Publications and Media Books

The book written by Andrew Webb is certainly the most comprehensive book related to machine learning. I have not been able to find any machine learning topic which is not treated in this book.

According to me, this book is more for a scientific audience for the simplest reason that the presentation gives more importance to equations than to application examples. It does not explain how to program machine learning algorithm but rather which algorithms exist and what is their mathematical background. Every technique is presented first using text and only then mathematical development is shown. Therefore, it is convenient for people preferring textual description as well as the ones preferring equations.

The book is very well structured. Every chapter starts with a textual introduction on the related issue and then describes several techniques to solve it. At the end, specific application examples are given. A large part is then devoted to summary, discussion, recommendations (not always), notes and references, and finally exercises. Topics are covered in a non standard way for people used to data mining practical books. After an introduction, density estimation techniques are explained. Then linear and non-linear discriminant analyzes. It goes on with decision trees, performance and feature selection to finish with clustering and some other additional topics. Although this book is written in a statistical point of view, it is certainly one of the most comprehensive resource for machine learning and data mining.

The author claims that this book is written for senior undergrads and gaduate students, on the contraray, of what he claimed, his treatment of the suject is very sketchy. He has written this book in a somewhat citational manner i.e not treating any details of the concerned topics whatsoever and only stating the facts directly like he is citing some kind of terminolgy and not intersted in giving the reader a thourough understanding of the subject.
He has given extensive references and urls and so this book is more like " I can't explain anything go search urself here".
I think its the most worst way anybody could adopt for writing a book. In my opinion the only purpose of this book was to have a publication on his credit.
I would strongly recommend any students to refrain from buying this one as it will not help you much in any way.
Or else if u realy like to use very expensive toilet paper then give this book a try.

I recently started study about Pattern Recognition. This book is so well organized.

- Introduction to statistical pattern recognition

- Basic approaches to supervised classification via Bayes' rule and estimation of the class-conditional densities.

- Discriminant function approach to supervised classification.

- Techniques of exploratory data analysis.

- Additional topics on pattern recognition including performance assessment.

Especially, this book contains URL which concerned with topics. It is very useful!!

Laszlo in Action is an 'ok' introduction to OpenLaszlo. I found it mildly informative, however, it lacks any backend information. Notably, how do you get your data from the database to OpenLaszlo. The publisher tells us that there are two appendices that describe backends for Java Struts and Ruby on Rails to transport data between a database and OpenLaszlo but those appendices are not actually in the book. They're download only PDFs from the publisher's website. Had I known this before purchasing the book I would have skipped buying it. I don't know why the publisher decided not to actually print the appendices but I call it an epic fail on their part.

Save your money. Download the appendices from the publisher and use OpenLaszlo's online documentation.

This book is an excellent introduction to OpenLaszlo version 4.0. It describes the OpenLaszlo framework, its concepts and unfolds the language philosophy over several chapters by creating a webshop application. One major aspect of OpenLaszlo is, to initially define the visual GUI mockup using some embedded XML test data inside the OpenLaszlo frontend. After finishing the visual GUI, you switch the XML source to a server address and off you go ! So, web applications can be visually created in a very simple and appealing way using a XML markup language and small XML test data - no need to fiddle around on server or database side. After finishing the visual work, a backend programmer can do the database creation and webservice part of the application. Frontend and backend development are no longer a mixed operation - web 2.0 applications in record time. Note: OpenLaszlo was already on the market in 2002, when Adobe (formerly Macromedia) stole that idea and created Flex. OpenLaszlo is OpenSource and it rocks !

Gave a good background on cockatoos for the new owner

Layout is good but too many photos and not enough text. This is a very basic guide and left me hungry for more which I am having trouble finding. Can you believe I have found more indepth information on Tarantulas than I can find for Cockatoos?

