Plots, Designs, and Schemes is the first study that investigates the long history of American conspiracy theories from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. Since research in these fields has so far almost exclusively focused on the contemporary period, the book concentrates on the time before 1960. Four detailed case studies offer close readings of the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692, fears of Catholic invasion during the 1830s to 1850s, antebellum conspiracy theories about slavery, and anxieties about Communist subversion during the 1950s. The study primarily engages with factual texts, such as sermons, pamphlets, political speeches, and confessional narratives, but it also analyzes how fears of conspiracy were dramatized and negotiated in fictional texts, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown (1835) or Hermann Melville's Benito Cereno (1855). The book offers three central insights: 1. The American predilection for conspiracy theorizing can be traced back to the co-presence and persistence of a specific epistemological paradigm that relates all effects to intentional human action, the ideology of republicanism, and the Puritan heritage. 2. Until far into the twentieth century, conspiracy theories were considered a perfectly legitimate form of knowledge. As such, they shaped how many Americans, elites as well as “common” people, understood and reacted to historical events. The Revolutionary War and the Civil War would not have occurred without widespread conspiracy theories. 3. Although most extant research claims the opposite, conspiracy theories have never been as marginal and unimportant as in the past decades. Their disqualification as stigmatized knowledge only occurred around 1960, and coincided with a shift from theories that detect conspiracies directed against the government to conspiracies by the government.

This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the design of blocked and split-plot experiments. The optimal design approach advocated in the book will help applied statisticians from industry, medicine, agriculture, chemistry and many other fields of study in setting up tailor-made experiments. The book also contains a theoretical background, a thorough review of the recent work in the area of blocked and split-plot experiments, and a number of interesting theoretical results.

‘Subdivision’ is a way of representing smooth shapes in a computer. A curve or surface (both of which contain an in?nite number of points) is described in terms of two objects. One object is a sequence of vertices, which we visualise as a polygon, for curves, or a network of vertices, which we visualise by drawing the edges or faces of the network, for surfaces. The other object is a set of rules for making denser sequences or networks. When applied repeatedly, the denser and denser sequences are claimed to converge to a limit, which is the curve or surface that we want to represent. This book focusses on curves, because the theory for that is complete enough that a book claiming that our understanding is complete is exactly what is needed to stimulate research proving that claim wrong. Also because there are already a number of good books on subdivision surfaces. The way in which the limit curve relates to the polygon, and a lot of interesting properties of the limit curve, depend on the set of rules, and this book is about how one can deduce those properties from the set of rules, and how one can then use that understanding to construct rules which give the properties that one wants.

This book describes the research of the authors over more than a decade on an end-to-end methodology for the design and development of Web Information Systems (WIS). It covers syntactics, semantics and pragmatics of WIS, introduces sophisticated concepts for conceptual modelling, provides integrated foundations for all these concepts and integrates them into the co-design method for systematic WIS development. WIS, i.e. data-intensive information systems that are realized in a way that arbitrary users can access them via web browsers, constitute a prominent class of information systems, for which acceptance by its a priori unknown users in varying contexts with respect to the presented content, the ease of functionality provided and the attraction of the layout adds novel challenges for modelling, design and development. This book is structured into four parts. Part I, Web Information Systems – General Aspects, gives a general introduction to WIS describing the challenges for their development, and provides a characterization by six decisive aspects: intention, usage, content, functionality, context and presentation. Part II, High-Level WIS Design – Strategic Analysis and Usage Modelling with Storyboarding, introduces methods for high-level design of WIS covering strategic aspects and the storyboarding method, which is discussed from syntactic, semantic and pragmatic perspectives. Part III, Conceptual WIS Design – Rigorous Modelling of Web Information Systems and their Layout with Web Interaction Types and Screenography, continues with conceptual design of WIS including layout and playout. This introduces the decisive web interaction types, the screenography method and adaptation aspects. The final Part IV, Rationale of the Co-Design Methodology and Systematic Development of Web Information Systems, describes the co-design method for WIS development and its application for the systematic engineering of systems. The book addresses the research community, and at the same time can be used for education of graduate students and as methodological support for professional WIS developers. For the WIS research community it provides methods for WIS modelling on all levels of abstraction including theoretical foundations and inference mechanisms as well as a sophisticated end-to-end methodology for systematic WIS engineering from requirements elicitation over conceptual modelling to aspects of implementation, layout and playout. For students and professional developers the book can be used as a whole for educational courses on WIS design and development, as well as for more specific courses on conceptual modelling of WIS, WIS foundations and reasoning, co-design and WIS engineering or WIS layout and playout development.

A Great Novelist, A Learned And Wise Critic, And A Charming Short-Story Writer Can These Three Reside In A Single Person? Yes, But, Of Course, In A Very Few, And E.M. Forster Is Certainly One Of Those Very Few, And That He Is Par Excellence. Any Knowledge Of Modern English Novel Without Even An Acquaintance With Forster Is Absurdly Incomplete. All Of Forster S Six Novels, Perhaps Barring Only Maurice, Have Been And Are Being Printed And Re-Printed In Hundreds Of Thousands Of Copies, And All The Six But Perhaps The Longest Journey Have Been Filmed By Worthy Directors, Such As Lean And Merchant, And The Films Have Received And Are Receiving High And Spontaneous Acclamations. As Said, Forster Is Also An Outstanding Critic And Will Go A Long Way Down The History Of Criticism As Much As He Will Be Remembered As A Highly Fantastic But Excellent Short-Story Writer For A Long Time To Come As He Is Today.This Compendium-Like Book, Split Into Three Volumes, Contains Discussions On All The Six Novels Of Forster Where Angles Fear To Tread, The Longest Journey, A Room With A View, Howards End, Maurice And A Passage To India. Besides, The Study Includes His Twelve Prime Short Stories, And His Critical Acumen And Theories. It Does Not Harbour No, It Carefully Avoids Any Pretension Or Pedantry, But It Comprises Almost All The Matters Relevant To Forsteriana, Plainly But Rather Expatiatingly Treated, So That It Is Expected To Help, Yeoman-Like, Certainly Not The Avant-Garde But The Sophomores. An In-Depth Study Of Forster As A Novelist And As A Critic Provided Herein Adds To The Value Of The Book. Furthermore, Quotations Included In The Appendix, Bibliography And Index Would Serve As Useful Study-Aids For The Readers.