What we earn today is worth less tomorrow. So, what can we do about it? How can we future-proof our finances? The answer is simple: invest.

When it comes to investing you might have a few assumptions (you have to be rich to invest, it's too risky, you need to be a 'professional'), are bombarded with financial jargon (index, funds, stocks, shares) or are not sure where to start. Kalpana Fitzpatrick, financial journalist and money expert, will help you take control of your finances with this easy-to-understand guide to investing.

Invest Now is an essential book that will teach you:

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In recent years, billions of dollars (and euros, yen, and other currencies) have been spent by wireless services providers to acquire the radio frequency spectrum needed to offer so-called "Third Generation" (3G) mobile services. These services include high-speed data, mobile Internet access and entertainment such as games, music and video programs. Indeed, as voice communications are substituted by data communications, software -rather than terminals or networks- has become the driver of the wireless industry. Meanwhile, services are becoming increasingly specialized.
Why has the road to multimedia cellular been so difficult? These benefits of the mobile Internet have come with the costs of a massive transition that has coincided with the bust of stock markets and the technology segments worldwide, controversial and costly license auctions in several lead markets, dated or mistaken regulatory policies, the clash between the early hype and the pioneering realities of the mobile Internet. But these are generalities that barely scratch the surface. The devil is in the details. And it is these details that Competition for the Mobile Internet addresses.

This unique volume explores cutting-edge management approaches to developing complex software that is efficient, scalable, sustainable, and suitable for distributed environments. Practical insights are offered by an international selection of pre-eminent authorities, including case studies, best practices, and balanced corporate analyses. Emphasis is placed on the use of the latest software technologies and frameworks for life-cycle methods, including the design, implementation and testing stages of software development. Topics and features: * Reviews approaches for reusability, cost and time estimation, and for functional size measurement of distributed software applications * Discusses the core characteristics of a large-scale defense system, and the design of software project management (SPM) as a service * Introduces the 3PR framework, research on crowdsourcing software development, and an innovative approach to modeling large-scale multi-agent software systems * Examines a system architecture for ambient assisted living, and an approach to cloud migration and management assessment * Describes a software error proneness mechanism, a novel Scrum process for use in the defense domain, and an ontology annotation for SPM in distributed environments* Investigates the benefits of agile project management for higher education institutions, and SPM that combines software and data engineering This important text/reference is essential reading for project managers and software engineers involved in developing software for distributed computing environments. Students and researchers interested in SPM technologies and frameworks will also find the work to be an invaluable resource. Prof. Zaigham Mahmood is a Senior Technology Consultant at Debesis Education UK and an Associate Lecturer (Research) at the University of Derby, UK. He also holds positions as Foreign Professor at NUST and IIU in Islamabad, Pakistan, and Professor Extraordinaire at the North West University Potchefstroom, South Africa.

Web services and Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) have become thriving areas of academic research, joint university/industry research projects, and novel IT products on the market. SOC is the computing paradigm that uses Web services as building blocks for the engineering of composite, distributed applications out of the reusable application logic encapsulated by Web services. Web services could be considered the best-known and most standardized technology in use today for distributed computing over the Internet. This book is the second installment of a two-book collection covering the state-of-the-art of both theoretical and practical aspects of Web services and SOC research and deployments. Advanced Web Services specifically focuses on advanced topics of Web services and SOC and covers topics including Web services transactions, security and trust, Web service management, real-world case studies, and novel perspectives and future directions. The editors present foundational topics in the first book of the collection, Web Services Foundations (Springer, 2013). Together, both books comprise approximately 1400 pages and are the result of an enormous community effort that involved more than 100 authors, comprising the world's leading experts in this field.

This book features research presented and discussed during the Research and Innovation Forum (Rii Forum) 2021. The Covid-19 pandemic and its social, political, and economic implications had confirmed that a more thorough debate on these issues and topics was needed. For this reason, the Rii Forum 2021 was devoted to the broadly defined question of the short- and long-term impact of the pandemic on our societies. This volume serves as an essential resource to understand the diverse ways in which Covid-19 impacted our societies, including the capacity to innovate, advances in technology, the evolution of the healthcare systems, business model innovation, the prospects of growth, the stability of political systems, and the future of education.

