The Future of Aviation

Today, Marion Blakely, the current Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, gave a keynote at the Women in Science symposium. She spoke briefly about some challenges of being a woman in science, and how there will always be tradeoffs in terms of the work-family balance, but mostly she was quite positive about the issue. Then she introduced some of the changes that's going on in aviation and the FAA, and some really interesting challenges that they face:

• Technology: The tech being used today is mostly still the same as those used the 1950s. Air traffic controlling and radar are still the same. This poses a problem in terms of scale, as they expect the number of passengers to increase to 1 billion from about half that now in 2015, and as the number of small jets is increasing. The routes being used today still use a waypoint system that was developed in the 1950s to help deliver mail. In order to reroute to increase efficiency and be able to bring aircraft closer together, they have to overthrow the old tech. Radar updates a plane's position every 6-12 seconds, which is not precise enough for safety. Also, pilots now have little situational awareness; they don't know of other planes near them, and rely on the air traffic controllers to tell them. The FAA is planning to move to satellite based, automated systems, with transponders on the aircraft. (Really exciting problem from a networking/systems standpoint! Reminds me of the news of the military putting a router in space. Think of the synchronization/routing/packet loss issues!)


• Growth in private flight: she mentioned the X PRIZE winner, Burt Rutan, and microjets, which are 6-seaters that are available for ~$1 million, as things to watch. Within 2 years we might see the first commercial flights into space on Virgin Galactic(a!). It's an inherently risky business, so how much should the FAA regulate it? Is this a matter of adventure sports or transportation? At least they have to insure the people on the ground are not put in danger.

• Environmental issues: Though there are new propulsion systems available that are energy efficient, commercial liners are replaced every 20-25 years, and general aviation who knows when, so one can't hope for great changes in that direction soon. However she said they were investigating using alternative fuels, from a safety standpoint as well. And she mentioned how changes in the flight operation can be a big change: usually on descent, planes will dive to a certain altitude, stop, dive again, stop, which requires a lot of restarting of the engines. She saw in Louisville, UPS had coordinated their planes to descend smoothly, such that all the planes were evenly spaced going down and timed perfectly. It decreased emissions by 30% and also the noise level below a certain altitude.


• Private sector spurring change: helicopters flying in the Gulf of Mexico to oil rigs charged a lot for extra safety measures. They installed transponders on the craft and ground stations on the rigs. Now aircraft flying over that area also want to take advantage of those ground stations to plan better routes.


• Safety: right now it's the safest time ever to fly. The most dangerous part of a flight is the trip to the airport. In terms of security from human factors, they're working on reducing the delay from the sidewalk to boarding to 30 minutes.

There were some other points about the economics of paying for all this, how in the U.S. has a tax on the tickets when most other countries have fees, but I can't recall the specifics. Her presentation was great though, very informative and delivered very competently, in a comforting Southern drawl. It seems you get to learn about a lot of fields in aviation, as she talked about how the air currents in the U.S. are particularly difficult so lead to more delays, to the new Boeing aircraft that's coming out, to issues of policy and organization.

The Future of Energy (is much like the present)

Yesterday, Vaclav Smil, professor at University of Manitoba and prolific writer about energy, spoke at the Future of Energy Series here. His talk was titled "Transforming Energy Techniques," but he mainly discussed how energy techniques are not going to be changing anytime soon. He said it was a historical lecture, and those types of lectures are not given enough about energy, since in the media one usually just hears about new technologies all the time. (He also disliked using the word "technology"; "techniques" are what should be focused on). He was quite exciting and fun to watch. Here're notes:

• The three major "prime movers" on our planet today, the steam turbine, the car, and the electric motor, were all developed in the 1880s, and their basic technology has fundamentally not changed since then. We may have more efficient versions of them, but if the engineers who invented them saw them today, they'd be able to recognize the components. The only modern invention that's comparably important is the gas turbine from the 1930s.


• So, new technologies have not spread. Prime movers capture the market slowly, but stay there for a very long time.


• Same is true for sources of energy: oil only surpassed coal as the main source in the U.S. in 1964. In the 20th century the U.S. used as much coal as oil.


• Before coal, wood was the main source of energy, and for 1 billion people today it still is. The U.S. only switched from wood to coal in the 1880s, in China in the 1960s. Techniques become embedded in society and stay there.


