Without the state

Making hardware 'open source' can help us fight future pandemics - here's how we get there

Making hardware 'open source' can help us fight future pandemics - here's how we get there

elenabsl/Shutterstock

Richard Bowman, University of Bath and Julian Stirling, University of Bath

In factories and industrial estates across the world, exceptional efforts are being made to ensure hospitals have ventilators, and logistics firms have freezers and refrigerators. Behind the scenes, this manufacturing drive has been taking place on an epic, unprecedented scale. In some places, it’s also been horrendously inefficient.

Some of that inefficiency is only to be expected. Manufacturing responsively at such short notice was always going to be messy. But many of the hardware hold-ups we’ve witnessed – from production line bottlenecks to parts shortages – could be avoided in the future by applying an “open source” ethos to the world’s production of hardware.

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Read more: Five ways collective intelligence can help beat coronavirus in developing countries

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Open source design is a form of collective intelligence, where experts work together to create a design that anyone has the legal right to manufacture. The software industry has long shown that “open” collaboration is not only possible, but advantageous. Open source software is ubiquitous, and the servers that power the internet itself are largely run on open technology, collaboratively designed by competing companies.

Early in the pandemic, and in recognition of the global emergency that was unfolding, dozens of the world’s largest companies did actually sign up to the “Open COVID Pledge”, promising to share their intellectual property to help fight the virus. On a smaller scale, more than 100 project teams set out to create and share “open” ventilator designs that could be produced locally, helping address the pressing need for ventilators around the world.

Unfortunately, neither of these initiatives succeeded in producing ventilators at the rate required by stretched hospitals in the early weeks of the pandemic. After examining existing attempts to share the intellectual property of machines, our recent paper concludes that projects must be open from the start in order to make a success of open hardware. Everything from the first doodle on a napkin to the detailed calculations that verify safety must be available if other experts and manufacturers are going to participate in the design.

Medical ventilators have been in particular demand since the beginning of the pandemic. Dan Race/Shutterstock

The road to open hardware

Producing hardware through open collaboration may be daunting. As opposed to the entirely virtual collaboration required for software development, hardware development needs physical parts – raw materials and machinery. It needs testing facilities and engineers to perform stress tests and safety checks.

There are promising signs that these challenges can be met. The RepRap 3D printer project has brought low cost 3D printing to a wider audience, making affordable prototyping possible at a distance. Meanwhile, the CERN White Rabbit project has shown that even the complex electronics that control the Large Hadron Collider can be developed as as open source hardware. But, to be efficient we need better work flows for collaboration – systems to help organise the distribution of tasks and responsibilities on collaborative hardware projects.

The journey from prototype to production is much more difficult, and less exciting, than the technical challenge of prototyping a device. Manufacturers must comply with international standards to ensure quality and manage risk related to their products. This is especially true of medical hardware, upon which lives depend. A key challenge for open hardware will be to achieve this certification in the same way that private companies do today.

Under current regulations, no matter how impressive and safe, ventilators constructed in volunteer maker spaces cannot be certified for medical use. But for equipment which is less strictly regulated, like face shields, open hardware is currently being leveraged successfully.

Achieving similar successes with high-tech medical devices will require organisations that are built to manufacture from open designs – dynamic factories, for instance, which will be responsive to global emergencies. It takes time to establish these organisations. But we can’t afford to wait for the next emergency: we should begin creating them today, in preparation for the next pandemic.

Of course, finding sustainable business models for open hardware is a challenge: can a system be created which shares intellectual property for free while helping designers and manufacturers profit? In one sense, open hardware has an advantage here: people are used to buying products, where online consumers are accustomed to using software for free.

Nonetheless, it’s likely that setting up an open hardware manufacturing ecosystem will need public funding, or investor funding buying into non-traditional business models. This would follow the trajectory of the internet, which began life funded by public institutions and is now home to the world’s biggest private enterprises.

Closer inspection

The open source microscope. Author provided

We’ve experimented with our own open hardware project to help us understand how the future of collaborative hardware might look. Our OpenFlexure microscope is designed to be manufactured at low cost in sub-Saharan Africa, to be used for malaria diagnoses. We’ve probably spent more time designing the processes that help us share our knowledge effectively than designing the microscope itself.

