James L Adams—People and Products

Hello Again

Blog Restart:

I took a bit more time off from writing posts than I thought I would. The last one, announcing that I planned to do so in order to do some thinking, reading, and some work with my hands, was in March of this year. Here we are in November, and here I am again. As I will show you in future blogs, I definitely have done work with my hands.

I have been retired from active duty on the Stanford University faculty for 18 years, and am now 83 years old. I am amazed, and quite pleased to still be alive, because when I was born, the life expectancy for males in the U.S. was 59 years. And my interests seem to still be out of control, with the result that they have changed a bit recently. I am still interested in product quality, creativity and innovation, engineering and technology, business, and all of those good things. But the past year has been eventful, to say the least, including phenomena reaching from Trump to drones, and jihad to crispr-cas9.

In particular, I have become increasingly interested in what brain researchers and cognitive psychologists have been up to, and how that new knowledge helps explain we Homo Sapiens Sapiens (wise wise people) a bit better. As to what I am thinking, we should be calling ourselves Homo Demi Sapiens (half wise people) rather than believing that we can find answers to increasingly complex problems and increasing expectations that please everyone. I am even working on a book with the title of Homo Demi Sapiens.

But I am not yet exercising the degree of curmudgeonishness (how do you like that for a new word) that my age entitles me to.

Unsurprisingly, I am particularly interested in what we are doing to ourselves with the present relatively rapid changes in technology, and with overall rapid change (or at least our attempts to do so. My interests in creativity and innovation began many years ago with an attempt to better understand such things in individuals. But then I was swept along by expanding attention paid to creativity and innovation in groups, probably stimulated in the U.S. by Japan’s successful use of groups who were producing automobiles and electronics products that were giving us a run for the money. Then I became interested in creativity and innovation in organizations, especially as it is affected by growth and success. But then I really bit the bullet and began to try to understand creativity and change in very large groups of people, such as nations. cultures, and religions.

Here we run into some real barriers. I am a firm believer in evolution (which may make some of you less eager to read what I write). It is a slow process, and to the extent that we have deep beliefs, skills, and desires, they do not easily or rapidly change. I recently gave a talk to a 50^th reunion of a Stanford Business School class on change. In that talk I discussed with them 15 aspects of humans that were probably of value before the Neolithic Revolution, when we were hunter gatherers, relatively few in number, and living in tribes. Now they seem to be getting us into trouble Examples are:

1. We focus on the short term
2. We are tribal
3. We like others to think like we do
4. We want simple answers to complicated problems
5. We depend on faith and defend it viciously
6. We ignore expertise if we do not like what it says

And so on.

I was a bit worried when I gave the talk, but to my pleasure they became deeply engaged in the topic. There will be some of that in my posts.

Also I have reading a great deal about what’s going on in brain research that gives new insight to my old friends creativity and change. One book I wholeheartedly recommend is The Undoing Project – A Friendship That Changed Our Minds (W.W.Norton, by Michael Lewis. It is the story of the partnership of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two Israelis who have made a huge impact on our understanding of thinking and problem solving —Kahneman (author of the popular book Thinking Fast and Slow) to go on to recently win the Nobel Prize in Economics, even though he is a psychologist. Not only is the story well worth reading, it is beautifully written. Lewis has written books such as Flash Boys, The big Short, Money Ball, and Liar’s Poker. and to my mind is the best there is at explaining complicated concepts to a lay audience.

The other is Behave – The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst(Penguin Press) by Robert M. Sapolsky , a Professor of biology and neurology at Stanford, an incredible teacher, a true polymath, and a proven outstanding writer (A Primate’s Memoir, The Trouble With Testosterone, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers). He has studied everything from baboons to neurons, and is outstanding at explaining broad subjects (such as behavior) from many angles. This book is more technical than Lewis’s book, but is fun to read because of Sapolsky’s writing style and humor. His book is organized starting with the small and fast moving (neurons to the large and slow (Cultures) . And his empathy for the reader is unmatched. When one is tempted to quit reading because the content is becoming overly technical, he will often put in a foot-note advising the reader to continue because the discussion of that particular material is almost over, or before the content becomes difficult, warn the reader that it is for the very motivated and not needed to understand the rest of the book. My favorite foot-note referenced a truly difficult to read paragraph. It read “I have no idea what it is that I just wrote”.

One of the reasons I was so pleased to find Sapolsky’s book, is that I have been very interested in the brain and behavior for many years, and the book draws it all together from the viewpoint of many disciplines and many levels. It is not the easiest book I have ever read, but I read it twice and am in the process of going through it a third time. That, from me, is a very high recommendation.

More information on the books in recommended books column

 

 

New Venture

I seem to have written posts for this blog for over 5 years (over 300 of them). I began the blog to discuss product quality, since it is as topic that has always interested me, and after a heroic and successful effort in the U.S. to improve manufacturing quality (which of course reflects on overall product quality), industry drifted off into other traditional directions (profit, grow-the-organization, etc.). As I mentioned in my last post, the manufacturing quality goals were nicely described in a classic paper written by David Garvin and published by the Harvard Business review in 1987, when quality was the hot word.

In 2012 I wrote my book Good Products, Bad Products, published by McGraw Hill, to pay more attention to such critical “dimensions” of quality that even though difficult to deal with quantitatively, are very important to human users. It is also mentioned in my last post, and discussed at more length earlier in the blog.

 I wrote my book partly as a text that I used to teach a course in the Stanford Engineering school (Good Products, Bad Products), that was taken over by Professor Dave Beach when I retired, who did a wonderful job with it until last year, when the course too was retired. The book suffered from lack of publicity, and perhaps a decreased interest in product quality in the U.S. Surprisingly (or not), although the book’s sales in the U.S. have been disappointing, it is doing much better in India, China, South Korea, and Japan —countries that perhaps are presently more sensitive to the value of quality in products. After all, it was Japan that awakened us in the 1970’s and 80’s. China, India, and South Korea are coming up fast.

But over the years, I also wrote posts on subjects I was also thinking about which ranged from the fit between the directions of technology and people, the joy of working with the hands, engineering, management, and so on.

I never sought wide distribution of these posts, as I wrote them to force myself to think more deeply about my areas of interest, and I did not want to become involved in a full-fledged conversation with large numbers of people, although the responses to my posts were thoughtful and flattering. But now I have been talked into a project that sounds difficult, but worth doing, by Tim Keely, a friend of mine who is an IT person of amazing talent at Stanford. The project is for me to go through these posts, pick the ones I think are the best, organize them, edit them, and allow him to make an e-book (or several) from them. I am going to try.

This will make my posts even fewer in number and perhaps more wandering in nature as I come up with new thoughts for the book(s), but I am looking forward to the attempt and hope you will bear with me. I will continue to write posts when I need more material for this project, or when I can’t bear not to —like commenting on ridiculous wastes of technology and money such as Trump’s proposed wall on the Mexican border, which hopefully will never happen, but should it, will set an all time record for lack of overall product quality.

So wish me luck. I’ll post progress reports as I go.

2016 Christmas books

As I told you in my last post, I received a ton of books for Christmas and am going through them as fast as I can. But this is a report on one of them that is particularly pertinent to this blog, and one that is good for one’s perspective.

The first is Thank You for Being Late, subtitled An Optimist’s Guide to thriving in the Age of Accelerations, by Thomas Friedman (Farrar,Straus, and Giroux, NY, 2016). If you don’t read Friedman’s books, you should, because they are current, beautifully researched and referenced, and both entertaining and educational. He has spent his life as a journalist, columnist, and book author, heavily in the Mid East (he majored in Arabic in college) and Washington D.C., and has a strong interest in technology and economics, although he spent the last portion of this book extolling the virtues of growing up in a middle class family in Minnesota.

In this book Friedman makes a good case for the fact that technology is accelerating, and we are having trouble keeping up with it. Friedman’s writings includes a large amount of comments from interviews and interactions with people ranging from exalted to victimized, and his title stems from a point in his life a few years ago when he changed from being annoyed by people being late to meetings, to thankful because this gave him a few minutes to think and relax. He has a deep interest in the “digital revolution”, and does an excellent job of describing what it is doing to us, for good as well as evil. He ends by extolling the virtues of units smaller than national governments (he too thinks the U.S. government no longer is covering the bases, partly due to increasing population, expectations, and complexity, and partly because change is occurring at a rate greater than populations, especially large ones, can cope with. His answer is multi-directional, and includes such things as more education and thinking about what is going on, but includes his argument for more action from smaller units (not only states and cities, but parts of cities). A lot of such feelings are going around, but not usually discussed with the breadth that Friedman has.

The other book is entitled I Contain Multitudes, sub titled The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, by Ed Yong Harper Collins NT, 2016, also beautifully written and researched, and entertaining as well as educational. It is well worth reading when one looks in the mirror and thinks that what one sees is the center of the world, a member of your culture, your family, or even you

I was an undergraduate at Caltech many years ago, and it was run by physicists, who were then receiving most or the press. As an engineering major, I  definitely did not feel in the front line, and in fact at one point was honored by being asked to visit the president (a physicist), whose agenda was to point out that my grades were quite high and had I considered switching my major to Physics. I had not. But I was flattered.

It has swung to more and more interest in the life sciences and lately has been consumed with what is called the microbiome—the microbes within the body, which number in the trillions (more than the “human” cells we have), and outnumber us in total DNA. I have received so much mention of these in the alumni mail and general media, that I consider myself as a life support system for these microbes, rather than what I used to think of myself (a large single entity). As the book points out, at one point we used to think of these microbes as bad germs, thanks to discoveries of people like Lister and Fleming , and that the goal was to get rid of them all. Consider the modern hospital. And in fact some of them are dangerous, and we have served ourselves well by our attention to getting rid of them. But as you may have been reading, we just may have gone too far. I recently had a bad experience with a bad G.I. microbe, which was finally controlled by a large dose of the drug we know so well that we call it “Cipro”, As those of you know who have gone through this experience know, the Cipro kills the bad bug, but also many, if not most, of the microbes that we need to digest food.

There is presently an evil bug called c-diff moving into the U.S. that likes to take over our G.I. tract while it is in its weakened shape from Cipro, requiring a different drug called Flagyl etc.etc.etc   This approach can eventually lead to death. As my Caltech mags and the media keep telling us, the answer is to quickly re-plant the various necessary microbes in the G.I. tract (there are many varieties, so just yogurt won’t do it). Where is a good source? Heard of the fecal transplant?) So far our overly toilet trained society can’t deal with it (some people call it it a “shit enema”) so we are willing to lose innocent people. But this is the tip of the iceberg. The balance of microbes in our body is being thought more and more to be the key to health, and imbalances responsible for many presently untreatable diseases.

You may know all about it (I thought I knew quite a bit until I read this book), but you will like the book anyway—and go away with a much more realistic self-image.

Social Media—Broadening or Narrowing?

 

Jenna Wortham wrote an article in the magazine section of the Nov. 27 New York Times that caught my attention, because the title is something I have thought about. It is “We’ve heard about the power of social media to help us empathize with others. But what if, instead, it’s just cocooning us with our friends? The article is here.

My answer to that question is undoubtedly cocooning us with our friends. As the article points out, sites that offer a broader look at the world (Vine, Snapchat, Tumblr) have either shut down, or are re-targeting to please their present and hopefully future customers by serving them what they would like to see and hear. If you were for Hillary in the last election did you see and hear much positive information about Trump, and vice versa? I think most of us who were for Hillary heard and saw mostly positive information about her, and little positive about Trump. I was for Hillary and never looked at a single example of Trump’s famous Tweets, and therefore, like most of my friends, was stunned when he won (still am).

The article makes some very believable points. Social media lives off of advertisements and the sale of big data. The more people that use their site, the more money they make and the more the network expands. It is easy for them to figure out what you like (on Facebook you even tell them). And seeking profit, it is reasonable that they like to feed you what you want to be fed. In fact this is true of all media.. Fox News flavors the news differently than CNN. The New York Times flavors it differently than the Las Vegas Review- Journal. I watch CNN and read the New York Times, as do my friends, who live in the same bubble.

Is social media helping unite the country after this very divisive campaign season? Is it helping us see both sides of the picture, or is it helping us continue to gather into increasingly narrow groups of like-minded people.

This is worth worrying about. Ms. Wortham concludes her article with the statement “if we can’t pay attention to one another, we might as well not live on the same planet.

Left Behind: The Digital World and Age

I have been a professional engineer, and I think a good one, for 60 years —more if you consider that I worked as one while in college —and have had a ton of education and experience, in industry, as a consultant, and as a professor. I also have spent some 55 years around computers, beginning with big mainframes and going through all the amazing developments to the present. But I am a user, and definitely not a computer expert. In fact, when I began, engineers did not solve their own problems on a computer. Rather we would take our problems to computer programmers, who would feed them into the machine and bring us our results. We after all, could not speak machine language, and therefore did not qualify to interact with these huge machines looming over us from their daises in their windowed white rooms.

I had a wonderful time with computers when so-called personal computers came along, and spent much of my life working with them, using the internet, and generally putting up with their foibles. But in the last few years, something has happened. I have been a long time Apple fan until recently, but now I no longer think it is fun to constantly screw around with their “upgraded” software, nor accept their thinly veiled attempts to totally control my hardware or software. Of course, they are not unique. I am tired of the messages that constantly appear on my screen enticing me to go all Google. Nor do I want to be on Microsoft’s cloud, or any others. Their clouds, after all, are huge servers panting away in giant, hot buildings and sucking electricity from the net in huge quantities. Nothing “cloudy” about them.

But such is not the case with my grandkids or the college students who surround me. They seem to revel in endless new apps, “upgraded” operating systems, and new digital gadgets that don’t seem to me to be that improved over the old ones. I am afraid that after fighting it all of my life, I must admit to a less flexible brain and an unwillingness (inability?) to keep up with digital technology. I had a rude example of that yesterday, when while working with my computer, it began misbehaving. I first noticed that when I downloaded my mail, it was inserting and then withdrawing duplicates of many messages, while making a strange noise. The cursor was also flickering, and it was trying to fill out the password boxes when I tried to open web sites.

Being knowledgeable, I rebooted it, but it became worse rather than better, and after a few trials it would not even accept my system password. After unplugging it from the wall and plugging it in again, and cursing at it with increasing vigor, it finally opened without any password and showed me the screen one sees on a new computer. At this point I panicked, because obviously either the machine had failed (not unusual in these days of disposable products) or someone had hit me with a horrible hack which not only had recorded everything on my computer, but had then destroyed what had been there. (I was backed up, but it seemed like a horrible enough hack could wipe that out also.)

The next day was a Sunday and I did not want to bother my favorite IT guy on a weekend, so I was telling a person who had been a student of mine, and is quite a bit younger than I, my strange set of what seemed unrelated problems, and he said “Oh, try another keyboard”. I laughed. Then I did try another keyboard and my computer came purring back to life. How could this be? To check I told my problems to another person, this one a graduate student, and he said the same thing, as did one of my grandchildren. So I went home and thought about it for a while, and of course, a stuck key could make the strange sound, make the mail messages and cursor hiccup , and definitely fill password boxes with dots that I could not do anything about. But how could these younger squirts instantly figure that out and I did not? This was an isolated case, but not the first.

Yep, age. You know that, and I know that, but somehow it is difficult for someone like me to admit that I am not keeping up with the game. I read an entertaining interview of a man who was well over 100 years ago some ago. He was bed-ridden, and at one point the interviewer pointed out to him how fortunate he was that computers allowed him to interact with the world and learn whatever he wanted through the internet. He replied that he didn’t know how to use computers. The interviewer, caught off guard, asked him why. His reply was that when he had turned 80 he decided that he had learned enough and he just wanted to use what he knew, so no way was he going to learn to use all this new silly stuff.

Maybe there is some of that in all of us, but it is hard to admit for a long-term professor.

Steam Show—Roots of Motive Power Inc.

Willits California is a small town on Highway 101 a couple of hours north of San Francisco. It is perhaps best known as one end of the “skunk” train, a restored train engine and cars that run between Fort Bragg on the coast and Willits and is quite popular with tourists. As  explained here, Roots of Motive Power Inc. is a group of people that operate in conjunction with a fine little museum (the Mendocino County Museum) and that have space next to the museum and across from a small park on which they can and do run antique heavy equipment . They sponsor several events during the year, and over time have accumulated an excellent collection of old steam and diesel equipment, much of it restored, and more under way.   Their largest event (The Festival) just occurred, and I attended with my older son Bob and one of my older friends, Marc Faye, the owner of the farm in the Sacramento Valley to which I escape.   Lest you think age is required to attend, the group that attends includes large numbers of kids, partly because there is a restored train that runs continually around the property, and because kids like large dirty machines with whistles that make clouds of steam and smoke.

