Engineering Ethics Blog

The EPA's New CO2 Teeth

2009-12-14T04:36:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Power to the Television: California's Challenge

2009-12-07T03:58:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Engineers, Scientists, Climate Change, and Politics

2009-11-30T04:08:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ethics: Evolved or Given?

2009-11-23T05:10:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Air Accidents In Perspective

2009-11-16T04:13:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Patent or Not To Patent: Supreme Court to Judge

2009-11-09T04:39:00.000-08:00

Most historians recognize the development of the legal framework of patents as an important, if not essential, part of the Industrial Revolution. The proper function of patents and patent law can perhaps be understood best by considering two extremes.

For most of history, the world was at one extreme: no patents or patent law at all. If a clever inventor came up with a new way of doing something or building a useful device, he had to keep it secret in order to maintain the competitive advantage his invention provided for him. Because if the goldsmith or millwright next door found out how the invention worked, the original inventor had no legal way to stop the imitator from using his invention. Consequently, processes and techniques were handed down from father to son or closely held in small guilds whose members were sworn to secrecy. And the pace of technological development during much of this time was consequently slow.

Now suppose we have a patent law, but instead of providing a limited-term monopoly to the inventor of twenty years (in current law), suppose it provided protection in perpetuity. Once somebody invented something, no one else could ever use that invention without the inventor's permission. Paradoxically, this opposite extreme would land us in a situation not too different from the one that prevailed before there were any patents at all. More information would be available, but you couldn't use it legally. Or at best, people would spend most of their inventive time and energy trying to get around the ever-growing forest of issued patents, rather than simply concentrating on inventing new stuff that the market needed.

In the last few decades, the situation in U. S. patent law has moved closer to the extreme of perpetual patents on anything—not so much in terms of the time limits on patents, but in terms of what can be patented. Unfortunately, the effect is much the same. If you can do one little tweak on someone else's patented idea and get a patent on it yourself, the situation is ripe for exploitation by patent lawyers and general confusion. By many accounts, that is more or less the state we're in today. Given enough money, I'm pretty sure you can patent anything these days, whether it's been around for decades or not, because the patent office has tended to neglect its former duty to make sure that inventions are original and worthy of patent protection. Although I haven't checked this to be sure, there is the legendary patent on a way a child swings in a yard swing. If this patent really exists, thousands of kids all across America unconsciously risk falling afoul of the patent laws every time they head for the playground.

Today (Nov. 9) the U. S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear their first patent case pertaining to the scope of the patent laws in many years. At issue is more than a single patent decision, although a patent claimed by businessmen Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw having to do with energy-price trading started the ball rolling. In a 2008 decision by the Federal Circuit (a special court that tries appeals of patent cases), Chief Judge Michel radically restricted his court's earlier generous interpretation of the kinds of things that can be patented. The rule he proclaimed says that a patentable process can only be issued if it is related to a "particular machine or apparatus" or transforms an article into "a different state or thing." If carried to its logical conclusion, this decision could invalidate or cast into question thousands of esxisting patents on business methods, software, diagnostic techniques, and many other technologies. A blogger at the intellectual-property website ipwatch.com excoriated Judge Michel for going way beyond the matter at issue, since whatever the Federal Circuit says about patents is the last word unless the Supreme Court says otherwise.

Sudden invalidation of a lot of patents would certainly be disruptive, especially at a time when the technology industry is not doing that well financially. Many high-tech companies are watching this case closely for that reason. The hope is that the Supreme Court will correct what many people perceive as a blunder on the part of the Federal Circuit, but how far they go in correcting the earlier decision could have important implications for the future of patent law in the U. S.

Patent law is a creature of the legislative branch, not the judicial branch, and perhaps all this attention will lead Congress to revisit the state of patent law with a view toward streamlining and modernizing the system. One practical problem that has led to the flood of dubious patents in recent years is the fact that the Patent Office is grossly understaffed. The sense is that rather than give patents the attention they need at the price of taking many years to issue a patent, the Office simply does something close to rubber-stamping in a matter of two years or less. Another problem is that two years is still only a little less than eternity in some businesses such as software, where entire generations of products rise and fall in a matter of months. But Congress is busily engaged on other matters for the time being.

The Supreme Court will take some months to decide this case, so we look forward to revisiting it in the spring, by which time a lot of things will look better, I hope.

Sources: I used material from the following websites: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/08/supreme-court-to-hear-key_n_349964.html (the Huffington Post is not something I routinely visit, but showed up first on a Google search—I don't recommend it for general viewing!), http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2009/11/09/argument-day-in-bilski-at-us-supreme-court/id=7209/, and http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704328104574517882062296034.html?mod=googlenews_wsj.

Toxic Drywall: All the Housing Market Needs

2009-11-02T04:22:00.000-08:00

As if Florida homeowners didn't have enough to worry about already since many of them are "under water" financially, a recent report I heard on National Public Radio revealed that many thousands of houses in Florida and at least six other states may have been built with toxic drywall imported from China. People living in these houses have reported many kinds of health problems, ranging from acute sinus infections to nosebleeds and insomnia. Besides the health hazards, anything made of copper in these houses tends to turn black and often fails. Think wiring, plumbing, and air conditioning coils. How can something like this happen, and what can be done about it?

The "how" is fairly easy to answer, at least in general terms. Drywall is a sandwich made of cardboard surfaces on either side of a core made of partly dehydrated calcium sulfate, otherwise known as gypsum. Although there are places where you can mine gypsum, increasingly the material is obtained from flue-gas desulfurization plants associated with coal-fired power generation. Coal with a lot of sulfur in it releases the sulfur when it's burned, and if you don't de-sulfurize the flue gas that results, you get a terrible air pollution problem. Scrubbers can capture the sulfur, but the byproduct is a lot of sulfate stuff which can be purified into calcium sulfate by processes I have no clue about, not being a chemist.

But I can easily imagine that if someone who wanted to profit from the hot market in drywall caused by the building boom earlier in this decade got careless about converting impure flue-gas-derived gypsum to calcium sulfate suitable for making drywall, they might accidentally leave in some chemicals (such as iron sulfide in an acidic matrix) that, upon getting moist, would release hydrogen sulfide. And hydrogen sulfide is very nasty stuff. Its toxicity is comparable to hydrogen cyanide, which is what California used to use in it gas chamber for executions. Nobody wants to live in a gas chamber.

Something like this apparently happened in China when a good amount of Chinese drywall was imported to the U. S. and used in several states to build houses. If this hypothesis is correct, the first place you'd expect to hear about problems is where the average humidity is highest, and that's Florida. Sure enough, as long ago as 2004 complaints began to emerge in that state about weird rotten-egg odors, blackened and failing copper air-conditioner tubing, and wiring faults. Although the Environmental Protection Agency has reportedly investigated the problem, their findings are "not conclusive," so any redress from the government will be delayed if it arrives at all.

That's probably how it happened; now, what to do?

The parties involved are: the Chinese manufacturers of the defective drywall, the importing and marketing firms that sold the stuff in the U. S., the builders who used it to build houses, the homeowners who live in these houses, the financial institutions holding mortgages on the houses, the insurance companies insuring the houses, and various governmental regulatory agencies whose responsibilities touch on a problem like this. Already you can see the legal tangles just waiting to happen. Because of the lack of recourse many homeowners have run up against, someone has organized a Chinese Drywall Complaint Center that acts as a clearinghouse for information and news on the problem. Misery may love company, but that doesn't get rid of the toxic drywall.

This is an example of how a novel problem can take longer to solve than one we've dealt with before. As far as I know, the only similar situation involved polyurethane insulation that emitted formaldehyde gas or other toxic materials. Formaldehyde is not something you want to smell a lot of either, but it's not nearly as toxic as hydrogen sulfide. And it doesn't leave physical traces behind like blackened pipes and wiring. Another complicating factor is that the defect doesn't show up immediately. Evidently months or years of exposure to high humidity brings out the problem, and so builders who bought the defective drywall and installed it promptly can legitimately claim they had no idea it would do this. On the other hand, if the stuff fell off the ceiling as soon as they put it in, they would have known something was wrong immediately. So there is the time-bomb aspect to the situation as well.

Any time an international border appears between the perpetrators of a wrong and the victims, things are more complicated than otherwise, and that is the case here as well. Probably some rough justice will happen as the next importer of Chinese drywall finds that their market has disappeared, but that is unfair to the Chinese drywall manufacturers who are doing things right, assuming there are some. Unfortunately, in the rather xenophobic United States, most people think of China in simplistic terms and don't consider that it's at least as complicated as the U. S., if not more. But the Wild-West aspect of China's economy makes it hard for its government to enforce any kind of uniform regulations or safety codes, with the result that a few grossly negligent firms can put lead paint on children's toys, or melamine plastic in pet food, or hydrogen-sulfide-emitting compounds in drywall and get away with it, at least until the newshounds get involved. And then the whole country gets a black eye that only a minority of companies deserve.

As for the consumers who are stuck with toxic drywall, they still have few recourses. Not enough is known about the problem even to recommend a remediation strategy. It's pretty clear that tearing out all the old drywall in a house and putting in new non-toxic wallboard would probably cost more than tearing down the whole place and rebuilding from scratch. So insurance companies, builders, and even the government agencies involved are reluctant to pay for or recommend such an extreme course. What may happen is that people will simply walk away from such houses, many of which are underwater anyway, and take the consequences. Which won't help the banks any.

In the meantime, if you're looking to buy a cheap foreclosed home, take a look at the copper fixtures in it first. If you see any black corrosion, it's probably not a bargain after all.

Sources: Text relating to the NPR report on this subject is available at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114182073&ps=cprs. As long ago as last March, Time Magazine posted an online article on the subject at http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1887059,00.html. The Chinese Drywall Complaint Center website is Http://ChineseDrywallComplaintCenter.Com/. I also used material from the Wikipedia articles on drywall and hydrogen sulfide.

Effects of a News Media Fast

2009-10-26T04:00:00.000-07:00

Since most news media nowadays are electronic in either their production, distribution, or delivery, and this blog is about engineering ethics, which relates to the right use of technology, including news media, I think the following personal reflection on a recent experience of mine falls within the greater ambit of what I'm trying to do here.

Recently I had been feeling more than the usual amount of hassle and anxiety. Ever since I began teaching, fall semesters have always been more stressful than spring semesters, and for various reasons this one has been worse than usual. Of late I had fallen into the habit of taking in the following news media daily, if not more often: National Public Radio news once or twice a day (at least half an hour total), the Austin American-Statesman newspaper, a well-known biweekly conservative magazine, and the magazine's daily set of blogs online as well which I read during lunch. The health-care debate was the nominal reason for such newshound behavior, but beyond a certain point the desire to hear or read news becomes its own justification—in other words, a habit.

Among the spiritual disciplines of both Christianity and other religions is the discipline of simplicity—of doing without things that are not necessarily harmful in themselves, but can distract us from more important matters if not placed under conscious control. Muslim believers around the world recently wrapped up the large-scale spiritual discipline called Ramadan, which involves a total dawn-to-dusk fast that runs for several weeks. The 19th-century author and preacher George MacDonald said something which I cannot find the exact quote for, but the sense was, "A man is diminished by anything outside himself which he thinks he cannot do without"—other than God, that is.
With these thoughts as background, I decided at the beginning of last week to go a whole week without listening to, watching, or reading any news media.

