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Books in Social sciences

The Social Sciences collection forms a definitive resource for those entering, researching, or teaching in any of the many disciplines making up this interdisciplinary area of study. Written by experts and researchers from both Academic and Commercial domains, titles offer global scope and perspectives.

Key subject areas include: Library and Information Science; Transportation; Urban Studies; Geography, Planning, and Development; Security; Emergency Management.

  • Evidence-Based Librarianship

    Case Studies and Active Learning Exercises
    • 1st Edition
    • Elizabeth Connor
    • English
    This book features case studies and active learning exercises related to using evidence-based approaches in several types of academic libraries. Evidence-Based Librarianship is a vital reference to practicing librarians, library science students, and library science educators as it focuses on applying practice-based evidence gleaned from users, direct observation, and research.
  • The Challenges of Knowledge Sharing in Practice

    A Social Approach
    • 1st Edition
    • Gunilla Widen-Wulff
    • English
    Addresses the key skills that are required in organisations in the information intensive society. The book examines the power of information behaviour on the construction of different kinds of shared knowledge and social identity in a group. An introduction to the different dimensions of social capital that is structural and cognitive, and looks at the relational aspects of information behaviour in organisations. Experiences are analysed in two different case studies - in the financial and biotechnology industries - in order to gain additional insights in how the internal organisation environment should be designed to support the development of the organisation's intellectual capital.
  • Physical and Logical Security Convergence: Powered By Enterprise Security Management

    • 1st Edition
    • Brian T Contos + 3 more
    • Eric Cole
    • English
    Government and companies have already invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the convergence of physical and logical security solutions, but there are no books on the topic.This book begins with an overall explanation of information security, physical security, and why approaching these two different types of security in one way (called convergence) is so critical in today’s changing security landscape. It then details enterprise security management as it relates to incident detection and incident management. This is followed by detailed examples of implementation, taking the reader through cases addressing various physical security technologies such as: video surveillance, HVAC, RFID, access controls, biometrics, and more.
  • Handbook of Defense Economics

    Defense in a Globalized World
    • 1st Edition
    • Todd Sandler + 1 more
    • English
    The second volume of the Handbook of Defense Economics addresses defense needs, practices, threats, and policies in the modern era of globalization. This new era concerns the enhanced cross-border flows of all kinds (e.g., capital and labor flows, revolutionary rhetoric, guerrillas, and terrorists) including the spillovers of benefits and costs associated with public goods and transnational externalities (i.e., uncompensated interdependencies affecting two or more nations). These ever-increasing flows mean that military armaments and armies are less able to keep out security threats. Thus, novel defense and security barriers are needed to protect borders that are porous to terrorists, pollutants, political upheavals, and conflicts. Even increased trade and financial flows imply novel security challenges and defenses. Globalization also underscores the importance of a new set of institutions (e.g., the European Union and global governance networks) and agents (e.g., nongovernmental organizations and partnerships). This volume addresses the security challenges in this age of globalization, where conflicts involve novel tactics, new technologies, asymmetric warfare, different venues, and frightening weapons. Volume 2 contains topics not covered in volume 1 – i.e., civil wars, peacekeeping, economic sanctions, the econometrics of arms races, conversion, peace economics, and the interface of trade, peace, and democracy. Volume 2 also revisits topics from volume 1, where there has been a significant advancement of knowledge – i.e., conflict analysis, terrorism, arms races, arms trade, military manpower, and arms industries. All of the main securities concerns of today are analyzed. Chapters are written by the leading contributors in the topic areas.
  • Generalisation of Geographic Information

    Cartographic Modelling and Applications
    • 1st Edition
    • William A. Mackaness + 2 more
    • English
    Theoretical and Applied Solutions in Multi Scale Mapping Users have come to expect instant access to up-to-date geographical information, with global coverage--presented at widely varying levels of detail, as digital and paper products; customisable data that can readily combined with other geographic information. These requirements present an immense challenge to those supporting the delivery of such services (National Mapping Agencies (NMA), Government Departments, and private business. Generalisation of Geographic Information: Cartographic Modelling and Applications provides detailed review of state of the art technologies associated with these challenges, including the most recent developments in cartometric analysis techniques able to support high levels of automation among multi scale derivation techniques. The book illustrates the application of these ideas within existing and emerging technologies. In addition to providing a comprehensive theoretical underpinning, the book demonstrates how theoretical developments have translated into commercial systems deployed within NMAs. The book explores relevance of open systems in support of collaborative research and open source web based map services.
  • Snort Intrusion Detection and Prevention Toolkit

