What are the likely consequences of prolonged, wide-area electrical power failure? lifts [elevators] blocked: people possibly trapped in them trains stranded: people possibly stranded in them traffic control inoperable: possibility of accidents and queues at road junctions critical facilities (hospitals, police stations, etc.) dependent on their own generators food refrigeration stops: perished food needs to be disposed of food manufacture lines cease operation; food perishes no water or sewerage pumping: health and safety regulations put buildings out of use electric cars and electrical equ ..read more

                                                          Source: Wikimedia Commons An interesting map was published by the US Geological Survey shortly after the Turkish-Syrian earthquakes.[1] It showed (perhaps somewhat predictively) that there was only one tiny square of the vast affected area in which Modified Mercalli intensity (which is largely a measure of damage) reached 9.0, the 'violent' level.[2] This is--just about--enough to damage ..read more

    In an article in Times Higher Education Professor Harvey J. Graff described malpractice among academic journal editors and called for a bill of rights to protect authors against such excesses. He discussed arbitrary decision-making, failure to communicate the reasons for decisions, negligence, manuscripts with excessive time in review, unprofessional reviews and use of inappropriate reviewers. I agree with all of his observations. I have been an editor (and mostly an Editor-in-Chief) of major international journals for almost 38 years. During that time I have encountered all sor ..read more

Few would deny that there is a general air of malaise in academia at the moment. I look around at colleagues and their attitudes seem to vary along a spectrum from combative anger, through pervasive anxiety, to sullen resignation. Academics seem to be trapped in a spiral of worsening conditions, but many fear that if they seek a new position elsewhere, the situation there may be just the same as the one that induced them to move. Others, of course, are simply unable to move, stuck in a job with working conditions that are increasingly less tolerable. Standards of management are generally very ..read more

A principle of cascading disasters is that the world is ever more closely linked by networks on which we all depend for communications, commerce, enlightenment and entertainment. When disaster strikes, these networks are capable of transmitting impacts through a variety of domains and system states, each of which produces different consequences. The cascade is a result of the progression of a shock through different kinds of vulnerability. To categorise these as social, economic, psychological, environmental, institutional, and so on is to oversimplify the mechanisms within them and the conne ..read more

  I live in a short street that connects a 15th-century convent to a Napoleonic-era theatre. On one side there is a park full of ornamental trees, in the middle there is a via crucis flanked by a double row of plane trees and the other side is lined by a row of elegant palazzi. The street is paved with flagstones and parking is forbidden by law. My neighbour parks her car outside her front door every night.  She does so even though it is only 30 metres to a legitimate car park, there is a sign forbidding parking and the local police occasionally fine her. We have tried gently to rea ..read more

The island of Capri seen from the slopes of Mount Vesuvius (photo: D. Alexander) There are two things we don’t teach our students but we should: to see and to listen. They are virtues--and skills--that are at least as important as writing and speaking. Some would argue that they are even more important. Pierre Bonnard, the great post-Impressionist painter, said that “many people look, but few see”. How very true! It is one thing to receive a visual impression and quite another to interpret it. For those of us who are in London, a good exercise is to catch the no. 9 bus at Aldwych, go upstai ..read more

Although we need to change attitudes to disaster from response to preparedness and prevention, this must not be done at the expense of our ability to respond to disasters when they occur. In the light of climate change, technological risks and migration, we will soon need civil protection systems that are an order of magnitude more powerful than those that we have now. One of their principal functions will be to limit damage. In prevention, there is almost always a positive relationship between investment and return. In other words, spending money on preparedness saves money on damage cont ..read more

  Some years ago I met a 31-year-old Bulgarian policeman whose main claim to fame was that he had been the Chief of Police for the Republic of Haiti for 20 minutes, or in other words until someone more senior arrived from Port-au-Prince airport. This was in 2010, shortly after Haiti had been prostrated by a magnitude 7 earthquake. Nobody knows how many casualties there were in that disaster: perhaps 240,000 dead and 300,000 injured. As bodies piled up on street corners and in courtyards there was no time to count them all. Some 1.6 million people were displaced from their homes, but the ..read more

The tsunami museum at Rikusentakata, seen from atop the coastal tsunami barrier across the land that was devastated by the waves in March 2011 Thursday 11th March 2021 was the tenth anniversary of the Japanese triple disaster: earthquake, tsunami and radiation release. I sent my greetings and respects to my Japanese colleagues and spent the day teaching my students about the event and its aftermath. I first visited the affected area in 2014, having failed to gain a place on an earlier expedition that took place a year and a half after the disaster. The affected area is the Tōhoku region of no ..read more