Making the Nation Safer: The Role of Science and Technology in Countering Terrorism

Making the Nation Safer: The Role of Science and Technology in Countering Terrorism

Vulnerabilities abound in US society. The openness and efficiency of our key infrastructures – transportation, information and telecommunications systems, health systems, the electric power grid, emergency response units, food and water supplies and others – make them susceptible to terrorist attacks. This text discusses technical approaches to mitigating these vulnerabilities. A broad range of topics are covered in the book, including: nuclear and radiological threats, such as improvised nuclear devices and “dirty bombs”; bioterrorism, medical research, agricultural systems and public health; toxic chemicals and explosive materials; information technology, such as communications systems, data management, cyber attacks and identification and authentication systems; energy systems, such as the electrical power grid and oil and natural gas systems; transportation systems; cities and fixed infrastructures, such as buildings, emergency operations centres and tunnels; the response of people to terrorism, such as how quality of life and morale of the population can be a target of terrorists and how people respond to terrorist attacks; and linked infrastructures, i.e. the vulnerabilities that result from the interdependencies of key systems. In each of these areas, there are recommendations on how to immediately apply existing knowledge and technology to make the nation safer and on starting research and development programmes that could produce innovations that will strengthen key systems and protect us against future threats. The book also discusses issues affecting the government’s ability to carry out the necessary science and engineering programmes and the important role of industry, universities and states, counties, and cities in homeland security efforts. A long term commitment to homeland security is necessary to make the nation safer, and this book lays out a roadmap of how science and engineering can assist in countering terrorism.

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Making Innovation Work: How to Manage It, Measure It, and Profit from It

Making Innovation Work: How to Manage It, Measure It, and Profit from It

Making Innovation Work presents a formal innovation process proven to work at HP, Microsoft and Toyota, to help ordinary managers drive top and bottom line growth from innovation. The authors have drawn on their unsurpassed innovation consulting experience — as well as the most thorough review of innovation research ever performed. They’ll show what works, what doesn’t, and how to use management tools to dramatically increase the payoff from innovation investments. Learn how to define the right strategy effective innovation; how to structure an organization to innovate best; how to implement management systems to assess ongoing innovation; how to incentivize teams to deliver, and much more. This book offers the first authoritative guide to using metrics at every step of the innovation process — from idea creation and selection through prototyping and commercialization.

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Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences, Mobipocket

Product Description

This is the eBook version of the printed book. If the print book includes a CD-ROM, this content is not included within the eBook version.

“We’re now hip-deep, if not drowning, in the ‘experience economy.‘ Here‘s the smartest book I‘ve read so far that can actually help get your brand to higher ground, fast. And it‘s written by people who not only drew the map, but blazed these trails in the first place.”
–Brian Collins, Executive Creative Director, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide Brand Integration Group

In a market economy characterized by commoditized products and global competition, how do companies gain deep and lasting loyalty from their customers? The key, this book argues, is in providing meaningful customer experiences.

Writing in the tradition of Louis Cheskin, one of the founding fathers of market research, the authors of Making Meaning observe, define, and describe the meaningful customer experience. By consciously evoking certain deeply valued meanings through their products, services, and multidimensional customer experiences, they argue, companies can create more value and achieve lasting strategic advantages over their competitors. A few businesses are already discovering this approach, but until now no one has articulated it in such a persuasive and practical way. Making Meaning not only encourages businesses to adopt an innovation process that’s centered on meaning, it also tells you how. The book outlines a plan of action and describes the attributes of a meaning-centric innovation team. With insightful real-world examples drawn from the Cheskin company’s experience and from the authors’ observations of the contemporary global market, this book outlines a plan of action and describes the attributes of a meaning-centric innovation team.

Meaningful experiences—as distinct from trivial ones—reinforce or transform the customer’s sense of purpose and significance. The authors’ vision of a world of meaningful consumption is idealistic, but don’t be fooled: this is a straightforward business book with an eye on the ROI. It shows how to bring R&D, design, and marketing together to create  deeper and richer experiences for your customers.  Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences is an engaging and practical book for business leaders, explaining how their companies can create more meaningful products and services to better achieve their goals.

BUY FROM AMAZON–>> Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences, Mobipocket

New Moon Rising: The Making of America’s New Space Vision and the Remaking of NASA: Apogee Books Space Series 42

Product Description
The book is a detailed history of the evolution of the U.S. civil space program from the February 1, 2003 space shuttle Columbia accident to the release of the Presidential Commission report on Moon, Mars, and Beyond on June 2, 2004. During these extraordinary 16 months, nearly every element of NASA’s leadership was placed under a political microscope, with the result that the space agency set upon a new course of reorganization, resulting with President George W. Bush’s announcement of an entirely new space policy for the U.S.

The book begins with a comparison of all of the previous U.S. space policies, beginning with President John F. Kennedy’s selection of a manned lunar landing goal in May, 1961. Using declassified tapes and records from the Kennedy Library, his administration’s internal debates over what would become the Apollo project are detailed. President Richard M. Nixon’s decision to build a reusable space shuttle, and the placing of the shuttlecraft at the center of NASA’s programs, are also detailed. How and why President Ronald Reagan chose a permanent space station as his major civil space goal is recounted as well, as is the failure of President Bush’s father to launch a return-to-the-Moon and Mars initiative in 1989.

With this as the backdrop, the book describes the last decade of space policy under President Bill Clinton, and the inside story of the leadership of NASA by administrator Daniel S. Goldin. Using previously unreported stories of the inner workings of Goldin’s NASA, the book shows how the once proud space agency fell into disarray during the 1990s decade.

