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Normal Accidents
''Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies'' is a 1984 book by Yale sociologist Charles Perrow, which provides a detailed analysis of complex systems from a sociological perspective. It was the first to "propose a framework for characterizing complex technological systems such as air traffic, marine traffic, chemical plants, dams, and especially nuclear power plants according to their riskiness". Perrow argues that multiple and unexpected failures are built into society's complex and tightly coupled systems. Such accidents are unavoidable and cannot be designed around. Perrow's argument, based on systemic features and human error, is that big accidents tend to escalate, and technology is not the problem, the organizations are. Each of these principles is still relevant today. System accidents "Normal" accidents, or system accidents, are so-called by Perrow because such accidents are inevitable in extremely complex systems. Given the characteristic of the system invol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Perrow
Charles B. Perrow (February 9, 1925 – November 12, 2019) was an emeritus professor of sociology at Yale University and visiting professor at Stanford University. He authored several books and many articles on organizations, and was primarily concerned with the impact of large organizations on society. Academic appointments After attending the University of Washington, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and UC Berkeley, he received his PhD in sociology from Berkeley in 1960. He has held appointments at the universities of Michigan, Pittsburgh, Wisconsin, SUNY Stony Brook, and Yale, where he became emeritus in 2000. Since 2004 he has been a visiting professor at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford, in the winter and spring quarters. He served as the Vice President of the Eastern Sociological Society. He was also a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Northeast Blackout Of 2003
The Northeast blackout of 2003 was a widespread power outage throughout parts of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States, and most parts of the Canadian province of Ontario on Thursday, August 14, 2003, beginning just after 4:10 p.m. EDT. Most places restored power by midnight (within 7 hours), some as early as 6 p.m. on August 14 (within 2 hours), while the New York City Subway resumed limited services around 8 p.m. Full power was restored to New York City and Toronto on August 16. At the time, it was the world's second most widespread blackout in history, after the 1999 Southern Brazil blackout. The outage, which was much more widespread than the Northeast blackout of 1965, affected an estimated 10 million people in southern and central Ontario, and 45 million people in eight U.S. states. The blackout's proximate cause was a software bug in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy, an Akron, Ohio–based company, which rendered operators u ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Failure
Failure is the state or condition of not meeting a desirable or intended objective, and may be viewed as the opposite of success. The criteria for failure depends on context, and may be relative to a particular observer or belief system. One person might consider a failure what another person considers a success, particularly in cases of direct competition or a zero-sum game. Similarly, the degree of success or failure in a situation may be differently viewed by distinct observers or participants, such that a situation that one considers to be a failure, another might consider to be a success, a qualified success or a neutral situation. It may also be difficult or impossible to ascertain whether a situation meets criteria for failure or success due to ambiguous or ill-defined definition of those criteria. Finding useful and effective criteria, or heuristics, to judge the success or failure of a situation may itself be a significant task. In American history Cultural histor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Safety Engineering
Safety engineering is an engineering discipline which assures that engineered systems provide acceptable levels of safety. It is strongly related to industrial engineering/systems engineering, and the subset system safety engineering. Safety engineering assures that a life-critical system behaves as needed, even when components fail. Analysis techniques Analysis techniques can be split into two categories: qualitative and quantitative methods. Both approaches share the goal of finding causal dependencies between a hazard on system level and failures of individual components. Qualitative approaches focus on the question "What must go wrong, such that a system hazard may occur?", while quantitative methods aim at providing estimations about probabilities, rates and/or severity of consequences. The complexity of the technical systems such as Improvements of Design and Materials, Planned Inspections, Fool-proof design, and Backup Redundancy decreases risk and increases the cost. Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nuclear Safety And Security
Nuclear safety is defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as "The achievement of proper operating conditions, prevention of accidents or mitigation of accident consequences, resulting in protection of workers, the public and the environment from undue radiation hazards". The IAEA defines nuclear security as "The prevention and detection of and response to, theft, sabotage, unauthorized access, illegal transfer or other malicious acts involving nuclear materials, other radioactive substances or their associated facilities". This covers nuclear power plants and all other nuclear facilities, the transportation of nuclear materials, and the use and storage of nuclear materials for medical, power, industry, and military uses. The nuclear power industry has improved the safety and performance of reactors, and has proposed new and safer reactor designs. However, a perfect safety cannot be guaranteed. Potential sources of problems include human errors and external e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aviation Safety
