Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Who knows?

Earlier, there was a question about 'who is to know?' in the financial context. Economics is not called 'dismal' for no reason.

Then, we observed the frenzy created by the media about some car problems. Essentially, there are many assumptions about quality that go unaddressed until after the fact of accidents, it seems. Some of this may be due to a slackening of effort, since business has been driven by costs for some time now (that is, the CEO as king as opposed to making the consumer the king, okay?).

But, some problems arise from the difficulties of the cyber-physical. That is, this topic is now being addressed by the NSF, however there is much more to it than the current views cover.

It was good to see in the case of the car problems that experts who are outside the discipline, namely NASA and NAS, are being brought in as these issues go fairly deep. That action raises the level of talent being devoted to the problem and may become more necessary than not as products become more complicated.

By the way, one set of experts addresses myths vs facts. This is an interesting read as it shows that the manufacturer has to consider failure modes in order to instruct the driver what to do when an incident occurs that needs attention. Actually, problem avoidance requires identifying these modes of possible failure, too, so as to lower their possibility during design or to anticipate corrective actions, as we see here.

This, then, raises, again, the question of who represents the consumer in this case? Who would have thought that the merely rolling (as we all do when at a stop light on a hill while we move our foot from the brake to the gas pedal) would raise the likelihood of such a dire consequence?

Remarks:

02/26/2011 -- Another go.

02/08/2011 -- There was a report today concerning a study on the SUA problem that has been going on quietly. More news will be coming later when the report is technically analyzed.

08/13/2010 -- Recent news that it's user error.

04/19/2010 -- Genies, no not genius, indeed!

Modified: 02/26/2011

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