Publisher Description

An investigative journalist exposes the many holes in today’s bestselling behavioral science, and argues that the trendy, TED-Talk-friendly psychological interventions that are so in vogue at the moment will never be enough to truly address social injustice and inequality. With their viral TED talks, bestselling books, and counter-intuitive remedies for complicated problems, psychologists and other social scientists have become the reigning thinkers of our time. Grit and “power posing” promised to help overcome entrenched inequalities in schools and the workplace; the Army spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a positive psychology intervention geared at preventing PTSD in its combat soldiers; and the implicit association test swept the nation on the strength of the claim that it can reveal unconscious biases and reduce racism in police departments and human resources departments. But what if much of the science underlying these blockbuster ideas is dubious or fallacious? What if Americans’ longstanding preference for simplistic self-help platitudes is exerting a pernicious influence on the way behavioral science is communicated and even funded, leading respected academics and the media astray? In The Quick Fix, Jesse Singal examines the most influential ideas of recent decades and the shaky science that supports them. He begins with the California legislator who introduced self-esteem into classrooms around the country in the 1980s and the Princeton political scientist who warned of an epidemic of youthful “superpredators” in the 1990s. In both cases, a much-touted idea had little basis in reality, but had a massive impact. Turning toward the explosive popularity of 21st-century social psychology, Singal examines the misleading appeal of entertaining lab results and critiques the idea that subtle unconscious cues shape our behavior. As he shows, today’s popular behavioral science emphasizes repairing, improving, and optimizing individuals rather than truly understanding and confronting the larger structural forces that drive social ills. Like Anand Giridharadas’s Winners Take All, The Quick Fix is a fresh and powerful indictment of the thought leaders and influencers who cut corners as they sell the public half-baked solutions to problems that deserve more serious treatment.

In the decade since the publication of Rajan Suri’s landmark book, Quick Response Manufacturing, the innovative principles of QRM have been proven with impressive results at many companies, big and small, in a variety of industries. While the key principles of QRM remain unchanged, after a decade of teaching QRM workshops to senior executives, Suri has developed a clear, concise, and accessible method of presenting QRM strategy using four core concepts: 1. The Power of Time – the huge impact time has on your entire enterprise 2. Organization Structure – how to structure your organization to reduce lead times 3. System Dynamics – understanding how interactions between jobs and resources impact time to make better decisions on capacity, lot sizes, and similar issues 4. Enterprise-Wide Application – QRM is not just a shop floor strategy, it extends across your whole enterprise including material planning and control, supply management, office operations, and new product introduction Presenting new case studies on QRM implementation, It's About Time: The Competitive Advantage of Quick Response Manufacturing illustrates how QRM can not only reduce lead times but also improve quality, reduce operating costs, and enable companies to gain substantial market share. This practical reference explains how factories in advanced nations can use QRM strategy to compete with manufacturers in low-wage countries. In addition, it provides helpful pointers for QRM implementation, including accounting strategies, novel cost-justification approaches, and a stepwise process for implementation. Also included are downloadable resources with five appendices that provide a number of practical details to assist in the success of your QRM implementation. When you are ready to start implementing QRM, you will find that these appendices contain time-saving tips to help you work through implementation issues¿including simple calculation methods and tools to support the design of your QRM strategy. You can also access these Appendices on the Downloads and updates tab on https://www.crcpress.com/9781439805961. The author, Rajan Suri, recently became one of only 10 people to be inducted into Industry Week's 2010 Manufacturing Hall of Fame.

Originally from Sydney, Australia, Shane Sekuloski has been based in Central London since 2004 working on contracts predominantly in the Finance and Investment Banking industries for London-based clients with European operations. Shane's clients in London have included Barclays Bank, Citigroup, Brit Insurance, and JPMorgan Chase.Shane says: ""My aim in this quick-and-easy guide is not to blow your mind with the myriad intricacies of the IT contracting world, but to tell you what you need to know (and no more) about making the move from permanent employment to contracting with clients. Think of it like you're picking the brains of your contractor mate down the pub.""

Ken Okiishi's artwork has explored the subject in between digital and continuous space, the changing nature of authorship, memory, and perception, and the indeterminacy of consciousness as it clashes with the strictures of technology. He has engaged seminal works by figures including Woody Allen, Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Duchamp, Stephen Spielberg, David Wojnarowicz, Jacques Demy, and Larry Clark (and the histories and personalities that circulate around these cultural products), infusing them with autobiographical and technological elements that reframe them through the incongruity of "real life." While working on the exhibitions at MIT and CCS Bard that occasion this publication, Okiishi realized a radical material rupture in his work, as linguistic and bodily glitches became registered both inside and outside the screen, and the surface of media itself became the support surface for weirdly gestural paintings. This series of works, titled gesture/data, was first exhibited at CCS Bard and, most recently, was exhibited to great acclaim at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. This book is the first instance of considering Okiishi's work from the last fifteen years as a heterogeneous whole. This publication takes the format of the exhibition catalogue--as a carrier for the circulation of texts and images--as a format in crisis. The physical book appears here as a dummy that is loaded with various files, many appearing as the glitchy in-between that we have become accustomed to as files load on so many different devices and scales of screens. Included in this mass of files is Annie Godfrey Larmon's thesis on the work of Ken Okiishi (the first in-depth study of the artist's work), a new text by Alise Upitis on computing and the conditions of translation, images from Okiishi's series gesture/data (2013-ongoing), and a screenplay book of Okiishi's 2010 runaway hit, (Goodbye to) Manhattan. The Very Quick of the Word is published in conjunction with Ken Okiishi's exhibitions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center (July 16-September 1, 2013) and the Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (March 24-May 26, 2013).

Contains extensive coverage of the tax issues faced by all types of contractors, including large and small contractors, homebuilders, and other specialty trades, provides you with the clear, concise guidance you need to expertly address your tax issues.