Aviation safety is the study and practice of managing risks in aviation. This includes preventing aviation accidents and incidents through research, educating air travel personnel, passengers and the general public, as well as the design of aircraft and aviation infrastructure. The aviation industry is subject to significant regulation and oversight. Aviation security is focused on protecting air travelers, aircraft and infrastructure from intentional harm or disruption, rather than unintentional mishaps. Statistics Evolution In 1926 and 1927, there were a total of 24 fatal commercial airline crashes, a further 16 in 1928, and 51 in 1929 (killing 61 people), which remains the worst year on record at an accident rate of about 1 for every flown. Based on the current numbers flying, this would equate to 7,000 fatal incidents per year. For the ten-year period 2002 to 2011, 0.6 fatal accidents happened per one million flights globally, 0.4 per million hours flown, 22.0 fatali ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
International Encyclopedia Of The Social & Behavioral Sciences
The ''International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences'', originally edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, is a 26-volume work published by Elsevier. It has some 4,000 signed articles (commissioned by around 50 subject editors), and includes 150 biographical entries, 122,400 entries, and an extensive hierarchical subject index. It is also available in online editions. ''Contemporary Psychology'' described the work as "the largest corpus of knowledge about the social and behavioral sciences in existence." It was first published in 2001, with a 2nd edition published in 2015. The second edition is edited by James D. Wright. Subject Classification Contents include the following broad Subject Classification. Overarching Topics: Institutions and infrastructure, History of the social sciences and the behavioral sciences, Ethics of research and applications, Biographies, Integrative concepts and issues Methodology: Statistics, Mathematics and computer sciences, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Why Our Systems Fail And What We Can Do About It
Why may refer to: * Causality, a consequential relationship between two events * Reason (argument), a premise in support of an argument, for what reason or purpose * Grounding (metaphysics), a topic in metaphysics regarding how things exist in virtue of more fundamental things. * Why?, one of the Five Ws used in journalism Music Artists * Why? (American band), a hip hop/indie rock band formed in Oakland, California, in 2004 ** Yoni Wolf, formerly known by the stage name Why? * Why (Canadian band), a rock band formed in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1993 * Why?, a 1990s UK folk band, two members of which formed Quench in 2001 Albums * ''Why'' (Baby V.O.X album) or the title song, 2000 * ''Why?'' (Ginger Baker album) or the title song, 2014 * ''Why'' (Prudence Liew album) or the title song, 1987 * ''Why?'' (They Might Be Giants album), 2015 * ''Why?'', by Jacob Whitesides, 2016 * ''Why'', by Moahni Moahna, 1996 * ''Why?'', by the MonaLisa Twins, 2022 EPs * ''Why'' (Discharge EP) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster
On January 28, 1986, the broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven crew members aboard. The spacecraft disintegrated above the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 11:39a.m. EST (16:39 UTC). It was the first fatal accident involving an American spacecraft in flight. The mission, designated STS-51-L, was the tenth flight for the orbiter and the twenty-fifth flight of the Space Shuttle fleet. The crew was scheduled to deploy a communications satellite and study Halley's Comet while they were in orbit, in addition to taking school teacher Christa McAuliffe into space. The latter resulted in a higher than usual media interest and coverage of the mission; the launch and subsequent disaster were seen live in many schools across the United States. The cause of the disaster was the failure of the two O-ring seals in a joint in the shuttle's right solid rocket booster (SRB). The record-low temperatures of the launch had stiffened the r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Small Is Beautiful
''Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered'' is a collection of essays published in 1973 by German-born British economist E. F. Schumacher. The title "Small Is Beautiful" came from a principle espoused by Schumacher's teacher Leopold KohrDr. Leopold Kohr, 84; Backed Smaller States obituary, 28 February 1994. (1909–1994) advancing small, appropriate technologies, policies, and polities as a superior alternative to the mainstream ethos of "bigger is better". Overlapping environmental, soci ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
International Nuclear Event Scale
The International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) was introduced in 1990 by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in order to enable prompt communication of safety significant information in case of nuclear accidents. The scale is intended to be logarithmic, similar to the moment magnitude scale that is used to describe the comparative magnitude of earthquakes. Each increasing level represents an accident approximately ten times as severe as the previous level. Compared to earthquakes, where the event intensity can be quantitatively evaluated, the level of severity of a man-made disaster, such as a nuclear accident, is more subject to interpretation. Because of this subjectivity the INES level of an incident is assigned well after the fact. The scale is therefore intended to assist in disaster-aid deployment. Details A number of criteria and indicators are defined to assure coherent reporting of nuclear events by different official authorities. There a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fukushima Nuclear Disaster
The was a nuclear accident in 2011 at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Ōkuma, Fukushima, Japan. The proximate cause of the disaster was the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which occurred on the afternoon of 11 March 2011 and remains the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan. The earthquake triggered a powerful tsunami, with 13–14-meter-high waves damaging the nuclear power plant's emergency diesel generators, leading to a loss of electric power. The result was the most severe nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, classified as level seven on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) after initially being classified as level five, and thus joining Chernobyl as the only other accident to receive such classification. While the 1957 explosion at the Mayak facility was the second worst by radioactivity released, the INES ranks incidents by impact on population, so Chernobyl (335,000 people evacuated) and Fukushima (154,000 evacu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
