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Accident/Incident Prevention Techniques by Charles D. Reese
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Road Racing for Serious Runners
Pete Pfitzinger - 1998
This training plan is based on solid science, and its physiological basis is clearly explained and incorporated into a running program that produces maximum results and reduces the risk of injury.In Road Racing for Serious Runners, Pete Pfitzinger-a world-class marathoner, distance running coach, and exercise physiologist-tells you how to get the most out of your limited training time. Pfitzinger teams up with former Running Times editor-in-chief Scott Douglas to present a training and racing plan that will help you excel in the full spectrum of road racing distances. You will learn how to- design a week-by-week training program, - determine the right pace to run during speed workouts, - get the most out of long runs, - taper training before an important race, - detect and avoid staleness and injury, - determine the best strategy for each race, and- achieve the optimal mental state to train and race.Included with each of five training schedules are racing tactics, mental tips, and lessons from world-class runners. Whatever distance you plan to race, Road Racing for Serious Runners will guide you to peak performance!
Smart Power: Climate Change, the Smart Grid, and the Future of Electric Utilities
Peter Fox-Penner - 2010
This and other developments will prompt utilities to undergo the largest changes in their history. Smart Power examines the many facets of this unprecedented transformation. This enlightening book begins with a look back on the deregulatory efforts of the 1990s and their gradual replacement by concerns over climate change, promoting new technologies, and developing stable prices and supplies. In thorough but non-technical terms it explains the revolutionary changes that the Smart Grid is bringing to utility operations. It also examines the options for low-carbon emissions along with the real-world challenges the industry and its regulators must face as the industry retools and finances its new sources and systems. Throughout the book, Peter Fox-Penner provides insights into the policy choices and regulatory reform needed to face these challenges. He not only weighs the costs and benefits of every option, but presents interviews with informed experts, including economists, utility CEOs, and engineers. He gives a brief history of the development of the current utility business model and examines possible new business models that are focused on energy efficiency.Smart Power explains every aspect of the coming energy revolution for utilities in lively prose that will captivate even the most techno-phobic readers.
Professor Mommy: Finding Work-Family Balance in Academia
Rachel Connelly - 2011
The book provides practical suggestions gleaned from the experiences of the authors, together with those of other women who have successfully combined parenting with professorships. Professor Mommy addresses key questions--when to have children and how many to have; what kinds of academic institutions are the most family friendly; how true or not true are the beliefs that many people hold about academic life, and so on--for women throughout all stages of their academic careers, from graduate school through full professor. The authors follow the demands of motherhood all the way from infancy to the teenage years. At each stage, the authors offer invaluable advice and tested strategies for juggling the demands and achieving the rewards of an academic career and motherhood. Written in clear, jargon-free prose, the book is accessible to women in all disciplines, with concise chapters for the time-constrained academic. The book's conversational tone is supplemented with a review of the most current scholarship on work/family balance and a survey of emerging family-friendly practices at U.S. colleges and universities. Professor Mommy asserts that the faculty mother has become and will remain a permanent fixture on the landscape of the American academy. The paperback edition features a new preface that brings the book into conversation with Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In and Anne-Marie Slaughter's "Why Women Still Can't Have It All," as well as a new afterword providing specific suggestions for institutional change.
Drowning in Oil: BP & the Reckless Pursuit of Profit
Loren C. Steffy - 2010
. . . Steffy meets the burden by demonstrating that corporate behemoth BP (formerly British Petroleum) could have prevented the 11 deaths on April 20, 2010, aboard the Deepwater Horizon. . . . The deaths and the gigantic oil spill following the sinking of Deepwater Horizon will surely become a landmark of corporate ineptness and greed for the remainder of human history, thanks in part to Steffy's remarkable account."