In the short term, this slows our progress. In the long term, we expect that manufacturers anywhere in the world will be able to understand our design and adapt it to their local context. As these processes become further standardised, sharing designs for production will become increasingly simple. The final and most ambitious phase of our project will be working with manufacturers to produce microscopes certified for medical use – a huge step towards open source medical hardware we’d need to better fight a future pandemic.

Humanity already knew how to make ventilators decades before this pandemic hit. What was lacking was the access to this knowledge, the skills to work together on adapting a design, and the logistics to rapidly scale the manufacturing of complex machinery. It will take years to address these issues. Starting that process today will help us tackle global emergencies more dynamically and efficiently in the future.

Richard Bowman, Royal Society University Research Fellow and Proleptic Reader, Department of Physics, University of Bath and Julian Stirling, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Physics, University of Bath

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Life on Mars?

Will we ever have significant settlements of human beings living off-planet? Not according to this post at Crooked Timber. The author, John Quiggin says bluntly " humans will never go out to explore this universe, or even leave Earth in significant numbers." He offers lots of arguments including a comparison of the rates of progress in information technology with those in physical engineering. Even so, I'm not convinced, although as a long time reader of Science Fiction I admit that may just be wishful thinking. I'm not alone though and many of the comments, while recognising the need for major advances in various areas in order to make progress, still argue that we will be able to do it. This comment in particular sets out the real progress that has been made in space technology since the days of Apollo and the moon landings. All agree though that in order to achieve anything we need to survive as a species first, which is increasingly not assured as we ransack the planet and despoil its ecology.

All I know is that contrary to what I thought at the time of the landings, I won't be around to see that first footprint on Mars.

 

An alternative to Hinkley

Hinkley decision is a disaster for UK

The decision to go ahead with Hinkley C is I think pretty disastrous. It ties us, probably for the next 40 years,  to a nasty, poisonous, highly centralised and potentially vulnerable system of energy production, it lumbers us with a hugely expensive long term contract to pay very high prices per unit for the electricity produced.

All the media coverage of the Hinkley decision is about the so-called ‘gap’ we are facing between the demand for energy and the available supply. Completely missing though is any consideration of the savings that could be made by improving energy efficiency. This is a failure of imagination but it also masks a lot of vested interests.  Improved energy efficiency and a move away from centralised generation of energy would damage the profits of the generation companies and their partners the big construction companies. The financial backers also have a lot of money at stake. China in particular has undisclosed political objectives in securing a stake in UK energy and their potential later involvement in design and construction of nuclear plant raises worrying questions of security.

Government failures on energy efficiency

The government has abandoned its commitment to require all new homes from 2016 to be carbon neutral.  That commitment  would have ensured that all new dwellings from 2016 would generate as much energy on-site – through renewable sources, such as wind or solar power – as they would use in heating, hot water, lighting and ventilation. This was to be supported by tighter energy efficiency standards that would come into force in 2016, and a scheme which would allow housebuilders to deliver equivalent carbon savings off site. This back step was done on the back of a claim (pdf file) to be reducing “net regulations on housebuilders.”

CO2 emissions make up about a third of all greenhouse gas emissions and these are projected to rise to 50% by 2050. The UK’s building stock is among the most inefficient in Europe, has the highest levels of fuel poverty of a dozen comparable EU nations, as well as one of the worst proportions of homes in a poor state of repair. Over 10m British families live in a home with a leaking roof, damp walls or rotting windows. The Coalition’s cut to the Energy Company Obligation will by 2017  have led to 400,000 fewer households getting help to reduce energy bills by improved efficiency. This is despite our treaty obligation to reduce emissions by 80% and the new obligations that will come from the Paris Treaty on Climate Change.

The cheapest energy of all is that which isn’t used.

In practice though, arguments about sustainability, CO2 emissions etc are not required. The cheapest energy of all to the consumer is that which they don’t have to use. The requirement for zero carbon homes would have had a huge impact across the board, by reducing fuel bills for those in the houses built to that standard and in the knock on reduction in demand. 

