The aim of this work is to reduce the risks of medical treatment and e nhance the safety of patients in all areas of healthcare. The first se ction discusses human error, the incidence of harm to patients, and th e development of risk management. Chapters in the second section discu ss the reduction of risk in clinical practice in key medical specialti es. The third section discusses features of the healthcare systems tha t are essential to safe practice, such as communication of risk to pat ients, the design of equipment, supervision and training, and effectiv e teamwork. The fourth section describes how to put risk management in to practice, including the effective and sensitive handling of complai nts and claims, the care of injured patients and the staff involved, a nd the reporting, investigation and analysis of serious incidents.

This book defines and analyzes the content, structure, and values of three predominant types of public discourse, which are labeled Doublespeak, Salespeak, and Sensationspeak. These media messages are examined to determine how they are constructed and how they influence individuals, ideology, and culture. Discussions are illustrated with a diverse range of examples from popular culture, magazines, Internet sites, politics, television, and film. Fox argues that the Information Age has replaced actual reality with representations of reality. He states that electronic media dominates our lives. Together, these three voices saturate media and technology, profoundly influencing American culture. Fox suggests specific strategies for recognizing and understanding these coded messages.

This lively and informative discussion will appeal to anyone who is interested in learning how print and electronic media manipulate both individuals and society as a whole. The extensive research will appeal to media, communications, journalism, and cultural studies scholars alike.

America has always attempted to define itself through a network of invented myths and national narratives. Historically, this national mythmaking has focused on the building of the nation itself as a sort of grand adventure, as in the notion of manifest destiny, or the taming of the western frontier. This project has also naturally led to a focus on individual heroes, often playing the role of savior and redeemer in ways with clear religious resonances: Christ and "Shane" and Superman, for instance, all share key characteristics. At the same time, these superheroes have often been adolescents, designed to appeal to younger audiences as well. Other hero myths have been more down-to-earth, focusing on heroes who fight against evil, but in a more modest way, as in the case of the hardboiled detective. "Red, White, and Spooked" details the development of our national myths in an effort to try and see what these fantasies can reveal about what it means to be American today, and what we want it to mean.

Beginning with John Winthrop's city upon a hill sermon in 1630, American culture has been informed by a sense of its own exceptional nature. The notion of the Western hemisphere as a new world, a place filled with possibility and even magic, goes back to the initial voyages of Columbus, while the American Revolution gave even more impetus to the idea that the United States was a special place with a unique mission. As a result, America has always attempted to define itself through a network of invented myths and national narratives. "Red, White, and Spooked" details the development of our national myths which can be seen underlying the genres of country and film noir, the characters of Superman, Batman, and Spiderman, television hits like "Deadwood" and "NYPD Blue," and the "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "Lord of the Rings" franchises as well.

This culture-spanning investigation begins with a historical survey of supernatural and superhuman themes in American culture, concluding with the recent upsurge that began in the 1990s. It then turns to a number of thematic chapters that discuss various works of recent popular culture with supernatural and superhuman themes - such as "The X-Files, Smallville, The 4400, Medium, Heroes, Lost," and "The Dead Zone" - organized according to the desires to which these works commonly respond. The object here is to try and see what these fantasies can reveal about what it means to be American today, and what we still want it to mean.

Taking Yourself Seriously: Processes of Research and Engagement is designed for college students as well as more experienced professionals who want to further their development as researchers, writers, and agents of change. A wide range of tools and processes for research, writing, and collaboration are defined and described-from Governing Question to GOSP, Plus-Delta feedback to Process Review, and Supportive Listening to Sense of Place Map. The tools and processes are linked to three frameworks that lend themselves to adaptation by teachers and other advisors: A set of ten Phases of Research and Engagement, which researchers move through and later revisit in light of other people's responses to work in progress and what is learned using tools from the other phases; Cycles and Epicycles of Action Research, which emphasizes reflection and dialogue to shape ideas about what action is needed and how to build a constituency to implement the change; and Creative Habits for Synthesis of theory and practice. Researchers and writers working under these frameworks participate in Dialogue around Written Work and in Making Space for Taking Initiative In and Through Relationships. These processes help researchers and writers align their questions and ideas, aspirations, ability to take or influence action, and relationships with other people. Bringing those dimensions of research and engagement into alignment is the crux of taking yourself seriously. The tools, processes, and frameworks are illustrated through excerpts from two projects: one engaging adult learning communities in using the principles of theater arts to prepare them to create social change; the other involving collaborative play among teachers in curriculum planning. A final section provides entry points for students and educators to explore insights, experiences, and information from a wider world of research, writing, and engagement in change.

