ProPublica has another important expose, this one about the Navy’s dependence on flawed technology.
I donate to ProPublica. This investigative journalism has never been more important.
The Navy installed touch-screen steering systems to save money.
Ten sailors paid with their lives.
COLLISION COURSE
When the USS John S. McCain crashed in the Pacific, the Navy blamed the destroyer’s crew for the loss of 10 sailors. The truth is the Navy’s flawed technology set the McCain up for disaster.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
DAKOTA BORDEAUX HAD RARELY traveled outside his home state of Oklahoma before he joined the Navy in February 2017. He’d certainly never seen the ocean.
But only four months later, Bordeaux was standing at the helm of the USS John S. McCain, steering the 8,300-ton destroyer through the western Pacific. Part of the Navy’s famed 7th Fleet, the McCain was responsible for patrolling global hot spots, shadowing Chinese warships in the South China Sea and tracking North Korean missile launches.
It filled the high school graduate with pride.
“Not many people of my age can say, ‘Hey, I just drove a giant-ass battleship,’” said Bordeaux, 23.
To guide the McCain, Bordeaux relied upon a navigation system the Navy considered a triumph of technology and thrift. It featured slick black touch screens to operate the ship’s wheel and propellers. It knit together information from radars and digital maps. It would save money by requiring fewer sailors to safely steer the ship.
Bordeaux felt confident using the system to control the speed and heading of the ship. But there were many things he did not understand about the array of dials, arrows and data that filled the touch screen.
“There was actually a lot of functions on there that I had no clue what on earth they did,” Bordeaux said of the system.
Bordeaux, one of the newest sailors on the ship, was joined in uncertainty by one of the most seasoned, Cmdr. Alfredo Sanchez, captain of the McCain.
A 19-year Navy veteran, Sanchez had watched as technicians replaced the ship’s traditional steering controls a year earlier with the new navigation system. Almost from the start, it caused him headaches. The system constantly indicated problems with steering. They were mostly false alarms, quickly fixed, but by March 2017, Sanchez’s engineers were calling the system “unstable,” with “multiple and cascading failures regularly.”
Sanchez grew to distrust the navigation system, especially for use in delicate operations. He often ordered it to run in backup manual mode, which eliminated some of the automated functions but also created new risks.
In August 2017, Sanchez and his crew steered the ship toward a naval base in Singapore, where technicians were waiting. The navigation system had indicated more than 60 “major steering faults” during the month.
“We were going to have the programmers,” Sanchez said, “give the system a full, a full check, a full clean bill of health.”
The McCain never reached its destination.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The Federal Gov’t has farmed out most of it’s technology research/design/implementation to the private sector. The government has been stripped down to the bare bones when it comes to the engineering/technical sector so this is no surprise. To have a gov’t security clearance these days will get one a lot of job offers worth a lot more $$$$ in the private sector, but it doesn’t bode well for the military and government security sector. But we love the Free Market.
So-called smart technology is not only making us earthlings stupider than we were before, but also putting us in danger.
Touch screens in cars are also risky to read while driving because reading them takes your eyes off the road. The risk is made even worse because there is too much crap on the screen and it is confusing unless you focus all of your attention on it.
For instance, if you want to want to lower or raise the volume on the radio and your finger brushes the wrong screen icon, everything gets screwed up and the only way to fix it safely is to stop driving and park somewhere safe.
“A study analyzed by Bloomberg found that 10 percent of drivers are distracted up to 20 percent of the time they’re out on the road.
When laws are put in place against distracted driving, drivers are often deterred from doing so, but the laws don’t end the practice, the study finds.
More than 3000 people died in 2017 in distracted-driving-related traffic incidents, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)”
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a30172029/distracted-driving-phone-laws/
Touch screens and having a conversation with Smartphones also offer the same dangerous distractions when walking or driving, explaining why I turned my smartphone in years ago and replaced it with a “VERY” dumb phone that is only good for emergency calls.
