Research Integrity and Politics: The Regnerus Affair

Because many engineers do scientific research and publish in peer-reviewed journals, the matter of research integrity should be a concern of all engineers.  An acquaintance of mine, University of Texas sociology professor Mark Regnerus, has recently found himself in the center of a tornadic controversy over a paper he published last month in the Journal of Social Science Research.

I am not an unbiased observer of this situation.  I met Prof. Regnerus several years ago at a dinner, and he impressed me as a pleasant, sincere Christian (he is a Catholic convert) whose presence in the field of sociology was a welcome one, because sociologists in general tend to be leery of personal commitments to organized religion.  Regnerus is interested in the way sexuality influences and is influenced by social behavior, as evidenced by his earlier Oxford University Press book Forbidden Fruit, an investigation of teenage sexual behavior and attitudes.  But with his latest paper, Regnerus stepped on a political third rail.

The paper describes an extensive research project into the question of whether gay parenting affects the lives of children in measurable ways.  The conventional sociological wisdom, represented by a fairly small number of research papers, says that there is essentially no negative effect of being raised by two mommies or two daddies, as opposed to the conventional mother and father.  This body of work is cited by every judicial decision in favor of things such as adoption by gay parents and the extension of marriage to gay couples.

Regnerus’s study, which he himself admits is not perfect, found otherwise.  There were significant negative consequences of being raised by parents who were gay, according to the study.  I am not going to address the controversial question of defining “gay” or how extensive the negative consequences were or how accurate and scientific the study was. 

Not being a sociologist, I am not qualified to pass judgment on these matters.  What I am qualified to judge is the way the peer-review process has been attacked and corrupted after Regnerus’s paper was published.

The idea behind peer review is that scientific publications should be judged by those most qualified to do so:  namely, other scientists in the same field.  That is exactly how Regnerus’s paper was judged.  As is common practice in some fields, Regnerus was allowed to suggest the names of some reviewers, and as is also common, he had worked with some (not all) in the distant past.  In specialized fields, this kind of thing is often unavoidable and does not mean that the reviews will necessarily be biased in the author’s favor.  (Sometimes it works the other way!)  In any case, the reviewers recommended publication and the paper was published.

Then the deluge began.  A journalist and self-described “minorities anti-defamation professional” whose pseudonym is Scott Rose wrote a letter to the University of Texas administration alleging that Regnerus’s paper falsified data.  This is the most serious professional charge that anyone can level against a scientist, comparable to a malpractice charge against a doctor.  The first wrongdoing (as I pointed out in a letter published in the Austin American-Statesman) was for UT Austin to act on such complaints from a person who was not in a competent professional position to make such assessments.  Scott Rose is not a sociologist.  Rose has since published the full “evidence” he plans to present to UT Austin, and it consists of two kinds of arguments.  One kind comprises disputes over methods and definitions that Regnerus used.  If Rose had been selected as a reviewer of Regnerus’s paper, these arguments might have played a role at that point.  But Rose, not being a qualified sociologist, has no professional standing to make them, and they must be assessed on their merits by other professional sociologists.  The other kind of argument consists of various ad hominem attacks on Regnerus’s funding sources, which include organizations such as the Witherspoon Institute that favor conservative causes.  While taking funding from organizations with a political agenda is certainly a possible source of bias, in the field of sociology it is hard to avoid.  Even the federal government has a political agenda, and one’s source of funding cannot be construed as prima facie evidence of research falsification.

Rose also cites the other outrage against the peer-review process:  a special audit report written by a member of the Journal of Social Science Research’s editorial board on the question of whether the peer-review process that led to publication was flawed.  The member, Darren Sherkat, found essentially nothing wrong with the peer-review process.  Instead, he took the opportunity in the audit to review the paper himself, and used terms (“bulls---“) that in my opinion have no place even in a conversation about another colleague’s work, let alone a report on the integrity of the review process.

I have not even mentioned the press coverage with derogatory headlines, the letter signed by over a hundred sociologists objecting to Regnerus’s conclusions, and the politically motivated letter-mobbing of the journal’s editor, James Wright, which pressured him to request the review audit.  Releasing a draft audit to the media, as Wright did, was clearly a craven attempt to deflect hostile politically motivated attacks from himself.  It showed no respect or regard for Regnerus, and probably did not even achieve its intended purpose.

In an opinion piece published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, sociologist Christian Smith takes Regnerus’s side and expresses better than I can, the point that the scientific integrity of the field of sociology is at stake here.  I will ask a question.  In the 1930s, many prominent scientists and engineers in Germany lost their reputations, their jobs, and some eventually their lives because of a non-scientific reason:  they happened to be Jews, or outspoken Christians, or simply opposed to some political aim of the government.  Everyone now agrees that this was a grievous violation of human rights, an early warning sign of the greater wrongs the German government would do in World War II.  While that situation differs from the one Regnerus finds himself in by degree, does it differ in kind from what Jewish scientists suffered in Germany in the 1930s?  Regnerus has reached scientific conclusions that oppose the prevailing political winds.  Though his punishment has come from activists rather than official government sources, it is no less politically motivated and no less unjust.  Smith thinks the integrity of the social-science research process is threatened by the “public smearing and vigilante media attacks” mounted against Regnerus.  If such attacks are successful, we have taken a long step away from scientific integrity and a long step toward the encouragement of a political atmosphere that is totalitarian in its effects.

Sources:  Among the many articles published on this controversy in the last few weeks, I have used the following.  The Austin American-Statesman published a description of UT’s inquiry on July 11 at http://www.statesman.com/news/local/ut-investigates-professors-study-on-children-with-gay-2415276.html.  The Chronicle of Higher Education has published “The Regnerus Affair at UT Austin” by Peter Wood on July 15 at

http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/the-regnerus-affair-at-ut-austin/33509 and “An Academic Auto-da-Fé” by Christian Smith on July 23 at

http://chronicle.com/article/An-Academic-Auto-da-F-/133107/.

The Defibrillator That Fails May Be the One You Need

Everybody who has watched medical shows on TV has sooner or later witnessed a simulated attempt to start a heart going again with a defibrillator.  The doctor in charge tells everybody else to get out of the way—he places electrodes on the patient’s chest—then bang!—the body arches upward and, depending on what the dramatic needs of the moment are, either starts breathing again or gets covered up for the last time.  Used properly in real life, automated external defibrillators (AEDs, for short) can be lifesavers.

