-In the last twenty years, incidents of crime have declined by 25 percent. -Automobiles of today emit just 1 percent of the pollution that spewed from cars of the 1970s. -The national recycling rate is about 22 percent-seven times the rate of only ten years ago. -The average human life span continues to increase. Given all of these positive trends, why do so many people envision a bleak future for the world? More to the point, why are so many people scaring themselves to death? In this lively and accessible expose, author H. Aaron Cohl reveals how media madness and simple human psychology fuel the fires of paranoia. He demonstrates how alarming headlines ("Breast Cancer Strikes One in Eight Women," U.S. News and World Report) are frequently derived from misunderstood or misquoted statistics ("Breast cancer strikes on in eight women at age 95," National Cancer Institute). Readers will learn the encouraging realities of asbestos, drive-by shootings, and pesticides. Cohl also dispels misconceptions about mad cow disease, the greenhouse effect, and the dangers of air travel. Fresh, funny and informative, Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death? is a perfect antidote to sensationalized headlines of today's newspapers. H. Aaron Cohl has written a book that will put many troubled minds at ease.

Ballooning government? Millionaire welfare queens? Tort lawyers run amok? A $330,000 outhouse, paid for with your tax dollars? John Stossel says, "Give me a break." When he hit the airwaves thirty years ago, Stossel helped create a whole new category of news, dedicated to protecting and informing consumers. As a crusading reporter, he chased snake-oil peddlers, rip-off artists, and corporate thieves, winning the applause of his peers. But along the way, he noticed that there was something far more troublesome going on: While the networks screamed about the dangers of exploding BIC lighters and coffeepots, worse risks were ignored. And while reporters were teaming up with lawyers and legislators to stick it to big business, they seldom reported the ways the free market made life better. In Give Me a Break, Stossel explains how ambitious bureaucrats, intellectually lazy reporters, and greedy lawyers make your life worse even as they claim to protect your interests. Taking on such sacred cows as the FDA, the War on Drugs, and scaremongering environmental activists -- and backing up his trademark irreverence with careful reasoning and research -- he shows how the problems that government tries and fails to fix can be solved better by the extraordinary power of the free market. He traces his journey from cub reporter to 20/20 co-anchor, revealing his battles to get his ideas to the public, his struggle to overcome stuttering, and his eventual realization that, for years, much of his reporting missed the point. Stossel concludes the book with a provocative blueprint for change: a simple plan in the spirit of the Founding Fathers to ensure that America remains a place "where free minds -- and free markets -- make good things happen."

Chemical Process Safety: Learning from Case Histories, Fourth Edition gives insight into eliminating specific classes of hazards while also providing real case histories with valuable lessons to be learned. This edition also includes practical sections on mechanical integrity, management of change, and incident investigation programs, along with a list of helpful resources. The information contained in this book will help users stay up-to-date on all the latest OSHA requirements, including the OSHA-required Management of Change, Mechanical Integrity, and Incident Investigation regulations. Learn how to eliminate hazards in the design, operation, and maintenance of chemical process plants and petroleum refineries. World-renowned expert in process safety, Roy Sanders, shows how to reduce risks in plants and refineries, including a summary of case histories from high profile disasters and recommendations for how to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Following the principles outlined in this text will help save lives and reduce loss. - Features additional new chapters covering safety culture, maintaining a sense of vulnerability, and additional learning opportunities from recent incidents and near misses - Contains updated information from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Safety Council, with concise summaries of some of the most important case histories of the twenty-first century - Includes significantly expanded information from the US Chemical Safety Board, US OSHA, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and the UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) - Provides a completely updated chapter to guide readers to a wealth of reference material available on the web and elsewhere

From warnings on coffee cups to colour–coded terrorist gauges to ubiquitous security cameras, our culture is obsessed with safety. Some of this is drive by lawyers and insurance companies, and some by over–zealous public officials, but much is indicative of a cultural conversation that has lost its bearings. The result is not just a neurotically restrictive society, but one which actively undermines individual and community self–reliance. More importantly, we are creating a world of officious administration, management by statistics, absurd regulations, rampaging lawsuits, and hygenically cleansed public spaces. We are trying to render the human and natural worlds predictable and calculated. In doing so, we are trampling common discourse about politics and ethics. Hern asserts that safer just isn't always better. Throughout Watch Yourself, he emphasizes the need to rethink our approach to risk, reconsider our fixation with safety, and reassert individual decision–making.

The current dominating worldview and its paradigms of operations are unhealthy and unsustainable. Ecological, economic, political and psychological health are at stake. As experts in a philosophy of fearism, they apply a critical perspective on the dominant Fear Paradigm as root cause of the global crises in the 21st century. They offer a worldview shift via the Fearlessness Paradigm. This is a second major book on this topic, of which the first was Fisher’s The World’s Fearlessness Teachings (2010). This follow-up book is deep, punchy and provocative. It points to the failure of the world to understand the spirit of fearlessness that has existed from the beginning of Life some four billion years ago. The authors, from diverse backgrounds, point to the resistances that work against the recognition and development of the natural ‘gift’ of fearlessness and the design of a Fearlessness Paradigm, both which can counter the abuses of the Fear Paradigm. With extensive research and philosophical thought, the authors dialogue in a fresh imaginative way to help readers and leaders in all walks of life to better understand what resistances they may have to escaping from what Fisher calls the ‘Fear’ Matrix.

Exploring the interactions that swirl around scientific uncertainty and its coverage by the mass media, this volume breaks new ground by looking at these issues from three different perspectives: that of communication scholars who have studied uncertainty in a number of ways; that of science journalists who have covered these issues; and that of scientists who have been actively involved in researching uncertain science and talking to reporters about it. In particular, Communicating Uncertainty examines how well the mass media convey to the public the complexities, ambiguities, and controversies that are part of scientific uncertainty. In addition to its new approach to scientific uncertainty and mass media interactions, this book distinguishes itself in the quality of work it assembles by some of the best known science communication scholars in the world. This volume continues the exploration of interactions between scientists and journalists that the three coeditors first documented in their highly successful volume, Scientists and Journalists: Reporting Science as News, which was used for many years as a text in science journalism courses around the world.

Al Qaeda detonates a nuclear weapon in Times Square during rush hour, wiping out half of Manhattan and killing 500,000 people. A virulent strain of bird flu jumps to humans in Thailand, sweeps across Asia, and claims more than fifty million lives. A single freight car of chlorine derails on the outskirts of Los Angeles, spilling its contents and killing seven million. An asteroid ten kilometers wide slams into the Atlantic Ocean, unleashing a tsunami that renders life on the planet as we know it extinct. We consider the few who live in fear of such scenarios to be alarmist or even paranoid. But Worst Cases shows that such individuals—like Cassandra foreseeing the fall of Troy—are more reasonable and prescient than you might think. In this book, Lee Clarke surveys the full range of possible catastrophes that animate and dominate the popular imagination, from toxic spills and terrorism to plane crashes and pandemics. Along the way, he explores how the ubiquity of worst cases in everyday life has rendered them ordinary and mundane. Fear and dread, Clarke argues, have actually become too rare: only when the public has more substantial information and more credible warnings will it take worst cases as seriously as it should. A timely and necessary look into how we think about the unthinkable, Worst Cases will be must reading for anyone attuned to our current climate of threat and fear.