Back in the day, there was no Internet.  The only hope for young chemists looking for new experiments was to troll bookstores and newsstands.  Fortunately, chemistry sets were relatively popular when I was a kid and a number of authors produced books for this audience.

"The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments", Copyright 1960

Some of the cools stuff we used when I was young.  These items were available at most hobby shops and some toy stores.

Let me emphasize that I’m talking about REAL chemistry sets, not pretend ones offering only colored water experiments.  I extracted chlorine gas and ignited steel wool in it.  I filled balloons with hydrogen and exploded them.  Stuffing thin glass tubing into tight stoppers was part of many experiments.  Fortunately, all of my injuries from breaking the tubing were minor.  I attempted several times to freeze mercury solid with an alcohol – dry ice slush.  Back then, relatively large quantities of mercury could be had from mercury switches – available at any hardware store.

"700 Science Experiments for Everyone", Copyright 1962

Some books described surprisingly dangerous experiments – like this one.

Of course there were safety concerns even back then.  I had several “recipes”, but was never able to successfully make phosphorescent paint.  I just could not get high enough temperatures with my alcohol lamp.  I lived in a house with gas heat and wanted to cut into the gas line to power a Bunsen burner.  My dad was very much against this and as a consequence it never happened.

Let me put chemistry set “danger” in perspective.  A number of my friends had chemistry sets and I knew of a couple of burns and cuts but no serious injuries.  Certainly nothing as bad as a broken clavicle suffered by a friend that fell out of a tree or the compound fracture of an arm and elbow from a bicycle spill.  Personally, my worst childhood injuries came from skateboarding accidents, not my “exotic” chemistry experiments.

Here we are more than 40 years later – trees have not been banned, bicycles still cause severe injuries, and chemistry sets – well, government “protective” laws and personal injury lawyers have killed them.

In my EXPERT opinion – chemistry sets, the geeky-kid right of passage for generations, have been replaced, poorly, by the personal computer.  Let’s examine the differences.  I assume all readers of this blog are very familiar with personal computers.  As we know, they are capricious.  Worse, youngsters often “learn” to program by surfing the web for some appropriate code, copying, pasting, and moving on to the next programming impulse.  The entire experience could be considered VIRTUAL.  It may even be conducted with very little thinking and even less learning.

Chemistry sets, however, were not virtual.  They provided real knowledge of the physical world.  Even as a 10 year old I understood chlorine gas was bad stuff.  Burns were real – and painful.  You couldn’t cut and paste, you had to prepare the area (i.e. clean test tubes), find the chemicals, plan, and execute.  Youngsters able to successfully perform chemistry experiments demonstrated far more organization and persistence than their modern personal computer counterparts.  Indeed, the scientists and engineers that created nuclear power, that created jet engines and broke the sound barrier, that created transistors and integrated circuits – started with chemistry sets.

"The Question And Answer Book of Chemistry", Copyright 1962

Thanks to chemistry sets, I was a scientist long before I was an engineer.  As a pre-teen I understood methodical preparation and execution.  I believe this had an extremely positive effect on my career as an engineer.

Unfortunately, this early learning has been halted.  Over the last several decades there seems to have been a powerful agenda to remove self-reliance from the hands of the public.  A strict regulatory climate has combined fear mongering with a promise that Big Brother will take care of us.  One must hope that this is misguided good intentions and not a purposeful insidious plot to turn citizens into passive chattel.  Regardless of the reason, the result is the same.  It has turned us into a schizophrenic society that discourages all forms of risk taking by the man on the street but visibly and vociferously honors “professionals” who risk their safety and even lay down their lives for a broad array of causes.

The fireman that rushes into a burning building to save someone is correctly honored.  The soldier who risks his life to stop a terrorist is also correctly honored, as is the policeman who brings a dangerous criminal to justice.  Pity the poor youngster, however, who attempts to buy volatile substances to make rocket fuel or firecrackers.  He is likely expelled from school and may even get jail time.  His interest in science may well have ruined his life instead of launching a promising career.

While the student may have hurt himself or someone else playing with volatile materials, the same is true when, for example, young people play football.  Some may say this is an issue of relative risk and, unlike football, playing with chemicals is just too dangerous.  My personal experience, drawn from a time when “dangerous” chemistry sets were commonly enjoyed, says this is wrong.  In fact, I felt I hit the million-dollar jackpot when I discovered the book pictured below.  This book launched a thousand experiments with fireworks and homemade rockets.

I was never materially injured by any chemistry experiment, by any homemade rocket flight, by any of my fireworks exploits.  More importantly, my enjoyment of life, appreciation of science, and intellectual engagement were greatly enriched by these activities.

I’m not going to dispute the existence of risk.  My point is that we can never remove all risk from life – and it starts getting really expensive the harder we try.  The problem truly becomes deciding when we are safe “enough”.  This is a real problem since people are notoriously bad at judging relative risk.  Worse, there is a staggering array of agendas being pushed by powerful interests.  Some of these interests sell fear for profit.  Some sell distrust for political gain.  Some cover themselves in the flag and hide behind morality.  Facts are manipulated and misrepresented.

As a result, every year the “developed” countries become more cautious, fearful, and restrictive.  At the same time the “developing” countries, operating in a wild-west fashion, embrace risk, create jobs, and accelerate their economies.

