Why Catastrophic Organizational Failures Happen

Excerpt from the introduction: The purpose of this chapter is to examine the major streams of research about catastrophic failures, describing what we have learned about why these failures occur as well as how they can be prevented. The chapter begins by describing the most prominent sociological school of thought with regard to catastrophic failures, namely normal accident theory. That body of thought examines the structure of organizational systems that are most susceptible to catastrophic failures. Then, we turn to several behavioral perspectives on catastrophic failures, assessing a stream of research that has attempted to understand the cognitive, group and organizational processes that develop and unfold over time, leading ultimately to a catastrophic failure. For an understanding of how to prevent such failures, we then assess the literature on high reliability organizations (HRO). These scholars have examined why some complex organizations operating in extremely hazardous conditions manage to remain nearly error free. The chapter closes by assessing how scholars are trying to extend the HRO literature to develop more extensive prescriptions for managers trying to avoid catastrophic failures

Observational Constraints on the Catastrophic Disruption Rate of Small Main Belt Asteroids

We have calculated 90% confidence limits on the steady-state rate of catastrophic disruptions of main belt asteroids in terms of the absolute magnitude at which one catastrophic disruption occurs per year (HCL) as a function of the post-disruption increase in brightness (delta m) and subsequent brightness decay rate (tau). The confidence limits were calculated using the brightest unknown main belt asteroid (V = 18.5) detected with the Pan-STARRS1 (Pan-STARRS1) telescope. We measured the Pan-STARRS1's catastrophic disruption detection efficiency over a 453-day interval using the Pan-STARRS moving object processing system (MOPS) and a simple model for the catastrophic disruption event's photometric behavior in a small aperture centered on the catastrophic disruption event. Our simplistic catastrophic disruption model suggests that delta m = 20 mag and 0.01 mag d-1 < tau < 0.1 mag d-1 which would imply that H0 = 28 -- strongly inconsistent with H0,B2005 = 23.26 +/- 0.02 predicted by Bottke et al. (2005) using purely collisional models. We postulate that the solution to the discrepancy is that > 99% of main belt catastrophic disruptions in the size range to which this study was sensitive (100 m) are not impact-generated, but are instead due to fainter rotational breakups, of which the recent discoveries of disrupted asteroids P/2013 P5 and P/2013 R3 are probable examples. We estimate that current and upcoming asteroid surveys may discover up to 10 catastrophic disruptions/year brighter than V = 18.5.Comment: 61 Pages, 10 Figures, 3 Table

Catastrophic Crop Insurance

Beginning in 1995 farmers were offered the chance to carry a minimum level of Multiple Peril Crop Insurance (MPCI) coverage at very little cost. This catastrophic or CAT insurance coverage replaces the protection offered to crop producers under federal disaster programs in recent years.

Irreversible and Catastrophic

As many treaties and statutes emphasize, some risks are distinctive in the sense that they are potentially irreversible or catastrophic; for such risks, it is sensible to take extra precautions. When a harm is irreversible, and when regulators lack information about its magnitude and likelihood, they should purchase an "option" to prevent the harm at a later date; the Irreversible Harm Precautionary Principle. This principle brings standard option theory to bear on environmental law and risk regulation. And when catastrophic outcomes are possible, it makes sense to take special precautions against the worst-case scenarios; the Catastrophic Harm Precautionary Principle. This principle is based on two foundations: an appreciation of people's failure to appreciate the expected value of truly catastrophic losses; and an understanding of the distinction between risk and uncertainty. The Irreversible Harm Precautionary Principle must, however, be applied with a recognition that irreversible harms are sometimes on all sides of social problems, and that such harms may be caused by regulation itself. The Catastrophic Harm Precautionary Principle must be applied with an understanding that in some cases, eliminating the worst-case scenario causes far more serious problems than it solves. The normative arguments are illustrated throughout with reference to the problem of global warming; other applications include injunctions in environmental cases, genetic modification of food, protection of endangered species, and terrorism.

Diffusion-based neuromodulation can eliminate catastrophic forgetting in simple neural networks

A long-term goal of AI is to produce agents that can learn a diversity of skills throughout their lifetimes and continuously improve those skills via experience. A longstanding obstacle towards that goal is catastrophic forgetting, which is when learning new information erases previously learned information. Catastrophic forgetting occurs in artificial neural networks (ANNs), which have fueled most recent advances in AI. A recent paper proposed that catastrophic forgetting in ANNs can be reduced by promoting modularity, which can limit forgetting by isolating task information to specific clusters of nodes and connections (functional modules). While the prior work did show that modular ANNs suffered less from catastrophic forgetting, it was not able to produce ANNs that possessed task-specific functional modules, thereby leaving the main theory regarding modularity and forgetting untested. We introduce diffusion-based neuromodulation, which simulates the release of diffusing, neuromodulatory chemicals within an ANN that can modulate (i.e. up or down regulate) learning in a spatial region. On the simple diagnostic problem from the prior work, diffusion-based neuromodulation 1) induces task-specific learning in groups of nodes and connections (task-specific localized learning), which 2) produces functional modules for each subtask, and 3) yields higher performance by eliminating catastrophic forgetting. Overall, our results suggest that diffusion-based neuromodulation promotes task-specific localized learning and functional modularity, which can help solve the challenging, but important problem of catastrophic forgetting

Analysing Catastrophic OOP Health Expenditure in India : Concepts, Determinants and Policy Implications

The present paper attempts to modify definition of catastrophic out-of-pocket health expenditure by characterising it based on consumption of necessities. In literature, catastrophic expenditure is defined as that level of OOP health expenditure which exceeds some fixed proportion of household income or households capacity to pay. In the present paper, catastrophic health expenditure is defined as one which reduces the non-health expenditure to a level where household is unable to maintain consumption of necessities. Based on this definition of catastrophic health expenditure, the paper examines determinants of catastrophic OOP health expenditure in India. Findings suggest that it is important to carefully revise the concept of catastrophic health care spending and the method developed in this paper can be considered as one of the possible alternatives. We find that education is one of the important policy instruments that can be used to reduce incidence of catastrophic spending in India. The findings also suggest that even after efforts to reduce differences among various social classes in India, socially deprived classes are still vulnerable as they are more likely to experience financial catastrophe due to illness.Catastrophic health expenditure, Consumption of Necessities, India