The Other Side of the Coin

  Several of my friends, knowing my aversion to things military, were aghast at the revelation in my most recent posting that I'd been involved in military work in the summer of 1948.   Despite their shock, though, they had the kindness to ask for other tales of my early professional days.  I'll oblige, but probably will upset them again by disclosing still more of my early defense work.  It's the reverse side of the coin whose obverse shows my present, more pacific image.

  In that last posting, I surveyed the geopolitical context of the summer of 1948: the Soviet blockade of Berlin and the Berlin Airlift.  Things got worse after that, becoming a period of heightened fear and paranoia in the US. Many were predicting a nuclear Armageddon; others were calling for a first strike on the USSR while it was behind in the nuclear arms race.  Anti-communist hysteria raged.   (I remember my mother hiding away books by Russian Bolsheviks that she had bought in 1920 as a college student, and a colleague at one of my defense jobs being discharged and blacklisted because his father had been a radical during the Great Depression.)   The Korean War, which started in 1950, was seen as an augur of things to come, part of an ongoing communist conspiracy to take over the world.  Bomb shelters were a hot item.  To begin to understand the zeitgeist of the era, it's worthwhile watching the superb satirical movie, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

  Most engineering jobs at the time were defense oriented, rather than civilian.  So, after earning my Master's degree from MIT in 1952, I joined MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, a just-started undertaking for the Air Force aimed at upgrading the country's air-defense system.  One element of the system was to be the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line—a network of radar stations in far-northern Canada and Alaska, built to detect Soviet bombers coming over the polar region.   I first worked on a classified radio system, NOMAC, which would provide a minimally detectable and jam-proof connection between the DEW Line and the Air Force's central command. Later, still at Lincoln Laboratory, I did my MIT doctoral thesis on theoretical models of the radio-propagation distortion that could degrade the operation of NOMAC.   

  The work was at once technically exhilarating and dismaying in its Cold War context, yet strangely normal for one who had been weaned on the upheavals of the Great Depression and World War II.  From my present-day viewpoint, the main good to come from it was that the signaling technique we used in NOMAC became a predecessor of code-division multiple access (CDMA), which is now used by many cellphone carriers such as Verizon; and my radio-propagation studies led to much of my later academic work, which in turn was used in the development of the GSM cellular-signaling system employed by other carriers such as AT&T.

  Since I'm in a revelatory mode, here's more grist to chew on.   While working on my doctorate, I also consulted for EG&G, a company with origins at MIT that developed instrumentation for the atomic-bomb test range in Nevada. My task was to analyze how such instruments distorted the measurements they made, with an eye to correcting the distortion.  In the course of that work, I visited the test range.  Testing was then still done above ground, on towers; I actually saw such a test from 13 miles away, wearing goggles with a 10,000-fold attenuation.   It was overwhelming and sobering.  But, once more, I must admit that it just seemed part of the era's reality, and in that context was by force of habit unexceptional to me. 

  And there's yet more.  After getting my doctorate in 1956, I worked for four years at the Hughes Aircraft Company in Los Angeles, doing theoretical work that in part underpinned the development of radar systems for fighter aircraft.  An unclassified presentation of some of that work at a conference led to my being recruited to teach at the University of California at Berkeley in 1960.  What's amazing is that, except for a brief stint as an office boy before college and three work-study semesters at the radio and  television manufacturer Philco as an undergraduate, UCB was my first non-defense job.  I was already thirty.

  Even after having just again watched Dr. Strangelove, it's hard for me to re-create in my mind both the temper of those times and how natural it seemed working under its influence.  Those who grew up later, I believe, cannot understand the miasma in which we were engulfed.  The lifting of the cloud was slow, starting with the downfall of Senator McCarthy in 1955, and the subsequent abating of anti-communist hysteria.  It received a major impetus from President Eisenhower's farewell address in January 1961, when he warned of the unprecedented power of what he called the "military-industrial complex," which he saw as threatening to change the country's very core principles—a grave statement from a lifelong military man.   None the less, echoes of the 1940s and 1950s reverberated for decades, through the Vietnam era and beyond.

