Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

Nice article on Tweeting Under Fire in Reason. Summarizes a study by disaster sociologist (love the title) Jeannette Sutton about how regular people communicated during the 2007 Southern California wildfires--and it leaves no doubt that locals are by far the most important messengers. My favorite line (from a resident):

“There is no ‘they.’ ‘They’ won’t tell us if there is danger, ‘they’ aren’t coming to help, and ‘they’ won’t correct bad information. We (regular folks) have to do that amongst ourselves.”

For future reference, two good community forums for fire info:
socalmountains.com & rimoftheworld.net

Check out the full study here (warning: PDF).

Thanks to Dan for the heads up.

If there is one story you read all year on risk, it should be Matt Richtel’s New York Times story on driving while texting or talking on a phone. Seriously: don’t worry about your plane crashing. Don’t worry about your child getting kidnapped. Cut that out. Take all that worry and put it here.

“On his 15th birthday, Christopher Hill got his first cellphone. For his 16th, he was given a used red Ford Ranger pickup, a source of pride he washed every week. [L]ast Sept. 3, Mr. Hill, then 20, left the parking lot of a Goodwill store where he had spotted a dresser he thought might interest a neighbor...Mr. Hill was so engrossed in the call that he ran a red light and didn’t notice Linda Doyle’s small sport utility vehicle until the last second. He hit her going 45 miles per hour. She was pronounced dead shortly after. Later, a policeman asked Mr. Hill what color the light had been. ‘I never saw it,’ he answered.”

The most dangerous thing most Americans do is to drive. If you drive while using your phone, you are four times as likely to cause a crash. Personally, that isn’t what worries me the most. I know enough about my brain by now to know that I can’t text or talk on the phone while driving--so I don’t do it. What terrifies me is that everyone else is four times more likely to cause a crash.

Regular readers of this blog know that I usually make a serious effort not to fear monger. But not this time. We can expect this problem to get much worse. If you have a Blackberry or an iPhone (or are under 30 and have never used a phone for anything but texting), you know that talking is no where near as distracting as writing or reading a printed message. The other day, I tried to read an email while walking around in my house and slammed into a wooden beam. I collapsed in a pathetic heap and spent the rest of the day feeling vaguely dizzy and highly moronic. I shared this story with a few friends. Guess what? Everyone has a story about running into a sign or falling on the sidewalk while emailing or texting.

Now imagine doing that behind the wheel. Now imagine 17-year-olds doing that behind the wheel (see Dr. Phil’s interview with a shameless texter above.) These are people whose brains are literally not developed enough to understand their own mortality.

So what next? The research on using a cell phone while driving is about five years behind where it should be. We know enough about the dangers of talking--we need to know about texting and emailing. Meanwhile, the laws are so far behind they not even worth talking about. (Laws requiring hands-free devices have no effect on traffic accidents. We’ve known this for a long time, but for some reasons, hands-free laws keep coming up in state legislatures.)

We kill about 40,000 people a year on the roads in this country. The dead people are already disproportionately young. Even as we have built safer cars, with air bags and anti-lock brakes, we have raised worse drivers. I know people hate the government interfering in their lives, and I generally rail against any attempt to block communication between people. But I would happily support a cell-phone-jamming signal in every car. Because banning cell phones (which hasn’t been done anywhere anyway) won’t work. We are rewiring our brains to crave the instant stimulation of a text or email. We won’t be able to resist the temptation if all we are facing is a hard-to-enforce law. But if we literally can’t use our phones while the car is in drive, we could override our own worst instincts.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want some 20-year-old who is texting his friend about a dresser to end my life.

One of the most annoying features of a pandemic flu is that it is never officially over. And this one is just getting started. I spent the day submerged in the Flu Summit held at NIH, just outside of DC. I can think of more fun things to do, but it was a helpful primer on where things stand. So I have good news and bad.

Good news: So far, this flu seems pretty stable in the southern hemisphere. It doesn’t seem to be getting more virulent. Which means it probably won’t wipe out all of humanity--not now anyway. Woo hoo! Also, it means that we can cook up a vaccine before the flu goes changing on us.

Less major but still vaguely good news: Obama called in from Italy for a quick rah rah and sent 3 cabinet secretaries to represent. None of them said anything particularly memorable, but it is a sign that they are taking this seriously--despite all the other things they are taking seriously at this cluttered moment.

Bad news: H1N1 is everywhere and targeting the young. An estimated 1m Americans have been infected. Of the dead, the vast majority are under age 65. So even if H1N1 stays at its current, relatively low fatality rates, that could still mean thousands of dead or hospitalized children and adults in the months ahead.

Prognosis: Vaccine trials should start in August. If all goes well, vaccinations could begin mid-Oct. It seems likely the first phase of a vaccine will target kids, pregnant women, health care workers and people with “underlying conditions"--which is defined in this case to mean lots and lots of people (i.e. people with asthma, diabetes, obesity, etc.) But there are still hundreds of things no one yet knows: like how much vaccine people will need, how it will be distributed, and when.

Bottom line: Influenza is notoriously unpredictable, so everything will depend on government types (states and locals especially) and the public adapting quickly. To stay in fighting shape, I’d go here, here and here on a regular basis. Not very satisfying, as far as bottom lines go… OK, I’ll try again: I’m getting the feeling that schools will be Ground Zero--the epicenter of infection, disruption, mitigation and vaccine delivery. Prepare to hear a LOT about schools… and given the way American schools are run, prepare for some places to work miracles and other places to stink it up in a major way.