I attend this show for a number of reasons, including my love of old machines, my interest in the history of technology, and because people with rather unique hobbies and interests, who are not always understood by their friends and neighbors, are so happy when they get together with others of similar interests, that one cannot help but become swept away by it.   It is also a nice size (you don’t need a smart phone to keep track of each other), fairly close to where I live, and in beautiful country. And it’s even free.

A few photos might help. One of my favorite machines is a Bucyrus power shovel, often seen in photos of the digging of the Panama Canal. The photo at the left not only shows the shovel when not moving, but if one looks closely one can see the very clever way it is steered — by placing logs into one of the tracks, causing that one to slow down. The man standing by it is the log placer. The next photo shows it in action.

The photos below show a beautifully restored steam roller that is benign enough to be allowed to run on the city streets. a machine waiting to be restored, and a large crane I had not seen in action before

 

 

 

 

I have a friend named Loren Bryon who is very interested in and active in the restoration of old equipment and a superb craftsman, particularly if steam is involved. He is a regular at these activities and was busily conquering the details of how to control this beast which he had not driven. The controls of such machines do not include such things as steering wheels or other devices now normally used to control machines. But after an hour or two passed, he became confident enough to drive it down a street on the grounds with cars parked on the sides. The remaining photos show him at work.

An excellent day, and as usual, I came home much improved because of the experience—and highly motivated to work on my own restoration projects, because they seem to be so straight forward and easy compared to the ones being done by the Roots people. Tractors are much easier to handle than locomotives, and aren’t as likely to blow up and kill you.

 

     

Free Time, Productivity, and Making, Fixing, and Tinkering.

I am perhaps a bit late on this post because I have been down in Southern California helping my brother dig through three generations of stuff in several buildings. When we were kids we lived and worked in this series of buildings along with our parents, our grand parents, an uncle, and various dogs and cats (and before that horses and chickens). We were located on 20 acres of oranges, in the times when that and a few outside jobs were capable of supporting such a crew. After the death of our parents, grandparents, and uncle, the sale of ten acres, and my leaving for various vocations and locations, my brother John has been operating the remaining ten as a fruit and vegetable farm (Adams Acres). But unfortunately, the area has gone through hard times, and the customers for fruit and vegetables do not always match my brother’s desires in growing plants. He has an M.S. in botany, and a Ph.D. in soil science, and is a fan of fruit of a comparatively exotic nature compared to that bought by many who live in the area, who are motivated heavily by price and what they are used to. So he is selling most of the land to a developer and the need arose to "lighten up".

Although hard work, this sorting process has been both interesting and nostalgia producing. It graphically illustrates the difference in life in Southern California in 1907, when the grove was planted, and the present. I actively worked in the grove between the late 1930’s and the early 1950’s, when I went to college, never to return except for visits, and even in the 60 years since then there has been massive change. As far as agriculture, little remains in the area. As far as life style, the change is similarly complete. Work in the area at one time consisted mostly of manual labor. Now, work is scarce. Life was bucolic, with clean skies, little if any crime, and the sweet smell of orange blossoms, although the work was occasionally hard and money sometimes scarce. But compared to my present existence, and that of my friends, there seemed to be a lot more spare time.

The photo at the left shows a small hooked wool rug made by my grandmother, who died in 1965, but spent a lot of time making rugs, quilts, lace tablecloths, blankets, and such things. My mother, meanwhile. In her early days was making furniture, also clothes, and helping build buildings. Both were doing the cooking, the cleaning, and other such chores. My father, my grandfather, and I were working on the grove and the buildings, and my uncle was working full time as a machinist. But we seemed to have a lot of  time beyond these duties. This rug was not intended to be walked on!

The hooked rug is beautiful, partly because of the texture that could only have resulted from hand work. It takes a long time to make hooked rugs, but somehow the time was available. The photo on
the right  shows me in a shirt my mother made me from sulfur sacks in high school. It still fits me! She didn’t have to make me fancy shirts, but she loved to and had time to do it, and I loved the result.  She also made everything in my room when I was a kid (see below). She later became a very successful water colorist —time again.

During our sorting, we continually found evidence of this startling fact. Although the family did essentially everything having to do with life —building the buildings, doing the maintenance, working the grove, growing and, hunting and fishing for food, and making furniture, machines, and even toys (the two photos at the end of the post show a horse made for me by my mother and a toy tractor made by me for my brother).

We had a lot of free time to do such things as learn about music (I was the town pianist), read a lot of books, magazines, and news papers, listen to the radio, and do well in school, And we did not only constrain ourselves to large and challenging tasks. The  photograph at the right shows a small welder I carved, and a delicate goblet my beefy grandfather turned from Manzanita wood, complete with imprisoned ring. I admit he did this because of my grandmother’s frequent challenge to him to make something pretty since he was usually doing blacksmith work, building buildings, spreading fertilizer, or driving the tractor., etc. etc. etc.

Now it seems to be more difficult to provide for free time in ones life. Why? For one reason, in the old days in rural areas there were no diversions such as television, the internet, social networking and computers, and highways and advertisements beckoning us off to adventures in other locations. There were few movie theaters, little if any night-life, and friends were widely spread. Looking back, it seems that life should have been quite boring. But at the time it did not seem so. One could always make covered wagon models, toys for kids (my brother and I) or goblets from Manzanita wood, paint pots, or just goof around with one’s dog. And we didn’t know that life could be made hectic by endlessly “improving” ourselves.

Would I like to go back there? No. Am I glad I grew up there? Yes. I learned an incredible amount from the do-it-yourself stages of my life and my very talented family members, and gained great confidence and positive feedback from what I did. I also learned to make time in my life for hobbies that I love, and for just goofing around. Working with my uncle and grandfather obviously set me on the path to becoming an engineer, and being expected by those around me to do well in school and in my work led me toward becoming a professor, a career I have loved. And since I did have free time (nothing to do and no one to talk to) I did learn to entertain myself by thinking—an excellent way to spend time. And finally, I learned the importance of making time in my life for learning, for my hobbies (mostly requiring use of my hands), and for just goofing around.

 

Things Break and People/Machines Screw Up

I don’t know how many times I have said the words in the title of this blog to people. I admit the “Machines” is a rather rather new, because in the past machines were not considered “smart” enough to screw up, but now we must admit them to the club (perhaps I should have said People/Robots}

This comes to mind because of two widely reported incidents in which Tesla cars, equipped with “Auto Pilot” capability were involved in crashes, one fatal to the driver, and the other consisting of two impacts with guard rails followed by overturning of the car. Both of these made the New York Times, the first on the front page, the other more buried within the paper. Had the cars not been harbingers of the much reported era of “Autonomous Cars”, they would in all probability not qualified for such notice. However, we have not only bought into the possibility that machines, especially computers, will take over more and more functions from people, but that they will do better at it—i.e. fewer “Accidents”.

I am a fan of Tesla Motors, who I think has made it plain to owners of cars with their auto pilot capability that this is an aid to drivers, not a replacement, and that the technology is,in fact, new. And someone had to take the lead in using some of this technology with real people in real traffic. People being what they are, it is not surprising that owners might, as they used to say in the Air Force, push the envelope. So I find the two incidents regrettable, but not surprising, and in spite of people’s wishes, examples of the title of this post. You can kill yourself (and others) in any car if you do not understand the limitations of the technology.

Ironically, I visited my farm escape in the Sacramento Valley a couple of days ago, and there in the midst of a partly-harvest vast field of rice, was a lonely looking big-time John Deere Harvester. I recognized it as belonging to my friend, the owner, since it was in his field, but it was unusual to find it looking abandoned in the middle of the field. I found that it was broken — in short, the mechanism holding one of the tracks had failed, resulting in breakage of a huge casting and other components. The reason was probably inadequate securing of a large nut, but that is not the point. It received emergency care, with the result that it is now in action again, with a maintenance bill of only $20, 000 dollars.

The point is that this is a very sophisticated and expensive machine (on the order of $700,000) built for very high performance (one of them will service hundreds of acres at high speed with great accuracy) and full of advanced technology (gps control, etc.), by one of the leading manufacturers of agricultural equipment and it failed, either because something broke and/or people/machines screwed up.

Although the present wave of optimism resulting from the amazing progress in technology may seem to be heading to a perfect future, in which people and machines, especially “thinking” machines, never fail, don’t believe it. I am confident that the title of this post will hold true as long as homo sapiens exist.

Artificial Intelligence—Blessing, Worry, or Both?

The Economist magazine of Jne 25^th to July 1^st, 2016, contains a special report on Artificial Intelligence. It is entitled The Return of the Machinery Question, referring to the major discussions that took place during what we call the industrial revolution and concerned the effects of mechanization on society_ in particular employment for the working class. It is well worth reading, as we will all be affected, and the first part of the report is here.

When I joined the Stanford faculty in 1966, I spent some time with the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), led by John McCarthy and involved in what was later recognized as pioneering work. Since I was fresh from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and had been involved in the design of space craft, I was trying to define a research area for myself. My Ph.D. research, having to do with the remote control of vehicles, had moved to SAIL, and the new field of artificial intelligence was attracting a good deal of attention. It was not to be my main field of interest, since I have never been as excited about computers and software as maybe I should have been, but I have fond memories of my time there and the people involved.

At the time, SAIL had a couple of Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8 computers wired together, relatively advanced at the time, but of course primitive by present standards. And the goals of the work were even more advanced, as has always been the case with the field of Artificial Iintelligence. And the work in which I was involved had to do with the control of machines. As time has passed, both digital hardware and software have advanced greatly, as has the amount of information available, but as the Economist report states, until recently the accomplishments in the field have seemed to be not as spectacular as might be expected.

But now, the field seems to be exploding, and as the report points out, impacting activities as varied as “improving internet search engines, blocking spam e-mails, suggesting e-mail replies, translating web pages, recognizing voice commands, detecting credit-card fraud, and controlling self-driving cars”. Rather than being disappointed in the progress in artificial intelligence, we seem to be becoming worried about its potential to replace people in large areas of employment. Some studies have shown that some 50% of all jobs are threatened by computed automation —white collar as well as blue.

The cause of this is a combination of radically increased computer power, new approaches to the use of computers, huge amounts of information becoming available, and large investments being made in the area. Such techniques as deep learning, which allow computers to use this information to find new patterns, develop new techniques for solving problems, and improve their own software are showing up in a wide variety of fields, from medicine to finance to education. And computers are increasingly beating humans at their own games —a recent example being DeepMind’s Alpha Go system’s defeat of champion Lee Sedol at Go, a board game considered much more complex than Chess.

The report in The Economist not only reviews the progress of Artificial Intelligence, but also discusses the possible effects of this progress on society. Here it is optimistic, relying on historical data that new developments in technology have always resulted in more new jobs than the developments have obsoleted. But the optimism is a bit offset by the emphasis on the power of these new developments, and by reference to such things as experiments in universal domestic income in Finland and the Netherlands in case they might be needed to keep economies going in the fact of major job loss—also by references to the unprecedented reach of computers as opposed to the manufacturing of the industrial revolution.

Life is never boring.

The Small as Well as the Large

As I discussed in my last blog, we can improve our lives by developing a better feeling for very large (to us) quantities, but the same is true with the very small. As I mentioned in a recent post, some modern integrated circuits contain over five billion electronic components (a large number), with transistors separated by only 22 nanometers (small— a human hair is approximately 75,000 nanometers in diameter). Integrated circuits are all over the place these days, and I think it is fair to say that most of us have only a marginal feeling for five billion, and none at all for a nanometer. Does this matter? I think so, for reasons both economic and our overall understanding and appreciation of our world.

 As you may have read, not too long ago, through the use of extremely sophisticated instrumentation, scientists succeeded for the first time in detecting a gravity wave, an important phenomenon theorized by Einstein, but only recently measured. There is a nice article by Bryan Green on what that means in the Smithsonian magazine, entitled Catching a Wave, here. The wave had been traveling through the universe for over a billion years, after having been generated by the collision of two black holes the size of the sun. Since gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, there are some very large numbers indeed involved here. I find thinking about the dimensions and the nature of the universe to be good for me, because I can’t even begin to get a sense of them. It certainly keeps one from becoming too centered on oneself. I think we should all occasionally think about how trivial we are as individuals in the cosmic sense of things. But as the Smithsonian article states, detecting this wave required an instrument capable of measuring a variation in length of a laser beam of less than a billionth of a billionth of a meter —a very small distance.

At present there is a great deal of research in an area called nanotechnology with an increasing amount of successful application. In fact we are increasingly profiting from our ability to make use of our knowledge of the behavior of very large numbers of very small things. Some examples are here. Related examples, are resulting from study of the microbiome, or bacteria population of the human body. Our bodies contain more bacteria than human cells. Exactly how many and what kind is still being determined. An interesting article on the topic is here.  Or you can just type microbiome into your browser.

Without these bacteria, we can’t live. Anyone who has had a large dose of ciprofloxin (an antibiotic commonly used for treating food poisoning, but that kills good bacteria as well as bad) has had a bit of insight as to the importance of these bacteria. Out of this microbiome research is coming such things as fecal transplants and other new and powerful methods of curing previously difficult medical conditions, which I will not discuss because my wife considers them gross, but which can be found on the internet. Feel free to type it into your browser.

The estimate in one of the web links above is that we have about 50 trillion bacteria in our body, of which 40 trillion live in our colon. We have approximately 30 trillion of our own cells, of which 80 percent are red blood cells. (more big numbers of little things)

Incidentally, another method I have of realizing I am not as big a deal as I sometimes think I am is to consider myself primarily a very sophisticated system to provide food for the bacteria living in and on me. At times they seem much more impressive than I—of course I am better looking.

Large Quantities and Elections

The presidential election is beginning to become more real, as the candidates are being forced to deal with more serious questions – such as the federal budget. This is the time when the federal debt becomes an issue and people begin to speak of trillions. This is interesting, because most people know that a trillion is a large number, but have no “feel” for it. That is because most people can live happily avoiding large quantities, and tend to do so because their lives are complicated enough. We shorthand such quantities (using trillion, or tera instead of “a thousand thousand thousand thousand”), but even that does not capture the exponential nature of powers of ten. A short and clever movie was made by Charles Eames, a famous designer, in 1977, and was entitled Powers of Ten. It is now not viewed as much as it used to be, but perhaps should be if we are going to deal with numbers such as a trillion. If you have never seen it, it is here on You Tube.

Around election time, the U.S. national debt comes up (federal debt in 2015 was about $19,009,230,758,000, or  19 trillion dollars, but of course there is state debt, individual debt, and so on). Politicians like to blame the other party and other causes for this, but the government traditionally overspends. But how much should we worry about this? Do we really know what 19 trillion is? Techies like me would approximate it as 1.9x10¹³ dollars, but even that is hard to get a feeling for. If we break that down to on the order of $60,000 or so per person in the U.S., we can think about it more clearly, but it isn’t like our personal debt, because governments can print money and sell bonds, but we can’t.

I think most of us can get our heads around a million, since many houses now cost that much, and after all, a million is a thousand thousands. But a billion is more difficult. Bill Gates has a net worth of about 82 billion dollars, but to appreciate that, it is necessary to put it into a form that is more understandable. For instance, the world’s population is about seven billion, so he could give 11 or 12 dollars to everyone on earth, and he and his family could still have five billion to cover their personal expenses. But if he has it invested in interests that return him 5% per year, he is making over 40 million a year, so he could keep his capital growing and live quite well.

But 19 trillion? It is a very big number. Let’s say I had a job which required me to type 19 trillion x’s on my computer. Using my trusty smart phone, I see that I can type this many—xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx or about 70 in ten seconds. That is or on the order of 500 in a minute if I practiced a lot. That’s believable, since when I took a typing course in high school I got up to 100 words a minute (piano player). According to the Guiness book of records, Barbara Blackburn is the champ at 212 words a minute, and typing test words average about five letters each. But I obviously couldn’t keep up this pace either physically or mentally for a whole day, so let’s imagine that with training I could put in the equivalent of six hours a day without going mad, and in the process type 60x500, or 30,000 x’s per hour, or 45 million per year (5 day week, 2 week vacation).   That means that even a million is a big number. But a billion is a thousand million, so to type a billion x’s would take I,000,000,000 divided by 45,000,000, or a bit over 22 years. So 19 trillion? How about four hundred and eighteen thousand years or so? Of course if we put 100,000 people on the job, they could finish in about four and a half years. (I may have slipped up on the arithmetic here, but you get the idea)

But how much should we care about the national debt? A lot. A simple discussion of the components of the national debt is here. It is a complex thing, ranging from repayment of bonds owned by individuals, companies, and governments inside and outside of the U.S. as well as intergovernmental loans, and other such complexities. and we have to cover the interest on much of it. Unlike individuals and companies, governments can not go bankrupt (as a few U. S cities and foreign countries have) and easily recover, if at all. Bankruptcy of the U .S. is unthinkable, since the U.S. as it is would no longer exist. Eventually the bill must be covered.

