From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Jan 3 22:18:50 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Evolution, Mars & ISS Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP Evolution, Mars & ISS Let me forward you this last WHAT'S NEW to you in its entirety. Information about getting your own subscription to the weekly newsletter from the American Physical Society, and archives, are at . --PJK -------------------------------------- Date: 1/3/05 1:58 PM From: whatsnew@bobpark.org WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 31 Dec 04 Washington, DC 1. DARWINIAN EVOLUTION: "MONKEY TRIAL" RECONVENES IN DOVER, PA. It's been 145 years since Darwin published Origin of Species, perhaps the world's greatest scientific discovery. No other idea has connected so many pieces of knowledge. It's now 80 years since the Scopes trial. If any doubts about evolution remain, you might suppose that DNA analysis would sweep them away. We can now measure how closely we are related to every creature on Earth. We share half our DNA with yeast. So genetically similar are bonobos to humans that, but for the inability of bonobos to talk, they might demand a seat in the UN. Yet, in Dover, PA, a town much like Dayton, TN, the school board voted to require that intelligent design be taught alongside evolution. The school board will lose in court, but we must ask ourselves why science has been so spectacularly unsuccessful in explaining such obvious truths to people. 2. THE EXPLORERS: SCIENCE MAGAZINE "BREAKTHROUGH OF THE YEAR." A hundred-million miles or so from Dover, PA, two geologists are picking their way over the Martian surface. They've found what they were looking for: unmistakable evidence that in the distant past there were bodies of salty water on Mars that may have been nurseries of life. Science picked the exploration of Mars as the Breakthrough of the Year. It is now a year since Spirit bounced onto Mars, soon to be followed by Opportunity. Eating only sunlight, they survived the Martian winter, the intense radiation, and they're still going. The search for life to which we are not related is the most exciting quest in science. Spirit and Opportunity are wonderful instruments, but it's the scientists back on Earth who control the robots, having become virtual astronauts, who are the explorers. The real distance from Dover, PA can't be measured in miles. 3. DIET HARD: NASA ON THE ISS CREW, "LET THEM EAT CAKE." While scientists are exploring Mars, the big news from the ISS was that a robotic Russian cargo craft had safely docked with food and water. It was a month late. To make matters worse, the previous crew had raided the pantry, forcing the crew of two to eat mostly desserts and candy, sort of like Christmas on Earth. What a sad waste. Is there any use to be made the giant space turkey? Perhaps they could make an ISS sitcom. THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND. Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the University of Maryland, but they should be. --- Archives of What's New can be found at http://www.aps.org/WN To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-whatsnew-46780O@lists.apsmsgs.org To subscribe, send a blank e-mail to: From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Jan 4 00:35:54 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Two Good Interviews Message-ID: Subject: Two Good Interviews (from NewsScan Daily, 3 January 2005) THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING: THE WEB, OF COURSE The distinguished computer scientist Ramesh Jain says in his blog that his interview with John Gehl for Ubiquity received widespread attention and demonstrated that the importance of paper publications is becoming less significant compared to appearance of ideas or articles in cyberspace: "None of my articles that appeared in well respected journals got the attention of relevant people so rapidly... I am convinced that this is clearly the direction for ideas propagation and distribution." And last week's Ubiquity interview with technology visionary Michael Schrage also received a tremendous response from readers. You'll find the two interviews at: and . From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Jan 5 14:05:15 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Rage Therapy Message-ID: Subject: Rage Therapy (from INNOVATION, 5 January 2005) TECH RAGE THERAPY Kent Norman, cognitive psychologist and director of the Laboratory for Automation Psychology and Decision Processes at the University of Maryland, loves to kill computers. His lab looks like a slaughterhouse for surplus and obsolete technology: "… I thought why not dispose of all this stuff in a creative, vent-filled manner? And I discovered it is fun, interesting and rewarding to barbeque a mouse, crack open a hard disk, and bend a keyboard," says Norman. But his destruction has a point -- he makes technology snuff films that he hopes will serve as a self-help tool for frustrated users driven to the edge. Norman has documented humans' tendency toward technology abuse through a rage survey, which has produced confessions like "I once shot a computer with a .50 cal BMG sniper rifle" and "Threw keyboard into the swimming pool. Kinda nice watching it sink." In fact, based on Norman's research, about 10% of all new computers and tech gadgets given as gifts over the holidays will suffer serious damage by frustrated recipients -- and the worst abusers? Techies, of course: "While most techies have a high tolerance for frustration when they go over the edge they can be excessive. I have one report of a frustrated geek who took his PC into the middle of a parking lot and doused it with two gallons of gasoline. That's a bit much. Two cups would have been more than sufficient," says Norman. (Technology Review 24 Dec 2004) ------------------------------------------------------------------- Maybe in addition to the many gyms and spas that most shopping plazas are turning into, there could be a rage therapy center attached to the recycling portion of the local town dump? --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Jan 6 15:34:51 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Tsunami Frauds Message-ID: Subject: Tsunami Frauds (from NewsScan Daily, 6 January 2005) BEWARE TSUNAMI INTERNET FRAUDS The FBI has issued a warning about online frauds that try to capitalize on the recent tsunami disaster by offering to help tsunami victims or relatives for a fee. Audri Lanford of comments: "Within hours of 9/11 we had the 9/11 scams. We've seen them for every major disaster." (New York Times 6 Jan 2005) ----------------------------------------------------------------- As the NYT article points out (for access to which you may need to do a free registration), there is even a variant of the Nigerian email scam, though I would have thought that to be a very obvious scam by now. The vultures never stop circling. Actually, that's a metaphor rather unkind to the real avian species. --PJK > One Tsunami variation now in circulation comes from Miss Helen, > princess of Somalia, whose "entire village" - and all of her > relatives - were "wiped away by this terrible flood." Miss Helen > claims to need help transferring her family's fortune - about $2.4 > million, the e-mail message says - which was sent to Spain just > before the tsunami. A 40 percent commission is promised to people > who help. The Internet Crime Complaint Center estimates that $125.6 > million was lost in 2004 to online swindles, with auction fraud > accounting for about 61 percent of all complaints. The Nigerian > e-mail scam ranked among the top 10 scams reported to the agency. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Jan 16 23:18:57 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Evolution (USA ver.2004) re Message-ID: Subject: Evolution (USA ver.2004) redux Regarding item 1. in a recent mailing, about another Scopes trial, , I wanted to share with you some reflections by my good friend and colleague Dr. Rodion Rathbone (with his permission). --PJK ----------------------------------------------------------------- At 12:52 PM 1/3/05 -0500, you wrote: >WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 31 Dec 04 Washington, DC > >1. DARWINIAN EVOLUTION: "MONKEY TRIAL" RECONVENES IN DOVER, PA. >It's been 145 years since Darwin published Origin of Species, >perhaps the world's greatest scientific discovery. No other >idea has connected so many pieces of knowledge. It's now 80 >years since the Scopes trial. If any doubts about evolution >remain, you might suppose that DNA analysis would sweep them >away. We can now measure how closely we are related to every >creature on Earth. We share half our DNA with yeast. So >genetically similar are bonobos to humans that, but for the >inability of bonobos to talk, they might demand a seat in the >UN. Yet, in Dover, PA, a town much like Dayton, TN, the school >board voted to require that intelligent design be taught >alongside evolution. The school board will lose in court, but >we must ask ourselves why science has been so spectacularly >unsuccessful in explaining such obvious truths to people. Might the arrogance of the scientific community have something to do with it? No, that couldn't be it. Given all the scientific disciplines, surely we understand almost all that's relevant to a happy human life. There are some areas where we don't have full understanding, but surely people must see that we have the only methodology that makes any sense. The poor ignorant populace, what can they be thinking. Why, most of them don't even know what a methodology is. It's easy to see the absurdity and stupidity of the more extreme positions in some other world view, but we have a more tolerant stance towards the more radical exponents of our own stance. In the 1800s, there was the statement "I am the master of Trinity College, and what I know not, is not knowledge." The intellectual community of the time saw it as a bit over-reaching, but not too far off the mark. From today's perspective, it's ludicrous. In the early 1950's, 55% of Americans polled affirmed that Joe McCarthy was basically doing the right thing, even though they had quibbles with his methods. By the end of the 1950s, thanks to Edward R. Morrow and others, few saw him as constructive. The memory of that time was long-lived, but not quite long enough. The stance of "We are Right, so let's kill them" is again seeking ascendance. I can see it clearly on the political right. Will I recognize this stance where it shows itself in my own intellectual community? The Amazing Randi has been a crusader for truth, exposing many a quick-buck artist posing as a paranormal seer. Thirty years from now, when we better understand the neurobiology of a 20% placebo effect in drug trials (sometimes 80%), will Randi's dedication remind us more of Wyatt Erp in Dodge City, or Cotton Mather at the Salem witch trials? >From where I sit, I can only wonder what the answer will be. I suspect such wondering is one of the strongest contributions we can make. Clashes in world views have always had a shortage of humility. It can lead to engagement and dialog, not dialog with those on the extremes, but among the rest. This is powerful. We have had too much of verbal missiles hurtled over the barricades. These only serve to prompt more fortifications on the other side, and prompt the less committed to take refuge under them. While they may prompt much cheering on our own side, and that feels encouraging, I think they advance our cause little. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Jan 21 02:24:20 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Jeffersonian Commons? Message-ID: Subject: Jeffersonian Commons? (from INNOVATION, 19 January 2005) SCIENTISTS MAKE AN END RUN AROUND PATENT LAWS Patents have suddenly caught the attention of the general public, as increasingly they're viewed as an impediment to scientific, technological and creative advancements. "The real story here is that we are in the midst of a huge revolution because the patent system hasn't kept up with technology and changes in society," says intellectual property attorney Bruce Sunstein. And while some companies have almost made a business out of enforcing patents they've acquired, others -- most notably IBM -- are making headlines for their move in the other direction. IBM recently announced it was releasing 500 of the company's 10,000 U.S. patents to the open source community in an effort to boost innovation among the scientific community. Dovetailing with IBM's announcement is the launch this month of the Science Commons -- a public domain repository of scientific works. Sunstein predicts that the advent of the Science Commons, along with Google Scholar and IBM's patent release, will push publishers of scientific journals to move toward a more open copyright and dissemination system. "Many scientists now see paper publications as an impediment, since the Web is a faster and cheaper form of dissemination of information, one that might well foster a greater and better community of scientific endeavor. This technological communications environment requires a new set of rules to assure the fair exchange of scientific ideas and a reasonable way of monetizing this exchange," says Sunstein. (Technology Review 12 Jan 2005) -------------------------------------------------------------------- The realization of a Jeffersonian intellectual property commons may be slower than the above would suggest in overcoming its opponents. E.g. how long is it now that Paul Ginsparg, now at Cornell, has been advocating that kind of scientific publishing? About 15 years. E.g. see , and its references to earlier work. A "whole generation" of theoretical physicists has grown up on his Los Alamos Preprint Archive . All progress in the direction of wider such practices is of course much to be commended. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Jan 24 13:54:01 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Internet Credulity Message-ID: Subject: Internet Credulity (from NewsScan Daily, 24 January 2005) PEW STUDY FINDS SEARCHER MISPERCEPTIONS A new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project has found that only 1 in 6 users of Internet search engines can tell the difference between unbiased search results and paid advertisements. All of the major search engines return a mix of regular results (based solely on relevance to the search terms entered) and sponsored links (for which a Web site had paid advertising fees). Only 38% of Web searchers are aware of the distinction, and of those only 47% can always tell which are paid -- even though they're usually labeled by the search engines. PEW researcher Deborah Fallows says: "We're still in the infancy of the Internet. People are still kind of so pleased that they can go there, ask for something and get an answer that it's kind of not on their radar screen to look in a very scrutinizing way to see what's in the background there." (AP 24 Jan 2005) ----------------------------------------------------------------- A dismaying finding, and yet another instance where our secondary schools, and probably even colleges, are failing. Not that the need for a little critical thinking is unique to Internet searches. Newspaper and television content these days is often little more than paid advertisement. As regards the Internet, I have long pointed to simple tutorials like , as a way of improving Internet savvy. It is not the only such tutorial, but the oldest known to me. (It can even be downloaded for off-line use.) Finally, I must say I'm 'kind of' disappointed in the syntax of the quoted Pew researcher. It kind of lessens one's confidence in the reported results of their study. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Jan 28 19:17:31 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Hubble Trouble and more Message-ID: Subject: Hubble Trouble and more Dear Colleagues - I'm forwarding another issue of "What's New." No comment is needed. Some of you have your own sbscriptions. Sorry for the duplication. --PJK ---------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 28 Jan 05 Washington, DC 1. VISION: WHERE DOES THE ADMINISTRATION GET ITS SCIENCE ADVICE? On Feb 7, when the President's FY06 Budget Request is released, Sean O'Keefe will announce that no money is allotted for repair of the Hubble Space Telescope. However, money will be provided to drop the greatest telescope ever built into the ocean. Fixing Hubble with astronauts is too dangerous, O'Keefe said. Repairing Hubble with robots is too uncertain, an NRC panel said. It's too expensive anyway, the White House said. On the same day, the White House estimated the budget deficit at $427B. Besides, it wasn't too dangerous for the ISS crew to spend five hours outside yesterday repairing a Russian robot arm. So what's the arm for? It's so astronauts can make repairs without going outside. Hmmm. But why would anyone bother to repair the ISS? It doesn't do anything. Drop the ISS in the ocean, and save Hubble. 2. JIMO: U.S. PLANETARY SCIENTISTS DO IT THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY. It sounded exciting in 2003 when NASA announced that the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter mission would be the first nuclear-propelled mission under Project Prometheus. But now it looks like a plan to put them off while NASA focuses on Moon/Mars. Kinky is nice, but if conventional will get to Europa, they'll take it. Europa may be the last hope of finding other life in the solar system. 3. OPINIONS: THIS IS A FREE COUNTRY--OPINIONS ARE ANOTHER MATTER. The Education Department paid commentator Armstrong Williams $240,000 to plug the No Child Left Behind Act. Health and Human Services paid columnist Maggie Gallagher $21,500 to promote the marriage initiative. This is hardly big bucks compared to a guy with a good jump shot, but fans still need to know who's paying. WN gets tons of mail from readers pointing out stories we missed. We use a lot of them but no one ever enclosed a check. 4. CREATIONISM: SHOULD WARNING MESSAGES BE REQUIRED ON BOOKS? Manufactures are required to include warnings on labels. Why not text book publishers? Besides, the stickers Cobb County wanted on biology texts weren't exactly wrong evolution really is "just a theory." http://www.aps.org/WN/WN05/wn011405.cfm Science is open. If someone comes up with a better theory, the textbooks will be rewritten. Although requiring warning labels on medicine bottles is vital, on books they become official doctrine. Several readers suggested stickers for bibles in Cobb County: "This book contains religious stories regarding the origin of living things. The stories are theories, not facts. They are unproven, unprovable and in some cases totally impossible. This material should be approached with an open mind, and a critical eye towards logic and believability." THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND. Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the University of Maryland, but they should be. --- Archives of What's New can be found at http://www.aps.org/WN You are currently subscribed to whatsnew as: pjk@design.eng.yale.edu To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-whatsnew-46780O@lists.apsmsgs.org To subscribe, send a blank e-mail to: From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Jan 31 17:27:09 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Internet annus mirabilis? Message-ID: Subject: Internet annus mirabilis? (from NewsScan Daily, 31 January 2005) SAFE & SOUND IN THE CYBERAGE [By Stephen Cobb and Chey Cobb, Who Present Their Annual Lament] *** As the first month of 2005 draws to a close it is time to sound our annual alarm over the state of Internet decay. At the beginning of 2003 we wrote that the Internet "exists at the whim of those who know how to destroy it." We also said that "Our society is a lot more dependent on the Internet than anyone has so far been prepared to admit." Almost simultaneously, but unbeknownst to us, a certain federal government employee by the name of Richard Clarke, not widely known outside of Washington at that time, was drafting his resignation letter as he prepared to quit as head of cybersecurity for the Bush administration. In his letter Clarke said, "As long as we have vulnerabilities in cyberspace and as long as America has enemies, we are at risk of the two coming together to severely damage our great country. We cannot assume that the past level of damage is in any way indicative of what could happen in the future." A year later, we felt so strongly about this issue, and the continuing lack of attention it was receiving, that we reiterated our warnings in both this column and a press release, pointing out that profits and productivity gains created by the use of email and Web sites could be lost unless there was rapid and widespread deployment of improved technology to defeat these threats. We were particularly frustrated by "the willingness of major stakeholders, such as the large software, hardware, and network service provider companies, to sit around planning how to beat each other in the marketplace even as the marketplace threatens to disappear from beneath their feet." We concluded that "There has to be concerted, cooperative action, now. The alternative is, at best, a reduction in growth rates for activities like online banking and shopping; at worst, wholesale consumer defection will occur, along with a damaging loss of profits and productivity gains for companies, government, and the economy as a whole." Not everyone agreed. Our warning was criticized as "shrill and overzealous." But our prediction that, driven by a rising tide of spam and malicious code, 2004 would be the worst year ever for security incidents and privacy breaches, proved sadly correct. While 2004 brought numerous announcements of multi-vendor cooperation on security issues, as well as some serious consolidation among security companies, life for many people attempting to use Internet-connected computers continued to get worse. We don't just base this on our own experience, the many hours we spent in 2004 helping people to reclaim their computers from viruses, spam, and adware. Consider the findings of a survey conducted in January of 2005 by Osterman Research which found that, thanks to the proliferation of spam, spyware, and related problems, "44 percent of computer users have reduced their use of e-mail and the Internet in the last 12 months." Perennial optimists may point out that 56 percent of the 241 respondents said they had not reduced their usage of e-mail and Internet, but that is hardly enough to maintain the growth rates upon which so many business models are built these days, from banking to retailing, manufacturing to transportation. January of 2005 also brought the first mainstream media article that dared to advance the claim, heretofore heretical in most media circles--interwoven as they are with so many of the business models now at risk--that a significant number of people are abandoning the Internet. Penned by Joseph Menn, the article appeared in the LA Times on January 14 under this headline: "No More Internet for Them: Fed up over problems stemming from viruses and spyware, some computer users are giving up or curbing their use of the Web." Mr. Menn had no problem finding people willing to talk to him about why they given up on the Net. Some of these people had been online for many years but 2004 was the last straw. Menn observed that, "A small but growing number of frustrated computer owners are...giving up or cutting back their use of the Internet, especially at home, where no corporate tech support team will ride to their rescue. Instead of making life easier -- the essential promise of technologies since the steam engine -- the home PC of late has made some users feel stupid, endangered or just hassled beyond reason." We were certainly been made to feel stupid on more than one occasion in 2004, often by systems that had become so badly infected that, after hours of trying to reclaim them, we ended up reformatting them. And we heard this scenario repeated time and again in conversations with friends and colleagues, including the CIO of one of the country's largest brokerage firms who, one fateful Friday night, agreed to help his neighbor fix the family computer. He started cleaning up the machine on Saturday morning, but by Sunday afternoon he threw in the towel. One piece of malicious code just couldn't be removed. So he reformatted the machine, all the while trying to explain to his neighbor why he, a CIO, didn't know how to fix this sort of thing. So, our prediction for 2005? The Internet defection trend will increase and make front page news. More people will buy Apple Macs in the hope of avoiding the problems that beset Windows-based machines, but Macs too will be targeted by viruses, worms, adware, and phishing attacks. And industry leaders will talk more loudly about the need for better user education as they attempt to prevent any of the blame for the current state of affairs from sticking to their brands. [Chey Cobb, CISSP, wrote "Network Security for Dummies" and has provided computer security advice to numerous intelligence agencies. Her e-mail address is chey at soteira dot org. Stephen Cobb, CISSP, wrote "Privacy for Business" and helped launch several successful security companies. He can be reached as scobb at cobb dot com.] ------------------------------------------------------------------- As someone who has used email in one form or another since the 1980s, online banking since 1987 (yes, CitiBank since 1987), and gopher and the Web since their inceptions, I have a considerable professional and personal stake in the health of the Internet. Although as a Macintosh user I have been less at risk of viruses and worms, the plague of spam has made a major dent in my use of email as a professional medium. > industry leaders will talk more loudly about the need for better > user education as they attempt to prevent any of the blame for the > current state of affairs from sticking to their brands. Creating whole new industries out of the inadequacies of earlier infrastructure, without ever really fixing any of it, is a phenomenon worthy of the employment practices in Russia in the Cold War era, all the more surprising on the golden shores of capitalism. Or is it surprising? When customers can no longer make informed choices because they no longer understand the complexities of the goods on offer, or do not even have a choice because of monopolies, and assuage their helplessness by large doses of fashion, then it isn't really classical capitalism. I share the authors' concern. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------ From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Feb 1 14:46:40 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Civics & Mush Message-ID: Subject: Civics & Mush (from NewsScan Daily, 1 February 2005) SCHOOL NEWS: FIRST AMENDMENT? WHAT FIRST AMENDMENT? A University of Connecticut survey of more than 100,000 high school students has found that educators are failing to give high school students an appreciation of the First Amendment¹s guarantees of free speech and a free press. Commissioned by the Knight Foundation, the $1 million, two-year study found that nearly three-fourths of high school students either do not know how they feel about the First Amendment or admit they take it for granted; seventy-five percent erroneously think flag burning is illegal; half believe the government can censor the Internet; and more than a third think the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees. Knight Foundation chief executive Hodding Carter III says, ³These results are not only disturbing; they are dangerous. Ignorance about the basics of this free society is a danger to our nation¹s future.² (Knight Foundation 31 Jan 2005) -------------------------------------------------------------------- And I thought the basic civics lesson about the separation of church and state was the one slighted in high school these days. The Knight Foundation survey suggests an even more dire situation. --PJK "You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." --Ray Bradbury -------------------------------------------------------------------- (from NewsScan Daily, 1 February 2005) FROM OUT OF RIGHT FIELD: A NEW CONCEPTUAL AGE Wired contributing editor Daniel H. Pink, author of the new book "A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age," says the future no longer belongs to people who can reason with computer-like logic, speed, and precision: "Until recently, the abilities that led to success in school, work, and business were characteristic of the left hemisphere [of the brain]. They were the sorts of linear, logical, analytical talents measured by SATs and deployed by CPAs." But today, the world is shifting from an economy built on the logical, sequential abilities of the Information Age to an economy built on the inventive, empathic abilities of right-hemisphere Conceptual Age. Identifying the causes for this shift to be "Asia, automation, and abundance," Pink champions a more energetic use of right-brain thinking: "Want to get ahead today? Forget what your parents told you. Instead, do something foreigners can't do cheaper. Something computers can't do faster. And something that fills one of the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant age. In other words, go right, young man and woman, go right." (Wired Feb 2005) -------------------------------------------------------------------- And regarding the brain's _right_ hemisphere, every good scientist uses it, everyone who has ever designed anything uses it. But the cause & effect loop has to be closed, and that requires some analysis and reasoning. Design moves us forward, but analysis supports those advances. The "go to the right side of your brain" advice is mushy thinking. Mr. Pink is rather short on examples. Better lipsticks? Cosmetic surgery? A successor to pet rocks? --PJK "Reason can dream what dreams cannot reason." --Nicholas Snowden Willey 1965 From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Feb 2 22:18:49 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Internet Credulity redux Message-ID: Subject: Internet Credulity redux (from NewsScan Daily, 2 February 2005) ADULTS' WEB SAVVY BEATS TEENS' According to a new study by the Nielsen Norman Group, teenagers aren't as adept at performing tasks on the Web as adults, with teens completing the assigned tasks only 55% of the time, compared with 66% for adults. Teens' biggest handicap was their poor reading and research skills, and their tendency to give up quickly when frustrated. "If things aren't immediately apparent, they go away," says Jakob Nielsen. "Their distaste for reading was a big surprise. It has to be very short, brief text and big pictures." The study, which involved a group of 38 teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17, found that they were drawn to sites that provided opportunities for interaction, whether it be filling in an online questionnaire or adding their two cents to a public forum. The teens steered clear of sites that attempted to include children in their focus -- putting the word "kid" on the Web site was the kiss of death, the study found. And while teens paid close attention to Web sites' appearance, they were put off by "glitzy sites with heavy, blinking graphics," preferring clean, "cool" designs such as Apple Computer's site. (San Jose Mercury News 1 Feb 2005) -------------------------------------------------------------------- At least in the wake of the dire findings I reported at it still means something to be an adult with experience. From an educator's viewpoint it doesn't bode well for your success in class unless you use very brief text and big pictures. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Feb 6 23:42:34 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Hollow Center? Message-ID: Subject: Hollow Center? (from INNOVATION, 2 February 2005) DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR DRIVE-THROUGH CLERK IS? When you order fast food from a drive through lane, you probably assume that the person you're talking to is just inside the building. But that may be changing -- Hardee's is experimenting with remote order-taking, using high-speed communications to link employees in Anaheim, Calif., to customers two time zones away. The move is part of a broader trend in the industry to migrate some duties from in-store workers to off-site proxies. Restaurateurs say the shift should enable them to process orders quicker more quickly and accurately, while at the same time eliminating communications problems such as heavy accents that sometimes can lead to misunderstandings. In addition to the Hardee's trial and a similar effort by McDonald's, Pizza Hut and Chuck E. Cheese have begun routing restaurant calls to call centers. From a business standpoint it makes sense, freeing up in-restaurant workers to handle in-house matters, says Jon Rice, marketing VP for Chuck E. Cheese. "Have you ever tried to call a restaurant during lunch or dinner? We want to keep our staff members focused on the guests at the restaurant and not answering the phones." Meanwhile, software supplier Craig Tengler, who supplied the software for McDonald's remote-ordering system, says his program can shave 13 seconds off the average transaction time -- a significant drop in the world of fast food competition, where only 6.8 seconds separate the speediest chain (Wendy's) from No. 2 Checker's. (Dallas Morning News/Kansas City Star 25 Jan 2005) OUTSOURCE EVERYTHING YOU CAN -- EVERYTHING! Outsourcing isn't just for manufacturing or for call centers -- it's for R&D. By outsourcing R&D offshore, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) can freeze a portion of their R&D budgets while expanding their product offerings. Information technology has accelerated the outsourcing trend in electronics because it allows OEMs to monitor the processes they give up, such as manufacturing and design. Mark Bernstein, president and irector of PARC, the former Xerox think tank that now operates as an independent subsidiary, says R&D will be dominated by cooperative global arrangements: "The breadth of research required to master a market these days is pretty significant. You're going to see a lot more partnering." Do these trends signal the demise of America's lead in technology innovation? Not at all, says Hewlett-Packards executive Jack Faber. Noting that HP's newer 64-bit servers are examples of products that are largely conceived and designed in the U.S., he says, "When I first came here 20 years ago, we had our own factories for sheet metal and screws and everyone thought we had to keep them. As we outsource, we just keep focusing on higher value-added work." (CIO 15 Jan 2005) LEADERSHIP AND THE FAILURE OF INNOVATION When it comes time to execute a strategy, many companies find themselves stymied. They carefully identify the opportunities within their reach, then wonder why results fall short of expectations. The problem? New strategies and initiatives demand leadership, but many companies fail to recognize that fact. So the innovations are doomed from the start. McKinsey consultants Tsun-yan Hsieh and Sara Yik take it one step further. They believe that leadership is the starting point of strategy. So what is "leadership"? While good managers deliver predictable results, leaders generate performance breakthroughs. Leaders create something that didn't exist before: they launch new products, enter new markets, boost performance while lowering costs. A company's leadership reaches well beyond a few good men and women at the top. It typically includes 3-5% of an organizations employees. Strategy and leadership go hand in hand; it's tough to implement one without the other. Strategy cannot succeed in a void, and leadership often makes the difference between reaching for great opportunities and actually achieving them. Top managers must assess their company's leadership gaps and find ways to close them -- over the short, medium, and long term. Better still, they should integrate leadership with strategy development and thoughtfully match their portfolio of leaders with opportunities. Thinking about leadership now can affect the direction, path, and actual outcome of future strategies. (McKinsey Quarterly 2005 No. 1) -------------------------------------------------------------------- Charles Handy, my favorite writer on business matters (favorite because people and their satisfaction with their working lives always matter most to him) wrote "The Future of Work" in 1985 and the "Age of Unreason" in 1989. (That's the original British edition I read. The later American edition had a typically tamer title.) In those books he introduced me to "outsourcing" and to unbundling the organization so that only its "core" functions remained centralized. His "outsourcing" ideas weren't so much international as drawing on regional subcontractors, part-time labor and work from home (including early forms of telecommuting when the subject had not even begun to appear in the US business literature). Innovation, and the education necessary for it, were always paramount. Unbundling and outsourcing have now in some cases progressed to the point of there being "nobody home" at the corporate center, a little like that train in the Buster Keaton movie that gets progressively dismantled to stoke the engine with the pieces of the carriages. Or maybe the analogy should be that of an atoll, with a habitable fringe and nothing in the middle. Worse actually. If you read any book about actually living on a Pacific atoll (like Maarten Troost's delightful "Sex Lives of Cannibals", 2004), the central logoon is where the garbage accumulates. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Feb 7 23:41:56 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Ibn Khaldun Message-ID: Subject: Ibn Khaldun NewsScan Daily highlights famous persons under its valuable "Honorary Subscriber feature. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------- (from NewsScan Daily, 7 February 2005) HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: IBN KHALDUN Today's Honorary Subscriber is the Arab scholar and statesman Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), who is celebrated as a pioneer in the philosophy of history. He was one of many Muslim historians who wrote detailed histories of the world, attempting to synthesize the knowledge and lore of the ancient civilizations of Persia, Byzantium, and the Near East. Scornful of other historians' blind trust in tradition, Ibn Khaldun took pains to explain the phenomena that he recorded. He believed that dynasties have a natural lifetime just like individuals, because they draw their strength from a sentiment he called "group solidarity," which is difficult to maintain for more than three forty-year generations. He noted that a proper understanding of events can be achieved only by comprehending human society in its different manifestations, distinguishing the nomadic from the sedentary, and studying the effects of geography and climate on them. His masterful history of the world, "The Book of Lessons and Archive of Early and Subsequent History," which contains his theories of history and society, was called by English historian Arnold Toynbee "the most comprehensive and illuminating analysis of how human affairs work that has been made anywhere." Because he took a scientific view of the rise and decay of human societies, arguing that such changes followed empirically verifiable laws, his analyses are not without relevance to modern problems. His scholarly output encompassed today's disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, folklore, geography, linguistics, economics and political science Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunis to a family with roots in the aristocracy of Seville, Spain. In 1352 he entered the service of the Sultan of Fez, but in 1356 he was imprisoned for two years under suspicion of political disloyalty. After spending some years in Granada, Spain, he returned to Africa and entered the service of the Sultan of Tiemcen. After various vicissitudes, including further imprisonment and a period of residence in a monastery, he obtained employment with the Sultan of Tunis. After visiting Mecca in 1384, he was appointed grand qadi in Cairo, Egypt, an office from which he was removed and reinstalled no fewer than five times. He died in Cairo in 1406. As an example of his writing, we include the following quotation on economics (anticipating the Laffer curve), taken from the Wikepedia Web site: "In the early stages of the state, taxes are light in their incidence, but fetch in a large revenue...As time passes and kings succeed each other, they lose their tribal habits in favor of more civilized ones. Their needs and exigencies grow...owing to the luxury in which they have been brought up. Hence they impose fresh taxes on their subjects...[and] sharply raise the rate of old taxes to increase their yield...But the effects on business of this rise in taxation make themselves felt. For business men are soon discouraged by the comparison of their profits with the burden of their taxes...Consequently production falls off, and with it the yield of taxation." *** [To find a library copy of Michael Brett's "Ibn Khaldun and the Medieval Maghrib" visit RLG's RedLightGreen service at -- or to purchase a copy of M.A. Enan's "Ibn Khaldun: His Life and Work" go to: Note: We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy programs.] SUBSCRIPTION INFO FOR NEWSSCAN DAILY: To subscribe or unsubscribe to the text, html, or handheld versions of NewsScan Daily, send the appropriate subscribe or unsubscribe messages (i.e., with the word 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' in the subject line) to the addresses shown below: Text version: Send message to NewsScan@NewsScan.com Html version: Send mail to NewsScan-html@NewsScan.com NewsScan-To-Go: TELL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT NEWSSCAN DAILY! Send them our little frog: *********************************************************** Please visit the site of RLG, the great organization that makes NewsScan Daily possible. (RLG has no influence over, nor any responsibility for, our editorial content.) Created in 1974 as the Research Libraries Group, RLG is a not-for-profit membership corporation of more than 160 universities, national libraries, archives, museums -- and other institutions with remarkable collections for research and learning. Its major initiatives are long-term retention of digital materials, resource sharing among member institutions, and improvement of researcher access to primary source material. RLG supplies online research resources worldwide. Visit RLG at . ********* To subscribe or unsubscribe to the TEXT version of NewsScan Daily, send an e-mail message to NewsScan@NewsScan.com with 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. To subscribe to our HTML version of NewsScan Daily, send mail to NewsScan-html@NewsScan.com, with the word 'subscribe' as the subject. (Subscribing to the HTML version won't automatically unsubscribe you from the text version; please unsubscribe yourself as explained above.) Please note: To unsubscribe from an account to which you no longer have access, send mail to at editors@newsscan.com. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Feb 9 04:01:51 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Every Chip a Suit Message-ID: Subject: Every Chip a Suit Dear Colleagues - Enough gloom already, you will say. I'll try to be more optimistic soon. For now I want to point to an intersection of legal and engineering themes that I see as looming a lot larger than most in EE seem to realize. Here are some items of note: - The future of the semiconductor industry, in terms of semiconductor product consumption, lies with consumer and entertainment electronics. Nothing else can begin to approach the consumption volume. You'll have seen this in the business press. The typical luxury car already has more than 30 microcontrollers. - "Every successful integrated circuit has at least one patent infringement suit pending." This told to me by a senior partner in one of New York's biggest intellectual property law firms. The density of such suits is increasing. Entrepreneurial enterprises now need to have a serious legal war chest. Lawrence Lessig of the Stanford Law School has championed the cause of greater openness in his 2001 book, "The Future of Ideas." I mentioned it on this list just after its publication . - Law suits are driving technology products off the market. The hard drive video recorder by Replay TV that skipped over commercials was sued out of existence by the major motion picture studios. Ditto the recorder's manufacturer. And if you want to record HDTV to a DVD after July 1, 2005, you had better act now. You can read about this, about other "extinct gizmos" and, most importantly, those presently in danger of extinction, at , a project of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation (brought to my attention by Prof. J. Rimas Vaisnys). This, and the items below, imply that legal constraints on technology and innovation are becoming its major shaping influence, more so than economics. Just as engineers are now working for big design firms like IDEO as a context with good leverage to bring products to market, so they may next be working for law firms, as the context with the ultimate clout. In fact I have it first-hand from a West Coast IP lawyer that good engineers can already earn six-figure incomes in the firm where he works. It is worth pondering what this means for the future of EE, the attractiveness of the field, and the implications for education. Students sniff these things out, though without probing them particularly, a lot sooner than their teachers. Pollyanna approaches will not work for long. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------ (from NewsScan Daily, 27 January 2005) SHAKEOUT IN CONSUMER ELECTRONICS FORECAST Experts are predicting a major shakeout in the consumer electronics industry, similar to the one computer makers endured two decades ago. Hordes of upstart rivals, plummeting prices and a host of new technologies are pummeling profits at industry stalwarts such as Sony, Pioneer and Philips Electronics. "We're seeing price depreciation that would have been unimaginable in the past," says Sony chief strategy officer Katsumi Ihara. "What's behind it is that with the switch to digital components, anyone can make them and there aren't compelling ways to distinguish one's products." In an effort to cope with the onslaught of mass look-alikes, the big electronic makers have scrambled to control the few key components that still yield reasonable profit margins, such as flat-panel displays. That, in turn, has led to a debilitating supply glut, with LCD prices falling 40% since last summer. The result has been a refocusing on the part of Philips and Thomson SA of France, which are now placing more emphasis on medical equipment and broadcasting gear, respectively. Meanwhile, Sony and Samsung are finding new life in cooperative ventures, teaming up to build the world's largest LCD panel factory. Hitachi, Toshiba and Matsushita are following suit, with an LCD plant that will open next year. The bottom line will be good for consumers, however, as electronics manufacturers struggle to churn out innovative products at ever-lower prices. (Wall Street Journal 27 Jan 2005) (sub req'd) ------------------------------------------------------------------ (from Edupage, January 28, 2005) ROUND TWO OF MPAA SUITS The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has filed a second round of lawsuits against an undisclosed number of U.S. users suspected of illegally trading copyrighted movie files. The group first filed lawsuits against individuals in November, followed by legal action against Web sites that function as file-trading hubs, including BitTorrent, eDonkey, and DirectConnect networks. MPAA Chief Executive Officer Dan Glickman said, "We cannot allow people to steal our motion pictures and other products online, and we will use all the options we have available to encourage people to obey the law." The MPAA also released a software tool called Parent File Scan that identifies file-sharing software on a computer, as well as movie and music files that might be protected by copyright. The software does not differentiate between legal and illegal files, and it does not monitor or block any downloads. Rather, it identifies files of a wide range of formats and leaves decisions about which are legitimate up to users, most of whom presumably will be parents. CNET, 26 January 2005 http://news.com.com/2100-1030_3-5551903.html ------------------------------------------------------------------ (from NewsScan Daily, 21 January 2005) E-WASTE IS PILING UP Consumers' penchant for constant upgrades -- new cell phones, a sleeker laptop -- is causing havoc in the environment, and with technology products now accounting for as much as 40% of the lead in U.S. landfills, e-waste has become one of the fastest-growing sectors of the U.S. solid waste stream. The International Association of Electronics Recyclers estimates that Americans dispose of 2 million tons of electronic products a year -- including 50 million computers and 130 million cell phones -- and China, which has served for years as the final resting place for Americans' unwanted TVs and computers, is becoming overwhelmed by the volume. Some high-tech companies are taking matters into their own hands -- Hewlett Packard and Dell job out their e-waste handling to environmentally sensitive recyclers such as RetroBox -- but such efforts are still quite limited and unable to cope with a problem that's reaching crisis proportions. Meanwhile, the U.S. is the only developed country not to have ratified the 1992 Basel Convention, the international treaty that controls the export of hazardous waste. "There's a real electronics-waste crisis," says Basel Action Network coordinator Jim Puckett. "The U.S. just looks the other way as we use these cheap and dirty dumping grounds." (Washington Post 21 Jan 2005) From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Feb 11 14:49:00 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Other Selves Message-ID: Subject: Other Selves (from NewsScan Daily, 9 February 2005) A MODERN VALENTINE'S DAY FABLE A budding romance between a Jordanian man and woman turned into an ugly public divorce when the couple found out that they were in fact man and wife, state media reported on Sunday. Separated for several months, boredom and chance briefly reunited Bakr Melhem and his wife Sanaa in an internet chat room, the official Petra news agency said. Bakr, who passed himself off as Adnan, fell head over heels for Sanaa, who signed off as Jamila (beautiful) and described herself as a cultured, unmarried woman -- a devout Muslim whose hobby was reading, Petra said. Cyber-love blossomed between the pair for three months and soon they were making wedding plans. To pledge their troth in person, they agreed to meet in the flesh near a bus depot in the town of Zarqa, northeast of Amman. The shock of finding out their true identities was too much for the pair. Upon seeing Sanaa-alias-Jamila, Bakr-alias-Adnan turned white and screamed at the top of his lungs: "You are divorced, divorced, divorced" -- the traditional manner of officially ending a marriage in Islam. "You are a liar," Sanaa retorted before fainting, the agency said. (The Age 7 Feb 2005) rec'd from John Lamp, Deakin U. (from NewsScan Daily, 11 February 2005) BLOGGING WHILE YOU WORK: MAYBE NOT A GOOD IDEA Using the pseudonym "Sarcastic Journalist," reporter Rachel Mosteller of the Durham (N.C.) Herald-Sun newspaper wrote this entry on her personal blog one day last year: "I really hate my place of employment. Seriously. Okay, first off. They have these stupid little awards that are supposed to boost company morale. So you go and do something 'spectacular' (most likely, you're doing your JOB) and then someone says 'Why golly, that was spectacular.' then they sign your name on some paper, they bring you chocolate and some balloons... Okay two people in the newsroom just got it. FOR DOING THEIR JOB." The day after her posting, Sarcastic Journalist was fired (even though it did not identify the newspaper in her posting). Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, comments: "We all complain about work and our bosses. And the ethos of the blogosphere is to be chatty and sometimes catty and crude. Even in an era of casual Fridays, that is not what companies want to be portrayed by the world." And labor lawyer Gregg M. Lemley notes: "In most states, if an employer doesn't like what you're talking about, they can simply terminate you." (Washington Post 11 Feb 2005) ------------------------------------------------------------------ The issue of identity on the Internet was most comprehensively treated by Sherry Turkle, MIT Professor of the Sociology of Science and licensed clinical psychologist, in her popular books "Life on the Screen," and her earlier landmark book "The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit" (1985). I mention these books as a more comprehensive framework for pondering, if you are so inclined, these sad anecdotes. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Feb 14 04:05:06 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Ernst Mayr Message-ID: Subject: Ernst Mayr This week's obituary of Ernst Mayr, evolutionary biologist. > Mr Mayr did well in America, ending up in the Alexander Agassiz > chair of zoology at Harvard, showered with honours, and proving the > fitness of his own genes by living for more than a century. It is an > irony, though, that his adopted country is the one place in the > developed world where the neoDarwinian explanations that he and his > colleagues created are not the commonplace of the schoolbooks, and > where many people prefer to cling to the campfire tales of Genesis, > rather than face the awesome thesis that Mr Mayr helped to > elucidate. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Feb 17 22:43:24 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Top Gun Laparoscopy Message-ID: Subject: Top Gun Laparoscopy Dear Colleagues - > If Dr. James Rosser Jr. had his way, every surgeon in America would > have three indispensable tools on the operating room tray: a > scalpel, sutures, and a video game controller. > When I try to explain that my schedule is in flux and why I'm having trouble scheduling a meeting, I often use the metaphor of hostile aliens zooming in from all directions. But the training of surgeons with video games? I suppose it's the coming thing, and I'm just being reactionary. Heck, there is even an endowed professorship now for the study of electronic games. I suppose that will become a joint appointment with the Medical School. And how does WIRED magazine so unfailingly keep its finger on the pulse of progress? --PJK > (from NewsScan Daily, 10 February 2005) > > PROFESSOR OF GAMES > Electronics Arts, the world's largest game publisher, has > joined with the University of Southern California to establish the > nation's first endowed university chair for the study of electronic > gaming. Bing Gordon, the chief creative officer and a founder of > Electronic Arts, has been named the inaugural holder of the faculty > chair at the USC School of Cinema-Television. Accepting the > appointment, Gordon said that "today's students, who are already the > world's leading experts in new technology, are the best bet to have > the vision and energy to invent sweeping change" in digital > entertainment. (AP/USA Today 9 Feb 2005) > > > (from INNOVATION, 16 February 2005) > > SIMS WITH SYMPTOMS > Researchers at the Bioengineering Institute in Auckland, New > Zealand, are combining their expertise in biomechanics and > computational physiology to develop digital models of every system > and anatomical feature of the human body -- from major organs to > molecular functions. The Physiome Project -- patterned after the > Human Genome Project -- is actually a worldwide initiative, > involving scientists in the U.S., Israel, Japan and the U.K., as > well as New Zealand. The goal is to create digital replicas that > can be used by physicians to test certain treatments to ensure that > the optimal regimen is prescribed. Physiome would also enable > medical engineers to build customized implants, such as pacemakers > or heart valves, and would allow surgeons to do dry runs on a > digital patient to determine the best approach before they pick up > a scalpel. "Today practically everything we see and touch was > prototyped by computers. One glaring exception is medicine -- but > there's no reason to expect that the technology won't move there," > says Randy Haluck, director of minimally invasive surgery and > surgical simulation at Penn State Hershey Medical Center. > Meanwhile, pharmaceutical giants like Aventis and Novartis are > hovering over the research in the hope that the technology will > enable them to develop and test new medicines before forking out > billions for risky clinical trials. (Wired Feb 2005) > From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Feb 22 17:46:15 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Top 100 Gadgets Message-ID: Subject: Top 100 Gadgets My friend and colleague Nathan Price writes: > > An amusing and surely controversial list of the Top 100 Gadgets of > All Time. > There is a definite bias toward the 21st and 20th centuries here but > the abacus, the sextant and the telephone all make the list too. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Feb 23 14:07:38 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Identity Theft Precautions Message-ID: Subject: Identity Theft Precautions (from NewsScan Daily, 23 February 2005) PROTECTING YOURSELF AGAINST IDENTIFY THEFT Consumers worried that their personal and financial data may have been captured by the criminals who scammed the ChoicePoint company are being assured by the Private Rights Clearinghouse: "If you don't receive a letter from ChoicePoint within the next 10 days, you can be assured you have not been a victim of this identity theft." Even so, you should always check your monthly bank and credit card statements to make sure all charges are valid, and you should review your credit reports at least once a year. If you do get a letter from ChoicePoint, follow its instructions, visit the FTC Web site, and obtain the affidavit credit bureaus require to place a long-term fraud alert on your account. And keep reviewing your credit history! (Washington Post 22 Feb 2005) (free registration req'd) -------------------------------------------------------------------- The article also gives related resources, such as the "What to do" article from Slate , which in turn has a number of useful links. Correcting identity fraud and your credit history is a task that amounts to a part-time job - a cheerful thought about our inadequately reliably computerized lives, as we wait for a letter from ChoicePoint. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Feb 25 23:10:01 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] TIIP Newsletter 2005-1 Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP TIIP Newsletter 2005-1 These mailings have often commented on the inadequacies of the patent system. Anyone interested in this topic might want to consider this newsletter. Subscription info at the end. --PJK ----------------------------------------------------------------- Newsletter TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY Issue 2005-1 To view the complete contents click on: http://www.researchoninnovation.org/tiip/index.htm * * * * Patent Continuation Abuse Mark Lemley and Kimberly Moore take a comprehensive look at a US patent practice that is not well-known: continuations. Under this practice, a patent application can be kept alive even after the patent examiner has issued a "final rejection." Lemley and Moore look at policy changes to limit some common abuses. Submarines in Software One such abuse is the practice of "submarine patenting"-keeping a patent application secret for a long time and then springing it on an industry that has already invested heavily in the technology. Stuart Graham and David Mowery examine the role of submarine patents in software patenting. Global Welfare & Drug Patents Should patent laws for pharmaceuticals be relaxed in poor countries? Doing so involves a trade-off: it may save lives now, but it may reduce incentives for drug companies to develop new products. F. M. Scherer calculates the net effect of this trade-off and concludes that it may well be better to let poor countries free-ride. Who Patents and Why? Wesley Cohen, Richard Nelson and John Walsh report on the comprehensive Carnegie Mellon survey on innovation at manufacturing firms. They find important differences across industries as to why firms patent based on the nature of the technology. Patents and Innovation One difficult empirical puzzle is the relationship between patents and innovation. Petra Moser looks at this issue with a unique dataset of innovations exhibited at World's Fairs during the 19th century. She finds that countries with patent systems do not have a higher rate of innovation per capita, but patents affect the industries in which different countries make their innovations. --------------------- Changing of the Guard Beginning with the next issue, Robert M. Hunt of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia will become our new Editor, and our current Editor, James Bessen, will no longer have this newsletter as an excuse for failing to keep up with his other commitments. We look forward to Bob's stewardship. ---------- To unsubscribe from this list, or change the email address where you receive messages, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=tiip@v2.listbox.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Feb 26 01:46:46 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Diderot & d'Alembert Encycl Message-ID: Subject: Diderot & d'Alembert Encyclopedia "Does anyone pay any attention to what science says?" asks Bob Park in the current issue of his "What's New" newsletter . With US public policy and education in a steady march away from science and reason, one's mind drifts to the 18th century Enlightenment period. See my notes at the end of And in his last book, "Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future," the late Neil Postman revisits the source of the values that formed our nation and its traditions of sane authority and meaningful purpose. Do a little time travel. The famous Encyclopedia of Diderot and d'Alembert was the Enlightement's quest to summarize all knowledge. It is now becoming available in a translated online version in English. --PJK ----------------------------------------------------------------- (from The Scout Report, Feb. 25, 2005) The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert http://www.hti.umich.edu/d/did/ Widely considered to be one of the crowning achievements of the Enlightenment, the Encyclopedia edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert in the 18th century has proved to be fertile ground for those who have sought to classify and chronicle the various branches of knowledge. This highly ambitious project was published during the period 1751 to 1777, and included 32 volumes amply illustrated with engraved plates. Close to 150 years later, a group of talented individuals sought to create an online version of the Encyclopedia translated into English, with links to the original French versions. The project is based at the University of Michigan Library, although contributors to the project are scattered across the world. Visitors to the site can search the currently available articles or browse by title, French title, or subject. Finally, visitors will want to take a look at the famous "Map of the System of Human Knowledge" that is immediately identified with this most celebrated human endeavor. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Mar 9 03:52:48 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Curiae Project Message-ID: Subject: Curiae Project An excellent Supreme Court database. --PJK ---------------------------------------------------------------- (from Scout Report, March 04, 2005) The Curiae Project http://curiae.law.yale.edu/ Law students, lawyers, and the general public will find The Curiae Project, based at Yale University's Law School, to be immensely helpful. On the site visitors can view a list of featured arguments and briefs which rotate on the site's homepage on a regular basis. The project has also created a ranking index which ranks the most commonly cited Supreme Court decisions, largely based on a number of works on constitutional law. Not so surprisingly, some of these cases include Marbury v. Madison, Gibbons v. Ogden, and Plessy v. Ferguson. Additionally, visitors can examine a list of the most frequently viewed cases, which include Brown v. Board of Education, Baker v. Carr, and Lochner v. New York. The site also contains a search engine and a number of links to external resources of note. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Mar 18 15:29:29 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Future of Innovation Message-ID: Subject: Future of Innovation (from The Scout Report -- March 18, 2005) http://scout.wisc.edu/Reports/ScoutReport/2005/scout-050318.php The Knowledge Economy: Is the United States Losing Its Competitive Edge? [pdf] http://www.futureofinnovation.org/PDF/Benchmarks.pdf In recent years, there has been a great deal of national and international talk about the so-called "knowledge economy" which is of particular interest to policy-makers, economists, and a host of other groups. One of the consortium groups interested in the knowledge economy is the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation. The Task Force is comprised of a number of related member organizations (including the American Physical Society). This February 2005 report from the Task Force explores the possibility that the United States may in fact be losing its leadership role in science and innovation, a position it has retained since the conclusion of World War II. Some of the benchmarks that the report mentions include the fact that the proportion of US citizens in science and engineering graduate studies within the US declined by ten percent between 1994 and 2001. This very timely report will be worth a read, particularly for those in the fields of academia and innovation studies. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Apr 3 20:49:39 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Student Differences Message-ID: Dear Colleagues - For many years now, Prof. Felder has vigorously pursued inquiries into how to make teaching more effective. His influence has also been prominent in setting ABET goals and guidelines. His vigor may not always be matched by the energy that typical faculty can bring to the rejuvenation of their course offerings, but even for the well-intentioned here is a worthwhile Web resource. If you want to know about Myers-Briggs Type Indicators and differences in students' learning styles, you need go no further than Prof. Felder's latest paper on "Understanding Student Differences." --PJK -------------------------------------------------------------------- from Resources on Engineering Education [pdf] http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/RMF.html On this website, Dr. Richard M. Felder, the Hoechst Celanese Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering at North Carolina State University, offers guidance, tips and resources for using techniques that he has found effective in teaching college level engineering courses. Numerous articles on learning styles, assessment, and instructional techniques are available here to download free of charge. Topics include active learning, cooperative learning and an Index of Learning Styles, which is "an on-line instrument used to assess preferences on four dimensions (active/reflective, sensing/intuitive, visual/verbal, and sequential/global) of a learning style model formulated by Richard M. Felder and Linda K. Silverman." Also posted here are some handouts for students with titles such as "How to Survive Engineering School" and "Tips on Test-Taking." From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Apr 9 20:33:41 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Fwd: GLOBALIZATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION Message-ID: Dear Colleagues - This mailing from the generally worthwhile TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR list may interest you. Business schools are well underway establishing campuses in other countries, in effect licensing their brand. Especially now with the WTO proposal, how far behind are broader such practices by universities, especially as competition heats up? --PJK >X-Sender: reis@reis.pobox.stanford.edu >Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2005 12:10:21 -0700 >To: tomorrows-professor@lists.Stanford.EDU >From: Rick Reis >Subject: TP Msg. #637 THE GLOBALIZATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION >Sender: owner-tomorrows-professor@lists.Stanford.EDU > >"In an important but generally overlooked development, the World >Trade Organization (WTO) is now proposing to regulate higher >education as part of the General Agreement on Trade in Services >(GATS), as it would any other form of trade-by removing barriers to >its traffic. The goal of GATS is gradual liberalization of the >trade in services, which is likely to have a broad and troubling >impact on the nature of higher education by affecting such issues as >subsidization of higher education, quality assurance, financial aid >for certain students, and the ability to gear teaching and research >to local culture and needs." > > * * * * * * > TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR(SM) MAILING LIST > desk-top faculty development one hundred times a year > > Over 22,750 subscribers > Over 600 postings > Over 600 academic institutions > Over 100 countries > > Sponsored by > THE STANFORD UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING > http://ctl.stanford.edu > > An archive of all past postings (with a two week delay) >can be found at: > http://ctl.stanford.edu/Tomprof/index.shtml > > * * * * * >Folks: > >The posting below addresses some interesting factors influencing >movement toward the globalization of higher education. It is from >Chapter Two: The New Competition, in The Future of Higher Education: >Rhetoric, Reality, and the Risks of the Market by Frank Newman, Lara >Couturier, & Jamie Scurry. Copyright ? 2004 by John Wiley & Sons, >Inc. All rights reserved. Published by Jossey-Bass. A Wiley Imprint >989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741 >[www.josseybass.com]. > >Regards, > >Rick Reis >reis@stanford.edu >UP NEXT: Who Has the Lowest Prices? > > Tomorrow's Academia > > ---------------------------------------- >1,472 words ----------------------------------- > > THE GLOBALIZATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION > >Recently a new phenomenon has emerged: the globalization of higher >education (see, for example, Green, Eckel, and Barblan, 2002; >Altbach, 2003). We mean here the emergence of global rather than >international institutions. International institutions have foreign >students enrolled; their domestic students often spend some time >studying abroad. Similarly, faculty come from other countries to >study, teach, or do research, and the home institution faculty >frequently go abroad. All of these activities have become routine >for the best-known universities in the United States and >increasingly so for all types of institutions, including American >community colleges. It is common in other countries as well. In >Canada, for example, 84 percent of universities report that >"internationalization" is included in their institutional strategies >(Green, Eckel, and Barblan, 2002). The British have stepped up >their efforts at attracting more international students, with an >increase of almost 20 percent in 2002 compared to 2001, becoming a >formidable rival to the United States. The number of American >students accepted into undergraduate programs in Britain rose by 17 >percent in 2002 (Galbraith, 2003). > Global institutions, on the other hand, conduct operations (educate >students, do research, generate revenue) in multiple countries. >This may be accomplished by establishing campuses (for instance, >Monash University in Malaysia and South Africa), by creating >learning centers (the British Open University throughout Europe and >in more than thirty non-European Union countries), of forming >alliances with local institutions (as with the Singapore-MIT >Alliance; "Global Development," 2003). Any virtual (online) program >is by its nature global, and a number of global online consortia are >popping up as well (such as Cardean University and Universitas 21). >Technology makes content delivery increasingly a global enterprise. >What is appearing more and more are mixtures-programs that use >intense short trips to the home university campus or to nearby >learning centers to supplement a base of virtual course work. >Several business schools have begun to offer executive education >this way (Duke University, for example). Australian universities >with strong financial support from their government are using all of >these methods, in one way or another, to create a higher education >presence across Asia that generates a sizable balance of trade. > >American academics tend to believe the globalization of higher >education presents only opportunity, not risk. To date, the total >enrollment in global academic programs is still small. Far more >programs are under discussion than under way. What is important to >recognize is that the barriers to global higher education >enterprises are falling, and the trend is up. Beyond this, the >conditions favoring more intense competition from the universities >of other countries are growing. > >In an important but generally overlooked development, the World >Trade Organization (WTO) is now proposing to regulate higher >education as part of the General Agreement on Trade in Services >(GATS), as it would any other form of trade-by removing barriers to >its traffic. The goal of GATS is gradual liberalization of the >trade in services, which is likely to have a broad and troubling >impact on the nature of higher education by affecting such issues as >subsidization of higher education, quality assurance, financial aid >for certain students, and the ability to gear teaching and research >to local culture and needs (GATS-Fact and Fiction, 2002). The U.S. >delegation has already proposed inclusion of for-profit higher >education and all testing materials and services, and it has >announced that it expects soon to propose inclusion of all of higher >education, despite the fact that there has been almost no debate >within the academy about the impact of this on higher education. >This form of rapid and potentially harmful globalization is an >example of how higher education is drifting into a market-oriented >system without adequate debate and planning-here and abroad. > >An advance look at how some aspects of globalization may affect the >way higher education functions can be seen in the workings of the >European Union, the one place where a great deal of planning has >taken place. The development of the Common Market led to a strong >interest in facilitating the movement of professionals across >country borders. This has led in turn to a joint effort to increase >the number of students from other Common Market countries at each EU >university, with a target of 10 percent of total enrollment. To >help reach this target, the European Union created a range of >programs that encouraged and subsidized such "study abroad." One of >them, the Erasmus Program, uses financial aid and promotes >collaboration between universities to encourage mobility of students >and faculty members. Since its establishment, more than one million >people have taken advantage of the opportunities it offers, with >some twenty-five hundred universities from twenty-nine European >countries involved. > >In time, it became evident to the Europeans that more than access >was involved-that Europe needed to compete for the best students, >many of whom head to the United States or Britain. Among other >concerns, the Europeans felt they needed to reduce the confusion >over different types of degrees (and the unwillingness of >universities to accept each other's degrees) and to improve the >attractiveness of their universities. In 1999, in Bologna, a >European Higher Education Area was formed. Among other steps, the >Bologna Accord called for standardization on a three-year bachelor's >degree and a two-year master's by 2010. (The Netherlands, Italy, >and Spain have already begun implementing the change.) A new >quality agency, the European Network for Quality Assurance in Higher >Education, has been established to ensure standards. The Europeans >also moved to teach some programs in English, which is fast becoming >the international language of business. Thirty percent of >universities in continental Europe-even some French universities-now >offer programs in English, almost all of which were established >since 1990 (Rocca, 2003). Recruitment, advertising, and marketing >campaigns have been launched. Frans Zwarts, the rector of the >University of Groningen in the Netherlands, summed up this activity: >"Traditionally, European educational systems focused on >accessibility. Now they are realizing that they have to compete for >top talent on a global level" (Riding, 2003). The EU has also >established a substantial fund (about $20 billion yearly) for the >support of European research (a sum roughly comparable to the U.S. >investment in university research). In meeting after meeting, the >Futures Project has heard the determination of European leaders, >political and academic, to compete with the United States. >Unnoticed by most American academics, this country has been >surpassed on a number of educational measures. OECD comparisons >rank the United States tenth for high school graduation, thirteenth >for entry rate to a four-year (baccalaureate) education, and tenth >for entry to a two-year (associate's) education (Mortenson, 2003). > >Given the right circumstances, societies can gain from the entry of >global higher education institutions are set in their ways and >outmoded in their approach, new institutions are bringing a breath >of fresh air, pushing the older institutions to new action. In many >settings, new institutions are needed to keep up with demand. The >number of tertiary students worldwide doubled in size in just twenty >years, growing from 40.3 million students in 1975 to 80.5 million >students in 1995, and the growth is continuing (Task Force on Higher >Education and Society, 2000). Where existing access and funding is >limited, new institutions from abroad are expanding opportunity. >New institutions may also bring needed diversity to the type of >experience available to students. For example, programs taught in >English are permitting students broad access to the global workplace >and the worldwide network of academia. > >At the same time, there are dangers. Cross-border initiatives are >subject to the vagaries of political changes, as MIT recently >learned when its collaboration with India's information technology >ministry, called Media Lab Asia, fell apart after the appointment of >a new minister (Rai, 2003). A foreign institution may be >insensitive to the local culture and students' needs. Criticism has >already arisen that the quality of some overseas programs is less >than that at the home campus and that universities from developed >countries have not focused on local concerns in developing nations. >The use of English raises for some people questions about cultural >imperialism and homogenization. Developing countries would surely >be ill-served if universities from the outside replaced local >universities rather than supplementing them. > >There are other profound changes in progress that deserve greater >attention. One is the aggressive growth of for-profit global >institutions. For example, the parent corporation of the University >of Phoenix has begun operations in Brazil, Mexico, India, and the >Netherlands and is eyeing several other countries (Jorge Klor de >Alva, personal communication, Mar. 2004). Sylvan Learning has been >acquiring small private universities (the eighth was just announced) >around the world (Blumenstyk, 2003). The goal is to build a >worldwide network that shares curricular materials and other >resources. If, over the next decade, a global higher education >sector led by for-profit institutions emerges, what are the concerns >for the public purposes of higher education? > >* * * * * * * * >NOTE: Anyone can SUBSCRIBE to the Tomorrows-Professor Mailing List by >addressing an e-mail message to: > > >Do NOT put anything in the SUBJECT line but in the body of the >message type: >subscribe tomorrows-professor >* * * * * * * * >To UNSUBSCRIBE to the Tomorrows-Professor send the following e-mail >message to: >unsubscribe tomorrows-professor > >-++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**== >This message was posted through the Stanford campus mailing list >server. If you wish to unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the >message body of "unsubscribe >tomorrows-professor" to >majordomo@lists.stanford.edu From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Apr 9 20:58:16 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Google (Satellite) Maps Message-ID: Dear Colleagues - Below I forward you a copy of the widely distributed newsletter TOURBUS, describing a new Google feature -- maps, high-resolution satellite maps. My reactions to this are more complex than TOURBUS's Patrick Crispen, who tends to write in the future-perfect tense. I'm more in the Mark Morford school , but haven't really figured out my attitude. Until you do, it's more fun to have Mark Morford give you his initial impressions of this new beast. --PJK >Approved-By: crispen@NETSQUIRREL.COM >Date: Sat, 9 Apr 2005 15:45:43 -0400 >Reply-To: TOURBUS-Request@LISTSERV.AOL.COM >Sender: The Internet TourBus - A virtual tour of cyberspace > >From: Patrick Douglas Crispen >Subject: Tourbus - 9 Apr 05 - Google Maps >To: TOURBUS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM > >---------------------------------------------------------------------- > TOURBUS Volume 10, Number 56 -- 09 Apr 2005 > Tourbus Home - http://www.TOURBUS.com > Tourbus Forums - http://forums.TOURBUS.com > [ For best results view this with a monospace font like Courier. ] >---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > TODAY'S TOURBUS TOPIC: Google Maps > >Howdy, y'all, and greetings once again from deep behind the orange >curtain in beautiful Irvine, California, birthplace of the red >Swingline stapler. > >TOURBUS is made possible by the kind support of our sponsors. Please >take a moment to visit today's sponsors and thank them for keeping our >little bus of Internet happiness on the road week after week. > > >+------------------------- Limited Time Offer -----------------------+ > >SAVE 20% on your entire order at Blair.com! >Shop our complete line of fashions for women, men, and home even >clearance?it's all in one convenient place! You'll find the sizes >you want, in the styles you need to fit you perfectly! Check out >our 7-Day Clearance Countdown for fantastic close-out deals! Play >your cards right and get a great deal?wait too long and you'll >miss out! Best of all, along with our everyday low prices and >great quality, your satisfaction is guaranteed, absolutely! > >Click: http://tinyurl.com/5n8qy or visit: >http://altfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/ck/5314-27516-11475-0?mpt=[CACHEBUSTER] >+--------------------------------------------------------------------+ > > >On with the show... > >---------------------------- >Google Maps >Audience: Everyone [kind of] >---------------------------- > >Well, it looks like the evil scientists at Google Labs >[ http://labs.google.com/ ] have been busy over the past few months. >Back in February, Google introduced "Google Maps" at > > http://maps.google.com/ > >Google Maps is Google's response to other popular map sites like >MapQuest [ http://mapquest.com/ ] and Yahoo Maps >[ http://maps.yahoo.com ]. Hop on over to maps.google.com, type in >what you're looking for--an address, a city, a point of interest, an >airport code, etc--and Google will display a really high-quality map >of that location. > >For example, if you search for SNA [the airport code for Orange >County's John Wayne International Airport] Google shows you where I >live. No, I don't actually live in an airport although at times it >sure does feel like I do. I live directly north-northeast of the Duck >Ponds. > >Now for the cool part. Once you've located John Wayne airport on your >map, click on the map with your mouse, hold your mouse button, and >drag your mouse up and to the right. > >That's right, folks: Google maps are draggable! Keep dragging up the >California coastline and you'll end up in Los Angeles. Oh, and you >can zoom in too. On the left side of the map, click on the plus or >drag the slider up. > >Wait. There's more. Do a search for "pizza Irvine." Not only will >Google show you the location of most of the pizza joints in beautiful >Irvine, California, if you click on any of the map's "push pins" or >click on one of the pizza places' names on the right side of the >screen, a shadowed balloon appears showing you the pizza place's name, >phone number, address, website link, and even a link to get driving >directions. And if you click on another company's name, the map will >automatically scroll to that new company's location. > > >+-----------------------* * * ZipBackup * * *----------------------+ > As a Tourbus reader, you know you need to be careful about viruses > and other nasties, but being careful is not enough! ZipBackup's > Wizard makes backing up to CDs or DVDs a snap for beginners and > ZipBackup is a powerful tool for experts. Download ZipBackup and > try it for free. You won't want to use a computer without it. > Get 25% off the ZipBackup regular price at > http://www.zipbackup.com/partners/tourbus >+-------------------------------------------------------------------+ > > >Oh, and Google Maps also does driving directions. Go to >maps.google.com and above the search box click on the "Directions" >link. Then, just key in your starting and ending addresses. > >------------- >The New Stuff >------------- > >Maps are cool, I guess--and I *REALLY* like the interactivity that >Google has built into its map site--but have you ever wanted to see >what your house or school or business looks like from space? > >Well, just go to maps.google.com, search for a particular address, and >then, in the upper right corner of the screen, click on the >"Satellite" link [it's at the far right side of that orange horizontal >bar.] > >Yes, you heard right: GOOGLE MAPS NOW SHOWS SATELLITE IMAGES! > >Oh, and all those search features we talked about before work on the >satellite maps as well. Do a search for "pizza Irvine" and you'll see >what Irvine's pizza places look like from space. And if you click and >drag your mouse, you can scroll around beautiful Orange County. > >And it's not just Irvine that is viewable from space. In fact, all- >around nice guy James Turnbull has spent the better part of a week >[Google added the satellite feature on Monday] finding cool stuff from >space and posting it to his Google Sightseeing blog at > > http://www.shreddies.org/gmaps/ > >Make sure to browse through the archives. Turnbull has found a BUNCH >of neat stuff hidden in Google's satellite images. > >------------ >The bad news >------------ > >Now for the bad news: > > - Google Maps is still in beta, so expect some bugs from time to > time. > > - You can only use Google Maps to search for locations in the > United States and Canada. More locations are coming soon, > though. > > - There some places in North America that aren't covered by > Google's satellite images, especially if you zoom in all the > way. A good example is the southern parts of Disney's Epcot > Center in Orlando. > > - The satellite images are "current" but not exactly up to date. > For example, the satellite image of the closed Tustin Marine > Corps Air Station [northeast of SNA] still shows base housing > even though the houses were demolished last summer. [Oh, and > those two really big buildings are blimp hangars which aren't > going anywhere.] > > - When you zoom all the way in on a map, especially a satellite > map, the address balloons are sometimes about 25 feet [7.6 > meters] off. For example, when I searched for my family's old > house in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the balloon pointed to the house > across the street. > >Still, for what you're paying for this service [NOTHING!], these >"problems" are trivial. All in all, maps.google.com is one of the >more exciting things to come along in a while. > > >+------------------ CAN YOU PASS THIS MONEY TEST? -------------------+ > Do you know that trying to pay off your high interest rate > debts FIRST, or paying extra on more than one debt is the > SLOWEST way to get out of debt? Don't make these same mistakes. > Learn more at http://www.leoquinn.com/itb.html >+-------------------------------------------------------------------+ > > >That's it for today. I'm off to Baltimore for the Blackboard >conference, so we'll talk again in a week or so. Have a safe and >happy week! > >=====================[ Tourbus Rider Information ]=================== > The Internet Tourbus - U.S. Library of Congress ISSN #1094-2238 > Copyright 1995-2005, Rankin & Crispen - All rights reserved > > Tourbus News Service - http://tourbus.com/news.html > > Subscribe, Signoff, Archives, Free Stuff and More at the > Tourbus Website - http://www.TOURBUS.com >==================================================================== > .~~~. )) > (\__/) .' ) )) Patrick Douglas Crispen > /o o \/ .~ >{o_, \ { crispen@netsquirrel.com > / , , ) \ http://www.netsquirrel.com/ > `~ -' \ } )) AOL Instant Messenger: Squirrel2K > _( ( )_.' >---..{____} Warning: squirrels. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Apr 11 22:04:39 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Grammar & Grading Message-ID: The deskilling consequences of poor tools are well-known. Even decent tools, like spell checkers, can deskill, by less re-reading and thinking about syntax. Maybe Prof. Brent can fix Microsoft Word's presumptions. Or is he the next-higher problem? --PJK ----------------------------------------------------------------- (from Edupage, April 11, 2005) POKING HOLES IN MICROSOFT'S GRAMMAR CHECKER Sandeep Krishnamurthy, associate professor of marketing and e-commerce at the University of Washington, is so incensed with the grammar checker in Microsoft Word that he has taken to posting examples of what he sees as the checker's failings on his Web site. He has also called on Microsoft to improve the checker. Citing egregious grammar mistakes that the tool does not question, Krishnamurthy said that although it might be helpful for above-average writers, it actually impedes below-average writers' efforts to improve their writing skill. Krishnamurthy said Microsoft should modify the tool to allow users to select the level of help they need, from basic to advanced. For its part, Microsoft said in a statement that the tool is not intended to find or identify all errors. Instead, it is designed "to catch the kinds of errors that ordinary users make in normal writing situations." Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 April 2005 (sub. req'd) http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i32/32a02902.htm COMPUTER APPLICATION GRADES ESSAYS A professor at the University of Missouri has developed a computer application that grades papers and offers advice on writing. Ed Brent, professor of sociology, created the application, called Qualrus, using a $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. Qualrus evaluates papers based on the structure of sentences and paragraphs and on the flow of ideas. Instructors can specify which factors of an assignment are most important, and Qualrus incorporates that information into the scores it provides. Brent claims the application improves students' papers and estimated that it saves him more than 200 hours of grading per semester. The tool has been approved for use across the university, but so far Brent is the only instructor using it. Brent is also looking for ways to distribute the tool to other universities and to businesses. CNET, 7 April 2005 http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5659366.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Apr 13 13:57:23 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] I Can See Clearly Now Message-ID: (from INNOVATION, 13 April 2005) SONY PURSUES TECHNIQUE TO BEAM INFO DIRECTLY INTO BRAIN Sony Corp. hopes to break new ground in virtual sensory experiences thanks to a patent granted to Thomas Dawson, a researcher working for the entertainment giant. According to the patent, using pulsed ultrasonic signals aimed at the brain can alter "the neural timing in the cortex. No invasive surgery is needed to assist a person, such as a blind person, to view live and/or recorded images or hear sounds." In addition to sounds and images, the technique could be used to induce other "sensory experiences," such as smells. A Sony Electronics spokeswoman says that although no experiments have yet been conducted, the patent "was based on an inspiration that this may someday be the direction that technology will take us." (Stuff 7 Apr 2005) --------------------------------------------------------------- Inspiration without experiment, as the basis of patenting and business planning, is clearly a growing trend, sort of a cozy way of domesticating science fiction into daily life. We're "cozying up" to a lot of "blue sky" ideas these days. It won't encourage any growth of reasoned thinking -- but that's a complicated, stressful and retrograde activity anyway. What is perhaps more interesting, is that this domestication leads to a bland and unimaginative science fiction, one not propelled by the far reaches of science, but more like a pet that purrs when you stroke it. There is no science in this science fiction. It is more like an aspect of the "decorative arts." --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Apr 25 22:02:46 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Maurice Hilleman Message-ID: > "... it was said that he had saved more lives than any other > scientist in the 20th century. His peers said that he had done more > for preventive medicine than anyone since Louis Pasteur. .... Some > said he should have had the Nobel. The same was said about Jonas > Salk, who developed the first successful vaccine for polio. But the > Nobel prizegivers tend to favour basic science rather than applied > research." The URL is If it doesn't work for you, the text follws. --PJK ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Obituary Maurice Hilleman Apr 21st 2005 From The Economist print edition Maurice Hilleman, pioneer of preventive medicine, died on April 11th, aged 85 A STORY that Maurice Hilleman liked to tell to illustrate his work as a developer of vaccines concerned his daughter Jeryl Lynn. In 1963 at the age of five she caught mumps, a highly infectious disease of childhood that is usually benign but can be a killer. Mr Hilleman used swabs to collect the mumps virus growing in her throat, and preserved it in a jar of beef broth. He produced a form of the virus that was too weak to cause disease but strong enough to trigger the body's natural defences and make the person immune. The weakened strain, named after Jeryl Lynn, has become the standard vaccine to prevent mumps. The disease is now rare, at least in rich countries. Identifying the problem, collecting data, finding a solution: Mr Hilleman developed some 40 vaccines, among them for measles, hepatitis A and B, chickenpox, meningitis and pneumonia. He developed the one-shot vaccine that can prevent several diseases, such as MMR (measles, mumps and rubella). When in 1988 President Reagan presented him with the National Medal of Science, America's highest scientific honour, it was said that he had saved more lives than any other scientist in the 20th century. His peers said that he had done more for preventive medicine than anyone since Louis Pasteur. Even allowing for the hyperbole generated on such occasions the commendations were merited. Some said he should have had the Nobel. The same was said about Jonas Salk, who developed the first successful vaccine for polio. But the Nobel prizegivers tend to favour basic science rather than applied research. It was Pasteur (1822-95) who discovered that a weakened microbe could be used as an immunisation against its more virulent form, and all succeeding microbiologists have had to live under his long shadow. Waiting for bird flu Mr Hilleman's greatest contribution to a healthy world may have been his work on the safe mass production of vaccines that can be stored ready for use against the pandemics that since antiquity have regularly swept across continents, such as the 1918 flu outbreak that killed more than 20m people. In 1957, when flu swept through Hong Kong, Mr Hilleman identified the virus as a new form to which people had no natural immunity and passed on his findings to vaccine-makers. When the virus reached the United States a few months later 40m doses of vaccine were ready to limit its damage. Mr Hilleman established that the flu virus is constantly mutating, making it difficult to provide a reliable vaccine. Developing a vaccine can be complex. His fellow-workers saw him as an artist as much as a scientist, bringing to his discipline an instinctive feeling of what would work. Following his guidelines, many nations are making large quantities of what they believe will be useful vaccines in the hope of defeating a possible pandemic of bird flu, should the virus spread from Asia. Getting a vaccine through its numerous trials to be licenced for public use was the big thrill in Mr Hilleman's life, he said. It was like being young again, like being back in Miles City, his home town in Montana, when they had something to celebrate, such as building a barn. "Everyone would get together, sit on a log, get a fresh bucket of water and pass around a cup." Did you say water? Life was simple then, he said. He picked up things there that he could have learnt nowhere else, such as hypnotising a chicken, an animal that has, if involuntarily, contributed much to medical research. Miles City sounds primitive rather than simple. It had been a frontier town and the older inhabitants still told stories of Indian battles. Young Hilleman was poor. His mother and twin sister had died during his birth and he and his seven surviving siblings had been brought up on a farm by relations. At the age of 18 he was working in a shop. For a young man who felt that life must have more to offer than selling goods to cowboys and their girlfriends, there were two glimpses of a more interesting world. One was his homemade radio, which could just pick up talk and music programmes broadcast from distant Chicago. The other was the local public library, where he found a copy of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species", which had avoided the censorship of the town's fundamentalist church. He did eventually escape, first to the local state university and then to the University of Chicago, where he studied microbiology. America was by then at war. Mr Hilleman's contribution to winning it was to develop vaccines to protect soldiers fighting in the Pacific. After the war he worked for the Walter Reed army medical centre and then joined Merck, a pharmaceutical company, which, over some 27 years, provided him with the facilities to explore the mysteries of immunology. Mr Hilleman believed that science would eventually rid the world of disease, as it had disposed of smallpox in 1979 and is close to banishing polio. But the big killers, tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS, were holding out, especially AIDS. He was baffled that 18 years of research had not produced a vaccine to prevent HIV, which can lead to AIDS. Mr Hilleman, usually a gentle, patient man, got angry about this. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Apr 26 17:46:48 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Constant Email Lowers IQ In-Reply-To: <2cf33606f12dc299ca88974923c56a4f@yale.edu> References: <2cf33606f12dc299ca88974923c56a4f@yale.edu> Message-ID: My friend Patrick Lynch sent me this, and I couldn't agree more. I update my email Inbox manually, when I want to. Automatic updating is an assured distraction. --PJK --------------------------------------------------------------------- At 7:49 AM -0400 4/26/05, Patrick Lynch wrote: >FYI: Interesting article > >Not so much the sheer volume of email, but the constant interruptions >if you're not disciplined enough to read in batches at set times of >day. The most sensible thing about email I've read in a long time, >particularly for jobs that require long, sustained periods of intense >concentration, like many IT and creative jobs: > >====== > >http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/technology/article/0,1299,DRMN_49_3726289,00.html > E-MAIL IS A THREAT to your IQ, according to a study conducted by >researchers at the University of London. > >Constant e-mailing and text messaging reduces mental ability by 10 >IQ points, a more severe effect than smoking cannabis, by >distracting the brain from other tasks, a University of London >report showed. > >The loss of intelligence and disruption caused by electronic "info- >mania," costs companies millions of dollars in lost productivity >each year, according to the study by the University's Institute of >Psychiatry. > >"This is a very real and widespread phenomenon," said Dr. Glenn >Wilson, author of the research, in a phone interview. "Info-mania, >if unchecked, will damage a worker's performance by reducing mental >sharpness. Companies should encourage a more balanced and >appropriate way of working." > >The study of 1,000 adults found that their intelligence declined as >tasks were interrupted by incoming e-mails and texts. The average >reduction of 10 IQ points, though temporary, is more than double the >four-point loss associated with smoking cannabis. A 10-point drop is >also associated with missing a night of sleep, the report said. > >Sixty-two percent of workers are addicted to checking messages out >of office hours and while on vacation, according to the report. A >third of all adults will respond to an e-mail immediately or within >10 minutes. One in five is "happy" to interrupt a business or social >meeting to respond to an e-mail or text message, the study found. > >"E-mails flashing on a screen distracts people, and the use of >electronic messaging should be limited," Wilson said. > >Women were less affected than men. Their average decline in IQ was >five points, compared with 15 for males, suggesting women are better >at multitasking, Wilson said. > >The study also surveyed opinions on messaging in the workplace. >Eighty-nine percent of workers said it's "extremely rude" to answer >e-mails and phone messages during a face-to-face meeting. >Seventy-two percent were "irritated" by work phone calls held in >public places. > >The Scotsman newspaper earlier reported the findings of the study, >which was commissioned by Hewlett-Packard Co., the world's >second-biggest personal- computer maker. > >-- >Patrick J. Lynch, M.S. >Director, MedMedia Group >Information Technology Services-Medicine >Yale University School of Medicine >100 Church Street South, Suite 107 >New Haven, CT 06519 >(203) 737-5033 >(203) 737-5034, fax >mailto:patrick.lynch@yale.edu >http://its.med.yale.edu/wdd >http://its.med.yale.edu/about_itsmed/directors/lynch.html > >"ITS-Med: connecting people and technology." >http://its.med.yale.edu > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://jove.eng.yale.edu/pipermail/eas-info/attachments/20050426/bcb6b7da/attachment.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed May 4 23:07:14 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Innovation is Changing Message-ID: (from INNOVATION, 4 May 2005) PIECING IT TOGETHER: THE CHANGING NATURE OF INNOVATION Lord Broers, president of the U.K.'s Royal Academy of Engineering, says that when he received his Ph.D. in the mid-1960s there was no doubt in anybody's mind at that time that the ideal model for technology development was the large, well-funded, industrial research laboratories such as AT&T Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and HP's research labs. But things have changed. "In retrospect it becomes obvious that this support of fundamental science was in effect a philanthropic activity and could be afforded because the companies that practiced it on a significant scale were in fact monopolies." Since then, the world of technology and science has expanded so much that it is no longer possible, even for the largest companies, to sustain a research effort that can cover all the disciplines used in their products. Broers says, "To be successful the innovators will almost certainly need an intimate knowledge of the science that underlies the technology, but their aim will not be to further the science. They will use their knowledge to break down the barriers that stand in the way of practical application." This is also necessary because the components in almost any modern product -- such as the mobile phone, the Airbus A380, or the modern automobile -- are made by such a wide variety of firms, are all good examples of this bringing together of lots of parts for a common end. "Companies ceased to make entire products themselves and became assemblers of the world's best, and to do this they had to know the world - both its technologies and its peoples." (BBC News 20 Apr 2005) ------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Colleagues - As you will discover from the BBC link, Lord Broers's comments are part of his Reith Lectures for 2005. Past Reith luminaries, samples of whose lectures are online, include Bertrand Russell, the first Reith lecturer in 1948, John Kenneth Galbraith in 1966, and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran in 2003. Lord Broers's five lectures are Lecture 1: Technology will Determine the Future of the Human Race Lecture 2: Collaboration Lecture 3: Innovation and Management Lecture 4: Nanotechnology and Nanoscience Lecture 5: Risk and Responsibility They are accessible as audio files and text. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed May 4 23:29:18 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] IP and Brains Message-ID: Dear Colleagues - I just emailed you about Lord Broers and his Reith Lectures. There you will find him a forceful advocate of internationally distributed R&D, global competition and close control over intellectual property rights. Quoth Lord Broers: > "To be only nationally competitive is to be not competitive." > > "Companies ceased to make entire products themselves and became > assemblers of the world's best, and to do this they had to know the > world - both its technologies and its peoples." > > "It is immensely exhilarating to be player but there are no places > reserved for amateurs." I thought it only fair to add a post-script about today's contentious landscape of global R&D and IP rights. --PJK "Whether elephants make love or war, it is the grass that suffers." --Swahili proverb ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (from INNOVATION, 4 May 2005) LOOMING CHALLENGE TO INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS White hat or black hat? University of Colorado economics professor Keith Maskus believes intellectual property rights are good for innovation: "Defining innovation broadly, I think IP is in support of development." And Dana Colarulli of the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) agrees: "IP is critical to robust development; it's the currency of ideas. IPO believes IP promotes innovation, and we need to have a balanced system and look for ways to invest." Yet a starkly differing view is offered by Larry Rosen, former general counsel for the Open Source Initiative and a leading open-source supporter; Rosen says "I'm here to represent the attitudes of many, many, many people around the world who think that for the software industry, patents are not the creative engine; they are the caboose." He believes that patents typically "serve as a disincentive rather than an incentive" to innovation, and therefore shouldn't exist, particularly patents for standards. "Patents that cover industry standards are far more dangerous than others, because they allow companies to put up toll booths on the information highway... Software is obsolete by the time it gets out the door. There is a lot of investment to start a company, but the tiny amount of time it takes to do the programming is nothing like the time it takes to build a business out of it, and there's no reason the patent system should have to protect that." (eWeek 22 Apr 2005) IT'S ALL ABOUT BRAINS Battelle senior researcher Jules Duga sees the beginning of a fundamental shift in manufacturing: the outsourcing of R&D activities that were traditionally considered a company's core competence: "Specifically what started as a movement toward utilizing captive facilities located primarily in Japan and Western Europe has blossomed into a significant increase in the support of R&D in non-captive, independent-performing institutions in developing or re-developing countries." So what's really going on here? Speaking to an audience at MIT, General Electric chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt explained his company's global R&D strategy this way: "We did it to have access to markets. But also we did it to get access to the best brains everywhere in the world. Today we run a very global network of R&D." In other words, it's all about brains: brains are the only thing saving a company like GE from what he calls "commodity damnation." Immelt says, "In this regard the only source of profit, the only reason to invest in companies in the future is their ability to innovate and their ability to differentiate. Today, organic growth is the key. It's going to determine who gets rewarded and it is absolutely the biggest task of every company." (IndustryWeek 1 May 2005) From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun May 8 22:07:32 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Public Higher Education Funding Message-ID: The increasing funding pressure on public colleges and universities should be kept in mind each time we hear the vapid claim that it will be the inventiveness of our scientists and engineers that will be our 'edge' in an age of global technological competition. The article is by Katharine Lyall, president emerita of the University of Wisconsin System and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Foundation. --PJK >X-Sender: reis@reis.pobox.stanford.edu >Date: Thu, 5 May 2005 08:51:39 -0700 >To: tomorrows-professor@lists.Stanford.EDU >From: Rick Reis >Subject: TP Msg. #645 A CALL FOR THE MIRACLE MODEL >Sender: owner-tomorrows-professor@lists.Stanford.EDU > >"Public colleges and universities, which enroll 77 percent of all >students in higher education, drew more than half of their operating >support from taxpayer sources in the 1980s; today money from state >coffers provides about 30 percent of funding. At some of the >nation's most prominent public universities, such as the University >of Virginia and the University of Colorado, state funding >contributes less than 10 percent of university operating support." > > * * * * * * > TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR(SM) MAILING LIST > desk-top faculty development one hundred times a year > > Over 23,000 subscribers > Over 600 postings > Over 600 academic institutions > Over 100 countries > > Sponsored by > THE STANFORD UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING > http://ctl.stanford.edu > > An archive of all past postings (with a two week delay) >can be found at: > http://ctl.stanford.edu/Tomprof/index.shtml > > * * * * * >Folks: > >The posting below, by Katharine Lyall, president emerita of the >University of Wisconsin System and a visiting scholar at the >Carnegie Foundation. looks changing models for higher education in >the United States. It is #16 in the monthly series called Carnegie >Foundation Perspectives. These short commentaries exploring various >educational issues are produced by the Carnegie Foundation for the >Advancement of Teaching . The >Foundation invites your response at: >CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org. Reprinted with permission > >Regards, > >Rick Reis >reis@stanford.edu >UP NEXT: Engaged and Engaging Science: A Component of a Good Liberal >Education > > Tomorrow's Academy > > ----------------------------------- 1,125 words >------------------------------- > > A CALL FOR THE MIRACLE MODEL > >By Katharine Lyall > >America is rapidly privatizing its public colleges and >universities, and that process is raising questions our society >desperately needs to grapple with. Who should aspire to a higher >education? To what extent are education's benefits public and social >in nature, and to what extent is higher learning a private good? >What are the core values of higher education and what are we willing >to pay to preserve them? > >The move toward privatization is the result of a "perfect storm" of >economic and political trends that are putting insurmountable >fiscal pressures on the states. When Republican tax policy >architect Grover Norquist said, "I simply want to reduce government >to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in >the bathtub," he articulated an increasingly popular view of >government. Currently, this view is driving the federal government >to shift costs and risks formerly borne at the national level to >the states, and the states, in turn, to shift costs and risks to >individuals. The idea of privatizing a portion of Social Security >and the continuing press for reductions in tax bases and tax rates >follow this line of thought. And public colleges and universities >are swirling in the vortex of this ideological storm as >institutions scramble to find new ways to fund the educational >enterprise by diversifying revenue sources and addressing new >constituents. > >Public colleges and universities, which enroll 77 percent of all >students in higher education, drew more than half of their operating >support from taxpayer sources in the 1980s; today money from state >coffers provides about 30 percent of funding. At some of the >nation's most prominent public universities, such as the University >of Virginia and the University of Colorado, state funding >contributes less than 10 percent of university operating support. >This steady disinvestment in higher education by the states does >not seem to reflect a clear public policy decision to reduce higher >education opportunities. It indicates instead structural problems in >state budgets and budgeting practices. Indeed, the criticism of >higher education for "exorbitant" tuition increases demonstrates a >continuing belief by legislators that access to higher education is >more essential than ever, both for individuals and for the state's >economic future, and that somehow universities should find a way to >maintain access despite the steady erosion of funding. > >In response to criticism from state legislatures, and from the U.S. >Congress as well, public universities have been extraordinarily >diligent and creative in diversifying their revenue sources: today, >no single revenue source dominates-as mentioned, state funds provide >30 percent, tuition supplies about 20 percent, and gifts, grants, >and contracts (mostly for research) constitute 50 percent or more. >In effect, state taxpayers have become minority shareholders in >their public colleges and universities. > >The move toward privatization of public colleges and universities >poses both threats and opportunities. Many argue that universities, >like other entities, can benefit from exposure to the competitive >discipline of the market to make them more focused in mission and >more efficient in operations. The market, they argue, will break the >bonds of tradition and either free or force universities to serve >students better. But others worry that privatization is forcing >universities to sell out to corporations and donors, to deny access >for low-income students, and to abandon their core public purposes, >including the extension of intellectual and human assets to the >larger community. > >Whatever one's view, the stark facts are: > * Public support (per student) for public universities has been >falling for two decades or more-and with growing fiscal pressures on >states, there is no relief in sight. > * Higher education leaders have encouraged growing access without >considering how it can be paid for-we see the urgency of the need >but have not anticipated the shifting fiscal and political >circumstances in which it must be met. > * The 20th century "social compact" among states, families, and >higher education has been abandoned de facto-neither elected >officials nor educators want to admit this, but a realistic >adjustment cannot be made until they do. Finger-pointing and >accusations of bad faith, bad management, and bad priorities will >not work. > >As some state leaders begin to pay attention and realize that >solutions are needed, they are creating interesting experiments in >higher education funding. For example: > >Charter universities are being created. The Virginia state >legislature has just adopted legislation providing for three tiers >of charter status that permit public universities to obtain greater >operating autonomy in exchange for meeting specified state >performance goals. This relationship more honestly recognizes the >state's minority stakeholder status and frees the university to >obtain management efficiencies outside the contractual constraints >of state government. > >Hybrid universities like Cornell University and the University of >Virginia operate with a mix of publicly supported and privately >endowed units within the same university structure. This permits >focusing scarce state funding on units and programs that state >decision makers designate as of critical state interest, leaving >the operation and funding of remaining units/programs to the >university operating privately. > >Full-cost pricing experiments, like Miami University in Ohio where >tuition is set to cover full costs of operation, and financial aid >set-asides from the tuition revenues are used to ensure access for >low-income students. > >Experiments like these are being closely followed and will help to >answer the question of how much of higher education's "core public >purposes" can be sustained as public support wanes. > >Promising experiments aside, we urgently need a public discussion of >a new sustainable higher education policy, based on realistic >financial and operating expectations, that outlines the commitments >of federal, state, and higher education institutions. Without this >public debate, privatization will continue to an inevitable end of >fewer institutions, less access-especially for those of modest >income-and erosion of our economic future. > >My own view is that the higher education universe is converging >towards a new model, the "public purpose university," defined not by >the old concepts of ownership and control (public vs. private) but >by the particular public goals it has elected to serve. No longer >can we expect Clark Kerr's multiversity to be all things to all >people. The core public purposes of higher education must be >collectively achieved (if they can be sustained at all) through >specialization and allocation of resources across all higher >education institutions. In this new model, both research and >teaching missions will become more focused, and more collaborative >activity will occur between and among "public" and "private" >institutions, coordinated by statewide university systems. > >This view may hinge on a spirit of cooperation that will be >difficult, if not impossible to achieve. But as Barack Obama has >said: "The true genius of America [is] a faith in simple dreams, an >insistence on small miracles." Our public colleges and universities >share that faith and work daily to bring about those small >miracles. > >........................................................................... > >Katharine Lyall is president emerita of the University of Wisconsin >System and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Foundation. Katharine, >who is an economist and public policy scholar, is completing a new >book on the financing of public higher education. > >Carnegie Perspectives is a series of commentaries that explore >different ways to think about educational issues. These pieces are >presented with the hope that they contribute to the conversation. >You can respond directly to the author at >CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org or you can join a public >discussion at Carnegie Conversations. > >Join the Carnegie Perspectives email list by sending an email to >CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org with "Subscribe" as the >subject line. > >* * * * * * * * >NOTE: Anyone can SUBSCRIBE to the Tomorrows-Professor Mailing List by >addressing an e-mail message to: > > >Do NOT put anything in the SUBJECT line but in the body of the >message type: > > subscribe tomorrows-professor >* * * * * * * * >To UNSUBSCRIBE to the Tomorrows-Professor send the following e-mail >message >to: > >unsubscribe tomorrows-professor > >-++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**== >This message was posted through the Stanford campus mailing list >server. If you wish to unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the >message body of "unsubscribe tomorrows-professor" to >majordomo@lists.stanford.edu From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed May 18 21:08:28 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Feeling Insecure? Message-ID: The Germ A mighty creature is the germ, Though smaller than the pachyderm. His customary dwelling place Is deep within the human race. His childish pride he often pleases By giving people strange diseases. Do you, my poppet, feel infirm? You probably contain a germ. --Ogden Nash -------------------------------------------------------------------- (from Edupage, May 18, 2005) STUDENTS SHOW EASE OF IDENTITY THEFT Graduate students at Johns Hopkins University set out to see how much personal information they could collect on as many individuals as possible, using only the Internet and $50. The 41 students were in a course taught by Aviel D. Rubin, professor of computer science and technical director of the university's Information Security Institute, who divided them into groups of three or four and instructed them to use only legal, public sources of information. The exercise mimicked the activities of data brokers, such as ChoicePoint and LexisNexis, and the students were able to collect and aggregate vast amounts of information, even with limited time and budgets. Although Rubin was pleased that fewer Social Security numbers were among the data collected than he had anticipated, privacy advocates insisted that such information remains easy to obtain, posing enormous risk of identity theft. Even without Social Security numbers, the data collected represented for some individuals a very broad picture of who they are, where they live, and activities in which they participate. Such access to personal information worries many, including Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who conducted a similar experiment, instructing his staff to try to steal his identity. Aside from information they discovered about Stevens, they were told they could buy his Social Security number for $65. New York Times, 18 May 2005 (registration req'd) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/18/technology/18data.html GAO WARNS OF INSECURE WI-FI A report released this week by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) strongly criticizes the Wi-Fi security of federal agencies. Wireless networks with no security or with poorly configured security pose significant risks of unauthorized access. Hackers within range of the network could access the network and potentially other computers on the network. Despite guidelines issued by the National Institute for Standards and Technology stating that government agencies should forgo wireless networks unless their security can be ensured, 13 of 24 major agencies do not require security for wireless networks, and 9 agencies do not have wireless-security plans. Investigators from the GAO monitored six agencies and detected Wi-Fi signals outside all of them. The GAO report recommends that the Office of Management and Budget require all federal agencies to use a variety of security measures, including encryption and virtual private networks. Reuters, 17 May 2005 http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?storyID=8521359 ***************************************************** EDUPAGE INFORMATION To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your settings, or access the Edupage archive, visit http://www.educause.edu/Edupage/639 Or, you can subscribe or unsubscribe by sending e-mail to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU To SUBSCRIBE, in the body of the message type: SUBSCRIBE Edupage YourFirstName YourLastName To UNSUBSCRIBE, in the body of the message type: SIGNOFF Edupage If you have subscription problems, send e-mail to EDUPAGE-request@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU ***************************************************** From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri May 20 23:49:53 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Is It Orignal? Message-ID: (from Edupage, May 20, 2005) JOURNALS USING SOFTWARE TO UNCOVER PLAGIARISM Software designed to uncover plagiarism is increasingly being used not only for student papers, where it got its start, but also for academic journals, where it is turning up instances of self-plagiarism as well. Although some dismiss self-plagiarism as unimportant relative to plagiarizing another's work, the practice of republishing one's own work in various venues strikes others as similarly objectionable. Christian Collberg, assistant professor of computer science at the University of Arizona, characterized self-plagiarism as vita padding and said that self-plagiarists who are funded from public sources are misusing taxpayer money. Collberg is working on a software application specifically designed to uncover instances of self-plagiarism. Though not as concerned about self-plagiarism, Cornell University is testing a plagiarism-detection application on an archive it maintains of articles in physics, math, and computer science. Among the 300,000 articles in the archive, the tool has found a few thousand instances that warrant further investigation. Chronicle of Higher Education, 19 May 2005 (sub. req'd) http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/05/2005051901t.htm ----------------------------------------------------------------------- In technology fields there is a steady growth of a kind of inadvertent duplication of the past, by ignoring work done longer ago than, say, 15-20 years. Differences in nomenclature, inaccessibility to online searching (e.g. material in discontinued journals and older monographs) can be enough to make ideas of the past invisible to even well-intentioned researchers in the present. Mind you, present-day researchers in technology often have little education in the history of technology, nor have they anywhere near the skills, and certainly not the motivation, to search diverse past sources as capably as historians. If software such as described above could be made to work at a more conceptual level, the Patent Office should start checking patents against the older professional literature. Heck, even the present literature. George Santayana's quote "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" is often cited in attempts to lessen mankind's toil. But for technologists it need not be a condemnation at all, but a potential collective license for "originality." --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat May 28 15:58:07 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Visions Message-ID: from WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 27 May 05 Washington, DC SPACE: VOYAGER 1 REACHES THE LIMIT OF BUSH'S ATTENTION SPAN. It's been traveling for 28 years and is now 8.7 billion miles from Earth. It just reported that it has entered the region of the heliosheath, where the solar wind begins to dissipate. It may be in this region another 10 years. Its Pt-238 radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) should keep operating until about 2020. When Voyager 1 crosses that final boundary, becoming the first human artifact to enter interstellar space, Earth won't know. Communications with Voyager will be cut off to save $4.5M of NASA's $16.5B budget (.025%), for Bush's Moon/Mars "vision." --- Archives of What's New can be found at http://www.bobpark.org To subscribe, send a blank e-mail to: ---------------------------------------------------------------- For a comprehensive review of the Voyager 1 mission, the vast amount of astronomical data it has sent back to researchers on Earth, with links to NASA and JPL, see ---------------------------------------------------------------- Way back in 1993, at the beginning of his historic IBM turnaround as CEO, Lou Gerstner famously said "The last thing we need is a vision. We have to deliver." By the late '90s that kind of "common sense" business style was eclipsed by personality cults, where the visions of leaders counted much more than execution. Deeply damaging was the underlying failure of the assumption that leadership would include the highest levels of accountability and ethical conduct. Ultimately this brought us the shocks of Enron, Worldcom and the like. Business is now returning to more sober operating premises. All things go in cycles. With some delay we are in a somewhat analogous cycle with science and technology policy. The privatization of intellectual property and poor management of interdisciplinarity are drivers. The "common sense" of quantitative reasoning and structured "cause and effect" thinking often yields to visions bereft of those underpinnings and their methodologies. To the inevitable extent that they affect education, the consequences of misleading visions will regrettably be much slower to reverse. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Jun 1 20:59:39 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Wrinkles in Higher Education Message-ID: (from Edupage, June 01, 2005) COLLEGES LEARN ABOUT IDENTITY THEFT FROM AN IDENTITY THIEF As part of its efforts to increase awareness about student loan fraud, the Department of Education is distributing a DVD to colleges and universities of an interview with a convicted identity thief. As part of his plea agreement, John E. Christensen was interviewed by authorities to create the DVD, in which he describes how, over a period of three and a half years, he used the identities of more than 50 individuals to defraud the government of more than $300,000 in federal student grants and loans. Each year, the Department of Education disburses about $65 billion in financial aid. In the interview, Christensen, who is serving his prison sentence in Arizona, explains how he fraudulently obtained personal information and used it to register for classes and apply for financial aid. Because financial aid processes take place largely online, defrauding the government is "becoming easier and easier all the time," said Christensen. "You never have to see anybody." New York Times, 29 May 2005 (registration req'd) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/30/national/30fraud.html ***************************************************** EDUPAGE INFORMATION To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your settings, or access the Edupage archive, visit http://www.educause.edu/Edupage/639 Or, you can subscribe or unsubscribe by sending e-mail to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU To SUBSCRIBE, in the body of the message type: SUBSCRIBE Edupage YourFirstName YourLastName To UNSUBSCRIBE, in the body of the message type: SIGNOFF Edupage If you have subscription problems, send e-mail to EDUPAGE-request@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU ***************************************************** From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Jun 10 02:38:31 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Cold Water Energy Message-ID: (from INNOVATION, 8 June 2005) COLD-WATER ENERGY -- WAVE OF THE FUTURE? With supplies of fossil fuel now declining, John Pi?a Craven, former chief scientist for the Navy's Special Projects Office, has developed a plan to use cold water pumped up from the depths of the ocean to provide low-cost and environmentally sustainable power, water and food to a new development in the Marianas. The proposal has already won $75 million from a Memphis, Tennessee, venture capital firm, and $1.5 million in federal funding. The cold-water energy system exploits the difference in temperatures between deep-sea water -- below 3,000 feet -- and surface water and air. A pipe pulls up the frigid water -- 39 degrees F -- to the surface, where it's run through heat exchangers to produce unlimited air conditioning that costs almost nothing. Condensation is gathered to provide freshwater for drinking and irrigation, and by directing some of the flow through a contraption Craven calls a hurricane tower, electricity is generated as well. Once proven, Craven plans to use his energy system to nurture a small experimental Hawaiian vineyard and pineapple farm, where he says cold-water irrigation enables him to produce three crop cycles a year rather than one or two. In the Marianas, the system will provide water and energy for 100 townhouses, a golf course, soccer fields and an athletic complex aimed at Japanese tourists. It will also sell freshwater to hotels now relying on desalination plants. "The oceans are the biggest solar collector on Earth, and there's enough energy in them to supply a thousand times the world's needs. If you want to depend on nature, the oceans are the only energy source big enough to tap," says a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). (Wired.com June 2005) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Remember my mailing "Is it Original"? Well, this idea of energy recovery from deep ocean water temperature differentials is coming around again. In the '70s I recall talks by Clarence Zener (of the Zener diode) advocating this form of energy recovery. There are patents from that period, e.g. , which mentions other patents by Zener and others. There are also interesting technical challenges with such energy recovery, such as having to deal with two-phase mixtures. (See the cited patent.) The other poignant thing about this item is that it should be proposed for the Marianas. To quote from a recent PBS NOW program : "The Marianas are a Commonwealth of the United States. Technically that means they're part of America. Clothing manufactured here even bears the label "Made in the USA." But here's the thing: many U.S. labor laws don't apply here. Back in the 1970's, Marianas officials negotiated with Congress to make sure of that. These factories depend on a steady stream of workers recruited from third world countries. Some of them net as little as $350 a year." The working conditions are as bad, sometimes possibly worse, than those in the New York garment industry sweatshops prior to the 1911 Triangle Shirt Factory fire . Read the rest of the PBS transcript, it's rather dismal and involves some very prominent Washington politicians and lobbyists. I don't think those Marianas garment workers are going to benefit from this energy proposal. Technically and socially, the proposal is mostly froth, like a lot of technology proposals these days. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Jun 19 23:14:31 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Nature's Patents Message-ID: Dear Colleagues - The most recent (June 9th) Technology Quarterly in The Economist , always a pleasant alternative to the hyperthyroid editorial style of WIRED magazine, leads off with an article on biomimetics, engineering imitating nature . This is an interesting area. In matters of "systems integration" nature with its million year "product development cycle" is way ahead of anything we do in engineering. E.g. a blade of grass is an integrated tubular structural support system, a fluid transport system and a chemical reactor, all extremely tightly integrated. On the other hand, there are many elements of design where the teachings of nature's inventions can be adapted by engineers, as in Velcro, gecko feet and the distributed vision system of brittlestars. About many such things I learned from the book by M.J. French "Invention and Evolution: Design in Nature and Engineering" (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Over the last three years a team at Bath University has compiled a database of 2500 of biological patents (the term suggesting that nature is the patent holder), with plans to collect ten times that number with the contributions of an online community. The URL for that database given in The Economist, is probably pretty heavily loaded these days. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Jul 26 22:17:26 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Personal Digital Libraries Message-ID: Dear Colleagues - With travels and various other preoccupations I haven't been sending you many EAS-INFO mailings. Probably not a problem for you. This article touches on an interesting issue. As the personal files and downloads on our computers ever expand, how do they do so in relation to any larger organizational principles, like those of libraries? Mostly not. Instead our computers become a mini-universe of materials at various levels of (dis)organization, with operating system tools like the new Spotlight feature in Mac OS 10.4 proposing to be a miniGoogle. This article considers the situation in larger terms, such as "Lifetime Personal Webspaces" . All best, --PJK -- (from CIT Infobits -- June 2005) PERSONAL DIGITAL LIBRARIES Academics have always amassed large collections of personal research materials: journals, letters, clippings, photographs, slides, and books. Digital capturing, computer storage, and retrieval tools have made even vaster collections both possible and practical. In "Plenty of Room at the Bottom? Personal Digital Libraries and Collections" (D-LIB MAGAZINE, vol. 11, no. 6, June 2005), Neil Beagrie looks at the impact that growth of personal libraries will have on individuals and the libraries in their institutions. He envisions the need for more services to help control, protect, organize, and present these materials. And he suggests that more formal networking can make personal collections a part of the larger body of materials available to researchers. The article is available online at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june05/beagrie/06beagrie.html. D-Lib Magazine [ISSN: 1082-9873] covers innovation and research in digital libraries. D-Lib is published, online and free of charge, eleven times a year by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) and is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). For more information, contact: D-Lib Magazine, c/o Corporation for National Research Initiatives, 1895 Preston White Drive, Reston, VA 20191 USA; tel: 703-620-8990; fax: 703-620-0913; email: dlib@cnri.reston.va.us; Web: http://www.dlib.org/. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Jul 26 22:40:07 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Life Bits Message-ID: It just occurred to me that the comments in the previous item should really have been enlarged to include this. --PJK -- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Jul 26 23:37:25 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Life Bits (again) Message-ID: It just occurred to me that the comments in the previous item should really have been enlarged to include this. --PJK -- LIFE BITS IEEE Spectrum | May 2005 By Robert W. Lucky I've had the pleasure of working with Gordon Bell through the years. He has earned my respect and admiration with accomplishments such as leading the development of Digital Equipment Corp.'s VAX computer and shepherding the Internet at the U.S. National Science Foundation during a critical time in its maturation. Now he has gained a new and unique status in my eyes as the guinea pig in a fascinating experiment at Microsoft Corp.'s Media Presence Research Group in San Francisco, called MyLifeBits. It is an attempt to record digitally everything that Gordon reads, types, and hears, as well as a lot of what he sees. Memory is now so inexpensive that we can have terabytes stored on our home computers. This means that the Memex, proposed by Vannevar Bush in 1945 as a machine to record all of life, is now within our reach. Gordon is certainly giving it a try. Every picture he takes, everything he reads, every action on his computer, all his telephone conversations-are recorded. Microsoft even has the SenseCam, a tiny camera he can wear that automatically takes about 2000 snapshots a day using an algorithm that decides when to take a picture, based on changes in the environment or in body signals like heart rate. The technology of MyLifeBits is rather straightforward, although there are interesting innovations in search, organization, and links. What fascinates me, however, is the philosophy of all this. Is this a good idea? Is it something I want? What are the implications? My first thought was that I wouldn't want this. It would be too intrusive, and, like some kind of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the process of recording would change the way I live. Moreover, it would be useless-a giant sludge pile of wasted bits that I would never access. I have been having second thoughts, however. I'm sure the intrusive part could be handled technologically-everything would be automatically recorded and indexed, so I'd probably get used to it, forget that it was being done, and start acting normally. I think about how I treat my data now. I've saved every digital picture I've ever taken-more than 10 000 of them. I've even saved the ones that were almost totally black, out of focus, or obstructed by my finger. I tell myself it doesn't cost anything and it's not even worth the bother of erasing the bad ones. However, I don't look at my pictures very much. There are too many of them, and instead of helpful file names like "close-up of finger over lens " or "landscape in total darkness," all the pictures have names that the camera thought was a good idea, like "P509437." Probably the average number of times that I've seen a given picture is close to one. I have also saved all my e-mail since the dawn of time. Almost every corporation has policies about e-mail retention (or rather, e-mail nonretention), and there have been high-profile trials where embarrassing and incriminating e-mail has emerged. In spite of these policies and risks, however, practically everyone I know has saved all of his or her e-mail. How can you erase it? As bad as it is, it's your life in there. I even feel a sense of loss when I discard an old hard drive. I feel as if there is some of me in that old drive. I'm not sure I would feel the same way about MyLifeBits. Would it really be me in those life bits, or just a collection of life's minutiae? It seems to me that much of real life is interstitial, that is, happening between things. A biography is filled with just the highlights; the rest is filler. I remember how often I have come home from work thinking that I had done nothing all day. Then, to make it worthwhile, out of this nothingness something noteworthy happens. Someone likened the idea of saving life bits to having a traditional cabinet full of paper files. It's not that you want everything in there, but that you can't predict what will be useful. I can't imagine myself randomly browsing my life bits, but I like the idea of being able to Google my life to find relevant information. Certainly, intelligent search and automated generation of metadata are keys to any usefulness that life bits would have. For example, the system should automatically annotate my nameless pictures by correlating picture dates with my calendar and with GPS tracking. I'm amused by the thought that life itself and life bits could have a recursive relationship. I imagine myself looking at my life bits. Later on I look at the life bits of me looking at my life bits. Then still later-well, you get the idea. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, but I'm not sure that MyLifeBits was the examination he had in mind. I haven't decided yet if keeping life bits is a good idea, but it sure is an interesting one. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ROBERT W. LUCKY (F), now retired, was vice president for applied research at Telcordia Technology in Red Bank, N.J. (rlucky@telcordia.com). From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Jul 28 00:47:48 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Fruit Ads, Fingernails Data Message-ID: Two fun things to do with lasers. Don't you just love the flow of ideas in a society that, very much in contrast to others these days, has amply taken care of all conceivable necessities and entered a sort of permanent state of play and self-indulgence. Apples for the teacher and exam crib sheets will never be the same again. --PJK ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (from INNOVATION, 27 July 2005) TATTOOED FRUIT REPLACING STUBBORN STICKERS We've all struggled with those pesky stickers that sometimes refuse to peel off produce, and now produce distributors are responding with a new technology that uses lasers to tattoo fruits and vegetables with their names, identifying numbers, countries of origin and other information that helps speed distribution. In addition to making life easier for consumers, the tattoo technology has another purpose -- it enables food suppliers to identify and track, whether for profit or security, everything that Americans eat. The process is being licensed by Georgia fruit distributor Durand-Wayland, and Vidalia grower Bland Farms is already shipping laser-coded onions to customers like Wal-Mart and Publix. In addition, Sunkist has used it on oranges sold in California and is testing it on lemons. Sunkist research director Henry Affeldt says the process is similar to the way lasers work in surgery, cutting and cauterizing the skin almost simultaneously. The resulting tattoo can contain an abundance of information, says Durand-Wayland president Fred Durand III. "With the right scanning technology the produce could even be bar-coded with lots of information: where it comes from, who grew it, who picked it, even how many calories it has per serving. You could have a green pepper that was completely covered with coding. Or you could sell advertising space." What will they think of next? (New York Times 19 Jul 2005) ID AT YOUR FINGERTIPS Researchers at the University of Tokushima in Japan have developed a process that uses a laser to burn microscopic dots into a human fingernail, which could one day carry as much as 800 kilobytes of data, says Tokushima professor Yoshio Hayasaki. The laser delivers very short pulses of infrared light onto a tightly focused spot, and researchers speculate that the energy unravels keratin molecules in the nail, making them more fluorescent. Shining a blue laser on the nail then illuminates the fluorescence, making the dots appear brighter than the surrounding nail, enabling the data to be read under a microscope. Because it is possible to adjust the depth of the writing laser's beam inside the nail, it's possible to superimpose several layers of data on one fingernail. Still to be addressed are the issues of subjects' movement during the burning process, and the fact that data would need to be reentered every six months or so as the nail grows out. (Nature 18 Jul 2005) From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Aug 3 23:00:59 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Female Android Message-ID: (INNOVATION, 3 August 2005) FEMALE ANDROID CHARMS RESEARCHERS Researchers at Osaka University have unveiled that most human-looking robot yet -- a female android called Repliee Q1. Repliee is designed to look human, with flexible silicone "skin" that covers a number of sensors and motors used to make her move and react in a human-like fashion. She can even flutter her eyelashes and appears to breathe. "I have developed many robots before," says Repliee's designer Hiroshi Ishiguru, "but I soon realized the importance of its appearance. A human-like appearance gives a robot a strong feeling of presence." Repliee Q1 can interact with people. It can respond to people touching it. It's very satisfying, although we obviously have a long way to go yet." Ishiguru muses that someday androids may be able to pass for humans, if only briefly. "An android could get away with it for a short time, 5-10 seconds. However, if we carefully select the situation, we could extend that, to perhaps 10 minutes. More importantly, we have found that people forget she is an android while interacting with her. Consciously, it is easy to see that she is an android, but unconsciously, we react to the android as if she were a woman." (BBC News 27 Jul 2005) -- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Aug 4 03:52:13 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Ignore Your Customers Sometimes Message-ID: (INNOVATION, 3 August 2005) SOMETIMES IGNORE YOUR CUSTOMERS Usability and design guru Don Norman has come up with an iconoclastic notion -- the customer isn't always right, and sometimes the difference between good design and great design boils down to ignoring customer feedback: "Great design, I contend, comes from breaking the rules, by ignoring the generally accepted practices, by pushing forward with a clear concept of the end result, no matter what. This ego-centric, vision-directed design results in both great successes and great failures. If you want great rather than good, this is what you must do." Norman notes that some companies who've spent too much time paying attention to the customer (Human-Centered Design) end up making products that work well for a small group of individuals, but at the expense of future users. "Design for the individual of today, and the design will be wrong tomorrow." Activity-Centered Design, on the other hand, focuses on devising a cohesive, well-articulated solution to the task at hand, including the sequential requirements of the underlying activities that accompany it. Norman cites companies like Southwest Airlines that has successfully ignored customer feedback in order to focus on its major strategic advantage -- inexpensive, reliable transportation. Passengers complain about open seating, but they still prefer the airline. Norman warns: "The 'listen to your users' produces incoherent designs. The 'ignore your users' can produce horror stories, unless the person in charge has a clear vision for the product, what I have called the 'Conceptual Model.' The person in charge must follow that vision and not be afraid to ignore findings. Yes, listen to customers, but don't always do what they say." (Interactions Jul-Aug 2005) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Donald Norman first gained wide recognition among designers and engineers with his 1988 book "The Psychology of Everyday Things." Later it was re-issued as "The Design of Everyday Things," because the publisher felt that "psychology" was too challenging a word for the buying public, particularly business executives. The world of that first book had much bad design, but recognizable as such with Norman's teaching. His goal was to develop and champion the user's good sense. It would be better to say the "customer's" good sense. If you think about it, adjectives like "demanding," "discriminating" and especially "tough" work much better with "customer" than with "user." Who ever heard of a "tough user"? Alas, bad and unnecessary design has gathered pace in the present day in myriad forms, alluring, byzantine and incomprehensible. No longer considered educatable to become an informed participant, the customer spoken of here has become a user, a Caspar Milquetoast, humored but not considered qualified to contribute to the improvement of his surroundings. Oh brave new world that has such Donald Normans in it. --PJK -- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Aug 5 02:47:50 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Scholarly Web Searching Message-ID: (from CIT Infobits -- July 2005) SCHOLARLY WEB SEARCHING "Google Scholar" -- a Google service for scholars that allows searches to be limited to academic materials (including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts, and technical reports) -- is not the only game in town. In "Scholarly Web Searching: Google Scholar and Scirus" (ONLINE, vol. 29, no. 4, July/August 2005), Greg R. Notess provides an overview of Google Scholar and Elsevier's Scirus, another searching resource for scholars. Unlike Google Scholar, Scirus includes regular web pages as well as journal articles. Using some sample searches, he compares the two services' search capabilities and limitations, as well as the advantages of each to scholarly researchers. The article is available online at no charge at http://www.infotoday.com/online/jul05/OnTheNet.shtml. Online [ISSN:0009-2258] is published bimonthly by Information Today, Inc., 143 Old Marlton Pike, Medford, NJ 08055-8750 USA; tel: 609-654-6266; fax: 609-654-4309; email: custserv@infotoday.com; Web: http://www.infotoday.com/online/. A limited number of articles are freely available online to non-subscribers. -- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Aug 7 02:08:54 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Bob Park's WHAT'S NEW Message-ID: Dear Colleagues - I've been reading Bob Park's weekly WHAT'S NEW mailings since their inception in the late '80s. (Their archive has just moved to a new site ). His intention has always been to look critically at science policy in government and at the public perception of science. All of us interested in these issues have had occasion to be impatient or frustrated, but those feelings played out within a setting we still believed to be largely governed by ideas inherited from Eighteenth Century Enlightenment -- ideas for a humane direction for the future, of scientific reasoning, of ways of facing reality as it is. How times have changed. Public gullibility has reached a medieval scale, assertion with conviction has replaced reasoning from facts, aliens and devils walk among us. , the last an interesting article about the Discovery Institute. And journalism has sunk to the hypocritical premise that it is enough to be a conduit for differing opinions, the more gaudily entertaining the better, without any effort to discover what is true. I can sympathize with the increasingly anguished tone of Bob Park's mailings. --PJK ---------------------------------------------------------------- >Approved-By: whatsnew@BOBPARK.ORG >Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 14:49:52 -0400 >Reply-To: whatsnew@BOBPARK.ORG >Sender: "Bob Park's What's New" >From: "What's New" >Subject: [BOBPARKS-WHATSNEW] What's New Friday August 5, 2005 >To: BOBPARKS-WHATSNEW@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU > >WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 5 Aug 05 Washington, DC > >science n. the intellectual and practical activity encompassing > the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the > physical and natural world through observation and > experiment. (Oxford English Dictionary, eleventh edition) > >1. THE PRESIDENT: MAYBE THE WHITE HOUSE COULD USE A DICTIONARY. >Conservative Christian supporters are gloating. On Tuesday, in >an interview with Texas reporters, the President of the United >States came down on the side of equal time for intelligent >design. Referring back to his time as Governor of Texas, Mr. >Bush said, "I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught." >Which two sides are those Mr. President? I don't think we can >teach the Genesis story in science class, even after you pack the >Court. Surely you're not talking about the "intelligent design" >thing? Can someone tell us who or what is doing the designing? >I think that will tell us whether it's science or religion. > >2. THE FOUNDER: DISCOVERY INSTITUTE DOESN'T NEED A DICTIONARY. >The Washington Post on Saturday had a little-noticed letter from >Bruce Chapman, founder and President of the Discovery Institute. >Director of the White House Office of Planning and Evaluation >under Ronald Reagan, Chapman learned from the master. Facts are >not important, what matters is conviction. "The only religious >believers in all this," he writes, "are the Darwinists, who are >out to punish scholars who see the weakness of Darwin's theory." >And who are these scholars? This brings up another alarming >trend, conservative think tanks manned by "scholars" who do no >research, but spew out books laden with conviction. Chapman >perfected this by recruiting bright young believers to the cause >and assigning them the task of becoming biology PhDs. > >3. THE SCIENCE ADVISOR: THE PRESIDENT HAS A SCIENCE ADVISOR? >Asked by the New York Times to comment, John Marburger responded, >"Evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology .... intelligent >design is not a scientific concept." Good response. It would be >nice if the President's science advisor advised the President. > >4. THE VATICAN ASTRONOMER: CATHOLIC CHURCH SPLITS OVER EVOLUTION. >A cardinal close to the pope has ties to the Discovery Institute >http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN05/wn071505.html, but in today's >issue of The Tablet, Britain's Catholic Weekly, Father George >Coyne, an American Jesuit priest and a distinguished astronomer, >directly attacked Cardinal Schoenborn's position on evolution. > >5. THE PRINCE: WEALTHY BRITISH FARMER LOOKS TO THE MOON FOR HELP. >Tormented by fears of nanorobots turning the planet into "grey >goo," and poisoning by genetically modified foods, Prince Charles >fights science by embracing homeopathy, coffee enemas, organic >farming, and now "biodynamics," which involves planting according >to cycles of the moon and signs of the Zodiac. In a monarchy you >are stuck with what you get, while in a democracy we can pick the >best qualified among us to lead. But it's only a theory. > >THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND. >Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the >University of Maryland, but they should be. >--- >Archives of What's New can be found at http://www.bobpark.org >What's New is moving to a different listserver and our >subscription process has changed. To change your subscription >status please visit this link: >http://listserv.umd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=bobparks-whatsnew&A=1 -- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Aug 8 18:57:16 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Faculty IP Ownership Message-ID: (from Edupage, August 08, 2005) KANSAS SUPREME COURT TO RULE ON OWNERSHIP OF FACULTY WORK The Kansas Supreme Court will evaluate an appellate court decision giving public institutions in Kansas the right to claim ownership of any faculty work, including books, with no negotiation on terms required. The lower court treated faculty work as "work for hire" under federal copyright law, classifying scholarly work as within the scope of employment of a faculty member. The current policy, designed in 1998, allows faculty to keep their book rights and has a revenue-sharing model for technology copyrights. Should the higher court decide in favor of the board, the policy could be changed at will. The case pits the Kansas Board of Regents against the Kansas National Education Association. Inside Higher Ed, 7 August 2005 http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/08/08/kansas See also related two stories cited in the above "Inside Higher Ed" piece: http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/06/14/supreme http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/05/05/brown --PJK -- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Aug 12 22:53:36 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Atomic Anniversary Message-ID: Now doubt you are aware that this is the 60th anniversary year of the beginning of the atomic age. Let me add two slightly offbeat items to the many large official ones. The shocking and perversely topical 1982 movie "The Atomic Cafe" . "The documentary "The Atomic Cafe" is a carefully-edited film composed entirely of newsreel footage, military- and defense-industry propaganda, and authoritative, cheerful narration." It is available on DVD and good rental places should have it. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------------- (from The Scout Report -- August 12, 2005) The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II : A Collection of Primary Sources [pdf] http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/index.htm In timely fashion, the National Security Archive has released another of one of its well-devised electronic briefing books for consideration by the general public. This particular book is edited by William Burr and contains 77 declassified US government documents on the atomic bomb and the end of the war in the Pacific theater of operations. As the site notes, "Interested readers can see for themselves the crucial source material that scholars have used to shape narrative accounts of the historical developments and to frame their arguments about the questions that have provoked controversy over the years." As with previous electronic briefing books, each document is complemented by a brief statement of its importance and general relevance to this overall theme. Additionally, there are notes that contain detailed bibliographic information of external sources used to expand on the details for each document. From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2005. http://scout.wisc.edu/ -- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Aug 30 15:17:25 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Declining by Degrees Message-ID: Dear Colleagues - I was on a trip in late June 2005 when the "Declining by Degrees" program aired on PBS. DVD and book are available from PBS.org and are worth your consideration. The drift toward the "consumer" mode of education consumption can result not just from intellectual laziness, but also from the time pressures of ever more compelling non-classroom activities. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 09:41:16 -0700 >To: tomorrows-professor@lists.Stanford.EDU >From: Rick Reis >Subject: TP Msg. #659 DECLINING BY DEGREES >Sender: owner-tomorrows-professor@lists.Stanford.EDU > >"Nate had succeeded in high school by figuring out what was going to >be on his tests and doing as little as possible. And since that >approach also got him into college and was now earning him a solid B >average, he saw no reason to change. Ask Nate the purpose of >college, and he would probably say something about "getting a good >job." The learning part wasn't necessarily what he was paying good >money for." > > * * * * * * > TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR(SM) MAILING LIST > desk-top faculty development one hundred times a year > > Over 23,750 subscribers > Over 650 postings > Over 650 academic institutions > Over 100 countries > > Sponsored by > THE STANFORD UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING > http://ctl.stanford.edu > > An archive of all past postings (with a two week >delay) can be found at: > http://ctl.stanford.edu/Tomprof/index.shtml > > * * * * * > >Folks: > >The posting below, by John Merrow, president of Learning Matters >Inc. and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Foundation looks at the >current state of higher education in the United States. It is #17 in >the monthly series called Carnegie Foundation Perspectives. These >short commentaries exploring various educational issues are produced >by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching >. The Foundation invites your >response at: CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org. Reprinted >with permission > >Regards, > >Rick Reis >reis@stanford.edu >UP NEXT: Methods of Conflict Resolution in an Academic Environment > > Tomorrow's Academia > > ----------------------------------- 1.106 words >------------------------------- > > DECLINING BY DEGREES >May, 2005 > >When award-winning journalist John Merrow started work on his PBS >documentary about the state of American higher education, >"Declining by Degrees," he met with noted educators, policy makers, >and researchers before he shot the first minute of video. Many of >us here at Carnegie spoke with him at that time. Yet, even with this >degree of preparation, John admits that he wasn't ready for what he >found once he began to visit campuses and started talking to faculty >and students. > >In this month's Carnegie Perspective, John takes on one of the >primary issues raised in the documentary, the decline in the quality >of education experienced by many of America's college students. For >anyone who cares about the state of the academy, it's a tough piece >to read, just as his documentary may be uncomfortable for many to >watch. Rest assured that during his frequent periods of residence >as a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Foundation, John's role is >often that of challenging all of us with equally uncomfortable >questions. > >By John Merrow > >Of all the students I met during nearly two years of working on our >PBS documentary about higher education, I continue to be intrigued >by a sophomore named Nate. After proudly proclaiming that he was >maintaining a 3.4 GPA despite studying less than an hour a night, he >wondered aloud, "It's not supposed to be this easy, is it? Shouldn't >college be challenging?" Nate was one of the more enlightened >students that we interviewed. > >He talked about his "boring" classes, including an English class he >described as "a brain dump." We sat in on that class. The teacher >had assigned students to write parodies of The Road Not Taken, >knowing that to do the assignment well, they would have to read and >understand Frost's poem. She was meeting students at their level ... >and trying to push them to go beyond it, attempting to move them out >of their "intellectual comfort zone" and lead them in new >directions. Tough job, because Nate and undoubtedly most of his >classmates-had obviously NOT read the assignment. Nate had succeeded >in high school by figuring out what was going to be on his tests and >doing as little as possible. And since that approach also got him >into college and was now earning him a solid B average, he saw no >reason to change. Ask Nate the purpose of college, and he would >probably say something about "getting a good job." The learning part >wasn't necessarily what he was paying good money for. > >Although we found this English class stimulating, we could see how >frustrating it became for the teacher because of the lack of >student-directed engagement and motivation. In this case, the >students' expectations didn't match the professor's. Teaching >becomes a difficult transaction when students expect to get the >diploma that they pay for without caring whether they learn anything >in the process. The situation is made more difficult because >professors begin classroom teaching at a disadvantage. Few have any >training in how to teach. We were very impressed by Tom Fleming, a >senior lecturer at the University of Arizona, who took advantage of >a faculty development course offered by his institution on teaching >theory and effective practices. Using technology in a huge lecture >hall, he deftly engaged students, allowing very few to merely get by. > >College used to be a "sink or swim" environment, but today, either >colleges are giving much-needed "swimming lessons"-investing in >student success-or they're allowing students to "tread water"- >giving decent grades for very little work. In the first case, >students actually receive an education; in the second, they merely >get a degree. It's all too easy for some students and faculty >members to settle into a pattern of behavior that looks like an >unspoken "non-aggression treaty," in which professors don't ask much >of students and the students don't expect much from their professors >(as long as they get A's and B's). > >The good news is that many faculty members-those giving swimming >lessons-work with energy and imagination to move their students >beyond that simplistic "diploma=$$" formula. The relationship >between Tom Fleming and his students falls into this category. Even >more heartening is the fact that many students intuitively know that >they're being denied an education and seek out campus experiences >that give them what they need. But that 20 or so percent out there >treading water are shortchanging themselves and future employers who >think that a college degree indicates achievement as well as >persistence. And those professors who find it more comfortable to >demand little of their students are denied the satisfaction that >good teaching affords. > >The shift in the expectations of students and faculty members began >around the time that America learned that college graduates made >more money than high school graduates-as much as a million dollars >more over their working lives. The mantra became, "If you want an >education, then you pay for it." The old social contract-the idea >that education of individuals is a public good and therefore should >in part be publicly financed-is on life support and barely >breathing. Instead, "Education Pays" is proclaimed on billboards >around Kentucky, encouraging kids to go to college just to nail down >that good job. > >Kids arrive on campus determined to major in "business" and often >remain impervious to the efforts of their professors to expose them >to new ideas and new information. Our student financial aid system >supports the "investment in me" approach by making less money >available in the form of grants to needy students, and more in the >form of loans to be paid back as a return on the individual's >investment in themselves. The message our kids get is that they're >not students; they're consumers. And if they're willing to settle >for "purchasing" a degree that means nothing in terms of educational >achievement, it's their right. It's their investment. In this >environment, professors, colleges, and universities are forced into >giving the customers what they want, not necessarily what they >should want. > >I admire students who squeeze as much as they can from the college >experience, and I salute the teachers who dedicate their energies to >seeing students succeed. Too much is left to chance, however, and >too many lives are blighted by our national indifference to what is >actually happening on our campuses during the years between >admission and graduation. What we found is not the equivalent of a >few potholes on an otherwise passable highway. Serious attention >must be paid at a national level. Other countries are not standing >still. Those that have not surpassed us already in educational >attainment levels are clearly visible in the rear-view mirror. > >........................................................................... > >John Merrow, president of Learning Matters Inc. and a visiting >scholar at the Carnegie Foundation, produced the documentary >"Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk," which will air on >PBS stations Thursday, June 23. Check your local listings for exact >times. To learn more, go to http://www.decliningbydegrees.org/. > >Carnegie Perspectives is a series of commentaries that explore >different ways to think about educational issues. These pieces are >presented with the hope that they contribute to the conversation. >You can respond directly to the author at >CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org or you can join a public >discussion at Carnegie Conversations. > >Join the Carnegie Perspectives email list by sending an email to >CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org with "Subscribe" as the >subject line. > >* * * * * * * * >NOTE: Anyone can SUBSCRIBE to the Tomorrows-Professor Mailing List by >addressing an e-mail message to: > > >Do NOT put anything in the SUBJECT line but in the body of the message type: > > subscribe tomorrows-professor >* * * * * * * * >To UNSUBSCRIBE to the Tomorrows-Professor send the following e-mail >message >to: > >unsubscribe tomorrows-professor > >-- >-++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**== >This message was posted through the Stanford campus mailing list >server. If you wish to unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the >message body of "unsubscribe tomorrows-professor" to >majordomo@lists.stanford.edu -- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Sep 6 19:01:29 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Katrina's Epidemiology Message-ID: Dear Colleagues - Via friends and other lists comes this long but revealing article by Laurie Garrett, dated Friday 9/2. She is Senior Fellow at the the Global Health Program at the Council of Foreign Relations, writing here about the similarities of the Katrina calamity to other recent world disasters, and the epidemiological fallout. For understanding the present situation and planning for future such, it is good to get beyond the current breathless news coverage, to the political epidemiology and the daunting clean-up demands: "In our experience dealing with catastrophes and epidemics overseas there is a DIRECT correlation between the historic relationship between government and its people, and the willingness of the populace to believe in and correctly respond to government instructions. Of course tens of thousands of people failed to evacuate: why believe the government this time? .... Public health collapses if the bond of trust between government and its people breaks, or never exists." "One past hurricane in the region produced so much debris that the cleared garbage filled an abandoned coal mine. We have never in history tried to dispose of this much waste. It is hoped that before any officials rush off thinking of how to burn or dump a few hundred thousand boats, houses and buildings, some careful consideration is given to recycling that material for construction of future levees, dams, and foundations. Looking at aerial images of the coastline one sees an entire forest worth of lumber, and the world's largest cement quarry." --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Sep 8 16:25:50 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] The Hundred-Dollar Laptop Message-ID: "From the Editor: The Hundred-Dollar Laptop" By Jason Pontin Technology Review, August 2005 http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/08/issue/editor.asp?trk=nl "Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of MIT's Media Lab, showed attendees [at Wall Street Journal's D3 conference] the screen of the Hundred-Dollar Laptop, or HDL. Beginning in 2006, he said, he would build 100 million to 200 million HDLs every year--and distribute them to the children of the poor world. Many attendees had read about Negroponte's idea and dismissed it as quixotic. Hearing how an HDL might be built, seeing a part of it, and realizing the scale of the project produced a rustle of delighted interest." From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Sep 11 18:53:17 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Robert Moog dead at 71 Message-ID: Let me take you away for a moment from the calamities of the last two weeks, and note the passing of Richard Moog, a pioneer in the technology for music. In the later 1960s his work, and that of Don Buchla, inspired my own exploration at Yale University of the genre of modular analog sound synthesis design, the first using integrated circuits. It was electronics technology in its early days, first generation op amps and early RTL, DTL and CMOS logic families. But it was technology sufficiently resourceful to inspire artists and collaborations between artists and engineers. Richard Moog started much of it. If the URL doesn't work for you, the text of The Economist obit follows below. There is also a Moog biography at the Web site of the company that bears his name, Moog Music. . Finally, a convenient bibliography of those early days is at . --PJK -- Obituary Robert Moog Sep 1st 2005 From The Economist print edition Robert Moog, an electronic-music pioneer, died on August 21st, aged 71 IN ONE sense, music went electric in the 1950s when companies such as Fender and Gibson began mass-producing electric guitars. But that was only half a revolution. The music was electronically amplified, but the original sound was still generated by mechanical vibrations, as it had been for thousands of years. Glimpses of an all-electronic future had been offered since the end of the 19th century. The Telharmonium, a 200-ton mechanical ancestor of the Hammond organ designed to be played down the telephone, had allowed musicians to tinker with sound waves to produce interesting new noises as early as 1897. From 1920 the Theremin, played by waving one's hands in front of two radio receivers, generated eerie electronic glissandi without any moving parts. In 1955 RCA, an American industrial company, combined these innovations in their Mark II Synthesiser, which used electric currents both to generate and manipulate sound waves. The Synthesiser was "played" using a binary programming language stored on punch tape, and it filled a whole room at the University of Columbia. Electronic music seemed destined to remain a curiosity-until, in 1964, a shy young man called Robert Moog, a graduate student at Cornell University, unveiled his own analogue synthesiser at a meeting of America's Audio Engineering Society. Mr Moog's background was ideal. He had been the class swot in Queens, and bullied for it. His mother had nagged him to become a concert pianist; his father, who loved to tinker with electronics, had kept him amused out of class by helping him to build a Theremin, whose subtleties enchanted him. His analogue synthesiser was elegant, turning a room-sized machine into something that could be set up in a recording studio; and it was musician-friendly, with a keyboard just like the one his mother had kept his nose to. Musicians wishing to master the instrument still had to learn a new vocabulary of waveforms, oscillators and filters. But it was a rewarding study. Synthesisers can generate an almost infinite variety of sounds, ranging from simulated guitars or pianos to, as Jim Morrison of The Doors once claimed, "the sound of broken glass falling from the void into creation". News of the invention spread fast. In 1968 it found fame when Walter (now Wendy) Carlos, an early practitioner of electronic music, released "Switched-on Bach", a hit album of Bach recorded entirely on Mr Moog's equipment. But the instrument's big impact was on popular music. The dark, druggy, disillusioned pop Zeitgeist of the late 1960s exactly suited the weird sounds made by the new machine. The Beatles used a Moog extensively on their late album "Abbey Road". Emerson Lake and Palmer, an early progressive rock band, were so enamoured of Moogs that they took one on tour with them, despite its bulk and delicate temperament. Music to the masses Other firms were quick to realise the potential of the new invention. By the 1970s, there were several competing models. Mr Moog continued to innovate, introducing in 1970 the smaller, portable Minimoog that allowed electronic music to get to night clubs or the beach. He kept at the cutting edge until the 1980s, and the arrival of computer-based digital synthesisers. Even now, some musicians-Fatboy Slim, for one-continue to prefer the warm, analogue Moog sound. His invention kick-started electronic music, both as an influence on mainstream music and as a sub-genre in itself. Bands such as Pink Floyd spearheaded the new sound, their music featuring long keyboard solos that seemed to originate in the emptiness of outer space. Stevie Wonder brought the synthesiser to a more mainstream audience; Herbie Hancock helped introduce it to jazz fans. Later, Kraftwerk and similar groups released entire albums of ghostly, futuristic music made without a traditional instrument in sight. For all his electronic and musical talent, Mr Moog was no businessman. He had begun well enough, making a packet as a young man by selling build-it-yourself Theremin kits, but after he had invented his synthesiser he could not manage its success. When Moog Music was bought by a firm called Norlin, he was relegated to minor musical-engineering tasks. He left in 1977, setting up another company, Big Briar Productions, and working on a variety of strange new instruments that he hoped would allow musicians even greater expressiveness. (His ideal, for all his modernity, was to produce an electronic instrument that could be played with the human emotion of a cello or a flute.) None of his later inventions had the same impact as his original synthesiser, but that didn't bother him. He saw himself as a simple "toolmaker", working to give other musicians the sounds they wanted. He rejected the idea that he had democratised electronic music; that, he insisted, had been achieved by cheap Japanese keyboards in the 1980s. Here, at least, he was mistaken. Without his inventions, thousands of composers in almost every conceivable genre of music-and millions of their listeners-would have been restricted to the familiar sounds of traditional instruments. And music would have been the poorer for it. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Sep 12 17:50:09 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Bad Science Reporting Message-ID: My friend and colleague Nathan Price has sent me so many good pointers that he ought to be co-editor of these mailings. His last is an excellent piece from The Guardian (UK) that disects the generally deplorable state of science reporting. Some favorite quotes: "It is my hypothesis that in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science, for their own means. They then attack this parody as if they were critiquing science. This week we take the gloves off and do some serious typing." " ... science journalists somehow don't understand the difference between the evidence and the hypothesis." "So how do the media work around their inability to deliver scientific evidence? They use authority figures, the very antithesis of what science is about, as if they were priests, or politicians, or parent figures. ... The danger of authority figure coverage, in the absence of real evidence, is that it leaves the field wide open for questionable authority figures to waltz in." A short and _very_ good article. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Sep 23 23:14:58 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Mummies R Us Message-ID: Here is an item from the information age, both whimsical and macabre. Your online travel agent for a different way of getting away from it all. --pjk ------------------------------------------------------------------- (from The Scout Report -- September 23, 2005) Eternity Travel http://www.mos.org/quest/et/ There are a number of novel and intriguing ways to present information via the web, and the Museum of Science in Boston has struck on one with this rather fine site. With the intent of introducing interested parties to the world of funerary practices in ancient Egypt, the site allows visitors to spend 3300 debens (an unit of currency from that period) on selecting their own tomb, mummification, mummy case, and ?extras? (such as an amulet or a statuette). Visitors begin by reading a welcome statement about this process, and they can add items to their shopping cart, all the while learning about this fascinating aspect of world history. Of course, visitors can also click on a number of hypertext links embedded within the item descriptions to learn more such topics as the benefits of selecting a shallow urban grave or a canopic jar. -- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Sep 23 23:44:23 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Two on Google Message-ID: Two items about the ever active and inventive folks at Google. --pjk ---------------------------------------------------------------- An interesting article by two Yale librarians, that compares the comprehensiveness of citation retrieval of Google Scholar, Web of Science and Scopus. Google does rather well. I became aware of this article through Ann Okerson, Assoc. University Librarian. D-Lib Magazine is a very worthwhile electronic-only publications about digital library issues, now 10 years old. I look at it too seldom, but it has always rewarded me with a high editorial standard. --pjk ---------------------------------------------------------------- (from The Scout Report -- September 23, 2005) Authors' group files lawsuit against Google Google library push faces lawsuit by US authors http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2005/09/20/AR2005092001416.html Authors Guild Sues Google, Citing "Massive Copyright Infringement" http://www.authorsguild.org/news/sues_google_citing.htm Google Blog: Google Print and the Authors Guild http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/google-print-and-authors-guild.html Google sticks its finger in the Wi-Fi Pie http://networks.silicon.com/mobile/0,39024665,39152509,00.htm The Google Print Library Project: A Copyright Analysis [pdf] http://www.policybandwidth.com/doc/googleprint.pdf U.S. Copyright Office [pdf] http://www.copyright.gov/ This week The Authors Guild, a group that represents 8000 US authors, filed a class action lawsuit against Google Inc. in an attempt to ask for damages and an injunction that will prevent the company from continuing their very ambitious digitization project which began in earnest around one year ago. Many commentators in the world of copyright law and technology were not surprised by this development as The Authors Guild has also been involved in attempting to make online publishers pay royalties to writers whose stories appear in any number of online databases without their express consent. In a concession to general concerns about the nature of their project, Google had announced plans back in August that they would respect the wishes of copyright holders who contacted the company to inform them that they did not want their works included in this digitization project. In yet another interesting development this week, there were rumors around the technology press that Google may be embarking on an extensive plan to build a significant WiFi presence across the country. A spokesperson for Google confirmed that their current test sites are solely limited to two public sites around their corporate headquarters in Mountain View, California. The first link will take users to a news article from this Tuesday?s Washington Post which provides detailed coverage of the lawsuit filed by The Authors Guild. The second link leads visitors to the official press release about the lawsuit from the press office of The Authors Guild. The third link leads to the official Google weblog entry on the recent lawsuit. Here visitors can learn about Google?s position on the subject, and peruse a number of relevant external links. The fourth link leads to a news article from Silicon.com that discusses Google?s foray into providing WiFi service. The fifth link leads a compelling commentary and analysis on the Google Print project by Jonathan Band. The sixth and final link leads to the homepage of the U.S. Copyright Office, where visitors can learn about filing copyrights and how to search for copyright records. -- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Sep 24 01:23:00 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Design Thinking Message-ID: As the facets of engineering, and engineering education, continue to multiply, it is increasingly difficult for students to grasp any attractive central theme to attract them to engineering. Design is such a theme, but it is possible to teach it well only with experience not typical in much of academia. Stanford's design program does it well, and is increasingly recognized as supplying an exciting unifying theme despite highly diverse engineering ingredients. David Kelly is one of the founders of IDEO , arguably _the_ design firm in the world. Many complex technological products you see at their site were _entirely_ designed by IDEO, they are just marketed by the companies whose name you associate with those products. --PJK -------------------------------------------------------------------- (from INNOVATION, 21 September 2005) THE POWER OF DESIGN THINKING The goal of Stanford's d-school is to train students to be innovators, says co-founder David Kelley. The school takes a multidisciplinary approach to teaching that uses "design as the glue that can hold different disciplines together and uses design thinking as the methodology What they learn is a new way of thinking and a new way of solving interesting, challenging problems. The d.school will provide students with design empathy in two ways: empathy for other disciplines and empathy for the person who will benefit from the product, service or environment they are designing for them," says Kelley, who touts the importance of "design thinking" to innovation in business. "It's not just for 'designers' in the traditional sense of the word. It is unique and powerful because it's not content specific. It is a way of taking risks and making creative leaps. It is the perfect complement to analytical thinking. Design thinking is data and planning based. By applying both design and analytical thinking together, the results are very different kinds of innovation." (NextD Issue 7) -- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Oct 14 19:18:35 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Ig Nobel Prizes Message-ID: With much recent attention given the 2005 Nobel awards, let me be sure you don't neglect the Ig Nobel awards . Although the annual ceremony is already past, you can view the accomplishments of past winers at . The 2005 prize in Physics went to John Maidstone from Australia for an experiment to measure the flow of black tar through a funnel. Begun in 1927, one glob drips every nine years. As reported by Bob Parks in his "What's New" , "he shared the Ig with a colleague who died between the second and third drops." The 2005 prize in Economics went to Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for inventing "Clocky" , an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people _do_ get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday. Other delights await you at the Ig Nobel site, such as the 2004 award in Medicine to Steven Stack of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA and James Gundlach of Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, USA, for their published report "The Effect of Country Music on Suicide" . --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Oct 14 19:28:54 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] What's New Friday October 14, 2005 Message-ID: And speaking of Bob Park, I thought I'd just send you his latest "What's New" issue. --PJK --------------------------------------------------------------- >Approved-By: whatsnew@BOBPARK.ORG >Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 16:40:34 -0400 >Reply-To: whatsnew@BOBPARK.ORG >Sender: "Bob Park's What's New" >From: "What's New" >Subject: [BOBPARKS-WHATSNEW] What's New Friday October 14, 2005 >To: BOBPARKS-WHATSNEW@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU > >WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 14 Oct 05 Washington, DC > >1. SUPREME IRONY: SHOULD NOMINEES BE QUESTIONED ABOUT SCIENCE? >After nominating Harriet Miers for a seat on the Supreme Court, >President Bush sought to reassure religious conservatives by >stressing Miers' evangelical Christian roots. Bush said it's >part of who she is. He's right, but traditionally the personal >religious views of nominees are not taken up in the confirmation >process. If the First Amendment is upheld, it shouldn't matter. >So forget religion. Far more important in the Twenty-First >Century is the nominee's views on science. There are, after all, >few cases that come before the courts today that do not have a >scientific component. Scientists must construct a list of basic >questions that would give some insight into the nominee's views >on science. For example: do all physical events result from >earlier physical events, or can they be caused by clasping your >hands, bowing your head, and wishing? Send your suggestions to >What's New. WN will print the best of them. > >2. FAITH-BASED GOVERNMENT: SENATOR BROWNBACK(R-KS)HEARS THE CALL. >Senator Sam Brownback has been more public than other Republican >senators in raising questions about the nomination of Harriet >Miers. A prayer-group-Republican from Kansas who wants to be >President, Brownback has an open mind on the question of religion >in politics: it can be either a Protestant conservative, or >conservative Catholic. Brownback, now Catholic, has been both. > >3. TOURIST CLASS: BILLIONAIRE BACK FROM INTERNATIONAL SPACE SPA. >Gregory Olsen, the third tourist to buy a $20M ticket to the ISS >http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN02/wn042602.html, has returned >from his week at the world's most exclusive spa. He gushed to an >Associated Press reporter: "It was kind of like this wondrous >thing." Unlike Dennis Tito, who had stomach problems during his >week at the ISS, Olsen played the fantasy-adventure game all the >way, even taking along his own science experiments. WN is >confident that Olsen's scientific studies, whatever they are, >will be as important as those conducted by NASA on the ISS. > >4. SHENZHOU VI: CHINA LAUNCHES TWO TAIKONAUTS ON LIVE TELEVISION. >Wednesday, in a demonstration of growing confidence in its human >space-flight program, China launched two taikonauts on a five-day >mission to low-Earth orbit, and did it in full view of the world. >While Shenzhou VI poses no military threat, it is a demonstration >of economic strength; China can now afford to squander vast sums >on pointless programs. Happily, this serves world peace by >diverting China's resources from more dangerous adventures. > >5. 2005 PHYSICS IG NOBEL: THE PRIZE IS NOT ALWAYS TO THE SWIFT. >Like that other prize with a similar name, you gotta be patient. >This year, the Ig went to John Maidstone from Australia for an >experiment to measure the flow of black tar through a funnel. >Begun in 1927, one glob drips every nine years. He shared the Ig >with a colleague who died between the second and third drops. > >THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND. >Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the >University of Maryland, but they should be. >--- >Archives of What's New can be found at http://www.bobpark.org >What's New is moving to a different listserver and our >subscription process has changed. To change your subscription >status please visit this link: >http://listserv.umd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=bobparks-whatsnew&A=1 From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Oct 22 23:26:34 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Sci/Eng Java Applets Message-ID: Yale Alum Gregg Favalora ('96 EE) wrote me >Here is a page of Java applets for things like 2-D and 3-D wave >motion, E&M, acoustics, optics, circuits... you name it. Each one >opens and has about 20 "presets" for things like multi-slit >diffraction, zone plates, low-pass filters, etc. > > A very fine collection that can keep you up late. --PJK -- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Oct 25 02:42:00 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District Message-ID: Dear Colleagues - This URL makes for interesting browsing, though it seldom lessens one's dismay. --PJK -- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Oct 25 17:52:56 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Nosey Chips Message-ID: Amidst today's technology, our privacy's "vapor pressure" keeps increasing, and is evaporating ever more quickly. Even when you think you've put a freeze on the process, there are slower forms of sublimation still. Here, alas, are just two recent reminders: My friend and Yale colleague Nathan Price points me to "a short but interesting article about the potential abuses of RFID chips, and a new book that takes a dim view of it all:" He and I tend to side with the alarmists. And this randomly encountered item "Is Your Printer Spying on You?" reminds us of other privacy concerns, intended or unintended. --PJK -- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Oct 27 23:48:05 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Immodest Proposal for Excellence Message-ID: Dear Colleagues - This makes thought-provoking reading. It is about quality control in teaching, overtly here in a hospital setting, but by implication also in an engineering program or a company. It proposes an aggressive attitude, such as in the Johns Hopkins program (described below) which is an aggressive drive to lower to zero the infection rate in intensive care units. The protocols are stringent and are working. >"Early on in this new routine, every nurse was handed two phone >numbers-the home phones of the medical school dean and the >university president-and told that if a physician didn't follow >protocol and refused to abort the procedure, they were to phone one >of these numbers, even at 3 a.m. That only happened once. The >infection rate at Johns Hopkins for that procedure is now >approaching zero." The piece concludes by asking how much engineering education and student success in courses could be improved by similar methods? >Faculty and teaching institutions face many impediments, just like >physicians; the conditions and capabilities of our students are >often unknown. But what if at some universities the president was >called every time a student failed? This proposal sounds crazy, I >know, but that's just the point. We're too comfortable with our >failures; we take them for granted. The good news is that we can do >much better. We know a great deal today about how to organize our >institutions and classrooms so that students not only stay but >achieve at high levels, and research in the cognitive sciences and >other fields provides grist for further improvements. I know we lack >the resources. I know we lack the administrative and policy support. >I know that some students we inherit are already deeply wounded. >Nevertheless, we need to ask much more of ourselves. Education is no >place for modest ambitions. The author is the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. --PJK ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- >Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2005 14:48:51 -0700 >To: tomorrows-professor@lists.Stanford.EDU >From: Rick Reis >Subject: TP Msg. #676 EXCELLENCE; AN IMMODEST PROPOSAL >Sender: owner-tomorrows-professor@lists.Stanford.EDU > >"Early on in this new routine, every nurse was handed two phone >numbers-the home phones of the medical school dean and the >university president-and told that if a physician didn't follow >protocol and refused to abort the procedure, they were to phone one >of these numbers, even at 3 a.m. That only happened once. The >infection rate at Johns Hopkins for that procedure is now >approaching zero." > > * * * * * * > TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR(SM) MAILING LIST > desk-top faculty development one hundred times a year > > Over 25,000 subscribers! > Over 650 postings > Over 650 academic institutions > Over 100 countries > > Sponsored by > THE STANFORD UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING > http://ctl.stanford.edu > > An archive of all past postings (with a two week delay) >can be found at: > http://ctl.stanford.edu/Tomprof/index.shtml > > * * * * * > >Folks: > >The posting below, by Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie >Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT) looks at important >lessons to be learned from some aspects of medical education. It is >#20 in the monthly series called Carnegie Foundation Perspectives. >These short commentaries exploring various educational issues are >produced by the CFAT. The >Foundation invites your response at: >CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org. Reprinted with permission. > >Regards, > >Rick Reis >reis@stanford.edu >UP NEXT: Sharing in the Online Community > > Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning > > --------------------------------------- 1,063 words >-------------------------------- > > EXCELLENCE; AN IMMODEST PROPOSAL > >September 2005 >By Lee S. Shulman > >Recently, I participated in a site visit to the teaching hospital of >a major American medical school. These visits are an integral part >of the Carnegie Foundation's ten-year program of research on how >lawyers, engineers, clergy, school teachers, nurses, and physicians >are taught and how they learn. On this visit, I joined a team of >students and faculty in the daily ritual of clinical rounds. > >I use the term "ritual" quite precisely: the clinical-rounds team >follows the same pedagogical pattern daily as it moves from patient >to patient and reviews the status of each. The team I observed >included a chief resident, a third-year resident, two first-year >residents, two third-year medical students beginning their internal >medicine rotation, and a pharmacy student on internship. Each of >seven patients comprised a "lesson" within a unit of instruction. We >stopped outside every room. The resident or medical student >responsible for that patient gave a report that followed a strict >outline. We talked about what had changed from the previous day. >Patients ranged from someone who had been in the intensive care unit >for less than twenty-four hours to one who had been in a coma for >thirty days. After thirty days of clinical investigation, the causes >of this patient's condition were still unknown. > >Next, the chief resident discussed what had occurred during the >rounds with the third-year resident in a preceptor interaction, >essentially like a supervising teacher with a student teacher. They >reviewed how rounds had gone pedagogically and talked about what >other questions one might have asked, what other aspects of >patients' conditions one might have noted, and how well patients >were managed and whether to do something different. We then moved to >teaching rounds, in which the chief resident presented a didactic >seminar on pulmonary function tests. > >The day ended with "M&M" (Morbidity and Mortality), otherwise known >as, "Where Did We Screw Up and What Can We Learn from It?" Pretty >much the same group from morning rounds reconvened, joined by other >faculty. Their goal was quality assurance. They reviewed at an >institutional level one of their most persistent failures, namely >the unacceptably high infection rate in the intensive care unit, >primarily associated with running central lines into arteries (a >procedure some readers will know in detail from Atul Gawande's >wonderful book about the training of surgeons, Complications: A >Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science.) Data indicated that the >infection rate is higher under certain circumstances, lower under >others. Everyone in the system was learning. In fact, an assistant >professor ran the session, with full professors learning alongside >third-year clerks. > >This kind of communal questioning and learning is compelling. Where >in higher education more generally do we find an institutional >pressure to come together and ask why students are not learning >mathematics or economics well, and what to do institutionally about >that? What I watched at this teaching hospital was an institution >actively investigating the quality of its work, knowing, caring, and >operating corporately to improve and learn from its collective >experience. This is an important model for the rest of higher >education. But it was a model not only of a powerful pedagogical >process but of something else-something we see far too seldom in >education. > >During the last part of this Morbidity and Mortality conference, the >facilitator noted that every major hospital has a problem with high >infection rates in ICU's associated with running central lines, >especially in the femoral artery. Unfortunately, it's easiest for >medical practitioners to run a line in the femoral artery. (Perhaps >running femoral lines is analogous to running lecture courses; >they're not necessarily the most effective, but they deliver the >goods to the largest number at the lowest cost.) In any case, the >facilitator mentioned that Johns Hopkins had decided that the high >infection rates were unacceptable. The medical school dean and the >university president met with the teaching hospital staff and >decided they knew enough to approach a zero percent rate of >infection. The problem was not absence of knowledge of best >practice, but absence of discipline and commitment to apply that >knowledge. Therefore, they developed a rigorous protocol for running >central lines. > >The protocol involves things such as how carefully and frequently >hands are washed, and not making things easier on oneself by using >the same line to draw blood and to deliver medication because the >odds for an infection zoom up every time that happens. Nurses >enforce the protocol and oversee each procedure, and nurses are >empowered to abort a procedure as soon as they see protocol being >violated, whether by an intern or by the department chair. Early on >in this new routine, every nurse was handed two phone numbers-the >home phones of the medical school dean and the university >president-and told that if a physician didn't follow protocol and >refused to abort the procedure, they were to phone one of these >numbers, even at 3 a.m. That only happened once. The infection rate >at Johns Hopkins for that procedure is now approaching zero. > >Like infection rates, the failures of education are often >procedural. In the M&M conference, the discussion of acceptable >levels of infection sounded like arguments about acceptable levels >of student failure. If one-third of students drop out in the first >year, some may be ready to claim that those students simply >shouldn't have entered college. What if a hospital said that if it >lost a third of its patients, those patients never should have been >admitted because they were too sick? Faculty and teaching >institutions face many impediments, just like physicians; the >conditions and capabilities of our students are often unknown. But >what if at some universities the president was called every time a >student failed? This proposal sounds crazy, I know, but that's just >the point. We're too comfortable with our failures; we take them for >granted. The good news is that we can do much better. We know a >great deal today about how to organize our institutions and >classrooms so that students not only stay but achieve at high >levels, and research in the cognitive sciences and other fields >provides grist for further improvements. I know we lack the >resources. I know we lack the administrative and policy support. I >know that some students we inherit are already deeply wounded. >Nevertheless, we need to ask much more of ourselves. Education is no >place for modest ambitions. > >Carnegie Perspectives is a series of commentaries that explore >different ways to think about educational issues. These pieces are >presented with the hope that they contribute to the conversation. >You can respond directly to the author at >CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org or you can join a public >discussion at Carnegie Conversations. > >Join the Carnegie Perspectives email list by sending an email to >CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org with "Subscribe" as the >subject line. > >* * * * * * * * >NOTE: Anyone can SUBSCRIBE to the Tomorrows-Professor Mailing List by >addressing an e-mail message to: > > >Do NOT put anything in the SUBJECT line but in the body of the message type: > > subscribe tomorrows-professor >* * * * * * * * >To UNSUBSCRIBE to the Tomorrows-Professor send the following e-mail >message >to: > >unsubscribe tomorrows-professor >-++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**== >This message was posted through the Stanford campus mailing list >server. If you wish to unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the >message body of "unsubscribe tomorrows-professor" to >majordomo@lists.stanford.edu -- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Nov 3 00:59:04 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] INNOVATION, 2 November 2005 In-Reply-To: <113093927510C39789.emlp.180042DB930233.innovation@newsscan.com> References: <113093927510C39789.emlp.180042DB930233.innovation@newsscan.com> Message-ID: I've excerpted from INNOVATION before, but there are several particularly interesting items in this issue, so here is the whole thing. (This is a subscription newsletter with a free six-week trial, note the details at the end.) Particularly fascinating, in a sort of disorienting way, is the "Virtual Worlds" item. Half a lifetime (30+ years) ago, when I first read the Swiss writer Friedrich Duerrenmatt (1921-1990), I was fascinated by the way he captures the reader with his uniquely deft transformation of reality. The ease with which virtual settings "grab" people seems much more powerful, though it perhaps happens mostly to people with less of a grip on reality in the first place. The implications for literature, theatre and film are disquieting. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >INNOVATION, 2 November 2005 > >~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ >Innovation Weekly reports on trends, strategies, and innovations in >business and technology, and is sponsored in part by Norwich University >, Animatrix Inc. , and >our loyal individual and institutional subscribers. The editors are John >Gehl and Suzanne Douglas, editors@newsscan.com. >~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > >TRENDS > New Gadgets Hark Back to Simpler Times > Virtual Worlds -- The New Workspace? > Wi-Fi Gets Smarter > Experience Counts > >STRATEGIES > The N.I.C.E. Approach to Nasty People > More Effective Brainstorming > Innovation After 60 > >INNOVATIONS > Multilingual Translation Technology > Specialized Search Seeks a Niche > New Approach Toward Mind Control Technology > The Inside Story on Robotic Surgery > >SPONSORS > Norwich University > Animatrix Inc. > > >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>TRENDS > >NEW GADGETS HARK BACK TO SIMPLER TIMES > Over the past few years, gadget makers have toiled ceaselessly to add >functionality to cell phones, PDAs and digital cameras, and consumers have >finally hit the wall on all these superfluous add-ons. British Telecom >futurist-in-residence Ian Pearson says look for a return to simplicity as >people focus on buying a device for one particular purpose: "We've done 20 >years of adding functionality, and 99% of that functionality isn't needed. >There will be an enormous market over the next several years for really >simple stuff." Still, says Pearson, 2006 is likely to be a good year for >gadget sellers. "We see the convergence of a whole stack of IT trends," >including better screens and improved location technology that can mesh >with communications functions, such as mapping programs that show us >whether any of our friends is close by, or a mobile reference modeled on >Wikipedia that can tell us if the restaurant in the next block is any good. >Pearson says despite what he's calling the "2006 IT explosion," he's not >buying anything yet. "One of the big reasons I don't buy things is because >as a futurist I see what they're going to do in the next few years." >(Wired.com 25 Oct 2005) > > >VIRTUAL WORLDS -- THE NEW WORKSPACE? > The line between virtual world and real-life economies is becoming >increasingly blurred, with game players offering big bucks for "loot" such >as virtual gold, magic powers and other items. The buyers are usually >gaming enthusiasts pressed for time who don't want to devote the hours it >takes to amass virtual wealth. "If I want to visit a new place in a virtual >world, it's hard with a job," says one. "But if I have $20, I can buy >powers and explore. It's becoming a significant trade." Many of the sellers >are players in China and other parts of Asia, who can pull in about $3 to >$4 an hour mining these virtual economies. "For foreign laborers, this can >be a reasonable wage," says Indiana University professor Edward Castronova, >who notes that the big money isn't made by the Asian gamers, but by the >facilitators of the sales who take a cut of the loot. But beyond those >transactions, gamers have found another way to turn their passion into >greenbacks. While playing Second Life, Australian gamer Nathan Keir created >Tringo -- a cross between bingo and Tetris -- that he sold to other Second >Life players for $5,000. He later sold the worldwide licensing rights to >Tringo for a low-five-figure sum. Keir's story is a harbinger of things to >come, says Cory Ondrejka, VP of Second Life maker Linden Lab. "Our game is >based on what you own. It's land speculation, reselling land, being a >landlord and creating goods and services. It's not much different than the >real thing. We're just scratching the surface." Meanwhile, Castronova >predicts virtual worlds will become evermore commercial as transaction >volume increases. "Companies will have to begin paying attention. Playing >these games can totally change hierarchical structures. What do you tell >your CEO when the guy in the mailroom who is a level 89 wizard just ordered >a vice president to surrender his parking spot and he actually did it?" >(Knowledge@Wharton 19 Oct - 1 Nov 2005) > > >WI-FI GETS SMARTER > Wi-Fi use is rapidly growing in popularity, with the number of global >users expected to top 271 million by 2008, according to Pyramid Research. >But with success comes the potential of headache of overloaded networks, >causing slow service and long delays. To avoid that scenario, >communications engineers are developing "smart" Wi-Fi equipment capable of >dealing with the issues of congestion, the changing radio environment and >security concerns. Smart Wi-Fi uses load balancing technology to relieve >network congestion by distributing users among various APs (access points) >more uniformly so no single AP gets swamped and slows down the whole >network. Another new smart Wi-Fi feature is automatic cell control, which >allows cell sizes to expand and contract to adjust for changing radio >conditions and compensate for holes in coverage due to malfunctioning APs. >Second-generation Wi-Fi also assesses the radio environment periodically >and dynamically reassigns channels accordingly to boost performance. >Finally, the new Wi-Fi will include Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), a >stronger security and authentication feature, putting to rest the fears >over eavesdropping that plague current networks. (Scientific American 26 >Sep 2005) > > >EXPERIENCE COUNTS > The hottest new gift-giving idea in today's entertainment economy is >the "experience card" -- a personalized plastic card that can be redeemed >for an experience of the recipient's choice, depending on the prepaid value >of the card. Examples offered by Portuguese firm A Vida E Bela include a >professional photography session (be a top model for a day) to flying >fighter jets over Moscow (the top gun fantasy). A Vida E Bela reports the >cards have become so popular, it's expanding to Spain and Brazil in 2006 >and will launch its own TV show in Portugal. In the U.S., Chicago-based >Signature Days is copying the A Vida E Bela model, offering experiences >such as trapeze lessons or hypnosis sessions. Meanwhile, Experience Wish, >in California, caters just to women with gifts such as a Marc Jacobs >knitted sweater or a day of flower arranging with top floral designer >Rebecca Cole. Prices range from $420 for a "Petite Wish" to $10,000 for the >"Ultimate Wish." (Springwise Nov 2005) > > > > >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>STRATEGIES > >THE N.I.C.E. APPROACH TO NASTY PEOPLE > Who among us hasn't yearned for guidance in dealing with difficult >coworkers, bosses or subordinates? Attorneys Ronald M. Shapiro and Mark A. >Jankowski address that challenge in their new book, "Bullies, Tyrants and >Impossible People: How to Beat Them Without Joining Them." They advocate >the N.I.C.E. approach -- Neutralize emotions, Identify type, Control the >encounter, and Explore options. For instance, when under attack, stay >focused on the issue at hand -- take a deep breath, ask a question, take a >sip of water to break the negative momentum. Ease tension by relaxing your >shoulders and smiling. Jankowski says he uses a "finger-on-the-lip" when >provoked: "To anyone else, it just looks like I'm thinking -- which I am. I >am thinking about not saying anything stupid or inflammatory." Suppress >your "flight" instinct with positive mantras such as, "I can handle this >situation I'm ready." And if it seems like you've reached an impasse, >don't give up -- sometimes it helps to offer an option that would be >attractive to your adversary. "Difficult people are often people trying to >gain or maintain control of a circumstance. The more they fear losing >control, the more entrenched they may become in their positions." By >introducing ideas that make them feel as if they have the freedom to select >and retain control, you're actually putting yourself back in the driver's >seat. (HBS Working Knowledge 24 Oct 2005 and USA Today/Shapiro Negotiations) > > > >MORE EFFECTIVE BRAINSTORMING > Thomas Kelley of design firm IDEO has a lot of experience in >fostering effective brainstorming. He suggests allocating a specific space >for innovation, well-stocked with sketch boards, maps, pictures and other >stimulating visuals, as well as an abundance of post-it notes, prototyping >kids, markers, story-board frames, etc. Practice the Zen principle of >"beginner's mind" and leave your preconceptions at the door. "Don't judge, >empathize." Seek out epiphanies through "vuja de" -- the sense of seeing >something for the first time, even if it's commonplace. Cross-pollinate: >hire people with diverse backgrounds or even nationalities, create lots of >opportunities for impromptu meetings among disparate groups, host a weekly >speaker series to get creative juices perking, seek out diverse projects >that stretch the firm's capabilities. When it comes to brainstorming, >sharpen your focus on one specific customer need or process and go for >quantity -- encourage wild ideas and pie-in-the-sky thinking. Number your >ideas -- a hundred ideas per hour is usually a sign of a good, fluid >brainstorm. Use props -- write and draw your concepts with the markers and >giant post-its stuck to every surface. Get physical -- let that enthusiasm >bubble over into impromptu prototyping using foam core, duct tape, glue >guns and other model-building tools. Stretch first -- sometimes it helps to >ask attendees to do a little homework the night before or play a word game >to clear the mind before getting down to business. (Business Week 24 Oct 2005) > > >INNOVATION AFTER 60 > As the boomer generation grows older, its dominance in the U.S. >science and engineering workforce means the average age in that field will >likely rise as well, according to the National Science Board's Science and >Engineering Indicators: 2002. What will this mean for innovation? "Will >workers in their 50s and 60s continue to make valuable contributions?" asks >Edward Tenner, an expert on technology and culture. Tenner points out that >even though young people are responsible for most basic innovations, many >prominent scientists continue to make significant discoveries well into >their later years. He cites Thomas Edison, who developed the disc >phonograph while in his late 60s and Swiss engineer Christian Menn, who >completed the revolutionary cable-stayed Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge in Boston >at 75. "What is the secret of such men and women? Partly, it is that they >do not expect the flashes of mathematical insight that may indeed be the >prerogative of the plastic youthful brain, but instead forge new syntheses >aided by experience." As Tenner notes, creative talent has no expiration >date. (Technology Review Oct 2005) > > > > >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>INNOVATIONS > >MULTILINGUAL TRANSLATION TECHNOLOGY > Speech translation technology is making great strides, says Alex >Waibel, computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University and >Germany's Karlsruhe University. One application, called Lecture >Translation, translates speech on the fly and without the restrictions on >topics that many speech programs currently require. Another prototype uses >directional speakers to beam translations of the same speech in multiple >languages to specific listeners. "It's like having a simultaneous >translator right next to you, but without disturbing the person next to >you," says Waibel. And for readers, there are Translation Glasses that >transcribe oral streams into subtitles that appear on a tiny LCD screen. >Finally, there's the Muscle Translator, which uses electrodes attached to a >person's facial muscles to capture the electrical signals generated when a >person is mouthing words. The signals are then translated into speech. >Conceivably, for people who have lost vocal capability, the electrodes >could be replaced with wireless chips implanted in the cheeks. These new >developments are possible, says Waibel, because in the past few years >researchers have switched their efforts from trying to make a computer >"learn" a language to a statistical analysis approach. "It doesn't go >through a deep understanding of the meaning of a sentence. It maps one word >to another. Increases in computer speed and power and databases have made >this a winning approach We essentially gave up trying to do the full >semantics of this thing," says Waibel. (CNet News.com 27 Oct 2005) > > > >SPECIALIZED SEARCH SEEKS A NICHE > In the rapidly expanding search engine market, specialized search is >one way that startup companies can hope to differentiate themselves from >search giants Yahoo and Google. Convera Corp. is hoping its Excalibur >technology and a multibillion-page index will attract companies and federal >agencies that want to brand their Web site's search engine with their own >name. Search marketer iProspect sees more opportunity in "vertical search" >that focuses on locating data in narrow industry sectors, rather than the >"horizontal" approach taken by the big commercial search engines. One >example is IT.com, a search engine designed for business users looking to >buy or research a range of technology products. "I'm very bullish on >vertical search," says iProspect CEO Fredrick Marckini. "The only way >someone will get a piece of Google's market share is to develop a robust >vertical search engine." (Washington Post 25 Oct 2005) > > >NEW APPROACH TOWARD MIND CONTROL TECHNOLOGY > A research consortium led by Oxford University is hoping to develop >new brain-computer interface (BCI) technology based on asynchronous systems >that would enable gradual, precise control of external mechanisms, as >opposed to the simpler on/off mode of existing BCI systems that enable a >person to control a cursor or robotic device simply by thinking about it. >Users typically are outfitted with non-invasive electrodes attached to the >head that measure micro-voltage from the brain's neurons. The signals are >analyzed through complex algorithms and translated into movement. Oxford >professor Stephen Roberts says the new system would use only one electrode >and his team is working on new algorithms sophisticated enough to enable >graduated, proportional control of movement. "It is reasonably simple to >use an interface to turn something on or off with a binary control switch. >That is well-proven technology," says Roberts. "But to control a robot arm, >that binary control isn't good enough. You need to be able to control the >movement and speed." Existing BCI systems display a cue on a computer >screen and the user is asked to think left, right, up or down. Roberts' >asynchronous system would wait passively until the user thinks of a >movement and then analyze what movement is intended. It won't be easy, >warns Roberts. "Normally what you get is a cacophony of noise in the brain >of all the neurons firing at once. The aim is to pick up these tiny signals >as cleanly as possible without any interference from beneath a mains hum, >which is a thousand times bigger than the signals you are trying to get >at." Although the immediate beneficiaries of such a system would be the >severely disabled, Roberts also sees eventual applications in the gaming >and entertainment industries, and says it could even be used to control >vehicles. (The Engineer 14 Oct 2005) > > >THE INSIDE STORY ON ROBOTIC SURGERY > We've read about remotely control robotic arms that can perform >surgery from a distance, but a team of engineers and doctors from the >University of Nebraska have devised a set of surgical devices designed to >be inserted into the patient's abdomen via a tiny incision (a "keyhole" >cut) and then manipulated once inside. "This is just the start of things to >come," says team member and surgeon Dmitry Oleynikov. "At some point the >surgeon's hands won't need to be in the body at all." Keyhole surgery has >become popular because it causes less trauma and heals more quickly, but >Oleynikov points out that the small incisions can constrain the reach of >instruments and obscure the surgeon's view of the operating site. >Self-contained robots that enter the body completely are much more >versatile, he argues. The devices still need approval from the Food and >Drug Administration before coming into widespread use, but the research >team is hopeful that clinical trials can begin within a year. In the >meantime, NASA astronauts are planning to test them out in an underwater >lab off the coast of Florida to practice a simulated appendectomy guided by >surgeons back on shore. (Nature 27 Oct 2005) > > > > >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>SPONSORS > >Norwich University > >A Student's View of the Norwich University Online Graduation Programs > >"I can tell you that since being at Norwich, there has never been a week >where I did not use what I have been fortunate enough to learn at >Norwich. Norwich enjoys a very strong reputation among Information >Assurance professionals simply because the Norwich Faculty is >outstanding. As a student at Norwich I have been fortunate enough to study >under some of the best minds in the Information Assurance field. I had read >works by several of my instructors who are well-known authors even prior to >enrolling at Norwich. I was thrilled to be able to interact with them." > >--Mike Buglewicz, Student > >Animatrix Inc. > >Founded in 1984 by CEO and principal designer Marney Morris, Animatrix has >created interactive projects that have defined major strategic shifts for >clients like AT&T, The Limited, Clinique, Domino's Pizza, Perot Systems, >and the Walt Disney Company. Animatrix projects include intranets, web >sites, interfaces and stand-alone applications. Visit Animatrix at > > >~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > >Innovation Weekly is copyrighted, 2005, by NewsScan, Inc., all rights >reserved; -- however, please feel free to forward sample copies to your >friends! Individual subscriptions are available at US$18 a year. >Company-wide redistribution licenses are also available, and our current >clients include computer manufacturers, software companies, marketing >organizations, advertising agencies, management consulting firms, academic >institutions, and research organizations. > >For a six-week free trial subscription to Innovation, please send a message >to innovation-trial@newsscan.com and in the subject line type the word: >'subscribe'. You can also use the trial registration form on our secure Web >site at http://www.newsscan.com. > >For a regular subscription, you can either go to our secure Web site at >http://www.NewsScan.com and enter your Visa, M/C, or American Express >number and expiration date; or you can send the info by e-mail to >editors@newsscan.com. Or, if you prefer to pay by check, simply make your >check payable to NewsScan Inc. and mail to NewsScan, Inc., 631 East Shore >Drive, Canton, GA 30114. Please put your e-mail address on the check or >other documentation! Or write to us personally at gehl@newsscan.com or >douglas@newsscan.com; call 770-704-7517 (voice); or send a fax to >770-704-7521 (fax). > >When you visit us at http://www.NewsScan.com to subscribe to this or our >other publication NewsScan Daily, give some thought to having us provide >special, customized news and information services for your company. > John Gehl & Suzanne Douglas >~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ -- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Nov 12 21:48:51 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:26 2006 Subject: [EAS] The History of Lead Message-ID: Dear Colleagues - With oil company profits under debate these days, with occasional allegations of refinery capacity manipulation, I thought you might be disposed to delve into some history, specifically that of the octane-raising tetraethyl lead additive to gasoline, used until 1986. Or maybe you are preparing material for an engineering ethics course, ..... --PJK ---------------- 26,843 words (long, but interesting) ---------------- Title: The secret history of lead. Source: Nation, 03/20/2000, Vol. 270 Issue 11, p11, 30p, Author(s): Kitman, Jamie Lincoln Abstract: Focuses on the history of lead as a gasoline additive. Health and safety concerns associated with lead; Reduction in blood-lead levels in the United States following the phase-out of leaded gasoline in 1986; Role of the United States government in the complicit cover-up of leaded gasoline's hazardous effects. THE SECRET HISTORY OF LEAD The next time you pull the family barge in for a fill-up, check it out: The gas pumps read "Unleaded." You might reasonably suppose this is because naturally occurring lead has been thoughtfully removed from the gasoline. But you would be wrong. There is no lead in gasoline unless somebody puts it there. And, a little more than seventy-five years ago, some of America's leading corporations--General Motors, Du Pont and Standard Oil of New Jersey (known nowadays as Exxon)--were that somebody. They got together and put lead, a known poison, into gasoline, for profit. Lead was outlawed as an automotive gasoline additive in this country in 1986-more than sixty years after its introduction--to enable the use of emissions-reducing catalytic converters in cars (which are contaminated and rendered useless by lead) and to address the myriad health and safety concerns that have shadowed the toxic additive from its first, tentative appearance on US roads in the twenties, through a period of international ubiquity only recently ending. Since the virtual disappearance of leaded gas in the United States (it's still sold for use in propeller airplanes), the mean blood-lead level of the American population has declined more than 75 percent. A 1985 EPA study estimated that as many as 5,000 Americans died annually from lead-related heart disease prior to the country's lead phaseout. According to a 1988 report to Congress on childhood lead poisoning in America by the government's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, one can estimate that the blood-lead levels of up to 2 million children were reduced every year to below toxic levels between 1970 and 1987 as leaded gasoline use was reduced. From that report and elsewhere, one can conservatively estimate that a total of about 68 million young children had toxic exposures to lead from gasoline from 1927 to 1987. How did lead get into gasoline in the first place? And why is leaded gas still being sold in the Third World, Eastern Europe and elsewhere? Recently uncovered documents from the archives of the aforementioned industrial behemoths and the US government, a new skein of academic research and a careful reading of that long-ago period's historical record, as well as dozens of interviews conducted by The Nation, tell the true story of leaded gasoline, a sad and sordid commercial venture that would tiptoe its way quietly into the black hole of history if the captains of industry were to have their way. But the story must be recounted now. The leaded gas adventurers have profitably polluted the world on a grand scale and, in the process, have provided a model for the asbestos, tobacco, pesticide and nuclear power industries, and other twentieth-century corporate bad actors, for evading clear evidence that their products are harmful by hiding behind the mantle of scientific uncertainty. This is not just a textbook example of unnecessary environmental degradation, however. Nor is this history important solely as a cautionary retort to those who would doubt the need for aggressive regulation of industry, when commercial interests ask us to sanction genetically modified food on the basis of their own scientific assurances, just as the merchants of lead once did. The leaded gasoline story must also be read as a call to action, for the lead menace lives. Consider: ? the severe health hazards of leaded gasoline were known to its makers and clearly identified by the US public health community more than seventy-five years ago, but were steadfastly denied by the makers, because they couldn't be immediately quantified; ? other, safer antiknock additives--used to increase gasoline octane and counter engine "knock"--were known and available to oil companies and the makers of lead antiknocks before the lead additive was discovered, but they were covered up and denied, then fought, suppressed and unfairly maligned for decades to follow; ? the US government was fully apprised of leaded gasoline's potentially hazardous effects and was aware of available alternatives, yet was complicit in the cover-up and even actively assisted the profiteers in spreading the use of leaded gasoline to foreign countries; ? the benefits of lead antiknock additives were wildly and knowingly overstated in the beginning, and continue to be. Lead is not only bad for the planet and all its life forms, it is actually bad for cars and always was; ? for more than four decades, all scientific research regarding the health implications of leaded gasoline was underwritten and controlled by the original lead cabal--Du Pont, GM and Standard Oil; such research invariably favored the industry's pro-lead views, but was from the outset fatally flawed; independent scientists who would finally catch up with the earlier work's infirmities and debunk them were--and continue to be--threatened and defamed by the lead interests and their hired hands; ? confronted in recent years with declining sales in their biggest Western markets, owing to lead phaseouts imposed in the United States and, more recently, Europe, the current sellers of lead additives have successfully stepped up efforts to market their wares in the less-developed world, efforts that persist and have resulted in some countries today placing more lead in their gasoline, per gallon, than was typically used in the West, extra lead that serves no purpose other than profit; ? faced with lead's demise and their inevitable days of reckoning, these firms have used the extraordinary financial returns that lead additive sales afford to hurriedly fund diversification into less risky, more conventional businesses, while taking a page from the tobacco companies' playbook and simultaneously moving to reorganize their corporate structures to shield ownership and management from liability for blanketing the earth with a deadly heavy metal. You can choose whether to smoke, but you can't pick the air you breathe, even if it is contaminated by lead particles from automobile exhaust. Seventy-five years ago, well-known industrialists like GM's Alfred Sloan and Charles Kettering (remembered today for having founded the prestigious Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center) and the powerful brothers Pierre and Irenne du Pont added to their substantial fortunes and did the planet very dirty by disregarding the common-sense truth that no good can come from burning a long-known poison in internal-combustion engines. The steady emergence of improved methodology and finer, more sensitive measuring equipment has allowed scientists to prove lead's tragic toll with increasing precision. The audacity of today's lead-additive makers' conduct mounts with each new study weighing in against them. Because lead particles in automobile exhaust travel in wind, rain and snow, which know no national boundaries, lead makers and refiners who peddle leaded gasoline knowingly injure not only the local populations using their product but men, mice and fish tens of thousands of miles distant. GM and Standard Oil sold their leaded gasoline subsidiary, the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation, to Albemarle Paper in 1962, while Du Pont only cleaned up its act recently, but all hope to leave their leaded gasoline paternity a hushed footnote to their inglorious pasts. The principal maker of lead additive today (the Associated Octel Company of Ellesmere Port, England) and its foremost salesmen (Octel and the Ethyl corporation of Richmond, Virginia) acknowledge what they see as a political reality: Their product will one day be run out of business. But they plan to keep on selling it in the Third World profitably until they can sell it no longer. They continue to deny lead's dangers while overrating its virtues, reprising the central tenets of the lead mythology chartered by GM, Du Pont and Standard lifetimes ago. These mighty corporations should pay Ethyl and Octel for keeping their old lies alive. They'll need them, in their most up-to-the-minute and media-friendly fashion: Because of the harm caused by leaded gasoline they have been joined to a class-action suit brought in a circuit court in Maryland against the makers of that other product of lead's excruciating toxic reign: lead paint. Along with the makers of lead paint and the lead trade organizations with whom they both once worked in close concert, suppliers and champions of lead gasoline additives--Ethyl, Du Pont and PPG--have been named as defendants in the suit. Though the number of cases of lead poisoning has been falling nationwide, the lead dust in exhaust spewed by automobiles in the past century will continue to haunt us in this one, coating our roads, buildings and soil, subtly indefinitely contaminating our homes, belongings and food. THE PROBLEM WITH LEAD Lead is poison, a potent neurotoxin whose sickening and deadly effects have been known for nearly 3,000 years and written about by historical figures from the Greek poet and physician Nikander and the Roman architect Vitruvius to Benjamin Franklin. Odorless, colorless and tasteless, lead can be detected only through chemical analysis. Unlike such carcinogens and killers as pesticides, most chemicals, waste oils and even radioactive materials, lead does not break down over time. It does not vaporize, and it never disappears. For this reason, most of the estimated 7 million tons of lead burned in gasoline in the United States in the twentieth century remains--in the soil, air and water and in the bodies of living organisms. Worldwide, it is estimated that modem man's lead exposure is 300 to 500 times greater than background or natural levels. Indeed, a 1983 report by Britain's Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution concluded that lead was dispersed so widely by man in the twentieth century that "it is doubtful whether any part of the earth's surface or any form of life remains uncontaminated by anthropogenic [man-made] lead." While lead from mining, paint, smelting and other sources is still a serious environmental problem, a recent report by the government's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry estimated that the burning of gasoline has accounted for 90 percent of lead placed in the atmosphere since the 1920s. (The magnitude of this fact is placed in relief when one considers the estimate of the US Public Health Service that the associated health costs from a parallel problem-the remaining lead paint in America's older housing--total in the multibillions.) Classical acute lead poisoning occurs at high levels of exposure, and its symptoms-blindness, brain damage, kidney disease, convulsions and cancer--olden leading, of course, to death, are not hard to identify. The effects of pervasive exposure to lower levels of lead are more easily miscredited; lead poisoning has been called an "aping disease" because its symptoms are so frequently those of other known ailments. Children are the first and worst victims of leaded gas; because of their immaturity, they are most susceptible to systemic and neurological injury, including lowered IQs, reading and learning disabilities, impaired hearing, reduced attention span, hyperactivity, behavioral problems and interference with growth. Because they often go undetected for some time, such maladies are particularly insidious. In adults, elevated blood-lead levels are related to hypertension and cardiovascular disease, particularly strokes, heart attacks and premature deaths. Lead exposure before or during pregnancy is especially serious, harming the mother's own body, affecting fetal development and frequently leading to miscarriage. In the eighties the EPA estimated that the health damages from airborne lead cost American society billions each year. In Venezuela, where the state oil company sold only leaded gasoline until 1999, a recent report found 63 percent of newborn children with blood-lead levels in excess of the so-called safe levels promulgated by the US government. THE SEARCH FOR AN ANTIKNOCK On December 9, 1921, a young engineer named Thomas Midgley Jr., working in the laboratory of the General Motors Research Corporation in Dayton, Ohio, reported to his boss, Charles Kettering, that he'd discovered that tetraethyl lead--a little-known compound of metallic lead and one of the alkyl series, also referred to as lead tetraethyl or TEL--worked to reduce "knock" or "pinging" in internal-combustion engines. Tetraethyl lead was first discovered by a German chemist in 1854. A technical curiosity, it was not used commercially on account of "its known deadliness." It is highly poisonous, and even casual cumulative contact with it was known to cause hallucinations, difficulty in breathing and, in the worst cases, madness, spasms, palsies, asphyxiation and death. Still unused in 1921, sixty-seven years after its invention, it was not an obvious choice as a gasoline additive. In the laboratories of Charles Kettering, however, the search for a gasoline additive to cure "knock" had been going on for some years prior to Midgley's rediscovery of TEL. In 1911 Kettering had invented the electric self-starter--a landmark development in automotive history that eliminated dangerous hand-cranking and enabled many Americans (particularly women) to drive for the first time, arguably killing steam and electric cars in the process. This invention would make "Boss" Kettering rich, famous and beloved to a nation falling in love with its wheels. Thanks to the starter, the folksy inventor's new firm, Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company, or DELCO, received its first big order, for $10 million, from the upstart General Motors Corporation, founded only three years earlier by William Crapo Durant. GM's 1912 Cadillac was equipped with DELCO's self-starter and battery ignition. When customers reported that the engine of this luxury automobile had an alarming tendency to knock--a sharp, metallic sound hinting at damage being done inside the engine--critics blamed Kettering's electrical components. Kettering was convinced, rightly, that knocking was a function of an engine's fuel rather than ignition problems. When Kettering and his partners sold DELCO to Durant's GM and its new partner--Alfred Sloan's Hyatt Roller Bearings--in 1916, his lab was already engaged in a search for the cure. Following the sale, this work was transferred to his new firm, the Dayton Research Laboratories, where a newly hired assistant, Thomas Midgley, was assigned to study the problem of engine knock. Stabbing in the dark, Midgley got lucky quickly when he added iodine to the fuel, stopping knock in a test engine and establishing for all time that the malady--premature combustion of the fuel/air mixture--was connected to the explosive qualities of the fuel, what would later be called "octane." Iodine raised octane and cured knock; however, it was corrosive and prohibitively expensive. Inspired by the fundamental breakthrough, Midgley nonetheless carried on with fuel research, testing every substance he could find for antiknock properties, "from melted butter and camphor to ethyl acetate and aluminum chloride." Unfortunately, "most of them had no more effect than spitting in the Great Lakes." THE ANTIKNOCK THAT GOT AWAY Automotive engineers knew by this time that engines that didn't knock would not only operate more smoothly. They could also be designed to run with higher compression in the cylinders, which would allow more efficient operation, resulting in greater fuel economy, greater power or some harmonious combination of the two. The key was finding a fuel with higher octane. Though octane sufficient for use in high-compression engines had been achievable since 1913 through a process called thermal cracking, the process required added expenditures on plant and equipment, which tightfisted oil refiners didn't relish. The nation's fuel supply remained resolutely low grade, a situation that troubled Kettering. By limiting allowable compression, low-octane fuel meant cars would be burning more gasoline. Like many visionary engineers, Kettering was enamored of conservation as a first principle. As a businessman, he also shared persistent fears at the time that world oil supplies were running out. Low octane and low compression meant lower gas mileage and more rapid exhaustion of a dwindling fuel supply. Inevitably, demand for new automobiles would fade. By 1917 Kettering and his staff had trained their octane-boosting sights on ethyl alcohol, also known as grain alcohol (the kind you drink), power alcohol or ethanol. In tests supervised by Kettering and Midgley for the Army Air Corps at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, researchers concluded that alcohols were among the best antiknock fuels but were not ideal for aircraft engines unless used as an additive, in a blend with gasoline. This undoubtedly led Kettering to concur with an April 13, 1918, Scientific American report: "It is now definitely established that alcohol can be blended with gasoline to produce a suitable motor fuel." The story of TEEs rise, then, is very much the story of the oil companies' and lead interests' war against ethanol as an octane-boosting additive that could be mixed with gasoline or, in their worst nightmare, burned straight as a replacement for gasoline. For more than a hundred years, Big Oil has reckoned ethanol to be fundamentally inimical to its interest, and, viewing its interest narrowly, Big Oil might not be wrong. By contrast, GM's subsequent antipathy to alcohol was a profit-motivated attitude adjustment. Alcohol initially held much fascination for the company, for good reason. Ethanol is always plentiful and easy to make, with a long history in America, not just as a fuel additive but as a pure fuel. The first prototype internal-combustion engine in 1826 used alcohol and turpentine. Prior to the Civil War alcohol was the most widely used illuminating fuel in the country. Indeed, alcohol powered the first engine by the German inventor Nicholas August Otto, father of the four-stroke internal-combustion engines powering our cars today. More important, by the time of Kettering's antiknock inquiry, alcohol was a proven automotive fuel. As the automobile era picked up speed, scientific journals were filled with references to alcohol. Tests in 1906 by the Department of Agriculture underscored its power and economy benefits. In 1907 and 1908 the US Geological Survey and the Navy performed 2,000 tests on alcohol and gasoline engines in Norfolk, Virginia, and St. Louis, concluding that higher engine compression could be achieved with alcohol than with gasoline. They noted a complete absence of smoke and disagreeable odors. Despite many attempts by Big Oil to stifle its home-grown competitor (one time-honored gambit: lobbying legislators to pass punitive taxation thwarting alcohol's economic viability), power alcohol would number among its adherents several highly regarded inventors and scientists, including Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. Henry Ford built his very first car to run on what he called farm alcohol. As late as 1925, after the advent of TEL, the high priest of American industry would predict in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor that ethanol--"fuel from vegetation"--would be the "fuel of the future." Four years later, early examples of his Model A car would be equipped with a dashboard knob to adjust its carburetor to run on gasoline or alcohol. Ethanol made a lot of sense to a practical Ohio farm boy like Kettering. It was renewable, made from surplus crops and crop waste, and nontoxic. It delivered higher octane than gasoline (though it contained less power per gallon), and it burned more cleanly. By 1920, as Kettering was aware, a US Naval Committee had concluded that alcohol-gasoline blends "withstand high compression without producing knock." Higher compression was, after all, what the GM men were after. In February 1920, shortly after joining General Motors' employ, Thomas Midgley filed a patent application for a blend of alcohol and cracked (olefin) gasoline, as an antiknock fuel. Later that month K.W. Zimmerschied of GM's New York headquarters wrote Kettering, observing that foreign use of alcohol fuel "is getting more serious every day in connection with export cars, and anything we can do toward building our carburetors so they can be easily adapted to alcohol will be appreciated by all." Kettering assured him that adaptation for alcohol fuel "is a thing which is very readily taken care of" by exchanging metal carburetor floats for lacquered cork ones. GM was concerned (albeit temporarily) about an imminent disruption in oil supply, and alcohol-powered cars could keep its factories open. An internal GM report that year stated ominously, "This year will see the maximum production of petroleum that this country will ever know." ETHANOL ON THE MARCH In October 1921, less than two months before he hatched leaded gasoline, Thomas Midgley drove a high-compression-engined car from Dayton to a meeting of the Society of Automotive Engineers in Indianapolis, using a gasoline-ethanol blended fuel containing 30 percent alcohol. "Alcohol," he told the assembled engineers, "has tremendous advantages and minor disadvantages." The benefits included 'clean burning and freedom from any carbon deposit...[and] tremendously high compression under which alcohol will operate without knocking.... Because of the possible high compression, the available horsepower is much greater with alcohol than with gasoline." After four years' study, GM researchers had proved it: Ethanol was the additive of choice. Their estimation would be confirmed by others. In the thirties, after leaded gasoline was introduced to the United States but before it dominated in Europe, two successful English brands of gas--Cleveland Discoll and Kool Motor-contained 30 percent and 16 percent alcohol, respectively. As it happened, Cleveland Discoll was part-owned by Ethyl's half-owner, Standard Oil of New Jersey (Kool Motor was owned by the US oil company Cities Service, today Citgo). While their US colleagues were slandering alcohol fuels before Congressional committees in the thirties, Standard Oil's men in England would claim, in advertising pamphlets, that ethanol-laced, lead-free petrol offered "the most perfect motor fuel the world has ever known," providing "extra power, extra economy, and extra efficiency." For a change, the oil companies spoke the truth. Today, in the postlead era, ethanol is routinely blended into gasoline to raise octane and as an emissions-reducing oxygenate. Race cars often run on pure ethanol. Daimler-Chrysler and Ford earn credits allowing them to sell additional gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles by engineering so-called flex-vehicles that will run on clean-burning E85, an 85 percent ethanol/ gasoline blend. GM helped underwrite the 1999 Ethanol Vehicle Challenge, which saw college engineering students easily converting standard GM pickup trucks to run on E85, producing hundreds of bonus horsepower. Ethanol's technical difficulties have been surmounted and its cost--as an octane-boosting additive rather than a pure fuel--is competitive with the industry's preferred octane-boosting oxygenate, MTBE, a petroleum-derived suspected carcinogen with an affinity for groundwater that was recently outlawed in California. With MTBE's fall from grace, many refiners--including Getty, which took out a full-page ad in the New York Times congratulating itself for doing so--returned to ethanol long after it was first developed as a clean-burning octane booster. ENTER DU PONT In 1919 GM purchased Kettering's Dayton research laboratory. The following year the company installed him as vice president of research of the renamed General Motors Research Corporation. No longer the shambling, anarchic outfit it had been under the inveterate risk-taker W.C. Durant, GM was now to be run in the militarily precise mold of E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company of Wilmington, Delaware. Awash in a sea of gunpowder profits from World War I, the du Pont family had been increasing its stake in GM since 1914. By 1920 it controlled more than 35 percent of GM shares and moved to pack the board, installing professional management, with the du Pont faction taking control of the corporation's all-powerful finance committee. Caught short by a margin call in the recession of 1920, Durant, GM's colorful founder, lost his stake and was forced by the du Pont family to walk the plank (he would spend his final days running a bowling alley). One of the clan's craftiest patriarchs, Pierre du Pont, was coaxed from retirement and named GM's interim president; Alfred Sloan, who had demonstrated the cold-hearted allegiance to the bottom line the du Ponts revered, became executive vice president preparatory to assuming the top slot. The pressure on all concerned, including Kettering and his research division, was to make money and to make it fast. Lest there be any misunderstanding, Sloan wrote to Kettering in September of 1920, alerting him to the du Ponts' new math: "Although [the Research Corporation] is not a productive unit and a unit that is supposed to make a profit, nevertheless the more tangible result we get from it the stronger its position will be.... It may be inferred at some future time...that we are spending too much money down there [in Dayton] and being in a position to show what benefits had accrued to the corporation would strengthen our position materially." That time would come soon enough for Kettering to deliver. An air-cooled engine he'd championed--copper-cooled, he called it--would soon prove a costly disaster for GM. Fortunately for him, immediately after joining GM he had given his trusted assistant Midgley two weeks to find something to ignite the new management's interest in funding continued fuel research. Though it would take somewhat longer than two weeks to fire their masters' enthusiasm, "Midge" succeeded. AND THE WINNER IS ... The effect of this sudden time constraint was striking. As GM researcher and Kettering biographer T.A. Boyd noted in an unpublished history written in 1943, Midgley's main research in 1919-20 had been to make alcohols out of olefins found in petroleum through reactions with sulfuric acid. (Farm alcohol was one thing, but a patentable process for production of petroleum-derived alcohol--a possible money-maker--was quite another, one of considerably greater interest to the corporation.) "But in view of the verdict setting a time limit on how much further the research for an antiknock compound might continue," Boyd said, "work was resumed at once in making engine tests of whatever further compounds happened to be available on the shelf of the lab.., or which could be gotten readily." As noted earlier, Midgley tested many compounds before isolating tetraethyl lead in December 1921. In the early days, he would attribute the discovery of TEL's antiknock properties to "luck and religion, as well as the application of science." In a 1925 magazine article, he would recall false trails with iodine, aniline, selenium and tellurium before hitting upon lead. Curiously, his article omitted any reference to the alcohol-gasoline blend he'd patented just five years earlier. Another oddity: The exact number of compounds tested prior to TEEs discovery varies dramatically in different accounts. As Professor William Kovarik of Radford University has observed, confusion reigns in part because the lab's day-to-day test diaries have never been released to the public by the General Motors Institute (GMI) archive. In the words of one archivist there, GM's lead archives have been "sanitized." One 1925 article in the Litera rv Digest put the number at 2,500 compounds tested, while The Story of Ethyl Gasoline, a 1927 pamphlet released by a company Midgley would help found, states that 33,000 were studied. Another time, he claimed 14,991 elements were examined, while a 1980 Ethyl corporation statement set the number at 144. This question is important because GM's discovery of lead's antiknock properties, which initially caused little internal excitement, would be hailed in popular media and later cited in polytechnical texts as a model of rational, orderly scientific inquiry that sought the single best answer to the knock question. A more realistic view of events is that TEL's re-emergence in the twenties was the result of a crude empirical potshot that was understood to promise a landslide of earnings over time. Apprised of Midgley's discovery that one part TEL could be used to fortify 1,000 parts of gasoline, Kettering proposed the name "Ethyl" for the new antiknock fluid, a mild irony in light of both men's longtime--and soon to fade--interest in ethyl alcohol. At researcher Boyd's suggestion Ethyl was dyed red. There was as yet, however, no plan to market Ethyl. Indeed, in July 1922, seven months after TEL's discovery, J.W. Morrison of the GM Patent Department would encourage Midgley to "see if the U.S. Industrial Alcohol Co. have opened a valuable line of research. Mr. Clements [the lab manager at GM] stated some time ago that it might be worth our while to carry our investigations further on the problem of utilizing alcohols in motors. I think he mentioned specifically combinations of alcohol and gasoline." From the corporation's perspective, however, the problems with ethyl alcohol were ultimately insurmountable and rather basic. GM couldn't dictate an infrastructure that could supply ethanol in the volumes that might be required. Equally troubling, any idiot with a still could make it at home, and in those days, many did. And ethanol, unlike TEL, couldn't be patented; it offered no profits for GM. Moreover, the oil companies hated it, a powerful disincentive for the fledgling GM, which was loath to jeopardize relations with these mighty power brokers. Surely the du Pont family's growing interest in oil and oil fields, as it branched out from its gunpowder roots into the oil-dependent chemical business, weighed on many GM directors' minds. In March 1922, Pierre du Pont wrote to his brother Irenee du Pont, Du Pont company chairman, that TEL is "a colorless liquid of sweetish odor, very poisonous if absorbed through the skin, resulting in lead poisoning almost immediately." This statement of early factual knowledge of TEEs supreme deadliness is noteworthy, for it is knowledge that will be denied repeatedly by the principals in coming years as well as in the Ethyl Corporation's authorized history, released almost sixty years later. Underscoring the deep and implicit coziness between GM and Du Pont at this time, Pierre informed Irene about TEL before GM had even filed its patent application for it. THE RISE OF TETRAETHYL LEAD With the application filed, the groundwork was laid for manufacture of TEL. An October 1922 agreement contracted Du Pont to supply GM. Signing for GM was Pierre du Pont; signing for Du Pont: his brother Irenee. Manufacturing began in 1923 with a small operation in Dayton, Ohio, that made 160 gallons of tetraethyl lead a day and shipped it out in one-liter bottles, each of which would treat 300 gallons of gasoline. In February 1923 the world's first tankful of leaded gasoline was pumped at Refiners Oil Company, at the corner of Sixth and Main streets, in Dayton, Ohio, from a station owned by Kettering's friend Willard Talbott. But four months earlier, an agitated William Mansfield Clark, a lab director in the US Public Health Service, had written A.M. Stimson, assistant Surgeon General at the PHS, warning that Du Pont was preparing to manufacture TEL at its plant in Deepwater, New Jersey. It constituted a "serious menace to public health" he stated, with reports already emerging from the plant that "several very serious cases of lead poisoning have resulted" in pilot production. Clark additionally speculated that widespread use of TEL would mean "on busy thoroughfares it is highly probable that the lead oxide dust will remain in the lower stratum." Estimating that each gallon of gasoline burned would emit four grams of lead oxide, he worded that this would build up to dangerous levels along heavily traveled roads and in tunnels. Stimson was troubled enough by Clark's letter to request that the PHS's Division of Pharmacology conduct investigations; unfortunately, the division's director responded, such trials would be too time-consuming. He suggested that the PHS rely upon industry to supply the relevant data, a spectacularly poor plan that would amount to government policy for the next forty years. Perhaps spurred by Clark's missive and Stimson's concern, in December 1922 the US Surgeon General, H.S. Cumming, wrote Pierre du Pont: "Inasmuch as it is understood that when employed in gasoline engines, this substance will add a finely divided and non-diffusible form of lead to exhaust gases, and furthermore, since lead poisoning in human beings is of the cumulative type resulting frequently from the daily intake of minute quantities, it seems pertinent to inquire whether there might not be a decided health hazard associated with the extensive use of lead tetraethyl in engines." BUT THE GOOD NEWS IS ... The year 1923 did not begin well, then, for supporters of tetraethyl lead. In January, on account of lead poisoning, Thomas Midgley was forced to decline speaking engagements at three regional panels of the American Chemical Society, which had awarded him a medal for his discovery. "After about a year's work in organic lead," he wrote, "I find that my lungs have been affected and that it is necessary to drop all work and get a large supply of fresh air." He repaired to Miami. Before leaving town, Midgley penned a reply to Cumming's letter, which had been passed on to him by Pierre du Pont. Although the question "had been given very serious consideration," he wrote, "...no actual experimental data has been taken." Even so, Midgley assured the Surgeon General, GM and Du Pont believed that "the average street will probably be so free from lead that it will be impossible to detect it or its absorption." In other words, TEL, the deadly chemical curiosity, was being brought to market without any thought or study as to its public health implications, but rather on the hopeful hunch of a clever mechanical engineer who, had just been poisoned by lead. Around this time, Midgley had also begun to receive letters expressing grave concern over TEL from well-known public health and medical authorities at leading universities, including Robert Wilson of MIT, Reid Hunt of Harvard, Yandell Henderson of Yale (America's foremost expert on poison gases and automotive exhaust) and Dr. Erik Krause of the Institute of Technology, Potsdam, Germany. Krause called TEL "a creeping and malicious poison," and he told Midgley it had killed a member of his dissertation committee. Charles Kettering may have been concerned by this growing chorus of TEL critics, but the early months of 1923 saw his mind preoccupied with another matter. In May of that year, after four costly years of development, Kettering's beloved copper-cooled engine was abandoned as a production program, a high-profile embarrassment within the company and the larger automotive community. "It was then," wrote Kettering's research assistant and biographer, T.A. Boyd, some years later, "that his spirits reached the lowest point in his research career." The abject failure of the copper-cooled engine led the fiercely proud Kettering to believe his personal capital in the company had been terminally depleted. "Since this thing with the CopperCooled Car has come up," he wrote Alfred Sloan (who became GM's president in 1923), "the Laboratory has been practically isolated from Corporation activities." Kettering's shame was so enormous that he tendered his resignation in a letter to Sloan. "I regret very much that this situation has developed. I have been extremely unhappy and know that I have made you and Mr. du Pont equally unhappy. ... work here at the Laboratory, I realize, has been almost 100% failure, but not because of the fundamental principles involved. Enough may come out of the Laboratory to have paid for their existence but no one will care to continue in Research activities as the situation now stands." 