At The Edge Of Uncertainty

Author : Michael Brooks
Publisher : Abrams
Page : 219 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2015-02-10
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781468311594

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At the Edge of Uncertainty by Michael Brooks Pdf

“Engaging . . . touches on advanced computing, essential differences between men and women, the power of the will to live, mysteries of the cosmos and more.” —The Washington Post The atom. The Big Bang. DNA. Natural selection. All are ideas that revolutionized science—and all were dismissed out of hand when they first ap­peared. The surprises haven’t stopped in recent years, and in At the Edge of Uncertainty, bestselling author Michael Brooks investigates the new wave of radical insights that are shaping the future of scientific discovery. Brooks takes us to the extreme frontiers of what we understand about the world. He journeys from the observations that might rewrite our story of how the cosmos came to be, through the novel biology behind our will to live, and on to the physi­ological root of consciousness. Along the way, he examines the gender im­balance in clinical trials, explores how merging hu­mans with other species might provide a solution to the shortage of organ donors, and finds out whether the universe really is like a computer or if the flow of time is a mere illusion. “Absorbing . . . scintillating . . . the edgy edge of scientific investigation presented with verve.” —Kirkus Reviews “Mind-bending . . . Brooks handily works his way through these thorny problems, highlighting current research and researchers along the way.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Author : Joan Halifax
Publisher : Flatiron Books
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2018-05-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781250101365

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Standing at the Edge by Joan Halifax Pdf

"Joan Halifax is a clearheaded and fearless traveler and in this book...she offers us a map of how to travel courageously and fruitfully, for our own benefit and the benefit of all beings." —From the foreword by Rebecca Solnit Standing at the Edge is an evocative examination of how we can respond to suffering, live our fullest lives, and remain open to the full spectrum of our human experience. Joan Halifax has enriched thousands of lives around the world through her work as a humanitarian, a social activist, an anthropologist, and as a Buddhist teacher. Over many decades, she has also collaborated with neuroscientists, clinicians, and psychologists to understand how contemplative practice can be a vehicle for social transformation. Through her unusual background, she developed an understanding of how our greatest challenges can become the most valuable source of our wisdom—and how we can transform our experience of suffering into the power of compassion for the benefit of others. Halifax has identified five psychological territories she calls Edge States—altruism, empathy, integrity, respect, and engagement—that epitomize strength of character. Yet each of these states can also be the cause of personal and social suffering. In this way, these five psychological experiences form edges, and it is only when we stand at these edges that we become open to the full range of our human experience and discover who we really are. Recounting the experiences of caregivers, activists, humanitarians, politicians, parents, and teachers, incorporating the wisdom of Zen traditions and mindfulness practices, and rooted in Halifax's groundbreaking research on compassion, Standing at the Edge is destined to become a contemporary classic. A powerful guide on how to find the freedom we seek for others and ourselves, it is a book that will serve us all.

Author : Jonathan Fields
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2011-09-29
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781101544532

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Uncertainty by Jonathan Fields Pdf

Jonathan Fields knows the risks-and potential power-of uncertainty. He gave up a six-figure income as a lawyer to make $12 an hour as a personal trainer. Then, married with a 3-month old baby, he signed a lease to launch a yoga center in the heart of New York City. . . the day before 9/11. But he survived, and along the way he developed a fresh approach to transforming uncertainty, risk of loss, and exposure to judgment into catalysts for innovation, creation, and achievement. Properly understood and harnessed, fear and uncertainty can become fuel for creative genius rather than sources of pain, anxiety, and suffering. In business, art, and life, creating on a world-class level demands bold action and leaps of faith in the face of great uncertainty. But that uncertainty can lead to fear, anxiety, paralysis, and destruction. It can gut creativity and stifle innovation. It can keep you from taking the risks necessary to do great work and craft a deeply-rewarding life. And it can bring companies that rely on innovation grinding to a halt. That is, unless you know how to use it to your advantage. Fields draws on leading-edge technology, cognitive-science and ancient awareness-focusing techniques in a fresh, practical, non-dogmatic way. His approach enables creativity and productivity on an entirely different level and can turn the once-tortuous journey into a more enjoyable quest. Fields will reveal how to: Make changes to your workflow that unlock buried creative potential. Build "creation hives" -- supportive groups that can supercharge and humanize the process. Tap social technology and user co-creation to add clarity, certainty, and sanity, even if you're an artist or solo-creator. Develop a set of personal practices and mindset shifts that let you not just tolerate, but invite and even amplify, uncertainty as a catalyst for genius. Drawing on extensive case studies and research, Fields shares a set of detailed personal practices and environmental changes that can not only humanize the creative process, but also allow individuals and teams to stay more open to opportunity and play a bigger creative game.

