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A video detailing something I've never heard of that made my jaw drop.  The Atlantic Monthly headlined their short piece on it, "How 4,000 Men Hand-Deliver 175,000 Lunches Around Mumbai in One Day:"

Dabbawalla from The Perennial Plate on Vimeo.

“Dabbawalla” comes from the term "tiffin dabba," referring to a tiered lunch box and “walla,” a carrier or vendor. As Saritha Rai explains in The New York Times, India’s dabbawalla network originated during the British colonial occupation after cities were flooded with new, regional workers as a way to bridge the distance [both literally and figuratively] between their work sites and their homes. Each morning, after the recipient has gone to work, family members who remain at home (mothers, wives, grandmothers, and sisters) prepare a freshly-cooked meal to be picked up by a dabbawalla, sorted and distributed at railway stations, and hand-delivered to their loved one at the office.

Today, Mumbai is home to approximately 4,000 dabbawallas who deliver tens of thousands of lunches via an intricate, 125-year-old coding system without fail. 

The NYT article is here.

 

Darwin's liberal arts program.

Darwin is writing about his own ideas for a redesigned "modern liberal arts curriculum:"

Last week I tried to expand a bit on the concept of the Liberal Arts as "the skills of a free man". I described the purpose of the ancient and medieval liberal arts education as being to develop a general and adaptable set of skills that allowed the liberally educated person to understand and reason about the world, and I attempted to contrast this type of education from being trained to perform some one task or set of tasks well.

The classic set of liberal arts is: Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy

Some of these disciplines are defined rather differently now than they were in the pre-modern world, and the modern world presents its own particular challenges to understanding, so I think it's worth thinking a little on how one might update this list.

Darwin goes on to list thoughts on a slightly different set of arts: history and literature; writing and rhetoric; philosophy; language, grammar and linguistics; mathematics; natural science; computer science; and social sciences. Please go and read his thoughts; this post is my response.

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Even though I took a concentration in the sciences in high school, and went on to major in engineering, I appreciate and share the goal of producing broadly educated individuals who have a sense of the way different disciplines interrelate and who have had practice in writing, in forming arguments, and in taking account of the whole human person in their work in the world.

But I don't think liberal arts colleges always succeed in this goal, particularly today. I think there are three major problems here:

• Number one: the leftist political slant of nearly every liberal arts department in the country. Slant is inevitable, but it shouldn't always be in one direction, and departments ought to conscientiously try to correct it. They don't.
  
• Number two: Education isn't broad, general, and adaptable, and it limits the ability of the educated person to think and reason about the world, when mathematics and physical science are absent or only afterthoughts. It's utterly ridiculous to call an education "broad" and "adaptable" when the graduates have only a vague understanding of the physical laws that govern the world they live in; a poverty of knowledge about the human body, the organisms that inhabit its surroundings, and the materials that make those surroundings; and ineptitude with the mathematical language in which we express relationships among all these things.
• Number three: the declining academic standards of those colleges. Some of this is associated with the leftist slant, in my opinion -- not that leftist slants are necessarily less academically rigorous than rightist slants, but "slant" is generally expressed by ignoring whole points of view and areas of study. Theology, Western civ, and military history, once important aspects of their fields, are gathering dust. If it was a rightward slant, we'd see different things ignored. That's part of it. Another part of it is simple grade inflation and reduced reading loads. The physical sciences and engineering just have not suffered from this as much.

To sum up: I don't think a lot of liberal arts colleges really are delivering what Darwin describes as the mission of the liberal arts.

I haven't much advice about how to fix political slant or grade inflation, but I do know something about the sciences and mathematics. And here I will try to strengthen my liberal-education cred a little bit more: Even though in college I specialized in chemical engineering, and even though in graduate school I had to get even more narrowly specialized, at heart I am a science generalist: I enjoy being at least a little bit conversant in everything much more than I enjoyed becoming an expert in a tiny little area of materials science. This is one of the reasons why staying home to educate my children attracted me more strongly than going on to look for work in research, when it was time to make a decision. I could maybe make an argument for a liberal sciences major to complement the liberal arts major: why not develop a generally adaptable set of skills that would allow the person so educated to understand and reason about the physical world and its laws? (Bonus: the objective nature of physical laws insulates such a program, just a bit more, against political slant and grade inflation.) I could even point to my chemical engineering major and suggest that it comes pretty close to actually embodying a liberal science/engineering major, since the curriculum is a fairly broad combination of science and technology areas (particularly if you take biology electives). It's really why I felt so comfortable there as an undergraduate.

Here are some thoughts. I am cribbing a little bit from what I wrote in Darwin's comboxes.

Mathematics. The key to making math work as a liberal art is to think of it as a means of expanding cognitive abilities. It isn't all calculation - it is a means of understanding the world and what is in it, how stuff moves around, interferes with other things, increases and decreases. Many people don't get to see the beauty of mathematics, even if someone has been wise enough to show them its utility.

MrsDarwin wrote in response to that comment,

One of the ways I've tried to make our homeschooling different from my own experience is that I'm trying to present math as a mode of thinking, not just as an exercise in memorization....

I, like Darwin, worked my own way through Saxon Math, but although I learned much about following formulas exactly as they were presented to me, I learned little to nothing about mathematics as "understanding the world and what is in it, how stuff moves around, interferes with other things, increases and decreases"....But that could also be because math and science had never, not even in my early years at school, been presented as anything other than formulas or drudge. I do think that if I had been inculcated with an interest in, if not a love for, math from an early age, my later studies would have borne more fruit. But I also think that having a good instructor would have been key.

