54 Results for : josdal
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The Tyranny of Metrics , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 322min
How the obsession with quantifying human performance threatens our schools, medical care, businesses, and government Today, organizations of all kinds are ruled by the belief that the path to success is quantifying human performance, publicizing the results, and dividing up the rewards based on the numbers. But in our zeal to instill the evaluation process with scientific rigor, we've gone from measuring performance to fixating on measuring itself. The result is a tyranny of metrics that threatens the quality of our lives and most important institutions. In this timely and powerful book, Jerry Muller uncovers the damage our obsession with metrics is causing and shows how we can begin to fix the problem. Filled with examples from education, medicine, business and finance, government, the police and military, and philanthropy and foreign aid, this brief and accessible book explains why the seemingly irresistible pressure to quantify performance distorts and distracts, whether by encouraging "gaming the stats" or "teaching to the test". That's because what can and does get measured is not always worth measuring, may not be what we really want to know, and may draw effort away from the things we care about. Along the way, we learn why paying for measured performance doesn't work, why surgical scorecards may increase deaths, and much more. But metrics can be good when used as a complement to - rather than a replacement for - judgment based on personal experience, and Muller also gives examples of when metrics have been beneficial. Complete with a checklist of when and how to use metrics, The Tyranny of Metrics is an essential corrective to a rarely questioned trend that increasingly affects us all. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Matthew Josdal. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/tant/010942/bk_tant_010942_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
- Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
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The Bastard of Fort Stikine: The Hudson's Bay Company and the Murder of John McLoughlin Jr. , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 407min
Is it possible to reach back in time and solve an unsolved murder, more than 170 years after it was committed? Just after midnight on April 21, 1842, John McLoughlin, Jr. - the chief trader for the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Stikine, in the northwest corner of the territory that would later become British Columbia - was shot to death by his own men. They claimed it was an act of self-defence, their only means of stopping the violent rampage of their drunk and abusive leader. Sir George Simpson, the HBC's Overseas Governor, took the men of Stikine at their word, and the Company closed the book on the matter. The case never saw the inside of a courtroom, and no one was ever charged or punished for the crime. To this day, the killing remains the Honorable Company's dirtiest unaired laundry and one of the darkest pages in the annals of our nation's history. Now, exhaustive archival research and modern forensic science - including ballistics, virtual autopsy, and crime scene reconstruction - unlock the mystery of what really happened the night McLoughlin died. Using her formidable talents as a writer, researcher, and forensic scientist, Debra Komar weaves a tale that could almost be fiction, with larger-than-life characters and dramatic tension. In telling the story of John McLoughlin, Jr., Komar also tells the story of Canada's north and its connection to the Hudson's Bay Company. Cover design by Chris Tompkins. Cover images (beaver dam) by Jason Drury (500px.com/jasondrury) and (fire arm) courtesy of Fredericton Region Museum. Reproduced by permission of Goose Lane Editions. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Matthew Josdal. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/adbl/029882/bk_adbl_029882_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
- Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
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Predictive Health: How We Can Reinvent Medicine to Extend Our Best Years , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 415min
Our health care system is crippled by desperate efforts to prevent the inevitable. A third of the national Medicare budget - nearly $175 billion - is spent on the final year of life, and a third of that amount on the final month, often on expensive (and futile) treatments. Such efforts betray a fundamental flaw in how we think about healthcare: we squander resources on hopeless situations, instead of using them to actually improve health. In Predictive Health, distinguished doctors Kenneth Brigham and Michael M.E. Johns propose a solution: invest earlier - and use science and technology to make healthcare more available and affordable. Every child would begin life with a post-natal genetic screen, when potential risk - say for type II diabetes or heart disease - would be found. More data on biology, behavior, and environment would be captured throughout her life. Using this information, health-care workers and the people they care for could forge personal strategies for healthier living long before a small glitch blows up into major disease. This real health care wouldn’t just replace much of modern disease care - it would make it obsolete. The result, according to Brigham and Johns, will be a life defined by a long stay at top physical and mental form, rather than an early peak and long decline. Accomplishing this goal will require new tools, new clinics, fewer doctors and more mentors, smarter companies, and engaged patients. In short, it will require a revolution. Thanks to a decade-long collaboration between Brigham, Johns and others, it is already underway. An optimistic plan for reducing or eliminating many chronic diseases as well as reforming our faltering medical system, Predictive Health is a deeply knowledgeable, deeply humane proposal for how we can reallocate expenses and resources to prolong the best years of life, rather than extending the worst. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Matthew Josdal. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/adbl/017188/bk_adbl_017188_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
- Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
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Act of Congress: How America's Essential Institution Works, and How It Doesn't , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 1149min
An eye-opening account of how Congress today really works - and doesn’t - that follows the dramatic journey of the sweeping financial reform bill enacted in response to the Great Crash of 2008. The founding fathers expected Congress to be the most important branch of government and gave it the most power. When Congress is broken - as its justifiably dismal approval ratings suggest - so is our democracy. Here, Robert G. Kaiser, whose long and distinguished career at The Washington Post has made him as keen and knowledgeable an observer of Congress as we have, takes us behind the sound bites to expose the protocols, players, and politics of the House and Senate - revealing both the triumphs of the system and (more often) its fundamental flaws. Act of Congress tells the story of the Dodd-Frank Act, named for the two men who made it possible: Congressman Barney Frank, brilliant and sometimes abrasive, who mastered the details of financial reform, and Senator Chris Dodd, who worked patiently for months to fulfill his vision of a Senate that could still work on a bipartisan basis. Both Frank and Dodd collaborated with Kaiser throughout their legislative efforts and allowed their staffs to share every step of the drafting and deal making that produced the 1,500-page law that transformed America’s financial sector. Kaiser explains how lobbying affects a bill - or fails to. We follow staff members more influential than most senators and congressmen. We see how Congress members protect their own turf, often without regard for what might best serve the country - more eager to court television cameras than legislate on complicated issues about which many of them remain ignorant. Kaiser shows how ferocious partisanship regularly overwhelms all other considerations, though occasionally individual integrity prevails. Act of Congress, as entertaining as it is enlightening, is an indispensable guide to a vital piece of our political system desperately in need ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Matthew Josdal. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/adbl/018944/bk_adbl_018944_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
- Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping