Residents in Boston, Massachusetts are automatically reporting potholes and road hazards via their smartphones. Progressive Insurance tracks real-time customer driving patterns and uses that information to offer rates truly commensurate with individual safety. Google accurately predicts local flu outbreaks based upon thousands of user search queries. Amazon provides remarkably insightful, relevant, and timely product recommendations to its hundreds of millions of customers. Quantcast lets companies target precise audiences and key demographics throughout the Web. NASA runs contests via gamification site TopCoder, awarding prizes to those with the most innovative and cost-effective solutions to its problems. Explorys offers penetrating and previously unknown insights into healthcare behavior. How do these organizations and municipalities do it? Technology is certainly a big part, but in each case the answer lies deeper than that. Individuals at these organizations have realized that they don't have to be Nate Silver to reap massive benefits from today's new and emerging types of data. And each of these organizations has embraced Big Data, allowing them to make astute and otherwise impossible observations, actions, and predictions. It's time to start thinking big. In Too Big to Ignore, recognized technology expert and award-winning author Phil Simon explores an unassailably important trend: Big Data, the massive amounts, new types, and multifaceted sources of information streaming at us faster than ever. Never before have we seen data with the volume, velocity, and variety of today. Big Data is no temporary blip of fad. In fact, it is only going to intensify in the coming years, and its ramifications for the future of business are impossible to overstate. Too Big to Ignore explains why Big Data is a big deal. Simon provides commonsense, jargon-free advice for people and organizations looking to understand and leverage Big Data. Rife with case studies, examples, analysis, and quotes from real-world Big Data practitioners, the book is required reading for chief executives, company owners, industry leaders, and business professionals.

The importance of fisheries is not lost in the global policy arena. What is often overlooked in the general discourse, however, is the significant difference between small-and large-scale fisheries. Major rethinking about all aspects of small-scale fisheries is required, including their contribution to catches, employment, livelihood, food security and conservation. This book is a collection of essays about the diverse, complex and dynamic contexts that characterize small-scale fisheries around the world. The essays highlight the strengths, capacity, motivation and contributions associated with this fishing sector. They remind us that solutions and opportunities for the viability and sustainability of small-scale fisheries can be found, once the issues are understood from a holistic perspective and possible options, including inventive governance arrangements, are fully explored. The authors are scientists and practitioners who work in small-scale fisheries in various parts of the world, many of whom participated at the first World Small-Scale Fisheries Congress (WSFC), held in Bangkok in October 2010, and are members of the global research network for the future of small-scale fisheries, Too Big To Ignore. The editor, Ratana Chuenpagdee, the initiator of the WSFC, is Canada Research Chair in Natural Resource Sustainability and Community Development at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. Book jacket.

Too Small to Ignore will encourage you to turn your good, loving intentions into strategic actions and empower you to help change the world–and the future–forever, one child at a time. The time has come for a major paradigm shift: Children are too important and too intensely loved by God to be left behind or left to chance. Children belong to all of us and we are compelled to intervene on their behalf. We must invest in children all across the world. In Too Small to Ignore, Dr. Stafford issues an urgent call for change. His adventures as a boy raised in a West African village provide an often-humorous and always-captivating backdrop to his profound and inspiring challenges. Wess lived the reality of “it takes a village to raise a child” and calls us to “be that loving village for children everywhere.”

Drawing on more than 30 case studies from around the world, this book offers a multitude of examples for improving the governance of small-scale fisheries. Contributors from some 36 countries argue that reform, transformation and innovation are vital to achieving sustainable small-scale fisheries - especially for mitigating the threats and vulnerabilities of global change. For this to happen, governing systems must be context-specific and the governability of small-scale fisheries properly assessed. The volume corresponds well with the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries adopted in 2014, spearheaded by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). These affirm the importance of small-scale fisheries for food security, nutrition, livelihoods, rural development and poverty reduction. The book arises from the project Too Big To Ignore: Global Partnership for Small-Scale Fisheries Research (TBTI). "A nuanced, diverse, vibrant and local-specific collection of essays – just as the small-scale fisheries around the world - dealt with by this versatile array of authors. Following on the heels of the recently adopted FAO Small-Scale Fisheries Guidelines, here is an erudite compendium which I heartily recommend to policy makers, academics and activists who wish to come to terms with the complex issue of governance of this important field of human activity." John Kurien - Founding Member of the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers (ICSF), and Former Professor, Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum, India "Likely to become a classic in its field, this book is about small-scale fisheries and interactive governance – governance which is negotiated, deliberated upon, and communicated among stakeholders who often share governing responsibilities. The authors show that interactive governance is not just a normative theory but a phenomenon that can be studied empirically, here with 34 case studies from as many countries around the world, north and south, east and west. Such "force of example" enables the editors to put together well-developed arguments and sometimes surprising conclusions about the way ahead. A must-read for managers, practitioners, stakeholders, and students!" Fikret Berkes - University of Manitoba, Canada, and author of Coasts for People