We very much need to get away from the idea of “safety at any cost”.  We just can’t afford it – for at least three reasons:

1. Financially, we’re headed for disaster if we keep spending money creating and policing anti-danger laws.  Spending money to arrest and prosecute a citizen who buys fireworks seems like an incredible waste of money; and we’ve experienced decades of failed, expensive, zero-tolerance drug interdiction.  Don’t get me started on airport security.
2. Morally, who is the government to decide something is too dangerous but something else, say driving in the Indianapolis 500, is ok?  How can this be anything other than an individual decision?  Would you have found it offensive if a government official told a young Danica Patrick, “Racin’ go-carts is too dangerous for little girls.  You should be takin’ a cooking class over at the community center”?
3. The existence and actions of aggressive “Safety Police” can create an intellectually cautious environment.

Of these, by far the most damaging is the “Safety Police”.  When too many people become intellectually cautious you have the Dark Ages.  When the Safety Police become too aggressive you have the Spanish Inquisition.

The history of the world shows both of these have happened before.  They can happen again.

What if watchful and “protective” governments determined that the work of young experimenters Robert Goddard and Wernher Von Braun was dangerous and jailed them for their activities?  This would likely cause a domino effect of icy fear.  One after another youthful rocket scientists would abandon that field of endeavor.

Today there would be no communications satellites, no GPS, no orbital views of weather patterns.  Of course launching high-powered rockets was, and still is, dangerous.  You can’t have great achievements without risk and it has been proven over and over that the “authorities” are really bad at judging which risks are worth taking.

What if a religious cult strongly believed man should not fly and successfully sued to stop the “dangerous” and “heretical” experiments of Wilbur and Orville Wright?

Did you just think of Stem Cells?

What if the purveyors of the social revolution called Personal Computers were prohibited from distributing their wares?  What if the authorities, fearing disruption of the status quo, fearing access to knowledge and computation power by the masses, “excommunicated” Marc Andreessen, Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Gary Kildall, Steve Wozniak, and the legion of dope-smoking hippies that created the Personal Computer and Internet revolutions?

What if our masters applied the “dangerous” label to anything that threatened their position as masters?

Do you feel the chill in the air?

What vital element of our nature is suffering from our modern preoccupation with safety?  What of our society will remain when the authorities have subdued the risk-seeking members?  What is our future without folk heroes like Evel Knievel, Steve (Crocodile Hunter) Irwin, Daniel Boone, and yes, even without socially disruptive risk takers like Henry Ford and Howard Hughes?

Many are uncomfortable; unhappy with the current direction of society and our culture.  Sensing a platform that may resonate with voters, growing contingents of politicians condemn government regulations.  They say the regulations cost money and jobs.  They say we would be better off without them.

Well, you know, I happen to like some regulations.  I don’t want my food to poison me and I’d like to be able to trust any medicine I buy.  I don’t want to breathe junk from industrial smokestacks or roast from global warming – manmade or not.  Yep, this may cost more, but that’s what engineers are for – to implement solutions while minimizing the cost of doing so.  For centuries (millennia?) we’ve all benefited from paying engineers to create a better living standard.

The politicians have it wrong.  Regulations don’t cost jobs – they create jobs.  Every company that spends money to satisfy emission standards is paying engineers and technicians to invent and implement ways of doing so.  Diversity and union requirements mean someone must write standards, meet with representatives of all sides, and negotiate with all groups.  These are just two examples, but the fact is money spent on regulations ends up being someone’s paycheck.

Do rules and regulations raise the cost of goods?  Of course.  This impact, however, is small compared to that of manipulated currency exchange rates, benefits like pensions and healthcare, and mega-CEO salaries.  Some car companies, for example, need the profit from the sale of 30,000 cars just to pay their five most expensive executives.  Some drug companies need to sell a half million prescriptions to pay their president.

The problem is not the cost in dollars of corporate and personal rules, regulations, and prohibitions.  The problem is the emotional cost – the chill in the air.  While many regulations create jobs, some destroy our very souls.  We’ve been taught for too long to defer to a professional and wait for the authorities to solve problems.  How many times have you heard from SO many sources: “Don’t try this at home”.  Well, it’s time we go back a few decades and at least ALLOW people to try things at home.  It’s time to reclaim our souls.

Am I seriously suggesting that children be allowed to have chemistry sets and fireworks?  Absolutely yes, but I’m not requiring it.  I want government barriers and negative messages removed but parents must be comfortable with risky activities in which their children participate.  I grant that some kids – and their parents – have no common sense.  However, things usually go bad quickly when the government steps in and starts making rules.  I’ve seen enough to convince me that excessive protection leads to non-thinking.  You are most at risk when you expect everything to be safe.  Unfortunately, it is very rare that everything is safe.

We live in a society created by giants and we embarrass them as they gaze down at us.  Powerful concepts like, “Better 10 Guilty Men Go Free than to Convict a Single Innocent Man“, have served us well for a long time.  Have we become so timid and fearful that we must always vote for the safest approach?  Isn’t it better that one is injured rather than 100; 1,000; or 100,000 be prohibited from the joy of experimentation and discovery?

Some parents will be protective and not allow their children to have chemistry sets.  Many of the same parents will not allow their children to play football.  That’s ok and their choice – but this issue is bigger than parents and children.  This issue is bigger than speed bumps in so many neighborhoods; bigger than seatbelt laws and smoke-free restaurants.  This is about an increasingly cowardly society that wants to be protected and coddled at every turn.  This is about decades of strict regulatory climate and government “caretaking” having eroded our “can-do” attitude.

