Ode to Aviation

Aviation is only a century old and yet we can hardly imagine the world being without it. The evolution in technology and scale of deployment has been quite amazing. Even if today, novelties are not so easily  accepted anymore unless they have proven their safety and reliability, a lot of novelties are being worked out today and I will highlight the ones that relate to my own work in satellite communication and navigation. This is an overview blog and you would need to surf through the hyperlinks to get a complete picture.

• The introduction of GNSS satellite navigation inposition determination and trajectory prediction of planes has advanced a lot since 2012. Meanwhile we have EGNOS supported landing in many airports. Unmanned flying (RPAS) based on Satellite Navigation is already applied in the military world.
• The use of GNSS in Search and Rescue operations.
• The use of Space-based ADS-B to localise planes above oceans. This area has received a lot of interest since the loss of flight MH370.
• The introduction of internet aboard of planes is ongoing. Even if there are concerns about the use of laptop computers on board, we will see more of this in the coming years.

There are a number of problems with aviation. We fly too much and pay too little. The reason is that the passenger doesn’t pay the environmental cost. The cost is mainly paid by the people living in the vicinity of the airports and to a lesser extent, by the tax payer. More about this in my Dutch blog: Waarom vliegen duur moet zijn.  Why flying needs to be expensive.

We have become so used of flying that we hardly look up when a plane passes over. I remember how much I liked spotting planes at the airport while waiting for a family member to arrive. The beauty of planes still fulfils me with awe and wonder. I refer to my earlier blog: Gute Technik ist immer schön.

Picture 1: taken at Air and Space Smithsonian Museum Washington, DC (August 1986)
Picture 2: taken at Belem, Lisbon: Fairey 17, first plane to cross South Atlantic Ocean (August 2016)

The Matthew Effect

There is an old Dutch proverb: “Water always flows to the sea”. The proverb indicates that money often goes to the rich, who need it least. The consequence of the rich getting richer, is also that the poor are getting poorer. This observation is made several times in the Gospel of Matthew, and is therefore called the Matthew Effect. “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.” It seems like a kind of natural inequality. If you have a lot of something, you will get more of the same. The winner takes it all. Although it is clear that the observation relates to possession (so-called ‘talents’), Jesus applies it also to “knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven”. It needs to be stressed though, that the Matthew effect is an observation, not a command to act in a selfish way. On the contrary, the observation contains an implicit warning: you should do your utmost to belong  to the happy few who deserve to be in the kingdom of heaven.

The Matthew effect has become a topic of increasing interest since 2008. Economists like Thomas Piketty have observed an increasing revenue inequality since the outbreak of the economic crisis. There is an increasing pressure for revenue transparency towards politicians and top managers. Basic income for all is on the table. The Matthew Effect also relates to the 80-20 Pareto rule: 20% of the world population is consuming 80% of the world resources and 80% of the world population only consumes 20%. The Matthew Effect can also be observed in the acquisition of power and fame. There is even a Matthew Effect in misery and feelings of misery: if you have a lot of misery (e.g. health problems or lack of confidence), you will acquire even more misery (more of the same).

The Matthew Effect term was originally coined by Robert Merton, who already observed that eminent scientists will often get more credit than comparatively unknown scientists. Later, the “Matilda Effect” pointed out that female research work tends to be ignored more often than male research work. Even if the Matthew Effect may not be well-known by name, we all have an intuitive knowledge about it. I believe the Matthew effect explains why we all do our utmost to belong to the so-called upper classes (as far as you can cynically measure it by bank account status), even up to the point of neurotic behaviour. We are simply too well aware of the consequences of entering the lower class' vicious circles. It also explains why we are so afraid to show more generosity.

I also refer to my Dutch blog: “Kwellende rijkdom” and to “Economics of Good and Evil”.

Picture: Saint Matthew and the Angel by Rembrandt van Rijn. This is a freely licensed work, as explained in the Definition of Free Cultural Works.

Asteroid Day

Today is Asteroid Day. This is a world-wide event and a great day to promote astronomy in general. You can follow it on the Asteroid Day Live webcast. Earlier today there was an interesting ESA conference in Darmstadt.

