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The Design Flaw That Almost Wiped Out an NYC Skyscraper
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Joel Werner writes in Slate that when Citicorp Center was built in 1977 it was, at 59 stories, the seventh-tallest building in the world but no one figured out until after it was built that although the chief structural engineer, William LeMessurier, had properly accounted for perpendicular winds, the building was particularly vulnerable to quartering winds — in part due to cost-saving changes made to the original plan by the contractor. "According to LeMessurier, in 1978 an undergraduate architecture student contacted him with a bold claim about LeMessurier's building: that Citicorp Center could blow over in the wind," writes Werner. "LeMessurier realized that a major storm could cause a blackout and render the tuned mass damper inoperable. Without the tuned mass damper, LeMessurier calculated that a storm powerful enough to take out the building hit New York every 16 years." In other words, for every year Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse." (Read on for more.)
Pickens continues:
"LeMessurier and his team worked with Citicorp to coordinate emergency repairs. With the help of the NYPD, they worked out an evacuation plan spanning a 10-block radius. They had 2,500 Red Cross volunteers on standby, and three different weather services employed 24/7 to keep an eye on potential windstorms. Work began immediately, and continued around the clock for three months. Welders worked all night and quit at daybreak, just as the building occupants returned to work. But all of this happened in secret, even as Hurricane Ella, the strongest hurricane on record in Canadian waters, was racing up the eastern seaboard. The hurricane became stationary for about 24 hours, and later turned to the northeast away from the coast. Hurricane Ella never made landfall. And so the public—including the building's occupants—were never notified.
Until his death in 2007, LeMessurier talked about the summer of 1978 to his classes at Harvard. The tale, as he told it, is by turns painful, self-deprecating, and self-dramatizing--an engineer who did the right thing. But it also speaks to the larger question of how professional people should behave. "You have a social obligation," LeMessurier reminded his students. "In return for getting a license and being regarded with respect, you're supposed to be self-sacrificing and look beyond the interests of yourself and your client to society as a whole.""
Until his death in 2007, LeMessurier talked about the summer of 1978 to his classes at Harvard. The tale, as he told it, is by turns painful, self-deprecating, and self-dramatizing--an engineer who did the right thing. But it also speaks to the larger question of how professional people should behave. "You have a social obligation," LeMessurier reminded his students. "In return for getting a license and being regarded with respect, you're supposed to be self-sacrificing and look beyond the interests of yourself and your client to society as a whole.""
No way! This is America! You're supposed to extract as much wealth as you can for yourself! Society as a whole doesn't exist!
So what if the building blows over and kills thousands - I guess we won't buy another building from those guys will we! The market takes care of that sort of thing - it's like magic!
HW
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
That sounds familiar. Wasn't there an episode of Numb3rs based on that?
It's not clear at all to me why the OP or the editors wouldn't at least mention that this information is taken nearly word-for-word from the really excellent weekly podcast 99% Invisible, so I'm making this comment to get it on the record. Also, here's a gratuitous link to the podcast: http://99percentinvisible.org/ and the episode: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/structural-integrity/
...It's called beta!
This is why architects should (though allowed in many countries) never be let sign off structural computations.
It's interesting to consider that the contractors were able to keep this secret despite its news value. This may challenge those who are against conspiracy theorists: 'The story you're telling would come out'. The Snowden revelations have shown that many hints WERE accurate - but some strongly underestimated what the NSA was up to. Conspiracy theorist 1, others 0 on this one...
is old.
Seriously, Slashdot?
"In return for getting a license and being regarded with respect, you're supposed to be self-sacrificing and look beyond the interests of yourself and your client to society as a whole."
We shall never see his like again in our lifetimes.
Since this happened in the 70s some of us have actually heard about this plenty of times by now. =D
Yes, it does, pretty well. I've used a PE (Professional Engineer) for exactly that reason - they "sell" trustworthiness, objectivity. The person I bought my house from and I paid the PE precisely because we know they sell the truth, rather than telling either of us what we want to hear.
That's the same thing CPAs sell - the market pays Price Waterhouse Coopers to find the truth, rather than skewing things.
