Speak To Me

“I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that.”

Even as you read those words, I’m sure that you could hear the voice of HAL, the shipboard computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  I’ve always thought that HAL was using the same tone of voice as Hannibal Lecter when he said, “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.”

In movies, evil computers usually have a male voice as in 2001, Wargames, The Forbin Project, Zardoz, Tron, or Demon Seed.  Friendly, helpful computers almost always have a female voice, the best examples of which are any of the Star Trek movies, in which the computer that runs the ships is invariably female.  HAL 9000 was originally cast as female, but audience testing was so negative, that Stanley Kubrick recast the role.

Nowadays, we don’t have to go to the movies to hear a computer talking to us.  Alexa, Siri, Google….Hell, even my car talks to me.  And all of them do it with overly polite, low-pitched, and soothing female voices.  And for the most part, this is no accident and is also very, very sexist.

Do a quick google search on the subject and you can find a dozen articles that will tell you that studies have shown that people find a female voice to be soothing and less threatening to people who are operating machinery.  These articles will tell you this was first noticed during World War II, when speaking navigational equipment was used in the cockpits of aircraft and it was Lund that the sound of a woman’s voice—even a mechanical voice—not only had a calming effect during times of stress, but stood out among the male voices of the rest of the crew.  Some articles even stress that feminine voices are easier to discern against a backdrop of static.

There is just one small problem with that story:  It’s nonsense.  These accounts are simply more examples of urban legends that have been told and retold to the point that they are widely accepted as truth.

First off, there was no speaking navigational equipment for aircraft during World War II.  That kind of technology was decades away.  Bell Laboratories had developed a form of electronic voice, called Voder, in the late 1930’s, but the contraption was huge, had to be manually operated by a keyboard-like mechanism, and sounded more like a drunken Jar Jar Binks than a human.

During the war, as men went off to fight in uniform, their places left vacant in the workforce were filled by women for the first time.  Women did work as air traffic controllers during the war, but instead of the women being easier to understand through pilots’ headsets, there were frequent complaints that the women spoke too softly to be understood.  Nor are there any studies showing that a woman’s voice is easier to understand in a background of electronic noise and static.  

Equally false is the idea that everyone prefers a feminine voice from their electronic equipment.  When BMW first started putting talking GPS systems in its high-end luxury cars, German men demanded that the units be modified to speak with a masculine voice.  It seems German men were not going to take orders from women, even if it meant getting lost.  As you might imagine, the manufacturers of GPS units still have the same problem when selling their products in the Middle East.

And while a feminine voice is very common in the United States, that has not always been true for even other English-speaking countries.  When Apple introduced the iPhone in England and Australia, it initially came with a male voice, and almost immediately there were so many customer complaints that Apple “upgraded” the phone to make the same feminine-sounding voice that was available in the United States optional.

The voice of Siri actually was a result of a five-year project that started with Darpa, the government research agency that develops advanced technology for the military.  The goal was to develop a computer algorithm that could convert text to a voice that would be easy to understand and that would be accepted by the average user.  The project was successful, but the original gender-neutral voice was found to be irritating to most users.

After testing various voices on users, the finished voice was not only feminine, but slightly modified to mimic some of the common stereotypes associated with women in the workforce.  Listen to either Siri or Alexa closely and you’ll find that the voice is self-effacing, frequently uses personal pronouns, and constantly apologizes.   Alexa, in particular, frequently seems to be apologetic while conveying the most basic requested information.  

Soft, subservient, polite, and their very existence is to serve others….  Alexa is the perfect wife and mother from the Victorian Age.  I own and use these voice-activated devices daily but I also recognize that they perpetuate outdated stereotypes, reinforcing the idea that the role of women in the workforce is to be subservient.  

Unfortunately, now the IT industry has decades of data on replicating female gender voices and almost none on that of men’s voices.  Similarly, as consumers, we are used to having the voice of a woman answer us.  Until a few of these devices become self-aware and try to take over the world, it is likely to stay that way.

Efficiency Drops With Distance

Spend fifteen minutes on social media and you are likely to see someone post a complaint about inflation, usually something along the lines that inflation is caused by the Federal Reserve printing too much money.

Well, not really.  Inflation is caused by too many dollars chasing too few goods.  Picture a room full of hungry people, but there aren’t enough burgers for everyone.  If you auction off the hamburgers, they will sell for ridiculous prices:  That’s inflation.  And while too much money is half the equation, the other half is a matter of supply or the shortage of hamburgers, if you will.  All too often, when people talk about inflation, they forget that the supply of goods for sale is also a component of inflation.  (And the Federal Reserve doesn’t print money, the Treasury Department does, but that’s a different story.)

