As a consultant, one of the things I tend to look for when evaluating a client's program is something psychologist call "cognitive dissonance". Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort caused by holding two conflicting cognitions (ideas, values, beliefs, etc.). In simpler terms, it's the internal conflict you feel when you're told to do one thing but […]
Last week I received an angry email from a colleague who objected to one of my recent articles and demanded to be removed from my email list. In honoring his request, I noted that he had never even read the article to which he was objecting. He had made an assumption about the content and […]
Like many of you, I've been wading through the recently issued National Preparedness Goal. From my somewhat cynical perspective, I think it's going to pretty much put a final nail in the coffin of the Comprehensive Emergency Management model that has guided our programs since 1978. Instead of the four phase model of mitigation, preparedness, […]
As promised, here are my thoughts on the UC Davis pepper spray incident. Let me preface my remarks by saying that I am reacting solely to what I see in the video and am not privy to any other facts, so it is not my intent to second-guess the officers on the scene. There's enough […]
In my recent article on the power of visual images I discussed the image of a UC Davis campus police officer using pepper spray on student demonstrators. One of the points in my article is that visual images lack context and that we are moved by the image because we don't always know what occurred before […]
By now you've probably heard that yesterday's test of the national Emergency Alert System did not go as well as planned. This, of course, is not a bad thing. The system has never been tested and identifying problems can only help to improve it. The larger question, though, is do we still need it? The […]
"Social media is for parties. We ain't giving no parties." This quote is attributed to a Washington DC Fire Department spokesman in a response over the DC fire twitter feed. It seems that one spokesman (who was later transferred to another job) was tweeting real-time information that the public could actually use. His boss preferred the […]
Several times a month I'll receive an email from some well-meaning friend that provides a warning about some new crime technique, virus or government/corporate conspiracy. I'm fairly good at spotting that they're spam and usually can find a link on one of the debunker sites that I can send back to my friend. Some of these […]