John Keane offers an original account of the origins of violence, its consequences, its uses and remedies, and the relationship between violence and democracy. Rejecting the view that "human nature" is violent, Keane demonstrates why democracies do not wage war upon each other, and are unusually sensitive to violence. He emphasizes ethical questions, such as the circumstances in which violence can be justified, and argues that violence can and should be "democratized" and made publicly accountable.

We live in a revolutionary age of communicative abundance in which many media innovations - from satellite broadcasting to smart glasses and electronic books - spawn great fascination mixed with excitement. In the field of politics, hopeful talk of digital democracy, cybercitizens and e-government has been flourishing. This book admits the many thrilling ways that communicative abundance is fundamentally altering the contours of our lives and of our politics, often for the better. But it asks whether too little attention has been paid to the troubling counter-trends, the decadent media...

This general book on high-performance computing in finance is academically and pragmatically relevant as it is built around real-life challenges. The text covers the newest techniques such as automatic differentiation, dataflow, and large scale computation for Basel III, Solvency II, and stochastic programming. With illustrative success stories in the use of high-performance computing in the finance and insurance industries, the book imparts the wisdom of adopting this method of numbers crunching to achieve business goals.