Scott J. Pearson

American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System

By Scott J. Pearson | October 17, 2018 by Scott J. Pearson

by E. Fuller Torrey, M.D.Copyright (c) 2014. This book tells the story of the American mental health system, starting with JFK’s “reforms” and ending with the Affordable Care Act. JFK, whose sister suffered from mental retardation and a failed partial lobotomy, assuaged his family’s “guilt” by reforming the system to close the state-run mental hospital system. This step federalized the system and took away state responsibility for these actions. In its place, no one –…

Resources to Explore: Visualizations

By Scott J. Pearson | October 17, 2018 by Scott J. Pearson

Information Visualization: Perception for Design by Colin Ware Visual Thinking for Design by Colin Ware

Software-Technology Visualization

Mastering Gephi Network Visualization: Produce advanced network graphs in Gephi and gain valuable insights into your network datasets

By Scott J. Pearson | October 10, 2018 by Scott J. Pearson

by Ken ChervenCopyright (c) 2015. I fooled around with Gephi at work some months ago. It’s one of the leading options that handles Social Network Analysis, a field that is taking off due to seemingly ubiquitous datasets due to academic publishing and social media. This book teaches you the basics of what Gephi has to offer vis-a-vis this field. I found most interesting the idea of a temporally-based social network – i.e., one that grows…

Biography-Memoir Science

Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism

By Scott J. Pearson | October 10, 2018 by Scott J. Pearson

by Mario BiagioliCopyright (c) 1993. This work, now considered the definitive treatment on the Galileo saga where he was silenced for arguing for the Copernican view that the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around, argues that the setting of Galileo’s story has never been well-considered. He was a courtier. He lived under the patronage of various rulers of his day and had to produce great wonders for them. As such,…

Biography-Memoir Humanities Religion-Philosophy

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

By Scott J. Pearson | October 1, 2018 by Scott J. Pearson

by Eric MetaxasCopyright (c) 2011.Audiobook. This book has been on my to-read list for a while, and it feels good to finally cross it off. Bonhoeffer’s story is worth sharing. Educated as a theologian, raised as a scientist under a German psychiatrist, Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived his life in rejection of the German state-church which was coopted under Adolf Hitler. He is a reminder of what living a life in the Resistance is like. Along the…

Humanities Poverty

Haiti, After the Earthquake

By Scott J. Pearson | October 1, 2018 by Scott J. Pearson

by Paul FarmerCopyright (c) 2012.Audiobook version. In January 2010, Haiti experienced a seven-point earthquake that laid waste to an already-struggling infrastructure. The world, for a few moments, paused and sighed a collective, compassionate sigh towards one of the oldest republics in the Western Hemisphere. Paul Farmer, known for starting Partners in Health and for being deputy ambassador to Haiti from the UN under Bill Clinton, composed this book about his experiences soon after the earthquake.…

Software-Technology

Advanced PHP Programming: A practical guide to developing large-scale Web sites and applications with PHP 5

By Scott J. Pearson | September 24, 2018 by Scott J. Pearson

by George Scholassnagle(c) Copyright 2004 This book applies both to PHP 5 and PHP 7 (no PHP 6 exists) fairly well because of the large amount of overlap between the versions. This book is meant to build up experts at PHP development. It handles everything ranging from cookies, to APIs, to extending PHP via C. At 650-pages, it’s a heavy read. There are lots of code examples as well as implementations of features (e.g., user…

Software-Technology

Ry’s Git Tutorial

By Scott J. Pearson | September 24, 2018 by Scott J. Pearson

by Ryan HodsoneBook (free) This book is a free purchase from Amazon. (You can’t beat that price!) It previews the Git utilities now popular in the field of revision/change management software. It can keep track of your old files in a programming project and coordinate among multiple developers (therein facilitating distributed development). I use Git at work. I’ve seen teammates more advanced at Git interrogate a Git database to extract useful information, restore backups, and…

Healthcare

Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis

By Scott J. Pearson | September 19, 2018 by Scott J. Pearson

by Helen Bynum(c) Copyright 2012, 2015. This book, part of Oxford University Press’s series on “biographies” of diseases, highlights one disease the haunted humankind for millennia – tuberculosis/consumption. This battle, like its infectious disease brethren of malaria and yellow fever, is as old as recorded civilization. Like most infectious diseases, it has become a victim of its success in that its prevalence is now only among some of the “less desirables” of humanity: The developing…

Healthcare

A History of Public Health

By Scott J. Pearson | September 19, 2018 by Scott J. Pearson

by George Rosen(c) Copyright 1958, 1993, 2015. George Rosen wrote this book, originally published in 1958, about the progress that humanity has made in this field. He was optimistic about the progress made with antibiotics and vaccines. He saw opportunity for the eradication of smallpox and malaria. He saw the trajectory of human progress as going upwards. In 2018, this optimism has been somewhat muted by the realities of HIV/AIDS, by the lingering persistence of…