What’s Cool About Standards?

by Bill Thompson

Technology writer Bill Thompson was one of the panel of speakers at the IEC Centenary Challenge awards ceremony. Published online on Jan. 16, 2007, this article is based on his talk given on that occasion. It is re-published with permission.

Musicians such as Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon and Miles Davis played seriously cool jazz, often taking tone and rhythm well beyond the expectations of their audiences. However when these talented musicians weren’t making freeform explorations at the edges of our tonal range they fell back on the songs and tunes that everybody knew, the ones that supported the repertoire.

In the lexicon of jazz these tunes are ‘standards’. Where other forms of artistic expression have classics or masterpieces, jazz contents itself with standards, themes and arrangements that form the starting point for exploration, providing a solid basis for musicianship. Standards kept the audience happy, bringing a performance down to earth after an extravagant bebop interlude, but they could also be relied upon to ensure that groups of people finding themselves together on stage for the first time would have some common approach to their music.

Jazz standards fulfil a similar role to the electrotechnical standards that the IEC defines and publicises, yet while Parker’s standards are cool, technical standards are rarely considered worthy of admiration and certainly don’t have fan websites devoted to them.

The work of standardization bodies like the IEC is largely invisible, generally disregarded and sometimes even criticised or dismissed despite the fact that it underpins the interoperability that makes much of the modern industrialised world possible. This is unfortunate, and not just because lack of interest leaves the IEC and other standardization bodies vulnerable to political interference or special pleading. It is unfortunate because it is unjustified and unfair.

Standards are everywhere. The most important standard for people in their everyday life is our agreement that certain vocalisations, grunts and squeaks will denote or connote specific objects, categories, classes and abstract concepts, and without this agreement on standards for language we would not even have civilisation.

Of course there are many different, incompatible and competing standards when it comes to language, a situation that the IEC has spent much of its existence trying to avoid in its own field.

There is also a great deal of argument about the incompatibilities between different languages. Some agree with the great analytic philosopher Willard Quine that translation is never perfect, and that there is always uncertainty of meaning while others, like semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco, believe that meaning can be preserved. Eco has even claimed that the English translation of his medieval mystery The Name of the Rose improves on the Italian original.

The indeterminacy of translation and judgements on the literary value of alternative renderings rely rather too much on metaphysical considerations, but fortunately we can take a more positivist, even mathematical, point of view when it comes to electrotechnical standards. Not only can we translate between units of measurement with provable accuracy, we can also build standard upon standard, and have confidence that everything beneath will work as described.

One of the clearest examples of this is found in the Internet Protocol Suite, where different protocols for data transmission are layered on top of one another, from the lowest datalink layers for voltage levels or wireless connections, through the Internet protocol to the transmission control protocol and on to data, application and presentation layers.

There are many examples of the way this layering results in innovative products, from email to the World Wide Web. IEC standards create a framework for interoperability that too often goes unnoticed. I go into a café and open up my laptop. It picks up a wireless network signal in the 2.4Mhz waveband, recognises the 802.11b protocol, and offers to connect me to the Internet. If I buy a USB pen drive and plug it into the side of the same laptop I can have an extra gigabyte of portable storage. Yet few of the millions of people who rely on these standards every day have any appreciation of what goes on beneath the surface.

At the hardware level Apple’s iPod music player relies on layers and levels of interlocking and compatible standards. They made it possible for Jonathan Ive, the company’s lead designer, to sit down one day and sketch out the first rough drafts of this product, and then allowed engineers to create a prototype from off-the-shelf components, knowing that they would work together. They could then refine their initial design into something that could be manufactured.

In the late 1980’s I worked at Acorn Computers in Cambridge and was one of the team that installed the Valid computer-aided design system for the electronic engineers to work with. They could build circuits and have them laid out automatically because the characteristics and pin outs of every component were well-defined, enabling them to use time working creatively, instead of spending it in trial and error exploration of possible layouts.

The widespread lack of awareness of what standards do and how they support and sustain the modern industrialised world may have a negative impact on creativity and technological innovation. It may not matter much to a school student trying to get online to do their homework or an executive frustrated because they cannot send an email, but the failure to understand what standards are and how they work could easily damage the potential of an entrepreneur just as badly as unfamiliarity with ‘My Funny Valentine’ would deprive a jobbing musician of work.