San Antonio Express-News
"Steffy has produced a fascinating, gripping, revealing account. . . . The book details events aboard the Deepwater Horizon in April of 2010 to start, but it digs deeper into what is revealed as a culture of cost-cutting boiling over within BP. Steffy documents years of incidents and poor management decisions, detailing the rise of key characters like John Browne and Tony Hayward alongside riveting outlines of horrifying events in Texas City and at other BP locations. . . . The book reads like fiction at times, with the author's heavily-detailed accounts of explosions and conversations creating vivid, nearly fantastical images. The tragic history of BP is all-too-real, though, as the lost lives and environmental damage certainly attest to.. . . Steffy is a thorough, straightforward author. His concerns largely lie with the loss of life and the general culture of cost-cutting of BP, painting an apt and terrifying picture of rampant, steady, costly neglect."
Seattle Post Intelligencer
"Steffy provides valuable insight and crucial corporate context in explaining how so much oil ended up in the Gulf of Mexico."
BusinessWeek
"[Steffy's] investigations reveal a corporate culture of cost-cutting initiatives that put profits ahead of workers' lives and the environment, with repeated safety violations and an abysmal accident history. . . . Steffy details how, in the context of BP's record, the disaster was just part of a pattern of poor decision making in the relentless pursuit by BP to become the largest and most profitable oil company in the world."
Booklist
About the BookAs night settled on April 20, 2010, a series of explosions rocked Deepwater Horizon, the immense semisubmersible drilling platform leased by British Petroleum, located 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. The ensuing inferno claimed 11 lives, and it would rage uncontained for two days, until its wreckage sank to a final resting place nearly a mile beneath the waves. On the ocean floor, the unit's wellhead erupted. Over the next ten weeks, as repeated attempts to cap the geyser failed, an estimated 200 million gallons of oil--the equivalent of 20 Exxon Valdez spills--spewed into the Gulf of Mexico, eventually lapping up on beaches as far away as Florida.Drowning in Oil, by award-winning Houston Chronicle business reporter and columnist Loren Steffy--considered by many to be the writer with the best access to the story--is an unprecedented and gripping narrative of this catastrophe and how BP's winner-take-all business culture made it all but inevitable.Through never-before-published interviews with BP executives and employees, environmental experts, and oil industry insiders, Steffy takes us behind the scenes of 100 years of BP corporate history. Beginning with the conglomerate's early gambits in the Middle East to its recent ascent among energy titans, Steff unearths the roots of the Gulf oil spill in the unwritten bargain between oil producers and consumers, whose insatiable appetites drive the search for new supplies faster, farther, and deeper.Beyond this, the Deepwater Horizon disaster took place after a history of cost cutting in pursuit of profits, particularly under the guidance of its two most recent ex-CEOs, John Browne and Anthony Hayward.Exhaustively researched and documented, Drowning in Oil is the first in-depth examination of how a lack of corporate responsibility and government oversight led to the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. It is an objective, no-punches-pulled account of the energy industry: its environmental impact and the intense competition among stakeholders in today's oil markets.This book puts all the pieces together, offering a definitive account of BP's pursuit of outsized profits as the industrial world awakens to the grim realities of Peak Oil."They fumbled around the darkened room and found an instruction manual. By flashlight, they read the starting procedures. They were doing everything right. After five or six futile tries, they gave up and headed back toward the bridge. Back on the bridge, alarms were shrieking and the captain knew they were running out of time. The subsea engineer had hit the emergency disconnect for the well, and although the control panel showed the rig should be free, it wasn't. The hydraulics were dead. Fire continued to shoot from the top of the derrick. The rig had no power, and without power, it had no pumps for the firefighting equipment, no way to shut off the flow of gas from the well, and no way to disconnect the rig from the flaming umbilical that had it tethered to the wellhead." --from
Drowning in Oil
Radio Free Boston: The Rise and Fall of WBCN
Carter Alan - 2013
It broadcast its final song, Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” in August 2009. In between, WBCN became the musical, cultural, and political voice of the young people of Boston and New England, sustaining a vibrant local music scene that launched such artists as the J. Geils Band, Aerosmith, James Taylor, Boston, the Cars, and the Dropkick Murphys, as well as paving the way for Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, U2, and many others. Along the way, WBCN both pioneered and defined progressive rock radio, the dominant format for a generation of listeners. Brilliantly told by Carter Alan—and featuring the voices of station insiders and the artists they loved—Radio Free Boston is the story of a city; of artistic freedom, of music and politics and identity; and of the cultural, technological, and financial forces that killed rock radio.
