This definitive work on the perils and promise of the social- media revolution collects writings by today’s best thinkers and cultural commentators, with an all-new introduction by Bauerlein.

Twitter, Facebook, e-publishing, blogs, distance-learning and other social media raise some of the most divisive cultural questions of our time. Some see the technological breakthroughs we live with as hopeful and democratic new steps in education, information gathering, and human progress. But others are deeply concerned by the eroding of civility online, declining reading habits, withering attention spans, and the treacherous effects of 24/7 peer pressure on our young.

With The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein emerged as the foremost voice against the development of an overwhelming digital social culture. But The Digital Divide doesn’t take sides. Framing the discussion so that leading voices from across the spectrum, supporters and detractors alike, have the opportunity to weigh in on the profound issues raised by the new media-from questions of reading skills and attention span, to cyber-bullying and the digital playground- Bauerlein’s new book takes the debate to a higher ground.

The book includes essays by Steven Johnson, Nicholas Carr, Don Tapscott, Douglas Rushkoff, Maggie Jackson, Clay Shirky, Todd Gitlin, and many more. Though these pieces have been previously published, the organization of The Digital Divide gives them freshness and new relevancy, making them part of a single document readers can use to truly get a handle on online privacy, the perils of a plugged-in childhood, and other technology-related hot topics.

Rather than dividing the book into “pro” and “con” sections, the essays are arranged by subject-”The Brain, the Senses,” “Learning in and out of the Classroom,” “Social and Personal Life,” “The Millennials,” “The Fate of Culture,” and “The Human (and Political) Impact.” Bauerlein incorporates a short headnote and a capsule bio about each contributor, as well as relevant contextual information about the source of the selection.

Bauerlein also provides a new introduction that traces the development of the debate, from the initial Digital Age zeal, to a wave of skepticism, and to a third stage of reflection that wavers between criticism and endorsement.

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Wikis are a great way to collaborate and share knowledge online. MediaWiki is a popular and powerful wiki engine, powering some of the biggest wiki sites in the world – including Wikipedia, the biggest and most famous wiki of all.

If you have a MediaWiki-based site and want to tailor its appearance, then this book is for you. MediaWiki Skins Design shows you how to fully customize the appearance and interface of your MediaWiki-based wiki. You will learn how to change every aspect of your wikii’s appearance to produce a MediaWiki site fully tailored to your requirements.

The book provides full details of how MediaWiki skins work, and the necessary template and CSS customizations required to completely alter MediaWiki’s appearance. Using this book, you will learn to develop rich, attractive, and friendly skins for MediaWiki.

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The ultimate guide to WordPress Themes - one of the hottest topics on the web today WordPress is so much more than a blogging platform, and Smashing WordPress Themes teaches readers how to make it look any way they like - from a corporate site, to a photography gallery and more WordPress is one of the hottest tools on the web today and is used by sites including The New York Times, Rolling Stone, flickr, CNN, NASA and of course Smashing Magazine Beautiful full colour throughout - web designers expect nothing less Smashing Magazine will fully support this book by by promoting it through their website and on twitter feeds

Download ebook: Smashing WordPress Themes: Making WordPress Beautiful (Smashing Magazine Book Series)

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Right on target. Innovative, nothing comes near it in occupational therapy. A sophisticated meld of occupational therapy and psychology. It is very innovative for occupational therapy and other fields. I am thoroughly impressed. I have found no occupational therapy book more interesting to me than this one. I always have to go outside of the field to find such rich and interesting material. Sharan Schwartzberg, EdD, OTR, FAOTA, Tufts University, Boston, Massachusetts This groundbreaking new book addresses a critical aspect of the occupational therapy practice the art and science of building effective, fulfilling relationships with clients. A distinguished clinician and educator, Renee Taylor, PhD, uses a new conceptual practice model, the Intentional Relationship Model, to define how the client and the therapist each contribute to the unique interpersonal dynamic that becomes the therapeutic relationship. She emphasizes how therapists must act deliberately, thoughtfully, and with vigilant anticipation of the challenges and breakthroughs that have the potential to influence the course of the relationship. Actual case examples from 12 exceptional clinicians from around the world illustrate how this model is used to address many of the challenging interpersonal situations that commonly occur in therapy. And, guided exercises and assignments help readers master the skills they need and apply them to a wide range of clinical situations and presenting problems.
Download ebook: The Intentional Relationship: Occupational Therapy and Use of Self

