Information technology is at the center of modern life. It supports most day-to-day activities: talking on the phone, getting money from an ATM, or working in the office. Whether for work, commerce, or fun, we interact with computers, networks, and databases — all sorts of information technology. How does it work? Certainly, technological advances helped create this world. But what keeps it running? The answer is people. These people — computer system administrators — are the unsung heroes of the modern age. This book, ten years in the making, is the result. It tells the story of system administration through the narratives of real system administrators. It documents dynamic systems of people and machines, of specialists working together to tame hugely complex information technology infrastructures, developing and adapting their own tools and practices over time to create productive work environments. The authors hope Taming Information Technology will lead the way to a future in which the important work of these IT workers is better appreciated, better understood, and better supported.

Examines how and why individuals--and entire nations--have throughout history resisted technological innovations.

Summary Taming Text, winner of the 2013 Jolt Awards for Productivity, is a hands-on, example-driven guide to working with unstructured text in the context of real-world applications. This book explores how to automatically organize text using approaches such as full-text search, proper name recognition, clustering, tagging, information extraction, and summarization. The book guides you through examples illustrating each of these topics, as well as the foundations upon which they are built. About this Book There is so much text in our lives, we are practically drowningin it. Fortunately, there are innovative tools and techniquesfor managing unstructured information that can throw thesmart developer a much-needed lifeline. You'll find them in thisbook. Taming Text is a practical, example-driven guide to working withtext in real applications. This book introduces you to useful techniques like full-text search, proper name recognition,clustering, tagging, information extraction, and summarization.You'll explore real use cases as you systematically absorb thefoundations upon which they are built.Written in a clear and concise style, this book avoids jargon, explainingthe subject in terms you can understand without a backgroundin statistics or natural language processing. Examples arein Java, but the concepts can be applied in any language. Written for Java developers, the book requires no prior knowledge of GWT. Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book. Winner of 2013 Jolt Awards: The Best Books—one of five notable books every serious programmer should read. What's Inside When to use text-taming techniques Important open-source libraries like Solr and Mahout How to build text-processing applications About the Authors Grant Ingersoll is an engineer, speaker, and trainer, a Lucenecommitter, and a cofounder of the Mahout machine-learning project. Thomas Morton is the primary developer of OpenNLP and Maximum Entropy. Drew Farris is a technology consultant, software developer, and contributor to Mahout,Lucene, and Solr. "Takes the mystery out of verycomplex processes."—From the Foreword by Liz Liddy, Dean, iSchool, Syracuse University Table of Contents Getting started taming text Foundations of taming text Searching Fuzzy string matching Identifying people, places, and things Clustering text Classification, categorization, and tagging Building an example question answering system Untamed text: exploring the next frontier

An examination of the cognitive tools that the mind uses to grapple with uncertainty in the real world. How do humans navigate uncertainty, continuously making near-effortless decisions and predictions even under conditions of imperfect knowledge, high complexity, and extreme time pressure? Taming Uncertainty argues that the human mind has developed tools to grapple with uncertainty. Unlike much previous scholarship in psychology and economics, this approach is rooted in what is known about what real minds can do. Rather than reducing the human response to uncertainty to an act of juggling probabilities, the authors propose that the human cognitive system has specific tools for dealing with different forms of uncertainty. They identify three types of tools: simple heuristics, tools for information search, and tools for harnessing the wisdom of others. This set of strategies for making predictions, inferences, and decisions constitute the mind's adaptive toolbox. The authors show how these three dimensions of human decision making are integrated and they argue that the toolbox, its cognitive foundation, and the environment are in constant flux and subject to developmental change. They demonstrate that each cognitive tool can be analyzed through the concept of ecological rationality—that is, the fit between specific tools and specific environments. Chapters deal with such specific instances of decision making as food choice architecture, intertemporal choice, financial uncertainty, pedestrian navigation, and adolescent behavior.

