An Analysis of The US Government’s ‘Cash for Clunkers’ Program
Thursday, June 3rd, 2010During the summer of 2009, the US government operated an economic stimulus program called Cash for Clunkers (C4C). The objectives of this program were to provide an immediate economic stimulus to the US economy, which was currently in recession, and encourage the replacement of inefficient vehicles for efficient ones in the private US transportation [...]
The Paths of Future Progress
Thursday, May 7th, 2009In the next century, the progress of humanity will proceed on the basis of how successfully we address the following six needs. They are not the typical needs of world peace, ending world hunger, or stopping environmental destruction that so often are vaguely thrown about in the press these days. Those are but [...]
World Metal Consumption and the Path to Space Mining
Friday, March 13th, 2009One of the real driving forces in any human exploration has been intense need. In the initial human migrations around the globe, people explored out of a need for food, and a need to be safe from other potentially hostile bands–there is safety in distance. During the European colonization period the nations and [...]
Ideas: Over Regulated or Under Regulated …
Monday, December 29th, 2008There has been a lot of talk recently about whether economic markets have imploded due to over-regulation or under-regulation. Although most pick up that argument with their own particular political biases, it is a difficult question to answer not least because many governments actually act in both directions at the same time. But, [...]
Waste is a Failure, Part 1: Heat
Monday, December 15th, 2008Waste is a terrible thing. At best, it connotes something that has performed no good for anyone. At worst, it is something disgusting that we avoid at all costs. But, nonetheless our lives are filled with waste. It is the rare person or circumstances that allow one to go through a [...]
A Proposal for an Integrated Risk Management Application
Sunday, December 7th, 2008Introduction
Analyzing and controlling risk is one of the most important aspects of the engineering design process. These risks include health and safety, design robustness and reliability, maintainability, marketability, cost, schedule, and performance.
Yet, many of these risks are managed only by the intuition of the project manager or management team. While many are skilled [...]
Real Risk and Perceived Risk
Saturday, September 27th, 2008What is the difference, and does it matter?
Whether implementing a new technology or attempting to solve a problem we currently face in the world or even just making mundate decisions about our daily activities, we continually make judgements about the risks we face. With our liminted resources, time, and skill we choose to limit [...]
A Careful Look at Green Advertising
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008Increasingly, green advertising has become much more important among manufacturers and retail businesses. It seems many consumers would prefer given many options to select a product that is less stressful on the environment than another equally functional product. While the degree to which this is influencing each person today varies widely, it is [...]
Life in the Peace Corps, Part 7, Adventure and Tragedy
Thursday, July 24th, 2008One of the benefits to service in the Peace Corps is that you find yourself during your service in a region of the world that you probably would not have visited otherwise with the opportunity and some time to take advantage of those adventures all around.
Life in the Peace Corps, Part 6, Connecting with Home
Thursday, July 10th, 2008Of the three main missions of the Peace Corps, two of them relate to cultural exchange: one in showing people who might not have otherwise come into contact with an American a real face that they can relate to, and the other being bringing a part of a foreign culture back to Americans that [...]
8 Books to Explain Development in Sub-Saharan Africa
Monday, July 7th, 2008It is a common conversation piece among those trying to understand how the world works: how did it come to be that Sub-Saharan Africa is far less developed than the rest of the contemporary world? While there is no one simple answer, there is an answer. One that involves several intertwining threads with some causes [...]
Life in the Peace Corps, Part 5, Living
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008For background, I am describing some of my experiences from the US Peace Corps in Guinea, West Africa. More information on this series is available in the introduction.
Many often wonder what it is really like to live as a Peace Corps Volunteer. The fact is it can be a very different experience depending on which [...]
Rates Can be Deceiving
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008This article recently brought up an excellent point on how some rates can be deceiving, and even reduce the likelihood that we will make the right decision. The example involved comparing impressions of fuel efficiency in miles per gallon versus gallons per mile, or gallons per ten thousand miles. While identifying the better of two [...]
A First Step Towards the Hydrogen Economy ?
