K Lea

As a five-feet-three-inch hunchback who weighed about 100 pounds, Homer Lea (1876--1912), was an unlikely candidate for life on the battlefield, yet he became a world-renowned military hero. In the Dragon's Lair: The Exploits of Homer Lea paints a revealing portrait of a diminutive yet determined man who never earned his valor on the field of battle, but left an indelible mark on his times. Lawrence M. Kaplan draws from extensive research to illuminate the life of a "man of mystery," while also yielding a clearer understanding of the early twentieth-century Chinese underground reform and revolutionary movements. Lea's career began in the inner circles of a powerful Chinese movement in San Francisco that led him to a generalship during the Boxer Rebellion. Fixated with commanding his own Chinese army, Lea's inflated aspirations were almost always dashed by reality. Although he never achieved the leadership role for which he strived, he became a trusted advisor to revolutionary leader Dr. Sun Yat-sen during the 1911 revolution that overthrew the Manchu Dynasty. As an author, Lea garnered fame for two books on geopolitics: The Valor of Ignorance, which examined weaknesses in the American defenses and included dire warnings of an impending Japanese-American war, and The Day of the Saxon, which predicted the decline of the British Empire. More than a character study, In the Dragon's Lair provides insight into the establishment and execution of underground reform and revolutionary movements within U.S. immigrant communities and in southern China, as well as early twentieth-century geopolitical thought.

In the last 50 years, classical breeding has played a significant role in achieving higher crop productivity, but major crops have reached a plateau in their yield potential. Therefore, the current focus for sustainable intensification of agriculture is the use of biotechnological approaches to enhance the yield potential by combating the yield losses that occur due to abiotic stresses. The abiotic stresses are governed by multigenes, and therefore, a holistic approach is needed to get success in imparting stress tolerance to enhance the yield potential of our crops. Plants face multiple stress conditions during their life stages and adopt several physiological, biochemical, and molecular strategies to combat that, which are sometimes not sufficient to survive, particularly crop plants. The climate change era has created a need to understand the abiotic stresses in a holistic way. Therefore, a deep understanding of multiple abiotic stress mechanisms is necessary to develop crops tolerant to climate fluctuation. With this background, the outline of this book covers the following features: • Agriculture sustainability and molecular understanding of multiple stress tolerance • Systems biology for life-history strategies, conventional and genomic approaches above and underground • Genetic resources and molecular understanding of seed priming • Molecular signaling compounds, cell signal transduction, and crosstalk between plant growth hormones and regulators • Roles Transcription factors, LEA proteins, reactive oxygen species and alternative oxidase • Genome editing, metabolomics, and ‘omics’ technologies

This book is a timely survey of much of the algebra developed during the last several centuries including its applications to algebraic geometry and its potential use in geometric modeling. The present volume makes an ideal textbook for an abstract algebra course, while the forthcoming sequel. Lectures on Algebra II, will serve as a textbook for a linear algebra course. The author's fondness for algebraic geometry shows up in both volumes, and his recent preoccupation with the applications of group theory to the calculation of Galois groups is evident in the second volume which contains more local rings and more algebraic geometry. Both books are based on the author's lectures at Purdue University over the last few years.

Lea's Chemistry of Cement and Concrete, Fifth Edition, examines the suitability and durability of different types of cements and concretes, their manufacturing techniques and the role that aggregates and additives play in achieving concrete's full potential of delivering a high-quality, long-lasting, competitive and sustainable product. Provides a 60% revision over the fourth edition last published in 2004 Includes updated chapters that represent the latest technological advances in the industry, including, but not exclusive to the production of low-energy cements, cement admixtures and concrete aggregates Presents expanded coverage of the suitability and durability of materials aggregates and additives