“War is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend. Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate."--Robert S. McNamara, architect of the Vietnam War.

Reading the obits of McNamara today, I am struck by his (atrociously belated) assessment of the brain’s limitations when it comes to modern warfare.

It is a view shared by many people who study risk, as well. Nassim Nicholas Taleb spent 20 years as a trader in New York and London. He is an author and a professor now, in addition to holding a large stake in a hedge fund.

Taleb and I met for tea in Washington, D.C., a few years ago, and I interviewed him for THE UNTHINKABLE. That afternoon, he had come from the Pentagon, where he had briefed officials on his theories about uncertainty. The Pentagon was a strange place for him to be, since Taleb is a self-described pacifist. “I am a peace activist simply out of rationality,” he said.

Taleb grew up in Lebanon, a country haunted by war’s unintended consequences. He has concluded that human beings are unable to handle
war in the modern age. “We’re not really able to assess how long wars will take and what the net outcome will be.” The risk is too complex for our
abilities. Once upon a time, we were better at war. “In a primitive environment, if someone is threatening me, I go kill him,” he says in his
clipped, matter-of-fact way. “And I get good results most of the time.” He calls this environment “Mediocristan,” a place where it is hard to kill many
people at once; a place where cause and effect are more closely connected. Homo sapiens spent hundreds of thousands of years living in Mediocristan. We rarely needed to understand probability because, most of the time, life was simpler, and the range of possible events was narrower.

But today, we live in a place Taleb calls “Extremistan,” subject to the “tyranny of the singular, the accidental, the unseen and the unpredicted.” Technology has allowed us to create weaponry that can strafe the planet in minutes. Lone individuals can alter the course of history. People kill each other every day without much physical exertion. And, at the same time, we have become ever more interdependent. What happens on one continent now has consequences for another. World War I, Taleb points out, was expected to be a rather small affair. So was Vietnam. In fact, the twentieth century was, and now the twenty-first century is, characterized by wars of unforeseen results.

Risk is often counterintuitive in Extremistan. Our old tricks don’t work. Survival may ultimately depend on understanding our brain’s limitations. 

I’ve heard from a few people today who are wondering what to make of the child survivor of the Yemeni plane crash in the Indian Ocean.

It’s not yet clear how old the child is (early reports said the child was 5--and male; more recent reports point to a 14-year-old girl), and This child is now said to be a 14-year-old girl, but we know little else at the moment. Still, it seems like a good excuse to talk about how children fare in plane crashes in general.

The answer: not well, alas. But before we even go there, a quick reality check: Children are hardly ever in plane crashes, it’s worth remembering. Car crashes are what we should be talking about night and day. Among those 2-12 years old, car-crash injuries are the leading cause of death. Each year about 1,800 children aged 14 and under are killed in cars, and more than 280,000 are injured. Let me say again: 1,800 children.

So we’re way off in the far reaches of low-risk/high-fear land here. But OK, let’s do this. So hardly any kids are ever killed in plane crashes. But what to make of the Yemeni crash? If it is true that the sole survivor was a child, does that mean children may be better off in some plane crashes?

No. In general, children--especially small children--are at special risk in a lot of accidents, including plane crashes. They may need extra help to escape, and they may be more prone to secondary complications (as are older people). They may not understand the safety instructions (like many grown ups) and they are accustomed to being told what to do--always dangerous in a plane crash.

We don’t know what happened in the Indian Ocean, but it’s a safe bet that the most important factor was luck. The survivor’s seat may have been located in just the right spot. But not even that can be predicted. What is the safest part of the plane in a water crash? I asked Dr. Dan Johnson, an aviation safety expert who wrote the highly readable book, Just in Case: A Passenger’s Guide to Airplane Safety and Survival. And he gave me the secret. Are you ready? “Sometime the overwing is safer, but sometime the back of the plane is safer, and other times the front is safer.” That pretty much sums it up. There’s no way to know, because it depends on the crash. In general, being closer to the exit is better, but there’s no telling which exit (until it’s too late).

But here’s one thing we do know about very small children in planes: they are safer if they are strapped in. Seems obvious, and yet you are still allowed to hold a child under 2 on your lap on planes. The research shows that there is no way you will be able to hold onto that child in a crash or sudden deceleration, but you can still try. And given the price of seats, I can see why this is still allowed. But parents should know that it is not nearly as safe as having the child in a car seat--in a separate seat.

In 1995, a mother held fast to her 9-month-old during a crash landing in Charlotte, NC, but she physically could not compete with the G-forces of the violent landing. Her child went flying out of her arms and died of massive head trauma. The mother lived. After that, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended that all children be restrained, no matter their age. The FAA objected with an interesting line of reasoning, according to a 1995 New York Times article:

“The agency contends that if families have to buy tickets for babies, some will drive instead and as a result more will die. The agency maintains that the problem of child safety in aviation barely exists; for a 15-year period beginning in 1978, a study the agency commissioned found, only one child death would have been prevented, along with one serious injury and three to six minor injuries in aviation accidents involving United States air carriers.”

Of course, if we are worried about plane tickets being so expensive that they force people to drive...well, the FAA should’ve gotten into the price-fixing business a long time ago. The debate over lap-babies has continued, but the bottom line is clear: it’s safer to have your kid in a seat of his or her own, and in a seat belt.

But if you really want to protect your child, nevermind all that: Put your kid in the back seat of your car when you’re driving to the airport. Buckle everyone’s seat belts and turn off your cell phone. Now we’re getting somewhere.