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Science, Technology, and Society

01/07/2016

Are Computers Turning Us Into Slaves?

Are Computers Turning Us Into Slaves?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted at 09:48 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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12/30/2015

A Great Book About Everything

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted at 02:06 PM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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12/24/2015

Space and Nostalgia — the Joy of Successful Projects.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Posted at 11:20 AM in Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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12/17/2015

Politicians,Their Fantasies, and Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted at 10:12 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Global Constraints, Management, People, Problem Solving, Science, Technology, and Society | | Comments (0)

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12/09/2015

Thinking and Writing

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

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

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

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

AND MAYBE WE SHOULD FACE IT!

PERHAPS THERE ARE NO PERFECT ANSWERS TO MOST IMPORTANT PROBLEMS,

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

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

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

AND COME UP WITH AND IMPLEMENT SOME WORKABLE CREATIVE SOLUTIONS.

 

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

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

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

Posted at 12:36 PM in Books, Design, Education, Engineering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | | Comments (0)

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11/28/2015

Virtual Reallity —Media Flavor of the Month

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted at 10:51 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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10/28/2015

Resistance to Change:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted at 09:42 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Education, Engineering, Global Constraints, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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10/12/2015

Intelligence and the Computer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted at 03:42 PM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Education, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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09/22/2015

Product Quality, Maintenance, Service, and Standardization

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

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

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

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

  IMG_0758The photo shows some of my own “standard” (slotted and Phillips head) screwdrivers.  Granted there is some duplication here, caused by defending against the normal response of borrowing but never getting around to returning screwdrivers, but due to modifications I have made on various ones to fit various odd screws, I use them all.  And of course I have a complete set of “Allen” hex (six sided)  wrenches (metric and U.S.) and a complete set of sockets and screw drivers for Torx screws (invented by the automobile industry but spreading widely).  But still I run into developments that amaze me, like the alternate screws developed by Apple to prevent “tampering” (which includes changing a battery,etc.)  The good news I suppose is that it opened up a new market for tools ( see the Amazon offerings here), and I have already participated by buying a battery kit over the internet, (but not without major resentment).  The bad news is that it is difficult for the average tinkerer to keep up with the tool requirements needed to use the expanding array of fasteners.

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

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

 

 

Posted at 09:24 AM in Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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07/20/2015

The Vanishing Machine Aesthetic

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

 Something happened many years ago (1920’s and 30’s) to start us hiding the workings of machinery. 
6yr_old_boy_cat_30The photo at the left shows a caterpillar 30, probably built in the 1920’s, with the usual kid playing on it.  The next photo shows a restored caterpillar 10 manufactured a few years later, but with a more “modern” approach to design.  Note that the workings are shrouded in sheet metal.  Cat ten The third photo shows a beat up caterpillar 10 without the sheet metal (I am restoring it and straightening out the sheet metal).  To me, it is more interesting without the sheet metal, but I will put it back on so it doesn’t bother people.

IMG_0527The final tractor photo shows a caterpillar tractor manufactured in 1995.  Certainly looks faster (it is) and more powerful (it is) and more technically sophisticated (it is), but what is inside of its sports-car body panels?  Give or take a bunch of electronics and a steering wheel rather than clutch/brake levers, it is similar.  But I’ll bet the reaction of most people (not farmers) is not to care—they just like the exterior. (I do admit it is a great tractor and I like the exterior also).  But this tractor is perhaps more difficult to understand and to maintain than the Caterpillar 30, as well as not as much fun for kids to play on.

 

ImageA44I think it is worrisome that we are no longer paying as much attention to how things work.  Personal computers are a good example —no clue as to what is in the package.  In fact, most of us are perhaps happier that way.  But the role technology is playing is increasing so that hiding it may delude us, especially if covered with modern marketing. The “Cloud”, being touted by companies with enormous server capability (Google, Apple, IBM, Amazon, etc.) is causing massive ignorance.  Traditional clouds are beautiful, especially close to sunset, the weightlessly drift through the sky, ever changing, and hopefully in California promise eventual much needed rain, and in summer cooler weather.  They are almost magic.

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

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

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

 

Posted at 03:22 PM in Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Education, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | | Comments (0)

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06/22/2015

Shadow Work, by Craig Lambert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted at 11:27 AM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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06/08/2015

Polluting the Internet

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

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

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

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

Posted at 01:27 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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06/01/2015

Computer Hype and Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Posted at 07:12 AM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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05/11/2015

The Engineer's Lament—Malcolm Gladwell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Posted at 09:16 AM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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03/16/2015

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.