Author : Hal Gregersen
Publisher : HarperCollins
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2018-11-13
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780062844774

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Questions Are the Answer by Hal Gregersen Pdf

2018 Nautilus Book Awards Silver Winner What if you could unlock a better answer to your most vexing problem—in your workplace, community, or home life—just by changing the question? Talk to creative problem-solvers and they will often tell you, the key to their success is asking a different question. Take Debbie Sterling, the social entrepreneur who created GoldieBlox. The idea came when a friend complained about too few women in engineering and Sterling wondered aloud: "why are all the great building toys made for boys?" Or consider Nobel laureate Richard Thaler, who asked: "would it change economic theory if we stopped pretending people were rational?" Or listen to Jeff Bezos whose relentless approach to problem solving has fueled Amazon’s exponential growth: “Getting the right question is key to getting the right answer.” Great questions like these have a catalytic quality—that is, they dissolve barriers to creative thinking and channel the pursuit of solutions into new, accelerated pathways. Often, the moment they are voiced, they have the paradoxical effect of being utterly surprising yet instantly obvious. For innovation and leadership guru Hal Gregersen, the power of questions has always been clear—but it took some years for the follow-on question to hit him: If so much depends on fresh questions, shouldn’t we know more about how to arrive at them? That sent him on a research quest ultimately including over two hundred interviews with creative thinkers. Questions Are the Answer delivers the insights Gregersen gained about the conditions that give rise to catalytic questions—and breakthrough insights—and how anyone can create them.

Author : Brady Wagoner,Tania Zittoun
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2021-10-19
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9783030831714

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Experience on the Edge: Theorizing Liminality by Brady Wagoner,Tania Zittoun Pdf

Liminality has become a key concept within the social sciences, with a growing number of publications devoted to it in recent years. The concept is needed to address those aspects of human experience and social life that fall outside of ordered structures. In contrast to the clearly defined roles and routines that define so much of industrial work and economic life, it highlights spaces of transition, indefiniteness, ambiguity, play and creativity. Thus, it is an indispensable concept and a necessary counterweight to the overemphasis on structural influences on human behavior. This book aims to use the concept of liminality to develop a culturally and experientially sensitive psychology. This is accomplished by first setting out an original theoretical framework focused on understanding the ‘liminal sources of cultural experience,’ and second an application of concept to a number of different domains, such as tourism, pilgrimage, aesthetics, children’s play, art therapy, and medical diagnosis. Finally, all these domains are then brought together in a concluding commentary chapter that puts them in relation to an overarching theoretical framework. This book will be useful for graduate students and researchers in cultural psychology, critical psychology, psychosocial psychology, developmental psychology, health psychology, anthropology and the social sciences, cultural studies among others.

Author : Maureen O'Hara
Publisher : Triarchy Press
Page : 172 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2012-10-31
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781908009289

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Dancing at the Edge by Maureen O'Hara Pdf

Maureen O'Hara and Graham Leicester explore the competencies - the ways of being, doing, knowing and organising - that can help us navigate in complex and powerful times. They argue that these competencies are innate and within reach of all of us - given the right setting, plenty of practice and some gentle guidance. But they are seldom seen because they are routinely undervalued in today's culture. That must change, the authors insist, and this book is intended to begin that change.The book is based on the authors' extensive research and their practical experience observing the qualities demonstrated by some of today's most successful cultural, political and business leaders. They write of 'persons of tomorrow' that they have witnessed:"e;We find that people who are thriving in the contemporary world, who give us the sense of having it all together and being able to act effectively and with good spirit in challenging circumstances, have some identifiable characteristics in common... They are the people already among us who inhabit the complex and messy problems of the 21st century in a more expansive way than their colleagues. They do not reduce such problems to the scale of the tools available to them, or hide behind those tools when they know they are partial and inadequate. They are less concerned with 'doing the right thing' according to standard procedure than they are with really doing the right thing in the moment, in specific cases, with the individuals involved at the time. In a disciplined yet engaging way they are always pushing boundaries, including their own. They dance at the edge."e;

Author : David Cleden
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 131 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2017-03-02
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781351920414

