Predicting and Preventing the Unwanted
The bow-tie diagram was born very early in the presentation of a new course, the Graduate Diploma of Occupational Hazard Management, I believe in 1979. This was the first university post graduate course on the general subject of safety that…
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Thoughts on the science of risk and the role of risk engineers
I suggested in part 1 that imperfect people are normal and perfect people are a figment of our collective imagination. This is a catchy idea but I am sure the reality is that personal qualities exist on a scale…
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The enduring nature of Murphy’s reputation is fascinating in its own right. I rather like the idea that the essence of risk engineering can be expressed by a household name. Whether what we know as his law is in fact…
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There are two fundamental aspects of risk and its control that are literally household words. The first is the safety valve. This small item of risk engineering would have come to prominence in the early days of steam and it…
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While moving my home library I came across St Thomas Aquinas’ work entitled Philosophical Texts. St Thomas (1275 to 1274) was a well known and well regarded Sicilian philosopher. My translation by Thomas Gilby was published in 1951 by the…
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While I have a view that the search for causes is somewhat futile and the effort is misplaced, I am nevertheless interested in the reality of this. What if a number of people were asked to independently look at the…
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Editions with errata corrected became available from approximately November 2020.
Dr Mike Mentis mmentis@saol.com At Xmas 2018 I shook hands with Derek Viner. We’d last seen each other 56 years previously when we finished school. ‘What have you been up to?’ we each asked. Derek started his career as an…
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In the fourth sentence of the second paragraph, the text should read “it is highly unlikely in Risk work…”, not “highly uniquely”.