11 Jul
2021
11 Jul
'21
10:10 p.m.
Ralph Corderoy writes:
Hi Jon,
Well, we agree once again. I have done a lot of work on medical devices,
and was surprised at the lack of diligence on the part of some of the
people with whom I worked. But your example is similar to the way that
people have trouble with COVID - there's too much of a lag between
exposure and symptoms for many folks to make the connection. So I'm kind
of wondering what sort of bug may blow up a refinery or chemical plant and
cause enough loss of life and damage to make people take notice.
Jon
So while I agree with your example, I guess that
I was contemplating
the sort of example that makes the public take notice. Arguments
about statistical models are lost on 99% of the population.
True.
I don't know of any but if I had to pick an area where they might be
occurring it would be medical devices. I've been an external reviewer
of a company's embedded C code for a medical device in the past,
bare-metal, simple pre-emptive round-robin task-switcher, etc., though
my suggestion is nothing to do with their quality of work or products,
just that the level of detail they went to shows how slacker companies
could err.
The Therac-25 gave fatal radiation doses in a few cases. These were
obvious when they occurred. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
What if a medical device which sits in the background quietly doing its
continuous, but sometimes vital, thing had the occasional hiccough from
which it recovered? If the blip is only fatal in patients which were
already touch and go and device fault left no obvious sign to suggest
death wasn't caused by the initial ailment then the cause of death would
be, quite reasonably, assumed.
Given some devices are present in large numbers for many years in
hospitals, and there's a lot of hospitals, an unnoticed bug could be
steadily chipping away at its human overlords.
--
Cheers, Ralph.