StarGuides Plus represents the most comprehensive and accurately validated collection of practical data on organizations involved in astronomy, related space sciences and other related fields. This invaluable reference source (and its companion volume, StarBriefs Plus) should be on the reference shelf of every library, organization or individual with any interest in these areas. The coverage includes relevant universities, scientific committees, institutions, associations, societies, agencies, companies, bibliographic services, data centers, museums, dealers, distributors, funding organizations, journals, manufacturers, meteorological services, national norms & standard institutes, parent associations & societies, publishers, software producers & distributors, and so on. Besides astronomy and associated space sciences, related fields such as aeronautics, aeronomy, astronautics, atmospheric sciences, chemistry, communications, computer sciences, data processing, education, electronics, engineering, energetics, environment, geodesy, geophysics, information handling, management, mathematics, meteorology, optics, physics, remote sensing, and so on, are also covered where appropriate. After some thirty years in continuous compilation, verification and updating, StarGuides Plus currently gathers together some 6,000 entries from 100 countries. The information is presented in a clear, uncluttered manner for direct and easy use.

A classic work in the field of practical and professional ethics, this collection of nine essays by English philosopher and educator Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) was first published in 1898 and forms a vital complement to Sidgwick's major treatise on moral theory, The Methods of Ethics. Reissued here as Volume One in a new series sponsored by the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, the book is composed chiefly of addresses to members of two ethical societies that Sidgwick helped to found in Cambridge and London in the 1880s. Clear, taut, and lively, these essays demonstrate the compassion and calm reasonableness that Sidgwick brought to all his writings. As Sidgwick explains in his opening essay, the societies he addressed aimed to allow academics, professionals, and others to pursue joint efforts at reaching "some results of value for practical guidance and life." Sidgwick hoped that members might discuss such questions as when, if ever, public officials might be justified in lying or in breaking promises, whether scientists could legitimately inflict suffering on animals for research purposes, when nations might have just cause in going to war, and a score of other issues of ethics in public and private life still debated a century later. This valuable reissue returns Practical Ethics to its rightful place in Sidgwick's oeuvre. Noted ethicist Sissela Bok provides a superb Introduction, ranging over the course of Sidgwick's life and career and underscoring the relevance of Practical Ethics to contemporary debate. She writes: "Practical Ethics, the last book that Henry Sidgwick published before his death in 1900, contains the distillation of a lifetime of reflection on ethics and on what it would take for ethical debate to be 'really of use in the solution of practical questions.'" This rich, engaging work is essential reading for all concerned with the relationship between ethical theory and. practice, and with the questions that have driven the study of professional ethics in recent years.

Self- governing control is a defining characteristic of autonomous computing machinery. Autonomy implies some degree of independence, and when a system's ability to achieve its mission is independent of how it is initialized, the system is self-stabilizing. Application of self-stabilization to system and network components is motivated by core concerns of fault-tolerance in distributed systems. Self-stabilization is a solution to problems of transient memory faults and systems with dynamic reconfigurations. Research in self-stabilization explores many of the classic themes of distributed computing (distributed graph algorithms, mutual exclusion, distributed agreement). Recent papers combine self-stabilization with traditional forms of fault-tolerance, consider methodological issues for the design of self-stabilizing systems, investigate randomized techniques, and apply stabilization to new networking models. The workshop brings together concerns from theory and practice of self-stabilization.

Although practice theory has been a mainstay of social theory for nearly three decades, so far it has had very limited impact on media studies. This book draws on the work of practice theorists such as Wittgenstein, Foucault, Bourdieu, Barth and Schatzki and rethinks the study of media from the perspective of practice theory. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from places such as Zambia, India, Hong Kong, the United States, Britain, Norway and Denmark, the contributors address a number of important themes: media as practice; the interlinkage between media, culture and practice; the contextual study of media practices; and new practices of digital production. Collectively, these chapters make a strong case for the importance of theorising the relationship between media and practice and thereby adding practice theory as a new strand to the study of anthropology of media.

This volume contains the papers presented at the 7th International Symposium on Automated Technologyfor Veri?cation and Analysis held during October 13- 16 in Macao SAR, China. The primary objective of the ATVA conferences - mains the same: to exchangeand promote the latest advances of state-of-the-art researchon theoretical and practical aspects of automated analysis, veri?cation, and synthesis. Among 74 research papers and 10 tool papers submitted to ATVA 2009, the Program Committee accepted 23 as regular papers and 3 as tool papers. In all, 33 experts from 17 countries worked hard to make sure that every submission received a rigorous and fair evaluation. In addition, the program included three excellenttutorialsandkeynotetalksbyMarkGreenstreet(U.BritishColumbia), Orna Grumberg (Technion), and Bill Roscoe (Oxford University). The conf- ence organizers were truly grateful to have such distinguished researchers as keynote speakers. Many worked hard and o?ered their valuable time so generously to make ATVA 2009 successful. First of all, the conference organizers thank all 229 - searchers who worked hard to complete and submit papers to the conference. ThePCmembers,reviewers,andSteeringCommitteemembersalsodeserves- cial recognition. Without them, a competitive and peer-reviewed international symposium simply cannot take place. Many organizations sponsored the symposium. They include: The United Nations University, International Institute of Software Technology (UNU-IIST); Macao Polytechnic Institute (MPI); Macao POST;and FormalMethods Europe (FME). The conference organizers thank them for their generous support and assistance.

This book is the second of two volumes on random motions in Markov and semi-Markov random environments. This second volume focuses on high-dimensional random motions. This volume consists of two parts. The first expands many of the results found in Volume 1 to higher dimensions. It presents new results on the random motion of the realistic three-dimensional case, which has so far been barely mentioned in the literature, and deals with the interaction of particles in Markov and semi-Markov media, which has, in contrast, been a topic of intense study. The second part contains applications of Markov and semi-Markov motions in mathematical finance. It includes applications of telegraph processes in modeling stock price dynamics and investigates the pricing of variance, volatility, covariance and correlation swaps with Markov volatility and the same pricing swaps with semi-Markov volatilities.