  Eisenhower's speech was a clairvoyant precursor of the remainder of the 1960s, yet in an ironic way.  Student protestors, also fearful of the powerful, conformity-inducing "establishment" (which included the military-industrial complex), ultimately did change the very nature of our society.  But the transformation was in the opposite direction from the one that Eisenhower worried about: rather than a change to more military fire power, it was ultimately to the hippie generation's flower power.  As I've written elsewhere in this blog, I had a front-row seat at that upheaval too.

  

  The reverse side of my coin, before it flipped to its obverse in 1960, shows a side of my career that is scarcely recognizable to me now.   As the ancients understood, Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.  Times change, and we change with them.

Changing Gears

  During the summer of 1948, after my freshman year at MIT, I got a job at the ARMA Corporation in Brooklyn.  It was by sheer luck.  I had visited the company where I'd worked as an office boy before college, just to say hello.  One of the secretaries, hearing that I was looking for a summer job, referred me to a friend at ARMA, who was an MIT alumnus.  At 18, I was apparently already part of the MIT old boys' network (there were very few women then at MIT), for after a brief interview I was hired.

  ARMA, a military contractor, was then developing an electromechanical fire-control computer for calculating the settings needed by a submarine's torpedo so as to make it hit a ship whose coordinates, speed and bearing had been entered into the computer along with other data. Electromechanical computers are analog devices that do computations using a mass of motors, shafts, gears and other components.  Each such computer was built for a special purpose, unlike later general-purpose electronic digital computers.  (There were then only a handful of digital computers in the world, each taking a roomful of equipment.)  The torpedo-firing problem would be the only one ARMA's computer would be able to solve.

  My job at first seemed colossally boring.  It was to manually calculate the answers to problems the computer would be asked to solve after it was built, to make sure that it was functioning properly.  Sitting eight hours a day doing such calculations didn't seem like it would be much fun.  But the job paid $27 per week, more than my college-graduate sister was making in the nascent TV industry, so who was I to complain?

  For those who know my current-day aversion to things military, I should give some background for this decidedly war-oriented work.  By the end of World War II in 1945, Eastern Europe was under the control of the USSR.  Defeated Germany had been divided into four zones, administered respectively by the US, the UK, France and the USSR.  Berlin, an enclave deep within the USSR's zone, was similarly divided into four sectors.  The US, UK and France accessed and supplied their Berlin sectors through specified railway lines, roads and canals crossing the USSR's zone of Germany, as well as by air.

  In June 1948, the Soviets suddenly blockaded all surface connections to the western allies' sectors in Berlin, thereby trying to make the western part of the city fully dependent on the USSR for provisioning.  That precipitated the first Cold War crisis.  The US and UK, unwilling to give the Soviets such a stranglehold, pledged to supply the western sectors by air.  During the ensuing 11 months, the Berlin Airlift flew an amazing 200,000 flights to the city, each day providing West Berliners up to 4700 tons of necessities such as fuel and food.  As I daily rode the subway to Brooklyn, I read the New York Times' dispatches on the blockade, along with analyses that pondered whether a hot war with the Soviet Union would erupt.  I felt I was doing a minimal but meaningful job in this internationally tense context.

  As it turned out, the Soviets backed down the following May and lifted the blockade.  A few months later, Germany was formally divided into the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany} and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), with Berlin now divided between the two new countries.  Both remained formally occupied until 1955.  I was caught by the irony that, right before my eyes, the western part of a despised former enemy was emerging as an ally of the West, an indispensable "bastion of freedom" against the communist threat.  

  Back to my job at ARMA.  In those days, manual calculations involved parsing a set of equations into a number of steps, calculating each step, recording its intermediate answer on paper, and slowly working up through these steps until getting a final answer.  Each step was carried out by referencing printed tables of mathematical functions and using a desktop Marchant mechanical calculator to do the arithmetic.  Compared to modern electronic calculators, the Marchant was molasses: using a complicated system of rotating gears, it took seconds for an addition or subtraction and ten seconds or more for multiplication and division.  Grinding through even a simple set of equations could take hours, and was very prone to errors.

  I had never used a Marchant, but once I familiarized myself with it, I set about the calculations that I was asked to do.  The trouble was that the answers seemed crazy, for they weren't directing the torpedoes toward the target's coordinates that I had started with.  I was pretty sure that I was making mistakes, and was terrified, spending many days doing fruitless recalculations, and sleepless nights wondering how I could be so in error.

  After what seemed like an eternity, I understood the problem.  The new computer for submarines was based on equations similar to those designed into an existing ARMA computer that controlled the firing of torpedoes from destroyers.  But the two situations had a critical difference.  A destroyer launched torpedoes from port and starboard, a submarine from bow and stern.  The equations for the two cases therefore should have reflected the very different launching symmetries the two types of ship had with respect to their forward-to-aft axes, but they didn't.  On probing, I discovered that the difference involved a single plus sign that should have been a minus sign in the equations I had been given; a change of sign could be implemented in the fire-control computer for submarines by adding a single gear to its design, changing the rotation of a single shaft.  I redid my calculations with the new sign, and they suddenly gave sensible answers.

  At first, no one believed me.  But I persisted in working up through my boss to his boss, and convinced him.  The new gear was added to the computer.  I was ecstatic—my very first contribution to a real-world engineering design!

  As you might imagine, I was fixated on gears that summer, so they became a metaphorical theme for my thinking.   I thought of myself as up-shifting from student engineer to professional engineer.  I  thought of the country's policy toward Germany as slamming into reverse.  Change was exciting, and vivid in my imagination.  

  That exuberant youth was six decades away from being jaded with change and subscribing to the proverb Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.  For him it was still Plus ça change, plus c'est une bonne chose.

Pluto and Me

  When Pluto was recently demoted by the International Astonomical Union (IAU) from being a full-fledged planet to dwarf-planet status, many people the world over were upset by the seeming arrogance of the action.  They felt that the IAU had arbitrarily over-ruled a scientific fact they knew to be true: the Sun has nine planets.  They mourned the loss of one of them.

  I guess I had even more reason to be upset, for Pluto was discovered during the week of my birth in 1930.  In a sense, it is my birth sign.  So, when my book club decided to read The Hunt for Planet X: New Worlds and the Fate of Pluto by Dutch astronomer Govert Schilling, I plunged into it to see why and how my birthright had been diminished.  I finally decided it was all the fault of modern electronics.

  A brief history: The first five planets other than Earth—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn—were known to the ancient Babylonians.  Although the telescope was invented in 1608, and some telescopic sightings of Uranus were reported in 1690, it wasn't until 1781 that it was confirmed as the seventh planet.  Likewise, Gallileo's drawings show that he had seen Neptune as early as 1612, but it wasn't established as the eighth planet until 1846, and that was mostly because Uranus' orbit deviated from the one dictated by Newtonian physics.  A trans-Uranian planet was conjectured as the cause, leading to a successful telescopic search for Neptune in a calculated location. 

  An earlier "eighth planet," Ceres, had been detected in 1801, orbiting between Mars and Jupiter.  It is very small, less than 1000 km (600 miles) in diameter.  But soon many other, smaller objects were discovered between Mars and Jupiter, so astronomers decided not to call them all planets, re-categorizing them as asteroids.  Adding an eighth planet to the known solar system thus had to await Neptune's discovery in 1846.  Finding Pluto took almost another century.  Its orbit is mostly beyond Neptune's; its diameter—about 2300 km—is about half the width of the U.S. and half the diameter of Mercury.

  Finding a new body in the solar system by telescopic observation had thus traditionally been a tortuous endeavor, involving hand-written records or, later, huge libraries of photographic plates, together with mind-bending manual calculations.  Then came a late-20^th century break-through: mounting electronic CCD cameras on telescopes—cameras like those in cellphones, but with orders of magnitude more sensitivity and resolution.  Using digitally stored photographs from them, a computer can quickly detect a new solar-system object and calculate its orbit.  Combined with increasingly large terrestrial and space telescopes, such cameras have within the past several decades found a cornucopia of objects rotating about the sun.  The largest, Eris, found in 2005, is roughly the size of Pluto.  Should Eris therefore be called the tenth planet, and other new bodies also be added to the list?

