James L Adams—People and Products

Nostalgia

My oldest son has some farm-land in the Sacramento valley in California.  He works at U.C. Davis and is very involved in sustainable agriculture.  He also grows vegetables a well as usual crops such as wheat, tomatoes, etc.  A year or so ago he acquired four work horses (Belgians – about a ton each) and set about integrating them into his farm.  It is close to the farm where I fiddle with old machinery, and yesterday I took a visiting friend up to check out the area.  Bob was spreading manure with his horses (who had produced it) and we stopped by to say hi and maybe give him a hand.  We could not stay long, but it was long enough to help him load a few loads into the manure spreader and ride around with him.

 My grandfather worked 20 acres of oranges with horses in Southern California jointly owned by my parents and grandparent  when I was a little boy,  but  I was so young I don’t really remember much about the horses. But visiting Bob with his horses made me remember much about farming when I was a kid.

 Work horses have some similarity to huge dogs.  They like to be scratched and petted and talked to, eat, and be around people.  But they have differences.  They have been bred to be unflappable, love to pull heavy loads, and are extremely well trained (they have to be, or the owner not only would have trouble doing his/her work, but would probably spend quite a bit of time recovering from bruises, broken bones, and other such inconveniences). 

 Of course the pace of horses is far slower than that of modern tractors. As a result, the pace of farming when I grew up was much slower and simpler than modern farming.  Not only do horses move more slowly, but horse drawn equipment is straight forward to understand and repair should it need it—no panic calls for the repair van.  And riding on the spreader behind the horses on a beautiful day was in many ways the opposite of working inside in a university.  Plenty of time to look at the scenery, think, listen to the birds, soak up the sunshine, and feel like something worthwhile was being accomplished. Although I was too young to become involved with my grandparent’s horses, I did get lots of chances to help spread  sweepings from Santa Anita racetrack stables onto the grove from the bed of the  family Ford Model B 1-1/2 ton truck.  Same thing – no critical deadline, no interruptions from one’s cell phone, no need to be highly visible in the world or have a great deal of money.

I certainly do not want to be a farmer, horses or not.  I fled the bucolic life as soon as I was able.  But I very much like farmland, farmers, and now work horses (although  I have no use at all for riding horses).  And it is interesting to me to recall how two families could at one time live off of 20 acres of citrus (a beautiful, fragrant, easy-to-raise crop that tasted good) when now 1000 acres is considered a small farm.  True, my parents and grandparents had little cash, shared one very used car, and were without such things as TV, computers, micro-wave ovens, air conditioning, and central heating. And since I did not live in town, I was not surrounded by people my age.  And I was definitely expected to do my chores.  But there were advantages to traditional country life, and I am glad my son can experience some of them. And I have to say, horse-drawn equipment was so simple and so well tested, that to me much of it is downright elegant. I finished restoring my McCormick mower (red machine in photo), and it is an example.

 

 

 

The Forklift—A Good Product

 When I began my hobby of restoring old equipment, I realized I needed to lift heavy parts and sub assemblies.  So  40 years ago or so I restored a 1950’s Clark Yardlift 40 forklift, which was free to me, since it belonged to a farmer friend, was not in running condition, and no longer had the performance he wanted.  It is a relatively small machine (capable of lifting a load of 2000 pounds ten feet in the air, tilting its forks over a range of 15 degrees, traveling 9 miles per hour forward or backwards, and weighing about 6000 pounds plus load.  Although it has inflatable tires up front, it is unhappy on rough or soft ground, and the forks have no sideways motion)

 But of course, like most fork lifts, it is extremely maneuverable, and since it is only 42 inches wide and 11 feet long with forks attached, it is consistent with my yard and other spaces where I work. It also has the advantage of being fueled by Propane, so it does not mind being unused for long periods of time.  When I want to use it, it reliably starts and does its thing.

 What do I use it for?  More and more as my wife and I age.  The photograph (taken by a fascinated neighbor) shows my wife at low elevation and I attacking our front hedge.  We hide behind ten foot tall hedges, which are a pain to trim from ladders.  However, with my wife on the pallet, along with a small generator and an electric clipper (in her capable hands), no mere hedge can slow us down.  Similarly I can carry anything weighing up to two tons wherever the forklift can go, and I can’t remember ever being able to lift two tons myself.  In fact, I can probably do more aided by my forklift now than when I could leap tall buildings with a single bound, but was trying to live without a forklift.  And, of course, it has unlimited kid-entertaining potential (see next two photos.

 Unfortunately, forklifts are considered an industrial product and not designed for people messing around in their yard.  And perhaps there are not that many people doing so any more.  But I would think there would be a market for a cheaper, lighter, yard model, at least for those of us who are aging but still like to move heavy loads around, trim smaller trees, and work on second stories of houses.  Of course, there are many boom lifts (cherry pickers etc.) used by painters, tree trimmers, utility people, and other “professionals”.  But they are expensive, limited in load lifting ability, and one can get into trouble lifting large loads too far from the base.  And worse yet, for people like me, it is very difficult to find one that is free because it is broken. (I am under pressure go find one again, since my foot slipped on the clutch in our last hedge trimming session, almost dumping my wife in the hedge – cherry pickers are controlled by the person in the air)

  So I consider my forklift, even thought it is now 60 years old,  an outstanding product, which has become a friend that helps me live the life I choose.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Life and the Distractions of Technology

In 2006, Matthew Crawford wrote an article in the New Atlantis magazine entitled “Shopcraft as Soulcraft”.  It is here.  My friends and I who are believers in the benefits, if not necessity, of working with the hands on tangible objects, loved it.  He followed with a book of the same title in 2008.  I have never met him, but think I should because I have been working on a similar book (working title Making, Fixing, and Tinkering) for several years. I am far from a full time writer— partly due to necessary hobbies involving working with my hands— so I don’t know when I will finish.  But I have suspected since I saw his original article in the New Atlantis that we think along similar lines.

 Now I am sure of it, because I just encountered an article he wrote in the Sunday Review Section of the March 8, 2015 edition of the New York Times entitled “The Cost of Paying Attention”.  The article was based on another book of his that is forthcoming entitled The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction.  The article from The New Atlantis is here.   I am excited about reading the book when it appears, and will comment on it in a future post.

 The article in the Times has to do with the constant distractions we have from such things as television, print, digital devices, and marketeers.  He uses the example of the difference in feelings and ability to think or focus on specific activities in the lounges associated with upper class flying, and the general waiting areas, which are papered with advertisements and filled with noise and other distractions.  His final short paragraph summarizes his thoughts: “I think we need to sharpen the conceptually murky right to privacy by supplementing it with a right not to be addressed.  This would apply not, of course, to those who address me face to face as individuals, but to those who never show their faces, and treat my mind as a resource to be harvested”

 To me, an example of distraction is social networking..  When I retired from active professoring in 1999, the internet and mobile phones and computers were not nearly as central to life on the campus.  But realizing that I was not yet dead two or three years ago, I figured that I had better catch up to our culture, and that social networking was a part of it.  So I joined Facebook, Twitter, and Linked in.  I linked to a few close friends, and was immediately overwhelmed.  I had not realized the capability of  these “services” to find people I knew in the world and harangue me about linking to them.  Neither did I realize the number of people I did not know in the world who wanted to link to me for reasons of possible employment, support for graduate study, a source of contacts, or simply to better brag about their number of “friends”. 

I enjoy writing posts to this blog, and sending it to a relatively small number of people by way of twitter and facebook, because it keeps me thinking about issues in which I am interested.  But I do an embarrassingly poor job of responding to comments, adding information to my sites,  accepting new “friends” and “contacts”, or otherwise following the etiquette of being linked to hundreds of thousands of people.  I am impressed with people who do so, although at some point it seems to require an assistant, if not a staff to keep up with all of this communication.  But I have more rewarding projects to do than I will ever finish, am constantly finding new activities that are rewarding, and I certainly don’t want an assistant or staff. Social networking, although seductive, I consider to be an attention pirate. And even e-mail has joined the list.  I seem to be spending more time making filters to trash information I don’t want than I do dealing with messages of value to me.

 Advertising is another evil.  There are of course the ads that interrupt TV programs, and the pop-up ads on the internet.  And I should apologize to the New York Times, because a couple of weeks ago I wrote a gentle rant against their “new” format for the Sunday magazine.  I could not stand it.  It was mostly advertisements for the usual luxury goods, and almost impossible to read because of out of control graphics —distractions.  To my amazement and delight, the very next issue had moved back toward its traditional format —back to a reasonable weight, articles whose continuation could be reasonably easy to find, graphics that did not disrupt the flow, and a reasonable amount of advertisement.  Perhaps the New York Times was simply making a quick chunk of money by selling ad space to the people who usually advertise in their ridiculously thick supplements on such things as Fashion and Travel, which consist most of ads.  Hopefully they were influenced by a large number of readers like my wife and I (and friends) who were thinking of canceling their subscription because of the issue that contained their “new” magazine format. 

 And what’s with grocery stores?  Next time you enter a “super market” pay careful attention to the advertisements.  The good news, is that your mind will soon refuse to do so.  The bad news is that if it did not, you would undoubtedly run into a shopping cart containing a couple of babies and being pushed by a shopper on their smart phone, either communicating with their spouse on what to buy or texting their friends, and end up in a hassle. 

 I am eagerly waiting for Matthew Crawford’s new book. Meanwhile I will re-think my interaction with social networking.

