Results by title

Charts the social and cultural life of private insurance in postwar America, showing how insurance institutions and actuarial practices played crucial roles in bringing social, political, and economic neoliberalism into everyday life.

Actuarial thinking is everywhere in contemporary America, an often unnoticed byproduct of the postwar insurance industry’s political and economic influence. Calculations of risk permeate our institutions, influencing how we understand and manage crime, education, medicine, finance, and other social issues. Caley Horan’s remarkable book charts the social and economic power of private insurers since 1945, arguing that these institutions’ actuarial practices played a crucial and unexplored role in insinuating the social, political, and economic frameworks of neoliberalism into everyday life.

Analyzing insurance marketing, consumption, investment, and regulation, Horan asserts that postwar America’s obsession with safety and security fueled the exponential expansion of the insurance industry and the growing importance of risk management in other fields. Horan shows that the rise and dissemination of neoliberal values did not happen on its own: they were the result of a project to unsocialize risk, shrinking the state’s commitment to providing support, and heaping burdens upon the people often least capable of bearing them. Insurance Era is a sharply researched and fiercely written account of how and why private insurance and its actuarial market logic came to be so deeply lodged in American visions of social welfare.

In Insurgent Aesthetics Ronak K. Kapadia theorizes the world-making power of contemporary art responses to US militarism in the Greater Middle East. He traces how new forms of remote killing, torture, confinement, and surveillance have created a distinctive post-9/11 infrastructure of racialized state violence. Linking these new forms of violence to the history of American imperialism and conquest, Kapadia shows how Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic multimedia artists force a reckoning with the US war on terror's violent destruction and its impacts on immigrant and refugee communities. Drawing on an eclectic range of visual, installation, and performance works, Kapadia reveals queer feminist decolonial critiques of the US security state that visualize subjugated histories of US militarism and make palpable what he terms “the sensorial life of empire.” In this way, these artists forge new aesthetic and social alliances that sustain critical opposition to the global war machine and create alternative ways of knowing and feeling beyond the forever war.

Cutting edge technological advances in information and communication technologies (ICT), such as AI, blockchain, big data, IoT, sensing, edge computing, quantum computing, and distributed multimedia systems, have eased the process of transferring multimodal data and multimedia information over wide networks. AI techniques are already fruitful in protecting multimedia data such as deep learning for multimodal data or multimodal fusion. But the processing of huge sets of multimedia big data (including data from social media) requires reliable communication platforms since the rise of cyber threats have also been growing exponentially.

Multimedia technologies have opened up a wide range of applications by combining a variety of information sources such as voice, graphics, animation, images, audio, and full-motion video which can be successfully implemented in banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) industries to support their activities and strategic goals.

Many organisations are transforming their businesses through the development of information and communications technologies. The security of this e-commerce is now a key enabler for businesses, and this book presents an overview of current and future infrastructures for e-business security.

Smart City and sensing platforms are considered some of the most significant topics in the Internet of Things (IoT). Sensors are at the heart of the IoT, and their development is a key issue if such concepts are to achieve their full potential.