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.

To Cloud or Not To Cloud?

The other day I was working in my lab with a new student, and we ended up with a lot of image data to transfer from his laptop to mine.  Because I personally date back to the days when computer data was transferred by means of a stack of paper IBM-type punch cards, my first thought whenever I want to move or store lots of data is to resort to some physical medium:  a hard drive or flash (USB) drive, typically.  But my student proposed using a service called Dropbox.  To use it once it was installed, all he had to do was to put the data in a file on his computer.  The software sent it over the Internet to some data center somewhere, and then sent the stuff to be downloaded to my computer where I could access it in a similar file.  And it was free, at least for the first two gigabytes of data.

Dropbox is an example of “cloud computing”:  the dispersal of computing resources onto the Internet, instead of localizing your computer power in a physical box or boxes at your site.  Radioastronomers came up with one of the earliest cloud-computing applications I’m aware of, when they wrote an application to process raw data produced by SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence).  If you wanted your computer to help in the SETI search in its spare time, you just downloaded their app and could take comfort in the knowledge that you were one of hundreds of people all over the country helping SETI look for extraterrestrials.

Nowadays, of course, cloud computing is a big deal business-wise, as companies recognize that outsourcing a lot of their IT needs makes more sense than trying to maintain their own physical system with all the hassles that involves.  But I wasn’t aware of the ethical implications of cloud computing until I came across an article by Dunstan A. Hope and  Ryan Schuchard on greenbiz.com, an Internet publication for businesses interested in being more environmentally conscious.

It turns out that the “cloud” is, of course, no airy nothing floating around in the ether, but consists of servers, processors, power supplies, cooling systems, and (a few) maintenance personnel concentrated in “data centers” whose locations are not always public knowledge.  It’s understandable for security reasons that companies who run these centers aren’t just posting their addresses everywhere, but their geographic anonymity makes it easy to assume that the cloud really is a cloud, and has no needs for space, electricity, water, or other resources.  It’s a little like things were back before we started being environmentally conscious in general:  when you threw something away in those innocent times, you didn’t give a second thought to where “away” was.  But now we know better, or at least we should.

Large data centers run by outfits such as Google use so much power that they are located near sources of abundant cheap energy.  One estimate by the Environmental Protection Agency says as much as 1.5% of the U. S. electric power output is used by data centers.  This can be hydroelectric energy, such as The Dalles, Oregon’s Columbia River power, or coal-fired power plants in the Midwest.  It’s an open question, as far as I know, whether it’s more energy-efficient for 100 businesses to use the cloud-computing services of one data-center operation, or for them all to have their own computers in their own locations.  I suspect if the data center is run with an eye toward energy efficiency, it may be better energy-wise to use the cloud.  A new trend in data centers is to build them in arctic areas so that you can use natural cooling (basically running with the windows open, so to speak) even in the summer, rather than pay for expensive refrigeration machinery to cool the systems in hot weather.  But there are not that many arctic areas with abundant cheap energy, so there are problems with this idea too.

Besides the notion of energy conservation, there is the question of security.  I confess to an atavistic feeling that the best measure of security for my data is if I can hold its physical embodiment in my hands:  a flash drive, a hard drive, or a laptop where the data is physically stored.  But realistically, a better way to protect against data loss is to hand it to professionals who put it on multiply-backed-up remote servers such as the Dropbox people or many other Internet services provide.  I suppose some malevolent malware-writer could cause a wipeout of the data stored in an entire cloud-computing service’s files, but it would be hard, and not nearly as likely as a hard-drive crash on one individual’s computer.  I always keep backups, but backups can fail too, and there’s the bother of keeping track of the media, updating it as it goes to legacy status, and so on.  So cloud computing makes sense from a data-security standpoint.

Besides physical security, there is the question of somebody stealing data or otherwise gaining unauthorized access to it.  The banks have dealt with this type of problem since the first bank began using the first computer, and while Americans are notoriously sensitive about breaches of their personal financial data, nobody much seems bothered by the fact that your personal financial information is stored in scattered places around the country.  Of course, not all cloud-computing firms have security as good as bank data systems, but at least the precedent is there.  So I’m not so concerned about this aspect of cloud computing.

