This book reviews and recasts many popular ideas, using an ecological perspective, ecological design principles and ecological thought experiments.

Rethinking Return on Investment: The Challenge of Accountable Meaningful Use offers a timely exploration of the value achieved through the Meaningful Use of electronic health records and other components of the HITECH legislation. The authors provide a look back at how ROI of health IT has typically been measured and explore how Meaningful Use regulations are driving healthcare organizations to adopt a value-based purchasing model--thus challenging readers to rethink how they define the ROI of health IT. The authors examine Meaningful Use within a three-stage Value Management Framework: value identification, value realization and value optimization. To assist organizations in evaluating how to drive value out of an investment in people, processes and technology, the book includes numerous value maps for measuring a project's benefits, such as quality improvement, care management and cost reduction. The authors conclude by setting the stage for how the current impact of Accountable Meaningful Use will continue to transform the healthcare delivery system for years to come.

The United States has more people locked up in jails, prisons, and detention centers than any other country in the history of the world. Exploring the history and foundations of mass incarceration, Dominique Gilliard examines Christianity’s role in its evolution and expansion, assessing justice in light of Scripture, and showing how Christians can pursue justice that restores and reconciles.

Rethinking Europe's Future is a major reevaluation of Europe's prospects as it enters the twenty-first century. David Calleo has written a book worthy of the complexity and grandeur of the challenges Europe now faces. Summoning the insights of history, political economy, and philosophy, he explains why Europe was for a long time the world's greatest problem and how the Cold War's bipolar partition brought stability of a sort. Without the Cold War, Europe risks revisiting its more traditional history. With so many contingent factors--in particular Russia and Europe's Muslim neighbors--no one, Calleo believes, can pretend to predict the future with assurance. Calleo's book ponders how to think about this future. The book begins by considering the rival ''lessons'' and trends that emerge from Europe's deeper past. It goes on to discuss the theories for managing the traditional state system, the transition from autocratic states to communitarian nation states, the enduring strength of nation states, and their uneasy relationship with capitalism. Calleo next focuses on the Cold War's dynamic legacies for Europe--an Atlantic Alliance, a European Union, and a global economy. These three systems now compete to define the future. The book's third and major section examines how Europe has tried to meet the present challenges of Russian weakness and German reunification. Succeeding chapters focus on Maastricht and the Euro, on the impact of globalization on Europeanization, and on the EU's unfinished business--expanding into ''Pan Europe,'' adapting a hybrid constitution, and creating a new security system. Calleo presents three models of a new Europe--each proposing a different relationship with the U.S. and Russia. A final chapter probes how a strong European Union might affect the world and the prospects for American hegemony. This is a beautifully written book that offers rich insight into a critical moment in our history, whose outcome will shape the world long after our time.

In choosing between moral alternatives -- choosing between various forms of ethical action -- we typically make calculations of the following kind: A is better than B; B is better than C; therefore A is better than C. These inferences use the principle of transitivity and are fundamental to many forms of practical and theoretical theorizing, not just in moral and ethical theory but in economics. Indeed they are so common as to be almost invisible. What Larry Temkin's book shows is that, shockingly, if we want to continue making plausible judgments, we cannot continue to make these assumptions. Temkin shows that we are committed to various moral ideals that are, surprisingly, fundamentally incompatible with the idea that "better than" can be transitive. His book develops many examples where value judgments that we accept and find attractive, are incompatible with transitivity. While this might seem to leave two options -- reject transitivity, or reject some of our normative commitments in order to keep it -- Temkin is neutral on which path to follow, only making the case that a choice is necessary, and that the cost either way will be high. Temkin's book is a very original and deeply unsettling work of skeptical philosophy that mounts an important new challenge to contemporary ethics.

The primary goal of this book is to show you new ways to improve the business impact of your HR function by up to 25 percent. Because the goal is so high, The approaches that permeate this book are aggressive ones that are designed to make you rethink everything you do in HR. Authored by one of the industry's most respected thinkers, Rethinking Strategic HR is a forward-thinking look at building a smarter, more powerful HR strategy in any organization. Throwing out the old, conventional approaches, this provocative book provides a hard-hitting guide to 21st century HR strategy that will challenge you to think in bold, new ways. From critiques of traditional practices to specific day-to-day steps to strategic thinking, you'll get a new perspective on HR including: A clear definition of what is and what is not strategic the five distinct levels of contribution that HR can make A list of the most-used HR department strategies Tools for assessing your own strategic level A chart on how to make 'fact-based' decisions How HR routinely 'under-costs' its decisions How to make a strategic case to your CFO and more!

This book is the first attempt to re-define objective risk. It addresses the cost of running out of capital as a generalized cost syndrome and explains how it is possible to describe this cost in such a way as to give it practical, real-life significance for personal finances, company finances and the economy as a whole. The discussion begins by presenting an intuitive and useful definition of risk: the probability of prospective capital shortfall. From this point it establishes a risk theory and expands the work of major thinkers such as Frank Knight and John Maynard Keynes, and adds reserve capital as a new financial risk management tool, with an economic function that is different from savings. This book will be of interest to economists, politicians, and decision makers as well as to the general public.

Choosing to design and make good places with philosophical ideas and cultural images.