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Some Buzz-words and their meaning. Resilience Cont’d (3rd part).

In this post we keep analyzing some buzz-words and their meaning. Resilience Cont’d (3rd part) is today’s subject. The prior post discussed “antifragile”. Some Buzz-words and their meaning. Resilience Cont’d (3rd part). Another buzz-word: resilience. Following the dictionary, resilience is the ability to become strong, healthy, or successful again after something bad happens (so, it would be a subset of antifragile, as it contemplates return to normality, but not thriving out of the mishap). Resilience is also the ability of…

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Some Buzz-words and their meaning. Antifragile Black Swan Cont’d (2nd part).

Some Buzz-words and their meaning. Antifragile Black Swan A new word: Antifragile. It seems like Mr. Taleb has coined a new word: “antifragile.” “Fragile” is the opposite of “robust”. Taleb adds the antifragile word to describe a system that thrives—its performance actually improves— under stress. Taleb’s new book mostly considers the notions of fragility and antifragility in biological, medical, economic, and political systems. Under that definition it is difficult to imagine an engineering systems that would be antifragile? Engineers have…

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Some Buzz-words and their meaning. Reliability

Some Buzz-words and their meaning. Reliability A little bit of history and a couple definitions. There was a time where professors in good engineering schools around the world used to state that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Actually, most likely the Romans and many military engineers like Marechal de Vauban (who were also the first “serious” geotechnical engineers around ‘600-‘700, by the way) were also designing following that principle. The idea was: in a system…

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