Science & Technology Audiobooks

The Support Group: Connection, Hope, and Healing for Patients and Providers

Shanda Blackmon is a pioneer in thoracic surgery, a skilled professional dedicated to providing the highest quality of care. But as a young doctor early in her career, she was overwhelmed. Her team was working at full capacity, yet Dr. Blackmon struggled to meet the needs of her many patients. Then one day at clinic she noticed patients trading stories in the waiting room, sharing not just valuable advice, but empathy and encouragement. That was the genesis of the support group, a safe place where people dealing with cancer and its aftermath could talk openly about what they were going through. It was a lightbulb experience for Dr. Blackmon. Once she saw the difference a committed ally could make in a patient’s long-term survivorship, Dr. Blackmon sought to extend the principles of support to her colleagues. Physicians, surgeons, and other healthcare workers endure long hours under constant stress and can succumb burnout due to the tidal wave of administrative work, patient complications, and constant pressure from administration to meet impossible demands. One doctor commits suicide every day in the United States, the highest suicide rate of any profession. Understanding and allyship can make a big difference in their lives too. An indispensable resource written by an experienced professional, The Support Group takes a candid look at the role of support in our healthcare practices and offers a workable model for patients, caregivers, and providers alike.

Shanda Blackmon, Shanda H. Blackmon (Author), Shanda H. Blackmon, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Barking Up the Right Tree: The Science and Practice of Positive Dog Training

When Dr. Ian Dunbar introduced his SIRIUS® Puppy Training in 1982, dog training mostly comprised punishing adult dogs for bad habits and lack of compliance. Dunbar focused on verbally cuing and creatively luring to achieve desirable behavior and using 'life rewards'-sniffing, walking, play with dogs, and interactive games-to reinforce speedy compliance and good habits from the outset. His 'dog's point of view' approach revolutionized the field, and today there are few trainers who have not been strongly influenced by it. While positive reinforcement is now widely adopted, this new book details how other reward-training techniques have strayed from Dunbar's original, quick and easy, highly effective lure-reward approach for teaching dogs ESL, in which we can verbally cue specific responses, offer heartfelt praise for success, and give guidance when dogs err. With Dunbar's method, we can teach dogs when and where to eliminate, what to chew, when and for how long to bark, and when and how to appropriately let off steam. Barking Up the Right Tree offers proof that aversive punishment seldom works to eliminate undesirable behavior or to get the dog back on track. Dunbar presents numerous nonaversive yet highly effective solutions for misbehavior and noncompliance-simply by using the words you teach, and without even raising your voice.

Dr. Ian Dunbar (Author), Elliot Fitzpatrick (Narrator)

Audiobook

Swallowed by the Great Land: And Other Dispatches From Alaska's Frontier

'Seth Kantner illuminates an Alaska most of us will never know.' -Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever When Seth Kantner's Ordinary Wolves was published it was a literary revelation of sorts. In a raw, stylized voice it told the story of a white boy growing up with homesteading parents in Arctic Alaska and trying to reconcile his largely subsistence and Native-style upbringing with the expectations and realities tied to his race. It hit numerous bestseller lists, was critically acclaimed, and won a number of awards. Seth's nonfiction second book, the memoir Shopping for Porcupine, was even more compelling for many-the same raw details of a homesteading upbringing, but intensely personal. Now, in Swallowed by the Great Land, he once again brings us into his lyrical wilderness existence. Swallowed by the Great Land features slice-of-life essays that further reveal the duality in the author's own life today, and also in the village and community that he inhabits-a mosaic of all life on the tundra. Unique characters, village life, wilderness and the larger landscape, a warming Arctic, and hunting and other aspects of subsistence living are all explored in varied yet intimate stories.

Seth Kantner (Author), Gabriel Vaughan (Narrator)

Audiobook

Everest: The West Ridge

In 1963, Jim Whittaker became the first American to summit Everest via the South Col route. Roughly two weeks after Whittaker's achievement, Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld, fellow American mountaineers on the same expedition, became the first climbers ever to summit the world's highest peak via the dangerous and forbidding West Ridge-a route on which only a handful of climbers have since succeeded. This special fiftieth anniversary edition reintroduces the adventure in a larger format by members of the expedition, including leader Norman G. Dyhrenfurth and team doctor Jim Lester. In addition to a new foreword by Jon Krakauer, this volume also features a new preface by Hornbein along with a series of prefaces he wrote for earlier editions, including the original from 1965.