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The power of Lion, at your fingertips. With the new Multi-Touch gestures in Mac OS X Lion, you can swipe, pinch, and tap your way to managing your Mac and organizing your life. Want your pictures to stand out? Grab files off the Mac at home while on the road? Tune out distractions? In this practical hands-on guide to Mac OS X Lion, you learn how to Throw away your DVDs: Encode an entire season of your favorite TV shows and manage the episodes from iTunes. Stay in touch: Have a video chat with far-off friends with iChat Theatre. Captivate your audience: Make a vacation slideshow that doesn’t stink. Keep your relatives informed: Build a family website with RapidWeaver. Survive the crash: Create an easy and comprehensive backup plan to secure your personal photos, movies, music, and more.  Express yourself: Write and record podcasts worth listening to. Plus many more useful projects—both big and small—to help you do stuff with Mac OS X Lion.

Download ebook: The Mac OS X Lion Project Book

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Pro HTML5 and CSS3 Design Patterns is a reference book and a cookbook on how to style web pages using CSS3 and HTML5. It contains 350 ready–to–use patterns (CSS3 and HTML5 code snippets) that you can copy and paste into your code. Each pattern can be combined with other patterns to create an unlimited number of solutions, and each pattern works reliably in all major browsers without the need for browser hacks. The book is completely up-to-date with code, best practices, and browser compatibilities for HTML5 and CSS3—enabling you to dive in and make use of these new technologies in production environments. Pro HTML5 and CSS3 Design Patterns is so much more than just a cookbook, though! It systematically covers every usable feature of CSS3 and combines these features with HTML5 to create reusable patterns. Each pattern has an intuitive name to make it easy to find, remember, and refer to. Accessibility and best practices are carefully engineered into each design pattern, example, and source code. The book’s layout, with a pattern’s example on the left page and its explanation on the right, makes it easy to find a pattern and study it without having to flip between pages. The book is also readable from cover to cover, with topics building carefully upon previous topics.  Pro HTML5 and CSS3 Design Patterns book unleashes your productivity and creativity in web design and development. Instead of hacking your way toward a solution, you’ll learn how to predictably create successful designs every time by reusing and combining modular design patterns.

Download ebook: Pro HTML5 and CSS3 Design Patterns

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In today’s world, the question “What should I do with my life?” only scratches the surface. Now, more and more people-from baby boomers retiring from their “first act” to people in their forties and fifties reconsidering their careers in a recovering economy-are finding themselves wondering how to find new stimulation and meaningful work over a lifetime. Bringing together a diverse array of stories, veteran journalist Bruce Frankel brings to life a mesmerizing series of profiles of men and women who discovered a new calling, success, or purpose later in life. Brimming with inspiration and humanity, What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life? celebrates activists, artists, entrepreneurs, filmmakers, and others who found extraordinary ways to experience true fulfillment in the second half of life.  On these pages, readers will meet a civil servant, laid off at age fifty-two, who enrolled in graduate school, earning a Ph.D. in psychology; a former consultant who began a microfinance program in Africa; a longtime contact-lens grinder who has chiseled twelve hundred stone heads on a property now known as the “Easter Island of the Hudson”; and many others who proved that age is a spark-not a barrier. Full of spirit and plenty of chutzpah–and winner of the Nautilus Silver Award and Axiom Business Book Award–this book shows that anything is possible in any stage of life.

Download ebook: What Should I Do With the Rest of My Life?: True Stories of Finding Success, Passion, and New Meaning in the Second Half ofLife

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SAP Master Data Management (SAP MDM) enables information integrity
across the business network, in a heterogeneous IT landscape. SAP MDM
enables the sharing of harmonized master data, formerly trapped in
multiple systems, and ensures cross-system data consistency. This book
will guide you through all the aspects of this software making it
possible for you to get optimum output.

