The sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has curbed human lifestyle by imposing restrictions on regular daily movements that had been taken for granted. Due to the pandemic, the welfare segment has received more attention, and every possible effort is being made to prioritize the services at the top. This can be made possible while using the latest tools, technologies, and resources that impact the human culture and welfare of well-being. Novel methods and devices that make the welfare services more efficient, adaptive, transparent, and cost-effective need to be explored. The Handbook of Research on Lifestyle Sustainability and Management Solutions Using AI, Big Data Analytics, and Visualization offers extensive research on lifestyle management and services that contribute towards indication, detection, conduction, protection, and technological enhancement including machine learning, deep learning, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and visualization. It also provides mechanisms that can improve lifestyle monitoring and help in increasing the immunity of the human body. Covering topics such as big data, robot therapy, and wearable technology, it is ideal for students, researchers, technologists, IT specialists, computer engineers, systems engineers, data scientists, doctors, hospital administrators, engineers, academicians, and technology providers.

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, Salim S. Abdool Karim was catapulted into a prominent position in the media and on television as the face of South African science in the country's response to the pandemic. Up to that point, his groundbreaking research on AIDS had garnered many awards, leading to his recognition as one of the world’s leading epidemiologists, making him ideally positioned to take the scientific lead in the Covid-19 response.

Standing Up for Science is Abdool Karim’s personal, behind-the-scenes account of the first three years of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is inspiring and informative, shedding light on the difficulties in providing scientific advice, on the international co-operation that was integral to responding to the pandemic, as well as giving insight to some of the controversies in the science-to-policy process, and drawing lessons from Covid-19 to prepare for future pandemics.

Beyond the recent events in which the story is grounded, the book is an ode to the value of science and its power to help us tackle some of the world's biggest problems.

An Economist Best Book of the Year A Financial Times Best Book of the Year A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year A ProMarket Best Political Economy Book of the Year One of The Week's Ten Best Business Books of the Year A cutting-edge look at how accelerating financial change, from the end of cash to the rise of cryptocurrencies, will transform economies for better and worse. We think we've seen financial innovation. We bank from laptops and buy coffee with the wave of a phone. But these are minor miracles compared with the dizzying experiments now underway around the globe, as businesses and governments alike embrace the possibilities of new financial technologies. As Eswar Prasad explains, the world of finance is at the threshold of major disruption that will affect corporations, bankers, states, and indeed all of us. The transformation of money will fundamentally rewrite how ordinary people live. Above all, Prasad foresees the end of physical cash. The driving force won't be phones or credit cards but rather central banks, spurred by the emergence of cryptocurrencies to develop their own, more stable digital currencies. Meanwhile, cryptocurrencies themselves will evolve unpredictably as global corporations like Facebook and Amazon join the game. The changes will be accompanied by snowballing innovations that are reshaping finance and have already begun to revolutionize how we invest, trade, insure, and manage risk. Prasad shows how these and other changes will redefine the very concept of money, unbundling its traditional functions as a unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value. The promise lies in greater efficiency and flexibility, increased sensitivity to the needs of diverse consumers, and improved market access for the unbanked. The risk is instability, lack of accountability, and erosion of privacy. A lucid, visionary work, The Future of Money shows how to maximize the best and guard against the worst of what is to come.

The world is undergoing a transformation as technology enters every ecosystem. Subsequently, there is a need to develop higher-order digital skills to ensure one's employability as professionals need to build digital competencies to remain competitive in the current work environment. Additionally, businesses must also continue to update their digital practices in order to remain relevant. Multidisciplinary Perspectives Towards Building a Digitally Competent Society explores multidisciplinary perspectives towards building a more digitally competent society, considers new business models and the need for organizations and individuals to develop the right mindset to embrace digitalization, and discusses how social capital can become a key driver in crafting a whole new digitally competent social fabric. Covering topics such as technological transformation, social media, and corporate social responsibility, this reference work is ideal for corporate practitioners, business owners, policymakers, scholars, researchers, practitioners, instructors, and students.

