The co-founder of three multi-million dollar start-ups, Oliver Luckett is frequently asked to speak on social media's impact. But how, he used to wonder, could he best describe the interactions of millions of users, a complicated system of human connections? One day, while hiking through Joshua Tree National Park, Luckett had a flashback to his days as a microbiology lab rat--and an epiphany: Social media is an organism, a living, breathing, evolving creature. Luckett and Casey deliver a revolutionary theory of social networks, showing--to an astonishing degree--how they mimic biological life. By examining cells, viruses, and other microbiological functions, we can master social media in both business and in life.

    Who Owns the Future? is his visionary reckoning with the most urgent economic and social trend of our age: the poisonous concentration of money and power in our digital networks.Lanier has predicted how technology will transform our humanity for decades, and his insight has never been more urgently needed. He shows how Siren Servers, which exploit big data and the free sharing of information, led our economy into recession, imperiled personal privacy, and hollowed out the middle class. The networks that define our world—including social media, financial institutions, and intelligence agencies—now threaten to destroy it.But there is an alternative. In this provocative, poetic, and deeply humane book, Lanier charts a path toward a brighter future: an information economy that rewards ordinary people for what they do and share on the web.

    Reconnect to life's enduring pleasures: friendship, family, romance, laughter, food, books, music, sleep, nature, art, and so much more.• Teaches tricks to cut down on phone use—the average person spends 1,400 hours per year on their phone• Presented in a petite, phone-like case with rounded corners• Filled with colorful, meditative artwork throughoutFor anyone who needs a break from their device, Goodbye Phone, Hello World is a rousing call to reclaim the precious hours lost to screen time.This collection of life-affirming exercises is an uplifting gift or self-purchase to reach for instead of a phone. • This book is for anyone who wants to do a digital detox, challenge their dependency on their phone, and seek out true connections.• Author Paul Greenberg is a New York Times bestselling author and the winner of the James Beard Award for Writing and Literature.• Perfect gift for anyone who claims to be addicted to their phone• Add it to the shelf with books like 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You by Tony Reinke. How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life by Catherine Price, and Off: Your Digital Detox for a Better Life by Tanya Goodin.

    He explores the history of places, like Vienna of 1900, Renaissance Florence, ancient Athens, Song Dynasty Hangzhou, and Silicon Valley, to show how certain urban settings are conducive to ingenuity. And, with his trademark insightful humor, he walks the same paths as the geniuses who flourished in these settings to see if the spirit of what inspired figures like Socrates, Michelangelo, and Leonardo remains. In these places, Weiner asks, “What was in the air, and can we bottle it?”

    Yes, the 'F' word. Tipping the scales at nearly 20 stone, with creaking knees and a dodgy ankle to boot, at the beginning of 2011 Pauline had reached a crisis point. Something had to change, and fast. It was never going to be an easy ride, but with her trademark warmth and sense of humour, Pauline recounts the highs and lows of the rollercoaster year in which she whips herself, and her life, into shape - with a fair few tales from her celebrated forty-year acting career thrown into the bargain. She reveals all: from the strain of working long hours away from home on one of Britain's most popular soaps to renewing her wedding vows and reuniting with her Birds of a Feather co-stars; from battling the bulge and facing the naysayers to rediscovering the joys of airline travel . . . without a seatbelt extension.Honest and revealing, Where Have I Gone? is brimming with brilliantly funny anecdotes and truly moving moments. So put your feet up and join Pauline as she embarks on the most incredible year of her life.

    Billionaire Protector Billionaire Baby Daddy Billionaire Cowboy Billionaire's Inheritance Each novel has never been released and has an HEA.

    Her client, Anna Petersheim, is pleasant and tells captivating stories. Plus, her home is quiet and far more peaceful than Esther's, with so many siblings. She only dreads the day when Anna's grandson, Viktor, will return from the river to take over the farm. She and Viktor were classmates years ago, and he'd been an obnoxious flirt who paid attention to every girl but her.A Toughened Riverboat CaptainA seasoned riverboat captain, Viktor Petersheim has seen his share of trials. He left the Amish after the death of his parents and siblings in a house fire for which he still feels responsible. Now, after years of working on the Mississippi River, he returns home to claim the farm he inherited from his grandparents and, hopefully, to repair some of the damaged relationships and broken hearts he left in his wake.Love off the RiverWhen Viktor arrives home, it doesn't take long for him and Esther to realize their mutual attraction. Even so, their relationship remains as tumultuous as a shaken snow globe, like the one Esther finds at a garage sale and gives to Viktor's grandmother as a token of affection. Viktor isn't the only man with an eye on Esther, and soon it looks as if she's ready to make a future with someone else. Will the two go their separate ways again? Or will the hand of God work something beautiful out of their angst and agitation?