  Astronomers were now in the same position as when they defined the asteroid belt, having to revisit the question of which objects would be classified as planets.  Like Congress drafting a bill that will benefit only some companies without naming them, the IAU—and with similar acrimonious debates—set about drafting a definition of "planet" that would include the classical eight but exclude Pluto and Eris and lesser bodies, without naming any of them.  It finally resolved that to be called a planet in our solar system, an object must satisfy three criteria:

• It must circle the sun, but not be the satellite of a planet.

• It must be massive enough to be in hydrostatic equilibrium under its own gravitational force, normally meaning that it is of spherical or ellipsoidal shape.

• It must have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit, i.e., be gravitationally dominant in it, so no objects of comparable size are present there other than its own moons or other bodies under its gravitational influence.

Several of the eight classical planets have objects in their orbits that have not been cleared (so-called Trojans), but they are synchronous with the planet, locked in by its gravitational field so as to revolve around the Sun at fixed distances in advance or behind it.  Those planets therefore satisfy all three conditions, which is why they still qualify as planets under the new prescription.   

  Pluto, Eris and Ceres pass the first two tests but fail the third.  Pluto's orbit passes through the Kuiper belt, a region well beyond Neptune's orbit, in which more than 100,000 objects over 100 km in diameter are believed to exist, including many that Pluto hasn't cleared from its orbit but aren't under its gravitational sway.  Eris, which ranges further from the Sun than Pluto—through the Kuiper belt and beyond into the so-called scattered disk—similarly hasn't cleared its orbit.  And Ceres has neither cleared other asteroids from its orbit nor locked them into synchronism.

  Bodies like Pluto, Eris and Ceres that satisfy only the first two criteria are now called dwarf planets.  Two others have been recognized by the IAU:  Haumea and Makemake, both having diameters roughly 60% of Pluto's and orbits about the same size.  It is suspected that another 100 now-known bodies may qualify, and the eventual total may be as many as 200.  So poor Pluto, my cherished birth sign, has been legislated out of its former planetary grandeur. 

  I'm delighted, though, that Pluto retains some of its idiosyncracy.  It has a nearby sister, Charon, half its diameter but large enough so the two jointly rotate around a barycenter lying between their surfaces rather than inside Pluto, like an unbalanced dumbbell—see the illustration below.  (For comparison, the earth-moon barycenter is about 1700 km—1000 miles—below the earth's surface.)  Considering the external position of their barycenter, some astronomers call Pluto and Charon a double dwarf planet, twins so to speak, unique in our solar system; but the IAU persists in classifying Charon as a moon of Pluto.  The former designation appeals to me because of its singular glamor, but I am solipsistically pulled in the other direction: since I don't have a twin, how can Pluto, my birth sign, have one?

Artist's portrayal of Pluto and Charon [source unknown]. The added

white dot is the barycenter around which the two rotate in common. 

  At any rate, I still feel sad for Pluto.  Perhaps never having achieved glory is better than achieving it and then having it fall to others' machinations.

On the Other Side of the Highway

  It's heartening to know that saints still walk among us.  One of them is Chris Bischof, who by his lifework has once again shown us that children who likely would become castoffs from our society can be guided to full participation in it and full fruition of their talents.  His devotion to his calling is nothing short of transcendental.

  This was Bischof's grim starting point:  East Palo Alto, adjacent to but "on the other side of the highway" from its more well-known and affluent neighbor, has had no public high school since 1976.  All its teen-agers, predominantly from minority groups, were bused to high schools in more-prosperous neighboring towns.  Because their elementary-school education was usually below par, most were tracked in high school into the lowest-level, non-college preparatory classes; and because they were bused to unfamiliar communities, they became increasingly alienated.  Sixty-five percent of them ended up dropping out, and of the remainder fewer than 10% went on to a four-year college.  That's shocking: in a Bay Area city right next to Silicon Valley, only one in three youngsters completed high school and only one in thirty went to college!  In effect, they were being consigned by neglect and isolation to society's dust bin.

  That was intolerable to Bischof.  As a Stanford undergraduate in the late '80s and early '90s, he started an after-school program for East Palo Alto elementary-school students, linking basketball with tutoring, hoping that this intervention would improve their chances when they went to high school.  But he soon realized that ever so much more was needed.   So, in 1996, soon after getting his Master's degree in education from Stanford, he recruited fellow graduate Helen Kim to help him start a new high school in the city—not just a garden-variety one, but the incredible Eastside College Preparatory School.