My understanding is that tuned mass dampers typically act laterally (e.g., N-S or E-W). With quartering winds, though, the motion would be torsional, so the tuned mass damper would not be effective for that mode, would it?
When did (s)he graduate? Where did (s)he end up? Doesn't (s)he deserve at least a minor credit in this story?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Another engineering fail is the collapse of indoor walkways at a Kansas City hotel. Except the fail actually killed over 100 people:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse
Interestingly, the _original_ designs for both the walkways and the Citigroup Center tower case were safe. In both cases contractors requested design changes, and the engineering firms didn't do a proper review when approving them.
I wish I could find an appropriate citation - the example I recall was a bridge which needed to be torn apart and repaired because of the use of a different type of bolt securing the framework. The replacement had similar tensile and shearing strength, but several years later the bolts started failing at a much higher than expected rate, requiring the bridge to be retrofitted with the original fastener. It turned out that the new bolt (while actually stronger in some respects than originally required) was subject to vibration stresses. The review permitting the substitution focused on the strength of the bolt required for the application, but the data showing that the bolt was subject to metal fatigue if subjected to extended vibration wasn't available or considered at that time.
Changes such as these are actually not too rare; I suspect that in most cases, the substitutions work exactly as expected, but when we're discussing infrastructure elements of this scope a single failure is not merely troublesome but often catastrophic.
I know hindsight is 20/20 but not considering the effect of wind hitting the corners of the building seems unbelievable. With no support at the corners it seems obvious* that the easiest way to cause a failure would be to apply force directed towards a corner. TFA does say that wind at the corners is not usually an issue, but when designing something so radically different you have to consider the effects of those differences.
*For anyone who has ever played with Lego: imagine building something that looks like that building and think of the easiest way to push it over. Consider how you control the direction when felling a tree.
A teetering bank towering over a church?
So all the newspapers of the USA were closed and no TV stations were broadcasting news? Certainly today it would make a strong story - after all we're resurrecting it after all these years; I'm dubious that the fact that the newspapers of New York were shut would be a such a barrier then.
LeMessurier realized that a major storm could cause a blackout and render the tuned mass damper inoperable. Without the tuned mass damper, LeMessurier calculated that a storm powerful enough to take out the building hit New York every 16 years.
Sonds like he forgot to account for systematic risk. Mutiple failures caused by one underlying event having a higher probability than unrelated failures. Its a common problem with the quantitative approach to analyzing failures.
Have gnu, will travel.
I want to be in support of unions, but then you read about shit like this. Basically, "Hey, let's render inoperative some vital equipment necessary to make the determination on whether 10 blocks of Manhattan need to be evacuated because they weren't wired by union electricians"...
One time, the readings went off the chart, then stopped. This provoked more bafflement than fear, since it seemed unlikely that a hurricane raging on Lexington and Fifty-third Street would go otherwise unnoticed at Forty-sixth and Park. The cause proved to be straightforward enough: When the instrumentation experts from California installed their strain guages, they had neglected to hire union electricians. "Someone heard about it," LeMessurier says, "went up there in the middle of the night, and snipped all the wires."
In other words, for every year Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse.
Well, no. That figure only applies if a power outage (affecting both the city power and the building's emergency power, so as to disable the building's tuned mass damper) occurs simultaneously with every occurrence of high winds. Or if the building's owners decide to just turn off the tuned mass damper for giggles, and leave it turned off for a decade and a half.
Far more interesting - and potentially scary - was the fact that even with the mass damper, the building would expect to see winds sufficient to cause toppling approximately once every 55 years. As the building is now approaching its fortieth birthday, there's a better than even chance that it would have fallen by now.
~Idarubicin
A construction flaw
“How the hell can you ignore this?” - Robert Boisjoly, Thiokol booster rocket engineer for the Challenger
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02...
“They completely ignored me in order to save Tepco money,” - Kunihiko Shimazaki, a retired professor of seismology at the University of Tokyo
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03...\
For things that are too big to fail and would cause major disaster, the corporate shield must be removed and executive management must be held directly responsible. Financially and criminally.
