Accident

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Accident

An accident is a specific, identifiable, unexpected, unusual and unintended external action which occurs in a particular time and place, without apparent or deliberate cause but with marked effects.

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Partial Stadium Collapse At Big12 College Football Championship 2005

Probabilism

In theology and philosophy, probabilism holds that in the absence of certainty, probability is the best criterion....
outcome which may have been avoided or prevented had circumstances

Attendant circumstance

Attendant circumstance is a law concept which Black's Law Dictionary defines as the "facts surrounding an event."In the criminal law in the United States, the definition of a given offense generally includes up to three kinds of "elements": the actus reus, or guilty conduct; the mens rea, or guilty mental state; and the attendant circ...
leading up to the accident been recognized, and acted upon, prior to its occurrence.

Narrowly defined, the designation may refer only to the event, while not including the circumstances (facts

Fact

A fact is something said to be true or supposed to have happened, example: Kiira is mean, FACT. An idea becomes a fact after competent people have tested a hypothesis through the scientific method....
surrounding) or results

Result

A result is the final consequence of a sequence of actions or events expressed qualitatively or quantitatively, being an advantage, disadvantage, gain, injury, loss, value or simply victory....
of the event; i.e., ‘accident’ is constrained

Constraint (information theory)

Constraint in information theory refers to the degree of statistical dependence between or among variables.See Mutual Information, Total Correlation, and Interaction information....
to an immediate incident, the occurrence of which results in an unplanned outcome. In common use, however, ‘accident’ may include the entire interacting circumstantial framework (chance, pre-existing, or uncontrolled dynamically developing conditions; commonplace actions; random time and place; participants; etc.) leading up to, including, and resulting from, the accident's immediate occurrence.

Physical examples include, e.g., unintended collisions or falls, being injured by touching something sharp, hot, or electrical, or ingesting poison. Non-physical examples are, e.g, unintentionally revealing a secret

Secrecy

Secrecy or furtiveness is the practice of sharing information among a group of people, which can be as small as one person, while hiding it from all others....
or otherwise saying something incorrectly, forgetting an appointment, etc.

Experts in the field of injury prevention

Injury prevention

Injury prevention are efforts to prevent or reduce the severity of bodily injury caused by external mechanisms, such as accidents, before they occur....
avoid use of the term 'accident' to describe events that cause injury in an attempt to highlight the predictable and preventable nature of most injuries. Such incidents are viewed from the perspective of epidemiology

Epidemiology

Epidemiology is the study of factors affecting the health and illness of populations, and serves as the foundation and logic of interventions made in the interest of public health and preventive medicine....
- predictable and preventable. Preferred words are more descriptive of the event itself, rather than of its unintended nature (e.g., crash

Crash

Crash may refer to:...
, collision

Collision

A collision is an isolated event in which two or more bodies exert relatively strong forces on each other for a relatively short time....
, incident

Incident

Incident may refer to:* A property of a graph *Incident, Culfest of NITK Surathkal, a cultural festival of The National Institute of Technology in Surathkal, Karnataka, India...
, drowning

Drowning

Drowning is death from suffocation caused by a liquid entering the lungs and preventing the absorption of oxygen leading to cerebral Hypoxia and cardiac arrest....
, fall, etc.)

Accidents of particularly common types (auto, fire, etc.) are investigated to identify how to avoid them in the future. This is sometimes called root cause analysis

Root cause analysis

Root cause analysis is a class of problem solving methods aimed at identifying the root causes of problems or events. The practice of RCA is predicated on the belief that problems are best solved by attempting to correct or eliminate root causes, as opposed to merely addressing the immediately obvious symptoms....
, but does not generally apply to accidents that cannot be deterministically

Determinism

Determinism is the philosophy proposition that every event, including human cognition and behavior, decision and action, is causality determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. With numerous historical debates, many varieties and philosophical positions on the subject of determinism exist from traditions throughout...
predicted. A root cause

Root cause

A root cause is an initiating cause of a causal chain which leads to an outcome or effect of interest. Commonly, root cause is used to describe the depth in the causal chain where an intervention could reasonably be implemented to change performance and prevent an undesirable outcome....
of an uncommon and purely random accident may never be identified, and thus future similar

Similarity

Similarity is some degree of symmetry in either analogy and resemblance between two or more concepts or physical objects. The notion of similarity rests either on exact or approximate repetitions of patterns in the comparison items....
accidents remain "accidental."

The informal term "freak accident" typically refers to an unfortunate and improbable event that seems exceedingly unlikely to happen by chance. In extreme contexts, the term may also imply doubt, ambiguity or suspicion about an accident event's cause.

Colloquially

Colloquialism

A colloquialism is an expression not used in formal Speech communication, writing or paralinguistics. Colloquialisms are also sometimes referred to collectively as "colloquial language"....
considered negative, 'happy' accidents with positive results are also possible.

External links

(CARE)
(Safety Tips and Information)
(Thousands of Photos, and Info on Types of Accidents.)
(Accident on map in popular languages.)

Accident

See also

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