A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY21 start with B start with B
Better Trout Habitat explains the physical, chemical, and biological needs of trout, and shows how climate, geology, vegetation, and flowing water all help to create trout habitat.
Beyond Naturalness brings together leading scientists and policymakers to explore the concept of naturalness, its varied meanings, and the extent to which it provides adequate guidance regarding where, when, and how managers should intervene in ecosystem processes to protect park and wilderness values. The main conclusion is the idea that naturalness will continue to provide an important touchstone for protected area conservation, but that more specific goals and objectives are needed to guide stewardship.
The issues considered in Beyond Naturalness are central not just to conservation of parks, but to many areas of ecological thinking—including the fields of conservation biology and ecological restoration—and represent the cutting edge of discussions of both values and practice in the twenty-first century. This bookoffers excellent writing and focus, along with remarkable clarity of thought on some of the difficult questions being raised in light of new and changing stressors such as global environmental climate change.
California’s experience provides a rare opportunity to learn from a collaborative public process involving private interests and science-intensive decisions. Determined to do just that, Steven Yaffee, a renowned expert on negotiation and collaborative decision making, spent hundreds of hours researching the MLPA process in an effort to understand how California succeeded where other efforts have failed. The result is Beyond Polarization, a highly readable insider’s perspective on complicated decision-making processes and the strategic choices necessary for success. The book follows the initiative process region by region, each with its unique stakeholders and geographic concerns. These lessons can be applied to similar collaborative processes across the country and world.
Beyond Polarization presents an optimistic message about the public policy process in a time of civic division. It offers reassurance that, by using proven decision-making processes, policymakers, scientists, and local citizens can successfully collaborate to manage and protect natural resources we all have a stake in.
Drawing on decades of combined expertise in health care consolidation, Dranove and Burns trace Big Med’s emergence in the 1990s, followed by its swift rise amid false promises of scale economies and organizational collaboration. In the decades since, megaproviders have gobbled up market share and turned independent physicians into salaried employees of big bureaucracies, while delivering on none of their early promises. For patients this means higher costs and lesser care. Meanwhile, physicians report increasingly low morale, making it all but impossible for most systems to implement meaningful reforms.
In Big Med, Dranove and Burns combine their respective skills in economics and management to provide a nuanced explanation of how the provision of health care has been corrupted and submerged under consolidation. They offer practical recommendations for improving competition policies that would reform megaproviders to actually achieve the efficiencies and quality improvements they have long promised.
This is an essential read for understanding the current state of the health care system in America—and the steps urgently needed to create an environment of better care for all of us.
This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.
There is little debate that health care in the United States is in need of reform. But where should those improvements begin? With insurers? Drug makers? The doctors themselves? In Big Med, David Dranove and Lawton Robert Burns argue that we’re overlooking the most ubiquitous cause of our costly and underperforming system: megaproviders, the expansive health care organizations that have become the face of American medicine. Your local hospital is likely part of one. Your doctors, too. And the megaproviders are bad news for your health and your wallet.
Drawing on decades of combined expertise in health care consolidation, Dranove and Burns trace Big Med’s emergence in the 1990s, followed by its swift rise amid false promises of scale economies and organizational collaboration. In the decades since, megaproviders have gobbled up market share and turned independent physicians into salaried employees of big bureaucracies, while delivering on none of their early promises. For patients this means higher costs and lesser care. Meanwhile, physicians report increasingly low morale, making it all but impossible for most systems to implement meaningful reforms.
In Big Med, Dranove and Burns combine their respective skills in economics and management to provide a nuanced explanation of how the provision of health care has been corrupted and submerged under consolidation. They offer practical recommendations for improving competition policies that would reform megaproviders to actually achieve the efficiencies and quality improvements they have long promised.
This is an essential read for understanding the current state of the health care system in America—and the steps urgently needed to create an environment of better care for all of us.
In diverse regions around the country, impending crises over dwindling natural resources and conflicts over land use have given birth to a new approach to environmental management and policymaking. Known as bioregional assessment, the approach gives science and scientists a crucial role in the policymaking process, bringing together experts on a range of issues to assess existing ecological and social conditions and to provide a base of knowledge from which to develop policy options and management decisions.
A number of high-profile assessments have been conducted, and while much has been written on individual projects, little has been done to compare assessments or integrate the lessons they provide. Bioregional Assessments synthesizes the knowledge from many regions by examining the assessment process and detailing a series of case studies from around the country. Each case study, written by knowledgeable leaders from the region, features a detailed description of the project followed by reviews from the perspectives of science, management, and policy.
Case studies examined are the Forest Ecosystem Management Assess ment Team (FEMAT) Assessment; the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Assessments; the Everglades-South Florida Assessments; the Northern Forest Lands Assessments; Southern California Natural Community Conservation Planning (NCCP); the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project; and the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project.
