http://www.amandaripley.com/blog/ en amanda_ripley@hotmail.com Copyright 2012 2012-05-11T19:09:35+00:00 http://www.amandaripley.com/blog/call_for_nominations_the_rick_rescorla_award/ http://www.amandaripley.com/blog/call_for_nominations_the_rick_rescorla_award/#When:18:09:35Z This year, for the first time, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will recognize a regular, non-governmental human (or organization) for acts of superior leadership and innovation—through a new honor called the Rick Rescorla National Award for Resilience. This is a big deal. For years, schmucks like me have been haranguing the federal government for failing to highlight the stories and wisdom of the regular people who make our country more resilient. Instead of talking about how government is going to make us safe, we ought to start listening—to the t-shirt vendors, the flight attendants, the survivors and the guy in the aisle seat, to the Rick Rescorlas of the world who have shown us how the public can prevent and respond to disasters with grace, courage and initiative. Well, now DHS is doing it, in at least one symbolic and important way. Please send your nominations asap to rescorlaaward@hq.dhs.gov. More details and the nomination form can be found here. The deadline is June 1, 2012. The award was named after Rick Rescorla, the head of security for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in the World Trade Center. I wrote about Rescorla in The Unthinkable, and I’ve talked about him around the country. His story is impossible to forget once you’ve heard it. So let me share some of it here, now that we have a good excuse… Rick Rescorla was one of those thick-necked, former soldier types who spent the second halves of their lives patrolling the perimeters of marble lobbies the way they once patrolled a battlefield. He was disciplined in everything he did, and he understood the power of the human brain to get better through practice. After the 1993 bombing and the fiasco of an evacuation that followed, Rescorla decided that Morgan Stanley employees had to take full responsibility for their own survival— something that happened almost nowhere else in the Trade Center. He knew it was foolish to rely on first responders to save his employees. His company was the largest tenant in the World Trade Center, a village nestled in the clouds. Morgan Stanley’s employees would need to take care of one another. From then on, Rescorla started running the entire company through frequent, surprise fire drills. He trained employees to meet in the hallway between the stairwells and, at his direction, go down the stairs, two by two, to the forty-fourth floor. He noticed they moved slowly, so he started timing them with a stopwatch—and they got faster. The radicalism of Rescorla’s drills cannot be overstated. Remember, Morgan Stanley was an investment bank. Millionaire, high-performance bankers on the 73rd floor chafed at Rescorla’s evacuation regimen. They did not appreciate interrupting high-net-worth clients in the middle of a meeting. Each drill, which pulled the firm’s brokers off their phones and away from their computers, cost the company money. But Rescorla did it anyway. He didn’t care whether he was popular. When guests visited Morgan Stanley for training, Rescorla made sure they all knew how to get out too. Even though the chances were slim, Rescorla wanted them ready for an evacuation. On the morning of 9/11, Rescorla heard an explosion and saw Tower 1 burning from his office window. A Port Authority official came over the public address system and urged everyone to remain at their desks. But Rescorla grabbed his bullhorn, his walkie-talkie, and his cell phone and began systematically ordering Morgan Stanley employees to get out. They already knew what to do, even the 250 visitors who were taking a stockbroker training class and had already been shown the nearest stairway. Rescorla had led soldiers through the Vietcong-controlled Central Highlands of Vietnam. He knew the brain responded poorly to extreme fear. Back then, he had calmed his men by singing Cornish songs from his youth. Now, in the crowded stairwell, as his sweat leached through his suit jacket, Rescorla began to sing into the bullhorn. “Men of Cornwall stand ye steady; It cannot be ever said ye for the battle were not ready; Stand and never yield!” Moments later, Rescorla had successfully evacuated the vast majority of Morgan Stanley employees out of the burning tower. Then he turned around. He was last seen on the 10th floor, heading upward, shortly before the tower collapsed. His remains have never been found. Rescorla taught Morgan Stanley employees to save themselves. It’s a lesson that had become, somehow, rare and precious. When the tower collapsed, only 13 Morgan Stanley colleagues—including Rescorla and four of his security officers—were inside. The other 2,687 were safe. 2012-05-11T18:09:35+00:00 http://www.amandaripley.com/blog/where_does_the_go/ http://www.amandaripley.com/blog/where_does_the_go/#When:17:54:27Z Thanks to the folks at USC’s Master of Arts in Teaching Program for this nice graphic on $ and education around the world. Via: MAT@USC | Master’s of Arts in Teaching But this raises another mystery: We’ve known for a long time that more money does not tend to lead to more learning, once you get past a bare minimum (which