With the election of President George W. Bush in 2000, the book takes the reader into the inner councils of the new Bush presidency in the months after the September 11, 2001 attacks as Bush himself chooses a long-time family friend to head up NASA-Sean O’Keefe. For the first time, the private conversations between Bush and his senior staff over NASA’s future are told, including Bush’s charge that O’Keefe transform the broken space agency. O’Keefe’s internal battles within NASA to institute reforms are told, ending with an agency on the mend-on the morning of February 1, 2003 when space shuttle Columbia fell from the skies above Texas. In a virtual minute-by-minute recounting, the events of that tragic day are told from the inside of O’Keefe’s inner circle for the first time. Based on extensive, on-the-record interviews with O’Keefe and his top managers and leaders, the book gives the reader the feeling of being present as the details of the space disaster unfold. In the weeks and months following the event, the reader learns of how NASA struggled to reform its failed safety program, and what the secret debates were inside the Bush administration on how to accept the recommendations of the Columbia accident board-or to fight them publicly.

While NASA struggles to reform itself to continue human space exploration and repair the damaged shuttles, a quiet and largely unknown review begins at the White House as to what the nation’s purpose in space should really be. Working independent from NASA for many months, the story of how a handful of young staffers, supporters of space, work in secret to devise a series of potential space policy pathways. Others, outside the space program are solicited for their views as well. As the cause of the Columbia accident becomes clear, Bush moves to forge a new framework for an expansive space vision. The book brings the reader into these deliberations as a ‘fly-on-the-wall’, as one-by-one options for space exploration are studied-and rejected as either too expensive or too risky. As the summer of 2003 draws to a close, the policy process appears to be headed towards recommending manned lunar exploration as the new goal for the U.S. space program. But as the process draws towards a conclusion and a recommendation, Bush himself enters the picture, ordering the space vision reshaped to include other destinations in the solar system beyond the moon. Thus the moon becomes a location to craft new technologies that would provide a technology boost to industry as well as open space beyond earth orbit to traversing astronauts.

But beside the debate on where to go in space was another debate on how to pay for it. The book brings the reader into the deliberations on how to retire the fleet of winged space shuttles, exit the space station, and virtually reform the space agency to free up billions to pay for the new space plan. By fall, 2003 planners are ready to propose to Bush a bold space exploration agenda, blending new generations of space robots with space voyaging astronauts and a new series of manned spaceships resembling Wernher Von Braun’s original space goals.

The book takes the reader inside the Bush White House on December 19, 2003 when, in secret, the President adopts the new space plan for America. Then, the book reconstructs January 14, 2004 when Bush makes his speech announcing his vision for NASA-as Vice president Dick Cheney speaks in California at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But no sooner does the new plan become public waves of criticisms roll over NASA about another policy decision- abandon the Hubble Space Telescope. The book gives previously unreported details on how the Hubble decision was reached-and how NASA scrambled to defend its choice. The book also takes readers to Capitol Hill as the new policy faces withering criticisms from Republicans and Democrats alike. While the plan supporters battle for its survival in a crucial election year, the book also takes the reader into NASA headquarters, as the first contracts and studies on what would be called ‘Project Constellation’are developed, giving readers a first look at possible designs for the new ships. The book also tells how NASA gained the crucial support of former moonwalker Neil Armstrong, and why the reclusive American space hero agreed to come forward to help rescue the plan from political defeat.

The book ends with the June 2, 2004 report of the Presidential Commission appointed by Bush to vet the NASA plan. Calling for a massive restructuring of the civil space program, the book ends with how NASA was secretly planning to ‘one up’ the commission-by announcing a new plan of its own to redesign the American space program to get back to the moon-and to go to worlds beyond.

Main Points

The inside story of how NASA responded to the 2003 Columbia accident in never-before-reported detail

The secret deliberations within NASA on how to make way for a new goal such as manned lunar and Mars flight

The story of the major U.S. political figure who came to NASA’s aid during the debates, and whose support became crucial to helping get Bush on board

The role of the president himself in shaping-and reshaping-the space plan

How NASA reached the decision to abandon the space shuttle and station to free up funds to pay for the new plan

How the Sean O’Keefe administration built a quiet political coalition to support the proposal-and why it almost came undone during the critical weeks following the Bush announcement

What it was like at the helm of U.S. civil space as tragedy gave way to an unexpected opportunity, told from the insider’s unique perspective in a you-are-there- in- the- room style with Sean O’Keefe and his inner circle, battling over options to save NASA-and what President George W. Bush really believed the space program should do for America.

Note:
This book was written with the full cooperation of NASA and the Bush administration, but has not been and will not be reviewed by them or pre-approved in any way.

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Madness in the Making: The Triumphant Rise and Untimely Fall of America’s Show Inventors

Product Description
Madness in the Making is an engaging narrative and a tour de force of original historical interpretation. An astute observer of patents for newspapers and magazines, David Lindsay here coins a new term — the show inventor — that highlights a tension rooted in the earliest days of the American republic. While some — like Thomas Jefferson, founder of the U.S. Patent Office and an inventor himself — believed that public exhibits of new inventions encouraged an unseemly coarsening of society, show inventors like Oliver Evans, who created the Orukter Amphibolos, a steam propelled dredger, hoped to advance American know-how, and not coincidentally, their own commercial prospects with public exhibitions. In this lively portrait of American inventors and the forces that spurred their creativity, Lindsay’s cast includes dozens of colorful characters, such as Eli Whitney, who once demonstrated defective muskets to Jefferson, and Samuel Colt who years before unveiling his famous six-shooter, offered trials of laughing gas to the public. Lindsay also documents the bizarre “War of the Currents”, when Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla dueled over how electricity would be delivered to the millions waiting for it. David Lindsay has written an entertaining book that shows how America became the invention-driven, technologically sophisticated society that it is today.

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