| Sumario: | Part of a special issue on 21st-century disaster research. The writer explores the relationship between complexity, catastrophe, and modularity. Although concentrations of populations, hazardous materials, and economic power have the potential to cause disasters, they need a failure to activate the destructive “energy.” The failure can be a natural event, such as an earthquake or storm; or an industrial or technological failure; or a terrorist attack. The capacity to mitigate or prevent these has much to do with the complexity of the system; complexity is the enemy of reliability, engineers say. Complexity can be reduced by modularizing the various systems. The writer elaborates on this idea by focusing on examples of modularity in Microsoft's Windows computer operating systems, the interoperability of the Internet, and the U.S. electric power grid.
|
|---|