In 2004, a California computer whiz named Barrett Lyon uncovered the identity of a hacker running major assaults on business websites. Without fully... grasping the repercussions, he set on an investigation that led him into the heart of the Russian mob. Cybercrime was evolving. No longer the domain of small-time thieves, it had been discovered by sophisticated gangs. They began by attacking corporate websites but increasingly stole financial data from consumers and defense secrets from governments. While Barrett investigated the cutting edge of technology crime, the U.S. government struggled to catch up. Britain, however, was a different story. In the late 1990s, the Queen herself had declared safe e-commerce a national security priority. Agents from the London-based National Hi-Tech Crime Unit sought out Barrett and enlisted his help. They also sent detective Andrew Crocker, a Welsh former boxer, to Russia to track down and prosecute the hackers—and to find out who they worked for. Fatal System Error penetrates both the Russian cyber-mob and the American mafia as the two fight over the Internet’s massive spoils. It takes readers into the murky hacker underground, traveling the globe from San Francisco to Costa Rica, London, and Russia. Using unprecedented access to mob businesses and Russian officials, it shows how top criminals earned protection from the Russian government—and how Barrett Lyon and Andrew Crocker got closer to the titans of the underground economy than any previous outsider. Together, their stories explain why cybercrime is much worse than you thought—and why the Internet might not survive. 

This novel book introduces speech and hearing sciences students to the principles of "signal" and "system" analysis. Beginning with an examination of... what signals and systems are, the book develops a thorough background from which many of the most important issues in speech and hearing can be tackled. Numerous illustrationKey Features* The first dedicated text on this subject* Presents techniques for speech and hearing analysis and experiments* Contains minimal mathematics in describing a highly technical field* An introductory text for students in speech, hearing and psychology

John Clancy / 3m, 2f Fatboy is a brutal comedy inspired by Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi. This satire on modern America's insatiable appetites--from... gobbling up 72oz. steaks to small nations--is presented as a live-action Punch and Judy show. In this fast-moving, shocking, profane, dead-on, funhouse mirror reflection of the world today, the brutish allegory known as Fatboy, along with his monstrous wife, Queen Fudgie the First, stands trial for war crimes. Despite overwhelming evidence the court refuses to convict and succumbs to Fatboy's "persuasive" tactics. "Brazen...daring...highly entertaining." - Jason Zinoman, The New York Times "Make room for Fatboy. Meaner than Stalin, hungrier than Idi Amin, deadlier than Pol Pot, he is the grotesque composite of every despot who ever lived...he is also savagely funny...Some plays ridicule their audience; others inspire political action. Fatboy may be the rare work that does both."- Jorge Morales, Village Voice "This is brilliant political satire, hitting the zeitgeist right where it hurts...A ground-breaking piece of American absurdism, a transatlantic take on the Ubu tradition that goes beyond imitation to seize and transform the myth for a new age of American power." - Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman "Clancy's 2004 Edinburgh Fringe hit adaptation of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi comes just in time for the Wall Street meltdown and one of the most surreal election campaigns in American history."-Steven Leigh Morris, LA Weekly "A gleefully rule-breaking Punch-and-Judy show...Funny as hell."-Time Out Chicago

Originally published in 1969, Fat City is an American classic whose stature has increased over the years. Made into an acclaimed film by John Huston,... the book is set in and around Stockton, California.

Fate and Transport of Contaminants in the Environment was developed to provide non-specialists with an understanding of how chemicals behave in the... environment. The text grew out of class notes used to teach students from a wide variety of scientific backgrounds majoring in environmental engineering, biology, chemistry, physics, and environmental science. The focus is on understanding the most important processes controlling the spread of chemicals, their movement through the environment, and where they end up. Openness to diversity of student background requires inclusion of introductory materials on how air and water behave in the environment as well as the concepts and equations for contaminant transport, partitioning, and reactions. Simplified mathematical predictors for assessing environmental trarnsport and human or ecological exposure are also presented. The equations are designed to help students form an understanding of the assumptions and limitations present in the constantly changing abundance of computer codes found in environmental literature and to give them a basis for assessment. This book aims to provide students with instinctive as well as conceptual grasps of the major forces at play in chemical contamination. Each chapter includes real examples encountered by the author, along with example and homework problems intended to illustrate key conepts covered in the text.

This guide provides a tool to help predict the fate and transport of chemicals in air, water, soil, flora, and fauna. Equations and background... information needed for prediction are included. Predictive methods are explained. Data is included on 203 commonly encountered chemical substances.

