World affairs

Why Malaysia Air 370 could not have been remotely controlled

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I recently visited some friends and colleagues at Wharton to discuss my work on evolution of flying. Naturally, Malaysia Air  MH370 came up. We have continued the discussion by email since I got back. Here is a note I wrote, explaining why it’s impossible to preprogram a flight plan so that the pilots could not override it, if they were conscious.

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Notice the automatic circling when it reached Athens. Everyone onboard was dead.

Sid, overriding manual override  is designed to be impossible. The pilots always have override. Indeed, the first 2 items on some emergency procedures are:

1) Disengage autopilot

2) Disengage auto throttle

and there are specific buttons to make that easy to do in a hurry. (As well as by going into the Flight computer and reprogramming it, or rebooting it, etc. ) Continue reading →

How did the Ukranian govt. know who was demonstrating against it?

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[edits Jan. 31] A poli sci friend recently blogged about the Ukranian government’s “text that changed the world,” a mass text message thousands of anti-government demonstrators in Kiev. She asked 1) How did the government know who was in the main square of Kiev that day? (Cell phone location) and 2) How did it send the same message to everyone at once? (Mass SMS)

Demonstrators in Kiev. From CNN 

The second question is easy: phone companies routinely provide mass-SMS services to large customers. For example, I’m on the “emergency alert” texting service of UC San Diego’s campus police. It was designed for earthquakes, but it has been used for other kinds of messages “between earthquakes.” The same message goes out to every phone number on their list.

What to do to avoid tracking? Short version: Leave your phone at home. Second best is to shut it off or switch to airplane mode, but those work only if the government is not making an effort to target you.

Continue reading →

Amazon is blowing smoke about drone delivery

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Amazon Delivers Some Pie in the Sky – NYTimes.com.

I’m not impressed by Google’s “aerial delivery.” It’s easy to demonstrate a show system. But it will be very hard to create a safe system that can deliver loads of a few pounds, at a distance of even a few miles, much less the 10 that Jeff Bezos apparently claimed. Or to deliver to a specific person in an apartment building.

Here’s a quick response I wrote on Andrew McAfee’s page about this.

I’m skeptical. There are real safety issues here, as well as weight/payload/power issues. To deliver a 2kg package 30 km will take a vehicle gross weight > 6 kg (rough numbers). And helicopters, unlike fixed wing,  are “fail-dangerous.” Not to mention problems of delivering to a specific person in an urban environment. So I call “pie-in-the-sky” on this.

I see others are being skeptical because of regulatory problems. Yet other countries are way ahead of U.S. on regulation, and I don’t think regulation is the fundamental problem. The real problems include safety and payload:

  • Helicopters (actually, multirotors) have very limited endurance and therefore range. You can put a big battery on them, but then you need a bigger machine to carry the weight.
  • They have limited payload. Four ounces is no problem; but 5 pounds requires, right now, a machine with a total span of about three feet.
  • At least six motors and props will be needed (called a hexacopter). Otherwise, failure of a single engine would cause an immediate crash. Even with six or more rotors, a total power failure, or a guidance  failure, causes a crash. In a crash, the operator has  zero control on where the machine ends up. This is unlike an aircraft.
  • A machine this size that crashes is big enough to kill someone underneath. Especially if some of the motors are still operating. Even professionals are very careful about what they fly over. You can see videos on Youtube of idiots flying over crowded beaches, but a few people have been badly hurt this way, and the number will grow.
  • Navigation using programmed routes is straightforward in clear areas, by using GPS-based-autopilots. But with obstacles (trees, buildings) a lot of development work remains. This problem, unlike the others, will be solved eventually by Moore’s Law.
  • If you use an aircraft (wings) instead of a copter, many of the safety issues get much better. But on the other hand, you need a much larger area to land in. You can’t land in someone’s back yard.

Most of these problems are due to laws of physics, not the capability of current electronics. In short, delivering packages is an active area of R&D, but it will be feasible only in  situations where it is almost useless:

  • When you will be flying in unpopulated areas
  • When you can afford to crash, and lose, a few percent of your vehicles.
  • When the load is small, and the range is short.

There may be  some cases that fit this description, but very few. For the next 5+ years, using drones for that don’t have to land remotely – mainly for remote sensing – is going to be the only practical application. Unless you have a military budget, of course.

 

The Capture of International Intellectual Property Law through the U.S. Trade Regime by Margot E. Kaminski :: SSRN

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This paper finds that the IP law in recent U.S. free trade agreements differs subtly but significantly from U.S. IP law. These differences are not the result of deliberate government choices, but of private capture of the U.S. trade regime. 

