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…
On Saturday July 23, a high-speed train lost power and either slowed down or stalled, and a second one rear-ended it, in or near Wenzhou city, on a line in Hanhzhou province: the Independent newspaper reports. The lost power was said to be due to a lightning strike. Unfortunately, the collision took place on a…
In preparation for my talk at the 11th Bieleschweig Workshop, on the Fukushima accident and systems prone to extreme usafe events, I have prepared a synopsis of my contributions to the mailing list on the accident which we set up in Bielefeld, called A Fukushima Diary. It’s about 110pp long, so a little too long…
As a member of the German national committee for standards concerning the functional safety of electrical/electronic/programmable-electronic systems (known in the jargon as E/E/PE systems), I received on 11th May a document sent to another standards committee, proposing an international standardisation project for Root Cause Failure Analysis through the International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC, the ISO affiliate…
Yesterday, Werner U brought our attention, on a closed mailing list of which I have been a member for almost two decades, to a study by John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University, and Mark Stewart, a civil engineer at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales of the costs and potential…
Readers might like to know about the 11th Bieleschweig Workshop on System Engineering, which will take place in Bielefeld in the Senate Room of the University on 3rd-4th August, 2011. The topic will be Interacting with Extreme Risk: The Fukushima Accident. We organise the Bieleschweig Workshops. I think that there exist the foundations of a…
Richard Dawkins has the notion of memes. They are, crudely speaking, thoughts or ideas or ways of thinking or cultural traits, that spread through society. The idea occurs in his well-known book The Selfish Gene, published 45 years ago this year. I am interested in – and often frustrated by – the ways that ideas,…
I have been working this year with sociologists, in a research group composed largely of visitors to Bielefeld’s residential research institute ZiF. The group is working on Communicating Disaster. Then one happened – an enormous natural event triggered a disaster. Let me look at part of it, namely the system-safety disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi…