"How a new understanding of warfare can help the military fight today's conflicts more effectively. The way wars are fought has changed starkly over the past sixty years. International military campaigns used to play out between large armies at central fronts. Today's conflicts find major powers facing rebel insurgencies that deploy elusive methods, from improvised explosives to terrorist attacks. Small Wars, Big Data presents a transformative understanding of these contemporary confrontations and how they should be fought. The authors show that a revolution in the study of conflict--enabled by vast data, rich qualitative evidence, and modern methods--yields new insights into terrorism, civil wars, and foreign interventions. Modern warfare is not about struggles over territory but over people; civilians--and the information they might choose to provide--can turn the tide at critical junctures. The authors draw practical lessons from the past two decades of conflict in locations ranging from Latin America and the Middle East to Central and Southeast Asia. Building an information-centric understanding of insurgencies, the authors examine the relationships between rebels, the government, and civilians. This approach serves as a springboard for exploring other aspects of modern conflict, including the suppression of rebel activity, the role of mobile communications networks, the links between aid and violence, and why conventional military methods might provide short-term success but undermine lasting peace. Ultimately the authors show how the stronger side can almost always win the villages, but why that does not guarantee winning the war. Small Wars, Big Data provides groundbreaking perspectives for how small wars can be better strategized and favorably won to the benefit of the local population."--

Government, war, the economy, human identity, philosophy and the way we work. All of these, among others, are soon to be transformed. As technological advancements usher in a time where each and every human being on the planet will be connected by more than 50 billion manmade devices, our global society is going through a major and rapid change. CEO and editor of the FP Group (who publish Foreign Policy Magazine ) David J. Rothkopf is a revered and cutting-edge commentator on global trends; the writer of a weekly column for his magazine, and the author of numerous widely-acclaimed titles. In this newest work, released on the back of his highly successful TED talk, Rothkopf aims to delve beneath these changes, and explore not only the ideas that will help usher in this new era, but also the people behind them. Like Da Vinci and Jefferson, Darwin and Marx, there are thinkers working now who, over time, will be viewed as massively influential in this era of upheaval. But who are they? And what are their stories? What unlikely places do they come from? Rothkopf is determined to uncover those on the cusp of scientific research, giving never-before-heard, world-changing ideas their debut platform. These are the debates that are happening right now, those that are poised to produce incredible breakthroughs in the coming years, but are yet to be publicly revealed. And with a wide-range of areas covered, including education, health and money, there is sure to be something compelling and relevant for everyone.

Warren Buffett is worth nearly $50 billion. Does he “deserve” all this money? Buffett himself will tell you that “society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I’ve earned.” Unjust Deserts offers an entirely new approach to the wealth question. In a lively synthesis of modern economic, technological, and cultural research, Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly demonstrate that up to 90 percent (and perhaps more) of current economic output derives not from individual ingenuity, effort, or investment but from our collective inheritance of scientific and technological knowledge: an inheritance we all receive as a “free lunch.” Alperovitz and Daly then pursue the implications of this research, persuasively arguing that there is no reason any one person should be entitled to that inheritance. Recognizing the true dimensions of our unearned inheritance leads inevitably to a new and powerful moral case for wealth redistribution—and to a series of practical policies to achieve it in an era when the disparities have become untenable.

Customers have radically changed the ways they interact with businesses, and today's organizations need to adapt Is your company prepared for the Gen D future, or is it heading toward life support? A lot of companies across the globe are going to die over the next few years, not because of macroeconomic stress, but because there is an emerging generation that is radically changing the rules of customer engagement. In Build For Change , Pegasystems CEO Alan Trefler shows exactly what companies can do to turn the coming "customerpocalypse" into one of the biggest business opportunities of the decade. The newest generation of consumers is turning customer relationship management on its head. Build For Change highlights the revolutionary changes to business, marketing, and technology practices that are needed to survive and thrive in these unforgiving times. Readers will learn how businesses are increasingly relying on new forms of customer engagement, and how one customer's experience—whether good or bad—can alter a company's reputation with the click of a mouse. With practical insight from a leader in customer engagement, this book serves as a timely wakeup call to companies that have not yet embraced the digital future. Traditional marketing is becoming increasingly irrelevant, and businesses must become more customer-centric while taking a completely different approach to adopting and using technology. Build For Change outlines exactly what can—and must—be done to ensure sustainable success in the new digital era: Relate to the new generation of consumers, and understand their preferences and demands Stop obsessing about mountains of data, and instead apply business-driven continuous improvement to customer processes Learn how to overcome the fatal flaws of current technology fads Rethink organizational roles to drive adaptive and transformative innovation Consumers have more options than ever before, and ensuring customer loyalty in the modern market means knowing exactly what the customer wants and how to deliver it brilliantly. Build For Change provides actionable guidance for engaging this new connected consumer.

