Engineering-risk Books

The authors pull concepts and recommendations from three Y2k disciplines: program management, business management, and technology management. This is possibly the first time all three disciplines have been presented in a manner such that a company president can understand the real business threat due to lack of Y2k readiness.

In my presentations on the impact of Year 2000 in healthcare I am often asked to recommend resources. There are only two recommendations I will give and one of them is "Y2K Risk Management" by Steve Goldberg, Steven Davis and Andrew Pegalis. I equate this book to "just in time information." It is precise and right on the money in terms of the final preparations for January 1, 2000. I use it, our Risk Manager uses it and it is appropriate reading for all involved in Y2K preparedness. If I had only one choice, with the time remaining, this book would be it.

Y2K risk management and contingency planning is the hottest Y2K topic right now. Readers need to know about this book, and fast! For example, agencies of the federal government have until April 30 to submit their year 2000 contingency plans in the event of system failures. Why isn't _Y2K Risk Management_ part of the Amazon Millennium Store? According to all the reviewers, this is THE book to read for anyone who needs to mitigate Y2K business and legal risks, and develop a sound contingency plan.

Easy read, could have been more in depth about some aspects.

Steven Barsky, has written another excellent publication, that is an absolute requirement in every divers bookcase. He clearly explains the concerns that every diver should consider before diving into questionable water. For the professional diver this will be the book you will use to ensure your safety. Without a doubt all public safety divers must read this book. To remain safe underwater every diver will want to read "Diving in High-Risk Environments" for their health.

This book is excellent for both academics and practitioners. Because of its low level of mathematics, it can be used at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The exposition is clear and concise but not formal. The book covers a lot of ground and is written by an expert in the field. Almost each section has plenty of good real world examples. It can be used as an introductory reference to advanced topics such as interest rate option modelling and the Brace-Gatarek-Musiela Approach.

However, the book needs a new edition to include the latest topics in the modelling of interest rates. A visual basic computer disc for practice could improve the book considerably.

At less than $50 the price of the book makes it a bargain.

This book emphasises the relationship between the debt and currency markets. This relationship can be summarized by the international fisher equation, however this book addresses topics that are typically not addressed in more theoretical texts. If you really want to understand how the international currency and debt markets operate on a practical level, including a rather comprehensive coverage of Swaps, Caps, Collars, FRAs, etc., then this book is a must. The mathematics in this book are rather simple and should pose no problem for a beginner or intermediate level student of finance.

A great book for practicing engineers who want a quick insight into the safety issues related to control system design

I like it so much...I've bought it twice now (I lost my other copy and decided I couldn't live w/o it).

Got the friendly yellow paperback version. The book is in three major parts; Options, Time series and then Value at Risk.

The first section starts out well with an overview of Stochastic Processes and then moves on to Stochastic Integrals and Differential Equations. All of this is motivation to help with the pricing of Options, starting with European, then American and moving onto Exotics and Bond Options. It covers all the major points, though it is a little limited in the Exotics, it does have a good references to more thorough works.

The second section on time series works with ARIMA, ARCH and GARCH models.

The third section (labeled Selected Financial Applications) is mostly about the VAR though is has some really good commentary on the Volatility of Option Portfolios.

An added bonus is that you can download the PDF version of the book, and all the data for the examples from the web, with quite a neat one-time license.

I would recommend this book to people needing a good overview of the subjects listed above, and as a handy reference.

This book was such a relief after going through tens of books/lectures notes on stochastic calculus. Most math books give the theory behind Ito calculus (martingales, measure theory etc.), but fail to give the motivation and reasoning behind abstract definitions. This book does an excellent job in deriving many seemingly-complicated math formulas (or, theorems) using intuitive terms. It is an excellent read for people who have a reasonable background in probability theory, and are wishing to learn stochastic calculus (plus finance). I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn the rudiments of Ito integral and see its applications in finance.

This entertaining fictional account takes the reader through the civil war to the assassination of Lincoln through the eyes of both northern and southern sympathizers. Besides romance, the reader sees first hand the riots in Baltimore and New York, military prisons in Richmond and Washington, ruthless secret services of both North and South, and the heavy price often paid by ordinary people.

