Conducting Online Research on Amazon Mechanical Turk and Beyond, by Leib Litman and Jonathan Robinson, provides researchers with step-by-step technical information on this important research platform. The book gives a broad view of the MTurk ecosystem and customs, hones in on common researcher pitfalls, and provides detailed data on sampling, ethics, and experimentation.

Net Works offers an inside look into the process of successfully developing thoughtful, innovative digital media. In many practice-based art texts and classrooms, technology is divorced from the socio-political concerns of those using it. Although there are many resources for media theorists, practice-based students sometimes find it difficult to engage with a text that fails to relate theoretical concerns to the act of creating. Net Works strives to fill that gap. Using websites as case studies, each chapter introduces a different style of web project--from formalist play to social activism to data visualization--and then includes the artists' or entrepreneurs' reflections on the particular challenges and outcomes of developing that web project. Scholarly introductions to each section apply a theoretical frame for the projects. A companion website offers further resources for hands-on learning. Combining practical skills for web authoring with critical perspectives on the web, Net Works is ideal for courses in new media design, art, communication, critical studies, media and technology, or popular digital/internet culture.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Pervasive Computing, PERVASIVE 2007, held in Toronto, Canada in May 2007. The 21 revised full papers are organized in topical sections on reaching out, context and its application, security and privacy, understanding use, sensing, as well as finding and positioning.

This title tells the true story of the Turk, the infamous 18th-century automation. The story links an unlikely cast of historical characters, from Napoleon, Beethoven and Poe to the pioneers of the computer age, and provides an accessible way of examining the complex relationship between magic, man, mind and machine, from the Enlightenment to the computer age.

This book collates the key security and privacy concerns faced by individuals and organizations who use various social networking sites. This includes activities such as connecting with friends, colleagues, and family; sharing and posting information; managing audio, video, and photos; and all other aspects of using social media sites both professionally and personally. In the setting of the Internet of Things (IoT) that can connect millions of devices at any one time, the security of such actions is paramount. Securing Social Networks in Cyberspace discusses user privacy and trust, location privacy, protecting children, managing multimedia content, cyberbullying, and much more. Current state-of-the-art defense mechanisms that can bring long-term solutions to tackling these threats are considered in the book. This book can be used as a reference for an easy understanding of complex cybersecurity issues in social networking platforms and services. It is beneficial for academicians and graduate-level researchers. General readers may find it beneficial in protecting their social-media-related profiles.

This book is about the rise of digital labor. Companies like Uber and Amazon Mechanical Turk promise autonomy, choice, and flexibility. One of network culture's toughest critics, Trebor Scholz chronicles the work of workers in the "sharing economy," and the free labor on sites like Facebook, to take these myths apart. In this rich, accessible, and provocative book, Scholz exposes the uncaring reality of contingent digital work, which is thriving at the expense of employment and worker rights. The book is meant to inspire readers to join the growing number of worker-owned "platform cooperatives," rethink unions, and build a better future of work. A call to action, loud and clear, Uberworked and Underpaid shows that it is time to stop wage theft and "crowd fleecing," rethink wealth distribution, and address the urgent question of how digital labor should be regulated and how workers from Berlin, Barcelona, Seattle, and São Paulo can act in solidarity to defend their rights.

The SAGE Handbook of Survey Development and Application provides a practical resource that researchers can go to for cutting-edge tools to ensure they are employing the best survey research techniques. This handbook not only covers the classic and innovational skills and approaches involved at every step of the survey research process, but also centres itself around applied, how-to guidance to aid readers in best practice. Chapters engage with a broad range of topics including sampling issues, approaches to establishment of measurement equivalence, and the use of online labour pools in survey development. With contributions from a global community of leading and emerging scholars across a wide variety of disciplines, this Handbook is focused on being applicable and accessible across the social sciences. Containing over 120 tables and figures, checklists and tutorial guides, The SAGE Handbook of Survey Development and Application will serve as a one stop resource for survey research. This handbook serves as a touchstone for a variety of fields such as Organizational Behavior, Industrial & Organizational Psychology, Management, Psychology, Educational Research, Marketing, Public Policy, and others. PART 1: Conceptual Issues and Operational Definition PART 2: Research Design Considerations PART 3: Item Development PART 4: Scale Improvement Methods PART 5: Data Collection PART 6: Data Management and Analysis PART 7: Research Production and Dissemination PART 8: Applications

