Justin Vanessus 02

California’s Zero-Emission Train Regulations: End of the Line for Trains?

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 10:44:00 +0000

As polluters go, diesel-electric trains could be a lot worse. A post on the website of the Institute for Energy Research says that it takes only a gallon of diesel fuel to move a ton of freight 500 miles by train, whereas if you put the same load in your one-ton pickup that gets 15 miles per gallon, or even a semi-trailer that does somewhat better, you will be making a lot more greenhouse gas with the trucks than with the train.

But that hasn’t deterred the California Air Resources Board (hereinafter CARB) from issuing a set of proposed regulations that would effectively shut down diesel-locomotive-pulled trains, not only in California, but quite possibly everywhere else in the U. S. as well. How would it do this?

First off, the regulations are not completely out of touch with reality. The creative types who came up with them recognize that there are not yet any full-scale zero-emission locomotives anywhere in the world, not even in secret labs owned by Elon Musk. So starting in 2026, all train companies will start having to pay into escrow almost a billion dollars each in order to save up to buy these zero-emission (presumably battery-powered) trains that don’t exist today, and may not exist for decades to come, either.

Besides bankrupting small train lines, this will create an economic burden that will raise prices nationwide and put rail transport at a disadvantage that may force more shipments onto truck lines, where they will end up causing more pollution than if the CARB had just sat on its hands and done nothing.

And not all train traffic happens inside California, either. A lot of it carries goods between that state and the rest of the country, and no one thinks that huge switchyards will spring up on the border of the state to change out nasty polluting diesel engines for electric ones to run inside the state. In fact, due to a kink in the original Clean Air Act of 1972, California has a unique privilege to see that its own internal CARB regulations automatically trump any federal regulations, unless someone shows (typically through costly and lengthy litigation) that the CARB regulations are unreasonable. And because California is such a large market, a regulation that is in force there typically has to be accepted by default elsewhere. This is exactly how California automobile pollution standards, which were much stricter than either existing Federal or other state standards, became the de-facto U. S. standard.

And now California is trying to do the same thing with their rail-transportation rules.

According to a report in National Review, during a public-comment period that ended Apr. 22 a huge variety of organizations protested the proposed regulations. These range from the expected (train companies, state and local legislators) to the unexpected (railway labor unions) and downright surprising (two Federal agencies opposed it).

As written, starting in 2030 the regulations require that all locomotives operating in the state must be less than 23 years old, obsoleting many perfectly good engines that can last for 40 years or more. By that same year, only six years from now, half of all new locomotives must be zero-emission, and by 2035, all new locomotives must be electric (or nuclear, or “Back to the Future” flux capacitors, or whatever).

In 1958, during Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, that dictator decided that China had to become the world’s largest producer of steel, within five years. The only sensible way to achieve that goal was to study the current large-scale steel industry, figure out what factories and people and training and expertise would be needed, and spend the money it would take to buy the equipment and build the steel mills and blast furnaces to do the job.

But that is not what Mao decided to do. Instead, he called on his citizenry to build “backyard furnaces,” typically a few yards (or meters) in diameter, made of mud bricks and fueled by wood or charcoal. In essence, he asked billions of people to take up steelmaking as a hobby, only a deadly-serious one. So many people were compelled to abandon useful pursuits like farming in order to make backyard furnaces that some authorities think it contributed significantly to the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-1961, in which an estimated tens of millions of people died. And the pig iron that the peasants managed to make was so poor in quality and small in quantity that the whole thing was abandoned a few years later.

The backyard-furnace fiasco is a good example of what happens when a person or organization without the ordinary common sense that (as my grandmother would say) God gave a soda cracker, is endowed with dictatorial powers. The looming disaster awaiting U. S. railways if the CARB railway regulations about zero-emission trains are enacted bears more than a family resemblance to Mao Zedong’s ill-fated backyard foundries.

At least people knew how to make steel, and it was a proven technology. It just wasn’t practical for millions of Chinese peasants to make it on an absurdly small scale with no modern equipment, quality controls, or modern transportation.

It is provably impractical—presently impossible—to make a free-standing electric locomotive that runs on batteries and does what a modern diesel-electric unit does. But that hasn’t stopped the dictators at CARB from cooking up a regulation which, in the best case, will cost U. S. rail companies millions of dollars to fight in court, and billions to comply with in escrow funds in the meantime even if a zero-emission locomotive never comes to pass.

With the proposed CARB railway regulations, we have arrived at the dictatorship of the administrative state. It is no longer merely a future threat—it is here, right now, standing with a battle-ax poised over the neck of the U. S. railway industry. It passed through my mind to encourage the railways to simply refuse to service California once the regulations are in place. See how they like it without trains. This would probably provoke a Federal takeover of the industry, as it did during the Wilson administration in World War I, and the only advantage then would be that the dictatorship would be out in the open for all to see.

But it is already, and I only hope that this ends better than Mao’s backyard furnaces. Right now, I’m not optimistic.

Sources: The Institute for Energy Research article “California Proposes to Ban Diesel Trains and Has Asked EPA For a Waiver” appeared on Mar. 29, 2024 at https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/regulation/california-proposes-to-ban-diesel-trains-and-has-asked-epa-for-a-waiver/. The National Review article “California vs. the World on Zero-Emission Trains” by Dominic Pino appeared at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/california-vs-the-world-on-zero-emissions-trains/. I also referred to the Wikipedia articles “Backyard furnace” and “Great Chinese famine.”

Does Bitcoin Use An Immoral Amount of Energy?

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 11:18:00 +0000

The business of cryptocurrency turns out to be one of the more power-hungry forms of market speculation. An article in the April 2024 issue of Physics Today says that between 0.6% and 2.3% of the total electricity production in the U. S. goes to cryptocurrency mining farms. Is this a bad thing, and if so, what can be done about it?

A helpful review of the history of cryptocurrency is found in the surprisingly entertaining 2020 book Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by National Public Radio reporter Jacob Goldstein, who points out that one of the main attractions of physical currency (paper bills and coins) is its anonymity. No one can tell where a $100 bill has been, and so that's why illegal transactions around the world favor briefcases full of large-denomination bills.

Goldstein describes how after the rise of the Internet, "techno-libertarians" tried to develop a digital equivalent of cash, free of the need for banks and creditors and debtors to keep track of who has transferred what amount of money. After several "cypherpunks" came up with pieces of what was needed, an anonymous person (or group of persons—no one knows exactly) calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto put it all together in a paper sent to other cypherpunks on Halloween, October 31, 2008.

Goldstein calls the entity which eventually became known as bitcoin "an anonymous(ish), money(ish) thing that buyers and sellers could exchange over the internet without any bank or tech company in the middle." After a very slow start, including the first-ever purchase paid for with bitcoin in 2010 (someone sent a tech nerd a pizza in exchange for 10,000 bitcoins, which were then worth about a third of a cent each), the criminal element discovered that bitcoin was ideal for international illegal transactions involving illicit drugs. Bitcoin started to rise in value, and as the code for bitcoin was openly published, imitators started to create their own versions.

But as with many network-based phenomena, the first to get in with a usable product tends to dominate, and today bitcoin is responsible for about half the total market in cryptocurrency. Lately it has been trading at around $72,000 per bitcoin, which would make that 2010 pizza worth $720 million at today's prices.

As Goldstein points out, most items used over the centuries for money have been either relatively difficult to obtain, or else governments have strictly enforced laws to prevent counterfeiting. Nakamoto chose to make bitcoin intrinsically hard to create by embodying digital puzzles that must be solved before new bitcoins can come into being. The custody of the master code has now been taken over by a 57-member Bitcoin Mining Council, which has adjusted the difficulty of the puzzles to keep up with advances in computer technology so that nobody has been able to flood the market with bitcoins, at least so far. And the code is set up so that no more than 21 million bitcoins will ever exist.

The price of all these restrictions is that to make a new bitcoin requires huge computer installations, such as the 700-MW-rated-consumption unit in Rockdale, a small community in Central Texas. In 2023 that much power produced almost 7,000 bitcoins. The mining analogy is apt, because as the Physics Today article points out, the estimated global energy consumed in cryptocurrency mining is 163 TWh (163 with 12 zeroes behind it), comparable to the estimated 132 TWh consumed worldwide in gold mining. Both enterprises require a great deal of work to produce a commodity whose price is unstable, and a sudden dip in price can render either a gold mine or a bitcoin mine useless. But risk-averse people generally don't fool with mining investments in the first place.

Cryptocurrency doesn't have to consume huge amounts of power. One alternative version, Ethereum, changed its algorithm in 2022 to something called "proof of stake," which exchanges puzzle-solving for putting up one's own stock of cryptocurrency as collateral in order to do the necessary digital work to maintain the blockchain process, which by itself is not that burdensome. Ethereum thus reduced its energy consumption by 99.9%.

As an attempt to replace physical cash, bitcoin and its allied cryptocurrency creatures are a failure. One of the prime features of the U. S. dollar is its relative stability in value as measured by what it will purchase. Even minor upticks of 5 or 10 percent annually, as we saw in the last few years, lead to fierce political blowback and can endanger whole administrations. So no one without a very good (and probably illegal) reason to do so is going to use a commodity for routine transactions like bitcoin, whose value bounces around like a kangaroo.

Instead, cryptocurrency has found its niche in the spectrum of other commodities traded primarily for speculative purposes. Most economists consider speculation a basically unproductive activity, because it tends to be a zero-sum game. If A makes a killing on the stock market, you'll surely find that B, C, and a lot of other letters lost at least that much, unless a lot of leveraging is going on, in which case we get into fractional-reserve banking theory, and that's a whole other column. A society can tolerate a certain amount of financial speculation, but at least gold mining leaves you with something physical that you can wear or plate electrical contacts with. When your bitcoin investment turns sour, it's gone into the bit void, never to return.

People do all sorts of things with their money, and as long as what they are doing with it is not intrinsically illegal, I don't see a large problem with bitcoin mining compared to all the other nasty things that we have to put up with these days. Other things being equal, I wish they'd redesign their algorithm to use less power, but it might rock the boat too much and leave every investor with little or nothing. But hey—it's only bits anyway.

Sources: Jacob Goldstein's Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein (New York: Hachette, 2020) is a treasury (so to speak) of little-known facts about money and a pretty good guide to how it works, including the Federal Reserve System. Physics Today carried the article "Code changes could drastically reduce bitcoin's enormous energy requirements" by David Kramer on pp. 26-29 of the April 2024 issue.

It's Time to Ban Social Media on Smartphones for Children and Adolescents

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 11:29:00 +0000

In the May issue of National Review, San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge presents smoking-gun data that shows the manifold harms to children and teenagers caused by smartphones, specifically social-media use on them. She claims, and I agree, that we have to do more to alleviate these harms, by government intervention if necessary.

First, the harms. Twenge has collected data on a wide number of measures of wellbeing including sleep patterns, socializing, indicators of loneliness and depression, and participation in adult activities. Significant shifts in all these data have occurred over the last five decades.

In-person socializing, measured as the percentage of U. S. teens going out with friends twice a week or more, was reasonably steady until about 2008, when it began to decline, and fell off a cliff around 2012, falling from 80% in 1976 to around 55% in 2021 for 12th-graders.

The percentage of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders sleeping less than seven hours a night was about 35% from 2003 to 2013, when it abruptly took off and rose steadily to 50% by 2022.

The percentage of U. S. 12- to 17-year-old girls suffering major depression in the past 12 months was steady at 12% until 2011, and then went through a similar rise to almost 30% by 2021.

And the percentage of 15-year-olds measuring "high" in loneliness in regions as disparate as Asia, Latin America, Europe, and English-speaking countries all show a sharp uptick when? Three guesses and the first two don't count: 2012.

What happened in 2012? It was the year that the number of smartphone users in the U. S. crossed 130 million on its eventual way to the current number of 316 million, out of a population of about 330 million. Also, the number of active Facebook users crossed the 1 billion mark worldwide that same year.

Twenge, wearing her good-scientist hat, proposes other possible causes for these dismal statistics about teen wellbeing: anxiety over college debt, the opioid crisis, even global warming. None of them pass muster. Her close study of the detailed behavior patterns of teens regarding smartphones reveals that the average U. S. adolescent spends nearly five hours a day on social media. That's more than a half-time job, seven days a week.

Anyone observing teens in the wild can confirm that their faces are stuck to their phones at every possible moment—in an elevator, walking down the street, at mealtimes with or without other family members, and evidently late at night too. As for the other possible causes Twenge diligently considers and rejects, there is no such thing as mathematical proof in psychology, but she has come as close as anybody can to proving that social media use on smartphones has had a huge, and largely negative, influence on the daily lives of teenagers.

Granting the validity of her case, what is to be done about it?

Leaving teenagers in the gentle hands of the social-media companies is like leaving the hens in the gentle paws of the fox. Some of the world's most sophisticated and effective AI software drives teens to keep clicking and scrolling on infinite websites, because the firms' profits depend on their doing so.

Asking parents to control their teens' use of smartphones is nice in theory, but one would have to be a literal helicopter parent to do that effectively, hovering over each child's shoulder every waking minute of the day. Yes, there is software to block certain sites, but teens know ways to evade such restrictions, and it's simply impossible for even highly conscientious parents to monitor and censor every last thing a child does with his or her phone.

Twenge proposes a straightforward ban on social media use for everyone under 16. While the brain of a sixteen-year-old has still got a lot of maturing to do, this age represents a compromise between exposing highly vulnerable young people to the harmful effects of social-media use and keeping them from using it when they are mature enough not to be significantly harmed by it. While an outright ban is still in the future, a number of states (Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, an Utah) have passed laws requiring that firms obtain parental permission before allowing people under 16 to get social media accounts.

In many ways, this issue has parallels with the way attitudes and laws concerning smoking changed during the last part of the twentieth century. Once a near-universal social habit, smoking was first revealed to be a leading cause of lung cancer. Then when we found that cigarette companies had engaged in a concerted effort to deceive the public, their reputation suffered further. The banning of cigarette ads from TV and radio in 1971 began a general social trend that gradually changed smoking from a normal activity to one engaged in by a decided minority of people, but only after years of adverse publicity, revelations of corporate wrongdoing, and contested legislation.

Largely because of the profits involved, we can expect a similar battle over an all-out ban on social media for teens. In this case, however, the people most affected can't directly influence legislators, not being old enough to vote. It is up to parents and others concerned about the wellbeing of the next generation to organize opposition to powerful entrenched interests backed by billions of dollars. And even if our small-r republican system of government was in proper working order, this would be a hard fight.

Fortunately, protecting children and adolescents from psychological harm has not become a partisan issue—yet. Both Democrats and Republicans can understand the need to keep social-media firms from exploiting populations who suffer harm all out of proportion to their numbers. Twenge and her fellow social-science colleagues have given us all the proof we need to take action. Now all that is needed is the courage and diligence to see it through.

Sources: Jean M. Twenge's article "Ending the Tyranny of Smartphones" appeared on pp. 34-38 of the May 2024 issue of National Review, and relies on data presented more fully in her latest book Generations (Atria Books, 2023). I also referred to data from the following websites: https://www.statista.com/statistics/201182/forecast-of-smartphone-users-in-the-us/,

https://www.statista.com/chart/10047/facebooks-monthly-active-users/, and https://apnews.com/article/georgia-social-media-children-age-porn-pornography-007fae0a3b3f80393b4a7d7a7a8b430a.

Havana Syndrome: Is It Real, and Who's Doing It If So?

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 10:50:00 +0000

For nearly a decade, there have been isolated reports of strange health problems in U. S. diplomatic and espionage personnel stationed in sensitive parts of the world such as Cuba, China, and Vietnam. Although there is no typical case, there are some commonalities in many of the cases. The symptoms usually have a sudden onset. Victims describe hearing strange noises, feeling severe pain in the head and elsewhere, and other neurological symptoms. Some of them have proved to sustain serious brain-trauma injuries and suffered chronic debility from the attack. Some victims have been struck inside offices or hotel rooms, while others were outside—one attack allegedly occurred on The Ellipse in Washington, D. C.

Of course, U. S. government investigations into these incidents have sought to determine several things, including (a) whether the attacks are real, or simply a product of psychological stress and conventional illness, and (b) if they are real, what is causing them. The matter is complicated by the fact that diplomatic issues are involved, as well as national prestige.

