This is a lecture 3 of the Systems Engineering curriculum from MIT and edX, Engineering the Space Shuttle. Links to the lectures: Origins of the Space Shuttle or The Making of a new Program Development of the Space Shuttle Bureaucratic Space War Political History of the Space Shuttle Space Shuttle Orbiter Subsystems Orbiter Structures & […]
Or a corollary to the title: Why a computer will never function intelligently. Mihai Nadin wrote a brilliant paper titled: Machine intelligence: a chimera. It can be accessed and read here on Springer. Nadin, M. AI & Soc (2019) 34: 215. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-018-0842-8 Abstract The notion of computation has changed the world more than any previous […]
This is lecture 2 of the Systems Engineering curriculum from MIT and edX, Engineering the Space Shuttle. Links to the lectures: Origins of the Space Shuttle or The Making of a new Program Development of the Space Shuttle Bureaucratic Space War Political History of the Space Shuttle Space Shuttle Orbiter Subsystems Orbiter Structures & Thermal […]
Control Engineering magazine just published a survey where respondents offered career advice. I extracted some that I thought was the most valuable. You can read entire report in the magazine. I love this quote: Set goals, work to accomplish goals, and don’t worry about anything. Here’s my advice: Dare mighty things! Refuse to do work […]
I always think that system engineering is about the people who work together having really good communication. And it’s that kind of communication that does good system engineering, tools or not! A little more on solid versus liquid. Solids could be shipped by rail. To say it another way, the diameter of the solids is […]
A conversation arose today about threat analysis and I responded that I am against this practice of doing threat analysis. I thought that others will benefit from reminding them about design goals and how security fits in them. Threat – countermeasure is easy to explain to a novice but produces very ugly and inefficient systems. […]
Cells compute. In each cell in you right now most of the energy burn is going to translation. That is, in the ribosomes where your DNA basically is turned into protein. The ribosomes operate within two orders of magnitude of the thermodynamic optimum which makes them about 10 to the fifth times better than all […]
If something works, it’s obsolete ‒ 2010: Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke The reason for the huge successful NASA perhaps to this day is Jim Webb. He was at NASA only for six or seven years and he shaped it. When he became the first NASA administrator, James Webb collected all NASA managers and said: […]
Watch Past International President Mohammed Murad from his 2018 Annual Convention session where he poses the question, is leadership for me? Find out how to answer this as he takes you through his 5 H’s of leadership: Head, Heart, Health, Humility and Happiness. I have something which is called five H’s of leadership. The […]
Slides I presented at the Automotive Cybersecurity conference at Detroit on Friday. The main message is captured in the last bullet in the Summary: We do not know how to build 100% reliable systems, we only know how to manage risk – your system will fail and you have to build for failure. This was […]
Alan Tatourian 