PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (THE VASA)

A koder with attitude, KV answers your questions. Miss Manners he ain’t.

Dear KV,

I teach computer science to undergraduate students at a school in California, and one of my friends in the English department, of all places, made an interesting comment to me the other day. He wanted to know if my students had ever read Frankenstein and if I felt it would make them better engineers. I asked him why he thought I should assign this book, and he said he felt that a book could change the way in which people think about their relationship to the world, and in particular to technology. He wasn’t being condescending; he was dead serious. Given the number of Frankenstein-like projects that seem to get built with information technology, perhaps it’s not a bad idea to teach these lessons to computer science undergraduates, to give them some notion that they have a social responsibility. Do you agree?

CS Prof

Dear CS,

While I have to agree in general with the idea that telling and retelling stories is a good way to teach people, I have to say that the idea of using Mary Shelley’s novel for this is very much antiquated and unlikely to be effective in a computer science class. I, myself, was once forced through a “Computers and Society” course in college, and although we didn’t read Frankenstein, we were beaten over the head with a litany of how bad computers and technology were for society from a professor who was trivial to manipulate. All I had to do was agree with her every utterance and write technology-bashing essays for her class to get an A. Was this an effective use of time?

Of course not, it was a show. If you really want to

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reach an audience, you have to engage them with stories that you understand and can relate to their experience. When I think of the kind of story I want to tell to undergraduate students, I think of the Vasa, a ship and story that I think should be better known among engineers.

I first learned of the Vasa from a T-shirt at a conference in 1990. A company that a friend had started used the cross section of the ship to lampoon the ISO OSI effort on network protocols. “Another 7 Layer Model That Failed” read the caption. The connection was that ISO had seven layers and the Vasa had seven decks, but when I found out why the Vasa had tragically failed I became fascinated, because it was such a classic engineering failure story.

The Vasa was built between 1626 and 1628 for King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, who was, at that time, attempting to rule the Baltic Sea. In the 17th century, rulers were expected to be capable of more than just giving orders, so Adolphus not only organized wars, he also helped design the ships of his naval fleet. At the time Swedish warships had one deck of cannons on each side from which they fired fusillades at enemy ships, sometimes even hitting and damaging the other ships. When the Vasa was commissioned, this single row of cannons was considered state of the art.

Sometime during the construction of the ship Adolphus found out that the Poles had ships with two decks of guns, so he modified the design of the Vasa to have a second gun deck. This would have made it the most powerful naval vessel of the time, capable of delivering a broadside of devastating proportions. The men he had contracted to build his ships attempted to explain that the ship had too little ballast to support two gun decks, and that the resulting ship would likely be unsafe to sail. The king insisted—just like, say, many project managers— that his orders should be followed. On a software project you can quit, but if the king is your boss you might lose more than your job—you might, say, lose your head—so the project went forward.