Entries Tagged "risk assessment"

Page 13 of 22

Remote Fireworks Launcher

How soon before these people are accused of helping the terrorists?

With around a thousand people in the UK injured every year by fireworks, a new electronic remote control ‘Firework Launcher’ will put safety first and ensure everyone enjoys the Christmas and new year celebrations.This innovative, compact device dramatically reduces the chance of injury by launching fireworks without a flame and at a safe distance—so all you need to worry about is how spectacular those fireworks really are!

Do fireworks kill more people than terrorists each year? Probably.

Posted on January 27, 2009 at 12:34 PM • View Comments

Teaching Risk Analysis in School

Good points:

“I regard myself as part of a movement we call risk literacy,” Professor Spiegelhalter told The Times. “It should be a basic component of discussion about issues in media, politics and in schools.

“We should essentially be teaching the ability to deconstruct the latest media story about a cancer risk or a wonder drug, so people can work out what it means. Really, that should be part of everyone’s language.””

As an aspect of science, risk was “as important as learning about DNA, maybe even more important,” he said. “The only problem is putting it on the curriculum: that can be the kiss of death. At the moment we can do it as part of maths outreach, maths inspiration, which is a real privilege because we can make it fun. It’s not teaching to an exam. But I actually think it should be in there, partly to make the curriculum more interesting.”

Reminds me of John Paulos’s Innumeracy.

Posted on January 26, 2009 at 1:55 PM • View Comments

"The Cost of Fearing Strangers"

Excellent essay from the Freakonomics blog:

As we wrote in Freakonomics, most people are pretty terrible at risk assessment. They tend to overstate the risk of dramatic and unlikely events at the expense of more common and boring (if equally devastating) events. A given person might fear a terrorist attack and mad cow disease more than anything in the world, whereas in fact she’d be better off fearing a heart attack (and therefore taking care of herself) or salmonella (and therefore washing her cutting board thoroughly).

Why do we fear the unknown more than the known? That’s a larger question than I can answer here (not that I’m capable anyway), but it probably has to do with the heuristics—the shortcut guesses—our brains use to solve problems, and the fact that these heuristics rely on the information already stored in our memories.

And what gets stored away? Anomalies—the big, rare, “black swan” events that are so dramatic, so unpredictable, and perhaps world-changing, that they imprint themselves on our memories and con us into thinking of them as typical, or at least likely, whereas in fact they are extraordinarily rare.

Nothing I haven’t said before. Remember, if it’s in the news don’t worry about it. The very definition of news is “something that almost never happens.” When something is so common that it’s no longer news—car crashes, domestic violence—that’s when you should worry about it.

Posted on January 19, 2009 at 6:19 AM • View Comments

"Nut Allergy" Fear and Overreaction

Good article:

Professor Nicolas Christakis, a professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School, told the BMJ there was “a gross over-reaction to the magnitude of the threat” posed by food allergies, and particularly nut allergies.

In the US, serious allergic reactions to foods cause just 2,000 of more than 30 million hospitalisations a year and comparatively few deaths—150 a year from all food allergies combined.

In the UK there are around 10 deaths each year from food allergies.

Professor Christakis said the issue was not whether nut allergies existed or whether they could occasionally be serious. Nor was the issue whether reasonable preventative steps should be made for the few children who had documented serious allergies, he argued.

“The issue is what accounts for the extreme responses to nut allergies.”

He said the number of US schools declaring themselves to be entirely “nut free”—banning staples like peanut butter, homemade baked goods and any foods without detailed ingredient labels—was rising, despite clear evidence that such restrictions were unnecessary.

“School entrances have signs admonishing visitors to wash their hands before entry to avoid [nut] contamination.”

He said these responses were extreme and had many of the hallmarks of mass psychogenic illness (MPI), previously known as epidemic hysteria.

Sound familiar?

