Taivo Lints Blog

A book edited by Erik Hollnagel, David D. Woods and Nancy Leveson (and containing chapters by these and many other authors), from 2006, about an improved approach to safety management.

"Resilience Engineering" is a well-integrated collection of quite thorough explorations and analyses of safety management in complex systems, both on the theoretical level as well as in the form of case studies. Even though the title might give an initial impression of the book being focused on technical systems, it is actually quite universally applicable and looks at techno-social systems as wholes, mainly in the form of technologically oriented organizations.

The core idea of "Resilience Engineering" is to move the field of safety management from the kind of design-time analysis that has been expected to produce "demonstrably safe" systems that should be safe within predescribed working conditions but in reality still experience failures due to the unpredictability and complexity of the real world, to the construction of adaptively resilient systems that are actively monitoring and adjusting for dangerous deviations.

Also, the book calls for better accident models that do not view failures as simply breakdowns or deviations of the components from the design specifications, but also as events that may easily arise as occasional unexpected consequences of interactions between otherwise acceptably working parts: "Rather than looking for causes we should look for concurrences, and rather than seeing concurrences as exceptions we should see them as normal and therefore also as inevitable. This may at times lead to the conclusion that even though an accident happened nothing really went wrong, in the sense that nothing happened that was out of the ordinary. Instead it is the concurrence of a number of events, just on the border of the ordinary, that constitutes an explanation of the accident or event."

Additionally, the book notes that even if the theoretical basis for understanding and preventing the majority of failures would be well-developed and widely available (which it isn't), there is still a major practical concern to tackle: safety management incurs an additional cost for the system, and in real life the pressing need for higher efficiency keeps (justifiably) trying to minimize all costs. Therefore, "from a risk management perspective, the key question is how to keep concern for risk alive when things look safe". And this can be particularly difficult due to the effectively working safety measures seeming unnecessary to a superficial observer for the very reason that those measures successfully prevent the failures and leave an impression of a safe environment. Or, as the book puts it: "superficially a safety manager’s job is to handle irony: the core of a good safety culture is a self-defeating prophecy, and a whistle blower’s ultimate achievement is to be wrong". The solution is to create a well-developed and strong safety culture that avoids the erosion of critical safety measures in the endless push for efficiency.

I definitely found the book educative and enjoyable, and would recommend it to anybody who has a deeper interest in safety management and in the adaptivity issues of (complex) systems.

More info about the book at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0754649040/

A book originally from 1998, updated in 2001, about microorganisms that live in extreme environments.

The topics include:

• The main things an (Earth) organism needs (energy, liquid water, etc.).
• An overview of Earth's extreme inabited environments (hot springs, cold places, deep seas, deep terrestrial subsurface, deserts, very salty waters, places of extreme pH, oil).
• The main molecular mechanisms to cope with stressful (extreme) conditions.
• Practical usage of knowledge derived from extremophiles in biotechnology and medicine.
• Relevance of extremophile studies to the hypotheses of what is the correct (real) family tree of life.
• Gaia hypothesis.
• Possibility of, and search for, the life elsewhere in the Universe.

It is an easy & pleasant to read popular science book that still retains some of the harder scientific contents (especially the most relevant parts of molecular biochemistry), which I think is a good approach (um, after reading comments at Amazon, I would rephrase that as "easy & pleasant for scientifically minded persons who have already encountered a few biochemistry texts earlier in their life" :D ). The author Michael Gross, though currently a full time science writer, has been an active scientist in the field of extremophilic microbiology.

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0738204455/

A book by Ricard V. Solé and Brian C. Goodwin, originally from year 2000.

The cover gives an impression that the book is a discussion about what life is, but this is not the case. Instead, it is a good and relatively easy to read overview of a large number of tools and approaches that are often referred to as complexity science. There are deterministic chaos, emergence, criticality, self-organization, patterns in excitable media, entropy, Ising model, information theory, renormalization, self-similarity, sand-pile model, metabolic networks, genetic networks, cell differentiation, reaction-diffusion systems, biological clocks, neural nets, phase transitions, ant colonies, nest building in social insects, biodiversity, ecological stability, viral quasispecies, catalytic chemical networks, evolution and extinction, stock market fluctuations, urban growth, traffic models, etc.

As the page count is around 300, the book obviously doesn't go into great details of every concept, neither does it always have all terminology explained, neither is there a coherent overarching story. Thus I don't know if it would be a good reading for somebody who has never heard most of the presented ideas before, but for me it is a good collection of notes that can be used for sparking inspiration and for quickly remembering the key concepts, the details of which should then be looked up from other sources. So, in general I like it.

More information at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465019285/

and if you have access to Wiley InterScience, then: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/97519452/

The book discusses the notion of time (reversible vs. irreversible), gives a mathematical overview of transformation groups and statistical mechanics (Gibbs style), time series, information and communication (Shannon style), explores feedback and stability of systems containing feedback, and then goes on by trying to apply all that to understanding how organisms and brains work.

It apparently is a classic book, and most likely was state-of-the-art, innovative and influential when it first came out in 1948. However, I, in 2007, did not much enjoy reading it as most of the content is nowadays either well known or disproven. What I did get out of it was a quick glimpse into the state of science more than half a century ago.

More information at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/026273009X