"Tiffany Shlain explores how turning off screens one day a week can work wonders on your brain, body, and soul." -- from book jacket flap.

An all-in-one guide to understanding and managing the dark side of our digital lives. It all started out so well: the online world began as an effective tool for communication that carried with it a great promise to level the playing field and eliminate borders. But it’s morphed into something totally unintended. We’ve all had to endure the troll that derails a generally benign conversation; or received that scam email from a wealthy Nigerian prince; or felt the strange feeling of being watched and tracked by advertising companies as we navigate the web. Welcome to the modern internet. These are but a few of the topics that The Dark Side of Our Digital World: And What You Can Do about It examines to get at the root causes of our current problems with information technology, social media, and problematic online behavior. The book explores the issues raised by the negative side of information technology, including surveillance and spying, declining privacy, information overload, surveillance capitalism and big data analytics, conspiracy theories and fake news, misinformation and disinformation, trolling and phishing. What’s ultimately at stake is how we are able to cope with increasingly invasive anti-social behaviors, the overall decline of privacy in the face of total surveillance technologies, and the lack of a quality online experience that doesn’t devolve into flame wars and insults. The future of the internet as well as our societies depends upon our ability to discern truth from lies and reality from propaganda. The book will therefore also examine the possible directions we could take to improve the situation, looking at solutions in the areas of psychology and behavioral conditioning, social engineering through nudging techniques, the development of e-democracy movements, and the implementation of public policy.

A struggle is taking place--not just among corporate titans, but among entire industries. At stake is control of the world's fastest-growing industry: communications. The contestants are Hollywood studios, television networks, and cable, telephone, computer, publishing, and consumer-electronics companies. All are vying to collect a toll on the information superhighway. And as they jockey for control, they tread on volatile ground, as one fixation after another (cable, interactive TV) is dumped in favor of the next (satellite, the Internet). There is no better account of this turmoil than the one provided here by Ken Auletta, bestselling author of Three Blind Mice ("the best book ever written on network television"*) and Greed and Glory on Wall Street, who for five years has brilliantly tracked the communications industry for The New Yorker. Auletta's access to the principal players is unparalleled (six days with Rupert Murdoch, summit meetings with John Malone), and his grasp of the issues--from boardroom politics to regulatory and technological pressures--is unmatched by any other journalist. In this riveting collection of his best pieces Auletta takes the reader on a behind-the-scenes tour of such companies as Disney, Viacom, Microsoft, Time Warner, and Telecommunications, Inc., and keenly chronicles the vanities and visions of the new Highwaymen--Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, Michael Eisner, Sumner Redstone, Bill Gates, and more. Just as Three Blind Mice was heralded as "the new bible of the broadcasting business," The Highwaymen will be received as an indispensable guide to the future of this explosive new world. * Frank Stanton, former president of CBS

The starting point of this volume was a conference entitled "Progress in Mathematical Programming," held at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California, March 1-4, 1987. The main topic of the conference was developments in the theory and practice of linear programming since Karmarkar's algorithm. There were thirty presentations and approximately fifty people attended. Presentations included new algorithms, new analyses of algorithms, reports on computational experience, and some other topics related to the practice of mathematical programming. Interestingly, most of the progress reported at the conference was on the theoretical side. Several new polynomial algorithms for linear program- ming were presented (Barnes-Chopra-Jensen, Goldfarb-Mehrotra, Gonzaga, Kojima-Mizuno-Yoshise, Renegar, Todd, Vaidya, and Ye). Other algorithms presented were by Betke-Gritzmann, Blum, Gill-Murray-Saunders-Wright, Nazareth, Vial, and Zikan-Cottle. Efforts in the theoretical analysis of algo- rithms were also reported (Anstreicher, Bayer-Lagarias, Imai, Lagarias, Megiddo-Shub, Lagarias, Smale, and Vanderbei). Computational experiences were reported by Lustig, Tomlin, Todd, Tone, Ye, and Zikan-Cottle. Of special interest, although not in the main direction discussed at the conference, was the report by Rinaldi on the practical solution of some large traveling salesman problems. At the time of the conference, it was still not clear whether the new algorithms developed since Karmarkar's algorithm would replace the simplex method in practice. Alan Hoffman presented results on conditions under which linear programming problems can be solved by greedy algorithms.