It’s not a secret that Apple has developed a new selling strategy for it’s sensational genius - iPhone. In a few words the new strategy means that not a single shop can sell iPhones with “no strings attached”, there’s always a mobile operator behind.
The trick is that mobile operator negotiates with Apple (or through third party operators) and Apple gets revenue from each sold iPhone. It leaded to absence of fixed price for the gadget and a lot of tricky contracts with operators appeared. In this post I’ll try to cover all the most unfriendly contracts and ways how to get your iPhone.
Estonia got iPhones 3G on August 22, 2008 through TeliaSonera and local operator - EMT. The price of the gadget is $250. For the money you get iPhone and 2 year contract which monthly price is $55. Simple calculations show us that the actual price is $55 per month * 24 months+ $250 for the phone = $1,570.
Who are the contracts targeted to? If you can count a bit and not sticked with the the number on a label and are able to see the asterix behind it - you easily notice the gadget doesn’t cost the money that is asked for it.
In comparsion in the UK you can get an iPhone in O2 for $70 per month of 1,5 year contract ($1260 + $230 for the gadget = $1,490).
For example in Russia “the black market” offers unlocked iPhone for about $2,500 with no warranty and no boundaries to a single operator, what makes the contract more preferrable. Officially iPhone is not available in the country.
So the marketing goes well - kiddies beg their parents to buy the gadget, the price itself is not that high and contracts are signed.
Engineer is one who is responsible for building or creating something according to a set of guidelines, instructions and/or specifications which performs needed functions without failures. Though technologies are that widespread that we can build faster and safer, but when it’s about human nature - it’s always about human factor. According to the Murphy’s law: if something can fail, eventually it will.
Why engineering disaster?
The reason why we consider a failure as an engineering disaster is perception of risk. For example during a year approximately the same number of people die in accidents involving trains, bicycles and airplanes. But perception of risk is much different in these types of accidents. When a plane is going to crash no one inside is in control of the situation and if one plane crashes much more people die rather than in accident involving bicycle.
What causes a disaster?
Causes of engineering disasters can be merged into next groups:
Failure of engineering ethics (”human factor”, miscalculations, etc)
Extreme/unpredicted environmental conditions (that were not taken into consideration)
Improper design (many of which are also the result of unethical practices)
Materials failures
In this post I’ll try to cover these causes by 10 examples of most shocking engineering disasters in history.
Concorde was the fastest transatlantic passenger’s airline. It could develop near super-sonic speed and carry more than hundred passengers. The airline was suspended due to the Concorde plane crash during the take-off. The crash killed all passengers (100) plus 9 crew members.
Cause:
Quote from official report:
“[…]during the take-off run the front right tire of the left main landing gear was destroyed
[…], probably after having run over a piece of metal;
- the destruction of the tire caused damage, either directly or indirectly, to the aircraft
structure and systems, causing the aircraft to crash less than one minute and thirty
seconds after the destruction of the tire. The damage sequence and the connections
between the various events have not yet been fully established.[…]”
Conclusion:
“the Certificates of Airworthiness for Concorde be suspended until
appropriate measures have been taken to guarantee a satisfactory level of
safety with regard to the risks associated with the destruction of tires.”
Simple tire damage eventually destroyed whole plane.
NASA’s Shuttle is a spacecraft that is used by the United States government for human missions in Space. In 1986 second Shuttle named Challenger blew up shortly after the launch, on it’s 10th mission.
Quote from official report:
“On the morning of January 28, 1986 Challenger was destroyed
73 seconds after launch during the 25th mission. The seven-member crew perished.
Early in its investigation, the Commission identified the mechanical cause of the accident to be the failure of the joint of one of the Solid Rocket Boosters. The Commission found that the design was not well understood by the engineers that operated it and that it had not been adequately tested.”
After the tragedy Shuttle project was suspended for 32 months for investigation of special commission appointed by the president Ronald Reagan.
In 2003 the disaster has repeated with Columbia shuttle - the first space shuttle launched in 1981.
“The incident was caused by improper wiring in the R5 cargo door latching mechanism. At the time, the design of the 747-122 provided a small window situated flush against each of the cargo doors, so that the ground crew could visually confirm that the doors’ latches were set to the locked position. There were, however, several flaws in this design. It didn’t allow a particularly close look at the door latches, and it didn’t show the entire latching mechanism, which made the complete inspection of the latched door impossible. With these factors in place, an accident was bound to occur, and finally did on this flight.”
Result: the Shuttle project is suspended again for further investigation.
