This free book tells the story of how Sweden is becoming a virtually cashless society. Its goal is to improve readers' understanding of what is driving this transition, and of the factors that are fostering and hampering it. In doing so, the book covers the role of central banks, political factors, needs for innovation, and the stakeholders in...
This open access Pivot demonstrates how a variety of technologies act as innovation catalysts within the banking and financial services sector. Traditional banks and financial services are under increasing competition from global IT companies such as Google, Apple, Amazon and PayPal whilst facing pressure from investors to reduce costs, increase ag...
Welcome to InnerSource, the powerful movement for developing open source software within the walls of a single organization, where the "openness" of a project extends across teams inside the company. In this report, O'Reilly editor and author Andy Oram takes you inside InnerSource, first by reviewing the principles that make open sou...
This book examines the evolution of the relationship between taxpayers and their states in Sweden, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Romania, and asks why tax compliance is so much higher in some countries than others. The book shows that successful states have built strong administrative capacities, tax citizens fairly and equitabl...
The increasing capacity of digital networks and computing power, together with the resulting connectivity and availability of "big data", are impacting financial systems worldwide with rapidly advancing deep-learning algorithms and distributed ledger technologies. They transform the structure and performance of financial markets, the serv...
The Lightning Network (LN) is a rapidly growing second-layer payment protocol that works on top of Bitcoin to provide near-instantaneous transactions between two parties. With this practical guide, authors Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Olaoluwa Osuntokun, and Rene Pickhardt explain how this advancement will enable the next level of scale for Bitcoin, in...
Principles of Finance is targeted at the core finance course for undergraduate business majors. The book is designed for conceptual accessibility to students who are relatively early in their business curriculum, yet it is also suitable for more advanced students. Due to the wide range of audiences and course approaches, the book is designed to be ...
Understanding the music industry as it exists today requires an understanding of how it developed over time. Today's music industry would most certainly not be the one anybody would design from scratch. It has many inefficiencies and quirks that reflect the economic pressures and musical concerns of bygone ages.
The history of music is clos...
This book is the first comparative study of public, voluntary and private asylums in nineteenth-century Ireland. Examining nine institutions, it explores whether concepts of social class and status and the emergence of a strong middle class informed interactions between gender, religion, identity and insanity. It questions whether medical and lay e...
This book discusses a variety of important but unprecedented ways in which psychology can be useful to philosophy. The early chapters illustrate this theme via comparisons between Chinese and Western philosophy. It is argued that the Chinese notion of a heart-mind is superior to the Western concept of mind, but then, more even-handedly, the relativ...
Cloud Computing is enabling many trends in IT today: microservices, pay-as-you-go pricing, and serverless architectures, to name three. The biggest player in the market's Amazon, who offers the most mature cloud systems through their Amazon Web Services (AWS). Other companies are gaining traction as well: Google invests into their Google Cloud...
Business Mathematics was written to meet the needs of a twenty-first century student. It takes a systematic approach to helping students learn how to think and centers on a structured process termed the PUPP Model (Plan, Understand, Perform, and Present). This process is found throughout the text and in every guided example to help students develop...
How do you price your software? Is it art, science or magic? How much attention should you pay to your competitors?
This short handbook will provide you with the theory, practical advice and case studies you need to stop yourself from reaching for the dice.
Neil Davidson is co-founder of Red Gate Software. Redgate was founded in 1999 and now ...
With so much media and political criticism of their shortcomings and failures, it is easy to overlook the fact that many governments work pretty well much of the time. Great Policy Successes turns the spotlight on instances of public policy that are remarkably successful. It develops a framework for identifying and assessing policy successes, payin...
Ethereum represents the gateway to a worldwide, decentralized computing paradigm. This platform enables you to run decentralized applications (DApps) and smart contracts that have no central points of failure or control, integrate with a payment network, and operate on an open blockchain. With this practical guide, Andreas M. Antonopoulos and Gavin...
In a world where information has never been so accessible, and answers are available at the touch of a fingertip, we are hungrier for the facts than ever before - something the Covid-19 crisis has brought to light. And yet, paywalls put in place by multi-billion dollar publishing houses are still preventing millions from accessing quality, scientif...
