The presence of approaching death always leaves you in a contemplating space. Reliving those exact moments pushes me to find the very culprit who changed my life. It also makes sitting in a classroom a pain in the ass. Having survived my first year at Tracker Hive Academy, I'm left with wondering what's next for me, the eight elements, Junior Tracker with no professional filter. We have to face the culprit who is clearly out to get me, but there has to be more to this, especially with certain allies involved.Things only get complicated when my sexy Troubled Four start having imbalance problems, making it difficult for the rest of the world to know who is who - except me, of course. My Shadow only wants to add to the chaos by attacking the very students we're attempting to protect.My life is definitely a shit storm, and when Alaric himself goes missing during an assignment, all bets are off.I am a Queen in my element and won't be told how to get what belongs to me. With Zeke, Zion, Zackery, and Zeus on my side, there's nothing I need to fear - and with Calvin as our joker card. We're a dangerous threat together, and this Hive goes by one thing: Breaking all the rules. Game On.

When the element of fire burns within your veins, the academy for all things blazing is the best place to learn how to make that flame burn even stronger. Alice Blaze is my name, and I'm your typical adopted sixteen-year-old. My mom disappeared after my birth and my dad was an alcoholic maniac. That left me being raised by my protective grandparents in the single house up the hill that people only come to view on Halloween. Apparently, our house is haunted, but I haven't figured that one out yet. Regardless of my depressing backstory, my life has always been in the line of misery. Since I was little, I always got into trouble, and it always ended up with something combusting into flames. Lighting up the curtains, explosive vials in lab class. Don't get me started with the accidental school fire. Need I say more?The last straw is when I'm accused of shattered all the windows in the entire school, but that doesn't make sense because it has nothing to do with that burning nemesis called fire. With my grandparents having enough of my constant transfers, a letter of invitation lands right onto our doorstep.I'm invited to Blazing Academy, the academy for all things scorching hot. Shifters, demons, and blazing hot witches...oh right. That's apparently what I am. A blazing hot witch. Let's hope that's all I am, and that this first semester goes a lot smoother than I'm imagining.

Bring on the competition and the cheerleader fights. I'm ready to take a stand, prove myself, and save my team once and for all. After triumphing over another exam-gone-wrong, all we want to do is recover. But it seems that there's no rest for the witches, because another challenge immediately smacks us in the face. It's something none of us saw coming, and one thing is for sure: entering Semester Four won't be the same unless the Notorious Four is together once more.I, Brianne Marie Harlow, have to take matters into my own hands if I want to attend my Fourth Semester at Witchling Academy with my four boyfriends. I only have one shot to bring my wayward team member back into the fold, and though I'm confident I can change his mind, I'm worried about the challenges that will surely come if I succeed.Tension is growing, and the dynamic of our team is beginning to morph into something stronger than any of us realize. My relationships with Jax, Connor, Kaito, and Finnick are maturing, and with those changes come experiences I could never imagine happening with any other group of wizards.The Witchling Games are approaching, and our team is ready for the chase. Things are about to get feisty, and while I'm always ready to kick some magical butt, I can't help but wonder if we have what it takes to win. There's only one way to find out. Let's do this, Semester Four.

Finishing our first year at Witchling Academy brings a wave of new experiences. Now with Semester Three approaching it's time for me to decide what path I want to walk as I enter young adulthood. I, Brianne Marie Harlow, am now dating the Notorious Four. It's still quite a shock in my mind, but to be surrounded by my supportive family and friends, it's become something life changing for me and my four amazing boyfriends - Jax, Connor, Finnick, and Kaito.With summer break, brings moments of adventure and exploration, as I begin to figure out what I want in this group relationship and deal with my own insecurities. Adding my new familiar to the mix and having two amazing best friends to help me figure out the goods and bads about dating, summer goes by like a breeze. Semester Three is where things start getting messy. When the professors warned us about the change in dynamic with year one to year two, we never would have thought it would escalate to magic battles, car chases, and end us in the middle of a magic crime case.Adding the continuous bullying, old memories, girl jealousy, and issues developing within my own team, we're going to have to stick tightly together or we'll be pulled apart forever.Thankfully, I won't let that happen. If I'd have to be the middle ground to keep my Notorious Four from tearing apart, I'd do it right here and now. All in the name of protecting the people I love. Now let's all pray this goes as well as it does in my head.

An academy reverse harem fantasy romance series. I shouldn't be here, and everyone knows it. Blackbriar Academy is an enchanted school on a magical island, and everyone wants in. It's a home away from home for the most advanced mages in the world-and only the absolute best of the best are given an invitation. By some freak accident, I managed to get one. If I pass the trials, I get to stay. With nowhere else to go, Blackbriar is my one shot at having a real life, and I won't let anyone take this from me. But there's a catch. It turns out the people on this island are being trained to hunt the darkness-basically, they're being trained to hunt me. To survive, I have to hide what I am. As a half-mage, I shouldn't have any magic at all. And yet, my natural abilities are almost impossibly powerful-and incredibly illegal. Over history, magic like mine has corrupted the souls of those who were born with it. They've all gone dark-razing towns and murdering hundreds of thousands throughout history. All but me, and I have no idea why. As the trials get more and more challenging, it's clear I'm being hunted. If I'm caught... I die. At Blackbriar Academy, nothing is ever as it seems... but I have nowhere else to go. Nothing, and no one, will stand in my way. The Trials of Blackbriar Academy is a full-length novel with a badass heroine, a riveting storyline, and an alternative relationship dynamic that supports our badass heroine's right to choose more than one man. Get ready for a heart-pounding story filled with an academy fantasy romance unlike anything you've read before. Buckle in for heart-pounding action, breathtaking magic, deadly assassins, four drop-dead gorgeous leading men, lots of toned muscles, and most importantly-a young woman's journey of justice, self-discovery, and freedom. READ THE WHOLE SERIES The Blackbriar Academy: a riveting and addictive academy fantasy romance series. Book 1: The Trials of Blackbriar Academy Book 2: The Shadows of Blackbriar Academy Book 3: The Hex of Blackbriar Academy Book 4: The Blood Oath of Blackbriar Academy Book 5: The Battle for Blackbriar Academy Publisher's Note: The Blackbriar Academy saga is an adult urban fantasy series with explicit scenes and is meant for mature readers who enjoy spellbinding stories with a few very steamy, fan-your-face moments in their fantasy fiction.

Our world is being revolutionized by data-driven methods: access to large amounts of data has generated new insights and opened exciting new opportunities in commerce, science, and computing applications. Processing the enormous quantities of data necessary for these advances requires large clusters, making distributed computing paradigms more crucial than ever. MapReduce is a programming model for expressing distributed computations on massive datasets and an execution framework for large-scale data processing on clusters of commodity servers. The programming model provides an easy-to-understand abstraction for designing scalable algorithms, while the execution framework transparently handles many system-level details, ranging from scheduling to synchronization to fault tolerance. This book focuses on MapReduce algorithm design, with an emphasis on text processing algorithms common in natural language processing, information retrieval, and machine learning. We introduce the notion of MapReduce design patterns, which represent general reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems across a variety of problem domains. This book not only intends to help the reader "think in MapReduce", but also discusses limitations of the programming model as well. Table of Contents: Introduction / MapReduce Basics / MapReduce Algorithm Design / Inverted Indexing for Text Retrieval / Graph Algorithms / EM Algorithms for Text Processing / Closing Remarks

Set in the African bush: a tracker seeks one lion, thanks to lessons that can teach us all how to live--Provided by publisher.