Of course I was immediately faced with the question of what constitutes "news media." I think my closest brush with breaking the fast happened in a doctor's office when I picked up a trade journal on radiology, and read about some recent advances in medical imaging technology. I suppose technically that was news media, but not the kind I was trying to avoid. For the most part, I succeeded in avoiding the thing I had sworn off from.

The point of any fast is not to see how many gold stars you can get by following the rules, but to practice the discipline of resisting one's desires, ordering them instead to a vision of the good. My vision of the good involves Christianity, but I recognize that other people follow other visions of the good as well.

So much for the reasons; what were the results?

Well, obviously I had more time to devote to other things, although frankly I didn't notice it that much. One consequence was that I hauled out an old portable CD player and instead of listening to NPR during a half-hour of exercise, I listened to the sound-track album of the Coen brothers film "O Brother Where Art Thou?" I don't know much about the art of sound recording (as opposed to the science), but that CD is one of the clearest and most fun-to-listen-to music recordings I have. The film itself was a rare combination of comedy, tragedy, and history (being based on Homer's Odyssey), and I found my ability simply to enjoy the music was greater than I have experienced for many months. I can liken it to what former smokers say about being able to smell flowers for the first time in years, soon after they quit smoking. I don't know how far we can take the analogy between cigarette smoke and news media, but there seems to be some subtle connection there.

I can't say my whole life turned into a tranquil drifting on calm seas. There were plenty of minor troubles (for instance, in a moment of haste I broke my wife's favorite coffee cup, a promotional item from Hewlett-Packard I received years ago with a liquid-crystal coffee thermometer on the side and Maxwell's Equations printed inside), but I perceived an overall lowering of an annoying kind of background tension or angst that had been bothering me for many months—really, ever since the health-care debate geared up in earnest last summer.

I have now stepped off the no-news-media wagon, deliberately, commencing with the Sunday paper yesterday. But I'm seriously considering making a news media fast a part of my routine. Much news these days is repetitive anyway, since it consists of recycling or tweaking the same things to fill the 24-hour cycles of a growing number of media outlets. So if you ignore the whole mess for a week, you're not likely to be seriously behind unless we have another 9/11 tragedy or something equally earthshaking during your fast.

One of my favorite authors, C. S. Lewis, was a professor of English at Oxford and Cambridge University, and famously ignored newspapers and radio most of his life. He used to say that if anything really important happened, someone would tell him about it sooner or later. It wasn't his job to keep up with the latest developments, and if your job does require you to do that, a media fast wouldn't be practical. But unless you'd be endangering your livelihood by doing so, I recommend trying it for a week or so. You may be surprised at the results.

The Deep Corruption of State-Sponsored Gambling

2009-10-19T04:21:00.000-07:00

Long-time readers of this blog (both of you) know that I am no friend of gambling. One way to express my stand succinctly is to place myself on a spectrum of opinion ranging from the pro-gambling extreme of no legal or moral restrictions at all, to the anti-gambling extreme of total prohibition root and branch, all the way down to the private Saturday-night poker game among friends. On a scale where 0 is total-pro and 100 is total-anti, I'm about 85. I see no reason to interfere with small-scale gambling among friends and acquaintances, but when gambling becomes a large-scale business from which people earn their living, I start to get uncomfortable. Some new information I ran across recently has turned mild discomfort into acute dismay. But it is a dismay that few people share.

Like any habit, gambling can be addictive. Just as packs of cigarettes carry health-warning labels and booze ads caution users to "drink responsibly," many ads for lotteries and casinos feature 1-800 numbers to call in case you think your gambling is becoming a problem. What I didn't realize until I read Maura J. Casey's article in the November First Things magazine, is that many casinos make a huge fraction of their profits from a small number of gamblers who, by almost any definition, are addicted to the slots. And the slot machines are where an increasing amount of casino revenue comes from.

Casey cites a study by Harrah's, one of the big Las Vegas operations, that revealed the source of 90 percent of their profits: only 10 percent of their customers. Other studies from places as diverse as Nova Scotia and Australia confirm this pattern. So a very small number of people pour money into slots and other games literally as fast as they can push the buttons, and these people make the casinos profitable. And Casey shows how Harrah's has turned to scientific studies to optimize the design of slot machines so that people are not distracted by anything else and can play as often as ten to fifteen plays per minute. Clearly, someone in that state is not a fully rational individual, making the so-called informed choice that casinos claim as their justification for existence. "We're not forcing anyone to play," they say, but when you have a multi-million-dollar corporation with state-of-the-art monitoring and design teams on one side, and some poor cabdriver from Hoboken on his two-week vacation on the other side, most people would say it's not a fair contest.

Add to this the well-known fact that poorer populations spend proportionally much more of their income on gambling than wealthier folks do, and you have a classic case of exploitation. Not only do poor people spend more (one study cited in Scientific American showed that people who earn less than $12,400 a year spend an average of $645 a year-—over 5% of their gross income—on lotteries alone), but one neuroeconomist has found that simply feeling poor makes you more likely to gamble.

I am ashamed to admit that the Texas state lottery—a thing I thought the Baptists here would never allow—uses some of its revenues to support higher education, and indirectly pays my salary. I don't feel strongly enough about it to quit my job, though. That is one of those prudential judgments one has to make, like paying taxes despite the fact that the government spends some of your money on things you don't approve of. But this pattern of government sponsorship of gambling—either directly in the case of state lotteries, or indirectly in the case of state taxation of casinos—creates a deeply corrupt conflict of interest.

When poor, defenseless people are exploited by large, well-funded, well-organized corporations or institutions, there are only a couple of ways they can seek redress. They can organize themselves, but this is hard and poor people generally don't have a lot of free time to devote to organizing boycotts and going on protest marches. Or they can turn to the government for help. By any reasonable political philosophy, one important function of government is to defend people who cannot defend themselves against the depredations of powerful interests. But in the case of legalized gambling, the powerful interests either are supporting the government, or are the government. So this explains how hard it will be to turn back the corrupting tide of state-sponsored gambling that has seeped into nearly all states (Utah and Hawaii being the only exceptions by now), and that has insinuated itself into state budgets as what many view to be an essential revenue stream, especially in these fiscally constrained times. So there is almost a built-in barrier against doing anything through the legislative process to turn back the tide of legalized gambling.

I have a natural hope and a supernatural hope about this matter. The natural hope is that history's pendulum will eventually swing back. Lotteries were common in the early days of the republic—I believe Harvard's founding was partially funded through a lottery. But in the 1800s, public opinion turned against gambling, and if it has happened once, it could happen again. My supernatural hope is that God will act where governments refuse to help the exploited. I don't know when, where, or how, but that's up to God. As for the people responsible for the exploitation, well, the sooner they realize what they're doing and stop it, the better.

Sources: Maura J. Casey's article "Gambling with Lives" appears on pp. 37-41 of the November 2009 issue of First Things. The Scientific American piece on neuroeconomist George Loewenstein's study of how feelings of poverty affect gambling can be found at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=dangers-irrational-brain. And one of the many studies showing how poor people spend a larger percentage of their income on gambling than other groups can be found at http://www.buffalonews.com/426/story/789628.html.

Washington Metro Deaths: The Accident that Wasn't Supposed to Happen

2009-10-12T04:06:00.000-07:00

One of the things I like the most about visiting Washington, DC is its efficient, clean, and easy-to-use subway system. Whenever I need to visit Washington, I usually fly to the Baltimore-Washington Airport and then take public transportation from there. A car is a liability in Washington, as far as I'm concerned, because you can get to most places of importance on the subway. Washington's Metro is one of the newer of the nation's major public subways, having opened in 1976, and from the start it embodied computer-controlled systems of signaling and braking. So along with many other admirers of that system, I was shocked to read last June 23 of an accident the previous day that ultimately claimed the lives of a train operator and eight passengers. What went wrong?

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), in its slow, methodical way, is still investigating, but a compilation of news reports on Wikipedia can allow us to get a fairly good idea of what may have happened. The accident happened during the afternoon rush hour, just after 5 PM. As is often the case, Train No. 214 on the Red Line, one of the major north-south arteries, was stopped between the Takoma and Fort Totten stations, waiting for another train to clear the Fort Totten stop.

Trains have been waiting on tracks ever since there were trains and tracks, and in the pre-automation days a system of block signals was devised to warn oncoming traffic that the block of track ahead was occupied. When the engineer saw a yellow signal, he was to slow down, since it meant that there was another train in the block beyond the next one. Blocks were spaced far enough apart to allow plenty of room to stop the fastest train moving at a legal speed, and for the most part the system worked as long as engineers were paying attention and the signals were working.

While we will never know exactly what the oncoming train operator saw (she was killed in the accident), we do know from records that her train, No. 112, left the Takoma station at 4:57 PM. From what I understand, the Metro trains can operate in either an "enhanced" manual mode or a completely automatic mode. Operators can delay the train's departure to accommodate laggards who won't pull their arms out of the doors, for instance, but the system is also automatically supervised by braking sensors that presumably stop the train long before it could collide with another one. However, if the operators do their job, these emergency systems rarely come into play, and I can see how both operators and maintenance people might get lazy about making sure the automatic safety systems are in working order. According to reports, Train 112 was in automatic mode when the collision occurred.

At any rate, some time before 5:03 PM the operator of Train No. 112 applied the manual brake. This wasn't enough to keep her train from plowing into the rear of 214, telescoping onto the rear cars. "Telescoping" in a train collision means that one car rides up on top of another, usually doing great damage to both cars since the stationary car smashes much of the moving car's insides and vice-versa. Any people who happen to be in the way do not usually make it out unscathed. Although members of the U. S. Army who were present made heroic rescue efforts, they were not sufficient to prevent the nine fatalities and numerous injuries that resulted.

In tests on June 25, NTSB officials found that the track circuit located at the site of the stopped train failed to detect a test train placed on it. This is highly significant, since a similar failure would account for the accident. If the automatic systems didn't receive a signal that the No. 214 was stopped on the tracks, they would not have engaged and the only thing that would have averted the accident was a manual intervention by the operator. Why wouldn't the track circuit work?

The apparently simple task of figuring out whether a multi-ton railcar is present on a set of tracks is not as easy as it seems. Signaling currents have to be detected in an electrically noisy environment with large AC power currents running nearby to run the cars. The system has to work despite corrosion and oil on tracks, varying pressure on wheels, and a number of other factors. Down here in Texas, a new surface commuter rail system in Austin has been delayed repeatedly for many months partly because the train-detector track circuits have not yet worked properly. Perhaps a whole new concept of train detection is called for if the present systems are so flaky. But I'm not a railway engineer, of either the driving or designing kind, so I will refrain from second-guessing those whose job it is to fix such problems.

While we will have to wait to see what the NTSB ultimately concludes about this accident, it looks like it may well have been a fatal example of the old "garbage in, garbage out" saying. If the automated distributed braking systems don't have valid data to work with, they're not going to stop the train. And a harried, overworked (or perhaps inattentive) operator can't always be counted on to take action when she sees that a collision is imminent. Some of the Metro tunnels snake around and bend in ways that make it impossible to see far enough ahead at all points to avoid a collision, even if you paid all the attention in the world.

In the meantime, the next time I go to Washington, I'll still take the Metro. But I may make it a point to get into one of the middle cars.

Source: The Wikipedia article on this accident appears at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Washington_Metro_train_collision and was my primary source for this blog.