A recent year-long investigation by news organizations including the web-based Insider, Germany's Der Spiegel, and CBS's 60 Minutes revealed on Mar. 31 that there is strong circumstantial evidence pointing to Russian operatives who have been seen in the vicinity of many of the attacks. Although no "smoking-gun" evidence such as hardware or caught-in-the-act scenarios have come to light, the Russians are known to be researching directed-energy weapons, which the U. S. and other countries have already deployed in certain areas.

Directed-energy weapons work by generating powerful radio-frequency or microwave energy and directing it in a concentrated beam toward a target. (There are also weapons of this kind that use infrared or visible laser beams, but those are easily blocked by walls and are probably not being used in these cases.) Depending on the power level and the nature of the target, the results of an attack can range from simple heating to crippling damage in the case of a hardware target such as a missile, or severe physical injury in the case of a biological organism.

One problem in trying to discover material on this topic is that no one who has a working unit wants to brag about what it can do. Undoubtedly, many animal studies have been done in this area, but to my limited knowledge there is very little on it in the open literature.

Besides that, the U. S. government, or at least some people in it, seem reluctant to name names even if they do have strong evidence that, for example, Russian spies are causing most of the Havana-syndrome cases. National Review reports that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said as recently as a year ago that they thought enemy action as a cause of Havana Syndrome was "very unlikely." And Sen. J. D. Vance's reaction to the Mar. 31 news reports was dismissive, to say the least—he said it felt like "a lot of journalists have lost their minds."

As a microwave engineer, I admit that this whole controversy inspires in me a sense of frustration, because the one thing that is true about directed-energy weapons is that they are extremely easy to detect, given the proper equipment. Unfortunately, depending on the nature of the weapon, the proper equipment can be costly and inconvenient to use.

There are wideband radio receivers that can sense radiation ranging in wavelength from below the AM broadcast band (roughly 0.5 to 1.5 MHz) well into the microwave region (3 to 30 GHz, billions of Hz). But if the energy is powerful enough (and it would have to be to cause the symptoms that victims report), the receiver doesn't have to be complicated at all. A set of wideband printed antennas going to detector diodes monitored by a low-power (but well-shielded!) microprocessor could form an electronic version of the old radiation badges that used to be worn at all times by workers in nuclear reactors (and still may be, for all I know). And produced in enough quantity, these units could cost under a kilobuck each, possibly much less.

The point is, if we are looking for conclusive proof of both the cause of these attacks and the fact that they do indeed occur, a fairly small amount of engineering effort would result in an abundance of data in case anyone wearing such a sensor was attacked. This project would cost something, but the lives of diplomats and other personnel abroad are worth something too.

But no technical solution that ends up getting used by people is purely technical. Someone has to need it enough to make it and deploy it. And there are abundant indications that in this situation, as with many other issues relating to the U. S.'s relationship, such as it is, with Russia, the administration seems eager to smooth over issues that arise rather than taking firm countermeasures. If such smoking-gun knowledge that portable directed-energy monitors could provide is something that the U. S. government doesn't want to know, the U. S. government isn't going to go to the trouble of looking for it.

To my mind, this is a dereliction of duty to protect your own people from harm. At least one diplomat resigned his post rather than run the risk of suffering an attack similar to what several of his colleagues received. When things get this serious, it seems that any technical means available should be taken to protect people against these attacks, and getting hard evidence of them first would take us a long way toward that goal.

As more news about Havana Syndrome becomes available, political pressure to do something may change some minds in the government where it counts. But for all the public knows at this moment, our diplomats and other personnel abroad are sitting ducks, waiting for another directed-energy-weapon attack. And figuring out what these attack are and who is doing them is the first step toward preventing them.

Sources: The reaction of J. D. Vance and other government officials to the Mar. 31 news reports appeared in an article by Noah Rothman in National Review's website at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/an-alleged-attack-on-the-united-states-isnt-the-time-for-snark/. The very lengthy report on Havana Syndrome published Mar. 31 by Insider is at https://theins.press/en/politics/270425. I also referred to the Wikipedia page on Havana Syndrome, which (unique in my experience) has been locked by Wikipedia management to prevent malicious editing until Apr. 19.

Key Lessons of the Key Bridge Collapse

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 11:23:00 +0000

Some accidents are simple: two cars collide on a freeway, a tree falls on a jogger, lightning hits a golfer. Others require a chain of events, each of which is unlikely, and so are much rarer than the simple kind. The sequence of occurrences, each one fairly harmless by itself, which led to the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore Harbor on last Tuesday, March 26 included things that by themselves would cause few if any major problems. But on that fateful night, they all aligned to end four lives and cause what will eventually turn out to be billions of dollars in direct and indirect damage.

About forty-five minutes after midnight, the Singapore-registered container ship Dali left its berth at the Port of Baltimore bound for Sri Lanka. Its route lay beneath the second-longest continuous-truss bridge in the U. S., the Key bridge, which carried traffic around the southern part of the Interstate 635 loop around Baltimore, and was the last bridge to pass under before the Dali reached the open sea. On the bridge, a construction crew was repairing potholes resulting from the previous winter.

Some time after leaving port, the Dali began to experience engine trouble. Security-camera videos recovered afterwards show that the ship's lights flickered on and off several times and black smoke began to come from the stacks. As a recent NBC News report shows, contaminated bunker fuel is a serious problem in marine shipping circles. As the giant propulsion engines are separate from the smaller diesel engines that run a ship's generators, and both were affected, some experts have speculated that contaminated fuel may have caused the ship's power problems, as that is a common factor that would account for both difficulties.

Whatever the cause, the ship's crew was alert enough to issue a mayday call by radio, which was picked up by first-responder officials, and they issued orders for traffic to be blocked on the bridge.

Less than two minutes later, the now-adrift ship plowed into one of the two main "bents" supporting the highest span of the bridge. A cloud of masonry dust can be seen on the video of the collision, shortly before the support fails and the entire truss structure breaks up and falls into the ocean. Two construction workers on the bridge were rescued, but six others remain missing and were presumably killed. While our prayers go out to those who lost loved ones and friends, the accident could have caused many more fatalities if it had happened during an afternoon rush hour with hundreds of vehicles on the bridge.

Several relatively unlikely things had to happen together for this tragedy to take place.

As it turns out, engine problems and failures due to contaminated fuel are not that uncommon. Propulsion engines of the type used on the Dali can have up to fourteen cylinders, each over a yard (~1 meter) in diameter and with a stroke of eight feet (2. 5 meters), and the amount of fuel used is phenomenal. So shippers are motivated to find the cheapest fuel around that will run the engines, and so-called bunker fuel is used. It is thicker and heavier than the type of diesel fuel used in passenger cars, and because suppliers sometimes cut corners and mix adulterants in the fuel to cheapen it, it's not uncommon for ships to lose power from bad fuel.

We still don't know the exact cause of the power loss, but the vast majority of such events occur in the open sea where a drifting ship represents lost time and money, but is not otherwise dangerous. The Dali had the bad fortune to lose its power in the worst possible place: a few hundred yards away from a vulnerable bridge.

Why wasn't the bridge structure protected from such collisions? It doesn't take a genius to guess that sooner or later, a ship might lose control and bang into a support. Not being a maritime bridge architect, I can't answer that question. As the bridge was built in 1977, it withstood nearly half a century of wear and tear from weather, traffic use, and shipping. It's an open question whether the builders tried to estimate what it would take to fend off a straying ship colliding with the supports. As there are so many variables—the size and weight of the ship, its velocity, exactly where it would hit—the designers may have just tried to make sure smaller ships couldn't damage it and hoped that the pilots of the larger ships would be equipped with radar and other navigational aids to miss the bridge supports.

And until last Tuesday, every ship capable of knocking down the bridge succeeded in missing them. But the unlikely event of a ship losing power and having just the right combination of weight, ocean currents, and momentum to wreck the bridge finally came up, and the result is as we see.

Again, we can be thankful that the main losses are monetary rather than in the form of injuries and many fatalities. This accident could have been much worse, and the ship's crew and first responders deserve credit for issuing maydays and blocking traffic as promptly as they did.

But for the foreseeable future, anyone wanting to drive around Baltimore is going to have to do it without the benefit of the Key Bridge, and until the wreckage is cleared, the Port of Baltimore is shut down. As disasters go, this one was spectacular, but way down the list of fatal accidents compared to other mechanical failures that killed many more people.

We can be sure that the next bridge will have more protection from ship collisions, whatever else is taken into consideration. And this accident may shine a light on the dubious quality of bunker fuel used in maritime service, an international market with poor quality-enforcement mechanisms, according to the NBC News report. These are good things, and while any accident is regrettable, the lessons we learn from them benefit the next generation of designers and users of the built environment.

Sources: I referred to an NBC News report on bunker fuel quality as a possible cause of the accident at https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dali-contaminated-fuel-scrutiny-baltimore-key-bridge-collapse-rcna145478, a CBS News timeline at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/francis-scott-key-bridge-collapse-timeline-911-call-dali-cargo-ship-mayday-maps-construction-worker-recovery/, and the Wikipedia articles on the Francis Scott Key bridge collapse and the maritime Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C engine, the largest reciprocating engine in the world.

GPS vs. Covered Bridges: Unintended Consequences

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 11:19:00 +0000

Every time a new technology becomes popular, effects happen that nobody anticipates—not the designers, not the firms selling the product, and not the users either. A small but significant case in point was highlighted in a recent Associated Press piece describing the increased vulnerability of historic covered bridges in the U. S. to truck and RV drivers who blindly follow their GPS instructions, only to smash into the bridge superstructure.

Covered bridges were themselves a technical innovation. According to the Wikipedia article on covered bridges, wooden structural members exposed to the weather, even if painted, will last only about 20 years before they need complete replacement. In the 19th century, the European innovation of covering a bridge with walls and a roof spread to the U. S., and many thousands of them were built, mostly between 1825 and 1875. Because they were usually built for local pedestrian, horse, and carriage traffic, the overhead clearance was typically about ten feet or less, well below the fourteen feet (4.3 meters) that is the U. S. interstate highway standard minimum clearance.

Although most of the covered bridges in the U. S. are long gone, some communities have preserved them for historic and cultural reasons, and a few dozen are still used for vehicular traffic. One such bridge stands outside Lyndon, Vermont. The 140-year-old Miller's Run bridge provides a shortcut around the town of Lyndon, and many GPS-enabled smartphone programs such as Waze intended for passenger cars will route drivers through the bridge. Despite several warning signs stating the low clearance of the bridge, at least 20 drivers of box trucks, vans, and RVs have hit the bridge in the last few years. Sometimes only minor cosmetic damage results, but on one occasion a delivery truck hit the bridge supports. That cost the town $100,000 and put the bridge out of commission for several months.

When the driver can be identified, the town can collect insurance money to pay for the damage, but many drivers just keep going, sometimes leaving air-conditioning units behind that are scraped off the top of campers.

Bill Caswell, who is president of the National Society for the Preservation of Covered Bridges, says this problem turns out to be a constant battle. The only sure-fire solution is to build heavy steel height-limit barriers at each end. But even when communities put up warning signs and flashing lights to inform drivers of the upcoming obstructions, many of them are still surprised when they hit the barriers.

Many of you may never have seen a covered bridge, and even fewer have tried to drive across one in a truck that's too tall for it. But this problem is a good example of a widespread issue that philosopher and psychologist Iain McGilchrist has pointed out in his book The Master and His Emissary, and more briefly in a recent article in the journal of religion and public life First Things.

McGilchrist is one of the world's leading experts in the differing functions of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. His thesis defies easy summary, but basically, one can think of the two hemispheres as two people with complementary personalities working together as a team to accomplish mental tasks.

The right hemisphere is focused outward. It is the one that perceives the world and admits its complexity and mystery, in the sense of being partially but not completely understandable. The right hemisphere helps us to appreciate art, poetry, and the best in human relationships.

The left hemisphere, on the other hand, tends to simplify and abstract things down to only the essentials needed to get something done. It is the brain's bureaucrat, ignoring subtleties and ambiguities, and sticking heedlessly to a task long after the wider-ranging purposes of the task are forgotten. The left hemisphere can't see the forest for the trees, and McGilchrist's cri de coeur these days is that once more (after similar paths trod by ancient Greece and Rome), we are letting left-brain thinking take over our civilization, and are in danger of falling into ruin just as those civilizations did.

When someone driving a rented moving van for the first time tries to get through Lyndon, Vermont, if he or she is following right-brain thinking, the thing to do would be to drive through the quaint old town, stop in and have a meal, maybe, and stroll around the town common, appreciating the flavor of a historic location full of time-bound associations and resonances of the past.

But if the driver is dominated by left-brain patterns, Lyndon is just an obstruction on the way to wherever the goal lies, and in following that fount of efficiency, the voice on the GPS-enabled phone, the driver turns away from the town and heads straight for the Miller's Run bridge. Perhaps the driver observes the scenery—the trees, the street signs, the warning sign saying something about a bridge—but the left brain discards all of this as meaningless and useless fluff. The main thing is to cover so many miles in so many hours and get to the goal on the map. In this way, dozens of drivers have plowed straight into the bridge covering, wreaking various amounts of damage and propelling themselves off an idealized digital map into the real world of recalcitrant lumber, damaged vehicles, and auto insurance claims.

Perhaps the town of Lyndon will finally decide enough is enough, and erect two sturdy steel arch barriers over the roadways approaching the bridge so that even GPS-hypnotized drivers can't cause any more damage. But these barriers will stand as a mute and expensive testimony to the inability of modern humans to embrace the whole of their environment, instead of giving in to a tunnel-vision version of reality simplified to a creeping colored line on a map.

Or maybe, just maybe, the world will heed the call of prophets such as McGilchrist and pull back from the brink of disaster that we seem to be teetering on. If history is any guide, though, it will be hard to stop ourselves in time. And this go-round, we may damage a lot more than a few bridges.

Sources: The Associated Press article "Historic covered bridges are under threat by truck drivers relying on GPS meant for cars" by Lisa Rathke appeared on Mar. 20 at https://apnews.com/article/covered-bridges-gps-truckers-accidents-906e3379e07b20dbcdbe16e7cf5e5d6d. I also referred to the Wikipedia article on covered bridges. Iain McGilchrist's article "Resist the Machine Apocalypse" appeared in the March 2024 issue of First Things, and can be viewed at https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/03/resist-the-machine-apocalypse.

TikTok: Divest or Ban?

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 11:32:00 +0000

The online platform TikTok is once again in the news, this time the target of proposed U. S. legislation. One of the most popular and innovative social-media outlets, the Chinese-originated and Chinese-controlled app's infinite-scrolling videos have been imitated by Facebook and YouTube, and 170 million Americans use it, many of them under 30. So why is Congress once more considering legislation that would either force ByteDance, the Chinese parent company, to divest itself of the U. S. division of TikTok, or else face a total ban of the app?

The ostensible reason is that despite TikTok's public protestations to the contrary, it appears that user data garnered by the U. S. division of TikTok can be accessed by its masters in China, as I noted in a December 2022 blogpost here. Whether ByteDance actually exploits this capability is not clear, but adding that to the fact that TikTok has engaged in a certain amount of censorship on subjects sensitive to the Chinese Communist Party's sensibilities provides enough rationale to consider legislative action.

In a recent essay in Time, reporter Scott Nover describes the bill that the U. S. House of Representatives passed on March 13. If passed by the Senate and signed by President Biden, it would present TikTok with a choice: either totally divest the U. S. division so that it is completely independent of the rest of the Chinese-based organization, or face a total ban on selling and using the app in the U. S. Although the bill theoretically gives the firm a choice, several sources say that the true intent is to enact a ban, not just to force divestiture.

As the only major social-media app not developed in the U. S., TikTok excites the envy of Facebook and YouTube, and U. S.-based social-media firms would be more than happy to see a major competitor eat the dust, so they could rush in with their replacement apps and fill the void.

