In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.

    We talk about the history, trends, technology ecosystem and future of Connected Cities, Connected Homes, Connected Health and Connected Cars. We also discuss the most exciting growth areas for entrepreneurs and venture capital investors. We share exciting stories and unique opinions of more than 30 industry veterans, experts and visionaries from Google, Ericsson, AT&T, Qualcomm, SAP, MIT, Jawbone and many others. We called this book The Silent Intelligence because most of the activity and growth in the space so far has been outside of mainstream visibility. Our aim is to help executives, entrepreneurs, investors and everybody who is interested in this topic, better understand the opportunities and challenges of the Internet of Things. We also hope that the new growth opportunities discussed in this book will be as exciting to you as they are to us.

    Host to organized baseball since 1892, Wahconah Park was soon to be abandoned by the owner of the Pittsfield Mets who would move his team to a new stadium in another town---an all too familiar story. Enter Bouton and his partners with the best deal ever offered to a community---a locally owned professional baseball team and a privately restored city owned ballpark at no cost to the taxpayers. It was a dream come true for the vast majority of the people of Pittsfield. But Bouton's plan was opposed by an elite group of power brokers who wanted to build a new $18.5 million baseball stadium---a stadium that the people had voted against three different times! In what one reviewer called that same humane, sarcastic voice, Bouton unmasks a mayor who brags that the fix is in, a newspaper that lies to its readers, and a city government that operates out of a bar. And that's just Part l. Part ll is the even more amazing story of what happened after this book as self published---a story in itself---in hardcover. Invited back to Pittsfield by newly elected city officials, Bouton and his partners raise $1.2 million, help uncover a document that dates Pittsfield's baseball origins to 1791, and stage a vintage baseball game that is broadcast live on national television. Who could have guessed what would happen next? And that this time it would involve the Massachusetts Attorney General.

    Whether it is recounting the struggles over the game"Tetris," offering blow-by-blow narrative of Nintendo's bitter legal warfare or its see-saw competition with other companies for market leadership, Game Over is a masterful piece of business journalism and technical reportage-a book both cautionary and hugely entertaining.

    A dead body in a cemetery might not sound so bad, but this one was murdered. An arrow to the heart took out Burton Crabb, the owner of Terror Tales, a local ghost tour company. Detective Matt Carver pegs Reva’s Aunt Alva as the prime suspect in the killing, so Reva’s got to pull out all of the stops to clear her Auntie’s name. It doesn’t help that Aunt Alva fought with the deceased over his disrespect of the cemetery’s inhabitants. Can Reva find the killer and keep her beloved Aunt out of prison? Or is she walking right into a killer’s deadly snare? Come along as Reva and friends solve this crime one spell at a time.

    for Corporate Security and Investigation to spy on another employee while they’re traveling for the company. Ordinarily careful to a fault, Sam decides to live it up. What better spot for business-class hedonism than boomtown Dubai, where resort islands materialize from open ocean, fortunes are made overnight, and skiers crisscross the snowy slope of a shopping mall.But when Sam’s charge is murdered during a night on the town, it is only the first in a series of bewildering events that plunge him waist-deep into a lethal mix of mobsters, prostitutes, crooked cops, consuls, and corporate players.Offering a chancy way out is Anwar Sharaf, the unlikeliest of detectives. A former pearl diver and gold smuggler with an undignified demeanor, Sharaf is sometimes as baffled as Sam by the changes to his homeland, especially as they are embodied in the behavior of his rebelliously independent—and hauntingly beautiful—daughter. But he knows where the levers of power reside. As the unlikely duo work their way toward the heart of the case, each man must confront the darkest forces threatening Dubai from within.Here is Dan Fesperman’s most suspenseful novel yet: a stunning portrait of a city whose mysterious rhythm (“like the precision throb of an artificial heart, clicking and insistent, yet cool to the touch”) is underscored by the insistent clashing of old and new.

     In the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans Superdome became a national symbol of misery and hopelessness, where the truly desperate rode out the storm. Four years later, in that very stadium, the New Orleans Saints won the NFC championship and earned their first-ever trip to the Super Bowl. Two weeks later, the Saints soundly defeated the heavily favored Indianapolis Colts 31-17 in what would become the most-watched television event in history. This is the inspirational story of a city recovering from disaster and a team with a history of heartbreak, seen through the eyes of the coach who taught them both how to win.

    In Rise of the Robots, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Martin Ford argues that this is absolutely not the case. As technology continues to accelerate and machines begin taking care of themselves, fewer people will be necessary. Artificial intelligence is already well on its way to making “good jobs” obsolete: many paralegals, journalists, office workers, and even computer programmers are poised to be replaced by robots and smart software. As progress continues, blue and white collar jobs alike will evaporate, squeezing working- and middle-class families ever further. At the same time, households are under assault from exploding costs, especially from the two major industries—education and health care—that, so far, have not been transformed by information technology. The result could well be massive unemployment and inequality as well as the implosion of the consumer economy itself.In Rise of the Robots, Ford details what machine intelligence and robotics can accomplish, and implores employers, scholars, and policy makers alike to face the implications. The past solutions to technological disruption, especially more training and education, aren't going to work, and we must decide, now, whether the future will see broad-based prosperity or catastrophic levels of inequality and economic insecurity. Rise of the Robots is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what accelerating technology means for their own economic prospects—not to mention those of their children—as well as for society as a whole.

