8 ms·
Leveson's fantastic Therac-25 paper is probably the most important document in the formative years of my young sweng career. I still re-read it every couple of
by sho_hn 2y ago
Leveson's fantastic Therac-25 paper is probably the most important document in the formative years of my young sweng career.
I still re-read it every couple of years, and it's held up a lot better than one of my other early favorites, which was Feynman's appendix to the Challenger report. In the sense that I still draw new thoughts and realizations from it as I re-read it with additional experience in some of the engineering and organizational disciplines it touches. Sad as it is, it's got a little bit of everything.
It's definitely got my vote for the I Ching of critical systems engineering.
Spend the time. Chances are you'll remember it.
- _peeley 2y agoDo you mind specifying the title of the paper? It appears there's quite a few papers[1][2][3] published concerning Therac-25 by an author named Leveson. [1] http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf [2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/274940 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/274940 [3] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8102762 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8102762
- sho_hn 2y agoGladly! It's the second of these, "An investigation of the Therac-25 accidents" (1993) w/ DOI 10.1109/MC.1993.274940. #1 is a later version that was an appendix to her book Safeware (which I have not read), and [3] is a nice second read that follows up on [2] many years later but isn't quite the relentless engineering detective story that makes the original so poignant.
- _peeley 2y agoThank you!
- stavros 2y agohttps://sci-hub.st/https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/274940 https://sci-hub.st/https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/2749...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- russdill 2y agoPDF of original journal pages: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~junfeng/08fa-e6998/sched/readings/therac25.pdf https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~junfeng/08fa-e6998/sched/readin...
- sho_hn 2y agoThis is the one :-). If I recall right, the journal scan had some additional diagrams some uploads have omitted, so while a PDF isn't the most ergonomic thing it's probably the safe bet.
- caioariede 2y agoI will take the opportunity to ask if there’s a good way to read PDFs using phone. How terrible it is!
- pests 2y agoProbably a Nobel to whoever solves this.
- nxobject 2y agoHow ironic that, at the time, she was in a professorship endowed by Boeing.
- phkahler 2y agoSafeware is good. I read it back in the day. Several good failure analysis.
- favorited 2y agoAgreed on the Levenson paper! Is there something specific about the Feynman appendix that you think hasn't aged as well, or is it more that you've squeezed all of the juice out of that fruit already?
- sho_hn 2y agoMore the latter! It's still a very charismatic text that I'm fond of, and it's of course also intensely quotable. But given its brevity it can only deliver so much.
- buildsjets 2y agoIf you want a much more detailed treatment that covers both every aspect of the technical issues, as well as the corporate and government malfeasance that lead to the disaster, consider “Truth, lies, and O-Rings” by Allan McDonald, the Thiokol program manager who would not sign of off on the launch and overruled by his executives. He had good things to say about Feynman, and definitely some axe grinding for other individuals. https://a.co/d/1f6MBUb https://a.co/d/1f6MBUb
- sho_hn 2y agoThanks!
- buescher 2y agoAs the kids say, this is correct. It's very good. If you have never read anything like it before, it could be mind-blowing. Her later work like Engineering a Safer World (available as a free pdf if you poke around on the MIT Press website) is merely good.
- therac26 2y agoThat paper hit me like a freight train, and I'm still recommending it whenever related topics occur. I can't say enough good about this.