in the future.

Sources: I used reports from various issues of the Austin American-Statesman over the last week (see http://www.statesman.com/ for specific reports on the rolling blackouts of Feb. 2, 2011).

Readers Respond to Poll on Real Engineering Ethics Problems

Two weeks ago I asked readers to send me stories about authentic engineering ethics problems they have run into. Numerically, the response was not overwhelming (I think I got three replies), but all of them were worth reading. And one reader in particular (who has requested anonymity) came back with several stories that made the whole effort worthwhile.

One reader in Australia noted the conflict between natural resources and farmland, on the one hand, and the needs of extractive industries such as mining, petroleum, and lumber on the other hand. Australia, with its proximity to the increasing demands of developing Asian countries such as China for raw materials, faces this problem in an especially pointed way, although it is truly a global issue.

Another reader points out that while engineering codes of ethics usually consider the needs of the public at large as well as the client, some clients actively oppose an engineer’s efforts to abide by environmental regulations and other public protections.

But the prize goes to the third response I received from a former engineer who is now in academia. Out of several rather hair-raising stories that he sent in, I will summarize just one.

The engineer in question worked for a large firm with overseas customers. One large project originated in the sales department, progressed through sales engineers, applications engineers, and moved on to the regular engineering staff. One of the engineers there noted that there was a paperwork error in the specifications. If the product was made as specified, it would lead to a hazardous situation and it could kill or maim people horribly. Accordingly, the engineer sent back the project and asked for the error to be corrected. The sales people denied the request, not once but several times. After one more try at getting the error corrected, the firm’s client company overseas sent their project manager (essentially a customer of the firm) to the firm’s offices and they held a meeting with him. The client-manager from overseas closed the conference room door and chewed out the engineers up one side and down the other, reminded them that they’d signed a contract, threatened lawsuits, and said either they should build the unsafe product as is or face a “total company shut-down.” I quote from the email: “At one point, the project manager tried to convince us of the trifling nature of the problem since the only people likely to be hurt were third-world village ‘a--holes’ whose widows would get wonderful government pensions if the worst happened.”

It turned out that the reason the overseas project manager was so insistent on keeping the mistake in the plans, was that he was operating under either national or corporate rules in his country which prohibited the alteration of a single project document once bidding was over. If anything was changed, the whole project would have to be rebid, and things would probably get delayed for years.

After much hair-pulling, the firm’s management decided to deliver all the project documentation without the signature of a single engineer. Instead, all the documents came with letters warning that the product was not safe for use unless a simple change was made, and described the change needed to make the project safe. Since the firm itself wasn’t building the product (the overseas client was), technically the firm wouldn’t be liable for injuries to the same degree, but even with all the warnings, the experience left many of the firm’s engineers with sleepless nights.

This story teaches valuable lessons on several levels. For one thing, it shows how cultural differences are an increasing factor in modern engineering work. The cavalier attitude shown by the overseas project manager toward the people likely to be hurt if the product failed was not shared by the U. S. engineers, to say the least. The conflict between sales staff, who wanted simply to get the sale, and engineering staff, who wanted the product to be safe, is a perennial one, but in my experience simply comes with the territory. The way the firm resolved the situation was perhaps one of the least bad solutions, but when a client refuses to accept the best solution and threatens to ruin your firm, sometimes the best solution simply won’t work. One hopes along with the engineers involved that the client firm took the advice and made the added change to improve product safety. But at some level, all such interactions rest on trust, and all the documents in the world will not prevent an unscrupulous contractor or construction worker from doing something wrong.