Posted at 09:17 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Education, Engineering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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01/19/2015

Go Economist

The cover of the Jan 17th-23rd 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.

Posted at 03:03 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Human fit, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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01/04/2015

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 11th 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.

 

 

 

    

Posted at 07:35 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Education, Engineering, Global Constraints, Human fit, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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12/08/2014

Flying Leafblowers—The Drone and Life

Leaf blower drone croppedThe 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-12th 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 30th, 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.

 

Posted at 11:00 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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11/16/2014

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.

Posted at 08:09 PM in Books, Current Affairs, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Human fit, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, Symbolism and Cultural Values, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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10/27/2014

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.

Posted at 07:21 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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09/15/2014

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. 

Posted at 06:24 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Education, Engineering, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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08/24/2014

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.

Posted at 08:55 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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07/20/2014

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.

 

 

 

Posted at 09:54 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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07/07/2014

The Internet and Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are definitely not living in boring times.

 

Posted at 08:28 AM in Craftsmanship, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Internet, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, Working with the hands | | Comments (0)

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05/12/2014

Thomas Piketty and Economics

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Posted at 11:36 AM in Books, Current Affairs, Design, Education, Engineering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Science, Technology, and Society | | Comments (0)

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05/04/2014

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.

 

Posted at 07:57 PM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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04/07/2014

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. 

 

Posted at 08:06 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Management, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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03/24/2014

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 3rd,  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.

 

 

 

Posted at 10:39 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Education, Engineering, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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02/16/2014

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.

 

Posted at 09:27 PM in Books, Craftsmanship, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | | Comments (0)

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12/30/2013

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.

 

Posted at 11:38 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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12/08/2013

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? 

 

Posted at 09:55 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Education, Engineering, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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11/03/2013

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.

 

 

Posted at 11:16 PM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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09/15/2013

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!   

Posted at 07:15 AM in Design, Engineering, Good Products, Bad Products book, Human fit, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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09/08/2013

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.  220px-Te_lawrence 220px-Lcamel

 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 20th 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.

Posted at 03:15 PM in Books, Current Affairs, Management, People, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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08/26/2013

Participation or Observation —Technology, sports, and athletics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Posted at 11:38 AM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Management, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society | | Comments (0)

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08/08/2013

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!   

Posted at 06:00 AM in Current Affairs, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Good Products, Bad Products book, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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08/04/2013

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.

Tesla-Model-sLast 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.

 

 

 

Posted at 10:12 PM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Management, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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07/28/2013

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


30kx3xjAn interesting list compiled this year by the American Institute of Aeronautics and and summarizing activity on the design and production of so-called unmanned aerial vehicles, contains 960 distinct aircraft being developed and produced by 270 companies in 57 countries.  The corresponding figures two years ago were 675 aircraft. 226 companies, and 44 nations. There is clearly fast growth here.  If you would like to scan the list, it is here.    .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted at 07:13 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, Symbolism and Cultural Values, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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07/18/2013

Product Quality—More Old Machines With Soul

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

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

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

 The crane is a particularly interesting machine because of the mechanical gadgetry necessary to get all of the necessary motions (front and back travel and turns, boom swing and position, winch functions) out of a single engine.  It depends on a complicated collection of gears, clutches, and brakes, and operating it requires many more levers and foot pedals than the operator has hands and feet.  It is particularly challenging to work on, not only because Crane 2of its complexity, but also because most of the parts seem to be slightly heavier than I can lift.  In a sense the older steam powered machines were mechanically simpler because they utilized a single boiler that fed steam to separate engines that powered the necessary motions.  But my gasoline engine does not require heating up, cooling down, or cleaning out when I operate it.

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

Posted at 08:15 AM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Craftsmanship, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | | Comments (0)

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07/14/2013

Product Quality and The Soul of Old Machines

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

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

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

 

 

Finish gravely closed Finish Gravely open

 

 

 

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

Posted at 08:21 PM in Craftsmanship, Design, Engineering, Good Products, Bad Products book, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | | Comments (0)

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07/11/2013

Product Quality, Computers, and the Internet


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

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

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

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

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

Posted at 08:05 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Good Products, Bad Products book, Human fit, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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07/04/2013

Fireworks: A Good Product (at least I think so)

Happy Fourth of July.  Go watch a fireworks show tonight.  The inventors of gun powder (see my last post) used it for fireworks over 1000  years ago.  Although these days fireworks seem to be a bit  controversial, they still thrill—a good break from reading about international problems and the economy.

