Risk, Uncertainty and Everything Else

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 alphabetic order:

1. 21st Century Security and CPTED: Designing for Critical Infrastructure Protection and Crime Prevention
2. A Practical Guide to Security Assessments
3. Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age
4. An Anatomy of Risk
5. An Introduction to Copulas, Second Edition
6. Are Your Lights On?: How to Figure Out What the Problem Really Is
7. Arguments from Ignorance
8. Bayesian Networks and Probabilistic Inference in Forensic Science
9. Beautiful Evidence
10. Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics
11. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
12. Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You
13. Choices, Values, and Frames
14. Communicating With Intelligence: Writing and Briefing in the Intelligence and National Security Communities
15. Country Risk Analysis: A Handbook
16. Country Risk Assessment: A Guide to Global Investment Strategy
17. Covert Action: The Limits of Intervention in the Post-War World
18. Critical Infrastructure Protection in Homeland Security: Defending a Networked Nation
19. Critical Infrastructure Protection Project: Workshop I Working Papers
20. Critical Infrastructure: Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness
21. Dealing With Public Risk in Private Infrastructure
22. Dutch Intelligence: Towards a Qualitative Framework for Analysis
23. Economic Value of Weather and Climate Forecasts
24. Effective Physical Security
25. Encyclopedia of Ignorance
26. Evaluating Novel Threats to the Homeland: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Cruise Missiles
27. Expert Political Judgment: How Good is It? How Could We Know?
28. Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
29. Foundations of Risk Analysis : A Knowledge and Decision-Oriented Perspective
30. Freakonomics, Revised and Expanded Edition
31. Fundamentals of Risk Analysis and Risk Management
32. Fuzzy Randomness: Uncertainty in Civil Engineering and Computational Mechanics
33. Fuzzy Sets, Natural Language Computations, and Risk Analysis
34. Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious
35. Handbook of Risk Management and Analysis
36. Heuristics and Biases
37. Ignorance and Uncertainty: Emerging Paradigms
38. Ignorance: A Case for Skepticism
39. Info-Gap Decision Theory : Decisions Under Severe Uncertainty
40. Information Security Risk Analysis,
41. Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge
42. Intelligence Analysis : A Target-Centric Approach
43. Introduction to Risk Analysis: A Systematic Approach to Science-Based Decision Making
44. Introduction to Security
45. Introduction to Simulation and Risk Analysis
46. Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
47. Linking Expertise and Naturalistic Decision Making
48. Mad Cows And Mother’s Milk: The Perils Of Poor Risk Communication
49. Naturalistic Decision Making
50. Order Statistics
51. Ordered Weighted Averaging Operators : Theory and Applications
52. Partial Identification of Probability Distributions
53. Political Theories of Risk Analysis
54. Possibility Theory: An Approach to Computerized Processing of Uncertainty
55. Practical Risk Analysis: An Approach Through Case Histories
56. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions
57. Principles of Forecasting: A Handbook for Researchers and Practitioners
58. Probabilistic Risk Analysis : Foundations and Methods
59. Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty
60. Reasoning about Uncertainty
61. Reliability and Risk: A Bayesian Perspective
62. Responding to Community Outrage: Strategies for Effective Risk Communication
63. Risk Analysis : Foundations, Models, and Methods
64. Risk Analysis and Society: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
65. Risk Analysis and the Security Survey, Third Edition
66. Risk Analysis in Theory and Practice
67. Risk Analysis: A Predictive Approach
68. Risk Analysis: Assessing Uncertainties Beyond Expected Values and Probabilities
69. Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory
70. Risk and Decision Analysis in Projects
71. Risk and Reason: Safety, Law, and the Environment
72. Risk Communication: A Mental Models Approach
73. Risk Engineering: Bridging Risk Analysis with Stakeholders Values
74. Risk Management for Computer Security: Protecting Your Network and Information Assets
75. Risk Management for Security Professionals
76. Risk Modeling for Determining Value and Decision Making
77. Risk Modeling, Assessment and Management
78. Risk-Based Reliability Analysis and Generic Principles for Risk Reduction
79. Security and Loss Prevention: An Introduction, 5th Ed
80. Security Metrics: Replacing Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt
81. Security Risk Assessment and Management: A Professional Practice Guide for Protecting Buildings and Infrastructures
82. Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart
83. Soviet Risk Taking & Crisis Behavior: A Theoretical & Empirical Analysis
84. Statistical Reasoning with Imprecise Probabilities
85. Statistics of Extremes: Theory and Applications
86. Strategic Security Management
87. Terrorism and Homeland Security: An Introduction with Applications
88. The Analysis, Communication, and Perception of Risk
89. The Counterterrorism Handbook: Tactics, Procedures, and Techniques
90. The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life
91. The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, & Terrorist Disasters
92. The Security Risk Assessment Handbook: A Complete Guide for Performing Security Risk Assessments
93. The Tipping Point : How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
94. The Wisdom of Crowds
95. Uncertainty Analysis : Mathematical Foundations and Applications
96. Vulnerability Assessment of Physical Protection Systems
97. War Risk Management
98. Words of Intelligence: A Dictionary
99. Working Minds : A Practitioner’s Guide to Cognitive Task Analysis
100. Worst Case Scenarios

Now keep in mind that these titles are of books that I do not already own (I have hundreds more than these). Perhaps I will get to the legacy books sometime in the future, but for now I am sticking to the list of 100 above. I will return to this post to update hyperlinks from the books each time I do a review. But bare with me as I suspect it will take a lot of time to get through them all…