Needed: A Nuclear Dragnet for Homeland Security?

Preferences, Knowledge, and Citizen Probability Assessments of the Terrorism Risk of Nuclear Power

How does the American public assess risk when it comes to national security issues? This paper addresses this question by analyzing variation in citizen probability assessments of the terrorism risk of nuclear power plants. Drawing on the literature on how motivated reasoning, selective information processing, and domain-specific knowledge influence public opinion, we argue that heterogeneous i...

Homeland Security: From Mathematical Models to Policy Implementation: The 2008 Philip McCord Morse Lecture

This paper is the archival record of the INFORMS Philip McCord Morse Lecture delivered in 2008. It describes the author’s research on four topics in homeland security and public health: preparedness and response to a bioterror anthrax attack, preparedness and response to a bioterror attack on the food supply, routes of transmission and infection control for pandemic influenza, and biometrics (e...

1st Workshop on Special Topics in Homeland Nuclear Security

Homeland security: a case study in risk aversion for public decision-making

Governments and their regulatory agencies normally exhibit risk-neutral attitudes in their decision-making. However, for low probability-high consequence events many decision-makers tend to be risk-averse because of the catastrophic or dire nature of the hazard or event. The degree of risk averseness can be described by utility theory. This paper will infer utility functions that reflect the le...

Sensor Management Problems of Nuclear Detection

Terrorist nuclear attack is a potentially devastating threat to homeland security. It is increasingly important to have the capability to intercept illicit nuclear materials entering the country and to monitor for nuclear threats emerging from within. This article describes a variety of approaches to sensor management in a multi-institution project on nuclear detection, which is based at Rutger...