    Just over fifteen years later, he had transformed himself into the charismatic CEO of a company worth $47 billion--at least on paper. With his long hair and feel-good mantras, the 6-foot-five Neumann, who grew up in part on a kibbutz, looked the part of a messianic Silicon Valley entrepreneur. The vision he offered was mesmerizing: a radical reimagining of work space for a new generation, with its fluid jobs and lax office culture. He called it WeWork. Though the company was merely subleasing amenity-filled office space to freelancers and small startups, Neumann marketed it like a revolutionary product--and investors swooned.As billions of funding dollars poured in, Neumann's ambitions grew limitless. WeWork wasn't just an office space provider, he boasted. It would build schools, create WeWork cities, even colonize Mars. Could he, Neumann wondered from the ice bath he'd installed in his office, become the first trillionaire or a world leader? In pursuit of its founder's grandiose vision, the company spent money faster than it could bring it in. From his private jet, sometimes clouded with marijuana smoke, the CEO scoured the globe for more capital. In late 2019, just weeks before WeWork's highly publicized IPO, a Hail Mary effort to raise cash, everything fell apart. Neumann was ousted from his company--but still was poised to walk away a billionaire.Calling to mind the recent demise of Theranos and the hubris of the dotcom era bust, WeWork's extraordinary rise and staggering implosion were fueled by disparate characters in a financial system blind to its risks, from a Japanese billionaire with designs on becoming the Warren Buffet of tech, to leaders at JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs who seemed intoxicated by a Silicon Valley culture where sensible business models lost out to youthful CEOs who promised disruption. Why did some of the biggest names in banking and venture capital buy the hype? And what does the future hold for Silicon Valley unicorns? Wall Street Journal reporters Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell explore these questions in this definitive account of WeWork's unraveling.

    Babies were plentiful, workers outnumbered retirees, and people aspiring towards the middle class yearned to own homes and cars. Companies didn't need to see any further than Europe and the United States to do well. Printed money was legal tender for all debts, public and private. We grew up learning how to "play the game," and we expected the rules to remain the same as we took our first job, started a family, saw our children grow up, and went into retirement with our finances secure.That world—and those rules—are over.By 2030, a new reality will take hold, and before you know it:- There will be more grandparents than grandchildren- The middle-class in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa will outnumber the US and Europe combined- The global economy will be driven by the non-Western consumer for the first time in modern history- There will be more global wealth owned by women than men- There will be more robots than workers- There will be more computers than human brains- There will be more currencies than countriesAll these trends, currently underway, will converge in the year 2030 and change everything you know about culture, the economy, and the world.According to Mauro F. Guillen, the only way to truly understand the global transformations underway—and their impacts—is to think laterally. That is, using “peripheral vision,” or approaching problems creatively and from unorthodox points of view. Rather than focusing on a single trend—climate-change or the rise of illiberal regimes, for example—Guillen encourages us to consider the dynamic inter-play between a range of forces that will converge on a single tipping point—2030—that will be, for better or worse, the point of no return.2030 is both a remarkable guide to the coming changes and an exercise in the power of “lateral thinking,” thereby revolutionizing the way you think about cataclysmic change and its consequences.

    There has been a marked increase in the adoption of PHP, most notably in the beginning to intermediate levels. PHP now boasts over 30% of the server side scripting market (Source: php.weblogs.com).The previous edition sold over 17,000 copies exclusively through Sitepoint.com alone. With the release of PHP 5, SitePoint have updated this bestseller to reflect best practice web development using PHP 5 and MySQL 4.The 3rd Edition includes more code examples and also a new bonus chapter on structured PHP Programming which introduces techniques for organizing real world PHP applications to avoid code duplication and ensure code is manageable and maintainable. The chapter introduces features like include files, user-defined function libraries and constants, which are combined to produce a fully functional access control system suitable for use on any PHP Website.

    Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Chris Anderson, Nassim Taleb, Esther Dyson, Brian Eno and nearly 150 other intellectual rock stars reveal how the internet is changing our minds, culture, and future, in John Brockman’s latest compendium from Harper Perennial and Edge.org.