Diane I’m looking forward to viewing your LA video.
But this is an excellent article. Though we don’t have to be ‘anti-tech’ to point to the basic problem with ALL purported technological “solutions” that this paragraph is evidence for:
“Sanchez grew to distrust the navigation system, especially for use in delicate operations. He often ordered it to run in backup manual mode, which eliminated some of the automated functions but also created new risks.” (my emphases)
It’s a metaphysical issue . . . technological solutions ON PRINCIPLE cannot meet the challenges embedded in the time-space continuum (aka: real-time) and the uncountable and too-often-un-imaginable situations that occur there, and that WILL continue to occur there (not to mention tech failures themselves).
The more we try to squeeze together (a) the reality of the continuum and (b) necessarily-prescribed technology, the more tech-heads try to make our reality into (b) a mindless corpse. That’s what a “technological solution” would look like–the more we try, the more keep adjusting the open reality of the continuum to the closed order of technology–and then people die. (Trump’s not the only fascist mentality we have to worry about.) CBK
“…tech-heads try to make our reality into a mindless corpse”
This is a stunning turn of phrase, CBK. Really captures the problem.
bethree5 I have often thought that, down deep, so many are still working on the old mechanical model, which works for many things, but not for . . . ahem . . . human beings and history. That, combined with the saturation of badly-formed capitalist principles (money is all), is why the humanities and the arts are so important as “core” courses in colleges; and it’s why, when tech training doesn’t provide it, otherwise-highly intelligent people are left with an undeveloped or deformed horizon and tend to denigrate those fields, thinking they’re not missing something in their education and they don’t need it. Why would they, their bank account is fine. CBK
Ms. King, I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this post. Thank you! May I repost? I will attribute it, of course.
Bob Glad you liked it–yes–post at will. CBK
Far too much technology is employed just because it’s ” high tech” not because there is a need or it works better than the old fashioned method (steering wheels and the like).
Sometimes the old fashioned stuff actually works better and is more reliable.
The problem is that the people making the decisions are out to impress their higher-ups with how “technological” they are, when what they really are is techno-illogical.
And of course, the companies producing the techno-crap only care about the money, not whether their stuff works.
A couple years ago, an upper level administrator was invited by my principal to my classroom during my lunch break, in order to question why I wasn’t using the district’s Common Core English curriculum app, StudySync, as a replacement of basil readers, novels, pens and paper. She said I was a “low-tech teacher”. Long story short, after explaining that the tiny snippets of text without context with confounding questions and assignments in the app were robbing students of real learning experiences, she said, “You’ve given me a lot to think about,” and left. I haven’t been pressured to use the app since.
We all need to start thinking instead of believing.
I’m going to now boldly (yet anonymously) violate Apple’s copyright law here:
If you want to crash a ship, lose attendance records and high school transcripts, promulgate fake news, destroy everyone’s privacy rights, ruin an election, dumb down education, or turn steady employment into a cheap contract gig,
“There’s an app for that.”
I’d like to edit post-posting, and remove the word ‘law’ from my reply. Is there an app for that?
Beautifully said, LeftCoast!!!!
You can’t copyright brief sayings or slogans and if it’s a trademark, it’s only violated if you use it in connection of goods or services that is likely to cause confusion as to the source of the goods or services”
In other words if you used “there’s an app for that to sell some tech good or service, you might be violating someone’s trademark, if Apple has indeed trademarked that slogan.
But just using the slogan is not a violation.
No, the problem is decisions made for the public farmed out to private enterprise whose only incentive is cutting OH– which when tech is involved means cutting human employment– combined w/underfunded govt oversight/ input, which results in policy decisions against the public interest.
Bethree
I’ve seen the “trying to impress higher ups” issue first hand.
Many of the government officials making decisions have no clue about the technologies they are dealing with so they make all sorts of stupid decisions.
Once the top level decisions are made about which technology to deploy and which contractor to use, the decisions are largely out of the hands of the government officials, but it all starts at the top.