Microethics, Macroethics, and the Working Engineer

2009-10-05T04:39:00.000-07:00

Normally, we don't deal much with ethical theory in this blog, but every so often it's worthwhile to look at the underpinnings of why we think about engineering ethics, and ways to think about it. A distinction that you may find helpful in sorting through engineering ethics questions is the difference between so-called "microethics" and "macroethics."

You may have encountered the micro-macro distinction first in an introductory economics course. Microethics, you were told, deals with the individual decisions of householders or business owners with regard to pricing, buying, and selling things and services. Macroethics, on the other hand, deals in the large-scale economies of industries, nations, or the globe as a whole. While it would be nice if microeconomists could ignore macroeconomics and vice-versa, I recently read an article saying that if everyone in the recent economic downturn had acted in a way that was sensible and rational on an individual basis, we would pretty much be in the mess we're in already. That is, sensible and even ethical individual decisions can sometimes lead to large-scale disasters nonetheless.

The same can happen in engineering, which is why Joseph R. Herkert, among others, has been writing about the microethics-macroethics distinction for close to a decade now. Joe (as I know him) is Lincoln Associate Professor of Ethics and Technology at the School of Applied Arts and Sciences, Arizona State University. He points out that for most of the history of engineering ethics, the decisions of individual engineers were taken to be the meat and potatoes of the subject. While this was good in the sense that no one had studied the matter as a formal academic topic before, the approach tended to brush aside larger issues affecting entire industries or countries.

For example, in the days before extensive environmental regulations were passed in the 1970s, it was still possible for companies to install expensive antipollution equipment (assuming it was available), and to be good environmental citizens. But if an individual engineer at a highly polluting chemical plant in, say, 1955, made a unilateral decision to spend millions of dollars reducing pollution, it would have affected the firm's bottom line adversely. In an industry where no one else was spending such amounts, the engineer's company would have been put at a disadvantage, and might even have gone out of business, even if the engineer didn't get fired first for making what would have been viewed as a money-wasting decision. So while we today might view that engineer as a farsighted pioneer whose actions were a good example for others to follow in later decades, in the context of the 1950s such a decision would have run afoul of a macroethical regulatory and economic environment that was dead-set opposed to the idea.

Macroethics in engineering simply takes into account the fact that even if everyone makes good microethical decisions, you can have systems and legal frameworks and large-scale institutions in place which nevertheless cause harm, and need to be addressed from an ethical point of view. Since macroethics matters cannot generally be changed at will by an individual engineer, you may wonder why we should even bother to think about them. After all, what can one engineer do to change an entire industry or nation?

More than you think. There are politically active engineers, but not that many. In a democracy, voting is one way an individual can influence policies at the macroethics level. Also, by explaining technical matters to the public and educating the general population about the technical realities and limitations of a macroethical matter, engineers can perform a great and much-needed service. Most people have no idea how any of the technical marvels they use every day are brought into being, and so they have even less of an idea that there are limits of any kind. There is a persistent rumor that the major automotive companies have had a long-range electric car hidden in their back rooms for decades, but suppress it because it would threaten their current business. Anyone who knows a little technically about how battery-powered cars work and the current state of the art of battery technology can figure out why this isn't the case (unless the companies have done a very good job of hiding some unimaginable physics and engineering!). While engineers have to be careful in public speaking, not talking down to or insulting their listeners, a careful, clear explanation of basic technology can go far to alleviate what an engineer might think of as irrational fears or beliefs.

But one lesson it took me a long time to learn is that even irrational beliefs influence behavior. The U. S. nuclear-power industry once led the world in the development of advanced nuclear reactors for generating electricity on a large scale. But a series of public-relations disasters and one real disaster that was largely harmless to human life (Three Mile Island) turned the U. S. public against nuclear power. Instead of acknowledging this attitude and trying to deal with it, advocates of nuclear energy largely dismissed it as "irrational," and the industry is now trying to undo thirty years of neglect and wandering in the wilderness.

Even individual engineers need to think about macroethical issues from time to time, even if you don't deal with them on a day-to-day basis. By taking an engineering job, you implicitly endorse the firm, the industry, and the nation that claims you. So in that sense at least, macroethics matters to every individual engineer.

Sources: The first article on microethics and macroethics applied to engineering appears to be J. R. Herkert, "Future Directions in Engineering Ethics Research: Microethics, Macroethics and the Role of Professional Societies," Science and Engineering Ethics, vol. 7, pp. 403-414 (2001).

Net Neutrality: Wireless Too?

2009-09-28T05:10:00.000-07:00

A week ago today, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski started a kerfuffle when he called for net neutrality in wireless as well as wired Internet services. To understand why this has upset a number of Internet service providers, and why they're upset, we need to review a few terms.

"Net neutrality" is the idea that service providers shouldn't discriminate among different uses of the Internet. That is, if I sign up for Internet service with Company A, I should be able to use the Internet to look up recipes for Hungarian goulash, or use voice-over-internet to call my aunt in Poughkeepsie, or legally download "Up" (whenever that becomes possible), and Company A should let me do any or all of these things. Why should Company A care, and especially, why should they care if I'm using an iPhone or other wireless device connected directly to their wireless network?

The short answer is, bandwidth. Bandwidth is to the Internet as pipes are to a water-supply system. You want more water, you need more and bigger pipes, and the same goes for the Internet. And there's a big difference in bandwidth between so-called "wired" service (really it should be called "fibered" since fiber cables carry most of the traffic), and wireless service that goes directly from the user's device to a service provider's cellphone tower or other wireless hub. (If you are using your own little wireless network around your home, as I do, that counts as wired service since it goes to a cable once it leaves your house.)

The bandwidth of wired services is limited only by what physical cables can be put in place between you and the main Internet. In most parts of the country served this way, there is plenty of bandwidth around on cable TV systems (most of which are mostly using fiber-optics anyway for a good part of their links) and especially if you are at a company or institution that has direct fiber connections. So although you may pay more to get a lot of bandwidth, it's out there and there's no particular reason your service provider should be chintzy and keep you from using bandwidth-hog services such as downloading peer-to-peer movies.

But if you try stunts like that on your iPhone, the service providers have a least a technical case in their favor. Unlike wired services, wireless services use limited slices of the airwaves, including some which the government recently auctioned off as a result of the switch to digital TV. The service providers paid billions for these wavelengths, because it was a little like when the Dutch paid the Indians for Manhattan. They aren't making any more Manhattans, so when it came up for sale they were wise to buy, at least from a real-estate perspective. (I won't get into treatment of indigenous peoples here—one ethical problem at a time!) There's only so much spectrum bandwidth out there, and when it fills up, the only way you can squeeze more data through it is to get more clever technology, and even that has a limit called Shannon's information theorem.

So when AT&T and company read about Chairman Genachowski's call for net neutrality even in wireless services, they set up a howl. Genachowski, an Obama appointee who worked closely with the candidate on telecommunications issues, is a Harvard-trained lawyer with experience clerking for Supreme Court justices and working for internet firms. Given his rather rarefied background, he has had at least an opportunity to see what private enterprise is like. But like most government agencies in the executive branch, the FCC is a pseudo-democracy. When they propose rules they allow time for comments and so on, but there is no law requiring the Commission to take comments into account in their rulemaking. So when Genachowski talks, companies listen.

In his speech, which actually does a good job of portraying the current situation in historical perspective, Genachowski cited the long tradition of openness and transparency of the Internet, right down to its technical structure that pushes applications to the edges and makes the main system act pretty much like a "dumb pipe." This is an example of how technical structure can influence behavior. For instance, if there were an easy way to monitor and bill Internet users for each particular use of the Internet over a certain provider, the way the old POTS (plain old telephone service) used to work, things would be vastly different, and arguably not near as far along as they are today. Placing approximately zero marginal cost on transactions encourages greater and more innovative use of a resource than if you knew you were going to be out a quarter for every time you queried Google, for instance. If that were true, I'd be broke a long time ago.

On the other hand, excessive government enforcement of egalitarian principles can lead to problems as well. Take the Cuban health system, for instance. Yes, it's free for all Cuban citizens, but outside of a few friends of documentary filmmaker Michael Moore who took their illnesses to Havana after they ran into problems in the U. S., I'm not aware of too many medical tourists who are drawn to the Cuban health-care system like flies to honey. The present fuss over wireless net neutrality is more likely a pro-forma complaint about something that the service providers were already figuring out how to do. And Genachowski himself allowed as to how in exceptional cases (periods of high demand, etc.) providers might have to restrict access to some services simply to maintain the stability and integrity of their networks. So they have an escape clause, so to speak.

The FCC is going to go ahead and do what it likes, and as in the past, the service providers will find a way to deal with it. Sometimes government regulation can even encourage innovation, as Genachowski appears to hope will be the case here. I hope and trust he's right.

Sources: I used material from an online editorial by Lynette Luna at the website FierceMobileIT, http://www.fiercemobileit.com/story/could-wireless-net-neutrality-be-boon-enterprise/2009-09-23. Chairman Genachowski's speech can be read in its entirety at http://www.openinternet.gov/read-speech.html.

The Internet's Threat to Civilization and Two Kinds of Ham

2009-09-21T04:12:00.000-07:00

Among the moral and social implications of technology we have considered in this space over the years, the Internet looms large. You wouldn't be reading this blog without it, yet there are studies and articles out there that show how students are losing the ability to read sequentially, follow arguments, and write more than a sentence or two without the uncontrollable urge to use an emoticon.

At times I'm sympathetic with this trend of thought. After years of looking up material on search engines, I've caught myself reading ordinary text in the Internet way—hastily skimming through paragraphs of carefully assembled prose like a motorcycle gang blasting through Central Park. When I realize what I'm doing, I try to slow down, but the habit is still there. And some of the uncomfortable side effects of mass digitizing of information are disquieting. For example, libraries around the world are looking at their now-digitized piles of paper and microfilm and asking, "Why should we keep paying for all this expensive space to store something that we already have on a few dozen mainframe hard drives in one room?" And we won't even mention what's happening to newspapers.

But sometimes it takes a person with a longer perspective to show you that things are not as bad as they seem. Dennis Baron, a professor of linguistics at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has written a book showing that the same mixture of hope, fear, and nostalgia has accompanied the advent of every novel communications technology, all the way back to the invention of writing itself. I have read only an interview with the author, not the book itself, but Baron views the current anxieties over an Internet-overdosed society to be overblown. He thinks at least as much good as harm comes from the social-networking activities on Facebook and so on, and points out that students themselves—at least the better ones—treat overuse of emoticons as a phase to be grown out of as they learn how the adult world expects them to communicate.

A similar view comes from my experiences, now largely historical, in the rarefied world of amateur radio. Ever since the birth of radio itself, there has been a small cadre of individuals who have used the medium, not for commercial purposes (in fact the laws pertaining to amateur radio forbid it), but for the fun of it. So most countries have set aside bits of the radio spectrum for these hobbyists, known as radio amateurs or "hams."

I joined the ranks of hamdom while still in college, and for a number of years was quite active with a roomful of largely surplus radio gear and antennas sprouting from the roof of our house. As time went on, I came to realize that all hamdom is divided into two kinds of ham.

The first kind, of which I was one, delights in the technology itself. These folks are constantly building new rigs or buying the latest gear to try out new features. The presence of a live person on the other end of the communications link is merely a convenience to them, to prove that the system itself works over the distance required. To somewhat misapply Marshall McLuhan, the medium becomes the message—the way a thing is communicated overwhelms the content of the communication. This attitude does nothing to further human community, in the long run.