US trade negotiations on IP have always seemed heavily biased to me. For a while, it appeared that the bias reflected Congressional bias in favor of  “strong IP.” The extreme example of that bias was Congress being taken completely by surprise – dumbfounded, even – by the outcry over  the SOPA and PIPA bills. To most of Congress, these bills were common sense. To much of America, they were horrible. See e.g. http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2012/01/25/who-really-stopped-sopa-and-why/

But this paper seems to say that US trade negotiators on the TPP treaty are going beyond the US law.  The Capture of International Intellectual Property Law through the U.S. Trade Regime by Margot E. Kaminski :: SSRN.

Of course the big news on TPP negotiation is the leaked draft of the TPP treaty, leaked by Wikileaks.  Unfortunately this article is not updated with insights from that draft, but it contains a variety of detailed examples in existing treaties. Another quote:

 

The USTR’s paraphrasing changes domestic rules into international standards; codifies domestic judicial interpretations as international rules; and omits parts of domestic law that balance IP protection against other values. These distortions shift the cost of lawmaking so that the advising industries bear fewer costs in obtaining the kind of law they want in implementing countries. 

A column on over-hyping of medical “breakthroughs”

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This column in Scientific American from a 30-year veteran of science journalism has some good perspective on the ongoing controversy about non-replicability of so many scientific results. I wish I knew a system solution.

Discussing his findings in Scientific American two years ago, Ioannidis writes: “False positives and exaggerated results in peer-reviewed scientific studies have reached epidemic proportions in recent years. The problem is rampant in economics, the social sciences and even the natural sciences, but it is particularly egregious in biomedicine.”

A Dig Through Old Files Reminds Me Why I’m So Critical of Science — blogs.scientificamerican.com 

Invented by a data scientist: the first anti-scam – AnalyticBridge

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Invented by a data scientist: the first anti-scam – AnalyticBridge.

An interesting concept: create a lottery which is really a disguised form of savings. That’s not quite what this proposal does, but it could be modified very easily.

From what I read, accumulating savings is a big problem for many poor people. Some nonetheless play the lottery. Create a lottery-squared, which takes in tickets from participants, accumulates most of it in an account for the payer, and puts a fraction in a true lottery. Then the ticket-buyer can “win” a small amount according to some rule. The rule  may be hidden from them, as in the original proposal, or could be partially under their control.

Lots of legal problems with this, to say the least. The middleman is acting like a bank, with all the issues that brings. The record-keeping and security could be a problem. And so forth. This is more of a problem in some countries than others.

By the way, this is similar to what “Christmas club accounts” in banks did in the 1950s, apparently. Customers would put $5 into the account each week, and get it all back in December.

Will MOOCs revolutionize education? History says the odds are against it.

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MOOCs – Massively Open Online Courses – are well up in the hype cycle right now. Coursera, Udacity, and other companies are trying to establish themselves as leaders in this “emerging market,” following the 1999 model of build the traffic first, then figure out how to monetize it. (That model worked fine for Google and Facebook, and failed for many others – but that’s a separate topic.) The expansive vision is that instead of showing up in classrooms to listen to a professor, students will “engage in online learning” including lectures and discussions over the Net. If they are in conventional colleges, they will still come to class, but it will be to discuss and go beyond the lectures they received the night before.

A recent post on another blog about the Open TV course movement reminded me that TV was once receiving similar game-changing forecasts. I’m sure it accomplished a little, but it never got much traction and came nowhere close to its hype. The post was on Punk Rock OR, and it gives some history that I didn’t know, about education by TV.

The history of education in American is littered with 1) fads of all kinds, and specifically 2) claims that XYZ new communication technology would revolutionize higher education. Examples include radio, mail-order courses, TV, movies, Control Data’s instruction system that used a time-shared computer, the Internet in general, the World Wide Web (that one is partly accurate). Many of these have had some value, but none of them has changed the basic paradigm of “asses in classrooms,” or if they have, they did not reach even a 1% market share. Notice that all of these have the same principle: achieve economies of scale, by using the faculty member far beyond where his or her physical voice can carry.

Yes, technology has helped education, and sometimes has even revolutionized it. Two old examples are the printing press, and the pencil. (Does anyone know a source for the explanation, by a school board, of why paper and pencils were unnecessary expenses, given that a chalkboard was perfectly adequate for teaching writing? I read about this many years ago.)

 But true revolutions in education are very rare. An example of a computer-revolution-that-hasn’t-happened: discussion conferences where discussions continue after class. These are technically straightforward, and the infrastructure exists and is used (e.g. Blackboard and others). So far, I have seen approximately zero examples of massive changes created by such discussions, for all their promise.

So I take the lack of impact from MOTVCs as yet another bad sign for MOOCs. Many of these forecast revolutions in higher ed, including TV and courses-by-mail, have foundered because there is something superior about actually showing up in a classroom, surrounded by other people talking about the same subject. We don’t really know why it’s superior – but so far, the replacements have not kept students coming back. Is there much reason to think “this time it’s different?”

Tieing this to technological knowledge and art/science, the main topics of this blog, good teaching apparently contains elements that are still very much art. Perhaps it’s as simple as the observation that humans, as social animals, use our brains differently when we are in groups.