Professor Moshe Vardi with Rice University provides an excellent article on the impacts of prioritizing efficiency over resiliency.  As we build technology and communication systems some of these key ideas should be considered as we plan for the trade-offs and between cost efficiency and the need for resilient systems needed to provide critical communication capabilities during emergency incidents.

Professor Vardi writes, “

There is a trade-off between efficiency and resilience. Efficiency requires optimal adaptation to an existing environment, while resilience is an ability to adapt to large or sudden changes in the environment. Society’s emphasis on short-term gains has long tipped the balance in favor of efficiency.

The bottom line is that resilience is a fundamental but underappreciated societal need. But both computing and economics have underemphasized resilience. In general, markets and people are quite bad at preparing for very low-probability or very long-term events.

Three recent crises – the 2021 winter storm in Texas, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Boeing 737 Max software failure – highlight the cost of valuing efficiency over resilience and provide lessons for bringing society into balance. “

Read the rest of this thought-provoking article here:

Engineers and economists prize efficiency, but nature favors resilience – lessons from Texas, COVID-19 and the 737 Max
Moshe Y. Vardi- Professor of Computer Science, Rice University
Article in “The Conversation” May 18, 2021

https://theconversation.com/us

“On a November evening five years ago, Tennessee firefighters fielded calls about a fire burning in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, near Gatlinburg. A few days later, high winds pushed the fire into the park’s Chimneys Picnic Area—out of control. 

Today, the Chimney Tops 2 Fire is considered one of the most devastating fires in the state’s history. Cell phone reception went down. The region’s 9-1-1 system couldn’t handle the call load. It caused an estimated $2 billion in damage—more than 17,000 acres were burned and 14 people died. “

At the time of the fire the county ‘s emergency alert system had only 1% of the population enrolled to receive emergency alerts.  While the system was in place to send the alerts the work to enroll the local community had not been completed which made the system ineffective when needed for this emergency. 

A critical part of preparing our community and our local healthcare organizations for emergencies is making sure the available communication tools are used by our staff to receive critical communications.   PUSHECS has created a page with links to many of our regions City, County and Federal alert systems to assist your efforts to communicate with your staff the many alert system in place that they can sign up for so they can receive effective and timely emergency alert notifications.  Consider making this information available on your staff emergency preparedness programs.

See the PUSHECS page on regional and national alert systems for more information

A black swan event has, unfortunately, nothing to do with Natalie Portman or Western Australia; it describes an event that is extremely unlikely, but can cause massive upheaval. For example, the 2008 global recession or, say, pretty much all of 2020.

By definition, no one sees a black swan event coming — but researchers at Stanford are attempting to change that. They are building a computational method to try and predict when the next graceful neck will raise its head.

“This work is exciting because it’s a chance to take the knowledge and the computational tools that we’re building in the lab and use those to better understand — even predict or forecast — what happens in the world surrounding us,” Bo Wang, assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford and senior author of the study, told Stanford News…….

Read the complete text of this article at BigThink  by author B. David Zarley

https://bigthink.com/the-present/predict-unpredictable-black-swan-events/

Excuse me, what just happened? Resilience is tough when your failure is due to a ‘sequence of events that was almost impossible to foresee’

Thinking about how to design and create resilient systems is tough, especially when the failure path is not apparent or is buried deep within the system design.  So called “Black Swan” events are those once in a life time catastrophic events whose failure paths often only become apparent after the event but expose flaws which in hindsight were all to apparent.  Read this great article from the “The Register” website on some basic steps to help design and test your critical communication and data systems to help avoid that “Black Swan” event.  https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/12/how_to_make_tech_systems_resilient/