I totally believe that, SDP. What I am ruing is our country’s apparent total ignorance of the human value and self-respect deriving from work, as well as the relative merits of hands-on human experience vs simulation. There seems to be zero guiding philosophy at top echelons other than “cut costs,” which amply explains stupid decisions on tech about which they have no clue. Even w/a check-the-box guideline, officials would be spurred to ask Q’s & bring in neutral experts.
If public good– or the big picture/ long view– or even plain common sense– were at the center of govt concern, officials would think twice about cheering & implementing every labor-saving digital device to sashay down the pike (as would CEO’s & $clouty .1%’ers). Perhaps this Navy accident will spark some reconsideration of plopping down untried devices willy-nilly in front of folks navigating ships. Or not. They’ll probably assess risk only in terms of % lives lost, & do some quick&dirty training sub rosa to hedge their bets. After 3Mile Island, every power engrg co in the country was re-inventing control dashboards from an ergonomic POV, but it took the specter of nuclear meltdown to make that happen.
The thing that fries me is, govt decision-makers see these automation fiascos coming –
but somehow it does not register. Laymen like me & hubby get it: an ever-increasing proportion of public prone on couch [if they still have a home] w/no work, no exercise beyond pushing a few buttons, some lulled into oblivion by a govt-provided stipend, the rest simmering for life-meaning in all the wrong places.
Some OECD countries get this. Tech advances cannot be arrested, but humans have social & productive needs which must be met in order to maintain peaceful, thriving nations. Workers need to be unionized & connected in a feedback loop w/govt. A simple place to start: if there isn’t enough human work to go around, divide it up. 30-35-hr workweeks. Use the profit from automation productivity to underwrite libraries, museums, lifelong ed/ training in all fields, community arts; organize volunteers to plant trees, collect water/ flora/ fauna specimens – etc!
What was someone who had no idea what all the bells and whistles did doing steering a ship? And then to hear that even the captain after a year (!) still found the system unwieldy and prone to error.
I also remember reading that the naval training program now relies very heavily on computer generated simulations rather than “apprenticeship” on real live ships. I don’t think that there is anything that can replace real experience. Can you imagine flying in a plane with a pilot who had never actually flown one?
Heck, we already know that we don’t need teachers to do any student teaching beyond a few weeks. Virtual reality should cure even that necessity.
I’ve worked with real scientists, engineers and computer “scientists” and the latter produce the worst software.
Supposed to be below
You seem to be harboring a delusion, SomeDAM. The problem is NEVER with the software but ALWAYS with the users. Until we completely eliminate people, this will continue.
Bob
It’s funny that you say that because that is precisely the attitude many software developers and companies have: “John and Jane Public are just to stupid to use my brilliant stuff. If they have to stand on their heads and bend themselves into a pretzel like a circus contortionist to make it work, so be it. That’s there problem, not mine!”
Self Correct Programmers
“Too” not “to.”
And “their” not “there”
“Correcting” crew
Is everywhere!
My late brother-in-law, a Vietnam era fighter pilot discussed the problem with so many automated functions then being placed in the planes he flew. He said there was less control from experience — his “seat of the pants” knowledge meaning kinetic and synathesthetic memory and reckoning of his flight path, speed, etc., also harbingers of engine or other trouble. The more useful tech was for targeting at high speeds and avoiding becoming a target.
Some commentator mentioned that these proliferating coding camps are producing a surplus of people who can code but have no idea of the consequences of that work.
Coding is easy. You can train a computer to do it, which means it takes no intelligence.
Thinking about what you are coding is the hard part and lots of computer “science” types just don’t do it.
I know because I have worked with a lot of them. They don’t think before they code, which leads to most of the problems one encounters with software.
Also, good, secure coding takes a long time and lot of testing while projects need to be completed quickly. Perhaps programs need to go through mandatory quality checking and testing cycles which are enforced by the FPA, the Federal Program Administration.
