What for decades could only be dreamt of is now almost within reach: the widespread provision of free online education, regardless of a geographic location, financial status, or ability to access conventional institutions of learning. But does open education really offer the openness, democracy and cost-effectiveness its supporters promise? Or will it lead to a two-tier system, where those who can't afford to attend a traditional university will have to make do with online, second-rate alternatives? Open Education engages critically with the creative disruption of the university through free online education. It puts into political context not just the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) but also TED Talks, Wikiversity along with self-organised 'pirate' libraries and 'free universities' associated with the anti-austerity protests and the global Occupy movement. Questioning many of the ideas open education projects take for granted, including Creative Commons, it proposes a radically different model for the university and education in the twenty-first century.

What for decades could only be dreamed of is now almost within reach: the widespread provision of free online education, regardless of a geographic location, financial status, or ability to access conventional institutions of learning. But does open education really offer the openness, democracy and cost-effectiveness its supporters promise? Or will it lead to a two-tier system, where those who can't afford to attend a traditional university will have to make do with online, second-rate alternatives? Open Education engages critically with the creative disruption of the university through free online education. It puts into political context not just the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) but also TED Talks, Wikiversity along with self-organised 'pirate' libraries and 'free universities' associated with the anti-austerity protests and the global Occupy movement. Questioning many of the ideas open education projects take for granted, including Creative Commons, it proposes a radically different model for the university and education in the twenty-first century.

WPF and Silverlight are unlike any other user interface (UI) technologies. They have been built to a new paradigm that if harnessed correctly can yield unprecedented power and performance. This book shows you how to control that power to produce clean, testable, maintainable code. It is now recognized that any non-trivial WPF or Silverlight application needs be designed around the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) design pattern in order to unlock the technology's full data-binding potential. However, the knowledge of how to do this is missing from a large part of the development community even amongst those who work with WPF and Silverlight on a daily basis. Too often there is a reliance on programmatic interaction between controls and not enough trust in the technologies' data-binding capabilities. This leads to a clouding of design values and an inevitable loss of performance, scalability, and maintainability throughout the application. Pro WPF and Silverlight MVVM will show you how to arrange your application so that it can grow as much as required in any direction without danger of collapse.What you ll learn * Understand why the separation of an application s View and its Model is paramount, including the history of Model-View-Presenter and Model-View-Controller. * Apply WPF and Silverlight s powerful data-binding model correctly. * Examine how to organize an application targeting WPF or Silverlight, including unit-testing, source-control, separation of concerns, data serialization, and how to tie everything together with MVVM. * Develop a full game development application using MVVM by example. * How to serialize the Model without being invasive, how to implement a plug-in architecture that extends both the View and the Model, and how to handle Exceptions gracefully. Who this book is for Developers that wish to learn how to architect WPF or Silverlight applications to ensure maintainability, testability, and separation of concerns.

This work explores new theories and directions in cultural studies. What should or could cultural studies look like in the 21st Century? New Cultural Studies is both an introductory reference work and an original study which explores some of the most exciting new directions currently being opened up in cultural studies. A new generation has begun to emerge from the shadow of the Birmingham School: a generation who have turned to theory as a means to think through some of the crucial problems and issues in contemporary culture. New Cultural Studies collects for the first time the ideas of this generation and explains just why theory continues to be crucial for cultural studies.The book explores theory's past, present and future role in cultural studies, providing students and researchers alike with an authoritative and accessible guide to: some of the most interesting members of this 'post-Birmingham school' generation; the thinkers and theories currently influencing new work in cultural studies: Agamben, Badiou, Deleuze, Derrida, Kittler, Laclau, Levinas, and Zizek; and the new territories being mapped out across the intersections of cultural studies and cultural theory: anti-capitalism, ethics, the post-humanities, post-Marxism, new media technologies, the transnational.

The work of Samuel Weber has greatly influenced writers and thinkers across the arts and humanities: including literary, critical, and cultural theory; media, communication, theater, and cultural studies; new media and technology; psychoanalysis; and philosophy. His remarkable and inaugural texts have been especially important to the deconstructive tradition, given his early recognition of the importance of the writings of Jacques Derrida. Taught by Theodor W. Adorno and Peter Szondi, he is equally at home in the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, in the German literary tradition, or in psychoanalysis. Weber played an important role in the process of translation, publication, and interpretation that brought "theory" to prominence in the United States. His work continues to reactivate and transform the legacy bequeathed to us by figures such as Kant, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Heidegger, de Man, and Derrida, not least by exposing the field of philosophy to contemporary questions in the arenas of media, technology, politics, and culture.This volume brings together a number of eminent scholars seeking to assess the intellectual impact of Weber's large body of writings. It also contains two new and previously unpublished essays by Weber himself: "'God Bless America!'" and "'Going Along for the Ride: Violence and Gesture-Agamben Reading Benjamin Reading Kafka Reading Cervantes.'"

