Something more mundane, but likely as least as relevant to many readers as yet another post on Hazard Analysis. Also, I have been struggling with the composition of a technical post on TCAS for a while so a bit of whimsy might be in order. I have suffered off and on from gastric ailments for…
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…
Here is a letter I just sent to the editor of a prestigious journal. I follow it with some links to the general debate about scientific publishing and publishers’ business models. Dear Editor, On 8/2/12 4:22 AM, SCP Editorial Office wrote: > Ms. Ref. No.: SCICO-D-12-xxxxxxxxxxxxxx > Title: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX > Science of Computer Programming >…
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…
Can things that look like hard facts and indeed are hard facts be socially constructed? Sure. But many people, indeed quite a few scientists, think not. I remember being quite surprised a decade and a half ago when I realized how many facts were indeed socially constructed. It is more obvious that social facts such…
The British Royal Academy of Engineering, an institution whose membership is nominated and elected only, is conducting a study on the engineering and societal impacts of space weather and has issued a call for evidence. I sent the following note on Sunday 25th March to policyAT[theRoyalAcademyOfEngineering] with a copy to the Office of Nuclear Regulation.…
I don’t have time to write any blog posts or anything else for that matter at the moment. But it seemed to me that an e-mail I wrote today might be converted to a post. Herewith. Steven Tockey pointed to an article in the Huffington Post about delivering tacos by robotic helicopter. Apparently there is…
Martyn Thomas chaired a committee convened by the UK Royal Academy of Engineering on infrastructure vulnerabilities to GPS disturbances. The committee reported in March 2011 and Martyn was briefly on the front page of UK news media on March 10, 2011 until the Tohoku event happened the day after. What Martyn’s committee found was astonishing.…
Not mine this time (the one I wrote in 1997 is still being referenced, but is out of date because the German degree system has changed) but the OECD’s from October 2011, based on 2009 data, which I have just discovered. The Washington Post published in September 2011 a startling graphic, accompanying an article on…
Michael. Everyone knew him as Michael. I was a freshman at Oxford in mathematics, interested in logic. I had been reading Chomsky in my first quarter because I had been told Chomsky had mathematised language. My tutor in algebra, Ian Macdonald (same jacket as in the picture!), an algebraic geometer, suggested I could look at…