 

Fireworks-photography-new-years-2013-chicquero-28

 

 

Posted at 10:04 AM in Design, Engineering, Human fit, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society | | Comments (0)

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07/01/2013

Product Quality, Invention, and China

We seem to be fascinated with China, these days. But conversations about such things as outsourcing, competition, and such often seem to assume that China has historically been backward nation until it began copying and cheaply producing parts and products ten or twenty years ago.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

 A well written book that might clear up the picture is The Man Who Loved China, by Simon Winchester (Harper Collins, 2008).  More information is available by clicking the book icon on the right.  It is the story of an extraordinary British scientist named  Joseph Needham, who fell in love with China and spent his life living in it, studying it, and interacting with people ranging from peasant to Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. 

 He arrived in China during World War II and decided to study the scientific and industrial history of China.  The result was a 24 volume work entitled Science and Civilization in China.  I have not read it, nor probably will you, but it is considered one of the great works of literature.  The Man Who Loved China book gives a good flavor of it, and establishes that before the European Renaissance, the Chinese did the majority of inventing in the world.  In the sixteenth century, scientific advances moved to the West, and Chinese creativity and commerce seemed to fade away.  No one seems to agree on the cause for this long quiescent period in science and technology, but clearly it has returned with a bang.

 In the index to Winchester’s book is a list of Chinese Inventions and Discoveries and dates that Needham found them first mentioned in old documents.  Some 250 are mentioned and not only cover an incredible range, but are astonishing for their age. You probably know about gunpowder ((9th century A.D., and printing (wood block 7th century AD, bronze type 1400 AD).  But  ball bearings in the 2nd century B.C.? Seismograph in AD132? Stirrup in 300 AD?  Axial rudder 1st century AD?

 And I can remember being solemnly told that U.S. engineering students were superior to Chinese engineering students, because the Chinese have never been as creative.  Isn’t self delusion wonderful?

 I think you will find Winchester’s book a wonderful read, not only for insight into Chinese history, but because he is a terrific writer and story teller.    

Posted at 07:56 AM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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06/24/2013

Creativity, the Mind, and the Brain

David Brooks, one of my favorite columnists in the New York Times, wrote a column in the June 18th edition concerning the present tendency to use neuroscience to explain the human condition. It was entitled "Beyond the Brain", and emphasized that the brain is not the same as the mind.  The two words do have different meanings to most people, in that “brain” usually  implies the 3 pounds or so of rather ugly meat inside our skull, and “mind” our more difficult to understand consciousness, cognitive output, and feelings. But we will continue to study the brain and its processes because we are curious and because new tools make it possible to learn more and more about it.  And I think we all agree that the brain is necessary for the mind.  But there are people (sometimes I am one) who believe that it may take something more powerful than human brains to totally understand the human mind, and computers are not it.

 

But I thought of this question last week, as  I was asked to give a talk on the past 50 years of creativity to the  50th anniversary party of the Product Design program at Stanford University.  I had been a part of this program from its beginning until my retirement and had been quite involved in reading, teaching, consulting about and working on problems involving creativity, so I found this an interesting assignment. 

 

One major change has occurred in the nature-nurture debate, which can sometimes bring up the brain-mind topic.  Fifty years ago, we (or at least those of us around universities) were taught to view people as being formed primarily by nurture – their upbringing, their culture, their friends, and perhaps their schooling.  Certainly people did not totally accept this, but it was politically correct to espouse it.  Since that time, due to research in the social sciences and our preoccupation with genetics, this view has shifted.  I have never seen a figure as to how much, but I would say that we give two thirds credit to what we have learned, and one third to our genes (brain), and the genetics argument continues to charge ahead.

 An example of such thinking is a nicely written book written by Peter Whybrow in 2005 entitled American Mania: When More is Not Enough (W. W. Norton, NY—click on icon at the right for more information).  At the time he was director of the Semel Institute for NeuroScience and Human Behavior at UCLA and the Judson Braun Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine.  In his book Professor Whybrow discusses the reasons that so many of us U.S. citizens seem to drive ourselves to acquire more than we need, whether it be money, possessions, food, or whatever, at the expense of time and energy that we could use to better improve our satisfaction with our lives , and the welfare of our families and communities. 

 

HowtospotarichguyWhybrow  argues partly from an evolutionary standpoint—through most of our evolution we have lived in scarcity, and have developed strong signals to inform us when our needs (food?) are not being met, but weaker signals when we have enough (the cause of obesity?).  He also argues as a psychiatrist (“mania; a dysfunctional state of mind that begins with a joyous sense of excitement and high productivity, but escalates into reckless pursuit, irritability, and confusion, before cycling down into depression” —sound familiar?) and finally as a neuroscientist, explaining the purposes and functions of various parts and processes of the mind, and how they can cause us to lose the balance of our lives.  He believes that genetics is a strong influence on this, and uses immigrants as a class of people that obviously pursue risk and uncertainty, and whose descendants do likewise.

 

It is a good read, and will get you thinking.  And it speaks to both mind and brain.

 

 

 

Posted at 11:50 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Good Products, Bad Products book, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society | | Comments (0)

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06/20/2013

War and the Products of Industry

The last few posts I have written have been on this topic. I veered in this direction because I do not think that people think hard enough about the tremendous impact that Defense Department activities have on not only products for the military, but on civilian products and the overall economy. 

 But considering the military side, it seems to me that an interesting thing has happened, in that the availability of consistent and high funding over many years has resulted in technology and resulting products that have invalidated the classic western Clauswitz theory of total war —massive armies and navies slugging it out as in World War II.  So-called weapons of mass destruction (nuclear bombs, bio-chemical weapons) have made the potential cost in property and lives of civilian as well as members of the military ridiculously high on both sides of any conflict in which they are used.  It is possible to make treaties banning their use in conflicts between nations, but there is always a risk of desperate usage by dictatorial governments or fanatics under attack.

 Wars (or “police actions”) in which the U.S. has been involved since World War II have remained limited, and have not result in the hoped for “victories”.  And they have often veered toward more eastern theory of wars (read Sun Tsu), which recognize the effectiveness of such things as surprise (Pearl Harbor), ambush,  deception, patience (Mao and Ho Chi Minh}, and avoiding un-winnable battles.  And the nature of battle itself has been drastically changed by the use of air, modern transportation and communication, night vision capability, improved personal arms and armor, observation satellites, computers, and the global positioning satellite system.

 And in the U.S., at least, there is a growing antipathy toward what is euphemistically called collateral damage, as well as military casualties, and it is about time, since the civilian casualty count in modern wars is often larger than that of the military, and the civilians are in a sense innocent by-standers.  The present uproar about drone attacks, in which relatively few people are killed is a symptom of this antipathy.  Though the casualties are relatively few, they seem to violate our sense of fairness.  They are the opposite of Gary Cooper and the one-on-one duel in the classic movie High Noon.

 I certainly do not claim to know the answer to this.  The Cold War period was a period of relative peace, but high anxiety.  I understand the desire of nations to possess nuclear weapons, since for better or worse, they definitely help in becoming recognized as a power to be reckoned with (North Korea?).  The League of Nations failed, and the U.N. and the world court seem to have only limited power.  And leaders of nations, even though they deny it, seem to like to fight. Do we need a new type of war?   Now there is an opportunity for creativity.    

Posted at 11:53 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Good Products, Bad Products book, Management, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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06/17/2013

Good Products? Bad Products? The Gun, Explosives, and War

Along about the year 900, the Chinese invented gunpowder.  It is a fairly simple substance, consisting of 65 to 75 percent potassium nitrate (saltpeter), 15-20 percent charcoal, and 10 to 15 percent sulfur – common materials, but interesting that someone would think of combining them.  The result burns fiercely, and if confined, explodes.  It was initially used for fireworks.  But eventually changed war, and the world.

 A hundred years later the Chinese were using gunpowder to propel spears and various materials from a tube.  A gun perhaps.  By the 14th century, the Chinese were making so-called hand cannons, and the secrets had followed the silk road to Europe.  The Ottomans were providing their infantry with crude, single-shot muzzle loaded guns by the year 1500.  Guns were heavy in those days, but ships were less concerned with weight, so cannons had taken their place in naval warfare.  And of course, since then guns have continued to decrease in weight and increase in power and speed of firing, until now we have operational multi - barrel machine guns capable of 6,000 to 10,000 rounds per minute. 