we did a long time ago). So here’s my question: Where does all that money go in the U.S.?? Why do we spend so much more? Has anyone seen a good answer to this? I’d love to see what percentage of our spending goes to things that other countries’ education budgets don’t have to cover (i.e. health care for teachers). One report (PDF here) states that this difference alone could account for up to 8% of the variation between our expenses and those of other nations. Well, if that’s true, that’s not actually very much. Has anyone tried to compare countries’ spending while controlling for differences in how non-salaried benefits get distributed from place to place? Also, I’d love to see what percentage of our spending goes to technology compared to the spending in other countries… Anyone ever seen anything that reveals the story behind the money? I may be missing something, but I can’t seem to find any really strong analysis of the money story—even though we are talking about huge sums of money… 2012-04-19T17:54:27+00:00 http://www.amandaripley.com/blog/women_children_first/ http://www.amandaripley.com/blog/women_children_first/#When:18:02:59Z On the Titanic, 70% of the women and children survived—but only 20% of the men. Cue the orchestra! But was the Titanic the exception? A new study investigates whether women and children really do have an advantage on a sinking ship. It is so refreshing, first of all, to see a study focus obsessively on the thing that matters most in a disaster—the behavior of the humans involved. Naturally, the results show that life is more complicated than the movies. The study, out of Sweden, concludes that it is in fact worse to be a woman on a shipwreck, based on a study of 18 maritime disasters involving over 15,000 people. The survival rate of women was 27% vs. 37% for men (see Table C1). But children have the lowest survival rate of all at 15%. And crew members have the highest rate of anyone at 61%! The authors have some compelling data, but their conclusion jumps the shark: Taken together, our findings show that behavior in life-and-death situation is best captured by the expression ‘Every man for himself’. Um, really? I look at the same set of facts and make a very different conclusion. The most important detail in the study is actually the crew survival rate. To me, these figures show that the most valuable asset in a disaster is not gender; it’s experience. The crew members knew where the life boats were. They knew how to operate them. And they knew how to swim. They weren’t afraid to take action; they weren’t waiting for instructions; they weren’t down below trying to save the children (a likely explanation for the death of at least some of the female passengers.) This doesn’t mean that crew members are all cowards who flee in the life boats while passengers die. That may happen sometimes, but the opposite also happens. Crew members, given their roles, may go to extreme lengths to help rescue passengers. And who knows? The passenger survival rate might be even worse if crew members did not have this inclination. Personally, I think the question of chivalry on a sinking ship is less interesting. There are too many compounding factors in a real disaster to be able to isolate whether people were being gender neutral or not. (Indeed, even more women might have died if the women-and-children-first slogan had never existed. Who knows?) Anyway, the good news here is that knowledge matters. Under strain, the brain reverts to what it knows best. If you’ve got muscle memory for getting into a life boat, you’ll be better off than someone who doesn’t. This kind of study should encourage cruise ship safety directors (not to mention building and airplane personnel) to give people physical experience trying on life jackets and releasing life boats. These are not onerous tasks; you do them with crew members all the time. Now do them with the rest of us. Thanks to Freakonomics and @DaniloBalu for noticing the study! 2012-04-18T18:02:59+00:00 http://www.amandaripley.com/blog/strength_training/ http://www.amandaripley.com/blog/strength_training/#When:16:02:49Z New America Foundation is hosting an unusual conference on resilience today. They’ve defined it creatively, which I like, including every angle from a resilient psyche to resilient capitalism. Plus, it gives me the perfect excuse to catch up with Admiral Thad Allen (retired), the Coast Guard Commandant who let the federal response to Hurricane Katrina and then oversaw the response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. We’ll be talking about resilience, along with several other veterans of the subject, this afternoon. 2012-03-23T16:02:49+00:00 http://www.amandaripley.com/blog/bugs_bombs/ http://www.amandaripley.com/blog/bugs_bombs/#When:17:49:10Z I’ll be joining some other, smarter folks to talk about bioterrorism at a Cornell event at the Woodrow Wilson Center in DC tonight. Is it possible to prepare for bioterrorism in a reasonable and intelligent way? Or can you not really have all those words in the same sentence?  