Author: Phil Simon

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Published: 2008-11-17

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1438944241

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What does a Fortune 500 company implementing a multimillion dollar "off the shelf" system have in common with a 150 person firm building its own system? In each case, the organization failed to activate and utilize its system as initially conceived by senior management. These two organizations are hardly alone. On the contrary, more than three in five new systems fail. Many miss their deadlines. Others exceed their initial budgets, often by ghastly amounts. Even systems activated on time and under budget often fail to produce their expected results and almost immediately experience major problems. While the statistics are grim, there is at least some good news: This doesn't have to be the case. Organizations often lack the necessary framework to minimize the chance of system failure at three key points: before, during, and after system implementations. Why New Systems Fail provides such a framework with specific tools, tips, and questions from the perspective of a seasoned, independent consultant with more than a decade of related experience. The book examines in great detail the root causes of system failures. Case studies, examples, and lessons from actual system implementations are presented in an informative, straightforward, and very readable manner. More than a theoretical or technical text, the book offers pragmatic advice for organizations both deploying new systems and maintaining existing ones.

The Big Truck That Went By
The Big Truck That Went By

Author: Jonathan M. Katz

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2013-01-08

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1137323957

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On January 12, 2010, the deadliest earthquake in the history of the Western Hemisphere struck the nation least prepared to handle it. Jonathan M. Katz, the only full-time American news correspondent in Haiti, was inside his house when it buckled along with hundreds of thousands of others. In this visceral, authoritative first-hand account, Katz chronicles the terror of that day, the devastation visited on ordinary Haitians, and how the world reacted to a nation in need. More than half of American adults gave money for Haiti, part of a monumental response totaling $16.3 billion in pledges. But three years later the relief effort has foundered. It's most basic promises—to build safer housing for the homeless, alleviate severe poverty, and strengthen Haiti to face future disasters—remain unfulfilled. The Big Truck That Went By presents a sharp critique of international aid that defies today's conventional wisdom; that the way wealthy countries give aid makes poor countries seem irredeemably hopeless, while trapping millions in cycles of privation and catastrophe. Katz follows the money to uncover startling truths about how good intentions go wrong, and what can be done to make aid "smarter." With coverage of Bill Clinton, who came to help lead the reconstruction; movie-star aid worker Sean Penn; Wyclef Jean; Haiti's leaders and people alike, Katz weaves a complex, darkly funny, and unexpected portrait of one of the world's most fascinating countries. The Big Truck That Went By is not only a definitive account of Haiti's earthquake, but of the world we live in today.

Accidents and Disasters
Accidents and Disasters

Author: Satish Chandra

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-05-18

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 9811999848

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This book deals with the contemporary subject of perception of risk and its influence on accidents and disasters. The contents examine the conventional viewpoints on human errors, incubation of errors, complexity and organisational deviance as a cause for accidents. Work of Mary Douglas with regard to risk, Charles Perrow's work on the normal accident theory and Diane Vaughan's theory on normalisation of deviance are examined from a fresh perspective in this book. It also discusses prominent accidents in aviation, space, nuclear energy, automotive and healthcare, using the pandemic and Boeing 737 Max as a backdrop to study accidents and disasters. It further explores the background and similarities to these events and addresses the core issues such as the state of regulation, the worldview of the sociologists, and proposes that mental models of complex systems, avarice and risk for gain as other possibilities for accidents. Using the concept of nudge in behavioural economics and the Elinor Ostrom’s viewpoint on regulating for common good, it suggests a way forward through the High Reliability Organisation Theory (HRO) leading to enhanced risk perception. The book will be of interest to those who would like to understand the need to incorporate risk perception into regulation, engineers and scientists, professionals and policy makers working in the areas of disaster and risk management, technology areas like aviation, nuclear plants, space and healthcare, students of the sociology of risk and of course the general reader.

English Idioms and Phrases Dictionary
English Idioms and Phrases Dictionary

Author: Daniel B. Smith

Publisher: Daniel B. Smith

Published: 2023-07-03

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13:

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Idioms are expressions that cannot be understood from their individual words alone, and the English language is full of them—and so is this dictionary: 4,800+ English idioms and phrases with example sentences included for you so as to understand them all. This is the essential idioms dictionary if you want to talk like a native speaker—or just find out more about the colorful phrases you hear and say every day.

Miseducation
Miseducation

Author: A. J. Angulo

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1421419327

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A provocative collection that explores how intentional ignorance seeps into formal education. Honorable Mention for the PROSE Education Theory Award of the Association of American Publishers Ignorance, or the study of ignorance, is having a moment. Ignorance plays a powerful role in shaping public opinion, channeling our politics, and even directing scholarly research. The first collection of essays to grapple with the historical interplay between education and ignorance, Miseducation finds ignorance—and its social production through naïveté, passivity, and active agency—at the center of many pivotal historical developments. Ignorance allowed Americans to maintain the institution of slavery, Nazis to promote ideas of race that fomented genocide in the 1930s, and tobacco companies to downplay the dangers of cigarettes. Today, ignorance enables some to deny the fossil record and others to ignore climate science. A. J. Angulo brings together seventeen experts from across the scholarly spectrum to explore how intentional ignorance seeps into formal education. Each chapter identifies education as a critical site for advancing our still-limited understanding of what exactly ignorance is, where it comes from, and how it is diffused, maintained, and regulated in society. Miseducation also challenges the notion that schools are, ideally, unimpeachable sites of knowledge production, access, and equity. By investigating how laws, myths, national aspirations, and global relations have recast and, at times, distorted the key purposes of education, this pathbreaking book sheds light on the role of ignorance in shaping ideas, public opinion, and policy.