Focusing in on the election, many groups are calculating the effects on the national debt of the economic plans being proposed by the candidates. One of the less biased groups is called the Tax Foundation, and their findings are here. A more politically liberal group is the Brookings Institution, and their conclusions are here. They are saying that in ten years, Trump’s plan could add over ten trillion dollars to the national debt, and perhaps up to 80 % (over 15 trillion).

Trump is, of course, telling us that his plan will benefit us all at no cost, the increase in expenses and decrease in tax income will be overcome by the tremendous savings he will make in the costs of government and the surge in economic activity that will result. Are we going to continue to believe that one? Hopefully not, although we have accepted similar arguments in the past. We seem to be eternal suckers for supply-side economics.

But too many of us will focus on what the candidates say, rather than what they will do. And we will not pay as much attention as we should to the numbers , because they are so large they have little meaning compared to the incomes and expenses we are used to.

I will talk a bit more about magnitudes in my next post, because our ability to avoid thinking deeply about very large (and small) quantities is being overwhelmed by the necessity of doing so, whether elections are forthcoming or not.

Two Models

The photo below is of two bomber models.   Which one is best? The one in the background (letter A on tail) is a B-17, of World War II fame, built from a modern kit. As an engineer, I marvel at the accuracy and detail of the various molded pieces that the modern model maker cements together. I didn’t check to see if the small figures of crew members have fingernails or not, but I would not be surprised if they did. And such models go together beautifully, requiring little skill, except for keeping the paint and cement where it should be. My grandchildren were putting such things together when they were eight or nine years old, until their house ran out of available ceiling space to hang them on.

I built this model because through a fortunate chain of circumstances my wife and I were given a ride on the B-17 that the Collings Foundation has beautifully restored and tours around the country. I rode in World War II airplanes plenty when I was in the Air Force. World War II was well over, but many of its planes were in service, partly because the people who had served in World War II were nostalgic for them, and because they were sturdy, practical, and available. In fact the first military airplane I even rode in was a B-17, and I managed to sit in the  nose (great view) while we did a fly over for a parade in Marysville, California.

The ride was fun, and Marian seemed to enjoy it a great deal, so I put together the model to hang in her office to remind her of a fun day. But, although she did love the day, she wasn’t that thrilled with the model, which now resides in our basement, which together with our garage and a room I commandeered as an office, I control.

But the other model, although lacking in accuracy and detail, is by far the best. I built it when I was eight years old, and had just returned from a fly-over and a walk through a prototype of a bomber numbered the B-19, a Douglas Aircraft competitor to Boeing's B-29 for the successor to the B-17. It was to be a super bomber, and to eight year old me, it was. The B- 29 had won the competition, but Douglas was touring the B-19 around to learn from it, do a bit of advertising, and help build war fervor. The B-19 had a wing span of 212 feet, a length of 132 foot and weighed 130,000 pounds empty. As contrast, the B-17 had a wingspan of 104 feet, a length of 74 feet, and weighed 33,000 pounds empty. For that time the B-19 was huge, and in fact was the largest aircraft ever built in the United States. I still have a vivid memory of being at March Field in Riverside and having it fly what now would be considered dangerously low over our heads. A discussion of it is at http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/americas-real-wwii-flying-fortress-was-the-massive-doug-1632864365

I immediately went home and built a model of it. This was in 1942, and there was little plastic, injection molding was in the future, and I had never seen such a thing as a model kit (perhaps because my parents didn’t allow me to, or I would have nagged them incessantly). But at that age I was pretty agile with a few materials. Since I lived on an orange grove, and my father worked in an orange packing house and my grandfather had a fairly complete shop, I had excellent access to both picking and shipping orange boxes, a jig saw, a lots of files, hammers, glue, and above all tin cans. So I made the fuselage, wings, landing gear, and various small pieces  from an orange shipping box, the propellers and tail surfaces from tin can stock, and wheels and such from a dowel rod I found in my grandfather’s shop. I had a private stock of aluminum, red, white, blue, and black paint and a few small paint brushes I had scavenged from my mother. But no plans or photos.

I don’t know why the twin tail, except that in those days people didn’t carry cameras around, there was no internet and I could not find a B-19 photograph in the town library to augment my memory of it, and maybe I was thinking of the B-24, which was large, had a twin tail, and was introduced in 1941. Or maybe I just liked twin tails.

Although my B-19 model was not even in the same world of accuracy, complexity, finish, and scale as those that result from modern plastic model kits, I BUILT IT, and my friends, although they were at the demonstration, didn’t have a model of it at all. And in the process I learned a lot about airplanes in general, as well as about the B-19, which was loaded with armament and the state of the art in control systems and power plant. And rather amazingly I still have it, usually hanging in my office, and remember the real one flying over my head whenever I see it.  I still have it because my mother was very proud of it (and me, of course) and kept it. I found it late in her life when I was helping her go through her possessions, and took it home. I can’t say the same for other things I was doing when I was eight years old. But it was part of the long process that has made me good at making, fixing, and tinkering, as I have said in my blog, all necessary therapy in my life, appreciated by my wife and home, and passed on to my kids.

Incidentally, in the upper left corner of the photograph can be seen a portion of a sail boat. Although we were not that close to the ocean, I was interested in sail boats when I was a kid, and tried to make a model of one and failed, because the wood working was over my head and I had never seen a big one. So my mother made me one, and that is it in the background of the photograph. She kept my model, I kept hers.  She had never seen one either, but mothers are not stopped by little details like that. Later in life I scratched my itch by making several detailed models of old ships. But now you can buy them ready made from the New York Times store, at a price that doesn’t compare with the zillions of hours I spent on mine. BUT I BUILT MINE, and in the process spent zillions of very rewarding hours, and also learned lots about old sailing ships from the structure, through the function of the many lines on them, to much of the history of sailing ships and their role,  I learned how to work at very small scale, and needless to say, I met lots of interesting people who were hooked on old ships and making models of same.

I consider myself lucky to be an unrepentant DIY (Do It Yourself) guy, and am grateful to my parents and grandparents for encouraging and helping me.

U.S. Growth in the Future

I am reading various books and articles concerning future predictions of the U.S. and other countries because of the Homo Demi Sapiens book on which I am presently working. I have just finished reading The Rise and Fall of American Growth, subtitled The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (see recommended books), and loved it, although it is a heavy book, both in weight and in content. The author, Robert Gordon, is an economics professor at Northwestern University, with a deep interest in history, in this case the history of technology and related effects.

He makes two major points in the book: one being that simple measures such as GNP do not adequately describe the effects of technological developments, and the other being that the time period 1870 through 1970, and in particular 1920 through 1970, may be unique in the U.S. as far as growth is concerned.

He includes improvement in the quality of life in his measure of growth, as well as economic data. He particularly addresses a number of what he calls “great” inventions that happened in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, such as electrical light and power, internal combustion engines, the germ theory of medicine, wireless communication, and water, gas, electrical telephone and rail and highway networks. He feels that these inventions and developments, and the resulting exploitation of them, ranging from urbanization to rapid and affordable instant communication and rapid travel to household appliances and mass production rapidly changed the U.S. in remarkable and positive ways, ranging from urbanization, to much longer life expectancy, to education and entertainment.

But he thinks that the huge growth resulting from this activity is unusual, and perhaps is beginning to return to a lower, and more normal rate of growth. This is a rather unpopular view in the U.S., and quite different than the one present candidates for office are promising if they are elected. We fully expect to return to the high rate of growth we attained in the period 1920 to 1970. There are still areas in which great change is happening rapidly, the obvious one being information, communication, and entertainment as a result of digital technology, but Gordon offers a large amount of data and arguments that even this is slowing down, that such activities are allowing us to do things much more rapidly and cheaply than we could before, but we could do them, and information, communication, and entertainment are only a small part of the many factors that define our standard of living.

He finishes the book by specifically pointing out four factors that slow down growth—increased inequality, inadequate education, demographics, and repaying debt— and suggests what we have to do to combat them. But he clearly does not think that we will ever reach the rate and revolutionary effects of the growth that occurred in the period which he discusses in the book.

I found the book very thought provoking, and tend to believe many of the author’s arguments, even though I have been involved in technology (even “high” technology, whatever that means) all of my adult life. But although I am a great fan of Star Wars movies, I don’t think they predict where we are going (I hope).  I think we will figure out how to overcome the obstacles to growth that Gordon identifies to some extent and to help people displaced by digital devices to provide better and more satisfying lives. And too much growth and change can be unsettling to a large and growing population.  Finally according to Gordon, part of our stimulus to rapid growth during the 20^th century was due to recovery from the great depression and the spurt in production and recovery during and after World War II. That was a hard way to grow!

Thinking and Writing

I am presently working on a couple of books I have been thinking about for years, as well as my “rescue old machinery” projects, house maintenance, and life in general. I will from time to time talk about all of these, but fortunately the title of this blog is People and Products, so I have given myself a lot of room to move.

One of these books is about the benefits of working with one’s hands. I have always had hobbies/jobs that require this, and such activity seems to be necessary to keep me fulfilled. The book is about why working with one’s hands is a good thing to do. It is perhaps a defense of the fact I spend quite a bit of my time in such activities, and of many of my friends who also do so. In my opinion use of the hands becomes more and more necessary as more and more of our lives seem to be focused on interacting with digital devices. To me, typing just doesn’t quite qualify.

The other one has the working title Homo Demi Sapiens (Half Wise Humans). The gist of the book can be seen below, which was the final slide I included in a talk I recently gave to a 50^th reunion class of the Stanford Graduate School of Business,  They agreed with me.

HOMO DEMI SAPIENS
Maybe We’re Not Quite as Smart
As We Think We are

AND MAYBE WE SHOULD FACE IT!

PERHAPS THERE ARE NO PERFECT ANSWERS TO MOST IMPORTANT PROBLEMS,

OR MAYBE WE AREN’T INTELLIGENT ENOUGH TO FIND THEM.

MAYBE WE SHOULD ACQUIRE A BIT MORE HUMILITY ABOUT HOW SMART WE ARE.

MAYBE PEOPLE ON THE OPPOSITE SIDES OF FENCES SHOULD LEARN TO BETTER COMPROMISE

AND COME UP WITH AND IMPLEMENT SOME WORKABLE CREATIVE SOLUTIONS.

 

This book has been years in the making, although I didn’t know it at the time. The initial edition of my Conceptual Blockbusting book was concerned with blocks to individual creativitiy. But as time went by, I included group creativity and organizational creativity. Homo Demi Sapiens is concerned with problem solving in even larger populations —religions, nations, the world, etc. A perhaps grandiose attempt, but fun to try.

A book I have read many times over the years is entitled Sagittarius Rising, and was written by Cecil A. Lewis, who was a World War I fighter pilot, later to become one of the founders of the British Broadcasting Company and a successful writer. The book, which is beautifully written, is a flattering picture of flying, but much of his World War I flying was over the trenches, in which he could look down from the beautiful sky to see people killing themselves in the mud and wreckage. One comment from the book  was “Man individually was sane and reasonable. Only collectively was he a fool.” True?

That comment has stayed with me, and perhaps is one of the reason I am writing this book. Other stimuli are such things as the international situation, replete with such things as the Middle East impasse, the environmental situation, and if we want to remain a credible world power, the war between the democrats and the republicans in the U.S. It is past time for we humans to get our act together. Termites have been around for 250 million years. They have what is sometimes called group intelligence. How long will we last? Our group intelligence as a species has not yet been fully tested. The modern form of humans showed up only 200,000 years ago, The Neolithic revolution (agriculture, settlements) happened only 12,000 years ago. In the past few hundred years we have made major changes in the way we live, but they are leading us in worrisome directions. If C.S. Lewis is right, we had better start worrying more about the “Sapiens” in the title we have given ourselves.

Resistance to Change:

Anthropologists sometimes speak in terms of generations (25 years) and in those terms, our species (homo) has been around some 240,000 generations (6,000,000 years), This is plenty of time for us to evolve a la Mr. Darwin.  But we did not have the advantage of stone tools until the Paleolithic period which began about 100,000 generations (2.5 million years) ago – 140,000 generations with no tools, probably no fire, definitely no athletic shoes, roaming the land in small groups (probably extended families )for our food and shelter, but plenty of time to evolve into tool users.   

 The Neolithic Revolution, when we discovered agriculture and began living in fixed areas, was about 500 generations ago (12,500 years). This period of time since we began farming and building towns and cities is a bit shorter, and we are obviously still involved in working the wrinkles out of such activities. 

 But think of what we have done to ourselves since the industrial revolution which occurred in Europe only about 10 generations (250 years) ago—or for that matter since transistors were invented some 70  years ago (three generations)—a major change in our life style with little opportunity to evolve to match it.

 I have been expecting a back lash against the recent high rate of changes in our lives, much of it resulting from developments in science and technology, over the past few years, but so far it has not happened.  In fact, we seem to be fascinated and entertained by these changes, providing that they don’t inconvenience us too much as individuals.  But there are signs that a backlash is beginning, ranging from mutterings of people being forced into “upgrading” their computer software, to the increasing worry about job loss, traffic, scarcity, and environmental degradation, to the increasing gap between the rich and poor, and the loss of the essential middle class.

 An example is an angry article in the October 25^th issue of the New York Times written  by Mark Lynas, and entitled Europe Turns Against Science.  It is here.  The article criticizes the 17 countries in Europe that have announced bans on the cultivation of genetically modified(G.M.) crops.  The author feels that this will not only be extremely costly, but even though the bans do not include research, will cause these countries to fall behind those who are including genetically modified plants in their agriculture (the U.S.?).  These European countries have great influence in the world, and apparently much of sub-Saharan Africa is also forbidding the growing of G.M. foods.  This is in spite of a great amount of research showing that G.M. foods are safe, and strange inconsistencies, such as the importing of some 30 million tons per years of soy and corn based animal feeds by these European countries, much genetically modified, and much from the U.S.  And since many G.M. foods are designed to be immune to many pests and diseases,  the use of pesticides and other polluting and expensive chemical agents will continue to increase in these countries.

 And then there is the problem of sufficient food production in the world.  G.M. crops  often are more productive.  The United Nations, which keeps track of  population trends in the world, has for some time predicted that the world population would peak at  9 million by the end of this century.  We are now at 7.3 billion (the last billion of which happened in only 12 years).  The U.N. has now upped its prediction for the end of the century to 11 million, a large portion of which will be in Africa.  In fact, one prediction is that by 2050, Nigeria will have a larger population than the  U.S.  Where is the food going to come from to feed everyone?  Lynas has a couple of quotes in his article to back up  his argument about some extreme African attitudes toward G.M.foods.  One is by Tobaiwa Mudede, described as a crony of Robert Mugabe, who singles out G.M. food as the cause of the “huge problem of sexual dysfunction in the U.S”. , where “males become impotent around the age of 24, at the prime of life”. The author also mentions being interrupted while giving a talk in Tanzania by a farmer who said  he would never grow biotech crops because “they would turn my children into homosexuals”.

 I blame resistances such as these on changes happening too fast for the comfort zones of our species.  We don’t seem to be that bothered by the much slower ongoing activities in “improving” plants through cross-breeding. There is some value in this typical  human resistance to change, because it results in thorough study of secondary effects of new developments. And I am expecting the next resistance to appear either in the area of associated with computers and the internet, or to extreme and very expensive developments in medicine oriented toward immortality .  But the downside is that many people who could benefit from these developments are deprived of them. The undernourished in Africa?

Intelligence and the Computer

Intelligence is a broad word.  If you want to check it out in Wikipedia, it is here.  Of note is that although usually applied to humans, it is also used in conjunction with animals, plants, and increasingly to machines (artificial Intelligence.)  If we consider the word “smart”(perhaps a subset of intelligent), we seem to include everything with a chip in it (smart cars, smart houses, smart thermostats, smart toys, etc.)

 Here in the heart of Silicon Valley, there seems to be increasing confidence that the computer and related information systems will continue to become more intelligent as time passes.  In fact, a few hard-core folk believe that computers will surpass humans in intelligence. There is an educational venture in the Silicon Valley area that calls itself Singularity University and which studies innovation and so-called exponentially accelerating technologies. Singularity in this case refers to digital technology, and is defined in Wikipedia here.   One of the co-founders, and now Chancellor of the  University, is Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and technology visionary..  He has written a book entitled Singularity is Near, and believes this singularity will occur in 2045, and that we should prepare for this time when computers become more intelligent than humans and continue to advance more rapidly than we can.