A wonderful book on this subject:
Norman, Don. The Design of Everyday Things. Basic, 2013.
Norman, of MIT, describes ubiquitous and terrible human interface design (e.g., doors with designs that scream push me when you have to pull them) and makes suggestions for avoiding these issues. One memorable example he gives, with pictures, is of identical rows of levers on a console in a nuclear power plant, one of which means “raise the fuel rods” and another “lower the fuel rods.” Engineers love neat rows of identical levers. In that case, operators had brought in beer taps (Heineken, Bud) and placed them over the levers so that they could quickly and easily tell them apart and avoid nuclear meltdowns.
There is a GREAT organization called the SocioTechnical Design Group that specializes in just such issues–the ways in which technologies (customer service portals, customer relationship management software, blah, blah, blah) end up going disastrously wrong because their hubris-endowed designers don’t take into account, beforehand, significant human factors.
Ofc, there are MANY of these with almost all current depersonalized education software.
Interesting, Bob. Engineers need to know psychology.
The only problem with using different beer taps for raising and lowering the control rods is that once you get drunk enough (as I am sure nuclear power plant workers are bound to do from time to time), you no longer care which beer you are drinking. One tap could say “Urine” and you would still pull it.
But otherwise, the book sounds useful.
Another great little book is Notes on the Synthesis of Form by architect Christopher Alexander, who has some very good things to say about designing for people.
Engineers and artificial intelligence researchers here at BobuSoft have collaborated for over a decade now to create the very latest in home dining technology. Our proprietary SmarTTable Dining Table listens to your dinner conversation and, based upon natural language processing and frequency-probabalistic prediction using the BobuSoft NeuroNet, determines when you are about to ask for the salt and automatically delivers PRECISELY the right amount to the edge of your plate. That’s right, our software actually LEARNS when you need salt! After the SmarTTable’s learning phase, you will be chewing a forkful and thinking, “Hmmm. This could use more salt,” and BEFORE YOU CAN SAY A WORD, a small, ergonomic salt cellar rises from the table to deliver precisely the amount and type of salt you need (right hand for right handers and left hand for left handers, in sea salt, kosher, or regular; iodized or noniodized; Trenta, Venti, Grande, or Fine crystal; white, Himalayan pink, or black, as you prefer)! What could be more PERSONALIZED than that? Available now on Amazon at the low introductory price of only $5,969, it’s the one piece of embedded SmartHome technology you can’t live without. No more rude, messy interrupting and reaching across other dinner guests! No more environmentally wasteful and gastronomically disastrous over- or under-salting! And, relieved of the burden of asking for more salt, you will have more time for scintillating dinner table conversion! (Salt delivery for new guests can be preprogrammed using our mobile SaltyTalk i-Phone or Android app.) As an added bonus (as opposed to a nonadded one), the SmarTTable comes with an extended service warranty for only $9.98 per month! Available in six designer colors. Salt not included. Salt loader packs available from BobuSoft ChowNOW.
Finally, the salt solution you’ve been waiting for!
Coming soon, SmarTTable butter!
(NB: Consult the online Technical Guide for dinner conversation privacy settings.)
Yes, your dinner conversation is downloaded to BobuSoft servers, but it is personally unidentifiable without CraftyBOB access codes.
If such a thing did exist and was made by a defense contractor, im pretty sure it would dump a whole shaker of pepper on your meal if you asked for a little salt.
Or more likely just obliterate your meal and the whole neighborhood with a cruise missile.
These things happen, SomeDAM, you Luddite!
Speaking of mealtime and the way AI is designed to address it, this came to me from a techie friend. Each iteration gets more absurd. The AI system has no concept of a meal, who it is for, why the ingrediants are provided and the illogic of combining them in various permutations. In the last sequence the AI system is trying to “write a story” to give meaning to meal preparation.
