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“Coexisting with Risk from Natural  Hazards” is the title of a National Academy of Sciences Roundtable, held on October 26,2011. And a podcast of the presentations is now available.

At the time of the all-day roundtable on risk assessment this past week, DHS had not yet released its national risk assessment report, which will be the public portion of an existing classified report. I will let you know when that report comes out, but in the meantime readers may be interested in some or all of the talks from that session.

While I was preparing my comments as a panelist, I ran across this article on risk assessment, aimed primarily at business people.  See Bias, Blindness and How We Truly Think, in Bloomberg News, Oct. 24, 2011. The article discusses some of the human behavior factors that make risk management so difficult to do.

The author, Dr. Daniel Kahneman, is a professor emeritus in decision science at Princeton

. A few key quotes are:

Most of us view the world as more benign that it really is….  We also tend to exaggerate our ability to forecase the future, which fosters overconfidence.

Related articles

• National Academy Reports/Books Available as Free Download (recoverydiva.com)
• See The Disaster Bookstore