The second kind views ham radio as simply a means of communicating with other people. Their delight is not in the technology, which they often learn rather grudgingly, but in the ever-new surprise of who might be sitting at the microphone, key, or keyboard at the other side of the ionospheric link. Think of an ongoing party with members from every part of the world, and that's what attracts the second kind of ham. I understand that the late Marlon Brando was an enthusiastic ham radio operator at various times in his life, and I suspect he was this type of ham. Although I have no surveys to back me up, I suspect that this type of operator tends to stay with the hobby longer, since the novelty of getting to know new people is truly inexhaustible.

The microcosm of ham radio prefigured the macrocosm of the Internet in many ways. Both are basically global means of communication; both impose certain restrictions on the style of communication, the length, and how the other party can be accessed; and both require at least a minimum knowledge of technology. On the Internet, the vast majority of users couldn't care less about the technology unless it gets in their way. Most users are interested in the content, not the method. The few hackers and geeks who play with the Internet simply because it's technologically neat are welcome to their amusements, but I haven't run across any lately. Of course there are those who use it for nefarious purposes, but you will always have a few bad apples in every crop.

As time went on my interest in ham radio waned. I still have my rig sitting on my desk here in the study, but it's been years since I fired it up. In the meantime, the Internet has become as much a part of my life as using electricity, as it has for billions of others around the globe. I will not commit the error of saying the Internet is neutral and it's how you use it that makes it good or bad. Like any other technology that humans use, it tends to incline our actions in certain directions, and these directions are almost never exactly neutral. But on the whole, the Internet has allowed more people to communicate at less cost, and that tends to benefit society, whatever bad habits they pick up along the way.

Sources: An interview with Dennis Baron appears in the online edition of Salon.com at http://www.salon.com/books/int/2009/09/19/better_pencil/. His book, A Better Pencil, has just been published by Oxford University Press, which still believes in paper, for the time being anyway. And for those hams who are curious, my call letters are KD5DC.

Albert Gonzales: Two-Faced Hacker

2009-09-13T17:53:00.000-07:00

An adage says there is no honor among thieves. U. S. Secret Service agents who employed a self-taught 28-year-old computer genius named Albert Gonzales to inform them of the activities of other hackers may now wish they'd never heard of him. Not only was Gonzales tipping off hackers that they were targets of federal investigations, Gonzales went on to break all records, not once but twice, for the largest amount of stolen credit-card and debit-card data: some 130 million numbers he amassed with the help of unnamed foreign cohorts, many in the former Soviet Union countries. Placed under arrest in 2008, Gonzales at first pled innocent, but as charges mounted up, first in New York, then in Massachusetts and New Jersey, and as he finally faced federal charges, on August 28 he decided to plead guilty. He will be behind bars at least until middle age, by which time his hacking skills will be hopelessly out of date. But will there still be hackers in 2034? My guess is: almost certainly.

I could dwell on the details of Gonzales's high lifestyle in his native town of Miami, but it is like the high-living stories of most other thieves: spend it while you got it, because you don't know when you'll ever have it again. You wonder if the Secret Service folks paying him for information ever noticed the BMW and the Rolex, but maybe he'd quit dealing with them by the time he was rolling in dough from more profitable employment.

This raises an ethical question that everyone who deals with computer security has to face: when does trying to think like a hacker in order to outwit other hackers cross the line into the gray area when you become a hacker yourself?

The term "hacker" means different things in different contexts. Back in the Middle Ages of electronics, I used to take apart old stereos and radios and put them back together in screwy ways. This was what many people would now term a type of hacking, which in its most general sense means using technology for a purpose that its designers did not originally plan on. But (except for the occasional prank) my purposes in hacking were innocent. Gonzales clearly intended to make a lot of money illegally by collecting tons of computer-record identities and selling them to the highest bidder. In this way he stayed in the background and got the advantages of wholesale crime without having to mess with the retail variety. And clearly he did it for the money, or for what the money could buy.

Now that computer hacking is an ongoing, large-scale criminal activity, the air of playful innocence that used to characterize its aficionados has largely dissipated. Perhaps justly, most organizations and government agencies assume that anyone hacking into their system is doing it to steal, or worse—there are always terrorists, and we have written occasionally about the danger of cyberwars waged by militant hackers.

For those interested in fighting crime, it will always be necessary to learn how the criminals do it in order to fight back. And in the case of hackers, agencies without enough homegrown talent will often look for a turncoat, but the possibility of double-agenthood—exactly what Gonzales did—is always present in such cases.

One of the best ways to keep good hackers from going bad is a thing that is becoming hard to find these days—or at least, I wouldn't know where to start looking for it, unless you could try the U. S. armed forces. What I'm talking about is a deep level of commitment to the good of a nation or organization that becomes the core of one's professional life. But it requires a stable lifetime of commitment on the part of the organization to achieve that, a stability that is increasingly hard to find these days.

One night, years ago, back in Massachusetts, I attended a talk given by a fellow who for years had been a supervisor in the New England Power Pool. This was the organization that coordinated operations of the Northeastern power plants and utilities to make sure everybody's power was reliable, stable, and there when they needed it. Power failures in the dead of winter in New England can be life-threatening, and as I listened to this guy talk, I realized that he was dedication incarnate. He wasn't blustery or table-pounding or anything—but he gave the impression of solid, firm, intelligent commitment to the high calling of keeping New Englanders' lights on, no matter what.

This was back in the days before utility deregulation, when power companies were quasi-governmental entities with more or less guaranteed profits. Perhaps it is just the nostalgic faulty memory of an aging engineer remembering a scene from his younger days, but it does seem to me that the stability engendered by the regulatory environment back then allowed the development of people who could really dedicate their lives to a good cause professionally, without worrying about layoffs and changing careers four or five times in their lifetimes. And, yes, it also allowed for incompetents to featherbed (goof off) for years in companies that didn't care about such things. Was the good worth the bad? I don't know, but I tend to think so.

The computer industry seems never to have been stable enough to produce a cadre of dedicated people whose entire careers could be given over to enforcing computer security for one firm. I'm sure there are such people, but in the nature of the business they've changed jobs several times, especially if they're good, and being dedicated to the good of an industry is a different thing from dedication to a stable group of people in one organization. But my metaphorical hat is off to those guardians of our credit card numbers, whoever they are and whoever they have worked for, who are constantly on the lookout for the activities of people like Albert Gonzales. May their numbers increase—securely.

Sources: Lately the Associated Press, with reasons that are not hard to imagine, has taken to putting sternly-worded copyright notices at the end of their articles, almost no matter where they appear. While they have every right to do so (and since this is a blog on engineering ethics I will attempt to honor their intentions), avoiding any piece of news that happens to appear under an Associated Press byline may get rather dicey at times. At any rate, this blog used material posted on August 18 at ABCNews.com at http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=8351894, and background from other sources.

Engineering and Labor: A Road Not Taken

2009-09-07T04:38:00.000-07:00

On this Labor Day (as observed in the U. S.), let's consider how engineering has affected the way people work to earn a living, and how the way things have turned out may not necessarily be the best of all possible worlds, at least not for everyone.

Since its inception in the 1800s, modern engineering has assumed the characteristics or goals of the age which gave it birth: "individual achievement, efficiency, progress, faith in science, material comfort, equality, and freedom." This list was taken from a sociological study of families in modern society, but it applies equally well to the goals toward which much of modern engineering strives. Last Saturday I visited a place where these values are not ignored, exactly, but subordinated to a different set of values: "respect for human life, sexual restraint, patriarchy, devotion to family, and love of neighbor." This second list comes from the same source as the first, and despite some negative connotations that some of the terms such as patriarchy have acquired, I think they apply fairly to the place I visited, with some exceptions.

On a few hundred acres of land west of Waco, Texas, a Christian community called Heritage Ministries is trying an ongoing experiment in how to live out the Christian life in a way that puts people, relationships, and family ahead of efficiency, economics, politics, and productivity. That may sound easy, but it's not. The path these folks have chosen is similar to the way the Amish communities in Pennsylvania and elsewhere live, but without many of the rigidities and divisive religious infights that have characterized the Amish. I'm sure the Heritage folks have had their family arguments, but in my very limited exposure to them (a few visits and the reading of one publication), I haven't seen any. Instead, what I see is a way of life that both appeals to me and denies most of what I as an engineer live for.

Let me explain with an example or two. Unlike some Amish communities, the Heritage community welcomes visitors to their retail establishments where they sell samples of what they make: everything from handmade soap to five-thousand-dollar handcrafted rocking chairs. On the day we visited, a team of young men and their sons was squeezing sorghum cane in an old-fashioned mule-powered mill. The juice ran downhill through a pipe to a boiling vat tended by six or eight young ladies and a man who fed the wood fire under the boiler. He told me they had farmed about three acres of cane and expected to make several thousand pints of finished sorghum.

Now I don't know much about sugar cane processing, which is a somewhat different operation, but I'm sure that if you threw a few hundred thousand dollars' worth of capital at this situation, you could easily eliminate all but maybe a tenth of a worker by scaling up the operation to industrial size. A large, modern, efficient sugar processing plant could handle what the little Heritage crew took all day to process in about half a minute. As an engineer, I couldn't stop myself from thinking these ways-to-do-it-better thoughts as I watched the laborious process before me.

It's not that the Heritage people are ignorant, or arbitrarily rejecting every advance in technology made after 1850. They drive cars, use computers, and while I was walking the grounds I nearly tripped over some CAT5 computer cable left over from when they networked their cash registers during one of their semiannual fairs. But their strong belief in " a certain simplicity of lifestyle, a rootedness in the land, [and] an emphasis on family and intentional community" makes them eschew large modern capital investments whenever it tends to separate the worker from the thing worked, and from other workers.

As Heritage leader Blair Adams says in the booklet What We Believe, "a craft, as distinct from a manufacture, can express the inner person for the very reason that he becomes so directly involved in it. And as far as what constitutes 'a waste of time and effort,' money doesn't seem to us the best cirterion for establishing the worth of one's 'time and effort.' To us, meaning and fulfillment provide much better criteria."

In recent years, Heritage and similar communities have benefited from the increased popularity of organically grown foods, the urge to buy local produce, and renewed interest in crafts and other off-the-grid attempts to be less dependent on the global economy. These things are good as far as they go, but a simple analysis shows that they can only go so far. If everybody tried to buy local produce, thus reducing the distance food is shipped, historian James McWilliams has shown that the carbon footprint of food production would actually increase overall because of differences in climate, agricultural technology, and other factors, not to mention the market disruptions it would cause. So for that and many other reasons, it would not be practical for everyone, or even most of the world's urban population, to live the way the Heritage people live. But does that mean it's wrong?

I don't think so. The Heritage community views the way they live as a silent witness to the power of God in Christ Jesus—a way of preaching without words. But regardless of one's beliefs, they show that many of the things we as engineers regard as vitally necessary—labor-saving machinery, cost-effectiveness, and the latest technology—do not play a big role in a whole way of life that, from all outward appearances, is at least as satisfying and enjoyable as our modern, individualistic, grid-dependent one is. And that is a reminder worth bearing in mind.

