Engineering-risk Books

In many respects, this is a geography text so basic it would almost be inappropriate for a 101 college class. We are told throughout that earthquakes involve violent shaking and can take lives, that people living near the coasts are vulnerable to hurricanes, and that avalanches tend to happen in mountainous regions. Anyone who doesn't know this much should avoid a career in geography to be sure. The author switches gears in the chapter on wartime bombing, giving valuable facts, figures, and analysis. This is likely his area of specialty. It is also the only part of the book likely to interest the reader.

I'm happy with amount of information covered and the index is excellent!

As a professional practitioner I would prefer to see more emphasis on practical applications and less on theory and proofs.

I get more use out of the Weibull handbook, which is the opposite. It is very focused on the practitioner but the index is not as useful and it has minimal theory.

The pair of them are excellent. If I could only have 1 then as a student I'd buy this book but as a practitioner I'd by the Weibull Handbook.

Though the publication date of this book, in the USA, is 2002, it was probably writen (in Sweden) no later than the mid-90's. This can be deduced by the dates of the references used. For instance: many references to J.Reason's 1990 work and none to the much more relevant 1997 "Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents".
This is a pitty because the 90's were exectly the years of total revamp of mishaps diagnostics, with less technical tools, such as Risk Trees and Event Trees -- well covered in this book -- being substituted by more sophisticated ones, such as Why-Because Analysis, Tripod and Prisma -- never mentioned in this book.
In view of the book's considerable price (even used!), it's probably not a very good purchase.

A short summary of how World War II actually began. Where WWI was more difficult to determine the guilt, WWII was actually a repeat of WWI due to the injustices of the Peace Treaty and the brutal treatment of a proud people. This book shows the rise of the dictators (Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler) and how these undemocractic regimes destabilized the rest of Europe. The result was a war more devastating than the previous.

This is an OK read. The book is well illustrated with pictures and there is not much reading matter in this book. The book explains the advent of World War II well.

This is one of the few books I have been able to put down, in fact I haven't been able to finish it yet. One day I may run out of ceral boxes to read and pick it back up again. But until I finish the other half of this book I will have to give it a "no". I have found very little insight in the lives of firefighters and don't think I will walk away from this book with anything of any value

I am very dissapointed after reading what I had hoped to be a book that finally acurately portrays wildland firefighting. What I got instead was another schoolgirl daily diary from a seasonal employee with very little real fire experience. Author and cohorts description of helitack, hotshots, engine crews, smokejumpers, and structure firefighters missed the mark considerably, and was quite offensive to one who has worked in more than one of those professions. Other authors such as Mclean(sp) much more accurately reflect the tragedy of loss of life and serious injury on the fireline. Unfortunately to date all attempts at describing day to day wildland firefighting have been seriously tainted by author bias and inexperience. I don't recommend spending your money on the slick covered book with not much real substance.

Desmond's work crackles with rich detail, careful analysis, and helpful insights that not only teach us a great deal about the life of a firecrew but also the social meaning of risk, discipline, and place. Beautifully written, On the Fireline helps us understand the challenges and opportunities wildland firefighters face and what draws them to lead lives of the brink of danger. Many ethnographies generate more heat than light, but Desmond strikes the right balance, for this is a story that both captivates and educates.

Life Cycle Assessment requires a more comprehensive and thorough approach than the author provides. Areas are left open, and the book raises more questions for the reader than the answers it provides. It is not a text that I will refer to to repond to critical questions. It was a disappointment to me.

Life Cycle Assessment is a complicated and controversial field when applied to environmental problems. Questions like "Paper or plastic?" are as ubiquitous as they are baffling. This book does little to clarify matters. It is at best an introduction to a subjective approach. It should not be surprising to the reader to find that the methods described in this book can be employed by separate analysts to reach entirely opposite conclusions.

In response to a critical review that appears in the Journal of Industrial Ecology v1:4, one of the authors of Environmental LCA defended the text with the argument that LCA is, and always will be a "soft science" and therefore may not satisfy readers that seek definitive answers, as no one methodology could be described as applicable to all problems. His defense is disingenuous. Despite its shortcomings, LCA is a promising tool worthy of further development. The goal of new books on the subject should be to advance towards a definitive methodology that results in consistent, interpretable conclusions. When faced with such an intractable, challenging problem as this, it does us all a disservice to suggest that we should just give up (and presumably settle for the kind of text this author has provided).

A definitive work on LCA would be a welcome addition to my library. This book is not it.

With the cost of over $60 and having a book that can cover so shallow is a 'rip off'. I think the book should be re-titled as `Idiots for Internet Security'. Even the books from IDG Idiot Series cover more in depth than this one. I spent 5 minutes and dropped this book to the bottom of the shelf. Most titles have a discussion of less than a page and some of them are not even relevant - such as `atomicity'. To be fair, the book should having a warning sign- `Strictly for non technical people'.