Enjoyed reading this historical novel that gives real insights to the cultural and military parts leading up to and occurring during the Civil War. The main focus is of course as the title states, the formation of the Secret Service vis a vis Allan Pinkerton. Actually according to the book, it was actually General McClellan's idea after his experiences with intelligence gathering in the Crimean War
Even after reading a historical book about the Wilkes brothers I still learned that John Boothe Wilkes had performed for Abraham Lincoln before the assasination.
It was rather surprising to learn also how accessible President Lincoln was to the general public in that day as well. As there was little security around the president, it was not a stretch to conceive of a plot to kidnap or assasinate him.
It is evident that the author has done considerable research on the life and times he writes about. I would classify it as James Michener for Dummies. Much more readable.

I am a big fan of John Jakes. ON SECRET SERVICE is as good as all his other books; the difference is that it stands alone and is not part of a series. The books tells the story of how the modern-day government Secret Service agency began during the Civil War. It's really interesting to read how it started from untrained amateurs, what tactics it used and how it infringed on individual rights...especially in consideration of today's operatives in the Secret Service and CIA. It is, however, more than just a story about this service. It is a wonderful historical fiction about how the Civil War affected the lives of ordinary people and how it truly tore our country apart. It also gives great insight into Lincoln and the original Pinkerton Detective Agency. If you hated studying the Civil War and know little about it, this book will change that.

I am a fan of John Jakes. The North and South series are some of the very best novels I've read. I was very disappointed in On Secret Service and could not get past page 100. The concept of the novel is excellent but the plot surrounding the historical facts is very thin. The characters themselves lack any depth and provoked no emotional response from me as the reader. The story simply did not intrigue me enough to finish it.

Most people forget that the Secret Service began during the Civil War era. Also, I don't think many people are aware that there was a spying aspect to the war because it was never in the forefront of events. I've been a Jakes fan since the KENT FAMILY CHRONICLES. (Still his best work, though I loved HOMELAND.) President Lincoln still dies in the end but I wish Jakes had provided his fictional characters with happier endings to balance the tragedy. I look forward to JJ's next work because this was not his best effort.

Human Nature...will it be the same tomorrow as it is today?

Don't bet on it--especially after reading this book. It's all about how GRIN technologies--Genetics, Robotics, Information and Nano Processes--are fundamentally changing the rules of the game in terms of human change and evolution--how we discover, process and handle new scientific development, and what we do with it to enhance ourselves.

Will the human of today be the human of tomorrow or will our minds and bodies be enhanced to such a degree that humans of today won't recognize humans of tomorrow in much the same way early man would not recognize the mankind today. What does make us human?

Mankind has made more scientific progress in the last 20 years than was made in the first 15,000 years. There is no longer any talk of the future as if it is some far off time. The future is now and as the book says, its pretty hairy. Or could be. Case in point: Dick Tracy and his two-way wrist radio a few years ago. Now we have cel phones. Space travel and Flash Gordon of the thirties? Now, its real.

So, what will this all mean? Where will it go? Garreau outlines three possibilities, the Heaven Scenario where everything changes, but comes out all right, the Hell Secenario where life--and mankind as we know it--ceases to exist and a Prevail/Transcend secenarios where man changes, survives and remains in semi-control of it all.

A paragraph on page 240 of the paperback edition strikes to the heart of the book and our problems/challenges/opportunities:

"The deeper question is whether these GRIN technologies can alter the basics of human condition. Can we imagine them changing the way we shape truth, beauty, love or happiness? Can we imagine altering the seven deadly sins--pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth? Or the virtues of faith, hope, charity, fortitude, justice, temperance and prudence?..." Some scientists say "yes" and look forward to a "new" and better human.

We may get to a world of enhanced humans, regular humans and "left out or left behind" humans. How would we (they) relate to one another? What about the concept or "All Men Are Created Equal are created equal?" These aren't questions for the future. These are questions we as a human society of science,philosophy, ethics and faith, must begin to think about now, not later. Later is not "later." "Later" may be next month or next year. Just because the United States bans the creation of clonned babies, that doesn't mean that scientists is other parts of the world aren't already at work on it, and may have already done it. How do we humans respond, how do we react? Is that creation "human?" Does it have a soul?