 Admittedly, I do not have the technical reputation that Kurzweil does, but I do not believe this at all. Computers have steadily taken over activities that humans used to do—calculation, recording and organizing information, controlling machinery, making decisions based on input, and so on.  But I see no way they can take over the ship.   For one reason, we humans, not computers, define intelligence, and we do so selfishly.  Think of how much faith we place in the I.Q. test, which˙ after all merely measures how well one does on a traditional “test”(according to traditional questions) rather than overall intelligence.  Nevertheless we believe in it, But should should computers out perform us at taking the test, we will change the test. As computers do better than humans at various tasks (Big Blue beating Kasparov at Chess, once thought to be a game requiring great intelligence, and speed at calculation, which got me good grades at Caltech), we seem to change our minds as to how much intelligence is necessary to accomplish these tasks. And there is always Dave’s approach to HAL, his misbehaving AI computer, in the 1968 movie A Space Odyssey—shut it down.  

 I first encountered the then large mainframe computer in the 1950’s when I worked first in the Air Force, and then at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  I was fond of these machines because they could do complicated and involved calculations that I really did not like to do, and practically never could have, by hand.  I have worked with computers ever since, and like most people, I consider them not only immensely useful, and wondrously capable of speeds and data handling with which humans cannot compete.  But I don’t think of them as particularly intelligent, any more than I thought of the Library of Congress, adding machines or telephones as Intelligent.   I know that Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches are being applied in an increasing number of ways. And the role of computers will change a great deal by 2045, which after all is 30 years from now. The digital age is still quite young. The invention of the internet was approximately 30 years ago and of the World Wide Web only 24 years ago. Computers will continue to amaze us , until we take the new miracle for granted, but we humans will continue to lead the movement.

 I am a believer in artificial intelligence when humans are in the loop.  When I joined the Stanford faculty, I worked a bit with the then Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, headed by John McCarthy, one of the early pioneers in AI.  One of the graduate students was working on computer vehicle control ,  and was using a remotely controlled cart I had built for my Ph.D. thesis (remote control by a human with time delays in the loop) a few years before.  It was clear to me then that computers would take over an increasing number of information processing tasks that people had traditionally done, but even then I was skeptical about how far they would go at being truly intelligent.  At some level, we humans have always had to tell digital devices what to do and how to do it.

 In the early days, AI was very interested in the workings of the human mind.  But the human mind is beyond complex.  Yesterday there was an article in the New York Times entitled “Will You Ever Be Able to Upload Your Brain, by Kenneth Miller, Co-Director of the Center for Theoretical Neurosciences at Columbia University”. It is here. He wrote it because of the attention being paid to an increasing number of people who seems to want their brain frozen and stored until science has progressed to the time when someone can thaw it out and start it up again. His answer is “maybe centuries from now”.  I have another reaction, and that is “who would want to”?  But the article does give an insight into how far away we are from truly understanding the human mind, despite a great amount of brain and behavior research.

 AI researchers no longer think of duplicating the human mind on silicon, but the search for computer based intelligence that mimics human intelligence is alive and well. In fact, as computers become better and better at crunching numbers and handling “higher” mathematics, and as they are equipped with better sensors and actuators and integrated into more and more nets, they become more and more useful to us (with a few exceptions, such as handling “big data” for marketing purposes and being involved in pranks and crimes). But the more time I spend screwing around with such things as new operating systems and applications, handling the increasing number of people who want to send me e-mails or texts, find things on the ever-increasing internet, or become my friend or contact on social networking sites, the dumber my computer seems at handling information for me,  and I have never considered allowing it to make decisions for me.

 The good news is that I don’t have to worry about Mr. Kurzweil’s singularity, because I will be dead by then.  The bad news is that computers may hasten my death, but only through frustration, and not because they are more intelligent than I.

Job Loss and Support for New Directions

There was a passionate article in last Sunday’s New  York Times by Paul Theroux, a prolific writer of books, and in particular travel books,  He is noted for spending major times in local areas and writing about the lives people live there.  This article was written after he had spent a great deal of time traveling in the U.S. deep south working on his latest book, “Deep South.  Four Seasons on Back Roads”.

 The article was about poverty resulting from the loss of jobs due to the closing factories, which in turn Theroux blames on outsourcing, which he in turn blames on the greed of companies.  This is not a new problem, but Theroux writes with the emotion of having spent time with people (in his words)  “towns with their hearts torn out of them” from factory closings.  This is not a new message, but to read Theroux at this level of anger is unusual.  You should read the article, if you have not.  It is here.

 Among other charges, he delivers blasts at various foundations and wealthy people in business and government in the U.S. who advertise the help they give to poor people in developing countries, but have not helped poor people in these towns he visits in the U.S.  I am a believer, having followed the bankruptcy of San Bernardino California (where I went to high school) from the closing of income producing activities ranging from an air base (Norton) to train maintenance shops (Santa Fe), to a nearby steel mill (Kaiser, which ironically was carefully taken part and moved to China, where it was re-assembled). An article about the collapse of the city is here.  Among other San Bernardino statistics, during the 2012-13 school year, 33,274 students (8.1% of the total) experienced homelessness.

 A large number of people who lost their jobs in San Bernardino have families,  little cash or credit, probably house mortgages, and may not have had  the training or education to easily find other jobs. I was discussing this with a colleague earlier today, and we agreed that somebody should help people in such a situation (and the deep south), because it was not their fault that the income base of the city collapsed. But we could not figure out who.  Should businesses insure their employees against a collapse?  Not much precedence for that, and probably not a lot of support from businesses.  Should the government do more in the way of offering training and education?  But that would possibly result in more tax on businesses, who are already screaming that taxes are too high, and outrage people who think that government aid is already too profligate. 

 And this might only be a preview of future problems.  Although most of the attention has been paid to blue-collar workers, computers have already taken over many tasks formerly done by white collar workers (CPA’s, lawyers, administrators, medical workers, clericals, etc.).  There is a great debate going on as to whether this will cause new work opportunities for white collar workers (“The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies”, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee ) or whether the white collar job loss will eventually be larger and noisier than the blue collar loss.  We will find out, and perhaps the white collar workers will be able to more easily slip into new jobs, but once again, many of them may need help, and who will pay if they do not have the resources to learn new skills, or are at a stage of life where it is extremely inconvenient to re-locate? Or do we thoughtful and sensitive U.S, citizens just say "tough luck"?

People, Products, and Quantities

People, Products, and Quantitities.

 The  U.S. “k through 12” educational system is presently burdened with many expectations — to get us more highly ranked internationally, make the sometimes less than brilliant children of wealthy and powerful people smarter, equip people to escape poverty and lead clean and rewarding lives, etc. etc. etc.  This is a far cry from teaching the ABC’s with a little arithmetic thrown in.  But to add my two cents, I wish our kids were being given a better feel for quantities than we were.  I am not talking about more calculus tricks here, but rather the ability to make order of magnitude estimates, handle probabilities, and deal with quantities with which we have little experience.

 Every time elections approach I become aware of the pleasure candidates get from throwing around large numbers (the national debt, the cost of Obama care, the number of immigrants in the country, and so on).  They do this knowing that most of the electorate has little experience with or feeling for such numbers, and will agree that we are in bad shape and should vote for the candidate dropping words like billions and trillions.  In a sense, their tactic is a good one, because we have not been trained to process such numbers.

 We are first exposed to quantities by learning to count our fingers and toes (probably the reason we use ten-based numerical systems and why parents did not appreciate the “new math” introducing digital and octal systems).  As we grew we picked up experience with thousands (car and house prices in the old days),  and have now grown used to millions (the population of large cities, and the net worth of well-off people.  But we are now being bombarded with quantities that we can’t handle with our intuition. We are cramming a billion transistors on a silicon chip, communicating with the Voyager spacecraft over 12 billion miles, and buying two terabytes (billion bytes) of computer memory for less than 100 dollars.  Bill Gates is worth 70 billion dollars. On the other end of the scale, we are fascinated with nanotechnology (the manipulation of material on a molecular or atomic scale)—the nano refers to a billionth of a meter, or the order of  10^-9 .   meters, (If  you are uncomfortable with this notation, you should be even more uncomfortable if I wrote 0.000000001 meters.  The total number of particles in the universe has been estimated at 10⁸⁵ You want to see 85 followed by 85 zeros? I doubt it.)

We also have difficulty thinking about long time periods.  The government usually defines a generation as 25 years.  The so-called Neolithic revolution, when we became hooked to agriculture and quit being nomad, was about 10,000 years ago, or about 400 generations. During that time, we have learned to do serious harm to our resources and environment.  We are not going to repair the damage or even quit causing it in one generation.  Yet we seem to have difficulty thinking and acting beyond our individual deaths.

 Part of our problem is the U.S. refusal to completely adopt the metric system.  We cling to our strange units such as inches, miles per hour, British Thermal  Units, ounces, pounds, and so on. At present, Myanmar, Liberia, and the U.S. are the only countries in the world that have not adopted the metric system, and we are the only so-called developed one.  In 1971 there was a major government study entitled “The Metric System, It’s Time Has Come”, led by Daniel DeSimone.  The government accepted it, but it didn’t take.  Can you imagine the price we pay in trade and travel for this, as well as needing to constantly figure out things like how many cups are in a gallon and how U.S. times in the 440 yard race compares with 400 meter times?

 But the problem mostly stems from lack of experience with very large and small numbers, and being taught methods of gaining perspective on them.  Orders of magnitude are important.  My older son has some land on which he sometimes raises tomatoes. Modern machine-raised tomatoes can produce on the order of 50 tons per acre.  Probably not too meaningful.  Better we should think of 100,000 pounds.  That’s a lot of trips to the store. If you have a spare one tenth acre on your lot, you should be able to raise 10,000 pounds of tomatoes.  That get your attention? I used to have fun asking students to quickly tell me how many hairs were on their head, or how many blades of grass were on the football field.  Over time they would get much better at order of magnitude guessing —not exact numbers, but a feeling for quantity.  In 1977 Charles and Ray Eames produced a short film entitled “Powers of Ten”, which gives a feeling for what happens when one adds or subtracts a zero from a number.  It’s still available, and worth watching if you have never seen it. It is here.

 We all need to become more familiar with quantities. The probability of dying in a car accident in the U.S. is on the order of one in 10,000 per year.  The probably of dying in an airplane accident is one in millions.  Why do people sitting in airplanes seem more worried than those sitting in cars?  There are approximately 12 million Mexican residents in the U.S.  That is about one per each 30 non-Mexican residents.  Is that too many?  I sure don’t think so, since the ones I know are hard-working, non-complaining, fun loving people, and after all quite a bit of the U.S. was taken away from Mexico by armed force.  Let’s not let ourselves be convinced that Mexico is taking us over. And let us face the fact that providing first class healthcare and education for everybody and keeping our  highways in good order  is very expensive, and someone will have to pay for it.

The Enigma of Success

I was recently talking with a few other faculty elders at Stanford, and we were reminiscing about the changes that had occurred in the University since we had arrived (1958 for me as a graduate student, 1966 as a member of the faculty).  They have been many.  Stanford in 1958 had begun its climb to its present size, wealth, and justified fame, and was a wonderful place to be because of its smaller physical size, its relative lack of red tape and rules, the excitement of rising in prestige, and its more informal physical plant and personal interactions.  During my time as a graduate student I not only carried a large teaching load and was responsible for a research contract, but was given the job of re-building (with student help) the upper floor of a large building, where we were building a new academic unit. In fact, I repeated this— studs, drywall, and paint— in the 1980’s when I was tasked with chairing a struggling program and allocated unusable space. I came to love the place through building my offices to suit my desires, and being able to move walls around at will.  No longer.  My present office has concrete walls and a building manager, and I must be very clever even to be able to drill holes in the wall.

 In 1958 there was no faculty club, so many of the professors would bring their lunches, eat them together, and socialize.  In fact the faculty members of one very academically successful group in my department was famous for playing loud and boisterous games of hearts during the lunch break.  Since there were many fewer Ph.D. students, there was less overhead in the funding and maintaining of laboratories.  Now successful faculty members in the Engineering School often have a much larger number of Ph.D. students, visiting faculty members, fellows, lab space to accommodate them all, perhaps an executive director with industrial experience to keep the whole thing running, several administrative assistants,  etc. etc. etc.  Faculty members are more likely to be entertaining visitors at lunch than playing hearts, and tending their mini empires rather than interacting with each other.

 An even larger change has been in the overall feeling of the place.  The 8000 acres  owned by the University was originally Governor Leland Stanford’s horse farm, and was in fact called the Farm, as it still is by many alumni. The academic center was developed but most of the land was not, and even the academic area was equipped with somewhat wild growth and nicely worn buildings.  Lake Lagunita on campus was generally full during warm weather (no perception of water shortage then), and just before filling, was sometimes used by the students to stage the Lagunita Seca road race, run by vehicles built by the students with no rules and driven by students with no training!  When I was a student there was one policeman on campus.  I don’t know how many we have now. It was possible to park one’s car next to one’s office.  It is a challenge to park on campus at all now, and probably will cost money.  We have tour busses, traffic circles, and stop signs for bicycles, and the construction going on seems to be never ceasing.  The university seems more like an airport every year.

 But as you know, Stanford has become an educational power house.  The university sits high on all ranking lists, attracts an increasing number of outstanding applicants, does research that affects us all, and becomes ever more successful at hiring world famous scholars for the faculty and raising money for everything from funding research and endowing professors to expanding the facilities.   There are certainly more conveniences, money, and prestige attached to being to being part of the university now than there were when I first arrived, and Stanford is even becoming a force in athletics But as one alumnus said on a recent visit.  “What happened to the Farm?  This is a research city—an extension of Silicon Valley”.

 And is the plant going in the same direction as the people?  Stanford is becoming larger than human scale and  a show house of cleanliness and landscaping. But people who work in universities are supposed to be creative.  My background includes a great deal of study of creativity.  Creativity requires room to think and experiment and an environment that is consistent. Faculty members and students in universities often have neither the time nor inclination to follow the dreams of architects and administrators.  Life in the university  consists of overlapping and seldom finished work, which can seldom be tucked away, leaving clean desks and shelves.

Below are two photos taken in the new Engineering Quadrangle at Stanford.  The next three show the  work space of an outstanding professor, an IT expert, and a  program manager.  These are a far cry from the interiors shown in the architecture renderings and blessed by the Trustees.  

The next photo shows the exterior of the Clark center for bio-engineering. It is a striking piece of architecture, with its glass walls opening onto a central atrium.  But if you look closely, most of glass walls have been obscured from inside, because the people working inside neither want to be watched by passers by (oh look honey, there is a professor), nor have the sun shine on their computer screens.  The next photo shows some actual student work space.  Happily, the students have overcome the architecture!

 The final photo shows office space for Ph.D students in yet another building.  But Ph.D. students are not willing to sit in rows with tidy desk tops, no space to store their work, food, and projects, and with people staring at them through glass windows. Therefore, few of them are in these rooms. 

In my opinion, many of our new buildings smack a bit too much of control and fantasies of how professionals should conduct themselves, rather than showing an understanding of the actual lives of students and others employed in the rather messy educational process . Alumni from many years ago speak fondly of the feel of the more poorly maintained, but informal physical campus.  The new buildings are impressive, but where’s the fun?  What’s to love?  Institutions have to learn better to grow and maintain the feeling of informality and smaller size.

 Of course, this progression in size, wealth, and fame is typical of fortunate organizations, and is in a sense a reflection of the American way.  And I am proud to have played a small part in it in the case of Stanford.  But there is much to be said for smaller organizations that can exist with less control, and therefore less overhead and reporting.  I am hoping that Stanford will continue to improve and enjoy the long success of universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, and even Harvard.  But individuals, organizations, and even nations seem to go through a cycle of climbing to “greatness”, and then going through the process of slowly declining and being forced to watch others take over leadership.  I sometimes think it would be nice if so much, including most economic theories, did not depend on growth.  But it seems that most of us are not strong enough to put limits on ourselves in favor of an environment that we can easily control—the human condition.  So I will continue to enjoy the ride.

 

 

 

 

The Vanishing Machine Aesthetic

I really miss being able to see the details of machines.  Not only are they exciting, but often beautiful.  I am suspect, of course, being an engineer, but so be it.  When I was a kid, I used to love standing too close to steam powered railroad locomotives, not only for the emotional thrill of their size and sounds, but also to try to figure out how they worked (possible for a kid in those days).  I don’t stand too close to modern train locomotives, or in fact, even notice them.

 Something happened many years ago (1920’s and 30’s) to start us hiding the workings of machinery. 
The photo at the left shows a caterpillar 30, probably built in the 1920’s, with the usual kid playing on it.  The next photo shows a restored caterpillar 10 manufactured a few years later, but with a more “modern” approach to design.  Note that the workings are shrouded in sheet metal.  The third photo shows a beat up caterpillar 10 without the sheet metal (I am restoring it and straightening out the sheet metal).  To me, it is more interesting without the sheet metal, but I will put it back on so it doesn’t bother people.

