Ramblemuse^SM Annotated Bibliography for Massage Practitioners

Innovative managers from around the world are discovering the benefits and the power of systems thinking. By understanding how systems work, we gain valuable new perspectives on our most persistent organizational problems. Systems thinking is necessary when properties of the system "emerge" from the interactions and when changing one part causes others to readjust — sometimes in unanticipated or even undesired directions.

Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. With a new foreword by his daughter Mary Katherine Bateson, this classic anthology of his major work will continue to delight and inform generations of readers. Bateson examines the nature of the mind, seeing it not as a nebulous something, somehow lodged somewhere in the body of each man, but as a network of interactions relating the individual with his society and his species and with the universe at large.

Brain, body, and world are united in a complex dance of circular causation and extended computational activity. In "Being There", Andy Clark weaves these several threads into a pleasing whole and goes on to address foundational questions concerning the new tools and techniques needed to make sense of the emerging sciences of the embodied mind. Clark brings together ideas and techniques from robotics, neuroscience, infant psychology, and artificial intelligence. He addresses a broad range of adaptive behaviors, from cockroach locomotion to the role of linguistic artifacts in higher-level thought.

Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) helps researchers understand how cognitive skills and strategies make it possible for people to act effectively and get things done. CTA can yield information people need--employers faced with personnel issues, market researchers who want to understand the thought processes of consumers, trainers and others who design instructional systems, health care professionals who want to apply lessons learned from errors and accidents, systems analysts developing user specifications, and many other professionals. CTA can show what makes the workplace work--and what keeps it from working as well as it might. "Working Minds" is a true handbook, offering a set of tools for doing CTA: methods for collecting data about cognitive processes and events, analyzing them, and communicating them effectively. It covers both the "why" and the "how" of CTA methods, providing examples, guidance, and stories from the authors' own experiences as CTA practitioners. Because effective use of CTA depends on some conceptual grounding in cognitive theory and research--on knowing what a cognitive perspective can offer--the book also offers an overview of current research on cognition. The book provides detailed guidance for planning and carrying out CTA, with chapters on capturing knowledge and capturing the way people reason. It discusses studying cognition in real-world settings and the challenges of rapidly changing technology. And it describes key issues in applying CTA findings in a variety of fields. Working Minds makes the methodology of CTA accessible and the skills involved attainable.

The ground-breaking book that set out to dispel the misapprehension surrounding the use of psychometric testing in staff selection and development is now available in a revised edition. Still the only book describing the process fully, it now includes a new chapter on its application in educational and psychological testing, beyond the usual realms of human resource management. With growing numbers of organizations using psychometric testing today, it is essential reading for every HR professional and academic interested in keeping up to date with selection methods.

During the past twenty years, our knowledge about expertise has dramatically increased. Laboratory analyses of chessmasters, experts in physics, medicine, international-level musicians, athletes, writers, and performance artists have allowed us to carefully examine the cognitive processes mediating outstanding performance in very diverse areas of expertise. These analyses have shown that expert performance is primarily a reflection of acquired skill resulting from the accumulation of domain-specific knowledge and methods during many years of training and practice rather than special innate talent. Confronted with universal limits of human information processing concerning memory capacity and speed of processing, expert performers are found to be able to acquire similar types of skills to circumvent these limits. General findings on expertise are systematized to lay the foundation of a general theory of expertise. In this book, many of the world's foremost scientists studying expert performance in specific domains of expertise review the state-of-the-art knowledge about expertise in these domains with the goal of identifying characteristics of expert performance that can be generalized across many different areas of expertise. These papers provide a comprehensive summary of general methods to study expertise and the current knowledge about expertise in chess, physics, medicine, sports, performing arts, music, writing, and decision-making. Most importantly, they reveal the existence of many general characteristics of expertise.

"The Bases of Competence" explains what skills and competencies students need to succeed in today's workplace and details how colleges and universities can strengthen the curriculum to cultivate these skills in their undergraduate students. The book addresses the continuing disparity between the skills developed in college and the essential skills needed in the dynamic workplace environment. By providing a common language from which to work, "The Bases of Competence" enables both educators and employers to create educational experiences of practical and enduring value. Drawing on more than a decade of research on companies, graduates, and students, the authors identify four distinct skill combinations most desired by employers — Managing Self, Communicating, Managing People and Tasks, and Mobilizing Innovation and Change. Using case studies and best practices from a wide variety of institutional settings and workplace environments, the authors show how developing competencies narrows the gap between the classroom and work--providing students with a portfolio of basic skills that translate into lifelong employability.

