Engineering: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

They also draw diagrams that show how a fault may have been caused by other credible faults – these are called fault trees.

Looking inwards, your structural subsystem of bones and muscles is also a holon with its own emergent properties such as your body size or muscular dexterity. Looking outwards, your family is a holon with its own emergent properties such as happiness or closeness. The highly connected neural connections in the brain create emergent consciousness. W

How do engineers actually deal with risk?

Forensic pathology is the science or the study of the origin, nature, and course of diseases. We can draw a direct analogy between medics monitoring the symptoms of ill health or disease in people with engineers monitoring the symptoms of poor performance or proneness to failure in an engineering system such as a railway network.

However, if they go unnoticed or are not acted on, then the pressure of events builds up until the balloon is very stretched indeed. At this point, only a small trigger event, such as a pin or lighted match, is needed to release the energy pent up in the system. The trigger is often identified as the cause of the accident but it isn’t.

systems and different again from a software specialist. These specialisms pose new risks since the relationships between levels and, more importantly, between the ways of understanding of specialists in those levels, are not straightforward.

We attempt to detect these hazards by looking for changes in important measurements of performance.

The answer is that we cannot eliminate risk, but we can learn lessons and we can do better to make sure the risks are acceptable.

In other words, energy is the capacity for work in a process and is an accumulation of power over time. During these processes, some of the impedance dissipates energy (resistance), some of it stores potential (capacitance) some of it stores flow (induction). For example, the dissipation or loss of energy through a resistance in an electrical circu