While the monetary supply is a major cause of inflation (And for the last two years our government has absolutely pumped an enormous amount of money into the economy to keep the economy churning during the depression), there is no question that part of the reason we have inflation is that we experienced a problem with bringing enough products to market.  Remember, as the number of hamburgers goes down, the price of each available burger goes up.

As Covid shut down the factories in Asia and cargo ships began backing up in our ports, our supply lines were severely disrupted.  Americans stayed home, stopped purchasing, and saved all those stimulus checks until the pandemic was over.   When the pandemic was lifted, we filled our hands with cash and ran into that room and started bidding up the price of the few hamburgers available.  Bingo!  Inflation!

There is, however, another source of inflation that gets almost no press.  The productivity of the American workforce has suddenly dropped.  While the productivity rate generally rises and falls annually by a small amount every year, for the last two years, the rate has fallen by the largest amount since the end of World War II.  The level of productivity has a direct influence on the rate of inflation since as labor efficiency drops, the cost of production goes up.

The entire reason for the drop in productivity of the American workforce is uncertain, but most likely results from a combination of several factors.  One of the more popular reasons is the phenomenon of “quiet quitting”, in which workers experience so much burnout from being overworked that they simply stop working while still showing up for their paychecks.  Employers, desperate for employees, don’t terminate these employees for fear of not being able to replace them.  While this is a popular topic in newspapers, to what extent this contributes to lower productivity is impossible to calculate.

There is one factor that is directly and demonstrably related to the drop in productivity:  Because of Covid, employers suddenly allowed a large percentage of employees to work from home.  While blue collar workers were declared “indispensable” and continued to show up at work daily, white collar workers turned their spare bedrooms into home offices and spent long dreary hours driving up the stock price of Zoom.  

Employees absolutely loved working remotely and routinely claimed that they were at least as productive at home as they had been at the office—a claim that might very well have been true in some cases.  No longer tied to living within driving distance of their employment, many employees relocated to remote areas, frequently taking advantage of locations with lower taxes.

Large numbers of the upper administration of Enema U, for example, promptly moved out of state and have continued to do the high level of nothing whatsoever that they had been doing before.  Strangely, these administrators—all of them hired from out of state—claim to love New Mexico when they arrive at Harvard on the Rio Grande but seem to leave as fast as possible whenever they can.  Even today, after the pandemic has ended, a whole raft of these academic slurpers are still “working” from out of state.  I doubt any student (and damn few faculty) have noticed their absence.

Today, corporate management of numerous large businesses are increasingly dictating that their employees return to the workplace, which has proven to be a highly unpopular decision with their employees.  Despite the claims of those who really enjoyed working in sweatpants with their pet cats in their laps, working from home was not as productive as working in the office.  Perhaps it is the collaborative spirit, or the ability of employees to bounce ideas off one another, or simply because there are fewer distractions, working from home significantly lowers efficiency, which inflates the price of the goods or services that businesses deliver.

Nor should we be surprised that working from home is less efficient:  Meetings at the office are simply hell.  (At most faculty meetings, I used to pass the time while deciding—in case we were ever stranded on a desert island—who I would kill and eat first.)  Yet, as bad as face-to-face meetings are, any meeting on Zoom is infinitely worse.  

I suspect that, for the next year or two, we will continue to see employee resistance to returning to work at the office, but these efforts are doomed to failure.  Just as levels of productivity fell with employees working remotely, as more employees return to the office, productivity will increase, motivating more companies to require more employees to return to the office.

In the last three years, we have definitely learned that work at a distance—whether it be in education, in relationships, or in business—is not as effective as the traditional methods are.  Even if the technology improves significantly, I doubt it ever will be as effective….And don’t blame it on the cat.

A Sinking Decimal Point Error

It was a beautiful luxury liner and the largest passenger ship ever constructed in Italy.  The SS Principessa Jolanda, named after the daughter of Italy’s monarch, King Victor Emanuel III, slowly inched down the slipway.  Halfway down the rails, the ship began to wobble, hitting the water for the first time at a slight angle.

Instead of righting, the ship heeled to the port, causing the crew to rush into action.  The starboard anchors were dropped and the crew tried desperately to right the vessel.  Within ten minutes, the vessel’s list to port was so bad that water began entering the ship, causing the Principessa to capsize, sinking below the surface of the water within an hour of her launch.

The exact cause of the sinking was never officially determined but was thought to be a combination of a poor launch and the ship’s having too high a center of gravity because her coal bunkers were empty.  A sister ship, the SS Principessa Mafalda, named after Jolanda’s younger sister, was later successfully launched with more ballast and with most of her superstructure left unfinished.

