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.

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.

Too Much Too Fast?

Yesterday I went to buy some groceries at a nearby Safeway Store. I first went through the usual heavy traffic to get there. After spending a great deal of time trying to find what I wanted, due to massive enlargement of the store, acceptance of “if you make customers wander around they will buy something not on their list” marketing, and lack of employees in the store proper, I went to the check stand and stood in slowly moving lines. These seemed to be due to many factors — the checkers trying to respond to the “no” answers to their asking if the customers had found everything they were looking for, the massive use of coupons and various “award” gimmicks, the lack of free bags and baggers, and confusion over swiping one’s card and shoving it into the newly purchased (and therefore subtly different —capable of either swiping or shoving and incorporating strange unexplained symbols) credit card device and leaving it until it said you can take it. I found the entire exercise frustrating, partly because I had only a few articles and the “under 15” aisle that was open was clogged with people having many more than their allotted number. And I was not looking forward to entering the traffic again to take my meager purchases home.

While standing in my line, I could not help but remember how simple it had been to shop at this store 30 or 40 years ago. Granted there was not such a staggering choice of products available. So what has happened? True, the population of the area has soared, and Silicon valley continues to offer jobs and wealth. But also, the seemingly small change in credit cards and associated devices to the EMV format which was bothering a few people in the grocery line is symptomatic of larger problems. This change is not confined to the stores in your town, but is a world-wide bank-sponsored attempt to decrease fraud. It will take some time to put into place. But when that has happened everyone will be faced with yet another set of devices which will no longer permit swiping, but will undoubtedly be able to handle other tasks having to do with the ongoing attempts to replace currency. And so it will go. And as is more and more true of many should-be-simple-to-operate devices which are involved in our lives, there will probably be little effort paid to standardization among different manufacturers of these devices . And this is true of many more complex products — home appliances, computers and peripherals including  software, automobiles, you name it. These things are tools to improve the quality of our lives, and we should not have to spend too much of these lives learning to deal with changes in the tools that are often trivial in the long term.

I am, after all, a veteran promoter of technological progress, creativity, innovation, change and such things. They are the essential to our success. But I am also very aware that if there is too much of such things too fast, the burden on the users becomes unacceptable.

I have had it with constant attempts to make me “upgrade” the digital products in my life. I was content with iPhoto on my Mac. It did everything I wanted it to. I could effortlessly get to other editing program, and it allowed me to organize things as much as I  desired. But mainly I had used it long enough not to have to think about it. I almost dropped Apple when they changed to Photos, because there were minor changes that took effort to learn, and for me, the change was  a negative one, not only in having to learn new tricks, but in the content of the software itself. But I admit my judgement may have been clouded, because at the same time I had to go to a newer operating system and my computer had to be encoded, causing it to be much slower (Stanford’s fault, not Apple). Apple continues to be making great profit by changing and attempting to find a universal operating system for all of its products, but although I held still for Photos, I am resisting the increasing pressure from them to again “upgrade” my smart phone, and if they keep trying to make me put stuff on my computer I neither need nor want, even though I have used Apple equipment from the start, I am out of there.

On a larger note, I think that technologically advanced nations like the U.S., and the businesses within them, should start to worry about the pace of change. Certainly computers have resulted in a large number of well-paying jobs, since people like me, who have used them for many years, are now dependent on IT people, who desperately try to keep up on them on a full-time basis. But the disappearing, well paid and rewarding “muscle memory” skill jobs will not come back. Repetitive white-collar jobs are following. The re-training of people to do more cerebral and people-skill jobs will be horrendous, and may require a couple of generations, by which time the game will probably have changed again. Perhaps the wide spread support of people like Trump, although seemingly a most unattractive person in all respects, is because he seems to be offering a simpler solution to the problems of life—let him call the shots and everything will be terrific. This has been the weapon of most dictators and revolutionaries over time, as has the promise to bring back the past (which was never as good as we think it was). But in the long term it has been shown not to work.

I, for one, am both amused and worried about the present estimates by technology visionaries, such as the one that the U.S. will be highly dependent on driverless vehicles in ten years. Maybe the people that work at Tesla and Google are eager to get there, and the cars are already being used for shuttles around their buildings. But the visionaries tend to forget that there are 320 million people living in the country, many of them dependent on people-driven cars (truckers) , and may of them simply liking to drive cars (me). And historically massive changes in large populations due to technological advances have taken more on the order of 50 years. Fifty years ago, I had been working on the first lunar and planetary spacecraft at the Jet Propulsion Lab. The visionaries were predicting colonies on the Moon and Mars in 20 or 30 years. Hasn’t seemed to happen yet. Autonomous vehicles can be made, and are running around on streets in various places in small numbers. But designing and building the vehicles may be the easy part. And pushing the schedule too fast may result in incredible angst. After all, our present traffic mess has required well over 100 years to accomplish.

The Mechanical Governor—A Very Good Product In its Day

Mechanical governors have been used with most engines since they were first developed until electronic devices took over the task relatively recently . Governors based on rotation were used to control the distance between wind-driven millstones in the 17^th Century. Later, with the advent of factories, regulated rotary motion was needed In the late 18^th century, and, James Watt invented what he called a conical pendulum, which operated on a principal similar to governors  to follow—balls attached to a rotating rod which was driven by the speed of the machine. As the speed increased, the balls tended to fly out (origin of the term “balls out”) which would cause levers to decrease the amount of steam entering the machine. A rough drawing is below.

Governors were primarily to guarantee a controlled output. You do not want the power in your machine (car, tractor, train, etc) to fluctuate with the fuel flow. You want to select the desired speed and make sure that the machine speed stays constant. They are sometimes thought to be speed limiters, and, in a way, they do stop excess speed, but they are much different than speed limiters contained in modern vehicles and other machines where limiting the top speed is required. Oddly enough, humans with political charge of states are called governors, and in a sense they are, in that they are supposed to smooth out the behavior of the state, but mechanical governors were not meant to cause radical change, as some human governors want to do. That was to be left to the humans in control of the machine—perhaps the analogue is the voters in the state.

I recently restored a Pickering Governor, shown in the photo to the right. Thomas Pickering was both the inventor and the name of the business he began in Portland, Connecticut, that was based on this governor. It was used widely on rotating steam machines in the U.S. for many years, and it still in use. It was a dominant fixture on steam locomotives, factory machines, and all manner of other steam-powered devices. And in fact, before electronics came along, devices operating on the same principal were installed in automobiles, trucks, tractors, and other machines powered by hydrocarbons.

As you can see from the photograph, the Pickering Governor has three balls mounted on spring segments, the bottom end of each being fastened to a collar that rotates but can not move up the central shaft, and the other end fastened to one that can move. As the speed of this unit (which is driven by a belt from the machine) increases, the balls tend to move out, which pulls the top collar down. This movement is somewhat resisted by the coil spring shown in the photo. The upper collar pushes on a rod that runs the length of the shaft, and moves a sliding gate in the piping ,which controls the amount of steam entering the machine. More speed results in less steam, and less results in more. Voila, constant motion, with speed controllable by compression in the coil spring. A drawing  is below, if you want more detail. But in spite of the complexity of the drawing, the operation of the governor is extremely simple—few moving parts, no tricky mechanisms, an elegant, reliable, and affordable product, which served our species well over many years, and could be understood and maintained by people with a minimum of training—A very good product indeed.

Why did I restore this governor? As you know by now, I love to restore old machines, especially if they were good products. In fact, I can hardly stand seeing such elegant and historical machines die on scrap heaps.

What am I going to do with it? Easy. I am going to put it on my desk beside my computer. It not only will represent a good contrast in modern and old technology, but will remind me that several large projects I have under way (writing books, etc) will proceed better if I work on them a bit every day. I tend to work on them in bursts, ending when I can’t stand to do so any more, and then ignore them, during which time I lose track of what I have done and where I am going, which in turn requires that I spend time reviewing what I have done and trying to recall hot ideas I had which I can’t quite remember. I need a better internal governor, and maybe this beautiful historic old external one will remind me. Also it is a more interesting object to look at than my computer (when the computer is simply showing me my desktop) and will not require constant upgrading and deleting of unwanted messages and advertisements.

Technology and Sports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Potential Good News for Lots of People

Most people, especially males, suffer loss of hearing as they age. This is a much larger problem than our society admits. Helen Keller, a woman who lost her hearing and sight at the age of two, and became well known for her ability to overcome these handicaps, claimed that given a choice between one or the other, she would prefer to be blind. A famous quote from her was “Blindness separates people from things: deafness separates people from people”. I have known outstanding teachers who retired because they felt separated from their students, and business people who felt separated from their clients.   I am fortunate in having so far retained my hearing ability , but at my age I am surrounded by people having mild to serious problems engaging in everything from meetings to casual social conversation.

As the two New York Times articles here, and here indicate, this is a widespread problem that will become more severe as populations age. Hearing aids have improved markedly over time, but only a fraction of the people who could benefit from them own one, for reasons ranging from cost to “looking old”. They also can be uncomfortable to wear and have short battery lives. Cost is probably primary, since the top of the line instruments can cost thousands of dollars, partly because of the archaic process needed to obtain one in countries such as the U.S.

In this day and age of technological wonders, especially the shrinkage in cost and size of electronic devices, this should definitely not be the case. But from these articles it looks as though there is hope. If some of the research and development money and talent going into the design of apps, trivial changes in operating systems, “smart watches”, and such things as autonomous cars could be spent on making better, cheaper hearing aids, a very large number of people could remain happily much more engaged in a full life.

The odd thing about this situation is that it seems that hearing aids could be rather easily matched to potential customers by use of tests administered by a computer coupled with a bit of fitting to the geometry of the potential customer’s ears. To throw a medical procedure into the mix without the coverage of insurance seems absurd. But from my own experience being involved in a start-up based on a potentially cheap serum-based test for allergies, I am not naïve about the difficulty of changing tradition. But in this case we are talking about large numbers of people who could be benefited by some of innovation both in the design and the distribution of hearing aids. I read an article about Facebook’s pressure on computer companies to either reduce the cost of the equipment needed to do social networking by a factor of ten, or to make it operate ten times as fast. How about reducing the cost of obtaining a hearing aid by a factor of ten and ensuring that they all have re-chargeable batteries?

Thinking About Science, Technology, and Society

I had the privilege of chairing the Stanford University program in Science, Technology, and Society (S.T.S) for five years in the 1980’s. I was talked into this by the then president and provost of the university, so had some clout, and was able to push a couple of degree programs through the academic senate, raise some money, hire some people, and think much more deeply about the subject matter than I had before. If you are not familiar with such programs, as the name indicates the subject matter is the interaction of these three broad areas, and there are on the order of 100 such programs existing in universities throughout the world (see this link).

I found that there is resistance to such thinking and such programs at many levels and for many reasons. At Stanford, for instance, there are many majors in both the A.B. and B.S. tracks in the S.T.S. program (begun in 1970 by four professors, two in engineering, one in philosophy, and one in religion), but the program is underfunded and understaffed. There are presently 38 faculty members listed as participants, but their appointments (and salaries and often their hearts) are in other departments, And S.T.S. work is highly interdisciplinary, and although interdisciplinary work is in vogue these days in universities, such things as hiring, promotion, and tenure tend to be judged based on traditional disciplines. As a non-Stanford example of the effect of this, in the 1980’s Jerome Wiesner, a man of outstanding accomplishments in government as well as academe, was president of M.I.T., and attempted to establish a whole S.T.S school. An excellent idea. But the faculty turned against this, I think partly because it threatened traditional disciplines.  And to some people, thinking broadly, and especially negatively,  about the nature and usage of science and technology is almost sacrilegious.

In countries such as the U.S. the directions of technology, and even science, are heavily influenced by such things as financial profit and war. Granted, there is tremendous satisfaction in working in the areas, and the results make for exciting media and discussion, but the fit between new science and technology and the quality of human life does not get adequate discussion. If you look at the discussion of S.T.S programs on Wikipedia here (not the best in the world) you can see some of the problems that we should think about more, but do not. One example is the old “tragedy of the commons”, which has to do with the loss in supply and quality of necessary resources if they are free. The original example was free grazing on the town commons. Present examples include using the environment including the atmosphere as a dump, the supply of fresh water, and the internet. Another set or problems comes from what is sometimes called technological determinism. Examples abound, such as the oft-heard comment that “technology must be fed”. Always?

We western cultures are loath to thoughtfully criticize technological developments. Do we really want a sky full of drones delivering packages? Do we really want driverless cars? Certainly we are learning a lot in our attempt to control them, but cars? It seems that traffic problems are due to the large and clumsy nature of individually over powered luxury packages as well as drivers. How about the present activities in the U.S, Russia, and China to develop smaller and faster nuclear weapons? Many years ago nuclear artillery shells were being developed, but people realized that it would not be a good idea to scale nuclear weapons down so they seemed more usable. Is it now a better idea?  We are thinking a bit about CRISPR/Cas9 DNA technology (put it into your browser), but we will undoubtedly forge ahead. Are we smart enough to improve ourselves through DNA technology?

I was motivated to write this blob by an article in the April 16-22^nd edition of The Economist, concerning the decision of Yuri Milner, ((a Russian physicist and investor who intends to spend $100 million on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)), to spend another $100 million on a Laser propelled star ship. I am not criticizing Mr. Milner, since it is his money and he can spend it how he wants and his projects are literally “out there” definitely technologically advanced, and make for good media, but wow! His proposed star ship will tentatively be powered by 10 million 10 kilowatt lasers on earth combined into one 100 gigawatt beam, and reach the planets around other stars in decades rather than hundreds of thousands of years. The catch is that the spacecraft must weigh on the order of one gram. Possible? Read all about it here. But what do you think of it as an expenditure of resources? I wonder whether the wealthy are coming down with Elon Musk envy? But Musk is an idealist and in my opinion getting us to expect zero emission vehicles and re-usable rockets is of more benefit than one gram spacecraft.

I worked on the first lunar and planetary spacecraft at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the later 1950’s and 60’s, and an early and influential SETI study supervised by Barney Oliver, a pioneer in the effort, was funded by a NASA contract I had in the 1960’s, so I am familiar with the origin of such efforts. And as I said, I believe that the wealthy should spend their money how they choose, but when it comes to government money, shouldn’t we have a bit more discussion? Certainly those involved in such things as SETI have discussed the downsides and upsides of detecting extraterrestrial intelligence, but shouldn’t there be more discussion by the public? We will probably send people to Mars, but it has been proven to be an awful place and will cost a lot of money, even though it will be a real adventure for those few who go, as well as a vicarious one for the rest of us. But is that the best way to spend the money, when there are so many useful things that could be accomplished here on earth?

I am certainly not against science and technology, and in fact lead a wonderful and exciting life by being part of them, but I see their purpose as improving the human condition, and what we are capable of doing is not always something that we should do. My years in the S.T.S program changed my life, and perhaps made me less valuable as a contributor to science and technology, but I have definitely come to think that in many situations we should think more before we leap, and perhaps even more while we are leaping.

Product Quality and Serviceability

I have several small machines (chain saw, hedge shears, blower, weed whacker) powered by gas engines that no longer work.  For  some time I have intended to go through them and heal their problems, but I keep postponing this, so I made a vow a few days ago that yesterday (a Sunday), I would work on them. But I didn’t. Instead I spent the day happily working on a non-working old tractor I own. It is a late 1920’s Cletrac that has not been run for many years, during which it was rained on enough to develop the nicest uniform coat of rust I have ever seen, and through lack of use was terminally gummed up.    

