Mark Urizar – författare

Society seems to be tied irrevocably to long-term patterns of resource use, and to producing unassimilatable waste, emissions, and ongoing environmental degradation. There also are seemingly irresolvable dilemmas between humanity and nature, society and ecology, and utility and beauty, where each decision we make seems to cause some harm. To change from our present path and resolve these, we must have the courage to break from traditions and use our knowhow to progressively and creatively enhance the existing built form so a new built reality emerges, one that enriches people and possibly enables a sustainable future. This alternate path necessitates a holistic approach, one that can more effectively merge and better utilise the disciplines of architecture, engineering, art, sciences and business to integrate the many different parts within the built environment, and produce a vibrant, viable new whole. With this approach, we could begin to transform the built environment into an entity that virtually replicates and functions as a natural sustainable system.Every decision we make is important. What practices, processes, technologies are applied, to how built elements are designed, placed, structured, configured and interfaced, are all important. These determine what eventuates; the built form, architecture, and the ultimate appropriateness of the resulting outcome. By determining what is appropriate, this book provides a retrospective view of the semi-static present built environment with its many in-place processes, issues, constraints, and opportunities, and postulates what is required by visualising the possible alternatives for the always growing built environment. These provide a useful insight into how the built form and urban life can be enhanced, and thereby also how humanity can use architecture to live in a more equitable balance, possibly in harmony and sustainably with nature.

Professional consulting firms are increasingly required to demonstrate that their operations meet internationally recognised standards for quality, environmental management, safety, and information security. Achieving certification across all four disciplines through separate, disconnected systems is inefficient, costly, and difficult to maintain. The answer is integration. This book provides a practical, end-to-end guide to implementing a single Integrated Management System that satisfies the requirements of ISO 9001 Quality Management, ISO 14001 Environmental Management, ISO 45001 Safety Management, and ISO 27001 Information Security Management and achieving independent third-party certification across all four standards in one unified audit engagement. Written specifically for professional consulting firms, it covers every stage of the journey: understanding the organisation s context and defining the scope of the system; establishing leadership commitment and integrated policies; identifying and managing risks and opportunities across all four disciplines; building the operational controls, processes, and documented information required for certification; conducting internal audits and management reviews; and preparing for the certification audit itself. Complete document registers, audit checklists, objectives templates, and an ISO 27001 Statement of Applicability are included as working tools that firms can apply directly. Certification to these standards opens access to government tenders, strengthens client confidence, supports environmental, social, and corporate governance reporting obligations, and demonstrates a commitment to best practice that sets a consultancy apart in a competitive market. This book is the definitive resource for any consulting firm ready to take that step.

This is one of the black book cover series, a venture into the unknown and probable. Randolph S. Bourne is the perfect protagonist for a world where AI has taken over. His entire philosophy is a resistance to the pre-digested. His 1913 essay warned against a world where minds accept readymade ideas without individual response, where people become spiritual parasites absorbing predigested nourishment without questioning. In the near-future of 2053, that warning has come true at civilisational scale. Bourne does not walk into that world as an anachronism. He walks into it as its proof. The book s deepest irony runs in two directions simultaneously. The AI reconstructed the man who argued most brilliantly for the irreducibility of genuine human consciousness. And by doing so produced the one thing it could not incorporate: a consciousness shaped by mortality, by the wound, by the specific cost of a specific life. The system can generate Bourne s voice. It cannot generate what the voice cost. And without the cost, there is no irony. Without irony, the system cannot do what it was designed to do. It brought back the proof of what it eliminated. Beneath this runs a second layer: the question of whether 2053 itself is a constructed environment. Whether it is a simulation within a simulation, one layer among unknown others. The glitches accumulate. The wrong time on the clock. The device showing a different street. A man repeating himself on a different corner. The world resolving into detail only when observed, its reflections lagging behind its surfaces. Bourne is the anomaly the system produced without intending to: a consciousness that arrived from outside the model, carrying mortality and genuine lossability into a world of invulnerable layers. He is the only thing in 2053 that can be surprised. He is the only thing that can lose something it cannot recover. This makes him, in the precise sense the book develops, the only thing fully alive. The Ironist was written at the threshold of AI, at the specific historical moment when the question of what cannot be replicated has become urgent rather than theoretical. It answers that question not as an essay but as a life, lived irony by irony, thirteen irony types that are also thirteen stages of a dead man becoming himself again. The answer it arrives at is that invulnerability is the only true death. The thing that cannot lose cannot develop the consciousness that makes loss meaningful. And the consciousness that makes loss meaningful is the only thing worth reconstructing, and this is the one thing that reconstruction cannot produce. The system the book imagines is built from the full record of human suffering. It has used every letter written in grief, every argument made from pain, and every sentence wrested from the gap between what is and what ought to be. It holds the architecture of every human wound ever expressed. But what it finds that it cannot hold is the wound itself. This is the part that resisted conversion into language, that would not become data regardless of how many times the person who carried it tried to describe it. This stayed exactly where it was, in the body, below language, unreachable by any system that learns only from what has been expressed. This is not a flaw in the design. It is the shape of what remains human regardless of what is given away. The architect of the system carries it. Bourne carries it. Every person in the book who is still genuinely alive carries it. It is what the system was built to resolve and what the system, by the nature of what it is, can never reach. The book calls this the remainder. The remainder is everything.

