Will she stop a wedding scandal or create one? It’s a huge society wedding—a whole weekend’s worth—but the groom’s dogged by doubts. The bride’s pushy mother commands her harried assistant, Anne, to keep him in line, unaware that she’s his ex-girlfriend. As for Anne, feelings she believed dead are stirring to life. Does Eric share them? And if he does, how much of a wedding catastrophe are they going to wreak? Romantic Times magazine gave Assignment: Groom! a four-star review. Reviewer Debbie Richardson said, “Jacqueline Diamond delivers a wonderful romance of reconciliation and combines it with a quirky cast of characters.” Don’t miss this hilarious romantic comedy by the USA Today bestselling author of The Bride Wore Gym Shoes and The Would-Be Mommy.

The advent of fiber optic transmission systems and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) have led to a dramatic increase in the usable bandwidth of single fiber systems. This book provides detailed coverage of survivability (dealing with the risk of losing large volumes of traffic data due to a failure of a node or a single fiber span) and traffic grooming (managing the increased complexity of smaller user requests over high capacity data pipes), both of which are key issues in modern optical networks. A framework is developed to deal with these problems in wide-area networks, where the topology used to service various high-bandwidth (but still small in relation to the capacity of the fiber) systems evolves toward making use of a general mesh. Effective solutions, exploiting complex optimization techniques, and heuristic methods are presented to keep network problems tractable. Newer networking technologies and efficient design methodologies are also described.

Optical networks based on wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) tech nology offer the promise to satisfy the bandwidth requirements of the Inter net infrastructure, and provide a scalable solution to support the bandwidth needs of future applications in the local and wide areas. In a waveleng- routed network, an optical channel, referred to as a lightpath, is set up between two network nodes for communication. Using WDM technology, an optical fiber link can support multiple non-overlapping wavelength channels, each of which can be operated at the data rate of 10 Gbps or 40 Gbps today. On the other hand, only a fraction of customers are expected to have a need for such a high bandwidth. Due to the large cost of the optical backbone infrastruc ture and enormous WDM channel capacity, connection requests with diverse low-speed bandwidth requirements need to be efficiently groomed onto hi- capacity wavelength channels. This book investigates the optimized design, provisioning, and performance analysis of traffic-groomable WDM networks, and proposes and evaluates new WDM network architectures. Organization of the Book Significant amount of research effort has been devoted to traffic grooming in SONET/WDM ring networks since the current telecom networks are mainly deployed in the form of ring topologies or interconnected rings. As the long-haul backbone networks are evolving to irregular mesh topologies, traffic grooming in optical WDM mesh networks becomes an extremely important and practical research topic for both industry and academia.

This book presents the practical motivation, theoretical description, and extant techniques for traffic grooming in optical networks. The description of the various topics of research will be authored by leading researchers in this area, and will contain comprehensive description of related literature for each area. This book is intended to be a definitive reference and text for traffic grooming both for the practitioner in industry and the student in academia.

This book provides an in-depth overview of the current research on sexual grooming. It explores the process by which an individual seeking to commit a sexual offense skillfully manipulates a potential victim into situations in which abuse can be more readily committed, while simultaneously preventing disclosure and detection. This volume addresses this understudied phenomenon and comprehensively examines what is currently known about the construct. It provides a thorough introduction to the sexual grooming literature, focusing on the history of the term and how sexual grooming strategies have become more publicly recognized through high-profile cases, as well as those in child-serving organizations (e.g., Catholic Church, Boy Scouts of America). The book reviews the various proposed models of sexual grooming – including the Sexual Grooming Model (SGM) – that detail the overarching steps or stages involved in the process. It discusses attempts to define the construct of sexual grooming and addresses potential consequences of sexual grooming, emphasizing how victims, families, and communities at large may be affected. Key areas of coverage include: Unique contexts and facets in which sexual grooming behavior has been observed, including online grooming, personal/self-grooming, familial grooming, institutional grooming, and grooming behaviors of females. The ways in which sexual grooming strategies may be manifested in sex trafficking cases and in adult sexual abuse. Assessment and treatment of sexual grooming, as well as prevention strategies. The implementation of grooming research to inform law enforcement efforts and court decision-making. The creation and adoption of legislation and policies designed to prevent sexual grooming. Child Sexual Grooming is an essential resource for researchers, professors, graduate students, clinicians, mental health therapists, legal professionals, policy makers, law enforcement, and related professionals in developmental psychology, child and adolescent psychology, social work, public health, criminology/criminal justice, forensic psychology, and behavioral therapy and rehabilitation.