Mikkel Flyverbom s The Power of Networks is a timely and important contribution to the emerging interdisciplinary study of cyberspace politics. In an exceptionally well-written and researched book, Flyberbom employs a form of ethnographic method to uncover the grounded practices that inform the many hybrid forums and entangled authorities of Internet governance. The book will be of interest to those who want a deeper understanding of the complexity and nuance of the many social forces shaping global cyberspace today. Ronald J. Deibert, University of Toronto, Canada Flyverbom presents an original ethnography of the political ordering processes of the digital revolution. He lays bare the relational practices within hybrid global forums in which multiple actors are mobilized to participate, contest, and dialogue. The book makes an important contribution to emergent global politics governing technologies, networks, meanings, and people within the United Nations system. J.P. Singh, Georgetown University, US With an ever-growing number of users, the Internet is central to the processes of globalization, cultural formations, social encounters and economic development. These aside, it is also fast becoming an important political domain. Struggles over disclosure, access and regulation are only the most visible signs that the Internet is quickly becoming a site of fierce political conflict involving states, technical groups, business and civil society. As the debate over the global politics of the Internet intensifies, this book will be a valuable guide for anyone seeking to understand the emergence, organization and shape of this new issue. In this vivid study, Mikkel Flyverbom captures how questions about the digital divide and the information revolution, dialogues with stakeholders, and networked forms of organization have become key features of the global politics of the Internet. Tracing the making and stabilization of this transnational issue in and around the United Nations over almost a decade, this book demonstrates how multi-stakeholder networks make new political domains accessible and unsettle established ways of organizing transnational governance. The Power of Networks offers a rich account of the practices and effects of organizing global politics and governance through dialogues and collaborations between governments, business and societies the world over. Offering a novel analytical vocabulary for the study of ordering, governance and organization, this innovative ethnographic study of hybrid organizations and entangled forms of power in global politics shows how insights from actor-network theory and the Foucauldian governmentality literature can reinvigorate studies of transnational governance and organizational processes.

An accessible illustrated introducton to the networks we use every day, from Facebook and Google to WiFi and the Internet What makes WiFi faster at home than at a coffee shop? How does Google order search results? Is it really true that everyone on Facebook is connected by six steps or less? The Power of Networks answers questions like these for the first time in a way that all of us can understand. Using simple language, analogies, stories, hundreds of illustrations, and no more math than simple addition and multiplication, Christopher Brinton and Mung Chiang provide a smart and accessible introduction to the handful of big ideas that drive the computer networks we use every day. The Power of Networks unifies these ideas through six fundamental principles of networking. These principles explain the difficulties in sharing network resources efficiently, how crowds can be wise or not so wise depending on the nature of their connections, why there are many layers in a network, and more. Along the way, the authors also talk with and share the special insights of renowned experts such as Google’s Eric Schmidt, former Verizon Wireless CEO Dennis Strigl, and “fathers of the Internet” Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn.

This is a simple, effective idea that should have been thought of sooner. Kung Fu Phonics teaches phonics, i.e. the rules of "sounding out" words, through phonetics. Q: How do you say "phone?" A: /fon/ Phonics books out today (chockablock with happy hippos and grinning giraffes) are aimed at kindergartners. 4th-grade kids consider them "baby books." Phonetics texts are all daunting tomes for grad students of comparative linguistics and philology, and buying one will put you out fifty dollars No book has used the one to teach the other, until KUNG FU PHONICS. Phonetics has only ever been used to describe how words sound. Kung Fu Phonics is the first to employ phonetics PREDICTIVELY, asking students to describe how unfamiliar words SHOULD sound. Kung Fu Phonics is great for teaching K and pre-K kids to read, and with them you can skip the phonetic notations and just have them read and say the words. It's also a fine tool for teaching English to non-native speakers of any age. If your child is reading below grade level, spend twenty minutes a day with him studying phonetics with this book. Phonetics is just a tool, an uncomplicated but exacting series of squiggles. It's a nice bit of misdirection He'll complain about phonetics and how useless it is while you're doing something awfully concrete to bolster his reading skills: teaching PHONICS. (And since he's learning something his classmates aren't, it doesn't have the embarrassing feel of remediation.) It's an 88-page workbook. Twenty-five lessons, five model words and fifty exercise words per lesson. Concise instructions keep almost every lesson to two pages. And the instructions are so clear that anyone who reads English on a high-school level can use Kung Fu Phonics to teach reading. (Alas, you can't just toss it to a kindergartner and tell her to get busy; it requires cooperative effort.) It requires no DVD or audio CD to use; it's ready to teach as is. This is the American English edition of KUNG FU PHONICS. It uses American (Merriam-Webster) phonetics and describes American pronunciations.