You can also question the wisdom of a rule that prevents the slightest alteration in documents after the bidding process is over. Some rules are implemented with ulterior motives. In any complex project, certain changes simply come up when on-the-ground reality collides with the engineering paperwork. And reasonable contract rules and laws recognize this fact. In my very limited experience with U. S. construction practices (limited to sitting in on one construction contracting class), an allowance for after-bid changes is made and rules are set up to implement these changes fairly and with adequate notification for all parties involved. I suspect that the overseas law about no changes in the documents after the bid may have been implemented by a government whose friends in high places wanted a loophole through which to funnel business their way. In the event that any documents are changed after a bidding process, this would allow a corrupt government to keep fiddling with the bids until its buddies got the business, while staying within the letter of the law. That is only speculation on my part, but I can’t imagine any other reason for such a rigid and unrealistic rule.

I thank all the readers for sending in their ideas. The National Institute for Engineering Ethics movie project will probably be ongoing for the next several years, so any time you have ideas along these lines, please send them in, either in a comment on the blog or directly to my email at kdstephan(atsign)txstate.edu.

Engineering Over Time Through Scientific American

In 1970, when I was 17, my grandmother bought me a gift subscription to Scientific American magazine. This was an act of faith on her part as much as anything else, since I suspect teenage boys were not a big item in the magazine’s marketing strategy. But I’ve been a subscriber ever since. I bring this up because this weekend, I boxed up my backfiles of the magazine, almost 500 issues, and prepared to ship them to an outfit in Georgia which offered me a reasonable price for them. It’s not every day someone offers to pay you to clean out your attic, so that’s what I did. It got me to thinking about science, engineering, and the changing status of both as reflected in a journal which has tried to be to the scientific community of America what The New Yorker tries to be to the nation’s arts-and-letters contingent. Exactly what that is can be debated, but it can be summarized as a prestigious forum for the latest and greatest, presented to readers in the upper strata of its chosen group.

Just to make the comparison more vivid, I will look at two sample issues of the magazine spaced widely in time: the March 1957 issue (a beat-up old thing I obtained under dubious circumstances, which I am not sending to Georgia) and my latest current issue, for January 2011. The only thing that is unquestionably the same in the two issues is the masthead logo or whatever you call it, the words “Scientific American” on the cover. Other than that, the differences are vast.

The major articles in the 1957 issue were about evenly divided between the life sciences and the physical sciences. On the biology side, there were pieces on hormones, a famous physician of antiquity named Galen, and a rare genetic disease called porphyria that a researcher had tracked down to a single prolific South African immigrant. On the physical-science side, the interested reader could learn about current techniques of seawater desalinization, recent findings about the Crab Nebula, and frozen free radicals. There were also a couple of articles on psychological matters. I have lost the cover for this particular issue, but if it was like the others of its time, it featured nothing but the magazine’s name, the date, and a single elegantly prepared artwork illustrating one of the articles, with a short subtitle. That was all.

Turning to January 2011, its cover also is dominated by a single image: the male and female symbols used by doctors, made three-dimensional and assembled in what could be described as a suggestive way. The dominant headline (one of several) reads “The Real Sexual Revolution,” and summarizes an article about the evolutionary development of sex. (In case no one has told you, sex sells, at least with magazines.) Three other headlines describe a few more pieces: one on the physical brain substrate of consciousness, one on the development of new flu strains, and one on robot scientists. There is a dominance of biology and the life sciences over the physical sciences, and this trend continues inside. Of nine feature articles listed in the table of contents, only two pertain primarily to physical science. And even those two deal not so much with physics per se as with technology and society: one speculates on what we’ll do if we actually make contact with an interstellar society, and another discusses energy policy.

Another thing to examine is the advertisements, which say a lot about the clientele a magazine hopes to procure. The 1957 issue is full of ads placed by companies wanting to hire scientists and engineers: places like Avco, Northrop, Boeing, RCA, Bell Labs—really an honor roll of the high-tech sector of that time. A tone of desperation even seeps into some of the ads. Clearly it was a seller’s market then, if you had an advanced technical degree in the physical sciences or engineering. The 2011 issue’s ads are softer and less focused, more institutional than purposeful, and many could (and do) appear in any high-prestige slick magazine these days. I saw no ads offering jobs: those have long since retreated into the specialty professional locations where they are more cost-effective. But if I want to buy some software to teach me Chinese, or take a cruise with like-minded Scientific American readers, or be impressed by the high-tech sector of the Czech Republic (the magazine sells special advertising sections to entire countries from time to time), I will find what I’m looking for in this month’s issue.