You don’t ban chainsaws just because someone gets hurt.  You don’t stop launching rockets because a couple of space shuttles crash.  You don’t stop doing open-heart surgery because some patients die.  You don’t stop playing football because of lost teeth, concussions, and even the rare cases of spinal cord damage and death.

Accidents, even grisly ones, should be addressed with better education and better preparation – not personal injury lawyers and additional government prohibitions.  In any activity there will always be the unlucky.  We must respect, not fear, risky situations and materials.  Banning all things risky costs society far too much in too many ways.  We must jump-start our society and reject expensive over-protection by Big Brother.

We can’t fix our mess of a society with political sound bytes and catchy phrases.  We need a multifaceted approach that engages politicians, parental good judgment, and spiritual advisors.  Perhaps we need to honor those injured in the pursuit of knowledge just like we honor firemen who rush into burning buildings.  Perhaps we need to indemnify companies who make dangerous products against ambulance chasing lawyers who see money behind genuine accidents.  Think this is a bad idea?  We already bailed out “too big to fail” banks and wealthy individuals who did crazy and perhaps maliciously stupid things.  Is this any worse?

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a sane political party?  One that embraced the need to cut spending but, at least until we get things cleaned up, recognized the need to raise some taxes?  You know, I just don’t think raising billionaire taxes by 3% will cause them to fire a maid or chauffer.  Likewise, cutting their taxes seems unlikely to cause them to hire another gardener.

This sane political party is currently imaginary, but together we can create it.  Together we can write the specification for a new political party that:

• Cuts spending on the convoluted mess of expensive subsidies, interdictions, and prohibitions.
• Maintains regulations and inspections on food, drugs, and environmental issues.  Why?  Well, what good is having a job if we turn the place into a wasteland and the food sickens your children?
• Explores the possibility of significantly reducing the cost of healthcare by allowing regular people direct access to curative drugs without needing a doctor as an expensive middleman.
• Looks at additional revenue sources such as adjusting corporate and personal tax rates or a national gas tax – but NOT toll roads.

Aside on toll roads.

Some politicians have seized on toll roads as a way to generate more revenue.  They use the self-serving interpretation that these are User Fees, not taxes.  Wrong.  Toll roads are socialism.  It is not only the drivers on the road that benefit from the road.  General commerce benefits since those who drive to work on the road spend some of their paycheck in many ways that benefit society as a whole.  Likewise delivery trucks to food stores and shopping centers, even the mail service will be paying tolls for the benefit of those who need not drive on that toll road to shop and receive mail.  This is clearly socialism at work as the active few pay an unfair share and support passive consumers.

The sane political party I envision will distinguish two categories of regulations.

1. Good Regulations.  These require purity of ingredients, freedom from contaminants, honesty about usefulness and side effects, truth in advertising, and forbid the wholesale destruction of nature.  In essence, the good regulations prohibit exaggerated claims and malicious behavior by the seller.
2. Bad Regulations.  These attempt to enforce what the government has determined to be desirable behavior by the citizen.

Summary

In my ideal world, manufactures cannot lie, mislead, or misdirect – but consumers, with access to truthful and factual information, are free to make risky and even bad choices.

This has been a long and rambling blog but some of the most intelligent and capable people in the world visit this site.  While my writing undoubtedly has an American slant, I believe the ideas are applicable to the world.  I’m hopeful that a number of you will pick up this challenge.  Perhaps we really can start a movement.

Remember –

Some things, my friends, are far more important than being safe.

1. You periodically demonstrate you haven’t forgotten all you were taught.
2. You are regularly exposed to new thinking, techniques, and technology relevant to your field.

You can see why this is so important for teachers – after all, there’s no telling the damage a teacher may do to a student by, for example, teaching them multiplication using a 50 year old technique.

In contrast, no engineering job of which I’m aware requires periodic certification of knowledge or exposure to new thinking or advancements.  True, I’m aware of many jobs that require annual sexual harassment training or perhaps a refresher in the corporate security rules, or maybe even a reminder about the rules for trading stocks based on insider information.  However, I’m aware of nothing that has to do with an engineer actually knowing how to do their job.  Nothing.

It’s a good thing engineers aren’t involved in anything as critical as – say – maintaining the self-esteem of a student struggling to learn how to spell.  Engineers merely design pacemakers, aircraft, and weapons of mass-destruction; nothing nearly as important.

Can anybody explain this?

But first a brief history –

I was fortunate to see Bill Gates in person twice.  Once he bought me a beer (well, actually, he bought about 30 of us beer).  I never met Steve Jobs but I ALMOST worked for him.  I was leaving my job at Disney just as Walt Disney was acquiring Pixar – making Steve Jobs the largest shareholder of The Walt Disney Company.

While I always thought Bill Gates was a genius, I was not always a fan of Steve Jobs.  In the early days the Apple ][ was a wonderful toy.  You could plug in cards to add functionality and it seemed you could do ANYTHING with it.  Then came the IBM PC that copied the open architecture idea… and then… came the Macintosh.  Huh?  They ruined it!  You couldn’t plug in cards!  What good was a closed computer?  I wasn’t the only one who thought this and Apple lost market share.

Jobs left Apple and started NeXT – but the personal computer market was too crowded and NeXT struggled.  At this point I thought Steve Jobs was “just the marketing guy” and the technical wizard, Steve Wozniak, made him rich.