How do social networking services earn money?What is the "second hand of the market" and how does it operate? Why does society need so many different kinds of goods? What does happiness economics not reveal about happiness?What is the link between talent, success and "stardom"? What is the business development model for the ent...
This book provides an original and challenging analysis of one of the most pressing social issues of our times: intergenerational inequality. Based on recent mixed-method research, it explores the extent and scope of generational divides through an up-to-date analysis of the changing opportunities for young people in Britain across different life d...
This book takes a taxpayer's perspective to the relations taxation creates between people and their state. Larsen proposes that in order to understand tax compliance and cheating, we have to look beyond law, psychological experiments and surveys to include tax collectors and taxpayers' practices. The text explores the view of taxes seen a...
The main objective of this book is to develop a strategy and policy measures to enhance the formalization of the shadow economy in order to improve the competitiveness of the economy and contribute to economic growth; it explores these issues with special reference to Serbia. The size and development of the shadow economy in Serbia and other Centra...
In the light of better and more detailed administrative databases, this book provides statistical tools for evaluating the effects of public policies advocated by governments and public institutions. Experts from academia, national statistics offices and various research centers present modern econometric methods for an efficient data-driven policy...
Get the most out of this foundational reference and improve the productivity of your software teams. This book collects the wisdom of the 2017 "Dagstuhl" seminar on productivity in software engineering, a meeting of community leaders, who came together with the goal of rethinking traditional definitions and measures of productivity.
The ...
This book examines the interrelationship of national policy, teacher effectiveness, and student outcomes with a specific emphasis on educational equity. Using data from the IEA's Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) conducted between 1995 and 2015, it investigates grade four and grade eight data to assess trends in key...
This book asks just how climate-smart our food really is. It follows an average day's worth of food and drink to see where it comes from, how far it travels, and the carbon price we all pay for it. From our breakfast tea and toast, through breaktime chocolate bar, to take-away supper, Dave Reay explores the weather extremes the world's fa...
This open access book provides innovative methods and original applications of sequence analysis (SA) and related methods for analysing longitudinal data describing life trajectories such as professional careers, family paths, the succession of health statuses, or the time use. The applications as well as the methodological contributions propo...
In this book, Nika Gilauri reveals his formulas for government reform and economic recovery, including how to fight against corruption, reform fiscal policy and tax systems, privatize state-owned enterprises, build a welfare system for those most in need, create a competitive education and healthcare system, and streamline procurement. All formulas...
This book addresses the issue of diffusing sustainable energy access inlow- and middle-income contexts.
Access to energy is one of the greatest challenges for many people living in low-income and developing contexts, as around 1.4 billion people lack access to electricity.Distributed Renewable Energy systems (DRE) are considered a promising approa...
This book provides an extensive treatment of Hardy inequalities and closely related topics from the point of view of Folland and Stein's homogeneous (Lie) groups. The place where Hardy inequalities and homogeneous groups meet is a beautiful area of mathematics with links to many other subjects. While describing the general theory of Hardy, Rel...
This book presents the concept of value as the central component to success and longevity of the global ICT industry player, Huawei. It provides examples of how Huawei focuses on customers to pursue sustainable and profitable growth rather than focusing on capital market valuation, which is a familiar scenario among Western companies. It is the bus...
Embedded Firmware Solutions is the perfect introduction and daily-use field guide - for the thousands of firmware designers, hardware engineers, architects, managers, and developers--to Intel's new firmware direction (including Quark coverage), showing how to integrate Intel® Architecture designs into their plans.
Featuring hands-on exampl...
You're sitting on a pile of interesting data. How do you transform that into money? It's easy to focus on the contents of the data itself, and to succumb to the (rather unimaginative) idea of simply collecting and reselling it in raw form. While that's certainly profitable right now, you'd do well to explore other opportunities ...
Recent reductions in public funding for audiovisual products have led to dramatic changes in the industry. The lack of interaction between the industry and capital markets has made sourcing funds for audiovisual products especially difficult.
This book explains why the distance between the audiovisual and financial markets exists, and considers th...