Risks

Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human

Taking us behind the scenes with today’s foremost researchers and pioneers, bestselling author Joel Garreau shows that we are at a turning point in history.  At this moment we are engineering the next stage of human evolution.  Through advances in genetic, robotic, information, and nanotechnologies, we are altering our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities, our progeny–and perhaps our very souls.  Radical Evolution reveals that the powers of our comic-book superheroes already exist, or are in development in hospitals, labs, and research facilities around the country–from the revved-up reflexes and speed of Spider-Man and Superman, to the enhanced mental acuity and memory capabilities of an advanced species. Over the next fifteen years, Garreau makes clear in this New York Times Book Club premiere selection, these enhancements will become part of our everyday lives. Where will they lead us? To heaven–where technology’s promise to make us smarter, vanquish illness, and extend our lives is the answer to our prayers? Or, as some argue, to hell–where unrestrained technology brings about the ultimate destruction of our species?

The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters

Charles Perrow is famous worldwide for his ideas about normal accidents, the notion that multiple and unexpected failures--catastrophes waiting to happen--are built into our society's complex systems. In The Next Catastrophe, he offers crucial insights into how to make us safer, proposing a bold new way of thinking about disaster preparedness.

Perrow argues that rather than laying exclusive emphasis on protecting targets, we should reduce their size to minimize damage and diminish their attractiveness to terrorists. He focuses on three causes of disaster--natural, organizational, and deliberate--and shows that our best hope lies in the deconcentration of high-risk populations, corporate power, and critical infrastructures such as electric energy, computer systems, and the chemical and food industries. Perrow reveals how the threat of catastrophe is on the rise, whether from terrorism, natural disasters, or industrial accidents. Along the way, he gives us the first comprehensive history of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security and examines why these agencies are so ill equipped to protect us.

The Next Catastrophe is a penetrating reassessment of the very real dangers we face today and what we must do to confront them. Written in a highly accessible style by a renowned systems-behavior expert, this book is essential reading for the twenty-first century. The events of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina--and the devastating human toll they wrought--were only the beginning. When the next big disaster comes, will we be ready?

Contractors Guide to Green Building Construction: Management, Project Delivery, Documentation, and Risk Reduction

Written for contractors and endorsed by the Associated General Contractors of America

Written specifically for contractors, this "how-to" book enables you to meet the challenges of green building construction. You'll discover how constructing environmentally friendly, sustainable buildings influences project management, delivery, documentation, and risk. Moreover, the book guides you through these important considerations at all phases of a green construction project, including:

• Bidding and contracting
• Managing green design when the contractor works as a design builder
• Subcontracting
• Procurement
• Construction management
• Project commissioning and closeout

This book is endorsed by the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) and was written with the assistance and advice of a specially assembled AGC task force. With a focus on the green building process from the contractor's viewpoint, the book avoids endorsing any one green building rating system in favor of presenting the business fundamentals common to them all.

Throughout the presentation, flowcharts and other features offer working tools for successfully managing green construction projects. Plus, real-world case studies developed through discussions with the actual contractors involved help you understand exactly what to expect and how to best manage constructing a green building. In short, this is one book that you need to have on hand to be a part of the rapidly growing green building movement.

Insurmountable Risks: The Dangers of Using Nuclear Power to Combat Global Climate Change

How much will nuclear energy cost relative to other means of getting rid of carbon dioxide emissions? What will be the risks of catastrophic accidents if we build reactors at the rate of one a week or more, cookie-cutter style, around the world? What about the risks of proliferation and terrorist attacks and nuclear waste? This book provides a meticulously researched analysis of the risks of using nuclear energy to combat global warming. Were there no alternative, the severity of the threat facing humankind and other species from global climate change might warrant serious consideration of the risks of nuclear energy. But as Insurmountable Risks convincingly shows, there are far safer economical alternatives.

Open Source for the Enterprise: Managing Risks, Reaping Rewards

Open source software is changing the world of Information Technology. But making it work for your company is far more complicated than simply installing a copy of Linux. If you are serious about using open source to cut costs, accelerate development, and reduce vendor lock-in, you must institutionalize skills and create new ways of working. You must understand how open source is different from commercial software and what responsibilities and risks it brings. Open Source for the Enterprise is a sober guide to putting open source to work in the modern IT department.

Open source software is software whose code is freely available to anyone who wants to change and redistribute it. New commercial support services, smaller licensing fees, increased collaboration, and a friendlier platform to sell products and services are just a few of the reasons open source is so attractive to IT departments. Some of the open source projects that are in current, widespread use in businesses large and small include Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, JBOSS, and Perl. These have been used to such great effect by Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, and major commercial and financial firms, that a wave of publicity has resulted in recent years, bordering on hype. Large vendors such as IBM, Novell, and Hewlett Packard have made open source a lynchpin of their offerings. Open source has entered a new area where it is being used as a marketing device, a collaborative software development methodology, and a business model.

This book provides something far more valuable than either the cheerleading or the fear-mongering one hears about open source. The authors are Dan Woods, former CTO of TheStreet.com and a consultant and author of several books about IT, and Gautam Guliani, Director of Software Architecture at Kaplan Test Prep & Admissions. Each has used open source software for some 15 years at IT departments large and small. They have collected the wisdom of a host of experts from IT departments, open source communities, and software companies.

