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…

Click to Continue Reading...

[Read more →]

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…

Click to Continue Reading...

[Read more →]

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…

Click to Continue Reading...

[Read more →]