Quality for Free

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

Minimalism,Organization, and Stuff

I seem to have become the home maintenance person for not only my own home, but for several of my friends and neighbors.  I also have several hobbies that require large amounts of materials and numbers of tools (new restoration project in photo at left).  To make matters worse, I grew up in a small-farm area at a time when the “great depression” had removed the little cash that was around, and was firmly taught that one never ever even considered throwing anything away that might have some use in the future, even if that use required modification.  So I have a lot of stuff.

 I often get subtle and well meaning advise from people who love me that I should have less stuff, and that I would  profit from better “organizing” it.  I thank them, but I am happy with my stuff, and “organization” varies from person to person.  I have probably mentioned my favorite theory which states that there are at least three approaches to organizing—by subject (what is it?), date (when did it happen?), or spatial (where is it?).  I am a spatial type, but “what is it” (filing cabinets, labeled boxes) people seem to dominate, especially if their stuff is not visible to the eye.  There are even consultants who help their clients dispose of stuff, and I am happy for them if they are successful, but they are not welcome in my life.

 This photograph shows the radial arm saw in my shop.  Notice that the table for the saw is clean.  That is necessary.  But the space behind the wall and the wall itself are simply full of things such as tools, tape, etc.  People who approach situations such as this by such things as painting outlines on the wall with hooks placed so that the tool, or whatever, can be placed on the outline think I  could improve the organiztion of my shop.  I thank that is admirable.   But this is my shop, and I don’t want to  take the time to place the tool exactly where its outline is.  I just want to get it off the table, and  hanging it on a nail is easy,  and I can find it rapidly because I can see it.

 This approach of being able to see stuff does perhaps require more space than if it is put into labeled boxes (drawers, etc) that are stacked.  But a tiny bit of thinking can help with this problem.  Take plumbing fixtures and associated pipes,
hoses, etc.  Since my house, and its sizeable yard, are equipped with 100 year old plumbing and wiring that tend to like frequent repairing, and since I mess around with old steam engines, orchard sprayers, and such, I have lots of pipe fittings and related objects around.  So I have taken to storing them by temporarily putting them together into hopefully interesting combinations and finding various places to keep them.  When I want something, I can instantly see what I want, remove it, and put it to use.  A few photos at right and below show some of these, which tend to be in corners either in my home office, my Stanford office, my basement, or my yard.

The final one, with the hoses attached, is my favorite.  It is in my yard, and almost always stops people who are walking around the yard, so that they can try to figure out its function and how it works.  It’s function, of course, is to act as a place for me to store pipe and hose fittings.  That’s all it does.

I  have found that I can smuggle great amounts of stuff into my house yard, and shop in a way that causes many people (including me) to think that it is “interesting”, instead of thinking I should either get rid of it or put it in a box. If you need/like large quantities of objects,and people you  love are bothered by that , keep them off balance by making the objects more “interesting”.  One person who loves me is Marian, my wife.  She also loves to make mobiles.  I am subtly encouraging her to make mobiles from some of my stuff.  Then it will hang around, be considered art, and I can cannibalize her mobiles if I need it  (although I may have blown my campaign if she reads this post). 

 

 

 

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.

Technology, Longevity, and Hubris

I have been off the web for a few days, so yesterday I was catching up on my reading.  Three articles I read that had to do with potential “improvements” in the human condition caught my eye.  Two of them were in the January 11^th New York Times Magazine section: the cover story by Gareth Cook, entitled Mind Games (here), and an article by Robin Henig, entitled Death by Robot (here). The third article was the cover story in the January 9^th issue of the Palo Alto Weekly, written by Joshua Alvarez and entitled After the Last Death (it is here).  The first describes a heroic and clever attempt to produce a complete map of the connections between the neurons in a human mind.  The second deals with the extent that robots built to do such tasks as fight in wars and take care of the sick can and should make moral choices.  The third is concerned with aging and the length of the human life span — if  you would, engineering humans.

 We are on a major run on technological sophistication and application due to the rapid increase in the power of digital software and hardware, with its attendant ability to gather and reduce huge amounts of data, combined with the resources put into research, development, and company start ups because of the potential to make money.  This has resulted in great optimism about the future, especially on the part of people who have become wealthy and famous by riding this wave.  But contrary to the wishes of technological determinists, the outputs of technology are not always good for society.

 I have always been a believer in a long ago book entitled Normal Accidents, by Charles Perrow, that claims that there will always be accidents in complex systems, and that if we can tolerate the cost of them (airplane crashes) we should go ahead with the system, but if we cannot tolerate the cost (nuclear warheads on intercontinental missiles) we should not build the system—or at least build it very cautiously, and think  hard about possible failures as we do so.  We humans are a complex system we should think hard about playing God with our species, at least until we prove that we can cure such  trivial problems as automobile traffic jams.

 The Gareth Cook article mentioned above is about an obviously brilliant scientist named Sebastian Seung, who is one of a group of people who believe that our memory is made up of interconnections between neurons, and if we could understand the process and the result, we would have the contents in the mind (information, emotions, values, etc.) in the form of data.  In other words we would know everything there.  Granted this is a huge project, but Seung believes it can be done over a few lifetimes, and has clever ways of using games to encourage massive numbers of people to be involved in the process.  But shouldn’t we be thinking about what that might mean, and what we might use it for?  How would we “read” this map.  Who would do so?  It is great science, and would give us great insight into the mind, providing we could figure out how to read it.  And this insight would  probably lead to major new insights on treatments for unacceptable behavior and brain diseases, and human brainpower,   But probably people would also consider it a road to a new form of mind control,  surveillance, or building a super-human species (silicon life?).  Good?  Bad? 

 As to moral choices by robots, should they make them?  Some people might like their “care robot” to shut off life support at a certain point.  Some would definitely not.  Should military robots make decisions about how much “collateral damage” to cause?

And then there is the question of life span.  The Palo Alto Weekly article contains comments by people involved in improving the health and happiness of aging people, obviously a topic that will become even hotter as the hordes of outspoken Boomers continue to become older (interesting that this is the “Don’t trust anyone over 30” generation, who resented being dominated by people in the age group they now populate).  Some of the people interviewed in this last article feel that the present life span will continue to slowly increase because of better knowledge about living and eating well, but this is good providing  that medical care is accessible by all, and that treatments for age-related diseases such as dementia, diabetes, and cancer continue to improve.

 But a couple of the people interviewed are firmly convinced that we willand should  learn to radically increase our life span.  One of them, Joon Yun, a physician who is  now president of Palo Alto Investors, a Venture Capital firm.is behind the Palo Alto Longevity Prize, a $1 million science competition aimed at ending aging by improving the body’s ability to restore itself as it becomes older.  He speaks of a 150 year life span.  But according to the article, he believes that it is theoretically possibly to attain a 1,000 year life span, or even more, by eliminating natural aging and death from internal causes biy learning to maintin the ability of the body to repair itself that it has in the early years. As he states, “We’ve got the technology to hack the aging code and end aging.  Question  is not “if” but “when” we want it to happen”.  

 In fact, there is an increasing amount of activity in the San Francisco Bay area in longevity (Ellison Medical Foundation, Calico (Google), AbbVie, Buck Institute). But drastically increasing life span is an incredibly disruptive concept, socially,  and should receive quite a bit of thought as well as research money.  There are many downsides.  What would happen to populations, motivations, economies?  Would you have liked to be under the thumb of your parents more years?  Would you like the wealthy to have time to accumulate even more money to influence politics?  Would you really like to put in the work  to build a completely new or several careers (since you would be pretty bored with your present one)?  Would you like even more years to “keep up with the kids”?

 Many of my friends are dying these days from what used to be called old age.  Their last years are not often wonderful. In comparison, my father and grandfather’s instant deaths from massive heart attacks while still wellequipped with their mental and physical facilities have a certain attraction.  If life span is radically lengthened, such aging factors as  dementia and frailty need to be dealt with— perhaps first.

 I personally vote with the people in the Palo Alto Weekly article who went with the “work-hard, exercise, have fun, eat right, and don’t try to live forever, because you won’t” philosophies. We are wired not to want to die, but we all will, and the length of life is more a matter of what is in our memories than how many days have passed. 

I differ from some of my friends, in that I don’t exercise enough and probably eat and drink too much to live as long as I might.  But as one of my physician friends (who does not like repetitive exercise, but is in his 90’s and is in great mental and physical shape) calculated, an hour a day exercise every other day in a gym for 50 years is 9,125 hours, or 1,140 eight- hour days, 0r 228 forty- hour weeks, or the equivalent of  4-1/2 years of digging ditches as a union member, which is a lot of potential play time and doesn’t guarantee one would live 4-1/2 years longer.  And eating and drinking is fun.

 And finally, I think it will be a while before we “hack the code”.  Decoding the human genome has proven to be only the tip of the iceberg.

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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.

 

Product Quality and Time

Marian and I are extremely fortunate in that we seem to have everything we want in life.  But this causes certain difficulties when times come in which people traditionally trade presents.  Therefore we seem to have reverted to less serious gifts.

 Marian has two dressing modes.  One is levis and work shirt for her gardener and home life with me.  The other is very tasteful and sometimes striking wear for public appearances.  For her last birthday I found a prize in the window of the Stanford bookstore. I initially didn’t know what it was. I finally figured out it was a bright red blanket with sleeves, all covered with various Stanfordish images. It was so awful I instantly bought it for her.  It accomplished its purpose, which was to cause her to laugh a lot and give me a bad time about how men could never properly buy clothes for women.

 But then time passed.  She reads a lot in bed, and found that it was very easy to throw the thing over her and put her arms through the sleeves to  hold her book/pad.  More time passed.  She became very fond of it, and defended it strongly whenever I gave her a hard time about it.  And now, you know how little kids have their “blankey” (often a raggy remnant of something that made them warm and comfortable (and still does))?  Marian has made the awful sleeved blanket into an adult blankey.  Photo proof below.