Years go by and Jobs made Pixar a success.  He came back to Apple and created the iPod and iTunes.  I changed my mind.  Steve Jobs apparently knew what he was doing and was on the verge of proving himself a bona fide genius and a true visionary.  His dream had finally become a reality.  Microelectronics and volume sales enabled the practicality of the closed computer.  If your computer already does EVERYTHING why would you ever have to plug in a card?

While Steve Jobs was changing the world, I was working at a large number of companies on a really large number of projects.  I flatter myself that my diverse background gives me a rare perspective on engineering innovation and what it takes to be successful.  More specifically, I firmly believe I understand the critical components of failure.  You see, most of the companies for which I worked no longer exist.  There are several traits common to this pile of failures – and these are exactly the challenges Apple will face without the leadership of Steve Jobs.

1. Lack of honesty – especially internally.  Lying to yourself about schedules (to “motivate” the engineers), about potential sales volumes (being “optimistic”), and about needed functionality (“that feature will be in the next release”) are all poisonous to corporate morale and product success.
2. Chasing the market instead of anticipating where the market will be by the time the product is ready.  This usually occurs when the person in charge is afraid of being wrong about where the market is headed.  Risk aversion leads to a defensive posture in the market (i.e. the loser).
3. Playing market catch-up.  Usually because of number 2, a competitor has a “must have” feature your product doesn’t have.  To many managers this means – “rush something with this feature quickly to market”.
4. Cost.  Yes, money can be saved by leaving off a couple of buttons – but perhaps, though not required, they are desirable.  Yes, wrapping the product in black velvet costs more than brown shipping paper – but it looks really good.  Far too many executives are just not very good at knowing when a few extra pennies buys a lot – so they go as cheap as possible.
5. Quality.  I’ve seen so, so many companies ship junk.  Important people say it is time to ship, so the junk gets shipped.  So very few executives have the patience to get it right

Rest in peace Steve.

The secrets of your success are hidden in plain sight; but few will ever find them.

I’ve lived through a number of situations where I, or a coworker, was asked to do a user interface.  Often (usually…) management would assert, “Don’t worry, this is just for a demo” or “Just throw it together quickly so we have something to use for testing”.  OH! But how many times we ended up actually delivering the “expedient” UI because, when it came time to ship, it was the only thing available.

So what is the actual problem with engineers building the UI?  The big problem is many engineers view the user interface as a tool.  They focus on functionality and not so much on form, attractive colors, texture, flow, presentation, etc.  Some engineers have difficulty breaking out of this mold but others, given the proper management environment, are ideal UI developers because:

1. The understand what this “tool” has to do
2. They are well suited, by training and background, to understand the capabilities and limitations of the technology used to implement the user interface.

A really, really, key factor in an engineer making a high quality UI is the always elusive “proper management environment”.  In my opinion, Steve Jobs has led Apple to great success because of two critical components of this “proper management environment”.

• He insists the product actually work (this may be far more rare than you might think).
• From his early commitment to a GUI/windowed operating system to packaging silver MacBooks in black velvet, he demands his products not only work well but present well.

Additional management tolerance is needed when the technology being used to develop the UI is unfamiliar.  Time must be invested in simply “playing” with the technology to explore its limitations and to see what works best (see my blog “Design First, Right” with screen samples at http://iPhone.MikeFicco.com).

Finally, management vision is needed.  The person assigning work to the engineer must see the value in going back and revisiting a somewhat “working” UI.  To take the time to hone it and perhaps even reinvent it with the knowledge and experience gained in making the first “expedient” version.

Like all things in engineering, perhaps all things in life, high quality results are achieved when you start with good people, provide vision and good direction, and above all allow some time for tweaking and polishing the final product.  Yes, time is money, but a quality product that works well and presents well sells much better than a smoldering pile of manure.

This folks, is a revolution.  For a hundred years the automotive industry struggled to beat mechanical complexity into submission.  As progress was gradually made the demands on drivers became progressively less.  Early drivers had to be tinkerers with a toolkit and mechanical aptitude.  Today blissfully ignorant people get in their car, turn the key, and drive away.

Aside –

I once had a dog that would return from a summer walk, sit in front of an air conditioner floor vent, and periodically paw it.  Evidently he was rewarded often enough for his pawing that he came to believe he could control, or at least influence, the air conditioner gods.  Of course there was a random delay before the cool breeze started.  One could only wonder if his primitive cocker spaniel brain attributed this to the air conditioner gods being busy or perhaps angry with him.

There are times when all of us are cocker spaniels (but maybe not as cute).  In a sense, we are all cocker spaniel brained when confronted with befuddling new technology.  Indeed, Arthur C. Clarke pointed out “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

To distill my thinking, we have a ubiquitous device – the car, of historic complexity, recently imbued with sophisticated embedded artificial intelligence.  Few who drive these cars understand the magic by which they operate.  Fewer still understand the limitations of that magic.  Worse, we cannot ignore the marketing and corporate agendas being applied to this unholy muddle.

For example, the people who want to sell you more oil tell you to change it every 3,000 miles while the people who want to sell you another car say an oil change every 7,500 or even 15,000 miles is fine.  Hummmmm.