Whatever the ethics of the trend, it looks like cloud computing will be in our future more as time goes on.  If you use a cloud-computing service, you can make an effort to find out what their Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating is.  This is the ratio of the total power used by the facility divided by the power actually needed by the computing equipment.  A lower number (lower than 2) is better.  And if they provide such information, find out where their data servers are, and what kind of power they use.  Even if it’s billed as a free service, somebody’s paying for electricity somewhere, and you might as well be responsible enough to find out about it.

Sources:  The article “Cloud computing raises new ethics, sustainability issues” appeared at http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/04/11/ethics-cloud-computing?page=0%2C0 and was written by Dunstan Allison Hope and Ryan Schuchard.  I referred to the articles on data centers and The Dalles on Wikipedia.  And I use Google’s cloud-computing service blogspot.com to post this blog, although I always keep a copy on my laptop! 

Engineering, Freedom, and the 28th Amendment

In a talk I gave in Doha, Qatar last fall at an engineering ethics conference, I listed some cultural characteristics that seemed to be necessary for engineering to flourish.  One of the characteristics I listed was “freedom for organizations” to pursue projects in the marketplace of ideas and goods.  Of course, most engineering is done by commercial organizations called corporations, which are legally treated as persons in many ways.  In the U. S., this way of treating corporations goes back at least to the 19th century, and farther if you look into English common law.  But broadly speaking, any group of people doing something as a group can be regarded in the light of a corporation, and so even nonprofit outfits such as Wikipedia, local churches, and (I suppose) even high-school chess clubs could conceivably be regarded as corporations.

What has the nature of corporations got to do with engineering?  A threat to the existence of corporations is, indirectly, a threat to the flourishing of engineering.  And a threat to the freedom, and conceivably the very existence, of corporations has arisen from one Rep. James McGovern of Massachusetts, who used his position in the U. S. House of Representatives last November to introduce a proposed 28th amendment to the Constitution.  Now, amendments to the Constitution are among the most difficult legislative objects to enact, because they require not only the approval of two-thirds of both the House and the Senate, but also three-fourths of the state legislatures.  So in practical terms, the proposed amendment is very likely to fall by the wayside before it could get within hailing distance of actually becoming law.  But even a small danger of a terrible tragedy is worth paying attention to, as students of engineering disasters know.

Why would passage of this amendment be so bad?  Because it revokes all the rights and freedoms reserved in the Constitution for the people, from anything you can conceivably call a “corporation.”  Individual “natural” persons would still have freedom of speech, the press, religion, and so on.  But two or more of them together, as long as such a grouping could be construed as a corporation, would be at the mercy of Congress, which could do anything it liked in terms of regulation:  prohibit any action, tax the entity to death, or even prohibit its very existence.

The alleged rationale for this amendment is the 2010 U. S. Supreme Court decision (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission) that upheld the right of corporations to make political expenditures.  In the view of some, this decision gave too much power to deep-pocketed corporations, which can now buy political ads with impunity.  While there are deep and serious problems with the way political campaigns are funded in the U. S., the cure proposed by Rep. McGovern would be a great deal worse than the disease.

Just to give a specific example, consider this blog you are reading.  It is appearing through the courtesy of one of the largest corporations in the U. S.:  Google.  While I as an individual am venting my opinion on what Rep. McGovern is doing, it is the corporation known as Google which is actually putting my words out there for other people to read.  If the proposed 28th amendment became law and Congress took a dislike to anything—anything at all—that anybody said in any blog that Google puts online, there would be no obstacle whatsoever to stop Congress from passing a law that gave Rep. McGovern’s office censorship rights over everything Google does.  While there is a clause in the amendment that says nothing shall be construed to limit the “people’s” rights, the word “people” is explicitly defined in the previous clause to exclude corporations.  Because posting all those blogs is a corporate act—you can’t find the one individual at Google solely responsible for operating blogspot.com—it is not protected by that construal clause, and out it goes if Congress wills.

This matter came to my attention in a column written by George Will, and he has plenty of other examples of what havoc could result from the proposed amendment.  This proposal is only the latest in a series of unwise and intemperate actions that seem to be getting more frequent in Washington.