Monday, June 30th, 2008Recent news has highlighted the opening of the first commercial hydrogen fueling station in California. For people who lease hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (the most common user) or some kind of hydrogen combusion engine, they now have one public place in the state of California where they can refuel their vehicles. A few others already [...]
Life in the Peace Corps, Part 4, Teaching
Friday, June 20th, 2008For background, I am describing some of my experiences from the US Peace Corps in Guinea, West Africa. More information on this series is available in the introduction.
Although, I was one of only two Americans in a small rural school with one class per grade teaching in a foreign language, my experiences in the [...]
True Progress is Looking for Writers
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008True-Progress.com is looking for writers to contribute to the mission of finding enduring solutions. If you or someone you know would like the opportunity to regularly publish articles on this site, please see the details here.
The Aim of Science
Monday, June 16th, 2008Good Science? Bad Science? What do these mean? How do we know the difference? We throw these terms around especially in political and policy arguments as if we all understand what they mean. Exceptions. Uncertainty. Facts. Theory. Bias. These ideas seem to determine whether or not we think any particular scientific idea is good or [...]
Life in the Peace Corps, Part 3, The Beginning
Friday, June 13th, 2008After completion of our training in Senegal, we traveled to Guinea to see our host country for the first time. As the rains had been late in Senegal, our time there was mostly marked by sand and heat and more of the same. The brilliant green lushness of coastal Guinea having already seen months of [...]
Reliability is Not a Constant
Tuesday, June 10th, 2008Often as a reliability engineer, or anyone responsible for researching the reliability of an item, or calculating it, you will find oversimplified published data giving you the impression that reliability is an unchanging physical property like mass or volume, something intrinsic to the materials included in it. This is actually the common sense approach; we [...]
Deep Water Offshore Wind Energy
Monday, June 9th, 2008Drilling for Oil is not the only Potential Energy Producing Activity Offshore
While “green” or renewable energy technologies are often seen as the rival against traditional fossil fuel technologies in some kind of epic battle, they can actually sometimes enhance and support each other. Recent news from wind power companies suggests that they may be able [...]
Life in the Peace Corps, Part 2, Training
Friday, June 6th, 2008On Fridays over the next several weeks, I am describing experiences from my service in the U.S. Peace Corps.
An overnight flight from New York’s JFK airport on Air Afrique put us in Dakar, Senegal the next day. In June, when the rains had still not come, Senegal was a very dry and very hot and [...]
Review – Modern Compressible Flow with Historical Perspective
Thursday, June 5th, 2008Modern Compressible Flow with Historical Perspective by John D. Anderson provides an excellent resource for studies in advanced fluid mechanics. In a field where many texts provide useful content in an entirely unmemorable fashion, this text is an exception. Theory, History, Applications, and other interesting information and stories make this book a beneficial addition to [...]
Zero-Failure Reliability Testing
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008So, you’ve got a design that you want to prove is better than the existing design from your own or another company. What’s the most efficient, fastest way to get to that answer with a very small sample size? Whle there may be several options you have, including accelerated testing, they each can have their [...]
Development and Official Regulation
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008If we consider development to be the general increase in well being of a population, then we have to recognize that there are times when the increase in one type of measure (real income) is countered by the negative action of another type of measure (disease rates). In these cases, government often steps in to [...]
Space Solar Power, The Next Leapfrog Technology ?
Monday, June 2nd, 2008Recently, this article on CNN.com revisits the idea of collecting solar power in space and beaming it down to Earth. With such a large world demand for energy expected in the next 20 to 50 years, and declining costs for access to space, could this be the time for this science fiction technology to become [...]
Life in the Peace Corps, Part 1, The Decision
Friday, May 23rd, 2008For the next several Fridays, I am going to retell some of my experiences from my service in the United States Peace Corps. This is probably not obviously directly related to the aim of True Progress, but I feel that it can be instructive and I believe that the Peace Corps has a specific [...]
Progress and Unintended Consequences
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008So, what happens when the very actions that we each individually take to improve our lives in the end cause detrimental consequences to all of us? The sage might say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and she might be right. But, does it have to be that way? Are we [...]
