What is a Caticon? What if you had an (almost) unlimited budget and an unfettered desire to surround yourself with furniture, clothing, art, household objects, books and pretty much everything else in various semblances of cattitude? You would have Caticons. Welcome to my thirty-year odyssey probing the corners of the art world, catalogues, foreign shores, and cyberspace, all in search of the one Cat Thing I did not yet have. This book chronicles that journey, a catwalk of 4,000 years of Art Imitating Cats and the ways in which humans have expressed their love of and appreciation for all things feline.

An irresistible and colorful celebration of Japan’s thriving cat culture. In Japan, cats rule. And the country’s feline love affair is now a worldwide phenomenon. From cat cafés and Hello Kitty to the familiar sight of a maneki neko (“beckoning cat”) waving its paw from a shop window, cat lovers all over the world are more immersed in Japan’s cat culture than they may realize. With charming storytelling, Catland will introduce you to cats practicing to become monks, a designer who makes cat costumes inspired by the fashions of 18th-century France, and skilled craftsmen who build pieces of fine furniture precisely scaled down to suit feline customers. Packed with photographs, works of art, pop culture and folklore, Catland is the perfect gift for the cat lover in your life.

This book constitutes the post proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Security and Trust Management, STM 2022, co-located with the 27th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, ESORICS 2022, which took place in Copenhagen, Denmark, in September 2022. The 7 full papers together with 4 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 18 submissions. The workshop presents papers with topics such as security and trust access control, cryptographic protocols, identity management, security metrics, and privacy.

The book is a memoir drawn from the journals and observations of the author who documents a journey across the US to an unknown city in Northern California’s Bay Area. The narrative belongs to one who always expects the unexpected. The neighborhood is new and the author explores the streets and terrain on foot. As the characters emerge, the essence of the city reveals itself. A silver haired woman next door who feeds feral cats, a reclusive couple across the fence who nurture wildlife, curious occupants of a no-pet building, a paralysed man with an emotional support cat and a menagerie of wild and tame creatures in the author’s backyard. A feral cat enters the author’s home, giving birth to a kindle of kittens. Here begins a story of nurture which weaves itself into a lifetime’s commitment to animal love. The author, domesticating the young family, plunges headlong into a web of animal rights activists and rescuers. The rhythm of everyday life is colored by the antics of a family of cats. The cycle of life is sweet. Sometimes bittersweet. It defines for the reader the amity between humans and animals from a nearness and depth that is rare to find.