Risk, Uncertainty and Everything Else

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…

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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

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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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In a recent article published in the journal Risk Analysis: An International Journal, me and my coauthors’ suggested that all risk analyses, particularly those supporting homeland security decision making, should provide decision makers with more than statements such as “your risk to so-and-so is high.” In much the same spirit of actionable intelligence, we suggested that all risk assessments should produce actionable risk information, that is, information that provides insight into how to go about reducing risk. Unfortunately, the article containing this discussion was ambitious in its scope, thus leaving behind little space (i.e., a fraction of one column) to fully elaborate on this idea (for the abstract or full-text of the original article, see Ayyub, et al., “Critical Asset and Portfolio Risk Analysis: An All-Hazards Framework.” Risk

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Due to a variety of coincidental circumstances, I happened upon one hundred books covering a variety of topics spanning the fields of risk and decision analysis, uncertainty modeling and intelligence. This is a lot of books. So, I decided to perfect the art of the “10-minute” review by offering the community my thoughts on each title, to include a bit of personal meta-data on the subject, title, author and so on. And in the spirit of speaking to the risk community, I will call this series “The Security Risk Professional’s Bookshelf” (I borrowed the title from the “Intelligence Officer’s Bookshelf” published in each issue of the CIA’s journal Studies in Intelligence).

The titles for this first round (as I anticipate many more rounds of 100-books) are as follows in…

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I often feel bad when, after a long day of number crunching, I produce a neat looking figure that has no apparent meaning, yet is too cool to delete.  However, an image devoid of meaning has little intrinsic value outside the realm of art, and art is often not helpful to the daily grind of an engineer.  This is why I often scrap such images, debug the code that

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For those interested in exploring the latest research on risk analysis in the contexts of homeland security, defense, or intelligence, check out the following academic journals:

• Risk Analysis: An International Journal (Blackwell Publishing)
• The Journal of Risk and Insurance (Blackwell Publishing)
• Journal of Risk and Uncertainty (Springer)
• Journal of Risk Research (Taylor & Francis)
• Risk Management: An International Journal (Palgrave Macmillan)
• International Journal of Risk Assessment and Management (Inderscience)
• Security Journal

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