This book shows how to identify potential design errors and modify procedures in the design process to mitigate design-induced error. Real life examples are used to demonstrate the points being made. Many of the concerns raised in the book have come from a worldwide study conducted with designers, managers, and end-users.

Written by the experts at 37signals, this book shows hundreds of real-world examples from companies like Amazon, Google, and Yahoo that show the right (and wrong) ways to get defensive. Readers will learn 40 guidelines to prevent errors and rescue customers if a breakdown occurs. They'll also explore how to evaluate their own site's defensive design and improve it over the long term.

"Measurement Error and Research Design is an ideal text for research methods courses across the social sciences, especially those in which a primer on measurement is needed. For the novice researcher, this book facilitates understanding of the basic principles required to design measures and methods for empirical research. For the experienced researcher, this book provides an in-depth analysis and discussion of the essence of measurement error and the procedures to minimize it. Most important, the book's unique approach bridges measurement and methodology through clear illustrations of the intangibles of scientific research."--BOOK JACKET.

Case histories of engineering success and failure are presented to enrich understanding of the design process.

This book brings together the research of a number of scholars in the field of knowledge creation and imparts a sense of order to the field. The chapters share three characteristics: they are all grounded in extensive qualitative and/or quantitative research; they all go beyond the mere description of the knowledge-creation process and offer both theoretical and strategic implications; they share a view of knowledge creation and knowledge transfer as delicate processes, necessitating particular forms of support from managers.

This textbook provides an introduction to software engineering for undergraduate students of computer science. Its emphasis is on a case study approach in which a project is developed through the course of the book illustrating the different activities of software development. The sequence of chapters is essentially the same as the sequence of activities performed during a typical software project. All activities, including quality assurance and control activities, are described in each chapter as integral activities for that phase of the development process. Similarly, the author carefully introduces appropriate metrics for controlling and assessing the software process. This book is intended for students who have had no previous training in software engineering and is suitable for a one semester course. In this new edition two trends are clearly highlighted: software processes and object orientation. From reviews of the first edition "I can recommend this book for classroom adoption or individual study..." Computing Reviews "Overall, the book is very readable and exceptionally well organized ... exposes the reader to many current sophistictaed formal and quantitative methods." American Scientist

Experts estimate that as many as 98,000 people die in any given year from medical errors that occur in hospitals. That's more than die from motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDSâ€"three causes that receive far more public attention. Indeed, more people die annually from medication errors than from workplace injuries. Add the financial cost to the human tragedy, and medical error easily rises to the top ranks of urgent, widespread public problems. To Err Is Human breaks the silence that has surrounded medical errors and their consequenceâ€"but not by pointing fingers at caring health care professionals who make honest mistakes. After all, to err is human. Instead, this book sets forth a national agendaâ€"with state and local implicationsâ€"for reducing medical errors and improving patient safety through the design of a safer health system. This volume reveals the often startling statistics of medical error and the disparity between the incidence of error and public perception of it, given many patients' expectations that the medical profession always performs perfectly. A careful examination is made of how the surrounding forces of legislation, regulation, and market activity influence the quality of care provided by health care organizations and then looks at their handling of medical mistakes. Using a detailed case study, the book reviews the current understanding of why these mistakes happen. A key theme is that legitimate liability concerns discourage reporting of errorsâ€"which begs the question, "How can we learn from our mistakes?" Balancing regulatory versus market-based initiatives and public versus private efforts, the Institute of Medicine presents wide-ranging recommendations for improving patient safety, in the areas of leadership, improved data collection and analysis, and development of effective systems at the level of direct patient care. To Err Is Human asserts that the problem is not bad people in health careâ€"it is that good people are working in bad systems that need to be made safer. Comprehensive and straightforward, this book offers a clear prescription for raising the level of patient safety in American health care. It also explains how patients themselves can influence the quality of care that they receive once they check into the hospital. This book will be vitally important to federal, state, and local health policy makers and regulators, health professional licensing officials, hospital administrators, medical educators and students, health caregivers, health journalists, patient advocatesâ€"as well as patients themselves. First in a series of publications from the Quality of Health Care in America, a project initiated by the Institute of Medicine