It may get, as Garreau so effectively states, to the point where we humans have to use the "Shakespeare Test" to determine one's degree of humanity as compared to one's techno-enhanced qualaities and abilities. Would Shakespeare recognize this person? And, more importantly, would Shakespeare's work, the greatest works on humanity anbd human nature ever written, be understood and appreciated by this ultra modern techno-enhanced and created man?

Interesting stuff and Garreau writes it where you can understand it most of the time. Somewhat wordy in places, but a worthwhile, challenging and thought provoking read.

The author presents a broad selection of other people's opinions on 'human enhancement' in a well-written, entertainng book. He does not perform a critical analysis of those opinions, just presents them for you to use to make up your own mind. Because the author doesn't really show strong opinions of his own, this book will likely not be as controversial or polarizing as the books of the people's opinions contained in the book.

I enjoyed this book and it is a good overview, but I enjoyed more reading the original books and articles.

Well-researched, and beautifully written, Joe Garreau brings his well-honed journalism skills to bear on the most vexing question humankind has ever faced: what to do now that our genetic, robotics, information and nano technologies have begun to give us the ability to enhance our own evolution?

Garreau offers a glimpse at the mind-boggling technologies DARPA is already developing in support of our national defense, then convincingly extrapolates how the ever-quickening pace of technological innovation will likely lead to a Singularity event when humans invent something more intelligent than themselves. The remainder of the book considers whether the Singularity will lead to a Heaven state (technological nirvana), a Hell state (destruction or degradation of humankind) or a Prevail state, in which humans develop control mechanisms to avoid becoming slaves to technology.

The Heaven and Hell scenarios are set up as obvious strawmen for Garreau to knock down en route to the more likely middle outcome. Yet his analysis of the Prevail scenario loses focus, as the discussion veers off on a number of philosophical tangents and seems to conclude that adopting an iHippy group-love mentality will prove the key to our survival.

While I found this to be a stimulating read and especially liked how Garreau organized his material around key thinkers in the relevant technical fields, I wish he had more fully explored some practical ways of containing threatening technology, such as the adoption of more powerful international governing bodies with the regulatory teeth to outlaw certain technologies and the use of new media tools to blacklist undesirable practices. (The current push to be green, in reaction to the Global Warming crisis, shows the possibility of forming international positions on key issues.) I don't mean to suggest that it's possible to define the Prevail endstate with any real specifics, but I came away with the impression that Garreau turned away from his considerable analytical ability in the later parts of the book.

This is about the so-called GRIN technologies: Genetic, Robotic, Information, and Nano. Properly speaking the title should be "Extreme Cultural Evolution," or perhaps "Accelerated Technological Evolution." "Radical" is used here in the sense of "extreme." Regardless of what we call it, for better or for worse, we will be enhancing our minds and bodies and changing the life forms around us, especially those we use for food. In fact we have already done so through computers, surgery, artificial limbs, genetically engineer agricultural products, etc. The difference to come is all about the acceleration of change coming from these technologies.

What happens when your daughter's brave new genetic endowment gives her a prodigious memory and makes her smarter, prettier, and stronger than you? No problem. We love our children. Ah, but what happens when she realizes that at age eighteen she is like an Australopithecus creature compared to the new genetic and nanotechnological enhancements bestowed upon her classmates just a few years younger?

What happens is the end of the world as we know it, and most critically the end of human beings as we know ourselves. The question is, is this is a good thing or a bad thing?

Joel Garreau has several answers in terms of scenarios of the future. There is the "Heaven Scenario," the "Hell Scenario," the "Prevail Scenario," and the "Transcend" possibility. Garreau interviewed a number of experts in many fields in an effort to find out not only what the prospects are, but to count noses, so to speak, and see who's optimistic and who isn't.