The final tractor photo shows a caterpillar tractor manufactured in 1995.  Certainly looks faster (it is) and more powerful (it is) and more technically sophisticated (it is), but what is inside of its sports-car body panels?  Give or take a bunch of electronics and a steering wheel rather than clutch/brake levers, it is similar.  But I’ll bet the reaction of most people (not farmers) is not to care—they just like the exterior. (I do admit it is a great tractor and I like the exterior also).  But this tractor is perhaps more difficult to understand and to maintain than the Caterpillar 30, as well as not as much fun for kids to play on.

 

I think it is worrisome that we are no longer paying as much attention to how things work.  Personal computers are a good example —no clue as to what is in the package.  In fact, most of us are perhaps happier that way.  But the role technology is playing is increasing so that hiding it may delude us, especially if covered with modern marketing. The “Cloud”, being touted by companies with enormous server capability (Google, Apple, IBM, Amazon, etc.) is causing massive ignorance.  Traditional clouds are beautiful, especially close to sunset, the weightlessly drift through the sky, ever changing, and hopefully in California promise eventual much needed rain, and in summer cooler weather.  They are almost magic.

 The “Cloud” being sold by computer companies is another example of intentionally hiding technology that our society should better understand.  It consists of access to the company servers (not all servers), and is an attempt by the company to function as our digital memory and provide our operating systems, applications, and other software (conveniently allowing them to charge us a monthly fee).  This cloud consists of glass fibers and other conductors under ground, on the ocean floor, and occasionally in sewers, feeding massive number of digital devices in anonymous , windowless, extremely hot  buildings that suck  huge amounts of electrical energy not only to accomplish their function, but also to prevent themselves from overheating.  Some time ago I mentioned a book entitled Tubes, by Andrew Blum.  An excellent read if you think the “Cloud” is either beautiful or magic, or if you don't understand the physical components of the internet.

 What’s happened to us?  Many things, but the directions of technology and the strengthening of the design profession have certainly had large inputs.  The realization of the advantages of low-drag aircraft, beginning with the evolution of fighter planes and the design of airplanes such as the DC-3 in 1934 was certainly instrumental.  The photo at the right  shows a famous pencil sharpener prototype designed by one of the leading designers of the 1930’s, Raymond Loewy in 1933.  It never hit the market.  But granted that it would only sharpen one size of pencil, it does look like it could move through one’s office rapidly, and would have probably sold because of the then love of “streamlining”.  I have opened the hood of a few “luxury” cars only to find that the engine is almost entirely shrouded, although it represents a high level of craftsmanship.  And I can tell long and now amusing stories of putting a new battery into my admittedly sleek Apple iPhone.

 I am for unwrapping and better understanding how things work.  Not only is it interesting, but we can better evaluate what we are doing to ourselves.

 

Brains and Minds

There is an increasing fascination,  at least among  media folk, with brains/minds.  I write brains/minds, because brains are the approximately three  pound pieces of complex meat that adults have in their skulls, and to many people, minds are more.  The fascination has to do with how they work, and  is a reaction to the many new insights from instruments (functional MRI scans, Pet scans) and insight into the structure and chemistry of brains.

 There are several problems involved with understanding how brains/minds work.  There is a perhaps cynical view (which I at times hold) that it will take something more powerful than a human brain to understand a human brain.  But to be more charitable to the neurologists, psychologists, computer scientists, and other people who are engaged in this task,  a major problem exists because the various disciplines involved are often not comfortable with each other.  There was an article  in the June 28^th issue of the New York Times entitled “Face It, Your Brain Is a Computer”.  It was written by Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology and neural science at NYU, who has just written a book entitled “The Future of the Brain”.  The article is here,  Happily, the article is not saying that the brain is a computer, as computers are commonly thought of.  Rather the author  is saying that thinking of the brain  as a computer  is perhaps a good way of structuring brain research.

 The magazine section of the same issue of the newspaper contains a section entitled “Head Trips”, which speaks of brain/mind function as seen by people ranging from a talk therapist to a person with a history of bipolar disorder, to a person doing research on the effects on the brain of microbiota that grow in the gut.  There seems to be agreement that  brain research must involve many disciplines, since the brain does seem to exhibit some “digital” behavior, certainly involves chemistry, electrical signals, and biological processes, and is strongly affected by behavior, experience, and emotion.  But many outstanding specialists are biased toward their own discipline.  When I read the article by Professor Marcus, I wondered how many of his friends were bio chemists.  I was very interested in the description of Mark Lyte’s work on the influence of microbiota, but he seemed far from the traditional talk therapists, who seem to be losing ground to the people in the “hard” sciences. In my opinion, theory that does not impress all of the intellectual camps involved, is not adequate.  We need a giant AHA, that sets all parties dancing—the equivalent of the double helix insight.

 Most of the brain/mind theories I am aware of are thought provoking and explain certain aspects of  thinking, responding, interpreting, predicting, and other things brains/minds do. But can the theories be integrated into a satisfying model?  That we shall see.  In the interim, I think brain research is one of the more entertaining things on which to stay current (except for the Golden State Warriors, of course).   

Matthew B. Crawford, and the Issue of Manual Skills.

In 2006, Matthew Crawford, (equipped with a Ph.D. in philosophy, an obvious fan of working with his hands and proprietor of a small business of restoring/maintaining vintage motorcycles), wrote an essay entitled Shop Course as Soul Craft, which was published in Atlantis magazine.  A friend of mine, Dave Beach, (who has built and is responsible for a very successful and large activity in the Stanford Engineering School called the Product Realization Lab in which students design and manufacture products), and I found out about it and spread it all around the local community.  It covered the advantages of manual skills in life and the importance to individuals, schools, and organizations of encouraging them.  I am one of a large number of people who are believers, and who take great pride in their ability to make and fix things and I have seen the positive effects of doing such things on the lives of many other people.   I depend on such activities for keeping me from occasionally becoming less likeable from lack of quick feedback and an overdose of mental activities seemingly divorced from reality (yes I am a professor). Dave and I are also both believers, along with many other people, in the contribution of such activities to producing products of high quality.

 Crawford's "Shop Course" essay was later developed into a book of the same name, which made a large splash because it made its way to many people of like mind, and coincided with a time of much worry about the inroads computers were making into skilled jobs.  If you haven’t read the article or the book, you can find the article here.

 Now Crawford has written another book entitled World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, N.Y.).  This one is somewhat broader in reach, having to do with our mental attention in an age in which large numbers of individuals and organizations, backed by powerful media, are competing for for this attention, to the point where we may be paying a cost in individuality and in the ability to focus as well on our main interests.  His “Shop Class” book was broader in reach than his Atlantis article of the same name, and this book is broader still.  I read it and loved it, but it is a more difficult read.  Crawford is now a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, as well as being a fabricator of components for custom motorcycles, and I think he is showing the signs of immersion in an academic scene .  It is difficult for academics to write books that are easy to read, because in a university, life consists of communicating with people in similar disciplines and assuming they have similar backgrounds and familiarity with material—in this case philosophy.  The result is an understandable tendency to refer to people and works that the general reader has not met or read, nor will probably ever do so.  After 50 years of fighting this problem, I know it well.  I even run into it at home because I occasionally find myself trying to explain something that is interesting to me, like quantum computing or the working of make-and-break ignition systems or the physical portions of the internet to my wife, who is brilliant, but was trained as an historian, and seems to  have little need for techie jargon and details.

 But the message in Crawford’s book is straight forward and powerful.  He again makes an argument for hands-on contact with the world,  He begins with the attack upon our attention from all sides, from advertising to internet communications and seductive digital toys.  He then goes into the problems resulting from handling an overload of stimulation by seeing it in terms of broad representations and generalizations rather than reality (“the public”, “government”, “farmers”).  He talks about joint, or group attention, its importance, and the increasing difficulty of obtaining it.  He worries that we are  losing the “real”, by dealing with these generalities and stifling our true nature and individuality in the process.  He finishes the main portion of the book by presenting what he considers an example of good focus—an old and traditional pipe-organ company, in which people learn from the experience of others and gain their pleasure from attaining expertise in the building of their products. Once again, the shop. 

This book is especially timely since many college students now seem to be trying to stay in contact with an ever increasing quantity of people and changing information and are planning to start companies even though they are equipped with little experience and with a minimum of skills learned through practice.  Even some devotees of creativity seem to be swinging away from experience and the learning of skills. I wish them luck.  These are invaluable tools in life.

 If you are interested in things controversial and in modern trends, I recommend you read this book and that you discuss it with your friends, especially if you are neglecting hobbies or work you love that allow you to get your hands dirty.  Dirty hands for me seem to result in a cleaner mind.  I recommend them to all.

 

 

 

 

 

Products and Engineering Education

Products and Engineering Education:

In an article in the June 15, 2015 edition of the New York Times, Frank Bruni, a columnist, wrote an article entitled “Accepted? Rejected? Relax"  It is here. The subtitle is "The obsession with elite colleges distorts reality, hurts kids, and perverts education”. I couldn’t agree more, even though I spent my teaching career at Stanford, which is one of them. I particularly think this is true in the case of engineering.

One thing that caught my eye was his mention in the article of the engineering school at Waterloo University, a public school in the province of Ontario, Canada, which is known for student and institutional innovation and the production of fine engineers, but not as an “elite” school. Last year I was a member of an advisory board to the government of Chile in conjunction with their “Engineering 2030 project”, which is an attempt to update their engineering schools and move them more toward work that will benefit Chile.  Waterloo was often mentioned as an example.  One of my sons is a long-term employee of Tesla Motors, a highly sought employer.  They are very high on Waterloo.  In Bruni’s article, he quotes Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, one of the best-known providers of seed money for technology start-ups.  When asked for the name of one school that stood out in terms of students and graduates whose ideas took off, he answered with Waterloo.  Since Altman attended Stanford, and since it has a high reputation for producing entrepreneurs, Bruni had expected him to come up with Stanford.  But Waterloo students had launched eight successful ventures with Y Combinator money.  “To my chagrin”, said Altman, “Stanford has not had a really great track record”  (of course Stanford students may make more use of other sources of funding, such as Kickstarter or venture capitalists)

 What is Waterloo doing right?  I think it is trying to produce engineers, not applied scientists, and perhaps not worrying as much about where it stands in the ratings of universities.   An example is their use of paid co-op programs to allow their students to learn in the context of industrial experience—a great help, since engineering schools tend to give an incomplete and somewhat misleading view of engineering. Another is their emphasis on design and creativity as well as analysis and theory—both central to engineering, but perhaps not as high in academic status.

 I was an undergraduate majoring in engineering at an elite school (Caltech), and probably would have changed schools had I not worked in a machine shop, and later as a junior engineer and finally as an engineer before I got my college degree. This was in a company at the time named Hunter Engineering, later to become Hunter Douglas, maker of upscale venetian blinds.  When I worked there, the engineering department consisted of a dozen people or so, all of whom had shop experience, and none of whom had a four year engineering degree ( The chief engineer had a degree from a two year college – I was called an engineer after my freshman  year) .  Yet during the time I was there, among other products, the company developed the machinery necessary to continuously cast, form, heat treat, and paint venetian blind stock at a very high rate.  This was an extremely difficult problem, which included a great deal of work to which the type of material stressed in engineering schools did not apply.  Schools teach material that is essential to an engineer, and add to one’s comfort with and understanding of mathematics, science, and engineering theory, but engineering also requires the sort of judgment and intuition resulting from experience.  Caltech emphasized math and science, rather than such things. The industrial experience I had allowed me to view my Caltech courses in context, as is probably the case with the co-op programs at Waterloo. 

 Science and engineering definitely overlap, but if you are interested in the differences, I discussed some of them in a book entitled entitled Flying Buttresses, Entropy and O-Rings published by Harvard Press in 1993.

 Engineering schools in many elite colleges had moved heavily to science, and maybe away from engineering, in the 1930’s, and then moved even more in that direction  after World War II.  The result has been a boon to engineering faculty members, who have been able to do research that attracts more money and is more prestigious to other academics, and in fact paves the way to new materials, processes, and approaches. But they often short such things as  the importance of cut-and-try approaches, testing, creativity and innovation, experience, and life in an engineering group.  The tie between academia and industry can be good in areas where the theory is more directly applicable, (Electrical Engineering, perhaps Chemical Engineering and Computer Science), but a gap remains in many fields such as mechanical and civil engineering.

 Engineering schools in the so-called elite universities are obsessed with breakthroughs and have gleefully accepted the academic value systems of applied scientists —theory, rigor, mathematics, increased emphasis on the Ph.D. degree — with faculty status determined heavily by refereed publications and visibility in their specialty. But during my years as a professional engineer (including my J.P.L. time) I never saw engineers that were involved in project work publishing in refereed journals, or even reading them. Professional engineers certainly tend to use theory when it works, but are usually forced to augment it with experience and testing, and tend to use theory with which they are comfortable.

 The swing back toward application in the elite engineering schools is underway, but it is very slow.  I was involved in attempts to cause this to happen by  the government and in the American Society of Engineering Education in the early 1960’s, and was hired onto the Stanford faculty in 1966 by Joe Pettit, a dean who cared deeply about education, and Fred Terman, the god of Stanford Engineering School, who had decided that the pendulum had swung dangerously far and a few people should be hired who had experience working as an engineer.  I was one of them.  But 30 years later, I was asked to spend a couple of years as “Associate Dean of Special Projects” and see what I could do to get Stanford’s Engineering School more involved in manufacturing, which was then a hot item in the U.S.,  and is in fact a central engineering activity.  I put an outstanding team together between the Graduate School of Business and the Engineering School, and we produced what I thought was an excellent plan.  But since industry knew much more about manufacturing than the School of Engineering, it included a co-op element.  Strangely enough, to us, that seemed to insult many of the influential members of the faculty, who apparently considered co-op programs, and perhaps even manufacturing, intellectually beneath them and beneath the engineering school.  R.I.P. good study, and hello China.

A Plague Of Advertising—More Is Not Necessarily Better

 I may be a bit unusual, in that I don’t think my purchasing habits have ever been much influenced by advertising.  In fact, I have always been suspicious of products that have unusual advertising exposure, because I figure that the makers of the product are desperately trying to get people to pay more for the product than it is worth. Neither have I thought that if I use the coffee maker that Roger Federer promotes I will be a better tennis player, or that if I buy a heavy duty pickup that I will be tougher.  Even more interesting, I now find myself avoiding products because I am tired of being constantly exposed to their ads.  Am I alone?

 There seems to be an explosion in advertising going on.  This is partly due to developments in media (the internet, TV,) which make it possible to “reach” huge numbers of people cheaply, partly because of increased competition to find and influence potential customers, and partly because of growth and increased sophistication of marketing and advertising as business activities.

 But what goes up usually comes down.  Is advertising really worth the money it costs? Do companies realize that people “tune out” ads if there are too many of them?  How many consumers, like me, are tired of  being constantly hustled?  And what is it doing to the aesthetics dimensions of living?  As  you may be aware, I quite often refer to the New York Times Sunday edition in my posts.  This is partly because my wife and I for  years have spent much of Sunday Morning in bed reading it while we drink coffee and munch on various unhealthy pastries.  We have been particularly fond of the Sunday magazine section.  We noticed some months ago, that the Sunday edition began including large slick-page “travel” or “style sections”, which consisted mostly of advertisements for expensive tours, or strangely unflattering and expensive clothes, typically modeled by young anorexic women and men. We instantly recycle these tomes, but I still cannot help but mourn the number of trees executed each week so that I will be able to receive these huge volumes that I never even open. 

 This dependency on full, or even double page ads, seems to be a survival strategy for newspapers and magazines. Some (New Yorker, The Economist) have held the line, but many (Architectural Digest, Wired) have succumbed to the temptation of big bucks.  But to my horror, today we received the much heralded redesign of the Sunday New York Times magazine (February 22, 2015), and guess what, from the three full page Cadillac ads in the front to the one on the back cover, it contains 220 pages, including some interesting articles, but also an incredible number of full color and often full page ads for everything from Carnegie Hall to jewelry, to kidney beans, to Miami hotels. As a comparison, I just picked up a copy of the magazine from a few weeks ago, and it contained 48 pages. Do you suppose that much of the difference consists of ads? Well, yeah!

 Hopefully, this Sunday’s edition was an attempt at a spectacular launch, and since I  have been a regular reader of the magazine, I admit the new version is a bit of a shock.  Will I get used to it?  Some, unless I simply quit reading it because I don’t want to spend the time trying to find the content buried in all the ads.  But it also suffers from graphic designers running wild.  How about two full pages for the title of an article (The Great Divide), turned sideways, yet. 

