The National Institute of Standards and Technology's Impact on Fire Safety Standards.

The authors document the role of the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) in the initial adoption of smoke alarms, ongoing changes to smoke alarm performance requirements, and ongoing research on wildfire safety in the wildland urban interface. They also provide econometric estimates of the social and economic impact of the fire safety standards that NIST helped develop.

Improving Joint Expeditionary Medical Planning Tools Based on a Patient Flow Approach.

The U.S. military's current concept of operations for expeditionary medical care emphasizes quickly moving patients to a series of successively more sophisticated medical facilities that provide the patients with the care necessary to treat their injury or condition. Balancing the deployment of treatment and evacuation resources is therefore necessary to ensure that the right mix of resources is available in a timely fashion. The authors propose a planning concept that, by promoting patient flow rate as the common unit of measurement, will help integrate medical planning across treatment and evacuation functions, across the increasing levels of care, and across the different military services. The primary medical planning tool approved for use by combatant commands for developing their operational plans-the Joint Medical Analysis Tool (JMAT)-already operates in a manner consistent with this concept. However, modifications and enhancements to JMAT are necessary to ensure that the concept can be fully implemented.

The life-saving effectiveness of body armor for police officers.

The objective of this study was to determine the effect of protective body armor on a police officer's risk of being killed and estimate the benefits and costs of outfitting police with body armor. In the United States, for police shot in the torso from 2004 to 2007 (n = 262), we calculate the relative risk of death from a gunshot without and with body armor. We estimate the benefit of body armor using the willingness-to-pay approach and compare it with the cost of supplying armor to police not currently wearing armor. The results show that the relative risk of dying without armor is = 3.4 (95% CI: 2.4 to 4.6). Outfitting all police with armor would save at least 8.5 lives per year, resulting in a benefit that is nearly twice the cost, or a net benefit of approximately $100/officer. Body armor more than triples the likelihood that a police officer will survive a shooting to the torso. Outfitting all police with armor yields a positive net benefit and is strongly justified economically.

Using probabilistic terrorism risk modeling for regulatory benefit-cost analysis: application to the Western hemisphere travel initiative in the land environment.

This article presents a framework for using probabilistic terrorism risk modeling in regulatory analysis. We demonstrate the framework with an example application involving a regulation under consideration, the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative for the Land Environment, (WHTI-L). First, we estimate annualized loss from terrorist attacks with the Risk Management Solutions (RMS) Probabilistic Terrorism Model. We then estimate the critical risk reduction, which is the risk-reducing effectiveness of WHTI-L needed for its benefit, in terms of reduced terrorism loss in the United States, to exceed its cost. Our analysis indicates that the critical risk reduction depends strongly not only on uncertainties in the terrorism risk level, but also on uncertainty in the cost of regulation and how casualties are monetized. For a terrorism risk level based on the RMS standard risk estimate, the baseline regulatory cost estimate for WHTI-L, and a range of casualty cost estimates based on the willingness-to-pay approach, our estimate for the expected annualized loss from terrorism ranges from $2.7 billion to $5.2 billion. For this range in annualized loss, the critical risk reduction for WHTI-L ranges from 7% to 13%. Basing results on a lower risk level that results in halving the annualized terrorism loss would double the critical risk reduction (14-26%), and basing the results on a higher risk level that results in a doubling of the annualized terrorism loss would cut the critical risk reduction in half (3.5-6.6%). Ideally, decisions about terrorism security regulations and policies would be informed by true benefit-cost analyses in which the estimated benefits are compared to costs. Such analyses for terrorism security efforts face substantial impediments stemming from the great uncertainty in the terrorist threat and the very low recurrence interval for large attacks. Several approaches can be used to estimate how a terrorism security program or regulation reduces the distribution of risks it is intended to manage. But, continued research to develop additional tools and data is necessary to support application of these approaches. These include refinement of models and simulations, engagement of subject matter experts, implementation of program evaluation, and estimating the costs of casualties from terrorism events.