The cost benefit of abandoning the requirement is small. According to a report (pdf) produced in 2014:

• At 2014 prices, the typical additional cost of building a semi-detached house to the zero carbon standard could be less than £5,000.
• Since 2011, costs have roughly halved. There are a number of reasons for this including the falling cost of solar PV, changes in the zero carbon definition, and greater efficiency in meeting air tightness standards.
• By 2020, the cost of building a new zero carbon semi-detached home could be less than £3,500.

In response to a Government consultation in 2014 on exempting small sites from the zero carbon requirement (before they ditched it entirely) the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) argued:

There is a range of evidence-based examples that demonstrate that highly fabric energy efficient homes do not cost more than conventional construction if cost strategies, program management and environmental strategies are built into project plans at the procurement stage.

What can we get for the cost of Hinkley?

Hinkley C is estimated to cost around £19bn to build. Inevitably this will be be higher and on past experience of major capital schemes in the UK it could be as high as £45bn. I'm going to assume a figure for the moment however of £30bn and a 15 year construction period. This equates to £2bn pa. Subsidies on generating costs are estimated at £32bn over 35 years. Rounding that up gives us another £1bn pa. So, ignoring financing costs the annual cost of Hinkley C over the first 15 years is going to be of the order of £3bn pa. The total over the 15 years would be £45bn. What can we get for that money?

Research conducted for the Town and Country Planning Association suggests that we need something like 220,000 new houses in England every year for the next 15 years. This is apparently lower than previous estimates but the research also shows that this is because many people now can’t afford their own home – either to rent or buy - and are living with parents or other people longer than they would like to. Other sources suggest a more realistic figure is around 250 – 300,000. For the ball-park estimates I’m going to make I will assume 250,000.

From the studies cited earlier the additional cost of building these new homes to zero carbon standards will be around £3500 per house. For the purposes of these figures I’m going to assume that this remains at this level, rather than reducing further. So, for 250,000 houses the additional expenditure over current standards would be £8.75m per annum. Over 15 years this adds up to £13.125bn.

The average electricity bill was around £600 pa in 2015 and for gas about £750. Assuming 80% savings in gas and 40% for electricity (very conservative assumptions) reduces these to an annual total of £840 per household which would be released for other spending. At 250k houses per year that is a total of approximately £200m for each tranche of houses built. After 15 years this equates to a continuing annual saving for consumers of £3.3bn and cumulatively over the 15 year period of just over £28bn.  This money would be spent elsewhere in the economy so having a further impact.

Bringing existing houses up to the same standard is more of a problem of course. As far as I can see the number of houses in England is around 21m. Retrofitting these to zero carbon standards will be difficult for many and impossible for some. Doing so may well also involve accepting significant changes in external appearance. Accepting the need to do so, may also shift the balance of what it is economic to refurbish and thus require additional new houses over and above the figure of 250k pa quoted above.

Again for the ball park figures I am aiming to produce, I’m going to assume that something like 20m houses can be brought up to zero carbon standard at an average cost of £10,000 per property. That equates to a total of £200bn. Assuming this work is carried out over a 25 year period, it would require 800,000 houses to be retrofitted every year, with an annual cost of £8bn. The cost over 15 years would be  £120bn This is a substantial sum, but needs to be put into the context of major infrastructure projects such as Crossrail - c£15bn, Crossrail 2 – estimated at £27-32bn, HS2 – estimated at c£50bn including rolling stock, and of course Hinkley itself.

There would also be significant savings in energy use, further reducing demand and energy costs, so releasing money into the economy. Assuming the same levels of reduction in energy costs as with new build, the savings to consumers would be approximately £670m for each annual tranche  of improvements, a continuing annual saving after 15 years of  almost £11bn, cumulatively over the 15 year period I’m using this adds up to about £90bn and over the full 25 years to an astonishing £235bn.

Other impacts of the programme will be significant.

I have so far ignored the multiplier effects of the increased spending power released by the savings on energy. This depends on household’s marginal propensity to consume (mpc) or its marginal propensity to save (mps).