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences and law, expertly written by the world's leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas. This cutting edge book introduces the origins and consequences of digital platforms, examining how artificial intelligence-enabled digital platforms collect and process data from and about users by providing social media and e-commerce services. Robin Mansell and W. Edward Steinmueller compare and contrast neoclassical, institutional and critical political economy approaches. They show how uneven power relationships between platform operators and their users are analysed in different economic traditions. Key features include: analysis of economic and public values provides a foundation for platform regulation examines the impacts of platforms on the media industry challenges claims of the inevitability of platform dominance discusses key challenges, including: artificial intelligence, data sharing and competition in the digital economy. This concise book will be indispensable for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of media and communication studies, innovation studies and economics, particularly those focusing on platform economics.

Offering the first scholarly analysis of the economic nature of blockchains and the formation of the blockchain economy, this timely book explores the future of global capitalism. Applying the institutional economics of Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson, the authors highlight how blockchains are poised to reshape the nature of firms, governments, markets and civil society. Chapters apply basic economic principles to explore blockchains and distributed ledger technologies through the framework of institutional economics. The book suggests ways in which cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin may develop further in the future, bringing us back to a barter economy which removes the need for a third person in economic transactions. Outlining a ledger-centric view of the economy, the authors explore how blockchains and dehierarchalisation will reduce the demand for government regulation. Institutional economists and scholars will greatly appreciate the thorough analysis of the development of institutional cryptoeconomics and insight into the future of blockchains that this book offers. Computer and technology scientists will also find this book to be a valuable read, as well as those working specifically in the blockchain industry.

Now in paperback, the critically acclaimed "Yellow Dirt," "will break your heart. An enormous achievement--literally, a piece of groundbreaking investigative journalism--illustrates exactly what reporting should do: Show us what we've become as a people, and sharpen our vision of who we, the people, ought to become" ( "The Christian Science Monitor" ).
From the 1930s to the 1960s, the United States knowingly used and discarded an entire tribe of people as the Navajos worked, unprotected, in the uranium mines that fueled the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Long after these mines were abandoned, Navajos in all four corners of the Reservation (which borders Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona) continued grazing their animals on sagebrush flats riddled with uranium that had been blasted from the ground. They built their houses out of chunks of uranium ore, inhaled radioactive dust borne aloft from the waste piles the mining companies had left behind, and their children played in the unsealed mines themselves. Ten years after the mines closed, the cancer rate on the reservation shot up and some babies began to be born with crooked fingers that fused together into claws as they grew. Government scientists filed complaints about the situation with the government, but were told it was a mess too expensive to clean up.
Judy Pasternak exposed this story in a prizewinning "Los Angeles Times" series. Her work galvanized both a congressman and a famous prosecutor to clean the sites and get reparations for the tribe. "Yellow Dirt" is her powerful chronicle of both the scandal of neglect and the Navajos' fight for justice.

How will artificial intelligence change our world within twenty years?

AI will be the defining development of the twenty-first century. Within two decades, aspects of daily human life will be unrecognizable. AI will generate unprecedented wealth, revolutionize medicine and education through human-machine symbiosis, and create brand new forms of communication and entertainment. However, AI will also challenge the organizing principles of our economic and social order and bring new risks in the form of autonomous weapons and smart technology that inherits human bias. AI is at a tipping point, and people need to wake up-both to AI's radiant pathways and its existential perils for life as we know it.

In this provocative, utterly original work of "scientific fiction," Kai-Fu Lee, the former president of Google China and bestselling author of AI Superpowers, joins forces with celebrated novelist Chen Qiufan to imagine our AI world in 2041 in ten gripping short stories.

Gazing toward a not-so-distant horizon, AI 2041 offers urgent insights into our collective future and reminds us that we are the authors of our own destiny.