In recent years economists have come to realise that social norms and norm-driven behaviour – such as notions of fairness, willingness to be generous towards strangers or cooperate with them, willingness to trust strangers and reciprocate others’ trust – play a crucial role in a variety of economic transactions and have implications for economic theories. There have been a lot of innovati…
Growing Farms: Successful Whole Farm Management is a workshop series that enhances the success of new farmers by helping participants think through biological, physical, financial, and family aspects of farm business. The workshops include classroom and field sessions, and topics follow a natural sequence, from planning through production to long-term management. As participants progress throug…
One way to learn about business is to read the textbooks, learn the definitions, discuss case studies, and pass the exam. In Foundation: A Hands-on Introduction to Business Fundamentals we take a less theoretical and more hands-on approach. We’re going to learn business by managing a business. The approach makes sense for two reasons. First, business itself is practical. If there were a sing…
In today's business environment, and under the influence of globalization and advances in the field of information technology, organizations are facing increasing demands for information processing. In order to respond to the demands of the current business context, modern organization are finding the solution in creating adequate capacity and infrastructure to support the establishment of harm…
Having originated in the advanced economies, the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008–09 spread rapidly to the rest of the world. The impact on the emerging markets, especially those in Asia, though not as severe as that in the advanced countries, was still quite signifi- cant. India withstood the crisis initially but could not remain entirely unaffected for long (especially after the collap…
This book is an updated and expanded version of Ruby in a Nutshell (O’Reilly) by Yukihiro Matsumoto, who is better known as Matz. It is loosely modeled after the classic The C Programming Language (Prentice Hall) by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, and aims to document the Ruby language comprehensively but without the formality of a language specification. It is written for experienced pro…
If we had to summarize design patterns in a single sentence, we’d say that they’re tools for coping with constant change in software design and development. When you look at the different design patterns in this book, they’re optimized to allow the programmer to make changes and reuse most of the software developed. The key concepts are change and flexibility. That same theme will be repe…
Like any development project, the ones in Hadoop start with proof of concept (POC). Especially because the technology is new and continuously evolving, the focus always begins with figuring out what it can offer and how to leverage it to solve different business problems, be it consumer analysis, breaking news processing, and so on. Being an open source framework, it has its own nuances and req…
Gephi is an interactive graph and network analysis and visualization tool that allows its users to study the properties of graphs and networks in detail, without having to write any code. Gephi supports almost all types of graphical networks including complex networks, hierarchical networks, dynamic networks, and temporal networks. Gephi has a lot of ready-to-use features that allow users to cr…
Since their introduction, social network sites (SNSs) such as MySpace, Facebook, Cyworld, and Bebo have attracted millions of users, many of whom have integrated these sites into their daily practices. As of this writing, there are hundreds of SNSs, with various technological affordances, supporting a wide range of interests and practices. W…
In this paper we produce an algorithm for pre- senting messages to users in social networks that integrates reasoning about the message, the author, the recipient and the social network. Our proposed model was derived on the basis of immersion within three different existing social networking environments, that of Coursera, Reddit, and medical self-help groups such as PatientsLikeMe. We first …
This volume, the second in the series produced by the Columbia Program on Indian Economic Policies, turns to the analysis of the reforms from a differ- ent viewpoint than the first. It takes as its starting point the fact that while the reforms have undoubtedly delivered in terms of poverty reduction and associated social objectives, the impact has not been as substantial as it has been in othe…
Social networking sites have gained much popularity in the re- cent years, because of the opportunities they give people to connect to each other in an easy and timely manner, and to exchange and share various kinds of information. However, these sites are architected based on a cen- tralized paradigm, which limits the mobility of their users, and ultimately, their chances for establishing new …