Put Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999)--see my review on Amazon--in the camp of those who see marvelous things happening, in fact a glorious singularity of advancement. Put Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, in the camp of those who believe we are headed for a right awful hell on earth. And put polymath Jaron Lanier in the camp of those who think we can prevail over our creations. And put Michael Goldblatt of the US military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the platoon of happy warriors just having fun with the prospect of new and more amazingly advanced weaponry (or defenses from weaponry).

After reading this dense and fascinating book I have a few observations. First, regardless of whether we like it or not, or whether Luddites and social conservatives manage to slow down or even halt some of the research, nothing but nothing is going to stem the tide, or alter The Curve, as Garreau calls the shape of things to come. If we don't do stem cell research or explore replicating nanobots, you can be sure that somebody else--in Korea, in China, in Russia, even in Pakistan--will. Any nation or culture that chooses to not explore these brave new worlds will be in danger of not only being left behind economically and militarily, but in grave danger of living a sub existence like that of pets or zoo animals.

There is some debate about this point. Garreau explores the idea that nothing will stop the tsunami and does find some people who think we can put up a wall or at least quiet the rampaging waters. Still others are asking, why should we? Think-tanker Francis Fukuyama, author of Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002)--see my review at Amazon--believes there is something precious in humans as presently constituted. He is fearful that we will lose that human nature through biological engineering. Personally, glancing at the history of human kind, I think that human nature could use some altering, and indeed believe that unless human nature does change, we won't be around much longer. Fukuyama believes that, were we to become as immortal as the gods, we would stagnate. He "doesn't think immortals will ever have a new idea again" and only the death of people allows new ideas to take root. (p. 163)

What if we do conquer all and end up with this so-called heaven on earth? What will it consist of? Will we pursue endless delights from brain chemistry? Are we creatures ruled by the gods of pleasure and pain, or is there some transcendental aspect to us? Garreau explores this question near the end of the book with help from Martin E.P. Seligman's three levels of happiness: "the pleasant life, the good life, and the meaningful life." Here I think Garreau, along with Seligman is whistling Dixie in the dark. The "meaningful life" is what? According to what I could gather on pages 261-262, the "meaning consists in attachment to something bigger than you are." Seligman finds such attachment in various activities from raising children to saving the whales to being a terrorist. I think a more lasting attachment may be to something like exploring the cosmos.

But would humans really have sufficient desire to do that? Recalling some famous dystopias from literature, H.G. Wells's The Time Machine or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, for example, I suspect that creatures such as ourselves (as currently constituted) can only exist in environments not that far removed from the savannah. Cities are tough enough for the couch potato obese of the Western world. If we gain everything our biology desires, we may become (further) degenerate and fall victim to something untoward and unpredictable. Or we may just end up examining our navels as the perfect mixture of chemicals courses through our bodies. If we conquer all and have no challenges left, what will we do? What does a perfectly satisfied and perfectly serene creature do? We don't know. Transcend human nature perhaps?

I read this book as part of an honors seminar at my university called "Cyborgs, Transhumansim, and the Future of Mankind." This is a very good collection of the different possibilities of how the singularity could play itself out. The author assumes that radical evolution will take place, so it is not completely objective, but he does reference scientists of different viewpoints, in order to gain a balanced picture of how believers in transhumanism envision the future. Very good overview to spur further research and thought.

POSITIVE POINTS: Best indepth book on Credit Derivatives. Very readable. Explains very nicely why this derivatives are so important for banks. Non technical.

NEGATIVE POINTS: Focus on banks with only a little chapter on Credit Derivatives as investment products. No explanation how those derivatives are priced (but hey, there are loads of technical books)

I am a Fin Math student and by now a Google search expert. I do have this book from my library and it requires patience .
Personally I would keep it that way borrow from a library and read free research on the net with more math. It is a good buy for a practioner who needs to refer various structures and market structure in one place. The author has definetely put in effort to collate all her years of market experience.

This is my fourth purchase; this one is for a new analyst I hired. I have read Janet Tavakoli's book as well as all of the current literature on credit derivatives. This book is one of the best books on derivatives I have read in terms of style of writing and content (I'm not after the mathematics on finance; there are plenty of those). I am a current successful credit derivatives trader.

Great book for introduction of CDS and other structured products. I work in risk and this book helped clarify several things.