Those who are concerned with standards are well aware that it is not inevitable that standards from different domains should work together to give us the seamless experience that we so often enjoy on the net. We have before us one example of a domain where the standards seem to work together in just the right way without human or any other intervention: the universe.

In his recent book The Goldilocks Enigma Paul Davies asks “Why is everything just right for life on earth?” He explores the deep question behind the observation that the core cosmological constants have just the right values for the universe to sustain matter and stars and planets and complex organic chemistry – or ‘life’ as we prefer to call it from the inside – and asks whether there is an ‘anthropic principle’ at work.

We clearly live in a universe with appropriate values for these central constants, but it is interesting to note that alternatives seem to be possible. In the article, ‘My Other Universe is a Porsche’, published in the UK New Scientist magazine, physicist Roni Harnik describes a life-bearing universe in which there is no weak nuclear force, and although his hypothesis is still far from proven it does hold out the possibility that there is more than one way of creating a universe with intelligent life.

Of course equivalent sets of standards are not always entirely compatible, as anyone who travelled the world in the days of dialup Internet connectivity discovered when they faced the wide variety of cables, connectors and electrical standards in the world’s telephone systems. It would probably be unwise to try to travel through a black hole to a weakless universe, however tempting the trip, since the traveller’s atomic structure would not be very compatible with the balance of forces at the destination.

The debate over the anthropic principle shows how important it is to ensure that standards make it possible for systems to work together, whether we are talking about the interaction between particles or the electrical connections between components on a motherboard. Just as the cosmological constants create a universe in which life is possible, so the IEC and related bodies create an environment in which invention, innovation and experimentation are possible, one in which new products can be brought to market, where businesses can be built on top of innovation.

Standards give us space to play by taking away choices. Not all choice, just the ones that would get in the way. They let us focus on what matters, rather as a playground lets children concentrate on play instead of having to worry about safety because a playground is not a forest, but rather the essence of a forest. Safer, we hope, but also easier to read and interpret, it guides play in order to let it develop, just as the harsh binary arithmetic of a Core2Duo processor allows a programmer to create a talkbot that can emulate human conversation in its randomness and unpredictability.

Standards let us focus on what matters, because as we build a more complex technological world we need to be able to ignore more, and while rough consensus and running code has proven a great development model for the Internet it is only workable as long as most of the decisions have already been taken – by the IETF, ISOC, ICANN, the ITU and of course IEC.

Standards serve the same sort of function for our creative intelligence as houses and forest clearance did for our daily existence. They remove the need to have to deal with some aspects of reality, make the world predictable and open up new possibilities. On the Net the rigid standards of the Internet Protocol Suite and the electrical and radio standards below them make creative expression possible. Even the coolest kids sites like MySpace rely on W3C recommendations, IETF standards and of course the work of the IEC.

The world changes and so there is often a need to go back to the old standards and reinterpret them. We already have energy-saving light bulbs that work with current power supplies and voltages but do not rely on incandescence to produce light, and now key players like Google, a major user of electricity, are pressing for a new approach to PC power supplies which will require revisions to a whole batch of twenty-year old standards. Revisiting standards keeps them relevant and useful, although it should always be a minority activity, and will be if the standards that are set are well considered.

We also need to consider where new standards are needed. Georges Zissis and Stuart Mucklejohn from the Université III Paul Sabatier in Toulouse won the IEC Centenary Challenge for a paper that goes far beyond the dry debate on standards that is so often portrayed in the media to address key questions of safety and quality of life in our cities, looking at the places where lack of standards can be a real problem.

Their paper, “Standardizing mesopic vision conditions and incidence on light sources science and technology” may not have a particularly enticing title but it ties together a discussion on electrical standards, human vision, lighting, security and economic development in an innovative and captivating way, showing how the lack of standards relating to human vision inhibits innovation in urban lighting.

In the end, we all need standards. Charlie Parker could only make recordings of his jazz standards because he could get electric power for his amps from a standard outlet. He relied on a myriad of electric-acoustic standards to let him plug microphones into recording equipment and turn his astonishing performances into a 25 micron microgroove on a 12 inch disc which would then be played on a turntable rotating at a frequency of thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute.

Without IEC standards we would not be able to listen to Bird’s own standards, yet I doubt he thought of this even once. Perhaps if he had we would be able to sit down and enjoy the ‘Capacitor Impedance Blues’ instead of ‘Yardbird Suite’.

Source: International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).