N.Y. Times 10 Best Books of 2007
The New York Times came out with its list of the Ten Best Books of 2007 on Sunday. Here’s the list.
Category: Books
Quality Improvement Tools & Techniques
For those of you in the operations research side of the medical care world, you may recognize an interesting textbook by Peter Mears title Quality Improvement Tools and Techniques. The book is a good reference tool, but is a little difficult to slug through. It has so many graphs, outlines, quotations, that there is little…
The Places in Between
I recently finished reading the fascinating book The Places in Between by Rory Stewart (see also NY Times review). The book describes the authors journey 2002 journal between Herat and Kabul in the middle of winter just after 9-11. Mr. Stewart gives a rarely seen glimpse of life for rural Afghanis and how they view…
A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper
I recently finished reading an interesting book titled A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper by John Allen Paulos. Published in 1995, the book employs simplified mathematical and statistical techniques in order to ascertain the validity of many statements published in the press. There are also numerous examples from the arena of health care reporting. For instance:…
Overtreated
“In its 1999 report To Err is Human, the Institute of Medicine report estimated that as many as ninety-eight thousand Americans are killed each year by medical error. Another ninety thousand to four hundred thousand patients are harmed or killed by the incorrect use of a drug–they received the wrong drug, or the wrong dose…
A Random Walk
I just finished reading Burton Malkiel’s influential book A Random Walk Down Wall Street. Originally published in 1973, the book was one of the first to advocate for the creation of a “no-load, minimum-management-fee mutual fund that simply buys the hundreds of stocks making up the broad stock-market averages and does no trading from security…
The Fox in the Henhouse
“We want the protection the government provides, and we want freedom. Put those together, and what we really want is for our government, and the whole public sector, from firefighters to voluntary organizations, to be both responsible and responsive.” I recently finished reading the book The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy by…
Globalization and Sushi
For those who rant about the evils of globalization, let us examine the Sushi Economy. NPR’s Marketplace discusses The Sushi Economy book with its author Sasha Issenberg. Mr. Issenberg talks about how globalization has made the sushi industry a reality in the modern world. Technological improvements in travel and communication have lead to an increased…
Against Intellectual Property: Pharmaceuticals
“…in a similar way, the slow growth of the coloring industry in the U.S. before the First World War was largely due to patent protection: most patents were held by the large German companies, such as Bayer, BASF, Hoechst and IG Farben. The chemical industry in the US was so underdeveloped, that during the First…