Mainly concentrates on the global aspect of Network Security issues. Very good for people writitng policies for the enterprise. Helps CIO's to get a perspective on what could go wrong in their geographically scattered network and provides insights into how to address those issues.

The previous reviewer is correct that this is a very concise book, and the authors' statement in the preface that the material is "within the reach of those who have had a first course in probability" is a wild exaggeration. In reality, a good prerequisite would be some familiarity with measure-theoretic probability (e.g., including Lebesgue-Stieltjes integration and things like the Borel-Cantelli lemma) plus an acquaintance with stochastic processes at the level of Ross's Stochastic Processes. The book does contain some excellent appendices summarizing prerequisite topics, but these would only be suitable as a review, not to learn the material. Nevertheless, for the mathematically prepared (or those willing to really put some time and effort into it) this is an excellent (probably the best available) compendium of modern research on semi-Markov processes as applied to reliability and survival analysis.

Those more interested in applications and practical techniques for semi-Markov processes would find Flowgraph Models for Multistate Time-to-Event Data (Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics) of interest, or the chapter on semi-Markov processes in Fundamentals of Queueing Theory (Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics). But for researchers and others looking for a comprehensive treatment of theoretical issues, I would highly recommend this book

The authors state in the preface to their book that their goal is to provide "a thorough approach to semi-Markov processes and their applications in reliability". This is an ambitious objective for a 222 page text, since a large body of research on Semi-Markov processes has developed over the course of the last forty years or so.

In the opinion of this reviewer, Limnios & Oprisan never even come close to their grand objective. Their book is simply too short, too terse and too condensed to give a thorough treatment. The authors realized early on that they would need to reference the vast body of literature. It is strange to this reviewer that their treatment, copyright 2001, chooses as its main references out-of-print French texts by Neveu (1964) and Janssen (1969). The authors' choice of difficult-to-find auxiliary references makes their treatment that much less accessible.

The prerequisite list here is extensive. The authors claim that all that is required is an understanding of Markov Chains, like you might find in Stroock's An Introduction to Markov Processes or Norris' Markov Chains. Furthermore, the authors claim to cover the following list of topics in the first 29 pages of their book (which comprises Chapter 1): measure theory, Laplace transforms and continuous-time Markov processes. In reality, Limnios & Oprisan introduce (barely) these and other topics including: stopping times, the Optional Stopping Theorem, stationary stochastic processes, martingale theory, Ergodic theory, strong Markov Processes and renewal processes.

In order to get through the first chapter of Limnios & Oprisan, you'll need an excellent background in these topics. I recommend Rogers & Williams 800 page, two-volume set Diffusions, Markov Processes, and Martingales: Volume 1, Foundations and Diffusions, Markov Processes and Martingales: Volume 2, Itô Calculus.

Chapter 2 runs a mere 18 pages and purports to cover "Markov Renewal Processes". I stopped counting how many times the authors give references to out-of-print books in this chapter. I also lost count of the number of times the authors use the phrases "it is straightforward", "it is easy to show", or "it is well-known", in the context of mathematical problems having none of the above properties.

This book is useful to the reader in one sense: it whets the appetite for an understanding of Semi-Markov Processes and Reliability Theory and puts this reviewer in the market for a well-written book on the topic.

I bought this book as I was interested in simulating in simprocess. The book is not useful at all neither for an experienced modeller, nor for a beginner. This is of no use for a practical modeller, theoreist or student.

It is more of an entertainment kind of book with very generalistic sporadic examples about where simulation application was successful and funny pictures, double space 16 font text with no content.

For beginners, one should rather buy "Business Process Simulation" by Laguna, which also has a student version of soft. One can go through simulation examples and learn a lot. (I bought this two books together)

In general, if you want to waist your time and money, and read something in half an hour and learn nothing, buy it. But but does it make sense to pay for nothing and make the authors rich just because they are from GACI or Ernst and Young consultancy. Bad use of their brand to promote the sales of the bad book (but probably not so bad software)

I used to use ModSim by CACI on NeXT machine. Now CACI have the easier and PC-compatible, called SimProcess. This book is not only about Simulation sytem, but the great SimProcess user manual. This book is actually a geneal book of Simulation, not a Risk analysis or elses. CD-ROM, come with this book, is the SimProcess. Buy one get another free. But the software can be downloaded from the company website.

If I understand you right, a scar is a "catastrophe" whereas cancer itself or surgical treatment of cancer is somehow less "catastrophic"? Does this make sense to you?

Anyone who reads my book will discover that there are skillful and reckless ways to use cancer salves, but dismissing something because of scarring seems a bit overzealous. Haven't you seen surgery scars.

I haven't read this article, but the headlines are just too sensational.