Yeah, I remember how well that worked in the 90's
Remember when Arther Anderson stood up to Enron and refused to sign their books. And in turn sacrificed the lucrative consulting contracts with Enron for only CPA fees.
As opposed to simply adding a footnote disavowing the report before signing it anyway.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
The original New Yorker article had a fascinating tidbit: when the architect realized the danger, he arranged to deploy a network of strain gauges to monitor the actual stresses in the building's critical structural nodes. This was done as an emergency, overnight IIRC. Several days later, the data stopped flowing. It turns out that the electrician's union found out that it was done without the union contract and had the wires cut.
they "sell" trustworthiness, objectivity.
Trustworthiness is not objective.
we know they sell the truth
Truth is not objective either.
Citation
The article makes me think of the Hancock Tower in downtown Boston. It had all sorts of issues with the wind including the large glass panels falling from the building to the streets below.
LeMessurier calculated that a storm powerful enough to take out the building hit New York every 16 years." In other words, for every year Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse."
Umm, actually that would be p=1-(1/E)^(1/16)=0.0605869 (about 1-in-16.5052).
I thought the shredding was technically legal because it was presubponea
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Might this be what you were perhaps remembering? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig_ceiling_collapse ? Was the "good enough" epoxy that ultimately caused the issue.
I've heard news reporting before on this subject. The way it goes is this: the architect submits his designs, which are subject to review. Once the green light's given, construction begins. Now, engineers on the project notice a way that they can cut costs or construction time, or somebody requests a modification to the original design (perhaps to add a restroom or breakroom, perhaps to add or remove a wall or subdivide a floor differently). ...
I wish I could find an appropriate citation ...
The Kansas City Hyatt Regency Skywalk disaster, 17 July 17 1981, is an excellent case study. Before the collapse of the WTC South Tower it was the deadiest structural collapse in U.S. histories (dam failures are another story entirely). Until 9-11 the CitiCorp Center was well placed to beat it.
In the Hyatt Regency case the design of the double skywalk was changed during constructution, replacing a continuous steel rod that supported both skywalks with two rods, one from the roof to the upper skywalk, and one from the upper skywalk to the lower. Problem was the design had the continuous rod bearing the full load, the change made the upper skywalk bear the load of the lower skywalk (and the people on it) when it was only supposed to be holding up people on the upper skywalk and nothing else.
As built the skywalk was so overloaded that eventual collapse was possible even without any load. Naturally when it did fail it would be at a time when both the upper and lower skywalks were heavily loaded with people, and the floor crowded below. 114 died, 216 were injured - many seriously.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Why look there only?
Look at all the software hiding behind various licenses that include clauses to try and escape responsibility?
Many EULA's from corps such as Microsoft and Adobe for example. Then there's Open Source licenses such as GPL and BSD.
That's actually an interesting engineering ethics issue: Can you, as a licensed software engineer, in good conscience release software under any license with such clauses, without totally violating your responsibilities and duties as an engineer?
My personal take on it is that no, you can't. Hence, I work as a freelancer, which means I can refuse contracts that would cause such a violation, or leave a project which institutes changes that would cause such a violation. All my contracts have clauses which clearly outline what my responsibilities are as a software engineer, including whistleblowing on unsafe practices.
This case is one of the usual case studies that make up many Engineering Ethics courses (at least it was brought up in mine). The nice thing about this case is that in the end, it all worked out for the better, and is a good news story rather than a disaster.
The other typical case studies are the Therac 25, Challenger Disaster, Hyatt Walkway Collapse and in Canada the Quebec Bridge collapse (which also lead to the creation of the Iron Ring.
There is a significant portion of the Engineering education that is dedicated to reminding prospective Engineers of their responsibilities to society, and the power they can potentially wield. Ethics is also a significant portion of the licensure to get one's professional designation.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
I don't see it -- the summary was taken word-for-word from a podcast? As in, someone transcripted and submitted it, including the quotes?
That podcast certainly wasn't the first source to report on the Citicorp Center design flaw -- there was article in the New Yorker in 1995 about it ( http://www.newyorker.com/archi... ).