This is a good book about how credit risk derivatives are handled in the daily practice of a big international bank. Although the author clearly knows her math the book contains hardly any formula. Since I am a model builder and most clients of our treasury consultancy firm are medium seize companies there initially was a misfit. However this book is a very good antidote for people putting too much faith in mathematical models. I can not help being one of them. I liked the down to earth approach very much. In the end I learned a lot more than I thought I would.

This book will change the way you think. It's as simple as that. Really eye-opening and persuasive arguments and examples as to why the absence of accidents per se is not an adequate indicator of a system's safety. Near-accidents are a better metric. Fascinating!

This was a very good look at the complexities of modern technology although the analysis and conclusions could be just as valid for any complex system. The issue I see with the book is that the information seems to be dated. There are a number of places where the author draws conclusions based on a lack of experience, technology operating hours, with the systems involved that may or may not be valid based on today's experience. It would be very interesting to see an update to determine if some of his assumptions are correct. If you are looking for an introduction to how portions of complex systems may interact in unpredictable ways, this is a good starting place.

I purchased and read the book for the concepts but enjoyed the examples. However, I did find several errors in the events in which I am familiar. Specifically those of space flight. In as little as four pages (pp267-270) he makes three errors. It makes me wonder about the accuracy of the rest of the book's examples.

Just for the record:
1) He attributes the second orbital flight of Mercury to Scott Crossfield when in fact it was Scott Carpenter. Crossfield was an X-15 test pilot of great skill, while Carpenter has been noted as the "worst astronaut in the program" by Chris Kraft. There are many accounts of Mr. Kraft openly wondering how Carpenter got to be an astronaut in the first place let alone being allowed to fly into space. This might better explain the events instead of it being a process - system problem.

2) It was almost certain then, and now after the recent recovery of Gus Grissom's Mercury capsule absolutely confirmed, that Gus did NOT blow the hatch. This would have been know at the time of my copy's printing.

3) It was Glenn's heat shield not the landing pack, which the status light indicated had come loose. This would have explained the reluctance of ground control to inform the astronaut since not much could have been done if true.

Of course these are minor and don't lead the author to any significantly different conclusions than if they were corrected. But the sloppiness does make me lower it to a 4 instead of 5 stars.

having obtained a second hand copy of "Normal Accidents" in the original 1984 edition, it is fascinating to see how many of the accident scenarios are still valid today. When compared with Lagadec's thesis published in 1982 ("Major Technological Risk", Pergamon Collection Futuribles, o. o. p.), the style is easier to understand, and the book is leaning a little more towards US culture and thinking of the 1980s. Incidentally, Lagadec himself reflected in a 1997 paper how "Normal Accident Theory" had become one of the generic views that engineers and/or sociologists had developed since the early 1990s. Even in 1996, Hood and Jones ("Contemporary Debates in Risk Management") quote Perrow as one of the significant contributors to the fundamental debate in risk management.
I very much enjoyed reading one of the early works in disaster and accident theory. Recommended without hesitation, and essential when you are looking for a deeper understanding of the theories that are around today.

Perrow sets out a framework for thinking about the causes of 'normal' i.e. unpreventable accidents by looking at the coupling of features in a system and then overlays the potential severity of a failure to draw conclusions about the real reasons for catastrophes beyond the often useless explanations of user error and acts of God. This is a book that is more often quoted than read, which is a pity as it is well written and thoughtful, though the final attacks on social power relations are a bit over the top.

This is the first book I've read by Singer. Right from the start of the book, he reveals himself as a master craftsman of character and dialogue. His characters are incredibly real and complex. They defy categorization, as real individuals tend to do. Their struggles are very human and believable. The characters are the delicious part of the book. In that respect, it is only towards the last third or fourth of the book, as it becomes obvious that most of the characters are "spinning their wheels" and inadequate character development is taking place, that the book gets rather tedious (and the feeling dawns that this book could have been made shorter). The denouement of Grein's fate is also quite improbable and a let-down.