The Lunatic Religious Fringe is really Out There, folks! I'm accustomed to their ubiquitous presence outside Star Trek conventions, handing out tracts to warn costumed Klingons of the unScripturality of sci-fi/fantasy. "Disney and the Bible" was being peddled by earnest evangelists outside the recent International Comic Con, along with tracts about gay Tinkiwinkies, satanic Anime, and pagan Potter. After skimming through the book, I was intrigued enough to buy it. Who knew that Walt Disney was a left-leaning Satanist out to destroy American Values, that Tinkerbell is a sex-maniac, Scar the Lion a homosexual, and that witchcraft is glorified in Disney cartoons? Well... in actuality, Disney was a leading contributor of suspected Hollywood commies' names to McCarthy's Blacklist. And Disney witches are all depicted as the stereotypical evil, ugly hags right out of Puritan pulpits. As for the deviant fairies and anthropomorphic animals, and supposed subliminal messages, erections, and phalluses, these are all addressed with righteous outrage. There's plenty of denouncement of the positive portrayals of nonChristian religion in Disney animation. Why indeed, should children be exposed to Hindu Mowgli, Buddhist Mulan, Muslim Aladdin, and other characters' heathen faiths? Somehow Robin Hood's pious Christian badger, Friar Tuck, gets overlooked in the indignant ardor. I have to wonder, though, why these zealots so strongly condemn the religious imagery of the Lion King, when so many Christians love Divine Aslan of the "Narnia" fairytales? And would it really have improved the story of Pocahontas to depict her coerced conversion to Christianity, subsequent virtual slavery in white man's society, and untimely death from smallpox? These Fundamentalist activists apparently think so! Parts of this book are unintentionally hilarious. For example, the allegation is made that "Fantasia", so popular with the hippie generation, must have been produced by a Disney staff high on drugs. "Yes, it is true'" one animator is quoted in seeming verification of the charge, "I myself was addicted to Ex-Lax and Feenamint!" At other times the book gets bogged down with humorless reproach from the likes of "reverends" Wildmon and Kennedy, the Assemblies of God, and the Southern Baptist Convention. One would think these "spiritual leaders" would have more urgent Christian callings than attacking animation. Overall, what seems most evident about this expose' is that obsessed religious fanatics can and do find Satan wherever they look for him.

This is at once the funniest and most tragic piece of writing I have ever read. Hopefully the editor was fired for allowing silly, silly mistakes such as the character Maleficent being mentioned as a villain in, first, Sleeping Beauty and, later, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (in the same chapter, even). Ferraiuolo frequently contradicts himself, weakening the argument against Disney and reaffirming the idiocy of people who believe that fairy tales and mythology (some of the first forms of literature in existence) are the downfall of society. Example: Chapter 1 states, "The introduction of Greek mythology into Disney's works was a precursor to his embracing a wide range of antibiblical themes, including black magic, witchcraft, sorcery and mysticism" (18). Yet, chapter 5 states, "Walt would be incensed, supposedly, at the level of family-degrading, sexually implicit and explicit movies being made" (93). How can "Uncle Walt" be immoral in one chapter and moral in another, especially in regards to his own films? The answer is simple: this book stretches any and every bit of so-called research to make a point fit an agenda.

The content of this book is something that everyone with kids needs to know. Like most American kids, I grew up with those "beloved" Disney characters, but was also frightened by a few of them. Years ago, Disney could be trusted as a family-oriented company. Unfortunately, such is no longer the case.

Although the writing style in this book is less than flawlessly smooth, it is, at least, easy to understand, and the content is dead-on. Christian or not, read this book.

Has Disney betrayed the public? After reading this book, and checking many of the facts and footnotes personally, I can only say that the author has done his homeowork and shocked us all. This book is not to be taken lightly. It is one that is packed with fact, and holds no punches back. I like it. Hell, I loved it. Those who will criticize it must have their own agenda, because the author does nothing but report what is a typical paper trail and timeline. It will be a most unpopular book, but that just makes it juicier. Very cool read. Very fast read. Very repeatable read...over and over.

While Perucci Ferraiuolo does address some legitimate concerns, most of his arguments border on the ludicrous. Ferraiulo sees what is obviously merely an attempt to avoid confusion with other cartoon productions of classics, i.e. billing "Peter Pan" as "Walt Disney's Peter Pan", as a display of blatant egotism. He claims that the story of Cinderella promotes occultic themes, and goes on to describe the original fairy tale as proof. What he doesn't see is that the Walt Disney production has left practically all of that out. He claims that the movie strongly suggests that the fairy godmother is in fact Cinderella's dead mother. (how so? Because she calls Cinderella 'Child?'). He criticises "Something Wicked This Way Comes", because the movie's villian shares obvious parallels with Satan. Again, Mr Ferraiuolo fails to see the point. This movie is in fact an analogy of the dangers of the temptations of the material world, and in the end, good triumphs over evil.
The occultic background of fairies are exposed in this book. But I have yet to hear of a child who developed an unhealthy interest in the occult after watching Sleeping Beauty. A lot of it, in the end, has to do with the mind.
I am not suggesting evil does not exist. However, we should not go about looking for evil in every corner until we get so caught up with it that we neglect the more important aspects of being a Christian, such as, loving your neighbour.

