The foibles of clients and idiosyncrasies of chief executive officers, told as only their public relations and public affairs staffers can, make for amusing, wry and true stories in Not For Attribution. Annual meetings, annual reports, press conferences, media relations and special events dont always go as planned, sometimes with hilarious results. Not For Attribution is the first ever volume to contain more than two hundred such entertaining anecdotes, contributed by members of their rapidly-growing profession with "real world" experience.

Whole World on Fire focuses on a technical riddle wrapped in an organizational mystery: How and why, for more than half a century, did the U.S. government fail to predict nuclear fire damage as it drew up plans to fight strategic nuclear war?U.S. bombing in World War II caused massive fire damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but later war plans took account only of damage from blast; they completely ignored damage from atomic firestorms. Recently a small group of researchers has shown that for modern nuclear weapons the destructiveness and lethality of nuclear mass fire often--and predictably--greatly exceeds that of nuclear blast. This has major implications for defense policy: the U.S. government has underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons, Lynn Eden finds, and built far more warheads, and far more destructive warheads, than it needed for the Pentagon's war-planning purposes. How could this have happened? The answer lies in how organizations frame the problems they try to solve. In a narrative grounded in organization theory, science and technology studies, and primary historical sources (including declassified documents and interviews), Eden explains how the U.S. Air Force's doctrine of precision bombing led to the development of very good predictions of nuclear blast--a significant achievement--but for many years to no development of organizational knowledge about nuclear fire. Expert communities outside the military reinforced this disparity in organizational capability to predict blast damage but not fire damage. Yet some innovation occurred, and predictions of fire damage were nearly incorporated into nuclear war planning in the early 1990s. The author explains how such a dramatic change almost happened, and why it did not. Whole World on Fire shows how well-funded and highly professional organizations, by focusing on what they do well and systematically excluding what they don't do well, may build a poor representation of the world--a self-reinforcing fallacy that can have serious consequences. In a sweeping conclusion, Eden shows the implications of the analysis for understanding such things as the sinking of the Titanic, the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and the poor fireproofing in the World Trade Center.

This is a broad-ranging study of U.S. strategic export control policy. In particular, this book analyzes and evaluates the effectiveness of export controls in delaying the acquisition of militarily sensitive high technology by the Soviet Union and its allied states. Furthermore, the question of whether or not U.S. economic competitiveness in various high-technology sectors has been unduly undermined by export controls is also evaluated. Numerous official government studies and reports, supplemented by a host of interviews with government officials, businesspeople, and analysts in the United States and Europe are utilized in drawing conclusions and posting policy recommendations. The consequences for export control policy of the revolutionary political upheavals in Eastern Europe and the former U.S.S.R. are also addressed. The study concludes that the strategic/security goal of utilizing controls to hinder and delay the acquisition of militarily significant high technology by the former Soviet Union and its allied states was generally effective. More controversially McDaniel argues that export controls per se have not been a significant determinant of lagging U.S. competitiveness in high technology. However, this conclusion is qualified by the observation that while overall trends in U.S. high-technology exports to important trading partners do not suggest that controls by themselves have unduly hurt U.S. exporters, individual sectors and small firms may be disadvantaged. Finally, the study cautions that U.S. policy must adapt or risk becoming outmoded and increasingly ineffective. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of international relations, international political economy, and international business.

Covers topics such as how to find memorable stories, localize national stories, interview effectively, create professional live shots, develop a broadcast voice, and write leads.

Drawing on an innovative dataset of the professional careers of 628 presidential campaign staffers working in technology from 2004-2012 and interviews with more than 60 staffers, Prototype Politics details how and explains why the Democrats have taken up technology more than Republicans over the past decade.

The growth of electronic publishing of literature has created new challenges, such as the need for mechanisms for citing online references in ways that can assure discoverability and retrieval for many years into the future. The growth in online datasets presents related, yet more complex challenges. It depends upon the ability to reliably identify, locate, access, interpret, and verify the version, integrity, and provenance of digital datasets. Data citation standards and good practices can form the basis for increased incentives, recognition, and rewards for scientific data activities that in many cases are currently lacking in many fields of research. The rapidly-expanding universe of online digital data holds the promise of allowing peer-examination and review of conclusions or analysis based on experimental or observational data, the integration of data into new forms of scholarly publishing, and the ability for subsequent users to make new and unforeseen uses and analyses of the same data-either in isolation, or in combination with, other datasets. The problem of citing online data is complicated by the lack of established practices for referring to portions or subsets of data. There are a number of initiatives in different organizations, countries, and disciplines already underway. An important set of technical and policy approaches have already been launched by the U.S. National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and other standards bodies regarding persistent identifiers and online linking. The workshop summarized in For Attribution-Developing Data Attribution and Citation Practices and Standards: Summary of an International Workshop was organized by a steering committee under the National Research Council's (NRC's) Board on Research Data and Information, in collaboration with an international CODATA-ICSTI Task Group on Data Citation Standards and Practices. The purpose of the symposium was to examine a number of key issues related to data identification, attribution, citation, and linking to help coordinate activities in this area internationally, and to promote common practices and standards in the scientific community.

Since the 2000 presidential election, debate over the role of religion in public life has followed a narrow course as pundits and politicians alike have focused on the influence wielded by conservative Christians. But what about more mainstream Christians? Here, Steven M. Tipton examines the political activities of Methodists and mainline churches in this groundbreaking investigation into a generation of denominational strife among church officials, lobbyists, and activists. The result is an unusually detailed and thoughtful account that upends common stereotypes while asking searching questions about the contested relationship between church and state. Documenting a wide range of reactions to two radically different events—the invasion of Iraq and the creation of the faith-based initiatives program—Tipton charts the new terrain of religious and moral argument under the Bush administration from Pat Robertson to Jim Wallis. He then turns to the case of the United Methodist Church, of which President Bush is a member, to uncover the twentieth-century history of their political advocacy, culminating in current threats to split the Church between liberal peace-and-justice activists and crusaders for evangelical renewal. Public Pulpits balances the firsthand drama of this internal account with a meditative exploration of the wider social impact that mainline churches have had in a time of diverging fortunes and diminished dreams of progress. An eminently fair-minded and ethically astute analysis of how churches keep moral issues alive in politics, Public Pulpits delves deep into mainline Protestant efforts to enlarge civic conscience and cast clearer light on the commonweal and offers a masterly overview of public religion in America.