Chronic disease, homeland security, and sailing to where there be dragons

The five papers in this special issue share the perspective that attitudes toward risk are strongly shaped by social context, and that understanding context can help us understand how risk decisions are made, and thereby how to make them better

Clark County pre-disaster mitigation project: Suggestions for project initiation

Attention to several organizational issues will facilitate the efforts of the Clark County regional Pre-Disaster Mitigation project. Key considerations include defining terms efficiently, establishing and maintaining a clear timeline, determining rules for acceptability of new information, determining the nature and boundaries of concerns to be addressed, evaluating a full range of mitigation options, considering how to manage uncertainty, and ensuring stakeholder buy-in and participation. The NOAA seven-step process should serve as an operational template. Project participants should anticipate substantial uncertainty, and consider probabilistic methods (e.g. Monte Carlo analysis) for coping with uncertainty within a GIS framework

Uncertainty, climate change and nuclear power

Long time-horizon environmental risks with potential for global impacts have increased in visibility over the past several decades. Such issues as climate change, the nuclear fuel cycle, persistent synthetic chemicals, and stratospheric ozone depletion share some characteristics, including intergenerational impacts, strongly decoupled incidence of risks and benefits, substantial decision stakes and extreme uncertainty. What is not well understood are the similarities and differences among sources and implications of uncertainty among these global environmental threats, especially those associate with current and future human behavior. This describes the uncertainties associated with managing two global concerns: the nuclear (fission) fuel cycle and anthropogenic climate change. It finds that the two issue share some common uncertainties, some highly differentiated uncertainties and some interdependent uncertainty. It argues that these uncertainties preclude simple conclusions about the tradeoffs between risks from anthropogenic climate change and those from nuclear power. It concludes that a framework that treats uncertainty as an aspect of management, not as an analytical challenge, will both improve options for effective policy making and provide direction for useful (from a policy perspective) future research

Clark County GIS vulnerability assessment project: Looking ahead, designing mitigation, and managing uncertainty

After reviewing the progress of the Clark County GIS Vulnerability Project to date, it appears to me that now is an appropriate time to look to the end of the project, and use that to shape the next several steps. The NOAA guidelines may still have use, but it is more important that the project make progress than that it meet particular prescriptive steps

Chapter 15 Empathizing with Robots

Typically, social robots are supposed to empathize with humans, understand human emotions, and anticipate human needs. With this chapter, the authors turn the table: What can humans learn through empathizing with technology? How might the design of robots change if developers adopted the perspective of a robot, walking in its shoes to perceive and understand the world from its point of view through sensors and actuators? Is the technomorphization of human bodies a mind-expanding complement to the anthropomorphization of technology? The authors present a range of innovative methods, all of which are based on empathy, for use by robot designers. For example, Thing Ethnography works by attaching cameras to access the perspective of an object. Object Personas is about imagining the personality of an object. When applying Enacting Utopia, designers perform like an object in a positive future. Through with Techno-Mimesis, they are able to perceive a use scenario as an object does. The authors clarify that such kinds of empathy do not happen out of naïveté (Old Animism). When applied consciously, they generate knowledge about—and reflexive distance from—technological objects such as robots

Chapter 15 Empathizing with Robots

Typically, social robots are supposed to empathize with humans, understand human emotions, and anticipate human needs. With this chapter, the authors turn the table: What can humans learn through empathizing with technology? How might the design of robots change if developers adopted the perspective of a robot, walking in its shoes to perceive and understand the world from its point of view through sensors and actuators? Is the technomorphization of human bodies a mind-expanding complement to the anthropomorphization of technology? The authors present a range of innovative methods, all of which are based on empathy, for use by robot designers. For example, Thing Ethnography works by attaching cameras to access the perspective of an object. Object Personas is about imagining the personality of an object. When applying Enacting Utopia, designers perform like an object in a positive future. Through with Techno-Mimesis, they are able to perceive a use scenario as an object does. The authors clarify that such kinds of empathy do not happen out of naïveté (Old Animism). When applied consciously, they generate knowledge about—and reflexive distance from—technological objects such as robots