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The Cunning of Uncertainty

Author: Helga Nowotny

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2015-11-19

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 0745687652

Uncertainty is interwoven into human existence. It is a powerful incentive in the search for knowledge and an inherent component of scientific research. We have developed many ways of coping with uncertainty. We make promises, manage risks and make predictions to try to clear the mists and predict ahead. But the future is inherently uncertain - and the mist that shrouds our path an inherent part of our journey. The burning question is whether our societies can face up to uncertainty, learn to embrace it and whether we can open up to a constantly evolving future. In this new book, Helga Nowotny shows how research can thrive at the cusp of uncertainty. Science, she argues, can eventually transform uncertainty into certainty, but into certainty which remains always provisional. Uncertainty is never completely static. It is constantly evolving. It encompasses geological time scales and, at the level of human experience, split-second changes as cells divide. Life and death decisions are taken in the blink of the eye, while human interactions with the natural environment may reveal their impact over millennia. Uncertainty is cunning. It appears at unexpected moments, it shuns the straight line, takes the oblique route and sometimes the unexpected short-cut. As we acknowledge the cunning of uncertainty, its threats retreat. We accept that any scientific inquiry must produce results that are provisional and uncertain. This message is vital for politicians and policy-makers: do not be tempted by small, short-term, controllable gains to the exclusion of uncertain, high-gain opportunities. Wide-ranging in its use of examples and enriched by the author’s experience as President of the European Research Council, one of the world’s leading funding organisations for fundamental research. The Cunning of Uncertainty is a must-read for students and scholars of all disciplines, politicians, policy-makers and anyone concerned with the fundamental role of knowledge and science in our societies today.

The Attributes

Author: Rich Diviney

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2021-01-26

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0593133943

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Do you have what it takes to succeed in any situation? According to a retired commander who ran training for Navy SEALs, true optimal performance goes beyond just skill. It’s all about THE ATTRIBUTES. “Diviney’s incredible book explains why some people thrive—even when things get hard.”—Charles Duhigg, New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Habit During his twenty years as a Navy officer and SEAL, Rich Diviney was intimately involved in a specialized SEAL selection process, which whittled a group of hundreds of extraordinary candidates down to a handful of the most elite performers. Diviney was often surprised by which candidates washed out and which succeeded. Some could have all the right skills and still fail, while others he might have initially dismissed would prove to be top performers. The seemingly objective criteria weren’t telling him what he most needed to know: Who would succeed in one of the world’s toughest military assignments? It is similarly hard to predict success in the real world. It happens often enough that underdog students accomplish exceptional achievements while highly skilled, motivated employees fail to meet expectations. Dark-horse companies pull away from the pack while dream teams flush with talent and capital go under. In working with and selecting top special operators for decades, Diviney saw that beneath obvious skills are hidden drivers of performance, surprising core attributes—including cunning, adaptability, courage, even narcissism—that determine how resilient or perseverant we are, how situationally aware and how conscientious. These attributes explain how we perform as individuals and as part of a team. The same methodology that Diviney used in the military can be applied by anyone in their personal and professional lives, and understanding these attributes can allow readers and their teams to perform optimally, at any time, in any situation. Diviney defines the core attributes in fresh and practical ways and shares stories from the military, business, sports, relationships, and even parenting to show how understanding your own attributes and those of the people around you can create optimal performance in all areas of your life.

In AI We Trust

Author: Helga Nowotny

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2021-08-19

Total Pages: 125

ISBN-13: 1509548823

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One of the most persistent concerns about the future is whether it will be dominated by the predictive algorithms of AI – and, if so, what this will mean for our behaviour, for our institutions and for what it means to be human. AI changes our experience of time and the future and challenges our identities, yet we are blinded by its efficiency and fail to understand how it affects us. At the heart of our trust in AI lies a paradox: we leverage AI to increase our control over the future and uncertainty, while at the same time the performativity of AI, the power it has to make us act in the ways it predicts, reduces our agency over the future. This happens when we forget that that we humans have created the digital technologies to which we attribute agency. These developments also challenge the narrative of progress, which played such a central role in modernity and is based on the hubris of total control. We are now moving into an era where this control is limited as AI monitors our actions, posing the threat of surveillance, but also offering the opportunity to reappropriate control and transform it into care. As we try to adjust to a world in which algorithms, robots and avatars play an ever-increasing role, we need to understand better the limitations of AI and how their predictions affect our agency, while at the same time having the courage to embrace the uncertainty of the future.