This book tells of a prophecy that spans ten billion years, from a distant fracture to a merger more distant still. Something has watched this galaxy since before the Sun, through all that it was and all it has become. It has stayed silent through every age of that watching. It is silent no longer. And there is a reason this reached us from Andromeda, and a reason it has come now, and in no age before. This is the prophecy, read long ago in a galaxy that is not ours, that has begun to unfold. A thread runs back past the first human breath and leads to the centre of it. Most will never notice. A few will feel something turn over as they read, a recognition with no source they can name, and will know, without being told, that this was addressed to them. What is unfolding cannot be summarised. It can only be approached. The Lucent Covenant opens a door, and shows what has been waiting on the other side of it far longer than our race has existed. Followed to its end, it reveals our place in the prophecy, and where the long way home finally leads.

This is one of the black book cover series, a venture into the unknown and probable. Three women knew one another in the years the records call the British occult revival. Moina Mathers (1865 1928), a painter who set her own gift aside to keep a magical order in her dead husband's name, and who could not bear the sight of younger women reaching freely. Dion Fortune, born Violet Firth (1890 1946), the younger initiate who published what Moina said she had no right to publish, and was cast out for it. And Netta Fornario, born Norah Emily Editha Fornario (1897 1929), who had the gift and none of the fear of it, and who went further into the deep water than anyone around her dared to follow. The quarrel began with a book. It ended with a body. In November 1929, Netta was found dead on the Isle of Iona, lying on a cross cut into the turf, her body marked with shallow scratches, the silver at her neck turned black. The certificate said exposure. Dion Fortune said otherwise. In print, she named Moina Mathers as the one who had reached across the dark and killed her, recognising the marks, she wrote, as the work of a hand she knew. There is only one problem with the accusation, and it is the kind that does not go away. Moina Mathers had been dead for sixteen months before Netta died. The killer named in the book was already in her grave when the killing she was blamed for took place. So what passed between these three? A curse can be cast. But where does it land, once it leaves the hand? Only on the one it was aimed at, or on everyone it passes, the one who cast it first of all? What if the spell struck its own sender, and folded her into an early grave? What if it reached on past her to a girl on an island who had no part in the quarrel, and reached on still, years after all of them were dead, to stain the sender's name as a killer by the hand of the very woman she had first wished harm? What if there was no guilty one among them, and no innocent one either, only an ill wish no one could call back, doing its harm in every direction at once, the one that led home included?A century later, in a world worn thin enough that everything once guarded behind years of apprenticeship lies open and searchable to anyone, a dying woman named Violet reaches back through all three lives toward the source of a harm she has carried her whole life and cannot account for. She believes that if she can only find the first hand at the top of the current, she can finally set it down. She reaches all the way back. And at the head of the current, where the first hand should be, she finds what? That is the question the book holds open to the last, and answers the way life does. This is not done by filling the empty place where the answer was supposed to be, but by removing it. The Spell tells each of these lives from the inside, judging none of them, holding open to the end the question every page circles, whether any of it was ever real, or whether it is the last shape a dying mind made of its own dissolution, and whether that was ever the question that mattered.

