The explosive growth of the Internet has led to the need for ubiquitous data and multimedia communications in the twenty-first century. In-home distribution of multimedia content is still a challenge, particularly for homes not equipped with specialized wiring to support high-speed data and multimedia communications. Retrofitting buildings with new wiring is prohibitively expensive and wirele…
Sovereign debt markets have demonstrated incredible resilience despite a century of dramatic political and economic upheaval. Among the most remarkable aspects of the contemporary debt regime is the degree to which expectations of borrowers remain relatively uniform even in the face of such major shifts. These basic expectations resolve into one background rule: sovereign borrowers must repa…
If you have more than one computer in your home, you should have a net- work. I used to consider that statement an opinion, but it’s so logical that I now think of it as a fact of nature. Nobody has ever presented a convincing (to me) argument that supports keeping multiple computers isolated from each other. Using and managing multiple computers is easier if you create a network. You don’…
As distance education continues to grow in its popularity, so does the use of social networking. Hindered by concerns associated with privacy and safety, social networking sites (SNSs) are frequently banned from educational settings. The following article presents the implementation of an alternative social networking site in distance education. Findings from this study highlight the benefits…
A life course approach to mental disorders is concerned with the interplay of social and biological factors in the production and consequences of mental illness over the life span—from the prenatal period to death and across generations. As described by Drs Kuh and Ben-Shlomo in the Preface, the life course approach to mental disorders draws on two foundations: the psychological life span per…
Originally the concept of culture was proposed only for humans, stressing the importance of social influences on its dynamics and development. Although there is no question that all human groups have different diverse, complex, and rich cultures, a debate begun in the early 1950s raised the issue of animal culture and what it may mean for the uniqueness of human culture. This chapter argues tha…
Freud is not dead. Far from it. In the year of the 150th anniversary of his birth we can truly say that his ideas are undergoing a renaissance. Freud is everywhere. And especially in neuroscience, we are taking a new look at his work and concluding that it is “still the most coherent and intellectually satisfying view of the mind” (Kandel, 1998) that we have. (Mark Solms, 2006, last page) …
As we all know, information is power. Many of you may not think of accounting as a means to get key information and to stay in control of your business operation. You probably think of the world of accounting as a place with a language you don’t understand. You view it as a necessary evil that you must have around in order to present the necessary reports to your investors and supporting fin…
The Disaster Risk Management (DRM) Systems Analysis Guide provides a set of tools and methods to assess existing structures and capacities of national, district and local institutions with responsibilities for Disaster Risk Management (DRM) in order to improve their effectiveness and the integration of DRM concerns into development planning, with particular reference to disaster-prone areas, …
For many parents, learning about new media technologies can seem like playing catch-up with their children. Teenagers, especially, are quick to learn new technologies: putting their music collection on iPods, texting on mobile phones, chatting on instant messaging services. They are also quick to drop a technology they think is old: the bad news for parents who’ve just gotten to grips with em…
Since 2007 the question of growth has plagued the British economy. Though, at the time of writing in the early summer of 2014, growth has returned, a pervasive anxiety about the solidity, stability and sustain- ability of that growth persists, even in the most hallowed of elite polit- ical circles. Thus, even the recently appointed Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, is concerned that…
Before discussing the pros and cons of regulation in general and financial regulation in particular, we have to understand what regulation is all about and what forms it takes. Although there are arguments for and against regulation in general (hence against and for deregulation), some arguments are type-specific. For example, environmental regula- tion is motivated by the desire to protect hum…