A mummy that reportedly holds the secrets to eternal youth is stolen and a young girl that has a disease that makes her age quickly is kidnapped to use as a guinea pig for the new drug that will give people the extra years we all desire. Nice blend of real life facts but gets a bit long in the tooth.

Death's Door is the ninth entry into bestselling author Michael Slade's Special X series and it begins and ends with a bang!

The audacious, and bloodthirsty theft of a mummy starts the Special X squad down a road littered with snuff films, psychos, murder, mayhem, and the return of the villain who matched wits with Robert DeClercq and still managed to slip away.

Michael Slade spins his mystery/thrillers with a vicious glee and a tip of the hat to the hard boiled crime thrillers, and all the great detective mysteries of old. Within the pages of Death's Door you will be exposed to the twisted nature of the psychotic mind, and how those psychos are hunted down. Do you have the guts to follow the clues that lead you to Death's Door?

No one writes them quite like Slade.

Michael Slade, Death's Door (Cemetery Dance, 2003)

Since Headhunter, the team pseudonymously known as Michael Slade have been cranking out thrillers that sit about as far out on the bleeding edge as thrillers get (you can find a bit more gore in the horror genre if you know where to look, but not by much). Death's Door continues the tradition. In this one, Special X (Special External Operations, a branch of the Mounties well-known to readers of Slade's novels) get sucked into investigating the discoveries of horribly mutilated bodies turning up on Canada's western shore. If you've read any of the series' recent novels, you've probably got a good idea of what's coming.

Slade writes fast-moving novels that work like quick punches to the gut; the thriller reader with a taste for the perverse will find much between the covers to satisfy. ***

I came to this book unaware that it was a continuation (so to speak) of the lives and doings of a whole host of characters, but that much became apparant as I trudged through the laborious prose and the smug, self-referrential narrative.

The story starts with the theft of a mummy and then expands exponentially to encompass the world of snuff films, plastic surgery, pedophelia, necrophilia, and ... movie theory?

The chaos of the story is well-contained, that much can be said in favor of the book, but in some ways, it is too well-contained, so that buy the time I finished reading, I felt like I had hardly read any story at all. The theft of the mummy -- which is detailed in the first few well-crafted chapters -- turns out to be a side-bar to the muddled mess that is the rest of the book, a story that is much less than the sum of its parts.

The book would be engaging and entertaining -- in spite of its rather silly plot -- if it weren't for the prose-stopping lectures that punctuate the story like two-ton commas. For a book that is already teetering on the edge of goofiness, these clumsy chunks of unnecessary exposition are lethal to the pacing and what little interest the story can contrive.

Likewise, the style of the writing fluctuates between lofty all-knowingness and staccato-blast witticisms. In between stilted discourses on everything from the genesis of crime-solving software to Alfred Hitchcock films you will find snide and pithy one-liners that reference virtually every manner of pop culture, from Jackson Pollock to Porky Pig.

All of this aside, what you're left with is, essentially, a mordant tale staffed with almost wholly unlikeable characters who all speak alike (sometimes in the same agnozing soliloquies that infect the narration). Finally, the book's conclusion is no conclusion at all, and is an obvious and strained attempt to leave room for another sequel for all of these flatly formed characters to suffer through.

I, however, won't be suffering with them next time.

Once upon a time, "Michael Slade" wrote original, interesting stories with well-nuanced characters in a sub-genre of "splatterpunk". But that was 20 years ago, and the original authors behind the Slade name (John Banks, Jay Clarke, Lee Clarke, Richard Covell) have dispersed, leaving the father-daughter team of Jay and Rebecca Clarke to trade in on the earlier "glories", and all we get are the now-standard "Special X" characters and a franchise name. Pity. OK, I'll concede that there is a veneer of intelligence usually lacking in graphic (as in "gore-riddled") crime fiction, but just sticking a bibliography at the end of every book doesn't necessarily make that book intelligent in and of itself. "Death's Door" is the most egregrious example of laurel-resting I've come across in a looooong time, worse even than Stephen King's last two or three thousand books. Not only are the major characters recycled, including the villian ("Mephisto", oh, dear.....), they are now recycled cardboard. Zinc Chandler gets to bang his head (again - poor man would be in an institution by now), DeClerq gets to act the swell and brood (alternately), "Ghost Keeper" is even more of a stereotype than his last appearance, as is Ed "Mad Dog" Rabidowski (full-blown psychotic now), and the rest of the crew, well, what did you expect?