When I gave it to her I think we would have both agreed it was a product of exceptionally low quality.  But now?  I would certainly hate to try to take it away from her. 

 But this is not unique.  The photo below shows my “every day” shoes.  I occasionally get comments like “those shoes are old and coming apart.  My retort is “but they are my old shoes.  I recently noticed a lady walking an old and beat up dog and staring at my shoes as I passed her.  I hoped that she would say “why don’t you get some new shoes?”  Unfortunately she didn’t, because I would have said “why don’t you get a new dog”

  It is perhaps unfortunate these days that we live in a society where everything is disposable, and people do not keep products as long as they once did, because I think one grows to love products over time, assuming they serve one well.  I had my first car many  years, and although it was not a very good car, I wish I still had it.  As I said in a previous post, I am restoring my father/son’s 1966 Chevrolet pickup, and even though my 2011 Toyota pickup is technically a much finer machine, I am eager to revert to the 1966.  Although I suppose my new OSX version 10.10 is a better operating system than the OSX version 10.6.8, I liked the old one better.  It was an old friend, and we interacted well.  I suggest that interaction time effects one’s perception of product quality, for better or worse. If a product serves you well, it eventually becomes a blankey.

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.

Projects, Working with the Hands, and Happiness

I have occasionally extolled the many virtues of working with the hands, so what am I up to now?  I am still working on restoring my vintage (1920’s) John Bean orchard sprayer. It has been a challenging project, because it required rebuilding a rotten wooden tank and providing it with a missing cover and other pieces of hardware, re-building the engine, a great deal of straightening bent pieces of metal and fabricating missing ones,  and de-rusting parts and painting.  Fortunately, I had previously re-built the pump, not knowing that a friend would someday give me the wagon, the tank, and various other rusty, but essential pieces..  I also had the engine on hand, but it is still not ready to run.  At one point a valve had stuck so thoroughly that the rocker arm that actuated it had broken.  And the wondrously novel carburetor still needs re-building.  But other than that it is in good shape, as can be seen from the third photo below.

 I love doing stuff like this, and this project is coming along well.  There is a good bit of plumbing and building of new parts remaining, and I have a ridiculous number of other projects under way, but the sprayer will be ready to go by spring.  And if it is not, I don’t have an orchard anyway.

 The photos below show the tank and the front of the machine as of now, (the truck in the background is a reasonably preserved 1955 Peterbilt, and is next in line), Marian,  my ever supportive wife (as long as I don’t neglect things she wants me to do) standing in the back of the rig, and the engine and pump.  The fourth photo is the engine before I began working on it, as evidence that it needed a bit of work.

Not only is the restoration satisfying, but it reminds me of the past, since a few of these machines were still in use when I was a little kid.  On taking the partly-rotten tank apart, I found that the inside surfaces were covered with a strange white material that had worked its way into the wood.  My first reaction was to go over them with a belt sander.  But fortunately I realized that pesticides in those days (before regulations) contained such things as arsenic, strychnine, and what were then called mercury salts, — a  timely realization, because undoubtedly I would have sanded them sans mask.  But maybe I have an immunity, because when we kids got too close to the rig, the men doing the spraying (this was before the feminist movement) would spray us.

Creativity and Boxes

 Thinking outside the box is a phrase that has been around a long time and is often used to describe creative thinking..  I first began to study theories about creativity in the late 1950’s, and I don’t remember it being so prevalent then.  And I don’t remember who used it first.  But at present it seems to be a very popular metaphor for creativity. 

If box is used to describe the normal thinking of an individual, that is probably okay.  But if it infers dodging or ignoring constraints, forget it.  We are subject to endless constraints in life, many of which are not negotiable.  In fact, thou shouldn’t commit murder, and the odds of you inventing a perpetual motion or anti-gravity machine is low.  So when someone asks me how you think outside the box, I consistently ask what box, which at least gives them something to think about.

 Constraints come from many places—the limits of the human mind, successes and failures in the past, knowledge, managers, company strategies,  the need for funding, the need for social stability, economics and politics, human resistance to change, retaining a livable environment, and so on.  I personally divide them into six categories in increasing order of  difficulty in overcoming them—“having and selling ideas” blocks (as in my ancient Conceptual Blockbusting book, group blocks, organizational blocks, social blocks, biological (inherent) blocks, and feasibility blocks (orbiting thrill seekers is okay, but taking them to visit a black hole is not).

 Such blocks are  interesting, in that if we did not have them, we couldn’t make it.  Our brains are simply not powerful enough to operate without constraints.  Creativity needs to be sensitive to control, and innovation to tradition.  When I was giving a lot of talks about creativity and innovation, parents would often ask me how to “raise” their children to be more creative.  I would first of all tell them that the problem was so difficult that nobody knew the answer, but I always thought it was important to build the right size box around them. If the box is too tight, there is no room  to explore and experiment.  But if it is too loose, it becomes so difficult to focus and achieve satisfaction from success, that perhaps the response will be to flee to something less creative (playing computer games?) in order to get feedback and a sense of accomplishment.  So, they would ask, how big should it be?  I could again say “no one knows”.

 I used to work at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which designs, makes, and flies robot spacecraft to the moon, planets, and other space objectives.  They are complex, must be finished on time, and result in pain to all concerned if they fail to complete their mission.  When I was there the Lab was organized by technical specialty (mechanical,  structures, communications, propulsion, power,  scientific instruments, etc.).  Missions were suggested by JPL and NASA, and backed up by a feasibility study.  After this, assuming the mission looked reasonable, a preliminary design was put together by a group that would quickly come up with a number of possibilities and converge to the most favorable one.  This group consisting of a representative of each technical  group and a few people who were known for their knowledge, experience, and creativity, and led by the project manager.

 fter this preliminary design was found to be acceptable to all, the technical groups went to work.  But there were typically on the order of 1000 people involved in such a project, and although there was a great deal of interaction among the engineers in different disciplines (long employment, motivated people), 1000 people cannot agree on the many issues involved in completing a complicated product rapidly enough to complete it in a reasonable time.  So the system was divided into subsystems according to the groups, and each subsystem was assigned interfaces with the subsystems of the other groups.  These ranged from size and weight to bolt patterns to electrical connector types to generated magnetic fields to power requirements, to vibration sensitivity to thermal characteristics to…..etc. etc. etc.. The definition of these interfaces was one of the more critical and creative tasks during the design of the spacecraft.  Each group then designed and built to these interfaces, so the whole complicated system could eventually be manufactured, assembled, tested, and launched on time and with confidence.  And so that the final project would be balanced, and not reflect the syndrome shown in the dated but classic cartoon oriented toward the design of airplanes and drawn by an airplane designer named C.W. Miller during World War II that is shown below.

  In a way, these interfaces outlined boxes in which the groups were constrained.  It was possible to argue for changes in a group’s  box, because senior people called system engineers were available to lead the resulting negotiation.  But the boxes were honored, because any group thinking outside of one of these approved boxes would screw up the whole project.  Inside their boxes, people were encouraged to be creative, assuming that their creative solutions were reliable and functioned better than the traditional ones.  Perhaps this would have been called thinking inside the box.

 

 

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.

Quality, Economics, and Jeff Marrick

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

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

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

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

 

Procrastination or Prioritization?

There was an interesting article by Anna Della Subin in the Sunday Sept 28^th New York Times entitled “How to Stop Time”, that was defending procrastination.  It is here.  I not only agree, but feel that procrastination is a good form of setting priorities, because many of us, partially due to computers and the internet, are tempted to take on more tasks than we can do well.  Procrastination is a good way to ensure that the lower priority tasks will be delayed, and eventually passed over.  Also, in these days of focus on efficiency and productivity (as usually measured by quantity of output rather than quality) it is often desirable to slow down.  The mysterious component of thinking sometimes called incubation requires time—the first idea is not necessarily the best one.  Achieving high product quality also requires time.  And of course, so do families and social lives.

 As an engineer, I am a believer in being a late adopter of new products in order to allow time for bugs and production glitches to be fixed, and service people to get used to them.  Also to allow time to see them in use.  I definitely don’t wait in line to be the first with a new Apple product.  In fact, I am still procrastinating on owning a smart phone at all, because I don’t want to either surf the internet or be at the beck and call of large numbers of people when not in my office, and most people seem to be seduced into letting their smart phones usurp increasing amounts of their time.  I fear I would be one of them.

 There was another article in the same paper entitled “Kicking the Facebook Habit”, by Richard Morgan, with the subtitle “It’s had its moments.  But I think I’ve broken the spell”. It is here.  It is about escaping the increasing time demands of social networking. A good way to disengage from burgeoning social networking is to procrastinate on entries and responses.  It may seem rude, especially if you are proud of your visibility, but if your friends are good friends, they will understand.  Maybe they will follow your lead. 

 I seem to have followed a path in life that results in more e-mail messages than I can handle, many of them from people I’ve never met seeking advice about engineering as a career, colleges, admissions criteria, how to become more innovative, etc.  I procrastinate on answering them, and by the time I get around to answering, I focus on those I remember as being written by people who might actually benefit from what I have to say.  I never get around to answering the many from overseas who seek financial support for graduate studies and clever ways to get admitted to highly rated U.S. engineering schools, and that is okay because the same message has gone to dozens, if not hundreds of other professors. 

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. 

