This book shows how to identify potential design errors and modify procedures in the design process to mitigate design-induced error. Real life examples are used to demonstrate the points being made. Many of the concerns raised in the book have come from a worldwide study conducted with designers, managers, and end-users.

Commercial law is the label applied to the collection of rules and principles which cover dealings between parties acting in the course of business. Commercial law is as diverse as commercial life. Nonetheless, there are key ideas which underpin all types of commercial dealings. This book focuses on those key ideas and considers how modern commercial law implements them. This book argues that commercial law has three main concerns: - Agency. The extent to which multiple parties can act on behalf of a single commercial enterprise. Without agency rules, there could be no modern commercial economy. - Risk. Commercial parties run two main types of risk: performance risk (the risk that the provision of goods or services or credit is inadequate) and credit risk (the risk that money due for performance rendered is not paid). - Dealings. The ability of, and limits on, parties dealing with property, including transferring title and creating security interests. In the process of exploring this trilogy, the book considers pervasive themes in commercial law including sources for commercial law, freedom of contract and its limits, the need for certainty and predictability, and the appropriate role for obligations of good faith and fair dealing.

This book shows how to identify potential design errors and modify procedures in the design process to mitigate design-induced error. Real life examples are used to demonstrate the points being made. Many of the concerns raised in the book have come from a worldwide study conducted with designers, managers, and end-users.

The modern vision of the world as one dominated by one or more superpowers begs the question of how best to understand the world-system that existed before the rise of the first modern powers.

Janet Abu-Lughod's solution to this problem, in this highly influential work, is that Before European Hegemony, a predominantly insular, agrarian world was dominated by groups of mercantile city-states that traded with one another on equal terms across a series of interlocking areas of influence. In this reading of history, China and Japan, the kingdoms of India, Muslim caliphates, the Byzantine Empire and European maritime republics alike enjoyed no absolute dominance over their neighbours and commercial partners – and the egalitarian international trading network that they built endured until European advances in weaponry and ship types introduced radical instability to the system.

Abu-Lughod's portrait of a more balanced world is a masterpiece of synthesis driven by one highly creative idea: her world system of interlocking spheres of influence quite literally connected masses of evidence together in new ways. A triumph of fine critical thinking.