 This is an obvious attempt to modernize the magazine, and there are some good points in what they are doing, but I am saddened if modernizing means that content should be overwhelmed with ads.  Hopefully they can decrease the number and increase the quality of the ads and the products they represent .  And I love exciting graphics, but not at the expense of readability.

 

 

 

 

Quality for Free

In my book, Good Products, Bad Products, I briefly discuss cost (to maker) and price (to customer).  These often relate to overall product quality, but not necessarily in a logical or linear manner.  But it is definitely the case that we are all sensitive to price when acquiring products.  But how about products, even reasonably high quality ones, that can be obtained for free? To many of us, especially those of us who do not have the benefit (?) of great wealth, these have a particular cachet.

 I used to like to read Wired magazine, but it has over time become such a promo-piece for expensive products (full page add for Gucci on the back of the Feb 1,2015 issue) and the digital industry that I no longer subscribe to it.  But like many Conde Naste publications, it still comes to my house, probably either because they think I will subscribe again, or because they can keep me in their circulation count (attractive to advertisers).

 This issue has an interesting editorial by Scott Dadich, the editor in chief, which starts out with a mea- culpa on his addiction to “shiny new gadgets”, followed by raves about Microsoft’s Project HoloLens .  But then he brings up the fact that the rapid turnover in new gadgets results in great numbers of still usable devices ending up in landfills.  He then mentions an article in the issue by Randall Sullivan about a person named Matt Malone, an expert in corporate security and a professional dumpster diver, in that he finds products (often new) that have been discarded and resells them at a lower cost.  In fact, he states that if he was to do this full time, he could make at least $250,000 in the Austin. Texas area alone.  The editorial is here, and the article is here.

 I resonate with Matt Malone, even though I have never met him.  First of all, he is adding to the world’s recycling effort, and secondly, I am an amateur dumpster diver and finder of fine objects in trash piles.  I don’t sell them for profit, but rather I either give them away, or keep them because I love them— they appeal to me and they are FREE.

  The photo at the left shows a “free swap” book box I built for my wife for Christmas.  She loves books, and since the area in which we live is full of academics, who in turn have and read lots of books, it gets a heavy trade.  But it is a miracle to my wife and I, because it is an ever-changing source of free books right next to our house (sorry Amazon). 

When I first arrived at Stanford it was "upgrading" and discarding many "old" items.  As an example, they were re-doing teaching spaces and filling dumpster boxes with captains chairs that had been used in the old rooms.  I snagged a half dozen of them for my house, because they were comfortable and showed the patina of history.  Ironically enough, some years later, Stanford was putting brass plaques on the few that were left. and awarding them to major gift donors. And people were so eager to acquire new and "modern" equipment that they did not value the beauty and historical value of some of the old.

 The two photos below show  an old medical instrument that was used for examining tissue sections, and a few rescued objects that are in my office.  The adding machine is of great value because none of our present students have the faintest idea of what it is.  The two instruments are there because I like them.  And I’ll bet you don’t have as good a whiffle ball container as the one in the photo below them.

 

And I do not restrict myself to dumpsters.  My wife is a compulsive gardener, and  has a constant need for pots. The photo below  shows her pot supply.   We never have to buy them, because Stanford has a free trash pickup for all campus homeowners twice a year, and I have a pickup, with which I can easily keep her in pots, as well as miscellaneous yard furniture, shelves, garden tools, and other goodies.

 I must admit that she is somewhat embarrassed that we will be seen by the neighbors as we go through their trash, but I am proud to be helping the ecosphere and our budget, as we acquire objects of high quality that are no longer appreciated by their former owners. 

 

Horn of Too Much Plenty?

Today I went shopping.  One of my land line phones had had a sick battery for some time and finally gave up, so I decided to go to a large local electronic supply outlet and get one rather than buy one over the web and wait for it to be shipped.   I had gone there often, and was pretty  sure they would stock the battery, and while I was there I realized I could pick up  a couple or USB hubs, since both my wife and I were out of slots, and another external drive.

 BUT, the resulting trip took much, much longer than I had planned , because (1) as many stores tend to do, they had re-arranged their stock, and (2) I was simply overwhelmed by choices, and had the common store experience of not being able to find anyone who knew much, if anything, about the options I had.

 As to batteries, there were yards of them displayed in a section labeled something like “Battery World”, and many, many customers standing in front of it agreeing that there should not be so many of them.  While old-line battery equipment makers seem to do fine with the traditional letter sizes (AAA, D, etc) and numbers (6 volt, 9 volt), makers of digital equipment have gone wild in configurations, sizes, voltages, and connectors.  Standardization time? 

 After looking through the whole mess, and squinting at the fine print, I could not find a match, so I ran down an actual employee, and taking my dead one he disappeared, (telling me the usual “give me a second”).  After 5 minutes he came back with a big smile, and told me that since it was a telephone battery, it was undoubtedly in the telephone section.

 So I set forth for the telephone section, and initially discovered that the batteries were not in the aisle entitled “Batteries”. I found them after looking through the section, but couldn’t find any numbers  that matched the old battery.  The first employee I hunted down could not solve my problem.  The second one did. 

 Then off to find the hubs and the drive.  After I found the locations in the store (they had moved), I encountered an overwhelming number of each, at a variety of prices, each boasting of their superiority on the box.  I once again found the rare employees, and asked them  questions such as “what is the difference between them”?  and “why shouldn’t I just buy the cheapest one"?  Once again, no satisfactory response, and in defense of the employees, probably because there was no way that the relatively few of them could understand the details of the overwhelming number of products in the store.

 Incidentally, on the same trip, I found the same result in the drugstore in which I was looking for more products.  It was a big store, but not a “big box” store.  The staff seemed to consist of a woman at the cash register and a pharmacist in the back, with long lines at each location. I was looking for eye-drops, and the choice was over whelming,  Looking at the ingredients, there seemed to be much more similarity between them than the packages suggested, but once again, no help available. Remember “floor walkers”?  No more.

 I enjoy owning high quality products, and some are better than others, but it is  becoming increasingly difficult to discriminate between products in these days of  overwhelming marketing, packaging that does not let you get your hands on things,  and decreasing numbers of informed store employees and trustable web sites that could help. I sometimes think that many times there is less easily available usable information in the "information age", than there was before.

The Ecosphere and Products

I am happily reading away at my Christmas books, and two of them are very readable and are concerned with the environment, and the technology and products that harm it. More details are in the recommended books section of this blog.

 One is Elizabeth Kolbert’s book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, and focuses on the species extinctions now underway due to human activities.  As you perhaps know, there is presently a movement to declare the end of the Holocene (wholly recent) epoch, which began some 11,700 years ago at the end of the last ice age, and declare that we are in a new epoch (the leading proposed name seems to be the Anthropocene), due to the fact that we humans are causing changes that will clearly show up in the fossil records of the future. One of most disturbing signs that will be visible is the damage we are causing to other living species.  Five major extinctions of species have occurred in the past due to catastrophic events in the Earth’s environment.  Now we seem to be entering a sixth, but guess what, this one seems to be caused by one of the species — us.  And the extinction not only is decreasing the wonderful variety of life, but is bound to cause us problems, since we have evolved in the context of it.

 The author of the other one, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, is Naomi Klein.  She is a Canadian woman who describes herself as an activist, a socialist, and a feminist.  Her first book, No Logo, was a blast at large, international, companies that acquire such a strong brand through marketing that they can sell people products they don’t really need.  The second, The Shock Doctrine, attacked unregulated capitalism, the Chicago School of Economics, and the tendency of the U.S. to support people attempting to enforce pure capitalism through political power or force (Pinochet).  Her latest argues for fighting climate change as an activity to not only preserve our cultures, but to help us create more humane and supportive societies. 

 Kolbert is a staff writer at New Yorker magazine, and Klein is an award winning journalist, and a syndicated columnist, and I can’t help  but think that such backgrounds are good training for the production of readable prose.  Neither of these books is a shallow rant. Kolbert’s book has over 30 pages of notes at the end, and Klein’s almost 60, (in small print, yet).  I have two more reasons for liking Klein.  The first is that a few years ago she was rated 11^th in a major poll run to choose the world’s top 100 intellectuals—and she never finished college.  The second is that her books are a breath of fresh air to me, since I have spent most of my life living in Silicon Valley, and teaching at Stanford —both becoming more and more fond of unbridled capitalism, which certainly has resulted in wealth, but to me a certain loss in the quality of life in the area.

 Kolbert’s book is a story of what is occurring.  Klein’s is a call to arms.  She obviously has little faith in either business or government willingness or ability to do anything about climate change  in the rapidly shrinking time between now and when we fail to meet the present goals  She believes that the force to do something about it must come through active protests of large numbers of people who oppose the lack of action on this issue in order to achieve the widespread awareness of the problems that will be caused by atmospheric change, and to accomplish the radical changes necessary to re-balance our lives with the resources we have.  And I think she makes good arguments for some of the benefits of such changes.

 Climate change can be ameliorated by a life style that minimizes the pollutants that drive it. My worry is that among the many things that we have not evolved to do well, is solving problems with long time scales (hundreds of years) and great complexity.  We have a tendency to ignore slowly developing bad news, especially if the bad effects will occur after our deaths, and to try for simple answers in situations where there are none that will please every one (health care).  So we try to ignore, deny, or side step the problems.  As an example, we now we hear more and more about geo-engineering.  Dumping more pollutants into the atmosphere to decrease solar radiation to the planetary surface?  Give me a break!

 I recommend the books.  They probably won’t change your basic beliefs concerning things such as the amount of effort we should put into trying to minimize climate change, but they are full of interesting information and should cause more thinking on the topic.  And if you think we should focus more clearly on the problem, you will like them a lot.

 

 

 

    

Good Product —Metropolitan Opera Hi-Def Simulcasts.

Marian and I discovered these productions a couple of  years ago, and I, to my amazement, have become a serious opera fan.  I have always liked certain music from operas, but live opera included such things as long drives to San Francisco, difficulty in finding a parking place, expensive tickets, cramped seats, and inability to see very well (the closer seats were more than expensive).  A theater in Palo Alto a few blocks from my house presents the simulcasts, and throws in free parking 100 feet or so from the door, extraordinarily comfortable seats with lots of leg room and usually empty seats on each side of you, $25 tickets, excellent coffee and ice cream as well as popcorn, and a very large screen and outstanding sound.

 And a presentation that puts you in the action both on and off stage.  I am still trying to understand how they do it.  Although the performances are broadcast live, the camera work is of movie quality, and the views of everything from singers to orchestra members, to scenery, to back-stage activities are seamless, shot from all angles and distances, seemingly perfectly integrated, and needless to say, up close.

 Before these simulcasts, I had not appreciated such things  as the acting skills of the performers (relatively cheap seats), or the effort spent to stage an opera.  The last one Marian and I saw was Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, which entranced us for 6 hours (it is not easy to entrance the two of us for that long),  plus two long breaks in which we could watch the 100 person stage crews do such things as erect a full-sized section of old-time Nurnberg and scenery for the final act, which begins as a discussion in the interior of a house and ends with a huge pageant in the town park.  And sandwiched in between were the usual interviews with performers, which shows them to be regular people with excellent senses of  humor.

 One of the all-time great interviews in the Simulcasts we have seen was of a formerly little known tenor named Jay Hunter Morris, who grew up in Paris, Texas, and worked  his way from church choir to back-up roles in less known opera houses.  The performance was Siegfried of Wagner’s Ring cycle,  one of the most difficult roles in the opera.  Siegfried sings almost constantly through the several hour-long opera. Only a few tenors in the world are thought capable of performing this role at the top level, and eight days before the first performance the tenor scheduled for this production realized he could not do the performance.  In came Jay Morris, who not only performed it brilliantly, and loved the part, but when interviewed proved to be a more than lovable small-town boy-makes-good. I shall never forget him lying on a couch trying to recover for the next act, and excitedly saying things such as  “I am so tired, but this is so fun”, and “who’d believe someone from Paris, Texas could wind up singing at the Met?”. He had definitely been discovered.  Needless to say, he is now world famous and the receipient of many honors.

 I am usually a believer that live performances are superior to media ones (obvious exception of movies). But I am well aware that attendees at Stanford’s new football stadium are often watching the big TV screens hanging in the middle of the field rather than the live players, and such heresy even occurs at Giants baseball games.  And I certainly realize that the Met Simulcasts have made me lose my interest in attending the live opera in San Francisco, or in New York for that matter. And I am very happy to see technology remain quietly in the backround, which I think should be the case, and yet deliver a product with the value of these Simulcasts.

Quality, Economics, and Jeff Marrick

A book I recently read—Jeff Madrick’s book entitled Seven Bad Ideas, subtitled “How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World” (see suggested readings)—  along with the excellent Ken Burns TV series on the Roosevelts,  have gotten me again thinking about economic theory and its effect on products.  Mainstream economists disagree, of course, but there is wide acceptance of theories that conclude that economics alone can result in good societies.  One is Adam Smith’s theory of the Invisible Hand – that buyers and sellers will converge on the ideal price for a good or service with no input from outside agencies such as governments.  Another is Says Law, which states that supply creates its own demand and has been around for two hundred years, even though major economists, such as Keynes, have put major effort into demonstrating that it does not work in modern society.

 A more contemporary figure that was extremely influential, and who subscribed heavily to pure capitalism with minimum intervention from government, was Milton Friedman, who Madrick vilifies repeatedly in his book.  He also emphasizes the many positive effects of government funding (massive support of research and development) as does the Roosevelt series vis-à-vis such programs as the Works  Progress Administration (WPA), which produced major infrastructure works as well as supporting artists, environmental work, and other socially valuable projects and products that would not have happened if dependent on pure capitalism itself. 

 From my position at Stanford University in Silicon Valley, it seems as though a great number of students and people are captivated with entrepreneurship and start-up companies.  That is good, but most of the start up companies I hear about and see are focused on making money for the founders and investors, and may or may not add a great deal to society.  The sale of WhatsApp, a then small software company, to Face Book for $19 billion certainly had economic ramifications, but what does it add to the quality of life in the U.S.?  On the other hand, many highways and other roads in California seem to be falling apart, and I meet few people who talk about starting a company to repair roads.  Neither does pure capitalism seem to care much about preserving the environment, global warming, or aid for the poor. 

 Faith in the market and such things as supply and demand curves simplify thinking about money and perhaps national economies, but modern economies are not simple.  Madrick points out that perhaps different cultures and countries in various stages of development may need devices that bias the market—tariffs, local incentives, and other such things  that are anathema to those who believe in the “free” market .  And products may be economically successful, but perhaps not important.  I was reading this weekend about two apps that tell the owner how often she/he use their smart phones each day. Economically successful, and  perhaps an aid to breaking overly time-consuming habits, but ????????

 

Nerds and Geeks?

There was an interesting article in the Sunday New York Times entitled We’re All Nerds Now.  It is here. The words nerd and geek have indeed changed in meaning since I was a student at Caltech many years ago.   At that time they were  insult words, implying social ineptness, often based on deep interest in topics that were not considered “in” (usually math, science, and technology), sometimes to the partial exclusion of those that were (pursuit of sex, alcohol, cigarettes, fast cars, athletics, and what was considered “cool” in mannerisms and dress of young people at the time),   The article is celebrating the fact that nerds and geeks now have a certain social cachet, and we are all better off for being more involved with technology. 

 Nerd and Geek definitely have a more positive connotation than they once did.  But I think the author, Noam Cohen, is a bit naïve in thinking that we are all nerd/geeks, simply because many of us surround ourselves with and heavily use digital equipment.  We have always  used complicated products of technology and science, ranging from automobiles and airplanes to telephones and medicine, but that does not mean most of us understand them in depth, or could design and manufacture them, nor does it mean that we are considered to be on the fringes of society.  And we have not  considered ourselves to be nerds or geeks.

 Nerds/geeks at one time had a deep understanding of their favorite technologies or other fields of interest, sometimes deeper than others wanted to hear about, and sometimes to the exclusion of highly developed social graces.  The typical nerd at Caltech in my day was someone  with an overwhelming interest in science, mathematics,  and/or engineering and who was comfortable with the theory and jargon involved, fascinated with them and their application, and fond of discussing them with others of similar interest.  The breed that typified this to me were the amateur (ham) radio people, who not only loved radio communication and related topics, but also were comfortable with the jargon and theory involved, had a clear understanding of how the equipment and systems worked, and in fact often built their own equipment.  And admittedly, if one did not care about grid bias, could occasionally be a drag.