    Drugs, white slavery, prostitution, murder... Former soldier and decorated war hero Bill Conlin finds himself immersed in it all when he can't find "respectable" work after his tour in Afghanistan. When his cousin, Jimmy, first tries to talk him into joining Irish mafia boss Frank Sullivan's gang, Bill brushes him off. All Bill really wants is a normal life with a nice girl, and he's pretty sure the waitress he just met, Dana, is the one. But with his savings running low, and desperate to get out of his Hell's Kitchen near-tenement apartment building, Bill, against his better judgment, agrees to a meeting with Mr. Sullivan, an Irish Mob boss--and immediately hits the point of no return... Now with a brand new Lincoln and fancy new uptown digs (complete with a live-in girl whose only purpose is to serve him, and a wardrobe packed with weapons), Bill's tasked to take down a Harlem-based Mexican prostitution ring. One thing leads to another, however, and the deeper he gets, the more he learns, and the more tangled up he becomes in a lifestyle he never wanted. But how long until he takes matters into his own hands... And what will the ultimate cost be... Mystery & suspense lurk around every corner of this hard-boiled crime drama where mobsters shoot it out with urban gangs on the streets of New York City.

    What would you do?When shy publisher Kate Kinley finds mysterious bruises on her mother’s arms she assumes the worst. Suffering with early onset dementia, her mother insists that nothing is wrong; it was just a clumsy accident. But was it an accident, or has her mother’s illness made her forget what really happened?In desperate need of someone she can trust, her isolation and paranoia grow as the closest people in her life become key suspects.With each heart-stopping revelation, Kate begins to realise that the perpetrator is no longer interested in inflicting bruises; they want blood.Keep Me Close is a compelling story of gross immorality, a cautionary tale of how easily wicked people can take advantage of the vulnerable elderly people in your life.If you love dark, psychological revenge-thrillers like The Sister-in-Law, The Babysitter and The Girl on the Train, you will love this twisty, sinister read. Perfect for readers of Gillian Flynn, Karin Slaughter, and Paula Hawkins.

    It has conquered developer mindshare at startups and enterprises alike with its focus of simplicity, convention and clean, maintainable code. The latest version, Rails 4, continues the tradition of enhanced performance, security and developer productivity, with improvements that enable professional developers to focus on what matters most: delivering business value quickly and consistently.The Rails™ 4 Way is the only comprehensive, authoritative guide to delivering production-quality code with Rails 4. Pioneering Rails expert Obie Fernandez and his team of leading Rails experts illuminate the entire set of Rails APIs, along with the idioms, design approaches, and libraries that make developing applications with Rails so powerful. Drawing on their unsurpassed experience and track record, they address the real challenges development teams face, showing how to use Rails to maximize your productivity.Using numerous detailed code examples, the author systematically cover Rails key capabilities and subsystems, making this book a reference that you depend on everyday. He presents advanced Rails programming techniques that have been proven effective in day-to-day usage on dozens of production Rails systems and offers important insights into behavior-driven development and production considerations such as scalability. Dive deep into the subtleties of the asset pipeline and other advanced Rails topics such as security and scalability. The Rails 4 Way is your best guide for making Rails do exactly what you want it to do.

    Big Blue, as the company is known, tends to rely for its success on magical thinking but that magic ran out a long time ago. The company got in trouble back in the 1990s and had to hire for the first time an outside CEO, Lou Gerstner, to save the day. Gerstner pushed IBM into services with spectacular results but this hurt the company, too. As services have became commoditized IBM could only compete by offshoring the work and quality suffered. The other negative impact of Gerstner was his compensation which was for the first time in IBM history very high. Only the Watson family had become rich running IBM with later CEOs like John Opel and John Akers living comfortable lives with lots of perks, but they never got BIG RICH. That changed with Gerstner. Sam Palmisano an IBM lifer followed Gerstner as CEO and followed, too, the Gerstner playbook. Palmisano retired three years ago with a retirement package worth $241 million, replaced by IBM's first woman CEO, Ginni Rometty, who certainly expects a comparable golden parachute. In order to achieve these numbers, though, IBM has essentially sacrificed both its customers and employees. In order to have ever growing earnings per share the company has cut labor to the bone, off-shored everything it can, dropped quality, deliberately underbid contracts to win them then not performed. IBM's acquisition policy is one of buying companies to get their sales then cutting costs to the bone and under-delivering. This and share buybacks have kept earnings growing until this house of cards recently began to fall. Ginni Rometty, who will end up taking the fall for Palmisano's flawed strategy, has stated a very specific earnings goal for 2015 that she will destroy the company to achieve if she must. This book how IBM fell from grace, where it is headed, and what specifically can be done to save the company before it is too late.