Freedom, though vitally important in a democracy, is not an absolute foundational right.  The enjoyment of freedom, for engineers as for everyone else, comes with the obligation to use freedom responsibly.  For engineers, this means thinking about the consequences of actions and projects that affect other people.  For legislators such as Rep. McGovern, it means considering the larger consequences of one’s proposed legislation, and how it could cause problems much worse than the original one it was designed to solve.  We can thank the wise and prudent framers of the original Constitution that they made the amendment process as difficult and cumbersome as it is.  It is hard enough to block ultimately frivolous and inimical proposals such as Rep. McGovern’s, but straightforward enough to allow enactment of changes for which there is sufficient national consensus.  But the fact that even one duly elected member of Congress could be so shortsighted and imprudent as to propose the de-personalizing of all corporations is a bad sign that wisdom and prudence are getting in short supply.

Sources:  George Will’s syndicated column on May 6, 2012 was entitled “Taking a Scythe to the Bill of Rights,” and can be found at many media outlets, for example http://thedailyworld.com/sections/opinion/columnist/george-will-—-taking-scythe-bill-rights.html.  Rep. McGovern’s own explanation of his reasoning can be found at the website http://freespeechforpeople.org/McGovern, which also has a link to the text of the proposed amendment.

Asteroid Mines: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

If you happened to be in the Seattle Museum of Flight last Tuesday, Apr. 24, you might have been able to squeeze into a news conference called by an outfit terming itself Planetary Resources, Inc.  Planetary Resources’ main distinction so far is that it has a lot of resources of the monetary kind.  Backers reportedly include Google CEO Larry Page, who is in possession of some $16 billion personally.  What Planetary Resources’s co-founder Peter Diamandis wants to do is to mine asteroids within a decade, that is, by 2022 or so.  Already they are planning to launch small orbital telescopes, modern versions of the old mining engineer’s surveying transits, that they will use to search for likely prospects for a visit.  But as in earth-bound mining, you are never completely sure what you have got until you go there and start digging.

The idea of mining extraterrestrial objects is not new.  One writer at www.livescience.com traced the idea back to an 1898 short story endorsed by none other than Thomas Edison, whose single most costly failed project involved a Canadian iron-mine venture in 1902.  In 1944, Isaac Asimov used an asteroid mine of the future as a setting for one of his speculative pieces about whether robots could become sophisticated enough to foment rebellion.  But Diamandis and company are not fiction:  they have serious money and serious plans, and while I’m sure science fiction enthusiasms are in their backgrounds, their main motivation is to make more of what they have a lot of already, namely, money.  But they want to make it in a cool way.

There are actually two aspects to their plans. One is to use asteroids as a resource for the thing that currently makes space flight so expensive in the first place, namely, the fuel.  When you have to pack everything you need on a trip and can’t count on finding any gas stations, it severely limits your options as to what else you can take along.  But several researchers have shown that if it was possible to establish fueling stations in space, it would make the logistics and economics of space travel much friendlier than they are now.  So once you’re in space, never mind gold or platinum or anything like that:  fuel is the most precious resource.  And the idea of erecting a solar-powered hydrogen plant on an asteroid and making hydrogen from water (ideally) or rocks (in a pinch) would satisfy that need.  From a technical engineering standpoint, this aspect of the Planetary Resources plans makes a lot of sense.

What about the rest of it, namely, mining asteroids for profit by extracting rare materials such as platinum and so on?  I would urge Diamandis, Page and company to do a little reading in the history of 16th-century Spain.  It was Spain more than any other country which did on a small scale what Planetary Resources is trying to do on a large scale:  namely, exploited newly discovered mineral wealth on a near-monopoly basis for quite a while, from 1492 right up to the 1800s.  The worst aspect of Spanish colonization of the Americas was their barbarous treatment of the native Americans, who were forced into slavery and furnished most of the labor involved in operating the gold mines that gave rise to the wealth that produced Spain’s Golden Age of culture.  Fortunately, no asteroid appears to have even non-sentient life on it, so that particular problem will not arise.