Damninteresting:
Diane Hartley contacted him to ask some technical questions about the design, which he was delighted to address. Hartley's professor had expressed doubts regarding the strength of a stilted skyscraper where the support columns were not on the corners. ... But the conversation got him thinking, and he started doing some calculations on just how much diagonal wind the structure could withstand. He was particularly interested in the effects of an engineering change made during construction which had seemed benign at the time: numerous joints were secured with bolts rather than welds.
Slate:
According to LeMessurier, in 1978 an undergraduate architecture student contacted him with a bold claim about LeMessurier’s building: that Citicorp Center could blow over in the wind. The student (who has since been lost to history) was studying Citicorp Center and had found that the building was particularly vulnerable to quartering winds (winds that strike the building at its corners). Normally, buildings are strongest at their corners, and it’s the perpendicular winds (winds that strike the building at its faces) that cause the greatest strain. But this was not a normal building. LeMessurier had accounted for the perpendicular winds, but not the quartering winds. He checked the math and found that the student was right. He compared what velocity winds the building could withstand with weather data and found that a storm strong enough to topple Citicorp Center hits New York City every 55 years. But that’s only if the tuned mass damper, which keeps the building stable, is running. LeMessurier realized that a major storm could cause a blackout and render the tuned mass damper inoperable. Without the tuned mass damper, LeMessurier calculated that a storm powerful enough to take out the building his New York every 16 years.
people.duke.edu:
The student wondered about the columns--there are four--that held the building up. According to his professor, LeMessurier had put them in the wrong place. "I was very nice to this young man," LeMessurier recalls. "But I said, 'Listen, I want you to tell your teacher that he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, because he doesn't know the problem that had to be solved.' I promised to call back after my meeting and explain the whole thing." When LeMessurier called the student back, he related this with the pride of a master builder and the elaborate patience of a pedagogue; he, too, taught a structural-engineering class, to architecture students at Harvard. Then he explained how the peculiar geometry of the building, far from constituting a mistake, put the columns in the strongest position to resist what sailors call quartering winds--those which come from a diagonal and, by flowing across two sides of a building at once, increase the forces on both. For further enlightenment on the matter, he referred the student to a technical article written by LeMessurier's partner in New York, an engineer named Stanley Goldstein. LeMessurier recalls, "I gave him a lot of information, and I said, 'Now you really have something on your professor, because you can explain all of this to him yourself.'"
...
LeMessurier had long since established the strength of those braces in perpendicular winds--the only calculation required by New York City's building code. Now, in the spirit of intellectual play, he wanted to see if they were just as strong in winds hitting from forty-five degrees. His new calculations surprised him. In four of the eight chevrons in each tier, a quartering wind increased the strain by forty per cent. Under normal circumstances, the wind braces would have absorbed the extra load without so much as a tremor. But the circumstances were not normal. A few weeks before, during a meeting in his office, LeMessurier had learned of a crucial change in the way the braces were joined.
Read this when it was in the New Yorker in 1995.
I particularly like the part where LeMessurier, the structural engineer given most of the credit for this giant ugly glass-and-steel rectangle on stilts (with a *gasp* slanted roof, how exciting!) calls the Old Saint Peters Church that it was built to accommodate “a crummy old building the lowest point in Victorian architecture."
If that's the sentiment of the people designing our buildings, then it's no wonder that US cities are such colossal eyesores.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
They treated the walkways as a 'black box' condition. It didn't matter to the buildings being connected if it was done using one support rod or two, from the standpoint of the two buildings there was no difference. Thus, only the walkways themselves were affected by the change, and that's the only element they reviewed at length. Obviously, even that review failed terribly, overlooking something which seems in retrospect to be obvious.
I'm sure you (and most other /. readers) already appreciate the flaw in this sort of logic. I'm not saying that every change needs to put the review process back at square one, but rather that changes need to be reviewed in more than the narrow context of the single element being changed. It wouldn't have helped here (and I'm neither an architect nor a construction engineer), but it just might have. "Hey - all of your stresses from those two walkways are coming in on this one rod - is my building going to take it?" followed by "Damn, you're right. Our walkways will both be loading up that one rod. Lemme think about that..."