This Institute of Medicine report has become one of the standard references of various national and international groups working on clinical practice guidelines. It set the guidelines for creating guidelines. "Public and private activities related to practice guidelines can be conceptualized, ideally, as having three basic stages: development, intervention, and evaluation. The second and third stages should—again ideally—involve feedback loops to the first stage to prompt the revision of guidelines when omissions, technical obsolescence, or other problems with a set of guidelines are identified. Guidelines are thus dynamic, not static. They reflect the interplay of scientific and technological progress, real-world organizational pressures, and changes in social values. To date, most government and other initiatives emphasize the first of the three stages, the development of guidelines."

Guidelines for the clinical practice of medicine have been proposed as the solution to the whole range of current health care problems. This new book presents the first balanced and highly practical view of guidelines — their strengths, their limitations, and how they can be used most effectively to benefit health care. The volume offers: recommendations and a proposed framework for strengthening development and use of guidelines; numerous examples of guidelines; a ready-to-use instrument for assessing the soundness of guidelines, and six case studies exploring issues involved when practitioners use guidelines on a daily basis. With a real-world outlook, the volume reviews efforts by agencies and organizations to disseminate guidelines and examines how well guidelines are functioning — exploring issues such as patient information, liability, costs, computerization, and the adaptation of national guidelines to local needs.

Merging cognitive science with educational agenda, Gardner shows how ill-suited our minds and natural patterns of learning are to current educational materials, practices, and institutions, and makes an eloquent case for restructuring our schools. This reissue includes a new introduction by the author.

How would a musical genius like Mozart have performed on the SAT or GRE? Well enough to go to an Ivy League? Difficult to say, of course, but thank goodness Howard Gardner thought to ask the question: Can every sort of intelligence be measured with the tools we've been using for the past century and more? In his 1983 book, "Frames of Mind", Gardner laid out the foundation for the theory of multiple intelligences (MI). In "Intelligence Reframed", a revisitation and elaboration of MI theory, he details the modern history of intelligence and the development of MI, responds to the myths about multiple intelligences, and handles FAQs about the theory and its application. He also restates his ideal educational plan, which would emphasize deep understanding of iconic subjects following from a variety of instructional approaches.

Gently dismantling the myth of medical infallibility, Dr. Atul Gawande's "Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science" is essential reading for anyone involved in medicine — on either end of the stethoscope. Medical professionals make mistakes, learn on the job, and improvise much of their technique and self-confidence. Gawande's tales are humane and passionate reminders that doctors are people, too. His prose is thoughtful and deeply engaging, shifting from sometimes painful stories of suffering patients (including his own child) to intriguing suggestions for improving medicine with the same care he expresses in the surgical theater. Some of his ideas will make health care providers nervous or even angry, but his disarming style, confessional tone, and thoughtful arguments should win over most readers. "Complications" is a book with heart and an excellent bedside manner, celebrating rather than berating doctors for being merely human.

One of America's most well-respected professors of education looks at the good that can come from playing video games-even violent ones. James Paul Gee is interested in the cognitive development that can occur when someone is trying to escape a maze, find a hidden treasure and, even, blast away an enemy with a high-powered rifle. Talking about his own video-gaming experience learning and using games as diverse as Lara Croft and Arcanum, Gee looks at major specific cognitive activities, from how individuals develop a sense of identity, to how one grasps meaning, picks a role model, or perceives the world. This is a ground-breaking book that takes up a new electronic method of education and shows the positive application it has for learning.

Does the current practice of self-regulation in the health care field protect the public? Gross evaluates the available evidence and concludes that current licensing of health care providers by self-regulation has not safeguarded the public interest. — Gross has written a comprehensive examination of professional licensure, drawing on the work of researchers from many different fields to make his text an interdisciplinary view of professional self-regulation, with specific emphasis on the health care field. A brief history of licensure is presented along with a discussion of the issues related to competency and quality of care. Alternatives to licensure are suggested, which Gross believes will improve public safety. This is an effective book on a very complex and important public issue. Gross has done a thorough job of evaluating the research on this subject and has included a very helpful bibliography. He challenges the professional establishment in a thoughtful manner. His concerns, data, and recommendations deserve careful review and consideration by anyone who has a professional interest in health care services.

