Risk, Uncertainty and Everything Else

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

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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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