Space Rover

Stewart Lawrence Sinclair. 2024. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc. [ISBN 978-1-5013-9995-4 159 pages, including index. US$14.95 (softcover).]

What are space rovers and what can they do for us? We generally think of a “space rover” as a machine to explore matter in outer space, but space rovers are also used to clean up nuclear waste like the 1986 Soviet Chernobyl site or serve as search and rescue vehicles for wreckage underwater like that of the Titanic or the more recent Oceangate Titan submersible. In the fictitious world of Disney, a space rover is a humanized robot “Wall-E” (Waste Allocation Load Lifter–Earth class) designed to manage collective waste on a dead Earth. Stewart Lawrence Sinclair does not open Space Rover with any mention of these topics. He does open the book with a description of the wreckage left on his step-grandfather’s ranch from the 2017 Ventura Thomas fire. While the book is dense with the history of planet exploration and details about all outer space rovers on both Mars and the Moon, Sinclair introduces the topic with a description of photos from of his step- grandfather. The photos include early equipment from NASA; original prototypes of lunar roving vehicles; and platforms that conveyed spacecrafts to the launch tower from the vehicle assembly building.

Sinclair recounts the history of space rovers through anecdotal stories from his life. In the first half of the book, he focuses on his father’s blended family’s work on moon rovers. The second half of the book focuses on information about Mars rovers and Sinclair’s relationship with Mr. Cooper, his mother’s childhood neighbor, who became a brilliant mentor and inspiration to Sinclair. The book is dedicated to him at the front.

One main function of a space rover is to collect samples of terrain for analysis on earth. These samples can provide geological information about the physical environment being explored. This can result in a theory of creation like that of the moon by the crew of the Apollo 15. Besides contributing to this discovery, lunar vehicles on the Apollo 15 mission also expanded the area they were able to explore, and the complexity of scientific equipment and communication they were able to employ.

With the utilitarian function of space rovers as scientific instruments, their use introduces philosophical and ethical questions about our role as humans in the universe. These questions are not new: Sinclair reviews the book “On the Silver Globe” (1903) by Jerszy Zulawski about adventurers on a quest to the Moon in search of Utopia (p. 21). Although this book was published over a hundred years ago, the questions it explores foreshadow current issues in exploration and astronomy.

Sinclair concludes his historical and factual recount of space rovers with a summary of the current philosophical issues with rovers. Humans yearn for something beyond us.

Julie Kinyoun

Julie Kinyoun is an on-call chemistry instructor at various community colleges in Southern California. An avid reader, she enjoys reviewing books that help her become a better educator.

    

Summer homemade ice cream

 We have the KitchenAid ice cream maker attachment and I’ve dredged it out of storage (well my linen cabinet anyway) for use this summer. My daughter is turning 13 in a few short weeks and loves any project in the kitchen. This flyer is old- a repost from long ago but seems appropriate now that we are using our homemade ice cream maker.

Enjoy!

Music and the Brain…..

Every Brain Needs Music: The Neuroscience of Making and Listening to Music. Larry S. Sherman and Dennis Plies. 2023. Columbia University Press. [ISBN 978- 0-231-20910-6. 270 pages, including index. US 32.00 (hardcover).]

Every Brain Needs Music: The Neuroscience of Making and Listening to Music is the compilation of a musical neuroscience collaboration—a synopsis of what science knows and does not yet know about how making, practicing, performing, listening, and learning music affects the brain. And beyond that, how those effects spill over into the human experience.

The book’s layout attracts the musical reader with its orchestra labels. The introduction is a “Prelude” followed by an “Overture,” a short summary of the book. Each subsequent chapter is labeled with a numerical “movement.” Music lovers will delight at the final chapter, “Coda,” knowing that the coda of a song is a short ending following one or more repeated sections.

The first “movement” begins with a detailed description of basic neuroscience. This includes the most common method of studying the active mind—a procedure called functional magnetic resonance (fMRI). It is very similar to a regular MRI but specific for the brain; it “detects the changes in the flow of blood through tiny vessels in different regions of the brain and changes in blood oxygenation, which represent changes in neuronal activity” (p. 11).