Understanding Disaster Insurance
Understanding Disaster Insurance

Author: Carolyn Kousky

Publisher: Island Press

Published: 2022-10-13

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 164283226X

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The frequency and intensity of natural disasters—such as wildfires, hurricanes, floods, and storms—is on the rise, threatening our way of life and our livelihoods. Managing this growing risk will be central to economic and social progress in the coming decades. Insurance, an often confusing and unpopular tool, will be critical to successfully emerging from the effects of these crises. Its traditional role is to protect us from unforeseen and unanticipated risk, but as currently structured, insurance cannot adequately respond to these types of threats. How can we improve insurance to provide consistent and sufficient help following all disasters? How do we use insurance not just to help us recover, but also to help us prevent disasters in the first place? And how can insurance help us achieve broader social and environmental goals? Understanding Disaster Insurance provides an accessible introduction to the complexities—and exciting possibilities—of risk transfer markets in the U.S. and around the world. Carolyn Kousky, a leading researcher on disaster risk and insurance, explains how traditional insurance markets came to be structured and why they fall short in meeting the needs of a world coping with climate change. She then offers realistic, yet hopeful, examples of new approaches. With examples ranging from individual entrepreneurs to multi-country collaborations, she shows how innovative thinking and creative applications of insurance-based mechanisms can improve recovery outcomes for people and their communities. She also explores the role of insurance in supporting policy goals beyond disaster recovery, such as nature-positive approaches for larger environmental impact. The book holds up the possibility that new risk transfer markets, brought to scale, could help create more equitable and sustainable economies. Insurance and risk transfer markets can be a powerful tool for adapting to climate change, yet they are frequently misunderstood. Many find insurance confusing or even problematic and ineffective. Understanding Disaster Insurance is a useful guidebook for policymakers, innovators, students, and other decision makers working to secure a resilient future—and anyone affected by wind, fire, rain, or flood.

Making It Count
Making It Count

Author: Arunabh Ghosh

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2022-01-11

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 069119971X

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"Among the biggest challenges facing leaders of the newly established People's Republic of China (PRC) was how much they did not know. In 1949, at the end of a long sequence of wars, the government of one of the largest states in the world committed to fundamentally re-engineering its society and economy via socialist planning while having almost no hard, reliable statistical data about their own country. This book is a history of attempts made to resolve this "crisis in counting." Drawing on a wealth of official, institutional, and private sources culled from China, India, and the United States, the author explores the choices made and the effects they engendered through a series of vivid encounters with political leaders, professional statisticians, academics, ordinary statistical workers, and even literary figures. Early reliance on Soviet-inspired methods of enumeration became increasingly untenable in China by the middle of the 1950s. A series of unprecedented and unexpected exchanges with Indian statisticians followed, as the Chinese sought to learn about the then exciting new technology of random sampling. These developments were, in turn, overtaken by the tumult of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961), when both probabilistic and exhaustive methods were rejected and statistics was refashioned into an essentially ethnographic enterprise. The author argues that this history, usually narrowly described as a universal, if European history, cannot be understood without acknowledging Soviet and Indian influences which not only revises existing models of Cold War science but also globalizes the wider developments in the history of statistics and data. For historians of China and social science, and political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists studying modern China"--

Psycho-Economics
Psycho-Economics

Author: Robert D. Weitz

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-03

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 131782637X

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Develop new ways to provide ethical, effective mental health services in a world of managed care! Psycho-Economics gives psychologists and mental health care administrators suggestions for handling the changes that have come with the advent of managed care. Using empirical research and practitioner accounts, this informative book assesses the impact of managed care, suggests ways to ameliorate its negative effects, and proposes ideas for the improvement of the managed care system and mental health care in general. Psycho-Economics takes a clear look at the ways in which the managed care system has altered the practice of mental health care. While acknowledging its positive effects on accountability and provision of a broader variety of care options, the chapter authors also note its powerful negative effects, including cutbacks in length of treatment, potential abuses of confidential medical records, and over-prescribing of mood-altering drugs. Yet the book also offers hope for psychologists, social workers, and other counselors. By developing diversified areas for professional practice, collaborating with primary care physicians, and creating corporate education opportunities, psychologists can contribute their expertise to people who might otherwise have never sought them out. Moreover, mental health professionals can embrace new opportunities in treating substance abuse, behavioral health, and such specialized areas as forensic psychology, domestic violence, crisis counseling, and employee screening. These areas and other new developments offer you a chance to build a solid practice devoted to serving society's needs. Psycho-Economics: brings practitioners effective, innovative approaches to clinical practice in relation to managed mental health care fosters awareness of the means by which managed care affects the quality of care that clients receive points out the steps that can be taken to minimize the negative effects that managed care dictates on the quantity and quality of mental health care highlights ethical and legal considerations that should be of concern to providers of mental health services encourages discussion of the future of the managed care system and its impact on providers and clients Psycho-Economics is a survival guide which will help contemporary practitioners like you maintain ethical and effective practices while coping with the administrative expectations of managed care systems.

A Usual Lunacy
A Usual Lunacy

Author: D G Compton

Publisher: Gateway

Published: 2011-09-29

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 0575118040

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It makes people positively ache with happiness. It puts the roses back in their cheeks and the itch back in their blood. "It" is the Scholes Virus - proper medical term for what used to be called, out of mawkish ignorance but with uncanny prescience, the "love bug". Professor Trevor Scholes has discovered, isolated and classified every variety of the infection that now bears his name. One variety, B79/K, is so rare that the odds are fifty thousand to one against two compatible carriers meeting. So of course Giles Cranston and Tamsin McGillivray meet . . .