2012-03-22T17:49:10+00:00 http://www.amandaripley.com/blog/are_french_kids_smart/ http://www.amandaripley.com/blog/are_french_kids_smart/#When:17:40:32Z The new book Bringing Up Bebe has got affluent American parents all in a tizzy—again. Why aren’t our kids parfait, aussi? Good question. I lived in France for a while, and anecdotally speaking, it did seem like French parents were less likely to indulge their children in some ways. My French friends put their children to bed at 7:30 pm and had a civilized dinner with their husbands. (Except for the ones who didn’t, of course.) I suspect that France is a more pleasant place to parent in 1,000 different ways, as my New America colleague Brigid Schulte explained in the Washington Post recently, notably the subsidized childcare, generous parental leave policies and universal health care. But putting that aside, I have another question: Are French kids smart? Does all that chic parenting translate into kids who know how to think critically and solve real problems? The evidence suggests…. Non, pas exactement. Here is how French 15-year-olds perform on the PISA, which is an international test of critical thinking skills, administered to half a million kids every 3 years by the OECD: Reading: France ranked 15th in reading in 2009, which is a teeny bit worse than our own kids performed (we ranked 12th), but about average for the developed world. Science: France ranked 20th in Science in 2009, which is again just slightly worse than our own kids (17th)—and about average for the develop world. Math: France ranked 18th in Math in 2009, about average for the developed world. That’s the only subject in which their teenagers outperformed our teenagers on the PISA. American kids came in 26th, below average for the developed world. In other words, French kids do OK on international tests of critical thinking in math, reading and science. But given their low rates of child poverty, they ain’t breaking any records. What about privileged French kids? The ones Bringing Up Bebe is, truth be told, most focused on? As with our own rich kids, the picture is mixed. The top-quartile of French kids—the ones with the most material advantages based on PISA’s index of economic, social and cultural status—outperform our own rich kids in science and math (even though they are not as rich as our rich kids). Still, our rich kids do a bit better than their rich kids in reading. (This is a pattern which holds up around the world. American kids do better in reading than math or science at every income level. Too bad future income is predicted by math skills…) This suggests that all of our schools, even our rich, suburban schools, are underperforming in math and science. Or else our parents are underperforming math and science… I’d argue that both are true. Anyway, the point is, France is not doing wildly better than we are—for its rich or poor kids—when it comes to learning. Low-income American kids AND French kids perform significantly worse than their high-income peers, which is less true in countries like Finland, Korea and Canada. Both the US and France have a problem with disparities in education outcomes, even though France has far less child poverty and far more generous social welfare benefits. Another reminder that a great education system requires more than anti-poverty programs. Beaucoup more. 2012-03-06T17:40:32+00:00 http://www.amandaripley.com/blog/the_unthinkable_on_pbs/ http://www.amandaripley.com/blog/the_unthinkable_on_pbs/#When:01:35:03Z No matter how many people I interview, no matter how many rewrites I do, I just can’t do what TV can do. There is something about good TV that captures the brain’s attention and doesn’t let it go. This month, a new PBS documentary based on The Unthinkable does what I couldn’t do. Surviving Disaster deconstructs how the brain responds to life-or-death events—so that we can all learn to do better. The documentary includes many characters from my book, in addition to other survivors of all kinds of trauma, from tsunami to car crashes. One young survivor describes in unflinching detail exactly what it felt like to get out of a house fire as a little girl in Texas. It is the kind of story you will never forget once you see it, and it is told with a purpose—to help the rest of us become smarter and stronger in our own homes and communities. I am so grateful to the folks at Santa Fe Productions for finding these survivors and sharing their stories. PBS affiliates are showing Surviving Disaster at different times, depending on where you live. A handful of the air dates/locations are listed below, and you can find other towns here. AIR DATES: Surviving Disaster Chicago—Sunday 3/11/12—9:30 AM (WYINDT) Cincinnati—Tuesday 3/6/12—9:30 PM (WPTODT) Philadelphia—Sunday 3/11/12—9:00 AM (WHYYDT) Pittsburgh—Thursday 3/8/12—9:00 PM (WQEDDT4) San Francisco—Sunday 3/11/12—3:30 PM (KRCBDT) *Please check local listings or Surviving Disaster for more locations and times.   