Author: Ian Whitmarsh
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801459648
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
Steadily increasing numbers of Americans have been diagnosed with asthma in recent years, attracting the attention of biomedical researchers, including those searching for a genetic link to the disease. The high rate of asthma among African American children has made race significant to this search for genetic predisposition. One of the primary sites for this research today is Barbados. The Caribbean nation is considered optimal because of its predominantly black population. At the same time, the government of Barbados has promoted the country for such research in an attempt to take part in the biomedical future. In Biomedical Ambiguity, Ian Whitmarsh describes how he followed a team of genetic researchers to Barbados, where he did fieldwork among not only the researchers but also government officials, medical professionals, and the families being tested. Whitmarsh reveals how state officials and medical professionals make the international biomedical research part of state care, bundling together categories of disease populations, biological race, and asthma. He points to state and industry perceptions of mothers as medical caretakers in genetic research that proves to be inextricable from contested practices around nation, race, and family. The reader's attention is drawn to the ambiguity in these practices, as researchers turn the plurality of ethnic identities and illness meanings into a science of asthma and race at the same time that medical practitioners and families make the opaque science significant to patient experience. Whitmarsh shows that the contradictions introduced by this "misunderstanding" paradoxically enable the research to move forward.
Author: Simone de Beauvoir
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504054210
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 98
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Book Description
From the groundbreaking author of The Second Sex comes a radical argument for ethical responsibility and freedom. In this classic introduction to existentialist thought, French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity simultaneously pays homage to and grapples with her French contemporaries, philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, by arguing that the freedoms in existentialism carry with them certain ethical responsibilities. De Beauvoir outlines a series of “ways of being” (the adventurer, the passionate person, the lover, the artist, and the intellectual), each of which overcomes the former’s deficiencies, and therefore can live up to the responsibilities of freedom. Ultimately, de Beauvoir argues that in order to achieve true freedom, one must battle against the choices and activities of those who suppress it. The Ethics of Ambiguity is the book that launched Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist and existential philosophy. It remains a concise yet thorough examination of existence and what it means to be human.
Author: Mourad Elloumi
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118853725
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 1126
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Book Description
The first comprehensive overview of preprocessing, mining, and postprocessing of biological data Molecular biology is undergoing exponential growth in both the volume and complexity of biological data and knowledge discovery offers the capacity to automate complex search and data analysis tasks. This book presents a vast overview of the most recent developments on techniques and approaches in the field of biological knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD) providing in-depth fundamental and technical field information on the most important topics encountered. Written by top experts, Biological Knowledge Discovery Handbook: Preprocessing, Mining, and Postprocessing of Biological Data covers the three main phases of knowledge discovery (data preprocessing, data processing also known as data mining and data postprocessing) and analyzes both verification systems and discovery systems. BIOLOGICAL DATA PREPROCESSING Part A: Biological Data Management Part B: Biological Data Modeling Part C: Biological Feature Extraction Part D Biological Feature Selection BIOLOGICAL DATA MINING Part E: Regression Analysis of Biological Data Part F Biological Data Clustering Part G: Biological Data Classification Part H: Association Rules Learning from Biological Data Part I: Text Mining and Application to Biological Data Part J: High-Performance Computing for Biological Data Mining Combining sound theory with practical applications in molecular biology, Biological Knowledge Discovery Handbook is ideal for courses in bioinformatics and biological KDD as well as for practitioners and professional researchers in computer science, life science, and mathematics.
Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309377722
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 473
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Book Description
Getting the right diagnosis is a key aspect of health care - it provides an explanation of a patient's health problem and informs subsequent health care decisions. The diagnostic process is a complex, collaborative activity that involves clinical reasoning and information gathering to determine a patient's health problem. According to Improving Diagnosis in Health Care, diagnostic errors-inaccurate or delayed diagnoses-persist throughout all settings of care and continue to harm an unacceptable number of patients. It is likely that most people will experience at least one diagnostic error in their lifetime, sometimes with devastating consequences. Diagnostic errors may cause harm to patients by preventing or delaying appropriate treatment, providing unnecessary or harmful treatment, or resulting in psychological or financial repercussions. The committee concluded that improving the diagnostic process is not only possible, but also represents a moral, professional, and public health imperative. Improving Diagnosis in Health Care, a continuation of the landmark Institute of Medicine reports To Err Is Human (2000) and Crossing the Quality Chasm (2001), finds that diagnosis-and, in particular, the occurrence of diagnostic errorsâ€"has been largely unappreciated in efforts to improve the quality and safety of health care. Without a dedicated focus on improving diagnosis, diagnostic errors will likely worsen as the delivery of health care and the diagnostic process continue to increase in complexity. Just as the diagnostic process is a collaborative activity, improving diagnosis will require collaboration and a widespread commitment to change among health care professionals, health care organizations, patients and their families, researchers, and policy makers. The recommendations of Improving Diagnosis in Health Care contribute to the growing momentum for change in this crucial area of health care quality and safety.
Author: Tjeerd M.H. Dijkstra
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 364216000X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 458
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Book Description
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics, PRIB 2010, held in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, in September 2010. The 38 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 46 submissions. The field of bioinformatics has two main objectives: the creation and maintenance of biological databases and the analysis of life sciences data in order to unravel the mysteries of biological function. Computer science methods such as pattern recognition, machine learning, and data mining have a great deal to offer the field of bioinformatics.
