Risk, Uncertainty and Everything Else

I admit I am new to this web 2.0 game.  I also admit that it is a little odd to have a URL that begins with my first name.  So, in the past two months I have been learning as much as I can about blogs and wikis and the like, and decided to create a new blog at the more friendly URL http://www.professormcgill.com/blog.

So, please point your links and such to this new URL.  I will be importing many of my previous posts to this new blog…

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According to a model for homeland security risk analysis that is currently under consideration for use in supporting resource allocation decisions, the formula for the risk associated with a specified scenario is as follows:

Risk = C * L(S|A) * L(A)  (Equation 1)

where L(A) is the likelihood of an attack being attempted, L(S|A) is the likelihood of adversary success given attack, C is the consequences following a successful attack, and the total risk is obtained by summing the results of Equation 1 for all relevant scenarios.  At first glance, it would appear to the casual reader that this model is simply an implementation of risk measured in terms of expected loss, with the exception of the non-standard representation of L(.) for expressing the probability of the event contained within the parenthesis…

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From 5-7 June 2008, I will be attending the “Critical Infrastructure Protection: Metrics and Tools” workshop sponsored by The Center for Homeland Defense and Security, Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, CA.

The agenda for this conference is as follows…

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Lately I have been doing a lot of traveling between State College, PA and Washington, DC for meetings and such.  To pass the 3.5-hours minimum driving time each way, I, like many others listen to audiobooks on subjects that excite me.  The following is a list of titles for good audiobooks I listened to that are sure to educate, if not inspire, risk professionals.  Note that I purchased all these books from Audible.com via ITunes.

• Freakonomics, by Stephen D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.  The essence of this book was that everything is governed by incentives.  But, as the author points out in his preface, there really is no coherent theme to the book; it is just a compilation of interesting

To follow up on my previous post regarding the work of Peter Sandman, I can’t help but advertise his short, yet important article entitled “Risk Words You Can’t Use” published in the August 2005 issue of The Synergist.  While this article is a quick read, I will distill it down further and caveat some with my personal experience:

• Conservative: To risk people, conservative means an overestimate of risk.  To laypeople, a “conservative” estimate is a low estimate.  So whereas a risk person would use conservative to overstate the risk, a layperson (or perhaps decision maker) may interpret the message to be an understatement of risk, and thereby think that the risk could be much worse.  Now, engineers and scientists understand what is meant by the

For those unfamiliar with this description of risk, check out the website maintained by Peter Sandman.  Dr. Sandman is a scholar on risk communication and risk perception, and has made a name for himself via the concept “Risk = Hazard + Outrage.”  He has published some very interesting things, one of which can be found on my list of 100 books to review.  A selection of his works is available electronically on his curriculum vitae.

Back to the formula “Risk = Hazard + Outrage”…  This is not a mathematical formula in any strict sense of the word.  Rather it is conceptual in nature, where the “risk” is defined by the objective nature of the “hazard” and augmented by the “outrage” felt by the individuals exposed…

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For those of you doing research into anything that requires a literature review, it pays to check out the types of work your Chinese research counterparts have published on in the Chinese academic literature.  There are two really good full-text databases out there for Chinese academic journals:

• Wanfang Data: According to the Wanfang data website, “as an affiliate of Chinese Ministry of Science & Technology, Wanfang Data has been the leading information provider in China since 1950s. With a wide range of database resources and value-added services, Wanfang Data has become a gateway to understand Chinese culture, medicine, business, science, etc.”  I personnally find this particular database to be very user friendly and English-language friendly.  The problem is that I don’t know of any scholarly institution with access…

The Security Analysis and Risk Management Association (SARMA) just posted some presentations from their most recent conference (the 2nd National Conference on Security Analysis and Risk Management) on their website.  The titles of the available briefings as of 5/31/08 are:

• Charles Davis and Lisa Bendixen on ”Implementation of the NIPP and Sector Specific Plans.”  Ms. Bendixen presented this one, and I was the moderator.  Click for more information on the National Infrastructure Protection Plan, or NIPP.
• Robin Dillon, Catherine Tinsley and Matthew Cronin on ”Interpreting Past Events in Disaster Preparedness Decisions.”
• Geoff French on ”Intelligence Analysis for Strategic Risk Assessments.”  Mr. French also wrote a paper on this same subject as part of the GMU School of Law Criticial Infrastructure

What is an “emerging threat”? Or even more generally speaking, what is a “threat” in the first place?

There are numerous definitions proposed and used for the word “threat” and its synonym “hazard”, and I leave it to readers of this blog (and myself) to explore the myriad definitions for such terms as these described in the SARMAPedia just to see what I mean (this website is part of the Security Analysis and Risk Management Association, or SARMA, initiative to develop a common lexicon; participation is encouraged).

For simplicity, let’s go with the following simple and generic definition of threat: a threat is a source of potential harm. Of course whether or not something is harmful is in the eye of the beholder, but for…

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Security Risk Professional’s Bookshelf, Volume 1, Number 1

Citation: Purpura, P. P. (2007). Terrorism and Homeland Security: An Introduction with Applications.  Butterworth-Heinemann (Elsevier).  ISBN: 978-0-7506-7843-8.

Here we have what appears to be an undergraduate text centered on this idea of homeland security.  It seems that the target readership for this book are HLS novices, so from that point of view the text covers a nice swath of homeland security issues and recent milestones (legislation, strategies, etc.).  But I think the book would come off as being quite lame to those in the homeland security community who know a thing or two about what it is, what is should be, and where it is (really) headed.  This book is truly an introductory text aimed at exposing…

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