“Takes us to a place of almost mythic power and tells a story that unfolds like a long ride on a killer wave . . . compellingly written.” —Sebastian Junger, New York Times–bestselling author Rising from the depths of the North Pacific lies a fabled island, now submerged just fifteen feet below the surface of the ocean. Rumors and warnings about Cortes Bank abound, but among big wave surfers, this legendary rock is famous for one simple (and massive) reason: this is the home of the biggest rideable wave on the face of the earth. In this dramatic work of narrative nonfiction, journalist Chris Dixon unlocks the secrets of Cortes Bank and pulls readers into the harrowing world of big wave surfing and high seas adventure above the most enigmatic and dangerous rock in the sea. The true story of this Everest of the sea will thrill anyone with an abiding curiosity of and respect for mother ocean. “A terrific, deeply researched tale about a truly wild place. You couldn’t make up Cortes Bank, or the characters who’ve tried to make it theirs.” —William Finnegan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life “A first-rate account of an amazing phenomenon and the people who tried to conquer and exploit it. A great read.” —Winston Groom, New York Times–bestselling author of Forrest Gump “After reading Chris’ most excellent account of the monstrous waves of the mysterious Cortes Bank—the Bermuda Triangle of the Pacific—I never thought I would ever consider riding a wave like this. But after surviving a five-foot, head-first fall from the stage earlier this year, I think I might be ready.” —Jimmy Buffett

Covering ideas and methods while concentrating on fundamentals, this book includes wave motion; digital imaging; digital filtering; visualization aspects of the seismic reflection method; sampling theory; the frequency spectrum; synthetic seismograms; wavelet processing; deconvolution; seismic attributes; phase rotation; and seismic attenuation.

The legendary Pluto had mysteriously fallen. The direct son of Pluto, Yan Ming, possessed the orthodox bloodline of Pluto, but was trapped in the Nine Hells Abyss by his younger brother. What they didn't know was that Xiao Zhu, who had the innate Netherworld Ghost Body, had the good fortune to obtain the Obsidian Stone, and Yan Ming, who was hiding in the Obsidian Stone, was her chosen one ...

From a brilliant Brookings Institution expert, an “important” (The Wall Street Journal) and “penetrating historical and political study” (Nature) of the critical role that oceans play in the daily struggle for global power, in the bestselling tradition of Robert Kaplan’s The Revenge of Geography. For centuries, oceans were the chessboard on which empires battled for supremacy. But in the nuclear age, air power and missile systems dominated our worries about security, and for the United States, the economy was largely driven by domestic production, with trucking and railways that crisscrossed the continent serving as the primary modes of commercial transit. All that has changed, as nine-tenths of global commerce and the bulk of energy trade is today linked to sea-based flows. A brightly painted forty-foot steel shipping container loaded in Asia with twenty tons of goods may arrive literally anywhere else in the world; how that really happens and who actually profits from it show that the struggle for power on the seas is a critical issue today. Now, in vivid, closely observed prose, Bruce Jones conducts us on a fascinating voyage through the great modern ports and naval bases—from the vast container ports of Hong Kong and Shanghai to the vital naval base of the American Seventh Fleet in Hawaii to the sophisticated security arrangements in the Port of New York. Along the way, the book illustrates how global commerce works, that we are amidst a global naval arms race, and why the oceans are so crucial to America’s standing going forward. As Jones reveals, the three great geopolitical struggles of our time—for military power, for economic dominance, and over our changing climate—are playing out atop, within, and below the world’s oceans. The essential question, he shows, is this: who will rule the waves and set the terms of the world to come?