Trans World Airlines (TWA) Flight 800 was an international passenger flight which type is Boeing 747. On July 23th in 1996 the plane crashed shortly after takeoff (approximately after 12 minutes) due to fuel tank explosion and many safety issues as claimed by commission investigating the case and killing more than 200 passengers and crew members.
Possible reasons for the in-flight breakup.
Witness reports and the distribution of wreckage indicated a catastrophic in-flight breakup of TWA 800. The NTSB considered as possible causes “structural failure and decompression; detonation of a high-energy explosive device, such as a bomb exploding inside the airplane or a missile warhead exploding upon impact with the airplane; and a fuel/air explosion in the center wing tank (CWT).”
Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937, a Tupolev 154M passenger jet on route from Moscow, Russia to Barcelona, Spain collided with DHL cargo jet flying from Bergamo, Italy to Brussels, Belgium in mid-air on July 1st, 2002 over the towns of Owingen and Überlingen in Germany, (near Lake Constance), killing all 71 aboard both aircraft. German official investigators determined on May 19, 2004, that the accident had been caused by problems within the air traffic control system and problems with the use of the collision warning system. On February 24, 2004, the controller, that is believed to be sleeping on duty at the time, Dane Peter Nielsen, was stabbed to death by Vitaly Kaloyev who had lost his wife and two children in the accident.
Regarding to a comment in recent post about LHC I made a little research on whether the LHC is a real danger to human being or just a science project aimed to help us understand how the Universe was made.
The comment was posted by Jason:
[…]these “geniuses” already made a gigantic miscalculation and destroyed, nay, shattered one of their magnets due to a design flaw that was undetected by everyone since the original drafts were made. This is not something to take lightly. Anytime there is human involvement there is a large chance for human error. We are fucked. Don’t forget about Murphy’s law.
Although taking into consideration different factors around any project scientists can measure and estimate the error percent, but there is always a human factor that leads to an error and then… No one can estimate the consequences.
The same happened to the LHC when it was in a building stage (April 2007):
[…] The mistakes led to an explosion deep in the tunnel at the CERN particle accelerator complex near Geneva in Switzerland. It lifted a 20-ton magnet off its mountings, filling a tunnel with helium gas and forcing an evacuation.
It means that 24 magnets located all around the 17-mile circular accelerator must now be stripped down and repaired or upgraded.
Dr Lyn Evans, who leads the accelerator construction project at CERN, the European organization for nuclear research, said the explosion had been potentially very dangerous.
“There was a hell of a bang, the tunnel housing the machine filled with helium and dust and we had to call in the fire brigade to evacuate the place,” he said. “The people working on the test were frightened to death but they were all in a safe place so no-one was hurt.” An investigation by CERN researchers found “fundamental” flaws that caused the explosion, close to the CMS detector, one of the LHC’s most important experiments. Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1626728.ece
At some point Jason is right - even taking into account huge experience of engineers and scientists there is always place for disturbance, boredom, depression, frustration, nervousness, tension - conditions where any human being can make a mistake, even irretrievable one. But who doesn’t make mistakes? Only those who do nothing and solution for not making a mistake is simple - just sit in a corner and do nothing.
In the series of LHC we had a short history of what’s the giant that is developed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The LHC series first began on delay of the project’s launch - it should has been launched in the first days of July, then it gets postponed until August 8th, a few days before the theoretical launch the new delay has been set for October 21st. Quite a long time for an “engineer’s routine” as the news claimed it.
The history of CERN itself began due to needs of governments to invest in the progress of particles accelerators that would drive economics as the part of a huge progress in science, especially during confrontation between USA and Europe.
A quote from official CERN’s history:
While scientists in Europe still relied on simple equipment based on radioactivity and cosmic rays, powerful accelerators were being built in the US.
So the CERN was born.
CERN exists primarily to provide European physicists with accelerators that meet research demands at the limits of human knowledge.
Some of first inventions from CERN:
Notable “firsts” were the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) proton-proton collider commissioned in 1971, and the proton-antiproton collider at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS).
After a few inventions from CERN in the field of particles acceleration the LHC was born, being the most aspiring invention of 21st century:
LHC experiments are, of course, being designed to look for theoretically predicted phenomena. However, they must also be prepared, as far as is possible, for surprises. This will require great ingenuity on the part of the physicists and engineers.
T he LHC is a remarkably versatile accelerator. It can collide proton beams with energies around 7-on-7 TeV and beam crossing points of unsurpassed brightness, providing the experiments with high interaction rates. It can also collide beams of heavy ions such as lead with a total collision energy in excess of 1,250 TeV, about thirty times higher than at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) under construction at the Brookhaven Laboratory in the US. Joint LHC/LEP operation can supply proton-electron collisions with 1.5 TeV energy, some five times higher than presently available at HERA in the DESY laboratory, Germany. The research, technical and educational potential of the LHC and its experiments is enormous.
