Books in the Perspectives series

A seemingly normal field trip ends with Marya and her friends gaining wings and fantastical powers. A 500-year old book tells the tale of people just like them, but there's more to the story. Red eyes haunt Marya's past and might determine her future. How far will she go for answers?

Why did Britain's cities, once the engines of the industrial revolution, decline so severely? What needs to be done if our cities are once again to be the drivers of our economy? This book answers these questions, looking at the lessons of the last two hundred years. .

The aim of this book is to inspire a better politics: one that will enable future generations to be happier. Greater well-being and better health should be the goals, rather than wealth maximization. We need to value healthcare more than hedge funds, caring above careers, relationships more than real estate. The book is about what makes most of us happier, but it is also about the collective good. We cannot truly be happy if those around us are not happy. The evidence for a successful politics that would promote happiness and health is examined, and policies that take account of this evidence are suggested. Government can and should work to make us happier.

Consumers in Britain face a curious mix of taxes and duties that are messy, opaque and out of date. They are also unfair: the poorer you are, the more of your income goes on paying these taxes. At the same time, we are ceaselessly bombarded by marketing information that is very one-sided. The foods that make us fat, for example, are promoted a great deal more than the foods that could keep us healthy - and again it is mainly the poor who bear the brunt. This book draws on insights from behavioural economics, participative decision-making and the author's twenty-five-year research career to take a fresh look at these issues. It concludes that there is a fair, inclusive, adaptable, affordable and resilient way of enabling us to eat healthily and to tackle the obesity crisis. The author proposes that negative VAT should be charged on healthy foods and high VAT should be charged on unhealthy foods. The book sets out a four-step process to actually implement this new regime, each step of which depends on mechanisms that have already been used by government. It is a bold yet practical proposition for tackling one of the most costly and damaging challenges we face.

With so many conflicting views and a balance to be struck between growth and conservation, what housing market outcomes might be regarded as a success for policymakers? This book attempts to give at least some answers, concluding with a list of criteria by which success might be judged along with a list of policy recommendations.

Poverty, and calls to end it, date back centuries. Even in prosperous modern times, despite the huge transformation of society, poverty has persisted. This book looks back at the struggle to end poverty and asks if it is worth it.

The difficult economic climate in Europe and the United States since the financial crisis is set to continue as the New Normal, despite frantic efforts to stimulate growth. The long phase of expansion that lasted from the 1980s until 2008 was driven by easy money, cheap imports and confidence - all gone. And the shift of geopolitical power to Asia is permanent. This does not mean that Western economies are inevitably condemned to 'lost decades' ahead. They can rediscover productivity and growth - but governments face formidable political obstacles to the reforms this would require.

London has enjoyed an extraordinary period of growth in the past generation, symbolized by the towers of Canary Wharf built on the skeleton of the old docks. Finance was at the heart of this, so how can London's economy be reinvented after the financial crisis? Success will depend on several factors that must go together: growing service sectors in addition to finance; making it possible for the people who work in London to live there in pleasant and affordable surroundings; and investing in communications and transport links. This must include an early decision on airport investment to improve global links, given that the capital's main airport is full to capacity - where the extra capacity is located is less important than starting work on expansion as soon as possible.

Netizens is an ambitious look at the social aspects of computer networking. It examines the present and the turbulent future, and especially it explores the technical and social roots of the Net.--Thomas Truscott, co-developer of Usenet While working on my own history of the Net, I watched the Haubens' documentation of Net development evolve and grow as they posted it to the Net itself. Now, with a hardcopy version of their work out, the authors have given us a valuable shelf reference to complement their online work.--Katie Hafner, coauthor of Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet Inspired by the writings of Thomas Paine and Jean Jacques Rousseau, Michael and Ronda Hauben sketch an=out a provocative declaration of Netizen rights in their appendix to this engrossing, well-researched, and very useful book. The Haubens reserve the term Netizen for positive contributors to the Net, the good citizens whose heroic precursors from the 1960s are reicly chronicled in a flowing historical and sociological account that is not to be missed.--Martin Greenberger, Director of the Center for Digital Media, UCLA