Mind you, not every scientist or engineer winds up with the attitude toward math that I have. But my experience was that (except for proof-based geometry and much later, in graduate-level continuum mechanics, which sounds like science and was taught by an aerospace engineering professor but is really math) it wasn't in my mathematics classes that the "beauty" of math happened. It was in science and engineering classes. It is in the study of "stuff" that it becomes clear how math works its magic on it: setting limits on the world, describing how that stuff moves around, increases and decreases. Writing a mass balance on a differential element of a spherical shell -- a basic problem in introductory chemical engineering -- always felt beautiful to me.

Yeah, I am kind of a weirdo. Please don't roll your eyes at me.

That being said, I would think that proof-based geometry would tie in neatly to the liberal arts curriculum. You could easily put a historical emphasis or logic emphasis on it, or even use it to substitute for a different type of logic course. I plan to use proof-based geometry as the main way of including logic in my homeschool curriculum.

But geometry is so useful with such wide application that it goes beyond logic. Geometry, the calculus specific to understanding related rates, and maybe a study of functions -- any of these could be applied to a wide range of intellectual activities.

 

Sciences. If you have to only have one science, I nominate physics. For one thing, it gives you a shot of putting all that mathematics in context -- of working together with mathematics to demonstrate how we use it to grasp the world. For another thing, even elementary Newtonian physics does a good job of demonstrating how things are not always as they seem -- how we become fooled by the specifics around us into misunderstanding general laws. Air resistance and friction and frames of reference create so many red herrings! For a third thing, it's the most "generally applicable" of all sciences. Biology is just chemistry at bottom, and chemistry is just physics at bottom. For yet another thing, it encourages the contemplation of the fundamental nature of the material world. It is the interface of creation.

But since "general" is the aim, it might be better to have a little physics, a little chemistry, a little bio, and then maybe an elective in some other area of science.

How to design such a course in order to create scientifically literate citizens would be instructive. And difficult: to take two whole semesters of the chemistry program, for instance, barely scratches the surface of chemistry. You would want to design it from scratch, not just rely on the introductory material that science majors have to take. You want a "chemistry for liberal arts majors" that isn't just code for "chemistry for people who hate math and need an easy way to get the science credit the stupid college says they have to have." And in many universities that would be hard: the chemistry department will want to save its best teachers for its own students (the chemistry majors). So unless you have buy-in from the department chair, and professors who have a passion for sharing their subject with students in other majors, it'll be so hard to put together a quality science series.

 

Languages. In countries where English is not the spoken language, I would require the study of English for the same reasons that the medievals studied Latin and Greek: it is a modern-day lingua Franca. But here in English-speaking North America, I would advise learning a second language: not so much for the ability to converse in the language or to read its literature, but for the cognitive development and deep knowledge of "how language works" that comes from translating one's thoughts into another idiom. I don't think you can really understand your own language until you have studied a different one for long enough to get its grammar and it's mode of thought. Sure, you could learn about language by studying linguistics instead. I have never taken linguistics, so I can't really judge. But my instinct is to say that you can learn enough of what is generally applicable about language by delving into the process of learning one language well.

Computer science. Darwin had some thoughts about this in his post. I agree with them. If you are going to have a basic understanding of the social forces that shape the modern world, then at this point in history you need to have an understanding of computing. I suggested "a notion of the algorithm" as the fundamental concept around which to build a liberal computing art. Darwin has some more ideas. Whatever you include, I think it would be instructive to include a little bit of computer programming: just enough to demonstrate the thought process that goes into instructing a computer to execute step-by-step instructions. See how a loop works, and an if-then command. Experience the frustration of accidentally dividing by zero. Debug something: discover how important accuracy really is when you are dealing with a machine that cannot guess what you really meant. Understand a tiny bit of what makes human intelligence so unlike machine language, and appreciate the human accomplishment that is inventing computer languages.

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I think what I have written here demonstrates a piece of my educational philosophy, or maybe you could call it a bias, or a theme that pervades my understanding of learning. It is this: To acquire mastery of a skill is a way to acquire generally applicable knowledge.

This has certainly played out in my own life. I could not appreciate the general beauty and utility of mathematics until I exercised my mathematical knowledge in wrestling with physics and engineering problems. I could not have taught myself Latin and Spanish (enough to teach them to children) without the experience I had being taught French -- a specialization! -- to fluency. To the extent that I understand the notion of an algorithm, the process of formulating a problem in the way a machine can understand, and other abstract aspects of computer science, I understand them because I have written computer programs, and struggled to debug and improve them.

I think you can't really learn linguistics until you've learned to speak a language. I think you can't really say you appreciate music until you've attempted to play an instrument well.

You might argue, well, linguistics is more than learning the grammar and vocabulary of one single language. Music is far more than convincing a French horn to emit the notes written on the page. Mathematics is more than a mass balance. And so forth and so on. You need context.

Yes. You need context. But I think it isn't so terribly hard to start with a practical skill and work outward to generalize it. One could argue that the necessary context is provided by acquiring practical skills in a variety of fields -- as mathematics, physics, and philosophy work together to create context for the understanding of creation.

Or we could put it this way. The liberal arts are supposed to educe an individual who has a general and adaptable set of skills. I argue that to be able to specialize -- to be able to dig deeper -- to be able to apply knowledge -- to make the abstract practical and concrete -- to check one's theories against the problem of the physical universe is itself a "generally applicable skill" that is utterly necessary in order to reason about the world.

And you can't acquire that generally applicable skill without practice specializing, without practice developing expertise in something, without practice in "practical skills" here and there, without asking yourself if reality confirms that your thoughts are correct.

Review: The Mind at Work by Mike Rose.

I'm going to stay on the subject of vocational-oriented education vs. liberal-arts education long enough to post a review of a 2004 book I finished reading last night:  The Mind at Work:  Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker by Mike Rose.

