
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- Rasmus Bååth's Research Blog Bayesian statistics and data analysis
- John Kruschke's "Dong Bayesian data analysis" blog Expanding and enhancing John’s book of same title (now in second edition!)
- Los Alamos Center for Bayesian Methods
- Charlie Kufs' "Stats With Cats" blog “You took Statistics 101. Now what?”
- "Impacts of Green New Deal energy plans on grid stability, costs, jobs, health, and climate in 143 countries" (Jacobson, Delucchi, Cameron, et al) Global warming, air pollution, and energy insecurity are three of the greatest problems facing humanity. To address these problems, we develop Green New Deal energy roadmaps for 143 countries.
- Mrooijer's Numbers R 4Us
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
- Mark Berliner's video lecture "Bayesian mechanistic-statistical modeling with examples in geophysical settings"
- Ives and Dakos techniques for regime changes in series
- Tim Harford's “More or Less'' Tim Harford explains – and sometimes debunks – the numbers and statistics used in political debate, the news and everyday life
- Giant vertical monopolies for energy have stopped making sense
- All about ENSO, and lunar tides (Paul Pukite) Historically, ENSO has been explained in terms of winds. But recently — and Dr Paul Pukite has insisted upon this for a long time — the oscillation of ENSO has been explained as a large-scale slosh due to lunar tidal forcing.
- Why "naive Bayes" is not Bayesian Explains why the so-called “naive Bayes” classifier is not Bayesian. The setup is okay, but estimating probabilities by doing relative frequencies instead of using Dirichlet conjugate priors or integration strays from The Path.
- Karl Broman
- "Consider a Flat Pond" Invited talk introducing systems thinking, by Jan Galkowski, at First Parish in Needham, UU, via Zoom
- Nadler Strategy, LLC, on sustainability Thinking about business, efficient and effective management, and business value
- The Alliance for Securing Democracy dashboard
- Beautiful Weeds of New York City
- Darren Wilkinson's introduction to ABC Darren Wilkinson’s introduction to approximate Bayesian computation (“ABC”). See also his post about summary statistics for ABC https://darrenjw.wordpress.com/2013/09/01/summary-stats-for-abc/
- Lenny Smith's CHAOS: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION This is a PDF version of Lenny Smith’s book of the same title, also available from Amazon.com
- Busting Myths About Heat Pumps Heat pumps are perhaps the most efficient heating and cooling systems available. Recent literature distributed by utilities hawking natural gas and other sources use performance figures from heat pumps as they were available 15 years ago. See today’s.
- Number Cruncher Politics
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
- Bob Altemeyer on authoritarianism (via Dan Satterfield) The science behind the GOP civil war
- All about Sankey diagrams
- Hermann Scheer Hermann Scheer was a visionary, a major guy, who thought deep thoughts about energy, and its implications for humanity’s relationship with physical reality
- Logistic curves in market disruption From DollarsPerBBL, about logistic or S-curves as models of product take-up rather than exponentials, with notes on EVs
- BioPython A collection of Python tools for quantitative Biology
- Why It’s So Freaking Hard To Make A Good COVID-19 Model Five Thirty Eight’s take on why pandemic modeling is so difficult
- Dollars per BBL: Energy in Transition
- Simon Wood's must-read paper on dynamic modeling of complex systems I highlighted Professor Wood’s paper in https://hypergeometric.wordpress.com/2014/12/26/struggling-with-problems-already-attacked/
- Fear and Loathing in Data Science Cory Lesmeister’s savage journey to the heart of Big Data
- Brendon Brewer on Overfitting Important and insightful presentation by Brendon Brewer on overfitting
- Earle Wilson
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION, reviews Reviews of Cathy O’Neil’s new book
- GeoEnergy Math Prof Paul Pukite’s Web site devoted to energy derived from geological and geophysical processes and categorized according to its originating source.
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION,
- Tony Seba Solar energy, electric vehicle, energy storage, and business disruption professor and visionary
- Mertonian norms
- Label Noise
- Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation
- Dominic Cummings blog Chief advisor to the PM, United Kingdom
- ggplot2 and ggfortify Plotting State Space Time Series with ggplot2 and ggfortify
- What If
- The Mermaid's Tale A conversation about biological complexity and evolution, and the societal aspects of science
- NCAR AtmosNews
- South Shore Recycling Cooperative Materials management, technical assistance and networking, town advocacy, public outreach
- Slice Sampling
- London Review of Books
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
climate change
- Warming slowdown discussion
- Grid parity map for Solar PV in United States
- Risk and Well-Being
- Ricky Rood's “What would happen to climate if we (suddenly) stopped emitting GHGs today?
