This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.Knowing, measuring and understanding media audiences have become a multi-billion dollar business. But the convention that underpins that business, audience ratings, is in crisis. Rating the Audience is the first book to show why and how audience ratings research became a convention, an agreement, and the first to interrogate...

Endless terror. Refugee waves. An unfixable global economy. Surprising election results. New billion-dollar fortunes. Miracle medical advances. What if they were all connected? What if you could understand why?The Seventh Sense is the story of what all of today's successful figures see and feel: the forces that are invisible to most of us but explain everything from explosive technological change to uneasy political ripples. The secret to power now is understanding our new...

The renowned Internet commentator and author of How to Fix the Future"expos[es] the greed, egotism and narcissism that fuels the tech world" ( Chicago Tribune).The digital revolution has contributed to the world in many positive ways, but we are less aware of the Internet's deeply negative effects. The Internet Is Not the Answer, by longtime Internet skeptic Andrew Keen, offers a comprehensive look at what the Internet is doing to our liv...

An "intriguing, insightful" look at how algorithms and robots could lead to social unrest—and how to avoid it ( The Economist, Books of the Year).After decades of effort, researchers are finally cracking the code on artificial intelligence. Society stands on the cusp of unprecedented change, driven by advances in robotics, machine learning, and perception powering systems that rival or exceed human capabilities. Driverless cars, robotic helpers, and intell...

In your pocket is something amazing: a quick and easy way to summon a total stranger who will take you anywhere you’d like. In your hands is something equally amazing: the untold story of Uber’s meteoric rise, and the massive ambitions of its larger-than-life founder and CEO.Before Travis Kalanick became famous as the public face of Uber, he was a scrappy, rough-edged, loose-lipped entrepreneur. And even after taking Uber from the germ of an idea to a $69 billion g...

"Good corporate drama . . . an enlightening narrative of how new communications infrastructures often come about." — The Economist, "A Book of the Year 2016"In the early 1990s, Motorola developed a revolutionary satellite system called Iridium that promised to be its crowning achievement. Its constellation of 66 satellites in polar orbit was a mind-boggling technical accomplishment, surely the future of communication. The only problem was that Ir...

How does Google sell ad space and rank webpages? How does Netflix recommend movies and Amazon rank products? How can you influence people on Facebook and Twitter and can you really reach anyone in six steps? Why doesn't the internet collapse under congestion and does it have an Achilles' heel? Why are you charged per gigabyte for mobile data and how can Skype and BitTorrent be free? How are cloud services so scalable and why is WiFi slower at hotspots than at home? Driven by twenty real-wo...

Instant Songwriting is the ultimate how-to book for musical improvisers and an excellent resource for songwriters. With over two decades of musical improv experience, Nancy Howland Walker guides you with clear, logical and fun step-by-step exercises, from the very basics of putting a song together, to highly advanced song techniques.Whether you are new to the art form or experienced, your songs are improvised or written, or you do this for fun or profit, Instant Songwriting helps y...

In the new edition of Introduction to Social Research, Keith Punch takes a fresh look at the entire research process, from formulating a research question to writing up your research. Covering qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods, the book focuses on matching research questions to appropriate methods. Offering concise, balanced coverage, this book clearly explains the underlying principles of social research and shows you how to put this understanding into practice.The third...

Over the last several decades, employers have increasingly replaced permanent employees with temporary workers and independent contractors to cut labor costs and enhance flexibility. Although commentators have focused largely on low-wage temporary work, the use of skilled contractors has also grown exponentially, especially in high-technology areas. Yet almost nothing is known about contracting or about the people who do it. This book seeks to break the silence.Gurus, Hired Gun...

The Video Game Industry provides a platform for the research on the video game industry to draw a coherent and informative picture of this industry. Previously this has been done sparsely through conference papers, research articles, and popular science books. Although the study of this industry is still stigmatized as frivolous and ‘only’ game oriented, those who grew up with video games are changing things, especially research agendas, the acceptance of studies, and their interp...

In less than a decade, the Internet went from being a series of loosely connected networks used by universities and the military to the powerful commercial engine it is today. This book describes how many of the key innovations that made this possible came from entrepreneurs and iconoclasts who were outside the mainstream—and how the commercialization of the Internet was by no means a foregone conclusion at its outset.Shane Greenstein traces the evolution of the Internet from gover...