'In a time when too many minds seem closed, this is a masterful analysis of what it takes to open them' Adam Grant, author of the bestselling Think Again 'Optimistic, illuminating and even inspiring' Guardian As the world is increasingly polarised, it feels impossible to change the mind of someone with a conflicting view. But this book shows that you could be one conversation away from changing someone's mind about something, maybe a lot of things. Self-delusion expert and psychology nerd David McRaney sets out to discover not just what it takes to influence others, but why we believe in the first place. Along the way he meets a former Westboro Baptist Church member who was deradicalised on Twitter, goes deep canvassing to see how quickly people will surrender their character-defining views, finds a 9/11 Truther who turns his back on it all, and reveals how, within a few years, half a country can go from opposing the 'gay agenda' to happily attending same-sex weddings. Distilling the latest research in psychology and neuroscience, How Minds Change reveals how beliefs take hold, not over hundreds of years, but in less than a generation, in less than a decade, and sometimes in an instant.

Fire safety is a major concern in many industries, particularly as there have been significant increases in recent years in the quantities of hazardous materials in process, storage or transport. Plants are becoming larger and are often situated in or close to densely populated areas, and the hazards are continually highlighted with incidents such as the fires and explosions at the Piper Alpha oil and gas platform, and the Enschede firework factory. As a result, greater attention than ever before is now being given to the evaluation and control of these hazards.

In a comprehensive treatment of the subject unavailable elsewhere, this book describes in detail the applications of hazard and risk analysis to fire safety, going on to develop and apply quantification methods. It also gives an explanation in quantitative terms of improvements in fire safety in association with the costs that are expended in their achievement. Furthermore, a quantitative approach is applied to major fire and explosion disasters to demonstrate crucial faults and events.

Featuring:

Full international coverage and a review of several major fires and explosion disasters.Presentation of the properties and science of fire including the latest research.Detailed coverage of the performance of fire safety measures.

This is an essential book for practitioners in fire safety engineering, loss prevention professionals, technical personnel in insurance companies as well as academics involved in fire science and postgraduate students. This book is also a useful reference for fire safety officers, building designers, engineers in the process industries, safety practitioners and risk assessment consultants.

Decision-Making Management: A Tutorial and Applications provides practical guidance for researchers seeking to optimizing business-critical decisions employing Logical Decision Trees thus saving time and money. The book focuses on decision-making and resource allocation across and between the manufacturing, product design and logistical functions. It demonstrates key results for each sector with diverse real-world case studies drawn primarily from EU projects. Theory is accompanied by relevant analysis techniques, with a progressional approach building from simple theory to complex and dynamic decisions with multiple data points, including big data and lot of data. Binary Decision Diagrams are presented as the operating approach for evaluating large Logical Decision Trees, helping readers identify Boolean equations for quantitative analysis of multifaceted problem sets. Computational techniques, dynamic analysis, probabilistic methods, and mathematical optimization techniques are expertly blended to support analysis of multi-criteria decision-making problems with defined constraints and requirements. The final objective is to optimize dynamic decisions with original approaches employing useful tools, including Big Data analysis. Extensive annexes provide useful supplementary information for readers to follow methods contained in the book.

In this lively and practical book, seasoned educator Jonathan Cassie shines a spotlight on gamification, an instructional approach that's revolutionizing K-12 education. Games are well known for their ability to inspire persistence. The best ones feature meaningful choices that have lasting consequences, reward experimentation, provide a like-minded community of players, and gently punish failure and encourage risk-taking behavior. Players feel challenged, but not overwhelmed. A gamified lesson bears these same hallmarks. It is explicitly gamelike in its design and fosters perseverance, creativity, and resilience. Students build knowledge through experimentation and then apply what they've learned to fuel further exploration at higher levels of understanding. In this book, Cassie covers: What happens to student learning when it is gamified. Why you might want to gamify instruction for your students. The process for gamifying both your classroom and your lessons. If you want to see your students engaged, motivated, and excited about learning, join Jonathan Cassie on a journey that will add a powerful new set of ideas and practices to your teaching toolkit. The gamified classroom-an exciting new frontier of 21st century learning-awaits you and your students. Will you answer the call?

