Three young men do what we all wanted to - they build Rocket Ship Galileo and fly it to the moon. Of course it's not so simple: there are rivals and red tape to overcome, and a totally unexpected and possibly lethal -- surprise waiting for them when they get there. Matt Dodson has heroic dreams of joining Space Patrol, so he becomes a Space Cadet and embarks on the long and difficult training that will show if he can do the job. His mettle is tested to the utmost when, on his first training flight he finds himself in the midst of an interplanetary crisis. Jim Marlowe grew up on the Red Planet, and when he's sent off to boarding school at Syrtis Major, he insists on taking his Martian pet with him. He doesn't anticipate how much trouble friendly little Willis will get him into -- and how paradoxically lucky that will turn out to be. Bill Lerner can't wait to leave an overcrowded Earth and become a Farmer in the Sky on Ganymede. He thinks he's ready for hard work and hardship -- but he has no idea what it will mean when things go wrong and the nearest help is four hundred million miles away!

The Spanish crown wanted native peoples in its American territories to be evangelized and, to that end, facilitated the establishment of missions by various Catholic orders. Focusing on the Franciscan missions of the Sierra Gorda in Northern New Spain (Mexico) and the Jesuit missions of Chiquitos in what is now Bolivia, Frontiers of Evangelization takes a comparative approach to understanding the experiences of indigenous populations in missions on the frontiers of Spanish America. Marshaling a wealth of data from sacramental, military, and census records, Robert H. Jackson explores the many factors that influenced the stability of mission settlements, including the indigenous communities’ previous subsistence patterns and family structures, the evangelical techniques of the missionary orders, the social and political organization within the mission communities, and epidemiology in relation to population density and mobility. The two orders, Jackson’s research shows, organized and administered their missions very differently. The Franciscans took a heavy-handed approach and implemented disruptive social policies, while the Jesuits engaged in a comparatively “kinder and gentler” form of colonization. Yet the most critical factor to the missions’ success, Jackson finds, was the indigenous peoples’ existing demographic profile—in particular, their mobility. Nonsedentary populations, like the Pames and Jonaces of the Sierra Gorda, were more prone to demographic collapse once brought into the mission system, whereas sedentary groups, like the Guaraní of Chiquitos, experienced robust growth and greater resistance to disease and natural disaster. Drawing on more than three decades of scholarly work, this analysis of crucial archival material augments our understanding of the role of missions in colonization, and the fate of indigenous peoples in Spanish America.

The People's Republic of China claims to have 22,000 kilometres of land borders and 18,000 kilometres of coast line. How did this vast country come into being? The state credo describes an ancient process of cultural expansion: border peoples gratefully accept high culture in China and become inalienable parts of the country. And yet, the "centre" had to fight against manifestations of discontent in the border regions, not only to maintain control over the regions themselves, but also to prevent a loss of power at the edges from triggering a general process of regional devolution in the Han Chinese provinces. The essays in this volume look at these issues over a long span of time, questioning whether the process of expansion was a benevolent civilizing mission.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Functional and Logic Programming (FLOPS 2004), held in Nara, Japan, April 7-9, 2004 at the New Public Hall, Nara. FLOPS is a forum for research on all issues concerning functional programming and logic programming. In particular it aims to stimulate the cross-fertilization as well as the integration of the two paradigms. The previous FLOPS meetings took place in Fuji-Susono (1995), Shonan (1996), Kyoto (1998), Tsukuba (1999), Tokyo(2001)and Aizu (2002). The proceedings of FLOPS 1999,FLOPS 2001 and FLOPS 2002 were published by Springer-Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series, as volumes 1722, 2024 and 2441, respectively. In response to the call for papers, 55 papers were submitted by authors from 1 Australia (1), Austria (1), Canada (1), China (4), Denmark (2), Estonia (), 2 1 1 France (3), Germany (4), Italy (1), Japan (15), the Netherlands (1), Oman 2 4 1 1 (1), Portugal (), Singapore (2), Spain (8), UK (3), and USA (6). Each paper 2 4 was reviewed by at least three program committee members with the help of expert external reviewers. The program committee meeting was conducted electronically for a period of 2 weeks in December 2003. After careful and thorough discussion, the program committee selected 18 papers (33%) for presentation at the conference. In addition to the 18 contributed papers, the symposium included talks by three invited speakers: Masami Hagiya (University of Tokyo), Carsten Schur · mann (Yale University), and Peter Selinger (University of Ottawa).