- "A field guide to the climate clowns"
- Skeptical Science
- HotWhopper: It's excellent. Global warming and climate change. Eavesdropping on the deniosphere, its weird pseudo-science and crazy conspiracy whoppers.
- Mathematics and Climate Research Network The Mathematics and Climate Research Network (MCRN) engages mathematicians to collaborating on the cryosphere, conceptual model validation, data assimilation, the electric grid, food systems, nonsmooth systems, paleoclimate, resilience, tipping points.
- "When Did Global Warming Stop" Doc Snow’s treatment of the denier claim that there’s been no warming for the most recent N years. (See http://hubpages.com/@doc-snow for more on him.)
- Tamino's Open Mind Open Mind: A statistical look at climate, its science, and at science denial
- “Ways to [try to] slow the Solar Century''
- David Appell's early climate science
- The Green Plate Effect Eli Rabett’s “The Green Plate Effect”
- "Lessons of the Little Ice Age" (Farber) From Dan Farber, at LEGAL PLANET
- "Warming Slowdown?" (part 1 of 2) The idea of a global warming slowdown or hiatus is critically examined, emphasizing the literature, the datasets, and means and methods for telling such. In two parts.
- Sea Change Boston
- `Who to believe on climate change': Simple checks By Bart Verheggen
- Agendaists Eli Rabett’s coining of a phrase
- The Scientific Case for Modern Human-caused Global Warming
- Wind sled Wind sled: A zero carbon way of exploring ice sheets
- NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index report The annual assessment by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the radiative forcing from constituent atmospheric greenhouse gases
- The Carbon Cycle The Carbon Cycle, monitored by The Carbon Project
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
- The Sunlight Economy
- James Hansen and granddaughter Sophie on moving forward with progress on climate
- Climate at a glance Current state of the climate, from NOAA
- Social Cost of Carbon
- weather blocking patterns
- Mrooijer's Global Temperature Explorer
- Earth System Models
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
- Climate Change Denying Organizations
- "Betting strategies on fluctuations in the transient response of greenhouse warming" By Risbey, Lewandowsky, Hunter, Monselesan: Betting against climate change on durations of 15+ years is no longer a rational proposition.
- Eli on the spectroscopic basis of atmospheric radiation physical chemistry
- Tell Utilities Solar Won't Be Killed Barry Goldwater, Jr’s campaign to push for solar expansion against monopolistic utilities, as a Republican
- Climate Change Reports By John and Mel Harte
- Isaac Held's blog In the spirit of Ray Pierrehumbert’s “big ideas come from small models” in his textbook, PRINCIPLES OF PLANETARY CLIMATE, Dr Held presents quantitative essays regarding one feature or another of the Earth’s climate and weather system.
- US$165/tonne CO2: Sweden Sweden has a Carbon Dioxide tax of US$165 per tonne at present. CO2 tax was imposed in 1991. GDP has grown 60%.
- CLIMATE ADAM Previously from the Science news staff at the podcast of Nature (“Nature Podcast”), the journal, now on YouTube, encouraging climate action through climate comedy.
- Andy Zucker's "Climate Change and Psychology"
- Équiterre Equiterre helps build a social movement by encouraging individuals, organizations and governments to make ecological and equitable choices, in a spirit of solidarity.
- "Mighty Microgrids" Webinar This is a Webinar on YouTube about Microgrids from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), featuring New York State and Minnesota
- SolarLove
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- Wally Broecker on climate realism
- Exxon-Mobil statement on UNFCCC COP21
- "Climate science is setttled enough"
- Non-linear feedbacks in climate (discussion of Bloch-Johnson, Pierrehumbert, Abbot paper) Discussion of http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/2015GL064240/abstract
- "Getting to the Energy Future We Want," Dr Steven Chu
- "Impacts of Green New Deal energy plans on grid stability, costs, jobs, health, and climate in 143 countries" (Jacobson, Delucchi, Cameron, et al) Global warming, air pollution, and energy insecurity are three of the greatest problems facing humanity. To address these problems, we develop Green New Deal energy roadmaps for 143 countries.