In addition, the book features introductory chapters that examine the challenges inherent in the assessment of complex regional systems, and the role of science in the assessment process. The concluding chapter provides a synthesis and analysis of the assessment process.
Bioregional assessments are quickly becoming an essential part of ecosystem management. This book provides a unique look at the theory and practice of bioregional assessments, and is an essential volume for resource managers, scientists, policymakers, and anyone involved with formulating or implementing strategies for regional planning and ecosystem management.
Black tides of spilled oil pollute the world's coasts with depressing regularity, giving scientists ample opportunity to observe their environmental impacts and learn how to clean up and restore the affected shorelines. Miles O. Hayes has been a leader in this work for over twenty years. In this highly readable autobiography, he describes his evolution as a scientist, his work in coastal oil spill contingency planning and clean up, and his personal philosophy of one's relationship with nature.
A skilled raconteur, Hayes tells engrossing stories of responding to most of the recent, headline-grabbing oil spills, including the Gulf War spills, the Exxon Valdez, the Amoco Cadiz spill in France, and the Ixtoc I blowout in Mexico. Interspersed among them are personal events and adventures, such as his survival of a plane crash while mapping a remote part of Alaska. From this life story emerges a compelling statement of the ongoing conflict between environmental preservation and the exploitation of natural resources to sustain our modern society.
Fineman focuses on blame’s roots and enduring manifestations, from the witch hunts of the past to today’s more buttoned-up scapegoating and stigmatization; from an individual’s righteous anger to entire cultures shaped by its power. Addressing our era of increasing unease about governance in public and private enterprises, he delves behind the scenes of organizations infected with blame, profiling the people who keep its plates spinning. With a critical eye, he examines the vexing issue of public accountability and the political circus that so often characterizes our politicians and corporations lost in their “blame games.”
Ultimately, Fineman raises the challenging question of how we might mitigate blame’s corrosive effects, asking crucial and timely questions about the limits of remorse and forgiveness, the role of state apologies for historical wrongdoings, whether restorative justice can work, and many other topics. An absorbing look at something we all know intimately, this book deepens our understanding of blame and how it shapes our lives.
Conflicts over subterranean resources, particularly tin, oil, and natural gas, have driven Bolivian politics for nearly a century. “Resource nationalism”—the conviction that resource wealth should be used for the benefit of the “nation”—has often united otherwise disparate groups, including mineworkers, urban workers, students, war veterans, and middle-class professionals, and propelled an indigenous union leader, Evo Morales, into the presidency in 2006. Blood of the Earth reexamines the Bolivian mobilization around resource nationalism that began in the 1920s, crystallized with the 1952 revolution, and continues into the twenty-first century.
Drawing on a wide array of Bolivian and US sources, Kevin A. Young reveals that Bolivia became a key site in a global battle among economic models, with grassroots coalitions demanding nationalist and egalitarian alternatives to market capitalism. While US-supported moderates within the revolutionary regime were able to defeat more radical forces, Young shows how the political culture of resource nationalism, though often comprising contradictory elements, constrained government actions and galvanized mobilizations against neoliberalism in later decades. His transnational and multilevel approach to the 1952 revolution illuminates the struggles among Bolivian popular sectors, government officials, and foreign powers, as well as the competing currents and visions within Bolivia’s popular political cultures. Offering a fresh appraisal of the Bolivian Revolution, resource nationalism, and the Cold War in Latin America, Blood of the Earth is an ideal case study for understanding the challenges shared by countries across the Global South.
Offering the Colorado-Kansas Railway as an example of how shortline railroads helped to integrate the rural landscape with the larger urban and economic world, Bowers reveals the constant adaptations driven by changing economic forces and conditions. He puts the railway in context of the wider environmental and political landscapes, the growing quarrying and mining business, the expansion of agriculture and irrigation, Progressive-era political reforms, and land development. In the new frontier of enterprise in the early twentieth-century American West, the railroad highlights the successes and failures of the men inspired to pursue these new opportunities as well as the story of one woman who held these fragile industries together well into the second half of the twentieth century.
Bound by Steel and Stone is an insightful addition to the history of industrialization and economic development in Colorado and the American West.
In Bring Back the Bureaucrats, John J. DiIulio Jr., one of America’s most respected political scientists and an adviser to presidents in both parties, summons the facts and statistics to show us how America’s big government works and why reforms that include adding a million more people to the federal workforce by 2035 might help to slow government’s growth while improving its performance.
Starting from the underreported reality that the size of the federal workforce hasn’t increased since the early 1960s, even though the federal budget has skyrocketed. The number of federal programs has ballooned; Bring Back the Bureaucrats tells us what our elected leaders won’t: there are not enough federal workers to work for our democracy effectively.