 And chemical power in other forms has led to such things as increasingly powerful explosives, supersonic aircraft, and indirectly, intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying nuclear “warheads”. (I put the word in quotes, because there is a strong school of thought that such things should actually be called nuclear bargaining chips, since if anyone uses them, they will be permanently ostracized).

 Over time, advances in technology have made weapons both increasingly powerful and more rapidly and easily deliverable, and at the same time militaries have grown greatly. At the height of Napolean’s Grande Armie (the first great “citizen’s army”) in 1812, it contained some 600,000 soldiers.  In the U.S. Civil war, over two million people served in the Union army alone.  And both sides were plentifully equipped with cannons, rifles, and side arms.  The result, as you nay know, was 620,000 deaths which represents the highest death toll of U.S. citizens of any wars in which the U.S. has been involved to date.

 And the nature of battle  has changed. War has gone from the close combat necessary when weapons were limited in range by people and animal power, to massed firepower of muskets and volley fire, to the stable slaughter of World War I trenches and machine guns, to the wider open tank and airplane battle in Europe in World War II, to the present “irregular” wars going on in the world right now.  These wars, strangely enough, have certain resemblances to the U.S. Revolutionary War, except that in that war the U.S. were the irregulars, and the British the regulars.

 World War II, sometimes thought to be an extension of World War I, very much raised the bar in what is now called collateral damage, and in the importance of industrial production.  Wikipedia states estimates of civilians killed ranging from 38 to 55 million, and military dead from 22 to 25 million, and it is generally agreed that the allied win was based heavily on the ability to produce the weapons and other material necessary to conduct the war.  An interesting book is Eagles of Mitsubishi: The Story of the Zero Fighter, by Jiro Horikoshi, the chief designer of the aircraft (University of Washington Press, I think now out of print, but available on the used book market.)  It tells the tale of the Zero, originally undoubtedly the outstanding fighter in the world, but eventually doomed because of the production of large numbers of increasingly high-performing fighters by the U.S., while Japan was limited in industrial capability to compete (The U.S. produced 300,000 airplanes during the four years of World War II).

 But since World War II, wars have been more limited and localized, and the winner (if  any) more difficult to determine.  It could be that our technology has advanced to the point where total war, at least as defined by Clauswitz doesn’t work anymore.  Perhaps through historically heavily supporting the development of technology, the military has helped unlimited make war too potentially costly and all-encompassing to be used to solve international (or any other) disputes.  More about this next post and then we will leave the subject of war.

 As to whether weapons and other materials of war are good products or bad products, it obviously depends on whether the judgement is to be made by the deer or the hunter; the military sniper or the civilian pacifist;  the Lockheed program manager or the Buddhist Priest;  The question of the quality of a particular assault rifle is necessarily impacted by whether the person answering the question is strongly for or against the right of civilians to own them.

 But since we in the U.S. are spending such an incredible amount of time and money on weapons and wars, we should at least be thinking more about what quality means when applied to products of industry used by the military—and what their availability to civilians and other countries should be.  We are, after all, the world's leading exporter of arms.

Posted at 02:15 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Good Products, Bad Products book, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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06/13/2013

Product Quality and Pre-gun War

Before the gun, technology was a major factor in increasing the deadliness and cost of war. Taking Europe as an example, the use of horses and chariots added greatly to the speed and violence of battle beginning in the early (3rd millennium B.C.E.) days. Chariots were extremely sophisticated for their time—wooden vehicles weighing on the order of 75 pounds that allowed high speed and were capable of travel over rough ground.  Composite bows were another early development.  They were formed of a number of pieces of laminated wood steamed into a curve opposite to that it would assume when strung (re-curve). Strips of horn were then glued to the side that would eventually be in compression. and tendons were glued to the side that would be in tension when strung.  The bow was then left to cure for up to a year.  When finally strung, the force required to draw the bow ranged up to 150 pounds (compared to a tenth if that with primitive simple bows) and it could be made short enough to be used on horseback or from chariots.

 Along with improved offensive weapons, fortifications developed (large ones such as the Great Wall of China and the Walls of Jericho and many small ones).  But armies still primarily fought on foot on open ground. As an example, The Greek heavy infantrymen (Hoplites) sometimes fought in a  Artgreekphalanxlarge formation called a phalanx, typically consisting of 16 rows of 16 men, and were equipped with sword, spear, and some 70 pounds of bronze armor including a large shield, helmet, and upper body and lower leg armor. Throwing spears were 7 to 10 feet long, but in formation, spears could reach 20 feet (the sarissa),and the formation could become fierce indeed, charging along with the front rows of spears being held horizontal, and rows toward the back being held vertically and lowered when the front ranks fell (see photo).