Now we have all the ingredients for a real mess:

• Complex and at times unproven technology
• Multiple competing corporate agendas
• Large population of uninformed users
• Deep seated (and unwarranted) faith in magic
• An abundance of cocker spaniel brains

A friend of mine has a fairly new car that displays a wrench icon on the dashboard when it is time for maintenance.  In the old days, a conscientious person would look at their odometer and make a service appointment at certain well-known mileage milestones.  15,000 and 30,000 miles are two examples of this traditional approach.  More recently, manufacturers have been making forays into Condition Based Maintenance (CBM).  This is cool stuff.  The idea behind CBM is that the need for maintenance depends on how hard you use something.  Embedded software in my friend’s car monitors sensors and calculates when to light up the wrench.  This is really cool until the cocker spaniels get involved.

Someone offered to change my friend’s oil around 9 or 10,000 miles.  Specific details are a little hazy.  Nobody is sure how much oil was used.  Nobody is sure if any computations or sensors were reset.  At around 15,000 miles my friend contacted the dealership to make a service appointment.  The service center representative asked if the wrench was visible on the dashboard.  It was not and the representative said not to bring the car in until the wrench was visible.  Questioned further, the representative said the wrench could not be confused by any out of cycle oil changes.  It knew when service was needed and don’t worry about bringing the car in until the wrench appears.

Note:  subsequent events and discussions with this dealership resulted in a complete retraction of this.  Evidently there is some sort of mileage based maintenance schedule.  It’s not my car and I’m not really clear on the details.  If you have a wrench on your dash – you should become knowledgeable about this.

Fast forward a couple thousand miles.  Still no wrench, but the oil warning light started coming on – first on hills, then most of the time.  Finally my friend decided to check the oil.  SURPRISE!  The engine oil was more than a quart low.  DOUBLE SURPRISE!  Hot transmission fluid barely touched the bottom of the dipstick.  We are not really sure what the wrench monitors, but clearly it doesn’t monitor fluid levels.  We’ve since learned it also does not monitor clogged air filters.  What exactly does the wrench monitor and why was it confused?  Good questions.

Now, remember – there is no real agreement among knowledgeable individuals and corporations on when you should change your oil.  3K, 5K, 7.5K, 15K…  Genuine oil change estimates are all over the map.  Given this, why would you:

1. spend a penny in development
2. add complexity to the manufacturing process
3. confuse customers and service personnel

to tell someone to change their oil at 7,735 miles instead of 7,500?  This smells badly of marketing, not engineering.

Conditioned Based Maintenance is cool stuff and an excellent field for further research.  Unfortunately, its current use in cars seems badly mired in corporate politics and marketing rather than science.

In 1998, the Internet was still a baby, new PCs were made from the Pentium II, and less than half of them had CD readers.  It was this year, this company, and these circumstances that revealed to me the secret of Microsoft’s early success.

My company’s software had grown too big to fit on a single floppy.  It required three (3).  In 1998 Internet delivery of the software wasn’t even considered by my boss.  Considered, but rejected by the CEO, was delivery on a CD.  He didn’t want to lose access to over half the PCs by requiring a CD reader.  To put this in perspective, the company had less than 50,000 customers and the CEO decided that access to 20 or 30 or 40 million potential customer was just not enough.  He demanded a bigger pool.

The unfortunate consequence of his decision was the delivery of this futuristic product was being dumbed-down to retain compatibility with old PCs.  Here was a product, most likely to be attractive to “early adopters”, but it was being crippled by the antiquated image of having to repeatedly swap floppies to install it.

It was during this time that I started thinking about how Microsoft did things.  Bill Gates seemed to not care about under-powered and feature-poor PCs.  So what if the customer’s current PC was too weak to provide a good user experience, or perhaps too anemic to work at all with his new software?  Unlike most corporate leaders, Bill saw the future and didn’t wait for the world to catch up.

His approach, and it worked very well, was to provide desirable features and functionality attractive to the early adopters.  They in turn went out and bought new PCs so they could get maximum enjoyment from the new software.  In the process Bill as the CEO, from memory and very brief research, led Microsoft to something like a 10x stock price gain from when it went public in 1986 until he stepped down as CEO in 2000.  At that time the Microsoft stock price was about $45.  Here we are in 2011 and the stock is about $25.

This isn’t to malign the leadership that followed Bill – only to encourage them to do better.  Yes, Bill was good but without him Microsoft has needlessly become a follower.  In a sense, they worry they may lose customers by requiring a CD reader.  They’ve come to believe others are more innovative.  As a result they look to acquire web search technology, cloud anything, Skype, etc.  I don’t remember Microsoft creating any new market or ground-breaking technology since Bill stepped down.  Worse, and now we get to the reason for this blog, they are doing just plain stupid things.

Example 1:  Windows Explorer search

Have you tried searching for anything with the Vista or Windows 7 versions of Windows Explorer?  I first encountered this nonsense a few years ago on Vista.  Windows XP search was just fine.  You give it a full or partial file name and tell it what to look for inside the files that match – simple, easy, and it worked.  On Vista, there didn’t seem to be a way to tell the search to look inside the files.  After poking for quite a while and web searching I figured out how to force Explorer to look inside files.  Unfortunately, I never figured out how to specify file names so some searches became very painfully long as the search looked inside every file no matter how big or irrelevant.

Amazingly, they didn’t fix this in Windows 7.  Last week I was doing a search for a file but I just couldn’t find it.  I assumed I just remembered the content incorrectly.  Later, I found the file for which I was searching – and the content was as I remembered it.

Huh???

I went back and searched again.  Knowing where to look, Explorer could not find the file.  This file was standard ASCII text (in fact it was Python code).  I could see the text in Notepad and I could see the text in Eclipse.  Hummmmm?  Maybe I have to turn on Windows indexing?  So I tried that and it corrupted my Subversion project files and I had to reinstall the entire project.  Grrrr!!!