Smart Technology, Social Inertia

The Sept 6^th, 2014 Technology Quarterly report in the Sept. 6th-12^th issue of The Economist was unusually optimistic.  It spoke of many future accomplishments in a very positive way—the possible successes from the biohackers movement, wondrous devices for improving medicine due to the dropping cost of and access to digital technology, decreasing energy usage by heating individuals, rather than spaces, suspended animation allowing more time for surgical miracles, increasing integration of digital technology into automobiles shortening the time to driverless cars, new air traffic control systems allowing pilots to choose their own direct routes, safer and cheaper methods of demolishing old buildings, improvements in anti-missile systems (and nuclear warheads}, and the rapidly nearing option of genetic improvement of humans. 

 Clever, yes, but are societies smart enough to use these things well?  If we are going to Improve humans, who makes the decisions as to what “improvement” means — The free market system? Government? And who gets it—Wealthy individuals? Everybody?  The race for systems to defend against long range missiles has been going on since Reagan’s ill-fated “star wars” system, (expenses since 2010 are nearing 100 billion dollars) even though there seems to be a consensus that it is easier to build missiles  and decoys than shoot them down. Are we going to forever keep up this arms race, even though it becomes increasingly expensive and creates increasingly unusable products? And when will the makers of these life changing developments  realize that creativity needs to be balanced with control, and innovation with tradition and existing skills and knowledge in the public?.

 One short article in this report is entitled "The Language of the Internet of Things".  It is here. It speaks of a future in which devices increasingly communicate between each other, allowing helpful services like smoke alarms that would notify fire departments of the location and nature of the fire and automatically unlock doors, and appliances that would coordinate the various components of meals and deliver them at a pre- programmed time.

 The article speaks to the necessity of these Things speaking a common language.  Seems obvious.  But unfortunately, history and the present “information revolution” show a long period of competition before this happens.  Even now there are several separate groups of companies seeking to develop this language, but although they is cross talk among them, they are going their own way.  In fact, the final sentence of the article is “Given the huge variety of connected devices, and no doubt the desire of some firms to keep thing proprietary, it is possible that no single standard ever emerges”.

 Earlier in the article, the author speaks of the difficulty of deciding upon this language, partly due to the unknowable nature of future products.  A sentence that caught my attention in this discussion was “People have to get used to smart devices and installing regular software updates even, perhaps, for ovens”.

 It will be a cold day in hell before I install software updates for an oven.  In fact, I am not even sure I want my stove oven communicating with my microwave oven. Brilliant innovators in the digital world should worry a bit about how long the majority of people are going to put up with this continual “upgrading” that often obsoletes perfectly adequate software and hardware, and with the relatively trivial but annoying differences in hardware and software products from different venders that seek advantages in marketing and protection from patent-law suits.  As to yet another sentence in the article, “The real problem may turn out to be not a lack of standards, but too many—and disagreement over which initiative to pursue”. “Too many standards” is a complicated oxymoron and a situation that is presently wasting countless hours of people’s time in now relatively simple cases such as use of the computer.

 Clever individuals are bringing these technological options to us.  Are societies smart enough to demand that they improve the quality of life and free up time, rather than further complicating our existence?  

 

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.

The Hay Squeeze, a Good Product

I was visiting my older son on his farm a couple of days ago, and he was facing moving some 750 bales of hay into his barn from a large stack of them a hundred yards or so away.  He has three large Belgian work horses, and they consume a great deal of oat hay.  Granted this is more than a year’s supply, but he had planted more oat hay than necessary, sold some at a high price, and wanted to keep quite a bit inside of his barn, where it will last at least a year without being attacked by mold and other such things.

 When I was younger, I would occasionally come up against bales of hay, usually to make myself archery targets and such things, since my family had graduated to tractors and no longer kept horses.  I still move them around occasionally, but it is not easy, especially in the hot sun.  A well packed bale can weight upward of 100 pounds, and hay hooks can hold one, but the result takes a fair amount of muscle, especially if the goal is to stack them.

 Fortunately, Bob has a friend who owns a hay squeeze, an overgrown combination truck and fork lift, that squeezes the bottom of a stack of bales, picks up the stack, and moves it either onto a truck, to some other location, or in this case, into Bob’s barn.  The operator position in the hay squeeze machine can either face the bales he/she is moving, or turn 180 degrees and drive it a highway speed down a road—hence  a combination truck and fork lift, although a fork lift slides  its forks under a load, and a hay squeeze does not need to do this, depending on the squeeze on the bottom bales in the stack to move it. The photograph below shows Bob’s friend and his hay squeeze at work.

 Since his friend operates his hay squeeze for a living, he is highly skilled at using it.  In fact, if the stack is uneven, he simply squeezes various levels, jiggles them around, and straightens the stack.  And he places the stack within an inch or so of where he desires it, because the squeeze machine can move the stack a bit sideways as well as front and back.

I was fascinated watching this operation, because I could not help imagining moving 750 bales from the pile to the barn on a hot summer day in the Sacramento Valley with nothing but a pair of hay hooks and my pickup.  The hay squeeze grabbed 60 bales at once, and completed the job beautifully in well under an hour. Wow!

 Of course, moving the bales by hand would have made work for someone. The hay squeeze is another machine that obsoletes people.  But since I had a bit of experience moving bales of hay on hot days, I found it difficult to mourn the loss.  Bob and I could perhaps have moved the pile in a couple of days, but would have required a great deal of beer and naproxen sodium.

Tools That Change Too Fast

A couple of days ago, I spent a couple of hours in the morning helping my wife get her computer to do her bidding, and a couple in the afternoon building a new top for the wooden tank on the antique orchard sprayer I am restoring.  The computer problem was somewhat typical.  In the past, she was able to scan text to her computer from her printer, save it as a word document, and then edit it — the miracle of OCR.  Then the system quit working.  The scanner denied that it was connected to the computer (after insultingly telling us that we should check to make sure the USB connector was plugged in —we know that much—and to load an up-to-date driver for the printer).  But if it was working in the past, why not now?  Obviously  because someone was screwing with the software to “improve” it.  Before I did that, I tried a few other things.  Her system scanned  jpeg documents okay and transferred them to the computer.  Why not text in an editable form?

 I could not make sense out of it, so I downloaded the latest driver for the printer, but that still did not solve the problem.  So I phoned an IT friend, and he couldn’t make sense out of the problem on the phone, so he dropped by for a personal inspection.  After what I considered a number of wizardly moves, he found some code in the machine that allowed my wife to scan the text and transfer it to the computer in the form of rich text, which could then be converted to Word and edited.  Two hours of frustration, and my wife was back where she had been in the past. But that did not include hours of frustration for her before she asked me for help.

Switch to making a top for my wooden tank.  The photo shows the result.  About the same amount of time was required to build it as I blew away on the computer problem, with pleasure from the process and pride when I was done.  The difference?  I used a table saw, a radial arm saw, and an electric drill to drill holes and sink screws.  My grandfather taught me to use a table saw when I was eight or nine years old, and they have changed little since then.  I encountered my first radial arm saw in a junior high school wood shop course, and had used an electric drill for many years before then.  True, use of electricity to sink screws was rare then, but the principle can be easily extrapolated from using a screwdriver.  My point is, that the tools did not constantly need upgrading.  It was possible to learn to use them, and then set about accomplishing things with them—not spending time becoming comfortable with the latest release.  And certainly not having the tools lose ability they once had.  Such things as computers and printers are tools.

I quit using Firefox a couple of years ago when it seemed that a new version was coming out every couple of weeks.  The Firefox people seem to have calmed down now, so I am back using it because it is a good browser (assuming they quit telling me that cat videos are a new form of communication —not among my friends!).  I am feeling the same about many aspects of computers.  I  have a computer-sophisticated friend who is still using Windows XP.  He knows the system cold, and it does everything he wants it to.  I am still using Apple OSX version 10.6.8  for the same reason, as I am holding onto applications I have used for years, and will until I am forced to move, at which time I will resent the time and effort I will need to acquire equal facility with the new and “improved”.  Tools that do the work should hold still and let us develop and use our expertise with them.  Think of the hammer!

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.

 

 

 

Product Quality and Capitalism

 In the New York Times Digest last Monday, there were three articles together on the business page that caught my attention.  The first was entitled "G.M. Disconnect between Managers and Engineering". The original article as it appeared in the newspaper is here.  It is concerned with defects that are detected in products at the engineering level and either do not get to the level of the organization that can solve the problem, or do so and are not dealt with, usually either for reasons of time or money.  This is neither new nor newsworthy, but probably we need to be reminded of it once in a while.  Engineers want products to be as perfect as possible.  At “higher” levels of the organization, schedules and profit loom large.  If people are killed (the ignition switch mess at GM, the Challenger explosion), or if the product is highly visible and potentially dangerous (the Three Mile Island shutdown), the media grabs hold of it and the impact is large.  This is especially true if it is found that management knew of the problem before.  It is not likely that product defects can ever be completely banished.  But managers should perhaps be more aware that eventually,  the cause of such things will be discovered, and the cost to the company will be far larger than if they were solved when discovered.   Unfortunately, the punishments at higher levels often seem to be proportionally less than those at the working level.

 The second article, entitled "Japan Seeks to Squelch its Popular Tiny Cars", available here,  concerns effort in the Japanese government to inhibit the production and ownership of keis, small cars that are particularly appropriate to the crowded road conditions,  high fuel prices, and relatively small trip lengths of Japan.  The government is apparently concerned that these very popular vehicles (40% of new cars sold in Japan last year were keis) are distracting the Japanese automobile industry from  more profitable larger cars.  The Japanese people, who have become used to the convenience and low cost of these small cars are rightfully annoyed.

