A four step plan to break your technology addictions and regain balance in your life. If you are bogged under by Facebook, Twitter, Blog, Gmail, Blackberry, iPad, laptop or X-box, if your heart flutters when you see a flashing red light, your phone beep and your e-mail ping, perhaps technology is increasingly taking over your life. With so much available to us, it is easy to surrender control to it. Our digital lifestyles are more of a weight on our shoulders than we know and many of us can no longer focus on a single task or face-to-face conversation without wanting to reach out or retreat to the virtual world every few minutes. It's time for a digital detox. This 28 day four step plan will get you started - rethink, reboot, reconnect and revitalise, learning to live with technology. 254pp in paperback.

Sub-titled 'A Cultural and Practical Guide for All Business Professionals', this new edition updates and expands valuable cultural and practical information and is necessary reading for all professionals working with or in the Middle East and North Africa. It covers the practical impact of Islam on business, significant changes in recent years, understanding Saudi Vision 2030 and other key initiatives in the region, issues of particular importance to all businesswomen, and for men who might be working with Arab and Muslim businesswomen. It covers business etiquette from handshakes and business cards to dress codes, political and social dos and don'ts, how to communicate effectively including remote and virtual communication, and the practicalities from the initial visit to establishing productive working relationships, including opening an office. Includes overview of geography, demographics, Sunnis and Shi'a law and order, passport and visa, taboos, gift giving and what to do in free time in Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Jerusalem, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, the Palestinian Territories, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, UAE and Yemen. 306pp, paperback, charts and graphs.

From the Baroque courts via the upstairs-downstairs layout of turn of the last century mansions, through the distributed application structures and digitally connected smart houses of today, the world beneath and above our visual horizon is teeming with the invisible hands and handles of service. In Krajewski's interpretation, the servers are the ones producing, steering, guiding, channelling, creating the conditions of possibility of knowledge. The book offers an examination of service as a cultural technique, and the server as its central media-technical figure at several intersecting configurations in history. We look at the domestic transitioning from the 18th century court to the 19th century bourgeois household; the little helper of scientific work and finally the electronic server as a prime mover of present-day information channels. We are introduced to forgotten or misremembered figures of subalternity - Lessing's Waitwell, Maxwell's Demon, dumbwaiters and Lazy Susans, library servants and Internet bots. All inhabit fictional, social and architectural levels of knowledge acquisition, storage, processing and distribution. The book offers a playful use of arcane sources blending literary texts, styles, discourses, theoretical models, pop cultural and historical references - Jonathan Swift, Jacques Tati and Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and the Xerox PARK Papers to The Smiths. Classic servants like the butler or the governess have largely vanished, where the Internet is filled with servers - Web, ftp, email and others perform their daily drudgery, going about their business noiselessly and unnoticed. Why then are current-day digital drudges called servers? A superb blend of media studies, cultural history and literature, the work recounts the gradual transition of agency from human to non-human actors. 441pp, illus.

Sub-titled 'Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans and the End of the Chinese Miracle' this is a penetrating examination of the country's opaque financial system and the complex factors of demographic shifts, urbanisation, industrialisation and over-reliance on debt-fuelled investments. This has brought the county to the brink of crisis. Anchored by stories of China's cities and its people, from factory workers and displaced farmers, to government officials and entrepreneurs, the narrative will take readers inside zombie companies, start-ups and regulatory institutions as McMahon explains how things got so bad, why fixing the problems is so hard, and what the economic outlook means for China and the rest of the world. China was once dominated by four state-owned banks. President Xi Jinping issued an urgent call for reform that gave the country until 2020 to transform its economy, yet the inner workings of its financial system are still very much a mystery to most outsiders. Until this book. Now more than ever, as the country's slowing economy is being felt around the globe, it is essential to understand how China allowed its economy to become so mired in debt. An informed analysis animated by anecdotes and characters, some colourful, some verging on tragic. A most engaging economy lesson. 256pp, large softback.

'Work less, create more: how to make your side hustle work for you' this is a Sunday Times bestseller. The world of work is changing, so how do you keep up? The Internet and smartphones give you the ability to make money on your own terms, when and where you want, but where do you start? If you have been itching to convert your craft into a career or your hobby into a start up, award winning blogger Emma Gannon teaches us that it doesn't matter if you are a part time PA with a blog, or a nurse who runs an online store in the evenings, whatever your ratio, your mixture, we can all channel our own entrepreneurial spirit to live more fulfilled and financially healthy lives. The book reflects on how we will all work more intelligently in the future and is written with humour and good sense for total newcomers to freelancing. 280pp. Paperback.

