Feb 22
Much advice is proffered in cyberspace about how to manage risk: at the time of writing, tapping risk management into Google yielded 72 million hits. Do you sometimes (frequently?) on reading risk management guidance get to the end without a clue as to what the guide expects you, the risk manager, to actually do? I …
Jan 13
A new book from Cambridge University Press – Successful Science communication, (Bennett and Jennings eds.) – contains 26 chapters with helpful things to say to people concerned to communicate complex ideas to “the public”. Plus a chapter by me entitled Not 100% sure? The public” understanding of risk; the reader is left to judge whether …
Jan 08
A recent BBC radio 4 programme entitled Thinking Streets takes listeners on a refreshing tour of traffic management schemes that are elevating the status of pedestrians and cyclists relative to that of those in motor vehicles. The effect, as researcher/presenter, Angela Saini notes, is civilizing – while also reducing accidents. The programme features Ben Hamilton-Baillie, who …
Jul 08
Judith Hackitt head of the UK Health and Safety Executive, has recently been complaining about “the creeping culture of risk-aversion and fear of litigation and the jobsworths responsible for its promotion. The HSE appears to be losing the battle. Below I set out a piece that I was asked to write for my local tenants and …
Jun 27
On 30 June and 1 July Oxford Brookes University is holding a History of Road Safety Symposium (http://ah.brookes.ac.uk/conference/history_of_road_safety_symposium). History, as they say, is written by the victors. The concluding speaker is Rob Gifford, Executive Director of the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety. The title of his presentation is “How parliament came to love seat …
May 05
Ive just had an email from the chair of the Bournemouth Cycling Forum with an interesting complaint. Local police are targeting criminal cyclists who cycle without lights and cycle on the pavement. He questions whether, in these straitened times, these should be police priorities. Does anyone have any evidence that cycling without lights is dangerous? …
May 05
On 20 April 2011 I was invited to speak at a conference on Critical Infrastructure Protection at the Counter Terror Expo at the Olympia in London. The two vast Olympia exhibition halls were filled with exhibitors selling protection against terrorists: on display were lorry-bomb-resistant barriers and bollards, blast containment solutions, CCTV and covert surveillance systems, …
Feb 08
1. Simple assertion. An example can be found in the current issue of The Economist by the journals Science and Technology correspondent writing under the name of Babbage (http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/02/road_safety). Babbage notes that the US fatality rate has been inching down over the past half century and then proceeds to explain why: it is the result …
Dec 02
I have been invited to contribute a chapter to a book called Risk Theory Handbook to be published by Springer. Publication is scheduled for a year from now, so there is still time to make changes/corrections/improvements. Comments are welcomed. Here is the abstract. Abstract What does a transport safety regulator have in common with a …
Nov 03
The Daily Mail today raised my hopes that it had had a Damascene conversion on the subject of drugs – and then dashed them. Below a letter to the editor that is certain not to get published. Dear Sir The Mail is often given credit for making the political weather. Certainly many politicians claim to …