Healthcare Research-Education

Personalizing Precision Medicine: A Global Voyage from Vision to Reality

This book has sat in my to-read stack for some time. I finally picked it up, and I’m glad I did. I love reading stories about the progress of medical research, the field I work in (specifically translational research). This book focuses on how medicine is evolving, especially zeroing in on in its business aspects as well as its international impacts. Even after the pandemic, precision medicine stands poised to provide more effective treatments in…

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Research-Education

Qualitative Data Analysis: A Methods Sourcebook

Professionally, I work a lot with quantitative data, through mathematics/biostatistics, building software, and research design. The world of words has long been a domain that has enchanted me even though symbols have comprised my main language. Recently, my wife has started graduate work using qualitative methods. I decided to fill my deficits in this world by reading this book. I am by no means expert or even experienced in it, but I merely have an…

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Research-Education Writing-Communication

Stylish Academic Writing

Academic writing has a reputation for being a bit dry and only interested in the dissemination of abstract information. Concreteness, style, and vivacity often fall to the wayside. As Sword points out, much of this dryness is due to social structures, not deliberate mastery of the craft. This book teaches how to bring a sense of style to academic writing without compromising its informational purposes. By examining 1,000 academic papers in ten different fields, Sword…

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Healthcare HIV/AIDS Research-Education

Scrambling for Africa: AIDS, Expertise, & the Rise of American Global Health Science

The prevalence of HIV and AIDS in Africa was a looming problem at the turn of the millennium, but heavy American investment in treatment for Africans under George W. Bush’s PEPFAR program addressed the acute symptoms. However, like much in life, smaller, no-less-significant problems exploded soon afterwards, particularly in the vein of post-colonialism. Was this a scientific partnership of equals or was it a contribution from a superior to an inferior? Does PEPFAR create a…

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Management-Business Research-Education Writing-Communication

The Only Grant-Writing Book You’ll Ever Need

Many small businesses, non-profits, individual researchers, and larger institutions depend on grants to fund their activities and livelihoods. Whether from private foundations or governmental entities, these funds are given through a competitive process. Through market forces, this process seeks to align funders’ desires with projects that achieve results. This book seeks to demystify this process and provide readers with a “leg up” to write better grant proposals. Karsh and Fox’s work is primarily geared towards…

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Research-Education

Mastery by Robert Greene

What does it take to rise to the top of one’s profession or any other domain in life? Through artful storytelling of historical and contemporary figures, Greene offers us a plethora of examples to follow. He tries to tie each case to principles of how the individual mastered her/his own environment. In so doing, he offers us a self-driven manual for how to command a sector in life. Greene’s contemporary exemplars include figures from many…

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Economics Management-Business Research-Education

Monetizing Innovation

Research and development (known colloquially as R&D) is an inevitability of capitalist markets. New innovations usually outpace yesterday’s technologies. However, many R&D products fail to transition from development to the marketplace. In this work, Ramanujam and Tacke suggest that many of the failures can be avoided by proper management of pricing prior to the start of the project. In truth, this work is an in-depth look at how to set the price of an innovation.…

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Healthcare Research-Education Science

Gordis Epidemiology, 6th Edition

Now in a sixth edition, this textbook is the seminal introduction to the field of epidemiology, or the study of disease in populations. It stands in the historical stream of Dr. Gordis, a leader of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins. Replete with diagrams, cartoons, case studies, and in-depth analysis, this work paints a comprehensive picture of the field in the 21st century. In the first section, the authors provide an introduction to epidemiology as it relates…

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Management-Business Research-Education Software-Technology

Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps

DevOps, roughly speaking, seeks to get IT workers to interact with each other more – particularly when they are in different functional roles. Authors Humble and Kim have led this movement and pioneered annual studies to ascertain its progress among practitioners of technology. In this book, they team together with Forsgren (a PhD who brings a rigorous knowledge of statistics and data collection to the table) to present their findings and explain their methods. IT…

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Research-Education

How to Teach Adults: Plan Your Class. Teach Your Students. Change the World.

To understand this book properly, the reader must grasp that Spalding has taught English as a Second Language (ESL) classes to adults for several years. He is engaged in self-education and in innovation of education for other groups. In the final chapter of this book, he lays out an ambitious vision for what public education has to offer America in our time. He addresses learning for adults primarily in a classroom environment (such as with…

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