New Releases by Sean Wang

Blacklisted from lucrative smuggling jobs for the mob, Roka and his crew reach a new low as they're reduced to hauling scrap. Their new job takes them through a particularly dangerous corridor of space, a lawless haven for marauders and rogues. But the real threat may be the lethal assassin posing as a passenger in their midst, who has a secret agenda of her own. The new story also introduces an entirely new group of mercenaries who have an unexpected connection to Roka's crew. Exiled captain Hiura and her all-female crew of the Iron Echo attempt to collect on a difficult bounty, but their path leads to Tet'Sali space, where an enemy fleet prepares for war. Collecting the super-sized, 200-page story in its entirety, Defects of Character continues the epic Runners saga with an expanding universe of new characters and factions. Special features include 10 pages of sketchbook concept designs.

A surface-mounted hot-film is a thin, flexible resistive sensor that can be used to measure the velocity, wall shear stress, or temperature in a flow. The flexible and compact nature of hot-films combined with their broad measurement capabilities make them versatile sensors for measuring flow on a variety of surfaces. This thesis is aimed at developing and characterizing a hot-film array for large-scale applications such as wind turbines and natural laminar flow airfoils. A fabrication method was created for for a large surface-mounted hot-film array, outlining the steps in the fabrication process and materials used. In addition to fabrication, an analysis of the hot-film response under static and dynamic conditions was also performed. Driving of the hot-film using both a constant current anemometer as well as a constant temperature anemometer was explored, which found that the constant current anemometer was too unreliable and inconsistent for assessment of the flow. An alternative measure of the hot-film output(s) was also explored in the integrated variance of the voltage output, which showed variation due to a change in the flow condition over the sensor. Fluorescent oil-film and particle image velocimetry were used to validate the variance output of the hot-film(s) under static conditions, and confirmed generally that a higher variance value, on the order 10^-4 V, indicated attached or unsteady flow, and lower variance values, 10^-6-10^-7 V, indicated separated or low velocity flow. Gusting inflow in dynamic testing was used to evaluate the hot-film performance under unsteady conditions, which seemed to generally corroborate the integrated variance values measured during static testing. However, uncertainties in the dynamic PIV results due to unsteady flow and limited image samples did not allow for definitive conclusions to be drawn for the hot-films under unsteady conditions.

SACMAT'16: The 21st ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies (SACMAT) Jun 05, 2016-Jun 08, 2016 Shanghai, China. You can view more information about this proceeding and all of ACM�s other published conference proceedings from the ACM Digital Library: http://www.acm.org/dl.

Abstract: Data deduplication is introduced as a popular technique used to increase storage efficiency used in various data centers and corporate backup environments. There are various caching techniques and metadata checking available to prevent excessive file scanning. Due to the nature of content addressable chunking algorithm being a serial operation, the data deduplication chunking process often times become the performance bottleneck. This project introduces a parallelized Rabin fingerprint algorithm suitable for GPU hardware architecture that aims to optimize the performance of the deduplication process.

Calendar units, such as months and days, clock units, such as hours and seconds, and specialized units, such as business days and academic years, play a major role in a wide range of information system applications. System support for reasoning about these units, called granularities in this book, is important for the efficient design, use, and implementation of such applications. The book deals with several aspects of temporal information and provides a unifying model for granularities. It is intended for computer scientists and engineers who are interested in the formal models and technical development of specific issues. Practitioners can learn about critical aspects that must be taken into account when designing and implementing databases supporting temporal information. Lecturers may find this book useful for an advanced course on databases. Moreover, any graduate student working on time representation and reasoning, either in data or knowledge bases, should definitely read it.

Collects all the story's sketches and concept designs, including characters, creatures, weapons, and costumes, with creator commentary on every page.

Intrusion Detection In Distributed Systems: An Abstraction-Based Approach presents research contributions in three areas with respect to intrusion detection in distributed systems. The first contribution is an abstraction-based approach to addressing heterogeneity and autonomy of distributed environments. The second contribution is a formal framework for modeling requests among cooperative IDSs and its application to Common Intrusion Detection Framework (CIDF). The third contribution is a novel approach to coordinating different IDSs for distributed event correlation.

This paper attempts to document the effects of accounting flexibility on managers' propensity to cut Ramp;D expenditures. Using Barton and Simko's (2002) NOA/Sales variable as a proxy for accounting flexibility, we find that managers are more (less) likely to cut Ramp;D when accounting flexibility is low (high), and that managers prefer the use of accrual to real earnings management given ample accounting flexibility. Our results are consistent with theoretical papers that posit substitution effects between accounting and real earnings management choices, with managers being more likely to cut Ramp;D when the marginal costs of accounting manipulations are low relative to real earnings manipulations.

Intergalactic smuggling isn't easy when you're hounded by pirates, bounty hunters, police and the occasional conscience. Runners, Book 1: Bad Goods collects the first five issues of the critically-acclaimed sci-fi adventure comic book. The volume chronicles the misadventures of reluctant smuggler Roka Nostaco and his ragtag alien crew as they try to complete a particularly dangerous run while beset on all sides by obstacles and adversaries.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Web-Age Information Management, WAIM 2001, held in Xi'an, China, in July 2001. The 21 revised full papers and 12 short papers presented together with 4 research experience papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. The papers are organized in topical sections on multimedia databases and high-dimensional indexing, information retrieval and text indexing, data mining, semistructured data management, data warehousing and federated databases, Web information management and e-commerce, spatio-temporal and high-dimensional information management, data mining and constraint management, data integration and filtering, and workflow and adaptive systems.

Abstract: "In a federated database environment, different constituents of the federation may use different temporal models or physical representations for the temporal information. This paper introduces a new concept, called a temporal module, to resolve these mismatches among the constituents. Intuitively, a temporal module hides the implementation details of a temporal relation by exposing its information only through two windowing functions: a function associating each time point to a set of tuples and a function linking each tuple with a set of time points. A calculus-style language is given to form queries on temporal modules.