Near Miss

Close calls, narrow escapes, or near hits. History has shown repeatedly that these "near-miss" incidents often precede loss producing events, but are largely ignored or go unreported because nothing (no injury, damage or loss) happened. Thus, many opportunities to prevent the accidents that the organization has not yet had are lost. Recognizing and

Near Miss Reporting as a Safety Tool arises from a meeting of safety professionals, academicians, and consultants from Western-Europe and Canada held in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, in September 1989. The book deals with near-miss reporting in various systems, mostly in the context of errors and accidents. The book begins by discussing the effects of bad management decisions in the design phase and a framework that will describe or manage these near misses through reporting, description, analysis, interpretation, and suggestions. Seven modules that compose this framework, called the Near Miss Management System (NMMS), along with pertinent cases, are explained. The book notes that near misses are ignored because of technical myopia, action-oriented organizations, event-focused organizations, consequence driven, and variables in quality of reporting. The organizational and management aspects of the NMMS are then analyzed within the commonly accepted culture and experience of the company. The book also presents comparative application of near miss information systems covering a wide range of industrial and transport environment. Such presentation allows differences and similarities to come into view more easily. The text will prove valuable for safety professionals in the nuclear and chemical industry and in road, railway, and air traffic management. Professors and students in safety management will likewise appreciate this book.

Displaced international consultant Dayle Standish heads for the Caribbean, following a losing battle involving corporate intrigue and blackmail. Diving Cozumel's azure waters, Dayle photographs a mysterious encounter inside a deep underwater cave. Soon after, a deadly assassin working for a foreign intelligence service starts targeting Cozumel dive operator Terry Manetta's customers. But Dayle is determined not to become the next victim, keeping one step ahead of a relentless killer pursuing her across the Atlantic and back to the Mexican Caribbean. Terry and her husband, former New York City detective Joe Manetta, team up with old friends at the NYPD, FBI, and CIA, to solve this international caper. Throw in the Washington DC PD and the alphabet soup gets even thicker, as spies, treasure hunters, and Cozumel scuba divers collide in this Caribbean adventure. It's been several years since Terry and Joe Manetta accidentally embroiled themselves in a Caribbean mystery thriller. Their latest adventure covers an international triangle anchored in New York City, Havana, and Cozumel with brief stopovers in Washington D.C., Madrid, and Cadiz.

Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, and as “the foremost poet-critic of our time” by Craig Dworkin, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American poetry. Near/Miss, Bernstein’s first poetry collection in five years, is the apotheosis of his late style, thick with off-center rhythms, hilarious riffs, and verbal extravagance. This collection’s title highlights poetry’s ability to graze reality without killing it, and at the same time implies that the poems themselves are wounded by the grief of loss. The book opens with a rollicking satire of difficult poetry—proudly declaring itself “a totally inaccessible poem”—and moves on to the stuff of contrarian pop culture and political cynicism—full of malaprops, mondegreens, nonsequiturs, translations of translations, sardonically vandalized signs, and a hilarious yet sinister feed of blog comments. At the same time, political protest also rubs up against epic collage, through poems exploring the unexpected intimacies and continuities of “our united fates.” These poems engage with works by contemporary painters—including Amy Sillman, Rackstraw Downes, and Etel Adnan—and echo translations of poets ranging from Catullus and Virgil to Goethe, Cruz e Souza, and Kandinsky. Grounded in a politics of multiplicity and dissent, and replete with both sharp edges and subtle intimacies, Near/Miss is full of close encounters of every kind.

Building on the Institute of Medicine reports To Err Is Human and Crossing the Quality Chasm, this book puts forward a road map for the development and adoption of key health care standards to support both information exchange and the reporting and analysis of patient safety data.