The following general formula to calculate the multiplier uses marginal propensities, as follows:

1/1-mpc

Hence, if consumers spend 0.8 and save 0.2 of every £1 of extra income, the multiplier will be:

                1/1-0.8

                = 1/0.2

                = 5

Hence, the multiplier is 5, which means that every £1 of new income generates £5 of extra income.

Using that 80/20 split, which seems close to the current figure for lower income households, and applying it to the total annual savings in year 15 of £118bn, would mean the generation of some £600bn of extra income in that year alone. This is probably an overestimate, since this is a transfer of expenditure from energy bills. However the impact of that money dispersed through the economy is likely to be greater than when spent on energy, particularly since so much of the energy sector is foreign owned, so transferring money out of the UK.

Even assuming a figure of only 25% of that, the impact would be significant.

Summary

To summarise therefore:

• Cost of Hinkley estimated at £30bn.
• Subsidies on generating costs £32bn
• Construction period 15 years

This should be set against:

• Additional cost of new build to zero carbon standard over 15 years estimated at £13.125bn
• Cost of retrofitting existing stock to zero carbon standard over 15 years estimated at  £120bn

Estimated reduction in household energy costs over 15 years.

• New Build estimated at £28bn
• Existing stock estimated at £90bn

Multiplier effect of expenditure transferred from energy bills

• in year 15 - £13bn
• over full 15 year period - £113bn.

Conclusion.

All these figures are very crude, but show two things:

1. The approval of Hinkley was a bad decision and poor value for money.
2. The substantial gains to be made by investing in energy efficiency on a scale comparable to the major infrastructure projects like Crossrail, HS2 and Hinkley. These have been ignored by successive governments. We cannot afford to continue to do so.

Related articles

UK set to miss renewable energy targets, warn MPs

Spectacular...

 

via Make magazine

Politics and science

I found this as a draft but in the light of the previous post it seems apposite.

The sacking of Professor David Nutt, head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs is yet another demonstration, if one were needed, that the major parties in the UK (and many of the minor ones) see the politicians' role as one of control.

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) is an independent expert body that advises government on drug related issues in the UK. It was established under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. That Act works on the principle that drugs are classified by risk with Category A being the highest and Category C the lowest.

Back in 2007, the then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith asked the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs to "review the classification of cannabis in the light of real public concern about the potential mental health effects of cannabis use and, in particular, the use of stronger strains of the drug."

They concluded that "after a most careful scrutiny of the totality of the available evidence, the majority of the Council’s members consider – based on its harmfulness to individuals and society – that cannabis should remain a Class C substance. It is judged that the harmfulness of cannabis more closely equates
with other Class C substances than with those currently classified as Class B.

In providing this advice, however, the Council wishes to emphasise that the use of cannabis is a significant public health issue. Cannabis can unquestionably cause harm to individuals and society. The Council therefore advises that strategies designed to minimise its use and adverse effects must be predominantly public health ones. Criminal justice measures – irrespective of classification – will have only a limited effect on usage."

Despite that evidence, the Government decided to reclassify Cannabis from Category C to Category B, in effect, because the PM had already made his mind up. He wasn't really looking for a review, he wanted a post hoc justification of his decision.

Of course this begs the question of whether this is an appropriate area for government to intervene in the first place...

Politicians, economists and the reality of climate change

I’ve finally got round to seeing ‘The Day After Tomorrow’. It is a fairly routine adventure story, topped off with great effects and lots of heroic ‘derring-do’. The nut jobs who complained about it as propaganda for the climate change lobby clearly need to get out more, because in the end the science in the film is there only to serve as a trigger for the action.

Some political points were made of course but they were nothing to do with climate change – I’m sure the irony of millions of illegal immigrants heading south over the Rio Grande into Mexico was not lost on US audiences for example. In the end though, to use the fact that a filmmaker takes liberties with the science of climate change for dramatic effect, as an argument against the reality is to say the least bizarre. I suspect that those who are still trying to deny what is going would be doing so in letters written in green ink if they didn’t have access to e-mail.