 The self labeled techie nerds and geeks of popular culture typically love digital equipment and the internet, but do not have a deep knowledge of how they work, and certainly could not build them.  Spending time at an Apple store or on social networking, do not lead to much technical sophistication.  I consider such people fans of the digital world, and perhaps skilled users, but not necessarily nerds or geeks.  In fact, many of the people I know whose left hand is usually grasping a smart phone are members of a very large and growing society, feeling good about being connected to a very large number of people, and getting points in their society for their activities. They even sometimes tend to look down upon people who do not have smart phones and pads and whose lives to not hinge on apps.  But if they run into trouble with the technology, rather than better understanding it, they tend to turn to  their friends and family,  customer service pages on the internet, or if they are in an organization, their favorite IT person.  And many of them do not seem to seek out the classic badges of the true technology nerd — mathematics and sophisticated theory.

 When I entered Caltech as a student, we were taken up to a camp in the mountains to become acquainted with the other members of our class and with the philosophy of the school.  Among other things, we were told that we would be considered a nerd/geek, simply because of our affiliation with the school.  We were also given simple rules to follow, such as never wear your slide rule on your belt, never wear shirt pocket pencil protectors, and never talk mathematics at a party.  Since I attended a rather non intellectual high school, I was able to add several to those that served me well socially. (such as talking about cars and not telling people at U.C.L.A parties that I was a Caltech student).

 Fortunately, times have changed.  I was an early champion of not only the advantages of, but in fact the necessity of more widespread knowledge of technology and science  (and of course math beyond calculation) in our society.  I still am.  For those reasons  I am glad to see the acceptance of the terms nerd and geek.  But as long as people are seen as nerds and geeks, we have a ways to go.  Bill Gates and friends have helped by making a lot of money and doing a lot of good.  But we are a long ways from most of my friends wanting me to explain why e, (the base of the Naperian logarithmic system), raised to the power of i (the square root of minus one) times pi (which you have all met) should be equal to minus one—which at one time fascinated we Caltech students.  Even my wife finds me less attractive if I start doing such things around the house. She loves digital equipment, especially if it is white and made by Apple, and as a check of my theory, I gave her a piece of paper with the sentence above beginning with “but”, and she admitted she could hardly bear reading it and had no interest in understanding it. But I must admit that I gain in perceived attractiveness if I fix her broken car or digital equipment, which I can do though not a nerd/geek in the social sense, but probably in the technical one —win some, lose some. 

The Hand, Happiness, and Quality

I am late again on this post, because I was again off of the internet, in this case in Oregon mixing with people who have hobbies that engage the hand as well as the mind.  My non-rigorous study once again concluded that people that have hobbies that require manual skills as well as thinking are happier than those who do not, especially as they age, and understand quality in all of its dimensions.

 In particular, Bill Boller (mentioned in a previous post) and I attended the Oregon Steam Up last weekend (link here), a festival of old machinery, as well as visited a couple of individuals who love to acquire, restore, and preserve old machinery.   I will devote this post to a few photos, to give you a feeling to what some of them do.  I had been to this event before, but this time was so inspired that I am finally going to focus on my Making Fixing, and Tinkering book.  In fact, I will focus more on the interaction between hands, brains, and products in this blog for a while.

 You have seen examples of model steam trains in the post referred to above, but the photo at the  left shows a few beautiful models from the show .  The  photo on the right shows a project that is nearly completed by one of Bill's friends, George Lavacor, an ex Oregon highway patrolman, who lives in the area.  It is a full sized locomotive, being restored essentially by George himself with the help of his friends.  Granted that it has so far taken him 30 years, but he has other activities, such as a family and fire trucks.  And it is a large (in many ways) project. The next photo shows a group of happy people eating lunch by their steam engine.  The last  photos show a few of the objects acquired and restored by Alan Schurman, who lives in Ridgefield, Washington, and is the proprietor of a large machine shop that makes saw mills, and of Tired Iron Ranch (referring to his home).  A link to it is here.

If you don't have a hobby requiring using your hands, you are missing a bet— for instance  throwing pots, wood or metal working, spiffing up  old tools you like, restoring a cast off version of your first car, repairing a ragged tapestry, or otherwise making something old beautiful, do it now.  If you get hooked on the process, you may become less grumpy as you age, as well as less frustrated right now. 

 

 

 

Standardization vs. innovation

In the recent past, I have had a couple more experiences with one downside of innovation—the decrease of standardization among products.  The first was yet another talk that I gave despite failures in my slides, due to first a recalcitrant projector, secondly an uncooperative sound system, and finally, a stuck computer (although I realize this was not due  to lack of standardization).  Both were cured, and I was stimulated to throw in a few words about reliability, predictability, and standardization.  For much of my career, graphics were delivered in talks by means of overhead and Carousel projectors. This equipment was bulky, and also had its own faults (the more mature of you will remember the thrills of a stack of slippery transparencies escaping their bounds, or of slides spewing out of a carousel tray when the retainer ring came loose.)  But such accidents were much rarer than computer—projector screw ups.  Part of the problem is that often one does not bring their own and familiar computer (one does not always want to haul a computer, even a super portable one, on a long and complicated trip in India).  Certainly the hardware and software will improve, but  it will also change, thus preventing the broad knowledge base that accompanied the long use of overhead and Carousel projectors. 

 The second just occurred because we switched our home TV service to Google, which we are able to do because the Stanford Campus has been a beta site, first for Google fiber and now the TV.  We are delighted with the service, both in terms of programming, and the outstanding people that seem to install to it and take care of us.  I was also delighted with the set top boxes, because they offered an HDMI connection, a component TV, connection, a standard and optical audio connection, and a USB connection. 

 My problem, like that of many people, is that although I realize the superiority of HDMI connections, I have a large supply of old, and high quality components that do not have consistent connections.  In fact it seems that  my house, basement, and shop are overflowing with old but operable equipment of mine as well as cast-offs from four kids who have gone on to better (?) things.  I would love to have HDML connections on everything I own, so I could just plug them together, but guess what—the AV in the Adams house is terrific, I am not going  to replace all of my old equipment, and I don’t want to spend money on a bucket of converters.  So I have just spent more time than I wanted to juggling HDMI, component, optical, composite, and coaxial wires, occasionally realizing I have run a signal through a TV and lost surround sound, etc.  Actually, I don’t completely mind not having everything on HDMI plugs, because if I did, something better would come along, and I would be worse off.

 Of course, if change doesn’t happen, a price is paid.  A good example is the refusal of the U.S. to switch to the metric system.  The only other two countries in the world not on the metric system are Myanmar and Liberia.  The cost to us is huge.  Products built for export must be built to the metric system, and products imported usually are.  Since I work on cars for fun and saving money, I have to have a complete set of metric and U.S. wrenches, drills, taps, and measuring tools and have access to machine tools that can cut the proper threads, etc. And I have to keep two types of fasteners in stock. And, of course, there is the inconvenience of travelling outside the U.S. and having to constantly convert to the metric system. There was a series of books produced by the U.S. Department of Commerce in 1968 based on a large study of the cost of not committing to the metric system entitled A Metric America, Its Time Has Come.  It was compelling reading, and the government tried to get us to do so, but we ignored them.  Actually, the metric system has been increasingly used in the U.S. for many years.  In particular science is base on it.  But despite several attempts, we do not seem to be willing to accept what is now the world standard, and by our actions we end up needing to follow both it and our rather hilarious system, built on things such as the length of some dead European king’s end thumb joint and foot length. And even if we were officially on the metric system, I would be annoyed by the number of different “standardized” types of screws, nuts and bolts  (see Wikipedia).

 But too much change also incurs a price.  Going back to digital slide projectors.  The standard plug to connect to a computer is the VGA plug.  It ia a rather large plug, but easy to use.  But there are no standard plugs on the computer side.  I use Apple products, and they have changed the projector outlet at least three times, going to ever smaller and more difficult to use plugs.  Undoubtedly there will be a continuing flurry of this as digital devices continue to shrink, become wearable, and attempt to retain product individuality.  I notice that occasionally, when I do take it traveling overseas, my portable computer requires an equivalent weight of adapters (to electric outlets as well as projectors), chargers, extension, USB, and Ethernet cords, mice (when I become annoyed at the track pad), and other doo-dads to ensure it will function when and where needed.  I am sure that I would do better if I were more sophisticated with digital hardware and software, but I DON’T WANT TO BECAME MORE SOPHISTICATED!  I am already ahead of the average bear.  How about more standardization, innovators?

 

 

 

 

 

The Hand and Product Quality

 I am going to give a talk to the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto this coming week extolling the virtues of working with the hands, an activity which has been an important part of my life, even though I have earned my income as an engineer and a professor.  But manual work has brought me the pleasure and quick positive feedback that has enabled me to sail happily through the ups and downs of my mental work. And thinking about my upcoming talk is causing me to become even more impressed with hands.

 The other night my wife and I attended a Beethoven recital by Richard Goode, one of the top pianists of the world. I played the piano quite a bit in my youth, beginning with lessons in a small town and by the time I was in high school playing in the region.  I played quite a bit until I was in my 30’s, but more and more for social groups, and finally at one point quit, because I realized I had good hands, but was neither a musician nor willing to devote the time and effort required to become really good.  Goode is really good.  He is a wonderful musician, and has the kind of hands one can develop by constant practice over many years (he is 70).  Since I have not kept up my piano chops, I was amazed at his manual dexterity, and could not help but wonder what would have happened had I had better teaching and kept at it.

 Today I was leafing through one of my favorite books, The Hand, by Frank R. Wilson,(see recommended book list), a neurologist and long time medical director of the Peter F. Ostwald Health Program for Performing Artists at the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco.  It is a well documented book full of thought provoking information and data about the human hand.  But as a life-long specialist in hands, Wilson does not simply mention that we are lucky to have opposable thumbs.  He goes into  detail about the evolution of the thumb, the arm, the shoulder, and the brain as a unit and a very important one.  As he points out, the opposable thumbs are only one part of the system, and would not be that significant if it were not for the grasping, positioning, and subtle feelings and motions we are able to do.  And he dwells on the sophistication and complexity of the hand (the thumb alone is controlled by 9 muscles entering from the forearm and the rest of the hand) and we seem to control it in its many tasks without even thinking about it.  Spend a bit of time watching yours and other people’s hands (and arms), and you should be impressed.  In one of the chapters in Wilson’s book, he compares the tasks the professional piano player’s hand must do with those of a professional rock climber.  Diversity of function indeed.

 I worry that use of the hand and related parts of the body is losing its centrality in the lives of many people.  Wilson makes the point that the brain and the hand developed together—a duo.   It seems to me that many people who seem to be neglecting one of the duo and making their living with their minds, are perhaps losing something by not building the manual skills that would bring them pride and pleasure.   I also worry  that hands are being neglected in education.  I started out in life by growing up on a farm and being taught a large number of manual skills, planning to be either a carpenter or a tool and die maker until I decided to become an engineer (I still worked in shops in the summer while in college). 

 Hopefully I don’t have to argue that hands-on experience in the basic processes necessary to design and build products gives one a better base to judge what is possible, what is not possible, what is good, and what is bad.  Painting custom antique and custom cars by hand gives one  valuable insights to programming a robot to do so, and working on the factory floor equips one to better supervise others that are doing so.  When I graduated from college, I was offered a job at Warner Swasey, then the premier machine-tool builder in the U .S.  I was quite flattered, because they had never offered a job to a Caltech graduate, and the fact that I had graduated #1 in engineering was not the reason.  They wanted me because I had worked summers in a shop.  And even then, I would have begun my career with two more  years working in their shop.  They wanted to make the best machines they could, and were not interested in engineers that had not served their time as machinists.  The U. S. is not doing such things as much any more, and perhaps as a result, the quality of our products has slipped relative to countries who offer more hands-on experience to their new employees.  In many (most?) cases. beginning at the bottom of an organizational chart results in unique proficiency at the top.  Why people working with their hands are often at the bottom of an organizational chart (except for the fortunate few like surgeons and piano players) is a topic for another post.    

 I have spent many hours in my life doing such things as restoring old machines, maintaining cars and houses,  and making and fixing electro mechanical devices and other things.  I think that without this experience, I would be much less competent at either engineering or teaching.  In fact, I have long had the pleasure of being involved in a growing activity at Stanford called the Product Realization Laboratory, led by Professor David Beach, in which students  design, develop, and manufacture products.  I am happy to say that now people are catching onto the value of such a program.  Once engineering schools gave their students hands-on problems.  Then they went through a long period of becoming increasingly theoretical.  Now hands-on work is coming back.  Good for individuals and for the economy—and for product quality.

 

 

 

Thomas Piketty and Economics

 I am in Hawaii to help a friend with a plumbing project.  As usual, when I faced a flight longer than an hour or two, I decided to take a book I wanted to read.  Since I heard so much about it, I chose Thomas Piketty’s book Capital In The Twenty-First Century.  I found it to be a great read.  It is a serious and long book, so I certainly did not finish it on the flight over.  But I became so hooked on it, that I continued to read it rather than help my friend with his plumbing.  But now both are done, and I will explain why I became so interested in it.

 First of all, Piketty is one of those wonders — an academic who can write very readable prose that includes a large amount of data, theory, and information without using jargon and analytical tools specific to his/her discipline.  This is particularly a failing among many academic economists, who seem to want to turn a topic that contains human behavior and emotion into an exact science.  Fortunately this dream is breaking down, and Piketty seems to me to have an excellent grasp of both the theories and human behavior.  In fact he makes the point that economics is a social science, not a physical one, and therefore must account for our foibles.

 The book is amazingly well timed, since it focuses upon the aggregation of capital over time and the resulting inequality.  It is based on a large amount of data on many nations spread over a large span of time.  His charts often begin with the year 1700 and go into the future (based on projections of population growth, and other pertinent trends taken from other fields).  He shows that over long time periods, capital growth tends to be larger than growth in population and wages.  Also that this capital tends to become focused among fewer and people (top 1% owning  over 30% in U.S. at present) until we reach the point that awareness and disapproval result  He does not waste time portraying the difficulties with this situation, but his data and comments do highlight the revolutionary behavior that has occurred when this inequality became too high (French revolution,  rise of communism/socialism, political break-up of wealth, etc.).

 To me, the book also shows the short-term mentality of we Homo Sapiens.  The amount of capital in the world was rising sharply until World War I.  This war followed by the great depression, followed by World War II, dramatically reduced the world’s wealth, and in particular the peaks in Capital.  The period between World War II and the present has been one of re-growth, and is resulting in peaks of capital again.  Piketty says this is normal economic behavior until interrupted.  But he points out that we became used to the unusual growth in wages and productivity in the latter half of the twentieth century, and count on ever increasing rapid growth in wages and opportunity.  Perhaps that may be the case for a while in countries playing “catch-up” (China, India, African countries), but maybe not everywhere. As a good economist, he does point out the necessity of growth.  But as a non-economist and a resident of the San Francisco  peninsula, I have always thought counting on eternal high growth is a bit risky.  Strange things happen as one approaches infinity.

 The comments about the Piketty book in and out of the media are interesting.  He is a young and attractive guy (French, yet), and was featured recently in the Sunday New York Times on the front page of the Style section—perhaps a first for academic economists.   And of course the reactions to his book tend to be biased by  people’s beliefs.  I have always thought that when problems become difficult, people retreat to faith and defend their faith viciously.  Economics is a good example.  In the U.S. it is much more comfortable to believe in capitalism, even though history suggests that pure capitalism does not take care of everyone. But many in the U.S. seem to be becoming less enchanted with it.  Piketty seems to be neither economically far left nor far right.  As he points out in the book, he is young enough to have missed the extreme feelings of the 1950’s and 60’s.   He is therefore getting quite a bit of attack from protectors ofpure capitalism such as Forbes magazine. To his credit, he takes some good swings back, in particular at their handing of individual wealth.  He is probably being attacked from the left as well, although apparently his book is being taken as the textbook for the Occupy Wallstreet crowd. 

 I found the book incredibly thought provoking (perhaps because of my ignorance of economics), even though I did have to occasionally look back in order to try to keep all of the material in my head.  I think it deserves the wide-spread reading and discussion it is apparently receiving.  More details in the recommended reading list at the left.

 

Chile and Engineering Education

 A few months ago I accepted an invitation to serve on an international advisory board for a new program entitled Chile New Engineering 2030.  This has turned out to be more work than I expected, but a most educational and rewarding experience.  The purpose of the program is to encourage Chilean engineering schools to pay more attention to what Chile is calling the “third mission” in these schools (the first teaching, the second research).  This includes, technology transfer, innovation, entrepreneurship, and encouraging the schools to better match Chilean economic needs.  Also  taking  advantage of the new entrepreneurship network resulting from Start Up Chile, as well as new approaches to teaching and learning.

 The rest of the world should take note.  During the 1940’s and 50’s, engineering schools moved rapidly from the more pragmatic material of the 1930”s to much greater use of mathematics and science.  In the U.S. this was partly due to the remarkable advances of technology during World War II, and partly due to the Cold War, which pitted the U. S. against the Soviet Union in such areas as nuclear explosives, missiles, navigation and detection schemes, and space exploration and exploitation.  There were break-through developments in solid state electronics and then sophisticated electronic computers that added to the increased emphasis on the application of science and theoretical research,  and increased funding to universities from government and business to help this along.

