Social Technology

The dramatic nature of Plato's dialogues is delightfully evident in Symposium. The marriage between character and thought bursts forth as the guests gather at Agathon's house to celebrate the success of his first tragedy. With wit and insight, they all present their ideas about love - from Erixymachus' scientific naturalism to Aristophanes' comic fantasy. The unexpected arrival of Alcibiades breaks the spell cast by Diotima's ethereal climb up the staircase of love to beauty itself.

The world we live in today, where everything is tracked by corporations and governments, originates with one manic, elusive, utterly unique man—as prone to bullying as he was to fits of surpassing generosity and surprising genius. His name was Hank Asher, and his life was a strange and spectacular show that changed the course of the future. In The Hank Show, critically acclaimed author and journalist McKenzie Funk relates Asher's stranger-than-fiction story.

Astounding is the landmark account of the extraordinary partnership between four controversial writers - John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard - who set off a revolution in science fiction and forever changed our world.

An inside account of the fight to contain the world's deadliest diseases - and the panic and corruption that make them worse. The Next Pandemic is a firsthand account of disasters like anthrax, bird flu, and others - and how we could do more to prevent their return. It is both a gripping story of our brushes with fate and an urgent lesson on how we can keep ourselves safe from the inevitable next pandemic.

Author of the number one New York Times best seller Against All Enemies, former presidential advisor and counter-terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke sounds a timely and chilling warning about America's vulnerability in a terrifying new international conflict -cyber war! Every concerned American should listen to this startling and explosive book that offers an insider's view of White House situation room operations and carries the listener to the frontlines of our cyber defense. Cyber War exposes a virulent threat to our nation's security.

The Social Media Management Handbook provides a complete toolbox for defining and practicing a coherent social media strategy. It is a comprehensive resource for bringing together such disparate areas as IT, customer service, sales, communications, and more to meet social media goals. Wollan and Smith and their Accenture team explain policies, procedures, roles and responsibilities, metrics, strategies, incentives, and legal issues that may arise.

Phaedrus lures Socrates outside the walls of Athens, where he seldom goes, by promising to share a new work by his friend and mentor, Lysias, a famous writer of speeches. This dialogue provides a powerful example of the dialectical writing that Plato uses to manifest ideas that are essential to human existence and to living a good life. Phaedrus shows how oral and written forms of language relate to each other and to philosophy.

While tech titans bragged they would 'move fast and break things', Kara Swisher was moving faster and breaking news. Covering the explosion of the digital sector in the early 1990s, she developed a long track record of digging up and reporting the truth of this new world order. Burn Book is part memoir, part history and, most of all, a necessary recounting of tech's most powerful players. This is the inside story we've all been waiting for of modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world.

Most people are baffled by how computers work and assume that they will never understand them. What they don't realize - and what Daniel Hillis' short book brilliantly demonstrates - is that computers' seemingly complex operations can be broken down into a few simple parts that perform the same simple procedures over and over again. Computer wizard Hillis offers an easy-to-follow explanation of how data is processed that makes the operations of a computer seem as straightforward as those of a bicycle.

Vol. 3 & 4: Mobile, Metadata, and the Machines Watching You Because it’s not paranoia if they really are listening, tracking, and triangulating your location. Welcome to the part of the fight where things get uncomfortable: mobile spyware, Stingrays disguised as friendly cell towers, rogue QR codes, AI-powered OSINT engines scraping your every move. This volume goes deeper: mobile OS lockdown, open-source tools that don’t betray you, quiet ways to communicate when the rest of the internet is on fire. We hit nodes, ransomware, privilege escalation, and Pegasus. We dissect Onion routing ...

In Archaeology from Space, Sarah Parcak shows the evolution, major discoveries, and future potential of the young field of satellite archaeology. From surprise advancements after the declassification of spy photography, to a new map of the mythical Egyptian city of Tanis, she shares her field's biggest discoveries, revealing why space archaeology is not only exciting, but urgently essential to the preservation of the world's ancient treasures.

The volumes of data we now access can give unparalleled abilities to make predictions, respond to customer demand, and solve problems. But Big Brother’s shadow hovers over it. Although big data can set us free and enhance our lives, it has the potential to create an underclass and a totalitarian state. With big data ever present, you can’t afford to ignore it. In this book, acclaimed science writer Brian Clegg - a habitual early adopter of new technology - brings big data to life.

Whether you're a budding blogger or seasoned web designer, WordPress is a brilliant tool for creating websites—once you know how to tap into its impressive features. The latest edition of this jargon-free Missing Manual shows you how to use WordPress's themes, widgets, and plug-ins to build just about any kind of site.

From the New York Times best-selling author of How We Got to Now and Extra Life, a look at the world-changing innovations we made while keeping ourselves entertained. This history of popular entertainment takes a long-zoom approach, contending that the pursuit of novelty and wonder is a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change. Steven Johnson argues that, throughout history, the cutting edge of innovation lies wherever people are working the hardest to keep themselves and others amused.

As Audrey Kurth Cronin explains in Power to the People, what we are seeing now is an exacerbation of an age-old trend. Over the centuries, the most surprising developments in warfare have occurred because of advances in technologies combined with changes in who can use them. Indeed, accessible innovations in destructive force have long driven new patterns of political violence. When Nobel invented dynamite and Kalashnikov designed the AK-47, each inadvertently spurred terrorist and insurgent movements that killed millions and upended the international system.

The digital landscape has changed buyers’ habits. Sales professionals now need to develop relationships with decision-makers through social networks to reach them early in the decision making process. Social Selling provides a practical, step-by-step outline for harnessing the skills and techniques necessary to achieve this, including developing a high quality community, building trust, developing authority and influence, and connecting with changemakers. It also discusses enterprise implementation of a social selling strategy and much more.

This friendly guide is for technology people who work, or want to work, in the public sector. Cyd Harrell outlines the types of projects, partnerships, and people that civic technologists encounter, and the methods they can use to make lasting change. She focuses on principles to help technologists find the right way to do the most good, starting with finding the people already doing the work. Based on her years of government tech partnerships, Cyd offers practical advice on how to build alliances with public sector partners, what tech (and non-tech) skills are most useful, and more.

L. Williams, in translating Giordano Bruno's Gli Eroici Furori (Heroic Enthusiasts) from the original Italian into English back in 1887 and 1889, has done a great service to humanity. His introduction is especially illuminating as it contextualizes Bruno's life until his tragic death at the age of 52 and provides us with a tantalizing glimpse into his cosmological philosophy. It is my hope that this small book, which is drawn exclusively from Williams' work, will serve as an intellectual appetizer and lead to a deeper plunge into Bruno's fascinating thought.

Mary Aiken is the world's leading expert in forensic cyberpsychology - a discipline that combines psychology, criminology, and technology to investigate the intersection where technology and human behavior meet. In this, her first book, Aiken has created a starting point for all future conversations about how the Internet is shaping development and behavior, societal norms and values, children, safety, security, and our perception of the world.

The remarkable woman at heart of the smash New York Times best seller and Oscar-winning film Hidden Figures tells the full story of her life, including what it took to work at NASA, help land the first man on the moon, and live through a century of turmoil and change.