Machine learning dominates every aspect of our modern lives as algorithms decide the news we consume, whether we get a mortgage, and which friends wish us happy birthday. But as these systems make ever more decisions on our behalf, how do we ensure that they do what we want and act both safely and fairly? This conundrum is the subject of this urgent and vital book on a subject that is often talked about but little understood. Brian Christian masterly surveys the 'AI fairness' community, introducing us to some of its historical roots in science, philosophy and activism, and crucially many of its quandaries and limitations. From the AI programmes and robots that exploit dangerous loopholes in their own instructions, to facial recognition algorithms that ignore black people, Christian explains how, as machine learning develops, we rapidly approach a collision between artificial intelligence and our most sacred human values. He unpicks the latest studies and features numerous interviews with top researchers. A revealing and helpful guide to an urgent problem in tech on how we can improve our lives rather than complicate or even destroy them. 476pp in large softback.

Whitaker Wright has been dubbed the world's most shameless swindler. He was one of the great characters of the Victorian age - Methodist, minister, businessman, swindler and symbol of excess, whose life inspired some of H. G. Wells's finest books. Henry Macrory has found a glorious subject in telling the forgotten story of an extraordinary man, a roguish hustler with a genius for self-reinvention who was for a time the richest man in Britain. Beginning his career as an impoverished preacher, Wright crossed the Atlantic to prospect for gold, surviving a Native American massacre before he made his fortune. Then the bubble burst. Leaving behind a string of angry investors, he fled to England to start again and soon he was one of the world's richest men. At his 10,000 acre estate in Surrey he employed an entourage of 77 staff, moved a hill that blocked his view, and built an underwater glass smoking room. On his vast steam yacht, he entertained the Prince of Wales, the Kaiser, and half of Britain's aristocracy. His downfall was as dramatic as his ascent. On the last trading day of the 19th century his financial empire, which he had propped up by cooking the books, went belly up. This time, the trail of furious investors stretched all the way to the Prime Minister. With the police in hot pursuit, Wright fled to New York, but his escape was short-lived. At the end of what the press dubbed 'the most dramatic trial of modern times' he was sentenced to seven years in jail. Minutes later, he sprang a last dreadful surprise. 356pp.

Sub-titled 'Unique Typographic Design In Sketchbooks, In Print and On Location Around the Globe', learn what typography can say about a brand or product. The book showcases the work of major international designers in branding and advertising, packaging and products, environmental and self-initiated projects. It concludes with a workbook section featuring four real-world 'briefs' related to each category. Each designer gives an insight into what each project was like from start to finish. Ian Barnard had a calligraphy project in 2016 applying calligraphy to a range of different surfaces using a variety of paint markers, brushes and pens and he shares his idea of how he collected random objects from charity shops and jumble sales like a violin or an old motorcycle helmet, resprayed them in a contrasting colour so that the type will show up. The letterers explain the harmony between concept, content and intention and the different mediums, lettering and colours to find a combination that represents the concept intuitively as opposed to literally, communicating a message without relying too heavily on words. The different styles and colours are captured in this showcase whether for whisky or a handcrafted protein lollipop, a no entry sign or a shed design. A worldwide gallery of contributors. 160 very large pages in softback, colour throughout.

Sub-titled 'The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean', more than a business book, this is the primer for anyone fed up with the meanness of much of society and looking for inspiration to do better. Bodanis makes chilling parallels between our era and the 1930s and chapters on the lives of contemporaries: Goebbels and F. D. Roosevelt are gripping to read or the example of Captain Bligh from Mutiny of the Bounty who was a model of good captaincy with excellent relations with his volunteer crew until he snapped when the pressure got too high. Bodanis reveals how it was fairness, applied with skill, that led the Empire State Building to be constructed in barely a year, and how the same techniques brought a quiet English debutante to become an acclaimed jungle guerrilla fighter. The ten vivid profiles feature pilots, presidents, and even a producer of Game of Thrones - we see that you can succeed without being a bully and that simple fair decency can prevail. 321pp, illustrated paperback.

Professor Dudley Buck invented the Cryotron: a tiny super-conducting computer chip that promised ever-smaller computers. An NSA consultant, he had a hand in countless top-secret projects linked to the space race, missiles and super computers. His inventions cleared a path for some of the most consequential developments of the last half century. Brilliant and unassuming, Buck might have benefitted greatly from his efforts had he not died in mysterious circumstances at the age of 32 soon after a visit to his lab by high-profile USSR government scientists. Was this a coincidence? Drawing on recently released papers, the books suggests a far more sinister picture. The sub-title of this highly acclaimed non-fiction book is 'The Strange Death of a Pioneering Cold War Computer Scientist' and the book is an incredibly thorough and fully accessible deep dive into the Cold War battle for computer supremacy. It details the increasingly relevant and increasingly eerie relationship between geopolitics and technology and is an insider's look at the 1950s military-industrial complex and the ease and informality with which academia, the military, intelligence agencies and industry collaborated. 286pp, paperback with photos.