Science, Technology, and Engineering Robust Systems
If you have any exposure to science/technology/engineering education at, say, the undergraduate university level, then you can probably just skip to the section "Why I Care" below. Most of this page is just trying to explain how I am using the five words in the title.
Systems
I'll go right to the 5th word, systems, because I think the others fall into place pretty easily. "My" definition of system isn't too unusual or complex; this is how the word was being used in my secondary-school science lessons and it hasn't changed much.
system n. a set of connected things or parts forming a complex whole, in particular
* a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network
[...]
* Computing a group of related hardware units or programs or both, esp. when dedicated to a single application
[...]
— (from the New Oxford American Dictionary)
An important part of the definition isn't stated explicitly: the perception of "system" is relative to the observer's relationship to the system.
If you need to consider the parts or their connections and interactions with each other, then it's a "system". If you are relating to the whole as a single unified thing, then you're not treating it as a system (though you may well be aware of the fact that it does have parts; and you might consider the whole as a part of some larger system).
This is important when we think about "technology". It is evident in the usage of the word as a noun, e.g. "a technology". The people who worked to develop the technology probably had to deal with the system(s) that make it up; but when the technology is put into use elsewhere, it might be used as a single "part" within a larger system. To make an example, if you are an engineer designing a bridge, then you treat the bridge as a system; but to a person walking across the bridge, it's probably just "technology". But the bridge has parts, such as tension and compression members, each of which had to be treated as a "system" by engineers who worked out how to make those members (e.g. I-beams or box girders). To the beam designer, structural steel was treated as a unit, though it too is a system comprised of crystal-grains of certain sizes, made up of certain elements, and quenched, tempered, etc. in a specific way.
Why I Care
This page was written in the "embarrassingly readable" markup language RHTF, and was last updated on 2015 Nov 12.
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