The use of the internet for commerce has spawned a variety of auctions, marketplaces, and exchanges for trading everything from bandwidth to books. Mechanisms for bidding agents, dynamic pricing, and combinatorial bids are being implemented in support of internet-based auctions, giving rise to new versions of optimization and resource allocation models. This volume, a collection of papers from an IMA "Hot Topics" workshop in internet auctions, includes descriptions of real and proposed auctions, complete with mathematical model formulations, theoretical results, solution approaches, and computational studies. This volume also provides a mathematical programming perspective on open questions in auction theory, and provides a glimpse of the growing area of dynamic pricing.

Perspectives in Spread Spectrum brings together studies and recent work on six exciting topics from the spread spectrum arts. The book gives a wide, collective view of trends, ideas, and techniques in the spread spectrum discipline, due to the authors' extensive work on spread spectrum techniques and applications from different vantage points. The inexorable march of electronics towards ever faster, ever smaller, and ever more powerful electronic and optical circuitry has wrought, and will continue to enable, profound changes in the spread spectrum arts, by allowing increasingly complex signalling waveforms and statistical tests to be implemented as the theory beyond spread spectrum continues to evolve. Perspectives in Spread Spectrum is divided into six chapters. The first chapter deals with sequence spreading design. There is not a single metric for design of spreading sequences; rather, the design is ideally tailored to the specific scenario of usage. This chapter delves into recent and very promising synthesis work. The second chapter deals with OFDM techniques. As channels become wider and trans-channel fading (or jamming) becomes frequency selective across the band, OFDM techniques may provide a powerful alternative design perspective. The third chapter is a generalization of the venerable Walsh functions. A new modulation scheme, Geometric Harmonic Modulation, GHM for short, is reviewed and characterized as a form of OFDM. From GHM, a further generalization of the Walsh functions is derived for non-binary signalling. The fourth chapter is concerned with some new and exciting results regarding the follower jammer paradigm. A counter-countermeasure technique is reviewed, notable for its counterintuitive characteristic which can be understood from a simple yet elegant game framework. The fifth chapter recounts some results pertaining to random coding for an optical spread spectrum link. The technique is based on laser speckle statistics and uses a coherent array of spatial light modulators at the transmitter but allows the receiver to be realized as a spatially distributed radiometric and therefore incoherent structure. The sixth and final chapter looks at an important and interesting application of spread spectrum to accurately locate a wideband, 'bent pipe', satellite transponder. It is, in a strong sense, an inverted GPS technique. Perspectives in Spread Spectrum serves as an excellent reference and source of ideas for further research, and may be used as a text for advanced courses on the topic.

Adopting an informational perspective towards knowledge work, this book investigates how enterprise portals can promote knowledge creation, distribution, and use. Moving beyond the design and delivery of portals as mere information retrieval tools, an enterprise portal is viewed as a shared information work space that can facilitate communication and collaboration among organizational workers, as well as support the browsing, searching, and retrieval of information content. Adopting an information vantage point, the book uniquely explores the human issues surrounding enterprise portal adoption and use, as well as the utilization of intelligent agents to ameliorate the use of portals for knowledge-based tasks. The result is a novel, rich and comprehensive discussion on the factors affecting the design and utilization of enterprise portals for knowledge work, suitable for both graduate-level students and organizational workers alike.

Manufacturing and operations management paradigms are evolving toward more open and resilient spaces where innovation is driven not only by ever-changing customer needs but also by agile and fast-reacting networked structures. Flexibility, adaptability and responsiveness are properties that the next generation of systems must have in order to successfully support such new emerging trends. Customers are being attracted to be involved in Co-innovation Networks, as - proved responsiveness and agility is expected from industry ecosystems. Renewed production systems needs to be modeled, engineered and deployed in order to achieve cost-effective solutions. BASYS conferences have been developed and organized as a forum in which to share visions and research findings for innovative sustainable and knowledge-based products-services and manufacturing models. Thus, the focus of BASYS is to discuss how human actors, emergent technologies and even organizations are integrated in order to redefine the way in which the val- creation process must be conceived and realized. BASYS 2010, which was held in Valencia, Spain, proposed new approaches in automation where synergies between people, systems and organizations need to be fully exploited in order to create high added-value products and services. This book contains the selection of the papers which were accepted for presentation at the BASYS 2010 conference, covering consolidated and emerging topics of the conference scope.