Never having used TikTok, I have only a dim idea of how essential it must seem to some teenagers. In a clumsy attempt to prevent the bill's passage, TikTok urged its users to phone their congressperson to protest the bill. Representatives were flooded with phone calls, some of which carried the caller's intent to commit suicide if TikTok were banned. Many of the callers were below voting age and presumably unable to vote against anyone who favors the ban, but the campaign apparently backfired, as it demonstrated TikTok's overwhelming influence with its users more than a principled regard for free speech on their part.

Nover, for his part, thinks that even if the bill becomes law, it will quickly become entangled in court cases, and the record for similar bans at the state level in the courts is not good. Former President Trump's attempt to ban TikTok by executive action was thwarted by a court, which said there were other ways to achieve the same ends. So just passing Federal legislation that would effectively ban TikTok won't necessarily mean an uptick in teen suicides, although that possibility can't be discounted.

The U. S. government has decidedly mixed motives in its move to ban TikTok, as it would be a big favor to U. S.-based social media firms. To that extent, the proposed law smells of crony capitalism, which uses government influence to suppress competition. There are those who take the view that as long as users get better, cheaper services, it doesn't matter whether those services come from a multitude of small firms or from one giant firm. In other words, bigness isn't a sin, just incompetence or exploitation. That is an economic debate for another day, but it can't be ignored in the mix of motives that gave rise to the proposed TikTok ban.

It's still a theoretical possibility that TikTok would actually divest itself of its U. S. division, but as I said in previous blogs, such things can be mainly on paper rather than in reality. One thinks of the breakup of Ma Bell, which cut the nationwide giant phone company into regional Baby Bells. But a few years after the telecommunications landscape opened up to competition, AT&T found few obstacles on its way to reuniting itself, and continues to be a major player in that field today.

Another problem with the proposed bill is that we don't have a smoking gun. No one has come up with hard evidence that China is definitely exploiting its ability to suck data on its U. S. users into Beijing for nefarious purposes. But the Chinese are very skillful at concealing their espionage activities and their consequences—that is what good spies do.

To give a completely undocumented but likely example I'm personally familiar with, a few years ago a student employee of mine wanted to get a circuit board design he had developed turned into an actual circuit board. This is done by sending a digital file to a circuit-board-fab company, which etches and drills the board and sends it back to you. He looked around to find various prices from different vendors. An outfit in Colorado wanted $50, another one here in Texas wanted $40 or along there—and a place based in China offered three-day turnaround for something ridiculously cheap, like $12. I let him use the Chinese $12 vendor, but not without wondering whether that firm and others like it were deeply subsidized by the Chinese government for the purposes of obtaining the raw circuit-board files from thousands of U. S. firms, all without sending a single spy to the U. S. Maybe all this is a fantasy of mine, but I don't think so. It was all perfectly legal and probably very effective for the Chinese too.

To my mind, the best outcome of the anti-TikTok legislation would be divestiture rather than a total ban. If the federal government shuts down a social-media app with 170 million U. S. users, that is truly a heavy hand placed on First Amendment rights of ordinary citizens to express their opinions. But even if the ban is attempted, the courts may well have something to say about the matter, so we will just have to stay tuned.

Sources: I referred to the article "The Grim Reality of Banning TikTok" on the Time website at https://time.com/6952889/tiktok-ban-freedom-of-speech-essay/ and an article in National Review at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-weekend-jolt/what-it-took-for-republicans-to-break-with-trump/. My previous blogs on TikTok are at https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2022/12/time-is-running-out-on-tiktok-in-u-s.html

and

https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2022/09/tiktok-and-chinese-connection.html.

Will Banning Minors from Social Media Break the Internet?

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Charles C. W. Cooke seems to think so. Cooke, a writer for National Review whose opinions and style I have great respect for, opines in the April 2024 issue that using Federal power to keep minors off social media is a bad idea.

He concedes there is a real problem: bullying, pornography use, depression, and suicide are all results of teenagers and even younger people accessing social media. He doesn't dispute that on balance, the harm that can happen is probably not worth the benefits that the youngsters gain. The problem is acute enough to show up in strange places such as the comics page. The strip "Baldo" by Hector Cantu and Carolos Castellanos portrays a nearly-nuclear Hispanic family that includes a precocious young girl named Gracie., who appears to be about 8. Recently, the writers chose to show Gracie taking out a cigarette lighter, lighting up, taking a puff, and in the last frame she had a mobile phone in her hand instead of a cigarette. The message, somewhat crudely but shockingly expressed, is that if you hand your eight-year-old a mobile phone, you might as well let her smoke too.

And the comparison between smoking and mobile-phone-mediated social media is apt in another way. The social ostracism that many smokers now experience, at least in the U. S., came about as the U. S. government adopted severe restrictions on cigarette advertising and sales. It's somewhat of a chicken-and-egg argument as to whether federal restrictions encouraged the change in social attitude, or the social attitude made the government's job easier. But as the hypocrisy of the cigarette companies was exposed, revealing that they knew very well tobacco killed their customers but went right on selling it as though nothing was wrong, I think public opinion simply turned against them, especially among young people. But the federal strictures helped the process along.

Cooke's main concern is that allowing the federal government to get its grubby, incompetent mitts on what is up to now almost a perfect example of the unrestricted free market of the Internet will ruin it for everybody. He thinks that if we let the camel of government regulation of age for using the Internet get its head under the tent, the rest of the smelly animal will come too, and politicians will find some way to prevent their political opponents from accessing voters under the age of 90 ,or something.

Now I'll agree that the ingenuity of bureaucrats to expand their remits beyond all reasonable bounds is impressive and worth being concerned about. But I haven't noticed any huge federal bureaucracy springing up around the subject of restricting tobacco use, unless you count the diversion of the huge pile of money extracted from the tobacco companies as part of class-action lawsuits by smokers toward uses that have nothing to do with smoking prevention. And that was mainly the doing of states rather than the federal government, if I recall correctly.

Cooke says if the federal laws proposed go into action, you would have to send your private information over the Internet every time you want to access YouTube or Facebook. Well, I do that every time I buy something online already—not only that, I send information that will allow a crook to steal from me, and now and then it even happens. But the banks are vigilant enough to keep credit-card fraud down to a level that seems to be tolerable enough for most people, and we haven't had some giant federal bureaucracy arise because of it.

I agree that it may be premature to enact a federal law in this area. But many states are currently experimenting with similar laws, and several have already gained some experience with them. Some reports indicate that major porn outlets on the Internet are seeing their income drop substantially. One report cited by the website of the Southern Baptist Convention says that as a result of an age restriction passed in Louisiana, traffic to the site Pornhub from that state has dropped by 80%.

That may seem like a drop in the bucket, but one of the strengths of the federal system is that each state is a little political-science lab of its own. After another year or two, federal legislators, if they are so inclined, can take a look at the many experiments in social-media regulation concerning minors that are going on right now, and take the best ideas from the successful ones.

Then, it shouldn't be that hard to craft a law that would not only restrict social-media companies from preying on minors, but would also restrict the role of the federal government in the regulatory process. Sen. Josh Hawley's proposed bill, nicknamed MATURE (for Making Age-Verification Technology Uniform, Robust, and Effective), would have as its primary regulatory feature the power granted to parents to sue Internet companies who don't comply. In that aspect, it resembles the Texas anti-abortion law which empowers private citizens to sue abortionists. No giant abortion-regulation bureaucracy sprang up in Texas after that law was passed. But a lot of abortion clinics shut down immediately, which was the desired effect.

Cooke says that he is going to take the steps available to a responsible parent, which he is, to ensure that his own children don't get harmed by social media. And that is fine if you are a responsible parent. But we have plenty of irresponsible parents too, and we should have some concern for their children, who are even more vulnerable to the harms that social media can cause than the offspring of parents who are aware of the dangers and do something about them.

Cooke seems to be motivated by a libertarian impulse to leave the pristine unregulated nature of the Internet alone. But as he points out, we have already seen inappropriate involvement of the government in censoring free expression on the Internet by means of the Twitter files released by Elon Musk's intervention. And nobody passed any laws to let that happen.

Granted that there is currently a shortage of wisdom in Washington, we can still hope that a few public-spirited Republicans and Democrats can cooperate (!) on a bill that would take into account the successes and failures of various state laws in this area, make sure that any Federal involvement in the matter is minimized, and still accomplish the goal: to keep children and teenagers from suffering the very real psychic harm that social media overuse and misuse can cause.

Sources: Charles C. W. Cooke's somewhat mysteriously titled "Chesterton's Internet" (he mentions the phrase twice but otherwise doesn't explain why he associates the Internet with G. K. Chesterton, who died in 1935) appeared in the April 2024 issue of National Review, pp. 34-36. I also referred to an article on the website of the Southern Baptist Convention at https://erlc.com/resource-library/articles/the-new-state-laws-effectively-curbing-online-porn/.

Big Tech Tries to Have its First Amendment Cake and Eat It Too

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 12:23:00 +0000

While my headline lacks something in concision, the topic for today is anything but simple: whether internet-based enterprises such as Amazon, Google, Tiktok, and X are free to do basically anything they want with the input their users provide, or whether the states of Texas and Florida can impose certain restrictions on content moderation. Last week the U. S. Supreme Court heard opening oral arguments in two related cases on this topic that the Court has decided to hear together.

NetChoice v. Paxton pits the trade association NetChoice, which includes such heavy hitters as Amazon, Google, and X, against the Texas state gadfly and attorney general Ken Paxton, who attempted to enforce a bill that would prohibit social media companies from censoring posts except in extreme cases such as obscenity and libel. Moody v. NetChoice concerns a law that was passed in Florida at the urging of Gov. Ron DeSantis to prevent social media firms from "de-platforming" a political candidate actively running for office. The lawsuits arising from NetChoice's objections to what it sees as restrictions on its members' First Amendments freedom of speech have percolated through the federal courts and ended up at the Supreme Court last Monday.

There are two extreme positions that mark the boundaries of this debate. One extreme is taken by the state legislatures, which is that large internet-based firms, including but not limited to social-media outfits such as X and TikTok, are used so universally that they should be considered as "common carriers." A common carrier, in legal parlance, is a service that is so essential to modern life that it must accept customers and their activities on a basis limited only by common-sense rules. The classic common carrier was the old Ma Bell system back when all you could do with a phone was call Aunt Maude. As long as you paid your monthly bill, you could say absolutely anything you wanted to say, and Ma Bell wouldn't stop you. And anybody who can muster up the cash for a bus ticket can ride the bus. Similarly, the state bills object to censorship, de-platforming, and other ways that social media companies either emphasize or obscure certain users depending on what they are saying, because the state laws tend to view them as common carriers.

The other extreme is taken by NetChoice, which views its members as valiant warriors protecting their own freedom of speech as well as that of their users. Their classic analogy is the old-fashioned hot-type newspaper, back when all you could do with the paper was line the bottom of the birdcage—after reading it, of course. Nobody presumed to tell the editorial-page editor what letters he could or could not include in the paper, and so no state law should tell X which tweets to suppress or encourage, or leave alone. They are private firms and it's their business what they do with their content, not the states' business.

A report on the first day's arguments by the Electronic Privacy Informatiion Center (EPIC) indicates that the Supreme Court justices are not enthusiastic about either end of this spectrum. In particular, they seem to think that NetChoice is being more than a little hypocritical because of how it has used a law called Section 230.

Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act gives NetChoice members immunity from prosecution for libel for what any of their users say, in this sentence: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." The word "publisher" echoes our exemplary newspaper editor, and Section 230 lets X say, in effect, "Man, we didn't write or publish or say that. Our crazy user said that, and you can't blame us for what he said." Section 230 protection is one of the carefully guarded legal jewels of the NetChoice empire, and flocks of lawyers appear whenever anyone threatens it.

At least two Supreme Court justices perceived that NetChoice is trying to have its free-speech cake by defeating the state laws limiting their content-moderation actions, and eat it too by claiming innocence when someone posts something objectionable and a NetChoice member claims immunity under Section 230. At one point, Justice Gorsuch asked, "So it's speech for the purposes of the First Amendment, your speech, your editorial control, but when we get to Section 230, your submission is that that isn't your speech?" And at another point, Justice Alito said, "It's your message when you want to escape state regulation, but it's not your message when you want to escape liability under state tort law."

It's anybody's guess what the Court will decide in these cases, but indications are that neither NetChoice nor the states will get everything they want. My own view is that social-media firms, by catering to the lower instincts of the human mind and heart, have wrought incalculable damage to the political and social structures of not only the U. S. but many other countries as well. And especially when the government begins to "assist" social-media firms in deciding what is free speech and should be left alone or promoted, and what is "disinformation" and should be de-emphasized or suppressed, we have traveled a good part of the way down a slippery slope to something akin to the old Soviet Union, or the present Peoples' Republic of China, where everything you say and do is monitored and assessed and has consequences that can be quite dire if you go against what the government wants you to do.

The Texas and Florida laws are a first step toward opposing this trend, and NetChoice's actions opposing them is exactly what you would expect a bully to do if someone challenges his dominance. Fortunately, the federal structure of our government is still functioning, although seriously damaged, and I hope that the justices' decisions in these cases will clip the wings of an industry which, Icarus-like, is flying way too close to the sun.

Sources: I referred to an editorial by Jennifer Huddleston in the Mar. 1, 2024 edition of the Austin American-Statesman, a blog post on the EPIC website at https://epic.org/four-key-takeaways-from-the-netchoice-v-moody-and-paxton-oral-arguments/, and the Wikipedia articles on NetChoice and Section 230.

A Tale of Two Companies: Information Unlimited and Edmund Optics

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 12:25:00 +0000

I'm going to address a branch of engineering or business ethics that you don't see discussed very often. The question it answers is: what obligation does a company founder have to see that the business continues after his or her passing? To help us think about this question, I'm going to give two examples at opposite extremes: Information Unlimited and Edmund Optics.

In November of 2008, I ordered three high-voltage capacitors from a company I'd never heard of before: Information Unlimited. The company's website had an edgy vibe and featured high-voltage equipment and components that are hard to find in one place. Whoever was running the site clearly had fun in their work: many of the items appealed to the teenage-mad-scientist types and were more like semi-safe toys than serious equipment.

Over the years, I ordered hundreds of dollars' worth of supplies and devices from their website, which was simply www.amazing1.com. The most expensive item I ever bought was a 40,000-volt DC power supply which cost about $500. The main reason I favored Information Unlimited over more orthodox suppliers was cost. You can buy similar equipment at a number of other places, but for that kind of unit you can't touch the standard suppliers for under $3500 or so.

The expensive units mount in a standard relay rack and come equipped with all kinds of aluminum enclosures and safety interlocks and so on. The Information Unlimited unit was made out of a piece of PVC pipe wired to a plastic box that you had to be pretty careful with. All high-voltage equipment can be fatal if you're not careful, so the people at Information Unlimited just assumed their users would be careful with their units. And I was, mostly, until one day I overloaded it and it broke. I mailed it back and they fixed it for less than half of what I paid for it, and only in a couple of weeks.

The other day, I wanted something from Information Unlimited, but their website had vanished. It turns out that their "resident genius," as one chatroom called him, was Robert Iannini, who had passed away just a few months before. A Wired profile of him from 2012 described a teenager so intent on experimenting with explosives that he blew off his left hand in high school and never quite graduated. But he talked his way into Northeastern University, graduated with an electrical engineering degree, and in the early 1960s invented the bug zappers that you now see everywhere in restaurants and grocery stores. With the $60,000 he got from that invention, he founded Information Unlimited and sold blaster guns, Tesla coils and a series of project books with titles like Electronic Gadgets for the Evil Genius.

And that's how Iannini made a living right up until he died on April 3, 2023 at the age of 85. Sometime between then and August, his company folded—the website disappeared and no one on the Internet seems to know anything about what happened to it. Whatever good talents Iannini had for running a business, planning his succession was not one of them. Not only hobbyists, but serious scientists on a budget, plasma physicists, and educators around the world are going to miss the products that only Information Unlimited carried.

Back in 1942, a man named Norman W. Edmund took out an ad in Popular Photography for his company Edmund Salvage, which sold factory-second lenses for amateur telescope makers. Following the end of World War II, the market was flooded with surplus military gear, including expensive-to-make but now dirt-cheap optics, and Edmund capitalized on this availability and moved his operation to Barrington, New Jersey. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Edmund Scientific catalog was a kind of milder-mannered pre-Internet version of Information Unlimited, offering scientific kits, toys, and inexpensive surplus items for both hobbyists and professionals.