Archives
Jan Galkowski
Category Archives: organizational failures
Losing sight of the big picture
When chasing political solutions to mitigating climate disruption, it’s long been tempting to go after relatively easy quick wins in the short term rather than facing up to the real problem: Emissions of Carbon Dioxide. So, in a world where … Continue reading
Posted in #youthvgov, air source heat pump, alternatives to the Green New Deal, American Solar Energy Society, an ignorant American public, an uncaring American public, Blackbody radiation, Bloomberg Green, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, bridge to somewhere, Buckminster Fuller, carbon dioxide, children as political casualties, climate economics, climate emergency, climate hawk, corporate litigation on damage from fossil fuel emissions, Cult of Carbon, decentralized electric power generation, development as anti-ecology, ecopragmatism, electric vehicles, electrical energy engineering, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuel infrastructure, fossil fuels, Glen Peters, grid defection, heat pump, Hermann Scheer, Humans have a lot to answer for, investment in wind and solar energy, James Hansen, Juliana v United States, keep fossil fuels in ground, Ken Caldeira, Mark Jacobson, mitigating climate disruption, On being Carbon Dioxide, organizational failures, Our Children's Trust, photovoltaics, Ray Pierrehumbert, solar democracy, solar domination, solar power, solar revolution, stranded assets, Susan Solomon, The Demon Haunted World, the green century, the tragedy of our present civilization, utility company death spiral, wind energy, wind power, wishful environmentalism
Tagged climate disruption, lack of climate ambition, short-lived climate pollutants
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Earth Day 2019: So how do people transition to the new energy economy?
I’ve been pretty hard on the Green New Deal. That’s partly because its proponents don’t seem to see that a transition to a new zero Carbon energy economy is inevitable. It’s opponents don’t see that either. It may not come … Continue reading
Posted in Amory Lovins, an ignorant American public, Ørsted, capitalism, climate business, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, climate justice, compassion, corporate citizenship, corporate litigation on damage from fossil fuel emissions, corporate responsibility, corporate supply chains, corporations, ecomodernism, electric vehicles, engineering, ethics, extended producer responsibility, extended supply chains, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuel infrastructure, Gaylord Nelson, global warming, Green New Deal, Hermann Scheer, investment in wind and solar energy, investments, John Farrell, Joseph Schumpeter, LBNL, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, local generation, local self reliance, Mark Carney, Mark Jacobson, microgrids, New England, NIMBY, organizational failures, Orsted, percolation theory, planning, public education, public welfare, RevoluSun, Richard Branson, science, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, Sonnen community, SunPower, sustainability, sustainable landscaping, Talk Solar, technology, temporal myopia, Tesla, the energy of the people, the green century, the right to know, the value of financial assets, Tony Seba, tragedy of the horizon, utility company death spiral, UU, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
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On lamenting the state of the Internet or Web
From time to time, people complain about the state of the Internet or of the World Wide Web. They are sometimes parts of governments charged with mitigating crime, sometimes privacy advocates, sometimes local governments or retails lamenting loss of tax … Continue reading
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, an ignorant American public, an uncaring American public, Anthropocene, being carbon dioxide, bollocks, Boston Ethical Society, bridge to nowhere, Buckminster Fuller, capricious gods, Carbon Worshipers, card games, civilization, climate change, consumption, corporate responsibility, Cult of Carbon, Daniel Kahneman, data centers, David Suzuki, denial, design science, ethical ideals, Faster Forward, Hyper Anthropocene, hypertext, ignorance, Internet, Joseph Schumpeter, making money, Mathbabe, networks, organizational failures, superstition, Ted Nelson, the right to know, the tragedy of our present civilization, transclusion, Xanadu, ZigZag
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Taking advantage of the natural skepticism and integrity of scientists and their co-workers, and their commitment to scientific process
I’ve seen this. One can seldom discuss or debate a science denier, whether at (my) presentations at UUAC Sherborn or in many places online, without their employing moving the goalposts or, when they fail to response to an explanation, trotting … Continue reading
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Meteorological Association, American Statistical Association, bridge to nowhere, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, climate disruption, climate economics, climate zombies, Daniel Kahneman, destructive economic development, engineering, ethics, evidence, force multiplier, George Sughihara, Humans have a lot to answer for, Hyper Anthropocene, ignorance, military inferiority, Minsky moment, organizational failures, Our Children's Trust, rationality, reasonableness, science, science denier, selfishness, the right to be and act stupid, the right to know, the stack of lies, the tragedy of our present civilization, United States
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On the rise of the Trumpistas …