Of course, if you import too much of a given scarce resource, its price can fall to the point where it’s not worth fooling with anymore.  But I am sure that the Planetary Resources people will look to the example of the DeBeers diamond monopoly as to how to control their prospective monopoly to extract the most value from it.  They are too smart to let greed get the best of them and flood the platinum market with tons of the stuff all at once.  But smart people have been outsmarted by markets before.

All the same, even if the technical hurdles are overcome, I anticipate that some legal and governmental issues may arise.  Somebody, somewhere, is going to want to tax all of this new economic activity.  Unless the U. S. manages to impose jurisdiction on an asteroid, there will be no way that the U. S. government can claim that the operation is domestic and subject to corporate tax.  This may be another attraction for the company:  asteroid mining is the ultimate offshore site.  Nobody has given a lot of thought to how all this will be dealt with from a legal and governmental angle.  And the current tight coupling between corporations and the U. S. government probably ensures that whatever regulations are imposed will generally be favorable to the corporations.

There are huge risks involved in this enterprise, even though the entire operation is supposed to use non-manned flight only.  If anybody can afford it, though, it is the backers of Planetary Resources, who together have multiple billions of dollars to spend.  And it may take every cent before they even get back a few grams of valuable stuff.  Mining has always been a business for gamblers, and space mining is no exception.  At the worst, even if it fails, it will furnish a lot of employment for heretofore unemployed aerospace engineers who can get to work on something that might actually make money.  And if it all works out, it could be the first step in the transformation of space travel from an exotic, rare, super-costly thing engaged in only by governments to something closer to what international flying is like today:  still sophisticated and relatively costly, but open to anyone with the money to pay for it.  And as I say about so many things I consider in this blog, time will tell.

Sources:  The Apr. 24 news conference was covered by many media outlets.  I referred to an article in USA Today at http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/story/2012-04-24/mining-asteroids/54507782/1.  A good overview of space mining in science fiction appeared at http://www.livescience.com/19862-asteroid-mining-fiction-present.html.  My attempts to access the Planetary Resources Inc. website at www.planetaryresources.com were unsuccessful.  I hope their rockets work better than their website. 

Ethanol in Gasoline: Unintended Consequences

Since 2007, virtually all gasoline sold in the U. S. has contained 10% ethanol, which is about as much as you can put in most cars without having to do a major redesign of the fuel system.  The reason is a federal law called the Energy Independence and Security Act (ERISA), which until last year also subsidized ethanol production to the tune of 45 cents a gallon and imposed a steep tariff on imported ethanol.  Why was this done?  As is often the case with politically-influenced actions, there were advertised reasons and not-so-advertised reasons.  And now that five years have passed, an economist at Texas A&M University has taken a good hard look at the effects of the ERISA mandate, and it is a lesson in unintended consequences.

The advertised reasons for the law were clear.  As the U. S. imports more oil, we become more dependent on the unstable geopolitical situations that prevail where much of imported oil is produced, our trade imbalance grows, and we make a bad situation worse, generally speaking.  The pipe dream of many environmentalists is to convert the entire energy economy to renewable sources:  wind, solar, and biofuels.  At the time, ERISA was passed, ethanol was the only biofuel that had any reasonable chance of making it into the nation’s gas tanks in a reasonable time frame.  While corn was the only practical biofuel feedstock in 2007, it was hoped that cellulose and other waste products could be turned into ethanol in the future.  So far, this hope has not been realized.

People have been making ethanol (grain alcohol) from corn ever since the first moonshiner ran his first still.  It is a fairly straightforward and cheap process, so even without the federal subsidy, so-called “E10” gas (90% gasoline, 10% ethanol) is cheaper than straight 100% stuff.  But instead of simply allowing refiners to mix in up to 10% ethanol if the market and production environment made it favorable, the law mandated a steep ramp-up to full sales of nothing but E10 in a very short time.  So on the surface, we would move that much closer to energy independence with this law.  Well and good.

The not-so-advertised reasons for the law have to do with the strength of the agricultural lobby.  The E10 mandate was a tremendous windfall for everybody who grows corn.  While some ethanol from corn was being used voluntarily as a fuel additive before 2007, the mandate caused this use to skyrocket.  By 2011, according to the Mosbacher Institute report by economist James Griffin, 37% of the entire U. S. corn crop went toward ethanol production.  And corn prices soared from $2.50 per bushel up to as high as $7.50.