2012-03-06T01:35:03+00:00 http://www.amandaripley.com/blog/playgrounds_of_the_future/ http://www.amandaripley.com/blog/playgrounds_of_the_future/#When:22:39:54Z What would a playground look like if it were designed the way kids actually play? I’m collecting a list of the coolest playgrounds in the world. Send me one if you see one! Here’s a good one from the U.S.A. 2012-02-29T22:39:54+00:00 http://www.amandaripley.com/blog/high_school_or_bust/ http://www.amandaripley.com/blog/high_school_or_bust/#When:14:24:20Z It’s hard to get excited about President Obama’s push for more states to require school until age 18. I know kids’ life chances improve if they make it through high school. That’s a big deal. But don’t we have an obligation to make school better before we force kids to spend even more time there? There isn’t much empirical evidence that raising the drop-out age actually reduces drop outs. So this feels a little retro. Kind of like No Child Left Behind: all stick, no carrot. You can hammer on kids (and teachers) all you want; but if you don’t simultaneously raise the quality of the whole system, then it won’t get you very far. For 10 years, most American school districts kept the same inequitable funding schemes, the same lackluster principal and teaching pools, the same subpar education colleges. Then, under federal duress, they injected a bunch of lame tests into the system and pounded on schools to do better. Guess what? Most of them didn’t. Washington, DC, requires that kids stay in school until they are 18. Let me tell you what that looks like. I have been in classes in DC schools that were fantastic, classes in which I had to consciously stop myself from joining in. Classes in which all the kids came in below grade level in the fall, and all the kids left at or above grade level come spring. I have been in other classes—sometimes in the same schools—that would have driven me to drop out, too. I swear to God, the message in those classrooms was: Your time doesn’t matter. You don’t matter. It was like time stood still.  Nothing happened. The teacher moved at the speed of mud. When she spoke, it was to tell kids to shut their mouths. I know kids should stay in high school. Kids know kids should stay in high school. The cash price for dropping out has never been higher. You can’t even join the military if you drop out of high school. The disincentives are all in place. What’s missing are the incentives. I want kids to stay in high school. But more than that, I want kids to want to stay. It’s important to listen to the reasons kids drop out, as summarized in this 2009 Rennie Center policy brief: Both national and local research studies have found that dropping out of high school is a gradual process of disengagement. Loss of interest in school, poor relationships with teachers and impersonal learning environments are among the factors that lead to the decision to drop out. Spend the money on empirically proven methods to engage human beings. Then see if your dropout rate goes down—all by itself.   2012-01-27T14:24:20+00:00 http://www.amandaripley.com/blog/human_behavior_on_a_sinking_ship/ http://www.amandaripley.com/blog/human_behavior_on_a_sinking_ship/#When:20:31:42Z We won’t know for some time exactly what went wrong on the Costa Concordia off the coast of Tuscany a few days ago. But already, the survivor reports contain some clues as to what may have gone wrong with the evacuation. From the BBC: “We told the guests everything was OK and under control and we tried to stop them panicking,” cabin steward Deodato Ordona recalled. It was about an hour before a general emergency was announced, he said. Then the ship rolled again, now listing to the right, and the captain ordered the ship to be abandoned. From the Daily Mail: ...But although it soon became clear that the problem was far worse, passengers continued to be told for a good 45 minutes that there was a simple technical problem. Even when the situation became clearer crew members delayed lowering the lifeboats even though the ship was listing badly. ‘We had to scream at the controllers to release the boats from the side,’ said Mike van Dijk, a 54-year-old from Pretoria, South Africa. ‘We were standing in the corridors and they weren’t allowing us to get on to the boats. It was a scramble, an absolute scramble.’ Robert Elcombe, 50, from Colchester but who now lives in Australia, said he and his wife Tracy got into a life boat – but were ordered out again when staff said it was ‘only a generator problem’ that could be fixed. In almost every disaster, predictable human distortions slow down the response. This is normal—which is not the same thing as inevitable. The first predictable phase is a period of profound denial—a disbelief that the ship could really be sinking (or the plane could really be crashing or the hurricane could really be barreling towards you). The brain works according to pattern recognition, so it fits whatever is happening into scripts for what has happened before. It usually takes a surprisingly long time to accept that something terrible has happened. The second behavioral threat is the fear of panic. People—especially people in charge—fear the crowd, sometimes more than they fear plunging into the cold sea. They do this even though most people do not panic in most disasters. They are frightened, and they try to escape death—but widespread anti-social behavior rarely happens. The bigger problem, time and again, is the fear of panic—which causes officials to withhold vital information. Both of these tendencies can be overcome with realistic and smart training that includes the passengers and the crew. The research on this—especially from plane disasters—is very clear and reassuring. But if that kind of training doesn’t happen (and too often, it does not, for all sorts of reasons), then you can be sure that things will slip quickly from bad to tragic, as minutes are lost and people are left without information—the one thing they need more than anything else. 2012-01-17T20:31:42+00:00