 Since the Greeks were a sea-faring people, naval warfare also developed, involving large galleys with bronze rams used to sink and/or board the enemy.  The largest was the trireme, which employed three banks of oars .  TriremeIncidentally, the Greeks did not spend most of their time sitting around in white robes discussing philosophy.  They were warlike people, whether fighting in wars between city states, or in wars  against other states.

 The Roman empire added full-time professional service (modern standing armies) and even more brutal hand to hand combat to war.  Many earlier “conquerors”, such as Alexander the Great, ranged through long distances winning their battles, but seemed to be most interested in displaying their power, rather than controlling the territory they claimed.  The Romans definitely governed their empire through their soldiers, whose legions moved their locations from point to point to make sure that their citizens were behaving and protected from Rome’s enemies.  Their soldiers fought with similar body armor to the Greeks, and carried a throwing spear and a traditional spear to use against the enemy during the charge, but their chief weapon was a short sword  which they used on contact.

 From the time that the Romans were overcome by various eastern tribes until the coming of the gun, warfare grew toward the feudal system, in which heads of state would give holdings to lords, who in turn would let the land out to serfs who would farm it for their livelihood.  In return the lord took a portion of their crop and the serfs  were expected to serve in the army of their particular lord, perhaps in service to the king, perhaps to settle a beef with another lord.   This in turn led to armies of a few wealthy and well equipped mounted wealthy fighters Knight3(knights), and a large number of soldiers on foot with minimal H2_14.25.716armor carrying such things as lances and battle axes.  The age of iron and steel had arrived, and as you have seen in museums, the wealth of the knights and heads of state resulted in weapons and armor with extraordinarily controlled and beautiful detailing.

But guns were going to wreck the knights, make war much more costly, and require more and more involvement of industry and mass production. 

Posted at 10:09 AM in Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Good Products, Bad Products book, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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06/10/2013

Fighting, Primitive War, and Weapons

People (especially men) fight physically for many reasons – different beliefs, status,  basic needs, entertainment, historical disagreements, and so on.  As long as technology is minimal, the damage to the species seems to be tolerable.  In fact, anthropologists have long studied what is often called primitive war, and have even outlined some advantages.

 Primitive war still occurs in isolated tribes, such as the Marings of Papua New Guinea.  Maring wars occur every ten or twelve years (the time it takes pigs to mature and fatten  for sacrifices and feasts) and involve hundreds of people equipped with simple bows and arrows, spears, and clubs.  The intent is to re-establish power and influence and re-allocate resources, women, and sometimes land.  Killing people is not a goal, and in fact, apparently the weapons are less lethal than those used to hunt animals for food, and the wars are often interrupted to work on gardens, or simply rest.  If someone is killed, the war may be halted, and the warriors seldom end up in hand- to -hand fighting. 

 Many primitive wars were more lethal, such as those involving the Maoris and the Aztecs, but were also limited as the Maoris developed fortifications that would withstand attack, and the Aztecs fought to capture people to be sacrificed to their gods, rather than for  spoils.  Such wars did not imperil the existence of  the people fighting them— no weapons of mass destruction.

 But even though our wars are now “modern” and involve nations, many more people, and tremendously sophisticated and destructive weapons that can be used over huge distances, we still fight in more primitive ways. If you are interested in more about this type of fighting, or the history of war in general, read “A History of Warfare”, by John Keegan, a terrific writer and senior lecturer in military history at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, England, described in recommended readings at the right. For more on the Marings, click here.

 A good example of primitive fighting with few weapons and no major casualties were the predictable large inter school fights after football games in my high school, which became so wide spread that my friends started a so-called car club to proclaim our toughness (complete with jackets proclaiming ourselves Sultans of Berdoo) as a defensive mechanism to escape them.  In fact American football might be considered a ceremonial type of warfare.  The photo Imagesat the left shows a modern gladiator (www.reddit.com).  Sports often have many elements of ceremonial warfare, and even though they may be highly regulated, the fans are not always so. 112riotDM_468x304The photo at the right is a shot of the start of a riot at a Birmingham United soccer match. For more on this topic see Football Hooliganism here.

