Sep 14
On 12 September 2006 the Department for Transport initiated an experiment on the M42 in which, in periods of congestion, drivers would be allowed to use the hard shoulder. Media coverage of the experiment focused on safety problems: in the event of breakdowns or accidents emergency services would take longer to get to the scene. …
Sep 11
Paper for conference on The Future of Tree Risk Management London, 15 September 2006. The average annual number of tree-related deaths between 1998 and 2003 (the most recent statistics available) was six, or one in 10 million averaged over the national population. The Health and Safety Executive considers that an individual risk of death of …
Sep 02
Summary of presentation for CRIMS (Canadian Risk and Insurance Management Society) conference, Calgary, 17-20 September 2006. It is important to be clear about the type of risk you are dealing with. Directly perceptible risks are dealt with instinctively and intuitively. Virtual risks are culturally constructed when the science is inconclusive people are liberated to argue …
Aug 31
Review for The Times Higher published 1 September 2006 Capitalism as if the World Matters By Jonathan Porritt, Earthscan Publications Ltd, 336pp, Hardcover £18.99 ISBN: 1844071928 Published 1 November 2005 Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble By Lester Brown, W W Norton & Co Ltd, 352pp, Paperback £10.99 …
Aug 21
My nomination for the most prescient work of science fiction is The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster. Writing in 1909, not only did he anticipate television, the Internet, video conferencing, email, Amazon, Google and Globalization but, more significantly, the impact that they would have on our lives. It is a short story about a world …
Aug 06
Letter to the editor of the British Medical Journal, 26 June, 2006, commenting on Unsafe driving behaviour and four wheel drive vehicles: observational study, by Lesley Walker, Jonathan Williams and Konrad Jamrozik. EDITOR Walker et al show convincingly that drivers and other occupants of heavy four wheel drive vehicles are safer in crashes than those …