Sources: The two sociological quotations are from p. 85 of Allan Carlson's From Cottage to Work Station (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), in which he cited the work of sociologist William D'Antonio. The quotations in the paragraph that mentions What We Believe are from the booklet of that title by Blair Adams (Elm Mott, Texas: Colloquium Press Trust, 2005). An article by James McWilliams describing the problems of being a "locavore" can be found in the online edition of Forbes Magazine at http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0803/opinions-energy-locavores-on-my-mind.html.

The Cost of High-Tech Medical Imaging

2009-08-31T05:00:00.000-07:00

As federal health-care reform bills make their tortuous way through Congress in September, one aspect of medical care that engineers should pay attention to concerns the cost of procedures that use expensive pieces of equipment such as CT-scan X-ray machines and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) systems. A recent op-ed piece by a group of medical experts pointed out that one reason we have the most expensive health-care system in the world (by many measures), is that we spend a lot of money on high-tech tests that really don't make people healthier. A study of CT scans in Cedar Rapids, Iowa revealed that in the community of 300,000 people, about 52,000 CT scans were administered in only one year. And that's below the national average, which is even worse. One thing that makes it easy to spend that money is the fact that high-end medical equipment is very expensive, both in terms of initial installation and operating costs. Why is that?

From an engineering point of view, medical imaging combines several factors to make a kind of perfect storm of expense. In the case of a CT-scan machine, you are dealing with X-rays, which require precisely controlled high voltages to generate, and a large array of precision detectors. MRI machines don't use X-rays, but instead they need something even more exotic and hard to generate: precisely controlled magnetic fields of tremendous intensity, which can only be produced with superconducting magnets that use liquid helium. Liquid helium is a costly, exotic material that has to be renewed regularly and needs a whole infrastructure to obtain. So even before you have your data, you've spent a lot of money just generating it. Besides that, a lot of intensive computation is needed to produce the images, but with computer and software costs falling these days, the computational aspect is probably the only part of the system that's cheaper than it used to be. Not just anybody can operate a CT-scan or MRI machine: you require highly trained radiologists or technicians who are familiar with safety requirements and the details of how to acquire good images. These people don't come cheap. Finally, every engineer knows that any piece of equipment's price goes up significantly if it is to be used in medicine. There are special safety and other regulations that medical equipment must meet, and the medical-equipment market is a strange and narrow one compared to, for example, consumer electronics. For all these reasons and more, the typical CT scan device goes for between $150,000 and $300,000, while a whole-body MRI machine will set you back more than a megabuck. And that doesn't count maintenance and operating costs.

Considering all this, it doesn't sound like there's much chance to develop really cheap MRI or CT-scan machines operated by the consumer, which after all would be one way to fix the cost problem. The last consumer-operated X-ray machines were the shoe-store fluoroscopes, now banned because they were dangerous, and rightly so. But suppose Congress succeeds in changing the business model of health care, so that we move away from the present system in which each MRI or CT-scan machine is like a piece of factory equipment whose owners are obliged to operate at full capacity in order to recoup their investment. What if we break the connection between the number of procedures and tests done, and the money taken in, so that it is not so direct as it is today? What consequences might this have for the future of high-tech engineering in health care?

For some reason, I find myself thinking about the computers used by the U. S. Postal Service. That agency does use computers, though it was probably not a national leader in pioneering business applications of computers. My impression is that whoever makes the USPS's computers (I'm talking about the little systems the retail clerks use at local post offices) won that contract a long time ago and has jealously guarded it ever since. Innovation and competition is not a big feature of this deal, I suspect. I have no particular complaints about how the Postal Service uses computers, but they could probably do better.

I pick the Postal Service because their near-monopoly status (at least in terms of small-town facilities nationwide) means their revenue is not that sensitive to the amount of money they spend on innovative technologies. Most of us have seen billboards in big cities advertising the latest and greatest medical testing equipment that thus-and-so hospital system has. Those billboards are there for a reason. You don't see billboards advertising the latest computer system that the Postal Service just bought, because it wouldn't make them any more money.

I'm not saying we should leave the present medical system alone, because it's not perfect, and I agree that we probably waste a lot of money on needless procedures that help pay for too many expensive pieces of medical imaging equipment. But every kind of system has advantages and drawbacks. If health-care providers—private and public—can no longer directly recover capital expenses in a fee-for-service way, they will quit spending so much money on high-tech equipment. Maybe that's a good thing, to a degree. But I wouldn't want to go to the opposite extreme that would remind me of a doctor I once went to who prided himself on how long he could keep his semi-antique EKG machine going. The thing was at least thirty years old, and I had to wait an extra five minutes while the tubes warmed up. I felt like I was participating in a historic re-creation of the invention of electrocardiograms, and it did not impress me favorably.

The trick in this aspect of health-care reform is to negotiate the macro-ethics of finding a happy medium between overuse of expensive technology (which is probably where we are now) and underspending to the point that we fall behind the leading edge of technology, depriving some patients of newer procedures simply because we didn't spend the money on them. A thriving technology sector is a delicate thing, and while cost containment is good, we don't want to reduce spending so much that leading-edge medical imaging companies simply decide to leave the market. That would be a loss not only for us in the United States, but worldwide if such companies lead the global market too.

I'm glad I'm not having to make these decisions, but I hope the congressional staffers working on this decide carefully, and are willing to change course if things don't turn out the way they hoped. Any feedback loop that goes through the Congress and the President has a very long delay time, and so we better hope they get it right the first time, because fixing it might take quite a while.

Sources: The article "10 Steps to Better Health Care," in which the statistic on the Cedar Rapids CT scans appears, is from the online edition of the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/opinion/13gawande.html.

Lessons from Russian Hydroelectric Plant Accident

2009-08-24T04:24:00.000-07:00

Most of the time, hydroelectric plants are one of the safest ways to generate electricity. The technology has been well established for a century or more, there are few toxic substances or chemicals involved, pollution and other environmental problems are at a minimum, and all in all, hydropower is a pretty benign enterprise. But on Aug. 17, a week ago today, Russia's largest hydropower facility, the Sayano-Shushenskaya plant in Siberia, experienced a massive explosion and flood that at last report killed at least 69 people, knocked out the entire facility, and sent an oil slick down river for miles. What happened?

According to the Wikipedia website on the plant, there have been four major accidents including this one since construction was completed in 1978. The earlier mishaps in 1979, 1985, and 1988 were caused by spring floods that overwhelmed the dam's capacity. This does not give one a positive feeling about the overall balance of the system design. Again according to Wikipedia, the sequence of events last week apparently went like this.

The way a hydroelectric dam works is to direct water under high pressure to turbines. Of course, this means you have a lot of pipes, valves, and regulator mechanisms, and great quantities of water flowing at high speeds and pressures. Somehow a "water hammer" developed in the system. This is basically the same kind of thing you will sometimes hear in domestic plumbing when a toilet or washing-machine valve shuts off suddenly. Moving water has inertia, and when a column of water moving in a confined place suddenly has nowhere to go, the energy stored in the water's motion turns into a sudden pressure surge that makes the pounding noise. In homes, this is usually no more than an annoyance, but at a hydropower facility, the much larger volumes and energies involved can have serious consequences. Well-designed plants have surge absorbers of various kinds installed to prevent this sort of thing, but either the Sayano-Shushenskaya plant didn't have the right kind, they didn't work right, or perhaps an operator error caused a water hammer that exceeded the system's capacity to deal with it.

In any event, a severe water hammer ruptured a conduit leading to a turbine, immediately flooding the engine room and turbine room. This would have been bad enough, but apparently the flood caused a transformer to explode. Transformers used in power plants are filled with oil for insulation and cooling purposes. Ideally this oil is non-flammable, but the high cost of non-flammable oil sometimes means that flammable kinds are used. Whether or not a fire resulted, the explosion wrecked a large area of the turbine hall, apparently breaching outside walls, as some photographs show. As of Sunday, 69 bodies had been recovered from the wreckage, making this the worst hydropower accident in recent memory.

The worst regional consequences of this accident involve the oil slick previously mentioned, and the economic harm to Siberia's aluminum-smelting industry, which used 70% of the power-plant's output. These, while serious, are nothing like the global effects of the Chernobyl disaster, which also involved a power plant in the former Soviet Union. That 1986 accident was caused by operator error at the nuclear facility and emitted tons of highly radioactive material into the air. Nevertheless, I believe more people died in the hydropower incident than died immediately following the Chernobyl accident, so in that sense the hydropower disaster was worse.

Normally, hydroelectric plants do not need large numbers of personnel, especially in areas of the plant that could become hazardous if something went wrong. Small hydroplants can go for days or weeks under totally automatic operation with no personnel present at all, and while a huge facility like the Sayano-Shushenskaya plant would need some operators, it is at least odd that seventy or more people were in harm's way when the explosion occurred. Perhaps this is a legacy of the old Soviet Union days when facilities were often designed to maximize employment rather than efficiency or profit. If that is the case, I hope operators of similar plants realize that even hydroplants are dangerous places, and allowing large numbers of employees to congregate in places that could be flooded if something went wrong, is a bad policy.

If the operation records can be reconstructed, we can eventually discover the cause of the fatal water hammer—whether it was a design flaw, an operator mistake, or a combination. And while I am no hydroelectric-plant designer, floods are fairly easy to model, and if there was some way to keep transformers from exploding in the event of a flood, taking such measures would have at least mitigated the size of last week's accident.

Our sympathies are with those who lost loved ones and friends in the Sayano-Shushenskaya accident. If we can learn that even apparently safe facilities such as hydroelectric plants have their hazards, and prevent such accidents in the future, they will not have died in vain.

Sources: The Wikipedia article referred to is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayano–Shushenskaya_hydroelectric_power_station, and is being updated currently as more information emerges. I also referred to news articles on the disaster at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090818/ap_on_re_eu/eu_russia_power_plant and http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_RUSSIA_POWER_PLANT?SITE=MOSTP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT.

Carbon Sequestration: Worth the Trouble?

2009-08-16T17:12:00.000-07:00

In August of 1986, over 1700 villagers living as far away as 25 km from Cameroon's Lake Nyos died when a mysterious, invisible suffocating cloud enveloped them. They were victims of one of the two known limnic eruptions in recorded history. For years, the waters of Lake Nyos had absorbed carbon dioxide from underground sources, probably volcanic in origin. Because of temperature differences in the lake, the gas-saturated water remained at the bottom until something, possibly as insignificant as high winds, triggered a lake turnover. Once the eruption began, the lake began to boil like a soft-drink bottle you leave out in the sun and open by mistake. A giant cloud of carbon dioxide spilled out of the lake and smothered people and animals for miles around.

This is the same compound that, if numerous carbon sequestration projects now underway are successful, will be buried under tremendous pressure in dozens or hundreds of locations all over the world. The question is: will it stay there?

Ever since humans discovered fire, we have been adding to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Until the 1800s, the quantity of carbon dioxide humans put into the air was negligible compared to that contributed by natural causes such as forest fires and volcanic activity. The concern with rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, of course, is that it tends to raise the Earth's temperature, other things being equal (which they never are). There is a general scientific consensus that (a) human activity has caused much if not most of the rise in carbon dioxide levels in the past two hundred years and (b) this will cause some increase in the Earth's average temperature, though how much and for how long is a matter of debate. Some theories even posit that a short temperature rise will trigger an instability that will wind us up in another Ice Age a few decades afterwards. Whatever actually happens, the political fact these days is that reducing one's carbon footprint has become a virtue, while emitting carbon, even for a good cause such as bringing the blessings of electric power to poor people, is a sin.