But in the third millennium B.C.E., “modern” war began with the coming of states such as Egypt and Sumer and took the direction of acquiring, land, wealth, and power.  The same weapons were used as in primitive war (bows and arrows, spears, clubs, axes, knives, swords) but the materials and designs continued to improve.  More people were involved and wars ranged more widely.  About 2340 B.C.E., Sargon become ruler of Mesopotania, and with an army of over 5000 and bronze weapons, conquered an empire roughly the size of present day Iraq. Modern war had arrived , and increasingly sophisticated technology was  to cause casualties to mount.

Posted at 01:11 PM in Books, Design, Engineering, Good Products, Bad Products book, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, Symbolism and Cultural Values | | Comments (0)

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06/06/2013

Product Quality, Military Influence, and Products of War

  Ak47If you did not instantly recognize it, the photo is of an AK 47 assault rifle.  More of them have been produced in the world than all other assault rifles combined.  Is it a good product, or a bad product?  It must have some advantages, and in fact is reliable, easily manufactured, cheap, effective, easy to acquire in many (most?) countries, and symbolic of revolution. It does not instantly impress one as being beautifully made and precise. It is designed to kill people in combat, not for hunting deer or target shooting.  That alone might cause  many people to consider it a bad product.  To a Taliban soldier, that might cause it to be thought a good product.  Many people would prefer not to think about this issue too hard, or perhaps I should say that the issue is too hard for many people to think about.  And assault rifles have rightly become symbolic in the argument about civilian gun ownership.

 I am always amazed at how many people prefer not to think deeply about war and technology.  We humans have apparently had wars through all of recorded history, technology and industry have certainly been a large factor during the past few hundred years, and wars are interesting because people act in totally illogical ways— for instance allowing themselves to be brutalized by drill sergeants and volunteering to act in ways in which the probability of being killed is very high.  And as president Eisenhower warned many years ago, the U.S. does probably have an industrial-military complex.

 As an example of this avoidance, I was once president of a museum start-up intended to celebrate the technological accomplishments of Silicon Valley.  The board consisted of a number of high level industry and political people.  The industry people were in general from electronics companies, and often founders. To my amazement, the board refused to consider members from businesses such as Lockheed Missiles and Space, F.M.C., Raytheon, and other powerful and successful companies that were primarily working on military products.  Even though located in Silicon Valley, apparently they weren’t part of the club.  As another example, for most of my tenure at Stanford, over half of the research funding in the Engineering School has come from the Department of Defense—a fact that seldom shows up in PR documents, even though none of the work is directly on weapons. We  don’t brag that our research activities are heavily dependent on DOD. 

 This is very weird, because in my memory, the U.S. is often involved in war. And we are proud of our industrial ability to help us do so (we remember that in the four years we were involved in World War II we manufactured over 300,000 military airplanes).  But we are ambivalent.  Even though the War Department was re-named the Department of Defense after World War II, we have only been actually attacked by one nation (Japan) in my memory, and have entered  conflicts in other countries many times.  But I’ll bet we are not going to re-name the Department of Defense the Department of Offense. 

 We like to think of ourselves as a peace-loving people, but are we?  The Defense Department budget is unclear at this point because of sequester cuts, but it is certainly above $650 billion dollars, and that does not include development and support of nuclear weapons (in the Department of Energy), the Veteran’s Administration, and other war-related costs.  In terms of battle fleet tonnage, the U.S. navy is larger than the next 13 navies combined, and as I remember, 11 of  these we consider to be our allies.

 Our “civilian” products are certainly influenced —and sometimes originated—by the military.  After all, it has brought us the internet —initially the ARPA net.  It brought us and maintains the Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) system.  It backed the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs, and the Computer (the one at the Institute of Advanced Studies headed by John Von Neuman needed originally to simulate such things as the explosion of the hydrogen bomb}.  It was a powerful lobby for space exploration, and brought us the Boeing 707 (evolved from a prototype for the very successful aerial refueling tanker called the KC 135).

 At a perhaps lower level, think of such things as clothing (cargo pants, epaulets on overcoats, camouflage), toys (guns, miniature vehicles, models), and entertainment (war movies and books, computer games, paint ball, air-soft weapons).  And I find it interesting that now we label  well-meaning movements as wars (war on drugs, war on poverty, war on cancer).  I clearly remember that when I arrived at Stanford, women active in the feminist movement seemed to prefer fatigues and other military clothing.