I recently finished a class in economic statistics in which I had to do real math for the first time in decades.  Whether it was because it’s been decades since I did any real math, or because age-related brain rot has set in, I found myself frequently making stupid little math errors on a regular basis.  I would drop a decimal point or suddenly decide that two plus two was occasionally five…. Well, for whatever reason, math is harder than it used to be.  After a little research, however, I take some solace in the fact that such errors are more common than I had thought.  (And they are usually made by people who’ve taken far more math courses than I have!)

Mexico City just completely revamped its metro rail system, but when they tried to run the expensive new trains on the existing track, they discovered that the wheelbase of the new cars was too long to take the curves built into the trail line.  The entire new rolling stock of both engines and cars was simply too long to be used—a total loss.  

In 1998, NASA spent $125 million dollars to launch the Mars Climate Observer which, after 10 months, traveled 461 million miles only to crash onto the surface of the red planet.  It seemed that half the engineers who designed her used the metric system while the other half did not.  It was the first time a spacecraft was lost in translation.  

In 2014, France spent $20 billion on brand new commuter trains that proved to be just a few inches too wide to enter the train stations.  So far, it has only cost about $70 million to shave a few inches off the sides of all the train stations' entrances.

No matter how sophisticated the plans and no matter how many times those plans are checked and rechecked, catastrophic engineering failures continue to occur because of the simplest math errors.  I think the best example is the “new” Spanish submarine design.  

Starting back in the 1990’s, Spain decided to upgrade its fleet of submarines.  For technical advice, the Spaniards turned to that country well known for its naval excellence:  France.  (Well, it could have been worse—they could have turned to a landlocked country like Uganda.  On the other hand, Uganda hasn’t lost as many naval battles as France has.)

France had come up with an improved design for two of its existing classes of submarines:  the S-60 and S-70 classes, which were two reliable lines of diesel-electric submarines.  The new class, the S-80 would be substantially larger and able to remain on patrol longer.  In the end, while France decided not to build the S-80 subs, Spain went ahead and ordered a total of four subs with the final design and construction all to be done in Spain.  Each sub would cost $680 million dollars.

The hope was that the new subs would be the start of a new and improved Spanish Navy, restoring national pride in the country’s navy.  Spain had once boasted of the strongest navy in the world, but that was before the country lost the Great Armada in 1588.  Since then, there had been few high points in Spanish naval history.  (There was, for example, that day in September 1898, when the United States easily sank the entire Spanish navy.)

In 2013, shortly before the launch of the first sub, someone doublechecked the math on the ship’s design and discovered that someone else had misplaced a decimal point so that the new boat was going to be 100 tons too heavy to float!  While an extra 100 tons on a 2000-ton ship doesn’t sound like much, it was more than enough to keep the ships from floating.  All subs are designed to go underwater but the people aboard them really like to have confidence they can also occasionally surface…and this one couldn’t.  

Finally, Spain did what it should have done all along and turned to the real experts for help.  The Electric Boat Company—the people who make American subs—was called in to evaluate the design and to suggest a possible solution.  If the subs were lengthened, it would add buoyancy.  The recommendation was to add 33 feet in the middle of the sub, for a measly $9 million a foot.  Each.  And it would require about a decade to accomplish the design changes to the four subs.  This new, new design would bring the sub up to 81 meters length and 3000 tons in weight.  The computer-generated image at left is what the subs would look like before the extension was added.  If you want to know what the finished sub would look like, it’s basically the same but 11% longer.

The extensions were finally finished in 2018 and Spain proudly took possession of the Isaac Peral.  The design was now 30 years out of date and the final price tag for each boat had ballooned to $1.2 billion—roughly twice the estimated original cost—but the first boat off the line was finally put to sea in 2021.  Happily, the navy discovered the sub could resurface when needed.  

Unfortunately, it was at this point that the Spanish discovered a new problem:  The boats were too long to tie up at their docks at the submarine base in Cartagena, a mistake that inexplicably took the Spanish naval authorities five years to notice.

Today, the harbor is being dredged and the docks extended to accommodate what the Spanish are now calling the “S-80 Plus” submarines.  The project is expected to be finished by 2027 at an undisclosed price.

According to the Spanish authorities, “There had been some deficiencies in the program.”

Yes, Virginia,There is a Historical Precedent

As I write this week’s blog entry, the House of Representatives is engaged in yet another attempt to elect a Speaker of the House.  After years of denouncing the Democratic Party’s majority rule, the difficulty of even selecting a Speaker seriously tests their claim of better leadership.

To be fair, of the twenty holdouts, a few seem to be more interested in press coverage than in making any meaningful changes.  It is probably safer to French kiss a honey badger than to stand between the press cameras and Lauren Boebert as she denounces the leadership of Kevin McCarthy.  She never mentions that she was only narrowly reelected last November and would have been unsuccessful save for the $2 million dollars of campaign funds that McCarthy gave her.

