James L Adams—People and Products

The Internet—Broadening or Narrowing

The internet is still young. The World Wide Web was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist. Historically, technological discoveries and inventions have taken at least 50 years to mature. There is no doubt in my mind that the internet will change appreciably in the next 24 years, and probably continue to change after that because of its complexity in content and in the things it is trying to achieve. And it should.

Most of us can remember the hopes that the internet would interconnect the world—a free and rapid means of communication for people of all countries, cultures, and values. It is doing some of that. But it also can bbe used to strengthen isolated tribes of people who would like everyone to think as they do. Rebel groups in many countries have used the internet to coordinate and fund their efforts. If we share their interest, we think that is good. If their interests are opposed to ours, we think it is bad.  

There was a good summary of this situation in a column written by Frank Bruni and entitled How Facebook Warps Our World in the Sunday May 22 Opinion Section of the New York Times. It is here.   He speaks of the ease of increasingly interacting with people with the same values, interests, and biases that we have, and in the process becoming isolated from people of different values, thus reinforcing our own. He worries that we will turn into narrow frustrated groups unwilling to accept or even try to understand the values of others. He does not blame Facebook or other social networking services. He blames us and our need to be part of a group that reinforces our beliefs — our tribe. Networking services simplify this process for us.

This can be seen building in the present Presidential election. At this point I know people who abhor Donald Trump, and others who abhor Hillary Clinton. In fact I know people who abhor both of them. None of these people have met either. They are operating on a bit of staged video and probably biased media and reinforced by their “friends”, both personal and incrfeasingly cyber. Finally there seem to be more moderate voices. I just read an article in The Atlantic Magazine entitled The Mind of Donald Trump written by Dan P. McAdams, a Professor of Psychology and director of the Foley Center for the Study of Lives at Northwestern University. It is definitely not a pro-Trump article, but he does go into characteristics of Trump that would help him as a president as well as those that would not. But it is a well researched 13 page article by an expert in a high quality magazine. It would probably not be read by many on the internet, and would certainly not fit into a tweet. It is here if you are interested.

I have for a long time been interested in and studied war, since although few people speak favorably about it, and it doesn’t seem to have much long term effect, it seems to have pretty much always been with us since we became numerous enough to disagree in reasonably large groups. But traditionally, wars have  been about such tangible things as land, treasure, and I suppose women. But now we are disagreeing strongly on such things as economics, religious beliefs, the value of human labor, education, and the rules of warfare itself.

And partly, thanks to the internet and modern media, groups taking different sides in these disagreements are spread widely. The ancient feud between Moslems and Christians, and even different branches of Islam are already established in different areas. Ethnic and racial battles are occurring, and arguments about race and gender are becoming more widespread. Traditionally enemies in war have either been adjacent to each other (the U.S. Civil War, England and France, Japan and China), and/or members of an established cultures who had access to sophisticated methods of transport (the U.S. and Japan during World War II). But now people who strongly disagree seem to more and more be geographically spread. The terrorist situation is perhaps an example.

Hopefully technology and societies will go in a direction that promotes conversation, cultural breadth, and world-wide understanding, rather than isolated nations or groups feeling that they are under attack and must respond, but I would not bet either way. We are already using drones to kill people overseas who lead causes we disapprove of— often causes who are using the internet to communicate and unite their bands. Will we import such behavior? Maybe the future use of drones will include not only delivering packages, but attacking groups of fellow citizens united by the internet involved in causes with which we do not agree.  

Automotive Seat Belts — A Good and Bad Product

Automotive seat belts save lives. And since most automotive accidents occur close to home (see https://www.progressive.com/newsroom/article/2002/may/fivemiles/, an old study but probably still valid), one should put on one’s seatbelt before the start of one’s trip. A simple reason for this is that the act of putting on one’s seat belt after one is in motion is well nigh suicidal. Why? Because it is usuälly almost impossible to both fasten the seat belt and drive safely. I am an expert on this, because I drove for some 20 years before seat belts became mandatory in the U.S., and the early years of one’s driving career embed themselves strongly in one’s habit. So, although I have improved because of yells of “put on your seat belt” from kids, grand kids, and wives, (and the knowledge that the seat-belt warning sound in my last car —a Toyota Pickup’ can drive you mad in a short time) I still, especially for short trips (which I realize are when accidents occur), sometimes neglect to fasten the thing.

If I then fasten the seat belt, my driving is severely impaired .Why? Because seat belts are often ridiculously difficult to fasten, considering that they have been required for almost 50 years. There are a number of reasons, such as these.