THE NEW BOOK FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF EVERYBODY LIES 'Don't Trust Your Gut is a tour de force - an intoxicating blend of analysis, humor, and humanity' DANIEL H. PINK 'Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is an expert on data-driven thinking, and this engaging book is full of surprising, useful insights for using the information at your fingertips to make better decisions' ADAM GRANT Big decisions are hard. We might consult friends and family, read advice online or turn to self-help books for guidance, but in the end we usually just do what feels right. But what if our gut is wrong? As economist and former Google data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz argues, our gut is actually not that reliable - and data can prove this. In Don't Trust Your Gut, he unearths the startling conclusions that the right data can teach us about who we are and what will make our lives better. Over the past decade, scholars have mined enormous datasets to find remarkable new approaches to life's biggest self-help puzzles, from the boring careers that produce the most wealth, to old-school, data-backed relationship advice. While we often think we know how to better ourselves, the numbers, it turns out, disagree. Telling fascinating stories through the latest big data research, Stephens-Davidowitz reveals just how wrong we really are when it comes to improving our lives, and offers a new way of tackling our most consequential choices.

This book presents a collection of state-of-the-art work in corpus-based interpreting studies, highlighting international research on the properties of interpreted speech, based on naturalistic interpreting data. Interpreting research has long been hampered by the lack of naturalistic data that would allow researchers to make empirically valid generalizations about interpreting. The researchers who present their work here have played a pioneering role in the compilation of interpreting data and in the exploitation of that data. The collection focuses on both of these aspects, including a detailed overview of interpreting corpora, a collective paper on the way forward in corpus compilation and several studies on interpreted speech in diverse language pairs and interpreter-mediated settings, based on existing corpora.

Contemporary culture is as much visual as literary. This book explores an approach to the communicative power of the pictorial and multimodal documents that make up this visual culture, using Peircean semiotics. It develops the enormous theoretical potential of Peirce's theory of signs of signs (semiotics) and the persuasive strategies in which they are employed (visual rhetoric) in a variety of documents. Unlike presentations of semiotics that take the written word as the reference value, this book examines this particular rhetoric using pictorial signs as its prime examples. The visual is not treated as the 'poor relation' to the (written) word. It is therefore possible to isolate more clearly the specific constituent properties of word and image, taking these as the basic material of a wide range of cultural artefacts. It looks at comic strips, conventional photographs, photographic allegory, pictorial metaphor, advertising campaigns and the huge semiotic range exhibited by the category of the 'poster'. This is essential reading for all students of semiotics, introductory and advanced.

Music Video Games takes a look (and listen) at the popular genre of music games - video games in which music is at the forefront of player interaction and gameplay. With chapters on a wide variety of music games, ranging from well-known console games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band to new, emerging games for smartphones and tablets, scholars from diverse disciplines and backgrounds discuss the history, development, and cultural impact of music games. Each chapter investigates important themes surrounding the ways in which we play music and play with music in video games. Starting with the precursors to music games - including Simon, the hand-held electronic music game from the 1980s, Michael Austin's collection goes on to discuss issues in musicianship and performance, authenticity and "selling out," and composing, creating, and learning music with video games. Including a glossary and detailed indices, Austin and his team shine a much needed light on the often overlooked subject of music video games.