Summary

Hey Microsoft guys.  I’ve been using computers for over 30 years.  I’ve used more operating systems and file systems than you ever heard of – from Intel’s RMX, Univac, DEC’s RSX, Unix, Linux, DOS, Mac, and EVERY version of Windows ever made…

AND, after HOURS of playing…

I can’t figure out how to use the new Windows Explorer search.  This is a bad, BAD product.  Fix it!  And while you are doing that, put BACK the ability to tell the search file names to look in so I can help narrow the search.

Example 2:  The Windows 7 calculator.

What the HELL were you thinking?  Some time ago I was working on a record structure that had 16 bit binary time stamps.  Using the Windows 7 calculator in hex mode, I was converting the binary number to decimal seconds, then dividing by 60 to get the minutes.  After several records I was surprised they were all evenly dividing by 60.  After several more I became doubtful and actually started to look at the numbers instead of blindly typing.  Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the Microsoft calculator didn’t work!  In what crazy universe does it make since to force the “programmer” view of a decimal calculator to ignore decimals?  You do know that sometimes programmers use these things called floating point numbers, right?  You know, programmers don’t always use integers, right?

To do my binary seconds to minutes conversion, and see the result was not an even multiple of 60, I had to save each value and toggle to the “standard” view to do the division – then toggle back to the programmer view for each record.

Have you guys ever tried to use this?

BAD – BAD – BAD!!!

Fix it!!!

Albert Einstein was first to describe the photoelectric effect, in 1907.  He was awarded the Nobel Prize for this work in 1923.  Briefly, the photoelectric effect occurs when a photon smacks into a substance and frees an electron.  When this happens regularly, an electric current is produced.  All solar cells are based on this phenomenon.  For many years visionaries have projected solar cells as the clean energy source of the future.  It looks like they may be right, but not in the way they expected.

Energy from Heat

Working together, Katzumi Suzuki of the Nipon Engineering Institute and Shrinavas Patel of the Engineering Foundation of Bombay reported in the Journal of Thermodynamic Physics that they created a successful experiment in which they lowered the photon energy needed to create the photoelectric effect to under one electron volt.  Such a low energy corresponds to a photoelectric “threshold frequency” in the infrared part of the spectrum.  In practical terms this means that solar cells made with their patented proprietary process are capable of producing electricity from infrared energy (i.e., heat).

Katzumi and Shrinavas report that today they can only achieve about 11% efficiency, but they hope to boost that to perhaps 18% within the next decade (their paper calculates a theoretical limit of 21.7%).  They are working to manufacture and sell one meter wide rolls of thin, flexible solar cell material of various widths and lengths.  No price has been quoted.

The amount of electricity generated is non-linear with temperature and, with the existing process, generation of electricity cannot be achieved at temperatures below -10 degrees Fahrenheit.  The Journal of Thermodynamic Physics noted that one square meter of material generated in the dark (i.e., no visible light) about 15 Watts at the freezing point and about 60 Watts at room temperature.  This means that a shirt made from this material could power a smartphone indefinitely from your own body heat.  A car covered in this material could drive for nearly 600 miles in an Arizona summer night.

Global Cooling

Perhaps the most important part of this discovery is its potential application in the field of climate change.  There are hints this technology could be used to cool global warming by transferring the surplus heat into charged batteries. Additional details can be found in the just published journal article.

Quick research taught me that, something like cell phone hardware and the phone company that provides the service, there is the security hardware and, separately, there is the company that provides the monitoring service.  I called one of the security companies and discussed my needs with an extremely well spoken woman who suggested I schedule an installation.  She offered that I was lucky to have called because they were in the middle of a major promotion.  She waived installation fees and gave me several free sensors.  She introduced me to her manager and made sure I was getting all the discounts available.  Cool, I thought, and was very impressed.

A few days later the installation technician showed up.  He removed his shoes before entering my house – another example of quality employees and good training, I thought.  Things took a negative turn, however, when I understood some equipment needed to be installed at the point where my phone line enters the house.  That was very inconvenient since doing so would require removing a cabinet and cutting into drywall.  The technician explained that the module needed to be installed at the point where the line enters the house and would not work correctly if simply connect to one of my many phone jacks.  Well, said I, that would have been good to know before we scheduled this appointment…

The technician pressed on and suggested an upgraded glass break detector.  He said the one I was to receive for free was not very reliable.  Finally, he suggested we upgrade to the GSM module so we would not need the home phone line to report a problem.  Using the GSM module would circumvent the need to use the home phone line – but unfortunately would add $10 per month in monitoring fees.  I decided to cancel the installation but the technician would hear none of that.  He insisted on putting me down for another appointment to “give me a chance to think about it”.

A couple of days later I called the company to cancel the new appointment.  What a change.  I was magically transported to a used car lot where I found myself apparently talking to a used car salesman – or at least it seemed that way.  They didn’t want to hear about canceling the appointment.  Wasn’t I aware of the crime statistics?  Didn’t I want my family to be safe?  I could have the GSM hardware for free (but NO discount on the monitoring).  On and on this continued and became difficult.  Eventually, I successfully cancelled the appointment.

What was I to do now?  I wanted a security system but didn’t want my wall damaged and didn’t want to pay extra fees.  I thought about the problem…

WAIT!!