'MY DEAR BOSS' Sloan declined to let Kettering go. But America's most famous automotive engineer after Henry Ford emerged with a renewed sensitivity to the profit-making needs of his corporation. In this regard, TEL held out an immediate lifeline. Writing Kettering from Florida in March 1923, Midgley related a mad brainstorm whose relevance had now become fully clear to Kettering. "My dear boss," he began, "The way I feel about the Ethyl Gas situation is about as follows: It looks as though we could count on a minimum of 20 percent of the gas sold in the country if we advertise and go after the business--this at three cent gross to us from each gallon sold. I think we ought to go after it as soon as we can without being too hasty." Midgley barely scratched the surface of the wealth to come. With a legal monopoly based on patents that would provide a royalty on practically every gallon of gasoline sold for the life of its patent, Ethyl promised to make GM shareholders--among whom the du Ponts, Alfred Sloan and Charles Kettering were the largest--very rich. Profit-free ethanol, indeed. As Kovarik has calculated: "With gasoline sales [in 1923] around six billion gallons per year, 20 percent would come to about 1.2 billion gallons, and three cents gross would represent $36 million. With the cost of production and distribution running less than one cent per gallon of treated gasoline, more than two thirds of the $36 million would be annual gross profit. Of course, within a decade 80 percent of the then 12 billion gallon market used Ethyl, for an annual gross of almost $300 million." The fears of excessive hastiness expressed in Midgley's letter were evidently allayed. In April 1923, one month after he'd performed his riveting calculations, the General Motors Chemical Company was established to produce TEL, with Charles Kettering as president and Thomas Midgley as vice president. OCTANE, THE MOTORIST'S FRIEND Beginning in 1921, GM's executive committee began to articulate the first principles that would come to be known as Sloanism--that is, planned obsolescence and product differentiation through speed, power, style and color; "a car for every purse and purpose," as Sloan was fond of saying. Between 1922 and the end of the decade, Sloan and his GM associates would devise marketing strategies that would see GM overtake Ford as the world's largest automobile manufacturer and set the tone for the next fifty years of American automotive consumption. Central to this growth would be an awareness that consumers were no longer looking merely for basic transportation, which was the stock in trade of Ford's beloved Model T. In addition to consumer financing (which Ford opposed), Sloan was convinced that style, snob appeal and speed would help GM steal its customers away. He was fight. Following the failure of his copper-cooled engine, Kettering rejigged his arguments for TEL for internal--definitely not public--consumption. As it happened, the new additive could be fitted neatly into the Sloanist equation. For while it was initially seen by Kettering and his staff as a way to cure knock and to husband fossil-fuel supplies, the high compression it enabled in motors was just as easily exploited to make cars faster and more powerful, thus easier to sell. Alan Loeb, a former EPA attorney and lead historian who has examined the period closely, has neatly summed up Kettering's conversion: "By 1923...it was clear that Kettering's original purpose for the antiknock research had given way to GM's desire to improve auto performance without regard for its effect on fuel economy. ... Kettering did not give up on efficiency and conservation as his own ideals, but ever after he knew better than to try to push a product that would not sell. In later years, even as Kettering's advocacy of conservation became more and more public, it represented GM's true motive less and less." Tellingly, Ethyl's earliest advertisements dealt solely with speed and power and invariably neglected to mention its active ingredient: lead. Boasted a September 1927 ad that ran in National Geographic: "As an Ethyl user, you have the benefits of greatly increased speed, more power on hills and heavy roads. Quicker acceleration and complete elimination of 'knock.' But the real high compression automobile is here at last! Ethyl gasoline has made it possible! Ride with Ethyl in a high compression motor and get the thrill of a lifetime." With the advent of the Depression in the thirties, Ethyl's advertising nodded to the economic realities of the day but still focused on power. An ad that ran in February 1933 contains a Norman Rockwellesque portrait of a small boy who is complaining to his embarrassed father, "Gee, Pop--they're all passing you." The accompanying text rubs it in. "They didn't pass you when your car was bright and new--and you still don't like to be left behind. So just remember this: the next best thing to a brand new car is your present car with Ethyl." LIFTOFF With the formation of the GM Chemical Company, work on a large-scale Du Pont TEL plant began immediately. Irenee du Pont hailed his company's technical director, W.F. Harrington: "It is essential that we treat this under-taking like a war order so far as making speed and producing the output, not only in order to fulfill the terms of the contract as to time but because every day saved means one day advantage over possible competition." Significantly, GM's patent on TEL would have covered any threat from competing makers of lead additive. Thus, as Kovarik has reasoned, the competition referred to must have been from those who would have offered a different kind of antiknock. GM, Du Pont and TEEs other backers would long publicly claim there were no conceivable alternatives to the lead antiknock additive. But the facts were otherwise. Ethanol was still out there. And GM negotiated throughout the twenties with Germany's I.G. Farben over an additive it made from iron carbonyl. Then, in August 1925, Kettering himself joyously announced "Synthol," a blended automotive fuel of benzene and alcohol that promised to "double gas mileage." There was, as we shall see, an unexpected--and momentary-business need for Synthol. The point is, there were alternatives. In a public relations coup, Ethyl leaded gasoline fueled the top three finishers at the Indianapolis 500 motor race on Memorial Day, 1923. With demand skyrocketing, Kettering signed exclusive contracts with Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon), Standard Oil of Indiana (later Amoco, more lately merged with BP) and Gulf Oil (owned by the Mellon interests) for East Coast, Midwest and Southern distribution, respectively, of leaded gasoline. TETRAETHYL DEATH In August, Du Pont's TEL plant opened at Deepwater, New Jersey, across the Delaware River from Wilmington. Less than thirty days would pass before the first of several TEL poisoning deaths of workers there would occur. Not surprisingly, given Du Pont's stranglehold on all local media within its domain along the Delaware, the deaths went unreported. Even so, news of these and similar deaths would inevitably come out. Realizing that its own medical research would be less than credible then, and having been turned down by reputable academics and the Public Health Service in its search for consultants to help "refute any false propaganda," GM hurriedly contracted the US Bureau of Mines in September 1923 to explore the dangers of TEL. Even by the lax standards of its day, the bureau was a docile corporate servant, with not an adversarial bone in its body. It saw itself as in the mining promotion business, with much of its scientific work undertaken in collaboration with industry. The bureau's presumptive harmlessness notwithstanding, to its written agreement with GM was nonetheless added a remarkable proviso, that the bureau "refrain from giving out the usual press and progress reports during the course of the work, as [GM] feels that the newspapers are apt to give scare headlines and false impressions before we definitely know what the influence of the material will be." Indicative of the bureau leadership's fundamental outlook was an exchange between the superintendent of its Pittsburgh field station, where the TEL investigation was being conducted, and the bureau's chief chemist, S.C. Lind. By letter, Lind had objected to the use of the trade name "Ethyl" when referring to tetraethyl lead gasoline. "Of course their [GM officials] object in doing so is fairly clear, and among other things they are not particularly desirous of having the name 'lead' appear in this case. That is alright from the standpoint of the General Motors Company but it is quite a question in my mind as to whether the Bureau of Mines would be justified in adopting this name so early in the game." The superintendent replied that omission of "the use of the word 'lead' in the inter-bureau correspondence" was intentional to prevent leaks to the papers. "If it should happen to get some publicity accidentally, it would not be so bad if the word 'lead' were omitted as this term is apt to prejudice somewhat against its use." Indeed, lead had acquired a bad name by 1920, as scientific and public awareness of its supreme deadliness as an occupational and pediatric hazard was increasing. Then, in April 1924, two GM employees engaged in the manufacture of TEL at a pilot plant in Dayton also died of lead poisoning. Large numbers of nonfatal poisonings were noted at this time. Thomas Midgley was said to be "depressed to the point of considering giving up the whole tetraethyl lead program." But Kettering, emerging from his copper-cooled funk, wouldn't slow down. Two months later, he would urge Du Pont to step up production. At the same time, seeking even greater control over Bureau of Mines test results, GM stipulated that "all manuscripts, before publication, will be submitted to the Company for comment and criticism." By any measure, the TEL constituency had experienced a run of rum luck, and in June 1924 GM president Sloan, "gravely concerned about the poison hazard" and deaths at TEL plants in Dayton and Deepwater, approved the formation of a medical committee, with J. Gilman Thompson, consulting physician to Standard Oil of New Jersey (which had been marketing Ethyl and dabbling in its manufacture), as chairman. Summing up the gloomy feeling all around at this time, Du Pont chairman Irenee du Pont wrote Sloan at GM that TEL "may be killed by a better substitute or because of its poisonous character or because of its [destructive] action on the engine." Following its investigation, GM's medical committee delivered what was apparently a negative and highly cautionary report on TEL. But Irenee du Pont, having undergone some sort of conversion or, possibly, having remembered his family's lifelong devotion to profit at any cost, wrote Sloan on August 29, 1924, and told him not to worry: "I have read the doctors' report and am not disturbed by the severity of the findings." Another product his firm made--nitroglycerin--was even more hazardous to make, du Pont added breezily, while lead dust from car exhaust was but nothing compared to erosion from lead paint. Years later, this would become a major plank of TEL supporters' defense. For some unknown reason, the report of Sloan's blue-ribbon medical committee, like many original documents referenced in GM reports on TEL, is not available in the company's public archives. HELLO, ETHYL Meanwhile, Standard Oil of New Jersey had developed a faster, cheaper method of synthesizing TEL. In August 1924 production began in a makeshift works at its Bayway plant in Elizabeth, New Jersey. GM still held the TEL patent, but Standard now had the better manufacturing technology and a patent of its own to prove it. To the apparent surprise of some at Du Pont, which had not been producing the fluid fast enough for GM's liking, the oil company (one of twenty-seven companies formed by the 1911 breakup of Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust) and the automobile company formed a joint venture, which they called the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation. Why, one wonders, would GM deign to form Ethyl, a new company, with Standard? "In the first place," Sloan would testify in a 1952 antitrust suit, "I recognized that General Motors organization had no competence whatsoever in chemical manufacture. We were mechanical people dealing in metal processing." The deaths at Day ton would certainly support this modest assessment. Sloan would also later record his view that management should not get sidetracked on non-core businesses. But there were clearly bushels of money to be made. Sloan had by now fully cottoned to an essential fact about his company's new lead additive patent. As the management expert P.F. Drucker described it many years later, "GM, in effect, made money on almost every gallon of gasoline sold, by anyone." In one of its first official acts, the newly formed Ethyl Gasoline Corporation evinced renewed sensitivity to spin (not to mention a justifiably elevated level Of paranoia) by insisting that its contract with the Bureau of Mines be modified yet again, to reflect that before publication of any papers or articles by your Bureau, they should be submitted to them [Ethyl] for comment, criticism, and approval." Thus, as the public health historians David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz have observed, the newly formed Ethyl Corporation was given "veto power over the research of the United States government." DEATH BY LOONY GAS Du Pont would supply most of Ethyl's TEL requirements for years to come, but, according to a letter written by Alfred Sloan to Irenee du Pont in the fall of 1924, in an accommodation to Standard Oil that firm had been permitted to maintain a small "semiworks" at its Bayway refinery. Later, Du Pont engineers would express serious reservations about the safety of Standard's facility. An internal 1936 Du Pont history would recount that the company was "greatly shocked at the manifest danger of the equipment and methods [and] at the inadequate safety precautions" at the Standard facility, but their suggestions were "waved aside." Unfortunate it was. On October 26, 1924, the first of five workers who would die in quick succession at Standard Oil's Bayway TEL works perished, after wrenching fits of violent insanity; thirty-five other workers would experience tremors, hallucinations, severe palsies and other serious neurological symptoms of organic lead poisoning. In total, more than 80 percent of the Bayway staff would die or suffer severe poisoning. News of these deaths was the first that many Americans heard of leaded gasoline--although it would take a few days, as the New York City papers and wire services rushed to cover a mysterious industrial disaster that Standard stonewalled and GM declined to delve into. Confusion and panic marked the headlines, with reporters forced to travel to New Jersey to track a story they'd probably have noted in a lightly rewritten press release if Standard had appeared more forthcoming. On October 30, days after the first Bayway death, the press was at last invited to Standard's New York City headquarters for an afternoon session of long-overdue, professionally crafted spin control. Thomas Midgley had been rushed to 26 Broadway from Dayton and would address the corps. But first, Standard's medical consultant, J. Gilman Thompson, presented them with a typewritten statement, supplying the company's most sculpted telling of recent history yet: [TEEs] recently discovered use for greatly promoting the efficiency of gasoline engines has led to its manufacture on a commercial scale through processes still more or less in a stage of development. This has occasioned unforeseen accidents. ... One of these has been the sudden escape, of fumes from large retorts, and the inhalation of such fumes gives rise to acute symptoms, particularly congestion of the brain, producing a condition not unlike delirium tremens. Although there is lead in the compound, these acute symptoms are wholly unlike those of chronic lead poisoning such as painters often have. "There is no obscurity whatever about the effects of the poison and characterizing the substance as 'mystery gas' or 'insanity gas' is grossly misleading. Asked to assess their liability to families of men who said they were not warned of the dangers, Standard Oil officials said "the rejection of many men as physically unfit to engage in the work of the Bayway plant, daily physical examinations, constant admonitions as to wearing rubber gloves and using gas masks and not wearing away from the plant clothing worn during work hours should have been sufficient indication to every man in the plant that he was engaged 'in a man's undertaking.'" The falsity and cruelty of Standard's position were manifest, the ironies rife. First, Standard wasn't in experimental production. It was making TEL to sell. Second, its stony silence alone had led to stories in the press about a "mystery" gas, because reporters learned that TEL had been dubbed "loony gas" from Bayway workers whom they interviewed after being brushed off by the company brass. Finally, the escapes of gas weren't sudden, as claimed, but ongoing, the poisoning cumulative. The doctors at Reconstruction Hospital had told the Herald Tribune that violent insanity was "brought on by the gradual infiltration of lead in their systems." The day's true highlight, however, would be Midgley's presentation. The celebrated engineer and Ethyl VP, who had only recently been forced to leave work to recover from lead poisoning, proposed to demonstrate that TEL was not dangerous in small quantities, by rubbing some of it on his hands. Midgley was fond of this exhibition and would repeat it elsewhere, washing his hands thoroughly in the fluid and drying them on his handkerchief. "'I'm not taking any chance whatever,' he said. 'Nor would I take any chance doing that every day.' "The New York World cited unbelievable dispatches from Detroit claiming that Midgley "frequently bathed" in TEL to prove its safety to skeptics within the industry. EHTYL ADRIFT The response of local governments and public health officials to the Bayway disaster was swirl and stem. The day of Midgley's peculiar demonstration, the New York City Board of Health banned the sale of TEL-enhanced gasoline, saying that "such mixtures of gasoline, containing lead or other deleterious substances, may be liable to prove detrimental and dangerous to the health and lives of the community, particularly when released as exhaust from motor vehicles." Within a matter of days Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and the State of New Jersey would ban gasoline containing the lead additive. Ethyl would continue to be sold in the Midwest, but elsewhere on the East Coast its use was unofficially discouraged by authorities. In early November 1924, after the fifth Bayway worker died, the Bureau of Mines study on TEL was released (remember that GM and then Ethyl had reserved for themselves the right to approve the timing of its release). Not surprisingly, the bureau's report, based on limited animal testing it had conducted, gave the substance a clean bill of health. The New York Times, which had decided as editorial policy to support the use of TEL, served up just the sort of front-page headline Ethyl hoped for: "No Peril to Public Seen in Ethyl Gas/Bureau of Mines Reports after Long Experiments with Motor Exhausts/More Deaths Unlikely." Yandell Henderson of Yale and others assailed the Bureau of Mines study as a hopelessly shoddy investigation financed by an interested party, Ethyl, and bemoaned Washington's anti-regulatory climate. The bureau had "investigated the danger to the public of acute lead poisoning," he noted derisively, and had failed even to take into account the possibility that the atmosphere might be polluted to such an extent along automobile thoroughfares that those who worked or lived along such streets would gradually absorb lead in sufficient quantities to poison them in the course of months. ... Perhaps if leaded gasoline kills enough people soon enough to impress the public, we may get from Congress a much-needed law and appropriation for the control of harmful substances other than foods. But it seems more likely that the conditions will grow worse so gradually and the development of lead poisoning will come on so insidiously (for this is the nature of the disease) that leaded gasoline will be in nearly universal use and large numbers of cars will have been sold that can run only on that fuel before the public and the Government awaken to the situation. ... This is probably the greatest single question in the field of public health that has ever faced the American public. It is the question whether scientific experts are to be consulted, and the action of Government guided by their advice, or whether, on the contrary, commercial interests are to be allowed to subordinate every other consideration to that of profit. Echoing the fears of PHS lab director William Clark more than two years earlier, Henderson had clearly isolated the greatest threat of leaded gasoline--not the severe cases of industrial poisoning that had grabbed the headlines but the slow, unrelenting low-level exposure that was sure to occur as the use of leaded gasoline spread. As we shall see, the industry would use this dichotomy--accidental deaths at the plant versus insidious poisoning--to its advantage. The former risk could be acknowledged because it could be prevented, while the latter was doubted, denied and endlessly debated. In years to come, the federal government would do much to help the lead interests actively across a variety of fields, but the greatest assistance offered was an act of omission: a signal failure to arrange for independent examination of the effects of automotive lead emissions on the public health. By 1924 the government's allegiance and probity were already in question. As C.W. Deppe, owner of the Lilliputian Deppe Motors, put it in a letter to the Secretary of the Interior, Hubert Work: "May I be pardoned if I ask you frankly now, does the Bureau of Mines exist for the benefit of Ford and the G.M. Corporation and the Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey, and other oil companies parties to the distribution of the Ethyl Lead Dopes, or is the Bureau supposed to be for the public benefit and in protection of life and health?" ENTER THE SURGEON GENERAL Three months after the Bayway disaster, a grand jury acquitted Standard Oil of criminal responsibility for the tragedy despite the fact that, as the New York Times stated in summarizing the grand jury's findings: "The report found that the deaths were directly due to poisoning... [and] recommended that before it resumes operations the company try to perfect some machinery by which ethyl gas can be manufactured without endangering life." This was good news for Ethyl's backers, but strangely at variance with the views of Standard's own partners. As Du Pont's internal history of 1936 concluded: "Notwithstanding... foreknowledge at the peril, the precautions taken in the small manufacturing operation at Bayway were grossly inadequate." And GM took a dim view of the Standard operation as well. Ferris Hurd, a GM attorney testifying in the government's 1953 antitrust suit against Du Pont, summarized events: [Standard] put up a plant that lasted two months and killed five people and practically wiped out the rest of the plant. The disaster was so bad that the state of New Jersey entered the picture and issued an order that Standard could never go back into the manufacture of [tetraethyl lead] without [he permission of the state of New Jersey. In fact, the furor over it was so great that the newspapers took it up, and they misrepresented it, and instead of realizing that the danger was in the manufacture, they got to thinking that the danger was exposure of the public in the use of it, and the criticism of its use was so great that it was banned in many cities and they had to close down the manufacture and sale of Ethyl. Of course, there was a danger to the public in the use of Ethyl, but the public wouldn't know it for decades, thanks in large part to the institutional inability and temperamental disinclination of the federal government at this time to do anything more than smile upon new technologies and corporate incursions into new and lucrative markets. The wave of publicity surrounding the Bayway disaster had left Ethyl on the defensive, however. The company knew it would be up to government to set matters right. A GIFT OF GOD? Today business school students carefully analyze the corporate response to the scare caused, by a small batch of tainted Tylenol and widely hail it as a work of genius. Yet it was nothing compared with Ethyl's road back from disaster, skillfully negotiated with a product that was a deadly poison from the get-go. Ethyl, to use the modern argot, had an aggressive plan and made it stick. You might say it was one of the most brilliant exercises in co-branded damage control ever. For on Christmas Eve, 1924, Charles Kettering, Frank Howard of Standard and Du Pont chief engineer W.F. Harrington paid a private visit to Surgeon General Hugh Cumming to request that the Public Health Service hold public heatings on TEL. Cumming readily agreed. As Du Pont's private history of 1936 would note, "In the prevailing state of strong prejudice and excited fears, the new industry was fortunate in having the question of the health risk in the use of tetraethyl lead actively taken up...by the US Public Health Service." On May 4, 1925, in an act exquisitely timed and brilliantly crafted to the right tone of seriousness for the proceedings, Ethyl publicly withdrew its product from the market. On May 20 eighty-seven participants convened in the Butler Building at Third and B Streets, in Washington, DC, along with a dozen reporters, for the Surgeon General's conference. Conspicuously absent was Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, whose agency was charged with oversight of the PHS. Nowhere was it reportedthat Mellon family interests controlled Gulf Oil, which had recently acquired an exclusive Ethyl distributorship. At the hearing, Standard's Frank Howard (soon to be an Ethyl director) uttered the memorable pronouncement that TEL was "a gift of God" that conscience and the march of human progress compelled GM to exploit. Our problem is not that simple. We cannot quite act on a remote probability. We are engaged in the General Motors Corporation in the manufacture of automobiles, and in the Standard Oil Company in the manufacture and refining of oil. On these things our present industrial civilization is supposed to depend. I might refer to the comment made at the end of the war--that the Allies floated to victory on a sea of oil--which is probably true. ... Now as a result of some 10 years' [sic] research on the part of The General Motors Corporation and 5 years' research by the Standard Oil Co., or a little bit more, we have this apparent gift of God--of 3 cubic centimeters of tetraethyl lead--which will permit that gallon of gasoline...to go perhaps 50 percent further... What is our duty under the circumstances? Should we throw this thing aside? Should we say, 'No, we will not use it,' in spite of the efforts of the government and the General Motors Corporation and the Standard Oil Co. toward developing this very thing, which is a certain means of saving petroleum? Because some animals die and some do not die in some experiments, shall we give this thing up entirely? Frankly, it: is a problem that we do not know how to meet. We cannot justify ourselves in our consciences if we abandon the thing. I think it would be an unheard-of blunder if we should abandon a thing of this kind merely because of our fears. Possibilities cannot be allowed to influence us to such an extent as that in this matter. (Many years later, Howard would be forced to relinquish his Standard post by the Federal Trade Commission for collaborating with Nazi Germany, but he would retain his seat at Ethyl.) Ethyl sales manager A.S. Maxwell got even more carried away, telling a reporter that engines would run so efficiently with leaded gas that GM was developing an engine that "will triple the best mileage a gallon of gasoline will give today." Actually, while the high compression Ethyl permitted--like ethanol or any octane booster--might have offered fuel-economy benefits, average fuel economy in the United States fell steadily from 1925, the year of Ethyl's introduction, through the seventies, when cars shrank and unleaded fuel became the standard, In 1974 GM's corporate average fuel economy had fallen to a near-comical 12.2 miles per gallon. By 1987, after unleaded became predominant and catalytic converters a standard, the sales/registered-fleet average for cars sold in the United States had climbed to 27.3 miles per gallon. Yet TEL defenders to this day cite conservation as its key benefit. THE CONFERENCE ADJOURNS America's automotive population was multiplying exponentially, yet the Surgeon General's conference spent six hours and forty-five minutes deliberating on what Yandell Henderson had prophetically called "probably the greatest single question in the field of public health that has ever faced the American public" and reached no conclusion. Instead. it voted unanimously on a motion by Dr. Matthias Nicoll, New York State Commissioner of Health, to place the question of tetraethyl lead in the hands of Cumming and a seven-member committee of experts to be appointed by him, with orders to report back by January 1, 1926. And it commended Ethyl for withdrawing its product while the question of its effect on the public health was still unsettled. Awkwardly for Ethyl, soon after the conference ended but months before the Surgeon General's newly impaneled committee could complete its study, details emerged about eight more TEL-related deaths and more than 300 injuries at Du Pont's sinister Deepwater plant. Six square miles that lit up the sky at night, Deepwater was one of the country's most active ports, yet it was nowhere to be found on nautical maps. Often referred to publicly by Du Pont as a dye works, it was rather a complex of poison-gas works, producing phosgene and chlorine gases as well as the lethal benzol series. Deepwater had no legal government--just Du Pont and its private police force. Dismissing the deaths, a Du Pont spokesman said at the time, "It is a fact that we have a great deal of trouble inducing the men to be cautious. We have to protect them against themselves." (You can still see Deepwater today at the southern end of the New Jersey Turnpike, but it stopped producing TEL in the nineties.) Happily for the du Ponts and the other lead interests, on January 19, 1926, the special committee appointed by Surgeon General Cumming found "no good grounds" for prohibiting the sale of Ethyl gasoline: "So far as the committee could ascertain all the reported cases of fatalities and serious injuries in connection with the use of tetraethyl lead have occurred either in the process of manufacture of this substance or in the procedures of blending and ethylizing." The committee reviewed the evidence of studies it had conducted in Ohio on 252 workers exposed to lead in their occupations as chauffeurs and garage men. While the committee noted "a greater storage of lead in the bodies of those exposed to ethyl gasoline" and lead in the dust of garages dispensing ethyl, nothing conclusive could be established in the short time given to it. So, although the newspapers would miss the distinction--the New York Times, for instance, headlined it "Report: No Danger in Ethyl Gasoline" the committee had merely concluded that TEL could be manufactured without the loss of life. It did not give tetraethyl lead a clean bill of health or settle the question of its effect on the public health. In fact, it cautioned: It remains possible that if the use of leaded gasolines becomes widespread, conditions may arise very different from those studied by us which would render its use more of a hazard than would appear to be the case from this investigation. Longer experience may show that even such slight storage of lead...may lead eventually in susceptible individuals to recognizable or to chronic degenerative diseases of a less obvious character. ... In view of such possibilities the committee feels that the investigation begun under their direction must not be allowed to lapse .... The vast increase in the number of automobiles throughout the country makes the study of all such questions a matter of real importance from the standpoint of public health, and the committee urges strongly that a suitable appropriation be requested from Congress for the continuance of these investigations under the supervision of the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service. While proposing that the sale of leaded gasoline should go forward, regulated by the Surgeon General, the committee passed a resolution calling on the Public Health Service to conduct further studies. Separately, the president of the Society of Automotive Engineers called for additional investigations concerning lead's possible relation to sterility. And the American Chemical Society, which might have been supposed a lock-step supporter of Ethyl, proposed around this time that increased governmental regulation over chemicals "is a subject worthy of further discussion." Thus, even the industry's paid scientists were uneasy about the use of lead in gasoline. Yet none of these calls for further government action were ever acted upon, and it was this failure that gave Ethyl its opening. The PHS never conducted the studies, the Surgeon General never lobbied Congress to pay for them and, for the next forty years, all research on TEL's health impact would be underwritten by GM, Standard Oil, Du Pont, Ethyl and lead-industry trade associations. With the credulity-stretching statement of an Ethyl spokesman that the only purpose of GM and Standard Oil--"two of the largest units in the automobile and oil industry"--was "to conserve a vital natural resource," the company welcomed the committee's report as total vindication. "We plan to resume operations," Ethyl announced without delay the day of the report's release. In May 1926, one year after the sale of TEL-laced gasoline was suspended, signs appeared in gas stations: "Ethyl is back." BUT THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE Misrepresenting the Surgeon General's committee report findings and glossing over its call for further study, Ethyl medical consultant Robert Kehoe recalled in a 1928 article the government's abdication of its charge: "As it appeared from [the committee's] 'investigation that there was no evidence of immediate danger to the public health, it was thought that these necessarily expensive studies should not be repeated at present, at public expense, but that they should be continued at the expense of the industry most concerned, subject, however, to the supervision of the Public Health Service." His own study, Kehoe wrote unsurprisingly, failed to "show any evidence for the existence of such hazards." Others were less sanguine about the committee's report and Kehoe's summary of the evidence. Committee member Dr. David Edsall, dean of Harvard's School of Public Health, called the report incomplete and "half-baked." C.E.A. Winslow of Yale recommended that "the search for an investigation of antiknock compounds be continued intensively with the object of securing effective agents containing less poisonous metals (such as iron, nickel, tin, etc.) or no metals at all." Winslow unsuccessfully sought to have the committee mention alternatives to TEL in its final report, forwarding this recommendation to the PHS, along with correspondence from the Ford Motor Company. One letter to Winslow, which is missing from the PHS files in the National Archive but present in his Yale University archive, dated August 15, 1925, reads: Alcohols for motor fuel Further to my letter of June 19th: You may probably have observed the production of synthetic alcohol as brought by the Badische Anilin and Soda Fabrik [BASF of I.G. Farben], now being produced in Germany at the rate of 60,000 gallons per month. Such alcohol is reported to be produced for between 10 cents and 20 cents per gallon and has much promise as a mixture with hydrocarbon [gasoline] fuels to eliminate knocking and carbonization [signed] Wm. H. Smith, Ford Motor Co. Surgeon General Cunning was not interested in alternatives to lead, even though proof of their existence ought to have immediately thrown the veracity of all Ethyl utterances into question. Speaking in August 1925, for instance, Thomas Midgley had told a meeting of scientists, "So far as science knows at the present time, tetraethyl lead is the only material available which can bring about these [antiknock] results, which are of vital importance to the continued economic use by the general public of all automotive equipment, and unless a grave and inescapable hazard rests in the manufacture of tetraethyl lead, its abandonment cannot be justified." Midgley had conveniently overlooked his earlier, high-profile endorsement of ethanol, as would Kettering and the entire US press corps. Kettering was also forgetting Synthol, the octane-boosting alternative he had publicized just months earlier when it looked like Ethyl might be forced to close shop. With the government's de facto seal of approval in hand for TEL, Kettering never again mentioned Synthol. Summarizing his remarks before the Surgeon General's committee, the New York Times reported: "The experience of the company does not offer any promise that any such cheap and efficient anti-knock can be discovered to replace the lead." UNCLE SAM LENDS A HAND Far from heeding his committee's call for the initiation of further studies on the effects of widespread use of tetraethyl lead, the Surgeon General thrust himself quickly into the role of international cheerleader for Ethyl's lead gasoline additive. In 1928 England's Daily Mail quoted British scientists voicing fear over the potential public health hazard posed by TEL, which was soon to be introduced to the British market by the Anglo-American oil company brand Pratt's. Ethyl's new president, Earle Webb, apprised Surgeon General Cunning of this development and received a warm, familiar response. "Your courtesy in keeping us informed of such developments is helpful and I am grateful for its continuance," Cunning replied, before contacting 'the British ministry. Soon thereafter, England's Ministry of Health would give TEL a clean bill of health, referring to American findings. This would be hard to jibe with a soon-to-be-published report in the British Medical Journal on "the slow, subtle, insidious saturation of the system by infinitesimal doses of lead extending over a long period of time," but Cumming wasn't through yet. Foreshadowing years of sterling service on behalf of Ethyl, the Surgeon General, the nation's highest-ranking medical officer, would put pen to paper again in 1928, encouraging New York City sanitary officials to lift the city's ban on the use of TEL-laced gasoline. "There are no good grounds" for the ban, he implored them. In 1931 Cumming would further assist Ethyl's overseas marketing efforts. Cabling the PHS offices from an international conference in Paris, the Surgeon General directed his minions to send the Swiss minister of health favorable reports on Ethyl. In 1932 the du Pont family would temporarily shift party allegiance and support to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidential bid with a sizable contribution to his campaign fund. The Democratic Administration was swift to return the favor. A year after FDR's inauguration, the Surgeon General would busy himself writing letters of introduction for Ethyl officials to public health counterparts in foreign countries. "This will introduce you to Mr. E.W. Webb, President of the Ethyl Gasoline Corp." the letters began. Cumming helpfully assured recipients that Webb had consulted with the PHS and that the PHS had found Ethyl an excellent product and given it a clean bill of health. He also fired off missives advancing Ethyl's cause with pesky state legislatures and public health authorities in the United States who were erecting regulatory hurdles. By 1936 Ethyl fluid would be added to 90 percent of gasoline sold in America--a resounding commercial success. But even this would not be enough. Responding to a complaint lodged by Ethyl that year, the Federal Trade Commission issued a restraining order preventing competitors from criticizing leaded gasoline in the commercial marketplace. Ethyl gasoline, the FTC order read, "is entirely safe to the health of motorists and the public...and is not a narcotic in its effect, a poisonous dope, or dangerous to the life or health of a customer, purchaser, user or the general public." The FTC's action on Ethyl's behalf came in the wake of an ad by the makers of unleaded Cushing Gasoline, who meekly proposed, "It stands on its own merits and needs no dangerous chemicals-hence you can offer it to your customers without doubt or fear." ETHYLIZED SCIENCE Dr. Robert Kehoe of the University of Cincinnati, Ethyl's chief medical consultant, would express the opinion following the inconclusive 1926 report of the Surgeon General's committee (of which he was a member) that there was no basis for concluding that leaded fuels posed any health threat whatsoever. And while it is true that tetraethyl lead's opponents could point in 1924 to no exact scientific test of leaded gasoline emissions as incontrovertible proof of their hazards, there was a large body of evidence, dating back 3,000 years, that lead is poison. Though the principals must surely have been aware of this historical evidence, it will suffice to recap merely a few of the contemporaneous scientific descriptions of lead's poisonous effects. In 1910, for instance, Alice Hamilton completed a groundbreaking and widely reported study of the lead industries for the State of Illinois, finding pervasive worker poisoning and conditions markedly worse than in European industry. In 1914 Americans Henry Thomas and Kenneth Blackfan detailed pediatric lead-poisoning death in the case of a boy who ate white-lead paint bitten off a crib railing. By 1921, the year of Midgley's discovery of TEL as an octane-boosting gasoline additive, the weight of the evidence was such that America's National Lead Company, sworn enemy of the antilead movement, was forced to admit grudgingly that its product was indeed a poison, in all its many forms (e.g., carbonate of lead, lead oxides and sulfate and sulfide of lead). The following year, the League of Nations would recommend banning white-lead paints for interior use on health grounds, as many European countries had already done. Establishing a pattern of tolerance for this most dangerous element, the United States declined to adopt the league's resolution. The bankruptcy of TEL supporters' medical opinion was exposed at the time by Yandell Henderson and others. Harvard's Dr. Edsall testified at the Surgeon General's conference: For 100 years and more observations have been made as to the effect of having a noteworthy amount of lead dust around in any occupation. ... It is not a question, then, whether there is or is not a hazard....I am disposed to believe that the hazard is a noteworthy one. How severe I am not prepared to say. The only way in which one can determine how serious it is would be through a very large number of extremely carefully carried-out observations as to what the effects are upon a large number of human beings. By 1928, emboldened by a refreshingly compliant government and TEL's effective victory before the Surgeon General, National Lead and St. Joseph's Lead would form the Lead Industries Association to take back the ground ceded with Lead's 1921 admission. "Of late the lead industries have been receiving much undesirable publicity," LIA reminded its members, as if it had forgotten in the intervening years that its product was a deadly poison. For years to come, the LIA, on whose board Du Pont and Ethyl officers served, would carefully gather, fund, support and disseminate propaganda supporting its pro-lead views, fighting all who would stand in its way. This disinformation, along with the lack of an adequate regulatory framework and the expense and difficulty of scientifically proving lead's insidious impact-bought manufacturers of lead paint and lead gasoline more than fifty years of unjust deserts. THE KEHOE RULE Ethyl president Earle Webb once, listed Robert Kehoe as one of three men without whom Ethyl could not have done what it did, and surely this must be so. Hired by Kettering in 1924 on behalf of GM to study hazards of TEL manufacturing plants, the young toxicologist quickly demonstrated the unerring instinct for pleasing one's masters that guarantees one employment of a more lasting nature. In 1925 he was appointed chief medical consultant of the Ethyl Corporation and remained in the post until his retirement in 1958. But it was in Kehoe's day job, as the outspoken director of the Kettering Laboratory--founded with an initial $130,000 gift from GM, Du Pont and Ethyl at the University of Cincinnati, where the lead industry paid Kehoe's salary for half a century--that he really rose to the challenge of promoting TEL. Against Kehoe's lab and decades of its pseudoscience, the general and unfunded concerns of the public health community were doomed for close to fifty years. As Kehoe told a Senate committee with rare accuracy in 1966. "at present, this [Kettering] Laboratory is the only source of new information on this subject [occupational and public health standards for lead] and its conclusions have a wide influence in this country and abroad in shaping the point of view and the activities, with respect to this question, of those who are responsible for industrial and public hygiene." Working on Ethyl's behalf and as a consultant to the lead industry until shortly before his death in 1992, at 99, Kehoe put in exceptionally good innings. (His lab would also certify the safety of the refrigerant Freon, subject of another environmentally insensitive GM patent that would earn hundreds of millions before it was outlawed.) Summing up the findings of a lifetime, Kehoe told Congress that he and his colleagues "had been looking for 30 years for evidence of bad effects from leaded gasoline in the general population and had found none." The credibility of his research had already been undercut and would soon be destroyed. But for many years, Kehoe's findings had been vouched for by semi-private organizations, including the American Public Health Association and the American Medical Association. Although they never undertook to investigate or independently verify his findings, their lap-dog approvals served to bulk up the scholarship in a field that was sparsely scholared. Kehoe's central belief--criticized by medical authorities from Yale, Harvard and Columbia at the Surgeon General's original 1925 conference and thoroughly discredited today, though still embraced by the lead-additive industry--was that lead appeared naturally in the human body; that the high blood-lead levels his test subjects exhibited were normal and healthy. In fact, independent researchers later realized, Kehoe's control patients--the ones who wouldn't be exposed to leaded gas in his studies--were invariably already saturated with lead, which had the effect of making exposed persons' high lead load appear less worrisome. Such later findings confirmed the assertions of Yandell Henderson and others who criticized Kehoe's methodology in 1925 before the Surgeon General's conference. Harvard's Dr. Edsall had reminded the Surgeon General, "In spite of what Dr. Kehoe has just said, I think that his work will have to be neglected for the reason that the finding of lead in such a large proportion of control people means that however carefully these observations were made there was something wrong technically." Late in his career, Kehoe contended that lead levels in gasoline could--and should be raised. In recent years, a new generation of academics has singled out Robert Kehoe as the father of a rule, or paradigm, of profound importance, one that was to govern American industry and its parade of hazardous products for much of the twentieth century. By relying on what Jerome Nriagu of the University of Michigan has called the cascading uncertainty rule ("There is always uncertainty to be found in a world of imperfect information"), the lead industry and makers and marketers of TEL gasoline additives were able to argue in 1925: "You say it's dangerous. We say it's not. Prove us wrong." (Or, as Nriagu prefers, "Show me the data.") They still do. As a result, Ethyl had its cake and ate it, several times. If the company's substance checked out as safe, then it would have been shown to have behaved responsibly. If not, it would take an eternity to prove, during which time the company could keep challenging test results and calling for more data. "Both possible outcomes," the historian Alan Loeb has written, "accommodated Ethyl. The general public was dealt all the risk and Ethyl and its owners were insulated from responsibility. To the extent that there was a health consequence, the Kehoe rule placed the burden upon the public." In the past fifty years, nuclear power, tobacco, chemical, asbestos, coal, pesticide and automobile interests have adopted strategies similar to the one developed by Kehoe. Clutching most of the technology and all of the research capital in their own hands, they'll say "Prove us wrong, and we'll change." But confronted with damning evidence, they'll repeatedly challenge the methodology of the studies or the bias of researchers. All of which takes time. When these defenses fail, the whole notion of extrapolating from test results on animals might be questioned. As Professor Herbert Needleman of the University of Pittsburgh has observed, because toxins are not tested on humans, this effectively means that no agent can ever be demonstrated as toxic to industry's satisfaction. Today, application of the Kehoe Rule has special meaning, as multinational corporations seek to introduce myriad genetically engineered crops and products prior to rigorous independent scientific testing. Once again, the burden of proof' is being subtly shifted to the doubters, with the entire world cast in the role of guinea pig. In 1925 Haven Emerson, a Columbia professor of public health and former New York health commissioner, said of the TEL experience, "Up to the present time we have almost invariably got our first inkling of a new industrial chemical hazard by some human catastrophe... it seems rather pitiable in a country of such wealth in means and knowledge that we had to wait for a series of human catastrophes to develop the demand for a series of animal experiments." LEAD PAINT VS. LEAD GAS Working alongside Kehoe at first was the Lead Industries Association. Formed primarily to fight restrictions on the use of lead paint, the LIA was also ready to serve as a sort of all-purpose lead-issue obfuscator. Though it wouldn't fund much actual research, the LIA would underwrite the original studies at Harvard in the twenties that isolated a new pseudo-psychological malady named "pica," the so-called unnatural impulse of some small children, mostly nonwhite, to stick lead paint chips in their mouths. Much to LIA's chagrin, Kehoe would break ranks with them on the subject of lead paint, judging their product indefensible in light of all small children's tendency to put things in their mouths. Coming from the lead-happy Kehoe, this was a grim diagnosis indeed. Happily for the doctor, in 1958 LIA and the former American Zinc Institute founded another industry advocacy group, the International Lead Zinc Research Organization, with an eye to promoting global use of the lead additive