Off Track And Online

How horse racing's pioneering use of communication and information networks helped shape the modern media, information, and leisure environment. The horse racing industry has been a pioneer in interactive media, information networks, and their deployment. The race track and the off-track betting parlor offer interactive media environments that reconfigure the relationships among private and public space and presence and copresence. In this book, Holly Kruse explores how horse racing has used media over the last several decades, arguing that examining the history and context of horse racing and gambling gives us a clearer understanding of the development of data networks, media complexes, public entertainment, and media publics. Kruse describes an enormous industry that depends on global information and communication flows made possible by a network linking racetracks, homes, off-track betting, farms, and auction sites. Racetrack architecture now allows for the presence of screens, most showing races from other locations. Online betting sites enable bettors to wager from home. Off-track betting facilities collect wagers on races from all over the country. Odds are set interactively through the pari-mutuel market system. Kruse considers the uses of public space, and its redefinition by public screens; the effect of interactive media on the racing industry, including networked, in-home betting; the “technopanic” over online poker and the popularity of in-home pari-mutuel wagering; and the use of social media by racing fans to share information and creative work with no financial payoff.

Off Track Planet’s Travel Guide for the Young, Sexy, and Broke has become the essential guide for travelers in their twenties and thirties who are looking for an edgy reference book on the most interesting destinations around the world, including the craziest place to get a tattoo, where you should go to check out amazing street art, why you might want to try fried bugs, and the best places to party until dawn. This revised edition features up-to-date information and more than 20 percent brand-new material, including new sidebars, content, and photos. Broken into three parts, the first section focuses on what to do and where when it comes to food, fashion, music, art, sex and partying, and more. The second section dives into practical advice on budgeting, hostels and lodging, transportation, passports and visas, and health and safety. The last section offers ideas about extending your stay through work, volunteering, and studying abroad.

Natasha Roy, a Forensic data analyst with a firm that investigates financial crime, finds her perfect life crumbling to pieces when the love of her life, Neil, is brutally murdered right after an ugly separation. It is then that she discovers that Neils friend, Ranveer, an ex-army Intelligence Bureau officer who is embittered by a heinous act during a classified mission that left him physically unfit for a field job, is the investigator on the case, with a personal vendetta to incarcerate her. It is then that she decides to take matters in her own hand instead of watching her life fall apart like a mute spectator, by putting to use the particular set of skills that she had acquired while investigating the major financial institutions of the world. She launches a crusade that leads her to find out that the man she loved was not whom she thought he was and with every stone she turns, she finds a buried secret darker than the one before. Exploring their unconventional ways for finding answers, they cross paths and stumble upon the truth that neither of them could have ever imagined to be the reason behind the murder.

In the current educational environment, there has been a shift towards online learning as a replacement for the traditional in-person classroom experience. With this new environment comes new technologies, benefits, and challenges for providing courses to students through an entirely digital environment. With this shift comes the necessary research on how to utilize these online courses and how to develop effective online educational materials that fit student needs and encourage student learning, motivation, and success. The optimization of these online tools requires a deeper look into curriculum, instructional design, teaching techniques, and new models for student assessment and evaluation. Information on how to create valuable online course content, engaging lesson plans for the digital space, and meaningful student activities online are only a few of many current topics of interest for promoting student achievement through online learning. The Research Anthology on Developing Effective Online Learning Courses provides multiple perspectives on how to develop engaging and effective online learning courses in the wake of the rapid digitalization of education. This book includes topics focused on online learners, online course content, effective online instruction strategies, and instructional design for the online environment. This reference work is ideal for curriculum developers, instructional designers, IT consultants, deans, chairs, teachers, administrators, academicians, researchers, and students interested in the latest research on how to create online learning courses that promote student success.

National efforts have been made to encourage technology integration in teacher preparation with expectations for frequent and successful applications with K-12 learners. While online learning has become pervasive in many fields in education, it has been somewhat slow to catch on in K-12 settings. The Handbook of Research on Emerging Practices and Methods for K-12 Online and Blended Learning is a collection of innovative research on the applications of technology in online and blended learning environments in order to develop quality courses, explore how content is delivered across disciplines and settings, and support the formation of relationships and enrichment opportunities. While highlighting topics including learning initiatives, institutional policies, and program structures, this book is ideally designed for teachers, principals, early childhood development centers, university faculty, administrators, policymakers, researchers, and practitioners.

This companion brings together scholars working at the intersection of media and class, with a focus on how understandings of class are changing in contemporary global media contexts. From the memes of and about working-class supporters of billionaire "populists", to well-publicized and critiqued philanthropic efforts to bring communication technologies into developing country contexts, to the behind-the-scenes work of migrant tech workers, class is undergoing change both in and through media. Diverse and thoughtfully curated contributions unpack how media industries, digital technologies, everyday media practices—and media studies itself—feed into and comment upon broader, interdisciplinary discussions. They cover a wide range of topics, such as economic inequality, workplace stratification, the sharing economy, democracy and journalism, globalization, and mobility/migration. Outward-looking, intersectional, and highly contemporary, The Routledge Companion to Media and Class is a must-read for students and researchers interested in the intersections between media, class, sociology, technology, and a changing world.