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Managing Project Uncertainty by David Cleden Pdf

Dealing effectively with uncertainty requires today's project manager to be familiar with a broad spectrum of strategies, encompassing both 'hard' and 'soft' methods. This theme of unified thinking (i.e. the need to selectively draw upon a wide range of strategies in any given situation) will differentiate the book from its contemporaries. By picking up where traditional risk management techniques begin to fail, it brings together leading-edge thinking from a variety of disciplines and shows how these techniques can be used to conquer uncertainty in projects. The ability to make good decisions when faced with uncertainty is the real challenge. It is a universal truth that a decision is only as good as the information it is based on. But good information is often hard to come by, and all projects are vulnerable to the unknown and the unknowable. Thus, uncertainty becomes the sworn enemy of the project manager. Wherever we try to analyse, quantify, plan and act, uncertainty lies in wait to surprise us with its ambiguity and unpredictability. It lurks in every stage of the project lifecycle: in the planning (how long will this really take?), the initiation (this isn't the situation I expected!), the execution (who could have foreseen that happening?), and even the completion of a project (where are the expected benefits?). But managing uncertainty is a lot more than just applying risk management techniques. It requires a deep appreciation of how uncertainty arises and, by recognising its different guises, the appropriate strategies can be formulated. If we can learn how to reduce uncertainty, we can make better management decisions and increase the chances of the project succeeding. This book addresses five key questions: ¢ Why is there uncertainty in projects? ¢ How do you spot the symptoms of uncertainty, preferably at an early stage? ¢ What can be done to avoid uncertainty? ¢ What strategies can be used to deal with project uncertainty? ¢ How can both the individual and the organisation learn to cope more effectively in the future? The reader is assumed to be a either a project management professional, or a senior manager looking for ways to improve project management strategy within their organisation. As such, a foundation in project management basics is assumed, although not essential. The book then builds on this by exposing new ideas and concepts, and shows how these can be harnessed to tackle uncertainty in its many guises.

Author : Michael Brooks
Publisher : Profile Books
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2010-07-09
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781847651303

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13 Things That Don't Make Sense by Michael Brooks Pdf

Science starts to get interesting when things don't make sense. Even today there are experimental results that the most brilliant scientists can neither explain nor dismiss. In the past, similar anomalies have revolutionised our world: in the sixteenth century, a set of celestial irregularities led Copernicus to realise that the Earth goes around the sun and not the reverse. In 13 Things That Don't Make Sense Michael Brooks meets thirteen modern-day anomalies that may become tomorrow's breakthroughs. Is ninety six percent of the universe missing? If no study has ever been able to definitively show that the placebo effect works, why has it become a pillar of medical science? Was the 1977 signal from outer space a transmission from an alien civilization? Spanning fields from chemistry to cosmology, psychology to physics, Michael Brooks thrillingly captures the excitement and controversy of the scientific unknown.

Author : Vaughn Tan
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2020-07-28
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780231551878

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The Uncertainty Mindset by Vaughn Tan Pdf

Innovation is how businesses stay ahead of the competition and adapt to market conditions that change in unpredictable and uncertain ways. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, high-end cuisine underwent a profound transformation. Once an industry that prioritized consistency and reliability, it turned into one where constant change was a competitive necessity. A top restaurant’s reputation and success have become so closely bound up with its ability to innovate that a new organizational form, the culinary research and development team, has emerged. The best of these R&D teams continually expand the frontiers of food—they invent a constant stream of new dishes, new cooking processes and methods, and even new ways of experiencing food. How do they achieve this nonstop novelty? And what can culinary research and development teach us about how organizations innovate? Vaughn Tan opens up the black box of elite culinary R&D to provide essential insights. Drawing on years of unprecedented access to the best and most influential culinary R&D teams in the world, he reveals how they exemplify what he calls the uncertainty mindset. Such a mindset intentionally incorporates uncertainty into organization design rather than simply trying to reduce risk. It changes how organizations hire, set goals, and motivate team members and leads organizations to work in highly unconventional ways. A revelatory look at the R&D kitchen, The Uncertainty Mindset upends conventional wisdom about how to organize for innovation and offers practical insights for businesses trying to become innovative and adaptable.