Beast: The Top Secret Ilmor-Penske Race Car That Shocked the World at the 1994 Indy 500
Jade Gurss - 2014
The massive effort to design and build it in a seemingly impossible timeframe is still hailed as one of the most herculean efforts and well-kept secrets in the history of the Indy 500. In the new book, Beast, bestselling author Jade Gurss chronicles the subterfuge and debunks the myths about this legendary engine that persist twenty years on. Gurss interviewed key players involved in the race to undercover the story of how this engine powered the Penske PC23 chassis to one of the most talked-about Indy 500 races in history. The British race-engine experts at Ilmor Engineering offer detail about the design and manufacture of the engine. Roger Penske’s team reveals how the engine and car were tested and developed, and how Mercedes came to be involved in the project. The story unfolds as Roger Penske and Mario Illien and Paul Morgan of Ilmor play every card they possess to create an incredible race engine--even rare World War II fighter planes and supersonic jets roar into the heart of this high-tech tale. Drivers Al Unser Jr., Emerson Fittipaldi, and Paul Tracy provide details on the tense weeks leading up race day. The book reaches a suspenseful climax at 240 miles per hour at the Indy 500 noone can forget. Wrapped up in the drama and intrigue are real business and motivational lessons which made Roger Penske one of the most successful businessmen in the world and that helped Ilmor and its cofounders, Mario Illien and the late Paul Morgan, design and manufacture Indy car and Formula 1 championship–winning engines. Beast is not only a must-read for sports and race fans, but a compelling narrative for those who enjoy genuine lessons in business and technology or thrilling mysteries based on actual events.
The Secrets of College Success
Lynn F. Jacobs - 2010
Written by award-winning professors Lynn Jacobs and Jeremy Hyman, it’s loaded with insider information that only professors know--but few are willing to reveal. The over 600 tips in this book will show you: *How to pick good courses and avoid bad professors *How to develop “college-level” skills and habits that’ll put you ahead of the pack *How to get through the freshman comp, math, language, and lab science requirements--in one try *How to figure out what’s going to be on the tests, and what professors are looking for in papers and presentations *How to pick a major you’ll really like--and be good at *How to get the edge for graduate school--or the inside track to a really good job *And much more.The tips are quick and easy-to-use, and the advice is friendly and supportive. It’s as if you had your own personal professor guiding you on the path to college success.
Hoover Dam: An American Adventure
Joseph E. Stevens - 1988
Through the worst years of the Great Depression as many as five thousand laborers toiled twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to erect the huge structure that would harness the Colorado River and transform the American West.Construction of the giant dam was a triumph of human ingenuity, yet the full story of this monumental endeavor has never been told. Now, in an engrossing, fast-paced narrative, Joseph E. Stevens recounts the gripping saga of Hoover Dam. Drawing on a wealth of material, including manuscript collections, government documents, contemporary newspaper and magazine accounts, and personal interviews and correspondence with men and women who were involved with the construction, he brings the Hoover Dam adventure to life.Described here in dramatic detail are the deadly hazards the work crews faced as they hacked and blasted the dam’s foundation out of solid rock; the bitter political battles and violent labor unrest that threatened to shut the job down; the deprivation and grinding hardship endured by the workers’ families; the dam builders’ gambling, drinking, and whoring sprees in nearby Las Vegas; and the stirring triumphs and searing moments of terror as the massive concrete wedge rose inexorably from the canyon floor.Here, too, is an unforgettable cast of characters: Henry Kaiser, Warren Bechtel, and Harry Morrison, the ambitious, headstrong construction executives who gambled fortune and fame on the Hoover Dam contract; Frank Crowe, the brilliant, obsessed field engineer who relentlessly drove the work force to finish the dam two and a half years ahead of schedule; Sims Ely, the irascible, teetotaling eccentric who ruled Boulder City, the straightlaced company town created for the dam workers by the federal government; and many more men and women whose courage and sacrifice, greed and frailty, made the dam’s construction a great human, as well as technological, adventure.Hoover Dam is a compelling, irresistible account of an extraordinary American epic.
Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11
Patrick Creed - 2008
It was American Airlines Flight 77, rushing toward its target. In his Pentagon office, Army major David King was planning a precautionary evacuation when the room suddenly erupted in flames. Arlington firefighters Derek Spector, Brian Roache, and Ron Christman, among the first responders at the scene, were stunned by the sight that met them: a huge flaming hole gouged into the Pentagon’s side, a lawn strewn with smoking debris, and thousands of people, some badly injured, stumbling away from what would become one of the most daunting fires in American history. For more than twenty-four hours, Arlington firefighters and other crews faced some of the most dangerous and unusual circumstances imaginable. The size and structure of the Pentagon itself presented unique challenges, compelling firefighters to devise ingenious tactics and make bold decisions–until they finally extinguished the fire that threatened to cripple America’s military infrastructure just when it was needed most. Granted unprecedented access to the major players in the valiant response efforts, Patrick Creed and Rick Newman take us step-by-step through the harrowing minutes, hours, and days following the crash of American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon’s western façade. Providing fascinating personal stories of the firefighters and rescuers, a broader view of how the U.S. national security command structure was held intact, and a sixteen-page insert of dramatic photographs, Firefight is a unique testament to the fortitude and resilience of America.
Vector Mechanics for Engineers: Dynamics
Ferdinand P. Beer - 1972
This Eighth Edition of Vector Mechanics for Engineers: Statics marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Beer/Johnston series. Over the years, these textbooks have introduced theoretical and pedagogical innovations in statics, dynamics, and mechanics of materials education.
The Myth of Individualism: How Social Forces Shape Our Lives
Peter L. Callero - 2009
The Myth of Individualism offers a concise introduction to sociology and sociological thinking. This engaging supplemental text challenges the dominant belief that human behavior is the result of free choices made by autonomous actors. Drawing upon personal stories, historical events and sociological research, Callero shows how powerful social forces shape individual lives in subtle but compelling ways. Chapters examine the fundamental importance of cultural symbols, the pressures of group conformity, the influence of family, the impact of social class, the wide reach of global capitalism and the revolutionary potential of collective action. An organizing theme of the book is that humans are fundamentally social beings. Even parts of our life that we tend to think of as personal, such as identity, cognition, and emotion, are conditioned and structured by a web of intersecting social relationships. By acknowledging the limits of individual effort and control, we gain insight into our own lives and the lives of others. We also achieve a more informative outlook on enduring social problems and we begin the process of developing a sociological perspective.
Student Solutions Guide For Discrete Mathematics And Its Applications
Kenneth H. Rosen - 1988
These themes include mathematical reasoning, combinatorial analysis, discrete structures, algorithmic thinking, and enhanced problem-solving skills through modeling. Its intent is to demonstrate the relevance and practicality of discrete mathematics to all students. The Fifth Edition includes a more thorough and linear presentation of logic, proof types and proof writing, and mathematical reasoning. This enhanced coverage will provide students with a solid understanding of the material as it relates to their immediate field of study and other relevant subjects. The inclusion of applications and examples to key topics has been significantly addressed to add clarity to every subject. True to the Fourth Edition, the text-specific web site supplements the subject matter in meaningful ways, offering additional material for students and instructors. Discrete math is an active subject with new discoveries made every year. The continual growth and updates to the web site reflect the active nature of the topics being discussed. The book is appropriate for a one- or two-term introductory discrete mathematics course to be taken by students in a wide variety of majors, including computer science, mathematics, and engineering. College Algebra is the only explicit prerequisite.
The Merrimack Event (Shieldclads #1)
David A. Tatum - 2017
After some meddling on the part of the Admiralty, many of the Academy's best are assigned to the oldest, smallest hulk in the Wargame, the unfortunately named corvette Chihuahua. Thanks to a genius engineer, an Army veteran loaned to the Navy for the war game, and an unconventional captain, they make a new discovery which turns her into the most valuable warship in the fleet: The first ever Shieldclad warship. The crew abruptly finds itself center stage in a real combat action, however, when Earth is attacked by an unknown foe, and a lone squadron of these once-mothballed ships is the Alliance's only hope to respond…