This book is a quick read, not too scholarly, and full of anecdotes about the lives of working people:  waitresses, hairdressers, railroad men.  There are also those who teach future workers:  a woman who teaches welding at a trade school, a man who teaches high-school carpentry.  

I was prompted to read this book when I turned on NPR in the middle of an interview with the author on Weekend Edition.  It must have been a rerun, I guess, since the book was released eight years ago.   But I was drawn in by Mike Rose's description of interviewing his own mother at the kitchen table, inviting her to reminisce about her years as a waitress.

The work of Mike Rose's mother, uncle, and other relatives figure large in this book.   It's part family history and part social/educational essay.   Here are some of the themes:

(1) Calling attention to the mental work that so-called "low-skilled" jobs demand of their practitioners.  For instance, the waitress works for tips, so she can increase her income by honing her craft.  A good memory helps.  So do subtle manipulation skills, quick judgment about the priority of tasks, spatial sense, flexibility, and negotiation techniques.  The personal work histories that Rose uses to tell these stories are fascinating to read, a sort of glimpse behind the swinging door, for someone who's never waited tables or built one.

(2) Inviting the reader to look at these workers in a new way that demands more respect than we might be inclined to think.  Rose argues that many  wait staff act as individual entrepreneurs, and that a hairstylist  is a sort of creative consultant.  

(3) The sometimes arbitrary distinction between "skilled" and "semi-skilled" and "skilled" workers; the historical role of labor unions in creating this distinction, and how gender and class have been used to funnel young people into prescribed roles.  (Sometimes the funneling can be a mixed blessing for a group:  he writes that "Girls were channeled into clerical courses," but points out that these were successful in leading to employment.)  

(4)  The artificial separation between "hands-on" or "practical" education, and "academic" education.   There is an interesting part of the book where Rose looks at the work of surgeons; they have, of course, a very technical and practical job involving the skilled use of the hands, but enjoy a much higher status than most other "hand" workers.  It makes for a thought-provoking comparison with the carpenters and welders that make up the larger part of the book.

(5) The mixed bag that is vocational and technical education today.   Vo-tech education might provide a place where a young person, disliking classroom work, can learn to strive for excellence and discover his own self-worth; or it might be a place where young people are shunted too early and where expectations are kept low, and where the intellectual development of the young people on the "job-training track" is unfairly neglected.  Rose writes a bit about his own experiences with the differences between "academic" and "vocational" education (he began high school as a working-class kid on the vocational track, and later moved to the college prep track), but most of this story is told by examples from the teachers and kids that Rose observed in their learning environment.  

Here's an excerpt from the back, criticizing the VocEd system's separation from the academic realm by pointing out a situation where, literally, a student needed to be guided to "see something from the other side:"

...[T]here were no bridging mechanisms...to enable creative interaction, to foster cross-disciplinary discussion that could expand and enlighten, for example, the use of tools or the development of literacy.  I think here of something I saw...that crystallized this... I was watching [Mr. Butler, a teacher,] as he was guiding two of his students inserting windows into a house frame.

They have just placed an assembled window into its space in the frame.  They are looking it over, eyeballing the edges, checking it with a spirit level.  They're following procedure, and everything seems OK.  They're ready to fasten the window in place.  Mr. Butler...asks them to come here a moment, to walk with him around to the other side of the window, inside the house.  "Take a look from here," he says. The boys inspect the edge of the frame---and see the problem.   The plywood that forms the frame on this side of the window assembly has been cut unevenly, and at several places there is not enough wood to receive the nails that the boys were about to drive from the other side.  They are visibly struck by this, say they wouldn't have thought of this.  But, geez, now that they see it....

In many ways, this is a small thing...But it also could be thought of as a metaphor for the vocational-academic divide.  Though a routine move, and though utterly functional...this strategic shifting of physical location represented for me the shifting in perspective that is such a key element of intellectual development.  It contributes to the solving of problems in many domains, to a more complex understanding of human behavior, to adopting a point of view in literature and the arts.  A lot could emerge from this moment.  The day-to-day at the...job site was full of such episodes, and their cross-disciplinary potential was, for the most part, lost to the English teacher or the psychology teacher, sealed off by the physical and conceptual barriers in the curriculum. [emphasis mine]

The result is separate professional spheres, each narrowly defined.  And it is the academic curriculum, not the vocational, that has gotten identified as the place where intelligence is manifest.

I think this episode is a good one to pull out, particularly as Darwin and I continue our banter on the meaning, utility, and limits of the "liberal arts education."  The episode with the window -- thinking of a "shift in perspective" that is literal and using it to jump off and think of metaphorical shifts of perspective -- is pretty emblematic of how I like to say that my technical education serves me as a "liberal" education.  I have a toolbox of metaphors and allusions too:  mine contains concepts like Schroedinger's cat, "black boxes," diffusion, parallel and series, material and energy balances, instabilities, damping, deformation, boundary layers.  Problem-solving of all kinds.  I call on the mental associations linked to concepts like these every day.  

I think much of this book would be a good assignment for a high school student.  There is certainly material there that might encourage thoughtful consideration of one's future, but more importantly, I think the anecdotes serve to inculcate respect and admiration for the people whose work (often behind the scenes) contributes to our health, safety, leisure, and comfort.

The chapters on vocational education are probably worth reading for any educator -- including the homeschooler.  I have gotten so used to thinking of vocational education as a good solution to much of the education bubble's excesses, that I had forgotten to consider how it really plays out in real schools, where the "academic" and the "vocational" sphere are completely isolated from one another.   But in  the homeschool, we can round out the liberal arts education with a good dose of skills training, or we can make sure that our trades-minded children still receive a firm grounding in classical liberal arts.  We don't have to make the trade-offs that the institutional schools have had to make -- nor the mistakes they've chosen.

