Are We Safe Enough

Are We Safe Enough? Measuring and Assessing Aviation Security explains how standard risk analytic and cost-benefit analysis can be applied to aviation security in systematic and easy-to-understand steps. The book evaluates and puts into sensible context the risks associated with air travel, the risk appetite of airlines and regulators and the notion of acceptable risk. It does so by describing the effectiveness, risk reduction and cost of each layer of aviation security, from policing and intelligence to checkpoint passenger screening to arming pilots on the flight deck. Quantifies the risks, costs and benefits of various aviation security methods, including policing, intelligence, PreCheck, checkpoint passenger screening, behavioral detection, air marshals and armed pilots Focuses on security measures that reduce costs without reducing security, including PreCheck, Federal Flight Deck Officer program and Installed Physical Secondary Barriers Features risk-reduction insights with global applications that are fully transparent, and fully explored through sensitivity analysis

Safety is not easy, it is a full time effort, and is equally important whether people are on the job or on personal time. If an organization is serious about mission success, it must take 'risk' seriously as well. Leaders need to be involved in the risk game at every turn, and understand the key elements (discussed throughout this book) that help them to win. Winning the risk game is what safety is all about. As in operational success, risk management requires the best human faculties to achieve victory; talent of organizational players and commitment from top leadership rule the day. The book covers leadership, safety programs, and risk management for organizations and individuals. It helps in professional development, grooming current and future leaders to understand their roles in safety and risk management. Central to the author’s message are: Seven truths of safety that the author discovered as a senior safety officer. Four roadblocks to achieving zero mishaps that must be aggressively addressed. Nine elements to risk reduction, with which leaders must become familiar. He establishes the importance of an organizational leader’s role in the safety/risk management game and provides the answer to, ’How safe is safe enough?’ Often, managers at various levels do not have an understanding of what goes into a safety program, this book tells them, from an expert's view. The readership includes: executives and middle management; all leaders as a professional development book and students. It is also a supplemental textbook for safety and risk management courses.

From the president of Wesleyan University, a compassionate and provocative manifesto on the crises confronting higher education In this bracing book, Michael S. Roth stakes out a pragmatist path through the thicket of issues facing colleges today to carry out the mission of higher education. With great empathy, candor, subtlety, and insight, Roth offers a sane approach to the noisy debates surrounding affirmative action, political correctness, and free speech, urging us to envision college as a space in which students are empowered to engage with criticism and with a variety of ideas. Countering the increasing cynical dismissal—from both liberals and conservatives—of the traditional core values of higher education, this book champions the merits of different diversities, including intellectual diversity, with a timely call for universities to embrace boldness, rigor, and practical idealism.

Some organizations pay a great deal of attention to ensuring the physical safety of their team members, but do the team members feel safe enough to speak up and raise tough concerns? Share bold and still-in-formation ideas? In this book, bestselling authors and inclusion experts Frederick A. Miller and Judith H. Katz introduce the concept of “interaction safety” and demonstrate how it can help create a work environment of trust, inclusion, and collaboration. Interaction safety encourages reasonable risk-taking and inspires every individual to be brave enough to reach for higher goals and more ambitious possibilities. When interaction safety exists, people know they will not be penalized, ostracized, demoted, made small, discounted, or shunned because of their thoughts, contributions, and conversations. Individuals feel encouraged, empowered, and can achieve more together than they would alone. Miller and Katz provide a four-level model for assessing and increasing the interaction safety in organizations, illustrated by short scenarios taken from real-life situations. They offer concrete actions team members, leaders, and organizations can take to build and maintain a productive, collaborative, and innovative environment in which people do their best work individually and collectively. When interaction safety is a way of life, the energy people used to spend walking on eggshells, trying to get their ideas heard, navigating minefields, or avoiding those they distrust can instead be put towards doing their best work and winning bigger for the organization. With a culture of openness and true collaboration, both the organization and individuals can soar!

This volume constitutes the papers and discussions from a symposium on "Societal Risk Assessment: How Safe is Safe Enough?" held at the General Motors Research Laboratories on October 8-9, 1979. This symposium was the twenty-fourth in an annual series sponsored by the Research Laboratories. Initi ated in 1957, these symposia have as their objective the promotion of the interchange ofknowledge among specialists from many allied disciplines in rapidly developing or changing areas ofscience or technology. Attendees characteristically represent the academic, government, and industrial institutions that are noted for their ongoing activities in the particular area of interest. The objective of this symposium was to develop a balanced view of the current status of societal risk assessment's role in the public policy process and then to establish, if possible, future directions of research. Accordingly, the symposium was structured in two dimensions; certainty versus uncertainty and the subjective versus the objective. Furthermore, people representing extremely diverse discip lines concerned with the perception, quantification, and abatement of risks were brought together to provide an environment that stimulated the exchange of ideas and experiences. The keys to this exchange were the invited papers, arranged into four symposium sessions. These papers appear in this volume in the order of their presentation. The discussions that in turn followed from the papers are also included.

Since the dawn of the Atomic Age, nuclear experts have labored to imagine the unimaginable and prevent it. They confronted a deceptively simple question: When is a reactor “safe enough” to adequately protect the public from catastrophe? Some experts sought a deceptively simple answer: an estimate that the odds of a major accident were, literally, a million to one. Far from simple, this search to quantify accident risk proved to be a tremendously complex and controversial endeavor, one that altered the very notion of safety in nuclear power and beyond. Safe Enough? is the first history to trace these contentious efforts, following the Atomic Energy Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as their experts experimented with tools to quantify accident risk for use in regulation and to persuade the public of nuclear power’s safety. The intense conflict over the value of risk assessment offers a window on the history of the nuclear safety debate and the beliefs of its advocates and opponents. Across seven decades and the accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, the quantification of risk has transformed both society’s understanding of the hazards posed by complex technologies and what it takes to make them safe enough.

Every time an airplane crashes, a gas line explodes, a bridge collapses, or a contaminant escapes the public questions whether the benefits that technology brings are worth its risks. Written in laymen’s language, How Safe Is Safe Enough? explores the realities of the risks that technology presents and the public’s perceptions of them. E. E. Lewis examines how these perceptions are reconciled with economic interests and risk assessors’ analyses in messy and often contentious political processes that determine acceptable levels of safety—levels that often depend more on the perceived nature of the risks than on the number of deaths or injuries that they cause. The author explains why things fail and why design necessitates tradeoffs between performance, cost, and safety. He details methods for identifying and eliminating design flaws and illustrates the consequences when they fail. Lewis examines faulty machine interfaces that cause disastrous human errors and highlights how cost cutting and maintenance neglect have led to catastrophic consequence. How Safe Is Safe Enough? explores how society determines adequate levels of safety, outlining the announcement and enforcement of safety regulations and addressing controversies surrounding cost-benefit analysis. The author argues that large regulatory effects stem from the public’s wide-ranging perceptions of three classes of accidents: the many everyday accidents causing one or two deaths at a time, rare disasters causing large loss of life, and toxic releases leading to uncertain future health risks. The nuclear disaster at Fukushima culminates the discussion, exemplifying the dichotomies faced in reconciling professional risk assessors’ statistical approaches with the citizenry’s fears and perceptions. For better or worse, technology permeates our lives, and much of it we don’t understand—how it works and what the chances are that it will fail dangerously. Such interest and concerns are at the heart of this authoritative, provocative analysis.