The technologically tethered, iPhone-addicted figure is an image we can easily conjure. Most of us complain that there aren't enough hours in the day and too many e-mails in our thumb-accessible inboxes. This widespread perception that life is faster than it used to be is now ingrained in our culture, and smartphones and the Internet are continually being blamed. But isn't the sole purpose of the smartphone to give us such quick access to people and information that we'll be free to do other things? Isn't technology supposed to make our lives easier? In Pressed for Time, Judy Wajcman explains why we immediately interpret our experiences with digital technology as inexorably accelerating everyday life. She argues that we are not mere hostages to communication devices, and the sense of always being rushed is the result of the priorities and parameters we ourselves set rather than the machines that help us set them. Indeed, being busy and having action-packed lives has become valorized by our productivity driven culture. Wajcman offers a bracing historical perspective, exploring the commodification of clock time, and how the speed of the industrial age became identified with progress. She also delves into the ways time-use differs for diverse groups in modern societies, showing how changes in work patterns, family arrangements, and parenting all affect time stress. Bringing together empirical research on time use and theoretical debates about dramatic digital developments, this accessible and engaging book will leave readers better versed in how to use technology to navigate life's fast lane.

The tech revolution will hit us all soon. How can any organisation survive and thrive? Headlines predict that whole industries will be decimated by Artificial Intelligence and automation. Some bosses and bankers are rubbing their hands at the prospect of cost savings and staff cuts. But there is another way. New technology can also empower teams, fuel creativity and make people happier. At Simply Business, twice voted the UK's best company to work for, big data and automated systems are being harnessed to generate positive growth, staff are currently trialling a four-day week in their Northampton office. In this bold blueprint, CEO Jason Stockwood - named by the Sunday Times as the UK's best leader - shows how any organisation can think freshly and benefit from technology by putting its people first.

A crucial guide to life before—and after—Tinder, IVF, and robots. What will happen to our notions of marriage and parenthood as reproductive technologies increasingly allow for newfangled ways of creating babies? What will happen to our understanding of gender as medical advances enable individuals to transition from one set of sexual characteristics to another, or to remain happily perched in between? What will happen to love and sex and romance as our relationships migrate from the real world to the Internet? Can people fall in love with robots? Will they? In short, what will happen to our most basic notions of humanity as we entangle our lives and emotions with the machines we have created? In Work Mate Marry Love , Harvard Business School professor and former Barnard College president Debora L. Spar offers an incisive and provocative account of how technology has transformed our intimate lives in the past, and how it will do so again in the future. Surveying the course of history, she shows how marriage as we understand it resulted from the rise of agriculture, and that the nuclear family emerged with the industrial revolution. In their day, the street light, the car, and later the pill all upended courtship and sex. Now, as we enter an era of artificial intelligence and robots, how will our deepest feelings and attachments evolve? In the past, the prevailing modes of production produced a world dominated by heterosexual, mostly-monogamous, two-parent families. In the future, however, these patterns are almost certain to be reshaped, creating entirely new norms for sex and romance, and for the construction of families and the raising of children. Steering clear of both techno-euphoria and alarmism, Spar offers a bold and inclusive vision of how our lives might be changed for the better.

Modern technology is transforming our most basic ideas about the creation of wealth. This book reveals how a new way of economic thinking is essential for success in today's world.

"Why is Israel's relatively small and low-budget military also the world's most innovative, technologically and logistically? Edward Luttwak and Eitan Shamir look to the IDF's unique structure: integrating army, air force, and navy in one service, under an officer class constantly refreshed by short tenures, the IDF is built for agility and change"--

The growth of technological and scientific knowledge in the past two centuries has been the overriding dynamic element in the economic and social history of the world. Its result is now often called the knowledge economy. But what are the historical origins of this revolution and what have been its mechanisms? In The Gifts of Athena , Joel Mokyr constructs an original framework to analyze the concept of "useful" knowledge. He argues that the growth explosion in the modern West in the past two centuries was driven not just by the appearance of new technological ideas but also by the improved access to these ideas in society at large--as made possible by social networks comprising universities, publishers, professional sciences, and kindred institutions. Through a wealth of historical evidence set in clear and lively prose, he shows that changes in the intellectual and social environment and the institutional background in which knowledge was generated and disseminated brought about the Industrial Revolution, followed by sustained economic growth and continuing technological change. Mokyr draws a link between intellectual forces such as the European enlightenment and subsequent economic changes of the nineteenth century, and follows their development into the twentieth century. He further explores some of the key implications of the knowledge revolution. Among these is the rise and fall of the "factory system" as an organizing principle of modern economic organization. He analyzes the impact of this revolution on information technology and communications as well as on the public's state of health and the structure of households. By examining the social and political roots of resistance to new knowledge, Mokyr also links growth in knowledge to political economy and connects the economic history of technology to the New Institutional Economics. The Gifts of Athena provides crucial insights into a matter of fundamental concern to a range of disciplines including economics, economic history, political economy, the history of technology, and the history of science.

