An examination of postwar medicine based on the notion of the biomedical platform--the theoretical and clinical meeting ground between the normal and the pathological.
The corpus-based studies in this volume explore biomedical research writing in English from a variety of perspectives. The articles in this collection delve into the lexicographic issues involved in building an electronic database of collocations and lexical bundles, offer insight on the teaching and learning of prototypical multiword units of meaning in biomedical discourse, and view written scientific English through the lens of such diverse fields as phraseology, metaphor, gender and discourse analysis. The research presented in this book forms the theoretical and methodological foundation of SciE-Lex, a lexical database of collocations and prefabricated expressions designed to help scientists write scientific papers in English accurately. The concluding chapter on FrameNet addresses frame semantics, whose application to the cross-linguistic study of scientific language will open new and promising avenues of research in the study of specialized languages.
This book draws on medical sociology and science and technology studies to develop a novel conceptual framework for understanding innovation processes, using the case study of deep brain stimulation in paediatric neurology. It addresses key questions, including: How are promising and potentially disruptive new health technologies integrated into busy resource-constrained clinical contexts? What activities are involved in establishing a new clinical service? How do social and cultural forces shape these services, and importantly, how are understandings of ‘health’ and ‘illness’ reconfigured in the process? The book explores how the ideals of patient-centred medicine influence innovation in the clinic, and it introduces the concept of patient-centred proto-platforms. It argues that patient-centred innovation can constitute an expansion of medical power, as the clinical gaze is directed not only towards the body but also towards the patient as a social being. This will be an innovative and insightful read for academics and advanced students, as well as health service researchers with an interest in technology adoption processes.
Health research and health care practice are radically transforming as governments invest more in large scale, national and international health projects with increasing levels of interdisciplinarity as populations age and as nations grow wealthier. This volume examines the structures and dynamics of scientific collaboration in health research and health care. Bringing together detailed research from the US, Canada, Europe and Japan, Collaboration Across Health Research and Medical Care sheds light on the features, environments and relationships that characterise collaboration in health care and research, exploring changing patterns of collaboration and examining the causes and consequences of team work in the health domain. With attention to the increasingly porous boundaries between health care and research, the book not only investigates research settings, but also considers the manner in which knowledge produced in laboratories and clinics is translated into day-to-day medical and care practice and health initiatives. It offers a rich examination of the political, technical and organisational facets of collaboration and the implications of changes in collaboration for every day treatment and practice, Collaboration Across Health Research and Medical Care will be of interest to scholars of sociology and science and technology studies, as well as those working in the field of health policy and research.
Body area networks (BANs) are networks of wireless sensors and medical devices embedded in clothing, worn on or implanted in the body, and have the potential to revolutionize healthcare by enabling pervasive healthcare. However, due to their critical applications affecting human health, challenges arise when designing them to ensure they are safe for the user, sustainable without requiring frequent battery replacements and secure from interference and malicious attacks. This book lays the foundations of how BANs can be redesigned from a cyber-physical systems perspective (CPS) to overcome these issues. Introducing cutting-edge theoretical and practical techniques and taking into account the unique environment-coupled characteristics of BANs, the book examines how we can re-imagine the design of safe, secure and sustainable BANs. It features real-world case studies, suggestions for further investigation and project ideas, making it invaluable for anyone involved in pervasive and mobile healthcare, telemedicine, medical apps and other cyber-physical systems.
Presenting a new way of thinking about the risks of medical innovation, this volume considers the issues from a social historical perspective, and studies specific cases in their respective contexts.
In the last several decades, there has been a surge of interest in expertise in the social scientific, philosophical, and legal literatures. While it is tempting to attribute this surge of interest in expertise to the emergence and consolidation of a "knowledge society," "post-industrial society," or "network society," it is more likely that the debates about expertise are symptomatic of significant change and upheaval. As the number of contenders for expert status has increased, as the bases for their claims have become more diverse, and as the struggles between these would-be experts intensified, expertise became problematic and contested. In The Oxford Handbook of Expertise and Democratic Politics, Gil Eyal and Thomas Medvetz have brought together a broad group of scholars who have engaged substantively and theoretically with debates regarding the nature of expertise and the social roles of experts to examine these areas within sociology and allied disciplines. The analyses take an historical and relational approach to the topic and are motivated by the sense that growing mistrust in experts represents a danger to democratic politics today. The chapters will be organized into three general parts: key theoretical and historical debates, the politics of expertise, and expertise within and across professional, disciplinary, legal, and intellectual spheres. Among the topics considered here are the value and relevance of the boundary between experts and laypeople; the causes and consequences of mistrust in experts; the meanings and social uses of objectivity; and the significance of recent transformations in the organization of the professions. Bringing together investigations from social scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars into the political dimensions of expertise, this Handbook connects interdisciplinary work done in science and technology studies with the more classic concerns, topics, and concepts of sociologists of professions and intellectuals.
A critical study of America's tranquilizer culture ranges from the 1950s to the present day as it looks at Americans' increasing dependence on pills and prescriptions to ensure peace of mind, traces the growth of the billion-dollar anti-anxiety business, and assesses the economic, cultural, and social influence of pharmaceuticals.
By focusing on chromosomes, Heredity under the Microscope offers a new history of postwar human genetics. Today chromosomes are understood as macromolecular assemblies and are analyzed with a variety of molecular techniques. Yet for much of the twentieth century, researchers studied chromosomes by looking through a microscope. Unlike any other technique, chromosome analysis offered a direct glimpse of the complete human genome, opening up seemingly endless possibilities for observation and intervention. Critics, however, countered that visual evidence was not enough and pointed to the need to understand the molecular mechanisms. Telling this history in full for the first time, Soraya de Chadarevian argues that the often bewildering variety of observations made under the microscope were central to the study of human genetics. Making space for microscope-based practices alongside molecular approaches, de Chadarevian analyzes the close connections between genetics and an array of scientific, medical, ethical, legal, and policy concerns in the atomic age. By exploring the visual evidence provided by chromosome research in the context of postwar biology and medicine, Heredity under the Microscope sheds new light on the cultural history of the human genome.
This book presents the proceedings of the International Computer Symposium 2014 (ICS 2014), held at Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan in December. ICS is a biennial symposium founded in 1973 and offers a platform for researchers, educators and professionals to exchange their discoveries and practices, to share research experiences and to discuss potential new trends in the ICT industry. Topics covered in the ICS 2014 workshops include: algorithms and computation theory; artificial intelligence and fuzzy systems; computer architecture, embedded systems, SoC and VLSI/EDA; cryptography and information security; databases, data mining, big data and information retrieval; mobile computing, wireless communications and vehicular technologies; software engineering and programming languages; healthcare and bioinformatics, among others. There was also a workshop on information technology innovation, industrial application and the Internet of Things. ICS is one of Taiwan's most prestigious international IT symposiums, and this book will be of interest to all those involved in the world of information technology.