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Technology Stocks : Discuss Year 2000 Issues -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jeff Mizer who wrote (9393)	12/12/1999 9:37:00 AM
From: John Hunt	Respond to of 9818

Is Complexity Interlinked With Disaster? Ask on Jan. 1 << Charles Perrow plans to rise early on Dec. 31 to see what happens as the calendar turns over to the year 2000, first in New Zealand and then, hour by hour, across the globe. It will be an unusual activity for the Yale sociologist, who says he rarely watches television. But Perrow sees the planet on New Year's Day as a giant laboratory for the influential theory he formulated in the early 1980's about the nature of catastrophic accidents. "This is going to be very exciting, to see just how interdependent we are," he said of the date change, which could disable computers around the world that have been programmed to read the year as two digits rather than four. The varied and unpredictable ways in which systems interact with one another is at the heart of the theory that Perrow described in his seminal 1984 book "Normal Accidents: Living With High-Risk Technologies." >> ... cont'd at ... nytimes.com Interesting article on nature of risk in a high tech, high complexity environment.