Fifty years have passed since the first Earth Day, on 22 April 1970. This accessible, incisive and timely collection of essays brings together a diverse set of expert voices to examine how the Earth's environment has changed over this past half century, and what lies in store for our planet over the coming fifty years.
Earth 2020: An Inside...
Made With Creative Commons is a book about sharing. It is about sharing textbooks, music, data, art, and more. People, organizations, and businesses all over the world are sharing their work using Creative Commons licenses because they want to encourage the public to reuse their works, to copy them, to modify them. They are Made with Creative Commo...
The Doing Business 2020 study shows that developing economies are catching up with developed economies in ease of doing business.
Still, the gap remains wide. An entrepreneur in a low-income economy typically spends around 50 percent of the country's per-capita income to launch a company, compared with just 4.2 percent for an entrepreneur i...
Developing web apps can be made more difficult by the fact that they do not easily or natively run in desktop environments. This can make a variety of development skills useless, reducing the amount of expertise even the best developers can bring to a project and increasing the workload for producing cross-platform apps. But with the Electron frame...
Today we are witnessing an increased use of data visualization in society. Across domains such as work, education and the news, various forms of graphs, charts and maps are used to explain, convince and tell stories. In an era in which more and more data are produced and circulated digitally, and digital tools make visualization production increasi...
W3.CSS is a free, no-license CSS framework you can use to produce responsive websites that work across all common browsers and devices. W3.CSS is small and simple to learn, and is a worthwhile contender to consider when deciding on a CSS framework. In W3.CSS Succinctly, Joseph Booth will take you through using features such as containers and helper...
Video games are a massive market, but reaching an audience requires supporting many platforms. MonoGame offers a near-complete implementation of XNA 4 that makes it possible to develop games for iOS, Android, Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, PlayStation Vita, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. In MonoGame Succinctly, author Jim Perry offers an introduction to M...
Inferring and Explaining is a book in practical epistemology. It examines the notion of evidence and assumes that good evidence is the essence of rational thinking. Evidence is the cornerstone of the natural, social, and behavioral sciences. But it is equally central to almost all academic pursuits and, perhaps most importantly, to the basic need t...
Internet filtering, censorship of Web content, and online surveillance are increasing in scale, scope, and sophistication around the world, in democratic countries as well as in authoritarian states. The first generation of Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet gateways; China's famous "Great Firewall o...
This is a small project that aims to gather some knowledge about game development and make it available to everyone.
As well as being a source of knowledge this project aims to be a learning experience for everyone involved too, by gathering contributions from the community, teaching others how to make a game, teaching algorithms but also learni...
Welcome to Writing Unleashed, designed for use as a book in first-year college composition programs, written as an extremely brief guide for students, jam-packed with teachers' voices, students' voices, and engineered for fun....
The internet has fundamentally transformed society in the past 25 years, yet existing theories of mass or interpersonal communication do not work well in understanding a digital world. Nor has this understanding been helped by disciplinary specialization and a continual focus on the latest innovations. Ralph Schroeder takes a longer-term view, synt...
Happiness and Utility brings together experts on utilitarianism to explore the concept of happiness within the utilitarian tradition, situating it in earlier eighteenth-century thinkers and working through some of its developments at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Drawing on a range of philosophical and historic...
Coffeeshops are the most famous example of Dutch tolerance. But in fact, these cannabis distributors are highly regulated. Coffeeshops are permitted to break the law, but not the rules. On the premises, there cannot be minors, hard drugs or more than 500 grams. Nor can a coffeeshop advertise, cause nuisance or sell over five grams to a person in a ...
From paintings and food to illness and icebergs, science is happening everywhere. Rather than follow the path of a syllabus or textbook, Andrew Morris takes examples from the science we see every day and uses them as entry points to explain a number of fundamental scientific concepts - from understanding colour to the nature of hormones - in ways t...
Faced with a global threat to food security, it is perfectly possible that society will respond, not by a dystopian disintegration, but rather by reasserting co-operative traditions. This book, by a leading expert in urban agriculture, offers a genuine solution to today's global food crisis. By contributing more to feeding themselves, cities c...
Inclusive language remains a hot topic. Despite decades of empirical evidence and revisions of formal language use, many inclusive adaptations of English and German continue to be ignored or contested. But how to convince speakers of the importance of inclusive language? Rewriting Language provides one possible answer: by engaging readers with the ...
This book is based on the MOOC Responsible Innovation offered by the TU Delft. It provides a framework to reflect on the ethics and risks of new technologies. How can we make sure that innovations do justice to social and ethical values? How can we minimize (unknown) risks?
The book explains:
- The concept and importance of responsible innovati...
Additive manufacturing or 3D printing, manufacturing a product layer by layer, offers large design freedom and faster product development cycles, as well as low startup cost of production, on-demand production and local production. In principle, any product could be made by additive manufacturing. Even food and living organic cells can be printed. ...
When running a web application or service, there are three crucial elements to keep tabs on: availability, performance, and usage. A wide variety of technologies are available to monitor these things, but one that stands apart is Application Insights, a developer tool available through the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. In Application Insights Suc...
Force.com Succinctly offers developers and business users easy access to the many benefits of this popular platform. Now anyone can build powerful enterprise apps without writing lots of code, and author Ed Freitas guides readers through the Force.com fundamentals. Developers from backgrounds such as SQL Server, .NET, and JavaScript will see quickl...
The R Notes for Professionals book is compiled from Stack Overflow Documentation, the content is written by the beautiful people at Stack Overflow....
This book is an inspirational message about what is possible and practical in the name of learning through mobile media. We present stories from a diverse set of educators, a microcosm of the landscape of mobile media learning.
Each author has found a way to create something new and beautiful in their own world. And though their results are exce...
Online communities provide a wide range of opportunities for supporting a cause, marketing a product or service, or building open source software. The Art of Community helps you recruit members, motivate them, and manage them as active participants. Author Jono Bacon offers experiences and observations from his 14-year effort to build and manage co...
This book takes a single line of code - the extremely concise BASIC program for the Commodore 64 inscribed in the title - and uses it as a lens through which to consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture. The authors of this collaboratively written book treat code not as merely functional but as a t...
This collection highlights a key metaphor in contemporary discourse about economy and society. The contributors explore how references to reality and the real economy are linked both to the utopias of collective well-being, supported by real monies and good economies, and the dystopias of financial bubbles and busts, in which people's own live...
This new book analyses the strategies, usages and wider implications of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platforms in the culture and communication industries that are reshaping economic, organizational and social logics. Platforms are the object of considerable hype with a growing global presence. Relying on individual contributions coordinated by s...
This book is a collection of short interviews with 14 prominent individuals from different parts of the world, from Australia to Canada, and of different occupations, from low-level programmers to physicists and musicians, asking them a more-or-less similar set of questions on the following topics: their general attitude to programming, attitude to...
The SQL Notes for Professionals book is compiled from Stack Overflow Documentation, the content is written by the beautiful people at Stack Overflow....
The Swift Notes for Professionals book is compiled from Stack Overflow Documentation, the content is written by the beautiful people at Stack Overflow....
This outlook provides a focused assessment of the state of public capital in the major European countries and identifies areas where public investment could contribute more to stable and sustainable growth. A European Public Investment Outlook brings together contributions from a range of international authors from diverse intellectual and professi...
Illicit financial flows constitute a global phenomenon of massive but uncertain scale, which erodes government revenues and drives corruption in countries rich and poor. In 2015, the countries of the world committed to a target to reduce illicit flows, as part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. But five years later, there is still no agreemen...