.
https://aiweirdness.com/post/190721709472/ai-vintage-american-cooking-a-combination-that
cx: frequency-probabilistic
I think with BobuSoft technology, we do not have reasons to get out of bed. Whatever we dream up, can be delivered to right where the dreaming happened.
I think we need you in our marketing department, Mate! –the BobuSoft Team
That would be a dream come true, Bob.
We at BobuSoft thank you, Mr. Wierdl, for your interest in joining our TEAM. Unfortunately,based on your Social Media profile, our BobuSoft HR-STACKRANK algorithm has determined that should you be hired, you would be likely to exhibit considerable independence of thought and personal initiative, either of which would be cause for termination under Section 248a, Subparagraph 666b1 of our Employee Handbook and Cheery Motivational Guide. We wish you every success in your job search and are including with this letter a coupon for a 10 percent discount on BobuSoft Resume Writer and Hyperbole Generator.
Be Best!
B. O. Ficious, BobuSoft Human Capital Architect and Associate Thought Leader
BobuSoft: All your base belong to us
SoftyBob, you crack me up! 🙂
Well, all those accidents – it now makes sense.
yup
I have also long been an advocate of Pro Publica’s work, often posting links to their collaboration with This American Life in producing the two part episode “The Problem that We All Live With” (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with-part-one). It has gained surprisingly little traction on this blog, but perhaps would be the subject of a post despite it’s having been originally reported 5 years ago.
An important and gripping story, Teachingeconomist. I agree with you. This would be a superb piece to be discussed on this blog. Thank you for sharing it!
Integration works. I’ve seen this firsthand in an integrated school I taught in in a Chicago suburb and most recently in a Florida school. Let me give you one example. In the Chicagoland school, I had a bright young African American student who had dreams of maybe becoming a dental hygienist. In the new school, her ambitions grew. I received a thank-you letter from her on her graduation from medical school. In the Florida school, many of the white parents were racist to the core. After all, this was the South. But their kids going to the school with black children and Latino children easily made friends (and boyfriends and girlfriends) across racial lines. It was really, really encouraging to see this.
The ProPublica/This American Life piece is one of the most powerful treatments of the subject of integration that I’ve encountered. It was truly horrific, btw, to hear the lengths that the state went to in order to try to undo the involuntary desegregation. This story is all the ore important because of how segregated U.S. schools have become once again. In many places, it’s as though the Brown decision never happened. Again, thanks, TE, for sharing this.
cx: all the more important
My husband and I noticed two news stories on PBS today heralding tech innovations that [in our view] promised nothing other than mediocre results in exchange for massive loss of jobs. The one was so over-the-top it caused me to forget he second– DIY venipuncture blood-testing!
When you have a government that leans always toward untrammeled capitalism and resists institutional support for the public good in the misguided belief that “there be monsters” [individualism/ innovation-killing “socialism”], this is what you get.
Given the difficulty real live human beings sometimes have in finding my veins, I can’t imagine that I would enjoy trying to find them myself and successfully draw blood. I wonder if they will have an expert DIY kit that compares with the expert at blood drawing that has been called on more than once with me. What a stupid idea!
Tech has gone wild. They are getting as bad as management consultants!
DIY Blood testing kits? Think Theranos.
A problem appearing similar to the Boeing 737 Max issue: unstable programming. But since it’s the military, where lives are much less expensive than in the civilian world, the steering program appear to have been implemented with much less testing than the Boeing’s.
Not just unstable programming. The whole plane was made airodynamically unstable due to a new engine placement.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/is-the-boeing-737-max-worth-saving.html
The problem arose because the plane was made inherently unstable on account of the fact that a new engine had to be moved forward and up relative to the old engine placement because the new more powerful engine was bigger and would not fit under the Boeing 737 wing.
The result was that the new placement of the more powerful engine caused the plane to tend to nose up, which required a system to sense when it was doing that and “correct” it (nose it down).
But the very poor design relied on just one sensor to determine whether the plane was nosing up and the MCAS software automatically kept nosing it down regardless of what the pilot was trying (frantically) to do. In order to override the system, it had to be disabled and Boeing did not even make that clear to the airlines using the MAX.