The small machines, after I repair them, will be immediately useful in the garden. The tractor will not be—in fact it does not even fit in the yard. The small machines will help my wife in her gardening, and will make her happy, even though she hates the sound of small gas engines (as do I – we won’t be pleased when the air is filled with drones). The tractor will not help her. What is with me?

Partly it has to do with when, where, and how I grew up. My parents and great grandparents went through the Great Depression scraping out a living on a small orange orchard plus outside jobs in Southern California, which at the time was occupied by many people doing the same thing. Because of this, no one considered themselves poor, and in fact in terms of satisfaction in life they weren’t, but people made what they could, bought the minimum of what they couldn’t, and repaired everything to the point where many of their possessions they built and maintained are still being employed by my brother, my children and I, including a house they built of materials such as siding from no longer used freight cars and shingles made from old orange boxes (nice house in great shape still lived in by my brother). The reigning ethic was never to throw anything away (hours spent straightening bent nails and bailing wire) and repair anything that broke. I can still hear the voice of my grandmother, sounding like the wrath of God, saying “If you can’t take care of it, you don’t deserve it!

I grew up in the middle of this, and somehow came to love making and fixing things and generally tinkering with them. Probably why I became an engineer and was attracted to hobbies that involve such activities. But I have not been able to escape wondering why these activities seem to appeal to some people (me), and not to others (my wife), and why some of them are more fun for me  than others . For instance, in the case of the tractor vs. the yard machines I can think of several reasons . First of all, to me it is more of an accomplishment to rescue something that is rusted together and hasn’t worked for years, than simply diagnose and repair something fairly new. Secondly, I find older objects, with their history, different ways of accomplishing their function (and often with great aesthetic appeal overall and in their parts), sometimes more interesting than contemporary ones. And strangely enough, the task is often easier.

Why easier? Farmers were the main purchasers of tractors and other such products and they had spare time to maintain them when the weather didn’t allow them to work directly on their crops. They demanded serviceability. As mentioned they often didn’t have enough cash to hire other people to maintain their products. They often liked to work on machinery. And in those days tractors were designed to be assembled in the factory more by hand, rather than by machines, so they were designed to be worked on by humans. Finally, they were less sophisticated technically (no digital circuitry) and manufacturing technology  did not allow the complexity that one finds in such things as modern multi-functional injection molded plastic parts

As a result, the Cletrac is relatively simple to take apart (few fastener types and not that many of them), understand, diagnose, and put back together. A couple of photos might help make the message, even though they are a bit confusing. The first one on the left shows shows my tractor minus its sheet metal parts and a large casting that covers the clutch, gear train, brakes, etc. Stripping it down to that level, despite the rust, took little time and was straightforward. Note the resulting easy access to the various components, compared to access of similar parts in an automobile. The photo on the right below is a close up of the components of the drive train —the differential, the transmission, and the brakes— at the same stage. If you are not familiar with such things, they are beautifully explained on the internet. But take my word for the fact that in old tractors like the Cletrac they are easy to reach and identify, and only a few standard tools are needed for further disassembly and repair, And as you may be able to see, one can work on these things without cranes, special tools, grease pits, or lying on the ground under the machine. Granted the parts are dirty and one becomes so also, but the dirt is easily removable (except perhaps under the fingernails, but dirty fingernails show that one is doing useful work).

The blower could be called more sophisticated, but although cleaner, and with smaller lighter parts, taking it apart and diagnosing what is wrong with it, finding the necessary parts, and putting it back together will be much less fun. Even the meager instructions are less intuitive. One dead giveaway to complexity and strange  fasteners is the phrase “Service on the blower must be performed by qualified repair personnel only”. Another is “Using a Torx screwdriver to….” I would bet that most people buying this sort of product do not own a set of Torx screwdrivers.

It is easy to tell the difference in what is often called serviceability with respect to the tractor and the blower by looking at the manuals that came with each. The blower manual mainly consists of instructions on how to operate it (should be obvious by looking at a good product), warnings about safety, various notices obviously for the purpose of avoiding lawsuits, a full page of exemptions from the warranty, and notices such as “if these solutions do not solve the problem, contact your authorized service dealer”. I happen to have copies of the Instruction Manual and Parts Manual that came with the tractor, and they represent the opposite end of the spectrum. The Instruction Manual spends a bit of time on the tractor operation, but then goes into the details of each sub-assembly of the tractor, how to assemble and disassemble it, and how to maintain it including beautiful drawings. The Parts Manual offers drawings of each part in various exploded views along with part numbers. Neither has warnings about safety, pleas to contact the dealer if anything goes wrong, or statements of how wonderful the product is.  And certainly not instructions to rely on “qualified repair personnel only”. The photo below shows two pages from the Cletrac Instruction Manual as an example. They show a portion of the undercarriage of the tractor and accompany a detailed discussion of how to test the assembly, take it apart, replace parts of necessary, and put it back together.

As I said in a previous post, serviceability is one of the central components of product quality. I am afraid we have lost a great deal of that as products have become more complex and difficult to understand. Or possibly we are considered (are becoming) less capable of taking care of our products. Or lost interest in doing so —throw it away and get a new one (as in "Oh goody, now I can get  a 6S plus with 64 gigs "). Or looking at it more positively, perhaps we would rather outsource the service function to specialists, thus creating more jobs for skilled workers. Maybe I should un-retire and fix things for money for other people instead of working on my own stuff. But then  my grandmother’s voice would be even louder. 

And I will fix the blower tomorrow.

Are Computers Turning Us Into Slaves?

Are Computers Turning Us Into Slaves?

In 1996, Clifford Stoll, already a long-time computer user, wrote a book entitled Silicon Snake Oil, which was critical of the internet. I loved it and recommended it to all of my friends. It was a breath of fresh air in an atmosphere which was polluted with the breathing of people sure that computers and the internet would solve all problems and generally lead to nirvana. Many of the latter are still around.

One observation I remember from the book, was that in the early days of the computer, he claimed he spent half of his computer time simply trying to get his equipment to do what he wanted it to do, which was reasonable, but in 1996 it seemed like he was still doing this, and it hardly seemed reasonable at all.

Now it is ten years later. It has been raining for the last two days in California, and although I probably should have gone outside and played in the rain, it being miraculous in our drought ridden state, I decided to stay inside and work on my computer, happily typing on books, getting my photographs out of Apple’s new and disastrous Photos software, doing small things such as this post, and so on. I did none of that. Instead I worked on our relatively simple home computer system, which consists merely of two computers, two printers, and related equipment.

At the beginning, my wife was having problems with scanning material to Word, and downloading Christmas photos from her camera, and my printer was doing an awful job printing pictures – streaky and too dark. The streaky was clearly from a printer needing cleaning. But the too-dark seemed like maybe something more profound. The result was a struggle with color balance, where was it being controlled, etc, and the usual downloading of new software. Still too dark. So I ran it through the cleaning sequence three times. No difference. At that point I had already spent far more time than the printer was worth, so I went and bought a new printer, and you know how much time that takes, especially since it is sales season, people are still returning Christmas gifts, and the traffic is a nightmare in this area anyway. And of course, there was then the time spent learning to use all of its features, most of which I didn't need.

After selfishly solving my own problems first, I attacked those of my wife, and made a slight bit of progress. Like most people we work with lots of peripherals and are hampered by finite desk space and large screened maschines with not enough USB ports (which are in the back of the machine, and therefore sweep everything on the desk to the floor when the computer is rotated to reach the damn things). She was powering one USB hub off of another one, and since the light on her card reader was not going on, maybe not enough power to download the photos? So I did the usual shuffling of USB cords, including trying to trace them through the snarl that accompanies most computers, hoping that some combination would let everything work, but no luck. I then re-entered the post holiday traffic and got a new and better brand of hub, but still no luck. I finally tried her card on my computer and it also didn’t load – woops, something wrong with the card. It turns out she bought it overseas, so I set that one aside for later.

On to the scanning. Somewhere in the recent “upgrading” we have been doing due to changes in operating systems (required on mine by the encryption now demanded by Stanford servers and hers demanded by peripherals and consistency with mine), and resulting obsolescence of applications, she couldn’t find her favorite method of simply scanning to RTF and then saving the document as a Word document. We worked on that for a while before succeeding, also trying to translate the marketing language concerning available new optical character recognition software that maybe we should download (impossible to learn such things over the phone, all advertised as the best on the internet, and I wasn’t about to go driving again). But by then, my two days were over.

So, Mr. Stoll, in those two days days, I  far exceeded spending half of my time trying to get my “system” to do what I want it to. I  spent ALL OF IT. And was not done! And to make matters worse, quite a bit of my time was spent accommodating to having to “upgrade” software which, I didn’t want to do, because it will require me to modify useful habits I have acquired over time, and the changes will not improve my life—so far, quite the contrary. In my present mood, typewriters were pretty cool.

Following day note: My wife’s computer had lost its connection to the internet the day before in all the excitement. We initially thought it was because we had pulled something loose in the afore mentioned swarm of wiring which not only interconnects our computers, printers, and so on, but also allows us to participate in a beta test of Google Fiber and TV, all controllable from a pad and working through many black boxes. My credentials would seem to indicate that I should be better than average at screwing around with this kind of stuff, since I have been an engineer for 60 years, have used computers since they became available, and I guess was once a “rocket scientist”, since I worked on spacecraft at J.P.L.  If true, I have great sympathy for those who are only average and are in the same boat as I seem to be in.

Turned out it was a faulty power strip, now replaced and all systems are go, except that one of the external back-up drives seems to be balking.  I will now post this thing, call for help from a friend, Tim Keely, the world’s best IT person, who will know what is up with the external drive (no clue from its manual on the web), get back to the imported photo card, and then begin my periodic unsnarling of wires that seem to love to intertwine beneath desks and tables and behind sofas, bookcases, heavy chests of drawers, and other heavy objects. My world is not yet wireless.

And aren't computers supposed to serve us, rather than the opposite?

A Great Book About Everything

 Every once in a while I read a book that really impresses me. Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari (HarperCollins books, more info on recommended books at left), is one of these. Maybe it is because I am working on a book concerning the influence of our evolution on problem solving. Sapiens is a book about us, including  a bit about the evolution of our brains. Maybe it’s because I learned a lot and tend to agree with what he says.

It also impresses me because Harari writes better than I do, is better at referencing sources than I am, and perhaps is smarter and knows more than I do about the history of the human race. But I will only admit this to those of you who read my posts, because I trust you not to tell anyone. And it doesn’t make me feel too bad, because he is a historian (writing and referencing), and probably doesn’t know as much techy stuff as I do. But his photo doesn’t make him look very old…………..

I have read many books about the origins and evolution of homo sapiens, but none that are as fun to read and that cover as broad a span of material. There is a quote on the front of his book from Jared Diamond, who is definitely no slouch in the knowledge and writing departments, and it pretty well summarizes the book. It is “Sapiens tackles the biggest questions of history and of the modern world, and it is written in unforgettably vivid language”.

The book is divided into four sections, The Cognitive Revolution, The Agricultural Revolution, The Unification of Humankind, and The Scientific Revolution. It’s emphasis is more on relatively recent times rather than primitive (more history available after we developed writing). It gives a few insights into where the author thinks it is all going, and although he leaves open the option that we have that ability to destroy ourselves, and may do so, it is generally positive, although he does point out a few mistakes he thinks we may have made. One example I found interesting, was his questioning of the agricultural revolution. He suggests, for example, after talking about life before and after the Neolithic Revolution, that wheat domesticated us instead of the opposite, turning us into slaves to increase it’s population and health at the expense of our free time and relatively crime and worry free lives.

Another interesting section is his ambivalence about money (economics). He is definitely convinced that money was one of the main reasons that we went through a major change in our material world. When we bartered for our help and goods, we were restricted on what we could get by what we had to offer. When money, which could buy almost anything, came into the picture, we not only had more access to what we wanted, but we could now grow in our ability to do this buying through loans and other financial means.

But as he does a good job of pointing out, modern economic systems are entirely based on faith, require growth, and lead to leveraging. He believes that in the long term the world will become one (if nothing else, business pushes this), and our varying faith in money and financial institutions as to the value of money could cause much more serious and wide-spread panics and crashes.

But enough. If you haven’t already, read the book. You’ll enjoy it, learn some things, and be able to argue with your friends about it.

Space and Nostalgia — the Joy of Successful Projects.

When I watched the video of the successful landing, after deploying eleven satellites, of the Space Exploration Systems Corp. Falcon 9 first stage booster the other day, I teared up, which I also did when I watched the successful landing of the Curiosity Mars Rover. Why? Granted they were both incredible technological successes, but for me there was more.

I worked for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena CA part time in 1960 and 1961, and then full time until 1966, when I joined the Stanford faculty. It was a wonderful time to be there, as the U.S. was in the “space race” with the Soviet Union, NASA had taken over the lab from the army (although it is managed by Caltech), the military had built the necessary booster rockets, such things as solid state electronic circuitry and computers were available. Despite the Cold War, it was also a happy time in the U.S., as far as confidence and the economy were concerned, and a comparatively innocent one, since the U.S. was still in its post World War II victory mood (despite the Korean War), and not yet facing the many large problems at home and in the world that bombard us from all directions.

In 1960, when I arrived, the Lab employed about 2000 extremely competent people and built its products internally, as it had learned to do while developing rockets for the army. It was then working on the Ranger spacecraft to the moon, which was to accomplish a number of missions having to do with learning more about getting there, and its nature. I joined the people in the Lab who were thinking about exploring the planets and other bodies much further from Earth. In those days, many unprecedented problems needed to be solved, and the Ranger project, in which the first six missions failed for various reasons, was the big learning experience, which resulted in much technology and understanding used in following missions. The first launch was in August of 1961, the first successful one in July of 1964 (the photographs of the approach to impact that flooded every TV screen in the country), and the final one in November of 1964. Although I was primarily involved with the first Venus and Mars flyby spacecraft (Mariner 2 and 4 were highly successful, 1 and 3 failed, so we were better, but still learning), The various technical groups had continual contact with each other, so we planetary folk were very aware of what the lunar people were doing, and took as much advantage as we could of what they had learned and designed and built.

I worked on various temperature control and structural problems for the Venus shot but was on the preliminary design team through design, fabrication, and mission control for the Mariner Mars — probably the high spot of my time working on aerospace projects. At the time I was at JPL, the work was not only technically extremely challenging, but a bit romantic, since traveling in space has always had a certain cachet, and we did not yet know that the other moons and planets were as barren as they turned out to be. People still believed in canals on Mars, and at least some form of life. Also, through the Ranger failures, we had learned the difficulty of designing very complex and necessarily light weight, and therefore somewhat fragile equipment that could survive the launch environment and was extremely reliable from launch to the end of its mission. I will not try to describe the feeling when these spacecraft, which represented years of hard and challenging work, succeeded in their mission. One reason I cannot capture it, is when one works on a complicated system involving many disciplines, goals, and processes, one becomes increasingly aware of how many things can go wrong. Also, at the time I was at JPL, spacecraft were attracting an amazing amount of attention in the world, and failures were not accepted by those not involved in designing, making, and flying them. The failure of the first six Rangers earned a Congressional Investigation for JPL, which was no fun at all.

So I teared up upon watching the Falcon 9 landing and the people who made it cheering on my TV because it stirred up feelings I had over 50 years ago. I managed R&D groups, was involved in feasibility studies for future projects such as the Voyager series, and did other overall jobs at JPL, but nothing came close to the feelings of being an anonymous part of a larger group successfully completing a difficult project that they considered significant.