in fuel and protecting makers of cadmium, the toxic zinc relation often found in batteries. Kehoe and Ethyl would find a happier home at ILZRO, which would fund the occasional scientific study. Dr. Paul Mushak, visiting professor of pediatric toxicology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, told The Nation that the industry has tended to underwrite research toward the margins of relevant issues, so as to avoid discovering something it might not like. Kehoe's split with LIA and the lead-paint camp was, oddly, beneficial for both parties. Ever since, the lead-paint and lead-gasoline interests have been able to point the finger at one another when assessing their own responsibility for the global lead-pollution problem, buying more time to sell their products and more time to distance themselves from potential liability. ETHYL CHANGES HANDS By the late thirties Ethyl had sewed up the US market, as noted, and was making major inroads in Europe. After World War II, Third World markets would begin to be opened. On the surface things looked pretty good for the company, which by now had blanketed the earth with its "gift of God." As "The Ethyl Story," an insert in the Ethyl corporation's annual report for 1963, observed with enthusiasm, "today, lead alkyl antiknock compounds are used in more than 98 percent of all gasoline sold in the United States and in billions of gallons more sold in the rest of the world. Leaded gasoline is available at 200,000 service stations in this country and thousands of others around the globe." Strange it was, then, that in 1962 GM and Standard suddenly dumped the Ethyl Corporation on the market. Even more surprising to many was the buyer, the tiny Albermarle Paper Manufacturing Company of Richmond, Virginia, and the structure of the deal: It was the modem world's first recorded leveraged buyout. Albemarle, owned by the Gottwald family, had acquired Ethyl, eighteen times its size, with $200 million of borrowed money, making the front page of the New York Times. "It was like a Mom and Pop grocery buying the A&P!" remarked an incredulous Monroe Jackson Rathbone, Standard Oil of New Jersey's president, after presumably taking a back seat in the negotiations. No one who's talking knows why GM wanted out of Ethyl in 1962. Ethyl's official historian notes dryly that profits were flat in the late fifties. The company's TEL patents had expired in 1947, and this allowed Nalco, PPG and Houston Chemical to get into the TEL game on the back of Ethyl's yeoman work. But Ethyl was still the 800-pound gorilla in the tetraethyl arena; overall, profits were pleasingly plump and Ethyl's annual reports were upbeat. A more important factor may have been the sense that antitrust was in the air, with the du Pont family being ordered by the government during this period to divest billions in GM shares. Ethyl's incestuous paternity and its unseemly relations with Nazi Germany during World War II (see sidebar) were reasons to avoid closer scrutiny by a nosy government. And, just perhaps, GM might have known something heavy was coming. Ethyl's new owners would, in fact, soon find themselves staring at more worrisome smoke signals than a patch of duff profits. In July 1943 the Los Angeles Times reported the city's first major smog episode. In 1950 Dr. Arie Haagen-Smit reported that the interaction of hydrocarbons (HC) and oxides of nitrogen (NOX) caused smog in Los Angeles. By 1953 automobiles would be identified as the region's largest source of hydrocarbons. Though they may or may not have known it in 1962, the makers of TEL would soon be staring down the barrel of a gun--the anti-air pollution movement. American auto makers saw the threat that air pollution posed to their business. In the mid-fifties they'd concluded a formal but secret agreement among themselves to license pollution-control technologies jointly and not publicize discoveries in the area without prior approval of all the signatories, a preemptive strike against those who would pressure them to install costly emissions controls. The effect of their pact would be to stifle the development of these much-needed devices and technologies. When their agreement came to the Justice Department's attention in 1969, the fallout from the exposure of their perfidy and mounting awareness of the nation's out-of-control smog problem would guarantee passage of air-pollution laws that would eventually put lead out of business in America. By this time, the legislative mood had changed as it pertained to the automobile, fueled in large measure by the work--and persecution, by GM-of a young lawyer and Congressional aide named Ralph Nader, who, after raising serious questions about auto safety, had been followed and harassed by GM's private detectives. Crucially, too, by 1969 the entire Kehoe view of natural human lead burdens had been knocked out--with one punch-by Dr. Clair Patterson, a California Institute of Technology geochemist. A onetime member of the Manhattan Project, Patterson is widely credited with giving us our most accurate estimate of the earth's age--4.55 billion years. With the publication in 1965 of his seminal work, "Contaminated and Natural Lead Environments of Man," in the Archives of Environmental Health, the scientific world had its hardest proof ever that high background lead levels in industrial lands were man-made and endemic. Noticing heavy planetary lead contamination in the process of establishing the age of the planet, Patterson detailed how industrial man had raised his lead burden 100 times and levels of atmospheric lead 1,000 times. Kehoe's rule of error ended in a flash. Kehoe held his head high in his remarks to Edmund Muskie's Congressional clean air subcommittee in 1966, but Patterson had turned him into an academic train wreck. Unlike Kehoe, Patterson utilized state-of-the-art methods to avoid subject contamination with background lead. Analyzing the 1,600-year-old bones of pre-Columbian humans, he showed that the twentieth-century human lead burden was seriously elevated. Though Patterson's work was widely hailed by the scientific community (it was the reason Kehoe was humored, rather than respected, by the Muskie committee), the paper earned the professor a visit from representatives of the Ethyl corporation, who, in Patterson's words, tried to "buy me out through research support that would yield results favorable to their cause." Instead of joining forces with Ethyl, Patterson delivered a lecture assailing the company's activities and predicting the demise of their TEL operation. Following these events, his longstanding contract with the Public Health Service was not renewed, nor was a substantial contract with the American Petroleum Institute. Members of the board of trustees at Cal Tech leaned on the chairman of his department to fire him. Others have alleged that Ethyl offered to endow a chair at Cal Tech if Patterson was sent packing. In January 1969 the four major US auto companies and their trade association--along with seven manufacturers of trucks and cabs, listed as co-conspirators--were accused by the Justice Department of conspiracy to delay development and use of devices to control air pollution from cars, based on their secret agreement. Though they would settle the government's suit in September by agreeing to terminate their compact as well as all joint research, publicity or lobbying on emissions issues, Detroit's position vis-a-vis air pollution had been severely compromised. Ethyl was on its own now, and it was fair and easy game to take the fall. On January 14, 1970, GM president Ed Cole announced to a flabbergasted audience the company's intention to meet pending clean-air laws with catalytic converters beginning in 1974. Attached to automotive exhaust systems, these devices trap many harmful emissions. However, the catalysts' active element, platinum, is expensive, a real problem when it is rendered instantly inoperative (and the car undrivable) by the lead in "ethylized" gasoline. Farewell, then, leaded gasoline. Ethyl was livid. As an authorized corporate biographer wrote some years later, "Here was General Motors, which had fathered the additive, calling for its demise! And it struck some people as incongruous--not to use a harsher word--for General Motors to sell half of what was essentially a lead additive firm for many millions and then to advocate annihilation of the lead antiknock business." "'Get the lead out' has become a slogan in every household," Lawrence Blanchard Jr., an Ethyl exec, complained. "I still stay awake some nights trying to figure out how we got into this mess." BIG LEAD FIGHTS BACK Tetraethyl lead was no longer GM's concern. Nor was it the concern of other auto makers, who followed suit announcing that they too would adopt the catalyst to meet ever-tightening federal emissions standards. Du Pont and Ethyl, on the other hand--along with a ragtag bunch of cheapskate oilmen who hoped to avoid upgrading their refineries to produce unleaded gasoline of sufficiently high octane--still cared a lot about American sales of TEL. When the EPA launched the first of several halfhearted attempts to begin removing lead from gasoline, lead's corporate affinity group fought back with a ferocity that bespoke major arrogance and even greater desperation. No sooner had the EPA announced a scheduled phaseout, setting a reduced lead content standard for gasoline in 1974, than it was sued by Ethyl and Du Pont, who claimed they had been deprived of property rights. In that same year, a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit set aside the EPA's lead regulations as "arbitrary and capricious." Ethyl had argued that "actual harm" must be shown, not just "significant risk," before their product could be outlawed, and the panel agreed. That Ethyl could make the argument at all was a troubling reminder that the executive and legislative branches of the United States government had signally failed to heed the Surgeon General's committee's original request for funding in 1926 for more independent research, leaving the driving, scientifically speaking, to Robert Kehoe. In 1976 the full United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit overturned the decision against the EPA, finding that "significant risk" was adequate foundation for the agency's action against lead and within its authority. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, a longtime Ethyl director when he was a Virginia corporate lawyer, didn't need to recuse himself, as the Court refused to hear an appeal brought by TEL makers Ethyl, Du Pont, Nalco and PPG, as well as the National Petroleum Refiners Association and four oil companies. Ethyl's excitable Blanchard lashed out, "The whole proceeding against an industry that has made invaluable contributions to the American economy for more than fifty years is the worst example of fanaticism since the New England witch hunts in the Seventeenth Century." Fighting on the beaches and fighting on the seas, an impassioned Ethyl wasn't going to go down easy, urging a reprieve for leaded fuel at a 1979 meeting of the Petrochemical Energy Group. Soon after, the company's oil industry amigos would sound the alarm for a mysterious "octane crisis" on account of an alleged increase in competition for aromatics, crude oil components that are mainstays of the plastics and synthetics businesses, as well as unleaded gasoline octane boosters. To combat the crisis, they requested an EPA slowdown on the gradual phaseout of lead. The petrochemical industry--led by Du Pont, Monsanto and Dow--would simultaneously launch an intensive lobbying campaign to delay the scheduled lead phaseout, charging, in a reminiscent tack, that the newly discovered dearth of aromatics "threatens the jobs of the 14 million Americans directly dependent and the 29 million Americans indirectly dependent on the petrochemical industry for employment." The ever-hopeful lead cabal's dreams were cruelly dashed in early 1982, after word leaked out of Vice President George Bush's Task Force on Regulatory Relief that the newly elected Reagan Administration planned to relax or eliminate the US lead phaseout. Recognizing its cue, Du Pont formally called upon the EPA to rescind all lead regulations. EPA Administrator Ann Gorsuch was only too pleased to comply, but she unwittingly launched a firestorm of bad publicity in advance of an announcement by telling a visiting refiner with a big mouth that she would not enforce violations of current lead limits because the regulations would soon be repealed. When Gorsuch's remarks appeared in the newspapers (and were lampooned in the comic strip Doonesbury), Reagan's EPA would, under heavy political pressure, strike a compromise that effectively sped up the phaseout. Once again, Ethyl had been let down by old friends. THE NEW SCIENCE OF LEAD Ethyl and Octel continued to whine, but by 1984 the health benefits of America's lead phaseout had become too remarkable to ignore, and it was this fact that ultimately ended lead's reign in America. The harmful effects of lead at lower and lower concentrations had been shown by independent studies in the late seventies and early eighties, and by now PHS was at long last settling in with the antilead camp. EPA economist Joel Schwartz, assigned by his Reaganaut superiors to examine the impact of the lead phaseout on small refiners preparatory to phasing lead back in, went rogue and reported back instead on the impact of the phaseout's early years on American blood-lead levels, which the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta had been independently compiling. The CDC's findings were startling, contradicting everything leadheads of the Kehoe school held dear. Between 1976 and 1980 the EPA would report, the amount of lead consumed in gasoline dropped 50 percent. Over the same period, blood-lead levels dropped 37 percent. The EPA estimated that the public benefits of the phaseout, which included reduced medical costs and lower maintenance for cars, had already exceeded costs by $700 million. Between 1975 and 1984 lead for gasoline consumption dropped 73 percent, while ambient air lead decreased 71 percent (see graph). The Lead Industries Association was so angry with the data the EPA had corralled that in June 1984 it sued the CDC, which had impaneled its lead experts to prepare an updated statement on childhood lead poisoning for the nation's medical and public health community (the suit was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds). Schwartz told The Nation that the collection of lead data was hindered by the Reagan Administration, which, early in its term, prohibited the CDC from requiring lead-screening programs to report results to it, figures that it would then publish each quarter in the scientific journal Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Reports. Subsequently, the CDC was prohibited from even inquiring about lead-screening program results. As more impartial studies were funded, however, the common-sense objections to leaded gas raised by public health campaigners in the twenties only seemed more prescient. Yandell Henderson, Alice Hamilton, David Edsall and numerous other eminent public health scholars had precisely predicted the problem sixty years earlier, before it became a global condition. Sadly, they were ignored. Dispersed into the air in automobile exhaust, lead dust would be no more healthy than it was when lead smelting was identified as a poisonous pastime 3,000 years ago. Moreover, as with many industrial toxins, the perceived acceptable level of exposure fell as further studies were finally carried out. In the fifties and sixties, blood-lead levels of less than 60 micrograms (a microgram is a millionth of a gram) per deciliter (one-tenth of a liter) of blood (mcg/dl) were considered acceptable by America's medical establishment, not requiring intervention, because overt symptoms of lead poisoning, such as convulsions, do not typically occur below this level. Prior to that, dating back to the twenties, lead poisoning usually had to be severe enough to cause death or severe brain damage to be considered a diagnosed poisoning event. A corresponding blood-lead level of 80-100 mcg/dl or possibly higher might be imputed. In the intervening years, the acceptable level has dropped steadily from 40 mcg/dl to 30 to 25 and now to 10 or below. Though the lead industry advocacy groups cling to the old numbers, the CDC, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the EPA and the National Academy of Sciences have agreed that the ill-health effects beginning at 10 mcg/dl are established fact, "an unprecedented coherence of opinion in the field of neurotoxicology." In 1994 a letter to the editors of the medical journal Pediatrics, several prominent lead research doctors addressing industry naysayers wrote, "If this massive database is not persuasive for lead, then no other chemical can be considered to have been demonstrated to be toxic." Completing a sequence familiar to pollution watchers, a recent review of scientific research by the National Research Council has led it to conclude, "There is growing evidence that there is no effective threshold for some of the adverse effects of lead." Children are especially at risk. Summarizing its study of the relevant science, the Department of Housing and Urban Development wrote, "There does not yet appear to be a discernible threshold for the adverse effects of lead on the young." In a 90,000-word 1997 review of all scientific evidence on the subject, Erik Millstone of the Science and Technology Policy Research Unit at Sussex University concluded that children suffer ill effects from lead at especially low exposures--much lower than was thought even recently--including reduced IQ, behavioral and learning difficulties and hyperactivity. Children are 4-5 times more susceptible to the effects of lead than adults. According to the CDC this is because children's digestive systems absorb more lead than adults--40-50 percent of that ingested versus 10-15 percent. In addition to breathing it in, children will ingest large quantities of airborne lead when it settles on soil, dust, food and playthings, which eventually contact their mouths. Based on research linking the two, in 1998 the Justice Department began studying the impact of childhood lead exposure on juvenile delinquent behavior. Perhaps the only encouraging news in any discussion of leaded gasoline is how readily blood-lead levels fall when its use is trimmed or eliminated. The US phaseout of lead began in 1975 and was largely complete by 1986. Based on data collected in more than sixty US cities by the CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services reported that blood-lead levels in Americans aged 1-74 had declined 78 percent between 1978 and 1991. For children aged 1-5, blood-lead levels decreased 76 percent, from 15.0 to 3.6 mcg/dl. The percent of children with bloodlead levels greater than or equal to 10 micrograms declined from 88 percent to 9 percent. The British Medical Journal reported three years ago that since Britain's lead phaseout began, bloodlead levels there had fallen by two-thirds. In New York City, where the war against tetraethyl lead can be said to have first begun with its ban in 1925, Dr. Sergio Piomelli, a hematologist at Columbia University's Children's Hospital, has reported that before the US lead phaseout began, 30,000 out of 100,000 New York City children tested had elevated lead levels; after the phaseout was complete, 1,500 of 100,000 had similarly high levels. In 2000, he told The Nation, the affected population is even smaller. Still, one of the most telling measures of the extent of human lead contamination--careful measurement of lead levels in the bones of our preindustrial ancestors--argues against too much backslapping. A 1992 article in The New England Journal of Medicine revealed that pre-Columbian inhabitants of North America had average blood-lead levels 625 times lower than the current "safe" level of 10 mcg/dl. EASTWARD, HO! Foreign custom kept Ethyl in business, and it put Octel on the map. In the seventies, with the auto industry embracing catalytic converters and talk of a lead phaseout circulating, the US market seemed certain to shrink, making foreign profits increasingly important to the lead giants. Casting back over 1972 in its annual report for that year, Ethyl reminded shareholders, "Continued penetration of expanding world markets would lessen any...impact on Ethyl's total antiknock sales." The following year, noting growing reservations about the American market, it went on to recall: "Sales of antiknock compounds continued to increase in all overseas markets in 1973. To promote this growth, Ethyl International added antiknock bulk terminals in the Far East, Middle East and South America. Construction of other terminals in various areas of the world is planned in 1974 and 1975." Ethyl further elaborated its foreign strategy in 1974: "Most foreign countries have recognized the importance of the role lead antiknocks play in conserving crude oil in this period of shortages. ... we believe antiknocks will continue to constitute a major product of the Company for years to come whether or not there is a domestic reduction in use of lead in gasoline." By 1979 the company would observe, "It is worth noting that during the second half of 1979, for the first time, Ethyl's foreign sales of lead antiknock compounds exceeded domestic sales." Ethyl and Octel both were additionally fortunate in being able to manipulate their prices to keep profit levels high. As Octel reported in a 1998 SEC filing, "From 1989 to 1995, the Company was able to substantially offset the financial effects of the declining demand for TEL through higher TEL pricing. The magnitude of these price increases reflected the cost effectiveness of TEL as an octane enhancer as well as the high cost of converting refineries to produce higher octane grades of fuel." In other words, they had their customers over a barrel. LEAD FOR THE POOR The sad, bitter fruit of Ethyl's and Octel's missionary work on behalf of leaded gasoline lies in its prevalence in the Third World today. Given the current state of knowledge regarding the hazards of lead, this constitutes a particularly egregious example of environmental racism. While more than 80 percent of the heaviest lead-using countries today are low income, 70 percent of low lead users (those that have phased out lead or allow only very low levels) are high income. While Americans cruise their freeways burning exclusively unleaded gasoline, as of 1996, 93 percent of all gasoline sold in Africa contained lead, 94 percent in the Middle East, 30 percent in Asia and 35 percent in Latin America. According to the World Bank, 1.7 billion urbanites in developing nations are in danger of lead poisoning, including neurological damage, high blood pressure and heart disease from airborne lead, 90 percent of which is attributable: to leaded gasoline. Excessive exposure to lead causes 200,000-500,000 cases of hypertension in the Third World, with 400 deaths per year attributable to lead exposure in the late eighties. In Mexico City, one of the world's most polluted (and populous) cities, 4 million cars pump an estimated 32 tons of lead each day into the air. In Jakarta, one and a half tons enters the atmosphere every twenty-four hours. A research scientist with the Canadian National Water Research Institute performed roadside-dust analyses in Nigeria that revealed as much as 6,000 parts per million of lead. In the United States, lead dust is considered hazardous to children at 600 ppm (see chart). In Alexandria, Egypt, where gas is heavily leaded, concentrations of TEL and air-lead levels are often double the European Union's recommended level, and traffic controllers have been found to suffer central nervous system dysfunction. In Cairo more than 800 infants die annually because of maternal exposure to lead. Daytime air-lead levels in Buenos Aires have been measured at 3.9 grams per cubic meter versus the twenty-four-hour EU limit of 1 gram per cubic meter. The continued use of TEL is especially troubling in light of the fact that the Third World's car population is multiplying rapidly, a situation that will only intensify if multinational automobile manufacturers have their way. Although the Chinese government has recently expressed its intention to remove lead from its fuel, other nations that haven't are already seeing vehicular population explosions like that predicted for China. Prodded by Western lead manufacturers, some countries have even allowed the lead content in their gasoline to be increased. Although it has since moved toward deleading its gasoline, India, for instance, more than doubled the amount of lead permitted in its gasoline (from 0.22 to 0.56 grams per liter) during the seventies and eighties; in Uganda, the number soared from 0.58 to 0.84 grams per liter, higher than was ever typical in the West. Never known for their philanthropy, refiners in poorer nations are disinclined to upgrade their refineries so as to obtain higher octane gasolines without using lead. Ironically, in the nineties the Venezuelan state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, exported unleaded gasoline. But it was importing TEL and adding it to all gasoline sold for domestic use--this in the country with the greatest number of automobiles per capita in Latin America. By way of explanation, it is perhaps not unhelpful to know that several high-ranking officials of the state oil company held consultancies with companies that sell lead additives to the country. Among the consequences of this corrupt arrangement: According to a 1991 study 63 percent of newborns studied had blood-lead levels in excess of US "safe" levels. Environmental standards in Third World countries tend to be lax. Where clean-air laws and unleaded gasoline do not exist, there is no impetus for automobile manufacturers to install catalytic converters in their cars. With the rapid growth in automobile use and the growing size of these countries' fleets, coupled with low vehicle-turnover rates (car lives of fifteen years are not at all uncommon in low-income countries) and minimal maintenance, air pollution becomes a much greater hazard. According to the World Health Organization, two-thirds of India's pollution is generated today by vehicles, compared with only 24 percent in 1971; the WHO estimates that 7,500 deaths in New Delhi each year are related to air pollution. Finally, because lead rums catalytic converters and fouls modern engine-management computers, leaded gasoline prevents motorists in these countries from using more efficient, less-polluting modern vehicles even if they want to. Where cars equipped with catalysts are sold as new or used vehicles, a predominantly leaded fuel supply invites motorists to either remove the air-cleansing catalysts or destroy them by filling their cars with leaded fuel. IT'S CLEANUP TIME The public health benefits and cost savings to societies of removing lead from gasoline are so vast that the business-friendly World Bank was moved--at a 1996 UN conference in Turkey, where leaded gas still accounts for 82 percent of the market--to call for a complete global phaseout. The bank calculated that the United States had saved more than $10 for every $1 it invested in its conversion to unleaded, by reducing health costs, saving on engine maintenance and improving fuel efficiency with modern engine technologies. Further claiming that no-lead fuel may increase engine life by as much as 150 percent, the bank called for an immediate five-year phaseout. (Buttressing the World Bank's public-spirited campaign, undoubtedly, is the realization that many of the state-owned oil companies currently producing leaded gasoline will require private investment-and possibly ownership--to finance refinery upgrades to produce high-octane unleaded fuels.) Unsurprisingly, the industry, which favors phaseouts of twenty-years' duration and more, responded testily: "Octel and the World Bank have been discussing the transition from leaded to unleaded gasoline for a long time," a spokesman told the Chemical Marketing Reporter in 1996. "It isn't really appropriate for the World Bank to apply US studies and data to the phaseout of lead in Third World countries." Ethyl and Octel both have strategies for dealing with Third World nations seeking to go unleaded. In separate interviews with The Nation, they admitted advising their remaining customers to go slow. As Ethyl's vice president of international sales, Bob Yondola, explained: "As countries have the infrastructure to support unleaded gasoline, have the monies for their people to buy the new cars, etc., etc., it makes sense [to switch to unleaded gas]. But if you've got some parts of the world where their infrastructure is still--you know, they need to come up with food and water, and sewers... for their people. And there are still places in the world like that. Then, I mean, getting the lead out of the gasoline, to me, wouldn't make as much sense as having sewers." Associated Octel's public affairs spokesman Bob Larbey, since retired, said his firm will help Third Word refiners clean up their contaminated lead operations, for a fee. "But," he said, "we talk to developing countries. For example, refiners come to us and say, 'We want to get the lead out,' because we're refinery experts, you see, and we could advise them on how they could best phase lead out, with what strategy. I think if we argue anything at all, we say, 'Well, if you're going to go out of lead, fine, let's talk a bit, but there's no need, this is the lead in health information, there's no proven adverse health affect, and so there's no need for you to do it precipitously. You might not want to take twenty years [as in the European phaseout] but really, there's no need to rush.' Because if you replaced it with other components of petrol then there's a risk from anything. ... Petrol itself is a risk without lead." The lead industry clutches the alleged dangers of other octane-enhancing gasoline additives near to its bosom. While admitting the hazard of his company's product, one Octel executive told the New York Times that leaded fuel is an "economic and environmental bargain" for the Third World because it improves fuel economy, which lowers other emissions like benzene, also found in gasoline. "Getting rid of one environmental risk won't necessarily improve public health if you replace it with greater risks," yet another spokesman for Octel's affiliate told the Chemical Marketing Reporter. Benzene, the hazard to which lead enthusiasts refer most often, can be used by refiners to boost octane cheaply in the absence of lead. But it isn't mandatory, and any sensible lead-reduction regulation would limit its use. Moreover, while as many as 5,000 Americans died annually from lead-related heart disease prior to the lead phaseout, only forty-seven people developed cancer from the use of benzene as a lead replacement. "The health impacts of aromatics [like benzene] are several orders of magnitude less than that of lead," said a World Bank spokesperson. DIVERSIFICATION AND SPINOFF Selling lead is an unusually profitable business. As Ethyl's 1995 report to shareholders blandly observes, lead additive sales accounted for 26 percent of gross revenues, but 74 percent of its profit. In 1995 the New York Times wrote of the profit bonanza Octel's then-owner, Great Lakes Chemical, had stumbled upon when, searching for sources of bromine for fire retardants, it landed in the TEL business. Far from petering out, demand for leaded gasoline, while shrinking, has remained far stronger than anyone predicted, especially in the third world. Meanwhile, every other major producer has stopped making the additives, known as tetraethyl lead, or TEL. That has left Great Lakes with an unexpected flood of profits and 90 percent of a market that no one else will enter because of the environmental problems associated with lead and the huge capital costs of building a new plant. Octel's old plant, along the Manchester Ship Canal outside Liverpool, bankrolled immense growth for Great Lakes, allowing it to double in size within five years (to $5 billion in annual revenue) following its acquisition of Octel, all the while maintaining a hefty 15 percent annual operating profit. As recently as 1977 Great Lakes had only $50 million in operating revenue. Years of lead profits have funded major diversification efforts for Ethyl and its owners, led by the Gottwald family of Richmond. The company's annual report for 1996 revealed "a long-running strategy: namely, using Ethyl's significant cash flow from lead antiknocks to build a self-supporting major business and earnings stream in the petroleum additives industry." By 1983 Ethyl had become "the world's largest producer of organo-metallic chemicals." It would expand its production for the petroleum industry (including the purchase of the petroleum additives divisions of Amoco and Texaco), as well as acquire interests in other specialty chemicals, plastics and aluminum products, oil, gas and coal. Ethyl would also invest billions in pharmaceuticals, biotech research, semiconductors and life insurance. At great expense, it would develop a serene corporate campus of seventy acres along the banks of the James River in Richmond. As the science against TEL mounted and government regulation stiffened, Ethyl began a series of restincturings that today find its TEL business standing suspiciously alone. In 1989 Ethyl spun off Tredegar Industries, a group it created to hold its aluminum, plastics and energy businesses. For every Ethyl share they held, investors would receive prorated shares in the new company. Voila! Limited liability. Later Ethyl would spin off its billion-dollar insurance company, First Colony Life. In 1994 Ethyl would split up its chemical and petroleum additives division and create a wholly owned subsidiary, Albemarle Corporation, named after the 100-year-old paper company that bought Ethyl (which retained its name) in 1962. One of the main enterprises of Albemarle, ironically, is supplying Ethyl with MMT under a long-term agreement. MMT is another gasoline additive (made of manganese and barely sold in the United States) with suspected health consequences. In 1994 Ethyl and its Albemarle offspring did a rousing $48 million of business together. Oddly, for a company that claims to be proud of its product (so proud that under an obscure provision of NAFTA it sued the Canadian government for outlawing MMT) Ethyl declined to tell Automobile Magazine in 1999 in which countries it sold MMT to refiners, presumably because it fears awakening consumers to the presence of its manganese additive. Because it was itself spun off to a management team from Great Lakes Chemical, Octel remains highly concentrated in lead, with TEL representing 85 percent of its business in 1996. Although CEO Dennis Kerrison has announced his intention to develop non-TEL businesses into core businesses by 2005, "even the most extreme estimates allow for the continued use of leaded petrol in some parts of the world until at least the year 2010." Off the record, company officials admit they could be selling lead in 2020 and beyond. Until then, Octel, "through the specialist facilities of Octel Environmental, provides a range of decontamination, destruction, removal and recycling services to refineries throughout the world to help to reduce the environmental impact of toxic lead residues." Under its Product Stewardship Programme--"a public service," Octel calls it--fifty tons of lead alkyl sludge were removed from New Zealand refineries s part of a cleanup beginning in 1996. Octel had supplied the refineries with 4,000 tons of TEL annually for years. So, in a crowning irony, poisoned motorists in New Zealand and around the world will, through higher gasoline prices, pay Octel (and Ethyl) to clean up the mess the TEL barons and their refinery customers made. WILL THE SUN EVER SET ON LEAD? Associated Octel's fiftieth-anniversary catalogue affectionately quotes a letter the company received from a former technical services manager in 1982, when Britain's antilead campaign kicked off in earnest: "Many funerals have been arranged for lead in petrol--1926, 1943, 1954, 1970, etc.--as I can recall. The grave has been dug, the service arranged, the coffin prepared, the parson and mourners instructed, but the body just would not lie down in the coffin." Though the catalogue was published in 1988, the sentimental hope that it's not over yet is secretly still held by Octel and Ethyl, and all the others who continue to push leaded gasoline. But the body of tetraethyl lead must be made to lie down in its coffin. The five-year phaseout of leaded gasoline favored by the World Bank in 1996 makes inarguable moral and business sense--two things that don't always go together, especially at the World Bank. The only ones arguing otherwise are Octel, Ethyl and the small coterie of self-interested researchers and narrowly trained toxicological technicians who've lived on the industry's tab for the last thirty years, since Robert Kehoe stepped down. Many European nations have banned leaded gas for 2000. Progress has been made. But somehow Ethyl and Octel will be splitting Third World profits for years to come. If the science was ever in doubt (and it really wasn't), the facts are now incontrovertible. Leaded gasoline is dangerous. When safer alternatives are available, as they always have been, leaded gasoline's benefits are nil. It is not good for cars, and it prevents the use of modern emissions reduction equipment, like catalytic converters, which, owing to the greenhouse effect, the world needs more desperately now than even TEL's most crass (and main) historic selling point is no longer valid: It isn't even cheap. There is at least one simple lesson to be drawn from the tetraethyl lead story. Industry cannot be trusted to regulate itself, as Clair Patterson--the man who dated the earth and single-handedly deflated ethylized science--once remarked. "It is not just a mistake for public health agencies to cooperate and collaborate with industries in investigating and deciding whether public health is endangered--it is a direct abrogation and violation of the duties and responsibilities of those public health organizations." As for General Motors, Du Pont, Standard Oil, Ethyl, Associated Octel and rest of the lead cabal, it's conceivable they'll be hauled into court sooner or later, which is one reason these companies all take such an active interest in so-called tort reform legislation. You would too, if you had been a key actor in one of the most tortious episodes of twentieth-century industrial history. We can hope that Congress doesn't give them a free pass, but no matter what, it will be the citizenry that will pay any financial bills coming due. They've already paid with their health. Many of the effects of childhood lead exposure are irreversible. These businesses should be shut down. And to make sure they don't forget their heinous experience, all these companies ought to open their archives to independent review, to assist in assembling the information that will help lay TEL down to eternal rest, to help show the world what went wrong when common sense was put on hold in the name of profit. In the face of all that is known today, the leaderships of foreign countries who continue to poison their people with TEL should be harangued to phase out lead from their gasoline--on a daily basis, by the United Nations as well as by governments, agencies and medical officials from around the world. Until then, the merchants of tetraethyl lead-or any other unnecessary additive known to be dangerous--are no better than criminals. They should be dealt with accordingly. Maybe in this new century they will be. PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Charles Kettering Shows GM President Alfred Sloan his invention--the self-starting motor. PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Pierre Du Pont PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Thomas Midgley Jr., who discovered tetraethyl lead, Freon and CFCs. PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Dr. Robert Kehoe, chief scientific apologist for the leaded gasoline industry. PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Station sign, c. 1924 GRAPH: average blood-lead levels of sampled populations in selected cities, late 1980s-early 1990s. 8,500 years of lead 79 years of leaded gasoline BC: 6500 BC. Lead discovered in Turkey. 3000 BC. First significant production of lead. 500 BC-300 AD. Roman lead smelting produces dangerous emissions. 100 BC. Greek physicians give clinical description of lead poisoning. 1800s: 1854. Tetraethyl lead (TEL) discovered by German chemist. 1887. US medical authorities diagnose childhood lead poisoning. 1900s: 1904. Child lead poisoning linked to lead-based paints. 1909. France, Belgium and Austria ban white-lead interior paint. 1910s: 1914. Pediatric lead-point poisoning death from eating crib paint is described. 1916. GM and United Motors buy Charles Kettering's DELCO, which experiments with preventing engine knock. 1918. Scientific American reports alcohol-gasoline blend can be used as motor fuel. 1918. Thomas Midgley patents benzene/gasoline blend as antiknock. 1919. Du Pont interests buy additional shares of GM. 1919. London General Omnibus Co. experiments prove ethanol is antiknock. 1919. Kettering gives Midgley two weeks to find antiknock, 1920s: 1920. US Naval Committee approves alcohol-gasoline blend 1920. Midgley patents alcohol and cracked (olefin) gasoline blend. 1920. Du Pont now owns more than 35 percent of GM. 1921. National Lead Company admits lead is a poison. 1921. Midgley demonstrates car powered by 30 percent alcohol-gasoline blend. 1921. Midgley discovers that tetraethyl lead (TEL) curbs engine knock 1922. League of Nations bans white-lead interior paint; US declines to adopt. 1922. GM contracts Du Pont to supply TEL. 1922. Public Health Service (PHS) warns of dangers of lead production, leaded fuel. 1922. Scientists express concern to Midgley over TEL in gas. 1923. Midgley repairs to Miami to recover from lead poisoning. 1923. Leaded gasoline goes on sale in selected markets. 1923. GM Chemical Corporation established to produce TEL. 1923. First Du Pont TEL plant opens at Deepwater, NJ. 1923. First TEL-poisoning deaths occur at Deepwater plant. 1923. GM contracts toothless Bureau of Mines to test TEL. 1924. Two GM employees die of lead poisoning at TEL plant. Dr. Robert Kehoe hired to study hazards at plant. Begins career as lead's lead apologist. 1924. GM forms medical committee to examine lead threat. 1924. Standard Oil begins production of TEL at Bayway plant. 1924. GM and Standard Oil of NJ form Ethyl Gasoline Corp. 1924. GM medical committee delivers negative and highly cautionary report on TEL. Irenee du Pont "not disturbed." 1924. Five workers die of lead poisoning at Bayway plant. 1924. NY Board of Health bans sales of TEL-enhanced gasoline. 1924. Bureau of Mines study gives TEL clean bill of health. 1924. Standard Oil suspends sale of leaded gasoline in NJ. 1924. Officials of GM, Standard, Du Pont request Surgeon General hold public hearings. 1925. Forgetting ethanol, Midgley proclaims TEL is only viable antiknock. 1925. Yale's Yandell Henderson warns of danger from breathing lead dust in auto emissions. 1925. Du Pont opens second TEL plant. 1925. Ethyl withdraws its gasoline from market until Surgeon General's conference. 1925. SG's conference calls for expert committee to study TEL. 1926. Committee calls for regulating sales of Ethyl and for further study by PHS, funded by Congress (studies never funded). 1926. Signs in gas stations: "Ethyl is back." 1926. Du Pont reopens Deepwater TEL plant. 1926. GM President Sloan expresses concern about valve corrosion with Ethyl, 1927. GM quells rebellion of dealers against use of lead fuel. 1928. Lead Industries Association formed to combat "undesirable publicity." 1928. Surgeon General tells NYC there are "no good grounds" to ban TEL. 1930s: 1930. Ethyl Export is founded in England to sell leaded gas overseas. 1932. British Medical Journal cites "slow, subtle insidious saturation of the system by infinitesimal doses of lead extending over long period of time." 1933. USDA, naval researchers find Ethyl and 20 percent ethanol blend equal in performance. 1934. Ethyl and I.G. Farben form Ethyl GmbH to make leaded airplane fuel. 1936. 90 percent of gasoline sold in US contains Ethyl. 1938. Ethyl Export becomes Associated Ethyl Company. 1940s: 1943. Report concludes eating lead paint chips causes physical and neurological disorders, behavior, learning and intelligence problems in children. 1948. US files antitrust suit against Du Pont to break up "largest single concentration of power in the United States." Main target is Du Pont's $560 million investment in GM. 1950s: 1950. Dr Aria Haagen-Smit identifies causes of smog in LA as interaction of hydrocarbons (cars largest source) and oxides of nitrogen. 1952. Justice Dept antitrust suit against Du Pont focuses on anticompetitve association between it, GM, Standard Oil and Ethyl. 1954. Octel begins TEL production in England. Mid-1950s. Auto makers pact stifles development of emissions-control devices. 1959. PHS approves Ethyl request to increase lead in gasoline. PHS regrets that SG committee's 1926 call for studies was not followed up. 1960s: 1961. Ethyl and Associated Octal compete for overseas trade. 1962. Ethyl sold to Albemarle Paper Co. in $200 million leveraged buyout partly financed by sellers, GM and Standard Oil. 1965. Clair Patterson's study "Contaminated and Natural Lead Environments of Man" offers first hard proof that high lead levels in industrial nations are man-made and endemic. 1966. Senate Public Works Committee holds first hearings on air pollution. 1969. Auto makers settle suit by Justice Department for conspiracy to delay the development of pollution-control devices. 1970s: 1970. Passage of Clean Air Act, 1970. To avert threatened legislation to restrict use of internal-combustion engine, GM agrees to add catalytic converters to meet Clean Air law. Active element of converters--platinum--is contaminated by leaded gas, presaging its demise. 1971. Lead-Based Paint Poisoning Prevention Act passed. 1972. EPA gives notice of proposed phaseout of lead in gasoline. In first use of Freedom of Information Act, Ethyl sues EPA 1973. EPA promulgates lead phaseout in gasoline but delays setting standards. When standards are set, EPA sued by Ethyl. 1976. EPA standards upheld by US Court of Appeals, and Supreme Court refuses to hear appeal. 1978. Energy Tax Act creates ethanol tax incentive, expanding use of ethanol in US. 1980s: 1980. National Academy of Sciences calls leaded gasoline greatest source of atmospheric lead pollution. 1980. National Security Act of 1980 mandates all gasoline be blended with a minimum of 10 percent grain alcohol--"gasohol." Subsequently scuttled by Reagan Administration. 1980. Gasohol Competition Act passed by Congress to stop oil companies' discrimination against sales of gasohol at their pumps. 1980. Ethyl reports it has expanded its overseas business tenfold between 1964 and 1981; profits help fund diversification. 1981. Vice President George Bush's Task Force on Regulatory Relief proposes to relax or eliminate US leaded gas phaseout. 1982. Reagan Administration reverses opposition to lead phaseout. 1983. Between 1976 and 1980, EPA reports, amount of lead consumed in gasoline dropped 50 percent. Blood-lead levels dropped 37 percent Benefits of phaseout exceed costs by $700 million. 1986. Primary phaseout of leaded gas in US completed. 1990s: 1992. Rio environmental summit calls for worldwide lead phaseout. 1994. Study shows that US blood-lead levels declined by 78 percent from 1978 to 1991, 1994. American Academy of Pediatrics study shows direct relationship between lead exposure and IQ deficits in children. 1996. World Bank calls for world phaseout of leaded gasoline. 