One of the pleasures of reading the American Scientist in the last decade or so has been the writing of Prof. Henry Petroski, the engineer and historian of technology currently on faculty at Duke University. Petroski used his columns in serialized fashion to lay out his since-published theory of “success through failure.”

By this term, Petroski means that as engineers innovate — for example, using new materials or methods to push the envelope of what it is possible to design and build — they inevitably make mistakes by relying on models (tangible or numerical) of previous technology to assess their designs’ reliablity and safety. Often only after catastrophe strikes — perhaps a structural failure of some kind like a Tacoma Narrows Bridge or a Kansas City Hyatt walkway — does the profession look backward and ensure that its design and test tools are updated to match the reality of leading-edge technique. There are certainly analogues outside civil engineering, as anyone can verify who has followed Intel’s search for insanely subtle chip bugs. In any case, Petroski suggests that anticipation and avoidance of catastrophic failure is possible, but only if one understands the hubristic risks of conventional design and thinking.

Well, now. We are presently in the midst of a catastrophic failure of financial engineering. Financial engineering is a construct invented in academia to recognize that the term “finance,” used historically for an essentially analytical discipline, practically a branch of applied economics, was no longer adequate to describe the activities of Wall Street in designing and delivering to the marketplace new financial instruments. Engineers design things. They have quantitative skills (e.g., great attention to detail, facility with simulation modelng, capacity to solve systems of differential equations, etc.) that are lacking in the general population, even those with strong business skills. Ergo, designing new financial instruments was an activity of financial engineers, who must be trained and socialized as such.

More on Paging Dr. Petroski to the Financial Engineering graduate lounge, stat!

Possibly spurred by the online publication two weeks ago of Sen. Obama’s answers, Sen. McCain has now delivered his own responses to the 14 questions posed by Science Debate 2008. You can read both campaigns’ responses side by side and judge their merits for yourself.

The McCain replies exhibit the same odd dissonance between the well known public “voice” of the candidate himself and the it-could-only-be-a-committee locutions of his science team. For example, Team McCain gushingly praises the “transformative” impact of communications technology on family lives, while we know that Sen. McCain himself admits he is still getting to know the Internet and is presumably not obsessively texting Cindy all day long. . . . However, up to some odd tonal quirks like the candidate’s campaign-long enthusiasm for the multifaceted role of community colleges, the McCain responses, like Obama’s, seem generally within the scientific mainstream and both replies have strengths and weaknesses.

In fact, some responses were quite similar, right down to use of the same vocabulary and buzz words (emission reductions through “cap and trade,” a “balanced” space program, a “permanent” R&D tax credit, etc.). However, McCain emphasizes for-profit innovation a bit more than does Obama. For example, his climate-change reply, he proposes a $5,000 a car tax credit for zero-emission vehicles while also taking a swipe at past alternative-fuel efforts that have “thrown around enough money subsidizing special interests and excusing failure.” Hmm. I hope he has in mind avoiding the Arizona alt-fuels tax-credit debacle.

More likely, he was simply thinking of his parallel call to “eliminate wasteful earmarks in order to allocate funds for science and technology investments.” That one may stick in the craw of many of the backers of Science Debate, among whom are responsible officers of universities that a generation ago would never have sought research earmarks, as a matter of pride, but now do so routinely, as a matter of perceived competitive necessity.

Not surprisingly, the McCain answers spend a lot of time on nuclear energy (a sector to which Obama himself has not been entirely unfriendly, given the prominence in Illinois of Exelon, the nation’s largest nuclear operator). McCain also shows perhaps more regard than Obama for the role of defense technology expenditures in civilian innovation and market-building. His discussion of ocean health is particularly admirable for its insistence on equal focus on the problems of the Great Lakes and our freshwater system. I did think the space answer was weak, though, considering its length. One other element that was notable to me: a specific call for the U.S. to help train a new generation of African agro-scientists in service of a new Green Revolution on that troubled continent.

Go read them yourself.

I began this blog three years ago with a post, “Bayh-Dole Under Attack Again,” and apparently the time has arrived for yet another attack in the mainstream business press. Readers will know that I am capable of deep skepticism or even cynicism about the motives of our university sector, but this particular attack seems wrong-headed to me. The central assertions — that academic research is now overly influenced by get-rich-quick dreams — is entirely unsupported, and there’s a great deal of confusion besides. Let’s “Fisk” a few key quotes:

For the first time, academicians were able to profit personally from the market transfer of their work. For the first time, academia could be powered as much by a profit motive as by the psychic award of a new discovery

Yes, but that misses the fundamental point of Bayh-Dole, which addressed the motivations of the licensee as much as those of the licensor. The law proceeds from an understanding that for-profit licensees will fully engage in commercializing discoveries made at universities and financed by federal tax dollars only when the rights thus licensed accrue to them and them alone. That was the reason for clarifying who could license out a federally financed discovery (the university whose faculty were performing the work at the time of discovery) and on what terms (exclusive, if necessary). That these transactions involve royalty payments and that academic inventors could make money (from their statutorily guaranteed minimum “inventor’s share” of royalties collected) was a minor grace note to the overall thrust of the law. To further assert that this means that academia has become powered by the profit motive is entirely unsupported in my view.
More on Bayh-Dole, again

Science Debate 2008, to which I earlier signed on with some reservations, has posted Democratic candidate Barack Obama’s answers to the “top 14″ questions organizers culled from issues suggested by the petition’s 38,000 signers.

Overall, the questions were decent: a few could be called leading, but no more so than is typical for candidate questionnaires by other special-interest groups. And make no mistake, the Science Debate signers are a special interest group, a list dominated by those who make a living performing federally funded research or leading research institutions that are themselves heavily dependent on the federal government, or representing either or both category in Washington. I have nothing against that; I just still wish the organizers were a bit more frank and self-aware.

I was pleased to find that the answers provided by the Obama campaign team were solid and workmanlike. They certainly didn’t sound much like the candidate’s own rhetorical style, but that again is typical in such situations. The answers committed no obvious errors, and I was particularly impressed that in the final question (on the role of science and research in improving healthcare), the Obama team forthrightly cautioned, “These are difficult problems, and science and technology can solve only some of them.”

In fact, it seemed to me that the questions led the answerers into some temptation to confuse policy informed by research with research itself, and technology diffusion with technology development or “use inspired research.” And then there’s the usual ambiguity on whether “technology” means just “information technology” or something broader (both uses can be found). Overall, the answers bear some attention, and it will be well worth waiting for the parallel submission from Republican candidate John McCain.

As I indicated in an update to my earlier post, the organizers have taken steps to qualify as a public charity, and their credibility rises somewhat in the process, even as I watch motives carefully.