This book proposes several commonly used interval-valued solution concepts of interval-valued cooperative games with transferable utility. It thoroughly investigates these solutions, thereby establishing the properties, models, methods, and applications. The first chapter proposes the interval-valued least square solutions and quadratic programming models, methods, and properties. Next, the satisfactory-degree-based non-linear programming models for computing interval-valued cores and corresponding bisection algorithm are explained. Finally, the book explores several simplification methods of interval-valued solutions: the interval-valued equal division and equal surplus division values; the interval-valued Shapley, egalitarian Shapley, and discounted Shapley values; the interval-valued solidarity and generalized solidarity values; and the interval-valued Banzhaf value. This book is designed for individuals from different fields and disciplines, such as decision science, game theory, management science, operations research, fuzzy sets or fuzzy mathematics, applied mathematics, industrial engineering, finance, applied economics, expert system, and social economy as well as artificial intelligence. Moreover, it is suitable for teachers, postgraduates, and researchers from different disciplines: decision analysis, management, operations research, fuzzy mathematics, fuzzy system analysis, applied mathematics, systems engineering, project management, supply chain management, industrial engineering, applied economics, and hydrology and water resources.

Since 2007, the repeated financial crises around the world have brought to the headlines financial practices and models considered to fuel the economic instabilities. Deep Dive into Financial Models: Modeling Risk and Uncertainty comes handy in demystifying the underlying quantitative finance concepts. With a limited use of mathematical formalism, the book explains thoroughly the models, their hypotheses, principles and other building blocks. A particular care is given to model limitations and their misuse for investment strategies, asset pricing, or risk management. Its reader-friendly nature provides readers with a head start in quantitative finance.

Knowledge in an Uncertain World is an exploration of the relation between knowledge, reasons, and justification. According to the primary argument of the book, you can rely on what you know in action and belief, because what you know can be a reason you have and you can rely on the reasons you have. If knowledge doesn't allow for a chance of error, then this result is unsurprising. But if knowledge does allow for a chance of error - as seems required if we know much of anything at all - this result entails the denial of a received position in epistemology. Because any chance of error, if the stakes are high enough, can make a difference to what can be relied on, two subjects with the same evidence and generally the same strength of epistemic position for a proposition can differ with respect to whether they are in a position to know.
In defending these points, Fantl and McGrath investigate the ramifications for debates about epistemological externalism and contextualism, the value and importance of knowledge, Wittgensteinian hinge propositions, Bayesianism, and the nature of belief. The book is essential reading for epistemologists, philosophers who work on reasons and rationality, philosophers of language and mind, and decision theorists.

Straight Choices provides a fascinating introduction to the psychology of decision making, enhanced by discussion of relevant examples of decision problems faced in everyday life. Thoroughly revised and updated throughout, this edition provides an integrative account of the psychology of decision-making and shows how psychological research can help us understand our uncertain world. The book emphasizes the relationship between learning and decision-making, arguing that the best way to understand how and why decisions are made is in the context of the learning and knowledge acquisition which precedes them, and the feedback which follows. The mechanisms of learning and the structure of environments in which decisions are made are carefully examined to explore their impact on our choices. The authors then consider whether we are all constrained to fall prey to cognitive biases, or whether, with sufficient exposure, we can find optimal decision strategies and improve our decision making. This edition highlights advances made in judgment and decision making research, with additional coverage of behavioral insights, nudging, artificial intelligence, and explanation-based decision making. Written in a non-technical manner, this book is an essential read for all students and researchers in cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, and the decision sciences, as well as anyone interested in the nature of decision making.

Examines the diverse uses and abuses of risk by social actors across a wide range of cultural, ethnic, and geographical locales. The introductory chapter by the two co-editors analyzes and contextualizes current scholarly debates on the social, cultural, and political construction of risk. It is followed by an overview on the anthropology of harm reduction that outlines an innovative framework for culturally informed risk analysis. The remaining nine chapters are organized into three sections, The Cultivation of Fear, Perceptions of Health, Safety, and Hazard: Risk Makers and Risk Takers, and Regulating Risk and the Public's Health. The book aims to address a set of questions of theoretical and practical importance to anthropologists, sociologists, public health scholars and professionals, and public policy advocates, among others. These questions include: How do individuals conceptualize and respond to risk? Can risk be a tool of empowerment for individuals and communities who define themselves as at-risk? How has risk figured recently in the production of health inequality? Has the social contract to provide care in its broadest sense expanded or contracted around issues of risk? Are risk and the imperative to adhere to risk warnings used by experts as a means of social control?