2000s: 2000. European Union bans leaded gasoline. Shoddy Science There were two basic scientific tasks for Robert Kehoe and later grantees favored by the lead additive makers: First, argue that human-body lead burdens in industrialized, ethylized America, measured by the amount of lead in blood or urine, are not seriously elevated but rather "natural" or "normal." Second, contend that even if Americans' body-lead burdens were to increase from leaded gasoline exposure, such exposures are harmless to human health. The first task involved testing lead levels in people around the world, especially in those regions considered remote or preindustrial; the second involved showing that people were not dying from leaded gasoline exhaust, nor were they showing any toxic effects traceable to leaded gasoline. Dr. Paul Mushak, director of a Durham, North Carolina, metal toxicology practice and a visiting professor of pediatric toxicology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, told The Nation, "As recently as the late sixties, Du Pont-supported researchers published results claiming to show that remote, nonindustrial peoples had the same blood-lead levels as urban residents in US cities. In reality, there were vast differences in lead exposures and the associated blood-lead content, differences conclusively shown in later, well-done studies of remote peoples. This large difference is also shown, in the way of a before-and-after illustration, when one examines current US blood-lead figures in this era of phased-out leaded gasoline, values that are but a fraction of the 'normal' blood-lead levels found decades ago in the heyday of leaded gasoline. The only thing that was 'uniform' or 'natural' in the Du Pont-sponsored effort was a similar level of pervasive lead contamination of blood and urine samples brought to the United States regardless of geographical and demographic origin." Research by Kehoe triumphantly announced that high bloodlead levels in remote rural Mexicans equaled US levels. In the nineties Dr. Herbert Needleman, now of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, publicized earlier studies debunking Kehoe's claims; those studies showed that Kehoe's Mexican test population was in fact heavily exposed to lead from the glazes used in local pottery, in both production and daily use. One of the first lead researchers to receive independent support from the government, Needleman was also instrumental in advancing modem lead-load-testing technique, by analyzing teeth and bones in addition to urine, feces and blood. These new tests were more accurate and more damning to industry, conclusively demonstrating the links between lead exposure and IQ, attention and behavioral deficits; the persistence of these into adulthood; and lead's association with aggression and delinquency. The Ethyl corporation and the leaded gas industry's trade group, the International Lead Zinc Research Organization, have persecuted Needleman ever since. In the early nineties he successfully fended off unfounded attacks on his research and academic integrity by a researcher who received ILZRO funding and whose law firm was represented on the Ethyl board. The researcher filed charges; against him with the NIH. Fancy PR firms (then under contract to the lead industry) attempted to vilify Needleman in the press. At one time denied private access to his own research papers (an academic guard had to accompany him) by the always mineral-friendly University of Pittsburgh, Needleman was finally exonerated. His science stands. Ethyl and the Nazis Working double time to craft their own heroic mythology, the makers of tetraethyl lead take much pride in their contribution to the Allied effort in World War II. According to a 1988 Associated Octel history, TEL was "'the magic bullet' [that] gave the engines more power enabling the aircraft to fly higher and faster. ... TEL was vital to power the Hurricane and Spitfire engines that played such an important part in winning the Battle of Britain. But for that victory, the outcome of the war might have been very different. In its own way, Octel has helped shape the fortunes of the post-war world." Like so many former Nazi sympathizers these days, Octel forgets a few relevant bits about how its family spent the war years and those directly preceding it: ? In 1934, with Hitler elevated to Fuhrer and the Nazi rearmament effort proceeding rapidly, Ethyl enters into an agreement with I.G. Farben, Hitler's biggest corporate supporter, to form Ethyl GmbH, to provide leaded gasoline for airplane fuel. Ethyl's London office and a low-level Du Pont official express dismay; they are ignored. Ethyl GmbH is formed under German management, but Ethyl Export retains an interest and the firm's Ray Bevan, an Englishman (later the head of Associated Octel), becomes a director. Ethylized fuel helps German planes fly as fast and high as Allied planes. Ethyl GmbH's plant is removed by the Russians after the war ends. ? At hearings before the Senate Munitions Committee in 1934, Irenee du Pont, having denounced the investigation as a plot by the Communist Third International, is pilloried for cartel agreements that require the Du Pont Company to share new technologies with Farben and Hitler, and also for helping to sell German munitions abroad, something the Versailles Treaty proscribed. During the hearing, Irenee's brother Pierre denies that his family controls GM, which, through Ethyl and its wholly owned Adam Opel AG subsidiary (a German maker of cars and trucks), has extensive Nazi ties of its own. "Have you not held considerable private personal interests in General Motors?" one senator asks. "No," replies Pierre, "nothing considerable." His memory is refreshed by his questioner: In 1929 alone, he sold $33 million of GM stock. ? In 1938 Standard Oil of New Jersey transfers technical know-how for TEL manufacture to Nazi Germany's Farben. TEL manufacture is not easy, as the Japanese will find out during the war when they try an amateur hand at it, killing sixteen workers or more in the process and, at one point, poisoning up to 40 percent of the workers they had engaged. Under the terms of the deal with Standard, Farben is obligated to exchange particulars of synthetic rubber production, but this never materializes. The British government later concludes that Standard and Farben agreements to block the rubber technology's export to the Allies rendered Standard "hostile and dangerous elements of the enemy." ? Du Pont keeps its cartel agreements with the Germans up until the eve of US entry into the war; signing its last price-fixing and trade pact with I.G. Farben in 1939. However, in 1940, Du Pont's foreign relations department tells its executive committee: "The Du Pont Company informed I.G. that they intend to use their good offices after the war to have the I.G. participation restored." ? In March 1942 Thurman Arnold, a US assistant attorney general, appears before a Senate committee investigating war profiteering and testifies that Ethyl Gasoline Corporation, General Motors, Standard Oil and I.G. Farben of Germany had an agreement by which the American corporations supplied the Nazis with the TEL formula and production expertise, without which Hitler could not have fueled his air force or gone to war. Committee chairman Harry Truman says, "This is treason." ? Based on his involvement in the Standard-Farben marriage, Frank Howard, the Ethyl director who told the Surgeon General that TEL was "a girl of God," is barred in a settlement with the FTC from ever serving on the board of an American oil company. Ethyl-Octel Family Tree The Ethyl Gasoline Corporation, a joint venture of GM and Standard Oil, founded Ethyl Export in England in 1930 to handle foreign business. Additional outposts were opened in Italy, France and Germany, and in 1938 Ethyl Export became the Associated Ethyl Company. The company was formed to control TEL production throughout Britain and France, and its primary goal was to expand the use of TEL, which it did by the clever expedient of making shareholders out of six leading oil companies-BP, Shell, Esso (as Standard Oil of New Jersey was known in England), Mobil, Chevron and Texaco--as well as General Motors. The Third World market fell in line after World War II. In 1961 Europe's Associated Ethyl changed its name to Associated Octel Company Limited, reflecting the fact that Ethyl and Octel were now competitors for European and Latin American business. In 1962 Ethyl was sold by GM and Standard Oil to the Gottwald family of Richmond, Virginia, owners of Albemarle Paper, who continue to trade in TEL from their headquarters in Richmond. Other US competitors--Du Pont, Nalco and PPG-have wound down their TEL businesses in recent years. After World War II Octel grew to become one of the world's largest TEL suppliers. Today, on the outskirts of Liverpool, England, it operates one of only three TEL manufacturing facilities remaining in the world--the others are in Germany and Russia. Octel, which supplies Ethyl with all of its lead under long-term agreement subject to a recent decree settling FTC price-fixing charges, now supplies 80 percent of the world's TEL. In 1989 Octel was sold to Great Lakes Chemical of West Lafayette, Indiana, makers of bromine and brominated chemicals, including EDB, the chemical scavengers used in ethyl gasoline to clear lead deposits from engines. In 1997 Great Lakes Chemicals spun off Octel into a separate company, which in 1998 was sold for $430 million to a highly leveraged management team led by Octel's managing director (now CEO), Dennis Kerrison. WE VISIT OCTEL "Do you see that village over there?" Bob Larbey asked, pointing out the minicab window. "That's where Louise Woodward grew up. That's where she lives." It was quite an admission. You see, Larbey was the soon-to-retire manager of external affairs for the Associated Octel Company, the world's largest makers of tetraethyl lead (TEL), the gasoline antiknock additive outlawed in the West but still sold in the Third World. His company's last remaining lead factory and Shell Oil's closely adjacent Stanlow Refinery, located in Ellesemere Port alongside the Manchester Ship Canal, outside Liverpool, are, for better or worse, Louise Woodward's next-door neighbors. Putting aside one's free-floating interest in the lives of the rich and famous (Woodward attained notoriety, you will recall, when she was charged in 1997 with murdering a Massachusetts infant in her care), karbey's revelation interested me for another reason. In the preceding months, I had been reading up on lead and had learned that a vein of scientific research five miles wide and fifty-six years old had linked childhood lead exposure to a variety of learning difficulties and personality disorders, among them violent, irrational and aggressive behavior. "Wow," I said to Larbey and Richard Bremner, a correspondent for England's Car magazine. Like me, Bremner is a starry-eyed old-car buff. We're all for safety and low emissions, but we love cars, especially older ones. Following industry pronouncements and reading car magazines religiously, we'd been led to believe--I in America in the eighties, when lead was removed from gasoline, and he only recently, as Britain contemplated its phaseout--that the removal of lead from fuel would damage the engines of our old cars. Frankly, I'd begun wondering about the honesty of the additive makers and the oil industry. Having run more than my fair share of venerable machinery in the fourteen-year period since the US ban went into effect, I hadn't had a single recessed valve seat--what I'd been led to fear--or any other engine problem to report. One is tempted to describe the Octel plant, which rends the gray and rainy Mersev sky in a most unharmonious fashion, as Victorian, except that it was built in 1948. After installing ourselves in jumpsuits and rubber boots, which lent special moment to the occasion, we were given two sets of gloves, two pairs of goggles and brand-new gas masks, which lent an air of terror. I couldn't help recalling the sickening deaths and illnesses of hundreds of TEL workers in the twenties in New Jersey, in plants run by Standard Oil and Du Pont. This was bad stuff. Gripped by violent bursts of insanity, the afflicted would imagine they were being persecuted by butterflies and other winged insects before expiring, their bodies having turned black and blue. As we toured the plant with Larbey and an Octel worker, Bob Pedley, my thoughts were instantly fogged by the significance of this place, the largest lead additive factory in the world and the last in the West. Octel continues to supply TEL to large parts of the Third World from this site, by tanker and seaborne container, as if the world medical establishment, the UN, the EU, the EPA and the World Bank (I could go on) hadn't come out strongly against the stuff. So TEL manufacturing experts will forgive me now if I can no longer remember the exact sequence of what we saw, or even what we were seeing. But I will never forget our first sight of huge caldrons of sodium being electrically heated to 600 degrees Fahrenheit, to remove chlorine. ("If the chlorine escapes, put your gas mask on and start running," someone had told me. Or had it simply been "start running"? I hoped not to find out.) The sodium was then blended, I think, with molten lead made from huge ingots, and this sodium/lead mixture was mixed with ethyl chloride to make TEL. Added at this point would be the ethylene dibromide (EDB), the "scavenger" material that causes the lead to exit the car's exhaust. EDB, I'd learned earlier, is another well-documented carcinogen. High up one of the exterior walls of the tower where the sodium/lead mixture is mixed with ethyl chloride were enormous tanks. In the event of a chemical overreaction--"It gets away from us sometimes," Larbey said with a chuckle--so-called burst disks rupture, allowing the empty tanks to fill with the toxic overbrew. We were about to enter the building when a guard asked Larbey who we were. He told him and the guard advised that the burst disks had just ruptured. Perhaps we wouldn't be going in, after all. "Hey, Richard," I said to my friend. "Would you stop turning into a butterfly?" On our way out of the factory offices on this gray, rainy day, I noticed a sign listing "incidents" for the year: 486. No fatalities. On the Virgin train back to London, Bremner and I spoke with Megan Harding, a New Zealander in Britain who represented APS Chemicals in a tentative joint venture with Octel to market Valvemaster, a phosphorus-based additive said to prevent the dreaded valve-seat recession. Harding explained that DMA-4, as Valvemaster was formerly known, was originally discovered as a detergent additive by Du Pont in the sixties arid was apparently once the world's leading gasoline additive. The unexpected protection it offered against valve-seat recession was discovered in the seventies, with more than a billion gallons of fuel bulk-treated since the advent of unleaded gas. (Valvemaster faces a sales ceiling, however, for, like lead, phosphorus fouls catalytic converters.) In one of the press handouts Harding gave us, Octel CEO Dennis Kerrison claims that Valvemaster is "proven, reliable, cost-effective." The next time I find myself in Ellesmere Port 1 plan to ask the man, If all that's true, why then haven't you stopped selling lead? The world--and Louise Woodward--have a right to know. ~~~~~~~~ By Jamie Lincoln Kitman Jamie Lincoln Kitman. a New York lawyer and writer, is a columnist and editor for Automobile Magazine and England's Car. A member of the Society of Automotive Historians, he drives a 1966 Lancia Fulvia and a 1969 Ford Lotus-Cortina, both of which run fine on unleaded. Research support was provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute. The author wishes to thank for their assistance and to acknowledge the research of Professor William Kovarik, Dr. Herbert Needleman, Professors David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz. Dr. Jerome Nriagu, Dr Amy Kyle, Richard Merritt. Richard Bremner and Alan Loeb. He would also like to express particular gratitude to his research associate, Bill Krauss, his editor, Richard Lingeman. and his fact-checker. Michael Kunichika. _________________________________________________________________ Inset Article THE HALL OF SHAME THE ENGINEER Charles "Boss" Kettering. 1876-1958. Inventor of electric self-starter, later head of General Motors' research division; major GM shareholder. Popular public speaker ("The greatest salesman of science this country has ever known"--Time), with more than 2,000 speeches and numerous articles to his name. Championed leaded gas before public and complaisant government, abandoning superior but less profitable additive--ethanol--he had earlier praised. HIS TRUSTED AIDE Thomas Midgley Jr. 1889-1944. Mechanical engineer, self-taught chemist, longtime Kettering "go to" man, "the father of Ethyl gas." Stumbled on tetraethyl lead (TEL) additive in 1921, defended its safety to government. Alerted Kettering to immense profits to be made in leaded gasoline. Other contributions to better living through chemistry: Invented Freon and related family of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in pesticides, plastics and propellants; later banned by EPA. THE INDUSTRIALISTS Pierre (1870-1954) and Irenee (1877-1963) du Pont. Scions of 200-year-old family-explosives business; used windfall profits made selling gunpowder during World War I to purchase a controlling interest in General Motors. Pierre installed as GM president; Irenee as head of Du Pont. Their firms productionized TEL and, separately and together with Standard Oil of New Jersey, earned royalties on gasoline sold around the world between 1924 and 1992. Ignored the dangers of TEL production while hundreds died or suffered poisoning at their factories; misled press and public as to nature of hazard posed by lead gasoline. Aided Nazi war effort in pacts with German chemical giant I.G. Farben. THE MAN OF SCIENCE Dr. Robert Kehoe. 1893-1992. Toxicologist, chief medical consultant to Ethyl Gasoline Corporation; leading apologist for its leaded gasoline additive. Director, Kettering Laboratory, University of Cincinnati, founded with girl from GM, Du Pont and Ethyl. Came to prominence at 1925 Surgeon General's hearing on tetraethyl lead, claiming unique expertise; for next forty years point man of GM/Standard Oil/Du Pont monopoly on lead research. Central belief, later debunked: All planetary life forms carry heavy natural lead burden. Proponent of practice of perpetually obfuscating; scientific data that question safety of lead, setting pattern for other polluting industries and makers of hazardous products opposed to regulation. In 1966 tells Muskie Clean Air subcommittee: "I would simply say that in developing information on this subject [leaded gasoline], I have had a greater responsibility than any other persons in this country." _________________________________________________________________ Inset Article THE AMAZING MR. MIDGLEY Born in 1889 in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, Thomas Midgley Jr. was a mechanical engineer with a self-taught knowledge of chemistry and a fondness for strong drink. Though his aptitude would lead the chemical industry to honor him on several occasions during his lifetime, many today might wish he'd never picked up a beaker. In addition to his work on leaded gasoline, this holder of 117 patents memorably discovered the refrigerant dichlorodifluoromethane--trademarked by his employer, General Motors, as Freon. If you count his discovery of the related family of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), used in aerosol spray propellants, foam for insulation, bedding, packing, solvents, pesticides, defoliants and cleaners, Midgley can truly be said to have left his mark on the world. (Ozone-burning CFCs were banned by the EPA in 1978, leaded gas in 1986.) Often overlooked is his work with Kettering during World War I on a flying bomb, the world's first cruise missile. Years after his captivating free-style tetraethyl lead demonstrations, Midgley demonstrated the nontoxicity and nonflammability of Freon by filling his lungs with the vapor, exhaling and extinguishing a lit candle. His final years with GM were devoted to pure research into rubber. When Midgley's inquiries proved unprofitable, GM cut him loose. He died at the age of 55 after four years of paralysis, allegedly caused by polio. An obituary in Time reported that he succumbed to accidental strangulation "by a self-devised harness for getting in and out of bed." Charles Kettering called him "the greatest discovery I ever made." _________________________________________________________________ Inset Article THE HALL OF FAME SOUNDING THE EARLY WARNING ON TEL Yandell Henderson. 1873-1944. Chairman, Medical Research Board, US Aviation Service WWI, consultant, Bureau of Mines. Supervised hundreds of poison-gas experiments, developed first Army gas mask, which he personally tested in a chamber filled with chlorine gas. Professor of applied physiology, Yale. Approached by Ethyl to study TEL, he insisted on research freedom; offer withdrawn. Most insightful critic of TEL after its introduction. Criticized industry funding of research. Identified nature of lead hazard sixty years before its ban and predicted that "conditions will grow worse so gradually and the development of lead poisoning will come on so insidiously (for this is the nature of the disease) that leaded gasoline will be in nearly universal use and large numbers of cars will have been sold that can run only on that fuel before the public and the Government awaken to the situation." Refused to buy leaded gasoline and planned trips so as to be able to stop at Amoco stations, which carried unleaded gas. PIONEERING EARLY STUDIES OF INDUSTRIAL POISONS Alice Hamilton. 1869-1970. Physician at 24, groundbreaking work in industrial medicine and pathology. Conducted first survey of use and effects of poison in US industry. Hired in 1910 by State of Illinois to study lead trades. Shocking findings resulted in new regulations, minimum safety standards. First woman faculty member at Harvard Medical School in 1919 (never tenured). Angered American Institute of Lead Manufacturers by issuing report, which that institute had funded, showing that lead accumulated in the bones and tissues of those exposed to it and was neither metabolized nor excreted. Early critic of tetraethyl lead use in gasoline. In 1925 told TEL makers, who claimed factories could be made safe: "You may control the conditions within a factory. But how are you going to control the whole country?" Also, "Where there is lead some case of lead poisoning sooner or later develops, even under the strictest supervision." DATING THE EARTH--AND DISCOVERING LEAD CONTAMINATION Clair Patterson. 1922-1995. Geochemist, Cal Tech professor. Definitively dated Earth as 4.55 billion years old. Aided by new generation of mass spectrometers and insistence on strict cleanliness so as not to contaminate samples. Scrupulous, incorruptible and methodical; basis for character Sam Beech in Saul Bellow novel The Dean December. An asteroid and an Antarctic mountain peak named after him. Stumbled on heavy planetary lead contamination while dating Earth; detailed dust route to lead exposure, concluded industrial man has raised his lead burden 100 times and atmospheric lead 2,000 times. Measured lead content in bones of 1,600-year-old Peruvian Indians. His 1965 work "Contaminated and Natural Lead Environments of Man," in Archives of Environmental Health, assailed by industry but cited in 230 articles, blew the lid off forty years of industry-funded lead science. Resisted subsequent industry attempts to buy, fire and isolate him. Hired by NASA to analyze moon rocks. Quote: "It is not just a mistake for public health agencies to cooperate and collaborate with industries in investigating and deciding whether public health is endangered--it is a direct abrogation and violation of the duties and responsibilities of those public health organizations." EXPOSING LEAD-INDUSTRY 'SCIENCE' Herbert Needleman. 1927--. Pediatric neurologist, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, University of Pittsburgh. Published 1972 article in Nature proposing that dental-lead levels be used to estimate body lead burden after exposure had ended; harangued by oil industry, Du Pont, Associated Octel and Ethyl. In 1976 became one of the first scientists funded to study effects of lead besides Ethyl's Kehoe. In 1979 published, with Alan Leviton and Bob Reed, a study showing that children with elevated levels of lead in their teeth score lower on tests of IQ, speech and language and on measures of attention. Later, supplied additional key scientific research to EPA as it prepared to eliminate lead from gasoline. Attacked regularly by lead interests. Hunton and Williams, law firm of Ethyl board members, filed an academic dishonesty complaint with the NIH. The University of Pittsburgh did not support him; he came through a grueling public hearing with his reputation intact. Quote: "If my case illuminates anything, it shows that the federal investigative process can be rather easily exploited by commercial interests to cloud the consensus about a toxicant's dangers, can slow the regulatory pace, can damage an investigator's credibility, and can keep him tied up almost to the exclusion of any scientific output for long stretches of time, while defending himself." _________________________________________________________________ Inset Article LEAD KILLS CARS, TOO While they were busy glossing over its perilous shortcomings for the public health, tetraethyl lead's boosters almost forgot that their "gift of God" posed some serious problems for cars. Instead of benefitting, engines were getting destroyed by lead deposits. GM researchers had noted this early in TEL's life, but Charles Kettering was anxious to get the new product to market. Problems, he argued, could be worked out with real-life experience to guide them. But necessary changes were slow in coming. In May 1926, three years after leaded fuel went on sale, GM's Alfred Sloan wrote Ethyl's new president, Earle Webb, to express concern that valve corrosion with Ethyl gas was so bad after 2,000-3,000 miles that it rendered cars "inoperative." Rather late in the day, one would have thought, he urged further development of the product. Referring to Ethyl's decision to re-enter the market, he wrote, "Now that we are back in again and are considering pushing the sale [of Ethyl] to the utmost, I think we ought to be concerned with this question." So the additive that Standard, GM, Du Pont and the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation defended so vigorously before the Surgeon General and the nation wasn't even any good yet--it junked people's second-largest investment, after their homes. Incredibly, in spite of the near-magical claims being made for TEL, GM's own car divisions were at this very time bitterly resisting engine modifications to take advantage of it. In fact, GM's Buick. Chevrolet. Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Oakland and Cadillac divisions would not recommend it to their customers until 1927, when they circulated bulletins to their dealers calling on them to withdraw any objections to leaded fuel. This was six years after TEL's invention and a full year and a half after a fractious national debate on TEL at the highprofile Public Health Service conference in Washington. Tellingly, support for TEL was forever lacking in the Society of Automotive Engineers Journal, the automotive engineering community's leading organ. The damaging effects to which Sloan referred necessitated the introduction of chemical "scavengers," which would cause the residue of the spent ethyl fluid to leave the engine along with the car's exhaust gases, thus preventing lead buildup. After a little trial-and-error experimentation proved the destructiveness of chlorine, ethylene dibromide (EDB), a byproduct of bromine invented by Dow Chemical in the twenties, was selected as the scavenger of choice. Proving the old maxim that you only make things worse when you tell a lie. Ethyl's adoption of EDB and its widespread use have created several waves of secondary environmental disaster. In more recent times, EDB combustion has been linked to halogenated dibenzo-p-dioxins and dibenzofurans in exhaust, believed to be cancer risks. Also, when EDB is burned in the engine, it creates methyl bromide, which as a component of automobile exhaust the World Meteorological Organization has termed one of "three potentially major sources of atmospheric methyl bromide," which harms the ozone layer. With the eventual demise of the US market for leaded fuel written on the wall, Ethyl had to find a new market for its lead scavenger EDB, and in 1972 it did--as a pesticide. Twelve years later, EDB would be banned by the EPA in this application following a 1974 finding that it was a powerful cancer-causing agent in animals; a 1977 finding of "strong evidence'' that it caused cancer in humans; and a 1981 determination that it was "a potent mutagen"--a carcinogen with especially damaging consequences for human reproductive systems, powerful enough that it should be removed immediately from the food chain. This was bad news, as the United States was by now putting 20 million pounds of EDB into its soils annually, and it had begun to show up in cake mixes and cereal. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would also act to restrict EDB exposure, and the EPA would cite its reduction in the atmosphere as an additional benefit of the leaded gasoline phaseout. Today the mechanical benefits of unleaded gasoline are obvious. Ever wonder why your new car goes longer than your old one between spark-plug changes? Or why exhaust systems last longer? Or why oil changes don't need to be as frequent? Try unleaded fuel. In a report delivered to the Society of Automotive Engineers, lead-free fuel was shown to significantly reduce engine rusting, piston-ring wear and sludge and varnish deposits, as well as to reduce camshaft wear. In 1985 an EPA report concluded that reduced lead levels reduced piston-ring and cylinder-bore wear, preventing engine failure and improving fuel economy. Estimated maintenance savings exceeded the maintenance costs associated with recession of exhaust valves, which is caused by the use of unleaded gasoline. Gary Smith, an English Ford engineer working in the area of fuel economy and quality/vehicle/environmental engineering, told The Nation: "The higher the lead content, the more it messes the engine oil up, and we wanted to get longer intervals between engine oil changes, so that's a negative for lead as well. ... [The scavengers used in leaded gasoline] or combustion of anything with chlorine or bromine will make hydrochloric and hydrobromic acid, so the actual muffler systems get corroded. They end up on--and affect--the spark plugs. Because we're trying to keep warranty costs down and [lower] costs for customers, we found ourselves going away from lead." _________________ From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Nov 20 21:02:30 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:26 2006 Subject: [EAS] Alien Ray Resonances Message-ID: From my friend Dan Prober, Prof. of Applied Physics at Yale, this delightful item arrived in my email. >MIT has restudied the issue of tin foil hats and their efficacy in warding >off alien rays, and come to surprising conclusions - that they not only do >not protect against mind rays from aliens, but they also amplify those >rays, which, coincidentally, are on frequencies restricted to government >use. Our government. A lesson here? Will Caltech weigh in next? --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Nov 25 01:27:21 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:26 2006 Subject: [EAS] $100 Laptop Message-ID: (from Edupage, November 16, 2005) MIT DEBUTS $100 LAPTOP At the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia, Nicholas Negroponte, director of MIT's Media Lab, will show an early version of a $100 laptop that he announced in January. Negroponte has said that such a device would bring the fruits of technology to millions of schoolchildren in developing nations, spanning the digital divide and spurring economic development. According to those involved with the project, a number of countries have expressed interest, including Brazil, China, Egypt, Nigeria, Thailand, and South Africa, though development remains before orders can be placed. In addition, the governor of Massachusetts has called on his state to provide the new laptops to every middle and high school student. Critics of the program argue that people in developing nations often need more basic supplies, such as food and clean water, and some also note that the educational value of laptops for every student has not been proven. The devices use the Linux operating system and flash memory; they do not include cameras or DVD-ROM drives, as originally planned. They run on C batteries that can be recharged using a hand crank attached to the device. Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 November 2005 http://chronicle.com/free/2005/11/2005111602t.htm From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Nov 29 03:11:34 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:26 2006 Subject: [EAS] Competition and Erosion Message-ID: Dear Colleagues - A sobering announcement about a just-to-be-released report from the National Academies Press "Rising Above The Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future": http://www.crn.com/components/weblogs/article.jhtml?articleId=174401510&printableArticle=true If you've seen the 1987 movie "Broadcast News", do you remember the growing-up scene early on where Aaron Altman (played by Albert Brooks), later to become the star reporter among the three protagonists, is beaten up by high school toughs? In helpless rage he shouts at them "You'll never earn more than nineteen thousand dollars." As his tormentors walk away, one says to the other, "Nineteen thousand - not bad!" Not a particularly good metaphor for international competitiveness, I'll grant you, but a charming movie if you haven't seen it. More seriously, and hardly ever talked about because of the primacy of economic arguments, are the "quality of life" issues of the "new capitalism." One of the exceptions is Richard Sennett's benchmark book "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism" (Norton, 1998). A sociologist at the London School of Economics and New York University, Sennett contrasts the vanished world of rigid, hierarchial organizations where what mattered was a sense of personal character, against the brave new world of reengineering, risk, flexibility and short-term teamwork. He sees the positives of a dynamic economy, but also the steady erosion in the workplace of a sense of sustained purpose, a sense of integrity and trust in others -- attributes that an earlier generation understood as essential to personal character. Put differently, seldom if ever can parents now bequeath to their children any sense of their work ethic. As Studs Terkel puts it in a jacket quote "a worker has become ... as dispensable as Kleenex." --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Nov 30 14:28:50 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:26 2006 Subject: [EAS] Labs, Advisors and Higher Education Message-ID: Dear Colleagues - This last issue of "Tomorrow's Professor" brought into much clearer focus a value that science and engineering brings to higher education, that of the closely-knit tutorial interaction between advisor and student. I found the circumstances of isolation of PhD students in the humanities, described here, rather startling. The call for a humanities equivalent of a research lab environment is worthwhile. I would caution though, that engineers at least do not fully realize the value of their old-fashioned tutorial circumstances. Instead they are busy deconstructing and virtualizing it with technology, at the loss of much of what is good about a lab environment. --PJK ----------------------------------------------------------------------- >Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2005 09:57:00 -0800 >To: tomorrows-professor@lists.Stanford.EDU >From: Rick Reis >Subject: TP Msg. #684 WE NEED HUMANITIES LABS >Sender: owner-tomorrows-professor@lists.Stanford.EDU > >"My curiosity about this hypothetical English >professor's reaction began after a discussion >with my father, a professor emeritus in physics >at the University of California at Santa >Barbara. As we chatted about my work as a >dissertation and tenure coach, he expressed >shock when I recounted how graduate students in >English could go a month or more with no contact >with their advisor. He estimated that his >students usually saw him daily, and never went >for more than a week without interaction with >him, except when he was traveling. As he quizzed >me more and more about the grad student >experience in humanities departments, it became >more and more clear to me that there is a deep >divide." > > * * * * * > TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR(SM) MAILING LIST > desk-top faculty development one hundred times a year > > Over 25,500 subscribers > Over 650 postings > Over 650 academic institutions > Over 100 countries > > Sponsored by > THE STANFORD UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING > http://ctl.stanford.edu > > An archive of all past postings (with >a two week delay) can be found at: > http://ctl.stanford.edu/Tomprof/index.shtml > > * * * * * > >Folks: > >The posting below looks at the need for greater >communication among graduate students and >between graduate students and advisors, >particularly in the humanities. It is by >academic career coach, Dr. Gina Hiatt >(Gina@AcademicLadder.com) and it appeared in the >October 26, 2005 issue of INSIDE HIGHER >EDUCATION (http://www.insidehighered.com/). ? >Copyright 2005 Inside Higher Ed, reprinted with >permission. > >Regards, > >Rick Reis >reis@stanford.edu >UP NEXT: Building the Teaching Commons > > Tomorrow's Graduate Students and Postdocs > > > -------------------------------------------- >1,172 words >------------------------------------------ > > WE NEED HUMANITIES LABS > >By Gina Hiatt >"Solitude vivifies; isolation kills." >-Joseph Roux, Meditations of a Parish Priest, 1886 > >I wonder how an English professor would feel >spending a week in a physics lab. Not about the >scientific work, but about the frequent, ongoing >interaction between students and peers, >post-docs and faculty. Scientists see each other >in the lab, if not daily, then at least weekly. >They have frequent lab meetings, colloquia and >interaction with scholars at other universities >around joint research. During my graduate >training in psychology at McGill University, >especially in the research lab at the Montreal >Neurological Institute, I spent hours hanging >around the post-docs. I learned at least as much >from them as I did from my interactions with my >professors. The expectation was that I would be >at the lab 9 to 5 or more, every day. I saw my >adviser every day. > >My curiosity about this hypothetical English >professor's reaction began after a discussion >with my father, a professor emeritus in physics >at the University of California at Santa >Barbara. As we chatted about my work as a >dissertation and tenure coach, he expressed >shock when I recounted how graduate students in >English could go a month or more with no contact >with their advisor. He estimated that his >students usually saw him daily, and never went >for more than a week without interaction with >him, except when he was traveling. As he quizzed >me more and more about the grad student >experience in humanities departments, it became >more and more clear to me that there is a deep >divide. > >In the humanities, outside of the classroom, >this kind of easy and even semi-formal >interaction is rare. The isolation for the grad >student begins in earnest when the coursework is >finished and the qualifying exams are completed. >The fledgling ABD is nudged out of the nest, >left to fly solo for long periods. The luckiest >students have advisors who are mentors and >insist on frequent meetings, which increase >accountability and allow the student to learn >how to think in a scholarly manner. The large >majority, however, are left to flounder, some of >them working as adjuncts far from the >institution where they are trying to finish a >Ph.D. > >The students whose advisers organize monthly >dissertation meetings get some help with the >isolation. These meetings usually involve prior >submission of one's work, with a presentation >and then feedback from peers and one's advisor >during the meeting. The opportunity to present >one's own work may come up only once every few >months. For many grad students, most writing is >accomplished in the days preceding submission of >their work. I believe that these meetings are >too infrequent and too formal to make up for the >absence of ongoing interaction with other >scholars. > >Beyond these dissertation meetings, scholarly >dialogue with peers or advisers is sporadic in >most departments outside the sciences. In many >cases, the adviser's expectation is that the >student will request a meeting when the student >is ready. Thus begins one of the vicious cycles >of graduate school. The student, working in a >void, measures himself against what he imagines >his peers are doing. Often he finds himself >lacking, and feels ashamed. So he puts off the >meeting with his adviser. This increases his >isolation and sense of inadequacy. He feels that >he is floundering and going in circles. Without >encouragement and deadlines, such students can >languish for months, and even years. > >As a dissertation coach, I've worked with many >such students. The luckier ones are early in the >process and not yet consumed with self-loathing >and shame. Others have been at it for years and >feel terrible about themselves. It is noteworthy >that 80-90 percent of the calls I receive for >dissertation coaching are from students in the >humanities, social sciences or education - all >fields less likely to have a lab environment. >The rest are writing their dissertation away >from their university and find it difficult to >work in that void. >Conferences and conventions offer important >opportunities for scholarly dialogue, as do >online blogs. However, there are limitations to >conferences (too infrequent) and blogs. What I >am advocating is injecting into the humanities >department some of the freewheeling dialogue >found in the halls outside the conference >presentation or in some of the better scholarly >blogs. > >Why is there such a difference between the hard >sciences and the humanities? An obvious reason >is that science is best done in groups, due to >the availability of expensive equipment and the >need for collaboration to make elaborate >projects work. Second, science is funded largely >by grants, which contain within them the need >for accountability. The person in charge of the >grant will make darn sure that neither time nor >money is being wasted, by frequently checking in >with those doing the research and writing. > >Barton Kunstler, who wrote "The Hothouse Effect: >Time Proven Strategies of History's Most >Creative Groups," in Futures Research Quarterly, >argues that organizations can grow into >"creative hothouses," much as Ancient Athens or >Renaissance Florence. If humanities departments >were to proceed as outlined by Kunstler, they >would go beyond counting their peer-reviewed >publications, and move into creating lasting >legacies and nurturing breakthrough thinking. >Kunstler identifies the attributes of >organizations likely to spawn such changes, >including the following: "workers immerse >themselves in others' ideas and work, absorbing >creative influences," and "mentor relationships >abound." Clearly, it would benefit all the >members of such a department, not just the >struggling graduate students, to create an >atmosphere that "spawns 'geniuses'" and "stands >at the center of a wider cultural movement." > >How will such changes occur in actual practice? >Certainly there is not a need for more >departmental meetings. Kunstler suggests that >you "reevaluate the basic assumptions and >methods of your discipline," and "challenge your >most treasured paradigms." Those at the higher >levels can begin by modeling the behavior they >would like to see in others - proposing informal >discussions, sharing work with colleagues, >discussing publishing with faculty from other >departments, and seeking out a grad student or >two to bounce ideas off of. If every professor >advising graduate students made it a point to >have a substantive conversation with one of his >or her ABD's a day, the picture for many grad >students would change radically. > >I suggest that graduate students begin at the >grassroots level. They should suggest weekly >meetings to peers, with the only agenda being >the discussion of work in progress at an >informal level. If they are geographically >scattered, they can meet by phone - there are >free conference lines available. In my coaching >groups there is a high level of closeness and >support, even though none of these people have >met in person. People should be encouraged to >attend with partly formed thoughts, poorly >written paragraphs, or just an idea they want to >develop. The idea is to think of all such >scholarly dialogue as a laboratory. Ideas are >cooked up, thrown in the test tube, and mixed >with human interaction, creativity and >motivation. These experiments will produce >better written and less painfully produced >dissertations or publications, and might >engender a "creative humanities hothouse." > >Gina Hiatt is a clinical psychologist and >dissertation and tenure coach. She is the >founder of Academic Ladder. Her blog is >AcademiBlog. > >* * * * * * * * >NOTE: Anyone can SUBSCRIBE to the Tomorrows-Professor Mailing List by >addressing an e-mail message to: > > >Do NOT put anything in the SUBJECT line but in the body of the message type: > > subscribe tomorrows-professor >* * * * * * * * >To UNSUBSCRIBE to the Tomorrows-Professor send the following e-mail >message >to: > >unsubscribe tomorrows-professor > >-++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**== >This message was posted through the Stanford campus mailing list >server. If you wish to unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the >message body of "unsubscribe >tomorrows-professor" to >majordomo@lists.stanford.edu From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Dec 7 15:54:27 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:26 2006 Subject: [EAS] Needling by Morford Message-ID: Verbal acupuncture by Mark Morford, in a good cause. --PJK http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2005/12/07/notes120705.DTL&nl=fix From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Dec 11 18:50:16 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:26 2006 Subject: [EAS] Fido Phone Message-ID: A suggestion for a belated Christmas present -- if you have a dog. If you don't, just consider it another index of how technologies evolve to support societal needs. --PJK -------------------------------------------------------------- (from INNOVATION, 7 December 2005) FIDO PHONE Has the world gone barking mad? Now there's a bone-shaped PetCell phone that dangles off your dog's collar and allows you to converse with Fido via two-way speaker. The PetCell works with standard cellular networks, comes with its own phone number and is designed to automatically pick up when the owner punches a code on their telephone keypad. A GPS feature enables you to track your pet's wanderings and display its location coordinates using any Web-enabled device or by dialing into a call center. "When dogs disappear, it's the first 15 minutes that are the most important," says a San Francisco dog trainer. "If your dog runs out of the dog park and you don't see if he went left or right, (PetCell) would make life a lot easier." The device will also come with an optional GeoFence that signals the owner if the dog roams outside preset parameters and built-in temperature sensors to check whether the dog is too hot or too cold. PetsMobility, maker of the device, plans to launch the PetCell in early 2006, priced at $350 to $400. (Wired.com 6 Dec 2005) From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Dec 25 17:58:54 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:26 2006 Subject: [EAS] Best Wishes and Some Thoughts Message-ID: Dear Friends and Colleagues - My slightly belated Best Wishes for the Holidays and the New Year. (Next follows old-fashioned "ASCII Art" for which you need a mono-spaced font.) + XXX XXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXX "BUON ANNO" "JOYEUX NOEL" "VESELE VANOCE" "MELE KALIKIMAKA" "NODLAG SONA DHUIT" "BLWYDDYN NEWYDD DDA" "GOD JUL" "FELIZ NATAL" "BOAS FESTAS" "FELIZ NAVIDAD" "MERRY CHRISTMAS" "KALA CHRISTOUGENA" "VROLIJK KERSTFEEST" "FROHLICHE WEIHNACHTEN" "BUON NATALE-GODT NYTAR" "HUAN YING SHENG TAN CHIEH" "WESOLYCH SWIAT-SRETAN BOZIC" "MOADIM LESIMHA-LINKSMU KALEDU" "HAUSKAA JOULUA-AID SAID MOUBARK" "'N PRETTIG KERSTMIS" "ONNZLLISTA UUTTA VUOTTA" "Z ROZHDESTYOM KHRYSTOVYM" "NADOLIG LLAWEN-GOTT NYTTSAR" "FELIC NADAL-GOJAN KRISTNASKON" "S NOVYM GODOM-FELIZ ANO NUEVO" "GLEDILEG JOL-NOELINIZ KUTLU OLSUM" "EEN GELUKKIG NIEUWJAAR-SRETAN BOSIC" "KRIHSTLINDJA GEZUAR-KALA CHRISTOUGENA" "SELAMAT HARI NATAL - LAHNINGU NAJU METU" "SARBATORI FERICITE-BUON ANNO" "ZORIONEKO GABON-HRISTOS SE RODI" "BOLDOG KARACSONNY-VESELE VIANOCE " "MERRY CHRISTMAS - - HAPPY NEW YEAR" "ROOMSAID JOULU PUHI -KUNG HO SHENG TEN" "FELICES PASUAS-EIN GLUCKICHES NEWJAHR" "PRIECIGUS ZIEMAN SVETKUS SARBATORI VESLLE" "BONNE ANNEBLWYDDYN NEWYDD DDADRFELIZ NATAL" XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX "Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here... Stand still. The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you." Native American poem translated by David Wagoner December 2005 marks the 10th anniversary of my EAS-INFO mailings to you. They started as a kind of "Internet neighborliness." And that's still largely how I think of them, even though now, ten years on, we are awash with networked messages of all kinds. In what ways these messages are more than dots in a fleeting pointillistic image of the world, and of ourselves as constructive agents in it, is getting increasingly hard to understand. Regret over the disappearance of older values being one of the symptoms of aging, we seem all destined to age prematurely. My thoughts go back to Neil Postman, now dead a little over two years, whose championship of values with exemplary patience and grace continues to stand as a beacon of hope and good sense. In the spirit of the season let me go back to a mailing from 1998 , and the Neil Postman questions quoted there with which he asked us to think about technology: a) What is the problem to which this technology is the solution? b) Who's problem is it? c) What new problem(s) will occur with the solution of the initial problem? d) Which people and what institutions might be seriously affected or hurt by this technology? e) What changes in language are being enforced by the implementation of new technology? f) What sort of economical, social and ecological impact will new technology have? g) What sort of people or institutions aquire special attention and education with the implementation of new technology? In my observation, in 1998 and now, these questions are asked astonishly seldom, even just (a) and (b). And (e) has become a highly important "sleeper" issue. I urge every advocate of technological progress to read Neil Postman, particularly "Technopoly" (1992) which begins with this story from Plato's "Phaedrus": > You will find in Plato's Phaedrus a story about Thamus, the king of a > great city of Upper Egypt. For people such as ourselves, who are > inclined (in Thoreau's phrase) to be tools of our tools, few legends > are more instructive than his. The story, as Socrates tells it to his > friend Phaedrus, unfolds in the following way: Thamus once entertained > the god Theuth, who was inventor of many things, including number, > calculation, geometry, astronomy, and writing. Theuth exhibited his > inventions to King Thamus, claiming that they should be made widely > known and available to Egyptians. Socrates continues: > > Thamus inquired into the use of each of them, and as Theuth went > through them expressed approval or disapproval, according as he > judged Theuth's claims to be well or ill founded. It would take > too long to go through all that Thamus is reported to have said > for and against each of Theuth's inventions. But when it came to > writing, Theuth declared, "Here is an accomplishment, my lord the > King, which will improve both the wisdom and the memory of the > Egyptians. I have discovered a sure receipt for memory and > wisdom." To this, Thamus replies, "Theuth, my paragon of > inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the > good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it. So it is > in this; you, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness > for your off-spring attributed to it quite the opposite of its > real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their > memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring > things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their > own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for > recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will > have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive > a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in > consequence be thought very knowledgable when they are for the > most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the > conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to > society." > > I begin my book with this legend because in Thamus' response there are > several sound principles from which we may begin to learn how to think > with wise circumspection about a technological society. In fact, there > is even one error in the judgment of Thamus, from which we may also > learn something of importance. The error is not in the claim that > writing will damage memory and create false wisdom. It is demonstrable > that writing has had such an effect. Thamus' error in in his believing > that writing will be a burden to society and nothing but a burden. For > all his wisdom, he fails to imagine what writing's benefits might be, > which, as we know, have been considerable. We may learn from this that > it is a mistake to suppose that any technological innovation has a > one-sided effect. Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; > not either-or, but this-and-that. One cannot, of course, help substituting the word "computer" for "writing" in the above, as Postman knows. I hope this sample entices you to seek out "Technopoly", whose clarity of language and exposition are a pleasure muted only by the gravity of its message. And let me mention a final apt element in the legend of the inventor god Theuth. He is one-eyed, implying a lack of depth perception unless one moves adequately with respect to one's subject. Again, my Best Wishes for the Holidays and the New Year! --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Dec 27 02:53:38 2005 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:26 2006 Subject: [EAS] Next Year's Engineers Message-ID: Hardly a cheerful look at the withering numbers of engineers that will be graduated next year. --PJK (from INNOVATION, 21 December 2005) COMPETING WITH ENGINEERING SUPERPOWERS CHINA AND INDIA It sounds like a wild exaggeration, but it's true. China is turning out nearly one million new engineers every year. India isn't far behind, graduating about 350,000 engineers a year. And the US? A tiny fraction of that total - perhaps 75,000. What does this engineering lag suggest about America's future competitiveness? Leaders ranging from university deans to chief executives to military officials are all worried, because the United States has become a country of lawyers and business executives, not engineers. Where will our future competitiveness come from? How can we out-innovate countries that are graduating five, ten, maybe 15 times more engineers than we are? The damage could be far greater than a simple trade imbalance. Our trade deficit is already humongous, some experts say, but it's traditionally been offset by the quality and creativity of our innovations. One solution is for companies to invest more in corporate research and development of new products. Too many companies fail to look beyond the next quarter's profits, so innovation suffers. Congress also needs to wake up to the fact that China and India are threatening our future competitiveness. "Congress has no idea this problem exists," notes Jerome Rivard of the National Academy of Engineering. "We need to tell them about it in a way the country can understand." (Design News 5 Dec 2005) Here is an example of "home-grown" technology. Where will it take us? WHITHER GOOGLE-MART? Where is Google headed? Tech pundit Robert X. Cringely thinks the search engine company is poised to take over the Internet. "Oh, they won't steal it or strong-arm us. They'll seduce us into giving it to them" and, he says, that may not be a bad thing. Google is currently designing huge data centers that fit on the back of a tractor-trailer rig and can be delivered anywhere and hooked up quickly and easily. "The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid," Cringely says. Having hundreds of Google data centers worldwide does more than offer simple redundancy and fault tolerance. They put Google closer to users, reducing latency. They offer inter-datacenter communication, load-balancing, and best of all, super-fast bandwidth connections at all peering ISPs. "There will be the Internet, and then there will be the Google Internet, superimposed on top. We'll use it without even knowing. The Google Internet will be faster, safer and cheaper," Cringely says. "And you know whose strategy this is? Wal-Mart's. Unless Google comes up with an ecosystem to allow their survival, all the other Web services companies will be marginalized. There will be startups and little guys, but no medium-sized companies. The final result is that Web 2.0 is Google. "Game over," Cringely adds. (I, Cringely 17 Nov 2005)