If the only people hurt were U. S. food consumers (not everybody drives a car, but everybody eats), it would be bad enough.  But the U. S. grows and sells more corn than any other nation, and much of it is exported to poorer countries, where it is a staple in many diets.  While the rise in corn prices was not solely responsible for the worldwide inflation in food costs that led to food riots in many nations in recent years, the timing is suspicious, and there is no question that the ERISA law led to hardships for many poor people around the world who were now even less able to afford to eat.

Another argument in favor of the ERISA law had to do with global warming.  If you burn gasoline, that directly adds the carbon in the gasoline to the air.  On the other hand, growing corn actually absorbs carbon dioxide from the air, so at first glance you’d think adding ethanol would lower every driver’s carbon footprint.  But a closer analysis that includes all the mechanical energy (fuel-powered) to grow corn and make ethanol reduces ethanol’s edge to only about 20% less carbon emitted per gallon than gasoline.  So that benefit isn’t all it was advertised to be either.

Unintended consequences show up all the time in considering engineering ethics, and the ERISA mandate has plenty.  The parties who appear to have benefited are:  growers of corn and producers of corn-based ethanol (a lot), the U. S. driving public (a little), and the U. S. overall, from the viewpoint of slightly improved energy security.  The losers include refiners (who have had to fool with the mandate and change their processes), anybody who buys corn (U. S. food consumers, U. S. livestock growers, and millions of foreign food consumers, many of whom are poor), and the U. S. public in the sense that they have had to pay the 45-cent-a-gallon subsidy through the U. S. treasury.  Quite a mixed bag, to say the least.

The ERISA experience has shown that mandates of this kind always have unintended consequences, whether or not they are anticipated.  Whether the unintended consequences outweigh the intended benefits often cannot be decided until the mandate has been in place and people have had time to deal with its effects.  It appears to me that we could do without the mandate now that there’s a lot of production capacity in place.  I don’t think corn prices would collapse, and ethanol use in fuels might fluctuate around a reasonable value that would strike a better balance between the advantaged groups and the disadvantaged groups.  But it’s very hard to displace such legislation once it’s in place, so we may have ERISA with us for many years to come.

 

Sources:  All statistics cited are from economist James Griffin’s report “U. S. Ethanol Policy:  The Unintended Consequences” available at http://bush.tamu.edu/mosbacher/takeaway/TakeAwayVol3Iss1.pdf.

New Twist to Tornado Warnings

Tornadoes have been in the news a lot lately, both because this season has produced a good many of them, and because the National Weather Service is trying out a new type of tornado warning to people who are in immediate danger. When a tornado’s radar signature is detected, people in Kansas and Missouri will now read and hear warnings that include phrases like “catastrophic,” “extremely dangerous,” “mass devastation,” and “high-end, life-threatening event.” These warnings may have played a role in the fact that while a storm system spawned about 100 tornadoes in Kansas alone last Saturday, no one was reported killed. However, five people died in Oklahoma tornadoes on the same day.

There was a time when even mentioning the word “tornado” in a weather forecast could cost a weatherman his job. Until the late 1940s, tornadoes were regarded as more or less arbitrary acts of God that no one could predict, let alone give responsible warnings about. Consequently, the policy of the U. S. Weather Bureau (as it was known back then) was to not mention tornadoes at all, for fear of causing undue panic in the population.

However, during World War II the military developed its own staff of forecasters, and after the war kept many of them on duty for predicting weather for special purposes, such as predicting weather near military airbases such as Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, where a tornado struck in March of 1948. Five days later, on Mar. 25, weather conditions were so similar to the ones that produced the earlier tornado that Maj. Ernest Fawbush and Capt. Robert Miller issued the nation’s first “official” tornado forecast, warning airbase personnel to make the planes secure and take other precautions. And sure enough, another tornado hit, but this time with minimal damage, owing to the precautions taken in response to the warning.

