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It is both misguided and dangerous to push unobserved risks further into the statistical tails of the probability distribution of outcomes and allow these high-impact, low-probability "tail risks" to disappear from policymakers' fields of observation.

Such environments eventually experience massive blowups, catching everyone off-guard and undoing years of stability or, in some cases, ending up far worse than they were in their initial volatile state. Indeed, the longer it takes for the blowup to occur, the worse the resulting harm in both economic and political systems.

Seeking to restrict variability seems to be good policy (who does not prefer stability to chaos?), so it is with very good intentions that policymakers unwittingly increase the risk of major blowups. And it is the same misperception of the properties of natural systems that led to both the economic crisis of 2007-8 and the current turmoil in the Arab world. The policy implications are identical: to make systems robust, all risks must be visible and out in the open -- fluctuat nec mergitur (it fluctuates but does not sink) goes the Latin saying.

icking from one channel to another, I often had to go past Channel NewsAsia (CNA). On two occasions, I stopped for a while to see for myself how they were reporting the Egyptian uprising compared to the others. It was pathetic.  Their reports were not timely, nor had they depth. Where Al Jazeera and the BBC had leading figures like Mohamed El Baradei and Amr Moussa on camera, together with regular on-scene interviews or phone interviews with the protestors themselves, and even CNN had the Facebook organiser Wael Ghonim, all CNA had was an unknown lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies from some institute or other in Singapore giving a thoroughly theoretical take, not on unfolding events, but on the background. And in a stiff studio setting.

This weekend, the bad news is the Richter 8.9 earthquake off the coast of Miyagi prefecture of Japan that produced a tsunami that was 10 metres high in places.

when I was at my father’s place, I wanted an update. All we had was CNA an so I turned to it for the eleven o’clock news. They had a reporter reporting from Tokyo about how transport systems in the capital city was paralysed last night and people walked for hours to get home. This topic was already covered on last night’s news; it is being covered again tonight. No other news agency with any self-respect is making “walking home” such a big news story (or any news story at all) when people are dying. CNA then followed that up with reports from Changi airport about flights cancelled and how passengers were inconvenienced. Thirdly, they had an earth scientist on air to explain what causes tsunamis. To soak up the time, he then had to field about four questions from the host repeatedly asking him whether tsunamis could be predicted — as if this was the burning issue at the moment.

Vigilante “hacktivist” group Anonymous has a new target: Westboro Baptist Church. In an open letter to the notorious Kansas-based church, Anonymous promises “vicious” retaliation against the organization if they do not “cease & desist” their protest activities.

Led by pastor Fred Phelps, Westboro Baptist has become infamous for picketing the funerals of US soldiers — events know as “Love Crusades” — and for their display of signs bearing inflammatory messages, like “God hates fags.” The church has long argued that their Constitutionally-protected right to freedom of speech allows them to continue their derogatory brand of social activism.

Anonymous also considers itself an “aggressive proponent” of free speech, having recently launched attacks on organizations they consider to be enemies of that right: Companies like PayPal, Visa and Master Card, who stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks after the anti-secrecy organization released a massive cache of US embassy cables; and the government of Egypt, which attempted to cut off its

people are more prone to despicable behavior if it’s masked by a crowd. So could widespread knowledge that the identity of mob participants might be made known via portable technology help reduce crime?

people often lose sight of security concerns amid the collective euphoria that can accompany swift, large-scale democratization movements like the ones in Egypt and Tunisia. “The eye gets focused on the goal and not the process,” he said, “and during that time, they put their own personal security and their network security at risk.”

But it’s not just the fog of enthusiasm that renders people vulnerable; it’s lack of experience.

Those dangers have become increasingly apparent in recent months. Facebook accounts were hacked in Tunisia. In Egypt, authorities shut down the Internet and cellphones, and employed technology that turned mobile phones into furtive listening devices, according to the guide.

Revolutionary communities are coalescing around social networks and text messages and occupy the city with the force to topple governments. The U.S. military’s has development autonomous aerial drones that they can be launched across a place like Egypt, when the government cut off internet access to prevent people from organizing protests. These drones would fly off and hover above the city, and create ad hoc connections and networks in a new form of nomadic territorial infrastructure.

it’s all about making the data work. “I triangulate an objective assessment of the new technologies coming in, a subjective assessment of the public’s reaction to new propositions, and then I take a punt.” This ‘triangulation’ is the combination of hardheaded data analysis, coupled with business nous. Data is something that informs his hunches – but never rules them.

As situations unfold in real time in Egypt or Bahrain, we can see how that affects the network, too.” Even a bill being sent by email triggers a whole chain of data events: customer gets bill, most open it; some have a query and call the centre. Forty thousand bills go out an hour but if the centre gets hit with too many queries, billings are dialled down to reduce calls in. It’s about fighting the data overload.

we are truly overloaded by data. Governments around the world are unleashing a deluge of numbers on their citizens. That has huge implications for big businesses with lucrative government contracts. In the UK, the government recently published every item of public spending over £25,000. Search the database for ‘Vodafone’ and you get 2,448 individual transactions covering millions of pounds. Information that companies once believed was commercially confidential is now routinely published – or leaked to websites like Wikileaks.

he “weight of evidence” approach to evaluation of causality is often vilified by cell phone and WiFi scare mongers as being an inadequate way to judge the evidence – often because it disagrees with their own sentiments about the science.  If you can’t disqualify the evidence, then you can go after the method of evaluation and disqualify that, right?  Of course, the weight of evidence approach is often portrayed as a dumbshow of putting all the “positive” trials on one side of the scale and all of the “negative” trials on the other and taking the difference in mass as the evidence.  This is how Dr. Phillips characterised it in his paper on electromagnetic fields and DNA damage, as well as his appearance on CBC Radio.  Of course, the procedure is much more like a systematic review, where all of the papers, regardless of their outcomes, are weighed for their quality. (The higher quality studies will have good internal and external validity, proper blinding and randomisation, large enough sample size, proper controls and good statistical analysis; as well as being reproduced by independent investigators.) Then they are tallied and a rational conclusion is offered as to the most likely state of the evidence (of course, it is much more involved than I am stating, but suffice it to say, it does not involve a scale.)   This is standard operating procedure and, in fact, is what we all do when we are evaluating evidence: we decide which studies are good and we pool the evidence before we make a decision.

we're so excited about checking e-mail and Facebook that we're neglecting face-to-face relationships, but that it's not too late to make some "corrections" to our high-tech habits. It's time to turn off the BlackBerry for a few minutes and set some ground rules for blending cyberspace with personal space.

examples such as Wikipedia and a ride-sharing Web site as proof that "the harnessing of our cognitive surplus allows people to behave in increasingly generous, public, and social ways."

the transformative potential of the Internet, as more people use their free time in active, collaborative projects rather than watching television.