Thats only if its your general practice and not being done out of the blue *and* you have no reasonable grounds to suspect you may need them..
You can't go 'well I see a court case coming.. I *might* be up for a subpoena, better start shredding'
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
What jurisdiction do you live in that actually licenses software engineers?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Good point. The real problem in context to the walkway was a very fundamental change.Very long support rods vs short segmented support per floor. But as I read and I think you aare correct we as humans really don't think like that. If I had mods I bump you up.
This entire thing started because a church decided they wanted to make a building unsafe. Another church provided volunteers to help with their clandestine evacuation plan. As anyone logical understands, if an evacuation plan isn't public, it can't work. It's like an exit sign that is hidden. It doesn't work. These church people almost killed tens of thousands of people. That is typical of their kind.
No. They had an idea to save time and money (to use bolts instead of welds for certain braces), and they submitted it to LeMessurier's firm, which approved it after some analysis, which turned out to have been done wrong. It wasn't the contractor's fault, they didn't have the expertise to evaluate whether the change would work or not, and they properly submitted it to those who did.
Why not? As long as you explicitly note that you are NOT guaranteeing it under your engineering license, and you aren't providing it under conditions where signed-off software would be required, why would it be unethical?
Ethics -- in general, not in the sense of a legislated code of ethics -- requires I stand by any guarantees I make. It doesn't require I always make such guarantees.
Only the New Yorker story where LeMessurier supposedly talked directly to a male engineering student directly conflicts with the others. Maybe the New Yorker made that part up for color.
An engineering student named Diane Hartley contacted him to ask some technical questions about the design, which he was delighted to address. Hartley's professor had expressed doubts regarding the strength of a stilted skyscraper where the support columns were not on the corners. "Listen, I want you to tell your teacher that he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about," LeMessurier told Hartley, "because he doesn't know the problem that had to be solved."
then later giving credit to Hartley:
Diane Hartley--the engineering student who had originally identified the error and alerted LeMessurier--almost certainly saved hundreds of lives and millions of dollars with her sharp eye and intrepid action.
I wonder if the BBC documentary has its own version or if it supports one of the others?
So are you really saying that Al Qaeda truck-bombed the wrong building ??? You know, take out one stilt, and it's game over. I guess maybe the building is protected with those concrete barriers, isn't it?
In my experience most secrets come out eventually..
How would you know?
There was even a case of a British royal heir that was likely murdered, a situation that would have endangered the monarch who did it (ordered it done). It took several centuries but they think they've found the body (it was found under a staircase).
It wasn't a royal heir, it was a king (Edward V), after being deposed in 1483 by his successor, King Richard III. The probable body (alongside his supposed younger brother) was found about 200 years later in Charles II's reign. Ironically, Richard III's own remains also remained hidden until last year. Historians still cannot agree who was responsible for killing Edward V, but modern thought is that the rumour that it was Richard was no more than Tudor propaganda - so the "secret" still holds.
PEs are more like the military. You must be willing to follow the rules, even when the rules are wrong. Questioning and independent thought are not rewarded. You spend more time justifying your decision than making it, and whether it works is irrelevant, so long as you can prove it was proper. Let the guys who write the regs worry about what's proper.
That's the same thing CPAs sell - the market pays Price Waterhouse Coopers to find the truth, rather than skewing things.
Yeah, those CPAs auditing Enron did a bang-up job of it, didn't they?
Learn to love Alaska
Many states in the US now license software engineers because the national organization now has criteria. A problem is that you need sign-off from an existing PE who knows your work, so there is a bootstrapping problem. A new software PE has to be approved by an existing PE, but there are virtually no existing software PEs to approve the first generation.
Of course, it's always been possible to work under the same ethical guidelines voluntarily. More than once I've told a client I won't do something because it would be akin to malpractice.
Arthur Anderson was a 100-year old brand worth $9.3 billion. Because they violated the public trust, they are now worth about $0. The company still exists, but noone will buy from them.
Sony, on the other hand, is still selling electronics after rooting their customers' computers wholesale. Electronics company does something unethical - they have a PR problem for a few months. CPA does something unethical - the market executed them.