The gap between theoretical ideas and messy reality, as seen in Neal Stephenson, Adam Smith, and Star Trek. We depend on—we believe in—algorithms to help us get a ride, choose which book to buy, execute a mathematical proof. It's as if we think of code as a magic spell, an incantation to reveal what we need to know and even what we want. Humans have always believed that certain invocations—the marriage vow, the shaman's curse—do not merely describe the world but make it. Computation casts a cultural shadow that is shaped by this long tradition of magical thinking. In this book, Ed Finn considers how the algorithm—in practical terms, “a method for solving a problem”—has its roots not only in mathematical logic but also in cybernetics, philosophy, and magical thinking. Finn argues that the algorithm deploys concepts from the idealized space of computation in a messy reality, with unpredictable and sometimes fascinating results. Drawing on sources that range from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash to Diderot's Encyclopédie, from Adam Smith to the Star Trek computer, Finn explores the gap between theoretical ideas and pragmatic instructions. He examines the development of intelligent assistants like Siri, the rise of algorithmic aesthetics at Netflix, Ian Bogost's satiric Facebook game Cow Clicker, and the revolutionary economics of Bitcoin. He describes Google's goal of anticipating our questions, Uber's cartoon maps and black box accounting, and what Facebook tells us about programmable value, among other things. If we want to understand the gap between abstraction and messy reality, Finn argues, we need to build a model of “algorithmic reading” and scholarship that attends to process, spearheading a new experimental humanities.

Social media's connectivity is often thought to be a manifestation of human nature buried until now, revealed only through the diverse technologies of the participatory internet. Rather than embrace this view, Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection argues that the human nature revealed by social media imagines network technology and data as models for behavior online. Covering a wide range of historical and interdisciplinary subjects, Grant Bollmer examines the emergence of “the network” as a model for relation in the 1700s and 1800s and follows it through marginal, often forgotten articulations of technology, biology, economics, and the social. From this history, Bollmer examines contemporary controversies surrounding social media, extending out to the influence of network models on issues of critical theory, politics, popular science, and neoliberalism. By moving through the past and present of network media, Inhuman Networks demonstrates how contemporary network culture unintentionally repeats debates over the limits of Western modernity to provide an idealized future where “the human” is interchangeable with abstract, flowing data connected through well-managed, distributed networks.

A THRILLING ALTERNATE HISTORY, STEAMPUNK ADVENTURE FILLED WITH ACTION, DIVERSE LOCATIONS AND CHARACTERS. The Ottoman Empire's dominance resurged when they unearthed the secrets of Greek Fire and steam technology, but Angelique Morreaux will be damned if she allows that to stop her from exacting her revenge. Born into a life of servitude in a foreign land, Angelique escaped and has been plotting and training ever since. Her scheme to hurt the Ottomans, however, did not include a British policeman being shackled to her as chaperone. Nor did Constable James Nathaniel Beechworth ever imagine when he swore service to King and country that he would one day find himself dragged across the world, escorting a criminal to the very enemy's heart: Istanbul. Just who that enemy is, however, is what they must uncover. Is it the Janissary, using the young Ottoman Sultan as a puppet? Or the rebel group Asena, who claim they are the only true and pure Turkish people? And what of the rumours of a far deeper conspiracy? If Angelique and Beechworth can somehow work together and survive, perhaps they will uncover the truth of The Mechanical Turk.