This is obviously off topic but it’s a big issue in the US.  The bailout and how to pay for it?

US Bank Bailout

After years of making ridiculous profits and providing obscene compensation to CEOs, the US taxpayer is being asked to bailout our mortgage industry.  One story after another points to 2 factors for the shear number of bad loans: #1 - lying loan officers; #2 - an unrealistic belief that everyone is entitled to a single family stand alone home.

The banking industry based their risk decisions on an ever taller more unstable house of cards - financial models the business side of the company didn’t understand.  The model builders should have known that their models can extrapolate but the predictions are questionable at best - they are incompetent if they did not.

We are still working on a bailout plan.  As of this point, the bailout is lots of dollars going directly to Wall Street.  Shouldn’t it go to individual home owners?  The biggest problem for the Wall Street firms is the uncertainty of the quality of the loans they made and how much do they own.  Secure the underlying home loans and the uncertainty becomes much smaller.  As a result you keep people in their homes, prevent whole neighborhoods from hurting because of a few foreclosures, help individuals instead of mega-corps, and free up credit.

How to pay?

Obviously any bailout will be expensive.  I am believer that we owe the Iraqis something for getting them into this mess.  I also believe that we in the US will suffer, long term, consequences if we leave before the country is semi-secure.

The question, with this bailout, becomes this: the Iraq war is putting wear and tear on our military equipment and men, where does the money come from to pay for bringing our military readiness back up to the proper levels?  The bailout sucks up any “extra” the US may have had or could borrow.  The longer the US is in the Iraq, the more expensive the military rebuilding will be.

We can’t afford to pay for both.  The longer we stay the larger the chance is that the US will have to pull out quickly because of money.  The sooner we begin to pull out the more smoothly we can accomlish the pull out and the more stable we can leave Iraq.

Large sums of money…

Large sums of money are going to Wall Street and Iraq.  Neither place is the right place for our money right now.

Randomness and why the Banks are failing

This last New Years I was talking to a friend in the Banking industry - 2 am and drunk.  He was lamenting the fact that the financial institutes based all of their risk assessments of these fancy derivatives on models.  The models were traditional mathematics as well as neural network based artificial intelligence.  The point he kept coming back to was their reliance on these models and how the models didn’t make good predictions under certain circumstances.

My response was that models are as good as their inputs.  As I’ve stated in a previous post, models are designed, built, and validated to answer very specific questions under very specific circumstances.  When the question is outside the design parameters then the results are likely to be garbage and certainly untrustworthy.

An interesting article on the Edge…

On the Edge, Nassim Nicholas Taleb details the pitfalls of trusting models and an incomplete knowledge of statistics and randomness.  Taleb is the author of Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.

The parts of the article I found most interesting were the ones about making decisions based on a rudimentary understanding of statistics.  His analysis is dead on.

On the International Space Station one of the Control Moment Gyroscopes (CMGs) failed.  After it failed NASA made the root cause analysis a high priority.  That said, engineers tried before me to explain why the CMG failed.  A bearing expert came in to tell us it could be this or it could be that or it could be something else…  The vendor responded similarly.

While I worked on figuring out the CMGs I was asked to determine what parameters in our telemetry stream could warn us of impending failure of another CMG.  Obviously we would prefer to shut it down before failure and bring it back to Earth for dissection and study.  I used every interpolation trick I knew, including Online Recursive Least Squares and Kalman filtering, to better predict what what was coming next.  No matter the technique or trick we applied to the data it didn’t work out.  “Good” techniques and models worked well on past days data but invariably they eventually fail to predict accurately some future event.

Randomness and Stochastic Control

Many real world systems are analyzed in stochastic manner.  In other words we assume that system noise and disturbances are random processes.  Frequently they are not random.  Frequently the processes are correlated.  Most of these systems can be approximated with these stochastic processes and analyses.

Systems engineering is often based on approximations of stats based models.  Obviously we have to be careful when we build models and especially careful letting Systems engineers (or ourselves) make decisions based on these models.

Source Links

Edge discussion on stats

Follow up discussion

I added Google search to my blog a couple of weeks ago.  When I did that the site continued to look fine in IE7.  However, the footer of the theme bled into the sidebar and main posting when viewed with Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari.

I tried and tried and tried.  No matter what I did to the previous theme it didn’t want to behave.  Even after I removed the Google search.  So I went looking for other themes. I like this one pretty well but I’ll probably alter it once I get my new site logo finished.

The theme also looks a little crowded to me. Let me know your thoughts.

Maybe I’m wrong but here are a few suggestions for making cars better.

Stirling vs. Alternators

In modern automotives the alternator uses energy off the engine to generate electricity to power the radio, A/C, etc.  The alternator sucks horsepower off the engine in order to create this electricity.

