The other day I posted about the intersections of Systems Safety and web operations and engineering. One of the largest proponents of bringing a systems thinking perspective to safety (specifically ‘software safety’) is Dr. Nancy Leveson, who has been in that field (really a multidisciplinary field) for at least a couple of decades. She’s the...
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(Part 1 of 2 posts) I’ve been percolating on this post for a long time. Thanks very much to Mark Burgess for reviewing early drafts of it. One of the ideas that permeates our field of web operations is that we can’t have enough automation. You’ll see experience with “building automation” on almost every job...
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I make it no secret that my background is in mechanical engineering. I still miss those days of explicit and dynamic finite element analysis, when I worked for the VNTSC, working on vehicle crashworthiness studies for the NHTSA. What was there not to like? Things like cars and airbags and seatbelts and dummies and that...
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Given my recent (and apparently insatiable appetite) for studying the contexts, interface(s), and success and failure modes between man and machine, it’s not a surprise that I’ve been flying head-on into the field of Human Factors. Sub-disciplines include Cognitive Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). It would appear to me that there isn’t one facet of the field of...
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I’m a firm believer that context is everything, and that it’s needed in every constructive conversation we want to have as engineers. As a nascent (but adorable) engineering field, we discuss (in blogs, books, meetups, conferences, etc.) success and failure in a number of areas, including the ways in which we work. We don’t just...
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