For a variety of reasons including circulatory problems and electrical shock, a person’s heart can go into an ineffective kind of twitching known as ventricular fibrillation, and blood basically ceases to flow.  This is called sudden cardiac arrest.  Invariably the person becomes unconscious and has no manually detectible pulse.  It used to be the case that unless properly equipped emergency workers arrived with an AED within four to six minutes of sudden cardiac arrest, it meant curtains.  Then it occurred to AED manufacturers to make their devices simple enough so even a sixth-grader could use one, as has been demonstrated in practice tests.  For the last fifteen years or so, easy-to-use AEDs have been showing up in public places such as airports, bus terminals, universities, and malls, and people have been rescued by quick-witted bystanders who grabbed an AED and used it in the right circumstances.  But as reported in IEEE Spectrum last spring, a disturbing number of AEDs out there fail to do their job, or would fail if called upon to work.

About 300,000 people in the U. S. alone die from sudden cardiac arrest each year.  Some  of these folks would not benefit from application of an AED, but many of them—possibly as many as 40,000 a year—could be saved by a properly applied working AED.  In Seattle, Washington, city authorities undertook to develop a registry of the location of every publicly accessible AED in town, and then promoted a “citizen defibrillation program” with advertisements, public information publications, and training.  The result is that as many as 45 percent of witnessed cardiac arrest cases (situations where the person is not alone) survive.  Contrast this to the U. S. average of 4 percent, or the even more dismal figure of 0.5 percent for Detroit.  The last thing anybody trying to use an AED expects is a little message on the machine’s display saying something like “BATTERY LOW” or “SELF-TEST ERROR 17.”  But it happens.

AEDs are medical devices, aren’t they?  And so they must go through the same rigorous Food and Drug Administration qualification and inspection tests as other medical devices, mustn’t they?  Well, not quite, it turns out.  AEDs are in a kind of legal gray area that allows manufacturers simply to say that their product is “substantially equivalent” to other AEDs, and then they can bypass the usual medical-equipment tests and qualifications.  So it’s up to the manufacturers to ensure that the batteries will stay charged and the unit will be operational even after years of total neglect, and perhaps environmentally harsh conditions of high and low temperatures and humidity in outdoor locations.

This would be a hard trial for any piece of electronics, but for a unit that someone’s life may eventually depend on, it’s doubly difficult.  And the Spectrum  report shows that an FDA investigation found over 90 percent of AED failures were not investigated sufficiently to identify the cause.  Most of these failures showed up during routine tests, but 750 of the reports of failure between 2005 and 2009 followed a death in which the AED was involved.  And at least one manufacturer maintained a “fix-on-fail” policy.  That is, when the same design problem began to show up in a number of calls for repair of AEDs, you would think the firm would act like most auto manufacturers do and issue a recall to all owners of that model device.  No—this outfit simply waited for the next failure to occur instead of notifying the owners of all potentially defective AEDs.

So what’s the answer?  Changing the law to make AEDs qualify through the same rigorous process as other medical devices is one alternative.  But the manufacturers claim, with some justification, that this will send prices (already in the $2000 per unit range) through the roof.  Ideally, an AED would be as cheap and reliable as a fire extinguisher so that people (for example, heart patients) could afford one at home.  But this isn’t going to happen if prices are north of two kilobucks a pop.

My libertarian streak makes me reluctant to say this, but the way we got fire extinguishers in every public building was by means of fire codes:  laws that compel building owners to have so many fire extinguishers for a given square footage of space.  And it’s the owners’ responsibility to make sure those extinguishers are operational too.  Maybe the only way to make sure AEDs work and are widely accessible is to pass similar codes requiring AEDs, at least in places where the demographics indicate it would be helpful.  Because people younger than 20 rarely go into ventricular fibrillation, for example, K-12 schools might not need more than one in a large building.  But rest homes, for example, could use more.

This issue strikes close to home for me, because as a 58-year-old male I’m in the prime demographic of those who might need an AED some day.  Both my grandfathers died of circulatory problems, and while I try to eat right and exercise, there’s only so much you can do.  Let’s hope the next time anyone you know needs a defibrillator, that one will be handy—and it will work, too.

Sources:  The article “A Shocking Truth” by Mark Harris appeared in the March 2012 issue of IEEE Spectrum, the general-interest publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, on pp. 30-34 and 57-59.  I also consulted the Wikipedia article on defibrillators.

Hacking for Solidarity: Broadcast Engineers and the Polish Resistance in the 1980s

In 2008 it was my privilege to visit a Polish friend of mine at his home in Warsaw.  We had become first acquainted back in the 1980s when it was his privilege, as a university professor of electrical engineering, to leave what was then a Communist country for a one-year sabbatical accompanied by his wife and two sons at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I was also teaching.  Some people would have defected and just stayed in the U. S., but Andrezj (pronounced “Andrey”) loved his native Poland enough to return and work for a brighter future, which as it turned out came to pass in 1989, just before the fall of the old Soviet Union.  His sons are both thriving young professionals in Poland now, and he does not regret his decision to return. 

I was reminded of my friendship with Andrezj and his family when I read in a recent historical journal about a little-known aspect of the Solidarity movement in Poland.  Officially a trade union, Solidarity formed around Lech Walesa, a shipyard electrician who led the movement and became modern Poland’s first freely elected President in 1990.  During the 1980s, the Communist government of Poland imposed martial law and rigidly suppressed and controlled speech.  All media outlets, including radio and TV, were under government supervision.  As the Solidarity movement grew, however, a group of radio and television engineers joined with other technical types (mainly university professors) to do (what we would term today) hacking of the official radio and TV networks.  Pretty soon after that, TV-watching Poles began to see images of things like the words of the national anthem superimposed on the video feed of dull official programs.  Now and then, the audio of the TV channel would give way to music of the national anthem, a joke, or some popular song that had nothing to do with the official program.   At other times, Poles listening to their radios began to receive signals from “pirate” radio stations broadcasting information that the government did not want them to hear.

The content of the messages sent by what came to be called “Radio Solidarity” was not as significant as the mere fact that somebody, somewhere, was messing with the government’s system, and could get away with it.  These activities were not without risk.  While routine protests such as marches were usually punished merely by fines, the Polish government pursued the Radio Solidarity hackers more vigorously and put many into prison.  But as the movement grew, more volunteers arose to replace those who were arrested among technicians and scientists who were technically proficient enough to tap into the broadcasting network, or build and hide radio transmitters in houses of sympathetic citizens.  At one point, an underground flyer called for people to wear radio resistors pinned to their lapels in memory of two brutal police actions against Polish workers in 1970 and 1981.  Evidently, large numbers of Poles did so, and once the authorities caught on to this form of “resistance,” you could go to jail for it.

Opinions differ as to how effective Radio Solidarity was in aiding the movement toward democracy.  One industrial worker happened to be high on a crane one evening in Gdansk as a Radio Solidarity broadcaster asked his listeners to turn out their lights for a minute if they were listening.  According to the witness, he saw half the city go dark.  A precise assessment at this point is impossible, but the emotional encouragement that such activities brought to people who might otherwise have thought they were struggling alone against the system could have been invaluable.

The story of Radio Solidarity brings to mind the more recent social-media-powered actions of those in the Middle East who have attempted to free themselves from oppressive regimes.  Unlike the largely successful Solidarity movement in Poland, which not only brought about regime change in that country but may have contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union itself, the record of recent opposition to governments in Middle Eastern regions is more mixed so far.  Perhaps it is fair to say that technical means of communication in a political movement is necessary these days, but not sufficient by itself to insure a smooth transition from oppression to freedom.  If citizens do not have a clear, united vision of what a democracy should be like and what goals they should strive for, all the communications facilities in the world are not going to make much difference.  Revolutions are always a last resort, and while some can turn out peacefully, the result is always unpredictable.

Ironically, the limited nature of network systems in the 1980s may actually have helped Radio Solidarity reach more people than hackers today can easily manage to do.  If the Polish national TV network back then resembled those of most other totalitarian countries, there was basically one channel and one program.  That meant if you hacked into the network feed, you had the entire country as an audience automatically.  Today, of course, with the multitudes of various communications media—TV, radio, the Internet, mobile apps, social media, texting, and so on and so forth—it is much harder to reach an audience that is not already primed to hunt for a particular website or participate in a particular meeting, and so it can be harder now to reach large numbers of people.  But this problem can be overcome, especially in times when young media-savvy people are eager to help out.

We can be grateful to the Radio Solidarity engineers and professors who did their part in overthrowing the oppressive Polish regime and catalyzing the downfall of the Soviet Union.  And we can hope their example can be learned by those today who are dealing with similar problems in their own countries.  It seems, though, that freedom of communication is not a magic bullet that keeps away the real bullets a hostile government can use against its citizens.  Syria is a current bad example of this.  Despite repeated internal and international calls for the Syrian government to relinquish its stranglehold, its rulers persist in shooting thousands of protesters.  I don’t know whether anyone in Syria reads this blog, but I would consider it an honor to be in trouble with the government of Syria, and hope that those fighting for true freedom in that country can use all the means at their disposal, including electronic ones, to find a good way out.

Sources:  The article “Dissident Visions through Technological Use:  Radio and Television Solidarity in Poland, 1982-1989” by Carmen Krol appeared in the Autumn 2011 issue of “Antenna,” a newsletter published by the Mercurians, a special-interest group of the Society for the History of Technology.

Higgs 1, Neutrinos 0

The world of high-energy physics breathed a collective sigh of relief last Wednesday when a team of researchers at CERN, the European physics lab, announced results from their Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that make it “99 percent certain” there is indeed a thing called the Higgs boson.  Further work is needed before the discovery makes it to the point that there’s only a one-in-a-million chance that it’s not true, which is allegedly the standard that physicists now maintain before a new particle is generally accepted.  But judging by the signs of exultation and emotion, such as the tears of Peter Higgs (the theorist who first predicted the particle in the 1960s), such acceptance is only a matter of time.

The mood at CERN contrasts with the emotions that a much less publicized announcement last February probably inspired.  Late last fall, some CERN researchers working with an Italian physics lab known (appropriately) as OPERA announced that they had clocked a subatomic particle called a neutrino (Italian for “little neutron”) as going just a hair faster than light.  I blogged on this last October 9 and remarked that if it turned out to be false, you wouldn’t see any headlines about it.  Well, I was wrong, but the headlines were a lot smaller than the ones about the discovery of the Higgs boson.

Turns out that the OPERA people had overlooked a bad connection in their fiber-cable system that messed up their timing by just enough to make it look like the neutrinos were going faster than light, which they probably weren’t.  It’s all rather fuzzy with overlapping error bars, but the problem was significant enough to account for their faster-than-light result, which they have now admitted may have been in error.  Several other similar experiments have not turned up any results indicating that neutrinos can exceed the universe’s speed limit either.

In these days of limited public resources (when were they ever unlimited?), what justification is there to spend many billions of dollars on things such as the Large Hadron Collider or the OPERA experiment?  Judging by the fact that the torch of leadership in high-energy physics has clearly now passed from the U. S. to Europe, the American public seems to have answered, “None.”  Some readers may remember the proposed Superconducting Supercollider planned for Texas, which was cancelled in mid-project in 1993 and never revived.  If it had been completed, it would have easily surpassed the LHC in energy capability, and so we might have been hearing about the Higgs boson discovery from Waxahachie rather than Geneva.

The fact is, no single nation can claim that its citizens were responsible for the discovery.  Thousands of Ph. D. physicists worked on the plans and experiments that made it possible, including hundreds from the U. S.  High-energy physics today is a thoroughly international enterprise, and to do anything significant experimentally means to become a member of a huge team that resembles a multinational corporation more than a small university-style laboratory.  This takes nothing away from the honors due to those who found the Higgs, but it does raise a question of responsibility.

CERN as an organization lent its name both to the Higgs-boson discovery and the announcement that neutrinos possibly traveled faster than light.  Some would say that, hey, this is the way science works, and further checking indeed revealed that the faster-than-light discovery was in error.  While I have no realistic doubt that the Higgs-boson discovery is legitimate, checking it may take anywhere from years to forever if you want to do it with another accelerator, because the LHC is the only show in town, that is, the world.  Of course there are many different experiments that can be done with the LHC to demonstrate the Higgs, so it’s not like we had only one instrument reading, for example.  But the point here is that CERN is becoming something of a monopoly in the high-energy-physics business.  And monopolies may try not to act like they’re monopolies, but it’s not always easy.

When scientists such as those at CERN are asked to justify their arcane projects, they generally reply that physics, like many other scientific pursuits, is ultimately a cultural activity, and has to be its own justification.  Some people paint beautiful paintings, others discover beautiful particles.  From the viewpoint of engineering, I have to agree, because it has been a long time since a discovery in the realm of high-energy physics has led to any major practical applications.  Probably the last time this happened was in the 1930s, when Lise Meitner and her colleagues discovered nuclear fission.  That led to the development of atomic weapons and nuclear energy, both of which had consequences that are still with us today.  Beyond that, however, I can’t think offhand of any consumer or industrial products that intrinsically rely on muons or neutrinos or quarks or any of the other members of the subatomic zoo discovered since then.

This doesn’t mean that practical applications will never come along.  But they appear to have slowed down, certainly, and so I have to agree that experimental high-energy physics is just like observational astronomy:  done for the beauty of the thing, and not for any practical uses of the knowledge that may result.

Still, a billion dollars is a lot of money, and I hope that CERN and organizations like it remember that they exist only by permission of a tolerant public.  Incidents like the mistaken announcement of faster-than-light neutrinos do nothing to enhance their reputation, and so I hope that further checking takes place the next time a surprising result like that shows up, and also that the physics worker bees pursue their goal of confirming the Higgs boson with one-in-a-million certainty.  That’s only several thousand dollars per chance, if you want to think of it that way.

Sources:  The announcement that errors were found in the faster-than-light OPERA experiment was carried by the online version of the journal Nature at http://www.nature.com/news/neutrinos-not-faster-than-light-1.10249.  Numerous news outlets reported on the Higgs-boson discovery, and I used the report from National Geographic magazine at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/07/120704-god-particle-higgs-boson-new-cern-science/. 

Now We Know: Stuxnet R US

Almost a year ago in this space, I wrote about a sophisticated new computer virus called Stuxnet which had apparently done considerable physical damage to almost a thousand uranium-enrichment centrifuges in Iran in 2010.  At the time, it wasn’t clear who designed Stuxnet, although guesses were that either Israel or the U. S. was responsible.

Well, on June 1 of this year, the New York Times published excerpts from an upcoming book that confirms those suspicions, and goes into a lot more details.  It turns out that Stuxnet was only one of several cyberattacks that originated with a project called “Olympic Games” that began during the presidency of George W. Bush, who encouraged his successor Obama to continue it.  Obama took Bush’s advice and persisted with the program even after the Stuxnet virus escaped “into the wild,” which is how the computer-security community learned about it a year ago.

There are two related ethical concerns that these latest revelations highlight.  One has to do with U. S. participation in cyberwarfare generally.  And the other has to do with the fact that someone in the current administration spilled so many beans about what we were doing.

Cyberattacks are following a well-trodden path down which earlier forms of militarily useful technology passed decades or even centuries ago:  telegraphy, radio, aviation, and nuclear weapons, to name a few.  The trend is from discovery to initial, usually rather amateurish, experimentation, and then to serious funding and adoption by all sides in a conflict.  With regard to cyberwarfare, we are now beyond the amateurish-experimentation phase and well into serious adoption by at least one side:  the U. S. and Israel, which turns out to have collaborated closely with the U. S. in the Stuxnet project for both technical and diplomatic reasons.  If history is any guide, we can now anticipate a cyberwarfare counterattack by one or more of our enemies sooner or later.

This is made especially likely because cyberattacks turn out to be pretty cost-efficient.  Software experts examining the Stuxnet virus at the time it was first found estimated that it was fairly cheap to develop, under a million dollars.  The latest revelations in the Times show that this may have been an underestimate, because the CIA went to the trouble of building a working model of part of Iran’s nuclear facility using the identical machines that were the target of the attack, in order to be sure it would work.  Still, it was cheap compared to a full-scale airstrike with cruise missiles, for example.

Cheapness cuts both ways.  The U. S. isn’t the only country with sharp computer whizzes willing to develop evil viruses to mess up critical infrastructure.  Stuxnet was highly specialized to do a specific kind of damage to only one facility, but virus-writers worldwide have highjacked its innards to do other malicious things since then.  It is not beyond the realm of possibility to imagine someone taking the basic Stuxnet format and designing a virus to, say, whack out an industrial controller commonly used to regulate the speed of steam turbines in power plants.  I’m not knowledgeable about the degree of sophistication of power-plant software or the tightness of their security measures, but I’m sure it varies from place to place, and while some on-the-ground collaboration was needed for the attack on Iran, that might not be necessary for some forms of virus attack.  The point here is that with its vast array of computer-dependent infrastructure, the U. S. is very vulnerable to just the kind of cyberattack we mounted against Iran.

Which brings up the second ethical concern:  did we have to go so public with all the details of what our responsibility was in Stuxnet?  Critical information about decryption technology used in World War II was kept in the dark for decades.  I would expect the kind of details we read in the Times to come to light some day, but less than two years after the attack?  Perhaps this is a deliberate ploy to warn counterattackers that yes, we can do this and you’d better watch out.  But because cyberattacks rely on lapsed vigilance and poor security measures (the Stuxnet actually got into the target network through a carelessly used flash drive someone carried into the secure facility), it seems like telling our enemies all the details of our attacks and responsibility for them, will just make them all the more cautious and less likely to fall for such things in the future.  In other words, if you’re going to fight a war with secret stuff, blowing the secret doesn’t seem like a good idea.

At the risk of sounding excessively political, one could speculate that the publicity about Stuxnet was another attempt to show the present administration in a “tough-guy” mode, consistent with recent revelations about how the President himself personally authorizes every drone attack on targets that have included a U. S. citizen in at least one instance.  These drone attacks have drawn criticism from the President’s own party, notably former President Jimmy Carter.  Like cyberattacks, drone strikes are, in the short term, a “no-risk” mode of warfare that carries no domestic downside in terms of U. S. casualties incurred during the attacks.  But an older code of conduct in the battlefield would view the kind of button-pushing fight we are presently engaged in as morally suspect, if not downright cowardly.

It was close to inevitable that cyberwarfare would take its place along more conventional means of fighting a military conflict.  But now that we have told the world we’re doing it, we should not cry foul if some fine day our own computer systems fall victim to a low-budget, focused attack that could do even more damage than ours did to the Iranian uranium facility.

 

Sources:  The New York Times report on the Olympic Games efforts appeared online on June 1, 2012 at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html.  President Carter’s criticism of drone strikes as being violations of human rights appeared in the same publication on June 24, 2012 at

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/25/opinion/americas-shameful-human-rights-record.html.  My blog “Stuxnet and the Future of Cyberwarfare” was posted July 24, 2011.

Everybody’s a Moviemaker Now

I rarely miss my self-imposed deadline of Monday morning for posting this blog, but this weekend I had an excuse.  I was at a two-day workshop Saturday and Sunday to learn Final Cut Pro, Apple’s medium-level video editing software.  It was pretty intense, and Sunday evening felt more like Friday evening, only I had to get up and go to work the next day.  So the blog got lost in the shuffle.  But the workshop gave me some food for thought about how things have changed over the decades with regard to making and distributing motion pictures.

First there was celluloid.  I was charmed to learn that at the Austin School of Film where I took the workshop, they still teach people how to shoot, develop, and cut (literally) black-and-white Super-8 movie film.  Until the late 1950s, film was the only way to store moving pictures.  Until that time, television was an instantaneous medium with no convenient way to store the images, unless you shot a movie (called a kinescope) from a TV screen.  The quality of kinescopes left a lot to be desired, and because film had to be developed, instant replays weren’t possible.

Then Ampex came out with the videotape recorder:  first the giant two-inch-reel professional version, followed a couple of decades later by the consumer-grade VHS format.  For the first time, the movie medium was cheap enough so that people could actually buy movies and watch them at home whenever they wanted to.  And though it was expensive, you could now own your own video-making equipment.  Once upon a time in the mid-1970s I was involved in an amateur video production using equipment borrowed from the media department at Caltech.  The camera was about the size of a loaf of bread and I had to lug the twenty-pound recorder around on a strap around my neck.  And when we got back to the dorm to view the product, something bad had happened to the audio and it wasn’t recoverable.  All black-and-white, by the way.

