Category: Society

Society Software-Technology

Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control & Dominate

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

This book exhibits such promise on a hyper-relevant topic, but falls short of its ideals. It offers a fascinating history of data and its use by civilization to organize itself. It points out where it has veered to dominate people (e.g., slavery, colonization, Roman control) and how humans have objected to its control. Today, we live in an age where generating data is inescapable with modern life. Data’s scale and reach are unprecedented. It concludes…

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Healthcare Religion-Philosophy Society

Religion, Spirituality & Public Health: Competing & Complementary Epistemes

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

In the COVID-19 pandemic, resistance to modern biomedicine (evidence-based medicine) occurred in droves and presented real problems to public health implementers trying to get us out of infections. Now that the pandemic is over, it’s worth spending time reflecting on how to better handle similar approaches in the future. This volume, from the British Academy, offers such an approach. Its vision is global in scope, not just localized to the British isles. So what’s an…

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History Society

American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent & the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

Jon Meacham, one of our nation’s leading historians, has chosen the texts of dozens of speeches about American progress across its history and even pre-history. Its story is not one of inevitable progress but progress amidst continual dissent. There have always been strong, powerful voices standing in the way of a more perfect union. Seeing them displayed in this way forcefully suggests that struggle is always needed to propel this nation’s aim of a “more…

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Healthcare Religion-Philosophy Society

Religion & the Health of the Public: Shifting the Paradigm

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

Religion and science are often portrayed as antagonistic fields. Most religious leaders do not pursue a science-heavy education, and most prominent scientists see too many ways that religion inhibits scientific exploration and healthcare. Public health and religion, however, have similar goals; they both seek to promote healthy living among their devotees. Why the fighting then? Generally, there exists walls of mutual ignorance and even stigma about the other side. The authors seek to address this…

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Biography-Memoir Healthcare Society

The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi & the Challenge to Victorian Medicine That Changed Women’s Lives Forever

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

By the end of the Victorian age, men had dominated medical practice for centuries, but women were beginning to make inroads into the profession. A few, Mary Putnam Jacobi being the first, made inroads in European training centers and returned to the US to integrate women into American medicine. In this book, Lydia Reeder narrates their struggle and eventual victory that depathologized being a woman. By pursuing their personal questions, these women physician-scientists brought obstetrics…

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Management-Business Society

The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise & the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

Organizational silos occur when groups of people in the same organization do not rely on each others’ insights because of various cultural reasons. While the division of labor that silos create is essential for any business, silos can inhibit an organization’s creativity and innovation. They have been weak points in or even downfalls of many great business empires. Through case studies across many organizations and industries, anthropologist Gillian Tett describes negative results silos can create…

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Economics Society

Superforecasting: The Art & Science of Prediction

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

In a multi-year research study, authors Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner identified volunteers, only paid $250 per year, to regularly try to predict questions about current events in a competition. A certain number of them have achieved the level of a “superforecaster” where they outperform even the federal intelligence community in their predictions. Obviously, these individuals demand further examination so that we all can learn from their “secret sauce.” What makes these individuals tick in…

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Healthcare Society

Reimagining Global Health: An Introduction

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

Global health is a field known, in the past, as international health and colonial health. It has recently sought to center itself around health equity – that every person deserves decent healthcare to have a decent life. Thus, it has tried to remove any shackles of Western imperialism from its conceptualization. Also recently, Paul Farmer and Partners in Health have brought attention to the field, especially in Haiti and Rwanda. A large braintrust centered around…

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History Society

How to Kill a Witch: The Patriarchy’s Guide to Silencing Women

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

Most of us think of witchcraft as a relic of a hyper-religious past. Most of us also don’t have detailed beliefs about the practice of killing witches in the name of beating the devil – other than it’s wrong. However, the authors make a compelling case that the persecution of “witches” in prior centuries was just patriarchy rearing its ugly head. Seventy percent of accused witches were women; the other thirty percent were often the…

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Society

The Greatest Sentence Ever Written

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

Biographer Walter Isaacson is eminent among writers of American history. For America’s upcoming 250th anniversary of independence, he wrote this short essay memorializing the penning of the Declaration of Independence. In it, he picks apart each phrase of the first sentence to explore its meaning: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit…

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