Many of the preliminary results discussed are based on fMRI studies—flawed as it is as a measure of brain activity. One significant discovery with this technique is that music alone (not other sounds) triggers specific areas of the brain. This could redefine what music is from a neuroscience perspective. Also considered was a qualitative survey taken of professional musicians of all types with the results being compiled into general trends within bar graphs included in Appendix A.

The other “movements” (chapters of this book) on practicing, performing, and listening are most relevant to many readers while the “movements” on improvising and composing pertain to a smaller percentage of their audience. All chapters discuss specific studies related to a comparison of music type and how fMRI results (or similar PET scanning) differ and how those results might be interpreted.

All readers who have ever practiced and performed music at any level can relate with the statement, “Mastering a piece can be an ongoing process of unfolding its meaning, in terms of both personal expression and the composer’s intention. It’s a search. It’s never boring, but always challenging in positive ways, for music holds poetic space” (p. 70).

Overall, this collaborative book presents a thorough synopsis of current musical neuroscience research. Unfortunately, much of it is still in the infancy stage as current technology only allows us to surmise connections between brain parts. The specific mechanisms and interchanges beyond the basic neuron level are not yet understood on a chemical level.

In the “Coda,” Larry Sherman states, “I’m struck by the amount of computational power it takes to perceive and respond to music and the fact that we still have much to learn about the underlying circuitry involved in how sound is processed in the auditory cortex before traveling to other areas of the brain” (p. 198). This coda is perhaps the prelude to yet another set of movements to be written when this is discovered.

Julie Kinyoun

Julie Kinyoun is an on-call chemistry instructor at various community colleges in Southern California. An avid reader, she enjoys reviewing books that help her become a better educator.

Subatomic Writing: 6 Fundamental Lessons to Make Language Matter

Jamie Zvirzdin. 2023. Johns Hopkins University Press. [260 pages, including index. ISBN 978-1-4214-4612-7. US$29.95 (softcover).]

“The demon wasn’t as ugly as I’d feared, although the cheerful IKEA lighting and the sun-yellow rug in our library can make anything seem cozier, even a blue-skinned night fiend (p. 7). A very dubious quotation from what is overall, a textbook about grammar, style, syntax, and punctuation—a summary and application of rules like those in The Chicago Manual of Style or Strunk and White.

In Subatomic Writing: 6 Fundamental Lessons to Make Language Matter, Jamie Zvirzdin outlines her knowledge of advanced writing in detail and provides students with exercises at the end of each chapter. By day, Zvirzdin is a science writer and educator at Johns Hopkins University and, by night, a program analyst for the University of Utah.

Her unique approach incorporates her knowledge of the mechanics of grammar and science with her love of narrative, action, and mystery into a one-of-a-kind textbook. Zvirzdin’s imagined demon is modeled after the famous hot/cold sorting demon of the brilliant physicist James Clerk Maxwell. The author uses her fabricated “demon” to suggest the metaphor of the book that “particles of language are like particles of matter” (p. 4). And when her house cat is “Schrodingered” (disappears) upon the threat of NOT creating a manuscript, Zvirzdin is forced to comply. To get her cat back by Halloween night, she composes six lessons. In each lesson, she takes a physics concept and likens it to some aspect of writing. Some of her metaphors work better than others, but for the reader it is the process of thinking about the validity of each that makes the book achieve its goal, to provide clarity and a source of communication between these elusive subjects that so desperately need each other for mutual success.

For example, there is a problem with her metaphor that likens writing to collisions between little balls: “Because if all the world is to be explained mechanically in terms of little balls (molecules, electrons, photons, gravitons, etc.), then the only way one ball affects another ball is if the little balls hit. If that is so, collision becomes the essence of physical interaction” (p. 16). Scientists who research molecular motion and thermodynamics will recognize this as an overgeneralization about their topic—most molecules do not behave this way and that is why equations like the ideal gas law are just that—for unreal, ideal situations.