A galaxy of distinguished international economists and historians pit economic history against the shaky assumptions of the classical economic theory of natural growth. Their explanations consider the factors of technology, entrepreneurialism, and paths to economic growth, but each reflects an ideological wave of explanation that has marked the last two hundred years.

In 1946, the World Health Organization defined health as: "a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." Until now, no one has defined this third dimension to health, or described strategies to deliver it. This ground-breaking book is the first to do so. Twenty-five years after the arrival of the Internet, we are drowning in data and deadlines; we can never have imagined that our daily intake of information and achieving a healthy balance in our personal and professional lives could feel so complex and so unhealthy. In recent years, organizations have come a long way towards promoting health literacy (on obesity, smoking, diet, and exercise) and some way in acknowledging mental health issues. But acknowledging the challenges of the Internet and social media on employee and workplace health is the social element, and most have not yet begun to offer solutions around either better information and knowledge management, or developing better and more sustaining relationships. The challenges, threats, and opportunities of a "perma-connected" global economy and society could not be greater-and they will only increase. This is the first book to define what social health means in both society and the modern workplace. Here, Julia Hobsbawm argues that developing social health will help employees become more efficiently engaged with each other and their work, and help employers to create workplaces that support social health and thus greater productivity.

Beginning with the development of the compass, Ruling the Waves examines a series of technological revolutions that promised, in their time, to transform the world's politics and business. With Debora Spar's gifted storytelling, each chapter reads like an adventure tale as she recounts the histories of the printing press and maps; of the telegraph, radio, and satellite television; of software, encryption, and the advent of digital music. At each of these junctures Spar suggests that invention led to both a wave of commerce and of chaos. Entrepreneurs such as Samuel Morse and Rupert Murdoch carved new markets from the emerging technology and proclaimed that the old rules no longer applied. And for a while, they were right. But eventually--and inevitably--even cowboys need rules: rules of property, rules of coordination, rules of competition. The erstwhile pioneers thus turn to government, lobbying for order and setting the stage for the next wave of discovery. A fascinating history of business, Ruling the Waves is also an original, thought-provoking analysis of the parallels between past innovations and inventions and our own tumultuous times.

"The goal of this book is to help you better understand the juncture between computer technology and people, the process of creating that technology, and the evolution of those innovations. It does this through the use of essays and annotated case studies of people using technologies such as cell phones, blogs, and personal computer productivity tools"--p. [1]

There is widespread perception that life is faster than it used to be. This book argues that popular and scholarly claims about acceleration gloss over the complex relationship of technology, speed and time. Rather than digital devices rushing us, our experience of always being rushed is the result of the priorities and parameters we ourselves set.

Helpman summarizes two decades of research about the connections among international trade, offshoring, immigration, and changes in net income. The overwhelming conclusion is that globalization has created a small rise in inequality. Other factors must be responsible for most of the rise; evidence suggests the chief culprit is technological change that heavily favors highly skilled workers.--

Modern science, the Internet, big data, and AI are each saying the same thing to us: the world is -- and always has been -- far more complex and unpredictable than we've allowed ourselves to see. As a result we're undergoing a sea change in our understanding of how things happen, and in our deepest strategies for predicting, preparing for, and managing our lives and our businesses. For example, machine learning allows us to make better predictions (think the weather, stock performance, online clicks) but we know less about why those predictions are right--and we need to get used to that. And in fact, over the past twenty years we've been unintentionally developing strategies that avoid anticipating what will happen so we don't have to depend on unreliable revenue forecasts, assumptions about customer needs, and hypotheses about how a product will be used. By embracing these strategies, we're flourishing by creating yet more possibilities and yet more unpredictability. In wide-ranging stories and characteristically all-encompassing syntheses, technology researcher, internet expert, and philosopher David Weinberger reveals the trends that hide in so many aspects of our lives--and shows us how they matter.--

A survey of the market economy's performance in allocating resources to technical advance.