World-historical questions such as these, the subjects of major works by Jared Diamond, David Landes, and others, are now of great moment as global frictions increase. In a spirited and original contribution to this quickening discussion, two renowned historians, father and son, explore the webs that have drawn humans together in patterns of interaction and exchange, cooperation and competition, since earliest times. Whether small or large, loose or dense, these webs have provided the medium for the movement of ideas, goods, power, and money within and across cultures, societies, and nations. From the thin, localized webs that characterized agricultural communities twelve thousand years ago, through the denser, more interactive metropolitan webs that surrounded ancient Sumer, Athens, and Timbuktu, to the electrified global web that today envelops virtually the entire world in a maelstrom of cooperation and competition, J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill show human webs to be a key component of world history and a revealing framework of analysis. Avoiding any determinism, environmental or cultural, the McNeills give us a synthesizing picture of the big patterns of world history in a rich, open-ended, concise account.

Take your hobby to the next level and turn your blog into real income

Anyone who blogs knows that it is a fun, creative way for sharing thoughts and opinions. Now imagine making money from that hobby This practical, how-to guide shows you how you can get serious about using your blog and implement advertising, sponsorship, partnerships, and affiliate marketing options to turn your hobby into extra income, or even a full-time career.

Helpful examples and featured articles with topic experts and bloggers who have built successful business demonstrate how to promote your business or build a blog-based business.Discusses finding your niche, adhering to legal considerations, establishing your disclosure and privacy policies, and dealing responsibly with review requestsIntroduces ideas for advertising and other monetization options and recommends promotional avenues to exploreSuggests creative ways to keep your blog fresh, unique, and interestingProvides tips for monitoring and measuring your success

"Professional Blogging For Dummies" opens the door to a world of money-making blogging possibilities

Understand Bitcoin, Blockchains, and Cryptocurrency "Antony helps us all clearly understand the mechanics of bitcoin and blockchain." Rob Findlay, Founder, Next Money #1 Best Seller in Investing Derivatives and Natural Resource Extraction Industry, Futures Trading, Banks & Banking, Energy & Mining, Monetary Policy, and Computers & Technology There's a lot written on cryptocurrency and blockchains. But, for the uninitiated, most of this information can be indecipherable. The Basics of Bitcoins and Blockchains provides a clear guide to this new currency and the revolutionary technology that powers it. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies. Gain an understanding of a broad spectrum of Bitcoin topics including the history of Bitcoin, the Bitcoin blockchain, and Bitcoin buying, selling, and mining. Learn how payments are made, and how to put a value on cryptocurrencies and digital tokens. Blockchain technology. What exactly is a blockchain, how does it work, and why is it important? The Basics of Bitcoins and Blockchains answers these questions and more. Learn about notable blockchain platforms, smart contracts, and other important facets of blockchains and their function in the changing cyber-economy. Things to know before buying cryptocurrencies. Find trustworthy and balanced insights into Bitcoin investing and investing in other cryptocurrency. Discover the risks and mitigations, learn how to identify scams, and understand cryptocurrency exchanges, digital wallets, and regulations. Learn about: Blockchain technology and how it works Workings of the cryptocurrency market Evolution and potential impacts of Bitcoin and blockchains on global businesses You've read books such as Blockchain Bubble or Revolution, Cryptoassets, Blockchain Technology Explained, Blockchain Revolution, The Bitcoin Standard, Mastering Bitcoin, or Bitcoin For Dummies, but to really understand the technology read The Basics of Bitcoins and Blockchains.

