Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Who ponders the sock? This common object is something people tug on and take off daily with hardly a thought. Unraveling the garment's history, construction, and use, Kim Adrian's Sock reintroduces us to our own bodies- vulnerable, bipedal, and flawed.Sock reminds us that extraordinary secrets live in mundane material realities, and shows how this flop...

Clear-sighted, darkly comic, and tender, The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet is about a daughter’s struggle to face the Medusa of generational trauma without turning to stone. Growing up in the New Jersey suburbs of the 1970s and 1980s in a family warped by mental illness, addiction, and violence, Kim Adrian spent her childhood ducking for cover from an alcoholic father prone to terrifying acts of rage and trudging through a fog of confusion with her mother, a suicidal inces...

Within the recent explosion of creative nonfiction, a new type of form is quietly emerging, what Brenda Miller calls “hermit crab essays.” The Shell Game is an anthology of these intriguing essays that borrow their structures from ordinary, everyday sources: a recipe, a crossword puzzle, a Craig’s List ad. Like their zoological namesake, these essays do not simply wear their borrowed “shells” but inhabit them so perfectly that the borrowed structures are wholly in...

For centuries, Asian immigrants have been making vital contributions to the cultures of North and South America. Yet in many of these countries, Asians are commonly viewed as undifferentiated racial “others,” lumped together as chinos regardless of whether they have Chinese ancestry. How might this struggle for recognition in their adopted homelands affect the ways that Asians in the Americas imagine community and cultural identity?The essays in Imagining Asia in the A...

This book is a comprehensive guide to the application of recently introduced and emerging technologies in minimally invasive spine surgery (MISS). These technologies, including 2D and 3D navigation, endoscopy, virtual and augmented reality, robotics, and 3D printing, are helping to overcome previous limitations of MISS, such as the steep learning curve and the need for a great deal of experience in order to achieve optimal outcomes. Compared with traditional techniques, their use is design...

Essays that explore the growing field of conflict archaeologyWithin the last twenty years, the archaeology of conflict has emerged as a valuable subdiscipline within anthropology, contributing greatly to our knowledge and understanding of human conflict on a global scale. Although archaeologists have clearly demonstrated their utility in the study of large-scale battles and sites of conventional warfare, such as camps and forts, conflicts involving asymmet...

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Information Security Applications, WISA 2013, held on Jeju Island, Korea, in August 2013. The 15 revised full papers and 2 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 39 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections such as cryptography, social network security, mobile security, network security, future applications and privacy.

Stream processing is a novel distributed computing paradigm that supports the gathering, processing and analysis of high-volume, heterogeneous, continuous data streams, to extract insights and actionable results in real time. This comprehensive, hands-on guide combining the fundamental building blocks and emerging research in stream processing is ideal for application designers, system builders, analytic developers, as well as students and researchers in the field. This book introduces the...

This book describes the key concepts, principles and implementation options for creating high-assurance cloud computing solutions. The guide starts with a broad technical overview and basic introduction to cloud computing, looking at the overall architecture of the cloud, client systems, the modern Internet and cloud computing data centers. It then delves into the core challenges of showing how reliability and fault-tolerance can be abstracted, how the resulting questions can be solved, an...

Our world is being revolutionized by data-driven methods: access to large amounts of data has generated new insights and opened exciting new opportunities in commerce, science, and computing applications. Processing the enormous quantities of data necessary for these advances requires large clusters, making distributed computing paradigms more crucial than ever. MapReduce is a programming model for expressing distributed computations on massive datasets and an execution framework for large...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment, DIMVA 2016, held in San Sebastián, Spain, in July 2016.The 19 revised full papers and 2 extended abstracts presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 66 submissions. They present the state of the art in intrusion detection, malware analysis, and vulnerability assessment, dealing with novel ideas, techniques, and applicati...

The world is awash with digital data from social networks, blogs, business, science and engineering. Data-intensive computing facilitates understanding of complex problems that must process massive amounts of data. Through the development of new classes of software, algorithms and hardware, data-intensive applications can provide timely and meaningful analytical results in response to exponentially growing data complexity and associated analysis requirements. This emerging area brings many...