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Foreword Hamilton Bean and I have a mentor in common. Dr. Dennis S. Mileti has for decades been a leader in the scientific study of public warning in the United States and globally. I’m no academic, but I’ve spent most of my career in public safety and emergency management trying to apply Dennis’s research and insights to the practical challenges of saving lives and reducing losses by alerting and informing the public when things go wrong. Dr. Bean advances that work in this book. After the 1989 earthquake near San Francisco, I built an emergency data broadcast system for the State of California. Later I was engaged by the Republic of Singapore to help them integrate a patchwork of public warn- ing and emergency public information systems in that island city-state. That project led me to try to translate the insights of Dr. Mileti and his col- leagues and students into the design of a technical Common Alerting Pro- tocol (CAP), which has come to serve as the foundation for the modern “warning Internet.” Which is how I happened to be around for the creation of Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) and the federal Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS). But although I knew a little of the theory of warning, my approach was biased toward the pragmatic. My knowledge was, and remains, largely anecdotal. Dr. Bean, on the other hand, is an academic of impeccable credentials, and in this book he demonstrates why we need such people. Here you’ll see the mechanics of modern public warning laid out, systematically and in context—not just of technology, but also of policy, psychology, soci- ology, law, and ethics. On almost every page I read, in plain language, a