• Once a technique is in place, infrastructure builds up around them. There's tons of investment already in refineries, mines, oil fields, gas lines, etc., that one can't just decide to switch to something else in 5 years, or even in 20 years. He mentioned huge circles of natural gas line pipes that run from Western Siberia, to France to Britain, through Spain back to the Mediterranean to Turkey and Bosnia. These lines would be useless if they didn't have something to pump through them. Change can happen, but it will happen on the order of generations.

• It takes a long time to get high performance. Two other historical examples: people only conquered famine in the 19th century; horses: a good harness only came around for them 1000 years ago, and only in the 19th century did people figure out how to feed them properly.


• Stats on world energy consumption: Subsaharan Africa uses ~5 gigajoules/year, India ~15, China 40, European countries 100-130, Japan 170, U.S. 340


• Energy in China: instead of competing with Japan, China wants to compete with the U.S. So instead of building bullet trains across the country, they put down 6-lane highways.
  
  In the 1980s, they experienced one of the largest housing booms in history. All the buildings though had concrete walls. Concrete is a terrible insulator of heat, and no one had fiberglass + wood, or triple windows.


• Asked if he thought there was any new technology that he thought could catch on, he emphasized that the major problem was scale. Wind turbines only produce 2-3 megawatts each, so the Chinese just plop down a 600 megawatt coal plant instead. The electric car hasn't passed that test, that of having millions of them run for a decade. The internal combustion engine has passed that test. Also he mentioned how if everyone started driving electric cars tomorrow, then we'd have huge drainage of the electrical networks at various intervals of the day as people recharged them, and where would that energy come from? So, he didn't really suggest any potential new energy source/technology.


• He mentioned that he optimized his house so it uses 1/12 of the energy of his neighbors, but this would not catch on in the developed world, because we are a culture of consumption. If we save money, we'll use it to take a plane to Las Vegas or buy a new car. 30% of the houses in the U.S. are custom built, and the average size of those houses are 5300 square feet. So we can't save energy through houses if we need 200 lights to light our homes. The U.S. has a "Texas mentality" and no one is going to opt for voluntary limits on consumption.

So overall, a kind of pessimistic but realistic view on energy. I guess those flying wind turbines won't be a viable solution yet.

Human-Robot Interaction

Today Brian Scassellati from Yale came and spoke about his research in robot-human interactions. He said he was interested in how humans behave, and how to make robots act accordingly in their presence, so that one's grandparents can interact with them. His research also turned up theories about how humans learn certain skills that we take for granted, and things they learned about autism in children when experimenting with using robots as therapy or diagnosis tools. So here are some brief notes, from what I can remember:

• The most interesting I thought was the last section, about using robots as therapy for children with autism. Autism is the 2nd highest genetic mental disorder, about 1 in 250 kids are born with it (much higher than I thought). Diagnosing it is pretty subjective, as children are just taken into a room with a clinician who check if they do certain behavorial traits or not. The rate of autism in the U.S. has also multipled tenfold in the last 8 years, but that may be because there are more people being diagnosed with it, using these subjective measures that differ between doctors. So he wants to develop some objective ways to diagnose autism.
  
  He's been studying how autistic children interact with robots, and the results are incredible. There are children who are completely asocial, who don't speak, who ignore their parents completely, but when placed in a room with a robot they exhibit many social behaviors. Even if their parents are in the room with them, they ignore their parents and focus on the robots. The researchers are trying to figure out why this is the case. They've ruled out that the robot is responsive to the child by having a robot that plays back a series of actions that have no relation to what the child is doing: the normal children get bored of it pretty quickly, but the autistic ones don't. Also they've ruled out that an anthropomorphic robot is the reason by having robots that have facial features misplaced or that don't resemble people at all. (One of the cute ones is this snowman creature, Keepon, from Japan; watch the brief video at the bottom!) So they're still working on why the children react to them, but when they leave the room, revert to their formal selves and stop social interactions completely. (One child has been seeing the Keepon robot weekly for 3 years, but still is only social in its presence). They're looking at what the children pay attention to when they say look at a scene in a movie: normal kids focus on the faces and the eyes, the autistic kids look at seemingly random things.
  