The firm turned a significant corner in 1970 when Norman retired and his son Robert Edmund became CEO. By 1984, the optics end of the business had become so large that Robert made it a separate division, keeping Edmund Scientific as an educational and hobby sales organization with a retail store in Barrington. Over the next fifteen years, Edmund Optics expanded globally, adding sales and manufacturing facilities in Germany, China, Korea, Taiwan, and elsewhere.

In 1998, Marisa Edmund, a granddaughter of Norman, joined the company, and she is now CEO of a worldwide original-equipment-manufacturer supplier of state-of-the-art cutting-edge optics. It is still privately held, and its market share is miniscule, but it is a good example of an extremely specialized niche-market firm which, while perhaps insignificant from an economic point of view, is a key player in many specialty firms' supply chains.

Character is a hard thing to pin down, and anything I say about Robert Iannini should be tempered by the goodwill I hold for his memory and for the many useful and cost-effective items I bought from his firm.

But the kind of personality it takes to start a company is often different than the personality or character needed to let it grow in ways that will serve a wider public. The fact that Information Unlimited was unable to outlive its founder by more than a few months tells me that it was in some sense an extension of Iannini's personality. Some leaders are unable to change the way they do things to adapt to changing market conditions or the need for competent staff who can run and even grow the business in your absence.

Clearly, this was something that Norman Edmund understood, as he stepped aside in favor of his son Robert when Norman was only 55. Not every founder has offspring who are interested in the family business, but Norman was fortunate in this regard, and now the firm he began continues to serve thousands of customers around the world. I wish I could say the same for Information Unlimited, but Iannini's legacy will live on in the Tesla coils and high-voltage power supplies he made. Still, I kind of wish I'd bought a blaster gun while I had the chance.

Sources: I referred to the 2013 Wired profile of Robert Iannini at https://www.wired.com/2013/01/information-unlimited/, Iannini's obituary at https://www.smith-heald.com/obituaries/Robert-E-Iannini?obId=27660790, a blog mentioning the end of Information Unlimited at https://www.eevblog.com/forum/reviews/what-ever-happened-to-amazing1-com-(aka-information-unlimited)/, Norman Edmund's obituary at https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/n-w-edmund-founder-of-iconic-south-jersey-scientifics-firm-dead-at-95/, and the Edmund Optics timeline at https://www.edmundoptics.com/company/about-us/80years/.

What's Unjust About Floods?

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 12:29:00 +0000

Torrential rains had turned the normally placid Connecticut River into a turbid brownish-yellow lake. The sun was out and the water was calm now, but the edge of the water where we stood watching our friend Dori was about thirty yards uphill from her house, which was a former fishing cabin on the bank of the river. It was all she could afford, and when she bought it she knew the place was in a flood plain. The house itself was on pilings and undamaged, but she had left her cats behind in her haste, and now Dori was wading out to rescue them. When she got back to shore with the felines, we asked her how the rescue went. She said it was okay except when she got her hands in the water, she could feel that the electricity was still turned on.

A new discipline called "flood justice" seeks to redress wrongs done to people like Dori who live in areas where flooding is more likely than in more wealthy regions. Last April, the first Flood Justice Symposium was held at the University of Arizona. Geophysicists, ethicists, urban and regional planning experts, and other interested parties discussed how floods often disrupt the lives of the poor much more than the higher socioeconomic classes, and what can be done to alleviate this injustice.

I must admit that my first reaction to the phrase "flood injustice" was "Huh? How can floods be unjust or just?" The juxtaposition of a rain-related word and "injustice" brought to mind the phrase from the Book of Matthew, where Jesus says, "he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust." (5:45) But the context of this statement is that Jesus is calling on his listeners not simply to love their neighbors and hate their enemies, but to treat everyone fairly, just as God does in providing his natural blessings of sun and rain for everyone.

The problem addressed by the concept of flood justice is an ancient one. Some areas of land are more likely to flood than others. In a free-market economy, the more flood-prone areas will be cheaper than average, and people without much money can't afford anything better. In some countries, flood plains are occupied by so-called "informal housing" which is a polite name for squatters who cobble together hovels with discarded lumber and cardboard. Such places become instant scenes of misery and death in a flood, as you might expect.

In an online article on the website of the American Geophysical Union, organizers of the symposium described a long-established policy method that tends to perpetuate flood injustice: the cost-benefit analysis, or CBA for short. Engineers are familiar with the CBA, which is based on the simple idea that when you face an array of choices that can each provide some benefits, it is only good sense to figure out what each choice will cost and pick the cheapest way to get what you want. In the context of planning flood-prevention civil-engineering improvements—dikes, spillways, drainage systems, etc.—this means that the most valuable properties will play an outsize role compared to flood-prone areas where land and improvements are cheaper. A CBA-guided improvement plan will naturally spend a fixed amount of money to protect the most expensive property in the region, because otherwise you would lose more value if the rich folks got flooded out compared to what the poor folks would lose.

Put that way, it does sound injust, but CBA thinking is deeply ingrained in engineer-dominated organizations. One way to widen the scope of planning is to include more community input from the poorer sections of a region, and to consider factors that are not as easily quantified as property values. The symposium organizers say that "recognizing the wider socioeconomic, cultural, ecological, psychological, and health effects of flooding is not enough. We must also integrate these considerations intentionally and responsibly into tools, metrics, and measures that inform flood risk management policy."

Another need that flood justice requires is better data. Many maps of the so-called 100-year flood boundaries have coarse resolution, are based on outdated data, and are deficient in other ways. Even if accurate data is available, real-estate developers have been known to conceal the fact from customers that a given property is in a flood-prone area, and not all U. S. states require that such information be provided to the buyer.

Governments can be the problem more than the solution in alleviating injustice with regard to floods. Floods don't respect boundaries, but local jurisdictions, especially in highly populated areas, tend to be a hodge-podge of finely divided authorities who are reluctant to share information with each other, let alone cooperate on a regional planning effort that would require working with rival jurisdictions. This is a government-policy matter, not engineering, strictly speaking. But engineering has to take place in the real world. Working out political differences and encouraging cooperation among different jurisdictions is part of the job, or at least it should be.

I will admit that I was skeptical when I saw the headline "Five Key Needs for Addressing Flood Injustice." But in fact, engineers as well as geophysical scientists have a lot to contribute to making flood damage and casualties rarer in the future, for the less fortunate as well as for the middle and upper classes. As more people crowd into urban areas, the way those areas are engineered will have a lot to do with the fate of the poorer classes, and whether they will lose everything in the next flood, possibly including their lives. Our friend Dori was philosophical about her losses, because she knew flooding was a possibility. But as soon as she reasonably could, she moved out of that fishing cabin into a house that was well away from the nearest flood plain.

Not everybody can afford to do that, though, and everyone who is involved in flood prediction, abatement, and management should consider more factors than simply the market value of land and improvements when making their next set of plans.

Sources: The article excerpted above appeared on the website EOS, operated by the American Geophysical Union, at https://eos.org/science-updates/five-key-needs-for-addressing-flood-injustice.

Alaska Airlines Plane Had Bolts Missing

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Last month, we blogged in this space about the Alaska Airlines flight that lost a door plug and decompressed at 16,000 feet on January 5. The aircraft involved was a Boeing 737 Max 9, and the door plug was recovered in the back yard of a Portland, Oregon resident. Fortunately, no one was killed, although several minor injuries resulted, and the plane landed safely.

On last Tuesday, the U. S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced that its investigators determined that the four bolts which retain the door plug in place were missing before it blew out. Documents obtained from Boeing and its supplier Spirit AeroSystems show a sequence of events that points to a serious manufacturing problem, if preliminary indications are borne out by subsequent investigations. At this point, here is what we know, based on news reports and a preliminary report by the NTSB.

The 737 fuselages are manufactured at a Spirit facility in Wichita, Kansas, which used to be owned by Boeing. In 2005, Boeing spun it off to an investment firm, but it still makes fuselages and ships them via extra-long railcars to one of the main Boeing assembly plants in Renton, Washington State. The fuselage of the plane in question arrived in Washington in August of 2023.

At the Renton plant, it was found that five rivets near the port-side door plug were damaged and had to be replaced. To access the rivets, it was necessary to remove the door plug. Except for the fact that it has no handle and other fittings that would make it a usable door, the door plug fits in the fuselage like a regular door. There are twelve "stop pads" which engage with fittings on the plug, but in order for it to move like a door, the plug must be free to move away from these pads. A regular door has a separate locking mechanism to keep it attached to the plane, but in the door plug, it appears that instead of a locking mechanism, four bolts retain it in place. Without these bolts, the only thing keeping the door plug in place is the mechanical integrity of the stop-pad pins and other machinery that is not designed to keep it there, but to let it move when needed.

After the defective rivets were replaced by Spirit personnel at the Boeing plant, a photo was taken of the completed work. This is the photo that shows three out of the four door-plug bolts were definitely missing (a fourth location was concealed by insulation, but that one was probably missing too, based on evidence from the recovered door plug).

These events took place in September of 2003. The aircraft was delivered to Alaska Airlines on Halloween of 2023, the end of October. Somehow the door plug managed to stay in place for a number of flights through November and December, but by January 5, the stop pads and associated parts had fatigued with repeated pressurizations enough to fail at 16,000 feet. If the plane had been at a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet when the plug blew, the depressurization could have sucked many passengers out and possibly crashed the plane. So this incident was an extremely close call.

As a teacher, I am continually impressed with the need for an ability that is unique to humans: the ability to pay attention. I impress this need upon my students, but every time I grade exams, I discover what happens when attention is not properly directed, or directed on the wrong things. Boeing and Spirit obviously have extensive procedures in place to manufacture, assemble, and inspect aircraft. And nearly all the time, these procedures work. But every procedure is useless if the human minds carrying them out do not perform them according to the rules.

Clearly, it was someone's duty to document with a photograph the rework of the five damaged rivets. But it is so easy to see how someone, even an inspector whose main job was to certify the correctnesss of a repair, would have his or her attention focused on the rivets, and not on the door plug only a few feet to the rear of the rivets. The NTSB inspectors, focused as they were on the door plug, saw immediately from that photo that someone had forgotten to install the retaining bolts before the insulation and interior finish materials were installed. And probably the first time the bolts were put in, before the rework procedure, somebody checked to make sure they were there. But this time, because things were slightly out of the ordinary during the rivet rework, that small but critical act of looking to see if the bolts were in place was omitted. And once everything was buttoned up, nobody could tell from outside that the bolts were missing.

This raises a question that occurs to a person who has disassembled and reassembled many pieces of equipment over the years. When a technician removed the bolts to take out the door plug and gain access to the rivets, where did those bolts go? On a workbench? In a pile of similar bolts? It seems like if they were just sitting around after the job was done, that would get somebody thinking about where they belonged. This is the kind of seemingly unimportant detail that suddenly becomes significant, and I'm sure that some NTSB personnel are asking similar questions of the people involved in the rework. I would not want to be one of the technicians who get grilled.

Modern technological means of documenting manufacturing processes have made it easier to trace actions such as the ones the NTSB is investigating. In the old pre-digital-camera and pre-email days, investigators would have had to rely only on recollections of mechanics, and it's very unlikely anyone would have taken pictures at every step of the process or produced documents with as much detail as electronic data can include these days.

Still, it's not robots who assemble airplanes, it's people. And people (and robots) can make mistakes, especially when they are doing something out of the ordinary such as rework, where it is impossible to write procedures for every contingency and people are trusted simply to do the common-sense good thing. The only problem here is, that wasn't quite good enough. Fortunately, the consequences were a lot more benign than they could have been, and the accident can serve as a warning, or encouragement if you like, that no matter how trivial an inspector's work may seem, it can save lives—or lose them.

Sources: I referred to an Associated Press report on the NTSB findings which appeared Feb. 6 at https://apnews.com/article/boeing-emergency-landing-report-alaska-airlines-8543c90b68b4d932a700cf57ff8f1b8e. The preliminary NTSB report itself is at https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Documents/DCA24MA063%20Preliminary%20report.pdf. I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Spirit AeroSystems.

Will Apple's Vision Pro Be the Next iPhone?

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:14:00 +0000

Back in June of 2023, Apple announced its Vision Pro, which the Wikipedia article about it calls a "mixed reality" headset. This week, in some parts of the world you can now buy your own Vision Pro—for $3,500. While this will not be an obstacle for wealthy early adopters, the rest of us will probably wait until the beta-version bugs are worked out and the price comes down. In the meantime, we can think about what this means for the future of humanity.

That sounds either presumptuous or silly, but there is no question that the advent of the smartphone has changed the course of world history, especially cultural, social, and political history. Combined with the AI-fueled algorithms that maximize profits for Facebook, X, and their ilk at the expense of rational political discourse, we have seen the smartphone severely damage democracy in the U. S. and other places. Yes, there are advantages to smartphones as well, but a serious debate over whether having them is a net gain or loss to society is one that we will probably never have, because they are here to stay.

That is not yet the case for the Vision Pro, so let's spend a little thought on imagining what life would be like if Vision Pro headsets or their upgraded equivalents become as common as smartphones. My speculations are aided by my watching an 8-minute video made by Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal, who went to a cabin at a ski resort with some video producers and wore a Vision Pro for most of 24 hours.

When you wear a Vision Pro, your entire visual field is mediated, in a literal sense. You can't see anything directly. All you see is a projection of two high-resolution video screens that go directly to your eyeballs. In order to see anything, including the ordinary world around you, you have to use the multiple cameras mounted on the Vision Pro. Everything you see goes into the cameras, through Apple's proprietary software and some of the 600 apps now available for the device, and only then do you get to see anything.

And it works the other way too. Physically, the Vision Pro looks like a pair of unusually bulky ski goggles, with a headstrap to keep it on and a fanny-mounted battery pack that has to be recharged every two or three hours. The outer surface of the goggles is also a video screen, and in order to present something other than a blank shiny surface to someone the wearer is talking with in person, the screen presents video images of the wearer's eyes. This is after the wearer has taken a photograph of her or his entire face, so the system knows how to present a somewhat reasonable facsimile of the wearer's visage.

Videoconferencing is one of the big intended uses of Vision Pro, but you can't just point a camera at a roomful of people wearing bulky headsets that cover their faces. Apple to the rescue—the 3-D photos of the wearer stored in the system are used to create "avatar" faces to present to the other people in the videoconference.

From all the reactions to Stern's avatar that she accumulated in her video calls using the Vision Pro, there was one unanimous opinion: her avatar looked terrible. Even Apple has not yet overcome the "uncanny valley" effect in trying to use computing to simulate the human visage. According to the uncanny valley hypothesis, unless a human simulation is extremely authentic (the good side of the valley), people will sense that something is off and have a negative reaction to it. At the other side of the valley, a cruder image is seen as merely cartoonish and not uncanny. Maybe Apple should have gone that route, as most people would prefer to see an obviously artistic caricature of a friend, rather than an image that is like something that an undertaker might manage to do with a corpse.

That was probably the worst experience Stern had with the device. Although Apple doesn't recommend cooking while wearing the Vision Pro, Stern went right ahead and chopped onions, and was delighted to find that the airtight seal around her eyes prevented her eyes from watering. (Chopping onions in a pan of water, I am told, is just as effective, and $3,500 cheaper.) And the 3-D movies available from some (not all) streaming services were impressive.

You can record your own 3-D videos with either the Vision Pro or the latest iPhone (15, I believe), and Stern tried this feature out while skiing, another activity that Apple doesn't recommend for Vision Pro wearers. But nothing bad happened on her bunny-run venture down the slopes, and the overall impression Stern left with her viewers is that this is still a prototype, but if they work out some bugs and get the battery life up and the power consumption down, along with the price, Apple may have finally found what Google tried to find with Google Glass and failed to do back in 2015: a mass market for what most people still call virtual-reality or augmented-reality headsets.

Apple avoids both of those terms and insists that what the Vision Pro allows is something they call "spatial computing." To my ears, this is a singularly unfortunate phrase, because it implies that the computer uses space somehow to calculate things. Well, every computer that takes up space does that, so it's just going to be a label for the 3-D techniques that the Vision Pro allows you to use for setting up your workspace.

