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Not mine this time (the one I wrote in 1997 is still being referenced, but is out of date because the German degree system has changed) but the OECD’s from October 2011, based on 2009 data, which I have just discovered.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…
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…
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“.…
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…
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…
John McCarthy has died. The great John McCarthy. Brilliant and entertaining, fun to be around, accessible unlike many of his stature, who carried an aura about him which blessed you with the feeling, if you came within it, that you were doing the Thinking That Really Mattered. Even if you were just flapping around at…
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,…
Following on to my recent post on certification requirements for commercial aircraft, John Rushby and I have been discussed a paper of his, on commercial aircraft software and the guidelines DO178B, in the invited session on certification at EMSOFT 2011. John is concerned with whether DO178B “works”, that is, leads to high-quality code which is…