One thing that will probably prevent me from reading other Singer books, despite his evident skill at character composition, is the "atmosphere" the book is permeated with - the underlying philosophy. The book is rather depressing, filled as it is with characters who experience personal angst, obsessive compulsiveness towards immoral actions, and a personal hollowness and despair. And in the end, there is no redeeming joy or hope to be found. While Grein's alteration could signal hope in something greater, it is arguably portrayed more as the permanent escape from reality of a man in despair, rather than a true conversion filled with genuine faith in greater meaning.

Having been in jesuit school during my primary and secondary, I distintly remember a priest who told me I should marry a jewish girl for you have the sort of character that requires it.. he was not mistaken, but the unfolding of that story rivals a novel of IBS... so my wife gave it as a girft and I found a novel in some parts as to be similar to Dovstoyeski, yet modern is some others as Saul Bellow's.. and even humorous as Woody Allen.

Its a story of survivors, of the melting-pot phenomenom of the USA, of the drift of generations and the loss of traditions, of the eternal contradictions, and the difference between a world separated by the holocaust.

"Shadows on the Hudson" is an excellent novel, even better than Singer's similiar but more compact "Enemies, a Love Story". Few writers have ever been able to involve the reader in the inner lives of fictional characters the way Singer could, and fewer still would have been able to make their stories so fascinating when they're all so cynical and often downtrodden, bemoaning God's silence and the corruption of modern man. Singer had a singular talent for exploring the chasm between expectations and reality, how we're almost always let down (and the post-WW2 Jews moreso than practically anyone in history), and how, for some totally inexplicable reason, we keep going. He made the absurd palpable for the modern reader, far better than even Camus and Sartre did, because he was an entertaining storyteller first, and THEN he was a philosopher.

This long, convoluted story of the lives of a half-dozen Jewish intellectuals and businesspeople in New York immediately after the second world war must be Singer's masterpiece. He often explored the same ideas in his novels---the point of existence and the role of the Jew in modern society---and in fact he often used philandering husbands and bitter wives and mistresses as primary characters, but he pulled it all together here into a riveting, beautiful story of obsession, regret, pain, and penitence that you simply don't want to end. That these people, and their endless torturous questions, aren't really important in the long run is precisely the final point of Singer's big novel: we make a tiny, swift ripple in the river and then we're gone, possibly forever; but it is how we grapple with the desires of the body and the needs of the mind and heart that gives our lives substance and form. Without this questioning and searching, without this rending of our spirit by apparently random or viscious events in our lives...without all of it, we would never turn to God. And then our small lives ARE meaningless.

At least, that's what I think Singer is trying to say. In the end, he was a fantastic writer who drew you into the story and kept you guessing until the end. Just like life itself...

Had it been published in English when it was written, shortly after WWII, it would have been ignored as the story of a mere milieu. Today it is the story of Everyman. These Jewish refugees in New York after the Holocaust, relatively prosperous since the truly poor had no means of escaping Hitler, display all the Angst, ambivalence, rootlessness and indecision of modern mankind. They cannot decide between reason and faith, modernity and tradition, America and Europe. Their God is no comfort and his non-existence no release. All that is real is Hitler -- and Hitler stands for what the modern world has to offer.

This novel is exasperating because it is always easy to despise the despicable characters it develops, yet reflection after each portion read forces one to admit a sympathy, albeit reluctantly. Very Dostoyevskian to be sure. Dostoyevsky is no pleasure to read either.

Singer deservedly got the Nobel Prize for Literature years ago and before this masterpiece ever saw the light of day except in Yiddish in serialized form.

For fans of Singer's writing, there is little new here. All of his classical narrative concerns are on display. But this novel, unpublished during his lifetime, is far more of an immense and deep exploration of his concerns; there is the feeling, when reading this sprawling novel, that he has found yet another angle to explore his fictional concerns, and it is one that is subterranean in its aesthetic. Shadows is staggeringly dark; its vision of humanity, both in the past, present and future, is unremittingly tragic and sorrowful. Singer never lets up, and reading this novel can be fatiguing because of its unrelenting stance toward despair. What saves the novel from perdition, what makes it more than a catalog of gloom, is that it is uttering extremely simple truths, even if they are hard to swallow.