Minding the Machines PDF Download

Author: William M. Evan
Publisher: Prentice Hall Professional
ISBN: 9780130656469
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 524

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Book Description
A provocative and authoritative guide to understanding the questions surrounding technology disasters that occur, with a blueprint for the prevention of future disasters, this book looks at over three dozen case studies and the lessons learned from them.

Author: Shyamal K. Majumdar
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 582

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Author: Neil Schlager
Publisher: Gale Cengage
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 902

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Book Description
Discusses aircraft, airships, automobiles, bridges, buildings and other structures, chemical and environmental disasters, dams, medical disasters, nuclear plants, ships, spacecraft, and submarine disasters.

Author: Dennis Mileti
Publisher: Joseph Henry Press
ISBN: 0309261732
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Disasters by Design provides an alternative and sustainable way to view, study, and manage hazards in the United States that would result in disaster-resilient communities, higher environmental quality, inter- and intragenerational equity, economic sustainability, and improved quality of life. This volume provides an overview of what is known about natural hazards, disasters, recovery, and mitigation, how research findings have been translated into policies and programs; and a sustainable hazard mitigation research agenda. Also provided is an examination of past disaster losses and hazards management over the past 20 years, including factorsâ€"demographic, climate, socialâ€"that influence loss. This volume summarizes and sets the stage for the more detailed books in the series.

Author: Frederick F. Lighthall
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
ISBN: 1457532972
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Disastrous High-Tech Decision Making: From Disasters to Safety offers new insights for scholars studying management, decision making, cognition in the wild, and safety in the context of imperatives to continue operations. This book takes you inside the deliberations and action that have produced high-tech disasters in safetycritical enterprises. From primary data and analyses never before considered in scholarly assessments of the Challenger disaster, Frederick F. Lighthall, Professor Emeritus at The University of Chicago, applies the insights of macroergonomics, social psychology, naturalistic decision making, and legal argumentation to this expanded set of documents and data. He argues that the Challenger case represents a prototype of decision making that arises whenever a possibly threatening change in operating conditions becomes evident. In this situation, inevitable in boundarypushing enterprises, four generic decision-making pitfalls await engineers and managers who must decide whether continuing to operate is safe or dangerous. These four decision-making vulnerabilities are also evident, Lighthall argues, in the decision situations of other high-tech disasters both similar (the Columbia shuttle) and dissimilar (Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster). In Part I of the book Lighthall traces decision participants’ chart-by-chart deliberations and argument about whether proceeding with the Challenger’s launch would be dangerous. Part II analyzes from contrasting perspectives the dynamics revealed in the narrative. Lighthall’s analysis ends by examining the demanding changes in outlook, knowledge disciplines, and learning processes required for safety to compete with the production imperatives of high-tech enterprises operating in unforgiving environments. This book is a must read both for students of management and of engineering who may find themselves working in these high-tech settings, and for managers and engineers who now work in these settings.

Author: Allen R. Coggins
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 1572338296
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
A one-of-a-kind reference book, Tennessee Tragedies examines a wide variety of disasters that have occurred in the Volunteer State over the past several centuries. Intended for both general readers and emergency management professionals, it covers natural disasters such as floods, tornadoes, and earthquakes; technological events such as explosions, transportation wrecks, and structure fires; and societal incidents including labor strikes, political violence, lynchings, and other hate crimes. At the center of the book are descriptive accounts of 150 of the state’s most severe events. These range from smallpox epidemics in the eighteenth century to the epic floods of 1936–37, from the Sultana riverboat disaster of 1865 (the worst inland marine accident in U.S. history) to the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Included as well are stories of plane crashes, train wrecks, droughts, economic panics, and race riots. An extensive chronology provides further details on more than 900 incidents, the most complete listing ever compiled for a single state. The book’s introduction examines topics that include our fascination with such tragedies; major causes of death, injury, and destruction; and the daunting problems of producing accurate accountings of a disaster’s effects, whether in numbers of dead and injured or of economic impact. Among the other features are a comprehensive glossary that defines various technical terms and concepts and tables illustrating earthquake, drought, disease, and tornado intensity scales. A work of great historical interest that brings together for the first time an impressive array of information,Tennessee Tragedies will prove exceptionally useful for those who must respond to inevitable future disasters.