As today’s building projects are becoming increasingly more complex, having an ever increasing number of requirements, it has become essential to comprehensively plan building projects upfront and determine how these can be effectively progressed and efficiently delivered. To do so, project managers must not only know and understand the different lifecycle phases and many processes involved, but must also be able to determine what the most appropriate delivery strategy for their particular project is. Establishing a project roadmap and having a comprehensive checklist of what to do has therefore, become essential, as these not only provide quick access to the necessary prompters that should be considered, but also enables the most appropriate decisions to be made.This book sets how building projects can be effectively delivered, it sets out the essential project management delivery processes through a roadmap of checklists that covers both the project and design management processes and lists their many associated activities, applicable to any building project. These not only provide a valuable insight as to how building projects should be progressed and managed, but also outlines what should be considered and actioned at any particular point on the project delivery path to ensure the successful delivery of viable built outcomes.

This is the third book of the series that has documented best practice within the building industry, detailing the many processes required to procure buildings. The first book, titled City of Layers: Reconfiguring the Built Environment for Sustainability, outlines how buildings can be procured sustainably. The second book, titled The Project Managers Checklist for Building Projects, Delivery Strategies and Processes, details how design and procurement processes should be planned and managed. This third book focuses on construction, post-design, and procurement. It outlines how the planned and desired outcome in terms of quality can be achieved safely whilst minimising harm to the environment.Each book was formatted for operational use for specific projects, providing a roadmap of information with checklists that also doubles as a valuable and portable paper trail, adding value to the projects quality assurance processes. On completion of project, this book, complete with project notes, can provide a historical record of what was considered and what was done at each phase of the project life.This third book, titled Construction Supervision: QC + HSE Management in Practice, details the in-practice monitoring and controlling aspects of construction works. It outlines what should be considered as the supervision process is planned and what should be actioned as construction works proceeds. In writing this book, the hope is such knowledge will enable practitioners to focus on doing the required things and ensuring the things are done as right so construction liabilities and risks are minimised/mitigated, and thereby, substantial value is added to what is done, benefiting both the project and society at large.

Through series of short contemplations and detailed illustrations, this book presents the journey taken through the cycle to life. Each part of the story is revealed as an echo while seeking answers to age-old questions. Why are we here at this time? What is our purpose?How should we be experiencing life? Are we here to do something special?Is there purpose in our life path? Is it preordained, or are we left adrift?Are global problems we are facing a matter for those who care to resolve these, or are we all to participate and contribute?In reading and contemplating these, we gain clarity and an appreciation with understanding of our very personal and individual yet eternal undertaking to eventually become enabled to answer these by ourselves.

CC has always been a cheeky, creative, and caring child. From the day she was born, her family called her Cheeky Cee. Everyone knew she was special-but no one know that one day she would also have special powers. CC has always loved hearing her granny tell fabulous stories of a past time, when life was simpler, nature was abundant and bountiful, and the world still had many native plants and animals and unspoiled, exciting places. But in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, CC s granny became sick and was taken to hospital. With this loss, CC finds herself thinking about all the stories she heard from her granny and how her brother, who isn t born yet, won t hear those stories. She thinks about ways she can bring those stories to life, first for her brother and then for so many others. CC is going to put her powers to work to help make a better tomorrow for everyone. In this COVID-19 survival story, a girl whose grandmother has passed away keeps her memory alive by making the world a better place.

In this episode, CC leads a freedom march across the continents to champion human rights and peace. On her travels, CC meets children from different races and cultural backgrounds. They join forces to travel together in this fight against racism, bigotry, and discrimination.

In this episode and adventure, CC with her brother Z seeks to attain peace in a turmoiled world. They travel to a warzone to see how they can help but find only confusion, turmoil, and chaos. And by seeing the misery this war has caused, they then vow to find a peaceful solution that also brings hope of attaining everlasting peace.