Jeff Hawkins, the high-tech success story behind PalmPilots and the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, does a lot of thinking about thinking. In "On Intelligence", Hawkins juxtaposes his two loves — computers and brains — to examine the real future of artificial intelligence. In doing so, he unites two fields of study that have been moving uneasily toward one another for at least two decades. Most people think that computers are getting smarter, and that maybe someday, they'll be as smart as we humans are. But Hawkins explains why the way we build computers today won't take us down that path. He shows, using nicely accessible examples, that our brains are memory-driven systems that use our five senses and our perception of time, space, and consciousness in a way that's totally unlike the relatively simple structures of even the most complex computer chip. Hawkins does a good job of outlining current brain research for a general audience, and his enthusiasm for brains is surprisingly contagious.

Gary Klein studies decision-making in the field, tagging along with firefighters, standing by in intensive-care units, and watching chess masters play lightning-fast "blitz" games to learn how people make choices with time constraints, limited information, and changing goals. From this research, he and his associates have developed a theory of "naturalistic decision-making. "Sources of Power" essentially lends the validity of scientific research to techniques that many of us use every day. There's intuition, which is based not on instantaneous insight but on the rapid (perhaps even subconscious) interpretation of perceptual cues. There's mental simulation, a finely honed method of visualization. There's storytelling and metaphor, which enable decision-makers to devise meaningful frameworks and compare their present situations to previous events. Nobody is born with an inherent mastery of these and other techniques, Klein tells us, but we are all born with the capability to develop, through experience, the skill sets experts call upon to make good decisions.

Consciousness is one of science's last great unsolved mysteries. How can the salty taste and crunchy texture of potato chips, the unmistakable smell of dogs after they have been in the rain, or the exhilarating feeling of hanging on tiny fingerholds many feet above the last secure foothold on a cliff, emerge from networks of neurons and their associated synaptic and molecular processes? In The Quest for Consciousness, Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch explores the biological basis of the subjective mind in animals and people. He outlines a framework that he and Francis Crick (of the "double helix") have constructed to come to grips with the ancient mind-body problem. At the heart of their framework is a sustained, empirical approach to discovering and characterizing the neuronal correlates of consciousness - the NCC - the subtle, flickering patterns of brain activity that underlie each and every conscious experience.

In Spacious Body, Jeffrey Maitland brings his knowledge and personal experience of Buddhism, phenomenology, alchemy, psychoanalysis, and the bodywork system of Rolfing to bear in forging concepts adequate to an understanding of embodied experience.

When do infants begin to learn? How do experts learn and how is this different from nonexperts? What can teachers and schools do — with curricula, classroom settings, and teaching methods — to help children learn most effectively? This book offers exciting research about the mind, the brain, and the process of learning that provides answers to these and other questions. New information from branches of science has significantly added to our understanding of what it means to know, from the neural processes that occur during learning to the influence of culture on what people see and absorb.

How do people learn? Exciting new evidence from many branches of science has significantly added to our understanding of what it means to know, from the neural processes that occur during learning to the influence of culture on what people see and absorb. This book examines these findings and their implications for what we teach, how we teach it, and how we assess what children-and adults--learn.

Every year, companies spend billions of dollars on training programs and management consultants, searching for ways to improve. But it's mostly all talk and no action, according to Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, authors of "The Knowing-Doing Gap". "Did you ever wonder why so much education and training, management consultation, organizational research and so many books and articles produce so few changes in actual management practice?" ask Stanford University professors Pfeffer and Sutton. "We wondered, too, and so we embarked on a quest to explore one of the great mysteries in organizational management: why knowledge of what needs to be done frequently fails to result in action or behavior consistent with that knowledge".

Why do fools fall in love? Why does a man's annual salary, on average, increase $600 with each inch of his height? When a crack dealer guns down a rival, how is he just like Alexander Hamilton, whose face is on the ten-dollar bill? How do optical illusions function as windows on the human soul? Cheerful, cheeky, occasionally outrageous MIT psychologist Steven Pinker answers all of the above and more in his marvelously fun, awesomely informative survey of modern brain science.

Deregulation continues to be a hot-button issue in the United States. While the national debates rage, however, regulation at the state level still flies below the public's radar screen, Although it is critically important. Paul Teske provides the foundation necessary to assess competing claims about state-level economic regulation in a time of turbulent politics and uncertain economics. He has produced an indispensable resource, offering both depth and breadth.

Recent scientific progress in understanding learning processes have led Tomporowski to conclude that skilled behavior reflects a dynamic interaction among physiological structures of the body, cognitive processes of the mind, and the motivational processes of the human spirit. This multidisciplinary approach describes how skills are learned and performed, as well as why skills are critical to the survival of individuals and the cultures in which they live.