Kudos to Elon Musk. He is definitely carrying out his goal of making a difference. My son Dan was an early engineering employee at Tesla and worked there until very recently, at which point he resigned and joined a start up. He had a wonderful run at Tesla, and I imagine quit because he does prefer smaller companies.   He joined Tesla because he is very conscious of the environment, and Tesla’s goal was (and is) to demonstrate the feasibility of electric cars. They certainly have accomplished that goal. Next year a whole series of electric cars will hit the road from other companies.

But Tesla, and now Space X, whose goal was to get the private sector involved in space travel?   Is Musk for real? Perhaps he is a more highly developed life form. He speaks often of wanting to build a city on Mars, die on Mars, etc. Perhaps he simply wants to go home. But I hope he stays here. We need more like him.

Oh, by the way, if you have not seen the video of the Falcon 9 flight, it is here

And Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Politicians,Their Fantasies, and Change

I wrote a post on October 28^th concerning resistance to change, and I briefly described my Homo Demi Sapiens book effort in my last one, but the best recent show of Homo Demi Sapiens has been the Republican presidential candidate debates, which recently concluded . I understand that politicians try to say things that will cause people to vote for them, and that they usually drift toward the middle after elected (Reagan ended up raising taxes). And also that they infer that they have detailed plans (seldom published) as to how to fix everything that is wrong quickly and cheaply, But give me a break. Change is not easy nor does it happen rapidly in a society, and individual politicians are not that much smarter than each other, although some of them certainly think they are.

In the last debate, they were discussing national security—keeping people safe. The recent “extremist muslim terrorist” shootings in San Bernardino California received a lot of attention. They were tragic, and therefore newsworthy, but not off of the chart. I went to high school in San Bernardino, and even then it was far from a crime-free city. There were 46 murders in San Bernardino in 2013 with no terrorist involvement at all. At present the San Bernardino overall crime rating is about twice the national average, and as I mentioned in a previous post, is in terrible shape at present due to the closing of Norton Air Force Base, the Santa Fe Railroad Shops, and Kaiser Steel Mill and the disappearance of agriculture. True, the 14 deaths in San Bernardino were outrageous, but we don’t seem to be as outraged by the approximately 30,000 deaths per year in traffic accidents, the approximately 11,000 murders per year from gun violence, or by the 2-1/2 million people who just die each year in the U.S.

Yet this shooting of fourteen people by a Muslim couple was a prime subject of discussion by the candidates, most of whom seemed to have a simple-sounding solution to the terrorism problem. Of course, their solution had much to do with their favorite causes (Trump immigration, Fiorino technology, etc.) And the all agreed that the “bad guys” should be killed (the instigator of the San Bernardino killings was apparently a woman) and that terrorist shootings and bombings should be stopped immediately (A lot of people are trying and it seems to be difficult). Interestingly, there was little if any attention paid to Russia, China, North Korea, or other such nuclear-armed countries that we seem to be worried about.

The problems with terrorism are complex. We seem to want to blame Muslims, but only a tiny percentage of muslims are terrorists, and those that are vary widely. The husband of the couple blamed for the San Bernardino shootings was born in the U.S. To my knowledge, few if any terrorists are from countries such as India, Indonesia, Turkey, and many other countries with large numbers of Muslims. The source seems to be the Middle-East, and we have demonstrated our inabilities there.

Terrorists are not killing themselves and other people because it is fun. They are doing it because it is consistent with their beliefs and the frustrations of their lives. Terrorism seems to be very effective against the U.S. Look at the effects the perpetrators of 9/11 have had on us, not only in casualties and property damage, but in confidence and convenience (think airport). The U.S. became scared, and is still scared, and therefore weaker. Nor do we seem to be able to agree as to whether we need more guns or fewer guns. So some level of terrorism will probably continue as long as it works, or until it seems to go out of style or is no longer news worthy (remember youth gang killings), or until nations shape up their act. People who have fought in and study the mid east believe that we will be there for a long time. And as for keeping them out of the U.S. as long as we succeed in getting our spies into other countries, a few terrorists will probably get into the U.S. (or already be here)

As an aside, although I have never met the man, the campaigning Trump was an overwhelming example of Homo Demi Sapiens. He was again trumpeting about the evils of Mexican immigrants and the need for his wall, but Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Alan Bersin has stated the Canadian border should received more worry than the Mexican border as far as national security is concerned. And as competing candidates timidly pointed out, his fixes for stopping terrorism violate many U.S. ideals.

His suggested wall would be an insult to everyone. Remember “El Chapo” Guzman’s escape from a high security prison via a relatively luxurious tunnel which ended in his prison shower? I have spent a reasonable amount of time on the border (relatives in Somerton Arizona, U.S. Air Force duty in El Centro, California), and it is long and unsettled, and a wall along it would take many years to build, require an immense amount of money and labor, and could be breached either by tunnel, airplane, boat, or explosives. And hopefully the U.S. would not get the reputation of killing Mexican people crossing it, as was the case with the comparatively short Berlin Wall. Historically, walls have not worked well in the long run—even the Great Wall of China. But politically, there is apparently enough fear in the U.S. (cleverly bolstered a bit by Trump) and lack of knowledge about the money and labor necessary to build such a wall, that some people actually seem not only to accept the concept, but be in favor of it.  I am very fond of Mexico and its people, have spent a reasonable amount of time there and going to school and working with Mexicans here, and do not remember any of them being murderers or rapists. But maybe Trump sees building the wall as a potential excellent construction job if he is not elected and can sell the concept.

Maybe some day we will accept an economy and elect a congress that keeps the infrastructure up and supports those who retire, those who are unable to support themselves, and the necessary military,. Maybe we’ll even stop killing and raping each other and be able to provide acceptable food, shelter, and medical care for all. But this is not all going to occur in the four or eight years after the next president is elected. The British are smart, educated, and civilized, and they have been tinkering with their government furnished medical care since 1948 and are still unhappy with it.

I will talk more about change in the future, but let me just say here that even though such things as technology, population size, expectations, and awareness of the finite nature of “natural” resources are changing rapidly, changes in large numbers of people move slowly, and the more disruption of which people are aware (thank the media and presidential candidates), the more they look to the past, which was never as benign as people remember it to be.

It would be nice if these candidate debates were based a bit more on well thought-out and realistic plans rather than opinions and desires for power on the part of the participants. But that doesn’t seem to be how the electoral process works, especially in the days of TV, marketing, and the internet, so bring on the fantasies. They are at least entertaining.

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.

Virtual Reallity —Media Flavor of the Month

I trust you had a happy Thanksgiving.  The University (and I) take a thorough vacation being thankful, so I am being a bit sloppy on posts.  But I am back, for better or worse.

Judging from the media, the world is agog with the thought of virtual reality devices and programs being available at a reasonable cost.  VR, as it is sometimes called, is being heralded as the next best thing, the replacement for television, and so on.  Apparently billions of dollars are being spent on developing the hardware by major players in the digital world and which is imminent on the market.  I am definitely not involved, and my only experience with VR is because a few  weekends ago the Sunday New York Times put together a down-loadable sample of how their material could be presented in VR, and included one of Google’s cardboard box viewers with their paper. 

 At this stage of the game, one cannot expect to receive a technologically mature product for free, but we had had a lot of fun playing with it. and it is indeed mind-boggling to be able to turn your head and watch the world swim by.  The image in the sample was not comparable in quality to that presently available on a TV or computer screen, but probably superior to the first TV image I ever saw, and if the decreasing cost and increasing ability to handle data continue, it will continue to improve.

 But I have had the privilege of observing movies  go to color and sophisticated sound and projection equipment and now three-d, TV going to color and larger screens with ever-increasing resolution and accompanying surround sound, opera doing a wonderful job with "hi-def", and everything from theater through vocal performance to classic orchestras taking advantage of technology.  These improvements have definitely made for a more complete experience, but I am not sure how much they have revolutionized the experience, because people seem to adapt to technological innovation, and take it for granted. 

In my opinion, the main factor in entertainment, is the quality of the message being presented.  Three dimensional films have not obsoleted the “old fashioned” film approach, which does not totally surprise me, because I happen to know a few people who have lost sight in one eye, and do not claim a great loss in their enjoyment of life.  My wife and I seem not to desire a TV screen that covers most of a wall.  Neither do we need woofers that cause discernable changes  in the size of our chest cavities.  In fact, we are often drawn to presentation of first class material presented in a more primitive way (old movies?)

 So my question about VR, which obviously requires more complex and therefore expensive camera and viewing equipment, is what is it best to be used for?  Obviously it will be used for games —it will add to the realism of war games if one has to worry about being shot in the back or bombed from straight over head.  But I recently looked again at the New York Times sample news presentation and found the VR to be somewhat distracting to its purpose.   The New York Times story in the sample concerned  children who had been displaced by war, something with which we should be very concerned,  but the wheat fields behind my head, seemed to fill no great need, especially because I kept checking what was there rather than focusing on the children and their problems.

  Theater often has great power because it focuses on a few characters and a set which adds to the story.  I am not aware of a travelogue movie that has used three d.  In fact, travelogues are usually made more interesting by including interesting characters and some sort of plot, on which the viewer can focus.  Even then, I am not sure that they are superior to high quality still  photos. Advertisements in Grocery stores tend to try to focus our attention, not allow us to see the merchandise behind us.

 So I think the future of virtual reality, other than in games and as a novel way to present information (for a while), depends on the ability to generate programs that can accomplish things that can not be done more cheaply, with simpler equipment, and perhaps more effectively due to less distraction by material not germane to the intention of those producing the material.  Good luck to it, but I plan to focus on real reality for a while.  

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.

Product Quality, Maintenance, Service, and Standardization

In his now classic paper “Competing on the Eight Dimensions of Quality”, Published in 1987 in the Harvard Business Review, David Garvin included serviceability as one of the critical eight.  This service must sometimes be performed by experts (the Boeing airliner), but often can be accomplished by the customer (oil level in a car, a bent prong on an electric plug, maybe replacing plumbing or getting a recalcitrant gas engine or your furnace to run).  People like me prefer servicing everything possible ourselves, for reasons ranging from economic to satisfaction.

 Products become more complex over time, as more features are added and technology becomes more sophisticated, and it seems to me that manufacturers are paying less attention to the owner’s ability to service the product.  The incentive for them to improve serviceability is offset by the profit to be made by being able to convince people to throw away the malfunctioning product and buy a new “upgrade” , and by the money to be made by the professional service people.  A clear example is Apple, whose products are very difficult to maintain, and who obviously don’t mind people taking their ailing equipment to the Apple store, so that Apple “geniuses” can try to sell them new equipment and while they are there, add-ons such as cool cases and new apps.

 But I am personally fed up with what appears to me a strong emphasis on designing for manufacturing (good), but less on owner service.  As a minor specific example, let me say a few words about the proliferation of nuts, bolts, and screws in the world.  We in the U.S. are somewhat guilty, since we insist on refusing to join the metric system, even though all nations except for Myanmar and Liberia have ( I think a wonderful example of U.S. arrogance ), and because of our major dependence  on  and participation in trade, have caused the world to use both systems, even though the metric system is far more straight forward and much easier to use. 

 But beyond that, although sizes and thread dimensions seem to be standardized, people continue to invent new geometries, and granted that many have advantages (especially in manufacturing), the tool requirements on the owner are getting ridiculous.  If you want to get an idea of the diversity in screws, nuts and bolts, run down the several pages of a table that might interest you here.

  The photo shows some of my own “standard” (slotted and Phillips head) screwdrivers.  Granted there is some duplication here, caused by defending against the normal response of borrowing but never getting around to returning screwdrivers, but due to modifications I have made on various ones to fit various odd screws, I use them all.  And of course I have a complete set of “Allen” hex (six sided)  wrenches (metric and U.S.) and a complete set of sockets and screw drivers for Torx screws (invented by the automobile industry but spreading widely).  But still I run into developments that amaze me, like the alternate screws developed by Apple to prevent “tampering” (which includes changing a battery,etc.)  The good news I suppose is that it opened up a new market for tools ( see the Amazon offerings here), and I have already participated by buying a battery kit over the internet, (but not without major resentment).  The bad news is that it is difficult for the average tinkerer to keep up with the tool requirements needed to use the expanding array of fasteners.

 So my plea to the manufacturers of the world is “Pay more attention to the ability of your customers to service your product”, because even the best of commercial service is an convenience and typically slow and expensive.  And my  plea to the rest of us to be more aware of the real cost (including resources and environmental damage) in throwing away a dishwasher because a new control panel plus a visit from a professional costs almost as much as a new one.

And there are many other reasons for making services simpler.  When I was younger my friends and I loved to “work on our cars”, and therefore were a natural market for well-used and cheaper ones, and came to love cars in general.    Nowadays, cars are much more difficult to “work on”.  Also the interest in cars among young people is plunging.  Suppose there is a correlation, auto manufacturers?  Kids don’t have as much money, but they are your hoped for future customers.

 

 

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.

 

Shadow Work, by Craig Lambert

  This is a short, easy to read, and provocative book by Craig Lambert (more info. at recommended books column at the left), that claims that our leisure time is being eaten up by doing work that used to be done for us.  The reason for this is partly technology (the computer), partly because business has discovered that by off-loading work to customers it can cut its payroll (pumping our own gas), and partly because we honor work in our culture.

 This book got my attention because everyone I know seems to be bemoaning the loss of leisure time, even though supposedly the information revolution is helping us by taking over increasing amounts of work, and because I have just blown away a ridiculous amount of time in first of all, going to an outrageously complex multi level password system needed to use the Stanford server (the university was badly hacked a while ago), and having my computers be encrypted (which of course required "upgrading" the operating systems, which required "upgrading" apps, etc. etc. etc. ) 

 Lambert defines shadow work as work we do without labeling it as work, and for which we are not paid.  One example is the constant mucking around we do with our computer(s), as manufacturers keep “upgrading” them to sell us even more features we don’t want (and remove some we do).  I hate Apple’s new “Photos” program, a supposed improvement over IPhoto.  To me it is a step  backwards enshrouded in meaningless changes and crowned with the loss of useful features.  Even worse, once one allows one’s computer to make the change (mandatory with OS 10-10-3 on), one can’t go back unless one has the latest version of iPhoto on the machine—apparently not known by my favorite IT person who knows everything.  Dumb move by Apple.  And lots of Shadow Work upcoming for me, as I am going to bail out of their photo organization software so I can organize my photos the way I want them, not how Apple thinks I should. In fact, maybe I'll bail out of Apple.

 The book has many examples of this phenomenon.  The replacement of travel agents by web sites, for instance.  Granted one has the ability to compare endless flights, hotels, rental car deals, etc., but the time and effort spent as contrasted with letting a travel agent do this (at one time paid by airlines, hotels, etc) can be huge.  Another is shopping, especially in big box stores, or even large grocery stores, in which it sometimes seems impossible to either find what one wants (especially if everything has re-arranged to be compatible with the now popular marketing technique of forcing the shopper to pass by everything in the store) or find a person to give one a helpful clue.  Another is the time spent figuring out all of the non-standardized kiosks, credit card readers, and other digital “aides”, all slightly different.  I just had a brand new-looking gas pump consistently refuse my credit card, and upon complaining to the one attendant, was told that I had to withdraw the card slowly.  Interesting after years of being told to withdraw it rapidly.

 Lambert also goes into topics such as doing one’s own taxes, legal work, and other activities formerly done by others.  And the time we spend filling out medical forms, and providing information on ourselves to internet vendors so that it can be sold in the Big Data world.  He agrees that many of these activities are cheaper and maybe faster than hiring professionals, and perhaps our time is less valuable than that of the doctor who wants the information, but his main point is that we do an increasing amount of “work” that used to be done for us, without realizing it, and the result is perhaps more frantic lives and less human interaction.  Definitely describes me.