  Isn't it fascinating how those kids perceive the world? They don't seem to recognize human-ness/life in other people, but do in robots. Or they don't see the value of interaction with people. The researchers seem to want to fix them, to make them see things differently, but maybe there's some bit of truth, something valuable, in how they perceive.


• Study in Vocal Prosody: teaching a robot to recognize speech is hard, but training them to recognize emotion should be easier. People can recognize is someone is angry or happy even if they're speaking in another language, and animals can do that too. So they trained a robot to do so (Kismet from MIT), and from the video it seemed to be doing pretty well, lowering its eyes and ears if it was being scolded. The strange thing was was that when they trained it using voice data from one gender, they could not get it to recognize the same emotions when the opposite gender was speaking to it, but it did well with members of the same gender. This was the case even when corrected for differences in pitch and such btw male and female. So that suggests that humans might have separate learning schemes for different voices, something for developmental psychologists to test.


• Study in Gazes, in Language patterns: teaching a robot to figure out what/where a person is looking at. Studies were done before by teaching the robot by looking thousands of iterations of people gazing. But he improved the method by having the robot reach for an object, and then study a person who looked at it. It only took a couple hundred trainings to get that right.
  
  With language, his students taught a robot how to distinguish between pronouns when making a sentence like "I have the ball." One can easily teach the robot to recognize tangible objects, but it's hard for them, like for children at first, to learn how to use pronous properly. So they had two people toss a ball between them, saying "I have the ball", "Now you have the ball", etc. And by the end the robot could look for where a ball was and say "You have the ball" or "I have the ball".

Chinese and American Higher Education: Challenges

Last Friday, Professor William Kirby, former Dean of Harvard college, grandmaster of all things Asia, spoke about the challenges facing Chinese and U.S. universities in the 21st century. He was, as usual, very well spoken and brought up some interesting points. Here are notes: (yes this is belated; work never ceases)

• There has been a huge growth in higher ed. in China over the past 7 years, a revolutionary growth comparable to that which occurred at the beginning of the 20th century when the examination system was overthrown. After education was slowly rebuilt in the 80s after the cultural revolution, there was a steady increase in college enrollment (from ~800K in 1989 to ~3 million in 1999), but then a sharp increase over the past few years (to ~15 million in 2005, some estimates around 26 million right now), as for the first time China is commited to democratize higher education.


• More stats: 15% of young people are in school, this is projected to grow to 40% by 2020. China now produces more PHds annually than any other country in the world. The government spending on education is several times larger than that spent by European nations.


• Criticisms: as the number of students rise, the number of faculty has not been increasing proportionately; the quality of the faculty is feared to be poor.


• Brings up the question, what does it mean to be an educated person?


• Kirby was asked by Chinese university leaders about the Harvard education, the core curriculum. Though American universities are now regarded as the best in the world, they were not always so. 100 years ago the leading schools were German, and Harvard only became superior by copying the German models in the 19th century and by other international borrowing. So though Chinese schools are not regarded as leaders now, it may change (Beida University is already ranked #14 in the world by the Times Educational Supplement).


• Though Harvard is regarded as a model for education, it has had a history of changing models, of presidents who think everyone should take a set of foundation courses to those who didn't want any requirements.

What is the role of general education? This is an important question especially for those universities who are distinguished for their faculty research, not teaching.

• Should seek to cultivate values in students different from those of the professions they will inhabit, foundation values, awareness of public issues. Should not just train specialists, but promote a commitment to lifelong learning, so one can be truly independent of mind when one graduates.


• One has to recommit to the humanities at the core of education, and keep institutions open to ideas from many sources; important in this age of increasing specialization


• Have to figure out how to value teaching as well as research when most awards out there are concentrated in research (or consulting). Without students, the faculty wouldn't be there.


• How to promote opportunity, increases access, fairness in admissions. How to engage in self criticism; to review how, what, and why of what we're teaching. Each generation can craft their own idea of what a general education means. (Beida faculty were surprised when Kirby brought up the idea of their voting on curriculum changes.)

Why do we have higher education at all?

• Some reasons: to serve the state, society. To have better citizenry. To get a job (not a bad reason)


• American education is special: there is a stubborn commitment to liberal education.


• Need to promote general education because otherwise researchers and students will keep interacting on more narrow ground.


