Microsoft Office Access 2003 Inside Out or The Cult of the Amateur

Microsoft Office Access 2003 Inside Out

Author: John L Viescas

Hey, you know your way around Microsoft Access—so now dig into Access 2003 and really put your databases to work! This supremely organized reference packs all the information you need to master every major tool, task, and enhancement in Access 2003—without the fluff. Quickly advance your expertise constructing a database, importing and exporting data, building queries, linking data, using forms, creating reports and applications, publishing data on the Web, implementing security features, and other critical functions. You'll gain hundreds of timesaving solutions and troubleshooting tips in concise, fast-answer format. You also get the entire book on CD-ROM, along with the Access Productivity Kit, featuring author extras such as sample files; two complete database applications from inside the book; the Microsoft Computer Dictionary, Fifth Edition; and dozens of other resources, including several direct from the Office product group. With INSIDE OUT, you'll discover the best and fastest ways to perform everyday tasks—and challenge yourself to new levels of Access mastery!

Interesting textbook: Misunderestimated or In Churchills Shadow

The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today's user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values

Author: Andrew Keen

Amateur hour has arrived, and the audience is running the show

In a hard-hitting and provocative polemic, Silicon Valley insider and pundit Andrew Keen exposes the grave consequences of today’s new participatory Web 2.0 and reveals how it threatens our values, economy, and ultimately the very innovation and creativity that forms the fabric of American achievement.

Our most valued cultural institutions, Keen warns—our professional newspapers, magazines, music, and movies—are being overtaken by an avalanche of amateur, user-generated free content. Advertising revenue is being siphoned off by free classified ads on sites like Craigslist; television networks are under attack from free user-generated programming on YouTube and the like; file-sharing and digital piracy have devastated the multibillion-dollar music business and threaten to undermine our movie industry. Worse, Keen claims, our “cut-and-paste” online culture—in which intellectual property is freely swapped, downloaded, remashed, and aggregated—threatens over 200 years of copyright protection and intellectual property rights, robbing artists, authors, journalists, musicians, editors, and producers of the fruits of their creative labors.

In today’s self-broadcasting culture, where amateurism is celebrated and anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed, can publish a blog, post a video on YouTube, or change an entry on Wikipedia, the distinction between trained expert and uninformed amateur becomes dangerously blurred. When anonymous bloggers and videographers, unconstrained by professional standards or editorial filters, can alter the public debateand manipulate public opinion, truth becomes a commodity to be bought, sold, packaged, and reinvented.

The very anonymity that the Web 2.0 offers calls into question the reliability of the information we receive and creates an environment in which sexual predators and identity thieves can roam free. While no Luddite—Keen pioneered several Internet startups himself—he urges us to consider the consequences of blindly supporting a culture that endorses plagiarism and piracy and that fundamentally weakens traditional media and creative institutions.

Offering concrete solutions on how we can rein in the free-wheeling, narcissistic atmosphere that pervades the Web, THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR is a wake-up call to each and every one of us.

Table of Contents:

Foreword     ix
Introduction     1
The great seduction     11
The noble amateur     35
Truth and lies     64
The day the music died [side a]     97
The day the music died [side b]     114
Moral disorder     141
1984 (version 2.0)     164
Solutions     184
Web 2.0 and politics     206
Notes     215
Acknowledgments     223
Index     227