 He also talks about the incredible time and effort spent by parents outside of the home that did not used to occur.  When I went to school in the dark ages of education there were no organized kid athletics, no summer camps, no parents driving  us to school or helping us with our homework (not much homework), no PTA or other volunteer groups, or parents organizing campaigns against teachers and administrators (too much homework—not enough homework).  I look at my children and the time they spend chauffeuring their kids around and attending events, and I think Wow.  I learned to play sports and did well in school without parent involvement, and it worked.  In fact, we would have been uncomfortable if parents were hanging around our ball games and attending out school productions.

 And finally, his argument again reminds the reader of the loss of paying jobs awaiting us in the future.  I went through a divorce many years ago.  It did not include large estates, criminal behavior, or anything that would result in a novel.  In fact it was even called a routine divorce by the judge, who chided the two attorneys for making it into a war and not coming to an agreement.  But they did earn money for a whole year.  An example where computers could have done better, but we do have a lot of attorneys to support.

 I recommend the book.  It is an  easy read and will make you wonder how much “Shadow Work” you are doing.

Polluting the Internet

There was an interesting article in the magazine section of the New York Times, June 8, 2015.  It was written by Adrian Chen, entitled  The Agency, and is here.  It is about the major effort going on in Russia not only to use the internet to spread positive feelings about the country and its activities (Putin, the  Ukraine, etc.), but also to spread confusion in “western” countries such as the  U.S., and in general, dilute the credibility of what is referred to as the “U.S.” internet.  It focuses on a fairly secret organization named the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, which hires large numbers of young  people with computer skills at relatively high salaries to put information on the internet that will accomplish these aims. No particular knowledge of the world, politics, economics, or sociology is needed.  The employees work hard (an example was a woman who worked two twelve hour days in a row followed by two days off), and in the two days was expected to file five credible political posts, ten non-political posts, and 100 to 150 comments on other people’s posts.

 The article gives examples of their work —building carefully orchestrated, but fictional hoaxes (Columbian Chemical Explosion in Centerville Louisiana, Atlanta Georgia Ebola epidemic) and disinformation of all sorts.  Although the article focuses on the one agency, which is modeled after a corporation, the author implies that there is a wide effort to do such work, and the workers seem to be challenged and rewarded for their work.  After all, this is a chance to do mischief for money.  What could be more fun to young people than writing negative material on all candidates for U.S. president, and not being at all inhibited by the truth.

 The  article is well researched, well written, and not surprising.  The Internet is heavily dominated by the U.S. and annoys at least the leadership of many countries.  TV is continually degraded by advertising, but is not targeted toward particular interests or beliefs, because it wants as large an audience is possible.  But the internet is consciously/unconsciously selling U.S. values (superiority of Christian capitalistic democracies, easily available porn).  It is  only natural for leaders of countries who are not interested in having their country be like the  U.S. to attack the internet.  What better way than to hire kids who like to play with computers to do so, through pumping into it information that is seen as positive by these leaders, and random information that is not based on truth ? 

 In a sense, this is an attempt to lower the quality of the internet by injecting junk and biased information into it.  I am usually doing things in which gains can be made by increasing quality. As far as I am concerned the internet already contains plenty of junk and biased information.  But it was interesting to me to read this article and realize that there are situations in which perceived gains can be made by lowering quality, and that people can earn good salaries by helping do so.  

Computer Hype and Reality

I was glad to see a column in the New York Times by Paul Krugman, entitled “The Big Meh”.  It is here.  Krugman is a prolific writer and a major force in economics, having won the Nobel Prize, and having been named the second most influential economist in the world by The Economist.  He points out that despite all of the hype about the information economy, the computer revolution, social networking, computer games, smart phones, and other digital marvels, the U.S. economy is and has been sluggish for the last ten years, and in his mind, except for a few spikes, has been disappointing for the last 40 years. 

 But the hype in the media grows, and here we are, waiting for our virtual reality kits and lining up to buy the latest expensive Apple miracle.  True, Apple, Google, Facebook, and such companies are boasting extraordinary cash flows, but, how much are we actually benefitting from all of these digital miracles? Krugman, in looking for reasons that our dazzling new technology does not seem to be strongly affecting the nation’s economy, states that perhaps the new technology is more fun than fundamental.

 Certainly many Stanford students want to start a company and make a fast pile of money, but most of them won’t.  And how about those unfortunate young people without college training who can’t find jobs —see the last Economist magazine. The cover features a drawing of a young white male sitting in a crashed male symbol, under  text reading “The Weaker Sex; No jobs, no family, no prospects” .  The lead article is entitled “Men Adrift”, and is here.

 We are realizing that there is a social cost from automating work that was formerly done by humans, and will realize it even more when CPA’s, attorneys, truck drivers, and others capable of making more noise begin to be displaced.  It seems to me that driverless trucks make at least as much sense as driverless cars, but clearly the media is a bit shy about taking on the teamsters.  We are also realizing that there is a cost to us in changing our lives to meet the demands of being “connected”, and having our habits known in increasing detail so that we may be more efficiently bombarded with more marketing material, as well as having our attention fractionated in many ways. Psychologists are having a field day with the latter.

 So far new technologies have taken on the order of 50 years to mature.  Tim Berners Lee, a British scientist, is given credit for having invented the World Wide Web (the basis of the internet) in 1989.  That is only 26 years ago.  We have a long way to go before it reaches anything close to maturity.  To me, it is presently becoming more difficult to use, and requiring more and more time to handle features that used to work, but are now overwhelming (e-mail), and more and more time to separate, as they used to say, the wheat from the chaff (ads, gripes, and baseless opinions).  And as a tool, I find that the time I spend using it is highly compromised by the time I spend trying to keep up with changes in the software associated with operating systems, apps, and programs that by now should be mature, but are constantly showing up with new (and to me unnecessary and sometimes negative) bells and whistles.  But I am an optimist, and believe that eventually it will settle down, take its place in our lives (although it will cost us to get rid of the distractions and trash bult into it), and the hype will go away.

 So I agree with Professor Krugman.  Let’s can the hype, figure out what we have and what we need, and make it serve us, instead of us serving it.  Incidentally, I just ordered a book entitled Shadow Work; The Unpaid Unseen Jobs that Fill Your Day, by Craig Lambert.  I'll give you my reactions after I read it.  It concerns work that used to be done by others for you, that you now have been tricked into doing through partial automation and cleverness on the part of companies through digital electronics.  Think of shopping in big box stores.  Remember when there were people to help you in stores?  I, and many of you,  even remember when people didn't  pump their own gas.  When I grew up, working in a "service station" was a sought after first step into the economy.  Now these jobs have gone away, along with the service.

 

 

 

 

The Engineer's Lament—Malcolm Gladwell

The May 4, 2015 issue of The New Yorker magazine contains an article by Malcolm Gladwell entitled The Engineer’s Lament,  with a sub title of Two Ways of Thinking About Automotive Safety.  It is here.

 Like many people, I am a fan of Gladwell, because he is both a terrific writer and capable of focusing on important and provocative topics. As an engineer, especially one who has witnessed controversies resulting from differences in the viewpoints of providers and consumers, I very much appreciated this article.

 My experiences have included working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratories during the early days of space exploration in which failures of the first Ranger missions were greeted with a Congressional Investigation; working at Stanford when a difference in viewpoints as to the purpose of overhead on government contracts lead to a Congressional Investigation; and working in a start up when differences in opinion between the founder and the venture capital firms as to the pricing of the product (help the needy or maximize profit) caused a great deal of strife.  In all cases, from my viewpoint as an engineer, the critical parties, although clearly trying to do good, just didn’t understand.  I am sure they returned the favor.  As a consultant, I have seen this situation occur time and time again both between and within organizations.

 Gladwell’s article is focused on the process of deciding whether or not automobiles should be recalled for reasons of safety.  Recent examples have included the recall of Toyota products because of potential “sticking” accelerators, recall of General Motors products because of ignition switch problems, and the older, but very significant recall of some 1.5 million Ford Pintos (suspected exploding gas tanks in rear-end collisions).    I am sure you saw the plentiful media coverage of at least the more recent ones. 

 From the point of view of the companies, and admittedly many if not most of the engineers,  the products delivered to the public are the best they can do within the monetary and time constraints demanded by competitive pressure.  Automobile companies (I briefly worked for one) are extremely sensitive to issues of safety because they are staffed by humans , aware of their large liability exposure, constantly challenged by the shortcomings of drivers, and brutally attacked by the media when one of their  components fails and kills innocent people.  But being part of one is also to be aware of the very large numbers of components in an automobile, the numbers of automobiles delivered in a year, and limited time to ensure that no “bugs” exist in the final product. After all, the Curiosity explorer now on the surface of Mars has proven to be an extremely reliable product, but required 12 years and 1.8 billion dollars to produce.  Granted that the environment it has been asked to survive is challenging, but so is that in which automobiles operate.  And engineers do not have 12 years and 1.8 billion dollars to develop a single automobile.

 Also, as Gladwell points out, the causes of automobile accidents are primarily due to such things as driver distraction (texting, talking, eating), alcohol, and poor skills, rather than automobile equipment failures.  But victims of such failures (and their eager attorneys) see things very differently.  Most people expect their equipment to be 100% reliable and safe, but not willing to accept the associated penalties.  As near as I can tell, at some level of complexity and change, people (and robots) will screw up and things will fail. But it is possible to improve the situation by striving for simplicity, spending more money, and taking the time to do more testing.  But we don’t want that.  We want spiffy new stuff now with more bells and whistles at low price.

 I am not putting Gladwells’ article in the “recommended book” column at the left of this page, but certainly would if it were a book.  The good news is that it takes much less time to read than a book, and a link to it is in the first paragraph of this post. And it touches on a critical problem where product quality is concerned. Take a look at it. My wife loved the engineer jokes.

 

 

 

 

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.

Go Economist

The cover of the Jan 17^th-23^rd 2015 issue of The Economist magazine blares “Seize the Day: How Falling Oil Prices and New Technology Offer a Chance to Transform Energy Policy”.  The Leader (here) speaks to the energy issue, as do several articles and a Special Report on energy technology.  For a consistently capitalist magazine, their treatment of energy is surprisingly green.  Their suggestions for improvement, of course include more freeing all energy markets and making them internationally seamless  removing all subsidies for producing and consuming fossil fuels world-wide, and ensuring seamless global energy markets}.  But it also backs up such things as carbon taxes and decreasing waste, smarter grids, and research on better storage for solar/electrical energy.

The Special Report points out advances in technology that are making alternate energy sources more economic (as one article points out, fossil fuels have historically gone up and down down in price, but solar keeps getting cheaper).  It also underlines the need for new business models and the need for cutting energy waste. Nothing  radical if  you follow the energy situation, but the Economist may receive more attention from deniers in business and government than pioneers such as the Rocky Mountain Institute.

 The Economist has consistently promoted cleaning up and modernizing energy production and usages, since such activities obviously open up great economic opportunities.  It is a stand that may seem to run counter to the vested interests of traditional energy producers and consumers – big oil, coal, etc.  But it is the future.  After all, our steady state energy source is the sun.  A couple of  billion years ago or so there was a extinction event, sometimes called the Great Oxygenation Event (here). Cyanobacteria, the dominant life form upon this time, began producing oxygen by photosynthesis, and in the process killed themselves off, leaving an atmosphere containing free oxygen.  And here, a long time later, we are.  Are we going to kill ourselves off and yield the scene to life forms that live on carbon dioxide and methane?

 The battle will be long and nasty, and will be fought in time periods consistent with our life spans rather than in billions of  years.   It will be a difficult one since oil, gas, and coal are such efficient sources of energy, so affordable, so integral to our society and so dominant a part of our economies, but we will be forced to clean up our act and our economy and we will adapt.  As a tiny personal example, I used to swear that I would leave the location in which I live (which I love) if burning wood in fireplaces was ever outlawed.  We’re close.  Our area has outlawed the inclusion of wood burning fireplaces in new houses, and we now have “no burn” days so often that my wife and I switched to gas logs a year ago.  We are not leaving.

 The age of fire must assume a much less destructive character.  Late developments (fracking, tar sands), might cause us to think we  have a long supply of fossil fuel (several  generations) which we can simply burn, but producing, refining, and moving it will continue to be more costly, we will continue to fight over it and play economic games with it,  damage to the ecosphere will continue, and we will have to continue to admit that we are dependent on long dead plants and animals.   Being humans, things will probably get worse before they get better.  It will take us some bitter arguments, more costly incidents (BP and OPEC) and require thinking and learning a lot, but we will change.  We will learn to use our fossil fuels more thoughtfully and we will end up with unused fossil fuels in the ground, just as we ended up with unused oil in the whales. 

 Now is a good time to get much more serious on this transition.  The warning signals have been increasing over many years, and we have heeded them to some extent, but  we “developed” countries have been building our dependence on simply burning fossil fuels sharply over the past 150 years, and now we are facing large populations doing the same.  It will take at least that long to become more sophisticated in generating and using energy.  I remember the years it took in denial and then in technical development to cut the emissions from automobiles.  This is a much larger challenge. And we in the U.S. seem to consider ourselves leaders of the world — why aren’t we leading it?

 I admire the role the Economist is playing in the change, especially since they may be losing a bit of support from the petroleum and coal industries,  so-called energy policy experts,  and all those who are dominated by them.  I notice in the letters and internet responses, some Economist readers are accusing them of “liberal” thinking, obviously an obscene activity to said readers.  But hey, by now oil and coal companies should be acting like energy industries, in deed as well as in their advertising.  And if oil prices stay down, we can raise taxes enough to fund our breaking-down infrastructure and accomplish the  technology development necessarily to help them use our fossil fuels in a more intelligent way.  They are too valuable to simply burn, and we need to quit using our fragile ecosphere as a free dump .  We definitely should  seize the day.

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.

 

 

 

    

Flying Leafblowers—The Drone and Life

The media, perhaps looking for a cause, seems to be becoming increasingly interested in drones.  An example is an article entitled Free the Drones (here) and one entitled The Robot Overhead (here) in the December 6fh-12^th edition of The Economist..  The gist of the first article is that Congress should loosen the grip of the Federal Aviation Authority on commercial drone flights, since they are so useful to business.  Congress has ordered the FAA to come up with new rules for commercial drone flights by September 30^th, but the Economist is clearly worried that the rules will remain overly restrictive.  I certainly hope they aren’t wide open. The second goes into present and potential commercial uses of drones.  But are we setting about to produce the equivalent of automobile traffic in the air?

 The photo reflects one of my fears—noise.  My wife and I hate gas powered leaf blowers, even though she has a large garden.  In our area we can hear one or more of them being used much of the time. The ones powered by two-cycle gas engines are the worst, followed by those powered by four cycle gas engines.  Relative to the gas powered ones, electrical ones are okay, but not as good as rakes. Finally, manufacturers, goaded by local laws, are quieting the things down, but it has been a good while.  How  about drones?  What kind of restrictions will there be on noise.

 I am all in favor of airplanes,  the commercial and military ones of which are tightly regulated during their design and operation .  And as for noise, the military ones are usually based away from population centers, and attention is being paid to commercial engine noise levels (there are, of course, people who buy houses next to airports and developers who build them, so the problem will continue to exist).  Private planes seem to be only marginally muffled. And there are necessary exceptions, such as the helicopter that lives on the top of the Stanford University hospital and flies directly over my house on its errands of mercy—we have not figured out how to build a quiet helicopter yet.  Who is going to control the drone noise?  Hopefully, not the Economist.