Wearing a Vision Pro really cuts you off from ordinary reality in a much more radical way than using a smartphone does. Everything that you see passes first through the guts of the machine, rendering your entire visual field subject to the whims of the Vision Pro designers. Perhaps that sounds benign now. But put this device in the hands of criminals, or even well-intentioned entertainers who simply want to thrill people, and it may open entirely new fields of horrors. It's too early to tell, but there will be downsides, especially if the Vision Pro proves as popular as Apple hopes. Let's just hope the downsides aren't too low.

Sources: I referred to an Associated Press article on the commercial introduction of the Vision Pro at https://apnews.com/article/apple-vision-pro-spatial-computing-augmented-reality-7ec545a42403cf12e799200864e47d94, Joanna Stern's video report on it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xI10SFgzQ8, and the Wikipedia article "Apple Vision Pro."

The Ethics of Disposable Earbuds

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 12:18:00 +0000

Over the Christmas holidays, we stayed at a nice Texas motel that had an exercise room. I usually take a daily bike ride for exercise, but as I didn't bring my bicycle with me, I did the next best thing and used a stationary bike. The bike had a video screen connected to the cable-TV system of the motel, and for the convenience of exercisers, the motel provided free disposable earbuds, so if you wanted to watch Metallica music videos, you wouldn't disturb the lady next to you who was tuned to PBS.

The earbuds worked fine, but I had never come across an establishment which provided them free of charge. It got me to thinking about how a thing which was once a high-tech piece of specialized and uncommon equipment has become a commodity so inexpensive that motels can afford to give them away.

The first device that transformed electrical impulses into audible speech was Bell's telephone receiver. You have probably seen old movies in which characters use the "candlestick" phone, consisting of a vertical stand with a transmitter that the user spoke into, and a "potato-masher" receiver that was held to the ear. The reason the potato-masher was as long as it was—several inches—wasn't for convenience in handling. All electromagnetic transducers (the technical term for a device that converts electric waves into sound waves) need a magnetic field, and producing a strong enough magnetic field to make the device work efficiently has always been one of the defining challenges of making receivers, headphones, and earphones.

In the 1890s, the best magnetic materials were lousy by today's standards. It took a U-shaped piece of iron about three or four inches long to make a strong enough magnetic field to work well as a telephone receiver, and so that was why the potato-masher was as long as it was.

By the early 1900s, materials had improved to the extent that the magnet was small enough to fit into a round can, and thus the headphone came to be developed. By 1930, you could buy a good pair of radio-quality headphones, the kind that fit over your head with a spring strap, for $1.09. I have an Allied Radio catalog published in Chicago which describes them as "[u]nusually sensitive headphones carefully designed with aluminum shells and genuine moulded caps." It's not clear why an imitation moulded cap would be a problem, but a certain amount of vivid writing was expected by the catalog reader of the day.

In 2024 dollars, those phones would cost $19.43, so how does a motel get by with giving their modern-day equivalent away? Advances in manufacturing, of course, and the most significant advance has been in the technology of magnetic materials.

Around 1990, it became possible to make what are called neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets, which produce the same magnetic field intensity as previous types but with a small fraction of the weight and size. Magnets made of NdFeB are why we can have excellent sound quality in tiny packages, and also why we can have small battery-powered drones (one of the reasons, anyway—lithium batteries are the other). And China, which bought the NdFeB technology from General Motors in the 1990s and ran with it, according to the economics website MacroPolo, makes the vast majority of all NdFeB magnetic materials today, although Japan and Germany still have toeholds in the high-end parts of the market. The U. S. is no longer a significant player in the technology, although we are one of the largest consumers.

The reason why the motel didn't provide a single public set of earbuds, the way nineteenth-century railroads used to provide a single public brush and comb chained to the washroom wall, is sanitation. I haven't seen any actual statistics on diseases known to be transmitted by reusing somebody else's earbuds, but I suppose it could happen. And there's the yuck factor of just thinking that somebody else's earwax is getting into your ear. Even if the motel provided more expensive non-ear-penetrating headphones with padding, there would still be skin-to-pad contact around the ear area, and so the easiest out is just to supply cheap disposable earbuds.

So what is the harm, if any, in using some inexpensive earbuds once and throwing them away?

For one thing, that decision adds to the stream of waste electronics flooding our landfills daily. As pollutants go, a pair of earbuds isn't that big a deal, but they are yet another example of the disposable society that is one of the driving themes of modernity. Magnets aren't exactly biodegradable, but it turns out that one of the more significant growth industries in the U. S. is the enterprise of picking through garbage to find NdFeB magnet material to recycle. An economic report by MacroPolo tells me that in the next few years, there may be a crunch in the NdFeB magnet supply chain. China can't make the best ones, Japan and Germany are maxed out, and the demand for magnets to go in everything from electric cars and wind turbines to drones and earbuds is increasing rapidly. So magnet material may become recycling gold if new sources of supply aren't found soon.

The libertarian economists among us would say, "Hey, if earbuds are cheap enough to throw away, don't worry about it. If it gets to be a problem, the price will go up and we'll do something else, maybe rent them and sterilize them." And they would have a point. But just because something is cheap doesn't mean that it's fine to throw it away after one or a few uses. Turns out that I kept my earbuds after we left the hotel, and now I have my own private set in my shaving kit if I ever come across another motel which isn't as generous with earbuds. And if the coming NdFeB magnet crunch comes to pass, I may be glad I kept mine.

Sources: I referred to a report "The Impermanence of Permanent Magnets: A Case Study on Industry, Chinese Production, and Supply Constraints" at https://macropolo.org/analysis/permanent-magnets-case-study-industry-chinese-production-supply/, and an original Allied Radio catalog for 1930 in my collection of antique catalogs.

Does Diversty Make United Less Safe?

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 12:48:00 +0000

Steve Kirby, CEO of United Airlines, drew a lot of flak this past week for two things. One of them raises serious questions about the tradeoff between so-called diversity hiring practices and safety. The other concerns one of Kirby's hobbies and can probably be dismissed as irrelevant, although it contributed to the overall attention level he's been receiving lately.

Some videos alleged to be showing Kirby—a 56-year-old married father of seven—performing as a drag queen went viral, amassing 2.7 million views in only a few days. As I have no means of knowing whether these videos are authentic or when they were made, and I can't find any evidence that either confirms or denies their provenance, I fall back on a policy I once read which the manager of an ice-manufacturing plant told his employees in the 1920s: "As long as you do your work well during the day, I don't care what you do at night." While the CEO of a major multinational corporation may regret a time years ago when he dressed up in drag, I see no reason to draw any far-reaching conclusions from that fact, if indeed it is a fact.

Its chief use by certain media organizations has been to serve as eye candy for the related story, which should be considered seriously: whether United Airlines' stated diversity-hiring intents are so extreme as to cause their passengers unnecessary safety risks.

While I have not been able to locate the original June 2021 interview that is the basis of this charge, the closest I can find to a direct quote from Kirby is from something called "The Patriot Oasis" on X: "We decided that 50% of the aviation academy students would be women or people of color. Today, women and people of color make up only 19% of our pilots."

The issue here is whether a prestigious and demanding profession—that of airline pilot in this case—should be allowed to compose and propagate itself according to criteria that are strictly professional-merit-based, or whether one should also consider what for the lack of another phrase I will call identity-based factors. Questions like this are made clearer by extreme cases, so I will use an example to show what I mean.

In 1960, less than 5% of lawyers in the U. S. were female. Many law firms would hire women only as secretaries and legal assistants, and many law schools either had a policy of not admitting women at all, or making it very difficult for a woman to obtain a law degree. But things changed, and today, 38% of U. S. lawyers are women.

Similar things can be said about the professions of medicine and engineering. For a variety of reasons both historical and political, barring women from entering professions simply because they were women became something that was both frowned upon, and eventually made illegal by Federal and state laws. What once seemed part of the nature of things now seems highly prejudicial and arbitrary. In retrospect, the custom of banning women from the professions of law, medicine, and engineering seems to have few if any redeeming features, and undoubtedly lost the talents of many otherwise qualified women.

Lifting bans is one thing. But setting numerical goals for percentages of various identity groups is a different thing. Is it justifiable to arrange selection and admission processes to shift the percentage of various identity groups (women, ethnic and racial minorities, social classes, etc.) in directions that appear to be desirable, not for the intrinsic good of the profession itself, but for an extrinsic good such as distributing the benefits of highly-paid prestigious professions among identity groups who have previously not enjoyed them?

If Steve Kirby's stated goal of his "aviation academy" students being 50% women or people of color is achieved, what are the consequences for the distribution of pilot quality among the graduates? Qualitatively speaking, if the total number of slots in the academy is fixed, and the selection rules are changed so that the fraction of women and people of color rises from whatever it is under strictly professional-merit-based criteria (presumably less than 50%) to the stated goal, some people who would have otherwise been admitted can't get in. I have no idea how hard it is to get into United Airlines' aviation academy, or what criteria one must meet in order to be admitted. Presumably, it includes a track record of flying experience and education, and perhaps some tests of professional ability.

The critical question is, does United Airlines maintain their professional-merit-based standards of admission and graduation and hiring while also managing to admit more women and people of color? To answer this question in detail would require months or perhaps years of research and access to information which is probably proprietary. But the answer is critical to our query.

If United raises their fraction of discriminated-against minorities by admitting and hiring them with lower professional criteria than those applied to other applicants, it is clear that quality is being compromised. But if they achieve their diversity goals only by extensive and intensified recruitment efforts, for example, and maintain the standards they held before the diversity initiative started, then there is nothing to worry about safety-wise.

There really is no other way to answer this question that I can see. And of all the various places I've seen or heard this topic discussed, no one seems to have carried the inquiry to the depths it needs to go in order to answer it with fairness both to United Airlines and to the flying public.

Maybe some investigative reporter is busily digging into the records as we speak, but somehow I doubt it. The drag-queen videos combined with a two-year-old interview quote have done their job of increasing Internet traffic to certain sites that are more interested in traffic than truth or objectivity.

In order to remain professions and merit the respect and prestige they receive from the public at large, professions, including that of airline pilot, must maintain their professional standards, and must also be perceived as maintaining those standards in order to retain the public's trust. This Internet-based kerfuffle about Steve Kirby has undoubtedly eroded that trust, but has left the real question of pilot quality unexamined.

Sources: I referred to a Fox Business report at https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/pilots-hired-based-merit-not-diversity-safety-top-priority-aviation-expert-says, the quote from Patriot Oasis at https://twitter.com/ThePatriotOasis/status/1747584074175107488, and for statistics on women in law at https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/05/women-lawyers.html, in addition to the Wikipedia article on Steve Kirby, United Airlines CEO.

The Door Plug Blowout on a 737 Max 9: Another Headache for Boeing

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 12:16:00 +0000

When Alaska Airlines flight 1282 took off around 5 PM Friday, Jan. 5 from Portland, Oregon, few if any of the 171 passengers suspected that anything unusual was going to happen. But at 5:11 PM, as the Boeing 737 Max 9 was climbing through 16,000 feet, passengers heard a loud bang followed by a roaring wind noise that made conversation impossible. Where a normal porthole window had once been, a gaping two-by-four-foot hole had appeared next to a row of seats on the left side of the plane. One passenger, Kelly Bartlett, didn't realize what had happened until a teenage boy moved into an empty seat next to her. He was sitting in the row next to the hole, two empty seats away from the window, and the blast sucked the shirt off his back. If he hadn't been wearing his seatbelt, he might have gone with it.

Oxygen masks deployed all over the plane, and the passengers remained calm amid the chaotic noise. The pilot immediately returned to Portland and landed the plane safely. No one other than the boy next to the hole was injured.

The Boeing 737 Max 9 can be configured for various numbers of seats, and for more than 200, an emergency exit is required in the location where the hole appeared. But for smaller capacities, the emergency exit is replaced by a panel, basically a plug the shape of the exit door, that blocks the exit opening. From inside the plane, the window and trim make this plug almost invisible. But all that was holding it against the differential pressure of over a ton as the plane rose through 16,000 feet were four bolts, at least if the plug had been installed correctly. This particular Max 9 was delivered to Alaska Airlines only last October, so the problem may have existed since it was built.

A Portland high-school teacher found the door intact in his back yard, so investigators are looking at it closely to determine the cause of the failure.

In the meantime, the U. S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has grounded all Boeing 737 Max 9 planes, which affects some 171 aircraft. It has ordered inspections of the bolts and other structures around the door plugs, and United Airlines has already found that some bolts on its door plugs are loose.

Only last week, we described in this space how all passengers on a commercial flight involved in a runway collision in Japan survived with only minor injuries, and we can fortunately say the same about this accident in Portland. But things could have been much worse. In similar incidents involving sudden holes in fuselages, passengers or flight attendants have been sucked out bodily. If the boy sitting next to the hole hadn't been wearing his seatbelt, that probably would have been his fate. And if the plug had waited to fail at a higher altitude, the pressure differential would have been greater, possibly tearing a seat off its mounts.

Although we can rejoice that nobody was seriously injured, the big question now is why the plug blew out. The fact that at least one other plane has been found with loose bolts holding the plug says that this may not have been an isolated incident. That is why the FAA has wisely grounded the Max 9s until a thorough investigation shows exactly what the problem was.

We can only speculate at this point, but already some things are fairly clear. The fact that the plane suffering the accident was so new points to a possible manufacturing problem. Nuts on airframes must be torqued to a specific tension, because the proper amount of torque represents a compromise between not enough tension on the bolt, which might leave it subject to vibration loosening or fatigue in some cases, and too much tension, which could lead to bolt failure. Many bolts on aircraft have locking cables, cotter pins, or other means by which the nut on the bolt is prevented from turning. It's not clear whether the four bolts that hold the door plug in place had such provisions, but even locking devices can fail, or be improperly installed.

Another 737 Max series, the Max 8, was the subject of an extensive and expensive investigation involving defective software that intentionally crashed the plane when it received faulty data from attitude sensors. This problem cost Boeing billions of dollars and lost prestige, and the last thing the company needs right now is another expensive and embarrassing safety problem.

In a statement to employees that was also released to the public, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun promised "100% and complete transparency every step of the way" during the investigation. He can hardly promise less, because Boeing's reputation is on the line with every accident that points to a manufacturing cause.

As airlines which own 737 Max 9s wait impatiently to begin using their millions of dollars of investment again, both the FAA and Boeing have big incentives to figure out why the plug blew out and how to make sure it doesn't happen again. The recovery of the intact door will be very helpful in the investigation, and I expect we will know something definite within 60 to 90 days.

In the meantime, air flight remains a safe mode of travel for the vast majority of passengers. The incredible number of things that all have to work flawlessly for a typical flight to be completed goes completely unnoticed by most passengers, but it is the product of the efforts of thousands of engineers, technicians, service people, pilots, crew members, air traffic controllers, and others who do their jobs without public recognition.

We are fortunate that the last two attention-grabbing commercial aircraft accidents have resulted in relatively few casualties. But grounding the Max 9s was the right thing to do, and everyone looks forward to the time when we can know what happened, why it happened, and how to keep it from happening again.

Sources: I referred to the FAA website at https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/updates-grounding-boeing-737-max-9-aircraft and the following news reports: https://abcnews.go.com/US/alaska-airlines-emergency-fittings-top-door-plug-fractured/story?id=106218951, https://www.npr.org/2024/01/08/1223517098/door-plug-boeing-737-max-portland-ntsb-faa. and https://abc7ny.com/alaska-airlines-flight-emergency-boeing-door-plug/14298712/.

The Mostly Good News of the JAL Flight 516 Crash

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 11:55:00 +0000

Any air transportation fatality is tragic, and our sympathy is extended to the loved ones of the five crew members of the Japan Coast Guard plane who died in a collision with Japan Air Lines (JAL) flight 516 on Tuesday Jan. 2. But considering that the JAL Airbus 350 had 367 passengers and 12 crew members on board, and every single one of them survived, this accident could have been so much worse.

Investigation of the crash will continue for months, but initially it appears that while the JAL flight was cleared to land on runway 34R at Haneda Airport, one of the two international airports in Tokyo, a much smaller Japan Coast Guard De Havilland turboprop was supposed to be waiting to enter the runway. However, possibly due to a misunderstanding or communications error, the De Havilland was already on the runway as the JAL aircraft was landing.

