This book confronts us with bad news first: Betrayals happen in the workplace, and unfortunately, they will continue to happen. They cause slowdowns; they cause mistrust; they disrupt a customer- or client-centered focus and create infighting. The good news is that quickly recentering your trust, though not blind trust, can overcome these shortcomings. This book can help readers to become more trustful employees in the workplace.

Machine learning (ML) is a hot yet daunting topic. It's perhaps the most important technological advancement supporting the revolution in artificial intelligence (AI), and most leading IT companies have been extracting value from it for some time. Almost every time predictions are made by a computer, like when a product or really anything is recommended, ML is at work. This book explains in technical detail how to get ML projects out of theory and into production.

There are many angles to motivate reading this book, and mine is from a deep interest in HIV. The supermodel known simply as "Gia" was one of the first prominent women to die of AIDS-related complications, and she remains one of the best-explored IV drug users who died from AIDS. Of course, most of the world knows her as a model who quickly rose to the front pages of the world's leading fashion magazines in the 1970s.

Most of us think of witchcraft as a relic of a hyper-religious past. Most of us also don't have detailed beliefs about the practice of killing witches in the name of beating the devil - other than it's wrong. However, the authors make a compelling case that the persecution of "witches" in prior centuries was just patriarchy rearing its ugly head.

Many contend that American politics is in a transition time from an old paradigm into something new, but few can divine what the future might hold. One of the social tensions is rhetoric between scarcity and abundance, and Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson wholeheartedly want to focus on ways that America can lead to abundance. They lay out an agenda for the political left, their natural conversational home, to reform itself so that they can advocate for a better future.

If you're looking to cry in empathy with an author's grief and hardships yet sense an undercurrent of hope, this memoir might be the book for you. Jonathan Tepper grew up as a missionary kid in Madrid, Spain. His parents tried to "save" people for heaven in a new church, but failed. Then they pivoted their ministry to help people overcome heroin addiction, and they slowly grew a church and social service.

We know enough about the physics of earth and the universe to be able to predict what'd happen in absurd situations, like a neuron star hitting the earth, flying a plane on Uranus, or experiencing a Richter magnitude -2 earthquake. Of course, we don't talk about it because most of us aren't physics geeks. Fortunately, Randall Munroe is, and he has a great sense of humor dealing with the absurd.

Jira is becoming a leading tool for project management at larger businesses, and using it is a skill required for many jobs. This book teaches you how to master Jira processes to manage projects under Agile or Scrum paradigms. Half of this book focuses on Confluence software, which my workplace does not use. Therefore, half of the book was irrelevant to me.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a process in artificial intelligence (AI) where specific documents can be consulted to provide an answer. It provides a way for individual groups to customize a bot for their internal uses. For example, a company can provide business policies specific to their own organization. Or healthcare firms can provide literature up to date with their own fields, not just the latest AI build of the foundation model.

Poetry and science are often placed opposite each other because they describe different things. One describes the human soul; the other describes nature. That's unfortunate because they can complement each other vividly. The natural world and the vast universe are sources of unending wonder. It's a shame that too many people are put off by science as intimidating. In truth, it's awe-inducing and humbling.

Prompt engineering is the art and science of finding the right words to generate the right responses from artificial intelligence (AI). It's becoming a skill in-demand in today's workplaces. It's also becoming an essential skill for life. To understand prompt engineering, you must understand how AI tools understand their inputs. This book explains that to you in many forms. It covers prompting as it intersects all the major AI disciplines, like general prompts (as in a ChatBot), fine-tuning, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

Some people adore books that leave them with a warm feeling, but I adore books that leave me with tears streaming on my face. This book is one of the latter. Originally a bestseller in Sweden, it's now translated into English (and other languages) for the world to contemplate. In the story, Bo is facing aging as his own body is breaking down.

Everyone today seems to want to do something with artificial intelligence (AI), but few seem to know how to do it well. We've started to see how AI bots can induce horrors, and business leaders plead to avoid those risks. ChatGPT, packaged from OpenAI, remains the dominant, most trusted AI tool even though many other versions exist. It'd be nice if we software folks could stop and get a masters degree in AI, but life goes on.

