Approaches to media literacy

Sample

Barry Silverstein

In today's hypercompetitive business climate, managers who help employees achieve their individual potential stand to get—and stay—ahead. Managing People, a comprehensive and essential resource for any manager on the run, shows you how.Learn to:Delegate the right work to the right employeeMotivate people to outperform the competitionEstablish and empower effective teamsManage multiple projects and stay on trackInspire trust and lead in times of changeThe Collins Best Practices guides offer new and seasoned managers the essential information they need to achieve more, both personally and professionally. Designed to provide tried-and-true advice from the world's most influential business minds, they feature practical strategies and tips to help you get ahead.

Sample

Douglas Rushkoff

Rushkoff warns that the promise of the Net as an open-ended civic forum is fading, as relentless corporate marketers peddle their wares and capitalize on shortened attention spans. He identifies subtle forms of coercion used by advertisers, public relations experts, politicians, religious leaders and customer service reps, among others, and provides examples of how the ordinary person is often unsuspectingly manipulated, whether in the shopping mall, at a sports event or in a Muzak-drenched store or office. This analysis is particularly strong when deconstructing the "postmodern" techniques of persuasion that advertisers use to reach increasingly cynical target audiences, including commercials that self-consciously mock the marketing process. Rushkoff also argues that mass spectacles (e.g., rock festivals, Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March, Promise Keepers rallies) foster "tribal loyalty" but are often contrived, commercial or downright destructive. He devotes a chapter to pyramid schemes used by cults, infomercials, Internet con artists and get-rich-quick marketers. His freewheeling survey underscores the social cost of these coercive strategies, which, he says, tend to make us see one another as marks.

Sample

Peter Rowland

"The bowerbirds (family Ptilonorhynchidae) are famed for their unique bower-building behaviour which, in some species, can be a complex construction of sticks and other vegetable matter that can grow to two metres or so in diameter and about one and a half metres high. Many species are also accomplished mimics, and are able to copy the calls of other bird species, other natural and mechanical sounds and even human speech. The bowerbirds are confined to Australia and New Guinea and, due to the difficulty in accessing certain areas of their distribution, the study of their habits has been challenging. The 20 species are also almost equally divided between the two regions with eight species endemic to Australia, 10 to New Guinea and two species occurring in both regions"--Publisher.

Sample

Matthew MacDonald

To bring you up to speed with Visual Basic 2005, this practical book offers nearly 50 hands-on projects. Each one explores a new feature of the language, with emphasis on changes that can increase productivity, simplify programming tasks, and help you add new functionality to your applications. You get the goods straight from the masters in an informal, code-intensive style.