After that, military forecasters felt free to predict tornadoes if conditions warranted, but for some years afterward, the civilian Weather Bureau maintained its prohibition on tornado forecasts. This split gave rise to an informal “rumor mill” network around military bases when tornadoes were likely and military forecasters predicted them. When a tornado forecast came through military channels, military personnel would call their friends and relatives in the surrounding area and let them know to watch out. Eventually, because of the increasing availability of weather radars to track the storms and better understanding of the atmospheric conditions producing them, the Weather Bureau allowed mention of tornadoes in forecasts, in the form of watches and warnings. A tornado watch simply means conditions are favorable for their formation, while a warning means a tornado has been sighted and immediate precautions are required for people in its path.

We don’t often think of all the technology that is needed to provide up-to-the-minute warnings of tornadoes, but there’s a lot involved. Besides the conventional weather instrumentation on the ground, there are weather satellites that provide huge amounts of detailed data on large-scale movements of weather systems. Supplement that with both the National Weather Service’s radars and private radars operated by media outlets, most of which are modern Doppler units that can measure wind speed and direction within a storm. Couple those sources of information with the Internet, wireless phones, PDAs, iPhones, people watching live weather-radar feeds on their computers, and so on, and you have a lot of technology in the service of letting people know a tornado is coming.

As time has passed and the National Weather Service has gotten more confident in its predictions, people are getting perhaps a little complacent about tornado warnings, which may explain the experiment to hype the verbiage in the warnings. Of course, it’s not really possible to “hype” a tornado: death and destruction are death and destruction, after all. But tornado warnings are to be taken seriously, and the latest change seems to be paying off in the reduced number of fatalities. One death is still too many, and there are some people who are simply caught by a tornado in the wrong place at the wrong time. But for anyone in a fairly sturdy structure, heading for an interior closet or bathroom and covering up can mean the difference between life and death.

Growing up in Texas, I was familiar with the idea of tornadoes both from stories I heard from my relatives of twisters they’d seen or heard about in Dallas and Waco, and from radar images of tornadoes tracked by an early weather radar our local NBC outlet, WBAP-TV, maintained as long ago as the early 1960s. It was my privilege once to tour the studios around that time, and what I wanted to see most was the weather radar. I was disappointed to find that the actual screen was a little bitty thing only about four inches in diameter. It was an old World War II surplus set that the station had adapted for weather service. But it did its job until more sophisticated commercial units came along.

For anyone who watches the Weather Channel or bombs around on YouTube, tornadoes are no longer unfamiliar and almost mystically malevolent objects. We have seen dozens of videos made by storm-chasers with more curiosity than prudence, and can be as familiar as anybody can be of a phenomenon that you haven’t actually encountered in person. Still, a tornado on the ground is something you don’t want to mess with, and I for one am glad we have all the advanced machinery at our disposal to keep an eye on the sky for the next twister.

Sources: The online New York Times carried an article about the new verbiage in tornado warnings on Apr. 15, 2012 at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/16/us/violent-storms-cut-across-the-central-plains.html. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a nice history of early tornado forecasting, including the Tinker Air Base story, at http://www.outlook.noaa.gov/tornadoes/torn50.htm. For a more in-depth look at tornado forecasting in the U. S., see historian Marlene Bradford’s book Scanning the Skies: A History of Tornado Forecasting (Norman, OK: Oklahoma Univ. Press, 2001).

If Odysseus Had Remembered His GPS

On a long road trip the other day, I listened to part of a set of CD recordings of Homer’s Odyssey. If you’ve never read it in a good translation, you’re missing something that is not only fundamental to the Western literary canon, but is also a rollicking good story. It’s about Odysseus, a hero on the Greek side of the Trojan war, and how he manages to get home, in 12,000 lines. Along the way he’s helped by the goddess Athena, tripped up and tormented by the sea god Poseidon, and runs into monsters, treacherous enemies, shipwrecks, and a gang of layabouts all hoping to marry his wife Penelope after Odysseus is declared dead.

