Todd Suomela's Library tagged disaster →  View Popular, Search in Google

"No matter that simplistic models and solutions and symptoms rarely work: Still, we want books that tell us we can lose weight easily in 7-10 days, or that we can geoengineer our way out of climate change. We want to believe what we already believe, or at least what we want to believe, or, in cases when there is overwhelming evidence that those beliefs no longer make sense, we want to believe what we are ‘born-again’ ready to believe. And, likewise, we want to be told that what we ‘should’ do is what we are already doing, or what we want to do, or what we are at last ready and willing to do. Until then, we are deaf, and there is no point arguing with us."

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"Now, I relish the schadenfreude-laden flavors of a mega-disaster scenario as much as the next misanthropic, science-fiction-loving geek, especially when it's paired with some "The fools! Can't they follow simple math?" on the side. Truly, I do. But squeezing that savory, juicy DOOM out of (for instance) the distribution of solar flares relies on the shape of the tail, i.e., whether it's a pure power law or not. The weak support, in the data, for such powers law means you don't really have empirical evidence for your scenarios, and in some cases what evidence there is tells against them. It's a free country, so you can go on telling those stories, but don't pretend that they owe more to confronting hard truths than to literary traditions. "

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"Unrealistic optimism is a pervasive human trait that influences domains ranging from personal relationships to politics and finance. How people maintain unrealistic optimism, despite frequently encountering information that challenges those biased beliefs, is unknown. We examined this question and found a marked asymmetry in belief updating. Participants updated their beliefs more in response to information that was better than expected than to information that was worse. This selectivity was mediated by a relative failure to code for errors that should reduce optimism. "

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"Basically, human optimism is a neurological bug that prevents us from remembering undesirable information about our odds of dying or being hurt. And that's why nobody ever believes the apocalypse is going to happen to them."

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"Tenure won’t save us from a higher education collapse. Start making alternative career contingency plans now because this collapse could be sudden and catastrophic. "

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"This is what Haiti is both victim and symbol of—this new, rapacious stage of capitalism. A cannibal stage where, in order to power the explosion of the super-rich and the ultra-rich, middle classes are being forced to fail, working classes are being re-proletarianized, and the poorest are being pushed beyond the grim limits of subsistence, into a kind of sepulchral half-life, perfect targets for any “natural disaster” that just happens to wander by. It is, I suspect, not simply an accident of history that the island that gave us the plantation big bang that put our world on the road to this moment in the capitalist project would also be the first to warn us of this zombie stage of capitalism, where entire nations are being rendered through economic alchemy into not-quite alive. In the old days, a zombie was a figure whose life and work had been captured by magical means. Old zombies were expected to work around the clock with no relief. The new zombie cannot expect work of any kind—the new zombie just waits around to die. "

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"Claus Rerup is an associate professor of Organizational Behavior at Ivey. He earned his Ph.D. from the Aarhus School of Business, Denmark in 2001. He joined Ivey in 2003 after completing his Post Doctoral studies at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Claus’ research addresses how multi-level processes such as routines, sensemaking and patterns of heightened attention influence organizational learning and high reliability. In particular, his work explores how coordination, politics, and heterogeneous information influence the ways in which employees and managers collectively learn from (rare) events. In most cases firms learn from an accident or crisis after the fact, but many organizations can also learn valuable lessons from a near disaster. Unexpected crises are often preceded by weak signals and near disasters, which suggest that organizational crises and accidents may be preventable provided the right systems and skills are in place for attending to such signals and events. "

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"Who, then, does it serve to imagine that we are wolves and sheep, fools and savages? Lee Clarke, a disaster sociologist and professor at Rutgers, wrote after Hurricane Katrina, “Disaster myths are not politically neutral, but rather work systematically to the advantage of elites. Elites cling to the panic myth because to acknowledge the truth of the situation would lead to very different policy prescriptions than the ones currently in vogue.” That is to say, if we are wolves and sheep, and so not to be trusted, then they are the shepherds and the wolf-killers."

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"It has long been understood by disaster researchers that both the general public and organizational actors tend to believe in various disaster myths. Notions that disasters are accompanied by looting, social disorganization, and deviant behavior are examples of such myths. Research shows that the mass media play a significant role in promulgating erroneous beliefs about disaster behavior. Following Hurricane Katrina, the response of disaster victims was framed by the media in ways that greatly exaggerated the incidence and severity of looting and lawlessness. Media reports initially employed a “civil unrest” frame and later characterized victim behavior as equivalent to urban warfare. The media emphasis on lawlessness and the need for strict social control both reflects and reinforces political discourse calling for a greater role for the military in disaster management. Such policy positions are indicators of the strength of militarism as an ideology in the United States. "

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"My research focuses on disasters. I have conducted in –depth research on several major disasters including Love Canal, the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, the 1993 Mississippi Flood, the Hanta Virus outbreak of 1993, ground water contamination in Woburn, MA, and Hurricane Katrina. I am presently conducting research on the TVA ash spill in Kingston, TN. My research on disasters has focused on several different aspects of these events: environmental health, scientific uncertainty, disaster mitigation response and preparedness, disaster policy, long-term recovery, clean-up efforts, human rights, environmental justice, displacement, economic dislocation, crisis communication in extreme events, public health, bioterrorism, community response efforts, and the dichotomy between lay and expert opinion. I am currently finishing a book on unnatural disasters. My courses include: disasters, environmental health, bioterrorism; disaster policy, anthropological theory, ethnographic research methods, and the dynamics of social change."

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"This is a collection of papers translated from the Russian with some revised and updated contributions. Written by leading authorities from Eastern Europe, the volume outlines the history of the health and environmental consequences of the Chernobyl disaster. According to the authors, official discussions from the International Atomic Energy Agency and associated United Nations' agencies (e.g. the Chernobyl Forum reports) have largely downplayed or ignored many of the findings reported in the Eastern European scientific literature and consequently have erred by not including these assessments. "

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"On 13 March, an essay entitled "Why I am not worried about Japan's nuclear reactors" appeared on a new and unknown blog. Within hours the post had gone viral – a testament to the power of hyperlinking and social media."

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"A few weeks before the tsunami struck Fukushima’s uranium reactors and shattered public faith in nuclear power, China revealed that it was launching a rival technology to build a safer, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper network of reactors based on thorium. "

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"[Charles Perrow's] current book is truly scary. In The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters he carefully surveys the conjunction of factors that make 21st-century America almost uniquely vulnerable to major disasters -- actual and possible. Hurricane Katrina is one place to start -- a concentration of habitation, dangerous infrastructure, vulnerable toxic storage, and wholly inadequate policies of water and land use led to a horrific loss of life and a permanent crippling of a great American city. The disaster was foreseeable and foreseen, and yet few effective steps were taken to protect the city and river system from catastrophic flooding. And even more alarming -- government and the private sector have taken almost none of the prudent steps after the disaster that would mitigate future flooding."

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