In the Loop: A Political and Economic History of San Antonio, is the culmination of urban historian David Johnson’s extensive research into the development of Texas’s oldest city. Beginning with San Antonio’s formation more than three hundred years ago, Johnson lays out the factors that drove the largely uneven and unplanned distribution of resources and amenities and analyzes the demographics that transformed the city from a frontier settlement into a diverse and complex modern metropolis. Following the shift from military interests to more diverse industries and punctuated by evocative descriptions and historical quotations, this urban biography reveals how city mayors balanced constituents’ push for amenities with the pull of business interests such as tourism and the military. Deep dives into city archives fuel the story and round out portraits of Sam Maverick, Henry B. Gonzales, Lila Cockrell, and other political figures. Johnson reveals the interplay of business interests, economic attractiveness, and political goals that spurred San Antonio’s historic tenacity and continuing growth and highlights individual agendas that influenced its development. He focuses on the crucial link between urban development and booster coalitions, outlining how politicians and business owners everywhere work side by side, although not necessarily together, to shape the future of any metropolitan area, including geographical disparities. Three photo galleries illustrate boosterism’s impact on San Antonio’s public and private space and highlight its tangible results. In the Loop recounts each stage of San Antonio’s economic development with logic and care, building a rich story to contextualize our understanding of the current state of the city and our notions of how an American city can form.

Report describes RAND contributions to Louisiana's Coastal Master Plan for policymakers in other coastal regions. It highlights the value of a solid technical foundation to support decision-making on strategies to protect and restore coastal regions.

Do scientists see conflict between science and faith? Which cultural factors shape the attitudes of scientists toward religion? Can scientists help show us a way to build collaboration between scientific and religious communities, if such collaborations are even possible? To answer these questions and more, the authors of Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think About Religion completed the most comprehensive international study of scientists' attitudes toward religion ever undertaken, surveying more than 20,000 scientists and conducting in-depth interviews with over 600 of them. From this wealth of data, the authors extract the real story of the relationship between science and religion in the lives of scientists around the world. The book makes four key claims: there are more religious scientists then we might think; religion and science overlap in scientific work; scientists - even atheist scientists - see spirituality in science; and finally, the idea that religion and science must conflict is primarily an invention of the West. Throughout, the book couples nationally representative survey data with captivating stories of individual scientists, whose experiences highlight these important themes in the data. Secularity and Science leaves inaccurate assumptions about science and religion behind, offering a new, more nuanced understanding of how science and religion interact and how they can be integrated for the common good.

Conrad Richter: A Writer's Life is the story of an aspiring writer who failed and then, desperate for money, tried again and wrote himself out of penny-a-word pulp magazines and into a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Based upon unrestricted access to all of Richter's letters, journals, notebooks, and private papers, this biography offers an intimate account of Richter's personal struggle to achieve success in his own and in other people's terms. Johnson's biography will engage anyone interested in the art of biography and in a novelist's act of writing. Admirers of Richter's novels will also find much of interest in his life. So, too, will those who find value in the story of a man who, despite his sense of himself as an imperfect vessel for God's plan for human evolution, lived his life with as much grace, determination, and courage as he could.

Exploring the growing division among academic scientists over a profit motive in research. The commercialization of research is one of the most significant contemporary features of US higher education, yet we know surprisingly little about how scientists perceive and experience commercial rewards. A Fractured Profession is the first book to systematically examine the implications of commercialization for both universities and faculty members from the perspective of academic scientists. Drawing on richly detailed interviews with sixty-one scientists at four universities across the United States, sociologist David R. Johnson explores how an ideology of commercialism produces intraprofessional conflict in academia. The words of scientists themselves reveal competing constructions of status, conflicting norms, and divergent career paths and professional identities. Commercialist scientists embrace a professional ideology that emphasizes the creation of technologies that control societal uncertainties and advancing knowledge toward particular—and financial—ends. Traditionalist scientists, on the other hand, often find themselves embattled and threatened by university and federal emphasis on commercialization. They are less concerned about issues such as conflicts of interest and corruption than they are about unequal rewards, unequal conditions of work, and conflicts of commitment to university roles and basic science. Arguing that the division between commercialists and traditionalists represents a new form of inequality in the academic profession, this book offers an incisive look into the changing conditions of work in an era of academic capitalism. Focusing on how the profit motive is reshaping higher education and redefining what faculty are supposed to do, this book will appeal to scientists and academics, higher education scholars, university administrators and policy makers, and students considering a career in science.

This report describes an approach for planning under deep uncertainty, Robust Decision Making (RDM), and demonstrates its use by the El Dorado Irrigation District (EID). Using RDM, the authors and EID tested the robustness of current long-term water management plans and more robust alternatives across more than 50 futures reflecting different assumptions about future climate, urban growth, and the availability of important new supplies.

Blanchard presents a unified and global view of macroeconomics, enabling students to see the connections between the short-run, medium-run, and long-run.

Lewis and Johnson lay out a clear nine-step method for identifying and weighting the importance of disparate goals and outcomes. These consensus-building evaluation techniques are well suited for administrators in the field of disabilities.