Tag: Catastrophic

Free Download Rational Accidents: Reckoning with Catastrophic Technologies
English | 2023 | ISBN: 026254699X | 341 Pages | PDF (True) | 6.5 MB
Nuclear reactors, deep-sea drilling platforms, deterrence infrastructures-these are all complex and formidable technologies with the potential to fail catastrophically. In Rational Accidents, John Downer outlines a new perspective on technological failure, arguing that undetectable errors can lurk in even the most rigorous and "rational" assessments of these systems due to the inherent limits of engineering tests and models. Downer finds that it should be impossible, from an epistemological viewpoint, to achieve the near-perfect reliability that we require of our most safety-critical technologies. There is, however, one such technology that demonstrably appears to achieve these "impossible" reliabilities: jetliners.

Free Download Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús, "Catastrophic Historicism: Reading Julia de Burgos Dangerously "
English | ISBN: 1531505643 | 2024 | 272 pages | EPUB, PDF | 3 MB + 6 MB
Catastrophic Historicism unsettles the historicist constitution of Julia de Burgos (1914-53), Puerto Rico’s most iconic writer―a critical task that necessitates redefining the concept of historicism. Through readings of Aristotle, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Werner Hamacher, and Frank Ankersmit, Mendoza-de Jesús shows that historicism grounds historical objectivity in the historian’s capacity to compose totalizing narratives that domesticate the contingency of the past. While critiques of historicism as a realism leave untouched the sovereignty of the historian, the book insists that reading the text of history requires an attunement to danger―a modality that interrupts historicism by infusing the past with a contingency that evades total appropriation.

Free Download Catastrophic Incentives
by Schlegelmilch, Jeff;Carlin, Ellen;
English | 2023 | ISBN: 0231555431 | 265 pages | True PDF | 7.65 MB
Societies are vulnerable to any number of potential disasters: earthquakes, hurricanes, infectious diseases, terrorist attacks, and many others. Even though the dangers are often clear, there is a persistent pattern of inadequate preparation and a failure to learn from experience. Before disasters, institutions pay insufficient attention to risk; in the aftermath, even when the lack of preparation led to a flawed response, the focus shifts to patching holes instead of addressing the underlying problems.