 

Unintended consequences.

One of the, shall we say, interdisciplinary topics I can really geek out about is unintended consequences.  

I first got interested in it with respect to engineering.  I like disasters.  No, I don't really mean that I like disasters, but they fascinate me.  I'm always grumpy with news coverage of bridges falling down and malfunctioning airplanes, because the news coverage always stops after it's done with all the human interest stories, and there's never a big fanfare when the NTSB comes out with their final report and explains why and how it all happened.  

Sometimes the cause of things falling down is a fairly uncomplicated error, triggered by the sudden application of unusual circumstances (like the 35W bridge collapse here in Minneapolis -- an underdesigned set of parts failed 30 years into the bridge's life during a massive resurfacing project which altered the loads on the bridge) or a perfect storm of errors (like the Gimli Glider story from 1983 that I linked to just a few days ago).  But I am particularly interested in bad things that result from good intentions:  unintended consequences.   

(Actually, the Gimli Glider story is a bit of an example of that:  the accident would not have happened had Canada not decided to convert to the metric system, which (one assumes) was a well-intentioned policy change.)

I have a good book on the topic of unintended engineering consequences somewhere here at home.  It's called Why Things Bite Back, which is all about technological fixes that create bigger problems than the ones they were intended to solve.  There are also a few examples among the case studies of failures in Henry Petroski's To Engineer is Human.

But I'm also interested in unintended consequences in law and policy, and unintended consequences in social engineering.  What put me in mind of these today was a post at the Volokh Conspiracy about the abuse of privacy law:

New Hampshire is one of about a dozen “all party consent” states.  The federal government and most states are “one party consent” jurisdictions, where recording is legal if one participant agrees to it. ... Recently, though, these laws have mainly protected the police, who’ve used the laws to arrest bystanders for making cell phone videos of police conduct.

Judging from the outrage such arrests have sparked, it’s safe to say that protecting police from public scrutiny is an unintended consequence of this privacy law. (As I’ve pointed out recently, that is not the only unintended consequence of all-party consent laws.  They’re also bad for computer security. In most states, I can hire someone to screen incoming messages for malware, and as long as I consent to the monitoring there’s no legal problem.  In all-party consent states, though, there’s a real risk that I need the consent of the malware sender before someone can screen his incoming message.)

...Privacy laws are largely efforts to regulate technology.  Some new technology comes along, and we don’t like some of the changes it is likely to bring.  The privacy campaigners tell us that we can keep the good parts of the technology and ban the bad.  So we adopt a new privacy law based on some principle that sounds good to us at the time. 

All-party consent laws, for example, responded to cheap taping equipment by adopting the principle that both parties should agree before their conversation is recorded.  It sounded good at the time; after all, wouldn’t any other rule encourage treachery? Then, gradually, cheap recording technology spread, and it became easier and easier to violate the law.  After a while, the principle that sounded so good a decade or two earlier began to seem a little artificial. Our internal privacy expectations had changed, but the law hadn’t.

Inevitably, violations of the law proliferated, to the point where the violations didn’t feel like wrongdoing.

When law-breaking is widespread and unapologetic, the authorities can pick and choose whom they prosecute.  Is it any surprise that they choose to prosecute people who inconvenience the authorities? Or that the laws end up being used to bolster the status quo? ...[H]aving laws on the books that are widely violated because they no longer fit our actual sense of right and wrong practically invites abuse by those in power.

The point of having laws is to punish, stigmatize, and prevent behavior that is widely accepted to be wrong, and to do so fairly.  Once a law is technically broken by lots of people, it is eventually only used by the powerful and privileged to punish people who threaten them.  If that isn't an unintended consequence I don't know what is.

It occurred to me I could use an "unintended consequences" category, so I'm creating one.

Why and how to question authority.

Those bumper stickers that say "Question Authority" -- have you seen them?

Once I saw a bumper sticker that said, "Who are you to tell me to question authority?"

I have always liked that one, partly because it's snarky, and partly because its snark derives from pointing out that the Question Authority folks are oblivious to the fact that, in asserting a standard of behavior, they don't so much undermine the notion of authority as set themselves up as an alternative authority.

Kaydee at Engineering Ethics Blog has a good meditation on the purpose of authority structures, and how to question authorities without questioning authority.

He focuses on the authority structure of licensed architects and engineers, who receive their authority from a licensing board, who in turn receive authorization from the government... and if you are a U. S. Constitutional fan, you know that the government in turn receives its authority from the consent of the governed:

There are those who view all authority with suspicion, and for some reason they seem especially widespread in New England, where “Question Authority” bumper stickers are almost as common as license plates; at least they were when I lived there in the 1990s.  The question I’d like to ask today is, can you be a good engineer and question authority too?   That is, is it consistent to be simultaneously an ethical engineer, and to maintain a fundamentally skeptical and judgmental attitude toward all authorities? 

...Normally we think of a person in authority as having power to decide important matters.  This is the facet of authority that first comes to mind when I think about authority with respect to engineering.  In an architectural firm, for example, only certain licensed architects and engineers are authorized to sign off on blueprints (or whatever the electronic equivalent is these days). But using the word “authorized” in that way brings up a second aspect of authority. 

Authorities don’t just get up one day and declare themselves authorities.  They have to be authorized.  In the case of licensed engineers, the state board in charge of licensing engineers authorizes the engineer to sign off on designs.  So authorities must receive their authority from, well, other authorities.  And authorities, as Austin points out, are ultimately other persons.  Even when we cite a licensing board or a book as an authority, we really refer to the person or people behind these intermediate entities.  So you can’t have authority without speaking of authorities, that is, persons who have authority.