 The third article is "Music for Nothing, at Least While it Lasts" (here).  It focuses upon the increasing amout of services and entertainment available over the internet and television either free or for very low cost (not counting the monthly payment to internet service and TV providers and the time spent blotting out advertisements and junk).  The concern is that this “boon” will be at the cost of the quality of the material.  It has an interesting and revealing comment from the musician Van Dykes Parks that appeared in The Daily Beast concerning a song he recently wrote with Ringo Starr.  He stated that in the good old days, the song would have provided him “with a house and a pool”, but at current royalty rates he and the former Beatle would make less than $80.  I must admit that I would like to finish a couple of books that I think could make a lot of people think about such things as creativity vs. control, innovation vs. tradition, and quality vs. profit, but probably won’t in the present scene of information overload and the need to market one’s own work.  Writing books is hard work and requires a lot of time.  I am not looking to spend even more time publicizing them through endless hours on the internet and doing book tours, especially since the book-reading population is decreasing.

 These three articles caused me to continue to wonder about the effects of unbridled capitalism on the quality of products.  Obviously high quality products should not injure or kill people.  G.M.’s safety problems are being blamed on its “cost culture”, a corporate attempt to minimize costs and therefore maximize profit and competitiveness—clearly good things in a capitalistic system.  Similarly, high quality products should fill people’s needs.  Perhaps cutting down on small cars in the country might protect export profits by further encouraging work on larger ones, which seems like a good capitalistic thing to do.  But, shouldn’t the Japanese people have the types of cars that fit their culture?  The area in which I live, would certainly benefit from much smaller cars.  It presently contains so many “normal” size cars (often containing one person) that they neither seem to move around so well any more, nor find places to park.

 And if people depend on high quality music, information, and entertainment from the internet, TV, and other media, and the media depend on that to attract us to their advertisements as well as on the money we pay them directly, where does the money come from to allow the people who produce such material to develop? Will the quality hold up?  Where will the future outstanding musicians come from?  Listening to the music floating up from the dormitories below us, drum machines seem to be increasing their presence.  Groups using them are more affordable, because drum machines do not require any practice or particular talent to deliver their rhythms and may be adequate for college dances.  But hopefully they are not a portent of future music, because listening to a simple and unvarying repetitive rhythm too long is a good way to be driven mad.

Fire: Good Product or Bad Product

When I was growing up I loved fire.  I am afraid I still do. I certainly know the downside of fire.  It has always been dangerous to life, limb and property. As a child, while playing with my home-made match shooter (an exciting device constructed from two spring clothes-pins), I once accidentally set fire to a wind-brake full of dead and oily Eucalyptus leaves and stored oil-filed smudge pots, and still remember my terror at the result.  A couple of years ago the house in Southern California my grandparents lived in and in which my mother and I were born burned down. Southern California, where I lived for many years, is famous for combining “wild” fires with homes (fire is necessary for some of the local plants to release their seeds).  And one of the main reasons I left the area in the 1960’s was the air pollution, then caused mainly from non-regulated cars and trucks.

 But fire was both comforting and exciting.  Our house was heated by a fireplace.  My father fortunately arose before the rest of us, and when I awoke in my frigid room, my first act of the day was to grab my clothes and sprint through the house to the fireplace, where I could don them in the warmth of the flames.  My grandparents cooked their food on a wood stove, and on cold days my grandmother would happily sit with her feet in the oven and read. And we kids would rake the above-mentioned Eucalyptus leaves into large piles and burn them, breathing in the exotic smell of their smoke and seeing how long we could stand dangerously close to the flames. 

 On weekends the owner of the local food and hardware store would take us up to the foothills in his truck and we would build a fire and bake weenies and other food.  As I grew older I was trusted with the forge and blowtorch and learned the magic of soldering. welding,  and working hot metal.  When World War II started, a large steel mill was built near to our house, and I was able to go watch the coke being pushed out of the ovens, the blast furnaces tapped, and the molten metal poured into ingots and then rolled into sheets and structural forms. And even smudging the oranges, a necessary but expensive and difficult job, was exciting to me (the photo is of my father in the light of the burning pots). Later I was to become a fanatic back-packer and grew to love open camp fires. While in the Air Force I had the opportunity to experience the fury of afterburners and the majesty of rocket engines.  While working in aerospace, I had an opportunity to witness one of the Apollo launches from close-up, certainly one of the largert and most concentrated fires of all time.

 But, the age of "open" fire may have peaked after somewhere between 500,000 and a million years of use by us and our predecessors.  This is due to vastly increased populations and population density; appreciation of the finite supply of fuels and their value for usages other than burning; increased sensitivity to damage to our environment, and the development of alternate sources of energy.

 And our perceived need for safety and controlling fire seems to grow.  The county in which I live has increasingly discouraged wood fires because of particulate emissions, beginning with burning leaves, and now neither allowing fireplaces to be built into new houses, nor allowing existing fireplaces to be lit on an increasing number of days.  In fact, after a large number of “spare the air” days last winter, I gave up and succumbed to a gas log, even though I once vowed to leave the area if wood fires were outlawed.  Gas logs are convenient, and are somewhat reminiscent of a wood fire, but to me not nearly as satisfying.  Leaves and trimmings are hauled away to be mulched, and my farmer friends in the valley are sharply constrained by no-burn days and restrictions on such things as stubble burning in the fields, since the air in the California central valley is fast losing its purity.  And industry is certainly feeling the need to further control processes involving fire.

 Oh well, I do like clean air. And there are always fireworks (for a while), and I still  have my oxy-acetylene welding rig. 

 

 

 

  

 

The Hand and Product Quality

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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.

 

The Phone Tree, A Usually Bad Product

  Most phone trees, typically computer generated to guide your call to the proper party in an organization, have the following flaws (suggested strategies to combat them in parentheses):

 1.    1.  The organization is subjecting you to a computer, and doesn’t care enough about you to connect you initially to a person. (Let the organization know that you will deal with them if a human calls you)..

2.    2.  The phone tree is too long or has too many branches. (Continually chant “operator, agent, human, help” into the phone until the computer gives up and connects you to a person.

3.None of the choices in the tree seem to have much to do with your problem. (Use above chant).

4.  The computer will first tell you that it is sorry, but there are an unusual number of calls waiting, and don’t hang up, because we very much value talking to you.   You are number 13 in line, and the wait will be approximately (10—20?—30?—50?) minutes. Or the computer will switch you to a phone which is either not answered or connects you to a tape apologizing that no one is there, but your call will be answered as soon as possible.  (hang up and seek an alternate vendor).

5.     5.  The phone call will actually be answered by a human, but they work in a  phone answering service and will only know the answers to "the most frequently asked questions", none of which also have anything to do with your problem. (Politely point out that they are wasting their ability to charm people and speak flawless English, and should demand a raise).

6.     6.  Your call is either immediately answered by a nice person who solves your problem, or you are rapidly switched to one of same. (Compliment them extensively, get their name,  that of their supervisor and the  president of the company, and send them a rave letter, with copies to their boss, the president of the company, and Barak Obama.  If you are wealthy, send them a gift of a round trip airplane ticket to Hawaii).

 Interesting, isn’t it, that there are apparently a large number of smart and personable young people who can’t find jobs, and yet organizations seem to want to replace people capable of pleasing their customers and improving their reputation with computers?  A couple of years ago the Stanford registrar’s office changed from a number of people in an office with an open door, who were willing to help students, faculty, alumni, parents, and whoever, to a system that illustrates several of the above problems – and Stanford has a lot of money and is expensive to attend.  Go figure.  But in the University's defense, if you call the main  number, a person still answers.

 I spend reasonable effort in finding organizations that have smart and helpful people answering calls, or even better, identifying the direct phone number, e-mail address, or other way to contact such people, as well as striking up a mild acquaintance with them . It is worth the effort in decreasing the frustrations in life as well as solving problems. Perhaps the most valuable contact is a highly placed administrator who takes care of the president of the organization and with whom you have become a personal friend. 

 Life is too short to be hassled by computers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

Fastenerphobia (Job's disease) and Disapointment with Japan

 My wife Marian drives a 2004 Acura TSX, a sporty little car destined to become a classic.  She takes very good care of it.  But recently, she broke a tail light while backing into a tight spot.  Clearly it needed to be replaced— a small problem, thought I.

 

  Although only a small piece was missing, (see the photo) these days one must buy a “tail light assembly” rather than a lens, but I found one on the internet for “only” eighty dollars (It would have cost twice as much at a dealer) I ordered it, waited two weeks for my notice that it was not in stock, and ordered one from another company, which arrived in a couple of days.

 

 Upon examining the wounded tail light, I found no screw heads that would allow me to simply remove the old one and install the new.  When I opened the trunk, I found a cover behind the tail light, and upon removing it found three nuts.  I removed them, which was not easy because the opening was neither large enough or aligned enough to go straight in with a socket wrench,  the projecting screws required an extra long socket, and of course they had been tightened to heroic car-assembly-plant torque.  But to my surprise, after much tugging and swearing, the assembly would not come loose from the car.