With this book, Onn Shehory and Arnon Sturm, together with further contributors, introduce the reader to various facets of agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE). They provide a selected collection of state-of-the-art findings, which combines research from information systems, artificial intelligence, distributed systems and software engineering and covers essential development aspects of agent-based systems.

The book chapters are organized into five parts. The first part introduces the AOSE domain in general, including introduction to agents and the peculiarities of software engineering for developing MAS. The second part describes general aspects of AOSE, like architectural models, design patterns and communication. Next, part three discusses AOSE methodologies and associated research directions and elaborates on Prometheus, O-MaSE and INGENIAS. Part four then addresses agent-oriented programming languages. Finally, the fifth part presents studies related to the implementation of agents and multi-agent systems.

The book not only provides a comprehensive review of design approaches for specifying agent-based systems, but also covers implementation aspects such as communication, standards and tools and environments for developing agent-based systems. It is thus of interest to researchers, practitioners and students who are interested in exploring the agent paradigm for developing software systems.

The availability of effective global communication facilities in the last decade has changed the business goals of many manufacturing enterprises. They need to remain competitive by developing products and processes which are specific to individual requirements, completely packaged and manufactured globally. Networks of enterprises are formed to operate across time and space with world-wide distributed functions such as manufacturing, sales, customer support, engineering, quality assurance, supply chain management and so on. Research and technology development need to address architectures, methodologies, models and tools supporting intra- and inter-enterprise operation and management. Throughout the life cycle of products and enterprises there is the requirement to transform information sourced from globally distributed offices and partners into knowledge for decision and action. Building on the success of previous DrrSM conferences (Tokyo 1993, Eindhoven 1996, Fort Worth 1998), the fourth International Conference on Design of Information Infrastructure Systems for Manufacturing (DrrSM 2000) aims to: * Establish and manage the dynamics of virtual enterprises, define the information system requirements and develop solutions; * Develop and deploy information management in multi-cultural systems with universal applicability of the proposed architecture and solutions; * Develop enterprise integration architectures, methodologies and information infrastructure support for reconfigurable enterprises; * Explore information transformation into knowledge for decision and action by machine and skilful people; These objectives reflect changes of the business processes due to advancements of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the last couple of years.

This book brings together three great motifs of the network society: the seeking and using of information by individuals and groups; the creation and application of knowledge in organizations; and the fundamental transformation of these activities as they are enacted on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Of the three, the study of how individuals and groups seek information probably has the longest history, beginning with the early "information needs and uses" studies soon after the Second World War. The study of organizations as knowledge-based social systems is much more recent, and really gained momentum only within the last decade or so. The study of the World Wide Web as information and communication media is younger still, but has generated tremendous excitement, partly because it has the potential to reconfigure the ways in which people seek information and use knowledge, and partly because it offers new methods of analyzing and measuring how in fact such information and knowledge work gets done. As research endeavors, these streams overlap and share conceptual constructs, perspectives, and methods of analysis. Although these overlaps and shared concerns are sometimes apparent in the published research, there have been few attempts to connect these ideas explicitly and identify cross-disciplinary themes. This book is an attempt to fill this void. The three authors of this book possess contrasting backgrounds and thus adopt complementary vantage points to observe information seeking and knowledge work.

This is a detailed study of the work of web designers, drawing on empirical research carried out from the birth of web design as an area of work in the 1990s to its professionalisation in the 21st century.

eTransformation in Governance: New Directions in Government and Politics is about transformation in government and governance due to the information society development. The book provides conceptual clarification of the e-transformation in governance, and presents empirical findings on the recent developments in Western countries. The book provides innovative and fresh views to recent developments and practices of e-governance.

Dreamweaver is the industry standard software for professional website design. Introduction to Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 with ACA Certification, written by expert instructors, provides a complete introduction to Adobe Dreamweaver and provides all the classroom tools needed to teach a complete certification program.