Predicting impact from asteroids on earth is becoming possible. Astronomy observation techniques from ground telescopes and from space telescopes are becoming more sophisticated. Avoiding impact like in the famous movie Armageddon may become possible in the future if we learn to detect potential impact very early. (The practical deviation methods may be very different from the one in the movie.)

It is no use to cultivate doom scenarios. But very much like in all sustainability issues, the principle of precaution should prevail. We should take care of our own providence like a good paterfamilias.

I refer to my blogs Death by Black Hole and Day of Wrath.

Foto: European Space Agency (Rosetta mission) –  license text can be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/igo/

Ode to Systems Engineering

This blog is about society, not about engineering. It even contains a message for politicians. Our society faces numerous problems that are too difficult to solve with improvisation and “gut feeling”. Take one of the worst problems in society: mobility. This is a complicated problem. In fact, it is too complicated to have it solved by small party circles and commune politics. A city may decide to ban cars from the city centre and cause a terrible mess elsewhere, because people look for alternative routes.

Politicians don’t understand it would be easy to cut traffic jams in towns by 50% by moderately adapting traffic lights to cell phone movements. When you say this, some politicians believe the use of the cell phone movements are a threat to privacy, but they don’t understand how feasible and obvious it is to prevent this. Politicians still don’t understand sufficiently how detrimental company car policies are for our mobility, our environment and our economy. This is because they can’t assess sufficiently the impact of their decisions.

But wat is systems engineering then? To put it simply, you enter the complexity of a coherent piece of real life into a box and you call it a black box. You can study many things about this box: the inputs, the outputs, how it behaves and interacts with other boxes. Systems Engineering forces you to make a detailed map of the interactions between systems. You start understanding how measures taken on one system may influence others. You also start understanding feedback mechanisms. You notice that more of A does not always lead to more of B. We need more systems engineers in politics and we need more politicians who believe in systems engineering. INCOSE is an organisation that tries to standardise terminology and methodology in systems engineering.

It is not true that systems engineering is totally unknown outside engineering faculties. In fact, systems engineering is often used in a false and perverse way in social media.  A typical example appeared recently: do you know what would happen if everybody stopped eating meat? Then the Facebook entry sketches the most absurd short term consequences, obviously with the implicit message: we should not stop eating meat. The question whether we could perhaps start by eating less meat is not even raised. Similarly, non-believers in climate change like to sketch absurd images of what would happen if we stopped driving cars. I hate this nonsense on Facebook and Twitter.

I hope to see some real systems engineering in politics, press and social media. It all starts with intellectual honesty and integrity. I also refer to my dutch blog: “Intellectuele integriteit in het Industrieel Beleid”.

About meditation – Die schöne Kunst des Innehaltens

What is meditation? It is one of the most essential activities in life, and yet we get little in education. Meditation is a spiritual activity that drives the human spirit away from fear of the future and anger about the past. It brings the human soul to more gratitude for the “here and now”, to acceptance, compassion and happiness. If you have a religious education, meditation resembles praying and contemplation, but in meditation, we don’t need to talk and in a certain way, we don’t even need to think, we prefer silence. Just like sports, it is good for body and soul, but it also requires time and regular practice. Meditation is becoming popular and there are plenty of methods and courses offered.

A near colleague of mine offered me this excellent book from Christophe André (the original title is ‘Méditer, jour après jour’). This book is really a work of art. Every chapter shows a beautiful painting, perfectly chosen to describe a state of mind. The author guides the reader’s attentiveness through the details of the paintings to bring him to a new awareness about an important matter in life, such as accepting, letting go or loving. I learned about the difference between “Aufmerksamkeit” (focused, analytical attention) and “Achtsamkeit” (wide attention for the environment, attentiveness, mindfulness).

The book also contains two audio CD’s with meditation guidance. The refined finish of the book is a joy in itself. You can open it at any chapter and start reading; the order in which you read the chapters is not so important. This book will find a fixed spot in my mental living room.

In these borderline times, where traffic and computers offer a thousand opportunities to get upset, meditation may be a good prevention of illness, despair, addiction or dependence. It shows that beautiful things invented thousands of years ago, always come back, no matter how we ignore them in daily life.

Pressure on kids

Pressure on kids must be the worst injustice tolerated in society today. Even more than tolerated, it is cultivated. Fear of the future makes parents choose for a complex path of training towards ‘high performance’. The rat race starts at birth. Life is a steep climb to the top.

It is good to motivate and stimulate kids to reach something in life. But what if the basic talents are simply not there? Or what if the talents are there, but the kids suffer under the pressure exercised upon them? Very often, failure anxiety destroys all talent.

Nowadays, studying for a degree is not even enough, you have to acquire a whole bunch of skills on top. You have to play sports, music, golf and practice Japanese martial arts. You have to learn to dance. You need social skills, learn to organise events and develop leadership. You have to acquire experience. You have to do an internship at Google and Apple. By the time you’re 25, you should have travelled to New York, Mumbai, Shanghai and Singapore.

I don’t mean to say the development of talents is not important. We don't want children with the complacency of Rip Van Winkle. But we need to be realistic. The virtue of patience is required, as well as true motivation and curiosity. Some kids are under too much pressure and disappointment is lurking when they get older. Another problem is that some other kids are not participating in this mad rat race. They may stay behind because they were born in the wrong household. They risk to bully their better fellow class mates and drive their teachers to a burn-out. Most of them will never really be fit for modern office life.

People don’t realise sufficiently that talent development is only part of your full personal development. What strikes me, is that people have become very demanding in terms of performance, but in return, as if it were some kind of compensation, they stay extremely permissive in terms of attitude. The reason is that our society is based on meritocracy. In terms of discipline, style, politeness and friendliness, we have lowered the standards considerably and nobody seems to mind.

I refer to my blog “Raising kids in the 21st century”.

Ode to the Internet

In my blogs I like to highlight things we take too easily for granted. I like to stand in awe for so many achievements of science and technology, even if these have become daily commodities. Today is a good day to stand in awe for the Internet.

The fourth of April, the Roman Catholic church celebrates Isidore of Sevilla, who is the patron saint of the Internet, the computer users and the programmers. The reason is that Saint Isidore created his “Etymologiae” (Origins of words) a complete encyclopaedia of all knowledge of his time. This encyclopaedia reminds us very much of Wikipedia and the entire Internet, reason why Saint Isidore was appointed patron saint of something that only came up when the saints were -unfairly- being consigned to oblivion.

As we all like to complain, we often point out the dangers of the Internet: the spam, the numerous security threats, the attacks on our privacy as well as the risk of addiction and alienation from the people who surround us. Another major remaining problem with the Internet is the digital divide. The Internet is still not available everywhere at an acceptable data rate.

And yet we forget so quickly how the world looked like before the Internet. You had to write letters by hand and bring them to a post office. Later, you got the luxury you could push it through a fax machine. You had to call a friend or walk to a library to look up everything you didn’t know. Today’s students have immediate access to all world information through the Internet. (And yet they have to discover painfully that information is no knowledge yet. You still need time and patience to acquire knowledge.)

Another advantage we tend to forget is that we can now quickly send messages to several people at the same time without disrupting them in their daily activities. This was not possible 40 years ago. It has now become much more easy to cooperate from a distance, which allows various associations and groups of common interest to work together. The Internet, including the social media services, offers you a fast and cheap way to make yourself known and to express your opinion. Considering the flood of opinions, you may get the impression your opinion doesn't matter much. But it does! The Internet is a bad thing for dictators and a good thing for the freedom of speech.

And much more Internet is yet  to come! Not only will we connect the most remote places on earth, also cars, ships, trains and planes will be connected. Moreover, we will move to an Internet of Things.

On Saint Isidore’s web site, you can find the following prayer, which I could recommend. I pray it this 4th of April to safeguard my soul J

“we beseech Thee, that, through the intercession of Saint Isidore, bishop and doctor, during our journeys through the internet we will direct our hands and eyes only to that which is pleasing to Thee and treat with charity and patience all those souls whom we encounter.”

See my earlier blog Ode to Joy 2.0 , in which I highlight more specifically the pleasures and inconveniences of social media. 

Picture taken in Seville Cathedral.