 

 Internet time.  I found a large number of unhappy posts by people that shared my problem, and unbelievably, it was necessary to remove the  back bumper cover, which covers not only the bumper, but a large part of the back of the automobile, and among other things covers two more bolts that needed removing to get the tail light loose. This took  much wallowing in the dirt and number of different tools, but I finally loosened it enough to change the assembly, (see photo here) cut my hand  replacing the bulbs I had removed to get the old assembly free, and put the car back together.  The happy result is at the left.    But unfortunately, the process of replacing the tail light slightly lowered my very high opinion of Japanese automobiles.  Tail light lenses break.  Why should one have to re-move large body panels to replace them—or even taillight “assemblies”

What has happened to the once happy sport of maintaining an automobile?  I changed this light because I do love to maintain cars, and I don’t want to think of what a dealer would have charged for the part plus shop time at $125 an hour. But  observe the two photos below, one of the tail light from a 1966 Chevrolet pickup, and one of a tail light and a back up light from a 1975 Jaguar XKE (pardon the dirt, they both belong to me and are working classics.)  Note the screws that can be easily removed to replace the lenses (originally available for a few dollars at most).  Isn’t there a certain functional elegance there?  What’s going on? incidentallly, notice that the Jag rear fender does not need a plastic cover over it.

One of the many apocryphal stories one hears about Steve Jobs is that he once summarily fired an   employee who showed him a prototype in which a screw was visible.  Apple products such as the  iPhone are clearly designed to be taken apart (at some expense) in an Apple store when, for instance, a new battery is needed.  In fact the internal screws are specially designed so that ordinary screw drivers do not work (a screwdriver that does plus new battery are available on the net, as well as instructions for separating the pieces of the shell.)  Hiding fasteners seems to be part of the new sleek visual look.  I agree it can be beautiful, but the beauty pales if something quits working and one wants to take it apart.

The final photograph shows the back of my old favorite Samsung phone.  A quarter turn of the screw (done with almost any thing including a coin), reveals the battery and the SIM card, just lying there waiting to be removed and replaced if desired.  It also doesn’t mind being dropped once in a while and being stuffed into my pocket.

 

 

 

PRODUCTS SHOULD BE DESIGNED TO BE DISASSEMBLED, AS WELL AS ASSEMBLED.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stanford Good Products, Bad Products course, ME314, 2014

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

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

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

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

 

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.

 

The Beauty of the Old

  This is a Bosch jigsaw, a wonderful machine.  It allows careful control, holds many blade widths, has variable speeds, and can be used on ceilings, walls, floors, or metal and wood, on a bench, in a vise, or leaning against a wall.  It is fairly new (for me) and one of my favorite tools.

 The photo below is of a Barnes foot power saw, made in the 1870’s and presently in my living room.  It likes only one type of blade, goes only as fast as one can pedal, and will only cut wood that is lying on its table.  It belonged to my grandfather and was used a great deal not only by him, but also by my mother and me—especially me, since when I was a kid I got great pleasure out of making goofy things out of wood.  When my grandfather died, I restored it, and later, among other things,  happily made replacement pieces for the large wooden picture puzzles kids use in their early years. In fact I was in great demand by pre-schools to do exactly that.

   Now why is this saw in my living room, and the Bosch saw not.  The Bosch saw is well designed, attractive, and a joy to use. But the Barnes saw is BEAUTIFUL, both aesthetically and functionally.  People can’t resist pedaling it, with the result that I have put a small piece of plastic tubing over the blade so they can’t saw off fingers.  Its finest hour might have come during a visit by a wonderful woman named Jing Lyman, the wife of  the then president of Stanford.  Sadly, her memorial service is tomorrow, and the world will miss her.

 Jing was a powerful woman, who apparently when young had wanted to be a carpenter.  In those days, the profession was hoarded by men, but she did wood-working for a hobby and worked as a shop teacher.  When she visited, she was wearing an almost ankle-length rather voluminous dress, but insisted that I find her a piece of wood so she could try the saw.  I did so, and she climbed onto the saw and began peddling.  At the time I had it well greased.  Suffice it to say that her dress became so wound up between the greasy wheels and belts that it suffered terminal damage in the effort to free her. The saw now has no grease, and long dresses are not allowed.

  Much of the saw’s beauty comes from the graceful castings of which it is formed.  Someday I will calculate the stress in some of the members, because they seem surprisingly thin for the loads they carry—almost delicate.  Yet when it was built the knowledge to do that was not available. The curves in the spokes of the pedal wheel are to keep the wheel from deforming as the spokes cool and shrink after the hot metal is poured into the mold during the casting process. But the final effect is elegant indeed. The table is a very nice piece of hardwood, as are the arms that hold the blade.  There was enough paint on the saw when I acquired it to duplicate the color and the striping.  I think even my wife is proud to have it in our living room.

  It must be possible to make visually interesting machines, even if they are electronic.  I laughed when I read about Apple suing Samsung for using round corners on their cell phones like they do.  Do screens and keyboards necessarily have to show no individuality, and can people patent a form so bland, though elegant, as a cell phone?  The final photo is of a Blickensderfer Number 6 typewriter—perhaps the ultimate in small typewriters.   Obviously you wouldn’t want to carry it in your pocket, nor is it particularly elegant, but you should agree that it is more interesting to look at than your present key pad.

 

Engineering, Math, Science, and Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Concept 2 (all kinds of quality), and the Good Products Bad Products Course

The Good Product Bad Products course continues on its way.  I will continue to report on it.  If you want a preview, if you go to the left sidebar, slide down to “archives” and you will find a series of dates. Click on the word “archives” and you will see more, and if you look at posts I wrote during Stanford’s winter quarter (early January to March) for the years 2012 and 2013, you will find information on the course for those years.  This year will be similar. In fact, if you are new to this blog, and have not looked through the archive, you might enjoy some of the other posts that are there.

 The first lecture last week was devoted to the process of doing field research by use of video and the case of a very successful company,.  One guest speaker was Scott Doorley,  who has a large amount of media experience, showed examples, and talked about story telling and use of video.  The second speaker, Peter Dreissigacker, was a student during my early days on the Stanford faculty, and received a master’s degree in the Product Design program , which was at the time my academic home at Stanford.  I remember him well, as a large, happy, talented,  idealistic person, an Olympic class rower, and an obsessive drawer of nice pictures.  Upon graduation Peter, his wife-to-be Bari, and his brother Dick (also  Olympic rower) went to Vermont, and bought an old run-down farm.  These were the hippie days, and moving to Vermont not only placed one in beautiful and not overly-populated country, it was considered a cool thing to do.

 Their dream of working a couple of days a week as bartenders or in equivalent jobs, upgrading the farm, skiing and rowing, was interrupted by the need to make money.  They decided to make oars and sell them.  For  various reasons, they decided to experiment with fiberglass, and after the usual experimentation and contemplation, worked their way up to oars reinforced with carbon filaments, at the time new on the market, but seemingly made to order for strengthening oars.  Their present oars are far beyond wood.

 The result was not only a very successful company, but one that receives an outstanding grade as to be a place to work—as Peter said, if you want to live in a small town and if you like rowing.  Their web page is here.

 The company began as a family company, and still is, although it has 60 employees (a large family).  It provides oars to a very large fraction of the teams competing at international competitions and to top school rowing teams, It also makes perhaps the world’s highest quality ergonometer for rowers and others looking for exercise devices.  The ergonometer has become a feature of well equipped gymnasiums,  It not only provides excellent exercise, but it has spawned a large following who compete remotely and in winter gatherings in areas where it is not much fun to row on top of the ice, using their scores on the sophisticated electronics in the machine.  Finally, they produce exercise machines for competitive skiers, or if you are a skier, for the gym or home.

 Why are they so wonderful?  It is a company built on life-style, not profit or growth.  It is after perfection in its products.  It has kept a focus on its markets and listens closely to its customers.  It benefits from extremely long employment and devoted employees, and Peter and Dick and Bari are wonderful people and take very good care of them.  It is also very proud that although it has only 60 employees (a size where it is possible to operate informally and in which everyone knows everyone else), it provides two or three hundred other jobs in the area by outsourcing to individuals and small companies to produce components for its product.  No China—just Vermont.

  It is always a real upper to me to visit the company, or to have the pleasure of Peter and Bari’s company.  Happily we will get to see more of them, since one of their daughters, Marlo Kohn, runs a lab for “makers” (open to any student and providing tools ranging from 3d printers to sewing machines) at Stanford,  and she is on the verge of  having a grandchild for Peter and Bari.  In the midst of the Silicon Valley with its manic desire for growth and money, Concept 2 looks like a very good business model indeed.  If you are ever in their area in Vermont visit them, especially if you are interested in starting a company.  You might consider basing it on what you love, being patient in becoming wealthy, staying away from venture capitalists, and hiring people who love what you do.

  Peter Dreissigacker is still a large, happy, talented, idealistic person who rows disturbingly well for someone his age, and not only still draws nice pictures, but includes his sketches in his PowerPoint presentations along with text and photographs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

Two Views of the Internet

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering Math) In Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Mechanical Failure of Electrical Things

 When working in aerospace, I at one time was the supervisor of an electronics packaging group.  Packaging in this case meant the mechanical design of electronic equipment —structurally, thermally, chemically, whatever— and the group was tasked with figuring out how to cut the weight from electronics subsystems and improve integration of the system.   When first asked to do this, I was reluctant, because electronics never were my main love.  But what I realized more and more clearly as I worked on the job, is that although solid state electronics components themselves are surprisingly reliable, (once they have gone through a bit of usage) in use they fail mechanically, often because of mechanical inputs, either from the environment or from people assembling, testing, and maintaining them.  Even if this is not the case, if electronic devices are expected to do physical work, they need not only an input (which can be from an electrical device), but an actuator which allows them to effect the physical world.  Such actuators are often a combination of electrical and mechanical (solenoids, electric motors, etc.) and exhibit traditional wear and anger at contaminating particles, and require such things as lubrication and controlled loads and temperatures. So it was an excellent assignment, because we could work on challenging mechanical problems that neither the electronic nor the traditional mechanical engineers were spending much time on.

