ENVS 2150 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Participatory Democracy, Market Saturation, Junk Food
29 Jan 2015
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Explanation of technological disasters focusing on organizational factors and combinations of problems related to the systems involved in the organization. Accidents occur not so much because of exceptional errors or inexcusable negligence but because of a number of quite regular errors that pile up. In dealing with technologies you are dealing with a system. This means a system of components: parts, procedures, and operators that all interact together to keep the system going. Technological disasters are inevitable over time if the technological systems have a great deal of interactive complexity and are tightly coupled. - lacking spatial, temporal, or other patterns of buffering among the components. With tight coupling things flow too rapidly or awkwardly to allow successful intervention. Tight versus loose coupling of technological components and subsystems. Tight coupling: the components and processes of a system are closely interconnected so it is difficult to isolate the failed part from the other parts.