Just a couple of things to write about The Obvious. I have written a couple of longer thoughts as Comments, here and here, at … And Then There’s Physics. I reiterate that I don’t believe any voter was hoodwinked, that … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Meteorological Association, American Solar Energy Society, American Statistical Association, AMETSOC, Anthropocene, atheism, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, bridge to nowhere, Buckminster Fuller, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Carbon Worshipers, citizenship, civilization, climate, climate change, climate disruption, climate zombies, coastal communities, consumption, corporate supply chains, cynicism, Daniel Kahneman, denial, disingenuity, Donald Trump, dynamical systems, Equiterre, exponential growth, extended supply chains, Exxon, fear uncertainty and doubt, forecasting, fossil fuels, geophysics, global warming, Hyper Anthropocene, ice sheet dynamics, ignorance, Joseph Schumpeter, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Interfaith Coalition for Climate Action, meteorology, Minsky moment, moral leadership, oceanography, organizational failures, physics, Principles of Planetary Climate, rationality, reason, reasonableness, risk, science, science denier, science education, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, Spaceship Earth, temporal myopia, the energy of the people, the right to be and act stupid, the tragedy of our present civilization, the value of financial assets, Tony Seba, wind energy, wind power, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, ``The tide is risin'/And so are we''
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Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION: A Review
(Revised and updated Monday, 24th October 2016.) Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’Neil, published by Crown Random House, 2016. This is a thoughtful and very approachable introduction and review to the societal and personal consequences of data mining, data science, … Continue reading
Posted in citizen data, citizen science, citizenship, civilization, compassion, complex systems, criminal justice, Daniel Kahneman, data science, deep recurrent neural networks, destructive economic development, economics, education, engineering, ethics, Google, ignorance, Joseph Schumpeter, life purpose, machine learning, Mathbabe, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, model comparison, model-free forecasting, numerical analysis, numerical software, open data, optimization, organizational failures, planning, politics, prediction, prediction markets, privacy, rationality, reason, reasonableness, risk, silly tech devices, smart data, sociology, Techno Utopias, testing, the value of financial assets, transparency
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Can the City of Boston adapt to and help mitigate climate disruption?
(See the major update at the bottom of this post as well.) (On “Less Science and More Social Science” at And Then There’s Physics) And Then There’s Physics is one of my favorite blogs discussing climate disruption and related policy … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, anomaly detection, Anthropocene, Bill Nye, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, bollocks, Boston, bridge to somewhere, citizenship, civilization, clean disruption, climate business, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, climate education, climate justice, Daniel Kahneman, destructive economic development, economics, engineering, environment, finance, floods, forecasting, Gaylord Nelson, global warming, Hermann Scheer, Hyper Anthropocene, insurance, investing, John Englander, Joseph Schumpeter, Kerry Emanuel, MA, Massachusetts, meteorology, Minsky moment, nor'easters, organizational failures, politics, risk, sea level rise, sociology, statistics, supply chains, sustainability, the right to be and act stupid, the right to know, the tragedy of our present civilization, the value of financial assets
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“Holy crap – an actual book!”
You’ll find links to Cathy O’Neil’s important book in the Blogroll here, as well as a link to reviews of it. I have not read it yet. While I have pre-ordered it, it’s not available. I have read the reviews, … Continue reading
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, Buckminster Fuller, business, citizen science, citizenship, civilization, complex systems, confirmation bias, data science, data streams, deep recurrent neural networks, denial, economics, education, engineering, ethics, evidence, Internet, investing, life purpose, machine learning, mathematical publishing, mathematics, mathematics education, maths, moral leadership, multivariate statistics, numerical software, numerics, obfuscating data, organizational failures, politics, population biology, prediction, prediction markets, privacy, quantitative biology, quantitative ecology, rationality, reason, reasonableness, rhetoric, risk, Schnabel census, smart data, sociology, statistical dependence, statistics, the right to be and act stupid, the right to know, the value of financial assets, transparency, UU Humanists
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A model of an electrical grid: A vision
Many people seem to view the electrical grid of the future being much like the present one. I think a lot about networks, because of my job. And I especially think a lot about network topologies, although primarily concerning the … Continue reading
Posted in abstraction, American Meteorological Association, anomaly detection, Anthropocene, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, Boston, bridge to somewhere, Buckminster Fuller, Canettes Blues Band, clean disruption, climate business, climate economics, complex systems, corporate supply chains, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, differential equations, distributed generation, efficiency, EIA, electricity, electricity markets, energy, energy reduction, energy storage, energy utilities, engineering, extended supply chains, green tech, grid defection, Hermann Scheer, Hyper Anthropocene, investment in wind and solar energy, ISO-NE, Kalman filter, kriging, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, Lenny Smith, local generation, marginal energy sources, Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Mathematics and Climate Research Network, mesh models, meteorology, microgrids, networks, New England, New York State, open data, organizational failures, pipelines, planning, prediction markets, public utility commissions, PUCs, rate of return regulation, rationality, reason, reasonableness, regime shifts, regulatory capture, resiliency, risk, Sankey diagram, smart data, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, Spaceship Earth, spatial statistics, state-space models, statistical dependence, statistics, stochastic algorithms, stochastics, stranded assets, supply chains, sustainability, the energy of the people, the green century, the value of financial assets, thermodynamics, time series, Tony Seba, utility company death spiral, wave equations, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
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Mark Carney: Why are financial regulators and central bank governors looking at climate?