 Since we live close to a football stadium, we are in the pattern taken by small planes noisily pulling large advertising banners.  They seem to fly around from tail-gating time until the game begins.  We are capable of reading the banners the first time around, and like many people,  the more times we see an ad the less we like the business sponsoring it.  Marketing seems to be uncontrollable in the U.S. at present.  Are drones going to be enlisted to further bother us with ads?  How about loud speakers?

 There is awareness and resistance to increasing drone traffic.  Despite Congress there will be regulations as to when and where various types can be flown and by who, and controlling such things as reliability  and even noise.  And the second Economist article mentions hunters shooting one down.  In fact I heard of a ballot measure in one state in the U.S. seeking to make it legal to shoot down drones.

I am not against drones in general,  But I see another example of technology coming faster than we can think through the consequences.  In a supplement to the 2013 Worldwide UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) Roundup, published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, there was a list of 57 nations and 270 manufacturers developing and producing some 960 unique type of UAV’s, 144 of them in the U.S.  I am personally glad the FAA is slowing things down.

 

Technology and Dying

I recently read Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health.  Also a terrific writer, who has received widespread recognition for his skill with words.  He is one of my favorite writers, and early in the history of this blog, I wrote very positive posts about three of his early books, Complications, Better, and The Check List Manifesto, which were about quality in medical care and how to achieve it.  I recommend them as well as this one.

 Being Mortal discusses the quandary of dying in developing countries.  Most of us in the U.S. say we would like to die at home, And in fact in the 1940’s, most of us did.  But by the 1980’s over 80 % of us died in hospitals, and the odds are that that is where we will draw our last breath, surrounded by sterility and technology.

 Although we realize that we should spend the end of our lives enjoying our lives as much as possible, and looking back with pleasure at our lifetime experiences, we cling to extending them as much as possible.  Hospitals are full of medical talent focused in exactly that direction—to cure, and extend lives.  So we enter a hospital, subject to our hopes, which coincide with those of our doctors.  The result may be that we die in a way that we would not have chosen —drugged and separated from friends and family.

 Gawande argues for more sensitivity to the quality of our lives at the end, but realizes the possible conflicts between this and modern medical care, furnished by organizations of people trained to extend lives and proud of their skills to do so.  This is being widely recognized these days, an appreciation that I am sure will increase as the Boomers reach the ends of their lives.  This can be seen in the increasing visibility of hospice care, POLST (Physician Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment) forms, and other means of dying without being connected to a host of tubes and wires, or because they have finally been disconnected.

 Medical care is another situation in which technology has reached a sophistication level that may not always be the answer.  Traditional Navajo indian attitudes toward death were interesting.  When a person died, their negative aspects (lack of harmony with the universe) went into a chindi, or ghost, which would hang around the site of their death and burial and infect those who became close to it with sicknesses perhaps leading to death.  As a result, there was an advantage for a person dying outside of their living quarters,  which otherwise would have to be destroyed to protect others from the chindi, but in an uplifting environment.   Interesting that this approach would help slow down the spread of infections, such as the dreaded antibiotic resistant MRSA bacteria that hang around hospitals. Only a limited number of people (4) were involved with preparing the body for burial and disposing of it, and they were careful to purify themselves afterward.  The chindi was to be avoided at all costs.

 The author Tony Hillerman wrote a wonderful series of mysteries taking place on the Navajo reservation, and in them would occasionally have the hero breaking a dying relative or friend out of a hospital so that they could die at home, hopefully out of doors surrounded by beautiful scenery, not only consistent with their lives, but sparing the hogan from destruction.  The hospital typically would furiously resist this action.  I would think that the hospital would be all in favor of this, because it would soon have been populated by large numbers of chindi, to the detriment of all who entered it, sick or healthy.  But medical people are trained to cure, and technology continues to make them more capable of doing so. And they generally do not believe in chindi.

Different and More are Not Necessarily Better

I have had an excellent and long relationship with Apple’s operating system 10.6.8.  I had vowed to stay with it as long as possible.  But it is difficult to stay with something you like when dealing with the digital world, because digital hardware and software are changeable with little relatively little expense, designers of it are often motivated by the glory of “new” features, businesses like to boast about new products in their marketing, and any fool can add stuff to the internet.  I unfortunately had a camera failure and had to get a new back (the digital information could no longer be read).  My new one is capable of wi-fi, which I thought would be useful, but it didn’t seem to like 10.6.8, so I finally bit the bullet and upgraded all the way to 10.10, which is of course being trumpeted by Apple as the epitome of all operating systems.

 I used to play the piano a lot, and clearly remember the agony of learning to do so.  But one day, after many hours of learning and practice and years of playing, I realized that I could just play it. It would do what I wanted it to do without conscious attention to the mechanics involved.  Driving cars, shooting basketballs, typing, riding bicycles, most human activities requiring some amount of skill follow the same trajectory.  In a minor way, so did operating system 10.6.8 for me.  I could just use my computer!

 Since I was able to delay changing so long, I have a good view of what has happened to Apple’s desktop operating system over time.  The answer is both a great deal, and not very much— new and useful features, but lots of trivial change in fonts and format, features that I do not want that would distract me from my work, inability to deal with several of my old applications (Photoshop), and a propensity to organize data for me in ways that have no meaning for me. I am presently trying to get rid of several of these new “features”. Fortunately I discovered the “notifications” box in system preferences, so I could disable several distracting notices at once.  And I am sure I can figure out how to get iPhoto to open by just showing me my photos and albums rather than classifying them into “events”, that not only have no meaning to me, but are not events at all.  But I will have to go back to a bit of learning to “play the piano again”, and I don’t want to just because someone decided the keys could be better arranged,  And unfortunately, I don’t expect the music to be any better.

 Granted that the digital world is improving over time, but such things as computers and the internet are tools to help people, and tools should honor the learned skills of the users.  The digital world is filled with people who cluster around places such as the offices of Wired Magazine, Singularity University, and computer companies such as Apple and Google, and believe in constant change, constant growth, and the increasing dominance of digital technology.  Technological determinism in its pure form!  Digital technology is marvelous and bringing us valuable capabilities, but it works for us, not the opposite.  I have pushed creativity and innovation for most of my life as a teacher, author, and engineer, am constantly amazed at our capability to do new and wonderful things, am a fan of the results of it, and have been involved in many very rewarding creative and innovative activities.  But guess what —creativity and innovation need to be controlled.  I will talk about that in a future post.

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. 

Bad Guys (?) and Good Guys (?) on the Internet

I have just finished an amusing and to me enlightening book entitled Internet (how crime went online and the cops followed) Police, by Nate Anderson, deputy editor at Ars Technica—see recommended books list on the left.  It is a series of cases of abuse of the internet and the attempt by various people to stop it.  Among other things, it highlights the disagreement between those who think the internet should be free and uncontrolled, and those who think it should at least follow the laws that pertain to written material and intellectual property.  Unfortunately, it is a very different media than paper, and easier to abuse than control, even if you believe it needs more control.  I have no doubt that it will be controlled more tightly as it grows, because that seems to be what happens when populations increase, and when anonymity is easy, money is to be made, and billions of people are involved, many of whom do not particularly revere the internet and view it as a source of quick money rather than something to cherish.

 Since I do not follow this topic in detail I found the cases quite extraordinary.  One of them, for instance, concerns a man named Nikolaenko, a Russian citizen, who quietly over time built a spambot network based on a virus he designed that infected more than 500,000 computers that would send out spam at his command.  It is estimated that at one time his network was producing over 30% of the spam in the world, and Nikolaenko was making millions from his clients.  He was finally identified, and apprehended during a visit to the U.S. (Russia does not punish its own citizens for such antics).  But U.S. courts could not do much with him, because spam, although very annoying, is difficult to prosecute, because those who do it claim freedom of speech, and old laws don’t seem to have much effect. 

 Notice that despite the “no call” attempt on the part of the government, telephone marketing is back in full force and even more annoying because it does not now involve real people.  We are thinking of dropping our land line, but marketing ads are now showing up on cell phones.  The trash quotient for our phone is on a par with the trash quotient in our surface mail (lots).  But the trash quotient in my e-mail is worse, and still growing rapidly.  And to make it even more insulting,  phishers are not even bothering to correct their spelling any more.

 A similar case involved a man named Steven Warshak, who founded a company that eventually was selling thirteen different medicines over the internet that supposedly increased penis size. He too was making millions, although the medicines not only didn’t work, they really didn’t exist.  He too was identified, but also escaped the punishment he would have received for fraud in the days of written documents.

 I knew there were problems in the internet, but not the extent of them, and how difficult it is to prosecute what many of us call “computer crime”, or “internet crime”.

 The book is well written, easy to read, and gives a good picture of the problems people have who are trying to police the internet. You will be biased as to how bad the problem is, but having recently gone through the exercise of sending an invoice overseas for some consulting I did, it seems to me that things are getting worse.  Sniffers love to find the word invoice, especially on overseas messages, because there is usually lots of valuable information on such things.  And I am also enduring Stanford University’s frantic attempts to escape hacking through two layers of passwords, one designed to foil sniffers,and therefore un-memorizable by humans,  and the other a constantly changing set of random numbers (encryption is coming), It seems to me that the usefulness of the internet is radically decreasing as a result of lack of control, and lack of laws that fit the media and its international nature.

Product Quality and Technological Determinism

Wikipedia says it reasonably well—technological determinism is a reductionist theory that presumes that a society’s technology drives its social structure and cultural values.  It is simplistic, wrong, and if subscribed to can get us in a heap of trouble.  Our technology is to serve us, not the opposite. Fortunately, we humans often turn against directions technology seems to be taking (in the U.S. poison gas in warfare, automatic weapons for civilians, DDT, CFC’s). We should turn against nuclear warheads, adding to global warming through atmospheric pollution, species depletion,  and other such methods of destroying our way of life, but we seem to be unable as a species to do so. In that sense, technical determinism exists —we seem to be captives of technologies that in the long run can do us no good.  But hopefully we will break free of them.

 How about the technology associated with the “information” revolution.  It is certainly interesting to watch.  Great good is coming from it, but also problems.  An acquaintance of mine is now a fellow at Singularity University in Silicon Valley (specifically at Moffett field).  It’s mission is “to educate, inspire and empower leaders to apply exponential technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges” (pretty modest, huh? Although I do have problems with exponentials, because they do approach infinity).

 The founders are Ray Kurzweil, and Peter Diamandis.  Kurzweil is a well known inventor, thinker, author and the Director of Engineering at Google.  Diamandis is a successful entrepreneur and the Chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, which offers “large incentive prizes to drive radical breakthroughs.”  They are both clearly brilliant people. 

 The singularity that is the name of the university, and the one Kurzweil talks about, is a point in time at which the combination of humans and computers, enhanced by biological knowledge and intervention, will become smarter than humans, with unpredictable results.  Kurzweil would like to see us move more rapidly to this point.  A good explanation of this singularity concept from Wikipedia is here.                .

 I was talking to my friend the other evening, and she was expressing wonderment at the thought of machines taking over so much of what we have historically done. and wasn’t sure she liked the thought.   I told her that from  what I knew of them,  the Singularity folk were Technological Determinists.  I don’t believe there will be a  quick “singularity”.  First of all, even at the present speed of change, an extraordinary number of people are being left behind and becoming somewhat unhappy at the whole process of being asked to conform to computers and the internet.  Secondly, when computer/human teams become better than people at tasks that can be solved through logic (chess is a good example), the tasks no longer seem as impressive to us. Finally, for better or worse, many of our more important problems seem to be solved (?) by politics, not logic.

If the use of computers leads to bothersome changes in culture, we will make changes in the software and hardware to better meet our needs.  Software and hardware are products, after all, and high quality products are to make our lives better, not less satisfying.  I think we will soon see some positive changes  to protect us from constant marketing, protect individual and national privacy, and that we will get more realistic about social networking.  If not, we will see a turn away from the magic of the internet.

 Great good is coming from our integration of computers into our lives, but also damage (consumption of personal time, disappearance of satisfying links to the economy, misinformation through marketing, loss of deep  thinking, etc.).  The people at Singularity University are believers and futurists.  They play an important role in getting people to think.  But the messages they deliver, like those of most of us, are biased by their beliefs.

 

 

 

The Internet and Me

I missed my weekly post last week, because I was at my Sacramento valley hideaway, which is not on the net, and I failed to write one in advance.  I could have found wifi somewhere and sent one out, but I needed a computer break, and reaching the Stanford server (due to constant attempts to hack into it) now requires not only a user name and a password consisting of a series of random numbers generated by the server, but also a second password so lengthy and constrained, that people tend to tape it to their computer in order to remember it, which of course partly nullifies the whole attempt at security.

I spent my the time in the valley working outdoors at revitalizing a 1966 Chevrolet pick up and a 1975 Alfa Romero—ex kid-cars, perhaps destined to become grand-kid cars, assuming we aren’t all stuffed into robotic containers (my feelings are nicely expressed by a column by Della Ephron in today’s New York Times entitled "Less Sexy, Better for Sex", which is here.) I also thought about my interaction with the internet, which seems to be taking more and more of my time (although not nearly as much as that of many people I know).

As I hammered, filled, sanded, and sprayed, I could not help but realize how much I was enjoying the work (even though the temperature was sometimes well over 100 degrees).  And also how much I did not miss my computer.  The picture shows me celebrating one morning at Las Maracas, my favorite restaurant in Knights Landing, Ca.  It was taken by Juan Barajas, one of the family that operates the restaurant. The meal on my plate was the first ever serving of “Mom’s Breakfast”, which I am encouraging them to put on the menu— a magnificent combination of biscuits, gravy, fried potatoes, eggs, bacon, and coffee—retro, probably unhealthy, but an excellent way to begin the day.

 I did miss access to some of the information on the internet while sweating in the sun, but not social networking as now constituted.  At my age, I am not looking to build a network of people I do not now know, nor sell myself or my wares.  I still hang around Stanford, which gives me more than enough interaction with people who have the same interests as I do, and am fortunate in having more real (not cyber) friends than I can satisfyingly interact with.   I enjoy writing posts to my blog, since it makes me think, and send notice of them to friends and connections at Facebook and Twitter, but I have made no efforts to widen my contacts, and find I would rather use my time for other purposes.

Clearly the internet will change over time, and it will be interesting to watch the process.  As an example, There is an interesting article by Gordon Goldstein in the July/August issue of The Atlantic entitled “The End Of The Internet?”, which is here. He points out that the internet in its present global form, which is largely an activity underwritten by large businesses, is becoming increasingly bothersome to governments and citizens in other countries, as well as in the U.S.  As you know, people world-wide are increasingly disturbed by such things as surveillance, hacking into “secure” data, general violation of privacy, ever increasing marketing, and material that is not consistent with their values.

In the article Goldstein discusses these pressures and possible new directions for the internet (or internets) which involve more regional and secure networks for various regions and nations.  Something to think about, since many people are.  Obviously such changes would result in more government regulation, less freedom, but perhaps also higher quality of information. 

The internet already is serving separate cultures.  Stanford  students tend to text rather than write e-mail messages, and my older friends still seem to be stuck in e-mail, although they universally complain about the amount of “junk” they receive.  Disagreeing interest groups (for instance liberals and conservatives or environmentalists and global warming non-believers) seem to like to communicate within the group, but not with each other.  People with younger children have different interests in the trips, pets, and parties of those who don’t (and vice versa).  And of course, there is the age phenomenon.  Few of my friends in my age groups are active social networkers.  They seem to want to use their time in other ways.

