Captivate the hearts and minds of young adult readers! Writing for young adult (YA) and middle grade (MG) audiences isn't just "kid's stuff" anymore--it's kidlit! The YA and MG book markets are healthier and more robust than ever, and that means the competition is fiercer, too. In Writing Irresistible Kidlit, literary agent Mary Kole shares her expertise on writing novels for young adult and middle grade readers and teaches you how to: • Recognize the differences between middle grade and young adult audiences and how it impacts your writing. • Tailor your manuscript's tone, length, and content to your readership. • Avoid common mistakes and cliches that are prevalent in YA and MG fiction, in respect to characters, story ideas, plot structure and more. • Develop themes and ideas in your novel that will strike emotional chords. Mary Kole's candid commentary and insightful observations, as well as a collection of book excerpts and personal insights from bestselling authors and editors who specialize in the children's book market, are invaluable tools for your kidlit career. If you want the skills, techniques, and know-how you need to craft memorable stories for teens and tweens, Writing Irresistible Kidlit can give them to you.

This book provides documentation for a new version of the S system released in 1988. The new S enhances the features that have made S popular: interactive computing, flexible graphics, data management and a large collection of functions. The new S features make possible new applications and higher-level programming, including a single unified language, user defined functions as first-class objects, symbolic computations, more accurate numerical calculations and a new approach to graphics. S now provides direct interfaces to the poowerful tool of the UNIX operating system and to algorithms implemented in Fortran and C.

This SpringerBrief discusses the most recent research in the field of multimedia QoE evaluation, with a focus on how to evaluate subjective multimedia QoE problems from objective techniques. Specifically, this SpringerBrief starts from a comprehensive overview of multimedia QoE definition, its influencing factors, traditional modeling and prediction methods. Subsequently, the authors introduce the procedure of multimedia service data collection, preprocessing and feature extractions. Then, describe several proposed multimedia QoE modeling and prediction techniques in details. Finally, the authors illustrate how to implement and demonstrate multimedia QoE evaluation in the big data platform. This SpringerBrief provides readers with a clear picture on how to make full use of multimedia service data to realize multimedia QoE evaluation. With the exponential growth of the Internet technologies, multimedia services become immensely popular. Users can enjoy multimedia services from operators or content providers by TV, computers and mobile devices. User experience is important for network operators and multimedia content providers. Traditional QoS (quality of service) can not entirely and accurately describe user experience. It is natural to research the quality of multimedia service from the users’ perspective, defined as multimedia quality of experience (QoE). However, multimedia QoE evaluation is difficult, because user experience is abstract and subjective, hard to quantify and measure. Moreover, the explosion of multimedia service and emergence of big data, all call for a new and better understanding of multimedia QoE. This SpringerBrief targets advanced-level students, professors and researchers studying and working in the fields of multimedia communications and information processing. Professionals, industry managers, and government research employees working in these same fields will also benefit from this SpringerBrief.