After several chapters of rather exhaustive definitions of physics terms (like quarks and leptons), Zvirzdin concludes her textbook with a return of her demon. To conclude, the mystery of the “Schrodingered cat” resolves itself when Zvirzdin submits her manuscript to the demo, and the cat miraculously reappears. A clever application of the statistically disappearing feline of quantum mechanics.

The narrative approach to Subatomic Writing provides humor and a breath of fresh air in an otherwise arduous, backbreaker science communication textbook. Zvirzdin tackles two challenging subjects by likening them to each other hoping to bring them in closer collaboration: a demon of a task.

Julie Kinyoun

Julie Kinyoun is an on-call chemistry instructor at various community colleges in Southern California. An avid reader, she enjoys reviewing books that help her become a better educator.

Book Review: Partial Truth

Partial Truths: How Fractions Distort Our Thinking

James C. Zimring. 2022. Columbia University Press. [ISBN 978-0-231-20138- 4. 244 pages, including index. US$28.00 (hardcover).]

In a world of exponentially growing data in all subjects, fractions and percentages are more important for both official and casual communication. In Partial Truths: How Fractions Distort Our Thinking, James C. Zimring claims that everything from scientific research to new age beliefs are distorted by bias created from numbers. By omitting sample size, failing to create appropriate data, or even manipulating existing data, our society derives faulty conclusions. His analysis of how and why this happens examines evolutionary human psychology and how misperceptions can lead to propaganda and polarization of society.

In this twelve-chapter book divided into three sections, Zimring lays out his arguments about data misperceptions. In Part 1, he explains how anecdotal evidence can persuade people with a sample size too small for valid conclusions, called “ignoring the denominator” (p. 17). A relevant example of this occurred when then President Trump claimed the United States had more cases of Covid-19 than other countries because we were testing more people. Trump ignored the denominator by failing to communicate that our rate of infection (cases per total number of people tested) was higher than other countries. Zimring goes into more depth on possible ways the data could have been collected and analyzed to derive different conclusions.

Presentation of data is just as important as our perception of it. Zimring’s focus on human psychology and perception renders his title choice a bit misleading—the book might more accurately be called Partial Truth: How Fractions and Human Psychology Distort Our Thinking. One simple psychology concept introduced and carried is that of a heuristic. “A heuristic is a process by which human minds rapidly solve complex problems by replacing them with analogous but simpler problems” (p. 32). These mental shortcuts can play tricks on our minds and influence how we formulate conclusions. Confirmation bias is another important psychological concept that “... is not a belief. Rather, confirmation bias is a process by which we reinforce our beliefs—any beliefs—regardless of origin or accuracy” (p. 42).

Part 2 focuses on how heuristics, confirmation bias, and other tendencies influence the interpretation of data that often leads to faulty outcomes. Focus areas include identification of criminals, invasion of Iraq, interpretation of coded messages in ancient texts, new age methods, evolution/natural designer arguments and, most importantly, the physical sciences.

Part 3 discusses how we can try to influence the way people think and avoid harmful polarizations of disagreement often based on the same available data. Methodology includes “epistemic network models” (p. 178) of actors in simulated social networks enacting various scenarios. Social networks analyze the effects of human tendencies, including confirmation bias and heuristics to arrive at conclusions.

In conclusion, Zimring summarizes, “We need the availability heuristic, and confirmation bias, and all of the other forms of misperceiving the fraction described herein. They fuel our advances as well as lead to our demise” (p 201). A contradictory statement of sorts alludes to the complexity of trying to decipher something that should be logical and yet is not.

Julie Kinyoun

Julie Kinyoun is an on-call chemistry instructor at various community colleges in Southern California. An avid reader, she enjoys reviewing books that help her become a better educator.

A Book Review about Balance

Balance: How It Works and What It Means

Paul Thagard. 2022. Columbia University Press. [ISBN 978-0-231-20558-0. 336 pages, including index. US$32.00 (hardcover).]