 I also became much more aware of the fact that given enough complexity and usage, electro-mechanical systems will fail.  And there is a good possibility that they will fail at some point if they are not designed with the humans who produce and use them in mind, because not only do things break, but people (and even robots) screw up. I have many memories of examples of this—a flight spacecraft, built and assembled in clean rooms, showing clear signs of one of the technicians having eaten a sandwich containing tomatoes over one of the electronic packages—a contract technician at the Cape actually putting two male connectors together enough to blow up a science instrument on another flight vehicle (thought to be an impossibility).

 I mention this, because I suspect that the seemingly miraculous success of digital devices, both in performance and profit, has caused us to give less attention to this.  Perhaps it is not only because electrical engineers would just as soon not work on mechanical problems and vice versa, but also because technology has been changing so fast that many devices are essentially thrown away in a relatively short time (Apple hopes it is a year).

  We hear more and more about autonomous cars.  But they certainly have not been in use long enough to have good data on their behavior when operated and maintained over long period of time by typical people. I tend to keep my automobiles for 10 to 15 years and 150,000 to 200,000 miles.  I expect to have minor problems with them in that time period and buy them replacement parts, but not to have a failure capable of killing me. And so far they have done that, partially due to the many years of experience and testing we have invested in them.

 How many autonomous cars have been run in traffic for even 200,000 miles?  One of the last two “incidences” my wife and I have had with cars was due to a neighbor backing rapidly out of a tree-and-fence lined driveway into my innocent wife, who was driving down the adjoining street. If the cars were autonomous, would its sensors have been able to detect the other car? Which one would have stopped?  Both of them?   The other was due to an almost new front tire delaminating while in heavy traffic moving rapidly on a very high bridge.  This required a bit of quick decision making with little data.  Neither of us had experienced such a thing.  We had to decide when and where to get off the road, which was difficult because there was no turn off lane, and neither of us was sure what was happening to the car and whether it would continue in its present bumpy and veering mode, or go into a more catastrophic one.  I am told that autonomous cars will be better than we are, but would they know what to do in uncommon failure modes such as this?

 As another example of electrical failure over time, my previous pick-up was mechanically both reliable and fairly rugged, but as it acquired miles, it began to have failures in electrical components such as coil packs and solenoids.  By the time I gave it to my brother’s farm after 125,000 miles, I had given up on many of its push-button operated features.  The buttons would push, but the features wouldn’t operate.  To make matters worse, accessing the faulty actuators was sometimes a nightmare (the rear-most coil pack and spark plug, the window and door-lock actuators), with the result that I looked hard to find a replacement vehicle with a minimum of such things.  I succeeded and love my new one (even though it is too big) because it has very clever long-used devices such as cranks on the windows and keys to lock and unlock doors.

 And then, of course, there are the interactions with electrical systems that grossly overestimate the capability of humans.  An example was the almost catastrophic Three Mile Island nuclear plant shut-down many years ago—the report of the study committee (the Kemeney Report) portrays a very believable situation in which operators trained only in normal conditions (the way we learn to drive) made all the wrong responses when behavior became abnormal.  Would computers have done better?  Only if all failure modes could have been quantified and predicted.

 Such mechanical weaknesses in electrical systems can be found at all levels.  Stanford University has many buildings and large conference and class rooms, in which people who not only work at Stanford, but come from all over the world, give talks.  I am one of them, and the room scheduling is done by a combination of a large computer and people who represent individual fiefdoms (and no, they do not always coordinate or agree), so I am often finding myself in rooms I am not familiar with.  These days, of course, people tend to use large numbers (often too many) graphic images, usually in some format such as Power Point, and usually stored in their powerful portable computer, because these rooms tend to be equipped with built-in projectors, but not computers.  The rooms do tend to be equipped with what are called smart panels, which typically contain  the necessary electronics, buttons, switches, and lights to integrate one’s portable computer, microphones, lights,or whatever with the room. they are certainly simple compared to one's computer and the equipment in the room.

 But my impression from using them, is that these panels are all different, usually without good instructions on how to use them (instructions are usually written by IT people who assume they shouldn’t be necessary and the rooms do not come equipped with these IT people) and unlabeled wires, (often coming from under the rug or other mysterious sources). Some screens are controlled by a switch, and others automatically when the projector is switched on, window covers may or may not be synchronized with the projector, and if one’s computer is on the odium, it often blocks the buttons, switches, and lights.

  If I have never used it, I routinely visit the room I will use the day before my talk, and typically spend 15 minutes to a half hour figuring it out, sometimes failing and looking for someone who uses it often.  Even if I have used it, I arrive at my talk ridiculously early because undoubtedly some one else will have used the room and left it in a different state than it was in the day before, especially if they have been able to physically access the projector.  People still don’t seem to realize how the computer and the projector interact, so they fiddle with the manual projector controls, which of course are also not standardized.  I often end up with several VIP types trying to help me figure out the AV system (often to their consternation with little success), but I guess it introduces an interactive and informal atmosphere to the session.

 I used to complain mightily when the standard slide projector (the Kodak Carousel) was almost universal.  The remote was often missing, slides could drop out if the retaining ring was not securely fastened to the drum, etc. etc. etc.  But at least the projectors varied little from year to year and did not attempt to interact with all other equipment in the room, and after one learned their foibles, one could show slides almost anywhere. I almost want them back, because I have a sneaky feeling that such things as “smart panels” will not be standardized in my lifetime, and of course, they are not smart at all.

 

 

 

  

 

The internet, Distraction, Addiction, and Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

 As I mentioned in a couple of my previous posts, there appears to be a tsunami of books critical of the internet under way.  I am setting about reading some of them, since being at Stanford and in Silicon Valley, I live among the priests and generally hear only praise for it and its potential.  To suggest that the internet is becoming less useful because of the overwhelming and often low quality if not useless) information it contains is somewhat like wandering through the Vatican wearing a sign proclaiming that there is no God.  But I am not an internet atheist.  In fact I use it a lot for reasons ranging from doing research for writing (even though everyone is aware that using URL’s as a source is rather ridiculous, because the content in them changes and they go away), through watching videos my friends tell me to watch on YouTube (and I do), to finding tomorrow’s weather prediction,   And oh yes, I have this blog , and am on Twitter, Facebook, and Linked in, although I at this point I am not exactly sure why—so maybe I am an agnostic.  More about that in a later post.

  I recently finished The Distraction Addiction, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang.  More details can be found under recommended books at the left side of this blog.  The author is a scholar-writer-researcher-futurist, who as the title of the book indicates, is extremely interested in the importance of attention and the cost of distraction on getting things done and enjoying life.  He draws from sources ranging from cognitive psychology to Buddhism.  I very much enjoyed the breadth of the book, which can be inferred from the subtitle “Getting the Information You Need and Want Without  Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Losing your Soul”.

 The author has a good sense of humor and a good writing style, but this is not a comic book.  And it is far from an anti-internet rant. The author and his family are obviously eager and informed users, even bonding by playing computer games together after dinner.  But instead it is a book of reasons why it is necessary to consciously control ones attention and limit distraction in this day of ever increasing opportunities to escape into endless communication, videos, surfing, and other such activities.  The book is both fun to read and thought provoking.  It reminds us that there are tremendous resources and very bright people tempting us toward seemingly being busily, if not frantically,  involved with each other and the world, but maybe neither accomplishing as much as we might that will affect ourselves or others in the longer term, nor taking proper advantages of other ways to enjoy life   The author calls his approach contemplative computing.  He not only reminds us of the traps of existing with the internet, but suggests ways to better avoid them, including such things as digital sabbaticals and taking advantage of software such as Freedom,  He clearly feels that we should be more mindful of the mind, as do I.  The internet is a formidable attack on our very valuable, but already limited attention.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

The Circle, the Internet, and People

 I have just finished a novel entitled The Circle, by Dave Eggers (see book list on leftt of page for more information).  I have been waiting for someone to write a book like this for some time. It is a sort of Brave New World/1984 that is based on digital technology.  The Circle is a mythical future company that is a combination of Google, Facebook, Apple, and such other companies.  It has bought the competition and is a near monopoly.  The troika that built it and control it consist of the idea person who was responsible for the advances in technology that made it possible, a person who believes fervently that the human race is best served by total transparency and interaction among all of its members, and finally a person who believes in large companies with large profits—all of them sure they are performing a great service for humanity.

 The story hinges around a young woman named Mae, who accomplishes her dream of being hired by The Circle.  She is a combination of naivete, talent, and ambition, and the book covers the changes in her life and values that result from the progress in the company in accomplishing its goals.  As the company grows, it  attracts more and more people into its beliefs and services, which include great break throughs in such things as miniature video cameras and data handling, with the result that personal privacy is drastically reduced, and  people spend the majority of their time  interacting and communicating over the radically improved equipment and network that is available. Finally, everyone has the ability to watch, listen to, and communicate with everyone else —pretty much total transparency and no privacy.  There are hold-outs, including Mae’s parents, her ex- boy friend, and finally, one of the three founders, but they will obviously not succeed in remaining free of this brave new world. I would have been with them.  I found the book chilling.

 When our children were young, people would talk about tree people and phone people.  When tree people had a problem, they would climb a tree and think about it.  When phone people had a problem they would proceed to call all of their friends and talk about it.  My wife and I and two of our sons were tree people, our daughter was a phone person, and as my wife would say, our other son would climb a tree with his phone.  Now we  have social networking people and non-social networking people. 

