The Aviation Paradox: Why We Can ‘Know’ Jetliners But Not Reactors     

John Downer 《Minerva》2017,55(2):229-248

Publics and policymakers increasingly have to contend with the risks of complex, safety-critical technologies, such as airframes and reactors. As such, ‘technological risk’ has become an important object of modern governance, with state regulators as core agents, and ‘reliability assessment’ as the most essential metric. The Science and Technology Studies (STS) literature casts doubt on whether or not we should place our faith in these assessments because predictively calculating the ultra-high reliability required of such systems poses seemingly insurmountable epistemological problems. This paper argues that these misgivings are warranted in the nuclear sphere, despite evidence from the aviation sphere suggesting that such calculations can be accurate. It explains why regulatory calculations that predict the reliability of new airframes cannot work in principle, and then it explains why those calculations work in practice. It then builds on this explanation to argue that the means by which engineers manage reliability in aviation is highly domain-specific, and to suggest how a more nuanced understanding of jetliners could inform debates about nuclear energy.  相似文献   

You Say “Myth” Like It’s a Bad Thing     

Christopher Hamlin 《Science & Education》2017,26(1-2):191-193

  相似文献   

<Emphasis Type="Bold">October’s</Emphasis><Emphasis Type="BoldItalic">Sumerki</Emphasis>     

David Randall 《Academic Questions》2017,30(3):365-370

  相似文献   

Erratum to: Who Benefits Most from a University Degree?: A Cross-National Comparison of Selection and Wage Returns in the US,UK, and Germany     

Renee Reichl Luthra  Jennifer Flashman 《Research in higher education》2017,58(8):879-879

  相似文献   

Clayton Childress: Under the Cover: The Creation,Production, and Reception of a Novel     

David Emblidge 《Publishing Research Quarterly》2017,33(4):497-499

  相似文献   

Materials Research in France: A Short-lived National Initiative (1982–1994)     

Emanuel Bertrand  Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent 《Minerva》2011,49(2):191-214

This paper describes the French initiative in materials research against both a national and an international background, in an attempt to disentangle the local circumstances, which prompted this governmental initiative, and to characterize the specific profile of materials research in France. In presenting a biography of the interdisciplinary program in materials research (PIRMAT), we argue that: i) the PIRMAT denotes a failure of the French science policy in materials research; ii) the leadership of the CNRS led to a specific style of research, quite different from the engineering approach of Materials Science and Engineering, and characteristic of a French style in materials research.  相似文献   

“Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?”     

Jeff Buechner 《Ethics and Information Technology》2017,19(3):221-236

  相似文献   

The Evolution of a National Research Funding System: Transformative Change Through Layering and Displacement     

Kaare Aagaard 《Minerva》2017,55(3):279-297

This article outlines the evolution of a national research funding system over a timespan of more than 40 years and analyzes the development from a rather stable Humboldt-inspired floor funding model to a complex multi-tiered system where new mechanisms continually have been added on top of the system. Based on recent contributions to Historical Institutionalism it is shown how layering and displacement processes gradually have changed the funding system along a number of dimensions and thus how a series of minor adjustments over time has led to a transformation of the system as a whole. The analysis also highlights the remarkable resistance of the traditional academically oriented research council system towards restructuring. Due to this resistance the political system has, however, circumvented the research council system and implemented change through other channels of the funding system. For periods of time these strategies have marginalized the role of the councils.  相似文献   

Mathematics for Its Own Sake     

Phillip Williams 《Academic Questions》2017,30(3):321-326

  相似文献   

The effect of acceleration signal processing for head impact numeric simulations     

Andrew Post  J. Michio Clark  D. G. E. Robertson  T. Blaine Hoshizaki  Michael D. Gilchrist 《Sports Engineering》2017,20(2):111-119

Brain injury research in sport employs a variety of physical models equipped with accelerometers. These acceleration signals are commonly processed using filters. The purpose of this research was to determine the effect of applying filters with different cutoff frequencies to the acceleration signals used as input for finite element modeling of the brain. Signals were generated from reconstructions of concussion events from American football and ice hockey in the laboratory using a Hybrid III headform. The resulting acceleration signals were used as input for the University College Dublin Brain Trauma Model after being processed with filters. The results indicated that using a filter with a cutoff of 300 Hz or higher had little effect on the resulting strain measures. In some cases there was some effect of the filters on the peak linear (8–30g) and rotational measures (1000–4000 rad/s²), but little effect on the finite element strain result (approximately 2–6 %). The short duration and high magnitude accelerations, such as the puck impact, were most affected by the cutoff frequency of different filters.  相似文献