In this updated edition of a groundbreaking text, concepts such as energy return on investment (EROI) provide powerful insights into the real balance sheets that drive our "petroleum economy." Hall and Klitgaard explore the relation between energy and the wealth explosion of the 20th century, and the interaction of internal limits to grow...
What does it take for success in the media business? Creativity, innovation, and performance, of course. Plus experience and good judgment. However, it also requires an understanding of the principles and tools of management. This book summarizes the major dimensions of a business school curriculum and applies them to the entire media, media-tech, ...
This book walks you through a patterns-based approach to building real-world cloud solutions. The patterns apply to the development process as well as to architecture and coding practices.
Developers who are curious about developing for the cloud, are considering a move to the cloud, or are new to cloud development will find here a concise overv...
The CSS Notes for Professionals book is compiled from Stack Overflow Documentation, the content is written by the beautiful people at Stack Overflow....
Living Earth Community: Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing is a celebration of the diversity of ways in which humans can relate to the world around them, and an invitation to its readers to partake in planetary coexistence. Innovative, informative, and highly accessible, this interdisciplinary anthology of essays brings together scholars, writers a...
In the decade and a half since Napster first emerged, forever changing the face of digital culture, the claim that "internet pirates killed the music industry" has become so ubiquitous that it is treated as common knowledge. Piracy is a scourge on legitimate businesses and hard-working artists, we are told, a "cybercrime" simila...
In the face of challenges posed by a shifting digital media landscape, an array of international bodies continue to endorse public service media (PSM) as an essential component of democratisation. Yet how can PSM achieve viability in settings where models of media independence and credibility are unfamiliar or rejected by political leaders?
The ...
Until recently, most grape-based wine was consumed close to where it was produced, and mostly that was in Europe. Despite the huge growth in inter-continental trade, investment and migration during the first globalization wave that came to a halt with World War I, it was not until the 1990s that the export share of global wine production rose above...
A cultural change in the Renaissance freed talented European writers to compose letters rivalling the finest that survived from ancient Rome. This book traces the lives and outlooks of distinguished Britons as revealed in their correspondence. The subjects range from the fierce satirist Jonathan Swift to the long-lived, all-observing Horace Walpole...
Most contemporary digital studies are interested in distant-reading paradigms for large-scale literary history. This book asks what happens when such telescopic techniques function as a microscope instead. The first monograph to bring a range of computational methods to bear on a single novel in a sustained fashion, it focuses on the award-winning ...
The purpose of this book is to shed light on the performance and personal competencies of information technology (IT) project managers in South Africa. Predictive models are built to determine what project managers consider the crucial competencies they should possess to deliver an IT project successfully. This investigation takes place in the cont...
Firefox, a free Web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation, is used by an estimated 270 million people worldwide. To maintain and improve the Firefox browser, Mozilla depends not only on its team of professional programmers and managers but also on a network of volunteer technologists and enthusiasts - free/libre and open source software (FLOS...
Historians often assume a one-directional transmission of knowledge and ideas, leading to the establishment of spatial hierarchies defined as centres and peripheries. In recent decades, transnational and global history have contributed to a more inclusive understanding of intellectual and cultural exchanges that profoundly challenged the ways in wh...
Comics Beyond the Page in Latin America is a cutting-edge study of the expanding worlds of Latin American comics. Despite lack of funding and institutional support, not since the mid-twentieth century have comics in the region been so dynamic, so diverse and so engaged with pressing social and cultural issues. Comics are being used as essential too...
Brexit will have significant consequences for the country, for Europe, and for global order. And yet much discussion of Brexit in the UK has focused on the causes of the vote and on its consequences for the future of British politics. This volume examines the consequences of Brexit for the future of Europe and the European Union, adopting an explic...
With its novel XOR-based metric topology, Kademlia is the first peer-to-peer system to combine provable consistency and performance, latency-minimizing routing, and a symmetric, unidirectional topology. In The Kademlia Protocol Succinctly, author Marc Clifton leads readers through the positive aspects of Kademlia's decentralized specifications...
Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are some of the most performant off-the-shelf, supervised machine-learning algorithms. In Support Vector Machines Succinctly, author Alexandre Kowalczyk guides readers through the building blocks of SVMs, from basic concepts to crucial problem-solving algorithms. He also includes numerous code examples and a lengthy b...
Free innovation is already widespread in national economies and is steadily increasing in both scale and scope. Today, tens of millions of consumers are collectively spending tens of billions of dollars annually on innovation development. However, because free innovations are developed during consumers' unpaid, discretionary time and are given...
Silicon Valley is the world's most successful innovation region. Apple, Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, Uber, and Airbnb changed our way of living. Silicon Valley has built a brilliant ecosystem that supports startups. Its entrepreneurial mindset fosters risk-taking, thinking big, and sharing.
A fast growing number of accele...
Ethnicity and Race in the UK examines the state of racial inequality in a wide range of areas in post-Brexit Britain, including employment, health care, education, criminal justice, housing, and representation in the arts and media. Written to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the UK Race Relations Act of 1968 as well as the founding of the...
The demand for skilled data science practitioners in industry, academia, and government is rapidly growing. This book introduces concepts and skills that can help you tackle real-world data analysis challenges. It covers concepts from probability, statistical inference, linear regression and machine learning. It also helps you develop skills such a...
The Go programming language is relatively small and concise, but its depth makes it an ideal option for solving modern-day development problems. In Go Succinctly, author Mark Lewin guides readers through the basics of Go, and he provides documentation and resources that allow users to dive into the language and learn it for themselves. By the end o...
Go is a modern programming language built to deal with modern programming challenges, such as concurrency and compilation. Designed specifically with the web in mind, Go is an excellent language for writing web applications, specifically for web services. In his second book on Go, Mark Lewin will take you through serving, routing, connecting to a d...
Innovation is the forgotten key to modern systems development - the element that defines the enterprising engineer, the thriving software firm and the cutting edge software application. Traditional forms of technical education pay little attention to creativity - often encouraging overly rationalistic ways of thinking which stifle the ability to in...
What can the architecture of ancient ships tell us about their capacity to carry cargo or to navigate certain trade routes? How do such insights inform our knowledge of the ancient economies that depended on maritime trade across the Mediterranean?
These and similar questions lie behind Sailing from Polis to Empire, a fascinating insight into th...
Zandi has a friend that no one else can see. His name is Birdy Monster. They mix up magic potions, play pretend and go on adventures together.
Zandi like to play with her imaginary friend Birdy Monster....
This open access book seeks to understand how politics is being made in a pluralistic sense, and explores how these political struggles are challenging and transforming gender, sexuality, and colonial norms. As researchers located in Sweden, a nation often cited as one of the most gender-equal and LGBTQ-tolerant nations, the contributions investiga...
This open volume presents a novel computational framework for understanding how collections of excitable cells work. The key approach in the text is to model excitable tissue by representing the individual cells constituting the tissue. This is in stark contrast to the common approach where homogenization is used to develop models where the cells a...
This open book explores the experience of working as a craftsperson or designer maker in the contemporary creative economy. The authors utilise evidence from the only major empirical study to explore the skills required and the challenges facing contemporary makers in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Drawing upon 180 interviews with peak organi...
This open access short reader looks into the dynamics which have reshaped rural development and human landscapes in European agriculture and the role of immigrant people. Within this framework it analyses contemporary rural migrations and the emergence of immigrants in relation to the incorporation of agrarian systems into global markets, the Europ...
In this lively and approachable volume based on his popular blog series, Martin Weller demonstrates a rich history of innovation and effective implementation of ed tech across higher education. From Bulletin Board Systems to blockchain, Weller follows the trajectory of education by focusing each chapter on a technology, theory, or concept that has ...
This book is devoted to emotional and narrative immersion in the experience of gameplay. The focus of our research is the complex interplay between the story and mechanics in digital games. Our goal is to demonstrate how the narrative and the ludic elements together can form unique player experiences. The volume is a collection of case studies invo...