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Since at least 1988, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has maintained what they call an Infrastructure Report Card that highlights critical shortcomings in the nation’s public built environment.  The reasons for this are pretty obvious:  civil engineers and the construction industry in general live on the development and maintenance of infrastructure, and because so much of it is paid for by government funding, which in a democracy is supposedly under the control of the people, you should let the people know what they ought to be spending money on, infrastructure-wise.  The ...

Consider what may seem to be an odd comparison:  Facebook and God.  For purposes of discussion, we will compare Facebook to the traditional Judeo-Christian God of the Old and New Testaments.  And we will restrict the comparison primarily to two matters:  communication and trust (or faith). Users of Facebook communicate with that entity by entering personal information into Facebook’s system.  That act of communication is accompanied by a certain level of trust, or faith.  Facebook promises to safeguard one’s information and not to reveal it to anyone else without your permission.  ...

Much as some engineers would like to ignore politics, it’s irresponsible to do so.  I’m not saying you have to be a political junkie, but an awareness of the ultimate purposes and effects of the organisation you work for is part of being a responsible engineer.  Writing in the Human Life Review, bioethicist Wesley J. Smith has issued a call to defeat technocracy before it takes over more of our lives than it has already.  And every engineer should hear that call. The meaning of the word “technocracy” has changed over the years.  Engineer William Henry Smyth coined it back in 1919...

Last week I commented on how Twitter kicked off @realDonaldTrump, and how decisions like that give the lie to Twitter’s claim of common-carrier-like protection against lawsuits granted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.  Normally I like to change topics every week, but this week is an exception.  A week ago today, on Jan. 10, Amazon Web Services shut down its web-hosting services for the social-media network Parler, taking it off the Internet and capping a series of moves by Amazon, Apple, and Google that effectively ended the company’s ability to serve its customers. �...

Faithful Muslims are required to pray five times a day, facing toward Mecca.  In our smartphone era, it was only a matter of time before someone came up with an app that reminds the Muslim user that it’s time to pray, and conveniently uses GPS data to direct the user toward Mecca from anywhere in the world.  Muslim Pro is the most popular app to do these and other helpful things for members of Islam, and has been downloaded some 98 million times.  When a person downloads an app that is advertised to do a certain function, the question of what else it might be doing in the background rare...