TRAGEDIES like the 1987 fire at King’s Cross station on the London underground could be prevented if engineers thought more carefully about the language they used in safety documents, says a computing specialist. And the way to do this, he says, might be to borrow one of the techniques of literary criticism.
At the inquiry into the King’s Cross disaster, which killed 31 people, managers were criticised for using the word “smoulderings” to refer to small, rubbish-fuelled fires like the one that led to the disaster. This is no isolated case, says Jim Armstrong, a computer scientist specialising in software reliability at the University of Newcastle…
