Books I'm Reading

A couple of Christmas books I'm reading:

#1. Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking by Thomas Kida. So far a really good book. Kida is a professor in the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst and specializes in decision making. The six mistakes are as follows:

We prefer stories to statistics
We seek to confirm, not to question our ideas
We rarely appreciate the role of chance and coincidence in shaping events
We sometimes misperceive the world around us
We tend to oversimplify our thinking
We have faulty memories.

#2. Snake Oil Science: The Truth About Complementary and Alternative Medicine by R. Barker Bausell. Dr. Bausell is a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore and was research director of the National Institutes of Health-funded Complementary and Alternative Medicine Specialized Research Center. He specializes in research design.

This book is largely about the placebo effect and how it affects the proper design and interpretation of clinical research trials.

Two other books I'm reading:

Dearly Devoted Dexter by Jeff Lindsay and I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. If you haven't read the Dexter series by Jeff Lindsay, I highly recommend that you do. I Am Legend will be the first graphic novel I've ever read.

Oh, I can't leave out this one. I'm teaching a section of Anatomy and Physiology next semester so I'm boning up on the subject. The textbook is Anatomy and Physiology: From Science to Life by Jenkins, Kemnitz and Tortora. Quite a readable book as it was written for students in the allied health sciences. I'm not really big on using textbooks to teach science because I think all you need to know can be found on the internets.