Ghost Key


Book Description

When Tess Livingston got off the bus at a roadside stop high in the Andes, she couldn't quite remember how she got there. She was an FBI agent, and the last thing she remembered was tracing a group of counterfeiters to Ecuador. Then she found herself at the Bodega del Cielo, waiting for the bus to Esperanza, or at least that’s where her ticket says she’s going. Ian Ritter, a journalist from Minneapolis, is also at the Bodega. He was planning a trip to the Galapagos Islands, but his limited Spanish isn’t up to explaining why he needs to change to Bus 13 to Esperanza. Their meeting changed their lives forever. For the city of Esperanza is a place out of time, partly in the material world, and partly existing on another plane. There the spiritual world can manifest. The dead can come through … and they do. A few of the dead are Chasers, beings of light who have deferred their passage to a higher plane in order to help and protect the living. But many of the dead are brujos, angry ghosts who cannot let go, who desire only to possess the bodies of the living so they can reclaim their own physical existence in the world. Brujos kill those they possess, sooner or later. Tess and Ian, and their families, have made a good life together in Esperanza, and have no desire to ever leave it. But now something unusual, even for Esperanza, is happening. Parts of the city seem to be leaving them. *** TJ MacGregor creates imaginative worlds where neither beasts, ghosts, nor humans are as they seem to be, where anything and anyone can change in a flash, where love is still worth saving, and where the most courageous act of all is simply holding on to your humanity.” -- Nancy Pickard




Capacitive Sensors


Book Description

Capacitive sensors produce spectacular resolution of movement to one part in 10-10 meters and maintain exceptional long-term stability in hostile environments. They are increasingly used for a variety of jobs in consumer and industrial equipment, including wall stud sensors, keypads, lamp dimmers, micrometers, calipers, rotation encoders, and more. The most focused, authoritative book available in the field, Capacitive Sensors brings you complete information on the research, design, and production of capacitive sensors. This all-in-one source provides detailed, comprehensive coverage of key topics, including underlying theory, electrode configuration, and practical circuits. In addition, you'll find reviews of a number of tested systems never before published. Capacitive Sensors is a must-have for product designers and mechanical and electrical engineers interested in using this fast-developing technology to get top price and performance advantages.




On Transactional Concurrency Control


Book Description

This book contains a number of chapters on transactional database concurrency control. This volume's entire sequence of chapters can summarized as follows: A two-sentence summary of the volume's entire sequence of chapters is this: traditional locking techniques can be improved in multiple dimensions, notably in lock scopes (sizes), lock modes (increment, decrement, and more), lock durations (late acquisition, early release), and lock acquisition sequence (to avoid deadlocks). Even if some of these improvements can be transferred to optimistic concurrency control, notably a fine granularity of concurrency control with serializable transaction isolation including phantom protection, pessimistic concurrency control is categorically superior to optimistic concurrency control, i.e., independent of application, workload, deployment, hardware, and software implementation.




Colm and the Ghost's Revenge


Book Description

It's been over a year since the terrifying events at the Red House Hotel and everything is back to normal, but Colm is still uneasy. He suspects there's someone evil lurking in the darkness, someone who's planning a terrible revenge. When strange things begin to happen again, he's plunged back into a world of sarcastic detectives and frightening mercenaries, awkward romance and the supernatural. Dealing with street bullies and overprotective parents is nothing compared to this. And to make matters worse, if the master criminal known as The Ghost finds the two remaining Lazarus Keys he will become extremely powerful. More powerful than anyone who has ever lived. The only people who can unravel the mystery and stop The Ghost are Colm, his annoying cousin, The Brute, and a pretty American teenager. Time is running out and the clock is ticking. But how do you stop what you can't see?




Cryptology and Network Security


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Cryptology and Network Security, CANS 2014, held in Heraklion, Creete, Greece, in October 2014. The 25 revised full papers presented together with the abstracts of 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 86 submissions. The papers cover topics of interest such as encryption; cryptanalysis; malware analysis; and privacy and identification systems as well as various types of network protocol design and analysis work.




The Turn of the Key


Book Description

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “A superb suspense writer…Brava, Ruth Ware. I daresay even Henry James would be impressed.” —Maureen Corrigan, author of So We Read On “This appropriately twisty Turn of the Screw update finds the Woman in Cabin 10 author in her most menacing mode, unfurling a shocking saga of murder and deception.” —Entertainment Weekly From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Lying Game and The Death of Mrs. Westaway comes this thrilling novel that explores the dark side of technology. When she stumbles across the ad, she’s looking for something else completely. But it seems like too good an opportunity to miss—a live-in nannying post, with a staggeringly generous salary. And when Rowan Caine arrives at Heatherbrae House, she is smitten—by the luxurious “smart” home fitted out with all modern conveniences, by the beautiful Scottish Highlands, and by this picture-perfect family. What she doesn’t know is that she’s stepping into a nightmare—one that will end with a child dead and herself in prison awaiting trial for murder. Writing to her lawyer from prison, she struggles to explain the events that led to her incarceration. It wasn’t just the constant surveillance from the home’s cameras, or the malfunctioning technology that woke the household with booming music, or turned the lights off at the worst possible time. It wasn’t just the girls, who turned out to be a far cry from the immaculately behaved model children she met at her interview. It wasn’t even the way she was left alone for weeks at a time, with no adults around apart from the enigmatic handyman. It was everything. She knows she’s made mistakes. She admits that she lied to obtain the post, and that her behavior toward the children wasn’t always ideal. She’s not innocent, by any means. But, she maintains, she’s not guilty—at least not of murder—but somebody is. Full of spellbinding menace and told in Ruth Ware’s signature suspenseful style, The Turn of the Key is an unputdownable thriller from the Agatha Christie of our time.




The Christian Minstrel


Book Description




Dependable Computing for Critical Applications 4


Book Description

This volume contains the articles presented at the Fourth InternationallFIP Working Conference on Dependable Computing for Critical Applications held in San Diego, California, on January 4-6, 1994. In keeping with the previous three conferences held in August 1989 at Santa Barbara (USA), in February 1991 at Tucson (USA), and in September 1992 at Mondello (Italy), the conference was concerned with an important basic question: can we rely on computer systems for critical applications? This conference, like its predecessors, addressed various aspects of dependability, a broad term defined as the degree of trust that may justifiably be placed in a system's reliability, availability, safety, security and performance. Because of its broad scope, a main goal was to contribute to a unified understanding and integration of these concepts. The Program Committee selected 21 papers for presentation from a total of 95 submissions at a September meeting in Menlo Park, California. The resulting program represents a broad spectrum of interests, with papers from universities, corporations and government agencies in eight countries. The selection process was greatly facilitated by the diligent work of the program committee members, for which we are most grateful. As a Working Conference, the program was designed to promote the exchange of ideas by extensive discussions. All paper sessions ended with a 30 minute discussion period on the topics covered by the session. In addition, three panel sessions have been organizcd.







Transactional Information Systems


Book Description

This book describes the theory, algorithms, and practical implementation techniques behind transaction processing in information technology systems.