Tag: risk
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The Zone of Essential Risk
‘The zone of essential risk’ is a term coined by Bob Blakely to describe the problem with rare, medium-sized transactions: If you conduct infrequent transactions which are also small, you’ll never lose much money and it’s not worth it to try to protect yourself – you’ll sometimes get scammed, but you’ll have no trouble affording…
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Leaving Infants in Cars
A child is accidentally left in the back seat of a car and dies from hyperthermia: a parent’s worst nightmare, I imagine, and something many believe wouldn’t happen to them (itself a big part of the problem). In an article debating the legal ramifications of such an accident, The Washington Post presents not only a…
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Understanding and Reducing Suicide
Discussing an article in The New York Times on understanding and reducing suicide rates, Mind Hacks’ Vaughan presents us with some other interesting research on the topic. If you want a flavour of really how simple the safety measures need to be to make a difference to suicide rate, research has found that putting pills…
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Working With Children – Fear & False Accusations
This news report comes as no surprise. While in the past, adults would have helped children in distress or rebuked those misbehaving, there was now “a feeling that it is best not to become involved”, it said. Report author Prof Frank Furedi, of Kent University, said: “From Girl Guiders to football coaches, from Christmas-time Santas…
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Prediction Markets and The Wisdom of Crowds
FT Predict is more than just a game. Predictive markets collect the wisdom of the crowd in a single dynamic price unit that can be far more sensitive to changes in the market than standard survey-based research. And a growing number of today’s leading companies embrace predictive market models in order to harness the wisdom…
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The Large Hadron Collider & the Inevitable (?) Black Hole
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is due to start smashing protons together this summer which has lead some to theorise that the end of the world is nigh. Not to worry, though: we can all sleep soundly enough, as it’s unlikely anything other than some interesting physics is going to be happening underneath France and Switzerland.…
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Overestimating Threats Against Children
Bruce Schneier recently wrote about the MySpace ‘safeguards’ being put in place to protect minors. His very succinct closing comments are a must-read. …there isn’t really any problem with child predators — just a tiny handful of highly publicized stories — on MySpace. It’s just security theatre against a movie-plot threat. But we humans have…
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Tragedies ‘Warping Government Policy’
Good to see someone in power and in the public eye stating this for the record. Government policy is often badly formed because it is drawn up in response to tragedies and problems, the Government’s new head of risk management has said (Sam Coates writes). Rick Haythornthwaite, head of the Risk and Regulation Advisory Council,…