Risky Business

The design process can also be viewed as risky business (Delatte 2009, Florman 1987, Petroski 1985). When an individual or an organization imdertakes design, they are aware of the possibility, however remote, that a quality design may not result. The resulting structure, facility, system, product, or process may fail to meet all requirements as discussed in Chapter 7 and, therefore, not achieve quality. 

Failure of a structure, facility, system, product, or process can have dire consequences in terms of loss of life or great economic cost, as illustrated by descriptions of failures, a few of which are presented in Chapter 11 and many of which are described by (Delatte 2009). Because each non-trivial design is new and unique, there cannot be a 100 percent guarantee of success. That which is designed is only as safe as its weakest element. Each design is an untested hypothesis. The test is the structure, facility, system, product, or process itself and how it functions. Failures can, in a cold academic sense, be explained as disproved hypotheses. 

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As seen, there is significant variability in the estimates. This is the reason why we should avoid using this technique if possible (unless we wish to generate initial guesses for the Gauss-Newton method for ODE systems). As it was mentioned earlier, the numerical computation of derivatives from noisy data is a risky business ... 

Brown, D. (2004) Chem. Engr. London No. 758 (August) 42. It s a risky business. 

The second gap in the drug development process occurs when pre-clinically validated candidate drugs fail to enter the clinical study phase because of profit-minded choices made by pharmaceutical companies. While it is not as expensive to develop drugs as the pharmaceutical lobby claims, it is still a costly and risky business (MSF 2001 17). Where a substantial reward at the end of the development process is clearly absent, corporate decision-makers are ill disposed to incur this risk. 

In view of the insensitivity of CISD to bias built into the MOs by the SCF step, the use of SCF MOs in MRCI calculations would appear to be a risky business. 

Corrigan, O.P., A risky business tire detection of adverse drug reactions in clinical trials and postmarketing exercises, Soc. Sci. Med., 55, 497, 2002. 

Our taste buds are sodium ion detectors. The neutral sodium atom (Na) does not taste salty. In fact, tasting a sodium atom would be risky business, as sodium atoms react violently with water. Whereas atoms and ions of the same element have some features in common, they are also very different. 

Trefil, James, How the Body Defends Itself from the Risky Business of Living, Smithsonian 26 no. 9, Dec. 1995 pp. 42-49. 

Predicting the service life of adhesives is a risky business. The most difficult question ever put to an adhesive consultant is, How long will the adhesive joint last in service The problem is that an adhesive joint is not made up of just one element. It contains several elements, and some of them interact. In fact, in most adhesive joints at least five elements must be considered substrate A, interface A, the adhesive, interface B, and substrate B. To understand and predict the rate of degradation of each of these elements is challenging, but it can be done. The most difficult failure situations to predict are those that result from interactive effects. 

The foregoing discussion should have provided the reader with the impression that new drug discovery is a very difficult and risky business, and indeed, there are very few industries prepared to invest in research programs where the likeli-... 

Both nitrogen narcosis and the bends make prolonged deep diving a risky business. They limit both the safe depth and safe duration of human diving. Even skilled professional divers rarely descend beyond about 50 metres. Also, they rarely remain at that depth for much more than 30 minutes. 

Logan, R.A. (1991) Popularization versus secularization media coverage of health. In Wilkins, L. and Patterson, P. (eds.) Risky Business Communicating Issues of Science, Risk and Public Policy. Greenwood, New York. 

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