You receive an e-mail. It contains an offer for a complete personal computer system. It seems like the retailer read your mind since you were exploring computers on their web site just a few hours prior.... As you drive to the store to buy the computer bundle, you get an offer for a discounted coffee from the coffee shop you are getting ready to drive past. It says that since you’re in the area, you can get 10% off if you stop by in the next 20 minutes.... As you drink your coffee, you receive an apology from the manufacturer of a product that you complained about yesterday on your Facebook page, as well as on the company’s web site.... Finally, once you get back home, you receive notice of a special armor upgrade available for purchase in your favorite online video game. It is just what is needed to get past some spots you’ve been struggling with.... Sound crazy? Are these things that can only happen in the distant future? No. All of these scenarios are possible today! Big data. Advanced analytics. Big data analytics. It seems you can’t escape such terms today. Everywhere you turn people are discussing, writing about, and promoting big data and advanced analytics. Well, you can now add this book to the discussion. What is real and what is hype? Such attention can lead one to the suspicion that perhaps the analysis of big data is something that is more hype than substance. While there has been a lot of hype over the past few years, the reality is that we are in a transformative era in terms of analytic capabilities and the leveraging of massive amounts of data. If you take the time to cut through the sometimes-over-zealous hype present in the media, you’ll find something very real and very powerful underneath it. With big data, the hype is driven by genuine excitement and anticipation of the business and consumer benefits that analyzing it will yield over time. Big data is the next wave of new data sources that will drive the next wave of analytic innovation in business, government, and academia. These innovations have the potential to radically change how organizations view their business. The analysis that big data enables will lead to decisions that are more informed and, in some cases, different from what they are today. It will yield insights that many can only dream about today. As you’ll see, there are many consistencies with the requirements to tame big data and what has always been needed to tame new data sources. However, the additional scale of big data necessitates utilizing the newest tools, technologies, methods, and processes. The old way of approaching analysis just won’t work. It is time to evolve the world of advanced analytics to the next level. That’s what this book is about. Taming the Big Data Tidal Wave isn’t just the title of this book, but rather an activity that will determine which businesses win and which lose in the next decade. By preparing and taking the initiative, organizations can ride the big data tidal wave to success rather than being pummeled underneath the crushing surf. What do you need to know and how do you prepare in order to start taming big data and generating exciting new analytics from it? Sit back, get comfortable, and prepare to find out!

This professional resource equips K-12 students with the skills they need to be critical readers in the 21st century. Today's reader is reading across multiple genres, on phones and tablets, with text in hand, and also online, and this helpful book provides educators with techniques on how to teach students to read on every platform and in every genre, to struggle with text, and to break through to new ideas when reading text. It focuses on the habits that students must form in order to gain the confidence to access all texts across all platforms. Each chapter is devoted to developing the five habits for successful reading: reading closely, widely, critically, deeply, and purposefully. Grounded in the latest research, the easy-to-implement strategies and instructional methods will help students cultivate strong reading skills in the 21st century classroom.

Technology is by far one of the most fearful parts of parenting in today's culture. And it changes constantly. As a parent, how do you stay current? How do you teach your children to use technology responsibly? Taming the Technology Monster can help.This booklet contains 8 guiding principles to raising digital natives. It breaks each idea into understandable, practical concepts to help you protect your children against all that technology can bring not only into your home, but into their hearts. Regardless of your child's age, you will be equipped with ways to stay ahead of the trends facing your kids every day, as well as ways to connect in the midst of those trends. Taming the Technology Monster will help you discover ways you can turn technology into opportunities for good in the life of your child and family.

Video games can instil amazing qualities in children – curiosity, resilience, patience and problem-solving to name a few – but with the World Health Organisation naming gaming disorder as a clinically diagnosable condition, parents and carers can worry about what video games are doing to their children. Andy Robertson has dealt with all of the above, not just over years of covering this topic fo newspapers, radio and television but as a father of three. In this guide, he offers parents and carers practical advice and insights – combining his own experiences with the latest research and guidance from psychologists, industry experts, schools and children's charities – alongside a treasure trove of 'gaming recipes' to test out in your family. Worrying about video game screen time, violence, expense and addiction is an understandable response to scary newspaper headlines. But with first-hand understanding of the video games your children love to play, you can anchor them as a healthy part of family life. Supported by the www.taminggaming.com Family Video Game Database, Taming Gaming leads you into doing this so that video games can stop being a point of argument, worry and stress and start providing fulfilling, connecting and ambitious experiences together as a family.

This text argues that companies must start with an understanding of people in relation to the development of products: user needs first, technology last - the opposite of how things are done now.

We live in a world increasingly governed by technology—but to what end? Technology rules us as much as laws do. It shapes the legal, social, and ethical environments in which we act. Every time we cross a street, drive a car, or go to the doctor, we submit to the silent power of technology. Yet, much of the time, the influence of technology on our lives goes unchallenged by citizens and our elected representatives. In The Ethics of Invention, renowned scholar Sheila Jasanoff dissects the ways in which we delegate power to technological systems and asks how we might regain control. Our embrace of novel technological pathways, Jasanoff shows, leads to a complex interplay among technology, ethics, and human rights. Inventions like pesticides or GMOs can reduce hunger but can also cause unexpected harm to people and the environment. Often, as in the case of CFCs creating a hole in the ozone layer, it takes decades before we even realize that any damage has been done. Advances in biotechnology, from GMOs to gene editing, have given us tools to tinker with life itself, leading some to worry that human dignity and even human nature are under threat. But despite many reasons for caution, we continue to march heedlessly into ethically troubled waters. As Jasanoff ranges across these and other themes, she challenges the common assumption that technology is an apolitical and amoral force. Technology, she masterfully demonstrates, can warp the meaning of democracy and citizenship unless we carefully consider how to direct its power rather than let ourselves be shaped by it. The Ethics of Invention makes a bold argument for a future in which societies work together—in open, democratic dialogue—to debate not only the perils but even more the promises of technology.