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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Analyzing asthma care in the twenty-first century Asthma is not a new problem, but today the disease is being reshaped by changing ecologies, healthcare systems, medical sciences, and built environments. A global epidemic, asthma (and our efforts to control it) demands an analysis attentive to its complexity, its contextual nature, and the care practices that emerge from both. At once clearly written and theoretically insightful, Breathtaking provides a sweeping ethnographic account of asthma’s many dimensions through the lived experiences of people who suffer from disordered breathing, as well as by considering their support networks, from secondary school teachers and coaches, to breathing educators and new smartphone applications designed for asthma control. Against the backdrop of unbreathable environments, Alison Kenner describes five modes of care that illustrate how asthma is addressed across different sociocultural scales. These modes of care often work in combination, building from or preceding one another. Tensions also exist between them, a point reflected by Kenner’s description of the structural conditions and material rhythms that shape everyday breathing, chronic disease, and our surrounding environments. She argues that new modes of distributed, collective care practices are needed to address asthma as a critical public health issue in the time of climate change.

What was the world like for people thousands of years ago? How can we know? Through fiction? This is a work of literary criticism, and more. It begins with a discussion of the problem of authenticity and then considers twelve pieces of fiction that depict human prehistory: H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau, Pierre Boulle's The Planet of the Apes, Jules Verne's The Village in the Treetops, Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Land That Time Forgot, the struggle for legitimacy in Wells' "The Grisly Folk," the Tasmanian analogue in Lester Del Rey's "The Day Is Done," William Golding's The Inheritors, "the promise of humanity" in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the theme of "a god among the heathen" in Wells' "The Lord of the Dynamos" and other works, Jean Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear, J.H. Rosny-Aine's Quest for Fire, and Wells' The Time Machine: An Invention. A final chapter considers the paleoanthropologist as literary critic.