As I was listening to all these fanciful goings-on, I began to think of how many god-like abilities that Homer describes are now things that engineering has brought to pass in the 2800 years or so since he wrote the poem. Take flying, for example. Athena could do it; she flies back and forth to Olympus (which was kind of the country club of the gods) enough times to get a free frequent-flyer trip anywhere in the world. And seeing at a distance: the gods watched Odysseus and his friends and enemies like they were characters in a soap opera. We’ve got these things covered with airplanes and television, at a minimum, not to mention the Internet.

Lots of dramatic tension in the poem is created by the fact that for much of the time, Odysseus is held captive on a small island by Calypso, a minor goddess who is smitten with him and wants to make him immortal. He will have no part of this, however, and spends his days on the seashore, pining for Penelope and home. No one comes to rescue him because he landed there after all his shipmates died in a shipwreck, and nobody but Calypso and a few gods and goddesses know where he is—and they’re not telling the mortals. Here’s where an emergency beacon, or at least a decent cellphone, would have come in handy. And if he’d had along a GPS, he might never have had the shipwreck in the first place.

While we already enjoy the use of a good many things that only gods had back then, one nut we haven’t cracked yet is immortality, which the gods possessed and were able to hand out more or less at will. Immortality is the stated ambition of a loose-knit group of scientists, engineers, and their companion enthusiasts known as transhumanists, who believe it is humanity’s fate to transcend ordinary biology and wind up as software in a virtual-reality environment that is indistinguishable from Olympus, as far as I can tell. There really wasn’t much that the gods couldn’t do, and the same will be true of our transhuman descendants, if the transhumanists get their wishes.

Anyone familiar with Greek mythology knows that despite all the advantages of being a god, the lives of Zeus and his immortal friends and relations were plagued with the same kinds of botherations that trouble ordinary mortals: jealousy, revenge, discouragement, and anger. This is because the Greek gods were really just people writ large, with very human failings and shortcomings. It took a long time for the inexpressible perfection of the God of monotheism (e. g. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) to make any headway into the Western consciousness.

Most transhumanists don’t seem to recognize any gods, Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian, or otherwise. Instead, they promise us that we will become just like the gods of Olympus: basically able to do anything we want. While their spokespeople have worked out in great detail a lot of roadmaps that describe how the technology needs to develop to get us there, I have never heard any of them discuss in comparable detail the problem that Homer knew backwards and forwards: once you get a bunch of gods together, how do you make sure they will get along? Another nonbeliever, Jean-Paul Sartre, famously said that “hell is other people.” And unless the transhumanists contemplate setting each of us up in our own private Olympus where the only other beings we interact with are automaton-like slaves (which sounds pretty dull), I fail to see how, even with every privilege enjoyed by the Olympians of Homer’s imagination, the proposed society of immortal transhumans is going to be one whit better than Homer’s Olympus. Even gods had to solve the problem of getting through a boring Wednesday afternoon.

So as I contemplate the wonders that technological optimists promise us in terms of indefinitely long lives, freedom from disease and death, and so on, and how this will make life permanently wonderful and trouble-free for everyone, I can’t help but wonder whether Homer would listen to them and simply laugh. Even if some day we accumulate enough cyborgean accessories to be physically unrecognizable as humans, the essential nature of humanity will still be there. And that tendency to do the wrong thing while knowing the right thing will get us into just as much trouble as it does now, if not more.

As far as I know, belief in the Greek gods is not a live option for much of anyone nowadays. But faith in the monotheistic God is, to my mind, the only worldview that makes sense of the way the world is. As long as the transhumanists ignore the God factor, I think their dreams of an ideal transhuman future will remain just that: dreams. And dreams without nearly as good a story line as the Odyssey, incidentally.

Sources: I referred to the Wikipedia articles on “hecatomb” and “Odyssey.” One of the more recent and substantial books with a transhumanist theme is Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near (Viking, 2005).

Wombs with a View: The Impact of Ultrasonic Imaging on Abortion

When the U. S. Supreme Court issued its Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 legalizing abortion, ultrasonic imaging of the human body was still largely in its early research stages. Unborn babies were neither seen nor heard, and the knowledge of the average citizen about embryology and what went on in a mother’s womb before birth was hazy at best. That was one reason why the phrase “terminating a pregnancy” as a euphemism for abortion gained currency, and why many organizations, religious and otherwise, were slow to mount opposition to legalized abortion.