> Yeah, those CPAs auditing Enron did a bang-up job of it, didn't they?
The 100-year old firm that audited Enron was worth over nine BILLION dollars at the time. It's now worth a few thousand, because nobody will ever hire them. The market executed them.
Compare Sony and their root kit.
Can you, as a licensed software engineer, in good conscience release software under any license with such clauses, without totally violating your responsibilities and duties as an engineer?
I have an engineering degree, but am not a "professional engineer". I've worked for over a decade on proprietary embedded projects based largely on open-source software.
We generally write good code (though there will always be known issues) and we provide extensive support for our products, and charge accordingly.
On the other hand, we also contribute features and bugfixes back to the upstream open-source projects.
I don't see a conflict.
Hurray. Another guild to protect jobs from outsiders. As if the US travesty of what trade unions should do, wasn't bad enough by itself.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
This is less of an issue than you make it out to be. I got my PE license with the computer engineering test, and I'd happily sign off on somebody taking the software engineering exam. I would have taken the software engineering PE exam, except it was not offered in my stated at the time (Texas). Coincidentally, Texas was the first to offer that exam.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
Yes and no. There should be barriers to entry for professions where lives are on the line.
Frankly, getting a PE license is not difficult, provided you are not a totally shitty engineer.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
The 100-year old firm that audited Enron was worth over nine BILLION dollars at the time. It's now worth a few thousand, because nobody will ever hire them. The market executed them.
A system that makes sure a failure doesn't occur a second time is better than nothing, but it's not as good as a system that makes sure the first failure doesn't happen. (Whether it's "good enough" depends on how acceptable it is to suffer that first failure)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I called the Texas licensing board asking how this is supposed to work and the person who answered pretty much said "yeah, you're screwed, unless you've been working as some other type of engineer".
I'd really like to talk to you about just how you went about getting licensed, and under what conditions you'd sign off on someone else. If you're nearby, maybe I can buy you lunch sometime. I can be reached at deepmagicbeginshere AT gmail.
...at least according to the summary, wasn't this a little histrionic?
"Without the tuned mass damper, LeMessurier calculated that a storm powerful enough to take out the building hit New York every 16 years." In other words, for every year Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse."
No, the "lack of a tuned mass damper" was already presupposing that the POWER was out. The power doesn't go out in NYC all that often, and even if it did...Would it have been impossible to have, I dunno, 5 backup diesel generators tested in rotation every day to provide emergency power to the tuned mass damper in the event of a coincidental power outage AND storm?
-Styopa
Most engineering graduates aren't PEs - you don't need the credential to work as an engineer. It indicates a certain level of professionalism, so people can choose to hire a PE. Of course in some life-safety situations there might be a regulation saying you can't do X (build a highway bridge) until a PE signs off the design.
It's not like a union where it's illegal to hire people that have identical qualifications. It pretty much just defines the label "Professional Engineer" to mean someone who has passed the test etc. to show they are qualified. If you want to hire an untested engineer, you're free to do so, and most people do exactly that.
* I'm not currently a PE, nor an expert in the field, so I may be mistaken about something in this post and I welcome any corrections.
I'm trying to avoid being a polarized element of Slashdot. I'm absolutely a believer in following the Yellow Brick Road - but to me, that's the narrow yellow stripe down the middle (and yes, I know that's a good way to get run over).
In one of my classes, during the "engineering ethics" segment we had nearly every, it was a guarantee this particular professor would bring it up at least once.
The punch line was that the guys insurance actually went DOWN after the whole ordeal. Something about people actually appreciating someone owning up to their mistake instead of bullshitting and trying to cover their ass. Go figure.
Interesting captcha: Cowboys. I graduated from Oklahoma State engineering. GO Pokes!
Cut the bullshit. The Texas Software PE license required among other things "At least 16 years of creditable experience performing engineering work" and "References from at least nine people, five of whom must be licensed engineers." Note that "creditable" means "experience working under a professional engineer".