Uncertain

Author: Maggie Jackson

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023-11-07

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 163388919X

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A Selection of The Next Big Idea Club! "Maggie Jackson’s incisive and timely book is a provocative exploration of the surprising benefits of not knowing. . . and shows how this state of mind can jolt us from intellectual complacency and foster creativity, resilience, and mutual understanding. Uncertain is a triumphant ode to the wisdom of being unsure.” – Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Power of Regret, Drive, and When "With cutting-edge science and insights both surprising and practical, Uncertain shows how cultivating an open and unsettled mindset can help us to spark curiosity, compassion, and creativity." – Gretchen Rubin, New York Times-bestselling author of The Happiness Project and Life in Five Senses "…remarkable and persuasive…" —Library Journal A revolutionary guide to flourishing in times of flux and angst by harnessing the overlooked power of our uncertainty. In an era of terrifying unpredictability, we race to address complex crises with quick, sure algorithms, bullet points, and tweets. How could we find the clarity and vision so urgently needed today by being unsure? Uncertain is about the triumph of doing just that. A scientific adventure tale set on the front lines of a volatile era, this epiphany of a book by award-winning author Maggie Jackson shows us how to skillfully confront the unexpected and the unknown, and how to harness not-knowing in the service of wisdom, invention, mutual understanding, and resilience. Long neglected as a topic of study and widely treated as a shameful flaw, uncertainty is revealed to be a crucial gadfly of the mind, jolting us from the routine and the assumed into a space for exploring unseen meaning. Far from luring us into inertia, uncertainty is the mindset most needed in times of flux and a remarkable antidote to the narrow-mindedness of our day. In laboratories, political campaigns, and on the frontiers of artificial intelligence, Jackson meets the pioneers decoding the surprising gifts of being unsure. Each chapter examines a mode of uncertainty-in-action, from creative reverie to the dissent that spurs team success. Step by step, the art and science of uncertainty reveal being unsure as a skill set for incisive thinking and day-to-day flourishing.

Mental Health Uncertainty and Inevitability

Author: Hugh Middleton

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-02-07

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 3319439707

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This book offers original knowledge, debate, and understanding from frontline fieldwork data and the relations between mental health difficulties, mental healthcare provision, and social theory. Dominant discourse of the last half century has followed a medical perspective. This has marginalised contributions from social science. Furthermore purely medical approaches to mental healthcare have profound shortcomings. Thus, this book draws upon innovative research findings to rejuvenate the relationship between psychiatry and social science. It frames this by reference to certain inevitable and uncertain elements of mental health which characterise this field. Over nine chapters the volume is a unique contribution to several intersecting areas of intellectual enterprise, research, and learning — as well as a source of insight into how mental health practice and policy might be modified and improved. As a result, it appeals to a wide range of audiences including social scientists, mental health practitioners, mental health researchers, social theorists, mental health service users, and policy-makers.

Governing by Inspection

Author: Sotiria Grek

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-09-19

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1317635132

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In recent decades, governing practices in education have become highly contradictory: deregulation and decentralisation are accompanied by re-regulation and increased centralisation, contributing to considerable governing tensions in and across different national systems and within the emergent European education policy space. On the one hand there is the persistence of performance monitoring through target-setting, indicators and benchmarks, and on the other, the promotion of self-evaluation and ‘light touch’ regulation that express a ‘softer’ governance turn, and promote self-regulation as the best basis for constant improvement. Drawing on research undertaken into three national systems, this edited volume explores the attempts to manage these tensions in Europe through the development of inspection as a governing practice. Inspectorates and inspectors offer key locations for the exploration of governing tensions, positioned as they are between the international, the national, and the local and institutional, and with responsibility for both regulation and development. All three national systems offer contrasting approaches to inspection, all of which have changed considerably in recent years. Governing by Inspection positions inspection in the framework of changing education policy and politics, and in a period of intensive policy development and exchange in Europe. It will be key reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education, political science and social policy.