    • 1st Edition
    • Brian Caswell + 2 more
    • English
    This all new book covering the brand new Snort version 2.6 from members of the Snort developers team.This fully integrated book and Web toolkit covers everything from packet inspection to optimizing Snort for speed to using the most advanced features of Snort to defend even the largest and most congested enterprise networks. Leading Snort experts Brian Caswell, Andrew Baker, and Jay Beale analyze traffic from real attacks to demonstrate the best practices for implementing the most powerful Snort features. The book will begin with a discussion of packet inspection and the progression from intrusion detection to intrusion prevention. The authors provide examples of packet inspection methods including: protocol standards compliance, protocol anomaly detection, application control, and signature matching. In addition, application-level vulnerabilities including Binary Code in HTTP headers, HTTP/HTTPS Tunneling, URL Directory Traversal, Cross-Site Scripting, and SQL Injection will also be analyzed. Next, a brief chapter on installing and configuring Snort will highlight various methods for fine tuning your installation to optimize Snort performance including hardware/OS selection, finding and eliminating bottlenecks, and benchmarking and testing your deployment. A special chapter also details how to use Barnyard to improve the overall performance of Snort. Next, best practices will be presented allowing readers to enhance the performance of Snort for even the largest and most complex networks. The next chapter reveals the inner workings of Snort by analyzing the source code. The next several chapters will detail how to write, modify, and fine-tune basic to advanced rules and pre-processors. Detailed analysis of real packet captures will be provided both in the book and the companion material. Several examples for optimizing output plugins will then be discussed including a comparison of MySQL and PostrgreSQL. Best practices for monitoring Snort sensors and analyzing intrusion data follow with examples of real world attacks using: ACID, BASE, SGUIL, SnortSnarf, Snort_stat.pl, Swatch, and more.The last part of the book contains several chapters on active response, intrusion prevention, and using Snort’s most advanced capabilities for everything from forensics and incident handling to building and analyzing honey pots.
  • Zen and the Art of Information Security

    • 1st Edition
    • Ira Winkler
    • English
    While security is generally perceived to be a complicated and expensive process, Zen and the Art of Information Security makes security understandable to the average person in a completely non-technical, concise, and entertaining format. Through the use of analogies and just plain common sense, readers see through the hype and become comfortable taking very simple actions to secure themselves. Even highly technical people have misperceptions about security concerns and will also benefit from Ira Winkler’s experiences making security understandable to the business world. Mr. Winkler is one of the most popular and highly rated speakers in the field of security, and lectures to tens of thousands of people a year. Zen and the Art of Information Security is based on one of his most well received international presentations.
  • Cyber Crime Investigations

    Bridging the Gaps Between Security Professionals, Law Enforcement, and Prosecutors
    • 1st Edition
    • James Steele + 3 more
    • English
    Written by a former NYPD cyber cop, this is the only book available that discusses the hard questions cyber crime investigators are asking.The book begins with the chapter “What is Cyber Crime?” This introductory chapter describes the most common challenges faced by cyber investigators today. The following chapters discuss the methodologies behind cyber investigations; and frequently encountered pitfalls. Issues relating to cyber crime definitions, the electronic crime scene, computer forensics, and preparing and presenting a cyber crime investigation in court will be examined. Not only will these topics be generally be discussed and explained for the novice, but the hard questions —the questions that have the power to divide this community— will also be examined in a comprehensive and thoughtful manner. This book will serve as a foundational text for the cyber crime community to begin to move past current difficulties into its next evolution.
  • Introduction to Environmental Forensics

    • 2nd Edition
    • Brian L. Murphy + 1 more
    • Brian L. Murphy + 1 more
    • English
    Introduction to Environmental Forensics helps readers unravel the complexities of environmental pollution cases. It outlines techniques for identifying the source of a contaminant release, when the release occurred, and the extent of human exposure. Written by leading experts in environmental investigations, the text provides detailed information on chemical "fingerprinting" techniques applicable to ground water, soils, sediments, and air, plus an in-depth look at petroleum hydrocarbons. It gives the environmental scientist, engineer, and legal specialist a complete toolbox for conducting forensic investigations. It demonstrates the range of scientific analyses that are available to answer questions of environmental liability and support a legal argument, and provides several examples and case studies to illustrate how these methods are applied. This is a textbook that would prove useful to a range of disciplines, including environmental scientists involved in water and air pollution, contaminated land and geographical information systems; and archaeologists, hydrochemists and geochemists interested in dating sources of pollution.
  • Probabilistic Methods for Financial and Marketing Informatics

    • 1st Edition
    • Richard E. Neapolitan + 1 more
    • English
    Probabilistic Methods for Financial and Marketing Informatics aims to provide students with insights and a guide explaining how to apply probabilistic reasoning to business problems. Rather than dwelling on rigor, algorithms, and proofs of theorems, the authors concentrate on showing examples and using the software package Netica to represent and solve problems. The book contains unique coverage of probabilistic reasoning topics applied to business problems, including marketing, banking, operations management, and finance. It shares insights about when and why probabilistic methods can and cannot be used effectively. This book is recommended for all R&D professionals and students who are involved with industrial informatics, that is, applying the methodologies of computer science and engineering to business or industry information. This includes computer science and other professionals in the data management and data mining field whose interests are business and marketing information in general, and who want to apply AI and probabilistic methods to their problems in order to better predict how well a product or service will do in a particular market, for instance. Typical fields where this technology is used are in advertising, venture capital decision making, operational risk measurement in any industry, credit scoring, and investment science.