Nothing frightens a parent more than feeling totally helpless when their child reports, “I’m scared. There’s a ghost in my room. I won’t sleep there.” Onerous questions come to mind, “Is my kid nuts? Am I nuts for believing them? How can I help with something invisible? How am I supposed to fight a phantom?” For the first time, Kids Who See Ghosts provides the answers to these questions, and offers adults guidance in tackling the subject with children. The highly intuitive child is empathic, psychic, or sensitive and can see ghosts. Parental responses to such events range from abject fear, to supporting their child, being unable to act, to visiting doctors and therapists. This guide bridges the gap from mainstream to the metaphysical, providing answers and guidance. It doesn’t matter whether parents believe in ghosts to know how to help children through frightening experiences. Goode challenges readers to open their minds for the journey through ghost tales and to learn empowerment strategies for their kids. Kids Who See Ghosts includes interviews with experts from diverse backgrounds, from Dr. Bruce Lipton to Lynn Andrews, from science to shamanism, to give a well rounded perspective on our perception of the afterlife, intuition, psychic abilities, and belief.

This novel, part romance, part science fiction, part thriller, is the story of a famous child prodigy in mathematics and music, Dianna Utterson, who, later as a PHD student in biophysics, develops a fool-proof, anti-mutagenic vaccine against AIDS. It's also a story of a jealous medical student's obsession to steal the genetic code and Fourier analysis developed by his lover, Dianna, needed by his future pharmaceutical corporation to manufacture her wonder AIDS drug. The book's most interesting sub-plot is the Jesuit-controlled, Pythagorean secrecy surrounding her cure and its conflict with traditional Vatican theology. With clear allusions to quantum physics, and molecular biology as developed by the American James Watson, and the British Scientists Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin, this novel is ideal for high school and college-age students, and those readers interested in the magic of bio-medical research in its quest to find cures for mankind's most elusive diseases. It's a lasting work that inspires readers to appreciate science through the uplifting experience of a disarming, beatific heroine, Dianna Utterson. --- Wayne Kappel, Ph.D, recipient of the Distinguished Teacher White House Commission on Presidential Scholars award, 1997

Radioactive Elements—Advances in Research and Application: 2013 Edition is a ScholarlyEditions™ book that delivers timely, authoritative, and comprehensive information about Radon. The editors have built Radioactive Elements—Advances in Research and Application: 2013 Edition on the vast information databases of ScholarlyNews.™ You can expect the information about Radon in this book to be deeper than what you can access anywhere else, as well as consistently reliable, authoritative, informed, and relevant. The content of Radioactive Elements—Advances in Research and Application: 2013 Edition has been produced by the world’s leading scientists, engineers, analysts, research institutions, and companies. All of the content is from peer-reviewed sources, and all of it is written, assembled, and edited by the editors at ScholarlyEditions™ and available exclusively from us. You now have a source you can cite with authority, confidence, and credibility. More information is available at http://www.ScholarlyEditions.com/.

Models of adaptation and neural plasticity are often demonstrated in robotic scenarios with heavily pre-processed and regulated information streams to provide learning algorithms with appropriate, well timed, and meaningful data to match the assumptions of learning rules. On the contrary, natural scenarios are often rich of raw, asynchronous, overlapping and uncertain inputs and outputs whose relationships and meaning are progressively acquired, disambiguated, and used for further learning. Therefore, recent research efforts focus on neural embodied systems that rely less on well timed and pre-processed inputs, but rather extract autonomously relationships and features in time and space. In particular, realistic and more complete models of plasticity must account for delayed rewards, noisy and ambiguous data, emerging and novel input features during online learning. Such approaches model the progressive acquisition of knowledge into neural systems through experience in environments that may be affected by ambiguities, uncertain signals, delays, or novel features.

This volume is devoted to the life and work of the applied mathematician Professor Erhard Meister (1930-2001). He was a member of the editorial boards of this book series Operator The ory: Advances and Applications as well as of the journal Integral Equations and Operator Theory, both published by Birkhauser (now part of Springer-Verlag). Moreover he played a decisive role in the foundation of these two series by helping to establish contacts between Birkhauser and the founder and present chief editor of this book series after his emigration from Moldavia in 1974. The volume is divided into two parts. Part A contains reminiscences about the life of E. Meister including a short biography and an exposition of his professional work. Part B displays the wide range of his scientific interests through eighteen original papers contributed by authors with close scientific and personal relations to E. Meister. We hope that a great part of the numerous features of his life and work can be re-discovered from this book.