Fast-forward to Samsung’s latest cellphone, the Galaxy SIII, which is predicted to sell 10 million units next month.  Not only does it shoot HD video, it allows you to share photos with anybody nearby who has another SIII, and recognizes when you’re looking at it by eye-recognition software.  If you just hold two SIIIs close together, you can transfer a 1-gigabyte video file in only three minutes.  The technology to do all this even twenty years ago would have taken up most of a good-sized room, but it’s all squeezed into a box the size of a large postcard.

Like most technological developments, the fact that anybody with an SIII can now shoot video of a quality and length that only professional production companies could manage formerly, has both good and bad aspects to it.  I think one of the best things that video for the people has led to is the filming of nefarious activities of all kinds, from incidents of brutality to mass uprisings against dictatorial regimes.  Like any documentation, videos can be subject to a variety of interpretations and misused, but in general, it’s better to have a video of a situation in addition to eyewitness reports, because the video doesn’t forget or change its tune over time.

But there are downsides too.  “Sexting”—the incidence of teenage girls sending suggestive photos and videos of themselves—has become so technologically easy that the child-pornography laws are being rewritten so as to avoid sending millions of otherwise law-abiding thirteen-year-olds into lifelong sexual-predator watch programs.  It’s a shame that kids are foolish enough to do this sort of thing in the first place, but it’s clearly in a different category from the hard-core child pornographer, and the law is belatedly recognizing that fact.

Add to the mix YouTube and the lottery-like attraction it exerts on would-be viral filmmakers, and you get indefinite millions of cat videos and the equivalent of a British Museum on your computer to wander around in, wasting time.  Only some reasonably intelligent people have selected what goes into the British Museum, while anybody who can push a few buttons can upload their cute cat’s latest to YouTube.

I’ve got nothing against cats personally, but the ready availability of abundant, novel ways to waste time is just one more temptation that people have to deal with these days.  I have lost the reference to a saying I came across the other day, but it was to the effect that while watching cat videos for an hour doesn’t actively hurt anybody, it is nevertheless a social ill whose effects are widespread but not easily quantified or even identified.  For those who believe in the devil, it represents a success on his part if the person in question is a believer.  This situation was captured well by C. S. Lewis in 1941 in The Screwtape Letters, when he described the state of mind that even then, well before the Internet, was a temptation to avoid:  “. . . a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that [one] is only half aware of them. . . .”  That is an excellent description of the condition that watching random YouTube videos can lull one into.  And it wouldn’t be possible unless millions of people were easily able to shoot and post their videos online.

The same thing happened with photography when George Eastman invented the Kodak in 1888.  From an expensive, tedious activity of professionals, photography spread to the masses, leading to oceans of snapshots you can still find by the handful in antique stores.  Most snapshots result from friends and relatives shooting pictures of each other, and in that sense have no higher goals or ambitions.  And many videos posted online are similarly intended for no higher purpose than to be shared among a few friends, and that is a good thing, as far as it goes.

Why was I taking a video editing class in the first place, you ask?  In contradiction to the tell-all atmosphere so common on the Internet, I choose to withhold that information until such time that I have made something worth drawing my readers’ attention to.  In the meantime, you can just wonder.

Sources:  The Jakarta Globe carried an Associated Press story reporting the projected sales figures of the SIII at http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/tech/samsung-galaxy-s-iii-sales-to-hit-10-million-in-july/526831.  Samsung’s own promotional material describing features of their new phone can be found at http://www.samsung.com/us/article/galaxy-s-iii-designed-to-make-life-easier.  And the quotation from C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters is from Chapter XII, p. 56 of the 1961 Macmillan paperback edition.

Acxiom Has A File On You

If you are one of 190 million U. S. adults studied by an obscure company in Little Rock, Arkansas called Acxiom, they have the digital equivalent of what used to be known in spy circles as a dossier on you.  In the bad old days of the Soviet Union, secret police maintained files on millions of ordinary citizens, consisting of allegations (many by friends and neighbors) of suspicious or subversive activities.  Acxiom is a firm that collects and sells information about consumers to companies wanting to sell products to them.  The motivations couldn’t be different, but in a weird way, some of the outcomes are the same.

In a recent profile of Acxiom, a New York Times reporter reveals the depth and detail of information that Acxiom can provide.  In contrast to the totalitarian state, Acxiom uses only publicly available information, or at least information that consumers voluntarily provide in forms and online interactions.  But just like the totalitarian state, Acxiom operates out of the public eye.  I had never heard of the outfit before I read the report in the Times, and it is likely that few of my readers have either.   And while no one is likely to be hauled off to a prison camp because of information gathered by Acxiom, some strange things are likely to happen to you nonetheless.

Firms like Acxiom are responsible for the creepy phenomenon I have noted in this blog before.  After investigating a purchase online one day, I was doing something completely different the next day, and suddenly I found that the ads next to the webpage I was reading were full of products that I was researching online the day before.  The feeling this engenders is hard to describe.  It isn’t betrayal, exactly, or like someone was reading my mail (although in a sense they were), but more like the sense you might get if you were walking alone in a big city late at night, and started hearing footsteps behind you that kept pace with your walking.  Nothing bad has happened yet; it might be a coincidence; but you sense that somebody out there knows something about you and is acting on that knowledge.  And you don’t know who it is, or what they plan to do.

I guess it’s the anonymity of the thing that is the creepiest aspect.  There is no single person doing this sort of profiling and product placement: it is the outcome of a huge system of cooperation between outfits like Acxiom and large corporations trying to sell things.  But anonymous dealings are a common part of life today, so what is the big deal ethically about it?

Several critics that the Times reporter spoke to cited the fact that Acxiom sorts its files into categories that have discriminatory overtones.  This categorizing system, termed “PersonicX” (I would really like to speak with the person who thinks up these ugly words), classifies you into one of seventy bins of consumer types, but only if you are not one of those poor or cheapskate customers that insiders term “waste”:  folks who steadfastly refuse to buy the nice things that the customized software applications repeatedly offer to them.  (I may well be in such a category, which would be fine by me.)  And don’t even ask about Acxiom’s databases sorted according to racial types:  Caucasians, Hispanics, African-Americans, and Asians.   You can buy information on any of these categories of consumers, and target your pitches in a way that takes race into account.

After thinking about this a while, I confess that although I find the eerily personal ads annoying, I can find no principled moral objection to the business Acxiom is in.  The fictional character Sherlock Holmes used to amaze his clients by extrapolating all sorts of facts from the slimmest of physical clues: he’d note a bit of cigar ash here, a shiny spot on a glove there, and like magic he would tell the client his profession, his age, what school he went to, and which side of his face had the best light while he was shaving each morning.

It seems to me that Acxiom is simply doing the same sort of thing Holmes did, except on a large, computerized, and more efficient scale.  And like private detectives, Acxiom offers its services to companies indifferently, and takes no particular responsibility for what its customers do with the information they buy.  I hope that if an anti-Semite organization wanted some details on the names and addresses of wealthy Jews with children in private schools, for instance, Acxiom would smell a rat and refuse to cooperate.  But fortunately, such outfits are not well-heeled enough to afford the kinds of services Acxiom provides. .

I think we are experiencing a long-term transition in the definition of privacy, and Acxiom’s activities are just another step along the way.  It’s possible that the first printed city directory, probably arising in the 1700s or so, was attended with more than a little concern on the part of people who would prefer not to be found, but that was because they were doing things that profited by anonymity.  Anyone who takes economic action of any kind (which means everyone except the very young, the very old, and the institutionalized) has to deal with the fact that information about you is collected by countless organizations, public and private, and resurfaces and recycles through databases indefinitely.  As long as the people who have the data are only trying to make a legitimate buck, I see no great harm in their work, and maybe some good if firms that would otherwise turn to blanket spam email target their ads instead on the much smaller number of people who are actually interested in buying what they have to sell.

Just as the only guaranteed way to avoid getting anything stolen is not to own anything, the only way to avoid getting your information collated and refined and sold by outfits such as Acxiom, is not to buy anything—ever.  And that’s pretty hard.  So we might as well get used to the idea, and hope that the motives of companies that use Acxiom’s data remain as relatively benign as they appear to be now.

Sources:  The New York Times article on Acxiom appeared online on June 16, 2012 at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/technology/acxiom-the-quiet-giant-of-consumer-database-marketing.html.

Ethics and the Wisdom of Proverbs

During the time I taught an engineering ethics module, I tried to help students realize that they didn’t have to come up with a basis for ethical decisions all on their own.  Here in central Texas, most students have at least some familial connection with one of the religions of the Book:  Christianity, Islam, or Judaism.  And while religious observance is not one of the most prominent aspects of undergraduate life, I encouraged students who had any sort of religious faith to explore what that faith said about right and wrong conduct.  One of the most accessible places to explore is the Book of Proverbs found in the Hebrew Bible, which of course is part of the Christian Old Testament.

Most of Proverbs is just that:  short proverbs or aphorisms that say things about a wide range of human experience, from the importance of honest weights and measures to the dangers of adultery, and everything in between.  A good many of these aphorisms draw a contrast between characteristics of a good person (usually termed “wise” or “righteous”) and those of a bad person (usually termed “a fool” or “wicked”).  The Hebrew word translated “fool” means more than just one who is silly or what we would nowadays call foolish.  It carries a connotation of moral deficiency, and combines the notion of someone who does wrong with the idea that wrongdoing usually brings its own reward with it.

This notion is captured well by Prov. 18:7 (chapter 18, verse 7), which reads “A fool’s mouth is his ruin, and his lips are a snare to himself.”  If you have ever said something that got you into trouble, you have experienced this proverb in action, and at the time you were acting foolishly, in the sense of Proverbs.  The image in this proverb, which comes up repeatedly elsewhere in the book, is of a man who lays a trap and then falls into it himself.

Rather like a pointillist painting that seems to be just a collection of random dots up close but turns into a detailed image when viewed from a distance, the proverbs in Proverbs each focus on one aspect of foolishness and wisdom.  But when taken as a whole, a more complex picture emerges.

If you seek algorithmic rules like “When situation A occurs, always do X” you won’t find many in Proverbs, other than the oft-repeated advice to stay away from loose women.  The author (or authors—opinions differ as to how much of the book should be attributed to its traditional author, King Solomon) rarely engages in direct commands.  Rather, he poetically describes the ways that wisdom differs from foolishness, and lets the reader look for himself or herself in the pages of description.

Despite this elliptical way of proceeding, we can garner some definite characteristics of both the foolish and the wise from Proverbs.  The wise or righteous person “heed[s] commandments” (10:8), “lay[s] up knowledge” (10:14), has a “diligent hand” that “makes rich” (10:4), and “has regard for the life of his beast” (12:10).  Whereas the fool or wicked person will “come to ruin” (10:8) and “the babbling of a fool brings ruin near” (10:14).  The fool has a “slack hand” that “causes poverty” (10:4), and even “the mercy of the wicked is cruel” (12:10).

Besides these bipolar contrasts, there are sayings or truisms that earthily, and even humorously, show how human nature apparently hasn’t changed in the two or three millennia since the book was written.  Take this little gem, which encapsulates the whole history of a transaction and its aftermath in two lines:  “ ‘It is bad, it is bad,’ says the buyer; but when he goes away, then he boasts” (20:14).  Or “If a ruler listens to falsehood, all his officials will be wicked” (29:12).  And anyone who thinks there’s no humor in the Bible should read Prov. 23:29-35.  Warning against the excesses of alcohol, it describes in extravagant metaphors what it feels like to go on a binge, and winds up with a quotation from the now-sober inebriate:  “ ‘They struck me,’ you will say, ‘but I was not hurt; they beat me, but I did not feel it.  When shall I awake?  I will seek another drink.”

The way Proverbs approaches ethics is very different from the way it is taught in most professional contexts today.  It is more like having a chat with a trusted advisor who can tell you war stories about his experiences and life lessons he learned from them.  In today’s mass-produced educational systems, the chance to sit down and talk with mentors this way is rare, and even once you are in the workplace you may not have such an opportunity that often.  So if you haven’t done so before, look up Proverbs on the web and take a few minutes to see if you can find yourself, or people you know, in its pages.  And here’s hoping you’ll recognize yourself in the pictures of the wise and righteous, and not those of the foolish or wicked.

Sources:  I referred to the Wikipedia article on “Book of Proverbs.”  The quotations from the book are all from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. 

AT&T Considers Data-Only Billing

What if you had to buy gasoline for your car in the same the way you have to buy cell-phone service nowadays?

First, you’d have to pick a gas company.  You’d go in, fill out a form or answer a bunch of questions, and then you’d have to sign an agreement to stick with that gas company for a year, say, or else pay a $200 broken-contract fee.  Once you agreed to that condition, you’d have to pick your gas plan.  Do you want gas just locally, or for long driving trips?  Gas for a sports car, a pickup, a minivan, or a lawn mower?  Want extra quarts of oil every 2,000 miles?  You have to make all these choices in advance, and then you’ll get billed a fixed fee, more or less, every month, at least as long as you don’t use more than your maximum number of gallons—plus eight or ten dollars’ worth of taxes, air-pollution recovery charges, and other government nitnoise that nobody but the lawyers can figure out.  If you go beyond your plan’s maximum amount of gas, though, you’ll end up paying big, maybe six bucks a gallon, for every gallon you go over.  And by the way, you have to buy your car from the gas company too—it won’t run on gas from any other company.

Sound pretty silly?  Yet if you substitute “phone company” for “gas company” it’s a fairly accurate description of how cell phone and related wireless-network services are sold today.

In the interests of full disclosure, I am no longer a fan of AT&T.  My childhood regard for that firm bordered on adulation, bolstered by their support of the legendary Bell Laboratories and reinforced by a positive experience in high school with an Explorer Scout group run by a bunch of telephone engineers.  I stuck with AT&T through the Ma Bell breakup in the 1970s, but parted ways with the firm after going on an extended trip in the summer of 2000 and committing the unforgivable sin of using my cell phone to call home a lot.  Because of this sin, I paid through the nose, several hundred dollars at least, and switched to Sprint as fast as I could after I got home.

Now that AT&T has more or less reassembled itself out of the sundry pieces that the courts chopped it into, its clout in the market makes it worthwhile to pay attention when its CEO, Randall Stephenson, speculates about future pricing structures.  On June 1, Stephenson said that “in the next 24 months” we may see phone companies selling phone, data, text, and other services on a “data-only” basis.  While he wasn’t too specific about the technical details, this probably means something like charges based on the number of bits transferred, rather than on other arbitrary things like number of text messages sent or number of minutes talked.

The arcane and ridiculous way that companies currently charge for phone and wireless services came about through a combination of historical circumstances, marketing ploys, and government regulation.  Back when there was nothing but POTS (plain old telephone service, on landlines), the big expense to the phone companies was their long-distance networks, once they had installed local plant and equipment.  So the custom of a flat rate for local calls plus per-connection fees for long distance arose, and at the time it made sense.

Then came multiple revolutions in telecommunications technology:  fiber-optic cables and digital transmission (which vastly lowered the unit cost of long-distance calls) and wireless, which increased the volume of data sent and added new varieties such as text and images to the mix.

Technically speaking, it is more challenging to carry the data representing a two-way phone conversation than it is a one-way text message.  The allowable network delay can’t be more than a fraction of a second, and there are difficulties with sidetone (hearing your own voice), echoes, and other things that increase the cost compared to simply sending some bits from one point to another.  Yet my current cell phone plan lets me talk as much as I like locally, but charges me 20 cents for every text message I send, even if it’s simply “OK.”  If you send “OK” via ASCII, a seven-bit-per-character code, that’s a total of 14 bits, or more than a penny a bit.  If I paid that much for a typical phone call, it would run into thousands of dollars.

A sensible billing system from a technical point of view would charge nearly nothing for actions that use nearly no bits, namely, things like texting and email.  Two-way voice would come next, then still pictures, then movies.  The network companies have to structure their pricing so that customers use enough bandwidth to keep them in business, but not so much that their network bottlenecks (e. g. cell-phone tower equipment) gets clogged and spoils the party for everybody.

As things stand, I suspect it’s kind of like a cartel.  Everybody is getting away with the inverted structure of charging more for texts (which use few bits) than for phone calls (which use more and are inconvenient network-wise).  But as soon as some upstart outfit gets out there with a data-only billing plan, the whole house of cards collapses and the consumer wins, in my view.  My guess is that the AT&T head’s announcement is a way of telling the market that they are prepared for the deluge if it comes, though how they are going to deal with it is not yet clear.

All the same, I look forward to the day when cell-phone pricing is a little more rational.  I don’t think it will ever be as simple as filling your gas tank, but the way things stand now, it’s like medical-insurance billing and tax forms:  it takes an expert to catch another expert who’s cheating, and the average citizen doesn’t stand a chance against a company that decides to bend the rules, or to create Byzantine price structures that are legal but so complex nobody can really know if they are getting a good deal or not.  Let’s hope Mr. Stephenson’s prophecy comes true, and maybe I’ll even consider going back to AT&T.

Sources:  The Austin American-Statesman print edition carried an AP article by Peter Svensson with the headline “Data-only plans may be near, exec says” on Saturday June 2, 2012. 

SpaceX Scores a First

The history of the U. S. A. in space changed in a fundamental way last Friday when the commercial firm SpaceX delivered its first payload of cargo to the International Space Station.  SpaceX's capsule Dragon successfully docked with the station and delivered much-needed supplies and equipment, a task formerly performed by the now-defunct Space Shuttle.  This culminates plans that go back officially to at least 2006, when NASA signed a Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Agreement with the firm.  CEO and primary financial backer Elon Musk said the achievement was "just awesome."

NASA has come in for a lot of criticism in these pages, but signing the agreement with SpaceX was a smart thing to do, especially now that events have vindicated the decision.  Of course, the larger hurdle of manned space flight remains in the future for SpaceX, and that job is an order of magnitude harder than hauling stuff, which is both disposable without moral qualms (other than the loss of money and time) and a whole lot easier to take care of in flight.  Humans in orbit require many times their weight of life-support and safety systems, which is one reason why the International Space Station is so much bigger than the Dragon capsule.  But let's give SpaceX its due and congratulate it on actually making money with a delivery to a manned space outpost.

Not that the firm is likely to be profitable yet in an overall sense.  Musk, a 40-year-old native of South Africa and founder of what became PayPal, is wealthy enough to afford to lose money for a while.  And it remains to be seen whether SpaceX will ever lead to a corporate space sector that profits from anything other than a few large contracts from governments.  In this sense, SpaceX is not that much different from the aerospace contractors that have been involved in NASA operations from the very beginning.

But Musk and SpaceX are now in the driver's seat, not NASA.  The Dragon was designed as well as built by SpaceX, and NASA is simply playing the role of a guy who wants some stuff moved, only instead of hiring a moving company to truck it across town, SpaceX made a delivery in orbit.

The hope is that firms like SpaceX will focus their organization and efforts on clear goals such as what Dragon just did, rather than running in all directions at once as we have so often seen NASA do in recent years.  Goal-directed behavior is not a guarantee of ethical behavior, or even success.  After all, the Nazis were very goal-directed, but their goals were evil ones.  But having a clear and measurable goal allows managers to answer the question "Do we need to do this?" easily and simply, and makes for good operational efficiency, a characteristic that NASA has been somewhat deficient in for the last few years.

Where does SpaceX go from here?  As I mentioned, there are plans for manned space flight.  Rocketry is a notoriously dicey field of engineering because full-up tests of entire systems are so hideously expensive.  If you build a radio, you can set it on your workbench and turn it on, and all it costs for the test is a few cents of electricity.  But to test a single-use rocket in a realistic way, you have to fire the thing and watch it go wherever it was designed to go—once.  If it works, you have to make sure you build the next one exactly precisely like the first, or else you can't be sure it will work as well as the one you tested.  This means that rocket design is not a business for the faint-hearted or under-funded soul.

Elon Musk is neither of these, and so we can look forward to SpaceX's next trick.  Every so often, I come across a student who has caught the space bug:  he or she wants to design rockets or even try out to be an astronaut.  Until recently, I listened to such people with decidedly mixed emotions, because the only business in town, practically speaking, was either NASA or a contractor tied hand and foot to NASA.  And the way NASA has been operating for the last decade or two, I was reluctant even to encourage such people.

But now that SpaceX is a viable organization and has proved itself in a big way, I would have no hesitation in recommending a career in commercial space exploration and related enterprises.  It's interesting that when NASA scored its greatest triumph, the July 1969 moon landing, Musk wasn't even born yet.  So clearly the generational torch is being passed, and that is a good thing.  The NASA way of doing things was good when NASA was fairly young, but Musk's SpaceX is a new start.  And Musk seems to be the kind of entrepreneur who benignly imposes his personality on his organization.  Such people can be hard to work for up close (witness the famed harsh perfectionism of the late Steve Jobs of Apple), but if the CEO's overall intentions are right, the organization can achieve a coherence and direction that makes it an attractive place to work.

Besides space, Musk has other interests, all of which he says he has chosen as ways of bettering humanity, which is what engineering should be all about.  His Tesla Motors has the eventual goal of making electric cars for the masses, although so far its only product is an expensive roadster.  And he has operated a charitable foundation for some years on the side.

It will be interesting to see whether Musk can develop to the extent of handing off SpaceX to other good managers as time goes on, rather than clinging to it after his usefulness to it has peaked.  He is presently chief technical officer as well as CEO, and that dual role doesn't seem likely to be sustainable for any length of time.  Let's hope that other entrepreneurs get into the space business to provide some healthy competition for SpaceX, and then we can say that we have truly made the transition from government-owned and operated space exploration to a full-up commercial model—that works.

Sources:  Besides the current news coverage of SpaceX's achievement reported by Associated Press, I consulted a news release by SpaceX at http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=20120525 and the Wikipedia article on Elon Musk.

"Alas, Babylon" Revisited

A family is torn apart by war.  The wife, son, and daughter take refuge with a brother-in-law in rural Florida.  The twelve-year-old daughter happens to be looking out a window when a thermonuclear bomb goes off only a few miles away.  As the flash fades, the daughter finds that she is literally blinded, and cries out for her mother.

Grim stuff.  Just as the image of the exploding hydrogen bomb was etched on the daughter’s retinas, the image of the flash that blinded her is etched on my memory. On April 3, 1960, I was watching the TV show Playhouse 90’s retelling of Pat Frank’s apocalyptic science-fiction novel Alas, Babylon.  Rather than just showing a white screen for a few seconds, the producers of this black-and-white drama represented the nuclear flash by switching the entire scene to look like a photographic negative in which black looked white and white looked black.  At the tender age of six, I had never seen such a creepy thing before, and it terrified me.  I had nightmares about atomic attacks off and on for years afterwards.

Alas, Babylon was the most well-known early literary version of a genre with which we have since become perhaps too familiar:  the post-nuclear-holocaust survival story.  Published in 1959 and still in print today, it follows the fates of two brothers, Randolph and Mark Bragg, as full-scale nuclear war comes to the U. S. when the Soviet Union retaliates for an accidental bombing of a Syrian seaport.  Mark, an Air Force colonel, receives early warning that war is coming and sends his wife and children from where he is stationed at a nuclear-missile site in Omaha, Nebraska, to stay with brother Randolph in Fort Repose, a fictional small town in central Florida.  Once hostilities begin, Mark, along with several dozen million other Americans in most large U. S. cities, is vaporized, and Randolph gradually assumes leadership of a small self-sustaining community that forms around an artesian well on his property.  There is the requisite love story, a violent battle with roving highwaymen, and after a year of total isolation from the outside world, the tale ends with a helicopter visit from what is left of the U. S. government.

Pat Frank was a military publicist before he moved to Florida and began writing novels. Alas, Babylon is his most well-known work, and probably one of the most realistic novelistic treatments of how things might actually go after a total nuclear war.  But even in 1959, it embodied some wishful thinking.  Given its almost flat topography, Florida probably has few if any self-pumping artesian wells.  In a real nuclear-war disaster, water would be even scarcer than the novel implies.  If I were to try to rewrite the book today, I would set it on a ranch in far West Texas, which is one of the least likely locations for an enemy with any prudence to toss a nuclear weapon.  And I would use windmill-driven water wells and perhaps a wind generator in the plot to give our survivors some chance at staying in the twentieth century.  It would be no stretch at all to assume they would have plenty of guns and ammunition, because these things are nearly universal in that part of the country.

While it is true that nobody much worries about nuclear war these days, the simple mechanical facts that both we and Russia have enough weapons to do tremendous damage to each other have remained unchanged since 1959, though lots of other things have changed since then.  And you could make the case that today, with Iran striving to make nuclear weapons and Israel moving its itchy finger toward its nuclear trigger in response, that the world (if not the U. S. and Russia) may be approaching a nuclear crisis as serious as the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, in which the USSR tried to put nuclear weapons in Cuba and the U. S. blockaded their efforts.

Because nuclear war has fallen off the bottom of the lists of what most people worry about, our preparedness for such a disaster, which was never very good even at the height of the Cold War, is abysmal today.  The only way I can think of in which we are perhaps better off than Pat Frank’s fictional survivors of 1959 is in communications, and this advantage may be largely illusory.  One reason the Internet was designed with distributed resources that are robust against the failure of several nodes is that the military provided the original funding and wanted a system that could survive a nuclear war.  It is by no means clear that this robustness has been preserved to the present day, and I don’t know how many major cities you would have to vaporize before the U. S. Internet failed.  But it might not be that many.  Once the Internet and telecomm systems fail, all you have left is satellites (if the ground stations haven’t been vaporized) or ham radio.

In every other way, I think we are less prepared than in 1959—more vulnerable in terms of power networks, emergency food and water supplies, and an intangible but vital characteristic I would call community spirit:  a recognition that a lot of individual rights and freedoms would have to go out the window for even a small community to survive.  I’m sure there would be exceptions, but I’m afraid lots of people in this country would face such a national emergency with mindless, selfish panic that would both harm themselves and others, and reduce their chances of survival to zero.

I am not an off-the-grid survivalist living as though nuclear war was coming tomorrow.  But I do think it is wise every now and then to at least give a thought to what we might be called upon to do if the worst happened, and even one terrorist nuclear weapon detonated on U. S. soil.  All the same, let’s hope we never find out for real how we would react in such an emergency.

Sources:  Pat Frank’s novel Alas, Babylon was published in 1959 by J. B. Lippincott, and can be found today in paperback editions.  I consulted Wikipedia articles on Pat Frank and Playhouse 90 for this blog.