The business world has seen the politicians writing "cap-and-trade" on the wall, and so there is big private money to be made in developing systems that will capture the carbon dioxide generated when fossil fuels (most notably coal) are burned in power plants. A French firm called Alstom is currently building several pilot plants around the country, including one attached to a coal-fired power plant in New Haven, West Virginia.

The technology itself is rather clever. After cooling and washing the flue gas with cold water, they bubble it through a solution of ammonium bicarbonate (contains hydrogen) and ammonium carbonate (no hydrogen). Nearly all the carbon dioxide combines with the ammonium radicals. They pump the fizz-rich liquid under pressure to a heater where the carbon dioxide boils off and is compressed to send it underground. And there, in my opinion, the real trouble begins.

Never mind that the whole pile of machinery is doing something that engineers of an earlier era would have considered ludicrous: capturing the main gaseous combustion product and shooting it underground. The operation adds nothing to the efficiency of the plant, takes a fair amount of energy itself, and creates a long-term hazard compared to which nuclear waste is relatively harmless.

Look at it this way: would you rather live five miles from some well-shielded solid radioactive stuff whose emissions can't even be detected outside the plant boundaries, and which will just sit there and gradually cool off for the next few hundred years; or, would you like to live an equal distance from the wellhead of a giant underground reservoir which, if released, will suddenly spew out and make Lake Nyos look like a minor traffic accident? For my money, I'll take the nuclear stuff any day.

Presumably, geologists have been careful to select locations where the underground carbon dioxide is relatively safe and isolated. Okay, but our experience with large underground gas reservoirs of artificial origin is limited, to say the least. While natural gas has been stored underground for many years (often in depleted gas fields, not coincidentally), the two cases are significantly different. For one thing, natural gas storage is limited to transient market-related storage needs, and so the pressures and volumes required are relatively modest. By contrast, carbon sequestration will be "permanent"—the whole point is to send it down there and make it stay there indefinitely. If it escapes to the atmosphere we are back at Square One after spending billions of dollars for nothing, plus quite likely having numbers of dead citizens on our hands. The pressures and volumes eventually needed for carbon sequestration, if carried out on a large scale, will dwarf the current natural-gas underground storage facilities. While I am unaware of any major accidents that have happened with underground natural gas storage, there may have been some. Of course, carbon dioxide doesn't burn and natural gas does, but suffocation from a non-flammable gas makes you just as dead as if you had burned to death.

What makes a whole lot more sense from a technical point of view is to replace coal-fired power plants with nuclear plants as fast as we can. Nuclear energy generates zero carbon emissions, the nuclear waste problem is manageable even without the ill-fated Yucca Mountain disposal facility that the Obama Administration recently axed, and there are no particular concerns about running out of nuclear fuel any time soon. If we get low we can switch to the kind of reactor that makes more than it consumes.

That is the technical reality. But the political reality right now, which engineers as well as everyone else has to deal with, is that nuclear power is under the same emotion-laden mushroom cloud that has characterized it ever since nuclear weapons ended World War II, and has never freed itself from the almost superstitious fear that the word "nuclear" inspires in many people. Some of that fear has now been transferred to plain old carbon dioxide, a gas which each living human being emits every time we take a breath. When you end up being afraid of yourself, there's no place to hide.

It is still early in the carbon sequestration business, and there is time for the political winds to change before we all get burdened by carbon cap-and-trade taxes to pay for giant sequestration plants that send carbon dioxide into the ground, only to have some of it pop up one day in an unexpected place. Let's hope that cooler heads prevail and we reach a consensus that does sensible things about carbon emissions without burying a lot of unwelcome surprises for our descendants.

Sources: A good article originating at the Washington Post, describing the technology and politics of the carbon sequestration process pioneered by Alstom can be found at http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/business/s_638488.html. A description of the geology surrounding the Lake Nyos disaster can be found at http://www.cevl.msu.edu/~long/nyos.htm.

Twitter and Facebook Silenced by Russo-Georgian Cyberspat

2009-08-10T05:41:00.000-07:00

You didn't quite see it here first (as usual, the New York Times seems to be the best source), but just last week we were writing about how cyberwars could cause serious collateral damage. Well, according to the Times, last Thursday millions of users of the social-media sites Twitter and LiveJournal had their service disrupted for the simple reason that a professor in the country of Georgia (formerly part of the old USSR) aroused the ire of some hackers whose malware-spawning abilities were way ahead of their good judgment. The 34-year-old economics professor was posting some nostalgic photos and recollections about the Russia-Georgia conflict of August 2008 when he noticed that the LiveJournal site he was using had gone bad. He tried switching to Facebook, which was also jammed, and then Twitter, which also flaked out for him. It took him a while to learn that he was the main reason that these sites were targeted by a distributed-denial-of-service attack that not only kept him from using them, but disconnected many millions of other users around the world as well. One expert said it was like bombing a TV station because you didn't like one of the newscasters.

Social media have taken on the roles formerly held exclusively by major news outlets with amazing speed. In Iran, during a June 20 election protest a young woman named Neda Agha Soltan was shot and killed. Cell-phone videos of the incident spread around the world to make her the iconic figure of the rebellion, and social media were crucial in this process.

So far, no one is relying on Twitter for much more than entertainment, unless you count a few businesses and advertisers. And so having it disappear for a few hours is nothing compared to finding a terrorist's bomb planted by a railroad line, for example. The argument I hear is that sooner or later, we will have life-critical systems that depend on the Internet in a way that hasn't happened yet, and that's when cyberwars will get serious.

There are several possible ways this situation could go in the future.

One is that engineers who design life-critical systems, keenly aware of the less-than-perfect reliability and security of Internet-based communications, will continue to take precautions that no matter what happens on the Internet, nobody will die as a consequence. That is more or less the case now, at least judging by the absence of fatal outcomes from cyberwars so far.

A second possibility is that cyberattackers will get much more sophisticated and go after hardened systems such as banks and military networks. These are much harder to crack than sites that put a lower priority on security, but determined and disciplined attacks, perhaps using dedicated cyberwar server farms rather than the rather flaky botnets, might cause serious disruptions which would be economically equivalent to blowing up a large number of office buildings (minus the people). Say somebody got hold of a bank's network and messed it up so thoroughly with misinformation and garbage transactions that it would take weeks to straighten it out, and in the meantime no electronic transactions could take place through that bank. This could effectively ruin a financial institution, unless the government stepped in to help, and we're seeing what a mixed bag that can be. And like other terrorist acts, you don't have to shut down the entire system. There is probably a psychological trigger point for bank runs, and the terrorists would only have to reach that point. Mass panic—millions of people lining up at money machines to get cash all at once—would do the rest.

Nobody would get killed, unless maybe in the crush of people around the ATMs, but you would still have an outcome equivalent in economic terms to a physical bombing.

A third scenario is something that I suppose most computer experts believe can't happen: a total freeze-up of the Internet. This might not be as bad as you think. Back when international communications were restricted to submarine cables and radio, every now and then the Earth would be hit by a geomagnetic storm caused by solar flares. Big ones occasionally caused so much surge current in undersea cables as to render them useless, and the ionosphere would get so trashed that long-distance radio channels would go down as well. In really severe storms, domestic telegraph and telephone long-distance lines would see some trouble as well. For a day or two, we'd be back in the early 19th century when the fastest message from London to New York took about a week by sea. The world survived these incidents, nevertheless, and although international commerce was a smaller portion of each nation's economy back then, I think the consequences of a worldwide Internet freeze-up might not be as bad as you might think at first, as long as it didn't last too long.

But if it took more than 24 hours or so to restore service, or if it was a patchwork thing that took weeks to get everyone back to normal, then the consequences would be severe. Just as a lot of the damage from 9/11 was to economic interests in terms of lost airline revenue, depressed retail sales, and so on, the same sort of thing would happen during and after an Internet freeze-up. So it's worthwhile at least thinking about how to prevent such a thing, or how to survive it in case it ever happens.

In the meantime, let's hope that the worst cyberattacks are no worse than last week's Twitter and Facebook scares. Personally, while there are some people I might like to get back in touch with via Facebook, the prospect of hearing unexpectedly from certain others has led me to leave the whole thing alone for the time being, so I didn't miss them. But we'll see how long I can hide.

Sources: The New York Times article on the Georgian cyberattack is at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/08/technology/internet/08twitter.html?_r=2&hpw.

Cyberwars: From Plans to Reality

2009-08-03T04:08:00.000-07:00

A report in the New York Times recently revealed that the U. S. military has already engaged to a limited degree in "cyberwar": attacks on an enemy's communications and computer networks. On two separate occasions, attempts were made to disrupt communications networks: one in Serbia in the late 1990s, and another during the early hours of the attack on Iraq in 2003. Both missions were at least partly successful, but both also caused collateral damage in the form of communications disruptions in nations that were not targeted for attack. The same report also described a much more ambitious plan to freeze Iraq's financial system electronically, but the Bush administration vetoed the idea over fears that it might cause a widespread financial panic. As was demonstrated last fall, inaction can just as easily cause widespread financial panic, but that is worlds away from deliberately fouling up a country's banking system. Nevertheless, the fact that we are already in a world where cyberwar is part of the armamentarium may be news to many people, including engineers.

As we mentioned in this space not long ago, the technology of cyberwar has outpaced the legal and moral traditions that govern, or at least address, the conduct of conventional warfare. Clearly, doing something to the Internet that would disrupt services to large numbers of people outside the territory under attack is not a good idea, which is one reason the Bush administration may have restrained themselves from putting Iraq's financial system in the deep freeze. But other issues related to cyberwar are less clear-cut than this.

Consider the principle that military forces should be clearly identifiable (wearing uniforms, etc.). This idea is routinely violated by terrorists, who like to fade into the background of ordinary citizenry, and also by cyberattackers, who are experts at hiding their true identity and whereabouts. I suppose you could leave return addresses in plain text in viruses designed to attack enemy networks, but I somehow doubt anyone is worrying about this.

A more serious consideration is the distinction between civilian and military populations. Until about 1900, it was not considered cricket to target civilian populations in warfare. This rule went by the board in a big way during World War II, when bombers on both sides began carpet-bombing attacks on cities without special regard for limiting their targets to sites of strategic significance. Since then, the principle of no attacks on civilians has received occasional lip service, but that's about all. It's very hard to imagine how a cyberattack could sort out only strategically important computers from those belonging to the average citizen, but maybe as the technology progresses, this sort of thing would be easier to do. The planned but never executed attack on Iraq's financial system would not have discriminated between a paycheck for a general and a payment for a bottle of milk, so clearly we have a ways to go in this regard.

The Obama Administration has said it is going to name a cyberwar czar who will try to centralize activities concerning cybersecurity and related matters. But so far no one has been nominated to the post, and we'll have to wait and see what happens once that person is in place. If history is any guide, this office will languish in obscurity until a major cyberattack causes serious damage to U. S. interests. Then there will be enough political steam generated to get something done, although the horse will have left the barn by then.

Fortunately, defending against cyberattacks is something that we have lots of experience with, since the field of computer science seems to have been born with a native proclivity to spawn hackers of all descriptions who like nothing better than to tear down what other programmers have spent months or years constructing. I don't know why this field is so hacker-prone, but the practical outcome is that we have lots of private-enterprise expertise already that knows how to defend against a variety of attacks, and these experts even work in a coordinated fashion most of the time. Let's hope that whatever the government does will not cripple this advantage, but instead will build upon it and encourage even better cooperation than we have already.