1. The take-up reels usually wear after a few years of use, so the belts do not always retract – sometimes even being grabbed by the door when it is closed, but often requiring groping between the door and the seat.
2. The sliding gizmo on the belt often slides out of sight between the door and the seat
3. The receptacle for this sliding gizmo is often hidden in the upholstery, between the seat and the drive shaft tunnel, or between seats.
4. The button location and design on the receptacle for the sliding gizmo is not standardized.

While battling these problems, especially in a strange car, the vehicle often weaves wildly down the road, while the driver valiantly tries to fasten the belt by feel while cursing, losing his/her temper, and otherwise exhibiting dangerous behavior. The worse situation often occurs when heading for the freeway in a rental car at night in a strange airport.  And of course you all realize the difficulty of fastening the seat belt for the passenger seat in someone else's car.

Why do I not always fasten my belt before starting the car? Bad news – there are a lot of people like me, who learned to drive before driver’s training, who are often in a hurry when they climb in their car, who drive a number of automobiles, and who think they can simply grab the sliding gizmo and click it into place (usually not true).

It seems that after 50 years, the massive improvements in technology, and the achievement of autonomous vehicles, we could do a better job of figuring out seat belts. I remember that when I was in the air force, we had big wide combined shoulder and seat belts with a massive quick-release buckle holding them together. At this point I would prefer them over the set-up in my truck. Granted they were of drab color, and did not retract, but they were standardized, honest in function, and easy to find, since the shoulder harness straps were usually over the seat back and the seat straps on the seat.

As some of you may remember, when seat belts were a new thing, many manufacturers made them automatic, so that when the door closed, the shoulder harness would wrap around the driver or passenger. Granted that seat belts still had to be fastened by hand, but at least the shoulder belt was already in place and fastened. I kind of liked them.  But but most drivers didn’t. The ancient video at http://jalopnik.com/5835426/this-is-why-we-dont-miss-automatic-seat-belts is an example of negative feelings. But come on – there has to be a better answer than what we now have.

Technology and Noise

The past weekend must have been an informal welcoming of spring on the Stanford campus, because every dorm on campus seemed to be having a party. The parties were generally out of doors and included a band. The bands were delivering contemporary dance music through the now standard large amplification and speaker systems. Our house is quite close to several dorms, so we once again had an opportunity to cower inside our house with our earplugs in and experience the joy of relentlessly repetitively sounds at a volume well in excess of the county rules on decibel levels.

The good news, is that the music masked the noise generated by automobile and truck traffic, airplanes (especially private ones and the helicopter owned by our hospital), the myriad of two-cycle engines employed by the gardeners in the area, and the construction equipment that seems to have resided on campus for the past ten years. I couldn’t help again thinking about the change in noise level on the campus and in our increasingly urban world during the time I have been at Stanford.

In particular, I notice the increase in noise from the growth in numbers and power of amplifiers and speakers. In the summer Stanford hosts a number of “sports camps” for kids, and the leaders of these groups are all equipped with amplified speakers to communicate with them. This might seem reasonable, since the kids make a lot of noise, but the leaders used to just tell them to be quiet when they needed to do so. My office on campus is beneath a large classroom, and the classroom is equipped with an amplification system. Teachers and guest speakers use these to talk to the students, and to those of us who have the dubious pleasure of listening to them through the air circulation system even though we are totally uninterested in what they have to say. I certainly never needed an amplification system to talk to a class. The bands performing in the dorms seem to need the requisite amplifiers, mixers and speaker systems made popular by rock bands, even though such bands had no difficulty making themselves heard with much less amplification when I first came here.

It seems that people love amplifiers. If the type of amplifier/speaker used by coaches (the modern megaphone) is lying around, people will pick it up, turn it to high, walk up to a friend from behind, and yell at them with it. If an amplifier and speaker system is in a classroom (often to provide sound for video or other media material) people will use it to amplify their own voices. If a band has a rack of speakers and amplifiers, they will turn them up to a level that has been shown to adversely affect the hearing of the audience if they are subjected to it over time. Both band and audience seem to enjoy it, but the band members typically are wearing ear plugs (musicians are careful of their hearing) and those trying to study, listen to their own music, or live in a nearby house may not.

Granted that I am old and grouchy, behind on my pop music, and complaining about things that other people enjoy or that are an output of work others think necessary (gardeners and construction crews), but for the sake of all of us, since we are heading into ever increasing population density, noise has to be controlled.   It has happened with automobiles and motorcycles. When I was in high school, it was prestigious to run ones vehicles with minimal muffling. If you are old enough, you remember “cut out pipes”, that allowed the driver to divert the exhaust straight from the engine, bypassing the muffler altogether. I wondered what the result would be of clamping down on motorcycle noise, but the owners actually came to believe that a very fast and quiet machine was cool, except for a few who are now thought to be merely obnoxious. Campus leaf blowers are now all electric, powered by a gas generator, which being four cycle is much quieter than the two-cycle commonly used on yard machines. Large diesel driven machines have not quite gotten the message yet, but they will. And even as I write this, there is a campaign underway on campus to do something about bands at parties.