In June 2014, FAO member-states endorsed the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries (SSF Guidelines). These Guidelines are one of the most significant landmarks for small-scale fisheries around the world. They are comprehensive in terms of topics covered, and progressive, with their foundations based on human rights and other key principles. It can be anticipated that implementing the SSF Guidelines, whether at local, national, or regional levels, will be challenging. This book contains in-depth case studies where authors discuss the extent to which the Guidelines can help improve the realities of small-scale fishing men and women globally and make their livelihoods and communities more secure. This will require policy intervention and innovation, along with contributions of civil society organizations and academia. However, most of all it will necessitate the empowerment of fishing people so that they can become active participants in decision making on matters where their well-being and human rights are at stake. By endorsing the SSF Guidelines, states have committed themselves to support and facilitate this development. This book asks whether states can successfully “walk the talk,” and provides advice as to how they can do so. The collection of case studies sets the platform for an interactive dialogue space for researchers, policy makers, civil society and small-scale fishing communities to start the conversation about the monitoring and evaluation of the implementation of the SSF Guidelines at local, national, regional and global levels. An added value is that it helps add focus to our work as civil society activists involved in ensuring the application of the SSF Guidelines. Naseegh Jaffer – General Secretary, World Forum of Fisher People (WFFP) This collection offers many ways in which institutions enabling small-scale fisheries can protect and promote sustainability, food security, customary tenure, self-management, and market access, while fostering such benefits as ecosystem-based management, protected areas, incorporation of local knowledge, and poverty alleviation. You will want to put this book in the hands of policy-makers and practitioners immediately -- and for years to come. Evelyn Pinkerton – Professor, Simon Fraser University, Canada

In an unorthodox approach, Georgetown University professor Cal Newport debunks the long-held belief that "follow your passion" is good advice, and sets out on a quest to discover the reality of how people end up loving their careers. Not only are pre-existing passions rare and have little to do with how most people end up loving their work, but a focus on passion over skill can be dangerous, leading to anxiety and chronic job hopping. Spending time with organic farmers, venture capitalists, screenwriters, freelance computer programmers, and others who admitted to deriving great satisfaction from their work, Newport uncovers the strategies they used and the pitfalls they avoided in developing their compelling careers. Cal reveals that matching your job to a pre-existing passion does not matter. Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it. With a title taken from the comedian Steve Martin, who once said his advice for aspiring entertainers was to "be so good they can't ignore you," Cal Newport's clearly written manifesto is mandatory reading for anyone fretting about what to do with their life, or frustrated by their current job situation and eager to find a fresh new way to take control of their livelihood. He provides an evidence-based blueprint for creating work you love, and will change the way you think about careers, happiness, and the crafting of a remarkable life.

The importance of small-scale fisheries for sustainable livelihoods and communities, food security, and poverty eradication is indisputable. With the endorsement of the 'Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries', FAO member states recognize that governments, civil society organizations, and research communities all have a role to play in helping small-scale fisheries achieve these goals. This book argues that policies targeting small-scale fisheries need to be based on a solid and holistic knowledge foundation, and support the building of governance capacity at local, national, and global levels. The book provides rich illustrations from around the world of why such knowledge production needs to be transdisciplinary, drawing from multiple disciplinary perspectives and the knowledge that small-scale fisheries actors have, in order to identify problems and explore innovative solutions. Transdisciplinarity for Small-Scale Fisheries Governance: Analysis and Practice, edited by Ratana Chuenpagdee and Svein Jentoft, successfully demonstrates how small-scale fisheries are important and what social and political conditions are conducive to their wellbeing. The volume contributes tremendously to building capacity of fisheries communities and policy-makers to make the ideals of small-scale fisheries a reality. It establishes the ecological, social, and economic sense behind small-scale fisheries. A milestone reference for all those who believe in small-scale fisheries and are keen to defend them with quality evidence! -- Sebastian Mathew, Executive Director, International Collective in Support of Fishworkers (ICSF) The Small-Scale Fisheries Guidelines guiding principles call for holistic and integrated approaches for their implementation. This book will help a new generation of scientists, policy-makers, and small-scale fisheries actors make the fundamental connections between different disciplines in science, traditional knowledge, and policy to guide a collective process towards sustainable small-scale fisheries. The book contains an inspiring collection of practical cases from around the world, complemented by deep dives into dimensions of small-scale fisheries, like food security, stewardship, climate change, and gender, which all call for transdisciplinary approaches. -- Nicole Franz, Fisheries and Aquaculture Department, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Rome, Italy.--