What about the Stirling engine?

The Stirling engine is a piston engine driven by an external heat source.  Internal combustion engines have a lot of waste heat that can be captured.  The radiator and exhaust are 2 obvious examples.  Current Stirling designs have reported efficienies of 18%.  Alternators are most likely 90% or more but they require power directly from the engine.

Stirlings have a lower efficiency but convert otherwise wasted energy.  Alternators are robust and realiable.  Stirlings are unproven but can be designed to be small.  Several, possibly more than a dozen, can be placed at convenient places around the engine.  Designed properly they could be swappable such that if one Stirling fails it can be replaced easily and without loss of electricity generation.

Airplane Nozzles vs. Electronic temperature control

The most recent trend in air conditioning and heating in luxury cars is to provide electronic control for each side of the car and in some cases it seems like control is provided for each passenger.  On airplanes each passenger has their own control through a simple nozzle.

So why do we need electronic control that can fail when a simple nozzle would suffice?

Layoffs suck…

I work in the Aerospace industry.  It used to be a 7 year cycle of ups and downs.  Thankfully the 7 year cycle doesn’t appear to be sync’ed in time between the different Aerospace companies.  Unfortunately the 7 year cycle appears to be more like 3 or 4 years now.

During the down side of the Aerospace business cycle layoffs happen (also read s**t happens).  Over this last year my company has been in a constant state of trickling layoffs.  My employer has stated that people with the correct skill set will be kept.  The reality appears to be that dumb luck defines who stays and who goes.

A state of constant layoffs drives morale into the basement.  As a result most people who can find a satisfactory replacement job have done so.  That isn’t to say the rest of us are unemployable by another company but many are looking for a job in just the right place with the right salary and several other factors.  There’s no need to take just any job so long as you still have your current job.

Morale after over a year of constant layoffs

The morale in any company after over a year in a state of constant layoffs is always terrible.  There is no other way to describe it.  After a year, every employee

1. has lost faith in their upper management to fix the situation. 
2. is sick of waiting for things to get better on their own. 
3. is sick of the revolving door of hirings, firings, adn reorganizations at the top. 
4. has had their hopes for a promotion in the near future quashed.
5. has gotten no raise or a crummy raise.
6. has watched a lot of friends leave or get the pink slip.
7. feels unappreciated.
8. is ready to move on. 

So who’s left?

 After a year of layoffs, who’s left?  You can probably answer that for yourself but it boils down to the people with no ambition and the people looking for another job.  The people looking won’t just stop looking when things get better.

Do layoffs payoff?

Layoffs happen.  After a couple of years of good profits most companies have some deadwood.  Short targeted layoffs are probably worth doing every so often.  Long, drawn out layoffs just drive everyone to look for alternative employment.

In engineering, there is a “coming up speed” time that every new employee goes through.  New employees have to learn the ins and outs of the company’s processes.  New employees have to learn the people involved.  New employees have to learn the already developed tools and the tools that still need development.  Replacing an engineer is not cheap but the true cost doesn’t appear to be recognized by the guys at the top.

MATLAB Pricing

MATLAB is a great tool.  I use it every day and have few complaints.  However, I’d like to use it for personal purposes.  The price of MATLAB makes its use for personal purposes cost prohibitive.  As of Sept. 14th, 2008 the prices are

• MATLAB: $1900
• Simulink: $3000
• Control System Toolbox: $1000
• Signal Processing Toolbox: $800

This is the basic MATLAB package I’ve always had as a professional.  Sometimes I have other toolboxes but I always have at least these.  Can most of us afford $6700 for personal use?

The MATLAB Monopoly

If MATLAB had any real competition, would the price still be $1900 for just MATLAB?  There are 2 competitors that I know of and neither is really a true competitor.  The first competitor is OCTAVE a free MATLAB like program.  In my brief examination of OCTAVE for use on my website I found it to be lacking most of the functionality of MATLAB.  The second competitor I come across is SimApp.  I’ve been in contact with a marketing person here in Colorado for SimApp and the price I was given was $500.  They have several licenses but I haven’t dug around the site to see what license you get for $500.  SimApp is a much smaller application with much less to it than MATLAB.

The purpose of SimApp is to offer only what we need most of the time and to do so at a reasonable price.  Mathworks offers items in toolboxes for the same purpose - at I assume that’s why.  However, their prices aren’t reasonable.

Is there justification for MATLAB’s price?

Like Microsoft, Mathworks is the only game in town and they set whatever price they want.  The price is high and I don’t like it but is it justified?