Author: Christina J Hopfe
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642138802
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
th The 15 International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems (NLDB 2010) took place during June 23–25 in Cardiff (UK). Since the first edition in 1995, the NLDB conference has been aiming at bringing together resear- ers, people working in industry and potential users interested in various applications of natural language in the database and information system area. However, in order to reflect the growing importance of accessing information from a diverse collection of sources (Web, Databases, Sensors, Cloud) in an equally wide range of contexts (- cluding mobile and tethered), the theme of the 15th International Conference on - plications of Natural Language to Information Systems 2010 was "Communicating with Anything, Anywhere in Natural Language. " Natural languages and databases are core components in the development of inf- mation systems. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques may substantially enhance most phases of the information system lifecycle, starting with requirement analysis, specification and validation, and going up to conflict resolution, result pr- essing and presentation. Furthermore, natural language-based query languages and user interfaces facilitate the access to information for all and allow for new paradigms in the usage of computerized services. Hot topics such as information retrieval (IR), software engineering applications, hidden Markov models, natural language interfaces and semantic networks and graphs imply a complete fusion of databases, IR and NLP techniques.
Author: Francisco M. Couto
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030138453
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 107
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Book Description
This open access book is a step-by-step introduction on how shell scripting can help solve many of the data processing tasks that Health and Life specialists face everyday with minimal software dependencies. The examples presented in the book show how simple command line tools can be used and combined to retrieve data and text from web resources, to filter and mine literature, and to explore the semantics encoded in biomedical ontologies. To store data this book relies on open standard text file formats, such as TSV, CSV, XML, and OWL, that can be open by any text editor or spreadsheet application. The first two chapters, Introduction and Resources, provide a brief introduction to the shell scripting and describe popular data resources in Health and Life Sciences. The third chapter, Data Retrieval, starts by introducing a common data processing task that involves multiple data resources. Then, this chapter explains how to automate each step of that task by introducing the required commands line tools one by one. The fourth chapter, Text Processing, shows how to filter and analyze text by using simple string matching techniques and regular expressions. The last chapter, Semantic Processing, shows how XPath queries and shell scripting is able to process complex data, such as the graphs used to specify ontologies. Besides being almost immutable for more than four decades and being available in most of our personal computers, shell scripting is relatively easy to learn by Health and Life specialists as a sequence of independent commands. Comprehending them is like conducting a new laboratory protocol by testing and understanding its procedural steps and variables, and combining their intermediate results. Thus, this book is particularly relevant to Health and Life specialists or students that want to easily learn how to process data and text, and which in return may facilitate and inspire them to acquire deeper bioinformatics skills in the future.
Author: Jonathan Oberlander
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478004355
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 227
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Book Description
The extensively updated and revised third edition of the bestselling Social Medicine Reader provides a survey of the challenging issues facing today's health care providers, patients, and caregivers by bringing together moving narratives of illness, commentaries by physicians, debates about complex medical cases, and conceptually and empirically based writings by scholars in medicine, the social sciences, and the humanities. Volume 1, Ethics and Cultures of Biomedicine, contains essays, case studies, narratives, fiction, and poems that focus on the experiences of illness and of clinician-patient relationships. Among other topics the contributors examine the roles and training of professionals alongside the broader cultures of biomedicine; health care; experiences and decisions regarding death, dying, and struggling to live; and particular manifestations of injustice in the broader health system. The Reader is essential reading for all medical students, physicians, and health care providers.
Author: Nicole Charles
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478022256
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 127
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Book Description
In 2014 Barbados introduced a vaccine to prevent certain strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV) and reduce the risk of cervical cancer in young women. Despite the disproportionate burden of cervical cancer in the Caribbean, many Afro-Barbadians chose not to immunize their daughters. In Suspicion, Nicole Charles reframes Afro-Barbadian vaccine refusal from a question of hesitancy to one of suspicion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, black feminist theory, transnational feminist studies and science and technology studies, Charles foregrounds Afro-Barbadians' gut feelings and emotions and the lingering trauma of colonial and biopolitical violence. She shows that suspicion, far from being irrational, is a fraught and generative affective orientation grounded in concrete histories of mistrust of government and coercive medical practices foisted on colonized peoples. By contextualizing suspicion within these longer cultural and political histories, Charles troubles traditional narratives of vaccine hesitancy while offering new entry points into discussions on racialized biopolitics, neocolonialism, care, affect, and biomedicine across the Black diaspora. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
Author: James Doucet-Battle
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452962316
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
A bold new indictment of the racialization of science Decades of data cannot be ignored: African American adults are far more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than white adults. But has science gone so far in racializing diabetes as to undermine the search for solutions? In a rousing indictment of the idea that notions of biological race should drive scientific inquiry, Sweetness in the Blood provides an ethnographic picture of biotechnology’s framings of Type 2 diabetes risk and race and, importantly, offers a critical examination of the assumptions behind the recruitment of African American and African-descent populations for Type 2 diabetes research. James Doucet-Battle begins with a historical overview of how diabetes has been researched and framed racially over the past century, chronicling one company’s efforts to recruit African Americans to test their new diabetes risk-score algorithm with the aim of increasing the clinical and market value of the firm’s technology. He considers African American reticence about participation in biomedical research and examines race and health disparities in light of advances in genomic sequencing technology. Doucet-Battle concludes by emphasizing that genomic research into sub-Saharan ancestry in fact underlines the importance of analyzing gender before attempting to understand the notion of race. No disease reveals this more than Type 2 diabetes. Sweetness in the Blood challenges the notion that the best approach to understanding, managing, and curing Type 2 diabetes is through the lens of race. It also transforms how we think about sugar, filling a neglected gap between the sugar- and molasses-sweetened past of the enslaved African laborer and the high-fructose corn syrup- and corporate-fed body of the contemporary consumer-laborer.