Author : Francesco Montomoli
Publisher : Springer
Page : 198 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2018-06-21
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9783319929439

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Uncertainty Quantification in Computational Fluid Dynamics and Aircraft Engines by Francesco Montomoli Pdf

This book introduces design techniques developed to increase the safety of aircraft engines, and demonstrates how the application of stochastic methods can overcome problems in the accurate prediction of engine lift caused by manufacturing error. This in turn addresses the issue of achieving required safety margins when hampered by limits in current design and manufacturing methods. The authors show that avoiding the potential catastrophe generated by the failure of an aircraft engine relies on the prediction of the correct behaviour of microscopic imperfections. This book shows how to quantify the possibility of such failure, and that it is possible to design components that are inherently less risky and more reliable. This new, updated and significantly expanded edition gives an introduction to engine reliability and safety to contextualise this important issue, evaluates newly-proposed methods for uncertainty quantification as applied to jet engines. Uncertainty Quantification in Computational Fluid Dynamics and Aircraft Engines will be of use to gas turbine manufacturers and designers as well as CFD practitioners, specialists and researchers. Graduate and final year undergraduate students in aerospace or mathematical engineering may also find it of interest.

Author : Romeo V. Turcan,John E. Reilly,Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen,Yariv Taran,Andreea I. Bujac
Publisher : Emerald Group Publishing
Page : 588 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2023-10-05
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781802620153

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The Emerald Handbook of Authentic Leadership by Romeo V. Turcan,John E. Reilly,Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen,Yariv Taran,Andreea I. Bujac Pdf

The Emerald Handbook of Authentic Leadership is a quest for interdisciplinary insights arising out of theory and practice. It is intended for a wide readership interested in leadership and leadership authenticity in the contemporary world.

Author : Heather McKenzie,John Quintner,Gillian Bendelow
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 136 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2020-10-12
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9789004399228

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At the Edge of Being: The Aporia of Pain by Heather McKenzie,John Quintner,Gillian Bendelow Pdf

Author : Amol Deshpande,Anthony Hunter
Publisher : Springer
Page : 389 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2010-09-17
Category : Computers
ISBN : 9783642159510

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Scalable Uncertainty Management by Amol Deshpande,Anthony Hunter Pdf

Managing uncertainty and inconsistency has been extensively explored in - ti?cial Intelligence over a number of years. Now with the advent of massive amounts of data and knowledge from distributed heterogeneous,and potentially con?icting, sources, there is interest in developing and applying formalisms for uncertainty andinconsistency widelyin systems that need to better managethis data and knowledge. The annual International Conference on Scalable Uncertainty Management (SUM) has grown out of this wide-ranging interest in managing uncertainty and inconsistency in databases, the Web, the Semantic Web, and AI. It aims at bringing together all those interested in the management of large volumes of uncertainty and inconsistency, irrespective of whether they are in databases,the Web, the Semantic Web, or in AI, as well as in other areas such as information retrieval, risk analysis, and computer vision, where signi?cant computational - forts are needed. After a promising First International Conference on Scalable Uncertainty Management was held in Washington DC, USA in 2007, the c- ference series has been successfully held in Napoli, Italy, in 2008, and again in Washington DC, USA, in 2009.

Author : Simon Grand
Publisher : Edward Elgar Publishing
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2016-04-29
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781785366314

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Routines, Strategies and Management by Simon Grand Pdf

The dynamic interplay of routines, strategies and management allows companies to successfully move forward within their industries. This book contributes to a coherent conceptualization of strategy, organization and management from a practice perspective, identifying strategy as realized in the action. Simon Grand provides a theoretical framework and detailed exploration in the context of two attractive empirical cases. He discusses topics such as theorizing routine dynamics, managerial engagement and managing routines as strategies to provide a detailed exploration of the importance of organizational routines for strategy. This book will be of interest to researchers in the areas of organizational studies, strategic management, technological innovation and the creative industries. The empirical case studies will also be of use to students and scholars of various disciplines.

Author : Sunetra Sarkar,Jeroen A S Witteveen
Publisher : World Scientific
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2016-08-19
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9789814730594

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Uncertainty Quantification in Computational Science by Sunetra Sarkar,Jeroen A S Witteveen Pdf

During the last decade, research in Uncertainty Quantification (UC) has received a tremendous boost, in fluid engineering and coupled structural-fluids systems. New algorithms and adaptive variants have also emerged. This timely compendium overviews in detail the current state of the art of the field, including advances in structural engineering, along with the recent focus on fluids and coupled systems. Such a strong compilation of these vibrant research areas will certainly be an inspirational reference material for the scientific community.