4-Nov-86 22:31:57-PST,10438;000000000000 Mail-From: NEUMANN created at 4-Nov-86 22:30:26 Date: Tue 4 Nov 86 22:30:26-PST From: RISKS FORUM (Peter G. Neumann -- Coordinator) Subject: RISKS DIGEST 4.4 Sender: NEUMANN@CSL.SRI.COM To: RISKS-LIST@CSL.SRI.COM RISKS-LIST: RISKS-FORUM Digest, Tuesday, 4 November 1986 Volume 4 : Issue 4 FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTER SYSTEMS ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator Contents: Flawed Radars in Air Traffic Control (PGN/UPI) The Future of English (risks of technocrats, risks of word processors) (Martin Minow) The RISKS Forum is moderated. Contributions should be relevant, sound, in good taste, objective, coherent, concise, nonrepetitious. Diversity is welcome. (Contributions to RISKS@CSL.SRI.COM, Requests to RISKS-Request@CSL.SRI.COM) (Back issues Vol i Issue j available in CSL.SRI.COM:RISKS-i.j. MAXj: Summary Contents Vol 1: RISKS-1.46; Vol 2: RISKS-2.57; Vol 3: RISKS-3.92.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue 4 Nov 86 09:55:22-PST From: Peter G. Neumann Subject: Flawed Radars in Air Traffic Control To: RISKS@CSL.SRI.COM FAA Says It Has Fixed Flawed Radar Systems Santa Ana (UPI, 4 Nov 86; from the San Francisco Chronicle of that date, p. 40) Malfunctions in key radar systems that track airliners in Southern California reached a hazardous level in recent years, but officials said yesterday that the most serious problems have been found and fixed. According to Federal Aviation Administration reports obtained by the Orange County Register, there were frequent breakdowns in the past four years in the Laguna Radar, which monitors the area in a 200-mile radius around its perch east of San Diego, and the San Pedro Radar, which scans a 200-mile circle around the Palos Verdes Peninsula. The systems monitor air traffic for Los Angeles International Airport, John Wayne Airport and Lindbergh Field in San Diego. The radar malfunctions grew critical enough that the FAA sent tecnicians from Washington, D.C., to the Air Route Traffic Control Center in Palmdale two weeks ago to monitor both systems and make adjustments. Among the malfunctions were frequent disappearances of airplanes from radar screens for 15 to 30 minutes and radar displays that show planes in a turn pattern when they are actually on a straight course. In some instances, the Register reported, air controllers saw aircraft "jump" on their radar scopes, which made planes appear to have changed direction when they had not. In others, radars tracking plane descents in an especially busy corridor showed jets traveling faster than they actually were. In addition, important altitude data that helps controllers avoid midair collisions frequently disappeared from radar screens. FAA official Russell Park confirmed the problem and acknowledged that the situtation could have been hazardous. He said the malfunctions played no part in any collisions, including that of an Aeromexico DC-9 and a small plane over Cerritos on August 31. He said the troubleshooting team from Washington was able to fix the most serious malfunctions quickly. [Quickly? But this went on for FOUR YEARS? PGN] [By the way, the November 1986 issue of the IEEE SPECTRUM is devoted to "Our Burdened Skies", and is a goldmine for those of you interested in our air transportation system.] ------------------------------ Date: 29-Oct-1986 1645 From: minow%regent.DEC@decwrl.DEC.COM (Martin Minow, DECtalk Engineering, ML3-1/U47 223-9922) To: risks@csl.sri.com Subject: The Future of English (risks of technocrats, risks of word processors) [Prediction] THE FUTURE OF LANGUAGE [By Anthony Burgess. From "2020: A Vision of the Future," in the 17 June 1986 "London Telegraph Sunday Magazine," a special issue devoted to the future. Burgess is the author of "A Clockwork Orange," "Earthly Powers," "Napoleon Symphony," "Nineteen Eighty-Five," "Re Joyce," and many other books.] Prime ministers speaking to the nation still attempt, like Mrs. Thatcher, to use "Standard English" and a supraregional or classless accent. By 2020 they will not have to do that. What they will have to do is speak a kind of English that denies the fact of education, avoids allusion to Shakespeare or the Bible, and, where it rises above the level of conversational usage, gains a pose of learning and authority from the use of technological terms. At the same time, with a kind of ultimate authority seeming to be vested in the hard but high-flown language of science, there will be more mendacity and evasion dressed up as technology. The Pentagon has already shown the way with such expressions as "anticipatory retaliation," which does not sound like striking the enemy without due declaration of war. America's language is already far advanced in the direction of combining the loose colloquial with the cant terms of the technical specialists -- who include sociologists