A laboratory balance is a simple, one- dimensional instrument dating back to ancient science. In its earliest form, the apparatus achieved balance with equal masses on both sides—adding mass to either side tipped it out of balance. Paul Thagard elaborates in his book Balance: How It Works and What It Means, that although the topic of balance dates to this ancient apparatus, it expands into immensely rich, multidimensional areas. In his book, the author first explains scientifically what balance is from a biological and medical perspective and then shifts into an evaluation of balance metaphors that help us fill in the gaps of our scientific knowledge—and whether these metaphors are strong, bogus, or even toxic to culture.

Inspired by Thagard’s own bout of vertigo, the first four chapters explain the science behind human balance and some of the common conditions that result as a breakdown of the mechanisms. He continues to use his personal experience with vertigo as an example, or the “experience of illusory motion: something seems to be moving even though it is not” (p. 42). This balance malfunction usually includes a mismatch of signals from all the neurological functions involved—the inner ear canals, vision, and hair cells send information to the brain—when vertigo occurs these signals do not match, thus creating a spinning sensation.

In the section linking balance to feelings, Thagard applies his balance mechanisms to the expanding field of mind and body, or the origins of consciousness. “My . . . theory explains why balance is usually unconscious but enters consciousness when problems arise. Unlike (other theories) my theory also explains why different imbalance experiences such as vertigo and nausea come with different feelings” (p. 105).

In chapter 5, Balance shifts to an explanation of metaphor and its role in understanding balance. Thagard states that literal mechanisms only explain basic biological and medical applications of balance, yet it is much richer than that. “But balance concepts flourish in other areas of human thought, including science (chemical equilibrium), medicine (balanced diet), psychology (stable personality), art (balanced composition), and philosophy (reflective equilibrium)” (p. 106).

In this lengthy analysis covering many subjects regarding balance, Thagard again references vertigo. Most notably in his analysis of the film Vertigo starring James Stewart and Kim Novak. His observation, “Hitchcock largely flubbed the science of vertigo, but he powerfully portrayed the balance disorder of dizziness triggered by heights. Just as effectively, he presented metaphorical vertigo provoked by uncertainty in romantic relationships and especially by astonishing events that have no explanation” (p. 232).

In conclusion, the author’s analysis of balance in philosophy challenges the assumption that being out of balance is not entirely negative—the idea of metabalance. This implies that “leading a meaningful life requires finding a balance between balance and imbalance” (p. 269). Thagard concludes by suggesting that a satisfying life requires an element of both.

Julie Kinyoun

Julie Kinyoun is an on-call chemistry instructor at various community colleges in Southern California. An avid reader, she enjoys reviewing books that help her become a better educator.

Book Review about Healthcare Leadership

 

Human-Centered Leadership in Healthcare: Evolution of a Revolution

Kay Kennedy, Lucy Leclerc, and Susan Campis. 2022. Morgan James Publishing. [ISBN 978-1-63195-553-2. 236 pages. US$18.95 (softcover).]

Nurses in a 21st century workforce encounter new and unique problems daily: complex technology, new medicines and treatments, and a constant pressure to meet higher standards with ever shrinking resources. Conquering these issues requires effective modern nursing leadership that meets a wider variety of needs than a traditional top-down style. Nurses Kay Kennedy, Lucy Leclerc, and Susan Campis assert that their new model of nursing leadership—the human-centered model—is up to the challenge.

“Human-Centered Leadership in Healthcare embodies the principles of complexity science. It [is] different from traditional leadership in that the leader is embedded in the system. The influencers and innovators are those at the point of care” (p. 1). These three authors provide evidence for their leadership theory with a compelling Institutional Review Board- approved clinical study that yielded qualitative results. Results included anecdotes and narratives, along with literature studies and historical perspectives. Although they provide the reader with a citation to investigate the research study further, the authors’ study summary is somewhat limited. Improvements could include details that would make their conclusions more lucid; for example, the exact length of the study is omitted as well as details about the content of the focus groups. It is mentioned that they categorized the responses into a matrix and “coded” them, but this process is not explained thoroughly. Their arguments would be more compelling if more of the results were directly linked to the conclusions of their leadership model.