The Mathworks updates MATLAB about twice a year.  For the most part it is bug fixes and minor improvements.  Very rarely is there serious new functionality included in these updates.  For MATLAB 2008a the major upgrade is in Object Oriented programming.  The new interface is light years better than the old but the functionality isn’t new.

Most of the improvements I heard of over the last couple of years have involved improved plotting tools.  Some tools are new like a GUI interface to allow for interactive regression on the plot.  The other plotting improvements are bug fixes in my opinion (i.e. bugs like the aspect ratios not remaining fixed in certain uses of the saveas function).  After all these years, they still haven’t gotten the bode plot right in my opinion.

Conclusion

This latest round of installations for MATLAB 2008a really made me and a lot of my coworkers very angry.  There was a lot of extra work to get it installed.  And the only reason for our having the extra was that Mathworks didn’t do the work themselves.  In essence Mathworks let the users do beta testing of the MATLAB 2008a installation process on a full release version.  Kind of like every new Microsoft operating system, this program wasn’t ready for general release.

Since many of us who use and love MATLAB have long been cranky about the price for an individual license, there is some latent hostility and strong beliefs about knocking the chip off Mathworks’ shoulder.

MATLAB is a great program and every company has a right to set their own price to maximize profit.  That doesn’t mean users have to happy about it.  Companies with real competition worry more about irritating their customers.  That or they go out of business.

P.S.: 64 bit MATLAB

I have a 64 bit Quad core PC.  I installed 64 bit MATLAB on it.  However, anything in Simulink that requires a compiler doesn’t work.  Mathworks doesn’t ship a compatible compiler.  The only compiler compatible with Simulink on a 64 bit installation is a special installation of Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005 Professional.  It seem kind of silly to install a $300 program just for the compiler.

Obviously, Mathworks should have included a compatible compiler.  The tech support was very helpful in this but only after I got nasty with them.  And the first level tech suggested more than one incorrect fix and this got to be time consuming.

Control System Modeling: Purpose

I’m going to use model and simulation as synonyms in this post.

The purpose of modeling in any discipline, including control systems, is to answer a question; often a very specific question is answered.  There are several reasons for why any given model only answers a small set of questions.  Budget and Schedule.

Modeling Complexity

Budget and schedule force engineers to model only those aspects deemed necessary to answer the question posed.

Modeling the universe in detail - even the very localized universe around a small object - takes a lot of work and time.  Budget and schedule concerns always force engineers to start with first principles and then model progressive deeper levels of details and fidelity.  The deeper layers are only modeled if the desired level of result accuracy requires this extra fidelity.

There are several reasons for keeping a model as simple as possible:

1. Initial time to development goes up with complexity
2. Time required for maintanence goes up with complexity
3. Odds of a mistake go up with complexity
4. Time between simulation start and delivery of results goes up with complexity

My observation is that items #1 through #3 increase roughly exponentially with complexity.  Turn around time (#4) increases but the amount of increase is highly dependent on the slowest part of the model as it exists prior to the increase in fidelity.

Control System Modeling: Pitfalls

Expanded Purpose

Engineers and other professionals who do not create or run simulations on a regular basis often forget about the narrow focus of a good model.  As a result these people often ask for results the model is not designed to produce.  Obviously the engineer being asked for the results needs to consider the request very carefully.  There may be an assumption built into the model which invalidates its use for this expanded purpose.

Juggling Programs

Each day that I work on a model I go through a process of “loading my RAM” or short term memory.  In order to work on the model and produce meaningful results a certain number of details and parameters must be loaded up into short term memory.  I find this process takes no more than 30 minutes and rarely takes more than 45 minutes.

The pitfall is in assuming you can juggle certain types of work.  Last summer I was asked to juggle modeling work and hardware maintanence work.  The hardware work needed me for 30 minutes at a time about 4 or 5 times a day.  As a result the hardware work repeatedly interrupted my efforts on the modeling work.  The interruptions came about every hour and a half.  So I used half of my time in between “loading my RAM”.

After about 2 or 3 weeks of trying to juggle the hardware and the modeling work I realized I was never gonig to get anything done on the model if I didn’t set some limits.  I asked the two programs how they wanted me to handle the problem.  The basic response was just deal with it.  So I decided to tell the hardware guys that 2 days a week they couldn’t bother me, except for emergencies.  No one was happy but it was the best I could do.

Clean Energy: The Sterling Engine

A while back I came across the Sterling engine.  The Sterling engine takes waste heat and turns it into piston motion.  Obviously if it moves we can generate electricity from the motion.

The main problem with Sterlings is the efficiency of the power extraction.  Using waste heat the available energy for extraction is significantly less than the original fuel.