The two aircraft collided, killing five of the six crew members on the Coast Guard plane and sending the Airbus 350 skidding down the runway. It eventually ground to a stop with the right engine still running. Dramatic video footage of the wreck shows passengers escaping down inflatable ramps in the red glow of the engine's fiery exhaust.

The JAL flight crew were unable to use the plane's PA system, so they resorted to megaphones in order to direct the passengers to usable exits amid the smoke that quickly filled the cabin. The wide-body carbon-fiber-composite A350 was designed for quick evacuation, but until now the evacuation procedure had only been tried out in drills. Eyewitnesses say none of the passengers appeared to be carrying luggage, which probably helped evacuate the plane quickly. The plane's captain was the last person to leave the aircraft. Despite the presence of over 100 fire trucks and the efforts of firefighters, the A350's fire spread throughout the plane and completely destroyed it. But other than bruises and minor injuries, all the passengers and crews made it out safely.

According to a BBC report on the crash, after a 1985 accident in which a JAL aircraft collided with a mountain and killed 520 people the company pledged that they would "never again allow such a tragic accident to occur." And a look at commercial aircraft fatalities over the years shows a generally declining trend since the 1970s, with a low of 59 deaths worldwide in 2017, for example.

This is the first total loss of a carbon-fiber-airframe A350, and the Airbus designers should be justifiably proud of the way the plane took the punishment of a crash landing without coming apart. Carbon does burn, after all, while aluminum doesn't burn as easily, and one might be concerned that a carbon-fiber plane would be more dangerous in terms of flammability. But the JAL 516 crash proved that under the particular circumstances of this accident, the Airbus managed to protect every human being inside from a fiery death.

Turning to the causes of the crash itself, increasing aspects of commercial flying have been computerized and automated. But the processes of taxiing, takeoff, and landing are mostly still done manually by the pilots and copilots.

Decades ago, railroads devised a system called "interlock" which helps prevent settings of switches that would put a train on a track occupied by another train. Planes aren't trains, but it seems that with modern GPS systems installed on every commercial plane, some sort of coordinated alarm process could be designed to inform pilots when they are straying onto a runway that they have not yet been authorized to enter.

Of course, such a system could cause more trouble than it's worth. And cockpits are already overflowing with alarms, flashing indicators, and other distractions that sometimes encumber pilots more than helping them.

But when you look into any multiple-fatality accident, regardless of the engineering field, you will typically find that there were precursors: less serious non-fatal incidents that nevertheless resembled the big awful one, but for some reason turned out to be either harmless or only slightly harmful. These near-misses are full of information about how to avoid the big awful accident, if only engineers and safety people will pay attention to them.

In the JAL-Coast Guard plane crash, five people died, but that was only a small fraction of the number who could have perished, had it not been for the excellent safety procedures and obedience of the passengers who evacuated Flight 516 so quickly. So in terms of what could have happened, this crash was more of a warning than a full-fledged tragedy.

If the cause does turn out to be due to pilot error, I think it's time to consider some sort of automated system that at a minimum, warns a pilot when he is about to stray onto a runway for which he hasn't been authorized. Not being a commercial pilot, I may be speaking out of ignorance and there may be such a system in place already. But it seems like if there was, we would have heard about it. Warning systems can only do so much, but if a light or voice had warned the Japan Coast Guard pilot that he didn't belong on the runway yet, his crew members might not have died, and 379 other people might not have had to run for their lives before their plane burned up.

It's good to know that those inflatable ramps are actually good for something, and that the practice evacuations in aircraft manufacturers' test facilities that some people make fun of ("Sure, try doing that with smoke in the cabin and screaming people everywhere") can actually be realized in a real-life emergency. But what would be even better is if this accident encourages new safety features that would keep the precipitating cause from happening anywhere, ever again.

Sources: I thank my wife for alerting me to the BBC article on this crash at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67870119. I also referred to statistics at https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-traffic-fatalities/

and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/aviation-fatalities-per-million-passengers, and the Wikipedia article "2024 Haneda airport runway collision."

California Cracks Down on Warehouse Pollution—Or Does It?

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 12:11:00 +0000

As the retail economy transitions from big-box stores to big-box warehouses supporting home delivery, the U. S. has experienced something of a warehouse building boom. And the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) in Southern California is going to make sure that those warehouses don't pollute the air.

How does a warehouse pollute the air? Good question. A warehouse itself is just a big room full of stuff. But getting the stuff in and out of the warehouse requires trucks and forklifts. Never mind that those trucks are going to be going somewhere else and emitting pollution anyway if that particular warehouse isn't built. The brilliant minds of the California regulators have determined that warehouse owners and operators are liable for the air pollution caused by any truck that delivers or picks up stuff at the warehouse.

In order to be absolved of these sins, warehouses must either pay a fee that allegedly goes toward the air district's anti-pollution initiatives, or must install electric vehicle chargers or rooftop solar panels. If the warehouse doesn't comply by the deadline (which varies from now till 2025, depending on the warehouse's size), the SCAQMD can assess fines of $11,700 a day. And according to an LA Times article, only about half of the warehouses included in current regulations have complied so far. In order to shame the noncompliant ones, the paper published a 109-line table of the warehouses that haven't complied. The article noted that the regulators made warehouses in disadvantaged communities a special priority for enforcement.

Nobody in their right mind is in favor of air pollution, other things being equal. But other things are hardly ever equal, and this attempt on the part of California regulators to reduce pollution that is loosely associated with warehouses shows that the regulatory process has reached the outer limits of feasibility in this case.

Let's see if we can analyze the logic of the regulations, such as it is. Californians need stuff that is typically shipped by truck. Currently, that stuff is moving less through retail stores and more through warehouses owned by retailers, shippers, and manufacturers, and a lot of truck traffic is going to and from the warehouses.

So far, electric trucks are not much of a thing, although in other regulations California is threatening to ban diesel trucks from the state altogether. (That would certainly fix the truck-pollution problem, but would deprive most Californians of their stuff.) The people building warehouses clearly have money to spend on building them, so they can certainly afford to pay either fees the regulators assess—so many dollars per truck coming and going—or they can afford to install lots of charging stations for the electric trucks which will surely materialize ("If you build it, they will come"), or force the warehouses to install solar panels on those nice flat roofs of theirs.

Now suppose you're a poor person living in one of those disadvantaged neighborhoods near which a big new warehouse has been built, and you open your door to diesel fumes emitted by the many trucks that drive past your house on the way to the warehouse. How is any aspect of these new regulations going to make your life better?

If the warehouse is paying a fee per truck and that goes to the SCAQMD, that isn't going to help you directly unless you get a job at the SCAQMD.

If the warehouse installs hordes of electric-truck charging stations, that isn't going to help you until the electric trucks come along, which may be many years from now, if ever.

If the warehouse installs solar panels on their roof, there's just as many trucks going by your house as there were before.

Unless you have the particular mindset that rejoices when any polluter is made to pay a penalty for their crime, and derive enough satisfaction from knowing that the warehouse operator is doing daily penance for attracting all those trucks that drive by your door, and that warm glow of vengeance or whatever it is outweighs the problem of all those trucks passing your house, you are no better off with these regulations than without them, at least for the foreseeable future.

Yes, perhaps the regulations move us incrementally closer to the fossil-fuel-free utopia envisioned by many in our elite classes, in which the roar of diesel engines is replaced by the almost imperceptible hum of electric motors—except for the occasional boom of exploding transformers overloaded by too much demand on an outmoded power grid.

I put the regulations in terms of sin and penance rather than in more objective or scientific terms, because that is what they amount to: a secular version of the religious concepts of sin and salvation. As I have shown, the warehouse anti-pollution regulations are not going to reduce the diesel emissions from trucks going to and from the warehouse, at least not until most of the California truck fleet becomes electric. But they punish people who have had the economic initiative to build warehouses in order to meet California's insatiable desire for stuff.

It would make more sense to assess fines on the trucks each time they make a delivery. But the regulators know they have pushed truckers about as far as they can stand, and so instead they go for large warehouse-owning corporations, which are richer and easier to shake down than individual truckers. I use the term "shakedown" intentionally, because in some ways, these environmental regulations are taking on the look of the Mafia henchman who comes into a dime store and says to the owner, "Nice little place you got here—a shame if anything happened to it." Because air quality has become such a sacred cow in California, almost anything can be done in its name, including the slapping of ineffective regulations that don't get at the root of the problem, but appease the gods of air quality.

Perhaps these regulations are just rough spots on the road to a diesel-free future, but in the meantime, I'm glad I don't run a warehouse in California.

Sources: The article "Crackdown on warehouse pollution results in more than 100 violation notices" appeared on the LA Times website at https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2023-12-22/warehouse-crackdown-results-in-over-100-pollution-violations.

Predatory Sparrows in Iran

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 12:11:00 +0000

In the United States, fears of widespread hacking causing major national disruptions have so far been mostly unfounded. There have been isolated foreign-based attacks on infrastructure here and there, but no one has so far been able to disrupt an important nationwide system deliberately for political reasons.

Iran hasn't been so fortunate. A hacker group calling itself Gonjeshke Darande, which translates as "Predatory Sparrow," claims responsibility for knocking out about 70% of Iran's gas stations in the last few days, according to an Associated Press report. A related CNBC piece connects the Predatory Sparrows with Israel, although the connection is unconfirmed by the group.

This isn't the first time the Sparrows have mounted cyberattacks in Iran. The CNBC report recounts a fire in an Iranian steel plant in June of 2022 which the group claimed to have started. The hackers say that they try to avoid inconveniencing civilians, but having 70% of a country's gas stations shut down is more than an inconvenience. Iran reportedly disconnected most of its government infrastructure from the Internet after the Stuxnet virus damaged uranium-enrichment centrifuges in the late 2000s, but the hackers have evidently found a way around that obstacle.

Iran has been sanctioned for its support of terrorism in other countries, and these sanctions prevent hardware and software updates from being installed that might otherwise help the country defend itself against attacks such as these. Reportedly, software pirating is widespread, but pirated software typically loses manufacturer support for security updates, with the result that such systems are comparatively easy to invade for nefarious purposes.

Iran is widely believed to be the power behind Hamas, the group which mounted the October 7 attacks in southern Israel. Engineering ethics always has to operate before a background of cultural and historical events. An action which can be construed as ethical in wartime, at least by some people, would be considered highly unethical in peacetime circumstances.

As large-scale hacks go, the Predatory Sparrows' shutdown of most gas stations, which isn't the first time they've done something like this, is not life-threatening, at least to most people. In tweets, the group claimed to have warned emergency services in advance, and so they at least appear to be trying to avoid serious harm to civilians. Their idea seems to be that if the people of Iran get fed up enough with issues like not being able to buy gas for a time, they will rise up and throw off the chains of the present regime. And that might happen, but the ayatollahs in charge have endured much worse challenges up to now, and unless their grip on power gets a lot shakier, they will probably shrug off this cyberattack as easily as they did the others.

Cyberattacks are still new enough to count as a novel addition to the warmonger's bag of tricks. As with other forms of warfare, its success depends on how well-defended the enemy is. For whatever reason, the United States seems to be doing a better job at defending itself against hacks than Iran has. I suspect a large factor in this difference has to do with the wide range of systems employed in the U. S. compared to more top-down-governed places like Iran.

I have no way of knowing for sure, but it wouldn't surprise me if nearly all the gas stations in Iran use the same kind of hardware and software. That uniformity makes a system much easier to hack compared to an infrastructure built out of several different brands and designs of technology. This is why theories of how a national election was allegedly hacked in many U. S. states hold so little water. A hacker would have to master and invade dozens or hundreds of different systems and would have to gain access to literally thousands of machines through individual county election offices in order to swing millions of votes.

While the rule can be extrapolated beyond its range of usefulness, it is true that in technological systems, diversity lends a kind of strength. If one brand of system falls to a hacker, the others may not. Iran would probably like to have a robust market for software, but sanctions and the general economic climate have militated against that. So in addition to having to limp along with outdated machinery, they suffer from Predatory Sparrows who take advantage of the vulnerabilities of outdated and pirated software.

What can the U. S. learn from this situation? At least two things.

First, money spent on cybersecurity is generally worth it. Regular updates and security patches are simply good practice, and most responsible organizations follow these guidelines.

Second, in technological diversity there is strength. Highly centralized national mandates dictating the details of any kind of cyber-infrastructure are liable to produce security vulnerabilities. The software industry is still one of the most lightly-regulated ones in our economy, and the resulting variety and dynamism is a security advantage as well as providing customers with the latest and greatest, other things being equal. Any attempt by government to do heavy-handed regulation is likely to lead to a uniformity that would not be in the best interests of customers, and it might make life easier for predatory sparrows and their like.

It's too bad that Iranians are having to wait in long lines at the 30% of gas stations that still operate (a fraction apparently chosen deliberately by the hackers), but when your government fights a proxy war, you can expect the enemy to get back at it by both fair means and foul. With cyberattacks, the line between fair and foul is especially fuzzy, and Iranians should be glad that the hackers are as relatively polite as they are. Still, it's a pain, and we can long for a day when neither Iran nor Hamas nor Israel has to resort to hacking, because peace has at long last come to earth.

And that's what Christmas is all about. But that's a story for another time.

Sources: The AP report "A suspected cyberattack paralyzes the majority of gas stations across Iran" appeared prior to Dec. 18, 2023 on the AP website at https://apnews.com/article/iran-gas-stations-cyberattack-a9ae33c352812e40ca3d255a2533fea9. I also referred to a CNBC report at https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/18/pro-israel-hackers-claim-cyberattack-disrupting-irans-gas-stations.html.

Are We Ready for Mandatory Alcohol Detectors in Cars?

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 11:52:00 +0000

Drunk driving has been a problem ever since automobiles were invented. The alertness needed to control a motor vehicle is incompatible with drinking more than a certain amount, and as a consequence of ignoring this fact, 13,400 people in the U. S. died in alcohol-related crashes, according to a recent AP news report. That may be about to change, because in response to a law passed by Congress in 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced on Dec. 12 that it is going to require all new passenger vehicles to have a device that will prevent drunk driving.

The NHTSA rule will not go into effect for a year or two, at least, because the agency's notice of proposed rule making first allows manufacturers to provide information about the state of the technology so as to have an orderly rollout and reasonable requirements once the rule is finalized. But unless Congress changes its mind, sooner or later all new cars will have this feature—or bug, depending on your point of view.

So-called "ignition lockout" devices are not new. A cursory search of the Internet turns up dozens of papers and project descriptions to implement versions of this technology. It appears that some jurisdictions already require certain people convicted of drunk driving to install a lockout device on their car before they are permitted to drive again. Some of these gizmos are pretty inconvenient—imagine having to blow into a tube every time you start your car. But it's better than not being able to drive at all.

The AP article says that the new required device won't have a tube for drivers to blow into, and the average driver may not even be aware of its presence. The optimum technology hasn't been decided on yet, but leading candidates include a sensor that would check the driver's breath from a distance (maybe mounted in the steering wheel?), or an optical spectrometer that would derive blood alcohol content from reflectance measurements on a finger.

From a technical point of view, one can ask what the acceptable rate of false positives and false negatives are going to be. For sober drivers and those who haven't consumed their legal limit, false positives will mean that your car won't start until the device decides that you're really sober. Users of alcohol-based mouthwashes and breath-freshener sprays will have to avoid using them just before getting in the car in the morning. This in itself is not a major problem, but other factors could cause false positives as well. For the finger-spectrometer device, what if you happen to wear gloves? Too bad, you'll have to take them off to drive.

And then there's the question of setting a threshold. As the instrument itself can be backed up by sophisticated statistical software, it may take other factors into account: the weight of the driver (easily obtained from a strain gauge in the seat), the driver's motions as monitored by pedal and steering wheel activity, and history of alcohol use as detected by the system in the past. But no system is going to be perfect. We can expect some unanticipated problems when the systems are first deployed widely among drivers who don't drink, because there's nothing like the real world to come up with situations that even the most imaginative engineer can't predict.