This book is a step-by-step tutorial that shows you how to
successfully administer SAP NetWeaver MDM 7.1. You will learn to plan
and manage master data with SAP NetWeaver MDM. The book highlights best
practices and life cycle implementation using MDM and the concepts
behind various aspects of SAP MDM administration.

Successfully administer and manage master data with SAP NetWeaver MDM 7.1

What you will learn from this book :

• Explore SAP NetWeaver MDM Business Scenarios
• Configure the MDM Console, MDM Server, MDM repository, and the DBMS
• Gain an overview of MDM Servers and repositories
• Create, delete, and modify repository tables and repository fields
• Maintain the integrity of your MDM repositories by backing up and restoring them
• Configure the MDM server and its underlying DBMS using the available options
• Load source data files into repositories using import maps
• Automate the syndication process using the Syndication Server
• Gain an overview of the daily administration tasks
• Perform SAP authorization and administration tasks related to security
• Understand integration of MDM with various SAP NetWeaver components

Download ebook: SAP NetWeaver MDM 7.1 Administrator’s Guide

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HTML has been on a wild ride. Sure, HTML started as a mere markup
language, but more recently HTML’s put on some major muscle. Now we’ve
got a language tuned for building web applications with Web storage, 2D
drawing, offline support, sockets and threads, and more. And to speak
this language you’ve got to go beyond HTML5 markup and into the world of
the DOM, events, and JavaScript APIs.

Now you probably already
know all about HTML markup (otherwise known as structure) and you know
all aboutCSS style (presentation), but what you’ve been missing is
JavaScript (behavior). If all you know about are structure and
presentation, you can create some great looking pages, but they’re still
just pages. When you add behavior with JavaScript, you can create an
interactive experience; even better, you can create full blown web
applications.

Head First HTML5 Programming is your
ultimate tour guide to creating web applications with HTML5 and
JavaScript, and we give you everything you need to know to build them,
including: how to add interactivity to your pages, how to communicate
with the world of Web services, and how to use the great new APIs being
developed for HTML5.

Here are just some of the things you’ll learn in Head First HTML5 Programing:

• Learn how to make your pages truly interactive by using the power of the DOM.
• Finally understand how JavaScript works and take yourself from novice to well-informed in just a few chapters.
• Learn how JavaScript APIs fit into the HTML5 ecosystem, and how to use any API in your web pages.
• Use the Geolocation API to know where your users are.
• Bring out your inner artist with Canvas, HTML5’s new 2D drawing surface.
• Go beyond just plugging a video into your pages, and create custom video experiences.
• Learn the secret to grabbing five megabytes of storage in every user’s browser.
• Improve your page’s responsiveness and performance with Web workers.

Download ebook: Head First HTML5 Programming: Building Web Apps with JavaScript

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Despite the rise of computer gaming, millions of adults still play face to face role playing games, which rely in part on social interaction to create stories. This work explores tabletop role playing game (TRPG) as a genre separate from computer role playing games. The relationship of TRPGs to other games is examined, as well as the interaction among the tabletop module, computer game, and novel versions of Dungeons & Dragons. Given particular attention are the narrative and linguistic structures of the gaming session, and the ways that players and gamemasters work together to construct narratives. The text also explores wider cultural influences that surround tabletop gamers.

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Printed entirely in color, with helpful figures and syntax coloring to make code samples appear as they do in Visual Studio and Expression Blend!

Using Silverlight 4, you can build richer and more powerful applications than ever before, and deploy them seamlessly in browsers, on desktop computers, and even on Windows Phone 7. In Silverlight 4 Unleashed, Microsoft Silverlight MVP Laurent Bugnion covers everything you need to do all this, and much more.

The only full-color, example-rich guide to Silverlight 4 for experienced Microsoft developers, Silverlight 4 Unleashed illuminates the entire development process: from installing Silverlight tools to building great user experiences, managing data to optimizing application performance.