I am optimistic on the future of the increasingly digital world, although there are obviously lumps in the (driverless?) road ahead.  Predictions of job loss among white collar workers due to digital automation are large, and lawyers, accountants, managers,  and other highly educated and salaried folk are not going to be as quiet as factory workers when they lose their jobs to increasingly powerful and easier to use software. And I do think the fantasy of a peaceful, totally interconnected world population over a free universal system is somewhat like the 1960’s fantasy of a world of “make love, not war”.  I also think that the internet desperately needs more quality control.

We are definitely not living in boring times.

 

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.

 

Michael Lewis, Flash Boys, Stocks, and Technology

  I am a fan of Michael Lewis books.  They are fun to read, filled with heroes and villains, and even better give insights into what is to me an exotic and foreign land — that of Wall Street and high (matter of perspective) finance.  I have just finished his latest book, Flash Boys (information in recommended reading column on the left of the blog).  As you can see from the internet, it is already highly controversial, but also presently number one on the New York Times non-fiction best sellers list.

  Michael is a very bright and likable person, who has a knack for causing people to tell him things they probably shouldn’t, which is of course a valuable attribute in the vocation he has chosen.  I met him years ago when his wife, Tabitha Soren, came to Stanford as a holder of a  Knight Journalism Fellowship, awarded to outstanding professional journalists.  He was interested in doing a piece on Silicon Valley venture capitalists, we talked a bit, and he asked me to introduce him to some.  Easily done, with the result that an excellent article appeared, describing the Silicon Valley venture capital industry very well, but also outing a bit of dirty linen that several members of the VC community did not want to become public.  I liked the article, but a couple of the people I told him to look up didn’t return my phone calls for a while.

 One thing that impresses me is that he has an incredible knack to convey the nature of the seemingly strange (to me) behavior of people investing large amounts of money in hopes of making huge profits.  Among other things, Flash Boys is about the impact that computers have had and are having on the stock market.  In brief, computers now handle large movements of money rather than people, and the speed at which they can make decisions and the speed at which buy/sell messages move has become a critical factor in trading, resulting in great emphasis on such things as the length of fiber cables and the speed of digital components. Large buys and sells affect the value of stocks.  When stock transactions were completed in seconds, traders were able to follow them.  But now first milliseconds and then microseconds are important for a number of reasons.  As an example, Computers are fast enough to sense a buy or sale well before it is complete, and use this knowledge to profit by such things as transactions through other exchanges.  The age of high frequency trading was  the result of this.

 Flash Boys is an excellent story about the effects of technology on a traditional business and the interaction between computer specialists and traditional traders and managers.  Books like this open my eyes a lot, because my attitude toward money was probably formed by growing up in a small town after the depression.  I tend to relax into thinking that it represents something fixed.  I certainly do not consider myself an investor, but Michael Lewis books do make me think about the trustworthiness of the money on which I depend on as a retired person.  High frequency trading does not affect my meager stock transactions, but it affects the economy, and the economy affects me.

 I recommend the book for a number of reasons, not the least being that it will give you another look at the influence of technology when it strikes a traditional business.  And if you are not on Wall Street working in finance, it will give you some things to think and worry about.

 

Product quality, ignition switches, and humans.

 I worked a short time for General Motors some 50 years ago, did not love them then, and do not particularly love them now.  But since we are again going through a familiar dance about the evils of General Motors which includes the media, Congress, attorneys, and various people grieving over the loss of loved ones, we should keep a few things in mind.

 Such dances have benefits, because companies do tend to become complacent about various aspects of product quality in the heat of seeking to increase their profits, stay at least even with their competition, and focus on marketing and growth,  Occasionally they do need to be reminded by the press and public anger that they should tighten up their ship.

 But General Motors sells some 2,750,000 automobiles a year, does business in 140 countries, and has a quarter of a million employees. In an activity such as this, many decisions are made, some of which in retrospect seem wrong.  Also, in a sample of 250,000 people, a few may not have safety uppermost in mind.  Humans are human.

 Each year there are approximately 1.3 million automobile related deaths in the world.  This amounts to 3500 per day, or one every six seconds.  In the U.S. the death toll is about 35,000 per year.  I drove through San Francisco yesterday when a long-distance foot race had the city traffic diverted into strange areas and made most drivers very angry. I then then came home down a jammed freeway with various impatient people trying to beat the crowd.  I think it is miraculous that only 35,000 people in the  U.S. are killed in automobile accidents each year. The equipment is pretty good.  The drivers are the problem.

 It is tragic if 13 people have been killed by faulty ignition swtches, and criminal if information that this was likely to happen was knowingly with-held.  But whether we like it or not, approximately 55 million people die in the world each year ( we will all eventually be one of them), and 2.5 million in the U.S., so 13 deaths, although tragic to family and friends, would have gotten only local media attention, had not the faulty ignition switch been discovered.  So maybe there is a bit of jump-on-evil-G.M. going on because it attracts media attention, offers politicians a platform for righteousness,  and gives frustrated people on the internet a chance to vent on big business, Bush, Obama, Democrats, Republicans, terrorists, or whatever.

 But it is important to remember that people screw up (especially in hind sight and if many of them are involved) and things break—always have, always will (especially if complicated).  Yesterday my relatively new HP scanner/Apple computer combination quit scanning.  I checked the connections, the system settings, rebooted everything, still no luck.  After I finish this post I will uninstall the driver and install a new one.  But it may still not work.  It's failure will not kill me, but this is a relatively simple and mass produced digital system.  I often have trouble with my digital electronics.  Still anxious for automatic cars?

 It is always possible to make more reliable products.  But it costs.  As an extreme example, the Mars Curiosity Rover and the spacecraft that landed it successfully in August 2012, were necessarily built to be highly reliable, and JPL had many years of experience in building reliable planetary robotic spacecraft.  And this was a particularly challenging project.  But the cost for the rover and and associated spacecraft was 1.8 billion dollars and over a decade was necessary to design, develop, and adequately test it.  It survived launching, 9 months in space, landing, and is happily doing its mission.  But 1.8 billion dollars would buy 60,000 General Motors cars at $30,000 each. 

 True, the cost would come down somewhat if a large number of Curiosity rovers and associated spacecraft were built, but extraordinary effort in design, manufacturing and testing each one would still be necessary to ensure that nothing would fail.  The space shuttle received such attention, but remember the o-rings?  Tesla automobiles are receiving unusual care, although a couple of battery incidents have received media coverage, but their relative production is low and their prices are high. if their output and prices approach those of Toyota’s, will they be able to avoid occasionally getting into trouble?

Again, things break and users and producers screw up. Trying to prevent this, or at least minimizing its impact, is a difficult part of the challenge in securing high quality products. 

 

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.

 

 

 

The Quality of Work, Computers, and the Mystery of Employment

For some time now, we have been hearing about unemployment, outsourcing, computer-based automation, and such things.  I recently read a book entitled The Second Machine Age, — Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.  The Authors are Erik Brynjolfsson, the director of the MIT Center for Computer Business, and Andrew McAfee, a research scientist at the Center. It is listed in the recommended books list on the left.  They also were the coauthors of Race Against the Machine.  Both books have gained considerable notice.

 It is packed with interesting information, but I also found it interesting because it contained several different messages.  The first part of the book consisted of raves for the amazing accomplishments of digitization, and all of the things that computers can now do that only humans used to be able to do.  It admits there will be problems as computers become more and more powerful, but miracles will be accomplished and individuals have no choice in going along with this.  The authors also deny becoming technological determinists (if we can think it up, it will happen). But for a while I thought “oh no, not another born again computer book”.

 But societies have choices—there are such things as, regulations, labor movements, legal challenges, revolutions etc., and they are beginning to happen over issues such as privacy and the quality of life—or in other countries censoring the internet. And we hear of autonomous automobiles, but much attention to the  possibility of autonomous trucks and we would hear from the teamsters union again.

Happily, in the second portion of the book, the authors bring up the downsides of digitization, and one of course, is the effect on work (labor and jobs).  And I think we have only seen the tip of this iceberg.

 Most people in business and economics focus upon jobs as a way to move money around, and believe that as computers take over more and more jobs, others will appear.  But will they?  An article entitled “Closing the Gap”, in the Feb 15-21, 2014 issue of The Economist, suggests that the present decrease of unemployment may be due to the fact that the U.S. labor force is permanently stunted by people leaving it for reasons ranging from early retirement to giving up on finding jobs.  I think there is another reason to worry, and that is the quality of jobs.  People who have worked in a highly skilled job they love, are hardly satisfied with any old job.  I have a highly educated friend who is a farmer.  He requires being out of doors and hates computers—period.  He would be a pretty  unhappy tax accountant (a job, incidentally, which computers are taking over).

 Brynjolfsson and McAfee obviously like to think about difficult problems, read scholarly articles, follow the news in the media, and write books.  I do too, but I too am an academic. I don’t think we are typical. I clearly remember being in high school and none of my friends liked to do such things.  Many of my present smart but non-academic friends do much of such things..  Can it be possible that most people are in that category? Do people like a bit of manual labor to use the hands and muscles that have so carefully evolved over time in some context other than a health club?  I grew up on a farm.  The work was hard and the sun was hot, but at the end of the day one could collapse and see what had been accomplished, My father was smart, found farming highly satisfying, and would not have liked an inside job without heavy lifting.  In fact he once wrote me a letter, and it was the only example of his handwriting I ever saw—and he wrote beautifully.  Later I worked in a large machine shop, and it was more fun than farming, and to me even more satisfying.  The people were bright, amusing, and took rightful pride in what they were accomplishing. They were highly skilled, and not only could they see progress during the day, but the output was not something just anyone could do. And they could compete to see who did better work.

 I also worked on a work-over rig in an oil field for a spell.  The crew was high in spirits (emotional and after work alcoholic), full of jokes and pranks, once again skilled (mistakes could kill people), and at the end of the day could see what they had accomplished.  Even farming gave one pride and a sense of contributing when a bit more mechanized, and like farming, oil field work was outside—an important element to a lot of people.  I don’t know to what extent computers are now ”helping” the crews, but it’s coming.  And it is interesting to consider a classic roughneck working in an office, especially wearing a suit.

 Later still, when I worked at GM and JPL, I also worked closely with even more highly skilled shop people, because I was designing prototypes which needed custom parts made extremely precisely often from exotic materials.  I was by then an engineer, but when agonizing over a difficult problem I would sometimes wish I still worked in the shop, because the feedback was faster and the people seemed happier, healthier, and more entertaining. 

 Such jobs have been disappearing in the U.S..  As an example, computer aided design and manufacturing, coupled with very precise machining centers, do not require high salaries and do a totally predictable job. Do you suppose that people who liked doing that kind of work by hand would be fulfilled sitting and watching a number of such machines doing the work while they were being paid very low wages to be bored?

 So it isn’t just the number of jobs.  It is the fit of the job to the person and the sense of contribution and accomplishment that accompanies it.  One problem is that despite the efforts of many people, males are still with an inheritance of competing, showing off, and talking trash (as are women, but they play different games).  Watching a computer, or even running one, doesn’t do it for many.  I had a lovely phone conversation yesterday with a woman who works for A.T.&T.  My land line phone was doing things that weren’t covered in the web site, so I called the number with my cell, and after waiting several minutes while the phone told me the call would be recorded for quality purposes (do you suppose anyone ever listens to the recordings?), that they were receiving an unexpected number of calls, and that I shouldn’t hang up because they valued my calls, all the time playing me crummy music, an actual nice person came on the line, and solved my problem.  After I told her how wonderful she was compared to a web page, we had a long conversation on A.T.&T’s dime and I forgave them.  Had it not been for the human contact, I would have put another notch on my frustration with the company.  The power of real humans! 

 I’ll bet the elders who told you where to find things at Walmart would like their jobs back, and I wish they could get them, but I am afraid we are in a system too much captivated by cutting expenses and increasing profit.  But the backlash will come. I think I’ll go join a union.  And quit buying things over the internet.  And plant some corn in my back yard.

 But maybe nobody knows what’s going on with employment.  In the February 16, 2004 New York Times there is an article by Fred Andrews entitled “The Case for Swapping Roles with China”.  Steven Roach hass just written a book entitled Unbalanced— The Codependency of America and China. I haven’t read it, but he apparently claims both of us are getting in economic trouble, and the only solution is for us to swap roles.  We should go from consuming to producing, and China should do the opposite.  Maybe I can get a job in a shop, while people in China all go to work buying and selling things over the internet and speculating on investments.

 

Big System Failures

I was writing a post yesterday about effects of the internet on Christmas, when the electrical power went off in my home. It came back in a couple of hours, which is better than usual. But my portable was uncharged, and I couldn’t get back to my post until today.  Our electrical service seems to drop out several times in a year, usually in the rainy season (tree limbs fall on the wires, equipment that doesn’t like water gets wet, construction in area, etc.).  But we are going through a long dry spell, and have not had rain or strong winds in weeks—business as usual.

 I have now rebooted computers, changed all (most) of our clocks, charged batteries and am back in business.  But I spent yesterday with an old friend who is a user of large computer systems, and we got into a discussion of system reliability, so lets think about that, rather than the internet and Christmas, since you all have just experienced that interaction.

 Things tend to fail when unprecedented and complicated, just after being manufactured (sometimes called “infant mortality”), and after long usage (sometimes called “wearing out”,)  The system supplying our house with electricity is certainly complicated.  But I would not call its components unprecedented or even that exotic, and I trust that they are manufactured with care, and perhaps if highly critical even “run in” a bit before installation, because repairing failures results in real costs to the utility and annoys its customers.  But yet it fails.

 Big systems have failures. There are many reasons for this, not all predictable. There are seeming exceptions to this, such as the two Voyager Spacecraft launched in the 1970’s and still operating now over 15 billion kilometers from the sun. But the amount of care in design, manufacturing, and repetitive testing involved in the Voyager project, combined with a design that focused on simplicity and ruggedness, plus the predictability and benign nature of space (once you get past earth orbit) are not typical in the production of terrestrial devices or the environment in which they operate. And the voyagers too will eventually fail.

 Computers fail. Yours probably have. The internet is full of stories of large and costly failures.  Put “Large Computer Failures” into your browser, and you will get a large number of examples.  Approximately a month ago, the Bay Area Rapid Transit sytem (BART) suffered a major problem with its computer system (here) which caused a large number of people to miss appointments, work schedules, and so on.

 Why is it that visionary individuals and companies never seem to consider system failures in their ambitious plans.  I cannot help but wonder how much thought about system reliability is going into planning such complex systems as highways containing computer controlled automobiles, a sky full of UMV’s (drones), and an ever increasing number of robotic machines in our lives.  The government is not likely to release the reliability statistics of military drones.  I have not heard statistics on the reliability of industrial robots, or the few exquisitely cared-for automatic automobiles running around at present.  But I am happy to see that concern about such things is increasing and think there should be more.

 When our power goes off, we suffer some annoyance, and some worry about such things as long outages which can cause inconveniences such as thawing food, non-working cordless phones,computers, TV’s, etc. But failures in complex automatic control systems can cause deaths. Consider automobiles.

 Automobiles are typically driven by someone until failures become annoyingly frequent before they are scrapped.  What does that say about Highway 5 or Los Angeles being full of computer driven cars?  We hear of airplane accidents due to pilot error when taking over when the autopilot fails.  A common explanation is that pilots  spend so much time manually controlling the plane that they lose their instincts on what to do in an emergency.  Shouldn’t we worry more about computer driven airplanes with out-of-practice “standby” human pilots —or no pilots at all?.  Many leaders of the digital world believe that computers are more reliable at controlling complex equipment in a complicated environment than humans.  I have  not seen any data that convinces me that this is true over the total lifetime of such equipment.

