A Must-Have Reference for both Business and IT Professionals! - Discover and Deal with how IT works in the real world - Understand Information People and what makes them tick - Build and maintain powerful and positive relationships between the Business and IT that move your Business forward - Create and manage effective IT teams that get the job done on time, within budget, and increase company revenue - Understand and manage the Business Politics of IT - Make sense of Business Technology and have it work for you - Get familiar with new methodologies that are influencing the future of technology - Learn to avoid the pitfalls that result in IT project failures and waste money - Inspire Business teams to focus on obtaining the unfair advantage in their industry through the intelligent and managed use of technology - Discover how to use meaningful technology to improve the quality of life of everyone who wants and needs it

Online Communication provides an introduction to both the technologies of the Internet Age and their social implications. This innovative and timely textbook brings together current work in communication, political science, philosophy, popular culture, history, economics, and the humanities to present an examination of the theoretical and critical issues in the study of computer-mediated communication. Continuing the model of the best-selling first edition, authors Andrew F. Wood and Matthew J. Smith introduce computer-mediated communication (CMC) as a subject of academic research as well as a lens through which to examine contemporary trends in society. This second edition of Online Communication covers online identity, mediated relationships, virtual communities, electronic commerce, the digital divide, spaces of resistance, and other topics related to CMC. The text also examines how the Internet has affected contemporary culture and presents the critiques being made to those changes. Special features of the text include: *Hyperlinks--presenting greater detail on topics from the chapter *Ethical Ethical Inquiry--posing questions on the nature of human communication and conduct online *Online Communication and the Law--examining the legal ramifications of CMC issues Advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers interested in the field of computer-mediated communication, as well as those studying issues of technology and culture, will find Online Communication to be an insightful resource for studying the role of technology and mediated communication in today's society.

No area of technology has developed faster or affected contemporary society more pervasively than electronic communications. Networked computers linked through the internet have enabled finance, commerce and manufacturing to function in a "virtual" environment, unconstrained by time and space. Boundaries have also been removed in voice, image, and data transmission, once normally provided through discrete media. Although the effects of these developments are large, their significance is far from clear. This collection of eleven original papers by British and Canadian experts examines a wide range of practical consequences of the current revolution in communications technology and reconsiders the actual depth of changes so far produced in the economy and society.

In this National Book Award–winning novel from a “brilliantly breathtaking writer,” a young Southerner searches for meaning in the midst of Mardi Gras (The New York Times Book Review). On the cusp of his thirtieth birthday, Binx Bolling is a lost soul. A stockbroker and member of an established New Orleans family, Binx’s one escape is the movie theater that transports him from the falseness of his life. With Mardi Gras in full swing, Binx, along with his cousin Kate, sets out to find his true purpose amid the excesses of the carnival that surrounds him. Buoyant yet powerful, The Moviegoer is a poignant indictment of modern values, and an unforgettable story of a week that will change two lives forever. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Walker Percy including rare photos from the author’s estate.

In this charming memoir, a renowned mathematician and winner of the American Book Award traces his career in mathematics from early lessons in horse racing and the realities of life to his adventures on the lecture circuit. A thought-provoking mix of autobiography, history, and insights into the role of mathematics in everyday life, this highly ent

Two common temptations lure us away from abundant living—withdrawing into safety or grasping for power. True flourishing, says Andy Crouch, travels down an unexpected path—being both strong and weak. Regardless of your stage or role in life, here is a way of love and risk so that we all, even the most vulnerable, can flourish.

Increasingly the world around us is becoming ‘smart.’ From smart meters to smart production, from smart surfaces to smart grids, from smart phones to smart citizens. ‘Smart’ has become the catch-all term to indicate the advent of a charged technological shift that has been propelled by the promise of safer, more convenient and more efficient forms of living. Most architects, designers, planners and politicians seem to agree that the smart transition of cities and buildings is in full swing and inevitable. However, beyond comfort, safety and efficiency, how can ‘smart design and technologies’ assist to address current and future challenges of architecture and urbanism? Architecture and the Smart City provides an architectural perspective on the emergence of the smart city and offers a wide collection of resources for developing a better understanding of how smart architecture, smart cities and smart systems in the built environment are discussed, designed and materialized. It brings together a range of international thinkers and practitioners to discuss smart systems through four thematic sections: ‘Histories and Futures’, ‘Agency and Control’, ‘Materialities and Spaces’ and ‘Networks and Nodes’. Combined, these four thematic sections provide different perspectives into some of the most pressing issues with smart systems in the built environment. The book tackles questions related to the future of architecture and urbanism, lessons learned from global case studies and challenges related to interdisciplinary research, and critically examines what the future of buildings and cities will look like.

Phil Factor is a legend in his own runtime. Scurrilous, absurd, confessional and scathing by turns, Confessions of an IT Manager targets the idiocy, incompetence and overreach of the IT management industry from vantage point all the way up and down the greasy pole. Phil Factor (real name witheld to protest the guilty) has over 20 years experience in the IT industry, specializing in database-intensive applications. For withering insight into the human weaknesses and farcical levels of ineptitude that bring IT projects to their knees, plus occasional escapes into burnished pastiche and cock-a-leg doggerel there is no funnier, more illuminating commentary on the IT crowd.

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by Truman Capote—also available are Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Other Voices, Other Rooms (in one volume), Portraits and Observations, and The Complete Stories Truman Capote’s masterpiece, In Cold Blood, created a sensation when it was first published, serially, in The New Yorker in 1965. The intensively researched, atmospheric narrative of the lives of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, and of the two men, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, who brutally killed them on the night of November 15, 1959, is the seminal work of the “new journalism.” Perry Smith is one of the great dark characters of American literature, full of contradictory emotions. “I thought he was a very nice gentleman,” he says of Herb Clutter. “Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.” Told in chapters that alternate between the Clutter household and the approach of Smith and Hickock in their black Chevrolet, then between the investigation of the case and the killers’ flight, Capote’s account is so detailed that the reader comes to feel almost like a participant in the events.