by Jeffrey D. SachsAudiobook(c) 2016. I voted for Hillary Clinton twice in 2016. She beat Bernie Sanders in the first race, only to lose to Donald Trump in the second in a close race. Bernie Sanders relied on Sachs’ economics advice. Therefore, I find it important to educate myself on the issues in this democracy and to read this book to illuminate my ignorant mind. Sachs lays out a powerful and persuasive case for engaging…
by Hadley Wickham(c) 2016. This is another book that applies to one of my nascent passions: Statistical programming with R. This book brings forth the central visualization package in ggplot by its author Hadley Wickham. Like most of Hadley’s works, the book is meticulously researched and extremely clear. It is a winner in accomplishing its goals of introducing visualization in R. It even contains a short section on modeling in R. For those who don’t…
by Sonia Shah(c) 2010.Especially during the later Bush years, I heard a lot about mosquito nets to prevent malaria. It was a simple intervention that provided real action. Now, I’m told many (actually, most) of those mosquito nets aren’t used to protect those that are sleeping. They are used as fish nets or on only adults, not on more vulnerable children. This little-known fact and more comprises the main storyline in Fever. Written by an…
Beyond Bullet Points: Using PowerPoint to Tell a Persuasive Story that Gets Results.by Cliff Atkinson(c) 2018. This book, sponsored by Microsoft, uses contemporary theories about communication to advocate that people stop using PowerPoint as a crutch and instead use it as a tool to tell a story. It accomplishes that task very effectively. Most people use PowerPoint to delineate a series of statements to be used in a presentation. I’ve sat through many lectures in…
by Eric Metaxas(c) 2016. The title of this book is stolen from Benjamin Franklin when asked if we were founding a monarchy or a republic. With his classic quick wit, he responded, “A republic… if you can keep it.” This book, by a radio talk show host, comprises a series of lecture-type chapters that admonishes patriotism instead of carelessness towards America. It contains many anecdotes which are interesting, such as that of Nathan Hale’s, “I…
by Francis S. Collins(c) 2010 My employer (Vanderbilt University Medical Center) is the world’s leader in implementing the ideas around personalized medicine, so I picked up this audiobook to educate me on what’s going on around me while I drove to and from work. In it, I found interesting stories from patients combined with weighty data from the human genome. Collins maintains a warm bedside manner as well as a writer as he does as…
R for Data Scienceby Hadley Wickham and Garret Grolemund.(c) 2017. If the above quote is the mission of this book, consider the task accomplished. Where most books in computer science fall down in trying to be cute while communicating an educational message, this book addresses the task of education about R squarely, and it does so in a manner that engages the mind with interesting problems. Usually, I skip the exercises sections of most computer…