  I have a reputation as a booster of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and in fact I am a believer.  But just because something is technically feasible on a small scale does not mean that it should too rapidly be introduced on a large one with attendant social complexity.  If your computer driven car hits another computer driven car, who is liable for the damages?  The car manufacturer?  The digital equipment manufacturer?  Are cars insured rather than drivers?  Are periodic maintenance checks mandatory?  How often does your car operating system require updating?  There are many factors involved other than the capability of hardware and software.

 

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? 

 

The Internet, Critical Books, and People

In my last post I mentioned that there is a noticeable increase in criticism of the Internet, and mentioned a few books as examples.  Today, to my amazement, the entire Book Review section of the November 3 New York Times was devoted to books about this topic, only one of which I have read —more to order.  You can see the reviews here, as well as a short article that is worth reading entitled “Is Tech Lit An Oxymoron?”. The books reviewed are not all negative about the Internet in general and social networking in particular, but there is a good bit of that.  This is not surprising, since many, if not most writers appreciate the book rather than the tweet and generally view the internet responsible for such things as the near disappearance of small book stores, the dire economic straits of traditional publishers, and the encouragement of brevity in writing at perhaps the cost in style, argument, and general story telling. 

 One of the books reviewed, by Alice Marwick, apparently singles out a marketing person named Gary Vaynerchuck for particular criticism.  Probably coincidentally, he is featured as the cover article entitled “Riding the Hashtag” in the business section of the same issue of the paper.  It is here.  He is apparently eagerly sought as an expert at Internet marketing and although he is clearly becoming famous and making money, his chosen work is about as far as how I want to spend my time as I can imagine.

 I have been using computers for a long time, beginning with using a large IBM mainframe to solve structural and thermal problems in aerospace in the 1950’s, although I must admit I was restricted to giving the problems to programmers, and certainly was not allowed to touch the machine.  And I am reasonably competent with contemporary hardware and soft ware .  But I retired from active duty on the Stanford faculty before smart phones and social networking became the rage.  I obviously have a cell phone, which seems to be a social requirement, but I still do not have a smart phone, because they seem to convert the owner into a constant sender and checker of e-mail and text messages, surfer of the internet, user of apps, etc.   I prefer to constrain such activities to a specific time each day, in order to not be interrupted doing other things that are very important to me. Unfortunately I am about to test my self discipline by getting a smart phone, in order to escape going mad using the brand new three-layer security system on Stanford’s network— a task which is simplified through use of a smart phone app.  But that is another story.

 As I also mentioned in my last post, two or three years ago I began social networking—this blog plus Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin— but have not gotten strongly involved because of a great deal of ambivalence on my part.  So far I have been more a watcher than a participant.  I have ”friended” some of my actual friends, am followed by people on Twitter, although I have not tried to attract followers, and I have some contacts and have joined some groups on LinkedIn.   I can see its benefits, but I neither comfortable with nor willing to spend the time trying to attract and communicate with a large following, and many people I would like to communicate with more are not actively involved in social networking.  In addition although I understand the importance of marketing in a capitalistic system, I think people who are constantly marketing themselves or their goods are a pain (I get enough of them on my phone and in print and TV ads) and they are plentiful in social networking.  Also, I gain a lot more from personal interaction with fewer people who are working on the same kind of problems I am interested in, than I do from a large crowd of people I have never met.  And since I feel guilty not spending more time with the friends I have, I am not looking for new ones.   I also prefer communication formats that allow more time than is popular with Internet communications.  On the positive side, I must admit I am fascinated by the affect of the Internet and social networking on people, and I can probably see it more clearly as a participant. Maybe I fall in with the book people.

 That is why I am glad to see a wider variety of thinking about social networking becoming available in the form of books and articles.  I need to decide whether to devote more time and energy to social networking or to quit.  It has its good side, and will improve, but I have other activities on my agenda.  And the type of deeply thought-out and hopefully substantiated opinions found in books helps me decide such things. As I read the books, I will post more details and my own reactions to them.

 

 

Noise, People, and Good Products

I have recently noticed an uptick in media concern with noise.  An article enabled “The sound of Silence” in the last issue of the Economist is an indication. It is here.

 It is about time.  I read a prediction recently that due to expanding population and economic trends by 2050 6.5 billion people will be living in cities.  That was approximately the entire world’s population in 2005.  People make noise, and if you pack them together (New York City) you have a lot of it, especially with the injection of police, fire, rescue, and commercial and amateur observation drones that are being projected—undoubtedly they will be propelled by two cycle engines and try to fly low so that the advertising banners they are towing are more easily readable.  I realize I should have emphasized noise more in my Good Products, Bad Products book. 

 The Stanford campus where I live is a good example, as well as the campus itself.  It used to be called "the farm".  It should now be called "the city".  It is in an extended growth and building period, and in addition the local area is doing a large amount of road work, including installing a  large new gas main to replace the one which caused an explosion and a fire in a town north of us.  One of the wonderful features of my home at one time was the quiet. No more. 

 We seem to be in the traffic patterns for both San Francisco and San Jose’s airports, We seem to be the only homeowners that do our own gardening (a hobby of my wife), so we are surrounded by professional mow and blow teams that often use multiple two-cycle engines at the same time.  In At 100 yards on one side of us is an increasingly busy campus road lined with fraternities that are the scene of parties featuring bands with ever more powerful amplifiers, and 100 yards on the other side is an increasingly busy road that has been the sight of gas main work for at least a year.  Even as I write this an even larger and louder garbage truck has stopped outside our house and our neighbor’s mow and blow team and contractor are at work.

 Will there be an end to what is sometimes called the noise pollution?  There will certainly be more regulations.  Past ones have caused vehicles to be quieter and rock bands to have decibel limits (difficult to police).  The university gardeners now use quieter equipment, such as four cycle generators to power electrical yard machines.  A few companies are now advertising the relative lack of noise from their products.

 And maybe the construction in the Stanford area will slow down some time—or maybe we are like an airport and are doomed to constant “improvements” accomplished by heavy equipment.

 My experience is that producers and consumers of products worry more about appearance and function than sound.  Maybe the time has come when populations have increased to the point where more attention needs to be placed on sound. Actually, this has been slowly happening for years.  When I was in high school we could drive our cars around with hardly any muffler (if you are old enough, you remember” straight pipes”.)  No longer.  When I was in high school the population of my home town (not my high school town) was 1200.  Now it is over 100,000.  That would be a lot of barely muffled cars. 

But as population grows, so does noise,  Cars seem to have dealt with being quieter.  In fact in The Economist article the author admits that maybe electric cars need to make a bit more noise.  Motorcycles lived through the requirement of being muffled.  At least heavy equipment is used to raze buildings and dig up pavement rather than explosives. But how about private planes and small internal combustion engines.  And how about more extreme punishment for people who use their automobile horns to express anger, rather than give warnings. 

 And I think that one contributor to the increasing noise problem is the present fad of “open office” architecture.  More about that in my next post.  But to get you thinking, Facebook is about to build a ten-acre open office for 2800 engineers (see Forbes article here)  Not for engineers like me!   

Insights into the Middle East, and Changes in the Technology of War

Once again, due to attention being paid to Syria, the Middle East is  all over the U.S. media and should be in everyone’s mind.  A valuable perspective is in a very well researched and book by Scott Anderson, entitled Lawrence In Arabia: War Deceit, Imperial Volley and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Doubleday, New York, 2013—more details by clicking the icon at the right).

 The book covers World War I in the middle east, with a focus on four characters:  William Yale, raised as an aristocrat, an employee of Standard Oil Company, and the only American field intelligence office in the Middle east during World War, who was to strongly influence American opinion about the Middle East after the war, Aaron Aaronsohn, a Jewish scientist who was a fervent champion for creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine and established a spy-ring in Turkey to help fulfill his goal, Curt Prufer, a German scholar who sought to foment an Islamic Jihad against the western colonial powers, and of course T.E. Lawrence, who, although a loyal British subject, acted to help the Arabs remain independent of the colonial powers, believing that such an outcome would be preferable both to the area and to Britain. 

 Lawrence became famous by “going native” and leading successful guerrilla forays which accomplished things that the British army, weighed down by tradition and lack of knowledge of the area and its people, could not.  Interestingly enough, he was a fan of  “The Art of War”, by Sun Tsu.  The  photo at the left, taken from his Wikipedia page shows him in his British army garb.  The second shows him in his preferred fighting configuration. 

 As the book beautifully argues, the results of the Paris Peace Conference, — major control by the British and French in the area, decreased power for the Arabs, encouragement for Jewish  immigration into Palestine with no agreement about what that might mean, were the precursors of present problems.  As the author states in the epilogue to the book “Certainly blame for all this (the unrest in the Mid East) doesn’t rest solely with the terrible decisions that were made at the end of World War I, but it was then that one particularly toxic seed was planted.  Ever since, Arab society has tended to define itself less by what it aspires to become than by what it is opposed to: colonialization, Zionism, Western imperialism in its many forms. This culture of opposition has been manipulated—indeed feverishly nurtured— by generations of Arab dictators intent on channeling their people’s anger away from their own misrule in favor of the external threat, whether it is “the great Satan”, or the “illegitimate Zionist entity” or Western music playing on the streets.”

 Read the book.  It will help you understand where we are.

 But I also found the book interesting because it portrays the differences and similarities of politics and war in the almost 100 year period since World War I.  In a sense international politics have not changed a great deal, despite the existence of the United Nations, increased globalization, and improved communication. It is still about perceived power and pecking order, although nations seem to be becoming a bit more thoughtful before they move from arguing to fighting.

 But we are slowly learning that our beloved “Western” theories of war no longer seem to work very well.  We in the U.S. should have learned that in our own Civil War, fought with large numbers of equally armed people confronting each other at close range.  But we didn’t, with the result that over 600,000 of our own people died.   World War I is now famous for its slaughter in the trenches and a settlement that undoubtedly played a role in causing World  War II. We certainly should  have learned it during the 20^th century.  Estimates are that 160 million people were killed in war during that period.  And what was accomplished? 

 The U.S. has been involved in several wars (police actions) since World War II, and as time goes on has learned to place less and less faith on fixed battles. The present fascination with “smart” weapons, drones, and cyber- war seems  to show an aversion to wholesale killing of non-combatants and armies of millions fighting battles of attrition.   Or maybe it just shows our love affair with technology.

 But unless strong institutions develop that are respected by all countries (international laws that are agreed upon and enforced) wars /police actions will continue. And our history in establishing such institutions has not been too impressive.  So what form will these wars/police actions take?  There are many opinions, but I am not sure anyone knows.  The “rules” for what we call traditional warfare are well known.  We are now in new territory.  Keep your eye on the U.S. response to Syria’s use of poison gas.  It may be a portent of the future.

Participation or Observation —Technology, sports, and athletics

 Some time ago I spent ten years chairing, teaching, and doing research in the Stanford University program in Science, Technology, and Society, which focuses on attempting to understand the interaction between the three.  I caught the habit, and think about this relationship every time I come up on an obvious change in one.

 The present Americas Cup races are a case in point.  The boats and the TV coverage are amazing. If you haven’t been watching, the capsizing of one of the Oracle boat six months ago is shown here. It gives  you some idea of the complicated and sophisticated nature of these boats. A long video of a race between the Italian boat and the New Zealand boat, which won the Vuitton cup in race #8 with the necessary help of GPS technology, since the race was run partly in heavy fog, is here (search through the video for the actual racing footage).

 The boats are at the edge, if not over the edge, of technology—hydrofoil catamarans with a vertical wing rather than a fabric mainsail, 72 feet long, 7 tons, 134 foot mast, and the latest in carbon fiber and titanium fittings, capable of 50 knots speed in a 15 knot wind.  But over the edge in cost, dependability, and skill and strength requirements for the crews.  They are huge, but relatively delicate, tending to get in trouble if winds are too strong or water too rough, but wonderful to watch—and apparently it costs on the order of 100 million dollars to participate in this event. 

 My wife and I probably will make the short trip  up to San Francisco and watch one or two of the races between the U.S. and New Zealand boat, but as in most major sports, we will miss the superimposed information and various up-close and overhead camera angles of the TV.  And I will be entertained, but not feel part of the game, since I will certainly never be on the crew of, or probably even ride on one of these superboats. If I owned a traditional sail boat, I don’t know whether they would inspire me or kind of spoil my fun.

I often wonder whether increasing technology and investment in sports/athletics and other activities is turning us slowly into a nation of watchers, rather than participants.

When I was in high school, our crummy cars were a big deal to us.  The “sport” of informal drag racing from stoplights, or on empty sections of lightly used roads, was part of the game.  I don’t remember any accidents due to this, because traffic was much lighter then than now, and our cars wouldn’t go all that fast. 

 There had been specially built cars competing for speed over a quarter mile on various desert dry lakes, but no precise timing available in informal competitions.  In 1950  an “official” drag strip was started in Santa Ana, California, and the sport of professional (pay to participate) drag racing began.  Originally it was possible to enter these races with modified production cars because entry fees were low, and car expenses consisted to gasoline to drive to Santa Ana. 

 But now, amateurs can’t play.  It once was considered noteworthy to get ones car up to 60 miles an hour in a quarter mile. Top dragsters are breaking 300 miles per hour in an elapsed time of under four seconds.  To put this in perspective, if a car traveling at 100 mile an hour passed the starting line and a waiting dragster and tripped the green light signaling the dragster to go, the dragster would catch up with the 100 mph car 1/3 of the way down the quarter mile course.  By the time the 100 mph car reached the half way point of the course, the dragster would have crossed the finish line. Another interesting number—the 500 cubic inch engine of a top fuel driver produces about 7000 horsepower during its brief run, more than the first eight rows of cars at the NASCAR Daytona 500.This kind of performance requires very high technical sophistication and vast amounts of money.

 If you never have seen an example, click here and turn your volume up.  It is a very short video of a race between two people,  John Force, who  is one of the all time heroes of drag facing and who has several kids now racing, and his daughter Courtney —a sweet father-daughter experience that my daughter and I cannot duplicate—too expensive and the technology is too sophisticated (also we would kill outselves).

 This is clearly a different world from my high school days.  After the sport became professionalized, and laws tightened up, street drags became much rarer, if not nonexistent in areas such as the one in which I now live. For a while,  I went to races to watch the action and be amazed at the equipment.  But then the cars became so fast that I quit going, because I couldn’t identify with the cars or the drivers any longer.  So I, like many people, ended up watching them on television or the internet.  Interestingly, my grandchildren and their friends seem to have little interest in owning or driving a car—  Perhaps because automobiles are so sophisticated that they are boring?  Certainly they are more difficult to modify than old ones, and it is more difficult to find and legally drive cheap old relative wrecks such as we had in high school.

The same thing has happend in athletics.  When I was in college, it was not such a big deal to play inter-collegiate athletics (especially in schools with crummy teams like the one I attended) because this was before the days of recruiting, sports scholarships, and big TV money.  I certainly was never an outstanding athlete, but I spent a lot of time playing basketball and other sports.

But now it is essentially impossible to “walk onto ” the varsity team of a major sport in universities such as Stanford, and equipment continues to become more expensive and facilities more difficult to find,   so people who are very good athletes are reduced to watching sports on TV or the internet and observing people wearing and using the latest equipment including vast stadiums and arenas outfitted with the latest communication equipment (and if in college enjoying an athletic scholarship or if professional a few million dollars a year), and try to get their exercise in gyms full of stale air and expensive high-tech equipment that looks like it should be in a rehabilitation center and gives us little sense of accomplishment or joy of being part of a competing team. Great strides have been made in arranging team sports accessible to kids.   Maybe we need to put more effort into amateur sports for adults, complete with less formidable financial and technological barriers to entry and participation.