From this research study, the authors formulated their theory of leadership based on the idea that self- care, self-awareness, mindfulness, and emotional intelligence are all springboards upon which a leader embeds themself within a healthcare system. “Human- Centered Leaders require intentional development of skills that support the leader’s effectiveness and the ability to create a sustainable culture of Excellence, Trust and Caring” (p. 131). The authors’ outline the attributes of excellence as embodied by the Awakener: a motivator, coach, mentor, architect, and advocate (p. 131). They then list the characteristics of trust embodied by the Connector: collaborator, supporter, edge walker, engineer, and authentic communicator (p. 98). Concluding their leadership model by listing the components of caring embodied by the Upholder: mindful, others-oriented, emotionally aware, socially and organizationally aware, and personally well and healthy (p. 115). The authors’ primary argument is that a truly effective leader in nursing must have all these skills, as well as the ability to discern when it is appropriate to emphasize one over another.

Overall, Human-Centered Leadership in Healthcare: Evolution of a Revolution is an excellent resource for nurses. However, the terms and language used assume the reader has experience in both healthcare and leadership. Including a quick-reference glossary with leadership terms and nursing acronyms would be helpful for someone new to both fields. Many skills described like reflective journaling, mindfulness, and appreciative inquiry are useful in developing leaders in other service professions aside from nursing. With this leadership model, Kennedy, Leclerc, and Campis have opened the door to their “evolution of a revolution.”

Julie Kinyoun

Julie Kinyoun is an on-call chemistry instructor at various community colleges in Southern California. An avid reader, she enjoys reviewing books that help her become a better educator.

Making Research Matter

 Health and Care Researchers

Tara Lamont. 2021. Bristol University Press [ISBN 978-1-4473-6115-2. 198 pages, including index. US$34.95 (softcover).]

“Researchers start their work wanting to make a difference. The extra steps and actions set out in this book and elsewhere to reach and engage people in meaningful ways, paying attention to story, language and appropriate channels are part of the job of a researcher in the 21st century. Research findings should not stay in the library or on the university bookshelf. They should be translated and worked up with the right communities into new policies, decisions, conversations and practice” (p. 166). This summary statement of Making Research Matter: Steps to Impact for Health and Care Researchers by Tara Lamont embodies her argument that the relevance of current research and its resulting impact on society are critical now more than ever.

Lamont’s introduction uses her own storytelling tools of chapter 8, the example of Florence Nightingale and her report to the Indian Sanitary Commission, published in 1863. The “pull” Nightingale created for her report included concise and orderly summaries with vivid images. These briefs were circulated among people like John Stuart Mill and even Queen Victoria- people whose support she would need later in promoting the policy and reforms suggested in her report. Nightingale forged ties with decision makers who could implement reforms themselves or communicate with others for influential changes. And she did it all without Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn! It is proof that the skills of impact for research resonate then as they do now despite the vast difference in the technological tools available.

Making Research Matter starts each chapter using the Why, What, Who, When and How format. The Why follows the introduction to clarify the overall importance of her book. In the current information and digital climate, the sheer amount of research available has increased exponentially. It is important for people to discern valuable research from either false data or irrelevant results. Valuable research involves asking the right questions of the population involved. One example compared mechanical devices to manual compressions in treating cardiac arrest in an ambulance. A high-quality research study proved that the outcomes for each showed negligible difference, and therefore the cost of implementation was not worth it. However, when staff were interviewed, they said that the technology allowed them to sit securely in a seatbelt which made them feel safer. This detail addressed a separate issue from cost analysis and could only be determined through interviewing the right people.

Lamont’s arguments for increased communication and interaction between researchers, policy makers, and lay people describes an ideal culture of collaboration, support for necessary reform and openness to change. It is her hope that researchers in all areas of health and care examine their skills, interest, and investment in this type of exchange for the enhanced quality, relevance, and implementation of valuable research findings into all areas of healthcare and wellness.