I really hate it when an author can't break new ground and instead feels entitled to dish out familiar material to an apparently easily-satisfied fan-base. Believe me, if this was "Michael Slade's" *first* novel, no publisher would touch it.

Do yourself a favor: if you've already read the first four Slade books ("Headhunter" through "Cutthroat"), you've read all that's *worth* reading. You can stop now and pick up something else, something different, original, and not continue to encourage sloppy, condescending, franchise gunk.

Slade, if you come up with something OFF of the "Special X" gravy train you've been riding a little *too* long, I'll be delighted to check it out. Otherwise: you've sold me your last book.

The audio book is a great addition to my listening collection. It serves as a good overview for anyone new to Scrum. While the audio quality was not perfect, the speaker was easy to understand and provided excellent information. I recommend this to anyone who cannot attend a seminar in person.

It was great hearing a seminar on Scrum. But It has its lacks, it is a recorded seminar and the audice ask Quastions you cannot hear, only the answer. The is anoying and frustrating in this audio. But the speak is quite competent and intertaining

Reviewed by Regan Windsor for Reader Views (9/06)

Scrum is a term taken from the sport of rugby which refers to the process used to get the ball back in play. Taken from a project management perspective it is used to continuously get projects back on track. Part of the Agile philosophy of placing a high importance on the human side of the project, it focuses on working with the customer to follow a process of developing iterations, going over the project with the customer, determining any changes, and continuing with the next iteration.

"Agile Project Management Using Scrum" is a live taping of a presentation of the same name given by Kevin Aguanno, a specialist in managing complex consulting, integration, and software development projects. While the Scrum has its roots in IT software development projects, its methodology is applicable to a wide range of projects both within and outside the scope of IT.

The constant focus on receiving validation throughout the project reduces the risk of falling outside the scope, budget, or time constraints of the project. It also ensures that project retains validity and usefulness to the customer -- providing what they need as opposed to what they ask for. This is accomplished by ensuring the project team has a strong understanding of what the client is using the software for, what is behind the changes they request, and where the strongest risk in the project lies, whether it be the scope, the dollars, or the time.

Scrum cannot be applied to all projects. Its focus is on projects that have aspects of "good enough" as opposed to high risk or critical projects. The methodology, however, still has value and can be applied to pieces of many project.

"Agile Project Management Using Scrum" delivers a concise summary of the Agile philosophy and the methodology surrounding Scrum. Useful as a tool to be utilized in the quick and successful completion of a broad spectrum of projects, you will also find in its methodology a management philosophy applicable beyond the project environment. A useful tool for all who manage!

I was expecting a little more on the subject of Agile. I didn't know enough about the subject to know that Scrum is apparently a special version / process of Agile.

RRR

I have been doing Project Management for about eight years. I had heard of Agile Development, but only had a loose idea of what it was. I had never heard of SCRUM. I found this CD to be a very informative experience. It is a recording of a speaking engagement by Kevin Aguanno, a Canadian certified PM and Agile/SCRUM expert.

While the sound quality could be better, as I listened to the approximately hour long presentation, I found myself worrying less about the sound quality and becoming more interested in the content. Mr. Aguanno gives a concise overview of Agile Development methods and SCRUM; what they are, when and how to use them, and illustrates his lecture with many on point examples from his own experience. He even explains where the name SCRUM is derived from!

This is NOT an in depth course. This is an overview, an introduction. If you want project plans and lengthy documentation, look elsewhere. If what you are looking for is an introduction to SCRUM, what it is and when to use it, you will be very, very satisfied with this audio CD!

This is all amateur common sense stuff. It is clearly a power point presentation and the speaker is not very experienced. Basically the whole thing can be summed up in one sentence:

"PMBOK Rules are Guidelines and you should still excercise common sense in their usage."

This taped seminar is far from the quality and value of other project management products on the market. The speaker can be insightful at times during the seminar but by in large he is simply regurgitating lessons learned by any PM with 2 years or more experience.

Reviewed by Bette Daoust, PhD for Reader Views (8/06)

At first glance of the title, you may wonder if you actually need to follow the rules for project management. In actuality, it is more like who should actually break the rules and when. The answer to this question is delicately dealt with in this audio CD. Paul Berman recommends not breaking any rules until you are an expert. An expert is one who knows all the ways not to do something. His analogy is to learn to color the picture within the lines first and really know how to do it well. Once you have mastered being within the lines, then discover what coloring outside the lines will do to the overall picture.