The work in this thesis proposes the innovative use of modern technologies and mathematical techniques to analyse and control future power systems. It exploits new enabling technologies such as Voltage Source Converter High Voltage Direct Current (VSC-HVDC) lines, both single and multi-terminal, and Wide Area Measurement Systems (WAMS) to reduce the risks of instability associated with greater utilisation of modern power systems. New control systems for these technologies have been analysed, and subsequently designed, using advanced probabilistic analysis techniques to ensure that they are robust to the variable and turbulent conditions expected in the future. The advanced probabilistic techniques used in the thesis for both system analysis and controller design represent one of the first such applications in open literature.

When the five Central Asian republics gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, expectations of violent conflict were widespread. Indeed, the country of Tajikistan suffered a five-year civil war from 1992 to 1997. The factors that the literature on civil wars in general and on the Tajikistan civil war in particular cites as the causes of war were also present in Uzbekistan – but this country had a peaceful transition. Examining this empirical puzzle by isolating the crucial factors that caused war to break out in Tajikistan but not Uzbekistan, this book applies a powerful comparative approach to the broader question of why civil wars occur. Based on fieldwork in both countries, it challenges many common explanations of civil war both generally and in Tajikistan in particular. This includes highlighting the importance of elites’ power perceptions, which have their origins in the interaction of structural-, process-, and network-related variables. Without examining these interactions, macro-structural explanations alone cannot explain the occurrence of civil war in one country and its absence in another. Applying the insights of bargaining theories of war from the literature on international relations to the civil war in Tajikistan, this book will be of interest to students of violent conflict, civil wars, Central Asia and Asian Politics.

The power engineering domain is facing huge challenges, with an increasing interest in intermittent renewable energies which are imposing major technical limitations. Operating ever closer to their limits, the industry-standard AC power grids are subject to instabilities. This book presents an insight into DC grid systems, offering interesting issues to well controlled power grids, in contrast to current AC systems which provide the simplest and most economic connection method for short distances.

Little is known about how Late Postclassic populations in southeast Mesoamerica organized their political relations. Networks of Power fills gaps in the knowledge of this little-studied area, reconstructing the course of political history in the Naco Valley from the fourteenth through early sixteenth centuries. Describing the material and behavioral patterns pertaining to the Late Postclassic period using components of three settlements in the Naco Valley of northwestern Honduras, the book focuses on how contests for power shaped political structures. Power-seeking individuals, including but not restricted to ruling elites, depended on networks of allies to support their political objectives. Ongoing and partially successful competitions waged within networks led to the incorporation of exotic ideas and imported items into the daily practices of all Naco Valley occupants. The result was a fragile hierarchical structure forever vulnerable to the initiatives of agents operating on local and distant stages. Networks of Power describes who was involved in these competitions and in which networks they participated; what resources were mustered within these webs; which projects were fueled by these assets; and how, and to what extent, they contributed to the achievement of political aims.

The news media have significant influence on the formation of public opinion. Called the agenda-setting role of the media, this influence occurs at three levels. Focusing public attention on a select few issues or other topics at any moment is level one. Emphasizing specific attributes of those issues or topics is level two. The Power of Information Networks: The Third Level of Agenda Setting introduces the newest perspective on this influence. While levels one and two are concerned with the salience of discrete individual elements, the third level offers a more comprehensive and nuanced perspective to explain media effects in this evolving media landscape: the ability of the news media to determine how the public associates the various elements in these media messages to create an integrated picture of public affairs. This is the first book to detail the theoretical foundations, methodological approaches, and international empirical evidence for this new perspective. Cutting-edge communication analytics such as network analysis, Big Data and data visualization techniques are used to examine these third-level effects. Diverse applications of the theory are documented in political communication, public relations, health communication, and social media research. The Power of Information Networks will interest scholars, students and practitioners concerned with the media and their social and cultural effects.

This book presents reports from the forefront of soft computing in the Internet industry and covers important topics in the field such as search engines, fuzzy query, decision analysis and support systems as well as e-business and e-commerce.

Less expensive, lighter, and smaller than its electromechanical counterparts, power electronics lie at the very heart of controlling and converting electric energy, which in turn lies at the heart of making that energy useful. From household appliances to space-faring vehicles, the applications of power electronics are virtually limitless. Until now, however, the same could not be said for access to up-to-date reference books devoted to power electronics. Written by engineers for engineers, The Power Electronics Handbook covers the full range of relevant topics, from basic principles to cutting-edge applications. Compiled from contributions by an international panel of experts and full of illustrations, this is not a theoretical tome, but a practical and enlightening presentation of the usefulness and variety of technologies that encompass the field. For modern and emerging applications, power electronic devices and systems must be small, efficient, lightweight, controllable, reliable, and economical. The Power Electronics Handbook is your key to understanding those devices, incorporating them into controllable circuits, and implementing those systems into applications from virtually every area of electrical engineering.