In the summer of 2013, just as a small town in Quebec was decimated due to a train derailment, heavy rainfall prompted thirty Alberta communities to declare a state of emergency. Whereas a SWAT team surrounded train conductor Thomas Harding and brought him to court where he was charged with the deaths of forty-seven in Quebec, Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi emerged from the Alberta crisis as a folk hero. As the Lac-Mégantic train derailment and the flood in Alberta demonstrate, political, economic, legal, and cultural climates influence the way disasters are received and managed. In Too Critical to Fail, Kevin Quigley, Ben Bisset, and Bryan Mills identify the social context that shapes the Canadian government’s ability to prepare for and respond to emergencies. Using original research on natural disasters, pandemics, industrial failures, cyber-attacks, and terrorist threats, the authors evaluate the risk regulation regimes that monitor, interpret, and respond to failures in Canada’s critical infrastructure to limit their possibilities and consequences. More broadly, this book identifies key vulnerabilities and regulatory challenges for both the government and the private sector in mitigating threats to safety and security. Too Critical to Fail applies an investigative lens to the multiple and competing risks that the government balances to secure assets that enable modern civilization. Raising questions about Canadians’ ability to protect critical infrastructure and respond to threats, this book challenges the biases that determine who is held to account when the system fails.

This book tackles poverty and policy issues in the UK by discussing successful projects and practices, across lots of short chapters. The first section provides a brief history overview of poverty in the UK over the past two hundred years and discusses the question of why the UK, as a wealthy western nation, still has a poverty issue. It discusses various vulnerable groups and contextual factors which lead to these inequalities. The second section articulates what anti-poverty work is and shares project examples from across the country where anti-poverty workers are supporting people to survive and then to thrive. Lived experiences voices are articulated to present examples of poverty being experienced. This book draws on academic and practitioner work and aims to equip the activist and inform the student, academic and policy maker.

Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' relied on the self-interest of individuals to produce good outcomes. Economists' belief in efficient markets took this idea further by assuming that all individuals are selfish. This belief underpinned financial deregulation, and the theories on incentives and performance which supported it. However, although Adam Smith argued that although individuals may be self-interested, he argued that they also have other-regarding motivations, including a desire for the approbation of others. This book argues that the trust-intensive nature of financial services makes it essential to cultivate such other-regarding motivations, and it provides proposals on how this might be done. Trustworthiness in the financial services industry was eroded by deregulation and by the changes to industry structure which followed. Incentive structures encouraged managers to disguise risky products as yielding high returns, and regulation failed to curb this risk-taking, rent-seeking behaviour. The book makes a number of proposals for reforms of governance, and of legal and regulatory arrangements, to address these issues. The proposals seek to harness values and norms that would reinforce 'other-regarding' behaviour, so that the firms and individuals in the financial services act in a more trustworthy manner. Four requirements are identified which together might secure more strongly trustworthy behaviour: the definition of obligations, the identification of responsibilities, the creation of mechanisms which encourage trustworthiness, and the holding to account of those involved in an appropriate manner. Financial reforms at present lack sufficient focus on these requirements, and the book proposes a range of further actions for specific parts of the financial industry.

This is Volume II of twenty-one in a collection of Race, Class and Social Structure. Originally published in 1960, this book is about the place of class and its synonyms, status, prestige, and power, in the structure of American society. A dominant theme of the book is that classes do exist even though individuals are not chained to these social positions with unequivocal finality.

"Catton treats the Diem government on its own terms rather than as an appendage of American policy. Focusing on the decade from Dien Bien Phu to Diem's assassination in 1963, he examines the Vietnamese leader's nation-building and reform efforts - particularly his Strategic Hamlet Program, which sought to separate guerrilla insurgents from the peasantry and build grassroots support for his regime. Catton's evaluation of the collapse of that program offers fresh insights into both Diem's limitations as a leader and the ideological and organizational weaknesses of his government, while his assessment of the evolution of Washington's relations with Saigon provides new insight into America's growing involvement in the Vietnamese civil war.".

Few people have failed at love as spectacularly as the great philosophers. Although we admire their wisdom, history is littered with the romantic failures of the most sensible men and women of every age, including: Friedrich Nietzsche: "Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent." (Rejected by everyone he proposed to, even when he kept asking and asking.) Jean-Paul Sartre: "There are of course ugly women, but I prefer those who are pretty." (Adopted his mistress as his daughter.) Louis Althusser: "The trouble is there are bodies and, worse still, sexual organs." (Accidentally strangled his wife to death.) And dozens of other great thinkers whose words we revere—but whose romantic decisions we should avoid at all costs. Includes an excerpt from Andrew Shaffer's new book Literary Rogues.

Progressive failure has been a classical problem in the field of geotechnical engineering and has attracted considerable attention in connection with slope stability and foundation problems. It is associated with strain localization or shear banding and is also related to damage in material structures. As knowledge of the progressive failure mechanism increases, it is now necessary to establish effective communications between researchers and engineers. The International Symposium on Deformation and Progressive Failure in Geomechanics provided an opportunity for discussing recent advances in this area. A total of 136 papers were contributed from 22 countries. As well as these, the symposium proceedings also contain 8 interim technical reports on the subject by the members of the Asian Technical Committee of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering and the Japanese Geotechnical Society National Committee on Progressive Failure in Geo-structures.