  As Bischof says, they started Eastside before they were ready, but eight youngsters who had been part of the after-school program for five years were about to enter ninth grade.  They had put their faith in him to help them do better than being bused to another town for a second-tier high school education.  "Sometimes," he says, "you just have to take a leap of faith, and trust that either there will be a net to catch you, or you will learn to fly."   So Eastside started with those eight freshmen, two teachers, and an old van to pick up the students.  Until some catch-as-catch-can classroom space was found, their "schoolhouse" was a picnic table under a tree in a park.

The Original "Schoolhouse" 

  
  All of those eight freshman graduated four years later as Eastside's Class of 2000 and went to four-year colleges.  By that time, Eastside had moved into a donated house, had taken in three new classes of freshmen, and had achieved its goal of full accreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, an indispensable imprimatur.  

  Fast forward to the present, Eastside's 17^th school year.  It now includes a junior high school, so it covers grades 6 through 12.  It has a beautiful campus on 5.5 acres, currently with about 325 students, all from minorities—63% Latino, 34% African American and 3% Pacific Islander.  The graduation rate is 85%, and every graduate has gone on to a four-year college, over half to the most selective colleges and universities in the country.  Ninety-eight percent have been the first in their families to go to college.  Eighty percent of graduates finish college (compared to 11% nationally for first-generation college students).

Eastside's Campus Today (Source: Google Earth)

Students with Chris Bischof (left) and Helen Kim (fourth from right)

  
  As a lifelong educator myself, I have participated in minority-outreach programs since the 1960s.  Those programs, usually underfunded and understaffed, have had varying degrees of success, sometimes impressive but nothing like what I heard about when I was first introduced to Eastside six years ago.  In a state of disbelief, I went to the campus to visit classes and speak at length with Bischof, faculty members and students.  I was completely convinced: such a transformative education was really taking place there. 

  And there's more.  Until a few years ago, enrollment consisted only of day students.  Some who scarcely had homes to return to at night were taken in by Eastside's incredibly dedicated faculty to live with them.  Today, Eastside has dormitories—the block of buildings on the right side of the quadrangle in the aerial view above—that will eventually hold half of its students.  (About 90 live there now.)  They have allowed Eastside to draw 18% of its students from other minority communities around the Bay Area, as well as made it possible for students to continue at the school when their families have had to move away.

  Remarkably, all this is done completely with private donations through a combination of annual fund raising and income from endowment—not a cent of public money is involved.  The budget this year is $6.2 million, or $19,000 per student, which is more than twice what California spends per student in its public schools, but much less than other private schools.  And what a difference that expenditure has made over the years: so far over 750 Eastsiders have been lovingly and painstakingly guided away from the fate they might have had as society's castoffs and to lives taking full advantage of their innate talents.

  What are Eastside's "magic" ingredients for taking minority students with huge education and resource gaps and getting them to the level of college graduates?  There are many.  Among them: 

• A rigorous, demanding schedule, far beyond what the students have experienced before.  The school day runs from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.  The curriculum is what one would find in the best college preparatory programs in the country, in no way watered down. 

• The most accomplished teachers, as committed as Bischof to the school's mission. 

• Personalized instruction: During the school day and extending until 10 p.m., time is scheduled for one-on-one tutoring, especially for students who are falling behind.  No student is allowed to drop through the cracks.  

• An esprit de corps that tangibly infects the campus, students and faculty alike.  Despite the onerous schedule, the students find the emotional support from it to persevere.

• Sponsored learning experiences every summer for each student, throughout the country and the world.

• Guidance throughout the college years, especially to make sure that the transition to college is successfully navigated.

From my own long experience with outreach programs, I know that every one of these ingredients is essential.  Drop one or two of them, and the chances of overcoming the obstacles these students face would plummet.

  In my eyes, Eastside—Bischof's brainchild, his passion, the whole of his existence—is a full-blown miracle.  That's why I look on him as a modern-day saint.  I apologize if I embarrass him by this accolade, for he is a modest man, but I must say what I feel.