Fortunately, despite the IEEEs push, very few states require licensing of any sort to write or sell software. If they do, I suppose I'll be forced out of my career, which has included working on medical devices. Fuck them and I hope they all die; they're certainly trying to kill me. Also note that the ACM split with the IEEE over this very issue.
http://www.tbpe.state.tx.us/li...
Point out the 16 years of experience requirement, please.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
Why not? As long as you explicitly note that you are NOT guaranteeing it under your engineering license, and you aren't providing it under conditions where signed-off software would be required, why would it be unethical?
Ethics -- in general, not in the sense of a legislated code of ethics -- requires I stand by any guarantees I make. It doesn't require I always make such guarantees.
Actually, in Canada I believe you can't do what you're proposing, and that is probably true for many other common law countries. You can't turn off your professionalism, because you can't withdraw from the duty of care you owe to your customers (even if you're not paid). This is due to the Hedley-Burne decision
I learned this almost 30 years ago in Engineering school, but I'm reasonably certain it still holds.
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
If only they did that at Fukushima.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
And guess where Enron is now. Dead, its CEO in jail. Falling on your sword while painful is necessary.
And I've worked with sealed generators designed to be submerged. It's cheaper to run an exhaust pipe and intake pipe 30 feet in the air, than mount a generator 3 stories up.
And it wouldn't have mattered much for fukushima, as the fuel was contaminated by the seawater. Though the responders would have had more options if they had a fuel-less working generator.
There were a lot of simple almost-free things that could have been done differently with the generators to prevent the problems caused by loss of power (then we'd know if the problems were caused by the earthquake, as the people responsible for the generators assert).
Learn to love Alaska
Actually what I do is more heavy wizardry than deep magic. :)
Except that PWC (and others) _were_ found to be skewing things.
Such a system is impossible. There are reasons sayings like "What can go wrong, will go wrong,"
and "When man makes something idiot proof, nature makes a better idiot" exist. Utopia ignores everything we know about the universe.
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
(Extra CamelCaps mine for emphasis)
I got tired of the caps in HughPickensDOTcom so I finally punched it in...
And there isn't a site! Instead, it's a rewrite to PoncaCityWeLoveYou.com of PoncaCityWeLoveYou fame previously here on Slashdot.
Anyone know why he rebranded into a shell redirect name away from the old one?
As for not mentioning things, it's typical lax editorial policy allowing their favorite submitters to slam stuff through.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Certainly, if its designed to work that way I agree you are right. In comparison to the impact, it's just seem like it's the one time where you say "this really has to work and we should spare no expense to make sure that it does". What is particularly guiling about this one is that the design issues and consequences were known and understood.
It would seem they didn't spent enough to make sure it wouldn't fail. It's heard with such repetition in industrial accidents.
I don't know the specifics surrounding the failures of the generators at Fukushima. Are you saying the generators were damaged as well?
The Japanese parliment commissioned a report (warning:pdf) which found it was "wholely man made" systemic failures that led to the generator and sea wall not functioning.
However, what is it you mean about what could have been done differently?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
> Meanwhile, the partner who spearheaded the push got sufficient bonuses (from AA) to compensate him for the lack of any future career.
> He was on their executive board by the end of it pulling in a fat, fat bonus every year based exclusively on his Enron relationship.
Does this supposed person have a name? Any citation for any of that?
However, what is it you mean about what could have been done differently?
Mostly design and engineering issues. Designing the systems to work during catastrophies, rather than having backups that are very likely to fail in the event of a primary failure.
The heat from a melt-down is more than enough to power systems that would prevent the melt-down (not just passive cooling, but emergency turbines within the plant, generating lower voltage than the main ones to run on when mains power is lost, looping primary power off-site was a design failure I remember pointing out to the engineer in my first tour of a nuclear plant, when I was 8. The "It'll never happen" did, just not at his plant.
Learn to love Alaska
Texas licensed Software Engineers before there was an exam for such. The only way to get licensed was to get a waiver, which required the 16 years of "creditable" experience. Now you "only" need 8 with a non-accredited degree (CS degrees are not accredited), plus the two exams.
F-22 was terminated based on the allegation of risk to its one single occupant.
The CGI reconstruction of the collapse is at around 7:22 in that video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...