That raises the structural question of where authority ultimately comes from....

 

Authorities must be questioned from time to time, because anyone can discover a problem that must be corrected or have an insight that must travel up the chain in order to be acted upon.  But we have a responsibility to do so in a way that preserves the existing authority structure -- which, after all, was put in place for a reason:

[N]ow and then, you may find that your authorities, whoever they are, have made an error, ranging from a mistake in a textbook to an order to falsify test records for an engineering project.  It will then be your role to deal respectfully but truthfully with the error in a way that preserves the overall authority structure, but moves the organization toward the freedom for human flourishing that [is] the ultimate purpose of all authority. 

I noted that one feature of a healthy and effective authority structure is the existence of a clear and well-accepted procedure by which information moves up the chain of command, so to speak.  It's especially important that the procedure be well-defined when the information has the potential to contradict the "authorities" or even to embarrass them, and it's even more important when human life may be at stake.  Think emergency rooms, combat theaters, and cockpits.  

Wikipedia has an interesting article on one such system of communication:  CRM, for Cockpit (or Crew) Resource Management.  (Sometimes the same thing is called Bridge Resource Management or Maritime Resource Management.)

CRM aims to foster a climate or culture where the freedom to respectfully question authority is encouraged.

... It recognizes that a discrepancy between what is happening and what should be happening is often the first indicator that an error is occurring. This is a delicate subject for many organizations, especially ones with traditional hierarchies, so appropriate communication techniques must be taught to supervisors and their subordinates, so that supervisors understand that the questioning of authority need not be threatening, and subordinates understand the correct way to question orders.

Cockpit voice recordings of various air disasters tragically reveal first officers and flight engineers attempting to bring critical information to the captain's attention in an indirect and ineffective way. By the time the captain understood what was being said, it was too late to avert the disaster. A CRM expert named Todd Bishop developed a five-step assertive statement process that encompasses inquiry and advocacy steps:

• Opening or attention getter - Address the individual. "Hey Chief," or "Captain Smith," or "Bob," or whatever name or title will get the person's attention.
• State your concern - Express your analysis of the situation in a direct manner while owning your emotions about it. "I'm concerned that we may not have enough fuel to fly around this storm system," or "I'm worried that the roof might collapse."
• State the problem as you see it - "We're only showing 40 minutes of fuel left," or "This building has a lightweight steel truss roof, and we may have fire extension into the roof structure."
• State a solution - "Let's divert to another airport and refuel," or "I think we should pull some tiles and take a look with the thermal imaging camera before we commit crews inside."
• Obtain agreement (or buy-in) - "Does that sound good to you, Captain?"

These are often difficult skills to master, as they may require significant changes in personal habits, interpersonal dynamics, and organizational culture.

Maybe the bumper sticker should read:  Question Authorities, Intelligently.

Entertaining Wikipedia article (unless you're afraid to fly).

Often, when our family takes a road trip, I bring along something to read aloud to Mark -- usually a nonfiction book. I like books that spur conversation between us, particularly pop-science books that we can argue about and analyze. This is fun even when the book is really bad. On the way down from Minneapolis to Ohio last week, we read The Psychopath Test, which turned out to be perfect road-trip reading -- entertaining, not entirely convincing (meaning that we had a chance to argue about it) and also, in general, food for thought.

I didn't have a book for the way back up, so I made do by following trails of links in Wikipedia to articles about things we didn't know. We started from an article about the Mars robot that landed earlier, and from there to previous Mars lander missions, including the one that famously failed because somebody forgot to convert newtons to pounds-force -- a mistake roundly mocked by everyone EXCEPT former engineering students because deep down, we all know THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD GO I. If my life had been only a little bit different, I too might have broken NASA.

Anyway, from there we went to a list of disasters caused by metrication errors, and that led us to what must be (since I love engineering failure stories) the most entertaining Wikipedia article I have ever read in my life: the story of the "Gimli Glider."

It is only entertaining if you know how the story ends, so let me give you the spoiler first. EVERYBODY SURVIVED, NO MAJOR INJURIES. There you go. Now the teaser: this is the story of an airliner that ran out of gas at 41,000 feet because Canadians had just started converting to the metric system. Now you can read and enjoy.

I read this aloud to Mark, and we agreed that it could never have been made into a true-life disaster movie because no one would believe the chain of events. The aircraft was nearly uncontrollable -- but by a remarkable coincidence, the captain was an experienced glider pilot. The first officer proposed landing at the nearest runway, which happened to be at a nearby closed air force base -- which he knew well because he had once served there as a Canadian air force pilot. But he didn't know that the air force base had been converted to a race track complex. Or that there was a race going on (think NASCAR, but Canadian) and the runway area was full of cars and campers. Also that there were cars racing on the runway.

Anyway, if you thought the "Sully in the river" story was gripping, I think you should try this one.

Six degrees to cupcakes.

When I was pregnant with my second child, I read a simple line in a parenting book (Becky Bailey, Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline) that resonated with me: 

"In any given moment, ask yourself, do you want to be special, or do you want to connect?"  

As a child and adolescent, I had wanted to be special more than anything, and I was growing tired of it.   More and more, I desired to make real connections.   But I hadn't seen until then that specialness and connectedness are in tension, that to emphasize one is necessarily to de-emphasize the other, and that in any moment we have the opportunity to make the choice between them.

The book goes on to say:

Unity ... comes from letting go of the need to compare oneself to others, and choosing instead to connect through a sense of equality.

I understand that, and the implied tradeoffs, much better now.

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 I like that it is phrased as a question, because it isn't as if connectedness is always to be prized over specialness; and there's a bit of a circularity to it, because one of the things that makes each person particular  -- unique -- "special" -- is the particular combination of connections he has made.  