 Two or three years ago I began dabbling in social networking, partly because my publisher convinced me  that I had to or people would not know my Good Products, Bad Products book existed, and partly because social networking is somewhat a function of age, and since I have a relatively large amount of that, I wanted to make sure that my resistance was due to me, not my age.  I am now sure.  And I feel in good company.  A few  years ago Don Knuth, a professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford , and a person I like and respect told me that he was going to cease communicating on e-mail to make more time for thinking about important problems and create a bit more spare time in his life.  He is a hero in the field (He is the author of  “The Art of Computer Programming”, a classic set of monographs beginning in the 1960’s and still continuing, and a god in the area of fonts) and I would be surprised if he has taken up social networking.

 There is a discernible increase in criticism of the internet.  I mentioned the books of Evgeny Morosov in a previous post, and he recently wrote an article published in the October 28 edition of the New Yorker Magazine entitled Only Disconnect, with the subtitle Two Cheers for Boredom.  It is here.  In the article he decries the disappearance of free time to think and ponder important problems among internet addicts.  He mentions three books I have not read; The Present Shock—When Everything Happens Now, by Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist and consultant, The Distraction Addiction, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a futurist trained as a historian of science, and Ambient Commons—Attention in the Age of Embodied Information, by Malcolm McCullough, a professor of design and architecture at the University of Michigan.  I have ordered all three and will let you know what I think of them when I read them. Incidentally, Morosov also admits that he is now the  owner of a safe with a built in timer in which he can lock his smart phone and internet cable.  Such is the power of the habit.

 I am perhaps hypersensitive, watching Stanford students live a life of constant interruption and escape via their smart phones and the internet.  They think they are multi-tasking.  But I read the literature, and know that they are just kidding themselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Entrepreneurship—An Answer to Everything?

The media is feeding more and more on entrepreneurship, an activity of which we in the U.S. are proud, and to which we have been recently looking more and more in order to solve our economic /employment problems.

 The  Schumpeter article in the October 12-18 2013 issue of The Economist entitled Not Open for Business (it is here) speaks of widely known weaknesses in the U.S. (as seen by entrepreneurs) that slow us down: lack of adequately trained human capital; immigration laws that make it difficult or impossible for many people from other countries who have played a major role in entrepreneurship in the past to live here; government regulations and taxes; and difficulty of raising money, in light of the perceived increasingly risk-adverse nature of venture capitalists.  As the article points out, start-ups created only 2.7 million new jobs in the 2012 financial year, as opposed to 4.7 million in 1999.

 But an article in the October 14, 2013 New Yorker, entitled San Francisco Transforms the Country, Again (here), paints a different picture, and one to which I resonate because I work in the university.  The article speaks of younger people (20’s, 30’s) who are well on their way of building an entrepreneurial culture based on small amounts of funding (thousands or tens of thousands instead of millions) from sources varying from crowd sourcing, to friends who are doing small scale angel investing based on successes they have had, to enterprises such as Y Combinator (here). 

 But the entrepreneurs discussed in this article are looking for life-style and individual freedom, rather than building great companies or manufacturing outstanding products.  Nor are they thinking of fast growth and large profits. They are taking advantage of the low cost of developing software and the increasing business services available on the internet to help form and run a company and market a product. But how important of a product?  An example of a  particular person who is admired in the article for his rewarding life style is a member of Sidecar, a group who sell people rides around the city in their private cars.  He lives in Tiberon (north of San Francisco), and drives to Palo Alto, (south of San Francisco) each day to play golf.  As he passes through San Francisco he checks into Sidecar, picks up enough rides to pay for his trip and golf, and heads to the links.  The person who admired the golfer during the interviews envisions the future as “everybody is a private contractor, snatching jobs out of the ether, working for one another as they please”.  Entrepreneurial perhaps, but hardly creating large numbers of jobs and big profits.

 People in their 20’s and 30’s (and teens) seem to be considering entrepreneurship because it is in and cool these days.  But they do not have families or large expenses yet.  When questioned about this, the San Francisco young entrepreneurs either have not thought about such things, or reply that they guess that they will eventually work for a large established company such as Google if they need to.

 And although entrepreneurs do not think they will fail, the majority of them do.  The San Francisco group seems to be willing to support those that do from their community, but even those start-ups that succeed, grow rapidly, and produce larger profits do not always offer the founder a wonderful life.  A good read on that topic is entitled All's Fair in Love and Twitter in the New York Times Magazine of October 13, 2013, and is here.

 

 

Creativity, Space, and Neatness, Part 2 - The Open Office Fad—Enlightenment or Delusion?

Stanford University has fallen prey to the “open office” philosophy recently, with sometimes questionable results.  In many of the new buildings, including the one in which my office is located, professors are allowed separate offices.   That is reasonable, since part of professing requires thinking about difficult things and talking privately with students about not only academic, but personal matters.  Also, at least I work better in a space that seems my own.  As I mentioned in my last post, I need space and limited interruptions. 

 But non-professors do not get separate offices.  The two photos below show a portion of a long hall in the building.  On one side are the professor’s offices.  The first one shows a section of the long other side, which was initially not broken by a barrier.  The architect’s drawings showed this  side with tables which included electric outlets for computers and Ph.D. students sitting in the chairs facing the wall across from the professor supervising their work.  The architects perhaps did not realize that Ph.D. students need their own turf and quiet to do their work, that professors are seldom in their offices, and that sitting in rows facing the wall is associated with such things as military basic training and wearing dunce caps.

 

The second photo shows the end of this wall where one of our administrators has frantically attempted to get some quiet and privacy to do her work by erecting various temporary screens.

 The third photo was taken in a new building that functions as the headquarters of the Engineering School.  It also shows a workspace  for Ph.D. students.  This time they do not have to sit in rows facing the wall, but they have little room to store material, are on display behind glass to people passing down the hall, have limited space to lock up such things as computers and peripheral equipment,  and would have to be disciplined enough to do their difficult work in the midst of a large group of people.  But being bright (they are after all Ph.D. students), they solve these problems by doing their work in their dorm rooms or homes.

 The last of the photos is the domain of Tim Keely, a good friend of mine , who is an outstanding IT manager in the school.  As part of this he typically has a large amount of computer equipment on which he is working —but no office space, because he is not a professor.  He works crammed in a niche in the corner of the Ph.D. space, and worries about who  will steal what equipment.  But he at least has a niche.  Unfortunately, he is about to be moved into an “open office” with the other administrators in the department.  He is not happy. 

 I believe in cross disciplinary workand lots of interaction, but not at the expense of a closable space of one’s own in which to work and keep all of the material necessary to do that work.  Open space to meet is fine when it helps accomplish the goal, but not for all people and not for all of the time.  And woe be unto you, should you be good at computers and in an open office, since you will spend all of  your time with the line of your office partners at your desk seeking your help.

 Even though they are cheaper, and these days there is much attraction to the “interaction” component, the open-office fad will pass.  There is ever-increasing negative feelings about such space at Stanford and elsewhere.  There was an amusing tirade in the Jobs section of the September 20^th New York times written by Phyllis Korkky, entitled "Modern Offices, Chock-Full of Offenses".  It is here.  It draws from personal opinion, and also Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners, who has written a book with her son that apparently contains observations bemoaning the loss of traditional offices— “Walls and doors can no longer protect workers from unwanted visits, along with various odors, shouts, coughs, sneezes, popping of gum, belching and spitting” (Stanford people, of course, do not belch and spit — but I admit I do pay a lot of unasked for visits to people).  As another quote, “Forget all this business about making everybody love everybody else, It is taking up time that could be spent getting work done, and it’s a drain on people’s finances and personal lives”.

 Happily over time all of this carefully architected glass, steel. And concrete space at Stanford will be humanized by its occupants, despite the efforts of the building managers and  walls that resist hanging up exciting, entertaining, and even useful material.   

 

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.

Internet Quality and Socialbots

I have been posting on Mondays and Thursdays for a while, but I am going to go to one post per week on Mondays.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  First of all, I want to better focus my time on a couple of books I have underway.  The  books have to do with creativity and innovation when very large numbers of people are involved (governments, religions, nations, etc) and the advantages of working with the hands.  Secondly, I need to spend some time thinking about how I can best take advantage of the internet.  In order to do this, I need to learn more about the internet and the directions it is taking.

 Networking is obviously a work in progress, and faces continual problems. I am a user, but not aware enough of the pitfalls involved.  For instance I did not know about socialbots and the increasing resources going into their development. An article in the  New York Times of August 11, 2013, entitled "I Flirt and Tweet.  Follow Me at #Socialbot" by Ian Urbina is here, if you haven’t seen it.  It describes the increasing sophistication and use of software robots to communicate with people on social networking sites for various reasons, varying from marketing through politics to attempts to annoy them or push various causes.  The article claims that more than half of Web traffic is from non-humans.  But messages composed by non-humans are increasing in the social networking area.  Some researchers are estimating that only 35% of the followers of the average Twitter user are real people, and estimate that within two years, 10% of  all social networking traffic will be by bots masquerading as real people.

 Apparently many of these bots have been provided with real social networking accounts and the article contains entertaining and worrisome examples of their power.  One quotes  Christian Rudder, manager and cofounder of OkCupid, a dating site.  Apparently at one point, his group bought and redesigned a smaller dating site.  The result was a sizeable drop of non-human participants, but also a 15% drop in real human users,  because the robot participants provided a major amount of flirtatiousness and romance.  The article mentions that his programmers are trying to design bots which will flirt with socialbots joining his site and lure them away to another location.  

 And I need to think harder about who I really want to communicate with.

 But I will continue to babble on Mondays.

 

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.