The Internet Book, Fifth Edition explains how computers communicate, what the Internet is, how the Internet works, and what services the Internet offers. It is designed for readers who do not have a strong technical background - early chapters clearly explain the terminology and concepts needed to understand all the services. It helps the reader to understand the technology behind the Internet, appreciate how the Internet can be used, and discover why people find it so exciting. In addition, it explains the origins of the Internet and shows the reader how rapidly it has grown. It also provides information on how to avoid scams and exaggerated marketing claims. The first section of the book introduces communication system concepts and terminology. The second section reviews the history of the Internet and its incredible growth. It documents the rate at which the digital revolution occurred, and provides background that will help readers appreciate the significance of the underlying design. The third section describes basic Internet technology and capabilities. It examines how Internet hardware is organized and how software provides communication. This section provides the foundation for later chapters, and will help readers ask good questions and make better decisions when salespeople offer Internet products and services. The final section describes application services currently available on the Internet. For each service, the book explains both what the service offers and how the service works. About the Author Dr. Douglas Comer is a Distinguished Professor at Purdue University in the departments of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has created and enjoys teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on computer networks and Internets, operating systems, computer architecture, and computer software. One of the researchers who contributed to the Internet as it was being formed in the late 1970s and 1980s, he has served as a member of the Internet Architecture Board, the group responsible for guiding the Internet's development. Prof. Comer is an internationally recognized expert on computer networking, the TCP/IP protocols, and the Internet, who presents lectures to a wide range of audiences. In addition to research articles, he has written a series of textbooks that describe the technical details of the Internet. Prof. Comer's books have been translated into many languages, and are used in industry as well as computer science, engineering, and business departments around the world. Prof. Comer joined the Internet project in the late 1970s, and has had a high-speed Internet connection to his home since 1981. He wrote this book as a response to everyone who has asked him for an explanation of the Internet that is both technically correct and easily understood by anyone. An Internet enthusiast, Comer displays INTRNET on the license plate of his car.

Whether you re already in the cloud, or determining whether or not it makes sense for your organization, Cloud Computing and Software Services: Theory and Techniques provides the technical understanding needed to develop and maintain state-of-the-art cloud computing and software services. From basic concepts and recent research findings to future directions, it gathers the insight of 50 experts from around to present a global perspective on the range of technical topics related to cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS). The book also:

Reviews real cases and applications of cloud computing
Discusses the infrastructure cloud and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Considers data- and compute-intensive environments
Examines security and reliability in the cloud

Witten in a manner that makes this complex subject easy to understand, this is an ideal one-stop reference for anyone interested in cloud computing. The accessible language and wealth of illustrations also make it suitable for academic and research-oriented settings. The comprehensive coverage supplies you with the understanding of cloud computing technologies and trends in parallel computing needed to establish and maintain effective and efficient computing and software services.

Praise for:

a must for professionals and executives as each chapter is contributed by a team of highly accomplished and acclaimed researchers, pundits, and professors.
Pethuru Raj PhD, Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions (RBEI) Ltd, India

The definitive history of the cult games console, produced in collaboration with Sega. This large format, deluxe hardback features a dazzling collection of never-before-published materials and specially commissioned editorial, offering unprecedented insight into the creation of Sega's last console and its celebrated library of games. A follow-on publication to our acclaimed 2014 release, Sega Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works, the book features a rich variety of content: manufacturing prototypes, stunning photography of rare hardware, game development materials, and peerlessly printed game imagery. Accompanying a cache of visual material gleaned from Sega's archives, is an in-depth, interview-led editorial piece by New Yorker contributing writer Simon Parkin. Featuring contributions from Yu Suzuki (Shenmue), Masayoshi Kikuchi (Jet Set Radio/Jet Grind Radio), Naoto Ohshima (Sonic Adventure) and Tetsuya Mizuguchi (Space Channel 5, Rez), this revealing retrospective sheds new light on this pivotal era for SEGA and chronicles the rise and fall of this lauded videogame console.

This book uses literature as a wrench to pry open social networks and to ask different questions than have been asked about social networks previously. The book emphasizes the story-telling aspect of social networks, as well as the connection between narrative and social networks by incorporating narrative, dynamic networks, and time. Thus, it constructs a bridge between literature, digital humanities, and social networks. This book is a pioneering work that attempts to express social and philosophic constructs in mathematical terms. The material used to test the algorithms is texts intended for performance, such as plays, film scripts, and radio plays; mathematical representations of the texts, or "literature networks", are then used to analyze the social networks found in the respective texts. By using literature networks and their accompanying narratives, along with their supporting analyses, this book allows for a novel approach to social network analysis.

