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　　The uncertainty principle

　　--The Article is quoted from Brian Fuller''s Blog 

　　In his dotage， my old man （a chemistry Ph.D） used to say， as he slowly stirred his martini with a crooked finger， “the more we know， the less we know.”

　　As systems become increasingly complex because we overcome old technological hurdles， they also become more unpredictable.

　　One recent example is report that NHTSA and the NASA Engineering and Safety Center （NESC） published regarding unintended acceleration of Toyota automobiles. Michael Barr has an excellent report on it. In short， NASA said it couldn’t rule in but couldn’t rule out software problems as a culprit in the unintended acceleration problem.

　　Dave Kleidermacher blogged about making smart phones trustworthy platforms. Is it just me or is it complete lunacy to run a national TV advertising campaign touting the wonders of starting your car remotely with a cell phone？ Your teenage daughter may appreciate the gesture but so too do legions of black hats. （See Kleidermacher’s earlier post on smart phones and security.

　　The New York Times had a pair of posts this week about hacking a Times Square video screen. The first hacking attempt turned out to be a hoax but a really popular YouTube video; the second a real attempt that came up a bit short.

　　And Stanford， via its Facebook page， has described how engineers are addressing the “aeroelastic flutter” problem， a complicated， unpredictable phenomenon. （P.S. don‘t watch this video if you happen to be on a plane with WiFi）。

　　What’s ahead？

　　The more complex the software （and hardware）， the harder it is to model and find corner cases. We seem to be falling behind in assessing the known unknowns and we’re completely in the dark about how to approach unknown unknowns.

　　We race up the abstraction ladder to try to keep our arms around design complexity， but that creates other issues. I attended the annual meeting of college engineering departments recently in Phoenix and one questioner from industry stood before a panel of academics shaking his head. It’s great to turn out really smart kids who know theory and can deal with abstraction， but if they struggle with basic engineering concepts， companies need to train （or retrain， perhaps） them.

　　How are we going to get better at anticipating the unknown unknowns？ It is formal methods？ It is impossible？

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