 

 

 

 

Product Quality, Marketing/Sales, and Life—A Minor Diatribe

When I arrived at Stanford, eagerly trying to understand such things as creativity/innovation and business, I cooperated in a number of workshops with a wonderful marketing professor in the business school named Bob Davis.  He was a very entertaining guy and devoted to defining marketing as not only different than sales, but a higher calling.  This is an activity that is common in graduate schools of business, even though it is a difficult line to draw.  This was before the days of digital communications, big data, esoteric analytical techniques, and involvement of top level statisticians and psychologists.  I was fascinated by the field of marketing, which seemed to be striving to better match products and people. 

 Now I am appreciably older, comfortably well off, seemingly equipped with everything I want, and amazingly annoyed by the inescapable presence of marketing/sales. Granted that I am not a typical consumer, but I am finding it insulting to have postcards trying to get me to subscribe to magazines drop out of magazines I already subscribe to, seemingly every store I enter trying to get me to join their “club”, endless attempts to get me to fill out surveys so that they have more information on me, and a world blanketed with advertisements everywhere I look and awash in commercials in all media I enter.

 I know what I want/need, and resent people trying to add to the list or alter my choices.  Do they think they know more about me than I do?  I find the self-marketing attitude of many internet addicts somewhat obnoxious (even though I admit I was talked into social networking by my publisher, who told me that otherwise no one would notice my Good Products Bad Products book).  I wonder at my wife’s daily ritual of rapidly going through our surface mail while standing over the re-cycling barrel, trying to avoid throwing something important away with the overwhelming majority of marketing-oriented junk.

 Is there no end to this?  I realize that we  humans seem to love “deals”, and that it is possible to show that this marketing “works”.   The recent trauma that J.C. Penney went through in seeking to move from hundreds of sales per year to constant lower prices (which I thought made great sense) resulted in a huge backlash and the resignation of its president after only eight months in office.  So I was wrong. Of course an organization called One Million Moms turned against the company for using Ellen De Generes  as a spokesperson.  Not being one of the Million Moms, I can’t claim any insight on that one.

 And of course, look at our ability to create “celebrities”, political campaigns, and national propaganda.

 But how much does this constantly increasingly sophisticated and wide-spread marketing/sales actually benefit us and the economy?  It definitely makes jobs, but is the noise it creates perhaps greater than the good it accomplishes? 

 I find myself avoiding products and being against people whose marketing interferes with the quality of my life, whether through producing billboards that mar beautiful country or attractive buildings, commercials that interrupt things I am interested in, messages repeated so constantly that I assume someone thinks I am so stupid I don’t understand them, junk mail, internet ads, phone calls that are unerringly synchronized with my meals, questionnaires, coupons, clubs, and other tools intended to influence me in ways the producers of goods and services think are positive.

 I want good stuff, and can’t clearly see the correlation between the quality of the marketing effort and the quality of the product or person being marketed.  I wish we would just produce outstanding choices and let me choose!   

Product Quality—Tesla Motors and How to Make an Impact

Tesla Motors was incorporated in 2003.  One of my sons. a green engineer who loves small companies and working on exciting things, but who had not worked in the automotive industry, joined them in 2005.  I have therefore been following the company, I must say with increasing pleasure.  When my son joined the company, it consisted of people who were highly motivated to convince the world that electricity was a feasible and in fact very attractive way to power automobiles.  In fact, electrically powered automobiles had been a long ambition of Elon Musk, one of its founders, its leading investor, and now its CEO.

 Due to the dismal performance of attempts to start car companies (Fisker, DeLorean), I suspect many people thought they would not succeed, especially because the employees were more Silicon Valley than Detroit.  Even I thought they had picked a very large challenge, although certainly a worthy one. But the company is succeeding beautifully, and in the process changing opinions and values in a very conservative industry with very conservative customers.  Even now, there are rumors of troubles and problems with the cars and the company running around, but these are founded on love of large V-8 engines. the smell of gasoline, and on nostalgia, not on reality. Reality can better be seen by the awards and enthusiasm the model S is getting, by its sales and back orders, and better yet, by driving one.

Last Sunday my son took my wife and I out riding in a model S that he was acquiring some data on, and it is very difficult to criticize.  It is beautiful, luxurious, handles magnificently, reaches 60 mph in slightly over 4 seconds, and has a range of over 200 miles.  If you are not familiar with the car, here is its Wikipedia write-up.

 The only concern I would have if I owned one is that the digital opportunities are so lavish that one might worry about driver distraction.  The company is building rapid charging stations and battery swapping stations as fast as it can to augment the basic process of charging the battery through 220 volt house current. And it is exporting to Europe and about to start exporting to Asia (but built in California).

 The Model S is pricey.  But that is reasonable to expect from a radically new product.  The first Tesla product, the roadster, was relatively more expensive, since it was a simpler and a less luxuriously finished machine.  It received a great deal of attention, not only because of its energy saving, but also because if its performance, its striking appearance, and perhaps because only 1000 of them were made.  The model S will be followed by the model X, which will be a crossover (a combination of a sports sedan and a minivan) built on the same platform with the same performance. Following that the company plans to release what they call Generation 3, which is targeted to cost approximately half of the price of the Model S, and be aimed for mass market sales—one of Tesla’s original goals.  Musk promises that it will be consistent with the Model S —a unique, advanced, and exciting machine with no desire for gasoline.

 Say what you will, but in only ten years, Tesla has produced two sensational automobiles, is producing electric drive trains for other manufacturers (Daimler and Toyota), and has changed the attitude of many doubters of the attractiveness and desirability of electrically powered cars.  And it has done so through undeniably high quality products.

 

 

 

Product Quality: UAVs (Drones) —The Biggest Potential Nuisance Ever?

An interesting list compiled this year by the American Institute of Aeronautics and and summarizing activity on the design and production of so-called unmanned aerial vehicles, contains 960 distinct aircraft being developed and produced by 270 companies in 57 countries.  The corresponding figures two years ago were 675 aircraft. 226 companies, and 44 nations. There is clearly fast growth here.  If you would like to scan the list, it is here.    .

 An article discussing the situation is in the July-august 2013 issue of Aerospace America, a publication of the AAIA, and the link is here.

 There is obvious attraction to these machines for military purposes, in that they are relatively cheap, versatile (observation to weapon platform), and do not risk human crew members.  They are also capable of maneuvers and missions that humans cannot, or would rather not do. Of course there is a great debate going on about their use, because they can, and have been used as assassination machines, and such things are controversial in military and government circles, especially if one is on the short list of potential victims.

 But many spokespeople for UAVs predict that they will soon be more heavily used for non-military government and commercial purposes — enforcing the law, dealing with fires and natural disasters, and enforcing environmental rules, as well as learning more about transportation and people, advertising products, aiding contractors and landscapers in their search for work, and other such seemingly innocuous tasks.  If they are right, I hope a lot of early thought goes into regulating the things.

 A short-range low cost hobby drone can now be built for on the order of 1000 dollars, and a reasonably reliable one perhaps adaptable to commercial use for 10,000 dollars.  Higher production and advanced technology will continue to reduce the cost of many components, although  if  UAV’s have commercial application, increased capability will offset this.  And with the technology presently available, they will be noisy.

 I see them from the bias of a person who grew up in an area with low population and generally hates the noise of such things as heavy traffic, construction noise, powered yard equipment in general and leaf blowers in particular.  The latter are particularly interesting, because do we really need such things?    My neighborhood is seldom without noise from them, and I did grow up thinking it was normal for trees to have leaves under them, and if not acceptable, there was always the rake.  Stanford’s campus is rather remarkable, in that it has a large number of trees, but almost no leaves on the ground—and apparently few rakes.  We (mostly my wife) are the only people in our area that do our own yard work, which is healthy outdoor exercise.  To us it beats going to gyms, pedaling stationary bicycles, using weight machines, and inhaling other people’s sweat.

 I cannot help thinking of UAV’s buzzing around helping issue speeding tickets (we have an okay balance now between police and speeders),  checking to see if my yard is a fire hazard and whether I need a new roof, checking crowd size or composition, pulling banners advertising sales at the local car dealers, or just providing entertainment to people who want to check out the neighborhood or practice their hobby.  I must admit I am influenced by the fact that Stanford’s medical center helicopter often flies over my house, private planes do their barely muffled thing, and we do live close to the landing patterns of at least two major airports (although the heavyweights do seem now to be quieter than the private planes).  But my life would be more pleasant if early in the game, yard equipment had not been allowed to use two cycle engines, and better yet had been restricted to electrical power or manual labor.  Hopefully we will think ahead more carefully on UAVs If we aren’t careful, we are going to annoyed by technology we don’t really need. Let's think seriously about what really need UAVs for?

 But the good news is that we are still allowed to kill pests such as bedbugs, yellow jackets, mice, rats, moles, and gophers,  Maybe we will be allowed to kill annoying UAVs.  The problem is that unless they are incredibly miniaturized, their falling dead or dying bodies may hurt innocent people.   

Related articles

Drones to fly U.S. skies, FAA approves 1st civilian UAVs

Drones to fly U.S. skies, FAA approves 1st civilian UAVs

Product Quality—More Old Machines With Soul

In my last post I talked about two reasonably small machines I have restored.  I received a question as to whether I had restored larger ones.  Sure.  Many.  Here are photos of three.  The first is a John Deere Model 55 Harvester, produced in the late 1940’s.  A nice feature is that all mechanisms are exposed, rather than being hidden behind sheet metal, as is the case of modern harvesters.  Perhaps a bit unsafe, but you can see what it does by looking at it

 The second is an Austin road roller built around 1914 and weighing about 15 tons.  It is powered by a large single cylinder engine equipped with huge 5-1/2 foot diameter flywheels intended to smooth out the power to the wheels.  It was eventually replaced with a roller using a two-cylinder engine and smaller flywheels, a combination that could be better balanced and therefore have less tendency to leave ripples in the asphalt.  It is a work in progress and I am now planning to fit it with it’s
emergency brake and an a compressed air starting system.

 Finally the third is a Northwest crane, built in the 1930’s and capable of being used not only as a crane, but to move dirt and rocks when equipped with a drag line or clamshell bucket, or rigged as a power shovel.  I have the buckets but  unfortunately I am missing a winch and a clutch necessary to rig it as a power shovel, but I will eventually find (or make) them.

 The crane is a particularly interesting machine because of the mechanical gadgetry necessary to get all of the necessary motions (front and back travel and turns, boom swing and position, winch functions) out of a single engine.  It depends on a complicated collection of gears, clutches, and brakes, and operating it requires many more levers and foot pedals than the operator has hands and feet.  It is particularly challenging to work on, not only because of its complexity, but also because most of the parts seem to be slightly heavier than I can lift.  In a sense the older steam powered machines were mechanically simpler because they utilized a single boiler that fed steam to separate engines that powered the necessary motions.  But my gasoline engine does not require heating up, cooling down, or cleaning out when I operate it.

 Why do I do this kind of stuff?  I love old heavy machinery, and for me, finding it, learning about it,  restoring it, and fiddling with it has always been a terrific balance to being a professor. I am better at thinking esoteric thoughts if my fingernails are dirty.  I suspect Marian sometimes thinks I am weird for doing this sort of thing, but I suspect  she knows how really weird I would be if I didn’t. 

Product Quality and The Soul of Old Machines

I have just completed rescuing and restoring an old drag saw, which was the predecessor of the chain saw and used for logging felled trees.  A photograph is below, with my chain saw under it  for scale.  The drag saw does not cut nearly as well as my chain saw, but for those fond of old machinery, it has obvious advantages.  The next photo gives one a chance to compare the mechanical drive for the two.  How will I ever be satisfied with my chain saw again?

The functioning of the parts of the drag saw is obvious, and watching it in action is a
meditative (although a bit loud) experience.  It takes one back in time to a more colorful period of logging.  And having taken it apart, tended to its unwell parts, and reassembled and painted it, I have a detailed knowledge of exactly how it works, have gained a number of hours of therapy through working with my hands, have added to the beauty of our yard, and saved the saw for future generations.

 I do not have a “before” photo of this project, but I will attach three photos to show you a similar project—the resurrection of a Gravely garden tractor.  How can one start with the rusty, although it turned out surprisingly complete, pile of junk shown in the first photo and produce the beautiful functioning machine shown in the second and third without feeling happy?  And wonders of wonders, old machines in the “before” condition shown cost nothing.

 

 

 

 

 

I am not alone.  This is a compelling hobby, and an excellent escape from the internet.

Product Quality, Computers, and the Internet

I am still working on the Trillions book by Lucas, Ballay, and McManus that I mentioned in my last blog.  The major message in the book is that as computer capability and information on the internet continue to increase (which they will) we will hit a wall with our present approach to information and the internet; that our use of server-client channels, company owned seperate “clouds”, differentiated hardware and software, and retention of old and once adequate formats will result in death through complexity and frustration on the part of users. Not being a computer person, I am going to discuss this book with a couple of friends who are, before I comment on such larger issues.

 However, I must admit I resonate with many smaller examples of increasing problems in the book.  I am finding it takes more time to find what I want on the internet because of the increasing number of locations my search engine finds for me, and more and more redundancy and unsubstantiated opinion on the internet in general. I just looked up bed bugs on Google, and of course received 3,400,000 pertinent pages in 0.25 seconds.  But most of the pages I looked at (many fewer than 3,400,000) said the same thing (they don’t carry germs, they feed at night, they are flat, etc.) and suggested the same cure (tear up your bedroom, look for black bug poop, vacuum, etc.).  A few were more valuable than the others.  I would have liked to just be guided to the few.  Same results if you look up anything having to do with medicine.  Ten pages would be enough and easier to deal with in most of these searches. But more and more appear, since there is no barrier to putting them up.

 One of my favorite escape-book authors is a very prolific Pulitzer Prize winning journalist named John Camp, who writes under the pen-name John Sandford.  In  one of his latest books, Silken Prey, he features a couple of satisfyingly edgy computer experts.  The hero, a detective named Lucas Davenport, also has a computer background.  At one point Davenport, while trying to research some suspects, states “I really need to get background on them.  But all I get from Google is a lot of shit”.  One of his experts, a woman who goes by the name of ICE, replies “You know that old thing about “Garbage in, garbage out?”  “Yeah” says Lucas. " "Google is now the biggest pile of garbage ever assembled on earth”, ICE says.  “Give it a couple of more years, and you won’t be able to find anything in it”.

 When feelings are common enough to make it into a John Sandford book, they are common indeed.

 As to software,  some time ago I replaced a dead Mac, and the new one came with a OS 7 level operating system, which did not like my Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft office suite, resisted showing me the scan bar, and refused to offer up the two little arrows on the right of the page which let one move incrementally through a document or photograph.  It also offered me new “features” which I found unnecessary and complicated.  I went back to OS 6.8, which although perhaps not as “advanced”, was one with which I was totally familiar, more than adequate, liked the applications I was used to, and did not require that I acquire new habits and skills. I was reminded of the days in which Dell would for an extra $150 sell a PC with Windows XP, which Microsoft had announced they would no longer service, rather than one containing the newer Windows Vista.  They had lots of buyers.  I am still using my Mac OS 6.8 and happy with it, but soon something will make it inconvenient for me to do so, and I will be spending time learning how to do things I once knew how to do in a different way and cursing because I can't disable features I don't want.