Towards a Digital Renaissance traces the excitement and optimism of the early internet, the outsider cyberpunk ethic and open access. But it also monitors the more complex but ultimately more commercialised online world of today, a world dominated by corporate business in which many feel that surveillance has become overwhelming. Jeremy Silver's involvement in various start-ups, both as CEO and investor, led to his leadership of Digital Catapult. Towards a Digital Renaissance examines the interplay between state and private financing in the digital sector. It also argues for the internet's potential to transition from a 'medieval' world of the GAFA big four (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple), closed and walled up like medieval city states, to a 'digital renaissance' based on the free exchange of ideas and an enabling metaverse made up of virtual reality and artificial intelligence that deepens our experience of reality rather than restricting or monitoring it.

This book identifies the 13 main challenges designers face when they talk about their work and provides communication strategies so that a better design, not a louder argument, is what makes it into the world. It is a fact that we all want to put great design into the world, but no product ever makes it out of the building without rounds of reviews, feedback, and signoff. As an interaction or UX designer, you've felt the general trend toward faster development, more work, and less discussion. As we spend time crafting, we become attached to our own ideas and it gets all too easy to react to feedback emotionally or dismiss it, when we should be taking the time to decode it and explain or adapt the design. Communicating the UX Vision helps you identify the skills and behavioral patterns to present your work in more persuasive ways, and respond more constructively to feedback from coworkers and stakeholders.

'Witty, rigorous, and as urgent as a fire alarm' Dorian Lynskey 'Cooly prosecutorial' Guardian Nobody meant for this to happen. Facebook didn't mean to facilitate a genocide. Twitter didn't want to be used to harass women. YouTube never planned to radicalise young men. But with billions of users, these platforms need only tweak their algorithms to generate more 'engagement'. In so doing, they bring unrest to previously settled communities and erode our relationships. Social warming has happened gradually - as a by-product of our preposterously convenient digital existence. But the gradual deterioration of our attitudes and behaviour on- and offline - this vicious cycle of anger and outrage - is real. And it can be corrected. Here's how.

If you're interested in using social media as an investigative tool, Introduction to Social Media Investigation will show you how! Social networks and social media, like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, are some of the most popular services on the Web, with hundreds of millions of users. The public information that people share on these sites can be valuable for anyone interested in investigating people of interest through open, public sources. Social media as an investigative device is in its infancy and not well understood. This book presents an overview of social media and discusses special skills and techniques to use when conducting investigations. The book features hands-on tutorials and case studies and offers additional data-gathering techniques.

This book provides practical information about web archives, offers inspiring examples for web archivists, raises new challenges, and shares recent research results about access methods to explore information from the past preserved by web archives. The book is structured in six parts. Part 1 advocates for the importance of web archives to preserve our collective memory in the digital era, demonstrates the problem of web ephemera and shows how web archiving activities have been trying to address this challenge. Part 2 then focuses on different strategies for selecting web content to be preserved and on the media types that different web archives host. It provides an overview of efforts to address the preservation of web content as well as smaller-scale but high-quality collections of social media or audiovisual content. Next, Part 3 presents examples of initiatives to improve access to archived web information and provides an overview of access mechanisms for web archives designed to be used by humans or automatically accessed by machines. Part 4 presents research use cases for web archives. It also discusses how to engage more researchers in exploiting web archives and provides inspiring research studies performed using the exploration of web archives. Subsequently, Part 5 demonstrates that web archives should become crucial infrastructures for modern connected societies. It makes the case for developing web archives as research infrastructures and presents several inspiring examples of added-value services built on web archives. Lastly, Part 6 reflects on the evolution of the web and the sustainability of web archiving activities. It debates the requirements and challenges for web archives if they are to assume the responsibility of being societal infrastructures that enable the preservation of memory. This book targets academics and advanced professionals in a broad range of research areas such as digital humanities, social sciences, history, media studies and information or computer science. It also aims to fill the need for a scholarly overview to support lecturers who would like to introduce web archiving into their courses by offering an initial reference for students.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the notion that nearly everything we use, from gym shorts to streetlights, will soon be connected to the Internet; the Internet of Everything (IoE) encompasses not just objects, but the social connections, data, and processes that the IoT makes possible. Industry and financial analysts have predicted that the number of Internet-enabled devices will increase from 11 billion to upwards of 75 billion by 2020. Regardless of the number, the end result looks to be a mind-boggling explosion in Internet connected stuff. Yet, there has been relatively little attention paid to how we should go about regulating smart devices, and still less about how cybersecurity should be enhanced. Similarly, now that everything from refrigerators to stock exchanges can be connected to a ubiquitous Internet, how can we better safeguard privacy across networks and borders? Will security scale along with this increasingly crowded field? Or, will a combination of perverse incentives, increasing complexity, and new problems derail progress and exacerbate cyber insecurity? For all the press that such questions have received, the Internet of Everything remains a topic little understood or appreciated by the public. This volume demystifies our increasingly "smart" world, and unpacks many of the outstanding security, privacy, ethical, and policy challenges and opportunities represented by the IoE. Scott J. Shackelford provides real-world examples and straightforward discussion about how the IoE is impacting our lives, companies, and nations, and explain how it is increasingly shaping the international community in the twenty-first century. Are there any downsides of your phone being able to unlock your front door, start your car, and control your thermostat? Is your smart speaker always listening? How are other countries dealing with these issues? This book answers these questions, and more, along with offering practical guidance for how you can join the effort to help build an Internet of Everything that is as secure, private, efficient, and fun as possible.