 And it was convenient for engineering professors, since science and mathematics have a great deal of panache in academia, and engineers were able to take over much work that had previously been called applied science and applied mathematics.  Since that time, research and graduate study in engineering has become ever more fond of theory, to the point where some work that has high intellectual cachet, may not show any application for a very long time —if ever.

 Chilean universities, like those in many countries, have been following the directions of leading universities in countries such as the U.S., England, and Germany,.  and rapidly increasing factors such as the percentage of faculty members with Ph,D. degrees, the number of Ph.D. degrees awarded per year, the number of papers published in refereed academic journals, and their position in global rankings. But do they really need M.I.T.’s and Caltechs?

 The goal of this phase of Chile New Engineering 2030 was to choose two or three engineering schools who would be funded to increase their efforts in this “third mission” and serve as models for other schools.  A total of some U.S.$50,000,000 was to be awarded, so the competition was fierce. Those of us on the advisory board, members of CORFO (the government agency responsible for the program), and a number of independent evaluators had read the proposals submitted.  The week of March 3 was spent  in Santiago listening to oral presentations of each proposal, asking questions of the presenters, and discussing the results.  Those of us on the board were asked to choose the proposals that we thought best, but since we were an advisory board, I do not yet know the final result.  But one conclusion that I reached yet again while reviewing the proposals, is that the U..S., may be a bit complacent in our pride of our engineering schools.  We may be following a model that has been successful in the past, but not guaranteed to be as effective as products, customers, economies, and overseas competition continue to change in the future.

 The other members of the advisory board are Dado Banatao. a member of the U.C. Berkeley Chancellor’s Executive Advisory Council, and Managing Partner of Tallwood Venture Capital, Teck Seng Low, CEO of the National Research Foundation of Singapore, Alvaro Fischer, Chairman of the board of Fundacion Chile, Norman Fortenberry, Executive Director, American society for Engineering Education, and Johan Malmqvist, Dean of Education, Chalmers University of Technology, and co-founder of the International CDIO Initiative.  A good group.  We are to meet once a  year in Santiago to review the progress of the chosen schools, and I look forward to working with them again.

 Oh, and the reason for my internet silence since March 3^rd,  is that I was more than busy the first week, and Marian and I followed it with some fine outback time in Chile and Peru, visiting friends and mountains.  And as you no doubt know, everyone should take vacations from the internet.

 

 

 

Stanford Good Products, Bad Products course, ME314, 2014

Winter quarter is almost done, but it does not seem like winter here in California, because the sun continues to shine, and the farmers (including my older son) continue to become depressed.  Perhaps it will never rain again and we will return to desert, where we began before building our immense snow-dependent water system.

 The course good Products Bad Products is also almost done.  The Course outline for this year is here.  But since I discussed the course in previous posts, I won’t go into detail again. If you go to the Categories section on the left of the blog below the Recommended books section, and click on "ME 314 Stanford course 2013, you will get some of it. But the web-site for the students “choose a good product and a bad one” assignments is no longer accessible from outside Stanford. Ashish Goel, who was one of the highly competent Teaching Assistants last year, and was in charge of all things having to do with the internet, was kind enough to put it back on an publicly accessible web site.  The URL is here. If you would like to look at some of the student choices and short discussions, open the URL and have a good time.  If you click on the title of the entries, photographs will appear as well as the complete short description by the student choosing the the products as an example of good or bad.                                      

 The course ends with amazingly well designed media-rich presentations of good products and bad ones based on each of the chapter areas of my books. Stanford students are good at media, and Dave Beach pushes it in the course, as you can see from the outline.

I wrote the book because the issue of product quality is extremely complex, subject to personal tastes and judgements, and in general difficult to define in a sound byte.  But by spending effort judging products and arguing about them, it is possible to become much more sophisticated when dealing with the topic. Try it.

 

Engineering, Math, Science, and Education

When I attended Caltech in the 1950’s, I worked summers at a large job shop in Riverside, California named Hunter Engineering.  It was started by a man named Joe Hunter and did everything from  machining custom parts, to welding, to manufacturing large lots of  components, to designing and building complete custom machines.  It had a small engineering staff, consisting of very talented people who had typically worked  in the shop and did not have engineering degrees from four  year colleges.  The first summer I worked in the shop, and then since I was going to college and studying engineering, I was moved  to the engineering function and earned my keep sitting at a drafting board and designing  various things. It was great fun.

 In  the 1930’s the company had developed a process of continuously painting material, and during the years I worked there, the company designed and built a continuous casting machine, rolling line and  heat treatment furnace, to go with the continuous painting process so that the stock began as aluminum ingots and ended as rolls of completed blind material.  The company had joined Douglas Engineering in the 1940’s and eventually became Hunter Douglas and is now among other things the largest producer of venetian blinds in the world, employing some 17,000 people.  When I worked there, it probably employed about 200. More details are here.

 I had a  problem, however, correlating the work I did at Hunter with the courses I was taking at Caltech.  By then Caltech was renowned for the scientific and mathematical research its faculty performed, and my courses were heavily slanted in that direction.  But the engineers at Hunter seemed to rely on rudimentary calculations, handbooks, finding information and methods of solving problems when they needed, and their experience. At Caltech we were not supposed to even read handbooks, but I found mine (bought for my summer work) valuable as a quick insight into what we were learning in detail.  Needless to say I kept them well hidden.

 Since those years, “leading—meaning ranked toward the top in polls” engineering schools seem to have leaned even more toward research, Ph.D. production, and visibility obtained through publication and awards (the Nobel prize is a good thing to have).  This year, the very popular Product Design program at Stanford, which trades some science and math for more project-oriented courses, is trying to hire a tenure line professor or two.  It seems to have accepted that the applicants should have Ph.D. degrees and are active in scholarly research.  In my career with Shell Oil, the U.S. Air Force, General Motors, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and teaching and consulting at Stanford, the best working project engineers and designers usually did not have Ph.D. degrees and definitely did not do academic research.  In fact they in general did not even read refereed scholarly journals.  I tried to  hide my Ph.D. degree at J.P.L. so that I could be involved in designing and building space craft rather than being a specialist, and the technology we used was not cutting edge—the game with robotic planetary-and-beyond spacecraft is reliability and long lifetime.  That is usually obtained through experience, seeking simplicity, and lots of testing.

 But science and mathematics have great appeal to the media.  When I worked at J.P.L., the media never tired of talking about the brilliant young scientists who  built these marvels.  They were not built by scientists, but rather by engineers, who tended to come from schools like Iowa State and others who were less festooned with Nobel prize winners and National Merit Scholars than Caltech.  In fact when I was there, although Caltech manages J.P.L., there were relatively few Caltech graduates working there.  And mathematics and science fit well into the intellectual life of universities and attract money.

 I am presently on the advisory committee of a project called Engineering 2030 Chile— an attempt to upgrade Chilean engineering schools through a competition that will shower funding on the winning schools.  The large universities will probably propose producing more Ph.D. students and hiring more internationally renowned scholars.  Is that what Chile needs?  They would like to diversify their industrial base  and have recently completed a very successful program named Start Up Chile to build a network of entrepreneurs.  Entrepreneurs in high technology need to be bright and well educated in the basic concepts of science and mathematics.  But they also need to be driven and able to deal with money and understand such things as marketing,  Ph.D’s ?  It seems that Chile would benefit from more bright, motivated, creative, and up-to-date engineers in many fields, even if they are not top level mathematicians and scientists. 

 Science and mathematics are essential tools for engineers, and their basic nature and principles must be understood.  But top mathematicians and scientists generally have specialist roles in industry, if they are there at all,  rather than being involved in the non-rigorous and often pragmatic work involved in large projects.

 I once became so annoyed by the tendency of humans to lump everyone using equations and scientific knowledge together that I wrote a whole book trying to explain what engineering is.  The title is Flying Buttresses, Entropy, and O-Rings (Harvard Press).  It is listed in the recommended book list on the left side of this blog.  As I said in the introduction, If you disagree with my views, please write a better one.  A bit more clarity is needed on what engineers are and what they do.

 

Stanford Good Products Bad Product Course, ME314, 2014

Sorry to be a day late on this post, but the winter quarter begins today at Stanford, and with it the winter course "Good Products Bad Products" which uses my book of the same title (pictured in the banner of this blog, published by McGraw Hill). I was hoping to send you some specific information on the course, but the first meeting is tomorrow, so of course the material is not ready todoy.  If you look in the category list (left side of this blog under recommended books) and click on "ME314 Stanford Course 2013"  You will find some posts I wrote during the quarter last year that give you some details on the course (begin at the bottom).  This year's course will be similar, but speakers and assignments will change—and, of course, the students.

I began this course many years ago to fill a void that I believed existed in  engineering and business education and practise.  During the priod 1970 to 1990 there was a great amount of attention paid to what was then called manufacturing quality.  This was due to products and industries of previously dominant countries being overtaken by those of a few countries who were focussing on doing things better  (Japan for instance) in areas such as reliability, quality of fits and finishes, general approach to manufacturing and management of same, and  cleverness at such things as minimizing rejects and inventory control.The resulting reaction resulted in improvements in everythinig from quality of the products to corporate profit.

The topics considered were measurable and progress could be directly charted and rewarded.  But there are many aspects of product quality that are not measurable, and very important in the overall quality of the product.  The course and my book focus on these.

When I became an Emeritus Professor (retired), the course was taken over by Professor David Beach, the developer and director of the Product Realization Laboratory, an extremely successful program in the engineering school that focuses on integrated design and manufacturing.  The course continues to improve.  I wrote the book a couple of years ago to provide a text, and David has redesigned the course to include more outside speakers, a greater emphasis  emphasis on the quality of student presentations, and more pertinent assignments.  I will include the course outline and more details in my next  post, but as a measure of the course quality and reputation, over 200 students wanted into the course, which unfortunately is limited by room size, the ability to get to know the students individually, and promoting  meaningful presentations and discussions, to 60 students. In addition some 30 people who are working on graduate degrees, but also working in industry, take the course by means of the internet (it is an internet course, but definitely not a MOOC course).

If you have been reading my posts,  you know that I care deeply about these issues, and I will continue to write about them and report on them in the context of the course as we go through the quarter. I am presently searching for people who have similar concerns about the overall product quality of industrially produced products.   If you are one, contact me at [email protected]  If you know other people who are, tell them about this blog and give them the message to contact me.

Higher product quality wins for everyone, and no matter how high the quality of a product, it could be even higher if we paid more attention to it, especially certain aspects of quality that are difficult to quantify . 

 

 

Two Views of the Internet

 As I told you in my post of November 3^rd, I was planning to order a number of the books reviewed that day in the New York Times that were concerned with the internet.  I have been reading through them, and the first two (listed under recommended books) held remarkably different views.  The first, Smarter Than You Think, was by Clive Thompson, a writer who has appeared in such publications as the New York Times, Wired, Fast Company, and Mother Jones.  He is a proponent of the internet, and I share many of his views.  As I have said before, I consider the internet a work in progress, with already great value, but great potential to improve —for instance in quality control (bad words for many internet folk) and increasingly smart, and perhaps specialized search engines. In particular, social networking, I believe, is in its infancy and it is difficult to guess what directions it will ultimately take.  I worry most about the effect of continually monetizing the internet.  I can’t help but think of the direction television, in particularly network television, has taken in order to squeeze more money from advertising.

 The New York Times Review of Thompson’s book is here, and portrays it well.   It is an honest report on the web and its potential starting with its service as improved memory for the individual, and ending with its function in connecting society.  It was easy to read and left me feeling good about the internet and the future. 

 The second book, Entitled Status Update – Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age, is by Alice Marwick, who after a research job at Microsoft, joined Fordham University as an assistant professor in communication and media studies.  The book reflects her experience working in and her research on the San Francisco computer scene during the post-bubble times of Web 2.0.  I loved the book for many reasons, even though as the review (here) said, she definitely verges into social-science-speak from time to time.  But as a professor, I have learned to enjoy academic dialects.  In particular the author loves to use the term neoliberal to describe the young entrepreneurs in her book, which she describes as “persons having a philosophy advocating deregulated free-market economic policies as a means to freedom and prosperity”.  I won’t quibble, except many of the people she interviewed seemed totally self-centered, which I didn’t think liberals were supposed to be.  And neo-cons believe in the free market. But not as much, I guess, in free expression, and more in spending time and effort converting others to their beliefs.

 I loved the book because I am a technical person living in Silicon Valley, working in a University whose new buildings seem to be named for entrepreneurs who have made a pile of money (Hewlett, Packard, Gates, Allen, Yang, etc.} and are filled with eager potential entrepreneurs.  I have a 50 yard line seat to watch the unfolding of the digital world.  Also because I have long been fascinated by social movements in San Francisco that promise a new, revolutionary, and more enlightened life (beatnik, hippie, now this).  Even though they do not result in radical change in everyone’s life style, they provoke thought and action, and always result in beneficial changes in viewpoint.

 In my view,  many of the younger digital advocates described by Ms. Marwick are a bit too much in their pursuit of becoming a brand and changing the world, especially those who she calls micro-celebrities. But they will help move our increasingly huge population to better itself whether they succeed or not, and the more of that we have, the better.

  Finally I enjoyed Ms. Marwick’s heroic effort to separate her scholarship from her personal feelings.  To the extent she failed, the book became more fun to read. I think I will send her a fan e-mail.

 

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering Math) In Education

In the Opinion section of the Dec. 8 New York Times there are two pleas for more emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) in education.  The first one, by their editorial board, is here.  The second, a column by Thomas Friedman is here.  You have probably run across similar pleas recently, because they are very much in the media.  Such pleas have occurred before—for instance after the successful Soviet launch of Sputnik—and probably are now occurring because of a combination of the importance of these topics in the economy and the availability of good jobs in such areas.

Most suggestions on how to remedy this situation focus on teachers and schools.  It isn’t that easy.  Granted that curricula and material should be updated and teachers be given more opportunity to stay current in these fields, but teachers are also carrying a huge load of socializing students, dealing with parents, and carrying out various administrative tasks—all for relatively low pay and lack of recognition.

Parents who do not work in these areas must try to contribute more by staying at least current enough to discuss them with their kids and help them with their homework.  These topics are relatively difficult to master, and often a good bit of encouragement is needed.  After the launch of Sputnik, an updated approach to handling math in the schools (New Math) was tried, but failed, and I was convinced at the time that part of the reason was that parents were not comfortable with the concepts.

People working in these fields, and the companies and laboratories they work for must become more involved in education.  This is difficult, because not everyone is a good teacher, and people who are good in their fields are busy at their jobs.  But if the U.S. is going to have more STEM people, industry and laboratories will have to play a part for motivational reasons as well educational.  Classes in school do not, and probably never will, give a good insight into the life of people in these activities. 

Unfortunately, STEM areas have changed very rapidly in recent history, due to things like digital electronics and computers, discoveries in areas such as genetics, space science and nanotechnology, and the rise of competence in them in many countries (China, Japan, South Korea, India, Etc.)  I was an undergraduate at Caltech, earned a Ph.D. from Stanford, have been involved in engineering in both industry and academia my entire career, and I can barely keep up.  As science and technology change, they become more complex, more esoteric, and less consistent with our intuition. I studied the theory of relativity as an undergraduate, but wasn’t sure I believed it.  A few years later we were putting corrections into orbits for planetary spacecraft to account for it.  Now we have string theory. As another example, think how much the discovery of the structure of DNA/RNA and the development of medical scanning have affected us in relatively few years.

As another problem, and one which has been around for all of my life, we need to do something about the negative attitudes that many people have about these areas. When I entered Caltech we were given a series of lectures about how to minimize our “Geek” reputation, which came with being a student at an engineering/science school.  This included advice such as “never talk math or science at a party”, and “drink and play a lot of sports”.  I later spent some time in art school at U.C.L.A. and didn’t seem to need suggestions on how to be cool.  Despite all of the money Bill Gates has made, the breakthroughs Microsoft has brought us, and the incredible good he is doing with his foundation, many people still are sure he is a nerd.

And we have to drop the “two culture” habit —dividing the population into what Stanford students used to call the “techies” and the “fuzzies”.  I’ve spent many years attacking it, and it is very deep in the U.S.  I suspect it is a legacy from the British.  It was the topic of C.P. Snow’s now famous 1959 Rede lecture, which is here.  After all, accredited engineering programs in U.S. universities require at least one full year of courses in the humanities and social sciences.  Why aren’t majors in these fields required to take at least one full year of engineering and natural sciences?  And why can’t I talk about math, science, and engineering at parties?