The volume's contributors, medical anthropologists and sociologists, provide rich, grounded ethnographic case material on the processes at work in everyday social life around the globe, as individuals and groups struggle to make saense of the health risks and inequities in their lives and communities. Authors address an array of urgent health concerns, ranging from food safety to environment, new technologies to infectious disease, in such contrasting locales as the US, Europe, South and Southeast Asia, and North Africa, and across diverse ethnicities and social classes.

This book focuses on the issues of decision-making with several numerical criteria. It introduces an original general approach to solving multicriteria problems given quantitative information about the preference relation of a decision-maker. It considers the problems with crisp as well as fuzzy preference relations, accepting the four axioms of "reasonable choice". Further, it defines the notion of an information quantum about the preference relation of a decision-maker and studies the reduction of the Pareto set using a finite collection of information quanta, demonstrating that the original approach yields a good approximation for the set of nondominated alternatives in a multicriteria problem. Lastly, it analyzes a possible combination of the axiomatic approach with other well-known methods. Intended for a wide range of professionals involved in solving multicriteria problems, including researchers, design engineers, product engineers, developers and analysts, the book is also a valuable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of mathematics, economics, and engineering.

This book offers a multidisciplinary perspective on perceived safety. It discusses the concept of safety from engineering, philosophy, and psychology angles, and considers various definitions of safety and its relationship to risk. Examining the categorization of safety and the measurement of risk, risk cultures, basic human needs and decision-making under uncertainty, the contributions demonstrate the practical implications and applications in areas such as health behavior, aviation and sports. Topics covered include: What is "safety" and is there "optimal safety" in engineering? Philosophical perspectives on safety and risk Psychological perspectives on perceived safety: social factors of feeling safe Psychological perspectives on perceived safety: zero-risk bias, feelings & learned carelessness Perception of aviation safety Intended for both practitioners and academic researchers, this book appeals to anyone interested in decision-making and the perception and establishment of safety.

Recently there has been much debate over the adoption, implementation, and maintenance of comprehensive health and sexuality education programs in Massachusetts public schools. Advocates of school-based comprehensive health education programs often use a public health approach to substantiate their position. They cite national and statewide statistics about adolescent sexual activity and unsafe sexual practice as a basis for providing students with the facts and the skills to make decisions to prevent pregnancy and the transmission of sexually-transmitted diseases. Opponents often speak about the parents' role in educating their sons and daughters and object to public school instruction that regards homosexuality and safe sex as acceptable choices.

In the literature, many models of community organization focus on the decision-making structure within the community, rather than on the process of social change. Therefore, we often know who makes community decisions, without knowing much about how and why these decisions are made. In this study the process of social change is explored by conducting comparative case studies of two Massachusetts communities.

A new text for positive psychology, this book places the self as the decision maker at the center of the motivational process. "Personal Motivation" represents a new approach for student and scholar to consider motivation theory, self theory, and decision theory. It supports current thinking, which sees the self as possessing power for growth and change. Challenging traditional motivation and personality theories, it puts personality within the context of a new motivation model. It also challenges current thinking by distinguishing between choosing and deciding, and by describing the various characteristics of decision making as uniquely human.

The self is reciprocally influenced by three motivational systems and is formed by the motivational process itself. A triarchic theory of motivation is proposed consisting of interdependent systems: formative, operational, and thematic. This book places the study of psychology back in the arena of life by developing a model of motivation and decision making immediately relevant to personal experience.

This book offers a comprehensive and systematic introduction to the latest research on hesitant fuzzy decision-making theory. It includes six parts: the hesitant fuzzy set and its extensions, novel hesitant fuzzy measures, hesitant fuzzy hybrid weighted aggregation operators, hesitant fuzzy multiple-criteria decision-making with incomplete weights, hesitant fuzzy multiple criteria decision-making with complete weights information, and the hesitant fuzzy preference relation based decision-making theory. These methodologies are implemented in various fields such as decision-making, medical diagnosis, cluster analysis, service quality management, e-learning management and environmental management. A valuable resource for engineers, technicians, and researchers in the fields of fuzzy mathematics, operations research, information science, management science and engineering, it can also be used as a textbook for postgraduate and senior undergraduate students.