Posted on December 19, 2008 at 6:56 AM • View Comments

Online Age Verification

A discussion of a security trade-off:

Child-safety activists charge that some of the age-verification firms want to help Internet companies tailor ads for children. They say these firms are substituting one exaggerated threat—the menace of online sex predators—with a far more pervasive danger from online marketers like junk food and toy companies that will rush to advertise to children if they are told revealing details about the users.

It’s an old story: protecting against the rare and spectacular by making yourself more vulnerable to the common and pedestrian.

Posted on November 21, 2008 at 11:47 AM • View Comments

Interview on Nuclear Terror

With Brian Michael Jenkins from Rand Corp. I like his distinction between “terrorism” and “terror”:

NJ: Why did you decide to delve so deeply into the psychological underpinnings of nuclear terror?

Jenkins: Well, I couldn’t write about the history of nuclear terrorism, because at least as of yet there hasn’t been any. So that would have been a very short book. Nonetheless, the U.S. government has stated that it is the No. 1 threat to the national security of the United States. In fact, according to public opinion polls, two out of five Americans consider it likely that a terrorist will detonate a nuclear bomb in an American city within the next five years. That struck me as an astonishing level of apprehension.

NJ: To what do you attribute that fear?

Jenkins: I concluded that there is a difference between nuclear terrorism and nuclear terror. Nuclear terrorism is about the possibility that terrorists will acquire and detonate a nuclear weapon. Nuclear terror, on the other hand, concerns our anticipation of such an attack. It’s about our imagination. And while there is no history of nuclear terrorism, there is a rich history of nuclear terror. It’s deeply embedded in our popular culture and in policy-making circles.

This is also good:

NJ: How do you break this chain reaction of fear?

Jenkins: The first thing we have to do is truly understand the threat. Nuclear terrorism is a frightening possibility but it is not inevitable or imminent, and there is no logical progression from truck bombs to nuclear bombs. Some of the steps necessary to a sustainable strategy we’ve already begun. We do need better intelligence-sharing internationally and enhanced homeland security and civil defense, and we need to secure stockpiles of nuclear materials around the world.

Nations that might consider abetting terrorists in acquiring nuclear weapons should also be made aware that we will hold them fully responsible in the event of an attack. We need to finish the job of eliminating Al Qaeda, not only to prevent another attack but also to send the message to others that if you go down this path, we will hunt you down relentlessly and destroy you.

NJ: What should political leaders tell the American people?

Jenkins: Rather than telling Americans constantly to be very afraid, we should stress that even an event of nuclear terrorism will not bring this Republic to its knees. Some will argue that fear is useful in galvanizing people and concentrating their minds on this threat, but fear is not free. It creates its own orthodoxy and demands obedience to it. A frightened population is intolerant. It trumpets a kind of “lapel pin” patriotism rather than the real thing. A frightened population is also prone both to paralysis—we’re doomed!—and to dangerous overreaction.

I believe that fear gets in the way of addressing the issue of nuclear terrorism in a sustained and sensible way. Instead of spreading fear, our leaders should speak to the American traditions of courage, self-reliance, and resiliency. Heaven forbid that an act of nuclear terrorism ever actually occurs, but if it does, we’ll get through it.

Posted on November 11, 2008 at 6:26 AM • View Comments

ANSI Cyberrisk Calculation Guide

Interesting:

In a nutshell, the guide advocates that organizations calculate cyber security risks and costs by asking questions of every organizational discipline that might be affected: legal, compliance, business operations, IT, external communications, crisis management, and risk management/insurance. The idea is to involve everyone who might be affected by a security breach and collect data on the potential risks and costs.

Once all of the involved parties have weighed in, the guide offers a mathematical formula for calculating financial risk: Essentially, it is a product of the frequency of an event multiplied by its severity, multiplied by the likelihood of its occurrence. If risk can be transferred to other organizations, that part of the risk can be subtracted from the net financial risk.

Guide is here.

Posted on October 24, 2008 at 7:04 AM • View Comments

1 … 11 12 13 14 15 … 22

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.