    But his notoriety as the author of several dark novels—and the well-known story that, decades before, he had gunned down four men in the American West—sometimes brings unwanted visitors to his door. When a terrified man shows up one evening and says that he is being pursued by the long-gone Jack the Ripper, Denton dismisses him as one more victim of London’s lunacy. But then the mutilated body of a teenaged prostitute named Stella Minter is found in London’s East End. . . .Disappointed by the lack of police concern, Denton determines to pursue the murderer, even after it’s clear that he’s become the next target. As Denton begins to peel away the layers of the lurid and horrifying murder, he finds himself exploring the dark underbelly of the bursting metropolis, a place so vast that Denton is forced to follow nothing but his instincts through the maze of London—its pubs, its police offices, its dark alleys and disreputable neighborhoods—to find a murderer who is himself an agent of the city’s cancerous growth. And along the way Denton is lucky enough to find an ally in a woman with a past as haunted and a spirit as independent as his own.Kenneth Cameron has brought turn-of-the-century London vividly to life in this intelligent and compelling crime novel. The Frightened Man delves far deeper than the mere circumstances of a murder to investigate the unseen—the secrets harbored in London’s immeasurable streets and in the dark side of human nature.

    It teaches Clojure from the basics to advanced topics using practical, real-world application examples. Blow through the theory and dive into practical matters like unit-testing and environment set-up, all the way through building a scalable web-application using domain-specific languages, Hadoop, HBase, and RabbitMQ. About the TechnologyClojure is a modern Lisp for the JVM, and it has the strengths you'd expect: first-class functions, macros, support for functional programming, and a Lisp-like, clean programming style. About this BookClojure in Action is a practical guide focused on applying Clojure to practical programming challenges. You'll start with a language tutorial written for readers who already know OOP. Then, you'll dive into the use cases where Clojure really shines: state management, safe concurrency and multicore programming, first-class code generation, and Java interop. In each chapter, you'll first explore the unique characteristics of a problem area and then discover how to tackle them using Clojure. Along the way, you'll explore practical matters like architecture, unit testing, and set-up as you build a scalable web application that includes custom DSLs, Hadoop, HBase, and RabbitMQ. What's InsideA fast-paced Clojure tutorial Creating web services with Clojure Scaling through messaging Creating DSLs with Clojure's macro system Test-driven development with Clojure Distributed programming with Clojure, and moreThis book assumes you're familiar with an OO language like Java, C#, or C++ but requires no background in Lisp or Clojure itself.================================== Table of ContentsPART 1 GETTING STARTED Introduction to Clojure A whirlwind tour Building blocks of Clojure Polymorphism with multimethods Clojure and Java interop State and the concurrent world Evolving Clojure through macros PART 2 GETTING REAL Test-driven development and more Data storage with Clojure Clojure and the web Scaling through messaging Data processing with Clojure More on functional programming Protocols, records, and type More macros and DSLs

    New JVM-based languages like Groovy, Scala, and Clojure are redefining what it means to be a Java developer. The core Standard and Enterprise APIs now co-exist with a large and growing body of open source technologies. Multicore processors, concurrency, and massive data stores require new patterns and approaches to development. And with Java 7 due to release in 2011, there's still more to absorb.The Well-Grounded Java Developer is a unique guide written for developers with a solid grasp of Java fundamentals. It provides a fresh, practical look at new Java 7 features along with the array of ancillary technologies that a working developer will use in building the next generation of business software.

    With the 97 short and extremely useful tips for programmers in this book, you'll expand your skills by adopting new approaches to old problems, learning appropriate best practices, and honing your craft through sound advice.With contributions from some of the most experienced and respected practitioners in the industry--including Michael Feathers, Pete Goodliffe, Diomidis Spinellis, Cay Horstmann, Verity Stob, and many more--this book contains practical knowledge and principles that you can apply to all kinds of projects.A few of the 97 things you should know:"Code in the Language of the Domain" by Dan North"Write Tests for People" by Gerard Meszaros"Convenience Is Not an -ility" by Gregor Hohpe"Know Your IDE" by Heinz Kabutz"A Message to the Future" by Linda Rising"The Boy Scout Rule" by Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob)"Beware the Share" by Udi Dahan

    He killed an unfaithful lover by just letting her grow old, but her hate pursued him across seven centuries. In 1358 he stood with a few dozen knights against an army of nine thousand to defend the life of a beautiful countess...and earned a love that would conquer death.Now Vitellan has awakened in the twenty-first century, a bewildered fugitive, betrayed and hunted in a world where minds and bodies are swapped and memories are bought, sold, and read like books. But worst of all, a deadly enemy from the fourteenth century is still very much alive--and closing in.

    In this lively and groundbreaking new book, economist Ian Ayres shows how today's best and brightest organizations are analyzing massive databases at lightening speed to provide greater insights into human behavior. They are the Super Crunchers. From internet sites like Google and Amazon that know your tastes better than you do, to a physician's diagnosis and your child's education, to boardrooms and government agencies, this new breed of decision makers are calling the shots. And they are delivering staggeringly accurate results. How can a football coach evaluate a player without ever seeing him play? Want to know whether the price of an airline ticket will go up or down before you buy? How can a formula outpredict wine experts in determining the best vintages? Super crunchers have the answers. In this brave new world of equation versus expertise, Ayres shows us the benefits and risks, who loses and who wins, and how super crunching can be used to help, not manipulate us.Gone are the days of solely relying on intuition to make decisions. No businessperson, consumer, or student who wants to stay ahead of the curve should make another keystroke without reading Super Crunchers.