You’ll master core Silverlight features such as controls and properties; communicating with web services; efficiently creating data-oriented line-of-business applications; working with external frameworks, and more. Bugnion concludes by showing how to use advanced features such as 3D-like effects and multitouch to deliver an even smoother, richer experience.

• Install and use Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio
• Extend Silverlight applications with user and custom controls
• Group, sort, filter, page, bind, and validate data
• Take full advantage of the Model-View-ViewModel Pattern in Silverlight
• Access Web resources and services
• Control the application’s appearance with resources, styles, templates, and Expression Blend
• Sketch user experience and build iterative prototypes by easily getting feedback from end users
• Create data-oriented applications more easily with the WCF RIA Services framework
• Adapt Silverlight desktop applications for Windows Phone 7
• Integrate effects and media into your applications
• Use Unity, MEF, and the MVVM Light Toolkit to write more maintainable, extensible software
• Optimize performance by reducing download size and memory footprint, and increasing execution speed

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The most comprehensive book on Microsoft’s new ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET 4 Unleashed covers all facets of ASP.NET development. Led by Microsoft ASP.NET program manager Stephen Walther, an expert author team thoroughly covers the entire platform.

The authors first introduce the ASP.NET Framework’s basic controls and show how to create common site-wide layouts and styles. Next, they cover all aspects of accessing, presenting, organizing, and editing data. You’ll find thorough and practical sections on building custom components and controls, providing effective site navigation, securing sites and applications, and much more. This book presents hundreds of realistic code examples, reflecting the authors’ unsurpassed experience with ASP.NET both inside and outside Microsoft.

• Build interactive Web Forms, validate form data, and upload files
• Provide interactive calendars, wizards, site maps, and other valuable features
• Design efficient, maintainable sites with Master Pages and Themes
• Build data-driven applications with database controls, ADO.NET data access components, QueryExtender, LINQ to SQL, and WCF Data Services
• Generate charts on the fly with the new Chart Control
• Extend ASP.NET with custom controls and reusable components
• Create site registration and authentication systems that store membership data in SQL Server or Active Directory
• Use URL Routing to build dynamism, flexibility, readability, and SEO-friendliness into your URLs
• Improve performance and scalability with caching and preloading
• Maintain state with cookies, cookieless session state, and profiles
• Localize, configure, package, and deploy ASP.NET applications
• Use the ASP.NET MVC Framework to improve agility, testability, speed to market, and extensibility
• Retrofit existing ASP.NET applications with Ajax and build pure client-side Ajax web applications
• Construct a complete ASP.NET 4 website from start to finish

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Many successful project managers are beginning to utilize Microsoft SharePoint to drive their projects and operational initiatives. SharePoint Server provides teams with a centralized location for project information and facilitates collaboration between project team members. The intention of this book is to provide a hands-on case study that you can follow to create a complete project management information system (PMIS) using SharePoint Server 2010.

Each chapter is focused on a typical project management activity and demonstrates techniques that can be used to facilitate that activity. The book covers all project phases from managing requirements, implementation, testing and post production support. By the end of the book you’ll have a toolbox full of solutions and plenty of working examples. With these you’ll be able to build your own PMIS uniquely suited to your organization.

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Traditional relational databases and embedded databases both have shortcomings that can leave a developer perplexed. So for many people, the solution resides in an open source embeddable database with an amazingly small footprint (less than 250 kilobytes). SQLite packs a powerful array of features and can handle databases as large as 2 terabytes. It offers a flexible set of datatypes and the ability to perform transactions, and it is supported by languages like C, PHP, Perl, and Python. And because SQLite’s databases are completely file based, privileges are granted at the operating system level, allowing for easy and fast user management.

The Definitive Guide to SQLite is the first book to devote complete coverage to the latest version of this powerful database. It offers you a thorough overview of SQLite capabilities and APIs, while remaining cognizant of newcomers who may be making their first foray into a database environment with SQLite. This book serves as both a first-time tutorial and future reference guide.

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