Using this textbook, students master the foundational skills needed when working with style sheets, dynamic HTML, multimedia, databases, project management and much more. This text includes essential skills required for designing, developing, and maintaining websites as well as project management. Students gain valuable skills that further their careers in website development by learning to design and maintain fully functioning sites using the newest version of Dreamweaver. This curriculum, created by a team of Adobe experts who have developed training programs for Adobe Systems, offers your students the opportunity to confidently prove their skills mastery and gain this job-focused certification to give them the needed edge on their career path. Adobe Certified Associate exam vouchers are available for bundling for an additional fee.

This book presents a blueprint for corporate growth in the challenging environment of the first decade of the 21st century. It shows that Streamlining is an approach that leads companies to enable, automate and innovate, to control costs and improve performance in these new conditions. Pioneers like Cisco, Dell, GE, BP and Siemens have shown that it can deliver. This book will show all companies how to achieve results in the next part of their new techology/e-business journey and will be essential for managers.

Knowledge sharing within an organization is essential to its continued success and growth, though remaining aware of new communication technologies is a difficult task. Web Engineered Applications for Evolving Organizations: Emerging Knowledge explores integrated approaches to IT and Web engineering, offering solutions and best practices for knowledge exchange within organizations. This publication focuses on research in a number of related disciplines, including data knowledge storage and retrieval, intelligent information systems, IT education and training, and IT readiness.

The idea of this book comes from the observation that sensor networks represent a topic of interest from both theoretical and practical perspectives. The title und- lines that sensor networks offer the unique opportunity of clearly linking theory with practice. In fact, owing to their typical low-cost, academic researchers have the opportunity of implementing sensor network testbeds to check the validity of their theories, algorithms, protocols, etc., in reality. Likewise, a practitioner has the opportunity of understanding what are the principles behind the sensor networks under use and, thus, how to properly tune some accessible network parameters to improve the performance. On the basis of the observations above, the book has been structured in three parts: PartIisdenotedas"Theory,"sincethetopicsofits vechaptersareapparently "detached" from real scenarios; Part II is denoted as "Theory and Practice," since the topics of its three chapters, altough theoretical, have a clear connection with speci c practical scenarios; Part III is denoted as "Practice," since the topics of its ve chapters are clearly related to practical applications.

In this contributed volume, leading international researchers explore configuration modeling and checking, vulnerability and risk assessment, configuration analysis, and diagnostics and discovery. The authors equip readers to understand automated security management systems and techniques that increase overall network assurability and usability. These constantly changing networks defend against cyber attacks by integrating hundreds of security devices such as firewalls, IPSec gateways, IDS/IPS, authentication servers, authorization/RBAC servers, and crypto systems. Automated Security Management presents a number of topics in the area of configuration automation. Early in the book, the chapter authors introduce modeling and validation of configurations based on high-level requirements and discuss how to manage the security risk as a result of configuration settings of network systems. Later chapters delve into the concept of configuration analysis and why it is important in ensuring the security and functionality of a properly configured system. The book concludes with ways to identify problems when things go wrong and more. A wide range of theoretical and practical content make this volume valuable for researchers and professionals who work with network systems.

Text mining applications have experienced tremendous advances because of web 2.0 and social networking applications. Recent advances in hardware and software technology have lead to a number of unique scenarios where text mining algorithms are learned.

Mining Text Data introduces an important niche in the text analytics field, and is an edited volume contributed by leading international researchers and practitioners focused on social networks & data mining. This book contains a wide swath in topics across social networks & data mining. Each chapter contains a comprehensive survey including the key research content on the topic, and the future directions of research in the field. There is a special focus on Text Embedded with Heterogeneous and Multimedia Data which makes the mining process much more challenging. A number of methods have been designed such as transfer learning and cross-lingual mining for such cases.

Mining Text Data simplifies the content, so that advanced-level students, practitioners and researchers in computer science can benefit from this book. Academic and corporate libraries, as well as ACM, IEEE, and Management Science focused on information security, electronic commerce, databases, data mining, machine learning, and statistics are the primary buyers for this reference book.