Even worse will be the false negatives: cases in which the driver is really drunk but the system doesn't detect it. Habitual drunk drivers will have a strong motivation to defeat the system, and designers will have to take measures to ensure this doesn't happen. "See that little hole in the steering wheel? Plug it up with chewing gum and you can drive no matter how many you've had." Tricks like that will have to be prevented somehow.

Reducing the thousands of deaths annually due to drunk driving is worth something, certainly. And adding one more required system to automobiles is not going to be noticed along with the many hardware and software enhancements—assisted driving chief among them—which are already being implemented voluntarily by carmakers.

But an alcohol-detection system is different in kind from other systems, in that it monitors the driver's condition independent of how well he or she drives. You can make the case that automatic braking systems step in and remove control from the driver when the system decides it's necessary, but that is determined by immediate road circumstances to avoid an imminent crash. An alcohol-detection system uses a chemical sensor to conclude that the "meat system" called the driver is unsuitable for use, and simply shuts down the car until the driver sobers up.

This may be the first step toward driver evaluation that is already implemented in some ways elsewhere. "Dead man" lockout systems in certain types of industrial equipment require that a person always be touching the controls or holding a pedal down, and if the operator ceases to do so, the equipment automatically stops. One can imagine alertness tests using subtle cues such as eye motion in response to instrument-panel changes, and if the car decides you're too sleepy to drive, it tells you to pull over or else. Or else—what? Stopping in the middle of traffic wouldn't be a good idea, but unless the car is semi-autonomous already, it's hard to think of what to do with a sleepy driver other than to tell him or her to get off the road, and hope that the driver obeys.

Like it or not, all new cars will eventually have the alcohol-detection feature, which is already being required next year in some European Union countries. And we will have to deal with the consequences, whatever they may be. Reducing the number of drunk-driving crashes is a highly worthwhile goal, and if it means a few non-drinkers will be inconvenienced by false positives now and then, it's probably worth it.

Sources: The AP article "US agency takes first step toward requiring new vehicles to prevent drunk or impaired driving" was published at https://apnews.com/article/alcohol-breath-test-devices-required-new-vehicles-2a2e2862691ecea396df3ab66d4440c6. I also referred to a website of the Chinese firm Winsen (which makes alcohol-vapor detectors) at https://www.winsen-sensor.com/knowledge/alcohol-detection-engine-lockin-to-prevent-drunk-driving.html.

Water Beads: A Small But Significant Ethics Issue

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 12:14:00 +0000

Water beads, which are spheres of a highly absorbent polymer compound that absorbs water to produce glassy-clear globules that are nearly all water, turn out to be the focus of an ethical issue as complex as many that involve more influential technologies. I managed to survive until an advanced age in complete ignorance of the existence of water beads. But now that I've found out about them, they turn out to be more controversial than you'd think.

It all began last Friday at a Christmas dinner and concert at a church some friends of ours attend. The table decorations were clear plastic candle stands with a thin stem supporting a clear cup that had what looked like water in it. Floating on the water was a disc-shaped candle, but what caught my interest was what I saw between the candle and the bottom of the cup.

Somehow, there were five or six small Christmas ornaments suspended at various heights in the cup, which was at least two or three inches (2.5-4 cm) high. Some ornaments were at the bottom, some were suspended in the middle, and some were near the top. This got my physics-oriented mind going: what kept the ornaments from either all falling to the bottom or floating to the top? Was it clear gelatin? A touch of my fork to the top of the cup proved that no, there was plain water at the top. (You see how I spend my time at parties.) I leaned over to my friend at the next table, who is also technically inclined, and asked him how it worked. He had no idea, but knew the lady who did the table decorations and said he'd ask her after the event was over.

When we caught up with her, she said, "You want to know my candle-holder secret? Orbeez."

We didn't know what Orbeez were.

"Water beads. See, here's a cup that got spilled." On the table were dozens of what looked like clear marbles, maybe 5 mm (1/4 inch or so) in diameter. Being almost all water, they are almost invisible when suspended in water. If I looked through an intact cup with its ornaments, I could see sort of ripples in the clear fluid, like heat waves above a hot road in the summer, but nothing more than that. The water beads in the water stay intact and support the Christmas decorations at various heights. Mystery solved, but what the heck were Orbeez?

It's a trade name for water spheres made with a special polymer originally developed to make highly absorbent sanitary napkins in the 1970s. When compressed dry into either spheres or various other shapes, the material expands when placed in water, but retains its relative shape. Wikipedia's article on expandable water toys describes both the attraction they have for children and also the hazards they pose.

Especially if the objects are brightly colored or have interesting shapes resembling candy, it's easy to imagine a baby or young child eating them. And this has happened—a lot. The problem is that unless the object is already saturated with water, it will continue to absorb water and expand inside the digestive tract. The U. S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has a grim webpage with an X-ray showing a child's colon filled with water beads that caused an intestinal blockage, which leads to severe illness or even death if untreated.

According to an article on the ClickOrlando.com website, 4,500 emergency-room visits in the U. S. were attributed to water beads from 2017 to 2022. This is why last month, U. S. Representative Frank Pallone introduced legislation that would ban the sale of such beads altogether.

As with other engineering-ethics issues, the first step is to identify the parties involved. The manufacture of the beads takes place offshore, mostly in China. Retailers buy them either directly or from repackagers, and sell them to the public. Both children and their parents buy the beads, and adults such as our table decorator as well as children use them. Some types of beads have a maximum size of only a few millimeters, and are advertised as harmless except to very young children, whose small-bore internal plumbing could still be plugged by such objects. Others can get as large as two inches (about 50 mm), and pose a clear hazard if ingested.

What we have now is close to a libertarian approach to the problem. Water beads as such are unregulated, but the CPSC has issued consumer recalls on specific brands of water beads that appear to be very likely to be misused. For example, Target sold a product called "Chuckle and Roar Ultimate Water Bead Activity Kit." The CPSC issued a recall notice for this product on Sept. 14 of this year. It's not stated why this particular product was singled out, unless it was associated with an unusually high number of ER visits.

Rep. Pallone's bill would take the government-knows-best approach and simply ban all such products, at least according to the brief report on it. It's unclear whether responsible adult users such as florists and decorators would be allowed to buy them, perhaps after showing proof they are over 18, like ammunition is treated. If enforcement is not any more rigorous than the regulations around buying ammunition, which I did online by simply checking a box saying that I was over 18, the new law might not be very effective.

Somehow, people with small children keep them alive in houses full of things that might hurt them: drain cleaner, cleaning fluids, medicines, and so on. While allowing a very young child who doesn't know the difference between food and plastic to play with water beads seems unwise, it's up to society at large to decide whether hundreds of ER trips every year for kids who eat water beads is worth the pleasure they derive from using them properly.

To be frank, most of society is unaware that there is even an issue. If Rep. Pallone's bill advances toward passage, you can count on the water-bead sellers to protest, and unless there is an organized group such as Parents Against Water Beads, the voices of the manufacturers and retailers may prevail. In that case, we'll all just have to be more careful and try not to make this world any more hazardous than it is already for small children. Even if water beads really are cool looking.

Sources: The article describing Rep. Pallone's bill is at https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2023/11/13/bill-coming-to-congress-would-ban-orbeez-other-water-beads-over-child-injuries/. The CPSC statement on the water-bead product recall is at

https://www.cpsc.gov/About-CPSC/Chairman/Alexander-Hoehn-Saric/Statement/Chair-Hoehn-Saric-Statement-on-the-Dangers-that-Water-Beads-Pose-to-Young-Children.

I also referred to the Wikipedia article on "Expandable Water Toy."

Consumer Reports Says Electric Cars Have More Problems

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 12:02:00 +0000

In a comprehensive survey covering vehicle model years 2021 through 2023, the publication Consumer Reports found that electric cars, SUVs, and pickups had among the worst reliability ratings compared to either all-internal-combustion-powered vehicles or IC-powered hybrids (not plug-in hybrids, which were also problem-prone).

Results varied by brand. Tesla, the largest seller of all-electric vehicles, rose in the reliability rankings from 19th out of 30 automakers in last year's survey to 14th out of 30 in the latest study. This reflects an overall tendency that is probably the main cause of reliability problems with electric vehicles (EVs): inexperience.

The first time you do anything, you're not likely to do it perfectly. Young people sometimes don't understand this basic principle of life, and it leads to unfortunate consequences. My mother once sent me to take tennis lessons when I was about ten. When I discovered I couldn't serve like a pro right off the bat (or the racket), I promptly lost all interest and closed myself off to a lifetime of tennis enjoyment.

The same thing that is true of individuals learning how to do new things is true of automakers learning how to make EVs. An Associated Press article on the Consumer Reports survey quotes Jake Fisher, their senior director of auto testing, as saying the situation is mainly "growing pains." No matter how detailed and accurate computer models and laboratory prototypes are, a manufacturer can't simulate the myriad of unlikely situations that will arise when a product is made in units of thousands and sent out to the great unwashed public, who will do a lot of crazy durn things that the maker could never think of.

This sort of thing has been going on with internal-combustion (IC) cars since before 1900, and the automakers are supremely experienced with what can go wrong with that technology. It may be surprising to learn, but the reliability requirements of military-grade technology are nowhere nearly as rigorous and demanding as the requirements for hardware used in the automotive industry. Jet aircraft are inspected and serviced every few hundred hours. But Grandma just drives her car until it breaks, and expects that to happen very rarely.

Combine that consumer expectation with a radically new powertrain, control system, and body, which is what EVs represent, and you're going to have problems, even entirely new types of problems. The issue of autonomous vehicles is formally independent of EVs, but as some of the most advanced autonomous-vehicle systems are found in EVs such as Teslas, the two often go together. And autonomous driving is only one of the multitude of new features that EVs make either possible at all, or a lot easier to implement.

An EV is more of a hardware shell for a software platform than anything else, and reliability standards for software are a different kind of cat compared to automotive reliability expectations. Software is at fault in many issues involving EVs, although it can increasingly cause problems with IC cars as well.

The hope expressed by many EV makers is that consumers will recognize the higher problem rate as something temporary, and won't allow it to tarnish the overall reputation of the technology. This depends on the age and psychology of the customer to a great and imponderable degree.

Just last night, for instance, I was talking with a friend who bought his first Tesla about five months ago. If he's had any problems with it, he didn't mention them. I asked about charging times, and he said it was no problem. He can charge his Tesla at his house overnight, and he knows where there are supercharging stations that will do it in only 30 minutes.

His attitude reminds me of a scene in the Woody Allen movie "Annie Hall." In a split-screen scene, Alvy Singer's therapist asks him, "How often do you sleep together?" Singer replies forlornly, "Hardly ever. Maybe three times a week." In the other half of the screen, his partner Annie Hall gets asked the same question by her therapist, and Annie says with annoyance, "Constantly. I'd say three times a week."

My friend, a power engineer and Tesla enthusiast, sees charging an EV in thirty minutes as wonderful, hardly any time at all. Someone like me, who is a dyed-in-the-wool IC traditionalist, can't help compare that half hour to the five minutes I usually spend at the gas pump, and the Tesla suffers by comparison.

The true-blue EV proponents will undoubtedly overlook or tolerate minor issues with their vehicles and rightly regard them as temporary stumbling blocks that will grow less frequent as the makers learn from their mistakes and improve reliability overall. The big question is, are there enough such proponents to support the overwhelming market share growth that the automakers hope for, and that the federal government is standing by to enforce with a big stick if it doesn't happen?

The same AP article notes that the initially explosive growth of EV sales has slowed by about half in the last year. It's a genuine open question as to where EV sales will stabilize, if they ever do, with regard to IC sales. The problem that the automakers face is that as things currently stand, they must comply with the so-called CAFE standards for overall fleet fuel economy, or else pay heavy fees for non-compliance. And the Biden administration has proposed steep increases in the fleet-mileage numbers that will require a large fraction of all cars on the roadways to be EVs in the coming years.

One can question the propriety of government interference in the auto marketplace. If left alone, the market will let all the EV enthusiasts satisfy their wants without driving up the overall price of cars or causing artificial scarcities of IC vehicles. Both of these downsides are likely if the government forces Adam Smith's famed invisible hand to deal only the kinds of cars the government wants, without regard to consumer preferences or needs.

Electric cars will become more reliable, but it's by no means clear if consumers will want enough of them to warrant the current pressures to overthrow the century-long reign of IC cars.

Sources: The AP article "Consumer Reports: Electric vehicles less reliable, on average, than conventional cars and trucks" appeared on Nov. 29, 2023 at https://apnews.com/article/electric-vehicles-consumer-reports-gasoline-vehicles-charging-eed9c3b8d86c1f7708b7c6e2d4dbf55e. I also referred to IMDB for the "Annie Hall" quote at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075686/characters/nm0000095, and for CAFE standards at https://www.npr.org/2023/07/28/1190799503/new-fuel-economy-standards-cars-trucks.

Corpus Christi Gets a New Harbor Bridge --- Eventually

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 12:10:00 +0000

When my wife and I took a short vacation down to the Gulf Coast in October, we used part of a day to visit the Texas State Aquarium in the North Beach part of Corpus Christi. To get there, we had to take the (old) Harbor Bay Bridge that crosses a large industrial canal through which pass tankers going to the main industry of Corpus Christi, which is oil refining. That bridge was built in 1959, and about twenty years ago, plans began to be made for a new bridge. As we saw from miles away, the new Harbor Bridge is well under way and may be completed as soon as 2025.

The new bridge will be cable-stayed: two tall pylons will hold sets of cables that slant out and down to connect to the bridge deck. And I do mean tall. One of the pylons is complete, and the builders are extending the deck out from it in both directions. It is by far the tallest structure for hundreds of miles around, and the cantilevered-out parts extend so far that I got a little giddy just looking at the thing. When it's finished, the bridge will allow much taller ships to pass underneath than the current bridge, and will have a pedestrian walkway and LED lighting. Its planned cost is some $800 million, but that was before some delays occasioned in 2022 when an outside consultant raised safety concerns. That halted construction on a part of the bridge for nine months, but the five safety issues were addressed, and construction resumed last April.

Later that month, as the Corpus Christi Hooks were playing a baseball game at nearby Whataburger Field (the eponymous fast-food firm's first restaurant was in Corpus Christi), a fire began near the rear of a construction crane on the bridge. Subsequent videos obtained by news media show a load on the crane falling rapidly to the ground, and flying debris injured one spectator at the ball game. A battalion chief for the Corpus Christi Fire Department said a cable failure caused enough friction to set grease on a cable reel afire. An Internet search has not revealed any other major accidents since the bridge project formally began in 2016, but it is possible that some have escaped the news media's attention.

Originally scheduled to be completed in 2020, delays and engineering-firm changes have pushed back the anticipated completion date to 2025. That's only two years from now, and while a good bit has been accomplished, there is still much remaining.

While any injuries or fatalities from construction projects are tragic, we have come a long way from the days when it was just an accepted fact that major bridges and tunnels would cost a certain number of human lives.

In 1875, the 4.75-mile Hoosac Tunnel was completed in the hills of Western Massachusetts. It took twenty years to build, and 135 verified deaths were associated with the project. One of the worst accidents happened when a candle in the hoist building at the top of a ventilation shaft caught a naphtha-fueled lamp on fire, and the wooden hoist structure burned and collapsed down the shaft, trapping 13 workers at the bottom, who suffocated. While the hazards were severe enough to inspire a workers' strike in 1865, this failed to stop construction, and the following year saw the highest number of fatalities: fourteen.

In 1937, San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge opened after four years of work. Its safety record was better than the Hoosac Tunnel, and would have been almost perfect except for a scaffolding failure that sent twelve men plunging through the safety net to the bay. Two survived, and there was one other unrelated fatality, making a total of eleven. Nineteen men fell into the safety net and survived to form an exclusive group they called the Half Way to Hell Club.

This completely unscientific survey of major construction project fatalities and injuries seems to indicate that over time, we as a culture in the U. S. have grown less tolerant of having workers killed on the job. Credit for this improvement can be parceled out in a number of directions.

The contractors and engineers in charge of construction projects deserve a good share of the credit. They are the ones who determine how the work will be done, and how important safety is compared to the bottom-line goal of getting the job done.