Open Source for the Enterprise provides a top to bottom view not only of the technology, but of the skills required to manage it and the organizational issues that must be addressed. Here are the sorts of questions answered in the book:

• Why is there a "productization gap" in most open source projects?
• How can the maturity of open source be evaluated?
• How can the ROI of open source be calculated?
• What skills are needed to use open source?
• What sorts of open source projects are appropriate for IT departments at the beginner, intermediate, advanced, and expert levels?
• What questions need to be answered by an open source strategy?
• What policies for governance can be instituted to control the adoption of open source?
• What new commercial services can help manage the risks of open source?
• Do differences in open source licenses matter?
• How will using open source transform an IT department?

Praise for Open Source for the Enterprise: "Open Source has become a strategic business issue; decisions on how and where to choose to use Open Source now have a major impact on the overall direction of IT abilities to support the business both with capabilities and by controlling costs. This is a new game and one generally not covered in existing books on Open Source which continue to assume that the readers are 'deep dive' technologists, Open Source for the Enterprise provides everyone from business managers to technologists with the balanced view that has been missing. Well worth the time to read, and also worth encouraging others in your enterprise to read as well." ----Andy Mulholland - Global CTO Capgemini

"Open Source for the Enterprise is required reading for anyone working with or looking to adopt open source technologies in a corporate environment. Its practical, no-BS approach will make sure you're armed with the information you need to deploy applications successfully (as well as helping you know when to say "no"). If you're trying to sell open source to management, this book will give you the ammunition you need. If you're a manager trying to drive down cost using open source, this book will tell you what questions to ask your staff. In short, it's a clear, concise explanation of how to successfully leverage open source without making the big mistakes that can get you fired." ----Kevin Bedell - founding editor of LinuxWorld Magazine

Sport Facility Management: Organizing Events and Mitigating Risks (Sport Management Library)

The growing global sport industry requires that the sport management curriculum keep abreast of new and proven management techniques. Sport Facility Management: Organizing Events and Mitigating Risks provides readers with a comprehensive up-to-date introduction to each element of facility management for the full range of sporting events.

The demand for individuals who are educated and trained in facility management event organization and risk management has grown significantly in the past decade. Each chapter provides both a theoretical foundation and practical applications for each critical phase of facility management: from pre-event briefings to cleanup and closings.

Too Far From Home: A Story of Life and Death in Space

An incredible, true-life adventure set on the most dangerous frontier of all—outer spaceIn the nearly forty years since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, space travel has come to be seen as a routine enterprise—at least until the shuttle Columbia disintegrated like the Challenger before it, reminding us, once again, that the dangers are all too real.
Too Far from Home vividly captures the hazardous realities of space travel. Every time an astronaut makes the trip into space, he faces the possibility of death from the slightest mechanical error or instance of bad luck: a cracked O-ring, an errant piece of space junk, an oxygen leak . . . There are a myriad of frighteningly probable events that would result in an astronaut’s death. In fact, twenty-one people who have attempted the journey have been killed.
Yet for a special breed of individual, the call of space is worth the risk. Men such as U.S. astronauts Donald Pettit and Kenneth Bowersox, and Russian flight engineer Nikolai Budarin, who in November 2002 left on what was to be a routine fourteen-week mission maintaining the International Space Station.
But then, on February 1, 2003, the Columbia exploded beneath them. Despite the numerous news reports examining the tragedy, the public remained largely unaware that three men remained orbiting the earth. With the launch program suspended indefinitely, these astronauts had suddenly lost their ride home.
Too Far from Home chronicles the efforts of the beleaguered Mission Controls in Houston and Moscow as they work frantically against the clock to bring their men safely back to Earth, ultimately settling on a plan that felt, at best, like a long shot.
Latched to the side of the space station was a Russian-built Soyuz TMA-1 capsule, whose technology dated from the late 1960s (in 1971 a malfunction in the Soyuz 11 capsule left three Russian astronauts dead.) Despite the inherent danger, the Soyuz became the only hope to return Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit home.
Chris Jones writes beautifully of the majesty and mystique of space travel, while reminding us all how perilous it is to soar beyond the sky.

System Engineering Management

Comprehensive revision of more than 300f the content of the previous 2nd Edition
Increased coverage in the areas of system engineering processes, outsourcing, risk-analysis, globalization, and the application of new technologies in system development
Additional case studies have been added reflecting real-world successes

Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society)

7. Science Beyond Truth and Enlightenment? / 8. Opening up the Political / Index

System Safety Engineering And Risk Assessment: A Practical Approach (Chemical Engineering)

As technological systems become more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify safety hazards and to control their impact. Engineers today are finding that safety and risk touch upon every aspect of any engineered process, from system design all the way through disposal. Employing highly pragmatic examples from a number of industries, System Safety Engineering and Risk Assessment: A Practical Approach provides a comprehensive and easily accessible guide on how to build safety into products as well as into industrial processes. Using a systems approach, the text discusses the best system safety techniques used in various industries, types of hazard analyses, safety checklists and other safety tools, as well as techniques for investigating accidents. It explains how to set up a data management system for a system safety program, and delves into risk assessment, including ways to conduct a risk evaluation. While the book provides engineers with an efficient reference in a critical area, the clarity of the writing along with the case studies and illustrations makes this book accessible to non-technical professionals needing a how to guide for the safety management of complex systems. It is also used by graduate classes involved with ergonomics and occupational safety as well as engineering.