The Unknown Unknown

Jim Rath's wife has grown tired of his hobbies: his immaculately maintained comics collection, his creepy underwater experiments, and his dreams of building a museum based on the Aquatic Ape Theory of Human Evolution. On the night that she leaves him, Jim thinks he has spotted an emissary from a lost aquatic race called the Nautikons. In truth, the man is a low-level agent of the Department of Homeland Security. What follows is a riveting story of two quixotic men who stalk each other toward a bloody showdown -- a spectacularly moronic act of terrorism at an aging water park. The Unknown Knowns -- its title is a reference to a quote from former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- is a brilliant send-up of the insidious language and sometimes tragically comic focus of our country's Homeland Security Department. Combining the social satire of Kurt Vonnegut with the paranoid delusions of Thomas Pynchon, Rotter takes everyday domestic fixations and turns them into a hilarious assessment of the human condition. Fresh, imaginative, and deft, The Unknown Knowns marks the arrival of a unique new voice in literary fiction.

This book contains everything we currently know about reagent testing substances. It does not promote or encourage use and is meant as a harm reduction tool.

‘Transdisciplinarity’ is a form of research and practice that synthesises knowledge from a range of academic disciplines and from the community. There is now global interest and a significant body of work on transdisciplinarity and its potential to address the apparently intractable problems of society. This creates the opportunity for a specific focus on its practical application to sustainability issues. Transdisciplinary Research and Practice for Sustainability Outcomes examines the role of transdisciplinarity in the transformations needed for a sustainable world. After an historical overview of transdisciplinarity, Part I focuses on tools and frameworks to achieve sustainability outcomes in practice and Part II consolidates work by a number of scholars on supporting transdisciplinary researchers and practitioners. Part III is a series of case studies including several international examples that demonstrate the challenges and rewards of transdisciplinary work. The concluding chapter proposes a future research pathway for understanding the human factors that underpin successful transdisciplinary research. As Emeritus Professor Valerie Brown AO notes in her Preface, this book moves transdisciplinary inquiry into the academic and social mainstream. It will be of great interest to researchers and practitioners in the fields of sustainability, qualitative research methods, environmental impact assessment and development studies.

The human element is the principle cause of incidents and accidents in all technology industries; hence it is evident that an understanding of the interaction between humans and technology is crucial to the effective management of risk. Despite this, no tested model that explicitly and quantitatively includes the human element in risk prediction is currently available. Managing Risk: the Human Element combines descriptive and explanatory text with theoretical and mathematical analysis, offering important new concepts that can be used to improve the management of risk, trend analysis and prediction, and hence affect the accident rate in technological industries. It uses examples of major accidents to identify common causal factors, or “echoes”, and argues that the use of specific experience parameters for each particular industry is vital to achieving a minimum error rate as defined by mathematical prediction. New ideas for the perception, calculation and prediction of risk are introduced, and safety management is covered in depth, including for rare events and “unknown” outcomes Discusses applications to multiple industries including nuclear, aviation, medical, shipping, chemical, industrial, railway, offshore oil and gas; Shows consistency between learning for large systems and technologies with the psychological models of learning from error correction at the personal level; Offers the expertise of key leading industry figures involved in safety work in the civil aviation and nuclear engineering industries; Incorporates numerous fascinating case studies of key technological accidents. Managing Risk: the Human Element is an essential read for professional safety experts, human reliability experts and engineers in all technological industries, as well as risk analysts, corporate managers and statistical analysts. It is also of interest to professors, researchers and postgraduate students of reliability and safety engineering, and to experts in human performance. “...congratulations on what appears to be, at a high level of review, a significant contribution to the literature...I have found much to be admired in (your) research” Mr. Joseph Fragola – Vice President of Valador Inc. “The book is not only technically informative, but also attractive to all concerned readers and easy to be comprehended at various level of educational background. It is truly an excellent book ever written for the safety risk managers and analysis professionals in the engineering community, especially in the high reliability organizations...” Dr Feng Hsu, Head of Risk Assessment and Management, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center “I admire your courage in confronting your theoretical ideas with such diverse, ecologically valid data, and your success in capturing a major trend in them....I should add that I find all this quite inspiring . ...The idea that you need to find the right measure of accumulated experience and not just routinely used calendar time makes so much sense that it comes as a shock to realize that this is a new idea”, Professor Stellan Ohlsson, Professor of Psychology, University of Illinois at Chicago

Syrian and Lebanese immigrants to Brazil chose to settle in urban areas, a marked contrast to many other migrant groups. In São Paulo, these newcomers embraced new lives as merchants, shopkeepers, and industrialists that made them a dominant force in the city's business sector. Oswaldo Truzzi's original work on these so-called patrícios changed the face of Brazilian studies. Now available in an English translation, Truzzi's pioneering book identifies the complex social paths blazed by Syrian and Lebanese immigrants and their descendants from the 1890s to the 1960s. He considers their relationships to other groups within São Paulo's kaleidoscopic mix of cultures. He also reveals the differences--real and perceived--between Syrians and Lebanese in terms of religious and ethnic affinities and in the economic sphere. Finally, he compares the two groups with their counterparts in the United States and looks at the wave of Lebanese Muslims to São Paulo that began in the 1960s.

The Messenger of God is, for Muslims, in every aspect of his life, an unfailing guide that we need to follow meticulously. He was sent to the world as a Messenger for all who would live and breathe on earth until the Last Day and led a full life with the potential to solve every possible problem. His days of Prophethood are akin to compressed files; with each page that is opened, new windows and doors are opened, and new alternative solutions presented, which are commensurate with our intention and clarity of vision.