Another thing that has changed, and in my opinion not for the better, is that the 1957 issue maintains a highly objective and non-political tone throughout, except in a small section called “Science and the Citizen.” Of course, strict objectivity is an illusion, but like good manners, it can be very convenient to employ nonetheless. When longtime publisher Gerard Piel and editor Dennis Flanagan left the magazine’s helm in 1984 to others, the new crew took on an advocacy role in both editor-authored statements and in their choice of articles. In their selection of columnists and direct editorials, the magazine now has an obvious anti-supernatural bias which was hard to detect in its earlier incarnations.

What has all this got to do with engineering, let alone engineering ethics? For one thing, it says engineering is a much more diverse field now than it was in 1957. Back then, an advertiser stood a good chance of addressing the small pool of high-tech American professionals through the pages of a single magazine. Nowadays everything is a lot more complicated: science and technology in general, and the process of finding people who can do what you want, in particular. This little comparison also shows how the physical sciences (and technology based exclusively on them) have shrunk in relative prestige compared to the life sciences. What this means for engineering is not exactly clear, except that engineers themselves must pay more attention to life science than ever before. This explains the growth in programs such as biomedical engineering, and says that too much specialization of any kind may not be a good idea in today’s rapidly changing world.

NOTE on the Readers’ Poll: Last week I asked for suggestions on themes for a new engineering ethics video I will have the opportunity to contribute to. The response was not exactly overwhelming (I think I got two so far), so if you have any ideas along these lines, please see last week’s blog and pass them along. In any event, I will discuss these next week.

Reader’s Poll: Topics for Planned Engineering Ethics Video Wanted

Here’s where I give my readers (both of you!) a chance to participate in an ongoing project that should result in a new video drama for use in teaching engineering ethics at the college level. Over the last two decades, an organization called the National Institute for Engineering Ethics has sponsored the production of three video dramas designed to highlight ethical issues in engineering. (Full disclosure: I am a member of the NIEE board of directors.) These videos have been shown in hundreds of engineering ethics classes over the years, and serve as a springboard for discussion of a wide variety of ethical issues and dilemmas that practicing engineers can encounter on the job.

The three videos are Gilbane Gold (1989), Incident at Morales (2003), and Henry’s Daughters (2010). They are all about a half hour long, with lots of supplementary material for classroom discussions and ethics exercises. (For more information about these videos, see the reference to NIEE in the Sources section below.) If you’ve graduated in the last fifteen years or so from an engineering school which happens to use them, you may have even seen one. If you remember seeing it and it made any kind of impression on you, I’d love to hear from you about it.

But that’s not the main reason for this poll. Many aspects of engineering ethics are perennial, in the sense that human nature doesn’t change that fast and certain kinds of issues keep coming up decade after decade. So to the extent possible, the NIEE tries to address issues in these videos that share that timelessness to insure their wide and continuing usefulness. However, in the nature of things, a video starts to look dated after a while because of hairstyles, dress, vehicles, and even things like the demise of big boxy computer monitors, which happened around the time Incident at Morales was released. So the folks at NIEE are in the early stages of developing the next project, and I would like your help. (By the way, this poll is something I’m doing strictly on my own initiative, and is not an official NIEE activity).