Author: Shailesh Nayak
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3540792597
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Lessons learned in the last several years have given clear indications that the prediction and efficient monitoring of disasters is one of the critical factors in decision-making process. In this respect space-based technologies have the great potential of supplying information in near real time. Earth observation satellites have already demonstrated their flexibility in providing data to a wide range of applications: weather forecasting, person and vehicle tracking, alerting to disaster, forest fire and flood monitoring, oil spills, spread of desertification, monitoring of crop and forestry damages. This book focuses on a wider utilisation of remote sensing in disaster management. The discussed aspects comprise data access/delivery to the users, information extraction and analysis, management of data and its integration with other data sources (airborne and terrestrial imagery, GIS data, etc.), data standardization, organisational and legal aspects of sharing remote sensing information.

Author: Edward Jones-Imhotep
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262036517
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
An examination of how technological failures defined nature and national identity in Cold War Canada. Throughout the modern period, nations defined themselves through the relationship between nature and machines. Many cast themselves as a triumph of technology over the forces of climate, geography, and environment. Some, however, crafted a powerful alternative identity: they defined themselves not through the triumph of machines over nature, but through technological failures and the distinctive natural orders that caused them. In The Unreliable Nation, Edward Jones-Imhotep examines one instance in this larger history: the Cold War–era project to extend reliable radio communications to the remote and strategically sensitive Canadian North. He argues that, particularly at moments when countries viewed themselves as marginal or threatened, the identity of the modern nation emerged as a scientifically articulated relationship between distinctive natural phenomena and the problematic behaviors of complex groups of machines. Drawing on previously unpublished archival documents and recently declassified materials, Jones-Imhotep shows how Canadian defense scientists elaborated a distinctive “Northern” natural order of violent ionospheric storms and auroral displays, and linked it to a “machinic order” of severe and widespread radio disruptions throughout the country. Tracking their efforts through scientific images, experimental satellites, clandestine maps, and machine architectures, he argues that these scientists naturalized Canada's technological vulnerabilities as part of a program to reimagine the postwar nation. The real and potential failures of machines came to define Canada, its hostile Northern nature, its cultural anxieties, and its geo-political vulnerabilities during the early Cold War. Jones-Imhotep's study illustrates the surprising role of technological failures in shaping contemporary understandings of both nature and nation.

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309045460
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 85

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Book Description
Initial priorities for U.S. participation in the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction, declared by the United Nations, are contained in this volume. It focuses on seven issues: hazard and risk assessment; awareness and education; mitigation; preparedness for emergency response; recovery and reconstruction; prediction and warning; learning from disasters; and U.S. participation internationally. The committee presents its philosophy of calls for broad public and private participation to reduce the toll of disasters.

Author: Jennifer Horney
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 0128095075
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Disaster Epidemiology: Methods and Applications applies the core methods of epidemiological research and practice to the assessment of the short- and long-term health effects of disasters. The persistent movement of people and economic development to regions vulnerable to natural disasters, as well as new vulnerabilities related to environmental, technological, and terrorism incidents, means that in spite of large global efforts to reduce the impacts and costs of disasters, average annual expenditures to fund rebuilding from catastrophic losses is rising faster than either population or the gross world product. Improving the resilience of individuals and communities to these natural and technological disasters, climate change, and other natural and manmade stressors is one of the grand challenges of the 21st century. This book provides a guide to disaster epidemiology methods, supported with applications from practice. It helps researchers, public health practitioners, and governmental policy makers to better quantify the impacts of disaster on the health of individuals and communities to enhance resilience to future disasters. Disaster Epidemiology: Methods and Applications explains how public health surveillance, rapid assessments, and other epidemiologic studies can be conducted in the post-disaster setting to prevent injury, illness, or death; provide accurate and timely information for decisions makers; and improve prevention and mitigation strategies for future disasters. These methods can also be applied to the study of other types of public health emergencies, such as infectious outbreaks, emerging and re-emerging diseases, and refugee health. This book gives both the public health practitioner and researcher the tools they need to conduct epidemiological studies in a disaster setting and can be used as a reference or as part of a course. - Provides a holistic perspective to epidemiology with an integration of academic and practical approaches - Showcases the use of hands-on techniques and principles to solve real-world problems - Includes contributions from both established and emerging scholars in the field of disaster epidemiology