Stories are everywhere... Exploring the great plots from Plato to The Matrix and from Tolstoy to Toy Story, this is a book for anyone who wants to unlock any narrative and learn to create their own. With startling and original insights into how we construct stories, this is a creative writing book like no other. It will show you how to read and write better.

Perplexed by the business value of social media? Not sure how to build an effective information system for your organization? Mike takes us on a safari through the communications jungle, to see how the monkeys that inhabit the modern office can bring out their brilliance through electronic collaboration. In a book which covers topics as diverse as cloud solutions and the mind shift required to turn your organisation into an anarchy (and why you might want to do so), we are shown how the smartest organisations can use the tools of the information age to boost productivity. We learn how information, the life-blood of any organisation and the route to value-creation, happy teams and loyal customers, can be turned from a passive resource to a highly active one. If you want to be a smart monkey, rather than just one of an infinite number of keyboard jockeys, then you need to read this book.

Amateur hour has arrived, and the audience is running the show In a hard-hitting and provocative polemic, Silicon Valley insider and pundit Andrew Keen exposes the grave consequences of today’s new participatory Web 2.0 and reveals how it threatens our values, economy, and ultimately the very innovation and creativity that forms the fabric of American achievement. Our most valued cultural institutions, Keen warns—our professional newspapers, magazines, music, and movies—are being overtaken by an avalanche of amateur, user-generated free content. Advertising revenue is being siphoned off by free classified ads on sites like Craigslist; television networks are under attack from free user-generated programming on YouTube and the like; file-sharing and digital piracy have devastated the multibillion-dollar music business and threaten to undermine our movie industry. Worse, Keen claims, our “cut-and-paste” online culture—in which intellectual property is freely swapped, downloaded, remashed, and aggregated—threatens over 200 years of copyright protection and intellectual property rights, robbing artists, authors, journalists, musicians, editors, and producers of the fruits of their creative labors. In today’s self-broadcasting culture, where amateurism is celebrated and anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed, can publish a blog, post a video on YouTube, or change an entry on Wikipedia, the distinction between trained expert and uninformed amateur becomes dangerously blurred. When anonymous bloggers and videographers, unconstrained by professional standards or editorial filters, can alter the public debate and manipulate public opinion, truth becomes a commodity to be bought, sold, packaged, and reinvented. The very anonymity that the Web 2.0 offers calls into question the reliability of the information we receive and creates an environment in which sexual predators and identity thieves can roam free. While no Luddite—Keen pioneered several Internet startups himself—he urges us to consider the consequences of blindly supporting a culture that endorses plagiarism and piracy and that fundamentally weakens traditional media and creative institutions. Offering concrete solutions on how we can reign in the free-wheeling, narcissistic atmosphere that pervades the Web, THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR is a wake-up call to each and every one of us.

In this collection of short stories from best-selling author Peter Watts, enter strange new worlds that defy the imagination. Journey to the depths of the ocean floor with genetically engineered human beings ... push the boundaries of life with a scientist obsessed with death ... and watch as sentient gaseous entities offer destruction and salvation to the human race. Nine stories make up this stunning new collection from a rising talent in the field of Science Fiction.

The text was first produced in Paignton Zoo by a group of Sulawesi Macaque monkeys as their contribution to the exhibition Generator (1 May - 22 June 2002, Spacex Gallery), curated by Spacex and STAR (Science Technology Art Research, University of Plymouth).

A guide to numbers, suggesting ways of looking at individual numbers and their unique properties.

Though best known in the English speaking world for his short fictions and poems, Borges is revered in Latin America equally as an immensely prolific and beguiling writer of non-fiction prose. In THE TOTAL LIBRARY, more than 150 of Borges' most brilliant pieces are brought together for the first time in one volume - all in superb new translations. More than a hundred of the pieces have never previously been published in English. THE TOTAL LIBRARY presents Borges at once as a deceptively self-effacing guide to the universe and as the inventor of a universe that is an indispensible guide to Borges