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This book provides an easy-to-read, user-oriented introduction to mental models research and Mental Modeling TechnologyTM. Mental models are powerful influences human behavior. The book offers insight from the developers and most experienced application professionals of a widely proven methodology for understanding and influencing human judgment, decision making and behavior. The case studies show examples of the methodological concepts in their application context. It is one of the most comprehensive collections of cases focused on government needs of any similar qualitative analysis approach. Finally, it presents an introduction to software tools and tutorials that enable readers to use the approach for their own research needs.
Older aged adults face many adversities over the later life course. This edited volume will address the ways in which seniors bounce back from different types and combinations of adversity – termed “resilience”. While research has been accumulating that identifies inherent abilities and external resources needed to adapt and navigate stress-inducing experiences among aging and older adults, gaps remain in understanding the unique elements and processes of resilience. A series of chapters included in this book will address several overarching questions: why do some older individuals/families/communities adapt to adversity better than others; what are modifiable behavioral protective/ris...
This book offers a comprehensive view on resilience based upon state-of-the-science theories and methodological applications that resilience may fill. Specifically, this text provides a compendium of knowledge on the theory, methods, and practice of resilience across a variety of country and case contexts, and demonstrates how a resilience-based approach can help further improved infrastructure, vibrant societies, and sustainable environments and ecologies, among many others. Resilience is a term with thousands of years of history. Only recently has resilience been applied to the management of complex interconnected systems, yet its impact as a governing philosophy and an engineering practic...
This book exposes the barriers to inclusive and effective public policy making, which are the current decision making paradigm and commonly held ideas that reduce public policy problems to scientific and technical ones. Through both environmental policy and other decision making examples, readers are shown the commonalities of all decision making. Solution-oriented practitioners and stakeholders will find this book filling a conceptual and methodological gap in existing policy literature and practice. The authors deftly guide readers from post-normal science, wicked problems, and uncertainty concepts to a conceptually-grounded, practical implementation of a new approach, the open solution ap...
This book explores the challenges that confront leaders in government and industry when making decisions in the areas of environmental health and safety. Today, decision making demands transparency, robustness, and resiliency. However thoughtfully they are devised, decisions made by governments and enterprises can often trigger immediate, passionate public response. Expertise Under Scrutiny shows how leaders can establish organizational decision making processes that yield valid, workable choices even in fast-changing and uncertain conditions. The first part of the book examines the organizational decision making process, describing the often-contentious environment in which important enviro...
The aim of the book was to produce the most comprehensive examination of a pandemic that has ever been attempted. By cataloging the full extent of the Zika pandemic, this book will be the most complete history and epistemic contextualization ever attempted to date. The work should function as the primary source for students, researchers, and scholars who need information about the Zika pandemic. This book examines the technical literature, digital and popular literature, and online materials to fully contextualize this event and provide a bona fide record of this event and its implications for the future. It is somewhat serendipitous that while this work was underway, we are going through an...
This is an open access book. Histories we tell never emerge in a vacuum, and history as an academic discipline that studies the past is highly sensitive to the concerns of the present and the heated debates that can divide entire societies. But does the study of the past also have something to teach us about the future? Can history help us in coping with the planetary crisis we are now facing? By analyzing historical societies as complex adaptive systems, we contribute to contemporary thinking about societal-environmental interactions in policy and planning and consider how environmental and climatic changes, whether sudden high impact events or more subtle gradual changes, impacted human responses in the past. We ask how societal perceptions of such changes affect behavioral patterns and explanatory rationalities in premodernity, and whether a better historical understanding of these relationships can inform our response to contemporary problems of similar nature and magnitude, such as adapting to climate change.
Prescriptive Analytics: Mastering the Spreadsheet of Everything combines the quantitative decision-informing techniques of management science and operations research with the data-centric techniques found throughout the world of analytics. The material uses only standard Excel spreadsheet features and functions for creating models and then applying sensitivity, scenario, simulation, decision, and optimization analysis. How can we make high quality decisions in an increasingly data-rich but also uncertain and complex world? This book provides the answer, preparing you for the prescriptive analytic future. Gilberto Montibeller, Professor of Operations Management, University of Bristol. An impo...
Biosecurity: A Systems Perspective provides an overview of biosecurity as a system of related components, actors, and risks. This book—directed to the biosecurity practitioner, generalist scientist, and student—introduces overall features of the biosecurity system while walking the reader through the most up-to-date research on each step of the continuum (i.e. pre-border, border, and post-border activities). This book, which explicitly incorporates economic and social dimensions as well as varied decision-making contexts, paves the way for a more systemic approach to biosecurity risk management. The work spans statistics, ecology, mathematics, economics, veterinary science, human medicin...
The unique characteristics of emerging technologies _ their diverse applications, the myriad concerns raised by new technologies, the need for public engagement, and the issue of effective coordination between governance players _ create the need for n