Here are some cost overviews of the projec:
Magnets
CERN LHC surroundings
LHC view from the top
Inside of LHC
The total cost of the project is anticipated to be between €3.2 to €6.4 billion. The construction of LHC was approved in 1995 with a budget of 2.6 billion Swiss Francs (€1.6 billion), with another 210 million francs (€140 million) towards the cost of the experiments. However, cost over-runs, estimated in a major review in 2001 at around 480 million francs (€300 million) for the accelerator, and 50 million francs (€30 million) for the experiments, along with a reduction in CERN’s budget, pushed the completion date from 2005 to April 2007.180 million francs (€120 million) of the cost increase have been due to the superconducting magnets.
As has been announced, Large Hadron Collider (the most essential scientific research project) launch has been delayed until October 2008.
Quote from wikipedia:
The initial particle beams are due for injection in August 2008, and the first high-energy collisions are planned to take place after the LHC is officially unveiled, on October 21, 2008.
It feels like managing 27km. long magnets with temperature below 1.9 Kelvins is not the simplest task.
Here is how CERN describes the LHC and what it can do:
Micro black holes
Some theorists and members of the general public have long voiced fears that microscopic black holes may appear as a result of the experiment, capturing surrounding matter and ultimately leading to the destruction of the entire planet.
However, scientists have consistently dismissed these allegations as “ridiculous” - even if a microscopic black hole did form, they say, it would only last for a fraction of a second. However, scientists have consistently dismissed these allegations as “ridiculous” - even if a microscopic black hole did form, they say, it would only last for a fraction of a second.
The largest machine in the world…
The precise circumference of the LHC accelerator is 26 659 m, with a total of 9300 magnets inside. Not only is the LHC the world’s largest particle accelerator, just one-eighth of its cryogenic distribution system would qualify as the world’s largest fridge. All the magnets will be pre‑cooled to -193.2°C (80 K) using 10 080 tonnes of liquid nitrogen, before they are filled with nearly 60 tonnes of liquid helium to bring them down to -271.3°C (1.9 K).
The fastest racetrack on the planet…
At full power, trillions of protons will race around the LHC accelerator ring 11 245 times a second, travelling at 99.99% the speed of light. Two beams of protons will each travel at a maximum energy of 7 TeV (tera-electronvolt), corresponding to head-to-head collisions of 14 TeV. Altogether some 600 million collisions will take place every second.
The emptiest space in the Solar System…
To avoid colliding with gas molecules inside the accelerator, the beams of particles travel in an ultra-high vacuum – a cavity as empty as interplanetary space. The internal pressure of the LHC is 10-13 atm, ten times less than the pressure on the Moon!
The hottest spots in the galaxy, but even colder than outer space…
The LHC is a machine of extreme hot and cold. When two beams of protons collide, they will generate temperatures more than 100 000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun, concentrated within a minuscule space. By contrast, the ‘cryogenic distribution system’, which circulates superfluid helium around the accelerator ring, keeps the LHC at a super cool temperature of -271.3°C (1.9 K) – even colder than outer space!
The biggest and most sophisticated detectors ever built…
To sample and record the results of up to 600 million proton collisions per second, physicists and engineers have built gargantuan devices that measure particles with micron precision. The LHC’s detectors have sophisticated electronic trigger systems that precisely measure the passage time of a particle to accuracies in the region of a few billionths of a second. The trigger system also registers the location of the particles to millionths of a metre. This incredibly quick and precise response is essential for ensuring that the particle recorded in successive layers of a detector is one and the same.
The most powerful supercomputer system in the world…
The data recorded by each of the big experiments at the LHC will fill around 100 000 dual layer DVDs every year. To allow the thousands of scientists scattered around the globe to collaborate on the analysis over the next 15 years (the estimated lifetime of the LHC), tens of thousands of computers located around the world are being harnessed in a distributed computing network called the Grid.
The info is taken from CERN’s official site about the LHC here.
First of all, let me say that none of scientific researches have made such a hype about itself and as so many people are interesting - let me post some interesting links about the CERN’s giant project + pictures
LHC launch was postponed until 08.08.08.
Short intro:
The Large Hadron Collider is a particle accelerator collider being built at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, or CERN, straddling the French-Swiss border near Geneva. It should be completed and ready to start producing data sometime this summer. In it, scientists will be able to smash protons travelling at more than 99.99 percent of the speed of light with protons traveling in the opposite direction at the same speed.
