Sep 08
Last night at 8pm BBC Radio 4 presented a programme entitled “Where did it all go right?” celebrating the success of Britain’s seat belt law. It will be available on the Radio 4 Listen Again facility for another 6 days. It can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mg2v6#synopsis (or if you are too late for the listen again …
Sep 03
The myth of the efficacy of seat belts laws has become deeply embedded. Their success is routinely invoked in all sorts of unrelated arguments: e.g. Opposing wind farms is as ‘socially unacceptable’ as not wearing a seatbelt says the climate change minister. Every so often it is given a boost by an outrageous claim that …
Jun 23
I have just returned from a fascinating conference at MIT on Security and Human Behaviour and am now preparing for the EU Green Week conference in Brussels. This post explores an issue common to both conferences: paranoia. The security of central interest to the MIT conference was that of people using the Internet. The titles …
May 05
Letter NOT published in the Guardian. Submitted 30 April. My two favorite commentators on the subject of risk have fallen out. Simon Jenkins (29 April) predicts that swine flu will end up with bird flu and Sars in the category of over-hyped scare that never happened. Ben Goldacre (30 April) says that if Simon turns …
Mar 18
Risk Now available as Risco in Portuguese. See Deus ̩ Brasileiro? for new preface Рin English.
Mar 06
The above title advertises a Cambridge Science Festival event, (9 March 2009) in which I have been invited to participate. My answer to the question in the title, will be spelt out in my first PowerPoint slide: No: because paranoia cannot be cured by CCTV, or DNA databases, or ID cards, or CRB checks, or …
Feb 11
Below is a letter to the Guardian, published today (11 February 2009) in reduced form. Jacqui Smith is keen that the Governments classification of drugs should send clear messages to would-be users. One message conveyed by her attack on David Nutt (Drugs adviser says sorry over ecstasy article, 10 February) is that she does not care …
Feb 09
In December 2007 I delivered a Working Paper entitled Managing risk in a hypermobile world to the OMEGA Project – a project dedicated to thinking about Mega Projects in Transport and Development. I began thus: Transport projects facilitate new connections between trip origins and destinations. In so doing they disturb previous patterns of connection, often …
Feb 07
Abstract The introduction to the proceedings of the Royal Academy of Engineering 2006 seminar on The Economics and Morality of Safety concluded with a list of issues that were worthy of further exploration. I have reduced them to the following questions: ¢ Why do moral arguments about ˜rights persist unresolved? ¢ Why can risk managers …
Feb 03
I began my inaugural blog on this website On becoming Vashti as follows: My nomination for the most prescient work of science fiction is The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster. A recent comment on this posting by a former student, June Gibbons, has prompted a further re-reading of The Machine Stops. With each re-reading Forster …