He said that the only foreseeable threat to CCA's business is a steep decline in crime rates, a low-probability event.

FORBES: Value Investing

Then, participants are told the real probability of the event happening in the broader population.

WSJ: Resolutions: So Irresistible, So Hard to Keep

The volunteers were then told the actual average probability of the event.

FORBES: Pollyanna Had Brain Damage! Study Claims Faulty Brain Wiring Sparks Unrealistic Optimism

It has also held that materiality of contingent or speculative events or information depends on balancing the probability that the event will occur and the expected magnitude of the event.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Shariah��s Black Box

In the second part of the study, participants were again asked to estimate the probability of each event happening to them, but this time they were not in the fMRI scanner.

FORBES: Pollyanna Had Brain Damage! Study Claims Faulty Brain Wiring Sparks Unrealistic Optimism

While lying in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, 19 volunteers were presented with a series of negative life events, such as being robbed or developing cancer, and asked to estimate the probability that this event would happen to them in the future.

FORBES: Pollyanna Had Brain Damage! Study Claims Faulty Brain Wiring Sparks Unrealistic Optimism

After extensive research, they found that an exit event during the previous year significantly increased the probability an individual would be engaged in subsequent entrepreneurial activity.

FORBES: New Report on Entrepreneurship Reveals 5 Key Insights

Thus, by deliberately disrupting all redundant safety systems, saboteurs can cause a severe event that would have had only a very low probability of occurrence if left to chance.

FORBES: One American's Struggle to Save New York City from Cyber Saboteurs

This led him to calculate that the information content of any event was proportional to the logarithm of its inverse probability of occurrence. (Unlike many popular-science books that eschew equations, Mr Vedral includes a couple and tries his best to explain them to the reader.) What does the equation mean?

ECONOMIST: Information theory