Review – Microscale Heat Transfer – Fundamentals and Applications
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008This review concerns a niche of mechanical engineering that involves heat transfer at very small scales. Understanding this phenomenon, which is considerably different from typical heat transfer and thermodynamics experienced in the everyday world, is critical to the advancement of nanotechnological machines and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).
Energy Efficiency: Good News onto Deaf Ears ?
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008Energy efficiency is a wonderful investment both for businesses and consumers often paying far better returns than the stock and bond markets. If so, then why don’t we take advantage of it? Increases in efficiency can reduce energy consumption for the same or increasing amount of output. All the while, pollution is reduced and money [...]
Assigning a Value to Life
Monday, May 19th, 2008Why considering a monetary value of life is not only acceptable, but morally necessary
Typically, the first time we consider someone placing a monetary value on protecting a life, the risk of death, or other similar circumstances, we cringe. The mere mention of life in the context of money seems cruel and far too calculating. Rightly, [...]
Review – Kill-A-Watt Electricity Usage Monitor
Friday, May 16th, 2008With energy costs increasing faster than inflation and much faster than income in the United States, many have a desire to conserve. But, without information, our conservation may be more expensive than it is worth and hardly as effective as it could have been. The kill-a-watt electricity usage monitor provides a useful way to be [...]
CAFE Standards and Speed Limits, Round 2
Thursday, May 15th, 2008In this earlier article on the new CAFE standards, I found that depending on the assumptions made for the number of future miles driven, restricting the speed limit to 55 miles per hour would be a more cost effective and more energy efficient solution than changing the CAFE standard. That analysis only considered the total [...]
Calculating Reliability with Partial Test Results
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008Getting answers before you are finished. Why are people always so impatient? Why can’t they just wait until testing is complete before they ask for answers? I suppose it is just human nature, as I have heard that question any time I have been involved in reliability testing programs. And, although we would know much [...]
Landfills as an Energy Source
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008As landfills which hold municipal solid waste are closed the emissions from decay of the material in the landfill becomes a pollutant. That pollutant can either contribute to smog and the increase in greenhouse gases, or it can be used as an energy source. A free, environmentally friendly fuel, potentially harmful if released, is not [...]
Education in the Developing World
Monday, May 12th, 2008Increasing the quality and quantity of education in poor countries is critical and absolutely necessary to their development, but let’s not lose sight of how disruptive a free and generous education can be. Education changes cultures, economies, and governments, and for nations entering that transition period the way must be prepared.
Defining Sustainable Technology
Friday, May 9th, 2008Sustainable technology is an idea that may produce a new level of real progress around the world. But often today, the term is more of a marketing badge that may or may not prove to be true when put to the test. I have written before about sustainable technology and some of the problems with [...]
Convert B10 or L10 Bearing Life to MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures)
Thursday, May 8th, 2008As a reliability analyst, sometimes none of your data matches the form you are interested in. It all comes in different collections of units, statistical distribution parameters, failure rates, environments, MTBF, MTTF, and on and on. In this article, let’s consider one common conversion for which my research found too little information available [...]
Producing Enough Engineers in the United States
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008What is the state of the American university system? Does it produce the types of professionals needed to keep the American economy strong and innovative?
We often hear a lot about how our contemporary economy requires plenty of professionals skilled in science and technology to maintain a healthy rate of innovation. There are are many reasons [...]
True Progress Releases Free Weibull Reliability Calculator
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008True-Progress.com has released its Free Weibull Reliability Calculator version 1.0.2.
You can download this tool by following this link.
This simple calculator utilizes the Weibull distribution to generate reliability data for your system
The Fallacy of Human Error
Monday, May 5th, 2008Why pilots (and humans in general) get a bad rap during accident investigations.
In my earlier article on root cause analysis, I mentioned that every cause present in a given situation can be considered equally responsible for the occurrence of the failure in question. Many times, however, investigations end up ascribing the fault of the entire [...]