Isn’t a home security system simply an embedded system with a remote connection?  Haven’t I worked for years on embedded systems that communicate via the Internet?  Don’t I have a perfectly good wireless LAN in my house?  Why can’t the security system just connect to my wireless LAN and handle all communication needs through the Internet?  I walked around my house and made a list of what I actually wanted and started calling security companies.

Oh my!  The world of security companies does not deal well with a customer that specifies what they want.  The business model of most of the companies seems based on some very simple principles:

• Sell fear
• Sell the 24 hour monitoring service
• Avoid discussing details

Maybe I just had some bad luck, but I ran into very deceptive statements and practices.  I eventually DID get a security system and that salesman and the installation technician were very professional.  However, my brief experience in this area tells me the home security industry is well behind the technology curve and desperately needs to be dragged into the future.

The home monitoring companies have an extraordinarily profitable business model and, from a technology perspective, are years behind.  It seems to me the days of this business model are numbered.

Management Experience

As an experienced engineering manager I know you can’t always predict how long work will take.  However, my direct engineering experience has been that predictions become MUCH more reliable if the work is broken down into discrete and well-defined steps.  Even more important is to then arrange the steps into a sequence that builds on intermediate results and optimizes usage of the available resources.  In short, success comes more readily with a complete and detailed plan.

My experience has also been that making the detailed plan available for review, critique, and comment often results in an even better and more highly optimized plan.  Such review allows for the inclusion of missed steps and for correction of operational sequences that had not been fully considered.

It is without question that ad hoc direction of maintenance crews is far less efficient than having a comprehensive multi-step plan with a well-defined series of steps and an estimate of the time to complete each of these steps.

Therefore:

The utility must have such a plan.  If they have no such plan – they should and must be required to produce one for each significant outage.  Managers must either be trained or replaced until such an obviously needed basic component of good service is instinctively created and used for every major outage.  Note: Inexperienced managers sometimes argue against taking the time to produce a detailed plan.  They may say it is only delaying the start of repairs.  Wrong.  It has been proven over and over that, for major work, a good plan more than repays the time invested in producing it.

Good Management Practices:

• It is good management and a demonstration of foresight to produce a couple of plans in advance of the emergency.
• When the emergency occurs, it should only take minutes to select a relevant preexisting plan and “tweak” it for the current circumstances.
• There is no reason the plan produced in the first half hour has to be the final plan.  Don’t be afraid to enhance it as the emergency progresses and more facts are learned.
• Make use of the experience gained during each emergency and adjust the preexisting plans to be even better for the next emergency.

Since it is the job of the Public Utility Commission to oversee the utilities, they would be negligent if they did not insist on reviewing the preexisting plans.  They should also insist on participating in post-emergency plan reviews.

It is incontrovertible that a plan must exist to guide repairs for every major outage.  The question becomes how should this plan be made available to the public.  I believe a spreadsheet or Gantt chart would be highly inappropriate.  Instead, I proposed a graphic web page.

Requirements:

1. The basic web page shall be a map of the region.
2. It shall be possible to zoom the map from a high-level view of the entire region to individual street level.
3. The utility grid shall be superimposed on the map.
4. The utility grid shall be color coded as follows:
   • Green – Represents the portions of the utility grid known to be working correctly.
   • Gray – Indicates sections of the grid that have an unknown state.
   • Yellow – These sections are not functioning correctly but are currently under repair.
   • Orange – These sections are not functioning correctly and are next in line for repair.
   • Red – Represents the sections of the utility grid not working and not scheduled for repair in the immediate future.
5. The current time of day shall be presented.
6. The time of day the page data was last updated shall be presented.
7. The page data shall be updated AT LEAST once an hour (update every 15 minutes is preferred).
8. The average time in minutes that trucks/crews have been on their current assignments shall be presented.
9. The number of currently working trucks/crews shall be presented.
10. The number of trucks/crews on break or pending assignment shall be presented.
11. In a major outage, a number of trucks/crews will likely be requested from neighboring jurisdictions.  Each group of requested trucks/crews shall be treated as a discrete block.  For each such block:
    • The source shall be named and the number of trucks/crews requested shall be indicated.
    • The expected arrival time shall be indicated along with the number of hours since the request was issued.
12. For all the blocks in #11, the total number of all trucks/crews that have been requested from neighboring jurisdictions but have not yet arrived shall be presented.
13. It shall be possible for the public to provide feedback on the emergency plan and its implementation.  This feedback shall be archived and made available to the Public Utilities Commission upon demand.

Epitaph

Over my two blogs on public utilities I’ve described a three-step process for improving the reliability and accountability of the system:

1. Stop blaming your outages on Acts of God and start doing regular preventive maintenance and infrastructure improvements.  If you claim you have already been doing so, clearly your efforts have been inadequate and need to be improved.
2. Prepare emergency plans and post these for review and comment.
3. Create a regularly updated (perhaps as often as every 15 minutes) web site that shows the current state of repairs.  This is certainly needed during an emergency – but why not do it every day?

Maybe we can finally stop hearing promises and actually have utility company executives earn their bonuses not by “saving money” but by providing the reliable service implied by their social contract with the community.

Background

The power company responsible for the majority of the outages was already under the microscope.  They seemed to have a several year history of reliability problems and just last year a major snowstorm caused long outages for many of their customers.  When extended outages occurred again, there was a not too surprising customer outcry followed quickly by a great deal of posturing by both the power company and politicians.

… but that was weeks ago …

The reporting and talking continues.  Hearings are being held.  Excuses and promises are being made and made again. Enough.

