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Saying the Wrong Thing
The Guardian yesterday wrote an encomium to the UK government’s Chief Scientific Advisor Prof. Sir John Beddington (I hope they don’t mind that I quote in full): Politics may not be the enemy of scientific method, but they are hardly intimate friends. Science inches along by experiment, evidence and testing (and retesting); politics is often…
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Root Cause Analysis
The International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC, is currently preparing an international standard to be known as IEC 62740 Root Cause Analysis. I prepared some material for potential inclusion in the standards document but as of writing it appears it will not be used. I think it is quite useful, so I make it hereby available. The…
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Aerial Collision Avoidance
Just over a decade ago, in July 2002, there was a catastrophic mid-air collision of a Russian passenger aircraft heading westwards and a freighter aircraft of DHL heading northward, near the town of Überlingen on Lake Constance (Bodensee) in Southern Germany near the Swiss border. I wrote a paper on it about a month later,…
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Recharging Electric Road Vehicles
I chair a group of specialists (electrical engineers, safety analysts, others) mandated by the German electrical-engineering standardisation organisation DKE to undertake a risk analysis of the process of recharging electric road vehicles. We have been working now for close on one and a half years, on conductive charging, and have a document under internal review…
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Concerns About Spent Fuel Pool 4 at Fukushima Daiichi
In Risks-26.86, Tobin Macginnis pointed to a Japanese documentary on the continuing dangers of SFP4, via Dave Farber’s IP list and PGN’s redaction. In Risks-26.87, Dan Yurman claimed in response that this nonsense has been thoroughly debunked by a special post at the blog of the American Nuclear Society as well as Scare the socks…
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The Accident to Qantas Flight 72, VH-QPA, in October 2008
The Airbus A330-303 VH-QPA experienced uncommanded nose-down pitch commands while in cruise at FL370. Lots of unsecured people were thrown to the ceiling, and some were injured severely. The aircraft declared an emergency and landed as soon as practicable, at Learmonth, where the injured were treated and several hospitalised. It has been known for a…
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Dealing With Nuclear Waste
The Independent reports today on a written statement by UK Energy Minister Hendry to Parliament on what the Government is deciding to do with its radioactive waste from nuclear power generation. The British government has decided for a project to convert plutonium waste into MOX fuel, maybe for “a new generation of nuclear power plants“.…
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Assurance of Cyber-Physical Systems
I attended Seminar 11441 on Science and Engineering of Cyber-Physical Systems at the Leibniz Centre for Informatics at Schloss Dagstuhl in the Saarland on 1-4 November, 2011. It was organised by Holger Giese, Bernhard Rumpe, Bernhard Schätz and Janos Sztipanovits. There is huge interest in cyber-physical systems in the US at the moment, backed by…
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The Definition of Risk – Yet Again
In a message to the York Safety-Critical Systems Mailing List, Tracy White recounted a discussion with someone from the field of “Risk Management” who was taking a course he was giving on system safety. There is apparently a series of international standards, designated ISO 31000, on “Risk Management” (so says Wikipedia ). Tracy says The…
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Ensuring Safety Requirements Fulfilment in Possibly-Imperfect Software
Ludi Benner just asked me privately about the feasibility of dumping stack traces from operating SW in flight. I concluded that it is not a very practical idea for a number of reasons. First, there is a lot of it. Second, you can’t analyse them for every flight, because there aren’t human resources for it,…