One example: it's precisely because of my connections with my family members that I am irreplaceable to each of them.  I am a particular person -- "Mom" -- to each of my children, the only mom they have, and my husband's only wife.  Connection and "specialness" are bound up.

Another example:  It's because of their unique connections with different "networks" that certain highly connected people hold together entire communities.   Malcolm Gladwell writes about this topic in his book The Tipping Point.  Are you familiar with the saying "six degrees of separation?"  The idea that every person is connected to every other person on the globe by a chain of introduction ("I know someone who knows someone who knows someone...") that's on average only six people long?  Many researchers, most famously Stephen Milgram, have attempted to measure interconnectedness through correspondence experiments.  But it isn't just the length of the "chain," but the structure of connectedness of the whole, that is interesting.  Gladwell writes:

The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts....Most of us don't have particularly broad and diverse groups of friends... In the six degrees of separation, not all degrees are equal.

Social connections aren't spread out evenly.  They cluster:  most of us have many connections within small groups that share lots of connections.  But here and there are individuals who tie those clusters together -- people who have connections to many different clusters.   By necessity, having many diverse connections mean that most of the connections aren't particularly strong.  (Gladwell says that such "connectors" have "mastered what sociologists call the 'weak tie,' a friendly yet casual social connection.  On Gladwell's web page is reprinted a brief excerpt,"The Connectors," that introduces the concept.)  But even the most highly connected people probably have a few very strong, prized connections with a few select and dear friends.  At least, that seems to be true about the connectors I know.

+ + +

Connectors wouldn't be connectors, wouldn't tie so many people together, if they weren't willing to be "special" in the sense that in each cluster they're the one person who stands out because, well, they know so many people outside the cluster.  So their numerous weak ties aren't to be disparaged:  they are extremely valuable.

+ + +

When I stepped back from most work other than directly meeting my family's needs, it was kind of like saying to the world:  I'm going to focus my energy on building a few connections, and reinforcing them heavily, rather than on making numerous connections that, because numerous, can't be strong.  

And that's what I do.  I have the chance to carefully supervise the connections between each child and his siblings, between these children and a few close friends, between the children and my friends and my friends' children, between my friends' children and me.  I have time to cultivate a few friendships of my own, too.   The networks my kids and I move in are small but connection-dense.   

 I do it this way not because I think it's better to have fewer, stronger connections than to be "well-connected" -- although I am learning to prefer it -- but because I think it's the kind of connectivity I'm better suited to help build.  I'm not worried that they won't be able to branch out more later.  They have time to develop a connectivity that is their own, once out of my shadow; I'm doing it for myself now, after all, at age thirty-seven, so why not they?

+ + +

But on second thought, I am a sort of connector, too.  I work to build the connections for my family in our small cluster, but the nature of being a parent is that you are a bridge to connect your family to the outside world:  a gatekeeper, if you will.  It's a small connection, but to those young people, it is an artery.

+ + +

There's another, virtual way of being a connector, and homeschooling is really the perfect outlet for it.  Ever dealing better with ideas than with people, I like moving in multiple mental worlds, and enjoying the surprising connections between them.   I like having a deep knowledge of engineering and also of homemaking.  I like being a scientist (well, sort of) and a theist.  I like being ridiculously unclassifiable on any political spectrum, which, I think, comes with the territory of examined Catholicism.  I like the challenge of standing in the middle between two groups that are foreign to each other -- not because I refuse to commit to membership in or agreement with either group, but because I like to thoroughly understand the perspectives of both -- and attempting to translate.  This is the kind of connection I like to make, and I think I am not bad at it, when I get the chance.  (At least in writing.  Never at parties.)

+ + +

I think maybe the level of connection one creates is part of  one's vocation, and so unique; after all, connections create responsibilities, and fulfilling these is what vocation is all about.   Perhaps those "connectors" among us, tying the clusters together with a mass of weak links, have a greater impact than the rest -- at least when they work to keep the links active.  A greater responsibility, even?  Maybe. 

Here's a little story about the value of being multiply connected, and a lesson that no matter what kind of connectivity we enjoy, we always have the choice to reinforce those connections -- to send a little jolt of energy across a gap, so to speak -- and that when we do send that jolt along, it can travel quite far. 

A couple of days ago I wrote about calling Poison Control from camp when my child got tree sap in her eye.  I was happy because they exist and because they give good advice; in a different universe where PCC did not exist or was run by lawyers, my vacation would have been ruined.   I believe I wrote something along the lines of "YAY POISON CONTROL.  I wish I could send you cupcakes."

Now, I may not be a connector in this particular field, but:

1. commenter/reader/three-dimensional contact ChristyP is, and she forwarded my blog post to 
2. a colleague who directs a poison control center in her state.   The colleague forwarded the email to
3.  the managing director of my local poison control center, with whom she was apparently on a first-name basis.    The managing director shared the story with 
4. the VP of professional and support services of the medical center that hosts the poison control center.  And that vice president surprised
5. "Dustin," the poison information provider who took my call, with 
6. a tray of cupcakes.

Count 'em, folks!    Too bad I didn't ask for Champagne!

But what's really great about this is the reminder that, no matter how numerous or even how weak the connections we control may be, no matter whether they are between our own family members or across town, we often get a chance to pass a little something along.  It may come to nothing, or it may "merely" make someone's day more interesting, or  -- who knows?  It could pay back far in the future.  I think I will think of this story often when those little chances make themselves known.

"Hacking for Solidarity."