This is the story of Microsoft(R) and how it rose to become the first monopoly of the information Age. The text is assembled from Ted Lewis's columns published in IEEE Computer (1994-1998), IEEE Internet Computing, and Scientific American. Microsoft Rising is a tale of great, emotion, and techno-marketing hype in one of the fastest growing, mainline industries of the world. It is an eye witness account to the changing computer industry and the story of Silicon Valley and how it works, a revisionist history of computing, circa 1990-2000. Microsoft Rising is ultimately about Microsoft's domination of the computer industry. This book reports the author's personal history through the early 1990's to the end of the decade. These stories often try to predict or explain the chaos of Silicon Valley. Lewis analyzes the industry and shows how high-technology industry is constantly changing in turmoil and upheaval. He also examines the art of software development and deals with innovation and the emergence of techno-society. The book does not promise any answers, but rather concludes this short journey into the recent past with a number of provoking ideas about the future of hi-tech.

Explores the history of the United States Navy's secret development of code-breaking computers and their adaptation to solve a critical fleet radar data handling problem in the Navy's first seaborne digital computer system - that went to sea in 1962.

A collection of essays skilfully written about the computer age Explores the patterns that the last half of the twentieth century bestowed upon us, looking at ideas that are both contemporary and timeless. Based on the author's column "In Our Time", which runs monthly in Computer magazine.

Most of us would consider the emergence of large-scale communication networks to be a twentieth-century phenomenon. The first nationwide data networks, however, were built almost two hundred years ago. At the end of the eighteenth century, well before the electromagnetic telegraph was invented, many countries in Europe had fully operational data communications systems, with altogether close to one thousand network stations. This book gives a fascinating glimpse of the many documented attempts throughout history to develop effective means for long-distance communications. The oldest attempts date back to millennia before Christ, and include ingenious uses of homing pigeons, mirrors, flags, torches, and beacons. The book then shows how Claude Chappe, a French clergyman, started the information revolution in 1794, with the design and construction of the first true telegraph network in France. Another chapter contains the first English translation of a remarkable document on the design of optical telegraphs networks, originally written in 1796 by the Swedish nobleman Abraham Niclas Edelcrantz.

Transport is key to our daily lives. The transport system is essential to ensure the movement of people and goods, and most of us will use the roads or public transport every day. Vast sums are tied up in it and are spent on trying to resolve the problems of congestion and delays. And yet it is a most neglected field of politics. Britain has never had a coherent transport policy. Transport ministers are regarded as minnows compared with their 'big beast' colleagues in other ministries. Successive governments have barely attempted to get to grips with the challenge of getting people around efficiently and safely while limiting the environmental damage caused by transport. In this entertaining polemic, Christian Wolmar, an author and journalist who has written about transport for over two decades, explains why politicians have not addressed the crucial issue of balancing transport needs with environmental considerations. Instead, they have been seduced by the popularity of the car and pressure from the car lobby, and they have been sidetracked by dogma. Solutions are at hand - and successful examples can be seen elsewhere in Europe - but courage and clear thinking are needed if they are to be implemented.

Trade is being weaponized - and this isn't good. As politicians on both sides of the Atlantic raise the stakes, trade is increasingly a tool of coercion to achieve strategic influence. This book looks at the risks for us all as trade becomes an instrument of foreign policy, and shows how politicians could turn things around.

This book argues that identity and money are both changing profoundly. Because of technological change the two trends are converging so that all that we need for transacting will be our identities captured in the unique record of our online social contacts. Social networks and mobile phones are the key technologies. They will enable the building of an identity infrastructure that can enhance both privacy and security - there is no trade-off. The long-term consequences of these changes are impossible to predict, partly because how they take shape will depend on how companies take advantage of business opportunities to deliver transaction services. But one prediction made here is that cash will soon be redundant - and a good thing too. In its place we will see a proliferation of new digital currencies.