• Chinese modern experience has shown what life can be in the absense of humanities: before under the examination system, a humanities education was the only education that statesmen received. From 1905 to now, education has drifted away from humanities, to science and engineering, to promote state power and technology. The government has an enormous faith in the power of technology and applied sciences. (Technocracy was translated by Chinese to mean "dictatorship of the engineers") In 1949, 4% of students were majoring in humanities.


• Now, there is the beginning of a return to liberal education in China. Beida, Fudan, Peking Universities have introduced general education curriculums. They recognize that an education without the humanities is incomplete.


• John F. Kennedy speaking at Amherst: "When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment."

Then during the Q&A:

• The rewards for pedagogy are much lower in China than in the U.S. Levels of financial aid are also much less, even at elite universities. There is no system of federal loans or other financing available.


• When Premier Wen Jiabao came to speak at Harvard, he wanted to speak at Sanders Theater, where Jiang Zemin had spoken previously. But at that time Michael Sandel was having his last Justice class, and refused to move even when Kirby asked. Another option would be Memorial Hall, but the last person from China who spoke there was the Dalai Lama, so that was out. Finally the Premier spoke at a place most fitting for a Chinese Premier in the 21st century, Burden hall at Harvard Business School. [transcript of the event]


• Though there are stories of corruption in the admissions process in college and high school levels, of students being admitted in exchange for "donations," there are not many stories about corruption of the examination system. If one does well, one will be admitted to a school of the expected level.

Overall, a fantastic talk.

Positive Psychology and Christianity

So as I mentioned yesterday, I went to one of the talks in the Veritas Forum. The annual Forum is always produced very well, with panels focusing on the tough questions, the why questions, and the God questions.

The panel was titled "Can't Get No Satisfaction? What Positive Psychology and Christianity Have to Offer." First, Carol Kauffman, a psychiatry professor and a personal "coach" gave a presentation outlining positive psych but mostly giving advice for people. She was really easy to listen to and assuring, speaking like Laura Roslin from Battlestar. Some of her tips sounded kinda like what you'd find in one of those "X Steps to Complete Fulfillment" books in the self-help section, but they were backed by SCIENCE, so I suppose they're more reliable. Anyhoo here's some notes:

- before, psychology focused on pathology, now it's turning to well-being and virtue and the study of conditions and processes that lead to these things; before, "happiness" was not something you could publish on

- as people have gotten wealthier by 3 times over the last 50 years, they have gotten 0 times happier

Then she discussed steps to improve one's happiness:

1) reverse the focus

• what we pay attention to affects how we feel


• the Zeigarnik effect: people pay attention to what is incomplete and out of order, what they did wrong instead of what they did right


• so one needs to consciously hang on to the positive: before you go to sleep, think about 3 good things you did that made you feel good


• positive Pygmalion effect: if you are looking for positivity, you are more likely to find it

2) identify and harness your strengths

• take the VIA test to identify your strengths


• match your work style with your strengths; I think she said people who were told to do this for a week felt happier and worked more efficiently and were better off six months later

3) power of positive effect

• What is happiness? apparently there's an equation for this:
  
  SWB (subjective well-being) = 50% B + 10% LC + 40% VB
  B = biological/genetic influence
  LC = life circumstances
  VB = voluntary behavior


• So, success doesn't make you happy, happiness causes success.

4) coaching for flow

• famous psychologist Csikszentmihalyi: believed one is most happy in a state of flow


• Flow occurs when one's challenge matches one's skill level: if the problem is too hard, one feels overwhelmed, if it is too easy, one feels bored.


• so one must raise or lower the bar of either the challenge or the skill level

The next speaker was Stephen Post, a professor of various fields, and also head of the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love. His talk was about how people feel good when helping others, a fact which is supported by studies, and about how that ties in with what Christianity tells people to do. Some things he mentioned:

• C.S. Lewis said "Joy is the serious business of heaven"


• Various quotes from the Bible: to give is better than to receive, etc.


• Studies have shown that married people, people who worship regularly are happier than others, along with people whose purpose in life extend beyond themselves


• There was a study where they hooked up devies to people recording their activities throughout the day, and later found that 70% of the time they were happy occured when they were helping others


• Some TIME magazine poll found that ~70% of people were most happy when contributing to the lives of others.


