Activity answers
Study Note: As outlined in the text I have not provided answers to all Activities. This is for two reasons:
For some activities only you can devise the answer and any I gave would be distracting or unhelpful.
For others in-text answers are given.
6.3 Where is the complexity and what is it? When I reflect on my experiences of child-support, I attribute the properties of mess, complex, or hard-to-understand to the situation. So, are mess, complex, and hard-to-understand the same thing? If they are, why is the course called Managing Complexity, rather than, say, Managing Messes? A glib answer is you might not have been attracted to it because of the everyday meaning of mess. Yet another answer is that complexity is a rich term whose everyday meanings have been further enriched by
5.7 Being ethical As outlined in Table 2, ethics within systemic practice are perceived as operating on multiple levels. Like the systems concept of hierarchy, what we perceive to be good at one level might be bad at another. Because an epistemological position must be chosen, rather than taken as a given, the choi
4.6 What matters? When the laptop is confirmed to be uncompromised, it is interesting that none of the characters cheers, although they all seem to be relieved. In other words, when the statement comes up, ‘laptop is uncompromised’, people seem to think that is ‘good’, the outcome is fine. They seem to have forgotten that the technician is probably dead at the time. So, in their deliberations, a person's life is forgotten. I am sure that, if they were reminded of it, they would, of course, say that thi
3.5 The story so far I have been discussing ethics as related to labelling things as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ or using more parochial words as substitutes. Different kinds of things could be said to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’, including means, ends, relationships, feelings, appearances, radiation levels and so on. The big ethical problem is how to combine this variety of things to reach a judgement, especially when combining them, it is possible that we end up with ambiguity or contradictions. I have explored the
1.6 Final vocabulary Any ethical analysis has to be grounded on something, otherwise the analysis has no end. And since reasons will be couched in words, I think it is helpful to look at what the philosopher Richard Rorty has called a ‘final vocabulary’. He suggests: All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate prais 1.4 What is ethics? I'd like to introduce an idea of ethics based on the work of G. E. Moore, a Cambridge Don who died fifty years ago. Bearing in mind that concerns with ethics date back at least to the Ancient Greeks, you might not be surprised that I bring in some ideas from Moore's Principia Ethica, a text written over 100 years ago but articulated in a particularly clear and plain-speaking style. Moore's take on things is that when ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are involved, then we're in the realm of eth 1.2 Ethical examples But is this a tenable position? In other words, is it only the people who use the technologies who carry the ethical burden? Conversely, is ethics of any interest to engineers, programmers and scientists? What, in the first place, constitutes an ethical issue? To begin examining these questions, let's look at some examples. References 8.3.6 Deep silicon etching MEMS structures often require etching to a much greater depth than is needed for microelectronics. A rate of 1–2 μm min−1 may be quite sufficient for making transistors less than 1 mm deep, but to etch through 600 mm of silicon to form an accelerometer would take all day. The advent of MEMS and wafer-level packaging applications, therefore, brought a need for yet faster anisotropic etches, requiring advances both in the process and in the etching equipment. Capacitive co 7.4.3 Chemical vapour deposition (CVD) If step coverage or equipment cost is more critical than purity, then PVD is supplanted by CVD. There are many variants on the chemical vapour deposition technique, but the concept is simple: gases adsorb onto the wafer surface where a chemical reaction forms a solid product. Any other products are gases, or at least volatile liquids, and are pumped away. There is one obvious restriction: the wafer surface must be the only place where the reaction can occur. If it is not, particle 7.4 Depositing compounds As well as conducting metal layers, device fabrication requires dielectric, insulating materials and these are mostly chemical compounds rather than simple elements or alloys. By far the most widely used of these is silicon oxide (either as a glass or as crystalline quartz), but other oxides and nitrides are also common, plus polymers and a selection of more exotic materials. Such compounds generally have very high melting points, or decompose under heating, so cannot be deposited by ev 7.3.3 Plasmas More control can be achieved in vapour deposition if a plasma is generated. A plasma is simply a gas where a proportion of the molecules have been ionised. The ions remain in an uneasy equilibrium with the electrons they have released, prevented from recombining only because the electrons are hot and fast-moving, and so are difficult to trap. Plasmas are widely used in materials processing, with pressure ranging from 10−3 mbar to 1 mbar and typically up to 1% of the molecul 3.1.5 Digital media for medical X-rays Digital cameras have revolutionised the family album. However, the initial driver for CCD imagers in particular was specialised applications such as the capture of high-quality astronomical images, especially on remote satellites and space probes, from where it is unfeasible to collect film and from where continuous, real-time, high-bandwidth data streams are impractical. The CCD camera system, with its combination of high-sensitivity image capture, high-fidelity read-out and long-term storag 4.8 Assess and review again If you've been following the stages of our problem-solving map, then the chances are you're ahead of me here (Figure 19). Yes, if it works, hurrah; if it doesn't then off we go again, all the way back to ‘possible solutions’ and selecting the best of the rest. Or maybe even going back to the be 4.7 Build prototype/demonstrator The physical models we talked about earlier are prototypes or demonstrators of a sort. However, for the purposes of making a clear distinction in the process, I'm referring here to prototypes or demonstrators as functioning preliminary models of the essential finished product or construction or service, bringing together all the elements of the design that may or may not have been previously physically tested (Author(s): 5.1 Overview The enquiry team set up by the Board of Trade, and sitting in Dundee Court House, held an initial session lasting several days starting on Saturday 3 January 1880. There were three members chaired by Mr Rothery, Commissioner of Wrecks. The others were Colonel Yolland, the Inspector of Railways, and Mr W H Barlow, president of the Institute of Civil Engineers, and a distinguished practising civil engineer. Henry Rothery was a mathematics graduate but trained as a barrister. He had been a 1.1 Overview Why are disasters important? They attract public attention because there is great loss of life, or because the event happened suddenly and quite unexpectedly, or because the accident occurred to a new project that had been regarded as completely safe. Certainly, the aspect of suddenness is one that features in many catastrophes, and indeed, it is this feature by which a catastrophe is defined. Great disasters are always traumatic, especially for those who endure them and come through al 5.7 Vibrating air column: reflection at the end of an air column When a sound wave reaches the end of an air column, it is clear that it will be reflected if the tube end is closed. You only have to imagine yourself standing some distance, let's say 50 metres, away from a flat wall. If you shout, you will hear an echo – the reflection of the sound wave you projected. There is one difference, though, between the reflection of a sound wave and the reflection of the wave on a string that you met previously. When a sound wave is reflected from a closed 5.5 Vibrating string: pitches of notes produced by stringed instruments When a string is bowed, plucked or struck, energy is supplied that starts the string vibrating. The string doesn't just vibrate in one single mode; instead, it vibrates in a combination of several modes simultaneously. The displacement along the string is the superposition of the standing-wave patterns corresponding to those modes. For example, if the string vibrated only in the first and second modes, the displacement at a given instant of time might appear as shown in Author(s):
Example 1: Th
