My “understanding” of the impact of toxic mould contamination on Public Health is not great but has grown considerably due to my interest in risk and complexity in the health service,  insurance and reinstatement industries.

What I have learnt is that the health implications for tenants, owners, landlords, contractors, etc, are considerable. As a result, so is the potential for substantial costs unless full facts about the dangers are established – and there appears to be a concerted effort to prevent this, both in US and UK – this could be bigger than Asbestos and ignorance is no excuse!

Perhaps that explains why people who voice legitimate concerns about ‘the official stance’ and what treatments are effective have found themselves marginalised, persecuted…even prosecuted!?

CONTEMPT OF COURT

Mrs. Sharon Noonan Kramer

2031 Arborwood Place

Escondido, CA 92029

760-746-8026

August 27, 2012

Update: September 10, 2012.  The Court, with no subject matter jurisdiction, fined me $3K (this is my Motion for Reconsideration submitted under duress) for refusing to publish a false confession on the internet of being guilty of libel for a sentence I never even wrote.. “Dr. Kelman altered his under oath statements on the witness stand’ while he testified as a witness in an Oregon lawsuit.”— to conceal how and why the courts framed me for libel for the sentences, “Upon viewing documents presented by the Hayne’s attorney of Kelman’s prior testimony from a case in Arizona, Dr. Kelman altered his under oath statements on the witness stand.  He admitted the Manhattan Institute, a national political think-tank, paid GlobalTox $40,000 to write a position paper regarding the potential health risks of toxic mold exposure.”…

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Risk or Uncertainty:: which are we confronted with now?

Listen to the “risk management” fraternity and they will tell you that they know what they are doing, blah, blah but I can, emphatically tell you that THEY DO NOT!

Here is what, the late, Hunt Taylor (former Hedge Fund Manager) had to say about the markets prior to his death in 2006:

“Let us start with what we know. First, these markets look nothing like anything I’ve ever encountered before. Their stunning complexity, the staggering number of tradable instruments and their interconnectedness, the light-speed at which information moves, the degree to which the movement of one instrument triggers nonlinear reactions along chains of related derivatives, and the requisite level of mathematics necessary to price them speak to the reality that we are now sailing in uncharted waters….

“I’ve had 30-plus years of learning experiences in markets, all of which tell me that technology and telecommunications will not do away with human greed and ignorance. I think we will drive the car faster and faster until something bad happens. And I think it will come, like a comet, from that part of the night sky where we least expect it. This is something old.

“I think shocks will come, but they will be shallower, shorter. They will be harder to predict, because we are not really managing risk anymore. We are managing uncertainty – too many new variables, plus leverage on a scale we have never encountered (something borrowed). And, when the inevitable occurs, the buying opportunities that result will be won by the technologically enabled swift.”

Ubiquity, Complexity Theory, and Sandpiles, How Change Happens

John Kay:: don’t blame luck when your models misfire

There are still legions of smart people recruited into FS to be put to work on building models that attempt to predict the future…WHY???

We will succeed in managing financial risk better only when we come to recognise the limitations of formal modelling. Control of risk is almost entirely a matter of management competence, well-crafted incentives, robust structures and systems, and simplicity and transparency of design

Basically, according to this quote, what we need to do is, almost exactly the opposite to what we have done for so many years!

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Driver sued for refusing to sue

I’m sure that most people will be shocked by this story but, for me, it is the back-story of the claim culture, the role of the insurance and secondary industries that it “feeds”. Sooner or later we realise who the victims are!

No-win, no-fee lawyers such as this can pay claims companies up to £500 for passing on the personal details of people injured in car accidents, although there is no evidence that this particular firm has done so. In January, Mr Hopper says he was contacted by a GP surgery asking him to attend a medical in respect of the claim. At this point, any lingering stiffness in his neck was long gone. Mr Hopper’s conscience kicked in. He would not lie to a doctor, so he pulled out of the claim before his appointment. He told the law firm he no longer wished to pursue the claim. They sent him a letter saying that as he had discontinued the court action, he was liable for their costs, which amounted to £1,140. h

You may already know that the Government have already sought to shake up civil justice related to the “no win no fee legions”.

This is a topic I have written about in much more detail before and these may aid your understanding of the true nature of the problems and who actually benefits from…

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Insurance, risk & underwriting:: out of the coffee shop and into the light

Wow! This is a great report from a US firm called Strategy Meets Action and I think that Deb Smallwood has spelled-out a way forward for insurers, MGA’s and brokers who are dithering on what they need to do be “win” in the immediate future and in the longer term, no matter how the landscape changes in coming years.

Don’t get me wrong, whilst the report makes sense of so much that can (does) cloud the mind of insurance executives – who have so many strategic issues to address and an abiding fear of making the wrong call – it doesn’t enlighten them as to “how” they tackle some fundamental failings, such as:

• how to differentiate between risks that “look good”, according to correlations in data gathered over many years and those that ARE good, based upon a reliable measurement of their current resilience [ability to absorb unforeseen events]
• how to rate risks for which there is little or no historic data [the truly “new” venture]
• how to develop and maintain a sensory awareness of, rapidly changing, internal/external factors – threats and opportunities

Real-time visibility is, undoubtedly, a huge advantage in the Digital Age but, that does pre-suppose that the capability to analyse large scale data [Big Data is THE hot topic] exists. But an even more important question is…

…how do you recognise something you haven’t seen before?

That is to say if it is a familiar pattern i.e. risk, something “known”. But hold on a minute, if this is the full extent of what the smart, enabled and aligned, insurer is looking for then that is to fail to recognise that there are “unknowns”. Do we assume that something unfamiliar is irrelevant, an outlier, or investigate to ensure it is not a new, emergent, pattern or risk?