I don’t see such concern for scientific rigour in other films. As I've said before - how many buses can leap across 30 foot gaps in the roadway (Speed), how likely is it that a virus could be uploaded to a computer you've never seen, built using technology you have no idea about (Independence Day), how likely is it that you could clone a replica Hitler to take over the world (The Boys from Brazil) how likely is any of the action in any James Bond movie? And as for The Stepford Wives! Its one thing to criticise a move because it is badly written but really people - get a life!

The latest report from the IPCC seems to have finally demonstrated the reality of climate change and what we face over the next 100 years. The projections are frightening:

• Probable temperature rise between 1.8C and 4C
•  Possible temperature rise between 1.1C and 6.4C
•  Sea level most likely to rise by 28-43cm
•  Arctic summer sea ice disappears in second half of century
• Increase in heatwaves very likely
• Increase in tropical storm intensity likely

These predictions exclude areas of really tentative science. For example, there is no consensus about the effect of melting polar ice on currents like the Gulf Stream or about the speed with which it would happen. Because they have been excluded it is possible that the impact on sea levels would be much greater, while the impact on temperature is also uncertain. The scenario in The Day After Tomorrow is still one of the possibilities if rather more remote than once thought.

There are those scientific ignoramuses (ignorami?) who would argue that these uncertain impacts should have been included, thus widening the range of error. There are even more stupid people who decry the fact that scientists revise their views. Take this for example:

On July 24, 1974 Time Magazine published an article entitled "Another Ice Age?" Here's the first paragraph:

"As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age."

Their conclusion then was "The trend shows no indication of reversing"! And, wonders of wonders, the impossible to conceive "reversing" occurred!

Take care with this because there is some fast footwork going on. See how the conclusion ‘The trend shows no indication of reversing’ morphs into ‘impossible to conceive’? If that isn’t scientific stupidity it is intellectual dishonesty – which is even worse because it is deliberate.

However, giving these people the benefit of the doubt, they clearly do not understand the idea of scientific method and its impact on uncertainty or even the concept of statistical uncertainty. I don’t think it is accidental that the most outspoken opponents of the thesis of human driven climate change are politicians and economists. Both groups claim to have the answer to your every ill, neither group shows any sign of understanding science and in general they do not progress by admitting of uncertainty of any kind, let alone on issues such as this. In that respect I thought the exchanges between the politicians and the scientists in The Day After Tomorrow to be quite realistic, as the politicians struggle with the political impact of bad news.

Those who deny the fact of climate change and its human component seem to be resorting to ever more desperate arguments in vain attempts to undermine the basic facts. The latest uses tentative suggestions that Mars is coming out of an ice age as the basis for an argument that this proves climate change on Earth is not man made. They ignore the fact that Mars doesn’t have large bodies of water and that the drivers of its climate will therefore be very different to those on Earth. Consequently the same event – whether it be sunspots or cosmic rays or whatever else is flavour of the month – is likely to lead have different climatic consequences on the two planets. They also seem quite happy to use scientific data gathered over a relatively short timescale – and recognised by its authors as highly tentative - to dispute decades of work by thousands of scientists.

You may have come across Mr Myron Ebell (an economist), who argues that the whole thing is a conspiracy to do down the US. It is Mr Ebell, (not a climatologist) who claimed that the UK Chief Scientist didn’t know what he was talking about because he wasn’t a climatologist. Spot the flaw in that argument? I’ve seen Mr Ebell described as an intellectual terrorist and that isn’t wrong. He is certainly willing to shift his ground and argue black is white so I suppose we have to class him as a politician too. This site documents Ebell’s activities quite comprehensively.

He isn’t alone of course – take this comment on the Guardian Comment is Free site.

Environmentalists just form the rump of the social scientist west-hating morons who are actually willing the environment to collapse so they can say I told you so and blame the US.

Sadly such hysteria is all too common. It probably means a dim future for our children and grandchildren.

Freedoms and the Power Law

According to an interesting book called Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin, the frequency of earthquakes of different sizes follows what is called a ‘power law’. In other words for every 1000 quakes of magnitude 5 there are roughly 100 of magnitude 6 , 10 of magnitude 7 etc. While this is of course highly relevant if you live in San Francisco or Kobe, it has much wider implications. This law underpins the mathematics of fractals, so beloved of many computer users. Most importantly however it is scale independent – in other words large earthquakes are less likely than small ones, but do not require some unusual event to trigger them. After a large earthquake event it may be reassuring to think that it will be some time before the next one, but both statistics and the ‘power law’ say otherwise.