Engineering Observations

Time to make some “engineering” observations. I experience first-hand both last year’s and this year’s extended power outages.  I was extremely irritated BOTH times when the power company blamed the outage on an “act of God”.  I disagree with that assessment.  Getting hit by a meteor – now that’s and act of God.  Getting snow in the winter just doesn’t seem to qualify as an act of God.  Furthermore, if you are genuinely surprised to get snow and ice during a Washington D.C. winter, you probably shouldn’t be allowed to be in charge of anything important.

Here is some further insight into this “act of God”:  both last year and this year, ALL my other utilities continued working after the power failed.  That would be my gas, water, sewage, telephone, and cable TV.  That is, my 5 other utilities performed significantly better than my power company.  So much for an act of God…

The good news for the most recent extended outage was that it was cold outside.  Since we don’t have any bears and coyotes in the area we could save some of the content of our refrigerator by putting it outside.  The bad news was that it was cold outside and we had no heat.  To be clear, my furnace and hot water heater are gas powered.  We had gas and we had water.  We had hot water.  We had no heat since the furnace blower required the conspicuously absent electricity to heat the house.  Fortunately, I had a fireplace and firewood.  We slept on the floor in front of the fireplace.  The furnace thermostat hit 52 degrees and on the second night without power I considered letting the faucets drip to prevent the pipes from freezing.

One (at least one) of the local radio stations periodically aired listener comments on the situation.  Most were outraged, but there was the occasional defender of the power company.  EVERYONE appreciated the efforts of the front line workers who risked their lives in the cold weather and dangerous conditions.  However, in my opinion, any comment that excused the power company from blame was very wrong to the point of being irresponsible.  Some comments went so far as to call people soft or whiners and told them to get tough or buy a generator.  Again, no one wants to diminish the contributions of the maintenance staff who worked so diligently to get power back on.  BUT it is unacceptable to do or say anything that excuses the executives who, for the last 20 or 30 years, “saved” money and presumably reaped large bonuses by minimizing regular maintenance and infrastructure improvements.

Calling those who complain about having no power “whiners” should have no place in any legitimate conversation.  It deflects accountability from the inability of the power company to fulfill the social contract at the basis of their very existence.  This is a public utility.  As such, the public cannot “vote with their feet” and select another company to deliver power to their home.  In return for being awarded this monopoly, the power company is expected to reliably deliver power – not blame God or repeatedly promise to get better.

I’ve worked for several companies that cut corners or skimped on design, implementation, or testing time in order to save money.  Of course the intention was not so much saving money as boosting profits.  My experience has been that these attempts usually backfire because customers don’t buy the junk that results from such cutting of corners.  That is, backfires for the company.  Many of my previous employers no longer exist.  Along the way, however, some executives got rich because of poorly (for the company) structured bonus plans.  Some also profited handsomely by selling hyped corporate stock before reality came crashing down.

Retail companies with competitors are very different from public utilities.  Those who manage public utilities have a social responsibility to provide quality service to their customers.  The politicians who oversee the utilities, therefore, have a responsibility to their constituents to insure bonus plans, maintenance schedules, infrastructure improvements, etc. are in line with the end goal of providing quality service.  If a public utility does not provide quality service, either due to ineptitude or malicious intent of its managers, those managers should be banned for life from involvement with any public utility.

But enough about managing a company to provide reliable service…

How to Reduce Electric Utility Outages

At some point, customers of even the best managed power company will lose service.  In my situation, both last year and this year, the power company was not able to – or was unwilling to – give us any realistic idea when power would come back on.  This year they made a blanket statement of “11:00 Saturday night”.  In my book (What Every Engineer Should Know About Career Management) I call this “big bang scheduling” and I assert that big bang scheduling is unacceptable.  A schedule with specific milestones is vastly superior because you can easily tell when implementers start to fall behind schedule or when events take an unexpected turn.  Either the power company was completely inept or they wanted to hide from the public when they were going off plan or off schedule.

During an outage, somewhere inside the gigantic power company people make decisions about what neighborhoods get worked on in what order.  If the power company doesn’t have a map of their power grid with known failures highlighted, they certainly should.  How could they hope to work in an efficient fashion without such an annotated grid?  I propose that all power companies… NAY!  All public utilities… be required to host an outage web site.  This should be a graphic presentation of the very same data used by the utility to schedule work.

I hear the power company now!  We can’t do that.  It’s too much work, etc.  Malarkey!  They BETTER be privately doing something like this already if they hope to repair damage in anything remotely resembling an efficient sequence of activity.  Graphically presenting this information to the public would accomplish two incredibly important objectives:

• Homeowners could track the progress of work and see where their neighborhood was in the sequence of repairs.  They could then make educated decisions about emptying the refrigerator or checking into a hotel.
• The public could critique the power company’s allocation or resources and staging of repairs.  The utility would probably dread such critique, but only because they are inept.  If done well, a public display of effective and efficient repairs could provide a wonderful boost of confidence that utility payments are being well spent.

My power company, unfortunately, reminds me of some of my former employers.  Unlike those, however, I can’t just leave in hopes of finding a better situation.  I’m stuck with these guys until the public utility commission wakes from their coma and learns enough about engineering to properly oversee the power company and properly align the thinking of the utility executives.  To help this process, in a future blog I will provide a short engineering specification of the outage web site concept presented above.

Done!   See How Utility Outages SHOULD Be Handled