DiIulio reveals that the government in America is Leviathan by Proxy, a grotesque form of debt-financed big government that guarantees terrible government. Washington relies on state and local governments, for-profit firms, and nonprofit organizations to implement federal policies and programs. Big-city mayors, defense industry contractors, nonprofit executives, and other national proxies lobby incessantly for more federal spending. This proxy system chokes on chores such as cleaning up toxic waste sites, caring for hospitalized veterans, collecting taxes, handling plutonium, and policing more than $100 billion annually in “improper payments.” The lack of competent, well-trained federal civil servants resulted in the failed federal response to Hurricane Katrina and the troubled launch of Obamacare’s “health exchanges.”
Bring Back the Bureaucrats is further distinguished by the presence of E. J. Dionne Jr. and Charles Murray, two of the most astute voices from the political left and right, respectively, who offer their candid responses to DiIulio at the end of the book.
Humans are plagued by shortsighted thinking, preferring to put off work on complex, deep-seated, or difficult problems in favor of quick-fix solutions to immediate needs. When short-term thinking is applied to economic development, especially in fragile nations, the results—corruption, waste, and faulty planning—are often disastrous. In Bringing in the Future, William Ascher draws on the latest research from psychology, economics, institutional design, and legal theory to suggest strategies to overcome powerful obstacles to long-term planning in developing countries.
Drawing on cases from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Ascher applies strategies such as the creation and scheduling of tangible and intangible rewards, cognitive exercises to increase the understanding of longer-term consequences, self-restraint mechanisms to protect long-term commitments and enhance credibility, and restructuring policy-making processes to permit greater influence of long-term considerations. Featuring theoretically informed research findings and sound policy examples, this volume will assist policy makers, activists, and scholars seeking to understand how the vagaries of human behavior affect international development.
For many of us, the presidential election of 2000 was a wake-up call. The controversy following the vote count led to demands for election reform. But the new voting systems that were subsequently introduced to the market have serious security flaws, and many are confusing and difficult to use. Moreover, legislation has not kept up with the constantly evolving voting technology, leaving little to no legal recourse when votes are improperly counted. How did we come to acquire the complex technology we now depend on to count votes? Douglas Jones and Barbara Simons probe this question, along with public policy and regulatory issues raised by our voting technologies. Broken Ballots is a thorough and incisive analysis of the current voting climate that approaches American elections from technological, legal, and historical perspectives. The authors examine the ways in which Americans vote today, gauging how inaccurate, unreliable, and insecure our voting systems are. An important book for election administrators, political scientists, and students of government and technology policy, Broken Ballots is also a vital tool for any voting American.
With three decades of experience representing clients that include eminent architects and engineers, as well as corporations, institutions, and developers, LePatner has firsthand knowledge of the bad management, ineffective supervision, and insufficient investment in technology that plagues the risk-averse construction industry. In an engaging and direct style, he here pinpoints the issues that underlie the industry’s woes while providing practical tips for anyone in the business of building, including advice on the precise language owners should use during contract negotiations.
Armed with Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets, everyone involved in the purchase or renovation of a building or any structure—from homeowners seeking to remodel to civic developers embarking on large-scale projects—has the information they need to change this antiquated industry, one project at a time.
“LePatner describes what is wrong with the current system and suggests ways that architects can help—by retaking their rightful place as master builders.”—Fred A. Bernstein, Architect Magazine
The literature of bureaucratic theory is rife with contradictions and mysteries. Bureaucrats, Politics, and the Environment attempts to clarify some of these problems.
The authors surveyed the workers at two agencies: enforcement personnel from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and employees of the New Mexico Environment Department. By examining what they think about politics, the environment, their budgets, and the other institutions and agencies with which they interact, this work puts a face on the bureaucracy and provides an explanation for its actions.
A Forbes Best Business Book. “Vital reading for today’s and tomorrow’s leaders.” —Arianna Huffington
“Burnout seems to be everyone’s problem, and this book has solutions. As trailblazers in burnout research, Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter didn’t just clear the path to study the causes—they’ve also discovered some of the cures.” —Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Think Again
“A thoughtful and well researched book about a core issue at the heart of the great resignation.” —Christian Stadler, Forbes
“Provides the path to creating a better world of work where people can flourish rather than get beaten down.” — Marcel Schwantes, Inc.
Burnout is among the most significant on-the-job hazards facing workers today. It is also among the most misunderstood. In particular, we tend to characterize burnout as a personal issue—a problem employees should fix themselves by getting therapy, practicing relaxation techniques, or changing jobs. Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter show why burnout also needs to be managed by the workplace.
Citing a wealth of research data and drawing on illustrative anecdotes, The Burnout Challenge shows how organizations can change to promote sustainable productivity. Maslach and Leiter provide useful tools for identifying the signs of employee burnout and offer practical, evidence-driven guidance for implementing change. The key, they argue, is to begin with less-taxing changes that employees nonetheless find meaningful, seeding the ground for more thorough reforms in the future.
As priorities and policies shift across workplaces, The Burnout Challenge provides pragmatic, creative, and cost-effective solutions to improve employee efficiency, health, and happiness.
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