Reviewer: Barrett Hazeltine

This one-page article is based on the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Risks Forum (http://www.risks.org), which documents failures and risks. Some failures arise from problems in computer hardware and software, and others arise from natural disasters: earthquakes, mudslides, hurricanes, and so forth. Information technology (IT) systems can anticipate, detect, and monitor such events. Why are they not used__?__ Three reasons are given: institutions tend to plan for past situations, institutions tend to ignore long-term consequences, and people generally resent taking sensible precautions. In any case, farsighted analysis is difficult, and influenced by self-serving mandates. We can do much better in preventing people-caused problems, and in anticipating nature-caused ones. This is a pithy article that makes sense; I encourage people to go to the Web site. Online Computing Reviews Service