The increased mechanization of construction labor has to be another factor. One modern construction worker equipped with the proper tools can do the work that required several workers decades or a century ago. So the simple fact that fewer people are needed to do a given job has made it less likely that people will be injured or killed on the job.

Government agencies—federal, state, and local—also deserve some credit. The Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was founded in 1970, and its influence has undoubtedly led to safety improvements, although doing a cost-benefit analysis of OSHA would be a daunting task even for a team of historians and safety analysts.

Labor unions hold safety as a high priority, and while there are probably statistics supporting the contention that unionized workers have better safety records than non-union employees, a lot of non-union workers manage to work safely too.

If the worst accident that happens during the construction of the new harbor bridge in Corpus Christi turns out to be the flying-debris crane mishap, that will be a truly exemplary record for a project that will have taken nearly a decade and cost nearly a billion dollars. The project still has a long way to go, and it's possible that the most hazardous operations lie in the future: putting the rest of the cables in place and connecting the deck to finish off the bridge. But the contractors have enforced safety sufficiently to get this far with no major incidents, and the hope is that this trend will continue.

The other question about the bridge is, of course, will it stay put once it's built? The original engineering firm for the bridge, FIGG, was kicked off the project in 2022 after an independent review. FIGG, by the way, was involved in the ill-fated Florida International University pedestrian bridge that collapsed in March of 2018. Recent reports indicate that all the engineering concerns have been adequately addressed, but we won't know for sure until the bridge is finished and has withstood its first hurricane. Stay tuned.

Sources: I referred to the following sources: https://www.kiiitv.com/article/news/local/new-video-port-of-cc-cameras-show-initial-fire/503-52b32589-f72c-4653-926b-2160c83fa3fd, https://www.kristv.com/news/local-news/a-crane-fire-seen-from-up-above-and-felt-from-down-below, https://www.tpr.org/news/2022-09-16/construction-on-new-corpus-christi-bridge-halted-as-engineers-say-design-flaws-could-lead-to-collapse, https://www.kiiitv.com/article/news/local/whataburger-field-spectator-hospitalized/, and https://practical.engineering/blog/2022/9/15/what-really-happened-at-the-new-harbor-bridge-project, as well as the Wikipedia articles on the Hoosac Tunnel and the Golden Gate Bridge.

Cruise Gets Bruised

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 12:27:00 +0000

General Motors' autonomous-vehicle operation is called Cruise, and just last August, it received permission (along with Google's Waymo) to operate driverless robotaxis in San Francisco at all hours of the day and night. This made the city the only one in the United States with two competing firms providing such services.

Only a week after the California Public Utilities Commission acted to allow 24-hour services, a Cruise robotaxi carrying a passenger was involved in a collision with a fire truck on an emergency call. The oncoming fire truck had moved into the robotaxi's lane at an intersection surrounded by tall buildings and controlled by a traffic light, which had turned green for the robotaxi. Engineers for Cruise said that the robotaxi identified the emergency vehicle's siren as soon as it rose above the ambient noise level, but couldn't track its path until it came into view, by which time it was too late for the robotaxi to avoid hitting it. The passenger was taken to a hospital but was not seriously injured.

As a result, Cruise agreed with the Department of Motor Vehicles to reduce their active fleet of robotaxis by 50% until the investigation by DMV of this and other incidents was resolved.

In many engineering failures, warning signs of a comparatively minor nature appear before the major catastrophe, which usually attracts attention by loss of life, injuries, or significant property damage. These minor signs are valuable indicators to those who wish to prevent the major tragedies from occurring, but they are not always heeded effectively. The Cruise collision with a fire truck proved to be one such case.

On Oct. 2, a pedestrian was hit by a conventional human-piloted car on a busy San Francisco street. This happens from time to time, but the difference in this case was that the impact sent the pedestrian toward a Cruise robotaxi. When the unfortunate pedestrian hit the robotaxi, the vehicle's system interpreted the collision as "lateral," meaning something hit it from the side. In the case of lateral collisions, the robotaxi is programmed to stop and then pull off the road to keep from obstructing traffic.

What the system didn't take into account was that the pedestrian was still stuck under one of the robotaxi's wheels, and when it pulled about six meters (20 feet) to the curb, it dragged the pedestrian with it, causing critical injuries.

California regulators reacted swiftly. The DMV revoked Cruise's license, and the firm announced it was going to suspend driverless operations nationwide, including a few vehicles in Austin, Texas, and other locations. There were only 950 vehicles in the entire U. S. fleet, so the operation is clearly in its early stages.

But now, after Cruise has done software recalls for human-piloted vehicles as well as driverless ones, it is far from clear what their path is back to viability. According to an AP report, GM had big hopes for substantial revenue from Cruise operations, expecting on the order of $1 billion in 2025 after making only about a tenth of that in 2022. And profitability, which would require recouping the billions GM already invested in the technology, is even farther in the future than it was before the problems in San Francisco.

The consequences of these events can be summarized under the headings of good news and bad news.

The good news: Nobody got killed, although being dragged twenty feet under the wheel of a robot car that clearly has no idea what is going on might be a fate worse than death to some people. After failing to heed the warning incident in August, Cruise has finally decided to react vigorously with significant and costly moves. According to AP, it is adding a chief safety officer and asking a third-party engineering firm to find the technical cause of the Oct. 2 crash. So after clearly inadequate responses to the earlier incidents, a major one has motivated Cruise management to act.

The bad news: Several people were injured, at least one critically, before Cruise realized that, at least in the complex environs of San Francisco, their robotaxis posed an unacceptable risk to pedestrians. I'm sure Google's Waymo vehicles have a less-than-perfect safety record, but whatever start-up glitches they suffered are well in the past. Cruise does not have the luxury of experience that Waymo has, and is in a sense operating in foreign territory. Maybe Detroit would have been a better choice than San Francisco for a test market, but that would have neglected the cool factor, which is after all what is driving the robotaxi project in the first place.

Back when every elevator had a human operator, there was a valid economic and engineering argument to replace the manually-controlled units with automatic ones. The main reason was to eliminate the salary of the operator. Fortunately, the environment of an elevator is exceedingly well defined, and the relay-based technology of the 1920s sufficed to produce automatic elevators which met all safety requirements and were easy enough for the average passenger to operate. Nevertheless, some places clung to manual elevators as recently as the 1980s, as I recall from a visit to a tax consultant in Northampton, Massachusetts, whose office was accessed by means of an elevator controlled not by buttons but by a rather seedy-looking old man.

Being an old man myself now, I come to the defense of everyone on the street who would like to confront real people behind the wheel, not some anonymous software that may—may!—figure out I'm a human being and not a tall piece of plastic wrap blowing in the wind, in time to stop before it hits me. Yes, robotaxis are cool. Yes, they save on taxi-driver salaries, but this ignores the fact that one of the few entry-level jobs that recent immigrants to this country can get which actually pays a living wage is that of taxi driver, many of whom are independent entrepreneurs.

Robotaxis may be cool, but dangerous they should not be. GM may patch up their Cruise operation and get it going again, but then again it may go the way of the Segway. Time will tell.

Sources: An article from the USA Today Network in the online Austin American-Statesman for Nov. 16, 2023 alerted me to the fact that Cruise was ramping down its nationwide operations, including those in Austin. I consulted AP News articles at https://apnews.com/article/cruise-general-motors-pedestrian-recall-software-crash-bf08c0c6e7914649750b4dde598af5fc

(Nov. 8, 2023) and at https://apnews.com/article/san-francisco-cruise-robotaxi-crash-e721a81c1366c71a03c0aa50aa2e98f3 (Aug. 19, 2023).

Should Social Media Data Replace Opinion Polls—And Voting?

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 11:48:00 +0000

Pity the poor opinion pollsters of today. Their job has been mightily complicated by the rapidly changing nature of communications media and the soaring costs of paying real people to do real things such as knocking on doors and asking questions. In an age when even the Census Bureau has mostly abandoned the in-person method of counting the population, opinion polls can't compete either. For a time—say 1950 to 2000—their job was made easier by the advent of the near-universal telephone. But the rise of robocalling, mobile phone proliferation with the caller ID feature, and the consequent general aversion of nearly everybody to answering a call from someone you don't know, has made it much harder for opinion poll workers to approach the ideal of their business: a truly representative sample of the relevant population.

So why not take advantage of the technological advances we have, and use data culled from social media to do opinion polling? After all, we are told that some social-media and big-tech firms know more about our preferences than we do ourselves. Out there in the bit void is a profile of everyone who has anything to do with mobile phones, computers, or the Internet—which is almost everyone, period. And much of that data on people is either publicly available or can be obtained for a price that is a lot less than paying folks to walk around in seventeen carefully selected cities and countrysides knocking on one thousand doors.

Well, anything a piker like me can think of, you can bet smarter people have thought of as well. And sure enough, three researchers at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland have not only thought of it, but have collected nearly two hundred papers by other researchers who have also looked into the topic.

In surveying the literature, Maud Reveilhac, Stephanie Steinmetz, and Davide Morselli apparently did not find anyone who has gone all the way from traditional opinion polling to relying mainly on social-media data (or SMD for short). That is a bridge too far even now. But they found many researchers trying to show how SMD can complement traditional survey data, leading to new insights and confirming or disconfirming poll findings.

With regard specifically to political polls, a subject many of the papers focused on, one can imagine a kind of hierarchy, with one's actual vote at the top. Below that is the opinion a voter might tell a pollster in response to the question, "If the Presidential election were held today, who would you vote for?" And below that, as far as I know, anyway, are the actions the voter takes on social media—the sites visited, the tweets subscribed to, the comments posted, etc.

It only stands to reason that there is some correlation among these three classes of activity. If someone watches hours of Trump speeches and says they are going to vote for Trump, it would be surprising to find that they actually voted for Bernie Sanders as a write-in, for example.

But there is a time-honored tradition in democracies that the act of voting is somehow sacred and separate from anything else a person happens to do or say. Because voting is the exercise of a right conferred by the government, in the moment of voting a person is acting in an official capacity. It is essentially the same kind of act as when a governor or president signs a law, and should be safeguarded and respected in the same way. A president may have said things that lead you to think he will sign a certain law. He may even say he'll sign it when it comes to his desk. But until he actually and consciously signs it, it's not yet a law.

There are laws against bribing executives and judges in order to influence their decisions, and so there are also laws against paying people to vote a certain way. That is because in a democracy, we expect the judgment of each citizen to be exercised in a conscious and deliberate way. And bribes or other forms of vote contamination corrupt this process.

Despite the findings of the University of Lausanne researchers that so far, no one has attempted to replace opinion polls wholesale with data garnered from social media or other sources, the danger still exists. And with the advent of AI and its ability to ferret out correlations in inhumanly large data sets, I can easily imagine a scenario such as the following.

Suppose some hotshot polling organization finds that they can get a consistently high correlation between traditional voting, on the one hand, and "polling" based on a sophisticated use of social media and other Internet-extracted data—data extracted in most cases without the explicit knowledge of the people involved. Right now, that sort of thing is not possible, but it may be achievable in the near future.

Suppose also that for whatever reason, participation in actual voting plummets. This sounds far-fetched, but already we've seen how one person can singlehandedly cast effective aspersions on the validity of elections that by most historical measures were properly conducted.

Someone may float the idea that, hey, we have this wonderful polling system that predicts the outcomes of elections so well that people don't even have to vote! Let's just do it that way—ask the AI system to find out what people want, and then give it to them.

It sounds ridiculous now. But in 1980, it sounded ridiculous to say that in the near future, soft-drink companies will be bottling ordinary water and selling it to you at a dollar a bottle. And it sounded ridiculous to say that the U. S. Census Bureau would quit trying to count every last person in the country, and would rely instead on a combination of mailed questionnaires and "samples" collected in person.

So if anybody in the future proposes replacing actual voting with opinion polls that people don't actually have to participate in, I'm here to say we should oppose the idea. It betrays the notion of democratic voting at its core. The social scientists can play with social-media data all they want, but there is no substitute for voting, and there never should be.

Sources: The paper "A systematic literature review of how and whether social media data can complement traditional survey data to study public opinion," by Maud Reveilhac, Stephanie Steinmetz, and Davide Morselli appeared in Multimedia Tools and Applications, vol. 81, pp. 10107-10142, in 2022, and is available online at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11042-022-12101-0.

Here's Why Your Girlfriend Will Eventually Get Bored During Sex

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 21:26:52 +0000

Don't shoot the messenger here

7 Ways to Make Your Girlfriend Feel Less Self-Conscious In Bed

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 21:00:08 +0000

If you give her what she needs, trust us— she'll return the favor

Calvin Klein's Latest Sweater ... Is Different. We Can't Put Our Nipples on It

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 20:47:57 +0000

It's not exactly office appropriate

Could Tattoos Actually Give You Cancer? Honestly, Science Doesn't Know

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 20:35:51 +0000

Research suggests that there might be a correlation between tattoo ink and cancer— but don't freak out just yet

Can Watching Too Much Porn Give You Erectile Dysfunction?

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 20:29:45 +0000

We spoke to two experts about the scary possibility

Daily Deal: Cook the Juiciest Steak of Your Life With This Sous Vide

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 20:13:28 +0000

Way cheaper than tuition at Le Cordon Bleu

Actor Frank Vincent Passes Away Due to Open Heart Surgery Complications

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 20:00:04 +0000

The critically-acclaimed mob drama star was 80 years old

Light Up Your Arms, Chest, and Abs With This TRX Exercise

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 19:23:38 +0000

The pushup to pike is ideal for multitaskers

No, Wonder Woman Is Not Based on a Threesome

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 19:08:57 +0000

A new movie suggests that the superhero was inspired by a steamy three-way— but the truth is a lot more complicated than that

This Victoria's Secret Model's Muay Thai Workout Will Leave You Drenched

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 18:41:24 +0000

You'll work your abs in ways you never have before

There's Actually a Way to Reverse Diabetes—Here's How You Can Do It

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 17:46:58 +0000

The condition doesn't have to be permanent for everyone, research suggests

Danica Patrick's 33-Minute Living Room Workout Looks Exhausting as Hell

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 17:34:08 +0000

The NASCAR star shows off her fitness in a living room workout she posted on Instagram

'I Tried Eating An Avocado Every Day For A Week—Here's What Happened'

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 17:25:33 +0000

It was harder than it sounds

Meet the Man Who Tattooed His Penis and 90 Percent of His Body to Help Fight His Chronic Pain

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 16:59:36 +0000

"Tattboy" has spent over $80,000 on his ink

The Cadillac CT6 Plug-In Hybrid is Green Luxury

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 16:48:55 +0000

What you should know about Cadillac's new hybrid

Could a Sex Robot Actually Kill You?

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 16:33:47 +0000

A viral news story claims hackers could train fembots to kill us in our sleep— but don't believe the hype

The 16 Coolest Leather Backpacks for Fall

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 16:16:03 +0000

Perfect for a daily commute or a weekend adventure—and everything in between

5 Celebrity Chefs Reveal the Key to Perfectly Fluffy Scrambled Eggs

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 16:05:23 +0000

Just don't over-whisk them

Here's Why WWE's "Big Show" May Finally Have to Call It Quits

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 15:39:29 +0000

Due to a lingering injury, the seven-time champion isn't sure what the future holds

What Every Germaphobe Should Know

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 15:34:10 +0000

Your quest to avoid pathogens might take you down the wrong path

Selena Gomez Reveals She Underwent a Secret Kidney Transplant Due to Lupus

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 14:55:46 +0000

The singer's battle with the autoimmune disease continues to impact her life

Watch This Giant Cyst Pop Like It Was Shot Out of a Cannon

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 14:50:44 +0000

You can thank Michael Lewis, M.D., for this clip

More Men Are Seeking Help for Eating Disorders Than Ever Before

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 14:09:04 +0000

The number of guys seeking treatment has risen 70 percent between 2010 and 2016

Conor McGregor Says a "Wealth Belly" Is the New Six-Pack—Here's Why We Aren't Buying It

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 13:15:01 +0000

Don't expect the MMA champ to start fighting as a heavyweight anytime soon, either

Male Birth Control Might Be Right Around the Corner, And It Sounds Pretty Damn Cool

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 12:52:58 +0000

Researchers have been talking about male contraception for years, but it actually might be on the horizon