* The first comprehensive guide to UX analytics, written for digital business professionals at all levels and without an analyst background * Serves as a ready reference, with over 50 case studies and 35 cheat sheets to guide smart decision-making * Teaches the C-SUITE method for applying UX analytics to any digital optimization challenge, created by a trained software engineer and multichannel marketing expert

* The first comprehensive guide to UX analytics, written for digital business professionals at all levels and without an analyst background * Serves as a ready reference, with over 50 case studies and 35 cheat sheets to guide smart decision-making * Teaches the C-SUITE method for applying UX analytics to any digital optimization challenge, created by a trained software engineer and multichannel marketing expert

An easy-to-understand primer on Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are driving the next technological revolution. If you want to get in on the action, this book helps you understand what these technologies are, their history, how they're being used, and how they'll affect consumers both personally and professionally in the very near future. With VR and AR poised to become mainstream within the next few years, an accessible book to bring users up to speed on the subject is sorely needed--and that's where this handy reference comes in! Rather than focusing on a specific piece of hardware (HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, iOS ARKit) or software (Unity, Unreal Engine), Virtual & Augmented Reality For Dummies offers a broad look at both VR and AR, giving you a bird's eye view of what you can expect as they continue to take the world by storm. * Keeps you up-to-date on the pulse of this fast-changing technology * Explores the many ways AR/VR are being used in fields such as healthcare, education, and entertainment * Includes interviews with designers, developers, and technologists currently working in the fields of VR and AR Perfect for both potential content creators and content consumers, this book will change the way you approach and contribute to these emerging technologies.

In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that the all-pervasive presence of data in our networked society has given rise to a new mode of production, one not ruled over by capitalists and their factories but by those who own and control the flow of information. Yet, if this is not capitalism anymore, could it be something worse? What if the world we're living in is more dystopian than the techno utopias of the Silicon Valley imagination? And, if this is the case, how do we find a way out? Capital Is Dead offers not only the theoretical tools to analyse this new world of information, but the ones to change it, too. Drawing on the writings of the Situationists and a range of contemporary theorists, Wark offers a vast panorama of the contemporary condition and the classes that control it.

The whole world knows the face of the young man with the bright black eyes. He is in the process of becoming an icon, a symbol, similar to the famous photo of Che Guevara. The face is that of Raif Badawi, who was nominated for the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize. Arrested in Saudi Arabia, he was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment and 1000 lashes - a de facto death sentence. The woman who succeeded in getting such people as Barack Obama and Prince Charles to appeal personally to the Saudi King for Badawi's release is his wife, Ensaf Haidar, who began the campaign to free her husband with a self-painted poster in front of a small church in Sherbrooke, Canada. When Raif Badawi and Ensaf Haidar fell in love with each other as adolescents, they did so in violation of every moral precept in the strictly Islamic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. During their clandestine love affair, the young couple had no idea that, more than a decade later, Ensaf's love for Raif would attract the attention of politicians from around the world as the blogger's wife now mobilises global public opinion in an effort to save her husband from murder at the hands of the Saudi judiciary. With a courage born of desperation, she is fighting from exile in Canada to secure the release of the father of her three children, and is bringing great pressure to bear on the murderous regime in her native country. Ensaf Haidar tells Raif's and her own story: the story of their shared liberal ideas and her fight for her husband's release.