Recent developments in model-predictive control promise remarkable opportunities for designing multi-input, multi-output control systems and improving the control of single-input, single-output systems. This volume provides a definitive survey of the latest model-predictive control methods available to engineers and scientists today. The initial set of chapters present various methods for managing uncertainty in systems, including stochastic model-predictive control. With the advent of affordable and fast computation, control engineers now need to think about using "computationally intensive controls," so the second part of this book addresses the solution of optimization problems in "real" time for model-predictive control. The theory and applications of control theory often influence each other, so the last section of Handbook of Model Predictive Control rounds out the book with representative applications to automobiles, healthcare, robotics, and finance. The chapters in this volume will be useful to working engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, as well as students and faculty interested in the progression of control theory. Future developments in MPC will no doubt build from concepts demonstrated in this book and anyone with an interest in MPC will find fruitful information and suggestions for additional reading.

This book is a tribute to Julian Francis Miller's ideas and achievements in computer science, evolutionary algorithms and genetic programming, electronics, unconventional computing, artificial chemistry and theoretical biology. Leading international experts in computing inspired by nature offer their insights into the principles of information processing and optimisation in simulated and experimental living, physical and chemical substrates. Miller invented Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP) in 1999, from a representation of electronic circuits he devised with Thomson a few years earlier. The book presents a number of CGP's wide applications, including multi-step ahead forecasting, solving artificial neural networks dogma, approximate computing, medical informatics, control engineering, evolvable hardware, and multi-objective evolutionary optimisations. The book addresses in depth the technique of 'Evolution in Materio', a term coined by Miller and Downing, using a range of examples of experimental prototypes of computing in disordered ensembles of graphene nanotubes, slime mould, plants, and reaction diffusion chemical systems. Advances in sub-symbolic artificial chemistries, artificial bio-inspired development, code evolution with genetic programming, and using Reed-Muller expansions in the synthesis of Boolean quantum circuits add a unique flavour to the content. The book is a pleasure to explore for readers from all walks of life, from undergraduate students to university professors, from mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers to chemists and biologists.

The Spectralities Reader is the first volume to collect the rich scholarship produced in the wake of the "spectral turn" of the early 1990s, which saw ghosts and haunting conjured as compelling analytical and methodological tools across the humanities and social sciences. Surveying the past twenty years from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective, the Reader displays the wide range of concerns spectrality, in its diverse elaborations, has been called upon to elucidate. The disjunctions produced by globalization, the ungraspable quality of modern media, the convolutions of subject formation (in terms of gender, race, and sexuality), the elusiveness of spaces and places, and the lingering presences and absences of memory and history have all been reconceived by way of the spectral. A primer for the wide readership engaged with cultural interpretations of ghosts and haunting that go beyond the confines of the fictional and supernatural, The Spectralities Reader includes twenty-five groundbreaking texts by prominent contemporary thinkers, from Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak to Avery Gordon and Arjun Appadurai, as well as a general introduction and six section introductions by the editors.

There is a moral to this book, a bit of Confucian wisdom often ignored in social network analysis: "Worry not that no one knows you, seek to be worth knowing."
This advice is contrary to the usual social network emphasis on securing relations with well-connected people. Neighbor Networks examines the cases of analysts, bankers, and managers, and finds that rewards, in fact, do go to people with well-connected colleagues. Look around your organization. The individuals doing well tend to be affiliated with well-connected colleagues.
However, the advantage obvious to the naked eye is misleading. It disappears when an individual's own characteristics are held constant. Well-connected people do not have to affiliate with people who have nothing to offer. This book shows that affiliation with well-connected people adds stability but no advantage to a person's own connections. Advantage is concentrated in people who are themselves well connected.
This book is a trail of argument and evidence that leads to the conclusion that individuals make a lot of their own network advantage. The social psychology of networks moves to center stage and personal responsibility emerges as a key theme. In the end, the social is affirmed, but with an emphasis on individual agency and the social psychology of networks. The research gives new emphasis to Coleman's initial image of social capital as a forcing function for human capital.
This book is for academics and researchers of organizational and network studies interested in a new angle on familiar data, and as a supplemental reading in graduate courses on social networks, stratification, or organizations. A variety of research settings are studied, and diverse theoretical perspectives are taken. The book's argument and evidence are supported by ample appendices for readers interested in background details.