But what is going to happen when Amazon and other organizations flood the atmosphere with noisy drones? Drones carrying significant weight and traveling relatively long distances are not going to be electrically powered for a long while.

Technology and Sports

As in most area of human life, technology has had major influences in athletics, ranging from the airplanes that allow teams to compete even though they are very long distances apart, new medical procedures for injuries, and improved shoes, rackets, safety and training equipment, etc. And, of course, the sophisticated devices used to make games available over such media channels as TV and the internet and allowing the observer to witness the details of the game perhaps better than those in the stadium (slow motion re-plays, multiple camera positions, etc). And uniform styles have also changed a bit. The photo  at the left is me 60 ears ago attired in the cool basketball uniform of those days. Notice short pants and less colorful shoes . But although no longer worn much in basketball games, Converse’s Chuck Taylor white high-tops are still alive and well.

But technology has had less effect on the action on the field or court, with the exception of annoying things such as advertisement time-outs. Tradition and the human element hold center stage. This is good, because after all, athletics is supposed to be a contest between humans. Apparently early Greek Olympians competed in the nude, to demonstrate that they were using nothing but their bodies. Modern athletes obviously wear clothes, but are still limited in the type of tools or devices they can use.

Of course, the games themselves have changed over time. Once while my wife and I were in Italy, we attended a re-enactment of Calcio Storico, a game introduced in the 15^th century and described here. It is played on a large field with goals at each end, and each team intends to get the ball into the other team’s goal. But there are 27 people on each team, and no rules to speak of, so one method of gaining an advantage is to disable the people on the other team. It is thought by many to be the parent of modern soccer, and if so, at least soccer has become more humane on the field through paring the team size and putting many more rules in place. Of course it has perhaps become more violent in the stands. But purists would enjoy the old game as well as the new ones —a field, people, a ball, and goal posts.

Technology seldom shows up on the sport page, but the first page of the sport section in the Sunday New York Times of the Sunday May 1 issue contains a story on the automatic home plate “umpire” developed by an engineering team from General Electric in the 1950.s, and championed by Branch Rickey, a man noted for innovations in the sport. The story is here.

The year 1950 was a bit early, both technically and emotionally, for this innovation. Rickey was perhaps more interested in it as a teaching tool than a replacement for the human umpire, but it was not to happen. All of us have disagreed from time to time with the umpire, as have players, coaches, and the broadcast people, but it is probably that this human element, as well as the apparent danger to the umpire exposed to foul balls, the swing of the bat, and attack from angry players and fans, adds to the pleasure of the game. Certainly modern technology, which allows observation of everything from the speed of the pitch to spin rate, the exit velocity of a home run, and the time between bat contact and the first step of the fielder, could call balls and strikes —and I can see that happening some day, much as the video-based play reviews by the referees in football, although the tradition of arguing with and booing the umpire is integral to baseball.

But it is interesting that sports do not display more use of technology, especially in this day and age, and especially for amateurs. I am not particularly interested in golf. I do like to hike through attractive scenery, but don’t particularly want to cruise through it in a golf cart being frustrated because I screwed up the previous hole. And it is an expensive past time in both time and money. But I might be more tempted if the restrictions on the equipment were not so restrictive. An example of some of the rules on golf clubs and balls can be seen here. I think it might be interesting to see what non-pro golfers might come up with if they would relax such things a bit. I might get much more interested in the game if I could invent and use clubs, rackets and balls of my own design with fewer restrictions (no compressed air or chemical propellants). Of course, I am an engineer.

And I was watching some young kids playing basketball on a court at a school recently. They were quibbling about the score and one side was losing terribly and not having much fun. I was thinking how easy it would be not only to build in an automatic score keeping system on the court , but also to mechanize the hoops so that the basket for the team with the higher score would become smaller, move higher, or both during the game. A real-time robotic equivalent of the handicap in golf!

I am not seriously proposing this, since I used to play basketball and consider it a sacred game, but it is interesting to think about such things. After all, even with roughly the same equipment the game itself has changed since I played—increased physical contact, dunking the ball and happily hanging on the hoop, the three point shot, the giant center, etc. How about some breaks for average sized people?

Of course, technology occasionally sneaks in when not allowed, and is soon discovered and the perpetrator punished. The article here concerns a bicycle racer found to be using a bicycle using an electric motor. Can you believe these bicycle racers?