It was an incredibly poor design from start to finish and all driven by an effort to cut costs. Boeing wanted the 737 MAX to be classified as basically the same plane as the standard 737 to avoid the time and effort (including ajrline pilot retraining) to get it recertified. So they did not even fully inform airlines about the MCAS system.
What boeing should really have done was completely redesign and remanufacture the plane to make the new engine fit under the wing Ike the old one
787?
I suggest you do some research.
That plane has had some “issues”, to put it in the most nonalarming terms.
I took a flight from Seattle to San Francisco a few days ago, and realized when we were aloft that I was on a 737. Not a MAX, of course, but nowhere on the booklet did the word “Boeing” appear. It is a beautiful plane with an elegant interior.
The 737 had other problems before but my understanding is that those are fixed, hence I bravely fly in them though I am not fond of flying.
In the summer, I’ll fly a 787 to Europe, and I hope it has no programming (or other) problems.
& what about the Iowa Caucus app? How did that work out for ’em?
This is why EVERYONE MUST VOTE ON ELECTION DAY, the ONLY day you can vote on an old-fashioned, works best, PAPER BALLOT. Do NOT use the touch-screen machines, esp. NOT the new ones, which spit out QR codes or bar codes, which we CANNOT read. How will you know if who you’d voted for is the person recorded by the touch-screen machine?
You DON’T! VOTE ON ELECTION DAY, ON PAPER,& tell EVERYONE you know. PAPER is SAFER!!!
Back in the LBJ era, there was a saying in Texas that after an election, there wasn’t a low place in the state that didn’t have a box full of ballots thrown into it.
In 1849, in Baltimore, Edgar Allan Poe was discovered semiconscious and drunk in a gutter. He never recovered and died five days later of swelling of the brain. He was discovered on Election Day, and a widely accepted theory of his death was that he was a victim of the “cooping” gangs, as they were called, who would grab some victim and take him around to various polls to have him vote again and again under various identities. In those days, men were given a drink (alcohol) as a sort of reward for having voted. This would explain Poe’s drunken state, and a beating from the cooping gang would explain his other injuries. However, Poe certainly didn’t have to be forced to have a drink.
Time to invite an independent, international team of Election Monitors to this Banana Republic without the bananas. If they came to my own state of Floruhduh, they would find that the Republicans
have gerrymandered the state to such an extent, to minimize the impact of Democratic votes, that there is now a company (I’m not making this up) called Gerrymander Jewelry that sells complicated jewelry in the weird, contorted shapes of the gerrymandered districts in the state
locate polling places for black and brown and Democratic areas at considerable distance from population centers of gravity [Especially prized are polling places without easy access by bus or other public transportation.]
use felon lists to cook the books. During the infamous Bush/Gore election, Florida polling places used FEDERAL felon lists to check voter eligibility at polling places; a polling place official would tell a black person named Fred Jones, “Sorry, you are on the felons list” and turn him away. During the same election, boxes of ballots turned up, mysteriously, in a school and in someone’s car trunk. Last year, Florida voters passed a referendum, vigorously opposed by the Republican establishment, allowing felons who had served their time to vote. So, the Republicans got busy and passed a law saying that felons could do so only after they had made reparations to the state for costs associated with their apprehension, trial, and incarceration.
refuse to allow same-day voter registration or to entertain any scheme for automatic voter registration
refuse to make election days other than the Federal General Election Day into state holidays, making it difficult for the working poor to get to the polls
have purchased polling machines manufactured by companies owned by right-wing extremists, machines that are not transparent in that they incorporate no means for checking that the tabulations are accurate or truthful
“(I’m not making this up)”
You of course, do. You must. But seriously, is he a liberal jeweler, using his art to criticize FL politics?
Here it is, Mate: https://gerrymanderjewelry.com/our-story
What an idea!