Calculating logarithms?!

As I was culling my book collection, I came across three delightful books by Bob Miller, a CCNY math professor:  his Precalc Helper, Calc I Helper, and Calc II Helper, all published in 1991 by McGraw-Hill's Schaum division.  That was around the time I started taking calculus courses, though I do not recall using those books.  I may have acquired them shortly after I completed my year of calculus.

Regardless, as I was leafing through these books on this last day of 2014, nearly a quarter century after they were published, I was particularly struck by Miller's treatment of logarithms.  In the Precalc Helper, Chapter 12, "Modern Logarithms", begins with this paragraph (p. 75):

We will do a modern approach to logs.  Modern to a mathematician means not more than 50 years behind the times.  We will not do calculations with logs (calculations involving characteristics and mantissas).  This is no longer needed because we have calculators.  What is needed is a thorough understanding of the laws of logarithms and certain problems that can only be solved with logs.

If I ever did calculations with characteristics and mantissas, I certainly don't remember them now. It is likely that my high school had already abandoned coverage of that topic by the time I was a student.

Then on page 1 of the Calc II Helper, opening the first chapter, titled "Logarithms", we find the following passage.

Most of you, at this point in your mathematics, have not seen logs for at least a year, many a lot more.  The normal high school course emphasizes the wrong areas.  You spend most of the time doing endless calculations, none of which you need here.  By the year 2000, students will do almost no log calculations due to calculators.  In case you feel tortured, just remember that you only spent weeks on log calculations.  I spent months!!!

I suspect the future arrived a lot sooner than Miller thought it would.  When I was in high school in the late 1980s, we were using a then-new software program, Derive, to graph mathematical functions.  In college, we were using Mathematica.  When I was a teaching assistant in graduate school, graphing calculators were already pervasive, and my students were allowed to use them on exams.  (I have never owned one myself.)  Evidently graphing calculators are still in use, though equivalent apps have been available for smart phones for a few years now.  (I have never owned a smart phone either, but I suspect this will have to change one day.)

At this point I am too far out of touch with mathematics teaching and technology to know what is considered standard of practice.  Nonetheless I am grateful I never had to do endless logarithm calculations by hand.  Make no mistake, logarithms are essential for science, engineering, and medicine.  In fact, I worked with logarithms at work earlier today.  But I let the computer do the calculating.

Congratulations to arXiv

According to Nature, the arXiv preprint server has reached one million articles in its holdings.  DTLR congratulates arXiv.org, and its founder Paul Ginsparg, on this achievement.

A Review of Abrahm Lustgarten's "Run to Failure"

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform was completing the task of drilling a pipe into BP's Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico.  The pipe experienced a blowout, and the blowout preventer failed, resulting in an explosion and eventual sinking of the platform.  Eleven workers were killed, and seventeen were seriously injured.  The rupture of the pipe resulted in a massive oil spill event that lasted 86 days.

The disaster was eminently preventable.  Investigation of its causes has focused on a number of technical and engineering issues; however the larger context was BP's corporate culture.  Understanding that culture requires a deeper study of BP's checkered history of operations management and industrial safety.  The book Run to Failure, by Abrahm Lustgarten (2012), provides just that.  Written in conjunction with the Frontline documentary, The Spill, it provides an in-depth examination of BP's history in North America, beginning in 1989 when John Browne was named head of worldwide exploration and production.  Browne would later become BP's chief executive, and on his watch there were major disasters at two of BP's legacy assets:  its Texas City refinery and its operations on Alaska's north slope, site of its Prudhoe Bay oil fields, as well as an extensive pipeline network.  These legacy assets were considered sources of revenue to be milked as much as possible, but they were not opportunities for growth, and thus infrastructure investments were minimized.

After the prologue, which describes the Deepwater Horizon accident and introduces the book, the next fourteen chapters are dedicated to events prior to that accident.  We observe a corporate culture where site managers were frequently rotated, while being pressured to produce financial results.  This produced a short term mentality, perpetual cost cutting, and an avoidance of investing in infrastructure maintenance, even where safety and the environment were at risk.  Safety management focued on the less expensive "slips and trips" rather than the vastly more expensive process safety.  Workers who raised concerns were ignored, and whistleblowers were blacklisted.  An attitude of "run to failure" pervaded at BP's legacy assets.  However, even BP's preferred areas for investment, such as the Gulf of Mexico, provided an example of corner-cutting in the rush to start making money.  The near sinking of BP's Thunder Horse platform during Hurricane Dennis in 2005 was caused by the mistakenly backward installation of several check valves in the platform's pontoons.

BP's poor safety record is compared unfavorably with those of other major oil companies, particularly Exxon, which seems to have taken to heart the lessons of the notorious Exxon Valdez oil spill.  The rate of spills and other process accidents for BP was usually several times higher than that of its competitors.

The last two chapters, and the epilogue, return to the Macondo well and the Deepwater Horizon accident.  The exposition of events reveals a series of poor decisions as well as equipment failures that all point to a culture of corner cutting in the rush to get results.  It provides a case study of engineering and business decision analysis and ethics.  The book ends with evidence that BP hasn't really changed its corporate culture, and implies that the company's next disaster will occur on Alaska's north slope.  A post from earlier this year in the Columbia Journalism Review, by Alexis Sobel Fitts, shows that BP is even now aggressively trying to influence public perception of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

One issue that arises is the role of federal and state government regulators.  The author discusses this issue, including a number of agencies, though the primary emphasis is on the Environmental Protection Agency.  This is perhaps due to his access to very candid sources from that agency.  There is relatively little discussion of the US Department of Interior's Minerals Management Service (MMS); fortunately you can read more about the role of this obscure agency in a May, 2010, Rolling Stone article by Tim Dickinson.  I wish that Lustgarten had incorporated more discussion of other regulators, including Dickinson's findings.

Run to Failure has been reviewed in a number of scientific journals such as Nature (Mascarelli, 2012).  The most useful reviews in my view are those by Peter Dykstra at Enivonmental Health News (here), and Matthew T. Huber (2013) in Contemporary Sociology.  I strongly recommend this book for those interested in engineering and business ethics, corporate culture, and the energy industry.

References

Matthew T. Huber, 2013:  Review of Lustgarten (2012).  Contemporary Sociology, 42:  400-401.

Abrahm Lustgarten, 2012:   Run to Failure:  BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster (W. W. Norton, New York).

Amanda Mascarelli, 2012:  Plumbing the depths.  Nature, 483:  154-155.

Congratulations to the Royal Society

The Royal Society of London is celebrating the 350th anniversary of its Philosophical Transactions, the world's oldest scientific journal. The journal has pioneered many of the features that we associate with scientific journal publishing, such as peer review, establishing priority, archiving, and dissemination.  The journal evidently was founded in 1665 by the Society's secretary, Henry Oldenburg.

This Royal Society blog post by Julie McDougall-Waters provides some context to the celebration.  DTLR joins in congratulating the Royal Society in celebrating this anniversary.