Interwoven tragedies: Hillsborough, Heysel and denial

Tragedies to Come

A book on the Mary Bell case acts, once again, as a depressing reminder that psychiatric facilities for children and adolescents are dangerously inadequate and that, until we devote enough resources and mobilise the right skills, further tragedies may still occur. Gitta Sereny's clear and readable book* will help many people, who had only the Press accounts to guide them, to make some sense of ...

The Tragedy of Tragedies

Symmetric Tragedies: Commons and Anticommons

An anticommons problem arises when there exist multiple rights to exclude. In a lengthy law review paper, Michael A. Heller has examined "The Tragedy of the Anticommons," especially in regard to disappointing experiences with efforts to shift from socialist to market institutions in Russia. In an early footnote, Heller suggests that a formal economic model of the anticommons has not been develo...

Engineering and Mastering Interwoven Systems

Networked systems are becoming increasingly complex in development and operation. Due to this complexity, it is mostly impossible to follow a simple sequential designdeploy-use cycle. Instead, development and operation will become more evolutionary in nature. Additionally, one can observe that individual complex systems are coupled with each other, even though this has never been intended in th...

Lessons learned from compounding tragedies.

Several months have passed since news broke of a horrific compounding tragedy at the New England Compounding Center (NECC) in Framingham, Massachusetts. An outbreak of fungal meningitis in fall 2012 was traced to contaminated methylprednisolone acetate prepared by the NECC. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as of May 11, 2013, 55 deaths and a total case count...