Wind Turbines and Controls

Wind turbines faced a similar energy extraction problem.  The folks at NREL chose some advanced controls to extract the maximum amount of energy from the available wind.  With wind there isn’t a consistent energy source and maximizing its extraction is key to making the technology economically viable.

Controls…

The available energy for extraction is small.  Like the wind turbines, Sterlings need control to maximize the energy extraction.

Thoughts?

Wikipedia Links: Removal of Links by Over Zealous Users

Wikipedia is beginning to get a bad reputation for over zealous users. These users usually have some pet peave and go about eliminating that pet peave with a single minded focus. These aggressive users removed a bunch of edits and links I’d posted to Wikipedia (my experience). Obviously Wikipedia does no one any good if it becomes a link farm for spammers. However, I feel that these users are chasing away quality content with their over zealous removal of others’ edits. Especially in technical fields they know nothing about.

Wikipedia Links: Removal of Quality Links

Wikipedians that followed my links were on my site for an average almost 3 minutes and viewed approximately 3 pages.  Many of my current user list are Wikipedians that followed my links.  I feel like my site stats justified my links on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia Links: Getting around over zealous Wikipedia users

So I’ve decided to help you get around these irritating users.  If you have a quality site with quality content using the following steps for posting Wikipedia links:

1. Create multiple users for posting links - harder to remove all of your external links
2. Create templates for you external links - consider incorporating the Extlink template into your link posting template - this hides your external links from over zealous users
3. Post some text before and after the external link - this makes it harder for those previewing you posts (contributions) quickly to see that you included a link

Wikipedia Links: Guidelines for external link posting

Guidelines:

1. Post no more than 3 links per each of your user per day
2. Do not post from each user each day
3. Post external links to content on your site that directly relates to the Wikipedia page you are posting to - someone will get angry, for good reason, if you just post to a generic page
4. Since you are limited in how many quality links you can really provide think carefully about which pages will serve your purposes best and only post once on these targeted pages

Wikipedia Links: Link to honest, quality content

If you link to a link farm or to garbage then word will get around.  You external links will go down before you can post another one.  Your site will get a bad reputation.  Your multiple users will immediately be recognized as sockpuppets.  You can’t get around 1000s of people looking to remove any sign of your existence from Wikipedia.

I’ve used MATLAB for my day-to-day tasks for over 7 years now.  If you include the time I’ve spent using MATLAB in school I’ve been using it for close to 10 years.  In general I think MATLAB and Simulink are great products and the Mathworks has done a lot to develop an image as the industry standard tool.

MATLAB 2008a Installation woes

That said, MATLAB 2008a has a new installation and activation procedure.  This requires either an active internet connection or a lot of jumping through hoops.  We just love that when we consider installing it on classified PCs that, by design, have no internet connection.

On my unclassified PC I had no apparent problems with the MATLAB 2008a installation and activation.  It took a little bit of time for the Mathworks server to get to provide my PC with the necessary go-ahead commands but that didn’t bother me.  At least until I couldn’t use MATLAB 2008a after the first reboot.  Yeah the license file includes the PC name in it - and that name appears to be case sensitive - so on reboot our company network somehow changed the case and I couldn’t use MATLAB 2008a.

2008a Uninstall woes

On top of that our company license allows for MATLAB to be installed on up to 4 PCs and up to 2 PCs can run MATLAB concurrently under the same license.  I’ve got 5 PCs at work.  I tested 2008a on the oldest PC as the most of the newer ones were tied up doing some heavy duty data reduction.  I wanted to be sure that 2008a performed just like the previous versions did.  2008a performed just fine.  At least until I attempted to uninstall it.

Uninstallation requires a deactivation process.  Much like the activation process, the deactivation process did not work like it should.  In fact, it didn’t work at all for me.  I had to talk to Mathworks tech support who then killed the oldest PC’s activation on their end.  On about the 3rd try with support I was finally able to deactivate that installation.

2008a: The bottom line…

Don’t install 2008a unless you have a really good reason for doing so.  I’m one of the early adopters in my company and I’ll probably skip the installation 2008b.  I’m hoping that by the 2009a version that Mathworks will have it head out of its ass.

Mathworks has every right to dictate license terms.  They have every right to dictate installation procedures.  And I have every right to be pissed that their new installation process wasted a whole lot of my time.

I have only detailed the problems I’ve had.  Others in my company have had a whole slew of other problems.  These problems are ameturish and should not happen in a product as old as MATLAB.  Changing the installation process that worked just fine (as far as this user is concerned) should either (a) make my life easier as the user or (b) at least be no worse.  Unfortunately, the new process is terrible.  It is horrible and whoever let it get through the Mathworks QA dept. should be smacked with dogbert’s wand of wisdom.