Interesting history post at the Engineering Ethics Blog:

During the 1980s, the Communist government of Poland imposed martial law and rigidly suppressed and controlled speech. All media outlets, including radio and TV, were under government supervision. As the Solidarity movement grew, however, a group of radio and television engineers joined with other technical types (mainly university professors) to do (what we would term today) hacking of the official radio and TV networks. Pretty soon after that, TV-watching Poles began to see images of things like the words of the national anthem superimposed on the video feed of dull official programs. Now and then, the audio of the TV channel would give way to music of the national anthem, a joke, or some popular song that had nothing to do with the official program. At other times, Poles listening to their radios began to receive signals from “pirate” radio stations broadcasting information that the government did not want them to hear.

The content of the messages sent by what came to be called “Radio Solidarity” was not as significant as the mere fact that somebody, somewhere, was messing with the government’s system, and could get away with it.

Read the rest.

 

Just in case.

In the "and now for something completely different" category -- I always thought of the Swiss as having a military that was mostly good for ceremonially guarding ceremonial things.  

But apparently that's just a front, because Switzerland's military has been busy building booby traps:

[T]he Swiss military has, in effect, wired the entire country to blow in the event of foreign invasion. To keep enemy armies out, bridges will be dynamited and, whenever possible, deliberately collapsed onto other roads and bridges below; hills have been weaponized to be activated as valley-sweeping artificial landslides; mountain tunnels will be sealed from within to act as nuclear-proof air raid shelters; and much more. 

From a 1984  book by John McPhee called La Place de la Concorde Suisse:

"To interrupt the utility of bridges, tunnels, highways, railroads, Switzerland has established three thousand points of demolition. That is the number officially printed. It has been suggested to me that to approximate a true figure a reader ought to multiply by two. Where a highway bridge crosses a railroad, a segment of the bridge is programmed to drop on the railroad. Primacord fuses are built into the bridge. Hidden artillery is in place on either side, set to prevent the enemy from clearing or repairing the damage."

And you thought the little knives were clever:

McPhee points to small moments of "fake stonework, concealing the artillery behind [them]," that dot Switzerland's Alpine geology, little doors that will pop open to reveal internal cannons that will then blast the country's roads to smithereens. Later, passing under a mountain bridge, McPhee notices "small steel doors in one pier" hinting that the bridge "was ready to blow. It had been superceded, however, by an even higher bridge, which leaped through the sky above—a part of the new road to Simplon. In an extreme emergency, the midspan of the new bridge would no doubt drop on the old one." 

By the time you get to the end of the blog post, you'll be convinced that the Swiss intend to singlehandedly repopulate the planet after the doomsday device goes off -- and that they have some chance of succeeding.  But the book is Cold-War era; maybe they haven't been keeping it up for the last 20 years, who knows?

Engineering ethics, from both directions.

I recently discovered a blog that's new to me but has been around since 2006:  Engineering Ethics Blog, written by "Kaydee," whose profile states that he teaches engineering courses at Texas State and that he has worked in industry and as a consulting engineer.  

Engineering ethics is a great interest of mine, coming at it from two directions -- the conventional one, and a different one as well.    

The first and common understanding of "engineering ethics" would be the professional ethical standards of practicing and teaching engineers.  Engineering organizations have their own published codes of ethics (for example, here is the code of ethics of AIChE, in which I briefly held membership before switching my job description to "never worked a day in her life"*).   Engineering colleges routinely offer courses in engineering ethics to their students, although the courses are not always required.  Here is an online, uncredited course in engineering ethics offered through MIT OpenCourseWare.  (I have not reviewed this course and this link is not a recommendation.)

In that sense, "engineering ethics" encompasses questions of serving public safety, of truth-telling in public statements, of refusing to take part in bribery or corruption, of accurate self-representation, and of working within one's own sphere of competence.  

There is another sense in which I, personally, like to think of "engineering ethics."  That is the special perspective and specialized knowledge that engineering training brings to the consideration of ethical questions in general.

Such questions confront all human beings above the age of reason.  They include questions that societies face in balancing diverse interests through public policy; questions of evaluating costs and benefits, risks and rewards in the workplace and in our personal lives; and how specific ethical questions ("case studies," if you will) refine and sharpen the broad principles of moral philosophy.

What do I mean by the "special perspective and specialized knowledge" of engineers?  Emphatically not that the engineer, or any other kind of scientist, has a specially privileged moral sense.  Scientists and engineers are no more likely to make good interior ethical judgments than anyone else.  We are just as likely to be selfish, corruptible, or arrogant.  If all our policymakers were scientists and engineers, we might have more technically informed policy, but we would not necessarily have policy that better served the public good.  There is precious little about "what one ought to do" in an engineering education -- and what there is, appears in the engineering ethics courses.

Part of what I mean by the relevant perspective and specialized knowledge is our expertise in technical matters that may inform ethical decisions.  

• We may not be specially able to tell the public whether we ought to mandate such-and-such an adaptive technology to better accommodate the disabled in public buildings.  But we can tell the public how much the machines will cost, how soon they could be installed, which places they would be more difficult to implement, and how frequently they would require maintenance.  
• We may not be specially able to tell the public whether we ought to ban a particular type of gadget that has fallen out of favor because of some impact its production or disposal has on the environment.  But we can provide a list of feasible substitute gadgets, count up how much the substitutes would cost, estimate how soon new technologies might come to market, consider whether there are alternative means of dealing with the old gadget's problems, and try to predict whether the substitute gadgets will bring worse costs and risks than the old ones.   

My husband, the other engineer on this blog, says about his responsibilities giving technical advice at work:  "I never tell them that such-and-such an idea is impossible, or that it is a bad idea.  That is not my job.  I always tell them how much their idea would cost, and let them make the conclusions."

But another aspect that the engineer brings to ethical problems is our trained approach to problems in general.  It's sometimes maddening for the people who have to work with us and live with us, but we can be accused of treating every problem, from public policy to household budgetary dilemmas to difficult childrearing decisions to friends' marital woes as an engineering problem.  

What are the constraints?  Make a list.  What are the available resources?  Tally them up.  Which pieces of information do we lack?  Take a measurement, go get advice, or make an appropriate assumption along with the necessary caveats.  What are the conceivable courses of action?  Plot them out.  Where are the critical decision points?  Identify them and identify the possible decisions.  

How much could each path cost?  What are the possible benefits?  Who benefits at each stage?  What are the risks -- and what is the probability of each projected undesirable outcome?  Can we live with those possibilities?

It's not that we don't take into consideration people's feelings about their problems.  It's just that the potential effect of feelings  have to be factored into the cost-and-benefit structure.  If you're going to have an irrational reaction to one potential outcome of this decision, then I have to factor your irrationality into the potential negative costs.

We tend to drive nontechnical types a little crazy when we import our approach into nontechnical problems.  But I think it's a good way to approach problems of all kinds, and is one reason why I'm grateful for my engineering education, which has shaped the way I look at all kinds of things, even though (as noted) I haven't worked a day in my life.  At least not recently.

Anyway, here is a sample of posts from Engineering Ethics Blog.

On the unintended consequences of the ethanol-in-gasoline mandate ERISA:

At the time, ERISA was passed, ethanol was the only biofuel that had any reasonable chance of making it into the nation’s gas tanks in a reasonable time frame....

The not-so-advertised reasons for the law have to do with the strength of the agricultural lobby.  The E10 mandate was a tremendous windfall for everybody who grows corn.  While some ethanol from corn was being used voluntarily as a fuel additive before 2007, the mandate caused this use to skyrocket.  By 2011, according to the Mosbacher Institute report by economist James Griffin, 37% of the entire U. S. corn crop went toward ethanol production.  And corn prices soared from $2.50 per bushel up to as high as $7.50.

If the only people hurt were U. S. food consumers (not everybody drives a car, but everybody eats), it would be bad enough.  But the U. S. grows and sells more corn than any other nation, and much of it is exported to poorer countries, where it is a staple in many diets.  While the rise in corn prices was not solely responsible for the worldwide inflation in food costs that led to food riots in many nations in recent years, the timing is suspicious, and there is no question that the ERISA law led to hardships for many poor people around the world who were now even less able to afford to eat....

Unintended consequences show up all the time in considering engineering ethics, and the ERISA mandate has plenty.  The parties who appear to have benefited are:  growers of corn and producers of corn-based ethanol (a lot), the U. S. driving public (a little), and the U. S. overall, from the viewpoint of slightly improved energy security.  The losers include refiners (who have had to fool with the mandate and change their processes), anybody who buys corn (U. S. food consumers, U. S. livestock growers, and millions of foreign food consumers, many of whom are poor), and the U. S. public in the sense that they have had to pay the 45-cent-a-gallon subsidy through the U. S. treasury.  Quite a mixed bag, to say the least.

On the Air France 447 crash of June 1, 2009:

While we will never know why co-pilot Bonin (the one with least experience) did what he did, the fact remains that at 2:10, he pulled the stick back and basically kept it there until it was too late to correct his mistake....

In older aircraft, the two pilot sticks are mechanically coupled together, so only one message goes from the cockpit to the ailerons. If two pilots disagree on what to do with such a stick, they find themselves literally fighting a tug-of-war in the cockpit, and most reasonable people would react by at least talking about what to do next. 

But even in the autopilot-off mode, the Airbus sticks could be moved independently, and the plane responds to the average of the two sticks’ motion. To my ears, this sounds like a software engineer’s solution to a human-factors problem. In the event, even though the senior pilot eventually did the right thing with his stick, the computer averaged it with Bonin’s all-way-back stick, and the stall continued. 

... I hope the software and hardware engineers working on the next Airbus rethink their strategy of independent sticks and averaging. While human-machine communication is important, this accident emphasizes the fact that interpersonal communication in a crisis is vital. That single additional channel of communication through a mechanical link between sticks might have been enough to avoid this accident. 

 

On the show Mythbusters:

Hyneman and Savage are really doing what used to be called “natural philosophy,” back when philosophy really meant the love of knowledge, and not some arcane specialty that you have to get a Ph. D. in to understand, which is mostly what it means today. Before about 1800, most science was done simply because people were curious and wanted to know whether a thing was true or not. There were no huge funding agencies, no boards of proposal review or journal referees—just a few curious guys (it was nearly all guys then) who got together in coffee shops and wrote each other letters about their experiments. And because there was almost no organized industry producing scientific instruments, they had to build almost all their equipment and experiments themselves.

Hyneman ran a special-effects shop before getting involved with MythBusters, and so the very hands-on demands of that type of work (especially before digital technology took over movies to the degree it has) gave him a set of skills that fits very well into the kind of things required by the MythBusters shows. So his lack of formal scientific training isn’t really a disadvantage—instead, he goes about things the way the average guy with time on his hands might look into them. 

Somewhat to my regret, I noted that the Wikipedia biographies of both stars list them as sympathetic with the skeptic or atheist turn of mind. While such a philosophy may be an advantage in their particular line of work, it is by no means a necessity....

The MythBusters people deserve credit for popularizing both science and how to do dangerous things safely. Their latest mishap, although attention-getting, could have been a lot worse, and I’m sure they will be more careful in the future while investigating questions from the past, such as whether a cannonball could really breach a stone wall. And I’m glad they are continuing a long-established tradition of science for science’s sake—even if they are interrupted by messages from their sponsors.

 

_______

*This joke is the property of MrsDarwin.