The question I’d like you to address is this: what engineering ethics problems or issues are you either facing right now, or think you’ll be facing in the near future? This is not mainly a technology question, although new technologies can be a part of the answer. What I’m looking for is situations, dilemmas, and types of ethical problems that you have either already encountered on the job, or know about someone else who has run into them. Just to give you an idea of what kinds of things the NIEE videos have dealt with in the past, here are quickie summaries of each one, from the NIEE website:

Gilbane Gold: Gilbane Gold is the name given to dried sludge from the city of Gilbane wastewater treatment plant. It is sold to farmers as a commercial fertilizer. The annual revenue generated saves the average family about $300 per year in taxes. Z CORP, a computer components manufacturer, discharges wastewater containing small amounts of lead and arsenic into the city sewers. By current city test standards, the discharge meets allowable levels. Z CORP environmental engineers know of a newer test which shows that the discharge may still meet the letter of the law, but exceeds the spirit of the law. Protection of the health, safety, and welfare of the public is a concern.

Incident at Morales: Phaust Chemical manufactures Old Stripper, a paint remover that dominates the market. On learning that Phaust’s competitor Chemitoil plans to introduce a new paint remover that may capture the market, executives at Phaust decide to develop a competing product. To save money in manufacturing the product, Phaust decides to construct a new chemical plant in Mexico. To design the new plant, Phaust hires a chemical engineer, Fred Martinez, who had been a consultant to Chemitoil. Fred confronts several engineering decisions in which ethical considerations play a major role. . . . When samples of Chemitoil’s new paint remover EasyStrip become available, it is clear that to be competitive with EasyStrip, Phaust must change the formulation of its new paint remover, requiring higher temperatures and pressures than originally anticipated. These increases in temperatures and pressures cause significant technical and ethical problems, the most serious of which is the fact that the automatic controls no longer work as intended. Thus, the plant manager, Manuel, volunteers to control the process manually. After the plant goes into full operation, an unfortunate accident occurs, resulting in serious consequences. (Spoiler Alert: Namely, Manuel gets killed.)

Henry’s Daughters: Henry is a retired but still well-connected automobile executive and lobbyist. GUIDEME, a client of Henry’s, is involved in an academia-industry-Department of Transportation smart highway design competition called SANSHANDS. The project goal is to develop specifications for automated highways and car control systems so that people won’t have to drive anymore. Laura, Henry’s oldest daughter, is a professional engineer who works at the Department of Transportation. She is the project manager, and responsible for compiling and recommending the specifications for the computer control system. Julie is Henry’s younger daughter. With her father’s finagling, she is an intern with OUTOCAR, a local start-up company recently founded by state university engineers in partnership with the University’s Business Incubator. OUTOCAR is competing with GUIDEME to take the design of SANSHANDS to the next level. The story intertwines the lives of both young women and their father. They are excited to be involved with a project that will impact the future of transportation. While most of their discussions focus on technical and personal challenges, sometimes they unintentionally cross the ethical line by letting proprietary information slip out. Ultimately, Laura’s team recommends OUTOCAR but the final award goes to GUIDEME. OUTOCAR personnel allege that ethical misconduct and possible criminal violations occurred during the project. Consequently, the state senate ethics commission holds a hearing and calls Laura and Henry to testify.

. . . So by now you have an idea of the kinds of things these videos deal with. I’m not looking for complete detailed story ideas at this point. It’s too early in the process for that. Instead, I’m interested in situations and issues (preferably from someone’s real experience) that you think would be helpful to discuss in a college engineering ethics course.

How should you respond? The best way would be to make a comment in the comment section of this blog. That way everybody can see what your idea is right away, including me. The other option is to email me directly (kdstephan@txstate.edu) with your suggestion. I will compile whatever responses I receive in the next week or two and discuss them in an upcoming blog post.

Of course, I cannot make any assurances that what you suggest (or even what I suggest) will make it into the next video, which probably won’t be produced for several more years. But I’d like to give you a chance to contribute your ideas to what we hope will be a helpful and productive educational tool for engineering ethics classes.

Sources: Since the videos are designed for institutional use, they are a little pricey to buy on an individual basis. But you can read descriptions and see more material on them at the NIEE website http://www.niee.org/murdoughCenter/. And since every engineering dean in the U. S. should have received a free copy of Henry’s Daughters in the last year or so, if you want to borrow it you could ask around at the dean’s office.