A Call to an Internet Arms Race
Friday, May 2nd, 2008Progress via a True Global Internet
In our contemporary world, one of the most important factors constraining the growth of societies is lack of information. In some places, infrastructure is not sufficiently developed in communications and electricity and the availability of electronics in the market to even allow people to connect to the information available via [...]
Conservation and the Marketplace
Thursday, May 1st, 2008How Conservation and Efficiency Can Sometimes Increase Consumption
Conservation and efficiency are always good, right? Unfortunately, not always.
Many of us, myself included, consider ourselves conservationists. We don’t buy or take things that we don’t need (for example, lots of extra paper napkins at the restaurant). We consider the energy efficiency of [...]
Hidden Technology Subsidies and System Design Bias
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008When Subsidies are Hard to See
When we think of our governments subsidizing a particular industry we usually envision a nice big check sent to them every year to the tune of millions of dollars from tax revenues. Sometimes, instead, it is that industry that is free from a particular tax that most others have [...]
A Way Out of the Politics of Climate Change, Part 5
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008Stay Focused on the Big picture
This is the fifth article in a five part series.
In this series, we have been outlining a evidence-based, constructive method to address the issue of climate change. While using this method doesn’t eliminate any disputes, it does change them from one of attacking philosophies, which are not easily changed, [...]
Review – IRCMS (Integrated Reliability Centered Maintenance System) by NAVAIR
Monday, April 28th, 2008This review refers to version 6.3 of IRCMS by NAVAIR (Naval Air Systems Command).
IRCMS 6.3 provides users with an aid to perform Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) analysis. RCM is a process by which the life cycle costs of performing maintenance on a system are compared to the consequences of not performing maintenance as well [...]
A Way Out of the Politics of Climate Change, Part 4
Friday, April 25th, 2008Evaluating Solution Effectiveness and Translating Analysis into Policy
This is the fourth article in a five part series.
To date in this series, we’ve looked at objective measures of how to frame a problem, how to determine the causes of that problem, and consider implementing a robust solution to the problem. In the last article, we [...]
Green Production versus Conservation
Thursday, April 24th, 2008In honor of Earth Day on 4/22 (a little late, I know), let’s consider the relationship between “green” production and conservation.
Our question is does conservation or “green” production result a greater positive impact regarding our use of resources. I am going to take the case of paper, as it is relatively simple product to [...]
A Way Out of the Politics of Climate Change, Part 3
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008Evaluating Likelihood and Addressing Uncertainty when Applying Solutions
This is the third article in a five part series.
In the first two articles in this series we looked at identifying a problem and a functional understanding of that problem and then at determining all the causes of that problem. Now, we are going to [...]
Review – Guns, Germs, and Steel
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond is an excellent explanation of why the world is the way it is. Combined with William Easterly’s book reviewed earlier on this site, a reader can finally get his or her hands around the broad historical causes that have produced the world that we live in.
This is [...]
A Way Out of the Politics of Climate Change, Part 2
Monday, April 21st, 2008A Root Cause Analysis on the “Failure Mode” of Changing (Increasing or Decreasing) Temperatures.
This is the second article of a five part series.
In the last article I outlined our functional model of the Earth. According to that model to explain why the current temperature of earth is the way it is, we have a primary [...]
Durability and Progress
Friday, April 18th, 2008Some would say progress is continually achieving a higher and higher level of capability as individuals and collectively as a society. For example, we can buy improved cell phones, computers, and automobiles each year. Others would say that progress involves reaching a state of balance such that we are not destroying any nonrenewable resources and [...]
A Way Out of the Politics of Climate Change, Part 1
Thursday, April 17th, 2008A Risk Assessment Approach to Climate Change Policy
This is the first article of a five part series.
It is difficult to find a more hotly debated public policy issue today than the one about potential regulatory actions related to global climate change. Much of this debate is emotional focused on various groups’ attitudes toward government action [...]
Development Off the Grid
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008And, I mean way off…
Picture yourself in a small tropical village a few hundred miles south of the Sahara Desert. About 800 people live there. You are probably related in one way or another to most of them, but you don’t really know how exactly, beyond your own close-knit extended family. There is no electricity, [...]