Others such as Planned Parenthood welcomed the ruling with open arms. The philosophy that says women own their bodies and all products thereof, and are free to do with them whatever they like, leads to the conclusion that eliminating an inconvenient truth such as a pregnancy by means of abortion is one tool in an array of technological controls that include contraception methods of all kinds.

Fast-forward to 2008 or so. A woman named Abby Johnson received the employee-of-the-year award from her employer, which happened to be Planned Parenthood. Abby had had two abortions herself, and regarded them as a woman’s right. Abortions were a necessary part of empowerment that incidentally paid her well and allowed her to rise to a management position in the Planned Parenthood clinic in Bryan, Texas.

One day a physician arrived from Austin with an ultrasound machine, the type used to view the wombs of pregnant women. He wanted to show how using the machine could lead to improvements in the efficiency of certain kinds of abortions, and that day Abby happened to be the person holding the ultrasound probe on the patient’s abdomen while the doctor did what he was there to do. Abby thought she was inured to the “products of conception” that had to be sorted out after each abortion, to make sure no arms or legs were left inside, before they were disposed of along with the other medical waste. But there was something different in watching the baby jump away from the doctor’s instrument as it got closer and closer, and the baby was cornered in one end of what should be the safest place in the world. Another minute, and it was all over. But Abby’s journey out of the world of abortions had just begun.

Abby Johnson is now a vocal and unstoppable witness for the pro-life cause. Last week she was in San Marcos, and I was privileged to hear her speak about her experience. I also met two college-age women who were also converted to the pro-life cause by seeing graphic images of what abortion is really like. One of them, Sarah Ryan, notes that six states (including Texas) have passed laws that require abortion clinics to show each prospective client a sonogram of the baby in her womb before performing the procedure. The technology to do this is now relatively inexpensive, and it is almost routine for prospective parents to put a sonogram of their pre-newborn on the refrigerator before his or her official arrival. Seeing is believing, and after watching the beating heart and baby-like movements of the living child within her own body, it will be admittedly harder for women to go through with what Planned Parenthood clinics around the country are set up to do for her.

Like many advances in medical technology, obstetric ultrasonic imaging was the work of dozens or hundreds of doctors, scientists, and engineers. But probably the most influential paper showing that it was not a pipe dream but a realistic technology was published in 1958 by Dr. Ian Donald, a Scottish physician with experience in World War II radar. His images of a pregnant woman’s womb obtained with safe and non-invasive ultrasound technology set off a storm of interest, which issued later in the development of commercial systems in the early 1960s and eventually the highly portable and economical devices that many obstetricians use today. It is significant that Dr. Donald raised his famous voice in protest over the 1967 Abortion Act legalizing abortion in the United Kingdom. Over forty years later, the descendants of his primitive ultrasound machine are still at work convincing women of the true significance of the mass of tissue inside their pregnant bodies.

The truth about abortion is now plain to see, thanks to technologies such as ultrasound and other modern imaging techniques. I find it intriguing that one of the most powerful things that can happen to a woman to change her to a pro-life supporter is to witness images of the graphic horror of abortion. Such scenes are not for everybody, and such pictures can be used wrongly to abuse women who are already tormented by the anxiety of what to do about an unplanned pregnancy. But I think it might be a good idea for every woman of child-bearing age at least to see a live ultrasound image of a baby in the womb of a real mother, before she herself faces the kind of choice that can lead to abortion. And if laws requiring abortion clinics to show sonograms to their clients are passed in more states, we can look forward to more babies surviving to become adults who—who knows?—may invent things just as wonderful as Dr. Donald’s ultrasound machine. It is a price of abortion that we seldom stop to think about.

Sources: Abby Johnson’s book about her experiences is titled Unplanned (Tyndale, 2010). Sarah Ryan’s article “It’s Not a Sprint, It’s a Marathon” on state laws restricting abortion appeared in the Fall 2011 issue of Human Life Review (p. 124). I referred to articles on the history of obstetrical ultrasonic imaging at the websites http://www.ob-ultrasound.net/iandonaldbio.html and http://www.ob-ultrasound.net/history1.html.