and psychologists, as well as cybernetics experts and aerospace men. When not being expertly evasive ("at this time the nuclear capability of this nation is not anticipated to assume a role of preemptive preparatory action"), it is slangy, unlearned, unwitty, inelegant. At its most disconcerting it combines two modes of discourse: "Now we zero in on the nitty-gritty of the suprasegmental prosodic feature and find that we're into a different ball game." It is already, perhaps, the matrix of British English of 2020. As for the sound of the English of 2020, some of its characteristics are in active preparation. Assimilation -- a natural enough process, which, however, must never be allowed to go too far -- is drawing a lot of vowels to the middle of the mouth, where the phoneme called schwa (the second syllable of "butter," "father;" the first a in "apart") waits like a spider for flies. The "a" of "man" is already a muzzy, neuter sound with the young. Assimilation of consonants is giving us "corm beef: and "tim peaches" and "vogka" (Kingsly Amis spotted these in the early seventies). Grammar has been simplified, so that most sentences are constructed to the "and...and...and..." Biblical formula (hypotactic, to be technical). Losing Latin in our schools, we are finding it hard to understand Milton and to appreciate the beauties of the periodic sentence. This will get worse. The English of 2020 will combine structural infantilism with hard-nosed technology. It will be harsh, and it will lack both modesty and humor. The written word is only a ghost without the solidity of the spoken word to give it substance, but to many it seems to be the primary reality. After all, the voices of dead poets and novelists survive only as black marks on white paper. Still, writers write well only when they listen to what they are writing -- either on magnetic tape or in the auditorium set silently in their skulls. But more and more writers -- not only of pseudoliterature but of political speeches -- ignore the claims of the voice and ear. I think that, with the increasing use of the word processor, the separation of the word as sound from the word as visual symbol is likely to grow. The magical reality has become the set of signs glowing on a screen: this takes precedence over any possible auditory significance. The speed with which words can be set down with such an apparatus (as also with the electric typewriter), the total lack of muscular effort involved -- these turn writing into a curiously nonphysical activity, in which there is no manual analogue to the process of breathing out, using the tongue, lips, and teeth, and accepting language as a bodily exercise that expends energy. What is wrong with most writing today is its flaccidity, its lack of pleasure in the manipulation of sounds and pauses. The written word is becoming inert. One dreads to think what is will be like in 2020. I have never yet ventured a prophecy that came true. In my little novel "Nineteen Eighty-Five" I get nothing except the name of the son of the Prince of Wales. It is altogether possible that, rejecting the easy way of pop music, drugs, and television, the youthy of the near future will stage a reactionary revolution and go back to Latin, Shakespeare, and the Bible and insist on school courses in rhetoric. But I do not think it likely. [It should be noted, perhaps, that the Boston Globe recently published an article that stated the offering of Latin in public high schools has increased markedly in the last five years. MM] Burgess notes that word processors make writing too easy. You can see the result in the bloated junk novels, all over 300 pages long, that seem to be designed only to fill waiting time at airports. One of my colleagues once edited a computer textbook written by one of the more important educators in the field (and he is a well-known writer himself). He said that "he nearly wore out the delete-paragraph key on the word-processor." The bad news is that there seems to be no real interest in good editing in the commercial marketplace. I would claim that this is a direct result of the ease of writing with word processors. Martin [In a recent memo, EWD976-0, 10 Sep 86, Edsger W. Dijkstra makes a plea against bad writing. One of his suggestions for making it easier on your readers was this: ``Avoid if possible using one-letter identifiers that are all by themselves words in the language of the surrounding prose, such as "U" in Dutch and "a" and "I" in English, as they may confront you with unpleasant surprises. (There is a page by David Gries, in which "I" occurs in three different roles: as a personal pronoun, as identifier for an invariant and as a Roman numeral! Of course, the reader can sort this confusion out, but it is better avoided.)'' EWD via PGN] ------------------------------ End of RISKS-FORUM Digest ************************ -------