I wish the world was a place where computers and networks were used only for good and productive purposes. But anytime something of value comes into being, somebody is going to get jealous or greedy and want to use it as a pawn in conflicts and wars. The Internet and modern telecommunications systems are a part of our lives now, and so we need to think about how to defend them, and if need be, attack them along with other kinds of infrastructure that is the focus of war. So far, the worst consequences of cyberattacks have been financial losses and inconvenience. Let's hope that with wise planning and forethought, nothing worse will happen to us in this area.

Sources: The New York Times article " Halted ’03 Iraq Plan Illustrates U.S. Fear of Cyberwar Risk" appeared in the Aug. 1, 2009 online edition at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/us/politics/02cyber.html. Full disclosure: as I will mention every now and then, my wife works for About.com, a division of the New York Times Company.

Smashup at an Atom Smasher in Europe

2009-07-27T04:52:00.000-07:00

Accidents at high-energy physics labs do not normally make the news. But when the lab is the European Union's crown jewel consortium CERN, and the accident puts their latest and greatest accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, out of commission for up to a year, the incident is worthy of wider attention than it has gotten so far.

America used to dominate the field of experimental physics, as our first-out-of-the-gate development of nuclear weapons proved. But with the political collapse of the Superconducting Supercollider project, a Texas-based particle accelerator that was cancelled in 1993, the world leadership in high-energy experimental physics began to move to Europe, where last September the Large Hadron Collider was being put through its initial tests.

State-of-the-art particle accelerators are some of the most complex experimental systems ever built. The LHC resides in an underground tunnel 17 miles in circumference under the border between France and Switzerland. The basic idea is to shove atomic nuclei around a huge evacuated pipe with the aid of strong electromagnetic fields and the guidance of monstrous superconducting magnets that have to be submerged in tons of liquid helium. Such enterprises are of course very costly in comparison to more modest laboratory equipment, but a $5 billion expenditure these days when the U. S. Congress is cogitating about health-care programs costing 200 times that much doesn't seem like a lot of money. Nevertheless, you want to protect your investment even if it is only $5 billion, and that seems to be what got damaged the most in last fall's accident.

Superconducting magnets are used because once you get current running in them, no electrical power supply is needed for the magnet itself. To produce the tremendous magnetic fields needed with conventional magnets would require prohibitive amounts of power. But running a superconducting magnet is not a trivial task. The LHC's magnets have to be cooled down to about two degrees C above absolute zero, and only large amounts of liquid helium can do that. So CERN became the world's largest user of helium in its attempt to cool down all the magnets for their inaugural run of the LHC last September.

Nine days after the tests began, an electrical connection between two superconducting magnets apparently failed. In a normal magnet, this would not be that much of a big deal, since an open connection would just cause maybe a transient electrical discharge and then the whole thing would shut down. But with a superconducting magnet, a bad connection causes heat. Heat causes a superconductor to abandon its main desirable property, which is to be superconducting with no resistance. Once some resistance shows up, that generates more heat because the current cannot stop instantaneously in a large magnet. The heat boils off more helium, more of the magnet heats up and gets resistive, and you have a great big vicious circle called a "quench."

Being very large magnets, the LHC units quenched in a big way. The helium pressure was so high it blew all the way into the vacuum tunnel and spread insulation and trash everywhere. Since CERN policy is to clear the tunnel of personnel any time tests like this are going on, no one was injured. But successive press releases in the weeks and months after the accident cited longer and longer delays before the system could be up and running again. As of this writing (July 2009) repairs are still being made, and hopes now are that the LHC can go online again sometime this fall.

While the CERN managers are to be congratulated that this accident didn't hurt or kill anyone, having a multi-billion-dollar machine damage itself to the extent that it takes a year to fix is not exactly wise use of resources either. Any system as complex as the LHC will do unexpected things when first fired up, and CERN has decided to install fault detectors as part of the repair process that will give advance warning of a possible quench condition in the future. This is wise, prudent, and consistent with the highest engineering ethics principles. We just hope it will prevent such accidents in the future.

Which brings us to the larger question: what is all this billions of dollars of machinery and personnel good for? The holy grail of high-energy physics research right now is a thing called the Higgs boson, named after one of the six or seven theoretical physicists who thought of the concept in 1963 and 1964 (somebody had to be first, and it was Peter Higgs). According to the most widely accepted model of subatomic particles, called the Standard Model, the Higgs boson somehow gives mass to all elementary particles (such as electrons, I suppose) that have mass. No one knows how heavy this Higgs boson is, but guesses range from about the weight of a silver atom's nucleus on up. The problem with making really heavy particles like this in a particle accelerator like the LHC is, you need a lot of energy per particle. Current machines can get up to 120 billion electron-volts of energy (120 GeV) into a particle, and the LHC is supposed to reach values about ten times higher. When it finally works. So hopes are high that at long last the elusive Higgs boson will show its face, or tracks, or however they plan to catch one.

Fortunately, nobody has yet had to die for the chance to discover the Higgs boson. But a lot of people have put a lot of effort and money into looking for it, and now after the accident they're having to wait an extra year. Some may look at such work and criticize it on the basis that hey, people are starving in Rwanda and we're spending billions on chasing some pencil-pusher's pipe dream? But the fact that humankind can contemplate the universe and expend lots of energy searching for purely abstract products of the intellect such as the Higgs boson, is one of the things that distinguishes us from animals. I for one wish the CERN workers first safety, then success in their search. But being a Texan, I also wish we'd finished the Supercollider and made Higgs bosons first right here in Waxahachie.

Sources: Several news articles are available on the vicissitudes of the LHC accident. I used material from the U. S. LHC website http://blogs.uslhc.us/?p=393, an article in Discover Magazine online at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/02/10/until-next-fall-lhc-smashes-only-hopes-not-particles/, and one at the Big Science News blog at http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/09/lhc-quench-stops-cern-re-start-delayed.html. For an instructive news video of what an unplanned superconducting-magnet quench looks like, see the YouTube version of a report on a hospital's MRI magnet that blew up at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R7KsfosV-o.

The Third Pole of the Health-Care Debate

2009-07-20T05:05:00.000-07:00

In the current debate over how health care in the U. S. should be funded, no one seems to be talking in a first-principles way about the moral underpinnings of the system. As I've said before, technology and engineering are so heavily involved in modern health care that I think engineers are disingenuous if they say they don't have a dog in this fight.

Sometimes situations can be clarified by going to extremes. I will pick three extremes which I think represent the poles of what we could do about health-care funding, and then see what conclusions we can draw about the moral bases of each.

The first pole is the extreme-libertarian solution: get government totally out of health care and let people figure it out on their own. This would mean shutting down Medicare and Medicaid, selling off all government-run hospitals, and letting the chips (and the patients) fall where they might. I think even the most extreme libertarians might blanch at ending such long-established practices as the licensing of doctors, but maybe not. One of my cousins is a libertarian, and he hasn't blanched in years. Surprisingly, this solution might not make much difference to those who are employed at firms that provide good health benefits. But for retired people who have come to rely on government-paid health care, there would be big problems, as well as for many who can't afford private care or insurance for it. This solution maximizes individual freedom from government actions, but if you're poor or retired or both and can't afford medical care, you would be out of luck. This shows the radical individualism of libertarian philosophy, and why it is inferior as a total guide to life.

The second pole is the extreme-socialist solution as is done in Cuba, for example: free health care for everybody. Of course "free" means the government pays for it all, and Except for the sick folks that documentary filmmaker Michael Moore took along with him to Cuba as an example of how much better their health-care system is than ours, I'm not aware of a huge surge of people who travel to Cuba for their marvelous medical institutions or services. The fact is that any government, especially Cuba's, has finite resources, and when resources are allocated by bureaucrats rather than markets, the results are often less than optimal, even if there are enough resources to begin with, which in the case of Cuba is doubtful. This solution removes a person's economic status from the equation, at least in theory, but requires rationing, waiting lines, and a pretty low average level of quality. Besides which, it seems that government-run health care systems tend to encourage a psychological dependency on the state which some think is mentally unhealthy in the long run. As with most "free" offers, free medical care often comes with political enslavement.

Most debates about the subject seem to be focused on just where between these two poles we ought to land. But I think that leaves out a critical factor, which I will dignify with the designation of my third pole. It's not easy to think of a name for this pole that will not evoke negative connotations. Perhaps "charity" in the older sense of "love" would cover it. Many private and public hospitals provide services to indigent patients whose costs they absorb, which means that everybody else who uses the hospital helps pay for it. Historically, the idea of caring for the sick without consideration of cost was a founding principle of many medical institutions with religious backgrounds. Many hospitals were staffed by nuns who took vows of poverty. And I think when this motivation is present, it forms the best of all foundations for individual careers and institutional principles. Would you rather be treated by a doctor who went into the business because he wanted to help people, or because he could make a pile of money? Yes, skill is part of the equation, but skill is more than mere technical proficiency. Being a quality of character, charity does not fit easily into economic calculations or political structures. But the first two poles either discount it totally or regard it as an unreliable and suspect motivation that is best ignored in favor of government-run solutions to the problem.

Many religious leaders, up to and including Jesus, made healing a vital part of their ministries. I do not have all the answers to our health-care problems, but I think we should consider making more room for and encouraging those who provide care in the neighborhood of the third pole—people and institutions who help patients because it is the right thing to do, not just because they can make money at it or because the government compels them to. If the debate can center more around this idea, I think the outcome, whatever measures it takes from the other two poles, will be better than otherwise.

Cyber-Security and North Korea: Worth Worrying About?

2009-07-13T05:16:00.000-07:00

Beginning on July 4, numerous government and private websites in both South Korea and the U. S. succumbed temporarily to attacks by a shadowy entity suspected of connections with North Korea. Although the damage and disruption were temporary, this sort of thing may be a small wave of a big future for web-based warfare. But unlike conventional warfare, which has at least the restrictions of the Geneva Convention, cyber-warfare is so new that there are few international agreements about it, and even less agreement among those responsible in the U. S. as to what should be done to defend against it.

First, the attacks. According to the Wall Street Journal, they were "relatively unsophisticated," but that doesn't mean they weren't effective. The distributed denial-of-service attacks were carried out by large numbers of computers which harbored a virus that ordered them to flood the targeted websites with requests for service. It takes time for website operators to notice what's going on, get a fix on where it's coming from, computationally speaking, and devise work-arounds to restore service to legitimate users. In the case of these attacks, the time involved was as long as three to four days during which service was interrupted or degraded to some degree. Besides several government-operated websites in North Korea, U. S. websites operated by the Defense Department, the Federal Aviation Administration, and private entities such as the New York Stock Exchange and Amazon.com were attacked.

Although positive identification in these types of attacks is difficult, the timing and other characteristics of the attacks makes it likely that North Korea is responsible. North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il is in poor health and has not made public his plans for a transfer of power. That makes the normally volatile country even more unstable and likely to pull malicious pranks such as nuclear-weapons tests and missile firings, which have also occurred in recent months. But when should we quit calling these web attacks pranks and take them more seriously?

