To give you a history of the evolution of the Prevention through Design (PtD) concepts, upon which I will base suggestions for possible future activities, I commence with a review of how an Institute for Safety through Design was created at the National Safety Council. In the early 1990s, several safety professionals recognized, through their studies of investigational reports of occupational i...

First, some background so you can evaluate and put my remarks in context. In the past 23 years, I have been involved with safety-critical projects in just about every industry.1 For example, I helped Ontario Hydro in Canada get the first nuclear power plant digital shutdown system certified and have similarly worked with the NRC in the U.S. and the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) to e...

Ernest Sosa has argued that if someone knows that p, then his belief that p is “safe,” and Timothy Williamson has agreed. In this paper I argue that safety, as defined by Sosa, is not a necessary condition on knowledge—that we can have unsafe knowledge. In the next section I present Sosa’s definition of safety, and in section III I present a counterexample to it as a necessary condition on know...

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ARP 4754A and ARP 4761 are international standards for the avionics domains. ARP 4761 provides a guidance for the safety assessment process, while the ARP 4754A prescribes close interactions between the safety assessment process and system development process in order to capture safety requirements imposed on the design. According to the ARP 4754A, the safety requirements should be carefully tr...

Preliminary work on the development of measures appropriate for the safety domain is reported. Measures are expressed in the style of the Practical Software and Systems Measurement (PSM) approach, a programme sponsored by the US DoD. Proposed measures are integrated with the PSM measurement framework. Reported work has been informed by discussions within the PSM community and by concurrent work...

A s many of us do, I recently turned to Google while quickly searching for a copy of the article on the safety profile of the human papillomavirus vaccine by Slade and colleagues published in JAMA.1 Typing into the search field with a purpose, I largely ignored Google’s autocomplete drop-down box that proposed search strings with each keystroke. However, on my path to typing out safety Gardasil...