Acknowledgments

Many colleagues have commented over the years on this project and sent me references and documents. Foremost among these is Lee Clarke. Among disaster mavens he is tops, and he has been intimately involved in my project from the beginning. At Stanford, where much of the work was done, Scott Sagan, director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation, and assistant director Lynn Eden created a thoroughly stimulating and comfortable atmosphere for workshops, seminars, and colleagueship. Lynn wins the prize for the most thorough and helpful critique of the entire manuscript. The following scholars at Stanford commented on multiple chapters, sometimes extensively: Dara Cohen, Laura Donohue, Michael May, Alex Montgomery, Patrick Roberts, Jake Shapiro, Dan Taron, and Marc Ventresca. Beyond Stanford, I received comments on individual chapters from Dan Berger, Clark Gellings, Eric Lopatin, Darragh Perrow, Jon Pincus, Andrew Shrank, Martyn Thomas, and Barbara Wareck. I thank the fellow members of a panel on software reliability at the National Research Council for unwittingly helping me to understand the Internet and software failures over the past three years. I have given lectures on this topic over the past three years at so many places I have lost track; the questions and probes were always very helpful. Finally, I would like to dedicate the book to an amazing woman who has tolerated its demands for four years: Barbara, my great good fortune.

I am grateful for support from a National Science Foundation Small Grant award, SES-0329546, and a research fellowship from the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University, October 2004 to April 2005.