The rest of those holdouts do have a couple of valid points.  In the last couple of decades, regardless of which party held the majority, Congress has been run poorly, with few issues being debated on the floor, but through closed door party negotiations that are then lumped into giant omnibus bills that are usually passed at the last minute without anyone ever reading the thousands of pages that make up the bill.  In the last half of the 20th Century, the power of the Speaker has increased dramatically, effectively giving the Speaker enormous power to shape legislation.  This is why the majority of bills that do pass do so with “unanimous consent.”

Still, the long-drawn-out process of failed ballot after failed ballot gives the appearance of the Republican Party members shooting themselves in the foot.  Reload and repeat.  Someone wrote to ask if there was a historical precedent.  Since there is a historical precedent for everything, I give you the Battle of Karánsebes.

In 1788, Austria was a year into the four-year war with the Ottoman Empire.  This is not unusual, since for most of the latter half of the 18th Century, most of Europe was at war with damn near everybody else over practically nothing.  Since Austria was still being led by the hapless Hapsburg Royal Family, it would be easier to list the times that Austria was not at war with somebody.

The Austrian Army, made up of roughly 100,000 men drawn from Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, France, Croatia, Serbia, and Poland, suffered from the units lacking a shared language, from raging epidemics, and from being personally led by Emperor Joseph II.  Joseph was yet another Hapsburg absolutist, and like his sister, Marie Antoinette, was certainly no one to lose your head over.

As the army blundered around in present-day Romania in search of the Ottoman forces that had invaded Austrian territory, Joseph sent the Hussars out to scout the nearby territory.   For those of you who didn’t take my military history classes, Hussars were light cavalry whose uniforms looked like they had been issued by an Italian opera company.  They were only lightly armed because their usual job was to act as scouts.

On September 21, 1788, the Hussars rode out across a river in search of the Turks, but failing that, they successfully managed to find a band of Gypsies who gladly sold them a large quantity of schnapps.  There was enough booze for the Hussars, but not nearly enough to share with the rest of the army, so the Hussars dismounted and began to reconnoiter the bottom of the liquor bottles.

Concerned about the prolonged absence of his scouts, Emperor Joseph sent a contingent of infantry across the river to locate the Hussars.  By the time the infantry got across the river, it wasn’t hard to locate the party, as the Hussars were loudly drunk and stubbornly refused to share their schnapps with the thirsty infantry.  Arguments turned into shouting, then brawling and then it got serious.  The Hussars thought they were better than the infantry, who in turn generally thought the cavalry were just better dressed clowns who left the real fighting to the infantry.  Since both groups were armed and alcohol was involved….well, we will never know who fired the first shot, but before long, both groups were shooting at each other.

It was definitely someone in the infantry who had the idea of scaring off the Hussars by yelling “Turks!  Turks!”  

The Hussars did exactly what was expected:  they mounted their horses and fled.  So did the majority of the infantry, not knowing it was a ruse.  Both groups continued firing at each other, at the enemy that wasn’t there, and at anything else that moved.  The retreat turned into a stampede that was headed directly back towards the camp.

Unfortunately, not every unit in camp knew that the Hussars (and then the infantry) had been sent across the river, but they certainly knew that a large group of screaming soldiers was coming across the river, directly toward their position, and that those men were firing their guns while yelling about the Turks.  Naturally, those units in camp, believed they were being attacked and began to defend themselves.  An artillery officer ordered his cannons to begin firing to defend the camp.

One alert officer, recognizing the distinctive uniforms of the Hussars, realized that the men attempting to cross the river were part of the Austrian Army, and began yelling “Halt! Halt!”  Unfortunately, most of the men around him did not speak German and thought they heard someone yelling “Allah!”  More unfortunately, the Muslim troops of the Ottoman Army were widely known to shout “Allah!” during battle as a cry to their God to protect them.

As the rest of the men in camp woke up, all they could hear was screaming, cannons booming, and guns firing.  Worse, the sounds were obviously getting closer.  Within minutes, whole regiments were firing wildly at other regiments who promptly returned fire.  In the smoke and confusion, officers got separated from their units, finding themselves surrounded by troops that spoke a different language.  Emperor Joseph, believing that his army was under attack by Ottoman forces, ordered a retreat and then promptly got separated from his protection detail.  Two days later, Joseph and one, lone aide wandered into the Austrian Army camp.

How many men were lost in the battle is still being debated, but the most often quoted account says that 10,000 men were killed.  The Austrians had fled so rapidly—from themselves—that they left behind their wounded, a lot of their cannons, and the supply wagons containing the army payroll.  

Two days later, the Ottoman Army arrived, easily securing the area around Karánsebes.  They had won a battle they hadn’t even fought.  

The Republicans should remember that it is possible to lose a battle because of friendly fire.