http://www.cbc.ca/i/caffeine/syndicate/?mediaId=725874755644 “We don’t want a Minsky moment about climate.” Update, 2016-07-19 Interesting that Carney talks about “stabilizing at a temperature” when emissions are stabilized using a Carbon tax. He agrees with a Carbon tax, but he seems to have his … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, Anthropocene, Bloomberg, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BLUE, central banks, civilization, climate, climate business, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, climate education, climate justice, corporate litigation on damage from fossil fuel emissions, corporate supply chains, demand-side solutions, ecology, economics, education, environment, false advertising, finance, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuels, global warming, greenwashing, grid defection, insurance, investing, Joseph Schumpeter, liberal climate deniers, local generation, organizational failures, rate of return regulation, rationality, reasonableness, solar domination, Spaceship Earth, stranded assets, sustainability, the right to know, the value of financial assets, zero carbon
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Newt Gingrich and Van Jones. Right on.
It’s the thing. And it addresses how media and people forget about the actual statistics, and focus on the White Hot Bright Light. A study by Gelman, Fagan, and Kiss A study by Freyer A counterpoint to the Freyer study … Continue reading
Posted in American Statistical Association, Bayes, Bayesian, citizen science, criminal justice, Daniel Kahneman, ethics, evidence, fear uncertainty and doubt, humanism, Lives Matter, logistic regression, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, MCMC, organizational failures, population biology, rationality, reasonableness, risk, statistics, Susan Jacoby, the right to know
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Our Children’s Trust
Washington State Climate Lawsuit has a second win for the plantiffs. Detailed complaint here. The details are available at Our Children’s Trust. In granting the youth a remedy, Judge Hill noted the extraordinary circumstances of the climate crisis, saying, “this … Continue reading
Posted in Anthropocene, bridge to somewhere, carbon dioxide, case law, citizenship, climate, climate change, climate disruption, climate justice, corruption, Ecology Action, environment, environmental law, ethics, fossil fuel divestment, geophysics, global warming, greenhouse gases, Hyper Anthropocene, James Hansen, MA, Massachusetts, organizational failures, Our Children's Trust, politics, public utility commissions, PUCs, rate of return regulation, rationality, reasonableness, regulatory capture, science, Spaceship Earth, sustainability, the energy of the people, the right to be and act stupid, the tragedy of our present civilization, zero carbon
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This Earth Day: The Data
(Amendments on 25the April 2016.) Sorry, folks, it’s It’s not just El Niño. El Niño’s have gotten bigger over the years. (Click on image for a larger picture. Use your browser Back Button to return to blog.) (Click on image … Continue reading
Posted in American Petroleum Institute, Antarctica, Anthropocene, Arctic, Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, BEST, Bill Nye, carbon dioxide, Carbon Worshipers, Chevron, citizenship, civilization, climate, climate change, climate disruption, climate education, climate justice, corporate litigation on damage from fossil fuel emissions, corruption, Dan Satterfield, ecology, El Nina, El Nino, ENSO, environment, evidence, Exxon, false advertising, fear uncertainty and doubt, fossil fuels, fracking, geophysics, glaciers, glaciology, global warming, greenhouse gases, Gulf Oil, Hyper Anthropocene, ice sheet dynamics, icesheets, ignorance, James Hansen, John Cook, La Nina, meteorology, NASA, NCAR, NOAA, oceanography, open data, organizational failures, physics, rationality, reasonableness, regulatory capture, science, science education, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, sea level rise, selfishness, Spaceship Earth, statistics, sustainability, Texaco, the problem of evil, the right to know, the tragedy of our present civilization, UU Humanists, WAIS, WHOI, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, zero carbon
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Sheila Widnall on the responsibilities of engineers: The COLUMBIA accident and its CAIB
Highly recommended. Always moving, at least for me. Engineering is a serious business: http://mit.tv/AjqL6n Engineers and their programs are embedded in organizational structures. These structures control the success or failures of the program. In dealing with high risk technologies the … Continue reading