The Spanish Civil War was a historical precursor to World War II. Franco's fascism for a time united disparate opposing groups like anarchists and communists. The opposition attracted volunteers from across Europe. However, these groups began infighting among each other, and the opposition ultimately failed. As with most failures, the blame game ran deep among groups. The great English writer George Orwell's first-hand account provides as much light as can be shown upon the whole affair.

In scientific circles, the "social determinants of health" is a common phrase used to describe how one's zip code can have more impact on health outcomes than one's personal health. This book plays off that title by describing how America's political situation - whether one is part of a favored class or note - can influence health outcomes. It takes particular aim at health inequities in American history.

Ever wonder what it takes to land a plane on top of a train? Or what's the best way to send nuclear waste to the sun? Or how to take a selfie with yourself and the moon? Well, Randall Munroe has answers, filled in a humorous tone. The beauty of how science generalizes - particularly, physics - is how it applies to all sorts of absurd situations.

When observing the world, many see that true leadership does not reflect positions of power; rather, it reflects a quality of personal character. Robert Greenleaf looked at 1970s America and the 1970s world and observed a lack of leadership. We had educated talent out the wazoo, but lacked people able to usher in lasting, good change. He wrote this book to cultivate such leadership qualities in its readers.

Most contemporary management books from scholars tend to center on a central "secret of management" upon which an entire philosophy is built. Henry Mintzberg instead flips the idea on its head and observed dozens of managers from various industries in the field. Then he tried to describe what they were doing empirically. Then he made that into a framework. In this bottom-up approach, he observed managers doing all sorts of things throughout a day, without any seeming center.

I'm a huge fan of French polymath Blaise Pascal simply because he provokes thought. Besides his scientific and mathematical contributions, he died before forming his greatest philosophical work into a coherent defense of the plausibleness of Christianity. Instead, they were left as a series of fragments for us to ponder in the following centuries. Simply titled Pensées (or "thoughts"), they give us insight into the spiritual life of one of history's greatest scientific geniuses.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine guide America's federal research policies based on identifying challenges in the field. This 2024 workshop looked at opportunities within scientific research for artificial intelligence (AI) to contribute. It was led by national experts discussing use cases in their research and attempted to generalize based on those experiences. Most use cases were from American-based science, but AI in Africa was a recurring theme.

It's always daunting to pick up a technical book that's over 500 pages long or 21 hours long. However, this book did not disappoint. Not every section, of course, addressed my particular needs. However, the entire treatise was clearly communicated with a broader technical audience in mind. That should be no surprise because Chip Huyen, besides being an AI expert, taught graduate school classes in AI at Stanford and writes science fiction as a side hobby.

I work in software research, so much of my professional life centers around introducing ideas into others' organizations. I am always trying to anticipate roadblocks that they might have. While my own work environment is relatively open to change and dialogue, not everyone has that kind of workplace. The authors share dozens of strategies to help regular individuals lead change in their organizations.

Most of us in America have read Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird at sometime throughout our lives. It's the clearest account of Jim Crow on Southern American culture and of the power of a few upright people to fix it. Lee's Alabama roots are well known, but she actually wrote the classic in New York City. Beforehand, she wrote a series of short stories with themes that forecast her great accomplishment.

Pair programming is a practice in software development whereby two programmers write code together. I've studied it from afar until recently. What happened is a colleague asked me to pair program with him. As his program manager from a coding background, we've been working with relative success and happiness for several months. I liked the process so much that I wanted to take a deep dive to explore problem areas and tricks of the trade in order to really master the topic.

To date, blacks in America continue to suffer disproportionately in proportion from HIV infections. HIV has always preyed most on those marginalized from society, and American blacks are included in that recipe. Although many associate HIV as a gay man's disease, black women have come to suffer more in recent years. How are we to know and understand these stories? Dan Royles shares it through seven distinct angles.