Risk, Uncertainty and Everything Else

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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