This is an accepted version of this page An error (from the Latin errāre, meaning 'to wander'[1]) is an inaccurate or incorrect action, thought, or judgement.
Actually revealing factual or social truth through words or body language, however, can commonly result in embarrassment or, when the gaffe has negative connotations, friction between people involved.
Philosophers and psychologists interested in the nature of the gaffe include Sigmund Freud (Freudian slip) and Gilles Deleuze.
In science and engineering in general, an error is defined as a difference between the desired and actual performance or behavior of a system or object.
This definition is the basis of operation for many types of control systems, in which error is defined as the difference between a set point and the process value.
Engineers seek to design devices, machines and systems and in such a way as to mitigate or preferably avoid the effects of error, whether unintentional or not.
Human factors engineering is often applied to designs in an attempt to minimize this type of error by making systems more forgiving or error-tolerant.
A notable result of Engineering and Scientific errors that occurred in history is the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, which caused a nuclear meltdown in the City of Chernobyl in present-day Ukraine, and is used as a case study in many Engineering/Science research [7] Numerical analysis provides a variety of techniques to represent (store) and compute approximations to mathematical numerical values.
Errors arise from a trade-off between efficiency (space and computation time) and precision, which is limited anyway, since (using common floating-point arithmetic) only a finite amount of values can be represented exactly.
The founder of management cybernetics, Stafford Beer, applied these ideas most notably in his viable system model.
For example, in an asexually reproducing species, an error (or mutation) has occurred for each DNA nucleotide that differs between the child and the parent.
In philately, an error refers to a postage stamp or piece of postal stationery that exhibits a printing or production mistake that differentiates it from a normal specimen or from the intended result.
This may involve such mistakes as improper admission of evidence, inappropriate instructions to the jury, or applying the wrong standard of proof.
The Freedom of information act provides American citizenry with a means to read intelligence reports that were mired in error.
The study of learners' errors has been the main area of investigation by linguists in the history of second-language acquisition research.
This might include an inaccurate or incomplete diagnosis or treatment of a disease, injury, syndrome, behavior, infection, or other ailment.