Thomas Hornbein (Author), Tom Beyer (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Best of Radical Candor, Vol. 1: Get Stuff Done

A show about how to kick ass at work without losing your humanityThe Radical Candor® approach—Caring Personally while Challenging Directly—can move you from a command-and-control culture to one of collaboration. Developed by Kim Scott, Radically Candid guidance is feedback that’s both kind and clear, specific and sincere. The Radical Candor Get Stuff Done Wheel: Guide Your Team To Achieve ResultsThe Get Stuff Done Wheel has 7 steps: Listen, Clarify, Debate, Decide, Persuade, Implement, and Learn. When run effectively, the GSD Wheel will enable your team to achieve more collectively than anyone could ever dream of achieving individually. Listen: Your team should know what the company is trying to achieve, and they likely have some of the best ideas for what your team should be achieving. First, listen to their ideas in trying to figure out which goals your team should be pursuing. If you can build a culture where people listen to one another, they will start to fix things you as the boss never even knew were broken. Clarify: Remember that new ideas are fragile and therefore easily squished. A critical role a manager can play is to augment the voice of their team by helping the team clarify their ideas and by clarifying the manager’s understanding of the ideas. Debate: Allowing the team time and space to publicly debate the ideas is a critical step. Guidelines for good debate include making the discussion about the ideas and not about egos. It’s about finding the best answer together, not about who won the debate. Decide: The best bosses often do not decide themselves, but rather create a clear decision-making process that empowers people closest to the facts to make as many decisions as possible. Not only does that result in better decisions, but it also results in better morale. Persuade: This isn’t easy, and it’s vital to get it right. Persuasion at this stage can feel unnecessary and make the decider resentful of people on the team who aren’t fully in agreement. The decider has painstakingly gone through the listen, clarify, and debate steps and made a decision. Why doesn’t everyone else get why it’s obvious we should do this—or at least be willing to fall in line? But expecting others to implement a decision without being persuaded that it’s the right thing to do is a recipe for terrible results. And don’t imagine that you can step in and simply tell everyone to get in line behind a decision, whether you have made it or somebody else has. Implement: As the boss, part of your job is to take a lot of the “collaboration tax” on yourself so that your team can spend more time implementing. The responsibilities you have as a boss take up a tremendous amount of time. One of the hardest things about being a boss is balancing these responsibilities with the work you need to do personally in your area of expertise. Here are the four things I’ve learned about getting this balance right: Don’t waste your team’s time; keep the “dirt under your fingernails;” block time to implement and fight meeting proliferation. Learn: By the time you’ve reached Learn—the last spot on the Get Sh*t Done Wheel—you and your team have put in a ton of work, you’ve achieved something, and you want it to be great. And it is human nature for us to become attached—often unreasonably attached—to projects we’ve invested a lot of time and energy into. It can take almost superhuman discipline to step back, acknowledge when our results could be a lot better or are simply no good, and learn from the experience.

Amy Sandler, Brandi Neal, Jason Rosoff, Kim Scott (Author), Amy Sandler, Brandi Neal, Jason Rosoff, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America

A fascinating history of the profitable paradox of the American outdoor experience: visiting nature first requires shopping No escape to nature is complete without a trip to an outdoor recreational store or a browse through online offerings. This is the irony of the American outdoor experience: visiting wild spaces supposedly untouched by capitalism first requires shopping. With consumers spending billions of dollars on clothing and equipment each year as they seek out nature, the American outdoor sector grew over the past 150 years from a small collection of outfitters to an industry contributing more than 2 percent of the nation's economic output. Rachel S. Gross argues that this success was predicated not just on creating functional equipment but also on selling an authentic, anticommercial outdoor identity. In other words, shopping for the woods was also about being-or becoming-the right kind of person. Demonstrating that outdoor culture is commercial culture, Gross examines Americans' journey toward outdoor expertise by tracing the development of the nascent outdoor goods industry, the influence of World War II on its growth, and the boom years of outdoor businesses.

Rachel S. Gross (Author), Melissa Redmond (Narrator)

Audiobook

Israel and the Cyber Threat: How the Startup Nation Became a Global Cyber Power

In Israel and the Cyber Threat, Charles D. ('Chuck') Freilich, Matthew S. Cohen, and Gabi Siboni provide a detailed and comprehensive study of Israel's cyber strategy, tracing it from its origins to the present. They analyze Israel's highly advanced civil and military cyber capabilities and organizational structures to offer insights into what other countries can learn from Israel's experience. To achieve this, they explore how and why Israel has been able to build a remarkable cyber ecosystem and turn itself, despite its small size, into a global cyber power. The book further examines the major cyber threats facing Israel, including the most in-depth look at Iranian cyber policies and attacks; Israel's defensive and offensive capabilities and the primary attacks it has conducted; capacity building; international cooperation; and the impact of Israel's strategic culture on its cyber prowess. By placing Israel's actions in the realm of international relations theory, the book sheds light on many of the major questions in the field regarding cyber policies. The most authoritative work to date on Israeli cyber strategy, this book provides a comprehensive look at the major actions Israel has taken in cyberspace. It also places them in the broader context of global cyber developments to help listeners understand state behavior in cyberspace.