Ethical Agility in Dance

Author: Noyale Colin

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-11-13

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 100098379X

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This edited collection examines the potential of dance training for developing socially engaged individuals capable of forging ethical human relations for an ever-changing world and in turn frames dance as a fundamental part of human experience. This volume draws together a range of critical voices to reflect the inclusive potential of dance. The contributions offer perspectives on contemporary dance training in Britain from dance educators, scholars, practitioners and artists. Through examining the politics, values and ethics of learning dance today, this book argues for the need of a re-assessment of the evolving practices in dance training and techniques. Key questions address how the concept of ‘technique’ and associated systems of training in dance could be redefined to enable the collaboration of skills and application of ideas necessary to twenty-first-century dance. The editors present these ideas in different modes of writing. This collection of essays, conversations and manifestos offers a way to explore, debate and grasp the shifting values of contemporary dance. Examining these values in the applied field of dance reveals a complex and contrasting range of ideas, encompassing broad themes including the relationships between individuality and collectivity, rigour and creativity, and virtuosity and inclusivity. This volume points to ethical techniques as providing a way of navigating these contrasting values in dance. It serves as an invaluable resource for academics as well as practitioners and students.

Innovation for Value and Mission

Author: Peet van Biljon

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-09-20

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 3110711087

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Innovation. No other concept is so widely celebrated, yet so secretly dreaded. The reason: innovation requires managing through uncertainty. This is hard for any organization whether private or public, small or large. This book provides a roadmap for those who want to understand and manage innovation in all its aspects. It explains both the "how" and the "why" of innovation – its economic and policy context as well as the techniques by which it can be orchestrated, along with the management systems needed to govern it. Innovation is uniquely presented through both a private-sector (value-creating) and public-sector (mission-fulfilling) lens. Topics covered in context include modern innovation and creativity techniques such as design thinking and the Lean Startup, the organizational challenges of innovation, as well as innovation project- and portfolio management techniques. Business-model innovation and open innovation complete the picture from the manager’s perspective. The private and public financing of R&D, startups, and corporate innovation are presented – contrasting the private and public worlds while explaining how they complement each other. Government innovation policy is discussed in its historical and contemporary context, and the innovation policy toolset is introduced. Continual innovation is vital for companies and countries to prosper. Readers will learn why innovation must follow technological breakthroughs to raise productivity and economic growth, and how innovation – when done right – can benefit larger society. An explanation for unequal growth – that some companies, regions, and countries are not seeing the full productivity gains promised by modern technology – is explored in the context of technology diffusion. No previous experience in innovation management, economics or public policy is assumed, and the book moves fast to equip the reader with practical tools and techniques. Innovation for Value and Mission is suitable for an introductory graduate level course, or as a desk reference for experienced practitioners and policymakers. Because it connects multiple topic areas and contains ample additional references, the book is also a great resource for those with expertise in one particular area of innovation who desire to branch out into other areas.

The Goals of Sustainable Development

Author: David Crowther

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-07-30

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9811050473

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This book analyses various aspects of social responsibility, corporate responsibility, sustainability and governance. Rather than focusing narrowly on a single perspective, it investigates a number of problems and scenarios that can all be considered an aspect of one of these fields, and shows how they are all related to each other and to the problems and issues facing businesses. This approach is based on the tradition of the Social Responsibility Research Network, which in its 15-year history has sought to broaden the discourse and to treat all research in these areas as inter-related and relevant to business. The book collects the best papers presented at the 15th International Conference on Corporate Social Responsibility and 6th Organisational Governance Conference held in Melbourne, Australia in September 2016.