Adverse negative externalities

The modern world provides solutions and assistance to humans never seen before….*

It’s Finals Week. I have taken a few days off from blogging so that I could grade 130 student essays on new technologies in the graphic communication industry. It has been enlightening, frustrating, amusing, and sometimes hilarious.

Though I encourage students to write about technologies new to the industry, I don’t limit the subjects on which they can write. As a result, I have received more than my share of research papers on Chocolography (it’s a system for printing on chocolate with a modified ink-jet printer), anti-counterfeiting measures instituted by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (color-shifting ink, embedded metal fibers, mag-stripes, and microprinting on currency) and a few really good papers on subjects that are new to me.

The students get extra points if they write about something with which I am not already familiar. I realize that that sounds like a teacher’s hubris, but you’ve got to get up pretty early to beat me to the Internet, and if there is a press release, a new patent or a new printing technology out there, I have probably read about it already.

The anti-counterfeiting topic was driven by a lecture I gave on intaglio printing. I talked about the effort by North Korea’s government to “destabilize” the U.S. economy with counterfeit money (I read about that in the National Geographic). I talked about watermarking in my lecture on papermaking; I talked about color-shifting ink, and microprinting so that they would understand how difficult it is to make counterfeit money. Some of them chose that topic because they were intrigued by the processes that are used to print the almighty dollar; it is also low-hanging fruit. You have no idea how many times I have read almost the same sentence about the detail in engraved portraits of presidents! (I know that Ben Franklin was not a president.)

The next-most popular topics were the Amazon Kindle replacing printed books, and the demise of the newspaper as we know it (to be replaced by the Kindle?).

Fortunately no one wrote about E-ink, a topic which in previous years drove me mad. I was so weary of reading about how E-ink was going to revolutionize the printing industry that I banned it for two years. No one was allowed to tell me about E-ink or any variation on that theme. But E-ink is actually inside the Kindle, so I took it off the banned topics list, and expected it to return, but no one mentioned it – thank goodness.

Bioprinting, which is the construction of living tissue with cast-off ink-jet printers, was a topic chosen by two students. This year it became more interesting because a medical lab has successfully printed seven human bladders, and those bladders are now living in human patients and apparently working. That is a big deal, because previous reports have talked about the futuristic uses of bioprinting, while this year’s crop is talking about actual functioning work being done in this field.

There are possible adverse negative externalities (see footnote) in bioprinting. First, it’s difficult, and second, there are all the ethical issues. When you start reading about it you will be thrilled by the possibilities of the process, and you will be concerned about where it will take us. Then images of Frankenstein with a modified HP ink-jet printer will pop into your brain.

Gutenberg (and that wasn’t even his name) would be excited by all that he has wrought! For those not up on their printing history, Gutenberg was a human never seen before who provided solutions and assistance to the modern world.

*This is a word-for-word excerpt from one of the papers I read last week, and the title of today’s blog is a phrase from the end of the same sentence!