The phrase "evidence-based policy" is frequently used, but it's crucial that such claims are scrutinized and validated. When the data on social and behavioral interventions are presented, high-quality evidence must be clearly defined and the methodology behind such studies held to rigorous standards.

Both the Cochrane Collaboration focusing on healthcare and the international Campbell Collaboration concentrating on criminal justice, education, and social services were created to develop, maintain and improve detailed guidelines for producing high-quality systematic reviews. And both organizations emphasize randomized controlled trials to evaluate the effectiveness of various interventions.

As a springboard from the Campbell Collaboration initiative and supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, this special issue of The Annals includes a thorough review of randomized tests across a variety of studies. Exploring significant dimensions of place randomized trials (also called cluster randomized trials or group randomized trials), these papers shed light on recent efforts to enhance the quality of designing such trials as well as on results reporting.

The research topics included in this volume are diverse. Taken together, these papers offer important insight into the nuts and bolts of conducting randomized trials: the significance of place in trials; how such studies are initiated; the incentives and justifications needed by participants; how to overcome challenges of implementation; and where to find out what studies have already been conducted or are currently underway.

While providing far-reaching insight into the topic of randomized testing, these papers also identify new issues and key questions to be further addressed in future research. Scholars and policymakers alike will find this collection of rigorous research essential in understanding the implications of current evidence-based policies as well as a guidepost for designing and conducting new studies. "

Sponsored by the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (CITAMS), this volume of Studies in Media and Communications features social science research that examines the practices, patterns, and messages related to representations of crime in mass media around the world. Chapters focus on a wide range of fact-based and fictional accounts of criminality as depicted in print and broadcast news, documentary and video-on-demand films, and television programs. Stories about crime and criminality have long been the mainstay of news and entertainment media content, and the intersection of crime and media is a common topic in scholarly research. Moreover, substantial evidence indicates that these media depictions are highly influential as people in economically advanced societies - who tend to have little personal experience with crime-form perceptions about criminality, crime rates, characteristics of criminals, and even their own likelihood of victimization. Thus, ongoing examination of crime images within various types of mass media aids in understanding the associated messages and meanings that are disseminated to consumers. This volume will enhance the knowledge of junior and senior scholars in criminology, sociology, journalism, and communication/media studies, particularly because of its inclusion of crime stories in a variety of formats and that represent media content from nations spanning five continents.

Encounters between people of diverse religious faiths and worldviews are becoming more common in an increasingly globalized and mobile world. Research has not, however, kept pace by investigating how people talk about their faith with others who believe differently. This monograph addresses that deficit by taking an emergent path, combining qualitative and quantitative analysis to investigate and understand multilingual speakers' discursive behaviors in multiparty interreligious dialogues. Using 33 hours of recordings from conversations across seven research sites, Sauer Bredvik investigates how speakers' multilanguaging practices interact with other indexical and referential signs (unfilled pauses, disfluency, pragmatic markers) to affect how constitute messages are understood. By combining corpus-assisted discourse analysis with emic data taken from observation and 11 hours of participant interviews, one is able to identify distinct patterns of use between these metalinguistic indicators and a dialogue outcome. Readers will gain an understanding of how people of various linguistic and faith backgrounds use all their semiotic resources to display hospitality and respect for the Other in multilingual, multifaith settings.

A large number of enciphered documents survived from early modern Hungary. This area was a particularly fertile territory where cryptographic methods proliferated, because a large portion of the population was living in the frontier zone, and participated (or was forced to participate) in the network of the information flow. A quantitative analysis of sixteenth-century to seventeenth-century Hungarian ciphers (300 cipher keys and 1,600 partly or entirely enciphered letters) reveals that besides the dominance of diplomatic use of cryptography, there were many examples of YprivateOE applications too. This book reconstructs the main reasons and goals why historical actors chose to use ciphers in a diplomatic letter, a military order, a diary or a private letter, what they decided to encrypt, and how they perceived the dangers threatening their messages.

The media plays a crucial role in shaping a healthy and vibrant democracy. It is the backbone of any functioning democracy. This book evaluates the role of the news media in The Gambia, in a variety of contexts and the major constraints and challenges which prevent journalism from fulfilling these ideal roles, and the most effective policy interventions available to strengthen the contribution of the news media to both democratic governance and human development. Specifically, it investigates the relationship between the Gambian Press and the military and quasi-military regimes in The Gambia, in the context of press freedom. This book examines in great detail decrees and laws enacted by the AFPRC-APRC regimes which restricted press freedom during the period of military rule in The Gambia and also in the post-coup era. Furthermore, it identifies and analyses the institutional, legal and non-legal measures and mechanisms utilized by the AFPRC-APRC regimes in controlling the Gambian press from 1994 to date. This work also examines both "direct" and "indirect" forms of manipulation the Jammeh regime used-forms that have ranged from selective assassination, extra-constitutional decrees, and promulgation of retroactive laws, to bribery, compulsion to self-censorship, and the offer (and acceptance) of lucrative press relations jobs in the government. This work attempts to address this question: how far can autocracies strengthen popular support by silencing dissent and manipulating the news? The many ways that autocracies seek to control the media are documented. How far has the Gambian leader, with the restrictive media environment in the country, succeeded in manipulating public opinion and strengthening his support at home?

The book offers a critical evaluation of Qatar's path from oil- and gas-based industries to a knowledge-based economy. This book gives basic information about the region and the country, including the geographic and demographic data, the culture, the politics and the economy, the health care conditions and the education system. It introduces the concepts of knowledge society and knowledge-based development and adds factual details about Qatar by interpreting indicators of the development status. Subsequently, the research methods that underlie the study are described, which offers information on the eGovernment study analyzing the government-citizen relationship, higher education institutions and systems, its students and the students' way into the labor market. This book has an audience with economists, sociologists, political scientists, geographers, information scientists and other researchers on the knowledge society, but also all researchers and practitioners interested in the Arab Oil States and their future.

Strategic Corporate Communication in the Digital Age explores how contemporary communication approaches are crossing boundaries as innovative media formats and digital transformations offer new challenges and opportunities to academia and practitioners. New technologies have empowered various organisations and their stakeholders. The digital and social media are central to the process of building trust, reputation and support, as online users can use them to scrutinise and influence corporate decisions and actions. This authoritative book features a broad spectrum of theoretical and empirical chapters on topics relating to organisations' interactive engagement with stakeholders during COVID-19. It sheds light on dialogic communications through different digital media, the utilisation of mobile learning technologies for corporate training and development, corporate disclosures of CSR practices, communications of small and medium sized businesses, and provides a taxonomy of online marketing methods, among other topics. This title is a premier reference source and a valuable teaching resource for courses in marketing, communications, strategy and organisational behaviour.

This book reports on the EU-funded 7th Framework project, Go4Hybrid (Grey Area Mitigation for Hybrid RANS-LES Methods). It presents new findings concerning the accuracy and reliability of current hybrid RANS-LES methods. It describes improved formulations of both non-zonal and embedded hybrid strategies, together with their validation in a broad range of flow cases, and highlighting some key industrial applications. The book provides students, researchers and professionals in the field of applied computational fluid dynamics with a timely, practice-oriented reference guide.

From the food we eat, to the clothes we wear, to the values that shape our realities, Globalization has affected nearly every aspect of modern life on this planet. Contributors to this book suggest that globalization is supplanting Cold War ideology and they critique mainstream news media coverage of civil disobedience. They further explore the "new activism" of social movement groups who use performance and media to appeal directly to the people in promoting their causes, fundraising, and recruitment.

This volume provides descriptions and interpretations of social and cognitive phenomena as well as processes that emerge at the interface of languages and cultures in the context of contrastive and contact linguistics and media discourse. Different contexts are explored with rich empirical findings and authentic exemplifying materials. The book includes fifteen papers, divided into three parts. Part 1 addresses conceptual reflection on languages and cultures in contact and contrast, while Part 2 focuses on contact linguistics and borrowing. Part 3 discusses cultural and linguistic aspects of media discourses.