 For the next few posts I am going to say some things about the influence of war and the military on industrial products and try to talk a bit about what quality means when applied to products intended for war.  I am certainly not pro-war, since it is a nasty business.  I did serve happily in the U.S. Air Force, but admit partly to avoid being drafted into the army.  But I recognize war as something humans have always done.

 I became so bothered by the  ability that most of us have to avoid thinking deeply about war that in the 1970’s I began teaching a course entitled War and Technology, which among other topics covered the historic eager support of technology by the military, which has resulted in developments such as nuclear weapons, chemical and biological agents, and remote weapons such as drones, which may in turn have lead us to the point where wars may no longer work as an mechanism to settle international, or even internal disputes.  Since it was perhaps my favorite course, I will throw in a tiny bit of history as we go.  And as I used to tell my students, don't let your political beliefs get in the way.  We are what we are.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted at 12:30 PM in Design, Engineering, Management, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, Symbolism and Cultural Values, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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06/02/2013

Immortal Avatars—Bad Product Idea

The Sunday June 2 New York Times had an article in the Business Section entitled "This Man is Not a Cyborg. Yet."  I assume that it is the kind of an article that weekend newspapers run if nothing much of global interest is happening.  In brief, Dmitry Itskov, a wealthy 32 year old Russian, is devoting his life to pursing a dream, in which large numbers of cheap avatars will be manufactured and equipped with digital copies of our brains, complete with consciousness, personality, and undoubtedly memory.

There is a  belief entitled Technological Determinism, which is that if it is technologically feasible, it will happen.  This is not always good.  In fact, it is often bad.  Let us assume, although it will be difficult, that it will become technically possible to make cheap avatars and equip them with digital copies of our brain.  Mr. Itskov, believes this will lead to lifetimes of many hundreds, if not thousands of years, and we will be released from the petty worries of day to day living.  Incidentally, he is perhaps a bit extreme, but not alone among people of wealth, especially those associated with science and technology, who like the media are titillated by a potentially much longer life span.  Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle and possessor of a net worth of many billions of dollars, is funding a foundation to do research on extending life, and many believe that he may be somewhat interested in his own.

 But supposing Mr. Itskov’s goal becomes feasible in 2045 (his schedule).  I can easily think up a few non-technical questions.

 1.     Who is going to maintain Mr. Itzkov’s avatar?.  Tax money?  Perhaps other avatars could, but if equipped with human minds, would they? He could probably endow  his avatar’s upkeep, but if this is to be the routine, will only wealthy people live thousands of years? In my opinion there are enough of them around already,  Where would avatars live?  I don’t want any in my neighborhood.

2.     How will Mr. Itskov decide when to fire up his avatar?  Will he do it when his avatar becomes available?  If he is on schedule he will be 64.  Or will he wait until he is feeling the onslaught of dementia to do so?  Will he use his wealth to download his brain into hundreds of avatars?  Will he turn off his flesh and blood body when his brain is downloaded? If not, what happens when it gets into an argument with his avatar?  Would he turn off his body if he was his present age?

3.     Most people I know love their parents, but when their parents die, after a time of mourning, there is a certain feeling of increased independence.  What would it be like to have avatar parents around for thousands of years?  Or an ex spouse?

4.     What rights will avatars have?  Will flesh and blood humans outrank them? When avatars are several hundred years old and still have brains fueled with ancient ideas will it be okay to remove their battery packs?  Or will that  be murder?  Will it be acceptable for avatars to download the brains of flesh and blood humans into an avatar and discard the human?

5.     What if cheap avatar bodies don’t work as well as flesh and blood ones?  Will the brain be frustrated with the body for thousand of years?  Sounds even worse than bad knees.

 Apparently many people think Mr. Itskov is insane.  I don’t think so.  I think that he is probably an idealistic  young guy with a lot of money who has not found a life yet.  Or maybe he likes to make a splash—after all, he was a media mogul.  In the interim, he will be popular with the “improve the human” set.

 I personally love life, have an infinite number of projects,  and do not want to die, and when the time comes I will fight it as well as I can in the traditional way.  But I do believe that it is our duty to get out of the way when we lose the fight, without inflicting ourselves on society for thousands of years. In particular, I would be even more of a pain over those thousands of  years if I were not diverted by the petty worries of day to day living.

 

 

 

Posted at 08:57 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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