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

Technical risk information: Decision tool or rhetorical ammunition? Undisputed facts in the Yucca Mountain debate

This paper examines how both opponents and proponents of the proposed high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca mountain Nevada claim that uncontroversial information supports their conflicting positions. Four pieces of information in particular are claimed by both sides: the distance of the proposed site from Las Vegas, the volume of waste that has been produced, the threat of terrorism since 9/11/01, and the occurrence of an earthquake in early 2002. Possible explanations for the difference include naive positivism, social constructionism, persistent beliefs and implicit warrants. The latter two models better explain observed knowledge/preference states. If so, more or better information alone will not improve the dialog about Yucca mountain. Rather, dialog should include a discussion of the ways in which they interpret information and draw conclusions based on their beliefs and warrants. This conclusion may be generalized to a range of information-intensive risk decisions

International Symposium on Technology and Society Invitation

Conference invitatio

Automated verification of shape, size and bag properties.

In recent years, separation logic has emerged as a contender for formal reasoning of heap-manipulating imperative programs. Recent works have focused on specialised provers that are mostly based on fixed sets of predicates. To improve expressivity, we have proposed a prover that can automatically handle user-defined predicates. These shape predicates allow programmers to describe a wide range of data structures with their associated size properties. In the current work, we shall enhance this prover by providing support for a new type of constraints, namely bag (multi-set) constraints. With this extension, we can capture the reachable nodes (or values) inside a heap predicate as a bag constraint. Consequently, we are able to prove properties about the actual values stored inside a data structure

UNLV sustainability task force report

The UNLV Sustainability Task Force has completed its mission to provide you with recommendations as to how UNLV can best pursue sustainability ideals. The attached report contains our conclusions and recommendations, along with appendices containing supporting materials and details