Charles D. Freilich, Gabi Siboni, Matthew S. Cohen (Author), Dina Pearlman (Narrator)

Audiobook

Climate Uncertainty and Risk: Rethinking Our Response

World leaders have made a forceful statement that climate change is the greatest challenge facing humanity in the twenty-first century. However, little progress has been made in implementing policies to address climate change. In Climate Uncertainty and Risk, eminent climate scientist Judith Curry shows how we can break this gridlock. This book helps us rethink the climate change problem, the risks we are facing and how we can respond to these challenges. Understanding the deep uncertainty surrounding the climate change problem helps us to better assess the risks. This book shows how uncertainty and disagreement can be part of the decision-making process. It provides a road map for formulating pragmatic solutions. Climate Uncertainty and Risk is a must-listen for those concerned about the environment, professionals dealing with climate change, and our national leaders.

Judith Curry (Author), Wendy Tremont King (Narrator)

Audiobook

Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age

The internet as we know it is broken. Here's how we can seize back control of our lives from the corporate algorithms and create a better internet-before it's too late. It was once a utopian dream. But today's internet, despite its conveniences and connectivity, is the primary cause of a pervasive unease that has taken hold in the U.S. and other democratic societies. It's why youth suicide rates are rising, why politics has become toxic, and why our most important institutions are faltering. Information is the lifeblood of any society, and our current system for distributing it is corrupted at its heart. Everything comes down to our ability to communicate openly and trustfully with each other. But, thanks to the dominant digital platforms and the ways they distort human behavior, we have lost that ability-while, at the same time, we've been robbed of the data that is rightfully ours. The roots of this crisis, argue Frank McCourt and Michael Casey, lie in the prevailing order of the internet. In plain but forceful language, the authors-a civic entrepreneur and an acclaimed journalist-show how a centralized system controlled by a small group of for-profit entities has set this catastrophe in motion and eroded our personhood. And then they describe a groundbreaking solution to reclaim it: rather than superficial, patchwork regulations, we must reimagine the very architecture of the internet. The resulting "third-generation internet" would replace the status quo with a new model marked by digital property rights, autonomy, and ownership. Inspired by historical calls to action like Thomas Paine's Common Sense, Our Biggest Fight argues that we must act now to embed the core values of a free, democratic society in the internet of tomorrow. Do it right and we will finally, properly, unlock its immense potential.

Frank H. Mccourt (Author), Frank H. Mccourt, Jonathan Beville, Michael J. Casey (Narrator)

Audiobook

Splinters of Infinity: Cosmic Rays and the Clash of Two Nobel Prize-Winning Scientists over the Secr

Set in a revolutionary era of physics and science when a series of rapid-fire discoveries was upending our understanding of the universe, Splinters of Infinity by Mark Wolverton tells a little-known story: the tale of two of America's foremost physicists, Robert Millikan (1868-1953) and Arthur Compton (1892-1962), who found themselves locked in an intense, often deeply personal, conflict about cosmic rays. Confirmed in 1912, cosmic rays-enigmatic forms of penetrating radiation-seemed to raise all new questions about the origins of the universe, but they also offered the potential to explain everything-or reveal the existence of God. In engaging, accessible prose, Wolverton takes the listener through the twists and turns of the Millikan-Compton debate, one of the first major public examples of how heated the controversies among scientists could become-and the lengths that scientists would go to settle their disputes. Along the way, Wolverton probes the forever elusive question, still unanswered today, about where cosmic rays come from and what they reveal about black holes, distant galaxies, the existence of dark matter and dark energy, and the birth of the universe, concluding that these splinters of infinity may not hold the keys to the secret of creation but do bring us ever closer to it.

Mark Wolverton (Author), Steve Marvel (Narrator)

Audiobook

Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines: Our Lifelong Relationship with Fungi

From beneficial yeasts that aid digestion to toxic molds that cause disease, we are constantly navigating a world filled with fungi. Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines explores the amazing ways fungi interact with our bodies, showing how our health and well-being depend on an immense ecosystem of yeasts and molds inside and all around us. Nicholas Money takes listeners on a guided tour of a marvelous unseen realm, describing how our immune systems are engaged in continuous conversation with the teeming mycobiome inside the body, and how we can fall prey to serious and even life-threatening infections when this peaceful coexistence is disturbed. He also sheds light on our complicated relationship with fungi outside the body, from wild mushrooms and cultivated molds that have been staples of the human diet for millennia to the controversial experimentation with magic mushrooms in the treatment of depression. Drawing on the latest advances in mycology, Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines reveals what scientists are learning about the importance of fungi to our lives, from their vital role in supporting the ecosystems on which we depend to their emerging uses in lifesaving medicine.

Nicholas P. Money (Author), Nicholas P. Money (Narrator)

Audiobook

Radiolab Greatest Hits, Vol. 1

Radiolab is one of the most popular and longest-running shows on NPR, with 1.8 million listeners per week and over 500,000 podcast subscribers. Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Latif Nasser, Lulu Miller (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook