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…
It sounds like a mish-mash, doesn’t it? will probably read like a mish-mash, too. Because true interdisciplinary work always looks that way, I think. That is one of the main points I wish to get across. But first, let me get there. Concerning my last post, Leslie noted that the condition he labels “FAA requirement”…
I was browsing the invited lectures given under Martin Abadi’s College de France lecture series and came across this elegant, simple explanation of so-called Byzantine failures by the gentleman who invented the term, Leslie Lamport. Leslie’s two papers on the subject with Rob Shostak and Marshall Pease in the early 1980’s, Reaching Agreement in the…
I’ve been watching the phone-hacking scandal closely, even to the point of reading the Guardian’s timeline of the parliamentary debate last Wednesday (20th July) every few minutes or so. I don’t agree with those in parliament who suggested that “the people” are tired of it. This people most certainly is not. It says a lot…