Well, folks, the promised “reform of the reform” has started. In my last post, I mentioned some of the troubles the transition from traditional german Diplom to Bachelor’s-Master’s degree courses has caused at my university. The Rectory has made money available for each faculty to discuss the reform of the reform, including overnight accomodation if…
The university where I teach, the University of Bielefeld, is forty years old this month. It was founded as a «reform university». Everything was in one huge building, as may be seen in this picture. The building has two main social features. First, it encourages interdisciplinary work, since students can hop between a lecture in…
I was saddened yesterday to learn of the death of John Stallings exactly one year before. John was a mercurial Berkeley mathematician of occasional genius who, if you believed him, mostly enjoyed sleeping, doing nothing, and various scurrilous activities. Including, on the level of barely scurrilous, BSing with graduate students such as myself and my…
The report on the RAF Nimrod accident in 2006 has recently come out and at least British safety engineers regard it as a major event. This is a milestone, and could be a watershed event, in system safety engineering in Britain. Put briefly, the report found that there have been various technical questions about the…
On 18 August I wrote an essay on eight themes in System Safety Engineering which addressed the use (or not) of so-called formal methods. On 28 August, Rod Chapman of Praxis HIS wrote a note to the University of York Safety-Critical Systems Mailing List which gave some figures for Praxis’s experience on a medium-large project…
Those of us interested in commercial aviation accidents have to deal with a lot of what I shall call screwy reasoning. Last week, I read a September 2 article in The Times on the crash of AF447 and its aftermath which I felt was somewhat screwy. It suggested that Air France’s attempt to introduce specialised…
I have been thinking recently about professional engineering communication. I was reminded once again of the lack of consensus by Nancy Leveson’s comment that “[t]he type of limited interaction that is possible by email is just not conducive to communication” as well as her regret at being “… pulled into one of these web debates…
I was led recently to think of some of the main issues in safety engineering of systems with computer-based components, when they occurred in the course of a discussion on the University of York safety-critical systems mailing list (look for “Certification of Tools/Components” in the archive). Here are some of these issues and my views…
There are some significant issues which are clarified by the BEA’s preliminary factual report, issued at the beginning of July: specifically the uncertainties and certainties in the meaning and partial interpretation of the maintenance messages received by ACARS; the question of structural integrity; the attitude and flight path of the aircraft on impact with the…
It happened again! On 13 December 2008, a Boeing 767-39H suffered a tailstrike on takeoff at Manchester Airport. A tailstrike can occur on takeoff when the pilots pitch the nose of the aircraft too high in the air before it has lifted off the ground. This can occur when the aircraft is “rotated”, that is,…