• "The secret virtue of Jesus is mirth"

So, not the most informative of talks, and indeed he sounded like he was preaching a lot of the time. I don't have a problem with his urging people to do good, it's just sometimes it seemed he was using the scientific studies to prove the truth of the moral importance of doing good (See the Bible says it's better to give than receive. How can that be true? Well here's this study that showed that people feel better when they give..). One can tell people to do noble things by saying it'll make them feel better, or by telling them it's their responsibility. The two reasons don't necessarily intersect (Post mentioned that when he was on 20/20, John Stossel asked him that by feeling good for doing good, doesn't that make a person selfish, and he responded that he'd encourage everyone to seek this happiness, that it's not a problem. I don't think he resolved the issue.) And you can't really support the moral imperative with polls or evidence. The overall message isn't bad, it's just not completely logically sensical.

Well I'll stop playing the devil's advocate. Tonight I'll think about 3 things that made me happy today.

Edward Tufte, An Academic and Otherwise Life

Last night, Professor Edward Tufte came to speak at an IIC seminar. He's a pioneer in the study of visual data representation, and though I haven't read his books, they are reputably beautifully written and crafted (he's designed all of them himself). Well you can read the rest of his impressive CV on his site.

The talk was at a room in the Biolabs, a quite hideous building, and getting to the room involved walking through a narrow hallway flanked with labs and having huge tankards of various gases and things obstructing the way. (It always amuses me to see the little shelves outside each door that serve to hold bottles of Coke and other beverages. Contamination threat!)

He looked very classy in a dark jacket and white shirt, no tie. He spoke of his life, of various "turning points" that got him where he was today, and at the end showed slides of his huge metal artworks (we also got free posters of them). Here're some notes from the talk:

- He began with an excerpt from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

- from the age of 15, he knew he wanted to be a scholar

- his mother told him, there are no shoulders to cry on

- in high school in Beverly Hills, he met people for the first time that were as smart or smarter than him; they'd play classical music games where a part of a piece would be played and instead of identifying the piece, they'd have to identify the conductor

- The Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences, where he once had a fellowship, was where people went to finish their books or decide what to do. It was described by some as the "leisure of the theory class."

- on a paper he wrote, one professor noted that a paragraph he wrote had echoes of Veblen. That's when he realized that he should be working in the "big leagues." (This was a theme he focused on a lot. He described the statistician John Tukey as in another league apart from the rest of the brilliant faculty.) He needed to work on "forever knowledge," whereas the most recent book on political science was filled with names and dates like Gerald Ford and 1976, which aren't eternal. He thought that up until then he'd been choosing problems to work on based on whatever came by his desk, or by a hallway chat with a colleague. Problems should be chosen by thought, and he decided to choose ones that were a) important and which b) he could make progress on.

- when trying to publish his first book, Harvard University Press wouldn't print it because it was too expensive to print the charts and images. So he decided to publish it himself. To publish a book you need three things: a garage, a lot of money, and a book designer. He spent a summer working with a designer learning about typography and laying out the book.

- his first three books were set in lead, because there was no digital version of the font Bembo that was of high enough quality. For his latest book he worked with a designer to make his own version of Bembo, "ET Bembo." (eee, type design!)

- he values his "acute sense of relevance," of being able to parse out the most important information from the noise, so that one could start to get "leverage" on a problem. He wishes people can cultivate this skill.

- scholars should be publishing their work. There's a large support system that got them where they were, and they are very overprivileged to do what they do. So to give back, they should show people what they're working on, what they've learned. If you don't publish your work, it doesn't exist.

- when he brought curators to see his art pieces, they'd say "that reminds me of so-and-so": very few people now speak in terms of visual experience. They talk in metaphors, about how something reminds them of something else, not about what's right in front of them.

- his next project is to work on representations in 3 dimensions. We are all used to seeing representations on paper and on screen, but there are always aspects (like volume of space), that they don't adequately capture.

That's the gist of what I can remember. The IIC site should have a video of the whole thing soon. Apparently the video is for internal uses only, according to Tufte's site.

Today I went to a forum about positive psychology and its links with Christianity. I'm too tired from reading, or attempting to read, this, so, til tomorrow.