The National Security Council (NSC) is the most important formal institution in the U.S. government for the creation and implementation of foreign and... defense policy. The Council's four principal members--the President, Vice President, Secretary of State, and Secretary of Defense--are responsible for incredibly far-reaching decisions regarding war and peace, diplomacy, international trade, and covert operations. Despite its obvious importance, the NSC has been subject to relatively little scholarly scrutiny, and therefore remains misunderstood by most international relations students. Fateful Decisions: Inside the National Security Council provides students with valuable insights into the origins, workings, strengths, and weaknesses of the NSC. Covering the period from 1947 to 2003, Fateful Decisions features seminal articles, essays, and documents drawn from a variety of sources. The book presents and illuminates several obscure documents regarding the beginning of the NSC and its early years. It then examines the transformation of the NSC from a newly established, and initially ignored, advisory committee to the nation's premier forum for national security deliberations. The selections--written by prominent scholars, journalists, and practitioners--offer revealing coverage of major topics, such as key challenges to the NSC and the role of the NSC in a post-Cold War environment. The articles also discuss the rise of the National Security Adviser to a position of prominence and provide profiles of those who have held the position, including McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, Samuel Berger, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice. Chronicling the performance of the NSC over the years, Fateful Decisions dissects both its successes and its failures--from the Cuban Missile Crisis through the Iran-contra affair, to the current war against global terrorism--and offers reform proposals to improve the Council's performance. It is ideal for courses on the NSC, national security decision-making, and U.S. foreign policy.

The Civil War is the greatest trauma ever experienced by the American nation, a four-year paroxysm of violence that left in its wake more than 600,000... dead, more than 2 million refugees, and the destruction (in modern dollars) of more than $700 billion in property. The war also sparked some of the most heroic moments in American history and enshrined a galaxy of American heroes. Above all, it permanently ended the practice of slavery and proved, in an age of resurgent monarchies, that a liberal democracy could survive the most frightful of challenges. In Fateful Lightning, two-time Lincoln Prize-winning historian Allen C. Guelzo offers a marvelous portrait of the Civil War and its era, covering not only the major figures and epic battles, but also politics, religion, gender, race, diplomacy, and technology. And unlike other surveys of the Civil War era, it extends the reader's vista to include the postwar Reconstruction period and discusses the modern-day legacy of the Civil War in American literature and popular culture. Guelzo also puts the conflict in a global perspective, underscoring Americans' acute sense of the vulnerability of their republic in a world of monarchies. He examines the strategy, the tactics, and especially the logistics of the Civil War and brings the most recent historical thinking to bear on emancipation, the presidency and the war powers, the blockade and international law, and the role of intellectuals, North and South. Written by a leading authority on our nation's most searing crisis, Fateful Lightning offers a vivid and original account of an event whose echoes continue with Americans to this day.

At the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and without any particular malice, placed on a train to... Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew.” In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, Georg remains an outsider. The genius of Imre Kertesz’s unblinking novel lies in its refusal to mitigate the strangeness of its events, not least of which is Georg’s dogmatic insistence on making sense of what he witnesses–or pretending that what he witnesses makes sense. Haunting, evocative, and all the more horrifying for its rigorous avoidance of sentiment, Fatelessness is a masterpiece in the traditions of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski.

When the leptin gene was discovered in 1994, news articles predicted that there might soon be an easy, pharmaceutical solution to the growing public... health crisis of obesity. Yet this scientific breakthrough merely proved once again how difficult the fight against fat really is. Despite the many appetite-suppressants, diet pills, and weight-loss programs available today, approximately 30 percent of Americans are obese. And that number is expanding rapidly. Fat is the engaging story of the scientific quest to understand and control body weight. Covering the entire twentieth century, Robert Pool chronicles the evolving blame-game for fat--from being a result of undisciplined behavior to subconscious conflicts, physiological disease, and environmental excess. Readers in today's weight-conscious society will be surprised to learn that being overweight was actually encouraged by doctors and popular health magazines up until the 1930s, when the health risks associated with being overweight were publicly recognized. Thus began decades of research and experiments that subsequently explained appetite, metabolism, and the development of fat cells. Pool effectively reanimates the colorful characters, curious experiments, brilliant insights and wrong turns that led to contemporary scientific understanding of America's epidemic. While he acknowledges the advances in the pharmacological fight against flab, he underscores that the real problem of obesity is not losing the weight but keeping it off. Drugs offer a quick fix, but they aren't the ultimate answer. American society must remedy the unhealthy daily environments of its cities and towns, and those who have struggled with their weight and have experienced the "yo-yo" cycle of dieting must understand the underlying science of body weight that makes their struggle more than a question of willpower.

For any woman who has ever had a love/hate relationship with food and with how she looks; for anyone who has knowingly or unconsciously used food to try... to fill the hole in his heart or soothe the craggy edges of his psyche, Fat Girl is a brilliantly rendered, angst-filled coming-of-age story of gain and loss. From the lush descriptions of food that call to mind the writings of M.F.K. Fisher at her finest, to the heartbreaking accounts of Moore’s deep longing for family and a sense of belonging and love, Fat Girl stuns and shocks, saddens and tickles.

At birth, Edmund Gosse was dedicated to 'the Service of the Lord'. His parents were Plymouth Brethren. After his mother's death, Gosse was brought up in... stifling isolation by his father, a marine biologist whose faith overcame his reason when confronted by Darwin's theory of evolution. "Father and Son" is also the record of Gosse's struggle to 'fashion his inner life for himself' - a record of whose full and subversive implications the author was unaware, as Peter Abbs notes in his introduction. First published anonymously in 1907, "Father and Son" was immediately acclaimed for its courage in flouting the conventions of Victorian autobiography and is still a moving account of self-discovery.