The work of Samuel Weber has greatly influenced writers and thinkers across the arts and humanities: including literary, critical, and cultural theory; media, communication, theater, and cultural studies; new media and technology; psychoanalysis; and philosophy. His remarkable and inaugural texts have been especially important to the deconstructive tradition, given his early recognition of the importance of the writings of Jacques Derrida. Taught by Theodor W. Adorno and Peter Szondi, he is equally at home in the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, in the German literary tradition, or in psychoanalysis. Weber played an important role in the process of translation, publication, and interpretation that brought "theory" to prominence in the United States. His work continues to reactivate and transform the legacy bequeathed to us by figures such as Kant, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Heidegger, de Man, and Derrida, not least by exposing the field of philosophy to contemporary questions in the arenas of media, technology, politics, and culture.This volume brings together a number of eminent scholars seeking to assess the intellectual impact of Weber's large body of writings. It also contains two new and previously unpublished essays by Weber himself: "'God Bless America!'" and "'Going Along for the Ride: Violence and Gesture-Agamben Reading Benjamin Reading Kafka Reading Cervantes.'"

Even after the 2008 financial crisis, neoliberalism has been able to advance its program of privatization and deregulation. The Uberfication of the University analyzes the emergence of the sharing economy-an economy that has little to do with sharing access to good and services and everything to do with selling this access-and the companies behind it: LinkedIn, Uber, and Airbnb. In this society, we all are encouraged to become microentrepreneurs of the self, acting as if we are our own precarious freelance enterprises at a time when we are being steadily deprived of employment rights, public services, and welfare support. The book considers the contemporary university, itself subject to such entrepreneurial practices, as one polemical site for the affirmative disruption of this model. Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

This book is a satirical and sometimes surreal self-help guide, which as well as challenging the orthodox perception of the Beatles' status, presents an oppressed minority with a complete defense strategy for dealing with any Fab Four fans reluctant to give peace a chance. By breaking Beatles' fans down into seven key groups, the author offers an invaluable insight into the mindset of each individual strain. Why would anyone claim to enjoy the Beatles' music? What's in it for them? (The reasons the Nostalgic Impolitic, for example, will choose to become a fan will vary greatly from those of the Latecomer or the American. They all long to fit in, but where and with whom?) Once you learn to identify which fan type is harassing you, simply follow the advice suggested in this book for dealing with that particular strain, and before you can say Pet Sounds, the fan will be retreating in defeat. The groundbreaking research expounded in these pages is also recommended reading for any form of Fab Four fan (apart from the Beatle Head), who may be interested in learning how to distinguish between articulate, cutting edge rock 'n' roll and bombastic bubblegum claptrap.

The Accellera Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) standard is architected to scale, but verification is growing and in more than just the digital design dimension. It is growing in the SoC dimension to include low-power and mixed-signal and the system integration dimension to include multi-language support and acceleration. These items and others all contribute to the quality of the SOC so the Metric-Driven Verification (MDV) methodology is needed to unify it all into a coherent verification plan. This book is for verification engineers and managers familiar with the UVM and the benefits it brings to digital verification but who also need to tackle specialized tasks. It is also written for the SoC project manager that is tasked with building an efficient worldwide team. While the task continues to become more complex, Advanced Verification Topics describes methodologies outside of the Accellera UVM standard, but that build on it, to provide a way for SoC teams to stay productive and profitable.

In the sciences, the merits and ramifications of open access-the electronic publishing model that gives readers free, irrevocable, worldwide, and perpetual access to research-have been vigorously debated. Open access is now increasingly proposed as a valid means of both disseminating knowledge and career advancement. In Digitize This Book! Gary Hall presents a timely and ambitious polemic on the potential that open access publishing has to transform both "papercentric" humanities scholarship and the institution of the university itself. Hall, a pioneer in open access publishing in the humanities, explores the new possibilities that digital media have for creatively and productively blurring the boundaries that separate not just disciplinary fields but also authors from readers. Hall focuses specifically on how open access publishing and archiving can revitalize the field of cultural studies by making it easier to rethink academia and its institutions. At the same time, by unsettling the processes and categories of scholarship, open access raises broader questions about the role of the university as a whole, forcefully challenging both its established identity as an elite ivory tower and its more recent reinvention under the tenets of neoliberalism as knowledge factory and profit center. Rigorously interrogating the intellectual, political, and ethical implications of open access, Digitize This Book! is a radical call for democratizing access to knowledge and transforming the structures of academic and institutional authority and legitimacy.

Where is cultural studies today? Does it have anything left to say? Where is theory and where is politics? Certainly, cultural studies seems to have lost its way somewhere between today's preoccupation with the empirical and the theory revolutions of the 1980s and 90s. Assessing the work of key theorists across the history of cultural studies - Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Meaghan Morris and Angela McRobbie - this book argues that the trend towards a more politicized practice is in fact not political enough; theory, and deconstruction in particular, can offer a more radical and a more political engagement. Pinpointing the ambiguities that both constitute and disturb cultural studies and outlining a radical agenda for its future, this book is designed for all those interested in cultural practice and theory.