Fidali S Way

A thrilling, epic novel about a young American man who is arrested for murder in Pakistan and narrowly escapes through the Himalayas, experiencing war, love, and revelation along the way. Disillusioned with American life, Nicholas Sunder has spent months backpacking through South Asia, most recently in the company of a beautiful French woman he met in India. When the woman is found brutally murdered in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan, Nick is arrested and tortured by the Pakistani police, who are convinced he is the killer. Amazingly, Nick escapes their custody and heads off on foot through the steep mountains of Kashmir, the highest war zone on earth. Now a fugitive without papers, money, or a country that will welcome him, Nick is reduced to his most elemental human identity in an unforgiving mountainous landscape where his very survival is unlikely. Nick's fortune turns when he encounters an eccentric Kashmiri smuggler and his mysterious companion, Fidali. An enormous, nearly silent man, Fidali not only knows a hidden way through the mountains but makes a deep impression upon Nick through his sacrifices for others. In time, after barely surviving great violence, Nick reaches an idyllic mountain village in Indian-occupied Kashmir, where he is drawn to Aysha, a remarkable woman unlike any he has ever met, who operates a medical clinic in the remote region. It is there he will confront the divide between Islam and the West and be forced to ponder how he has reached such a place -- forced to consider, in other words, Fidali's way. Drawn from the author's own experiences trekking through Asia, Fidali's Way brims with George Mastras's deep knowledge of the Himalayan region. He has walked the lands, climbed the mountains, and met the diverse peoples who call the high Himalayas their home. Few American authors have traveled as extensively as Mastras has through these remote, dangerous, and unstable places, and his personal insight is evident on every page. Not only a powerful suspense story, Fidali's Way is a timely exploration of a politically complex region and a meditation on some of the most important issues of our time: the relationship between Islam and the West, the ruthlessness of fanatical religion, and the redemptive power of pure faith. Sweeping in its scope and moral complexity, Fidali's Way brings forth a story that only an ambitious, large-hearted novel can tell and introduces George Mastras as a major new American novelist.

This paper describes an original method of global machine condition assessment for infrared condition monitoring and diagnostics systems. This method integrates two approaches: the first is processing and analysis of infrared images in the frequency domain by the use of 2D Fourier transform and a set of F-image features, the second uses fusion of classification results obtained independently for F-image features. To find the best condition assessment solution, the two different types of classifiers, k-nearest neighbours and support vector machine, as well as data fusion method based on Dezert–Smarandache theory have been investigated. This method has been verified using infrared images recorded during experiments performed on the laboratory model of rotating machinery. The results obtained during the research confirm that the method could be successfully used for the identification of operational conditions that are difficult to be recognised.

This book provides readers with an overview of recent theories and methods for machinery diagnostics applied to machinery maintenance. Each chapter, accepted after a rigorous peer-review process, reports on a selected, original piece of work discussed at the International Congress on Technical Diagnostics, ICTD2016, held on September 12 – 16, 2016, in Gliwice, Poland. The book covers a broad range of topics, including machines operating in non-stationary conditions, and examples from different industrial fields of mechanical, civil, computer and electronic engineering as well as the medical, food, automotive, and mining industries. By presenting state-of-the-art diagnostic solutions and discussing important industrial issues the book offers a valuable resource to both academics and professionals as well as a bridge to facilitate communication and collaboration between the two groups.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th IEEE International Conference Beyond Databases, Architectures, and Structures, BDAS 2014, held in Ustron, Poland, in May 2014. This book consists of 56 carefully revised selected papers that are assigned to 11 thematic groups: query languages, transactions and query optimization; data warehousing and big data; ontologies and semantic web; computational intelligence and data mining; collective intelligence, scheduling, and parallel processing; bioinformatics and biological data analysis; image analysis and multimedia mining; security of database systems; spatial data analysis; applications of database systems; Web and XML in database systems.

This book reports on recent theories and methods for diagnostics and condition monitoring of machines, materials and industrial processes, with a special emphasis on the application of artificial intelligence and intelligent control systems. Gathering original contributions to the 7th International Congress on Technical Diagnostics, ICTD2022, held on September 14–16, 2022, in Radom, Poland, this book offers extensive information on the latest trends in machine diagnostics and on IoT, smart sensors and machine learning technology in advanced condition monitoring. It addresses both scientists and professionals and is intended to foster communication and collaborations between the two groups.