I really agree that there is no place for innovation in project management unless you are an expert with the basics. However, once the basics are mastered, being able to discover unique solutions is the key to being a successful project manager.

Do you want to break the rules in project management? If so, then listen closely to what Paul Bergman has to say on this CD.

This is a recording of a live seminar. Audio was pretty good, information was of value. If you are interested in this stuff or simply need to hear confirmation of what you've thought about project management then this is your audio book.

this book was a waste of money! The pictures looked like cartoons and the instructions were non existant! The only instructions were in the last few pages and they were very vague. Like, details may be added now. That doesn't help much. Needs details like feather patterns abd brush strokes for feathers. I might as well have thrown $10.00 out the window.

The book is inexpensive and provides basic images of several duck species. However, it provides painting instructions only for mallards. For example, the book lists the primary paint colors for the other species, but it doesn't offer any information as to which of these colors are to be mixed to obtain the colors depicted in the images. This was a problem when I needed to repaint by Woodie dekes.

If you're looking for a super-accurate detail-oriented definitive authority on duck plumage, you won't find it in "Painting Duck Decoys..." The 24 color plates within could've been done by any budding high school art student. If not crude, they are at best poor approximations, not terribly useful for anyone concerned with painting decoys realistically. Perhaps the proportions of the ducks depicted will be of use to some. But most serious artists will undoubtedly find much more accurate information in books featuring photographs rather than the amateurish paintings in "Painting Duck Decoys..."

I am excited to see this book being offered at Amazon.com I became familiar with Anthony Hillman's book when I began painting my own decoys and had trouble finding any refrence material at hobby shops, craft stores or sportsman shops but my wife called our local library and found this book and it has been a God send. People have been very impressed with my refurbished decoys! So were the ducks! Although I am finnished painting my decoys, I am going to buy a copy for my collection! It is a piece of art in it self, The illustrations are crisp, clear and precise. The instructions are freindly enough for a beginner! I want to thank the author, Anthony Hillman for sharing his knowlege in his book. I have looked at all the hunting catalogs and have found that with the help of Anthony's book, my decoys look more realistic and I have saved money that I would have forked out for at least 4 dozen new decoys.

I recently recieved this book for Christmas. As an aspiring comic and cartoon artist, I usually try to pick up as many books concerning the subject as I can; they are few and far between. I was excited at first, but upon reading through it, I was very disappointed. Not only did I not learn very little that was new for me from this book, it did not deal in depth with either the art or the more technical side of comic books (the writing, the layouts, the character development, and so on). It DID provide some minute details that I hadn't run into, such as average page numbers and page sizes, but that was about the extent of the book's usefulness. I believe, however, that this book was intended for a different audience; mainly, those people who are trying to draw comics for the first time. This book will more than likely give them a generalized overview of what the genre is that they are looking at. However, to the more experienced artist, who has been at the drawing board for a year or two and with a few other comic instruction books on his shelf, this book doesn't deliver.

If you are an aspiring comic book artist looking to take the next step - from merely sitting at your desk and sketching to making publishing-ready work, this book can help point out this little details that most overlook or fail to learn.

This book is an incredibly elitist rabid intellectual rant, highly opinionated and abstract that were it written by a student it would be judged to be incoherent.Do you know what diegesis means?...becuase i couldn't find it even in a good dictionary.and that's just the tip of the iceberg. As an attempt to communicate it is lousy except to about 10 people in the world who might describe it as a rattling good read...name dropping practically every sentence,showing off prodigious intellectual prowess at the expense of communication.Are you a lecturer? Do you want to ruin the lives of your students? Then tell them to read this.

The digital explosion is ushering in a frightening future built upon transnational structures of power and greed presided over by the high priests of technology and management. But it is not too late to fight for an alternative future shaped not by the corporate cyborg but by aesthetics, the "pursuit of an ethical mode of being ... despite the conditions in which we find ourselves" of "being digital".

Sean Cubitt spits in the face of the digerati (a species of Cyclops who rule in the land of the blind masses) who foresee an infinitely expanding seamless web of information into which all humankind and industry must disappear. Reader in Video and Media Studies at the Liverpool John Moraes University, Cubitt dives into the multi-disciplinary welter of knowledge architectures to distill hard truths from the technobabble of the technotopians. "The fastest and widest impact that computers have had is in deepening the class structures of contemporary society on a global scale ... the demolition, not just of jobs, of communities and of cultures, but of hope itself as a direct or indirect effect of the electronics communication that have enabled the entirely destructive expansion of finance capital," he writes.

Resistance to and subversion of the "matrix", the technetronic, computer-mediated space dreamed up by sci-fi writer William Gibson in which giant corporations call the shots, offered by hackers, crackers and phreaks is an infantile reaction to a global technology which "while offering the appearance of naturalness and emancipation from onerous chores, introduces new orders of supervision and surveillance", Cubitt points out.

His book, a critique of the hard-sell of the digital revolution, is a mine of information as Cubitt apprehends the linkages between technological developments and their consequences for human society.

The problem of the promised utopia is that communication is reduced to aggression, command, power and submission. The matrix, into which the corporations want everyone and everything jacked in, is coded for the re-engineering of the human soul. The synergistic corporation is the actually existing cyborg, "not an assemblage of people but a machine ensemble ...a massive processing machine whose employees and consumers are its biochips", he warns.

The attack on extant cultures is multi-pronged. At the level of language, English is the standard, "oppressor" language of the Net, eroding the core role of other languages and cultural contexts. "Corporate culture responds to micro-cultural resistance with target marketing." And the designers of the Macintosh and Windows WIMP (window-icon-menu-pointer) interface further saw that "images have a greater efficiency in imparting information than language does" in combination with the expansion of the global market.

Cubitt analyses the process and aesthetics of reading since the human-computer interface allows the infinite generation of texts capable of varied readings. The traditional private and public experience of reading is replaced by the playful, the fantasy. This suits the digerati who foist an illusion of heightened individualism ("the user is in control") and mass personalization on consumers of the digital myth.

Transvestitism and tourism are the features of the Net, much lauded but in truth symptomatic of the shifting, fragmentation and disintegration of the self, Cubitt notes. The new individualism is a projection of the corporate cyborg. Control remains in the hands of the elite who code the heart and confines of the technologies bequeathed to users who are integrated into command heirarchies.

The creation of libraries was followed by the development of systems of classification of information. The synthetic Colon Classification cataloguing system developed by S.R. Ranganathan in 1933 became the founding principle of mechanical systems of information retrieval, the grandparent of Internet search engines and similar knowledge architectures, "no longer dependent on humanist mnemonic culture". Memory fails, and so does meaning, when everything is reduced to an eternal now in real time.

The individual is in danger of losing all privacy with the creation of databases which render him as a "data image" or a "data self". The "real" self is reduced to "mere" writing in binary code, a ghost in the machine. Bizarre forms of desocialisation appear in cyber cultures, community is sacrificed for competition. "To restore the social requires dismantling the binary to build a concept of mediation between presence and absence ... the materiality of media, people and their objects", Cubitt suggests.

He pours cold water on the prophecies of cyber-theologians who deny mortality, the post-humanists and transhumanists who speak of erasing the body and de-materializing the complex human processes of socialization in their fantasies of "downloading the meat-mind into the matrix" and being "human as program or human in programs".

As Cubitt makes his radical analysis of the histories and contributions of poetry, philosophy, art, radio, cinema, video, space technologies, remote sensing and the Hubble telescope, he unveils the magical braid running through it all. "Between the data records and its interpreters there always lies the work of manipulation," he warns. It has to do with the degradation of all "material", including "nature, human-modified nature, human-produced nature and human nature itself" to consumable commodities.

The digitally controlled play-world promises coherence and universalisation, homogenization. It leads to hyper-individualization and dispersion in cyberspace and "the sociality of images and implicitly of shared experience" is lost.

Digital aesthetics, concerned with the question of the future and the whole field of possibilities, suggests that the utopian question cannot be resolved by moving inexorably towards a corporatised technotopia. It must emerge from the shadow of corporate culture, that consciousness industry whose objective is to create brand identity adhered to by synergistic personalities forged through the introduction of play into work, masquerades, role-plays, simulations and alter egos, Cubitt says.

Digital aesthetics must break "the grip of the networked society's culture of selves", refuse being retrofitted into the corporate cyborg and "reinvent the machineries, the processes and selves of human-machine communication", Cubitt states. Thus the foundations for an evolutionary future which is genuinely global and democratic and outside the administered boundaries of the synergistic corporation can be laid. Is humanity up to this challenge? (the end)