Cyber-warfare is the ultimate in modern conflicts. It resembles conventional terrorist actions such as suicide bombings in that its effects are large in proportion to the resources required, its perpetrators wear no uniforms and can blend into the civilian populace easily, and identifying even so broad a category as the country of origin for a cyber-attack is difficult, let alone finding the people responsible. As far as I know, no one has died as a direct consequence of a cyber-attack, although as more and more life-critical systems from medical care to power grids depend on the Internet, this may soon change. Websites accessible to the general public are the easiest targets, but the harm caused by disabling them is generally limited to loss of revenue or public access, which is inconvenient but not life-threatening.

We can expect that attackers will grow in sophistication and focus as time goes on. There is already some concern that critical infrastructure systems that use the Internet are more vulnerable to attack than they should be. But if history is any guide, we will coast along in blissful ignorance until someone wreaks real harm—death or destruction of large amounts of real property—before steps are taken to remedy these vulnerabilities.

Conventional wars were fought over physical objectives such as territory, natural resources, or lives. As much as many terrorists would like to, no one has yet figured out a way to kill you by means of your own computer, unless you count grabbing your laptop and lamming you over the head with it. There is a cautionary lesson here for those who would like to integrate their own bodies with the web by direct implants of nerve-stimulating devices in the brain and so on. If a computer does something I don't like, I can always walk away. But if it's wired permanently to my brain and some hacker gets his hands on it, I won't have that option. There's a sci-fi movie for you, but one I wouldn't want to watch.

President Obama, to his credit, appears to be the most web-savvy occupant of the White House so far. But his plans to name a cyber-czar in charge of government internet security have hung in limbo as he searches for a suitable candidate. It's not like the President has nothing else to do, but this may be one of those cases where we will wish he'd paid a little more attention to a low-profile matter at the expense of one more town-hall meeting on health care, for example.

All the same, I hope that such a czar will wear his or her authority lightly. One of the strengths of the Internet, and the cyberworld as a whole, is the way that highly distributed expertise works very effectively most of the time to remedy problems as they occur. It is an example of engineering ethics at work that is quiet, not flashy, but worthy of our attention nonetheless. The great majority of computer and networking experts have a vision of the way things ought to be that is both moral and efficient, and tend to work most of the time in cooperation with each other to keep things running well. But the strength of such distributed expertise is also its weakness, in that it takes only a few malicious people who grab the controls to mess things up. Let's hope that we can mount organized defenses against such attacks in time to thwart them before they cause the kind of headlines that 9/11 received.

Sources: I used information from the following articles on the recent cyber-attacks: a piece by Donald Kirk of the Christian Science Monitor at http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0708/p06s24-woap.html, and an article in the online edition of the Wall Street Journal by Siobhan Gorman and Evan Ramstad at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124701806176209691.html.

Exclusive: Why the Austin Scaffolding Fell

2009-07-06T04:50:00.000-07:00

On June 10 of this year, three construction workers died when a section of scaffolding collapsed at a construction site near the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. Because the accident resulted in deaths, personnel from the U. S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration began an investigation shortly thereafter. While it is the normal policy of OSHA not to divulge information on an investigation that is incomplete, leaks do occur. If you keep reading, you will be the beneficiary of one such leak. But first, some details about the accident.

Photographs published at the time showed that the scaffolding was a cantilevered box frame that extended several yards on either side of an elevator-type mechanism that allowed the whole thing to move up and down the side of the high-rise apartment complex under construction. Photos of units on the manufacturer's website show that the scaffolding can extend as far as 25 or 30 feet either side of the mast that supports it. The workers using the scaffolding walk along the frame to do whatever operations the construction job requires.

There's no particular mechanical-engineering magic to cantilevering. Like a branch of a tree that sticks out sideways, the box frame's unbalanced weight has to be supported by the central elevator. In particular, the bolts that keep the top of the box frame attached to the elevator unit are under tremendous tension, since the whole weight of the frame tends to pull the bolts away from the elevator. If these bolts aren't strong enough and fail, the scaffolding will fall away like a branch cracking off a dead tree. That is apparently what happened on June 10.

The following information is what the newspeople call an unconfirmed report from an anonymous source. But I believe it to be reliable. According to the source, the bolts used in the scaffolding that failed were not the required Grade 5 type. If you have ever bought bolts at a hardware store, you may have noticed little patterns of lines on the hexagonal bolt head. These are not just random forging marks. They indicate the quality of steel in the bolt, and in particular, the maximum stress the bolt can withstand. Grade 5 bolts have three embossed lines in a "Y" pattern on the bolt head, indicating that they can take up to 120,000 pounds per square inch of stress under certain defined conditions. Cheaper bolts with no head markings are available. For example, Grade 1 bolts have only about half the stress capacity of Grade 5.

Assuming my source is correct, how did the wrong bolts get there? To answer that question requires that we move from the realm of science to the realm of human behavior. The problem could lie anywhere from the manufacturer of the scaffolding, to the general contractor for the site, to the subcontractor who installed the scaffolding, to the subcontractor's employees who put it together, to someone else who might have lost the Grade 5 bolts and substituted others without knowing the danger it would cause. Presumably the OSHA investigators are also working on this angle of the problem, which will require extensive interviews and inquiries which may never reach a satisfactory conclusion. But this shows the vital importance of apparently minor details, such as three little lines on a bolt head, to the safety of construction workers who probably had nothing to do with the assembly of the scaffolding.

A subsequent news article in the Austin American-Statesman pointed out that Texas has one of the worst records in the U. S. for construction-related fatalities. Pay rates are low, some construction employers opt out of workers' compensation insurance, and since OSHA primarily investigates complaints lodged by workers, the workers have to be their own safety inspectors. Since many speak only Spanish and some are undocumented, their reluctance to undertake this role is understandable. Simply identifying the next of kin of the workers killed in this accident was a challenge to authorities, since their families lived in small towns in Mexico.

How can accidents like this be prevented in the future?

This incident shows how vital the "soft" technologies of training, inspection, and good management can be to safety improvements. Even if we give the benefit of the doubt to the contractor and subcontractors by assuming the use of the cheaper bolts was accidental, the accident reveals a grave deficiency in the way supplies are inventoried and assembly procedures are carried out. No human-operated process can be made 100% foolproof, but if certain bolts have to be Grade 5 in order for a scaffold to be assembled safely, there must be a way to make sure that only Grade 5 bolts go into the system. Simple things like matching spray-paint colors or other wordless guidelines can go far to prevent tragedies like this, especially where non-English speaking employees are involved.

Such measures come too late for the three workers who died when the less expensive bolts apparently failed. But I hope as more details emerge, the lessons of how to avoid this kind of accident won't be lost on those who are in a position to make sure their employees and subcontractors have a safe working environment.

Sources: My source for the bolt information is anonymous for the simple reason that I do not know his name. Published information on the scaffolding collapse can be found on the Austin American-Statesman website at http://www.statesman.com/search/content/news/stories/local/2009/06/17/0617construction.html. Information on the grades of bolts available can be found at http://www.engineershandbook.com/Tables/boltgrades.htm.

If We Fixed Cars In the U. S. the Way We Fix People

2009-06-29T03:16:00.000-07:00

You would typically get auto insurance (including insurance for major repairs) as an employment benefit, and you'd never see the money. If you lost your job, you'd either have to buy very expensive insurance on the open market, or just hope your car didn't break down before you got another job.

If you had insurance, all you'd have to pay at the repair shop would be a small copayment of twenty or thirty dollars. The insurance would cover the rest.

Many people with a car problem would first have to take their car to their primary care mechanic (PCM), no matter what was wrong. If it was the brakes, your PCM would have to write you a referral to a brake specialist before you could get your brakes fixed. Of course, you could just pay for the repair yourself, but that would cost many thousands of dollars.

You could do minor repairs yourself, but for something major like a new starter, you couldn't just walk into the parts store and buy a new one. You'd first have to get a handwritten note from your PCM. Then you'd take the note to a special parts store that has college-trained salespeople licensed to sell the higher grades of auto parts, and buy the part from one of them.

Every auto repair shop would have huge filing cabinets with multicolored file tabs sticking out of them, one file for each car. All the important records on your car would be written by hand.

Minor repairs would be made in small shops, but major repairs would take place in a few giant facilities in each metropolitan area, where hundreds of cars would be collected together for repairs. Getting an estimate for repairs at one of these mega-shops would be next to impossible. Instead, you just take your car in, wait till they fix it, and hope your insurance will pay for it.

Reading a repair bill would be an exercise in mystification. Even professional accountants couldn't explain why the repair shop would charge $674.92 for replacing a U-joint, the auto insurance would pay $407.17, and you would end up owing $103.37.

Mechanics would check for the most unlikely problems even when the issue was a simple one. You might take your car in because the wiper blades needed replacing, and the mechanic might do a stress test on the windshield and charge the insurance company $400.00 for it. But you could rest assured that your windshield wasn't about to shatter spontaneously, which happens maybe once in every 30 million passenger miles.

Auto mechanics would have to go to school for six to eight years after their BS degree and pay back hundreds of thousands of dollars in school loans before getting their license to fix cars. But they would earn almost as much as lawyers do, if they could keep ahead of their own soaring insurance premiums. If you didn't have a government-sanctioned auto repair license and you tried to fix anybody else's car, you could go to jail.

Gasoline additives would be a multi-billion-dollar business, funded with a combination of government support and private money. Universities would have special auto-repair branches and auto-repair research departments to develop new additives and repair techniques.

Mechanics could be hauled into court and made to pay millions for faulty repairs. Mechanical malpractice law would be a lucrative branch of the legal business.

Eventually, things would get so screwed up that the U. S. government would wade into the mess and take over large portions of it, promising to manage things better than the former private owners did. Of course, that's exactly what has happened with the U. S. auto industry already—so maybe it's time to wind up this little fantasy. . . .

Health care in the U. S. is a complex system that can be viewed as a technology. And it is fraught inside and out with ethical implications, so I think the current debate over what should be done about health care is fair game for an engineering ethics blog, broadly defined.

Of course, people aren't cars, and the analogy between car repair and health care breaks down if you examine it seriously. But sometimes casting a familiar situation in a new light will reveal problems in a way that more people can understand. For example, it is a fact that most people don't know they pay an average of $400 a month for health care—either as a deduction from their paycheck, or a contribution from their employer, or typically both. If you had to write a health-insurance check for $400 from your own pocket every month (as some self-employed people do), that single change would bring the reality of health-care costs home in a way that no number of TV ads will do. Most people do pay for their car repairs out of their own pocket. If we had the direct price information that would let us pay attention to the quality and price of health care in the same way we evaluate an auto mechanic's services, it would do a lot to reduce needless health-care expenses.

Eliminating the employer tax deduction for health-care costs, if done the right way, will be a step in this direction. But not if it is done just as a way to raise revenue and make a government-funded public insurance option more attractive.

As the debate develops, it seems to be coming down to a single question: Who can exert more effective discipline on the health-services sector: a set of government bureaucracies that will ration and regulate the system, or an enlightened public which is allowed to see the costs of health care directly and make their own judgments as to which insurance plan and caregiver is best for them? The latter option still has a role for government, possibly as the provider of last resort for insurance or services for those who can't afford them, and as a check on rampantly malicious behavior on the part of powerful institutions.

Either there will be major changes in the way health care is delivered in this country by later this fall, or there won't be. Sometimes no change is better than a bad change. After all, we could be worse off. Surveys indicate that most people are reasonably contented with their present state of health care. The trick will be to help the groups who are under-served without worsening the status of those who like what they have already—and not do something else awful like run the government into bankruptcy in the meantime.