Looking at where the power law applies raises some interesting questions, which strike at the root of many of our cherished beliefs. As an example consider the traffic jam which occurs without any apparent cause on an otherwise free flowing road. Research at the University of Duisburg (p148) found that the number of jams of different sizes also follows a power law – in other words you don’t need a large event such as a crash to trigger a jam, it can be something as small as a car getting too close to the one in front and having to brake. Secondly however as the density of traffic increases traffic can be kept moving more smoothly by restricting the top speed, because this reduces the difference between the time to brake and the time to accelerate away again. This is the principle of the variable speed limits on the M25 and being tried elsewhere. So it really is true that if every one obeys the speed limit they get to their destination quicker.

This is interesting for other reasons too - the interaction of vehicles on the road is normally self-managing yet here is an instance where external intervention actually improves things – something likely to give libertarians apoplexy. After all - if libertarians can argue against traffic lights as an infringement of individual liberty, how will they view externally imposed speed limits?

The traffic signal was originally put up to replace the police officer on intersection duty. A police officer has the power to stop people for probable cause. If he stops someone without cause, he is abusing his power of office. Is the unnecessary delay at red lights on speculation that a driver will cause an accident an exercise of governmental power under color of law any less abusive than the action of a police officer who stops you on an unfounded suspicion that you are about to commit a crime? Traffic signal installation should not only be avoided because federal guidelines advise it and because of the damage it causes, but because the courts have ruled that the government, to protect constitutional rights, must show it uses the least restrictive means of furthering its goals. A control device that causes traffic jams is unlikely to qualify as a least restrictive means of achieving the goals the government claims to pursue.

In another example, Benoit Mandelbrot (he of fractal fame) found that the price fluctuations of commodities such as steel or cotton on the NY Stock Exchange also followed a power law. The implication of this is that large events, like for example the Stock Market crash of 1987, can happen as a result of a small trigger and don’t require an extraordinary event. More to the point the size of the outcome seems to be independent of the input. At first sight this seems to give support to those who argue against centralised economic planning since a given interest rate change can have wildly different outcomes. I assume this applies whether the rates are set by government or as now by the Monetary Policy Committee of an Independent bank of England.

This does not of course mean that human intervention cannot have an impact, only that it is unpredictable. The most important area here is probably climate change. It appears for example that species extinctions also follow a power law – meteor impacts may have triggered mass extinction for example at the time the K-T boundary was laid down, but equally large (or larger) impacts before and since have not triggered extinctions on the same scale.

If this argument holds up, it has huge implications for international policy. It would be impossible for example to predict with any certainty how effective the actions proposed in the Kyoto treaty might be, but equally we cannot predict with any certainty the impacts of what we are already doing. If ever there was a wicked problem then surely this is one.

Oh God this is familiar...

Charlie Brooker in today's Guardian:

Install this driver. Now update it. Now update it again. Register to login to our website. Then validate your membership. Forgot your password? Click here. Now there. Fill out this form. And this one. And this one. Please wait while TimeJettison Pro examines your system. Download latest patch file. Please wait while patch file examines own navel. Remove cable. Insert cable. Gently tease USB port with cable. Yeah, that's it baby. That's the way. Now show us your bum or I'm deleting your inbox.

Images from Hubble

The Hubble Site has released some new images to mark its 15th anniversary. Some of them are simply stunning. As well as wallpaper files you can also download files good enough for a 20" by 16" print.

Silence in church

Buried away in the comments and the inevitable discussion of property rights on this post about the iniquities of mobile phones at Samizdata.net is this beautifully simple idea.

Maybe they need to introduce a Friendly "quiet" signal, not a jammer, so that when detected it switches to a non audible ring? Places such as conference centres, meeting rooms etc, would have these very small transmitters that send the quiet signal.

This would be an excellent addition to future mobile phone standards.

Posted by Rob Read at October 25, 2004 05:03 PM