The Usefulness of Risk Assessment
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008What is Risk Assessment; how do we already use it; and how do we misuse it?
If our goal is to achieve progress, one of the ways we can determine that progress has been made is by a reduction in the quantity and severity of problems we face. Another way, would be to determine the quantity [...]
CAFE Vehicle Standards Compared to Speed Limits
Monday, April 14th, 2008What would more effectively reduce pollution from small vehicles?
Recently, there was a significant political argument in the United States about the costs and benefits of increasing the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. Increased efficiency, the argument went, would reduce the consumption of fuel, and therefore help restrain fuel prices, also reducing pollution from vehicles [...]
Review – The End of Poverty
Sunday, April 13th, 2008The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Out Time by Jeffery Sachs, is an optimistic, forceful argument for the economic potential of developing countries and the necessity of increased in aid from rich countries to realize it.
Jeffrey Sachs is an accomplished macro-economist, currently at Columbia University, who has experience helping poor countries get on track [...]
Root Cause Analysis and True Solutions
Saturday, April 12th, 2008In Search of The Best Answer, Not a Better Answer
Whenever there is a major man-made disaster or some kind of accident, responsible officials usually convene a team that conducts an investigation. The results of that investigation will usually identify a “root cause” and several “contributing causes”. If it was a plane crash, the team will [...]
Landfills, Mines of the Future ?
Friday, April 11th, 2008So, how long will it be before our trash is more valuable than existing iron mines?
The municipal waste collection system in the United States is very efficient at removing whatever materials we place in our trash bag. So much so, that we normally find it difficult to imagine the scale of the operation, and especially [...]
How Do We Define Progress?
Thursday, April 10th, 2008Back in the good old days…
Cultures seem to have their own ideas about what progress truly is and whether it exists at all or is just an illusion. Americans, in general, seem to have faith in progress over time, yet many continue to just as strongly express nostalgia for times past. Others have a more [...]
Review – Development As Freedom
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008Development as Freedom, by Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, provides a powerful argument that development and progress cannot be measured on the basis of economic output and consumption alone, that personal freedom is a very important and in some areas predominate variable in determining whether progress has been or will be [...]
Distributed or Centralized Solar Energy: Costs and Benefits
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008Excuse me, are you going to use all that Sun in one place?
Given present-day concerns about energy independence, pollution control, and energy price stability, solar energy is often touted as one of the (at least partial) solutions to that problem. Solar energy involves making electricity or other useable energy out of light from the [...]
The Challenge of Sustaining Sustainable Technology
Monday, April 7th, 2008One small step forward…
While I was serving as a teacher in the small town of Kankalabé (population: ~5000), Guinea in West Africa, the European Union financed a project to install a running water system in that town. The project, of limited benefit, was soon sabotaged and has since been nothing but a monument to unrealized [...]
Week-Long Aid Missions, Charity, and Sustainability
Sunday, April 6th, 2008Is this for them or for us?
A couple years ago, I was advising a group of undergraduate engineering students from Rice University on a project they were pursuing for Engineers Without Borders. They were designing a rainwater catchment and drip irrigation system for a village in Mali, West Africa. Having heard about their project and [...]
Review – The Elusive Quest for Growth
Saturday, April 5th, 2008The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics by William Easterly is an honest answer to part of the question, “why hasn’t the world improved like we thought it would?” Easterly conducts a post-mortem conference on western aid programs since the end of World War II, finding that in many cases [...]
Appropriate Technology and Development
Friday, April 4th, 2008Please, That’s Not Appropriate Here…
Appropriate Technology, a somewhat condescending (from the receivers point of view) title for a movement that arose in the 1970s, focuses on providing an improved intermediate step on the technology staircase between developing and industrialized countries. While some of these ideas have been expressed for many decades (see The Ugly American [...]
Welcome to True Progress
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 Onwards and Upwards
Do we know what we are doing? Maybe the right question is do we ever know what we are doing? What are the true consequences of our actions today and tomorrow and hundreds of years from now? Are we responsible for those consequences or should we never be concerned with them?
I believe that [...]