Karl Sabbagh

The nightly news and conventional wisdom tell us that things are bad and getting worse. Yet despite dire predictions, scientists see many good things on the horizon. John Brockman, publisher of Edge (www.edge.org), the influential online salon, recently asked more than 150 high-powered scientific thinkers to answer a vital question for our frequently pessimistic times: "What are you optimistic about?"Spanning a wide range of topics—from string theory to education, from population growth to medicine, and even from global warming to the end of world—What Are You Optimistic About? is an impressive array of what world-class minds (including Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, New York Times bestselling authors, and Harvard professors, among others) have weighed in to offer carefully considered optimistic visions of tomorrow. Their provocative and controversial ideas may rouse skepticism, but they might possibly change our perceptions of humanity's future.

"On May 15, 1995, one of the most important business stories of the decade entered its final act. For that is the date on which United Airlines took delivery of the first of a new generation of passenger aircraft... the Boeing 777." "The drama whose last act this is began more than five years earlier, when the Boeing Corporation - consistently one of the world's most successful and most admired companies - decided upon a multibillion-dollar gamble: to produce a two-engine jumbo jet that could successfully compete not only with aircraft from Airbus Industrie and McDonnell Douglas, but with its own twenty-five-year-old 747. Happily for historians of the future, and for readers in the present, they decided that each and every episode of this massive effort, including the 777's revolutionary manner of design, management, and financing, would occur under the watchful eye of Karl Sabbagh, the author of Skyscraper: The Making of a Building." "Boeing's accessibility and the author's talents make 21st-Century Jet an extraordinary business story. Or, rather, two: First is the large-scale story of an immense corporation betting its future on its ability to deliver an entirely new plane on schedule and on budget... and not just any new plane, but one designed entirely on computer and built to be "fly-by-wire" - with wings, flaps, and ailerons operated by electronic impulses, rather than by hydraulics. 21st-Century Jet is a penetrating explication of the engineering of some of the largest movable structures in the world, a book that reveals the engineering process at work - professionals sweating for weeks to remove ounces of weight from a door handle, for example - while making you feel the engineers' pride and excitement when they succeed." "But the second story is even more important: This is a book about team building... about the 777's "Working Together" management strategy and its revolutionary design-build teams, or DBTs. As a virtual management primer in coordinating the work of thousands of professionals (and in defusing their inevitable turf battles), this record of the massive effort of the DBTs - and the 777 required more than 200, each including a senior design engineer, a manufacturing supervisor, a financial manager, and (frequently and interestingly) a representative of a customer company, such as United Airlines or British Airways - makes 21st-Century Jet the business book of the year."--BOOK JACKET.

Modern medicine is one of the most successful branches of science, with a distinguished history of conquering many of the twentieth century's deadliest diseases. Yet today people are turning in record numbers to alternative therapies that have little or no scientific basis. Herbalists, homeopaths, crystal therapists, chiropractors, acupuncturists, and countless other unconventional practitioners are enjoying thriving businesses. What accounts for this flight from reason in the face of hard evidence that medical doctors do a better job of treating disease and alleviating suffering than their alternative counterparts? In Magic or Medicine? Dr. Robert Buckman and Karl Sabbagh offer a response to this question by critically evaluating both alternative and conventional medical approaches to patient care. Drawing on some of the earliest written medical sources as well as their own investigations into current alternative therapies, the authors argue that healing has always been partly the science of clinical treatment (medicine) and partly an art (magic). Medicine may make the patient get well, but often it is magic that makes the patient feel well. With all the pressures under which they work, modern medical doctors often neglect the magic in their dealings with patients. Alternative therapists, however, frequently offer nothing but magic. Buckman and Sabbagh look closely at the claims made for both medical science and alternative treatments and discover a gap between the promises and the reality of each approach. Magic or Medicine? is a fascinating exploration of healing in the late twentieth century and vital reading for anyone concerned about the effective delivery of health care.

Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal is a powerful satirical reflection on the economic, social, and ethical conditions existing in eighteenth-century Ireland. Using the character of an unemotional reformer, the essay makes the distressing proposal of selling underprivileged children for subsistence, highlighting the callousness inherent in utilitarian thinking and societal apathy. Swift employs piercing irony, logical mimicry, and measured humor to translate rationality into a moral denunciation, resulting in a text of lasting relevance that denounces unfairness and warns against harsh governmental policies.

Shows that seemingly trivial queries or assumptions lead to a deeper understanding of how science works. Who would have thought that scientists would turn to the hypothesis 'all swans are white' to determine the stability of the entire universe? Or that if we choose to spend our money on other people it might make us happier?

"Many people claim to remember events or impressions from as young as two or even into babyhood. But how much can we trust our memories, especially those of early childhood? Do you really remember going to the seaside as a toddler that summer day and grazing your knee, or do those vivid images derive from what your aunt has often told you?" "In this book, Karl Sabbagh looks at the growing scientific understanding of the nature of memories from early childhood. Memory isn't a bank of recordings to be replayed, but rather something dynamic, in which scenes and events are reconstructed, and continually prone to shaping by other information. For young children, memory is a tool for learning, and memories from before the age of two are discarded. Whatever we may think, we simply cannot remember back to such early times. The experiments of Elizabeth Loftus and other psychologists show how unreliable our memories are, particularly those of childhood, and how easy it is for false memories to become planted in our minds." "Yet, Sabbagh points out, the implications of this work do not seem to have reached the courts. The scientific study of childhood memory was stimulated by several high-profile cases in the US and UK in the 1990s, in which individuals were imprisoned on the basis of the victim's alleged 'recovered memories' of being abused in childhood. Several of these cases subsequently collapsed, leaving families devastated and struggling to heal the wounds. Using extracts from court records and interviews with psychologists involved in the 'memory wars', Sabbagh argues passionately against forms of 'recovered memory therapy' in what has become a heated debate in psychotherapy. Above all, he pleads that when it comes to claims based on memory, the results of objective scientific enquiry must form the foundation for judgement."--Jacket.